It’s interesting how a mass shooting is made out by progressives and the corporate state to be the work of “homophobes” and “transphobes” or “white supremacists” and “MAGA” until they discover that the identity of the shooter doesn’t fit the narrative. Then they fall back to the generic anti-gun rhetoric.
Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, the suspect in the mass shooting that killed five people and wounded 17 at a gay nightclub
Most recently, at Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, on the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance, a 22-year old named opened fire on those gathered there, killing five and wound more than a dozen others. Attorneys for the the shooter, identified as Anderson Lee Aldrich, have alerted the court and the media that Aldrich identifies as nonbinary, goes by “them/they” pronouns, and wishes to be addressed as “Mx. Aldrich.”
Of course, Aldrich has their skeptics.
This Trans Woman on CNN says she can look at a still photo of the Colorado Springs gunman and know that he's not Non-binary, he's a man. If we were to use that same standard on Natalee, what might we discern? pic.twitter.com/wMC9DmUEBi
This was not the first of Aldrich’s run-ins with the law. “In 2021 Aldrich was arrested after an incident in which their mother accused them of threatening her with a homemade bomb,” according to TVP World in an essay about what the publication calls “self-hate crime.” “Law enforcement managed to pacify Aldrich, who throughout the incident was live-streaming a video on Facebook in which they threatened to detonate the bomb.”
As soon as I learned about this case, I asked my Facebook friend why this man was not already in jail or prison or a psychiatric institution speaks to the failure of the criminal justice system to provide adequate public safety to citizens and residents of this nation. The case from last year wasn’t even adjudicated—had it been, it is possible this deranged man would have not been in a position to carry out these heinous acts.
However, if you open Google News aggregator today, you will find that the Club Q shooting is no longer the lead story. This is not accidental. I’m always telling people to look for causes. After all, guns don’t shoot themselves. But progressives only “find” causes in actions they can attach to an argument they don’t like. When the identity of the perpetrator is inconvenient, they shift the narrative or drop the story.
Look at how different progressives treated the rampant violence in America over the summer of 2020, violence that cost billions of dollars and dozens of lives, or all the violence that occurred in the wake of Donald Trump’s election—and compare these to what happened on January 6, 2021. Progressives will even lie and say that cops were killed by the January 6th mob. The icing on that cake is the sudden concern for racist Blue Lives.
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Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. I’m glad I didn’t take that vaccine. There were plenty of authoritarians who were prepared to force me to, though. I keep notes on all that. I will never forget. No enemy of freedom is a friend of mine. I’ll be pleasant and professional. But I will never look at you the same way.
The vaccines don’t stop transmission of the disease. Therefore, vaccine passports make zero sense. The elites know that. What this means is that vaccine passports were never about disease control but about assimilating you into a transnational ID system. This is the zenith of totalitarianism desire: the biosecurity state—global total control. If you don’t see this, then you have neither studied history nor grasped its lessons.
They failed this time. But they are going to keep trying.
Responding to a post I wrote recently citing the fact that more people are killed by “personal weapons,” i.e., hands and feet, than by rifles, a friend asked me whether a person could kill fifteen people with their fists. I answered the query this way:
I don’t want to obscure the fact that more people are killed by fists and feet than with rifles. It’s not a small difference. In 2020, 455 people were killed with rifles, whereas 662 were killed with fists and feet. Around 1,500 people are killed every year with knives. Beatings with clubs and other instruments runs pretty close to stabbing numbers. Some of these incidents involve multiple victims.
A man can in fact beat to death more than one person in the same context (or sequentially over time, something we ought not neglect). Of course, we can’t take away a man’s hands or feet. A man can knife to death more than one person. So should we ban knives?
In 2016, a man in Sagamihara, a town near Tokyo, killed 19 people and wounded another 26 with a knife. In the 2014 Kumming attack, in Yunnan, China, eight assailants stabbed to death 31 people and wounded 141. In 2017, on London Bridge, three assailants stabbed to death eight people and wounded 48. Just this year, in Saskatchewan, on September 4, 2022, two men stabbed 28 people, killing 10 of them.
Alex Hribal after his arraignment on April 9, 2014. Hribal stabbed 21 students and a security guard at a Pennsylvania high school.
A man can mass murder using a car. We just put away a man for hundreds of years here in the state of Wisconsin for using a car to kill people in a Christmas parade last year. Any instrument is a murder weapon or potential murder weapon in the hands of a man with murderous intent.
Fortunately, domestically speaking, mass killings involving 15 more people are extremely rare occurrences irrespective of weapon used. Moreover, mass shootings generally (four or more dead or injured in the same spatial and temporal context) are not distributed equally across the country. Most mass shootings occur in minority neighborhoods, most of those committed by black men (2021 was horrifying in that regard). The use of guns to mass murder is largely a phenomenon of gang violence in the inner cities of centralized urban areas. The vast majority of owners of guns, including rifles, are law-abiding citizens who use their rifles to hunt, for sport, and to protect their homes and persons.
However if one were to say that guns are a problem, then one should take a look at handguns, which are used to commit on average annually more than 6,000 homicides (more lately since violence crime has been rising drastically in the wake of Ferguson). Handguns are the instrument most often used in homicide.
It is also important to remember that most gun deaths aren’t homicides but suicides (and by a lot). Killing ones self with a handgun is overwhelmingly the choice of those who accomplish suicide. In fact, the discrepancy between the length of the typical individual’s arm relative to trigger and barrel for rifles cause investigators to question suicide as a possibility in those cases. In other words, not many people kill themselves with rifles (most who do rig a mechanism to pull the trigger and why do that when a handgun is uncomplicated).
Finally, guns are the tool most likely to deter assailants. Rifles and handguns have saved many lives. (Turns out that most people shot to death have criminal records, on average multiple arrests or convictions.)
When judging such matters, we should look at the causes of homicide and suicide. The instrument used does not cause either. Guns don’t shoot themselves. Murder is not less frequent in Europe than the United States because of gun availability. Murder is more frequent in the United States for the reasons identified above. America is unusual among advanced democratic countries in the level of serious crime, and in those cities where it worse, cities run by progressives, not enough is done to ameliorate the conditions or to protect the residents who live there—residents who are disproportionately black and brown.
Yes, my position on guns has changed over the years albeit not that much. I never supported gun bans. And I do not oppose gun regulations. But gun regulations cannot be of the sort that make it impossible for law-abiding citizens to obtain and possess firearms, including so-called assault rifles.
Have you read Encyclopedia.com’s entry on Black Slave Owners? The source is Michael Johnson and James Roark’s 1984 Black Masters. See also the history of American Indian Slaveholders. The five “civilized tribes,” the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, were fully integrated into the capitalist economic system and even assimilated into American settler culture, dressing in European clothing, speaking English, taking up Christianity, and buying and selling black people.
Marie Therese Metoyer was a black woman who owned more than 1,000 acres, with an estimated 287 slaves working the land.
I was never told any of this as a kid growing up or as a man in college—and I have an advanced degrees (including a PhD), so I have have been in a lot of college classrooms. Of course, I knew something about the history. When I have raised the matter with others, slavery practiced by nonwhites is routinely rationalized as a product of the corrupting effects of European colonization. But Africans practiced slavery in Africa before the colonization of Africa. And American Indians tribes held slaves prior to and during European colonization, with the tribes selling other Indians to Europeans (and Africans).
I was, however, told many falsehoods during my childhood, such as the falsehood that the Cherokee’s constitution-based government was the inspiration for the US Constitution only to later learn that it was the other way around. My teachers taught me this at Sequoya Elementary School in Knoxville, Tennessee. I heard this claim elsewhere, as well.
Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore owned 15,000 acres of Mississippi land (that’s his Mississippi home) and 400 enslaved Africans.
Most people I discuss this history with don’t know any of it. Like me, they weren’t taught that black men and women and American Indians owned black people. They were never told that Lincoln’s historic Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves on Indian lands because Indians were recognized as autonomous nations. The freeing of slaves held by Indians occurred later after extensive negotiations with the United States government—the same government that banned the importation of slaves into North America within two decades of America’s founding, sacrificed perhaps as many as a million Americans, mostly white Americans, to end chattel slavery, and abolished Jim Crow segregation.
Why is this history important to talk about? Does this mean that American Indians and Black Americans living today are responsible for what their ancestors did? Of course not. To suggest they are is an exercise in primitive blood guilt, an ethic that only racist authoritarians would claim to be virtuous. By the same modern rational standard of holding living persons responsible for the things they do while they are living and not for the actions of others living or dead, white Americans living today are not responsible for what their ancestors did, either. That’s why this is important.
Yet children are today taught that slavery was a practice established by white Europeans and for this, and for white supremacy, all whites enjoy a privilege and owe a debt to American Indians and black Americans. Children are not taught that Muslims established the world slave trade that Europeans inherited when world hegemonic power shifted to the trans-Atlantic sphere. Children are not taught that Africans captured and sold Africans to merchants from around the world. I had to learn all this on my own. Children are not taught these things so that the narrative portraying white people as “perpetrators” and American Indians and black Americans as “victims” can be sustained. This is what Critical Race Theory teaches, and its logic has become the basis of woke curricula in public schools.
When you stop and think about it, the facts of what children are taught and what is hidden from them blows up the assumption that white supremacy rules the day. Indeed, it blows up the assumption that white supremacy has been a significant force over at least the last half a century. For if this were a white supremacist nation, why would the education system, largely run by whites, defame white people while ignoring the history of American Indian and black American slavery? If this were a republic fueled by Christian nationalism, as we so often hear today, why is the role of Islam in establishing the world trade in Africans ignored or obscured?
Ironically, the bad history taught to our children betrays the lies teachers are telling them. And told us.
Drag Queen Story Hour, Queer Theory, and the Sexualization of Children
Update (June 5, 2023): I have updated this essay to include links to blogs I have written in the meantime that I think the reader will find helpful.
John Wayne Gacy’s “Pogo the Clown” (1985).
If, as an adult member of a free and open society, I become a believer in some thing, let’s say Christianity, and come to believe that I have an authentic self, a soul, if you will, that must be fixed or healed, since, according to my beliefs, I am born broken and sick, it will be because some theologian (amateur or professional) persuaded me to believe such a thing through the force of his arguments.
But if, as a little kid, everybody around me tells me that such things as souls and brokenness are real things and conditions, and moreover necessary to believe if I am going to be a good and whole person, and they take me to events where a man with strange hair, dressed in a strange way, saying strange things, telling stories about a brave and beautiful man who society wrongly rejected and oppressed, events that put me in a liminal state in order to transition me to a new way of seeing the world—or affirming the beliefs my parents instilled in me—and with the message reinforced by my family and my community after the ritual, then I will have become a believer not through reason, but instead through indoctrination. This is brainwashing.
In the long-running ’70s stage musical Godspell, Jesus is depicted as a clown
When I was a teenager, my parents took me to see the musical Godspell. I believe we went because a family friend was playing guitar in the production (the man who showed me the signature riff in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”).
I’m an atheist and have been so all my life, but, thanks to Godspell, for about two weeks, I flirted with faith. I suspect a big part of why I was moved in this way was the fact that the actors were dressed as hippies. Hippies fascinated me. Hippies were everywhere in the early 1970s and I wanted to be one when I grew up.
