Year: 2022

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”—John 1:1

What’s up with the struggle between trans women and TERFs? What’s a TERF? Twitter is blowing up over this as I write this blog. I’ve had these questions put to me several times now by different individuals. “Dude, you’re a sociologist. You guys do sex and gender and social movements, right? Explain this to me.” I was asked this just last night at a dinner party (of which there are no images.) Okay, I will. But reluctantly, as you will see.

I wrote most of this blog a while ago but avoided posting it because I see what happens to people who talk about gender ideology in a direct way with words that do not affirm the truth of what has become a worldview for many—not a majority—of people. But I listened yesterday to a podcast in which Brendan O’Neill interviewed satirist Andrew Doyle and the discussion has moved me to be, well, more direct.

Andrew Doyle’s new book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, was the subject of discussion on O’Neill’s show. I have not read the book, but I have read John McWhorter’s 2021 Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, and from the detailed interview O’Neill produced, I hear a lot of parallels.

The specific discussion point that brought me back to the draft of this blog was an email revealing Stonewall’s attempt to suppress a report about predatory males entering woman’s spaces in which an official of Stonewall branded lesbians “sexual racists” for raising concerns about being pressured into having sex with transwomen who have male genitals (and presumably even those who don’t). This was precisely the issue I raise in this blog. So here we are.

Stonewall is an activist organization in the United Kingdom describing itself as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights charity and recognized as such by the British government. It is the largest such organization in Europe. Stonewall rose to a position of policymaking power with New Labour (the takeover of labor by the professional-managerial class in association with transnational corporate power) in the latter 1990s. Its agenda was an admirable one, fighting for the equality of gays and lesbians, which was, as it was also in the United States, achieved. Seeking to keep the organization alive (you are surely familiar with the problem of bureaucratic inertia), it took up gender ideology and switched its advocacy to transgender interests. This has brought it into conflict with the interests of gays and lesbians.

I had not heard about the Stonewall email before Doyle brought it up. But I do remember hearing all my life that rude remark that all lesbians need to turn them around is some dick. I bet you’ve heard that rude remark, too. However, lesbians are women who don’t like dick—just like gays are men who don’t like pussy. And to bully lesbians into having sex with males with accusations of bigotry is quite a hateful thing to do.

It’s a lot like bullying heterosexual men into sex with transwomen by smearing them as “transphobic,” isn’t it? If a man wants to have sex with another male, whatever. I don’t care. I’m a libertarian. Why would I care? But for the same reason, if a man does not want to have sex with another male, then he shouldn’t be shamed for this. Moreover, for the same reason, I object to organizations with the state at their backs (power Stonewall enjoys) creating a climate of fear and consequence for individuals committed to their preferences when they smear them for their commitments.

As I tweeted a few hours ago, even if I disagreed with JK Rowling on the trans issue, I would have to defend her in the same way that I defend the cartoonist over Islamist threats. We have to be free to express contrary opinions without having to worry about losing anything.

Even if I disagreed with JK Rowling on the trans issue, I would have to defend her in the same way that I defend the cartoonist over Islamist threats. You have to be free to express contrary opinions without having to worry about losing anything.

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) September 2, 2022

We don’t have to accept the terms of gender ideology as a guide to whom we fuck or not. Nobody voted to install gender ideology as the operating system of western counties—and even if they did, it would be a tyrannical act of majoritarianism. Nor has the majority consented to this ideology (or to other woke ideologies, such as critical race theory). Doyle suggests that the public only doesn’t oppose gender ideology more vigorously because they’re scared. They see what happens to people who resist woke ideology. He has a point.

How could it be that lesbians could be accused of bigotry for not wanting to have sex with males to who they are by definition not attracted? The smear depends on an assumption, that identifying one’s self as a woman makes one also a female—that one literally changes their sex by saying they are of the opposite sex—and that therefore a heterosexual male can become a lesbian, a female with a penis who is attracted to women. It may be the case that this female with a penis is not attracted to other females with penis. Indeed, a true lesbian is only attracted to persons without penises. Here we find ourselves in a vast paradox. You can see it, right?

How do you get out of the paradox? Redefine the situation. Until recently, all dictionary definitions of woman went something like this: “an adult human female,” or “adult female person,” with female “denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.” Folks will tell you it’s complicated and so definitions need to change. Whenever I hear a person say this, the words of philosopher Roger Scruton echo through my skull: “Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language—which is to describe reality—is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it.”

I have noted the act of dictionaries changing the definitions of words to align with woke political ideology (Some Sunday Thoughts: Speech, Progressivism, mRNA shots, and FBI Plots; What Lies Behind the Popular Reracialization of the Human Population?) Dictionary definitions have traditionally concerned common usages. The art of lexicography (obviously it is not a science) involves studying words and compiling these into dictionaries. Any word can be defined in a myriad of ways, so the lexicographer is interested in identifying the most common usages so that people can have reasonable certainty in what people mean by the words they use. However, and Doyle points this out in the interview, dictionary companies have changed the state of the art to produce dictionaries that change the usages of words to align with political movements, such as the movement guided by gender ideology. Dictionaries have been captured by narrow but influential political forces and no longer represent common and organic usages of those words the powerful wish to repurpose for elite social engineering.

The specific problem here is that descriptions of reality are not inclusive of those who, while not female, nonetheless want others to consider them as women and even female—and inclusivity, we are told, is a virtue we must signal. “Trans women are women” has become a common slogan used by trans activists and many queer folk. The slogan means to tell us that a woman does not need to be an adult human female or adult female person to identify as a woman. A woman can be an adult human male. She can have a male genitalia. She is what she says she is.