My parents never reinforced the Godspell message, and so the effect wore off and I was soon back to my godless self.
I don’t know if Godspell had an agenda in back of it, and I don’t believe my parents had a ulterior motive in taking me to the production (I doubt they did—my mother took me to see The Life of Brian when it opened a few years later), but I suspect not a few young people were taken to see Godspell by parents hopeful that it would open a way into the Christian faith for their children that traditional avenues had failed to.
Here’s the point of today’s blog: You may very much want your kid to believe in your religion—or some ideology you profess. I get the character of passionate belief. But please understand that when you put your kid through a program, when you subject your child to manipulative techniques, for example, staged events designed to disrupt his ordinary understanding of things to prepare the ground for the planting of thoughts that you (or somebody else) want him to grow in his brain, you are compromising his autonomy—you are violating his right to arrive at his own beliefs through the rational process we call education. And if you are doing this to your children as an intentional act motivated by transgressive politics associated with crackpot theories, then you are perpetrating an injustice, not only for your child, but society at large.
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Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is a popular albeit niche type event occurring across the nation, typically held at public libraries, hosted by drag queens reading books to children and involving them in various other learning activities—books and activities that, while perhaps not exclusively, more often than not have to do to with, and are certainly projected through the lens of, a particular ideology, namely queer theory.
I need to take a moment to explain queer theory to readers in case there are any who are unsure of their understanding of this species of postmodernist critical theory. At the core of queer theory lies the notion that gender, and even sex, as well as heteronormativity and heterosexuality, are socially-constructed categories organized by power and learned during socialization.
Queer theory is not a passive academic exercise; it comes with the praxis of transgression. Jay Stewart, co-founder of Gendered Intelligence, explains: “Queer theory and politics necessarily celebrate transgression in the form of visible difference from norms. These ‘Norms’ are then exposed to be norms, not natures or inevitabilities. Gender and sexual identities are seen, in much of this work, to be demonstrably defiant definitions and configurations” (see his essay in the volume Genderqueer and Non-Binary Genders).
Queer theory is guided by the ideas of French post-structuralist and alleged pedophile Michel Foucault presented in a large body of work that includes the philosopher’s multi-volume The History of Sexuality, published over several decades, the last volume, Confessions of the Flesh, published posthumously (Foucault died of AIDS in 1984 at the age of 57).
At the heart of Foucault’s argument is that sexuality, presumed to be an essential component of the species, is actually a set of discursive practices organized by power in a manner that systematically dissimulates the mechanisms that call it into being while manufacturing the illusion that sexuality exists a priori in nature. In other words, sexuality is social production.
While there is certainly something to the sociological observation that human sexuality is interpreted through sociocultural and historical lens, sexuality, including sexual orientation, is nonetheless something found in nature. Relativism and emphasis on subjectivity should send up red flags about queer theory, or any other argument you encounter that cannot proceed scientifically.
Foucault’s notion of sexuality as discursive practice and social production was taken up and elaborated by Judith Butler who argues that the illusion power manufactures establishes heterosexuality as the truth of sex, a “truth” that determines notions of “feminine” and “masculine” around the biological constructs “female” or “male,” i.e., the gender binary. Gender, Butler contends, is performative. By performative, she does not mean gender is performance, but rather is identifying the norms and actions that establish gender in social interactions and relations (see her Undoing Gender). For Butler, the praxis of transgression serves as a resistance strategy. Examples of transgressive action are cross-dressing and drag.
One of the central concepts in queer theory is the notion of “heteronormativity,” which Lauren Berlant defines as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but also privileged.”
Queer theory denies that sexuality is the result of natural history. Heteronormativity is a worldview that normalizes heterosexuality and, moreover, promotes opposite sex relations and the feminine-masculine gender binary as the preferred sexual orientation and gender identity set. The dominant social institutions—cultural, political, religious—reinforce heteronormativity through mechanisms of formal and informal social control that work on both gay and straight individuals.
Crucially, following Foucault’s theory of power as generative and productive rather than as oppressive form rooted in a priori differences, heteronormativity is a mode of oppression that constructs sex as a mode of control. Sex is not a thing in nature the truth of which is revealed through knowledge; the knowledge of sex is organized by power which is found in social arrangements. For Foucault and other postmodernist philosophers, all truth is organized by power in this way—and it is power that manufactures all truth.
Foucault not only argues that gender and sexuality are socially-constructed but that age of consent laws are as well, and, as such, should be repealed, as they represent an arbitrary constraint on sexual relations governed by power unchosen by those controlled by such laws. In his view (and he was not alone in this view in French society), minors should enjoy the same access to sexual pleasure as adults, including sexual relations with adults; otherwise, the child is denied the full exercise of his fundamental human right to autonomy. In a 1978 radio interview concerning the matter, Foucault insisted thatassuming “that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”
In her essay, “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin builds upon Foucault’s critique of biological explanations of sexuality, extending it to examine how sexual identities and behaviors are structured in hierarchical systems of sexual classifications. She elucidates how certain forms of sexual expression are privileged over others, resulting in the oppression of those who fall outside these established parameters. Additionally, Rubin challenges the feminist notion that gender determines one’s sexuality or that gender and sexuality are interchangeable.
A longer list of the originators of queer theory often includes Gloria Anzaldúa, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner alongside Foucault, Butler, Berlant, and Rubin.
Some lists might include Teresa de Lauretis, since she is the woman widely recognized to have coined the term, but in light of her critique of Foucault’s neglect of the female body in his work, it’s perhaps understandable that she would abandon the term upon its cooptation by establishment forces.
Adrienne Rich, a notable essayist and poet, who was criticized for supporting of Janice Raymond during the writing of The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, a 1979 work considered by many queer theorists and trans-activists to be profoundly “transphobic” and therefore an instantiation of “hate speech,” doesn’t comfortably fit in the queer theory paradigm, either. Indeed, Rich’s core contribution to lesbian studies, her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” faded as an item of debate and discussion as the post-structuralist orientation of queer theory pushed essentialism out of next-wave feminist thinking.
One wonders how Rich (she passed away several years ago) would respond to the attack of the lesbians by trans activists, often manifest in the form of Antifa actions, directed at lesbian-straight feminist alliances. The relationship between Antifa, its roots in anarchism, and queer theory is not incidental, as readers can learn here from Derrick Jensen.:
Derrick Jensen: Anarchism and Queer Theory Jeopardy.
In addition to Foucault and Rubin, Jensen identifies other contributors to queer theory: Pat Califia, and David Halperin (see Halperin’s “The Normalization of Queer Theory”). He also identifies Diogenes, the Greek philosopher of cynicism, as the prototype of this way of thinking. Seeing all social norms as oppressive, Diogenes intentionally violated social norms, defecating and masturbating in public and disrupting Plato’s lectures by eating loudly.
Relevant here is Derrick Jensen’s concept of “toxic mimicry,” which aims to capture the way something takes the form of something else but for which the content is inherently different. The paradigm is rape. Rape takes the form of sex, but this is only its apparent form; the content of rape is radically different from sex, as the latter is an expression of love and a necessary step (at least naturally) in the reproduction of a binary mammalian species. The rapist finding himself aroused by his actions is not aroused by sexual intercourse but by power and violence.
The concept of toxic mimicry applies as well to the practices of the trans-humanist cult of synthetic sexual identities. The purpose of the clown is to embody fun and joy. But some clowns simulate fun and joy in order to achieve ends that, however much a child might find in his innocent funny or joyful, sexually damage and spoil the child. The clown as toxic mimic uses his costume and the normalization of his presence as a ruse to access and prey on children often delivered to him by the child’s parents.
Crucially, toxic mimicry can only apply to human action; only humans can take natural history and species-being and pervert them in so many ways by transgressing normality. Again, transgressing normality is the core praxis of post-structuralist critical theory, a destructive anti-humanism rooted in nihilism, in the denial of truth.
To return to Diogenes, cynicism is the inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest. Cynicism as a universal assumption feeds nihilism; if all human action is selfishly motivated, then duty to virtue, to high moral standards, is a pretense—virtue is itself a construct of those whose selfish interests are collectively organized and prevalent.
I hasten to caution readers against lumping the various interests that lie in some part in the scope of queer theory and dismissing these interests based on the critique of critical theory. One should examine carefully, which is to say skeptically, the assumption implicit in the LGBTQ acronym that homosexuality (sexual orientation) and transgenderism (gender identity) are morally, philosophically, and politically congruent. As Douglas Murray and other prominent gay pundits have stressed, gay is not synonymous with queer. One can be gay without being queer, i.e., be romantically attracted to the same sex without taking up the practice of transgression—just as one can be straight without making a political movement out of it. Indeed, the attempt to make heterosexuality out to be a power move means to politicize that which existed prior to civilization and as such has no intrinsic political content. Sexual orientation is only political if politicized.
Inspired by the queer theoretical and the practice of transgression, DQSH is thus an act in “queering society,” that is, to make everything explicitly about sexuality while marginalizing heteronormativity and heterosexuality by making these appear as constructed and oppressive despite the fact that they are essential and natural.
Whatever one thinks of the practice, it should be at a minimum admitted that it is unusual for this particular form of entertainment to appear before children in this way, for at least the fact that libraries are not usually associated with those (often subterranean) cultural environments that incubated and elaborated drag in the United States.
Drag, or female impersonation, began as an outgrowth of black-face minstrel shows, soon adopted by vaudeville (e.g., “prima donna” and “winch” caricatures performed by men) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It had spread to the night club scene by the early twentieth century and from there found its way into the gay community.
Writer Michelle Tea devised the concept of the Drag Queen Story Hour in 2015. The idea was inaugurated at the San Francisco Public Library. Brooklyn Public Library put on the show the following year and, since then, story hours have appeared across North America. The shows have even spread to Europe, where drag also enjoys a long history. There are more than thirty nonprofit chapters in the United States alone. There is even an international working group. DQSH is a well-organized campaign.
When conservative governments pass laws restrict drag performances for children (Tennessee’s law was just struct down by a federal court), critics of this move mock conservatives by focusing on the fact that drag performed for children is happening without talking about why it is happening. Drag for children is depicted as natural act that had no ulterior motive—that is, it is apolitical. Conservatives are accused of politicizing drag and then blasted for waging a “culture war.” In fact, DQSH is a weapon in a culture war waged by queer activists to disrupt normal social relations and weaken the necessary boundaries between adults and children. Drag around children is aimed as undermining the safeguarding of children. (See The Problem with Parental Rights. See also Republicanism and the Meaning of Small Government.)
According to Jonathan Hamilt, cofounder of the New York chapter, Drag Queen Story House strives to “instill the imagination and play of gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” Drag Queen Story Hour is thus pitched as a project to explore diversity and promote inclusivity. Taking children to these events help them develop empathy towards marginalized communities. Advocates emphasize the learning experience, explaining that the program encourages children to use their imagination, to turn their fantasies into realities, to reject the boxes society has established.
These selling points make the ideological ambitions of the campaign explicit: the project is devoted to disrupting the normative system that not only reproduces solidarity across social structure but has also allowed gay and lesbian people to live their lives freely and openly. The program is explicit in its intention to transgress gender norms in order to disrupt children’s understanding of sex and sex roles (see The Real Story Behind Drag Queen Story Hour).
Not a small number of feminists would suggest that what children are being taught in these events is not merely to take on faith the ideas and objectives of queer theory but to acquire a loathing of those women who object to being worn as a costume.
This was Raymond’s criticism in The Transsexual Empire. Transgenderism seeks to make women in the image of man by colonizing feminist identification, culture, politics, and sexuality. She contends that “transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.” She continues: “Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so they seem non—invasive.” The libertarian psychiatrist and human rights activist Thomas Szasz similarly describes “transsexualism as an emblem of modern society’s unremitting—though increasingly concealed—antifeminism.”
With transsexualism as the way in, years later, we find men invading women’s spaces, even lesbian dating services with demands that lesbians accept men claiming to be women, most of them with their genitalia intact, or be smeared as bigots. The objectors would ask you to consider the following: Drag queens are adult men performing (some would say mocking) femininity—and doing so in hyper-sexualized fashion.
Indeed, drag is often explicitly justified as a “send up,” an exaggerated imitation of someone or something in order to ridicule them. Women don’t typically—as in almost never—look like women in drag, let alone read to children in libraries dressed provocatively and behaving in a stereotypically sexualized manner. Drag queens, on the other hand, often appear at these events as strippers, entering the room as a nightclub act, and always using sexualized gestures and speech. The focus is on the drag queen as sexualized totem. That’s the point of the ritual: to desensitize children to the presence of explicitly sexualized men, men whose identities revolve around their fantasies about either being or mocking women.
One might ask why it is acceptable for a man to lampoon women in this manner but unacceptable for a white man to appear in black face. Is it because transgenderism has become an article of faith in a world ruled by identity politics but transracialism has not? (See From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much.) Moreover, is drag an instantiation of the objectification of women?
I will let you ponder those questions (unavoidable in my estimation). I want to emphasize the point that, however much one might agree with the agenda behind DQSH, by its own lights, it is explicitly the cultural expression of a political ideology and must be grasped as a project devised to suggest to children that their gender and sexuality are mutable and that liminal adult sexualized displays are normal place. In this way, DQSH is akin to other forms of indoctrination, such as Vacation Bible School.
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I share below a meme I have now shared on a few social media platforms, which has elicited not a few responses. It’s from the satirical news outlet Babylon Bee. It gets not only at Drag Queen Story Hour but also other forms of drag performed in front of children, for example, at nightclubs and other adult places of accommodation where drag queens perform strip tease, their genitals visible, and receive tips from children, who physically approach the men and touch their bodies. These types of interactions are frequent occurrences at the story hours, as well, where men sit children on their laps and romp with them on carpets.
From BabylonBee.com
When I posted the meme to Facebook, a friend asked, presumably rhetorically, “Why does a man in drag/lingerie want to act out in front of a group of children anyway? Why not have female strippers too?” Perhaps you, too, have wondered this (maybe you have been pondering it since I alluded to such a thing only moments ago).
I responded that, if it were a female stripper, then that would be seen for what it is: the sexualization of children by exposing them to adult sexual displays. Why is sexualization a problem? Thrusting children into circumstances with adult sexual content to which they can’t consent is potentially traumatic and damaging to children. It may also be illegal.
Why does a man dressing as a stripper change the situation? An anthropologist might say that it’s because, by occupying a liminal space, by not actually being a woman, but portraying exaggerated version of one, the man is not actually what he is feigning. It is a performance. So is stripping. So is prostitution, for that matter (the only difference between prostitution and pornography is that the latter occurs in front of a camera and thus enjoys First Amendment protection). The sex worker, like the porn actor, is pretending to like her John. I will suggest, then, that it is the agenda that makes one okay and the others wrong.
At the risk of enlarging the circle of offense-taking, parents who take their children to drag shows share with parents who put their children in beauty pageants a desire to place their kids in circumstances where the emphasis on hyper-sexualized displays are normalized and rewarded—with the potential for audience members attending these events to do so for purposes of sexual gratification. By characterizing these types of affairs as sexually exploitative, I have made people mad, especially those parents who have put their kids through them. I confess, I don’t know how to avoid the truth.
Netflix’s show about dancing queer children. Like Dance Moms and other youth-centered reality television shows, Dancing Queen is invested in queer childhood. The similarity to child pageantry programming is unmistakable. The children are sexualized. One might expect that, while the show is youth-centered, the audience is substantially adult and male.
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I want dwell for a bit on the opportunity these types of affairs afford those who see children as objects with which to achieve sexual gratification; these circumstances risk encounters with individuals whose motives may be untoward, and who are in any case projecting a sexualized and sexualizing persona.
There is a link between pedophilia, the clinical term for adult (mostly male) sexual attraction to children (the term is currently being recoded by The Party as “minor attracted persons,” or “MAPs”), and autopedophilia, a fetish (or kink) in which an adult is sexually aroused by imagining himself to be a child, which often involves dressing as a child and being treated as such by others, including children.
The later disorder is what psychiatrists call erotic-target identity inversion, or ETII. Autogynephilia, in which a male is sexually aroused by imagining himself to be a woman, which, as with autopedophilia, often involves dressing as the object of his sexual fantasy, is also a form of ETII. Pedophiles who suffer also additionally from autogynephilia may dress like little girls. Indeed, it is not uncommon for drag queens to adopt a princess-like appearance and tell the children around them that they are themselves a child. Perhaps the most famous case of this is Michael Jackson.
According to KHOU-11, based in Houston, a media spokesperson for a library there confirmed that one of the program’s drag queens, Tatiana Mala Niña (Tatiana “Bad Girl”), is Alberto Garza, a 32-year-old child sex offender. In 2008, Garza was convicted of assaulting an 8-year-old boy. He was sentenced to five years’ probation and community supervision. The Texas Sex Offender Registry says Garza is at “moderate” risk of reoffending. “In our review of our process and of this participant, we discovered that we failed to complete a background check as required by our own guidelines,” library officials said in a statement. “We deeply regret this oversight and the concern this may cause our customers.”
Bianca Del Rio, Winner of Season 6 of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
The clown-like aspect in many drag performances before children may also be a projection of this fetish (which perhaps explains why perceptive and sensitive children are often terrified by clowns—and why producers of horror fiction make bank with clowns). In other words, parents, in addition to taking their children to an event devised to disrupt the developing normative understandings of an immature human being, may also be taking their children to events where male performers are using their children to achieve sexual gratification.
Some children have never gotten over the trauma of being forced to be around clowns. Coulrophobia, the clinical term for adult fear of clowns, has its roots in childhood trauma. This occurs because the brain is evolved to detect danger—and the unusual is often dangerous.
There has been a lot of controversy over the use of the term “groomer” to characterize the behavior that occurs in these settings. In fact, using the word can get you banned on Twitter (perhaps not for long). As with extreme hostility to stories about how, in fact, most children (if allowed to) grow out of gender dysphoria, or the many and growing cases of detransitioners, describing all this as grooming provokes the zealotry that lies at the core of this (quasi)religious movement. But you’d be extraordinarily naive to not grasp the reality that, in many cases, this is in fact what is occurring. Think about it. Pedophiles like children. Pedophiles go where the children are. This fact has produced not a few Catholic Priests.
In their 2019 article, “The Grooming of Children for Sexual Abuse in Religious Settings,” published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior, Susan Reine and Stephen Kent “argue that unique aspects of religion facilitate institutional and interpersonal grooming in ways that often differ from forms of manipulation in secular settings.” They continue: “A number of uniquely religious characteristics facilitate this cultivation, which includes: theodicies of legitimation; power, patriarchy, obedience, protection, and reverence towards authority figures; victims’ fears about spiritual punishments; and scriptural uses to justify adult-child sex.”
If the reader thinks analogically, the parallels should become obvious. Gender ideology is form of religious thought and action. Listen to the language. Ideologues talk about truth of gender as “the way I feel inside,” a mystification. Nobody can see the way a person feels inside, just as nobody can see a person’s soul. But the soul in religion—the paradigm of the nonfalsifiable thing—is for the believer the real and eternal thing, just as gender is for the believer something that can be out of phase with what a person is actually, that is as ascertained by science. Religion has at its core a problem with reality.
While I have no problem with adults performing drag (it’s a First Amendment matter and I am a hard core libertarian), I know others who do. However problematic one might find the exaggerated emphasis on gendered signifiers, especially those associated with commercial girl culture, an emphasis that lies at the heart of drag expression, adults have the freedom in an open society to dress how they wish and perform gender in whatever manner they choose.
I don’t mean to sound Butlerian by putting it this way; I do not believe gender is merely performative or transmutable. Rather, this is my libertarian response to those who disagree with me about the appropriate of drag as a general proposition. Moreover, I remind them, there are forms of drag that do not involve sexualization. Monty Python drag bits, especially in the Life if Brian are hysterical. Everybody agrees with me here (so far, at least, the joy eaters haven’t cancelled Monty Python). To be sure, some opposition to drag is coming from a prudish place. I get that. Prudishness is not my bag. I’m a sex-positive feminist.
“I want to be one.” From Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
We live in a society where parents have a lot of control over what materials and events to which their children may be subject. Sex-segregated summer camp, vacation bible school, beauty pageants—to name a few. At the same time, parents need to think about whether subjecting their children to sexualized performances and identities—and provide their children to men to use to achieve sexual gratification (is there a vetting process in all this)—is the best use of their child’s time, and consider carefully what deleterious effects these could potentially have on their children.
That said, nobody I know is trying to stop sexualized drag shows per se. The concern is with the presence of children at events with explicitly sexualized content. One might reasonably ask why a project that is trying to promote compassion and empathy for sexual minorities need involve provocative sexualized content. After all, there are other ways to build empathy for the various groups, including sexual minorities, towards which parents may feel sympathy or believe are marginal.
Again, parents remain still free to indoctrinate their children with their cultural and political commitments. Muslim parents still dress their female children in chadors in the United States. (I do think we should draw the line at circumcision, though—another of my opinions that has angered others. Apparently I’m a pro at triggering people with my criticisms of prevailing cultural practices.) Drag Queen Story Hour is one of a myriad of mass cultural phenomena in which parents have been caught up.
At the same time, these are not sacred affairs. There are no sacred affairs. The point of the meme I shared above is to cut through the soft sell to get what motivates some—and I emphasize some—of the participants. The meme takes off a bit of the polish. That’s a healthy thing in a free and open—and presumably rational—society. It speaks to a concern with ideology and ritual and the effects these have on children by asking us to consider the motives of those who are drawn to these situations. Not all priests are problematic, after all; but parents should none the less be leery of turning over their children to them. As a general rule, parents shouldn’t let virtue-seeking make them naive.
* * *
Drag Queen Story Hour is a paradigm of the way queer theory works to transgress societal boundaries in order to create spaces not just for those who problematize or reject traditional gender boxes (see Foucauldian Seductions: Busty Lemieux and the Hijab), which risks confusing children whose developing brains find difficult distinguishing the difference between fantasy and reality (that’s the point of early indoctrination—see Why It Harms the Liberty of Neither Teachers Nor Students to Restrict Ideology in the Classroom), but also creates a space for those who desire room to not merely indulge their sexual deviancy in front of children but also to normalize pedophilia and other forms of paraphilia, indeed to instill in children at a young age the notion that there is really no such thing as paraphilia-as-disorders, that these are just other ways of being, and all ways of being are acceptable except those that disagree with the queer standpoint.