According to Merriam-Webster, a girl is now “a person whose gender identity is female,” but while they were busy inserting the construct of “gender identity” into the definition, they were also busy changing the definition of “female.” A female is now a person “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male,” which is, of course, a person who identifies as such. How do I know this? Because the same dictionary redefines male as a person who identifies as such, natural history notwithstanding. Hardly anybody in the world believes that this is possible. The vast majority of people use gender and sex not in the way the dictionaries would have those who look up words believe. This is a perfect an instantiation of what Orwell warned us about as one can imagine.

Why are activities and elites trying to change the usage of words? A core element of trans gender doctrine is the praxis of transgression. Transgression is the political act of questioning structures of knowledge and ways of knowing, not in a rational or scientific way, but as a means of disrupting ordinary understanding with the goal of undermining prevailing social relations and transforming society into something that fits a particular ideology.

Knowledge structures and ways of knowing are, as postmodernism and critical theory would have these, stood up by the oppressors to control others with language. Transgression is therefore a challenge to power, and part of this challenge involves changing our understanding of language so that in the shift from description to manipulation Scruton identifies, the latter becomes language’s normative function.

Orwell, from whom Scruton borrows the idea of newspeak, warns the world in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the paradigm critique of totalitarian desire and situation, that language is manipulated to serve the interests of those with the power to manipulate language in a world where this mode of social control has been normalized. The complaint of postmodernists that language is used to control people is thus the projection of a desire to use language to control people. I suppose that’s one function of language, but it’s not a very democratic or liberal one, which is to say that it promotes the opposite of what a free people would desire for the basis of social interaction.

The praxis of transgression asserts that, since language is action (the speech act), power can be reconfigured through the transformation of language and thought. This notion has a definite religious quality to it. It’s found, for example, lying at the heart of the Christian tradition. James (3:5) tells us that through the tongue is but a small organ, a small spark can set a ranging forest fire. A verse later, James tells us that words are fire—fire that burns the entire course of life (and history). Proverbs (18:21) tells its followers: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.” And don’t forget the first verse in John, quoted at the outset of this blog, where he tells us: “In the beginning was the word.” It is not accidental that gender ideology, alongside critical race theory, is a religious movement fulfilling the needs of those longing for meaning in a secular world where secular institutions are being delegitimized through transgressive politics.

TERF is an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” My understanding is that this term was invented in 2008 by a radical feminist who wished to differentiate trans-inclusive radical feminists from other feminists (lesbians, primarily) who do not agree that men can be women. It has since become a smear, similar to such smears as “homophobe” and “racist” (which is not to say in those cases that there are no such persons). Proponents of gender ideology define TERFs as “cis-women who don’t believe trans people truly exist and who believe women’s rights are damaged when trans women are treated equally and with dignity.” It would be accurate to say, then, that TERFs, or gender critical feminists, do not accept the trans slogan “Trans women are women.” Does anybody deny that trans people exist? How could that be possible given the visibility of trans gender people in cultural and social life? So those smearing feminists with this term indicates something else.

The activist organization Gender Justice is the source of the definition of TERF used above. Gender Justice “envisions a world where everyone can thrive regardless of their gender, gender expression, or sexual orientation.” The organization works towards “dismantling legal, structural, and cultural barriers that contribute to gender inequity.” Equality for groups like Gender Justice means opening women’s spaces (such girls and women’s locker rooms) and activities (such as sports) to “male-bodied” persons. Gender Justice “work(s) to ensure that people of all genders have a meaningful right to bodily autonomy, safety, health, and opportunity.” These are the goals of Stonewall, as well.

Straight away we see the ontological problem of whether trans women are women and an epistemological fight over how we would address this problem, i.e., is reality what powerful people say it or is there any objective way of accurately ascertaining reality, e.g., science. But the struggle goes deeper than this, and it’s this practical., indeed interpersonal piece that I believe is most important for understanding why Twitter is blowing up right now over the presence of lesbians and other women attempting to assert their rights in law and policy.

Many gender critical feminists are lesbians. A lesbian is a homosexual woman, that is, a woman who is attracted to women, not men. Here men are defined as “adult human males” or “adult male persons.” Homosexuality is defined as same-sex attraction. Lesbians are therefore not attracted to those who have penises or, often, even to those who used to have penises. (Most trans women still have penises.)

This may be obvious, but a trans woman can be attracted to men or women or both, as well as to people who claim to be neither (nonbinary). According to gender ideology, if a trans woman is attracted to men, and trans woman are women, then the trans woman is heterosexual. Heterosexual men should, therefore, accept trans women in their dating circles.

If, on the other hand, a trans woman is attracted to women, and trans women are women, then the trans woman is a lesbian. The doctrine makes it possible, then, for a person, with male chromosomes, gametes, and genitalia, who is attracted to women, to identify as a lesbian if this person identifies as a woman. This shifts the meaning of lesbian from same-sex attraction to same-gender attraction, with gender becoming self-designating.

If a lesbian does not accept the trans gender slogan “Trans women are women,” then that lesbian is not interested in having a romantic or sexual encounter or relationship with trans woman, as the lesbian is homosexual (not heterosexual)—and the trans woman is not a woman. In other words, if one does not accept the alchemy of trans activism, the trans woman is either a heterosexual male attracted to women or a homosexual male attracted to men, since the character of the person’s sexual orientation is same-sex attraction.

I need to something briefly about the matter of human rights here because there is a threat to fundamental rights when ideologues wrap themselves in cloak of universal justice while advocating for privileges for specific groups to define reality in self-interested ways with the force of law or scientific authority behind them. If the idea that an individual can be any sex they claim they are is allowed to colonize science, the one objective method for determining (albeit provisionally) the truth of reality, scientists will not be able to say without consequence that sex does not change when one changes gender.

We are close to the point where rules will be instituted in scientific practice that will keep us from upholding the integrity of scientific truth—or at least the pursuit of it. The editorial board of Nature Human Behavior has published an editorial, “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans,” in which the idea of human rights are used to advance the political agendas of (some) groups over against the rights of individuals—for example the right of to ask and answer questions that may offend the sensibilities of others. (There is a right to offend, as I am sure you well know, but no right to not be offended in western society, despite what the British police say.)