This is not to suggest for a moment that homosexuality is sexual deviancy. Homosexuality is part of the natural history of our species, just as it is for thousand of other animal species. Moreover, the destigmatization of homosexuality and the abolition of legal discrimination and persecution of gays and lesbians has been among the greatest triumphs of the American Creed over the darkness of bigotry. My arguments have absolutely nothing to do with a desire for the heterosexualization of children. Most children will come to opposite-sex attraction naturally (this is necessary for the reproduction of the species). Those boys and girls who will grow up to be gay and lesbian will come to that naturally, as well.
(If you think about it, giving cross-sex hormones and surgically altering the bodies of same-sex attracted persons in order to turn them into the apparent of the opposite sex is an extreme form of heterosexualization of children. It is a form of conversion therapy. See Elite Hankerings for Obedience to learn how this works in Iran. This is also covered here: Foucauldian Seductions: Busty Lemieux and the Hijab.)
My argument concerns two problems. First, the sexualization of children. Ironically, the exaggerated emphasis on gendered and sexual signifiers, especially those associated with the culture industry, is powerfully heterosexualizing. It is wrong to confuse potentially gay and lesbian children about the gender identity based on the subject of romantic attraction.
Second, providing access to children for sexual deviants. Does this mean that all drag queens are sexual deviants? Of course not. I can tell you without even looking for numbers that the vast majority aren’t. But some are. I had somebody disagree with me on this in this fashion: “Yes, some priests are pedophiles. But does that mean we shouldn’t allow children to be around priests.” I think they were taken aback when I said, bluntly, “Yes, I think it does mean that.”
Nathan Robinson, for Current Affairs, writes, “Conservatives’ visceral dislike for any defiance of strict gender norms exposes the authoritarian core of right-wing politics.” The assumptions in this smear are that gender ideology seeks only the transgression of rigid gender norms and moreover that support for traditional gender norms is authoritarian.
Neither of these assumptions is correct. Gender ideologists argue for transgressing all the norms surrounding gender and sex, including age of consent laws. Gender ideology is an extremist belief system. The ideology also advocates medically altering children while suppressing news about the facts of the stability of feelings of gender incongruence (some of which is generated by the movement itself) and the regrets of those who have been put on hormones and undergone surgical procedures such as castration and mastectomy. Moreover, support for traditional gender norms is supported by anthropological observations that there has always been a sexual division of labor, that is, the species is sexually dimorphic, and that the vast majority of males and females identify as such.
Jo Bartosch, in her essay “Drag Queen Story Time is not okay,” ponders the purpose of DQST in Great Britain, and comes to a most obvious conclusion: “DQST claims to offer ‘queer role models’ to children. But despite the popularity of its events, it remains unclear how a man in a lurid frock will make kids with two mums feel supported, or how DQST serves to stop the bullying of kids who don’t conform. Britain is a remarkably tolerant country and many children will have a same-sex couple somewhere in their family; aunties Clare and Kate are likely to be better role models than adult entertainers with X-rated social-media feeds.”
However, Bartosch writes, “there is something more sinister to DQST. The male drag performers going into schools and libraries are routinely introduced to children as ‘she’. In this way, far from challenging stereotypes, DQST performances underscore the idea that womanhood is a gaudy, sexualised costume. Children are introduced to the use of preferred pronouns and the concept, popularised by queer theory, that ‘gender is a performance.’” Bortosch continues: “At a fundamental level, this creates a disjuncture between what the child knows to be true and what the child is compelled to say. In this way, DQST teaches compliance; it is the conceit of arrogant activists who seek to indoctrinate children, not educate them. That this is happening under the guise of ‘inclusivity’ and within libraries and schools is a bitter irony.”
Yes, I know parents have the “right” in our society to make their kids believe as they do, but that doesn’t make it right. Children can neither consent to nor see through irrational teachings. A lot of adults can’t even see through the irrational character of their own beliefs. So my message is this: don’t put your kids through ideological programming. Don’t use children to advance agendas. Parents, leave your kids free to find themselves—not to find yourselves.
* * *
I want to end on a personal note. As a teenager in the 1970s, I caught glimpses of drag performers thanks to the generosity of bouncers working the entrances at clubs in the French Quarter. By the early 1980s, I was attending showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show in Coconut Grove with an army of gay men, who often went in drag.
Some might suggest that my persona in South Florida’s heavy metal band Maddax involved drag, although not nearly to the degree that other bands in the United States over the second half of the 1980s took their dress, hair, and makeup.
I’m reticent to claim things I may not have earned. Decide for yourself. The point is that I know the history of drag, I get what it’s all about. I would ask those who accuse me of bigotry whether they fully understand drag themselves.
“The opposite of courage is not cowardice. It’s conformity.” —Earl Nightingale
“We become what we think about.” —Earl Nightingale
In his 1927 book The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud argues that, when a solitary person or small group of persons believe some impossible thing that depends entirely on faith, that is, a feeling and associated belief that cannot be empirically demonstrated to actually exist, such as souls or angels, the person or group is delusional. A delusion, to crib from the Internet, is “an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder.”
However, if millions of people believe this impossible thing, it becomes something different (but not really). It becomes an illusion. Such illusions often appear in the form of religion, where such things as the soul or angels become articles of faith that must be believed.
Since such illusions are, as with their corresponding delusions, contradicted by rational argument or what would otherwise generally be accepted as reality (if but for the illusion), it is imperative to silence those who, like the small boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 parable The Emperor Has No Clothes, who not only contributed to the mutual knowledge of the emperor’s subjects but also, not yet indoctrinated into habitual practice of denying to the obvious, had to say what everybody already knew: the emperor was naked.
To be sure, the purveyors of the illusion will try to make what appear to be arguments to persuade those around them that their worldview is the true one. The arguments will of course be circular and nonfalsifiable. The power to compel belief ultimately rests on some capacity to command the social machinery (culture, economy, and politics) and thus control people. For Freud, given human nature, such control was probably for the best. Here is where I depart Freud’s company.
* * *
A 2019 blog by Verve blogger and “child empowerment” advocate Chanju Mwanza about transracialist Rachael Dolezal concludes with this: “There is a difference between transitioning into a new gender, which doesn’t harm anyone else, and choosing to live a lie to the detriment of other people who form the oppressed group that you’re so desperate to be a part of. The whole transracial concept embodies white supremacy and the fact that white people can continue to steal from the oppressed, even by pretending to be part of the community itself.”
Similarly, Braden Hill, an aboriginal Australian at Edith Cowan University, writes, “There is a difference between affirming your gender as a trans person and choosing to live and appropriate another culture.” (See “Members can identify as black, disabled or female, university union insists,” The Times.)
Whenever I see attempts to differentiate two phenomena that the author recognizes are intuitively similar, I do a word substitution to see if the argument still works the other way around. In this case, it would look like this: There is a difference between transitioning to a new race, which doesn’t harm anyone else, and choosing to live a lie to the detriment of other people who form the oppressed group that you’re so desperate to be a part of. The whole transgender concept embodies male supremacy and the fact that men can continue to steal from the oppressed, even by pretending to be part of the community itself.
A reader might object that girls and women also adopt new identities, many of them choosing to identify as boys and men. Indeed (and Freud would have something to say about this). And what about those who choose to identify as no gender at all?
Before any reader feels moved to make this objection, know that it ignores that blacks have passed for white in an attempt (some successfully) to escape their oppressed category. Moreover, there are blacks who wish not to identify racially at all.
On this last point, consider Kmele Foster’s argument for racial abolitionism. Glenn Loury puts Foster’s position this way: “Kmele Foster, a ‘Black man’ in terms of what you’d think when you saw him, refuses to call himself a Black man or to think of himself as a ‘Black man’ and abjures the very idea that we’re gonna see each other in these racial terms. He’s for abolishing the categories of race altogether.”
Foster’s argument is indebted to that of historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields who, in their book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, argue that the practice of racism, which involves reifying racial categories, produces the illusion of race.
What about this claim that transitioning to a new gender doesn’t harm anyone else? There are feminists across the West who are making the case that allowing trans women, who remain male, to enter women (female)-only spaces, such as bathrooms, domestic abuse centers, dressing rooms, locker rooms, and jails and prisoners, is harmful to women, as men use women’s dress as a ruse to put themselves in a position to prey on women (and children). Moreover, trans women use their new status to take advantage of opportunities and draw upon resources traditionally reserved for women in order to advance their own life chances and personal power.
Mwanza makes a number of arguments in her blog. None of them work very well. And, no, I did not pick her blog because it serves as a straw man. I have scoured the Internet for better arguments and have found none.
The so-called “transracialists” have appropriated the word “transracial,” Mwanza claims with some accuracy. Mwanza notes that, originally (and exclusively, in Mwanza’s view), transracial “refers to the act of adopting a child of one race or ethnic group and placing them into a family of a different race or ethnic group.” “Transracial,” she asserts, “speaks to the millions of children who are denied an intimate knowledge of their birth cultures and are constantly torn between their multiple identities by being raised in an environment different to their own racial or ethnic backgrounds.”
This is an odd argument given that ethnicity, defined as a demonstrably but relatively cohesive cultural and linguistic category, is learned. One is not born with an ethnicity (or a religion, etc). To the extent that we can say there are such things as “black” and “white” ethnicities (there is likely a category error here), then black children raised in white neighborhoods by white parents learn white ethnicity.
As for race, is this not a social construct? Are the really such things as races in natural history? Like Foster, Barbara and Karen Fields say no. So does Rachel Dolezal. To be sure, the black child looks different from the white parents, and this is the result of ancestry. But should we define ancestry in terms of race? Is the one-drop rule still in effect? Are we still applying blood quantum rules? (I have written quite a lot on this subject. See, for example, my recent blog What Lies Behind the Popular Reracialization of the Human Population? See also “Race Finished” by Jan Sapp.)
Skirting these important matters, Mwanza assumes that race and ethnicity are rooted in ancestry and therefore cannot be chosen. “Unlike gender, which is assigned to you at birth,” she writes, “your race or ethnicity is rooted in ancestry. You can’t inherit your gender but you do inherit your race. The fact that these people believe that they can pick and choose parts of the ethnicity they want and later decide to revert to their whiteness is white privilege at its worst.”
Sex or gender, whichever term you prefer, is a constellation of genotypic and phenotypic traits with which one is born. But what about blacks who have passed for white and chose or choose to do so? Is that opting into white privilege? Is it also an attempt to escape the oppressive category of blackness?
Given what I noted earlier about race and ethnicity, points on which anthropologists and sociologists generally agree, if ethnicity is cultural and race a social construct, how are these inevitably inherited given the phenomenon of transracial adoption? Race could only be assigned in the continuing presence of what the Fields describe as racecraft.
Moreover, is gender really assigned at birth? Or is it identified by the physician helping to deliver the baby with near 100 percent certainty based on objectively-ascertainable sex characteristics? We have to be careful not to allow the way activists and ideologues put things shape our grasp of reality. It’s not “It’s a boy!” because the physician assigned the label. It’s a boy because the physician, with all her experience, recognizes what it is—and is rarely wrong (as in almost never).
Mwanza claims that the new transracialists enjoy (if we let them) “the option to decide when to carry the burdens and discrimination felt by other races whilst also reaping the ‘benefits’ by taking money from organizations created to empower and help black communities.” She notes that Dolezal benefited financially for her “decision to go through adult life as a black person.” (Can a man benefit financially for his decision to go through adult live as a woman? Somebody should ask Dylan Mulvaney.)
How, if being black is an oppressed category, does a white person benefit from identifying as a member of an oppressed category? Would this not be stepping into oppression? Did Dolezal step out of privilege into oppression? Or did she step into privilege. Others, Mwanza argues, have “benefited financially from the publicity gained by coming out as ‘transracial’. They literally robbed black people of the money they deserved, and yet had the audacity to say it was fair because they ‘felt black’.”
Literally? Money deserved on what grounds? There’s an assumption here. There’s another assumption at work here, as well: that a white person cannot “feel black.” How does Mwanza know that? “Black isn’t something you can just decide to be,” she asserts. “You can’t … put on some makeup and perm your hair and assume that you’re now navigating the world as a black person.” Why not?
How does a man know what it feels like to be a woman? Or a boy a girl? Since we are our bodies, wouldn’t feeling like a woman require the experience of being one? If a woman is an “adult human female,” which has been the objective and noncircular definition in usage for millennia, then an adult human male cannot have such an experience. Knowing what it means to be a woman can only be in his imagination (even if the thought of it is enough to physically arouse some men). To be sure, he can dress like a woman, even surgically alter his body to appear as one (which rarely works), but he cannot be the genotype he isn’t. There’s no alchemy in the world that makes that possible.
Mwanza argues that trans people “don’t choose to be trans, they’re born that way.” (Is there evidence for this?) “Transitioning as a trans person [by which the author presumably means transgender person, since there are many trans category] is a violent, painful and difficult process that can result in job-loss, isolation and rejection.”
Ask Dolezal whether the transition to a black person has been a difficult process, one that resulted in job-loss, isolation, and rejection. Ask Malaika Kubwa, aka Martina Big, a German model and actress known for her “artificial transformation from a caucasian woman to a black woman,” to quote Wikipedia. What Kubwa is going through must be a painful and difficult process.
At the time the Dolezal story broke back in 2015 I didn’t think about this piece of it, that, by claiming to be black, Dolezal is able to claim for herself the existential position that she is the victim of racial discrimination and oppression that blacks uniquely suffer as a class (not that other racial minorities do not suffer in their own unique way)—or that this comes with privileges. At least some would say she could claim this or that this was her aim.
As a white person, so the woke ideology goes, Dolezal cannot experience race oppression. But as a black woman, Dolezal steps into oppression. She is at least trying to be an oppressed person. Why? Because, according to Mwanza, there are benefits to being black. I wonder to what extent the benefits of being oppressed was a motivating factor for Dolezal? Claiming the oppression of others on either or both expressive and instrumental grounds does seem to be a possible motive.
But there’s another form of oppression Dolezal steps into. To the extent that people don’t believe Dolezal is really black, she can also claim to be the victim of discrimination against transracial persons, which is a growing phenomenon across the West. Denying the concept of biological race, Dolezal does claim to be “transracial.” (See Adolph Reed, Jr.’s “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much.”)
* * *
I looked today for more about how Dolezal sees these matters and found an interview from March 2017 in Contexts by Ann Morning. Asked about the constant question put to Dolezal about how she identifies, Dolezal said, “I get fatigued by the overly simplistic race labels… Yes, Black is the closest descriptive race or culture category that represents the essential essence of who I am, and I stand unapologetically on the ‘Black side’ of the racially constructed Black/White divide. But, if I could choose a more complex label with my own terms, it might be ‘A pro-Black, Pan-African, bisexual artist, activist, and mother.’
“Most people on the street would likely feel that description is more confusing than helpful, so finding where I fit amid the binary language of our current race-based society, I could say ‘A Black woman born to White parents,’ or, if I was allowed to use a newer term (also since my parents don’t define me), I would prefer ‘A TransBlack woman.’”
Clearly, Dolezal sees herself as transracial in the new (or fallacious, according to her critics) meaning of the term. She describes her feeling as “instinctually” black and finds that feeling as “beautiful and inspirational.” “I didn’t know how to articulate that this was ‘me’ except in my drawings and playtime as a child,” she explains; “and from there I learned what was—and wasn’t—socially acceptable about how I felt.”
In describing her transitions, she says, “It felt like a long journey home. I started far away, and it just kept calling to me until I found my way fully there. Of course, feeling like I was then evicted in a sense in 2015 was painful. But it’s still home to me.”
“I connected the idea of race as a social construct with the philosophy of leaders like Dick Gregory who said that ‘White isn’t a race, it’s a state of mind.’ I knew White wasn’t my state of mind, and this gave me permission to stop repressing and be exactly who I am,” she tells the interviewer. “Whiteness feels foreign to me. It was, awkwardly, how people saw me when I was a child and how some people see me now, so I have to interact with that disconnect at times. The very idea of Whiteness, upon which the worldview of race was built, established the propaganda of White as righteous, pure, and superior. I reject this worldview and am not a member of, as James Balwin called them, ‘people who think they’re White.’”
Here is a useful exchange from the interview:
AM: Do you think there is a parallel between your racial self-identification and the gender self-identification of Caitlyn Jenner, who was heavily featured in the news at the same time as you were?
RD: Inasmuch as we were both categorized at birth as something other than what we felt—and some people will always see both of us as our birth category and nothing further—there is a parallel. I think courage and some degree of harmonizing the outer body with the inner self so people visually identify us, how we identify ourselves would be a commonality as well. There is absolutely no parallel when it comes to financial resources, which are a real factor for cushioning a nontraditional self-identity; there we part ways as super-rich versus single mom barely surviving. And there’s the difference of stigma, with gender fluidity being more widely accepted than race fluidity at this moment in history. Mainstream media didn’t shame Caitlyn in the same way I was shamed. My son, Franklin, asked me how race didn’t become fluid first, with science proving time and again it is not a biological reality. It’s a good question.
AM: What do you think of the term “transracial”?
RD: I think the former use of “transracial,” describing kids who were born with a different race label than the family they grew up in (usually via adoption) wasn’t widely known enough before 2015. So, with the spotlight on Caitlyn Jenner and then me in short succession, many people began using it to describe me, as if “transracial” was a new word and I was the front-runner of a movement. In a literal sense, I don’t like the word, because it would be like saying “transhuman” to anyone who accepts that race is fiction. And yet, if that is a term that helps people understand or is useful in creating awareness and empathy for people with a plural race identity, then I’m fine with it as a starting point. I really don’t feel like it’s up to me to decide what the word should or will mean.
The Rachel Dolezal case is an interesting case sociologically. It’s not the only case. Besides her and Kubwa, there are, among many others, Jessica Krug, a woman born to white parents who passed as black, Ja Du, a trans woman who was born to white parents and identifies as Filipina, and Old London, a white person who identifies as Korean. One wonders whether the public shaming of such individuals will deter others from following this path. I expect it won’t.
Hillary Clinton says voters don’t fully appreciate the consequences of voting GOP on Tuesday. I think they do. Republicans, especially the populists set to take over the party, or at least push it back towards its mid-nineteenth century roots, are better—much, much better—than Democrats on a range of issues: crime, culture, economy, education, immigration, medicine, and foreign policy. I will expand on some of those issues in this blog, but I will spend most of my words on the question of crime.
It’s obvious to attentive and compassionate Americans that standing down police and prosecutors and implementing various reforms, such as cashless bail, has compromised the criminal justice system’s ability to control serious deviant behavior; as a consequence, the United States is now experiencing a wave of crime, an increase that comes after decades of significant reductions in criminal offending—reductions that resulted largely from the vast expansion of the criminal justice apparatus in the early 1990s.
How serious is the crime problem? According to National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data, between 2020 and 2021, violent crime incidents and offenses increased 29 and 27.5 percent respectively. Homicide for both increased by more than 40 percent. Robbery by 18 percent. Rape incidents and offenses by 38 and 37 percent respectively. Property-crime incidents and offenses 22 percent and 21 percent respectively.
Clinton, who you will recall referred to black youth in the 1990s as “super predators,” claimed recently that red states are as bad for homicide as blue states. Wrong unit of analysis. Crime is worst in cities run by progressive Democrats. In fact, of the 30 American cities with the highest murder rates, 27 have Democratic mayors—and at least 14 Soros-backed prosecutors, with many more prosecutors politically progressive and sympathetic to the woke line.
As alluded to earlier, the increase in crime is not only because Democrats have weakened the criminal justice response; Democrats have given young black men and women permission to commit crime as reparations-in-kind. (See Is There Systemic Anti-White Racism?)
Over the last decade, the corporate state media, legitimizing its propaganda by appealing to the expertise of the progressional and managerial strata, functionaries (or effectively so) ensconced in academic institutions, and grievance merchants standing up activist organizations, have pursued a campaign to convince Americans that the nation is shot through with racism and that whites are to blame.
With the crackpot academic construction critical race theory in back of their public messaging, woke progressives aggressively disseminate the falsehoods promulgated by the corrupt Black Lives Matter campaign, myths such as that cops prowling America’s inner cities looking for young black men to murder. (For more on BLM, see What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it.)
Here’s the empirical reality: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Police-Public Contact Survey, around 60 million residents 16 years of age and older report having at least one contact with police annually. It might surprise you to learn the number is that large. In fact, it’s much larger than that, given that many individuals reporting contact have more than one encounter with the police in a year. What this means is that, with the US population at more than 330 million citizens and residents (with tens of millions more here illegally), the police have their hands full.
It might also surprise you (given media coverage) that most contacts involve white civilians, with females slightly more likely to experience contact with a police officer than males. However, males (at around 3 percent) are more likely than females (around 1 percent) to experience threats of use of force. A higher percentage of blacks (around 3 percent) and Hispanics (also around 3 percent) are likely to report experiencing threats or use of force than whites (at around 2 percent). Around 4 percent of blacks and the same percent of Hispanics report having been cuffed during contact, compared to around 2 percent of whites and other races.
That cuffing is reported as the most common use of force when force is reported is a significant fact. Cuffing has become routine at agencies because of the risk to officers when detainees and arrestees have their hands free. This change in policy has contributed to a significant reduction in death and injury occurring to police officers. (It’s a workplace safety issue.) The negative public perception around routine cuffing is driven by the fact that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to come into contact with police given the overrepresentation in serious crime.
The worst outcome of civilian-police encounters is lethal violence, resulting in either the death of the civilian or the death of an officer. The latter is a rare occurrence these days, however police officers in the United States kill approximately a thousand civilians annually.
According to Mapping Police Violence (based on police data, the Washington Post, and the website Fatal Encounters), around 97 percent of deaths result from shootings. Most of those shot by the police are armed and the majority of those killed are male—96 percent in 2020, according to the Washington Post (see my blog The Police are Sexist, too).
According to numerous sources, whites make up the largest proportion of those shot by the police, approximately half of the total number, with blacks and Hispanics in roughly equal proportions representing the other half of fatalities. Since many sources (the Washington Post/Fatal Encounters) mix ethnicity and race, and since most Hispanics are racially white, the proportion of whites killed, if ethnicity is abstracted out, becomes larger.