“In this guidance, we urge authors to be respectful of the dignity and rights of the human groups they study,” goes the editorial, using language that amounts to an exercise in reification. Objectively, there are very few actual groups among humans. Identitarianism manufactures groups hand-over-fist and then picks their representatives. Watch out for politics that appeals to the dignity and rights of such groups—it’s often backed by power that punishes those who challenge the legitimacy of claims made by these groups. The alchemy here is to turn opposition to and the interrogation of ideologies into acts of harming persons. Watch out for the rhetoric of asymmetrical power for it often presumes coherent groups of persons with common interests.

The neologism “cis gendered” is quite revealing here in this regard. A cis gendered person is a person who identifies with the gender (or sex) he or she was “assigned” at birth. If you have male genitalia and identify as a male, then you are a male; if you have male genitalia and identify as a woman, then you are women—and your penis and testicles (and prostate, etc.) all become female. The person whose gender and sex match is thus made equal to the person for whom these do not align by giving the former a prefix, too (the power of words). Since, in this world view, reality depends entirely on how you define it, it’s your truth, since only you can know your “true” or “authentic” self—and those around you are obligated to affirm that truth or risk being labeled “transphobic.” In this way, ideology is conflated with supposedly actually existing reality determined by personal subjectivity and a regime that demands others affirm, if not that subjectivity, then the person’s right to it over against the rights of others—no discussion.

Since thoughts determine reality in this view of things, it follows that transphobic people can erase the existence of trans people by the power of thought. Questioning the doctrine thus becomes an act of erasure. As with Islam for the Islamist, you’re not allowed to question the doctrine because it denies the cosmology behind it. The TERF is a person—an apostate, heretic, infidel depending on where one stands in relation to the faith—with the power to erase trans people and therefore represent an existential threat to trans people. It follows that the lesbian’s existence suggests that trans women are not really women since trans women are rejected by women who are only attracted to women. A lesbian is by definition transphobic if she refuses intimacy with a trans woman—and if she doesn’t, then is she really a lesbian? See how definitions work? The accusation is a way of suppressing opposition to or even interrogating claims generated by the ideology.

Trans woman identifying as lesbian seek access to lesbian spaces as well as to lesbian bodies, spaces, and statuses and hold up this desire not only as a metric of equality but affirmation as their existence as women. Therefore lesbians who reject trans woman as romantic and sexual partners, along with women who do not want male bodies in female-only spaces, are oppressors. But from the lesbian’s standpoint, the trans woman is a man and the lesbian is not heterosexual and therefore she is not a bigot. (The same is true for women who do not want men in their spaces; are they bigots, or women who feel unsafe when men intrude into their spaces? In any case, they do not accept the slogan as the definition of the situation. And this makes them bad people.)

Words cannot erase groups of people. Only actions—real actions, not “speech acts”—can hurt people. Lesbians are not erased by trans women claiming they are gay women any more than trans women are erased by lesbians countering that trans women are males and cannot therefore be lesbians. However, lesbians may be erased as a group, in terms of their human rights, if laws and policies take up gender ideology, make it official, and impose this ideology on society at large. Gender ideologists will claim the same problem for their side. And this is why the conversation must be had—and precisely why there are those who do not wish society to have this conversation. If we do not protect and defend the right of people to challenge claims free of consequence, then no rational conversation is possible, no consensus is possible, and an ideology is imposed on others because power.

Doyle’s evoking of the Salem witch trials is a pretty apt one. Again, it’s not new. On July 13, 2020, I penned this blog: Witch Finder Boylan: Free Speech and Mass Hysteria. It concerns the attempt to cancel JK Rowling, who, it turns out, is, so far at least, uncancellable. But the attempt to scare Rowling into repentance is not the only goal of the denunciations against her. It is also the intent is to scare those who might agree with her into saying so. Doyle and O’Neill focus quite a bit on Rowling in the interview. Here’s what I wrote more than two years ago on Freedom and Reason:

“In case you haven’t been following all this, this witch Rowling apparently has the magical ability to harm people by noting that persons who menstruate have traditionally been called women. She has been speaking out for a while now about what she perceives as the cancelling of women.

“Rowling fails to chant the approved slogan, indeed appears to casts spells against it, because she is worried about the cancelling of women by defining them out of existence. Not just in rhetoric, but in law and policy and even science (according to some scientists). Rowling is not alone in this concern and is with her example producing what we call ‘mutual knowledge.’ Mutual knowledge often spells trouble for counter/movements if it catches on. 

“Rowling is a powerful witch, i.e. difficult to cancel given her status and success. She uses her position to defend the right of others who do not enjoy her level of success to be free from the cancel mob. In other words, she is the leader of a coven of young and less powerful witches. Since she cannot be canceled by destroying her career, the witch finders are trying to make an example of her in order to silence others who can be destroyed.”

This is the greater goal of any inquisition. One might say that Rowling is being scapegoated, made to be a stand-in for whatever plagues the community. It is not quite apt here given that the community that seeks to purge the evil in its mists is not really a community as such, but a small group of activists seeking to sell an ideology as the next societal operating system.

A concern here not voiced by Doyle or O’Neill is that this project has in back of it transnational corporate power (I have written extensively about this problem on Freedom and Reason). I am not convinced by Doyle’s hopeful analysis that those elites who cow before the gender ideologists do so because they, too, like the elites at Salem, are scared, and that, in some five years time, this moment will pass. How could it possible that a small minority of activists could be more scary than the communists before whom the West collectively refused to grovel? Until the deeper source of power in all this is interrogated, I worry that our return to an open liberal order will not be forthcoming. I do hope I am wrong, though. Maybe that’s the same thing.