Again, these facts might surprise the reader given the message pumped out by the culture and media industries. To be sure, black males, constituting around six percent of the US population, are overrepresented among those who are killed by the police (at around between a quarter and a third of the total number). However, contrary to the popular perceptions, for example one survey finding a large percentage of blacks and white progressives believing the police kill a thousand or more unarmed blacks annually, fatal police shootings of unarmed blacks number around 22 per year (the number is much larger for unarmed whites).
Isn’t any number of unarmed fatalities too many? The category “unarmed” is misleading given that hands and feet are prehistorically the first weapons men utilized in violent encounters with other men. Hundreds of deaths occur every year in the United States from hands and feet, or “personal weapons.” In fact, in 2020, FBI crime statistics found that 662 homicides were committed with personal weapons. That’s more people than were killed by rifles that year.
The prevailing woke progressive narrative has very real effects. In a recent article by Justin T. Pickett, Amanda Graham, and Francis T. Cullen, “The American Racial Divide in Fear of the Police,” published in Criminology in January of this year, a review of surveys finds that about four in 10 blacks report being “very afraid” of being killed by the police, a statistic that is roughly twice the share of black respondents who reported being “very afraid” of being murdered by criminals, a statistically much greater risk, as well as about four times the share of whites who reported being “very afraid” of being killed by the police.
In a survey conducted by Eric Kaufmann of the Manhattan Institute in April of last year, eight in 10 blacks believed that young black men were more likely to be shot to death by police than to die in a car accident. The risk of dying in a car accident is much greater than being shot by the police.
At a recent conference held in Nashville on issues concerning the black community, where I presented an analysis on these numbers, a panelist, Debbie Griffith, affiliated with the University of Central Florida, shared her doctoral work, “Lessons My Parents Taught Me: The Cultural Significance of ‘The Talk’ within the Black Family,” concerning that moment wherein black parents and community members sit down young black boys and teach them how to behave when interacting with cops as a life-saving exercise, instructions that come with the claim that cops are racist and see black males as a criminal threat (she used videos from Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show on Comedy Central to illustrate). An audience member pointed out that white families also have a version of the talk, since it is widely understood that cops have a dangerous job and assume males of any race or ethnicity are a potential threat (see Jerome Skolnick’s pioneering work on the “symbolic assailant” in Justice Without Trial). But there is a difference, the audience member noted: the talk in white families is not racialized.
The expected rebuttal is that it doesn’t have to be racialized for whites because cops aren’t racist against whites. However, given that there is no evidence that cops are racist or that black males are any more likely to be shot by cops than white males after taking into account benchmarks, such as proportional involvement in serious crime, as well as situational factors, for example pointing a gun at an officer or rushing officers with a knife, the function of the talk in black families is to socialize young black males with a false perception of police officers, a perception that leads many black males to behave more aggressively towards police officers—a trend that police officers have not only taken in stride, but has led to their being less likely to escalate force on their end compared to similar encounters with white civilians, who, again, despite being much less likely to be involved in serious crime, account for most deaths at the hands of police officers.
Again, there are racial disparities when viewed in relation to population. The most common explanations for these, as well as other disparities in the criminal justice system, are implicit race bias and systemic racism. I’m sure readers have heard as truth the facts that racial bias is woven into the system and its institutions, in addition to existing in the minds of officers, prosecutors, judges, and juries, and that systemic racism, the complex of institutional arrangements, structures, and systems that disadvantages blacks and other minorities, is a serious problem in American society and across the West. However, these claims are unsupported by the evidence.
The problem of racial bias in civilian police encounters has been extensively studied. I want to mention two that highlight the problem with disproportionality and perceptions of bias before moving on to the hot-button issue of fatal police encounters.
Charles Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel’s 2014 Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, finds that, of drivers stopped by police, many of these stops constituting investigatory stops with neither reasonable suspicion nor probable cause to justify them (what we used to call “aggressive patrolling”), the proportion of racial minorities is almost double that of whites. Using traffic stops to get around Fourth Amendment law is a serious problem, and there definitely needs to be reform in this regard, but racial disparities in such stops—or in anything else in life—is not evidence of racism.
To illustrate, as I write in The Police are Sexist, too, “males are overrepresented in police shootings compared to females. In 2020, men were more than 25 times more likely to be shot and killed than women…. Are we to conclude from this that police are therefore sexist? Of course not. No one would assume that police are biased towards men and therefore more likely to shoot and kill them. No one assumes this because it’s immediately obvious that males are overrepresented in serious crime, whereas females are underrepresented.” I go on to elaborate the point: “male overrepresentation in serious crime causes men to interact with police more frequently than women and, as result, the risk of a lethal encounter with police officers is greater for men than women.”
Jack Glaser, in Suspect Race: Causes and Consequences of Racial Profiling, also published in 2014, contends that, while implicit stereotyping is not racism but an aspect of normal cognition (this was suggested decades before by Skolnick), it is nonetheless harmful and undesirable. In response to these and other findings, implicit bias training programs have been stood up across the nation to develop officer awareness of how attitudes and actions contribute to demographic disparities in the administration of the law. The body of assessments of these programs is not encouraging.
One of the difficulties with arguments from implicit race bias and systemic racism is that claims made on these grounds often take as evidence unexplained variation in racial differences, treating these as indicators of racism. Perhaps this is partially understandable given the difficulty in accessing the interior mental states of officers and criminal justice practitioners and the abstractness of notions of systems. However, it means that conclusions are the work of interpretations that rest, especially on notions of implicit racism, on unfalsifiable assumptions and circularity, where the fact of disparity become evidence of the cause of disparity. On the other hand, if disparities can be accounted for by other factors, the claims of systemic racism become increasingly untenable.
Awareness of the problem of racial disparities in the criminal justice system is long standing. William Wilbanks, in The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System, published in 1986, produced a comprehensive survey of contemporary research studies, searching for evidence of discrimination by police, prosecutors, judges, and prison and parole officers, finding that, although individual cases of racial prejudice and discrimination do occur in the system, there is insufficient evidence to support a charge of systematic racism against blacks in the criminal justice system. “At every point, from arrest to parole,” Wilbanks concludes, “there is little or no evidence of an overall racial effect.”
Robert Sampson and Janet L. Lauritsen’s 1997 comprehensive review of studies of the criminal justice system, a metanalysis published in Crime and Justice, also finds “little evidence that racial disparities result from systematic, overt bias.” In the early 1980s, Joan Petersilia of the RAND corporation came to a similar conclusion.
I have confessed in earlier blogs that I dismissed or was ignorant of these studies in the 1990s when I was researching the historic relationship between racism and criminal justice process (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters). But it’s curious that I was hardly the only pundit to forget or never know that the question had been answered.
Doubt about the claims of racial bias and systemic raised were raised anew in 2016 with the high-profile publication of Heather Mac Donald’s book The War on Cops. The book was followed by Harvard economist Roland Fryer’s 2019 paper, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” published in the Journal of Political Economy, available much earlier as a preprint (2018) and a working paper (2016). The New York Times covered the working paper in a 2016 article, so the findings were widely available well before the summer months of 2020.
While finding unexplained disparities in nonlethal civilian-police encounters involving force, when turning his attention to the most extreme use of force, i.e., officer-involved shootings, Fryer found no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are considered. Fryer argues that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers. Fryer suggests that lethal force carries costs great enough to deter officers from using the highest level of force at their disposal.
Fryer is hardly alone in his failure to find racist patterns in lethal police shootings In 2018, psychologist Joseph Cesario and colleagues, in Social Psychological and Personality Science, found, adjusting for crime, no systematic evidence of anti-black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects. The authors concluded that, when analyzing all shootings, exposure to police, given crime rate differences, accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for blacks. The fact pattern indicating exposure: at least half of homicides and more than half of robberies in America are attributable to black males. Moreover, black males account for some one-third of other serious crimes (aggravated assault, burglary).
David Johnson, Cesario, and others, in the pages of the 2019 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, refer to the effect of rates of violent crime as the “exposure hypothesis,” i.e., that serious criminal activity increases the likelihood of officer-civilian encounters, and this influences the frequency of policing shootings. The evidence Johnson and associates used in their study indicate that, taking crime rates into account, the bias in shootings actually appears to be against whites.
In a study published in Journal of Crime and Justice, also in 2019, Brandon Tregle and colleagues, when focusing on violent crime arrests or weapons offense arrests, found that blacks appear less likely to be fatally shot by police officers. Rutgers’ Charles Menifield and colleagues found, in a study published in Public Administration Review in 2019 that, although minority suspects are disproportionately killed by police, white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers. Most people killed by police are armed at the time of their fatal encounter, and more than two-thirds possess a gun.
Public safety is a quality-of-life issue. Serious crime falls hardest on the poor and working class, especially black and brown people. The most recent statistics on homicide find that 8,543 blacks were murdered compared to 5,498 whites. On the offender side, 7,875 murders were black compared to 4,905 whites. And, although there are more white victims of robbery than black victims—79,566 to 43,164 respectively), there are disproportionately more black victims of robbery relative to population. At the same time, on the offender side, 93,252 robbers were black compared to 44,946. Numbers like these explain the disproportionality in black civilians in fatal police encounters—and why some studies find the unexplained bias actually running in the opposite direction from that claims by progressives.
FBI
The latest statistics from the FBI are horrifying. Consider that the vast majority of murderers are male and black males are only six percent of the population—black males are responsible for well over half of all murders, as well as account for well over half of the victims. Again, such prominent Democrats as Hillary Clinton are openly lying about all this by substituting for the statistics that condemn their policies irrelevant state-level statistics; serious crime is an urban problem. What else do we hear from them? Black lives matter. It doesn’t look like it, doesn’t it?
Progressives cannot claim to speak for working people while undermining public safety. Ask yourself, why aren’t the progressives who run these cities working to fix the criminogenic conditions that disproportionately affect the marginal communities under their control? Why are they depolicing knowing that doing so makes these communities more dangerous, especially for the most vulnerable? Do not reason and compassion demand that, instead of rationalizing the situation in a manner that perpetuates crime and misery, and falsely accuses cops of racism, that those who claim to speak for marginalized populations would work to identify and solve the problems plaguing black people, the problems of idleness, dependency, fatherlessness, and mass immigration?
There are lots of other reasons to vote Democrats out of office. They have weakened the southern border, allowing millions of foreigners to enter the United States illegally. The empirical impact of mass immigration on the working class is not controversial in circles honest about evidence and effects. Foreign labor drives down wages for native and resident workers to the tune of hundreds of billions annually. Foreign labor takes the jobs of millions of native workers. Mass immigration disorganizes neighborhoods (especially black neighborhoods), fragments culture, and disrupts political formation. Mass immigration falls hardest on the poor and working class, especially black and brown people. Democrats cannot claim to speak for working people while undermining job and income security.
The Democrats have weakened the educational system by prioritizing the dissemination of critical theories (gender, queer, race) over the teaching of critical subject areas. For Democrats, public instruction has become a vehicle for the indoctrination of children in woke progressive ideology.
The Democrats have compromised world peace through NATO expansion and waging a proxy against Russia by injecting tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine (see History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War). To be sure, there are Republicans who have supported this effort, but Democrats are leading the project. These projects are schemes to drive hundreds of billions of dollars to transnational corporations and the armaments industry.