“Throughout history, outbreaks of social contagion have typically spread in small, close-knit groups, most commonly in schools and factories. Investigators are often able to identify an index case—the first person to exhibit symptoms—which then spreads to other group members. Unbeknownst to the rest of the group, the index case is often suffering from a medical condition. There is a common saying in the social contagion literature that mass psychogenic illness is spread by sight and sound—that is, by hearing or watching others who are affected. But what would happen if outbreaks could spread over the internet and on social media sites by a virtual index case? This appears to be exactly what has happened in the current outbreak. It represents a major shift in the presentation of psychogenic illness. In the past, most episodes of mass psychogenic illness were limited to a specific location or community, but this is no longer true in the Internet Age.”

— Robert Batholomew, Psychology Today

Social contagion, or mass psychogenic illness, is the rapid spread of an irrational or pathological activity, behavior, belief, or perception in a population. Thoughts and actions can move rapidly through social networks of like-minded people or those who share similar traits, such as age, gender, and so on. Individuals calibrate their self-image to align with those with whom they identify or have an affinity; when one individual adopts a certain attitude or behavior those in her social network catch the pathogen. Girls and young women are especially susceptible to social contagion because of greater innate sociability compared to men. But men are susceptible to psychogenic illness, as well. Adolescence is a risk factor because of rapid changes in cognitive, emotional, and physiological developments occurring during puberty make a person vulnerable to suggestion. But, as we see with the COVID-19 and white guilt hysterias, people of all ages can suffer from mass psychogenic illness.

We see this social phenomenon at work in the appearance of fads, or crazes, which are intense and popular albeit often short-lived enthusiasms for some activity, style, or thing. Many crazes are harmless; while they are irrational, they are not always pathological. But some crazes are pathological—they are literally crazes. For example, adolescents who learn that peers have engaged in self-harm, such as cutting, are more likely to cut themselves. We see the phenomenon in anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders. Self-harm is not always a random personal event, but often a social phenomenon. The power of social forces in corrupting reason and causing self-destructive attitudes and behaviors has been known for more than a century at least (see, e.g., Émile Durkheim’s Suicide).

Those suffering from social contagion are more likely to receive a psychiatric diagnosis and treated as medical patients by a profession that doesn’t typically consider the social causes of disorders for which there is no objective physiological evidence. This is not to say that the effects of psychogenic illness are not real. Remember the Thomas Theorem: “If men define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences.” Hysteria is a crippling disorder. But it is to say that, just as placebos can make a subject feel better, medical intervention can produce in a person’s mind the belief that he is actually unwell—or confirm for him what he suspected all along.

Last fall, Robert Batholomew, a medical sociologist, penned “The Girls Who Caught Tourette’s from TikTok,” in Psychology Today. He cites several studies concerning the rise in Tourette’s syndrome, what researchers call “functional tic-like behaviors,” in users of TikTok and social media generally. Bartholomew’s article is a useful thumbnail sketch of the phenomenon and a taste of what is a vast literature on the subject. He concludes his brief with this: “In the future, we can expect more outbreaks of social contagion in which the primary vector of spread is the internet and social media.” (See also Jonathan Haidt’s writings concerning the effect of social media on the emotional and mental wellbeing of America’s youth.)

The body of scientific study one can bring to bear on this matter goes well beyond self-harm and the Tourette’s contagion. Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or, as it’s now called, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a disorder about which mental health officials are highly skeptical, is spreading across networks of social media users. One source of MPD is iatrogenic, that is caused by the therapeutic experience. When it occurs outside the therapeutic context it is often pseudogenic, its cause an invention of the subject. A young woman with a diagnosis or who imagines trauma and learned than DID can be an outcome may spread her symptoms to other women in her social circle.

Despite their being such a vast literature on the problem of social contagion, and the significance of the problem, one almost never hears about the phenomenon in the media or from policymakers or politicians. Noting the character of these exceptions is part of understanding the politics of the silence. When an individual suspects there is an organized attempt to gaslight, mob, and terrify him, authorities, professionals, and influencers are eager to portray him as a delusional paranoid and schizophrenic (see The Psychiatrization of Gangstalking). When individuals are on to something about the world that threatens power, then they’re crazy. This is how authorities and the corporate media portrayed claims made by the Black Panthers before COINTELPRO came to light (see The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left).

However, when the person’s is actually delusional, or several people share an illusion, and these false beliefs are useful to some group with power, as profitable or enabling social control, then the pathogen is normalized or treated as unremarkable. I suspect that if the problem of social contagion ever becomes the topic of popular conversation that it will be censored and its proponents cancelled. Indeed, when the related phenomenon of mass formation psychosis drew the attention of the public thanks to Dr. Robert Malone’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, the corporate media launched a comprehensive delegitimization campaign before dropping the subject entirely. (See The Future of a Delusion: Mass Formation Psychosis and the Fetish of Corporate Statism.)

One of the arguments I have made (I suggested moments ago), and this explains both media silence and delegitimization campaigns, is that mass hysteria and moral panics are not always accidentally emergent but rather are manufactured for various purposes, from taking advantage of vulnerable populations (the medical-industrial complex is, after all, a profit-generating endeavor) to realizing political agendas. I discussed an example of profiting from delusions in my blog Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an instance in which profiteering from manufactured fear was functional to modern governments’s objectives to achieve greater social control over the populations they are meant to defend against subjection and tyranny. Black Lives Matter is another example of a political agenda functional to the installation and entrenchment of critical race theory and other corporate state ideologies. See Panic and Paranoia Deaden Humanity and Sabotage Its Future; By Learning to Let Go of Mass Hysteria, We Can Bring an End to the Destructive COVID-19 Panic; Sanewashing—It’s More Widespread Than You Might Think. A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer.

In light of all this, there is good reason to be concerned that the sharply rising cases of rapid-onset gender dysphoria we see among young people, a phenomenon disproportionately affecting girls and young women, is the result of social contagion. In his article, “Why is Transgender Identity on the Rise Among Teens?,” Samuel Paul Veissière, an anthropologist and cognitive scientist at McGill University, summarizes research indicating that the rise of rapid-onset gender dysphoria “points to a complex web of social pressures, changing cultural norms, and new modes of distress and coping that warrant further investigation.” He encourages parents, educators, and clinicians to be cautious in dealing with this growing phenomenon.

Gender dysphoria, previously identified in the DSM as gender identity disorder, or GID, is defined as persistent and powerful feelings of discomfort with one’s “assigned” gender or sex, or identification with another gender or sex. Gender, according to social scientists, refers to the attitudes, behaviors, and feelings that one’s culture associates with sex, which is a biological and, in mammals, an immutable reality. Gender is related to sex but is culturally and social constructed. Gender is variable across time and space. Indeed, as the ideology metastasizes, the relation of sex to gender flips so as to see gender is fixed and a priori and sex as mutable. Some individuals come to believe that they are not the gender they are and this causes significant distress. This distress is medicalized and the individual is sent to the doctor. To qualify for the disorder the subject must present with feelings that cause significant distress or impairment. There is no objective criteria for determining whether a person is suffering from dysphoria; it relies entirely on the sufferer’s subjective perception. This subjective perception is feed by an ideology asserting that the patient is the gender he thinks he is.

Unlike anorexia and other disorders, the psychiatric community is not for the most part approaching gender dysphoria with caution, nor are sociologists linking the concept of social contagion to the rapid rise of the phenomenon, but rather the push is for the Orwellian-named “gender-affirming” treatment, which may result in individuals amputating their breast or their genitals, many losing forever the enjoyments of a normal sex life and most becoming life-long medical patients. Thus what makes this particular social contagion especially dangerous is that it is backed by popular academic theory and the authority cultivated by medical professionals, and pushed by politicians and social influencers in a way other crazes are not. There is no learned theory aggressively advocating cutting or anorexia as a solution to the distress that causes individuals to take a sharp object to their forearms or emaciate themselves, yet there is one enabling self-harm as “affirming care.”

Although the role social contagion plays in rapid-onset gender dysphoria does not enjoy public awareness, there is growing concern among some political leaders and health authorities that the approach taken by medical professionals to this disorder is the wrong approach. Texas recently passed a law to protect children from medical interventions in these cases (see State Action in Texas Concerning Medical Interventions for Minors Suffering from Gender Dysphoria Explained). Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been a leader in raising awareness about the problem (see the video below). And only a few weeks ago, on the basis of a damning report concerning the treatment of children, the National Health Service of Great Britain shut down the Tavistock gender clinic, prompting writer Douglas Murray to state, “We pretend that we protect children and that we want to help them—and actually it’s not just unhelpful but actively cruel to say to a child that is confused if you feel a bit strange in your body maybe you’re of the opposite sex.”

.@GovRonDeSantis: “They want to castrate these young boys. That’s wrong … I think these doctors need to get sued for what’s happening.”

pic.twitter.com/VyisSuHe7k

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 3, 2022

Social contagion, or mass psychogenic illness, the rapid spread of an irrational or pathological activity, behavior, belief, or perception in a population, is something that we need to talk more about. Because of the technological leap in communication, thoughts and actions can move rapidly through networks of like-minded people or those who share similar traits, such as age, gender, and so on, and profoundly affect their choices. Although girls and young women are especially at risk, other categories of people are susceptible to psychogenic illness. Adolescence is a special risk factor because of rapid changes in cognitive, emotional, and physiological developments occurring during puberty make a person vulnerable to suggestion. Parents need to limit their children’s use of social media and pay more attention to the things going on in the lives of their kids.

We hear a lot about these horrible conservatives—especially those deplorable MAGA types—complaining about critical race theory in our schools. Audiences are told, as if they didn’t know, that CRT is not history, etc., and therefore the complaints aren’t legitimate. Most conservatives know CRT is not about history. They’re not stupid. They can see that it’s ideology. Most conservatives don’t have a problem teaching American history—slavery, Jim Crow, all the rest of it. They have a problem with CRT. There is nothing wrong with criticizing CRT. (It’s not like criticizing Islam or gender ideology.) And they’re right to have a problem with CRT. Put into practice, CRT rationalizes unjust practices and produces unfair outcomes. Conservatives—and heterodox, i.e., actual liberals—are objecting to that and to public school curriculum based on CRT that trains children to think in terms of racial animosity and resentment.

The primary problem with CRT, and this is one reason we have to talk about it, concerns the colonization of law, policy, and social interaction by CRT ideas (see Critical Race Theory: A New Racism; What Critical Race Theory Is and Isn’t. Spoiler Alert: It’s Racist and Not Marxist; Crenshaw Confesses: Critical Race Theory is About Racial Reckoning; Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards)—the colonization not only of government, but of corporations and religious institutions, as well. The very serious problem of the teaching of racial animosity and resentment to children, which is really what parents are complaining about, I will put to one side for now (see The Ethic of Transparency in Public Education—and the Problem of Indoctrination; Whose Spaces Are These Anyway? Political Advocacy in Public Schools; Banning CRT in Public Instruction). Today I want to focus in why CRT makes for bad law and policy.  I have discussed this before (Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment; Committing the Crime it Condemns; The Fight Against Compelled Speech; The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI; The Rules of Inclusion Represent the Totalitarian Desire to Punish Heretics and Infidels), but just in case you are new to my blog or have missed my other posts on this topic, I want to explain my objection again. It never hurts to make the same argument.