The Democrats were far and away the party most aggressively pushing lockdowns, social distancing, masks, and vaccines during the pandemic. (As with these other issues, my blogs on Freedom and Reason are many on this topic.) Have you wondered why Democrats aren’t running on the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines? I thought they saved us from the apocalypse. Millions would have died had they not taken away our freedoms and livelihoods—and robbed our children of years of social development. Such heroics sound like something politicians would be keen to run on. What gives?
Democrat policies are behind a series of shocks—COVID, Ukraine, monetary stimulus on a scale unprecedented since World War II—that is driving inflation. In short, supply chain disruption (bottlenecks, dislocations, shortages) caused by Democratic policies and their analogs across the trans-Atlantic sphere, fed by China and other foreign countries taking advantage of the weakness of the West. “On our watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are going to get the biggest increase in their Social Security checks they’ve gotten.” Mr. President, tell the people why: SS is chained to inflation.
I ask folks to consider why, now nearly half a century after Roe v Wade, Democrats did not in the meantime codify a woman’s right to her body. I will suggest to you that Democrats did not do so in order to conjure the specter of a conservative court to scare the votes out of women. The tactic failed. The court is conservative. And, with women divided on the question of abortion, and with the issue far down the list of voter concerns, the court’s ruling won’t make a difference at the polls. Conservatives are going to do what they do. Democrats failed to protect reproductive freedom. There’s no quick undoing of things. Other issues are more pressing: crime, war, and the corporate state. Don’t be a reflex. Think.
The overall problem with the Democrats I have discussed many times on Freedom and Reason. The United States was founded as a liberal republic, an instantiation of Enlightenment ideals, embodying the principles of democracy, humanism, rationalism, and secularism, codified in the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, signaled to the world as the American Creed. For the code and creed to live requires patriotism and attention to national integrity. The aims of the Democrats and their philosophy of progressivism are antithetical to the liberalism nationalism that founded the nation. The Democrats are transnationalist in ambition. Globalism undermines national sovereignty. The Democrats preach cultural pluralism, an ideology that undermines common culture and the solidarity built around a shared language and understanding of the establishment of America as a place where the individual is sovereign and the purpose of government is to enable each citizen to realize in total their human nature.
The practice of power that presumes an orthodoxy, i.e., that there is a right way to think about some matter, for example the claims of the genderist, such that a side can claim to be offended or harmed by contradiction and therefore justifiably censor any heterodox position and even punish the person expressing the contrary position, is quintessentially authoritarian in character. It follows that resisting censorship of, and punishment for, contrary speech has its own purpose: the preservation of liberty and democracy.
Censorship and punishment for heterodox views occur because those who assert the orthodoxy of their own view lack confidence in them and therefore exclude contradiction by censoring and silencing those who dissent from them. Those who truly have confidence in their views, that is, those who expect their views to win the day after a full airing of them and their contradictions, do not fear contradiction.
The geocentrists sought to prevent heliocentrism from having its day in the sun. Flat-earthers marginalized the round-earthers. Creationists sought to exclude the arguments of the evolutionists. But, today, the geocentrists, the flat-earthers, and the creationists are neither censored nor punished; their theories pose no real threat to the orthodoxies to which they now find themselves subordinated. These orthodoxies are confident in themselves because they won the debates on merit in the face of the censors. But the crackpot theory of the genderist cannot win the day on fact and reason, so he must censor and punish the contrarian.
For the genderist to operate–or at least count on others to operate for him–the machinery of censorship and punishment, his apparent orthodoxy must find purchase in the institutions of power, for this where lie the cultural, economic, political, and social forces necessary to impose ideologies upon the masses.
Whereas in the past, false orthodoxies were backed by dominant religious institutions, today, these forces converge in the corporate state, the intersection of big industrial and financial organizations, public administration, and the associated political framework that reproduces and normalizes that power through culture, law, and policy. If gender theory, as well as queer theory and critical race theory, did not have in back of them the corporate state, they would wither and die; their claims could not withstand the lights of fact and reason.
One question with which we must therefore concern ourselves is why the corporate state settled on these particular crackpot theories as the foundation of modern-day quasi-religious dogma. In Galileo’s day, the Church was concerned with his theory not merely because they lacked confidence in their own (many of them already knew they were wrong about the relationship of the sun to the earth) but because the apparent orthodoxy concerning the solar system preserved the dogma that legitimized their power–and not only the institution of religion, but the order of things that had prevailed all around for centuries. They knew that, if science were to replace religion, then the presence of the priest would diminish, and the forces the priest operated would be worked anew by those who had reason on their side.
Today, the body of critical theories, developed to transgress the normative structures of ordinary and stable human existence, is the new religious dogma of the corporate state. Alienating the man from his species-being, from the thing he is naturally, a fact objectively ascertained by science, critical theory prepares the ground for the incorporation of individuals into the bureaucratic collective by uprooting people from the soil of the common humanity.
It is not inevitable that science and technology should end in transhumanism. Science and technology are, after all human productions. Transhumanism is the consequence of science and technology in the hands of concentrated power. It is science as church. The corporate doctor who claims the alchemic power to transition men to women has become in priest in this new church.
Like the Church in Galileo’s day, through unchallengeable dogma, man was alienated from himself to perpetuate an elite structure of power. So it is today that, by denying the ability of man to challenge the dogma of the powerful, man is estranged from himself, the purpose of which is perpetuate elite power over man.
In this fight against the transhumanism of the corporate state, we cannot return to the previous transhumanism of the old religion. We must instead reclaim the ideas of the enlightenment–the ideas of secular humanism, of liberalism and democracy–and steel them against the forces of unreason and unfreedom.
There are those who argue that censoring and marginalizing those who disagree with the apparent orthodoxy is justified on the grounds that their objections are not rational–they do not hail from an appreciation of fact and reason–but are instead irrational expressions, issuing from a place of bigotry and hated. But this argument is a rationalization of the failure of their ideas to win the day. Geocentrism and evolution won the day in the face of irrational forces. So did those who struggled for racial equality. So did those who struggled for marriage equality.
Today, one can appear on social media expressing the view that human beings are divisible into racial groups with variable attributes or that marriage should remain between a man and a woman. In a free society, men will also be able to claim they are women without fear of censorship or punishment. What they won’t be able to do is expect that a social media company will punish other users of that platform for refusing the affirm delusions.
That is, if we can reform the structure of communications such that it reflects not the power of unaccountable corporate entities but instead the principles of free and open society. As we have learned over the last little while, the executive of the United States has instead been working hand-in-glove with the communications industry to push false orthodoxies across a range of issues.
The facts and the time-line are not at all as clear as they should be by now (a lot of this doesn’t make sense, but I will wait for a more detailed and rational account of the incident before delving into that aspect of the case), but, based on media accounts, the man who broke into the Pelosi estate and attacked Mr. Pelosi looks to be a paradigm instantiation of Eric Hoffer’s “true believer.” David DePape’s beliefs, however apparently fervently held in any give moment, swung widely from far-left to far-right. The woman with whom he had children essentially described a schizophrenic.
David DePape is accused of attacking Paul Pelosi with a hammer in the Pelosi estate
I have not pursued a deep dive into DePape’s social media output (it will be hard to do with platforms (including this one) censoring his postings. From a cursory glance, however, I can see that his mix of opinions are being woven by the media into an alleged comprehensive worldview not only designed to make DePape appear MAGA, and thus a continuation of January 6, but to tie criticisms of power and others things (such as vaccines) to fringe thought as part of a continuing campaign to paint any criticism of power and profit as paranoia. This is not to say DePape’s thoughts aren’t delusional. At the same time, severely impaired individuals are capable of holding perfectly reasonable views.
From the Los Angeles Times: “DePape followed a number of conservative creators online, including Tim Pool, Glenn Beck, DailyWire+ and the Epoch Times.” So? These outlets are neither far-right nor paranoid. “He also followed an account on YouTube called Black Pilled and reposted several of its videos on his blog.” The LA Times then goes on to twist the meaning of black pill ideology to align with right-of-center libertarian critique of the corporate state. It is not possible that reporters over at the LA Times do not understand such things.
The effort by the Democratic Party and the corporate news to characterize this as MAGA violence in the eleventh hour of a historic election reeks of desperation. Five years ago, a left-wing activist (a Bernie Sanders devotee) opened fire on Republicans practicing for a charity baseball game, critically wounding Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana. (Remember that? It may feel vague in your brain because it didn’t get a lot of coverage.) Are we going to blame the Scalise shooting on the over-the-top rhetoric progressives routinely spew regarding conservatives, you know, that they’re “fascists,” “racist,” and “white supremacists”?
People are responsible for theiractions. Those who criticize political figures and ideologies are not responsible for violence carried out by other people. This is a country of 330-plus million people. There are going to be mentally-disturbed individuals who do things like this. Fortunately, they are rare. And while progressives bite their nails over their revered leaders being threatened by marginal individuals, they ignore the reality of the murder and other forms of serious violence that occur daily in progressive big cities across the Northeast, violence that disproportionately takes the lives of the very subjects they claim to prioritize in their policies.
Phenomena surrounding the historic movement in European societies and societies of European origin over the last two hundred years from punishments bent on corrupting the body to correctional measures emphasizing the transformation of offenders into law-abiding citizens captured the imagination of philosophers, historians, and social scientists in the twentieth century. David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum (Little, Brown, 1971) Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (Vintage, 1977), Michael Ignatieff’s A Just Measure of Pain (Pantheon, 1979), Robin Evan’s The Fabrication of Virtue (Cambridge, 1982), Stanley Cohen’s Visions of Social Control (Blackwell, 1985), and John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary (Chicago, 1987) are a few of the more notable works exploring the transformation of punishment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
John Pratt’s Punishment and Civilization: Penal Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern Society
Employing a theoretical framework adapted from German sociologist Norbert Elias, John Pratt’s Punishment and Civilization represents a twenty-first century attempt to theorize the transformation of punishment in the English-speaking world (England, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada).
In The Civilizing Process, published in 1939, Elias theorizes that the internalization of civilized sensibilities, what began as etiquette rules in courtier society, led to an enhanced sympathy for the suffering of others among elite and masses alike and the virtual disappearance of physical force in everyday interactions. A new “habitus” (a term used by Mauss, Bourdieu, and others for the collective psyche and behavioral responses of a people) emerged with capitalism—a rational and reflective mode of thinking and acting. Highlighting the rational sensibilities expressed in prison reports on policy and practices, Pratt argues that changes in penal thought and practices result from the “civilizing process” Elias identifies.
With this logic in mind, Pratt sets out to accomplish two major things in this book. First, he aims to document how elites established a paradigm of punishment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that reflected qualities generally understood as civilized. To these ends, Punishment and Civilization represents a catalog of historic trends in the civilizing process manifest in the replacement of harsh physical punishments with rehabilitation and discipline regimes, as well as the shift from public to private punishment.
Elites are shown dissimulating the existence of a large-scale punishment system by removing prisoners and prisons from the public gaze, creating more humane prison conditions by improving food and hygiene, and sanitizing the language of punishment by shifting from a rhetoric imbued with moral passion to an impersonal, objective system of classification. In place of condemnatory proclamations now stood an official discourse and practice that emphasized scientific knowledge, bureaucratic authority, and public indifference.