The core idea of CRT, that abstract demographic categories are real things (they’re not—they’re abstractions), and, following from that, that concrete individuals identified as members of groups are personifications of those categories, is in diametric opposition to the principles of equality before the law and equal treatment, which (rightly, as in correctly) presume not groups but individuals are the proper subject of justice. Liberties and rights are first and foremost properties of individuals, not abstract groups, most of which are socially constructed. The idea that groups have human rights has become a widespread idea. We see in the various “human rights” campaigns that advocate for this or that identity group to enjoy some privilege in society. But human rights inhere in individuals and, by their very definition, belong to each human independent of group membership apart from actual and substantial genetic differences. A German is entitled to no privileges based on his ethnicity. A Muslim is entitled to no privileges based on his faith. Only women can make a claim to unique rights, rights that are few but crucial, because women are substantially biologically different from men.

This is not a political judgment. In its treatment of concrete individuals as automatically representative of everyone who shares an identity, in its reification of race specifically, CRT is false on rational and scientific grounds—to wit, CRT commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which is the error of confusing an abstraction for the concrete—that is, an idea for a thing (this is why I argue that CRT is a form of neo-Hegelianism, not neo-Marxism as conservatives and CRT advocates both claim). I will use myself as an example of the problem. I am a white man. While sex is an objective reality that differentiates males and females from each other (albeit my sex tells you very little beyond what unique rights I don’t have), my being white, a social construct, tells you nothing about me other than I am identified by a constellation of phenotypic traits. The claim that these phenotypic traits are predictive of group-level differences of behavioral proclivities, cognitive ability, or moral aptitude is not supported in the evidence—at least in a causal sense (there are cultural reasons for the differences attributed to race, which is a biological construct).

The point is that all individuals identified as members of a racial group cannot be judged—or we must say that it is wrong to do so—in terms of that identification before the law or in the operation of organizations that operate on the principle of public accommodations. To treat individuals differently on the basis of race is racist, and branding discriminatory law, policy, or action “anti-racism” does not make it less racist. Any policy that advantages or disadvantages any individual on the basis of his skin color is a racist policy—yes, affirmative action is a racist policy because it is based on the false notion that individuals are personifications of abstract racial categories and therefore enjoy benefits on that basis (i.e., privileges). In contrast, colorblindness is a just policy because it obligates those who hold an individual’s fate in their hands to treat that person as an individual and not on the basis of their presumed or announced racial identity. This is why CRT and the antiracist reject the standard of colorblindness—even branding it “racist” using the tortured logic that eliminating race-based policy advantages whites as a group, which is irrelevant in the case of race from the standpoint of rational jurisprudence (again, this is only relevant with respect to sex, a category that is being erased in law and policy across the West, replaced with the construct of “gender identity”).

Despite standing in opposition to rational jurisprudence, CRT ideas are playing a major role in changing the character of our legal system and our institutions, taking our society away from one that defends the liberties and rights of individuals, and pushing us towards a system that discriminates against individuals on the basis of race. As noted above, we are already doing this with affirmative action. With the concept of equity, we are seeing policies rolled out in health care (The Problem of Critical Race Theory in Epidemiology: An Illustration). And reparations for acts committed by people long deceased are a very really possibility (A specter is haunting America—the specter of reparations; Reparations and Blood Guilt; For the Good of Your Soul: Tribal Stigma and the God of Reparations). Many of these ideas and trends, e.g., affirmative action, precede the formal articulation of CRT in the 1990s. Indeed, in many ways, CRT is a contrived intellectual system that strives to rationalize those changes that are proving to be profoundly detrimental to individual liberty and human rights.

The Supreme Court has announced that on October 31 of this year, it will hear two cases concerning race-based affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Race-based affirmative action allows colleges to consider a student’s race when deciding which students should be admitted. This practice has benefitted black applicants while disadvantaging whites and East Asian applicants. Lower courts have ruled in favor of Harvard and the University of North Carolina on the grounds that the programs advance what judges see as a compelling interest in promoting diversity, a major political-ideological project of elites across American institutions. Remember that the original purpose of affirmative action as a program of reparations was canceled in the 1978 Bakke decision, which held that using race as a exclusive basis for admission (the quota system) violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But there is no rational reason why any given individual’s life chances should be determined by an elite political-ideological project that works by compromising the principle of equal treatment. What’s the difference between reparations and diversity? Nothing. The rhetoric of diversity is newspeak concealing the goal of reparations. Critical race theory is designed to rationalize an elite project of racial discrimination.

Breaking: Government officials in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 26 postponed a policy that would have required proof of vaccination for COVID-19 for all students age 12 and over for the new school year. See the story in The Defender.

On the eve of the delta variant chapter of the COVID-19 pandemic hysteria, I commented on a Twitter thread initiated by 1619 Project co-founder Nikole Hannah-Jones, in which I noted that vaccine uptake among blacks was much lower than among whites, with the implication that the draconian COVID-19 policies of progressive cities and states would disproportionately impact the freedom of black people. For some reason this was controversial.

Below you will find the thread to which I was responding. Note that it specifically cites critical race theory. My response: “Given that tens of millions of blacks don’t want the vaccine, in light of restrictions, then is even more than an analogy.” I got back this: “Besides the ludicrous point that things Black people don’t like = Jim Crow, there are only 40 million Black people in this country. So please cite your source for the tens of millions of ‘blacks’ who oppose vaccines.” Stunned by the irrelevance of Hannah-Jones’ response and her ignorance about something she should know about, I wondered out loud, “Aren’t you a journalist?”

This is why y’all need critical race theory because this is just so insulting and pathetic. pic.twitter.com/WjbWCLwjbk

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) September 17, 2021

Before I turn to the controversy (which was minor in the scheme of things but not insignificant), I want to take a moment to note why it was important to make this observation (beyond the point about the equal treatment of black people to somebody who should have immediately identified with the spirit of the observation, since critical race theory purports to put central to its logic the relative effects of law and policy and enforcement across racial groupings). The nation recently learned that the District of Columbia does not have a contingency plan for unvaccinated students, who are banned from attending schools in person this fall after the first 20 days, and the absence of a plan appears to be by design. Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, who you will remember as a zealous advocate of the Black Lives Matter riots over the summer of 2020, riots that ran simultaneous with the COVID-19 pandemic, admitted during a press conference that there are no alternative options, including virtual learning. According to data supplied by the city, over 40 percent of blacks ages 12-17 are not vaccinated.

That’s what I was trying to help Hannah-Jones and her audience understand: vaccine mandates and restrictions based on vaccinated status are discriminatory since they disproportionately impact black and brown groups. Instead of acknowledging the importance of my observation to her standpoint, either Hannah-Jones or one of her fans contacted the administration of my university and complained, portraying my comment as somehow outside the scope of acceptable racial discourse. Me, a sociologist, who specializes in race and ethnicity—my observation was somehow problematic.

I won’t name any names here, because there are people involved whom I value, but, instead of educating the person who complained about freedom of speech and academic freedom and the political and intellectual autonomy of teachers and researchers in the university’s employ, the complaint was sent down the chain of command and I was asked to consider not identifying my affiliation with the university in my Twitter profile (I am almost certain the person who made this suggestion to me was instructed to make the suggestion). My response was to ask the colleague, who is also on Twitter, and politically active in Democratic Party politics, as well as the activities of organized labor, whether his university affiliation also appears in his profile. After admitting that it did, the point was taken and the matter dropped. I have been determined to not let this episode have a chilling affect on me. I have become even more prolific and aggressive on Twitter (while Twitter continues to shadow ban me).

I am sharing this here and now (it has been nearly a year since this occurred) because the double standard involved in this case should be obvious but isn’t because of the depth of self-righteousness felt by progressives and the problem is growing every worse. The certainty of truth of progressive opinion on matters is such that it renders in the minds of progressives as hardly political speech at all, whereas the opposition’s point of view, not only obviously completely wrong, but also evil from a moral standpoint, is beyond the pale and thus reflects poorly on the institution—more than this, such opinions should be exorcised from the university. Of course, what reflects badly on the institution, especially an institution that, before all others, is supposed to embrace and defend the spirit of cognitive diversity, is precisely a lack of collective self-consciousness about its double standard.

I said my case was minor but hardly insignificant. There is a real crisis in today’s university. I recently wrote about the resistance among administrators and faculty in the UW-system to perform a self-examination on the question of free speech (see Science Politics at the University of Wisconsin—Deliberate Ignorance About the State of Cognitive Liberty and Viewpoint Diversity on College Campuses). There is a history of censorship and political bullying concerning speech in the UW system. In 2017, I wrote about a case, Don’t Talk About Innate Bisexuality at UW-River Falls, in which the campus pursued a “Check Yourself” campaign, the purpose of which was to teach faculty and students proper etiquette surrounding talk about sex, race, immigration, and so on. In effect, it was a speech code designed to impose terms of political correctness by those who have appointed themselves bearers of truth on the matter.

The University of Wisconsin’s strained relationship with free speech and academic freedom is what led the free speech organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) to issue a rather poor report card for several of its campuses. My campus at Green Bay is festooned with yellow flags. And while explicit policy problems remain, the chilling effect of indirect public denunciation and vilification has become a growing problem. As I discuss at length in Refining the Art and Science of Propaganda in an Era of Popular Doubt and Questioning, the campus last year established as its Common Theme, “Truth: Information, Misinformation, and Democracy.” The series of events reeked of progressive angst over the rise of the popular voice and the concomitant decline in the faith in the academic priesthood, with the implication that faculty should be aware of some line established by some commissar in some high office somewhere. I reported in The Rules of Inclusion Represent the Totalitarian Desire to Punish Heretics and Infidels the scuttled survey will be supplanted by a year-long series of free speech events emphasizing civil discourse, often a euphemism for the rule of inclusion. I am watching the kick off even on Teams as I write this blog.

The next time I am asked whether I want to think about what post on social media (an implicit threat) or whether I want to conceal the identity of my employers from those who read my tweets, I have questions to ask back: Does the administration have any position on faculty extolling the virtue of critical race theory, gender theory, or queer theory? Are faculty admonished for criticizing conservative politics or Republican politicians? If this were the policy—or the instinct—administrators would have their hands full admonishing faculty. I can testify to the fact that nearly every day in the faculty suite is a hatefest with conservatives and Republicans the targets of hate. That’s fine with me. But when it comes to criticizing woke progressive ideas, then one has to worry not only about disciplinary action, but promotion, etc. I am neither a conservative or a Republican, but I have one thing in me that most of my colleagues do not: a healthy respect for cognitive liberty and the free expression opinions. My colleagues should be allowed to talk openly about most anything.

I remember faculty being extremely critical of Donald Trump for his policies regarding immigration. I authored the faculty senate resolution in support of Dreamers and that was widely praised and passed unanimously. Had the prevailing ideology been the other way around, I might have worried about whether I should have pursued that resolution. Not me personally, but others who are less obnoxious on this topic than me. As it was, I not only didn’t have to worry, I could count on accolades for having done good work on behalf of students currently in limbo (which was not my motivation). I am concerned, and so should you be, that the metric for acceptable speech would be determined based on partisan political ideology. If the speech is woke progressive, then it is acceptable. If it is populist-nationalist, classically liberally or libertarian (left or right), or orthodox Marxist, then it is problematic. It should not be this way. But it is.

I promise this will not be a digression, but what does this word “woke” mean? The question is often asked as if the word had no actual meaning, but it does. Woke means adherence to an ideology that sees contemporary society in terms of oppressive and intersecting hierarchies, and that treats concrete individuals as personifications of abstract categories with the white cis-gendered heterosexual male automatically representing the primary oppressor class—marked by numerous unearned privileges—and therefore justifiably subject to censorship and marginalization. As I will write about in my next blog (albeit on a different topic), the importance of language to the restructuring of society the woke worldview demands lies at the heart of the double standard: the university is no longer viewed as a neutral space for the rational and rigorous interrogation of ideas whatever they are, from wherever they hail, but a political vehicle to prepare through indoctrination America’s youth for incorporation into the corporate state bureaucracy.