In a fascinating account of the decline in the use of the death penalty, for example, Pratt shows how English retentionists, initially seen as the rational voices for their appeal to the deterrent effects of death in justifying the continuing advocacy of capital punishment, slowly came to be seen as excessively emotional and irrational in the face of evidence indicating a contrary effect. At the same time, the excessive sentimentality initially attributed to the abolitionists faded, as they took over the role of the rational voice in penal policy.
Second, and more critically, Pratt explores what happens when trend and conjuncture combine in such as way as to cause the civilizing tendency to become unstable. In this way, Pratt’s approach to the study of the civilized habitus is more critical than Elias’. Incorporating the radical edge one finds in the works of Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust) and Nils Christie (Crime Control as Industry), wherein the idea that humane treatment of others naturally accompanies the rise of civilization is rejected, Pratt approaches the question of civilization and barbarism less certain that the former transcends, negates, or is even inconsistent with the latter. Both the Holocaust and the phenomenon of mass incarceration are seen from these standpoints not as exceptions to civilization but as outgrowths of it. With these lessons in mind, Pratt is thus skeptical that Elias’ invention of “decivilizing tendencies” effectively explains contradictions in the progress of civilization.
Pratt contends that, since 1970, the civilizing process, at least in the domain of punishment, has been undermined by a countermovement back towards retribution. A public that believes the state has failed to adequately protect them is a major impetus generating the shift towards law and order rhetoric and practice. The masses have come to believe (with the encouragement of political elites and conservative intellectuals) that the practice of the courts coddles criminals and that the rehabilitation regime as little more than a program for pampering inmates.
Pratt identifies several problems internal to the penal system that spurred public outcry. First, by civilizing the prisons, the state made prisoners more aware of their rights as citizens. At the same time, because of their position at the bottom of the prison hierarchy, prisoners had limited channels to legitimately pursue grievances. Disorder emerged in the prisons, dramatically symbolized by the Attica prison uprising of 1971.
Second, because of the public clamor in response to greater levels of societal disorder during the 1960s, as well as the shift in elite attitudes (especially in the United States) towards the crime control model, prison populations began to expand. The structure that had grown up under the reformist regime was ill equipped to handle the trend in mass incarceration.
Third, because of high profile failures and scandals, public sentiment turned against the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s. The legitimacy of the rehabilitation regime was cracking. The public grew increasingly intolerant of criminal offending. Whereas a sensibility had emerged previously that held society to be partly responsible for crime, the focus returned to the problem of individual criminality. The reintroduction of the death penalty in the United States is emblematic of the trend towards retributionist policy and practice.
The depth of public reaction has depended in part upon the collective position of the public with respect to the prison system. Pratt argues that the most civilized Western penal systems are in Northern European states (Scandinavia) and the most primitive in the southern United States (Georgia is representative).
In the Northern European countries, even though there is centralized bureaucracy (given the scope of the government apparatus), there is a greater level of participation of the public in the process of governance, which translates into a public perception of a measure of control over punishing. In those states lying towards the other end of the continuum, the bureaucracy is depicted as aloof from the public. Under these circumstances, the masses feel less in control over state functions. Here, the punishment systems tend to be harsher.
With the emergence of neo-liberalism in the 1970s, and especially after the 1980s, the punitive populism of the masses became more pronounced as the distance between the bureaucracy and the masses closed. Yet, Elites did not abandon the emphasis on rational organization and practice, hallmarks of civilization. Rather, the result was a retreat from due process and rehabilitation and a new emphasis on efficient law and order tactics.
Pratt forecasts two future possibilities. Either Western society will move towards the gulags described in Christie’s work, or its will conjure something worse (although it is not clear what this something worse might be). It depends, Pratt suggests, on whether the expansion of the prison system can absorb public hostility.
A lack of critical sociological depth in Punishment and Civilization constraints Pratt’s ability to follow up on this provocative question. Indeed, the major weakness of Punishment and Civilization is that the analysis remains too narrowly focused on internal changes in the penal system and fails to move beneath the surface level of societal change.
Inadequately explained is the shift to law and order rhetoric and practice that corresponds to large-scale transformations in the economics and demographics of the period. The question of what has unleashed the punitive public sensibilities remains vague. The United States, for instance, experienced as upheaval in the racial caste system in the 1960s with the overthrow of de jure apartheid, the exhaustion of the post WWII economic boom, and widespread popular revolt against the state’s imperial practices (for example, in Vietnam). Given the dramatic increase in the disproportionate numbers of blacks in US prisons and jails after 1970, one suspects that mass incarceration is, at least in part, another phase in the unfreedom of African Americans.
And what of the cycle between retribution and rehabilitation closely associated with the long swings of capitalist development identified in the work of such scholars as Christopher Adamson? Is the present historical phase a qualitative and secular movement towards efficient retribution or does it represent a temporary pendulum swing to harshness due to fall back the other way with the return of robust economic expansion and labor shortages.
Pratt touches on some of this by noting that the weakening of the state during the 1970s and the rise of neo-liberal hegemony unleashed populist sentiments among the masses and enabled them to make their collective voice heard on the matter of punishment. But the “get tough” approach—the reappearance of prisons, the deterioration of prison conditions, and a return to harsh law and order rhetoric—remains undertheorized at the deeper layers. By staying on the surface level, Punishment and Civilization remains too loyal to Elias’ framework, which, because of the problematic of civilization, limits its theoretical horizons.
Had Pratt infused his theory with the logic Foucault develops in Discipline and Punish, arguably the definitive twentieth century work in this area, greater depth could have been achieved. Foucault builds upon the critical political economy of Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer in Punishment and Social Structure (1939) by exploring the ideological and bureaucratic structures attendant to the bourgeois historical epoch. Developing a modified historical materialist framework, Foucault theorizes that the needs of French elites to reconfigure social control methods to align with the rise of liberal capitalism drove the shift from physical punishments to architectural and behavioral control over mind and sentiment. Punishment became discipline in the production of docile bodies—bodies suited for economic exploitation and political manipulation.
Thus, while the facts of modernity that Pratt and Foucault attempt to explain are substantively the same—restrained citizen involvement in punishment regimes, governmental monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, extensive deployment of scientific methods and classification systems, an architecture of control, bureaucratic organization, and emphasis on impersonal interpersonal relations—the end products of their respective efforts are quite different. Whereas Foucault’s analysis probes the surface forms of punishment to reveal the structural imperatives that lay beneath, Punishment and Civilization stays on its face, explaining not so much why punishment became civilized, but how elites civilized it.
This criticism should not however detract from the importance of the Pratt’s work. The story Pratt tells is worth telling, and he tells it in a cogent manner producing important insights along the way. The thinking employed in Punishment and Civilization is more critical than that of Elias, and this makes the book an important corrective to the positivistic conflict theoretical character of figurational sociology.
When Pratt emphasizes that civilized forms of punishment do not necessarily bring about civilized consequences, that moral indifference may result from the civilized norm of self-restraint, indeed, that the conditions of civilization do not preclude the exercise of violence, he takes the Eliasian approach into unexplored territory. For this reason, along with his careful analysis of historical documents detailing the reform of the criminal justice system, Punishment and Civilization is fine work and is sure to become the basis for many future sociological investigations of the transformation of punishment in the world bourgeois epoch.
This is a line from an attack ad on Facebook that appeared at the top of my newsfeed this morning: “Ron Johnson ignored warnings that he was a target of Putin’s disinformation and propaganda.” The truth is wildly different from The Party’s propaganda line and demonstrates how The Party has weaponized the administrative state apparatus against Republicans who have not sufficiently indicated their loyalty to the corporate state establishment.
Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmation hearing, February 9, 2021.
The Party is not only aggressively pushing the Big Lie that Russia was behind the “stolen election” of 2016 (and not the fact that one of the most despicable persons in American political history was The Party’s candidate) but has expanded the Big Lie to claim that Russia was behind an attempt to steal the 2020 elections and to influence the 2022 elections by using Republican politicians and figures.
This is a classic McCarthyist tactic, perhaps especially ironic in Senator Johnson’s case given that Johnson represents the same state McCarthy himself served—and of from the same party. Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia continues to function as a Red Scare tactic. The Party uses the Russia to scare voters in 2022 much the same way it used COVID-19 to scare voters in 2020. You may have noticed that the Ukrainian flag emojis tend to adorn the same profiles that featured masked do-gooders and vaccinated virtue signaling during the pandemic. Of course, the administrative state has been using Russia to scare voters for years.
Johnson knew about the intelligence. He suspected that the FBI briefing was a ploy to undermine his political messaging and his investigatory work by aligning these with Russian propaganda and Russian goals. Just to make sure readers understand how this works: the tactic involved briefing Johnson on “Russia disinformation” and then leaking the briefing to the public in order to manufacture the perception that Johnson is unwitting tool of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. That Johnson could see this for what it was contradicts the portrayal of naïveté. The motive of making Republican messaging out to be Russian propaganda is on its face obvious—at least it should be to anyone who understands the political weaponization of the nation’s security services over the last several years.
Johnson told the media in confirming the briefing of August 2020, “I asked the briefers what specific evidence they had regarding this warning, and they could not provide me anything other than the generalized warning.” What were they not telling Johnson? Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and its contents were damning. The laptop exposed the reality that the son was the father’s bag man in a global-level corruption scheme. (See New York Post Drops a Bombshell on the Biden Campaign; The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President.)
As the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Johnson spent much of 2019 and 2020 investigating Hunter Biden’s activities. Among other things, Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The FBI, and US intelligence agencies generally, sought to obscure the Biden family’s relationship with Ukraine—a relationship to which Trump had become wise (his attempt to get to the bottom of matters moving The Party to impeach him)—by claiming to have “determined” that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election and spent subsequent years trying to create the perception that the election interference came from Ukraine, not Russia.
There is a direct link between The Party and the FBI in the effort to discredit Johnson. As it turns out, the Johnson briefing came weeks after Democratic leaders in Congress told the FBI they feared Johnson’s investigation was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Johnson said in a 2021 statement, “Because there was no substance to the briefing, and because it followed the production and leaking of a false intelligence product by Democrat leaders, I suspected that the briefing was being given to be used at some future date for the purpose that it is now being used: to offer the biased media an opportunity to falsely accuse me of being a tool of Russia despite warnings.” Bingo.
During the 2020 campaign, the FBI planned to use the same tactic against Trump attorney’s Rudy Giuliani (this was reported by the Washington Post). Instead, investigators searched Giuliani’s home in April 2021 and seized computers and cell phones as part of their probe into his interactions with Ukraine (this was reported in the New York Times). Curiously, investigators left behind the Hunter Biden’s hard-drives in Giuliani’s possession. Presumably this was because the FBI was already in possession of copies and they knew destroying them when other copies existed would only make it easier to expose the agency’s tactics.
The attempt to undermine Johnson’s credibility reveals the machinations of the administrative state: the burying of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the work of the establishment to deny Trump a second term in office. And it worked. As polls have shown, enough voters have acknowledged that, had they known about the laptop, or that the laptop they had heard about was real, they would not have voted for Joe Biden, and the election—even if you believe the results of the election were legitimate—would have swung to Trump. In fact, nearly four of five Americans surveyed who followed the Hunter Biden story reported that truthful coverage of the election would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
freedom and reason 