If there is a requirement for all faculty to mark their tweets and other social media communications with a disclaimer saying they do not speak for the university or its administration, then I may not resist that—if everybody does the same. But I am not going to conceal my employer or my position. I worked goddamned hard for my PhD and to obtain tenure at a university so I could say whatever the hell needed to be said. I didn’t accidentally chose a profession where free speech is—or should be—respected. I have things to say. I expect all faculty to be treated equally with respect to politics, which means that the administration should take no position on the content of political speech and cultural and social criticism. Again, free speech is a neutral vehicle for the expression of ideas and opinions, not an identity. (See Abandoning the Principle of Individual Liberty for the Politics of Identity.)

I briefly take up five issues in this blog: partisan pandering on college debt, establishment newspeak, the COVID-19 pivot, the Islamization of the West, and Biden characterizing “MAGA” as “semi-fascist.” I will be back soon with a dedicated blog, likely on the topic of social contagion.

* * *

There’s a marine on Twitter who wants to know which office he needs to go to to get his legs back. He lost them paying for college.

I cannot believe I gave two legs for my tuition. What a dope I am. Ooh-rah!

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) August 24, 2022

How much tuition could be paid with the money Biden gave the neo-Nazis in Ukraine? Has anybody run the numbers?

Biden is out of touch. Even Democrats are turning on his plan to cancel ten thousand dollars in student debt for each borrower making less than $125,000 (twenty thousand for Pell Grant recipients), a huge swatch of the indebted population (President Biden Announces Student Loan Relief for Borrowers Who Need It Most). Estimates are being widely reported indicating that American taxpayers will pay north of half a trillion dollars over the next decade to pay for what is self-evidently a cynical political move in the face of midterm elections that populist-nationalist movement is well positioned to dominate. 

The unfairness of this move betrays the claim that Democrats represent working class families. Working people who didn’t take out student loans or who have already paid off their loans (my wife and I fall in the latter group) will not benefit from the program. In fact, we will be paying to bail out those who took out loans—while many of us out here are struggling to put our own kids through college.

"I've saved all my money. [My daughter] doesn't have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?"

Elizabeth Warren: "Of course not."

“I worked a double shift…you’re laughing at me…we did the right thing and we get screwed.”pic.twitter.com/xGWKOZi9av

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 24, 2022

This move does nothing to fix the systemic problems of college financing, the consequence of, among other things, making enrollment in college available to those unprepared to undertake the rigors of academic work, many or whom will seek degrees that provide no useful employment after college, and reduction in state financing of higher education thereby shifting the burden to families and individuals.

Instead of cancelling student debt, the government should invest half a trillion dollars to reinvigorate the nation’s network of trade schools, as well as invest in infrastructure projects that use those trades to rebuild industrial capacity in America, which will provide good paying jobs for our citizens. To ensure that Americans will have those jobs, the federal government must sharply restrict immigration.

At any rate, didn’t Nancy Pelosi say presidents don’t have the power of debt forgiveness? (See “Flashback: Nancy Pelosi Said President Lacks Authority to ‘Forgive’ Student Debt,” National Review. See also Slate’s “SCOTUS Will Probably Kill Student Debt Relief.”)

* * *

Have you heard? Pedophiles are being rebranded. They are now to be known as “MAPs,” or “minor attracted persons,” and recognized as a vulnerable and oppressed minority. Twitter has been one fire since videos of Berkeley police letting a transgender pedophile, Sophia Westfall, grooming who she believed were children (including a one-year-old) go (twice!) after being exposed in a citizen-organized sting operation led by Alex Rosen waiting at a park where children were playing. (Westfall, who identifies as a lesbian, also likes to take clandestine pictures of women in public places.)

Berkeley police tweeted rationalizations about the incident (I am being charitable, they were demonstrable lies). I tweeted the following in response:

I watched the videos. It looks to me like covering for a predator for the sake of a style of political correctness practiced virtually nowhere else in the world.

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) August 24, 2022

Now you know what the “Love is love” line on those “In this house…” yard signs means (“In this House…” The Slogans of Woke Progressivism).

From the first review: "The most important thing we can do is let them do wherever feels good with whom ever they choose, no matter the gender, the partners age, the types of sexual activity as long as its CONSENSUAL.” Maybe fake. But there are believers. https://t.co/BuKlcTkqTx

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) August 24, 2022

This is how they do it. “They” meaning the power elite. They change the language to disrupt ordinary understanding and shift sympathies—and, since they control institutional life, they can do this (which is why they must be removed from power).

Father Calvin Robinson explains why the left trying to rebrand pedophiles as "minor-attracted people" is "the greatest evil there is."

Read more: https://t.co/HN8Yk1Gi3Q pic.twitter.com/sULdX8wbDJ

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 25, 2022

MAPs is an instantiation of Orwellian Newspeak (it joins such euphemisms as “gender-affirming care,” “top surgery,” and “bottom surgery,” i.e., non-medically necessary castration and mastectomy).

Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, the totalitarian superstate in Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Party created Newspeak to bring the masses in line with the ideology of Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism).

In real-life today, the Party is the constellation of cultural and political forces comprising the Establishment, which, in the United States, presents with Democrats as its most visible front. The corporate state is transnational, so there are analogs in Europe, e.g., the Labour Party of Great Britain. (This is not socialism, of course, but corporate statism. Both the US Democratic Party and the UK Labour Party are neoliberal in orientation.)

The language of woke progressivism, which guides public policy, DEI training, etc., is the prevailing Newspeak in western societies (The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI). This is how crackpot ideas like critical race theory and gender ideology are smuggled into popular consciousness. This is what they are teaching our children. And they will lie to your face about that. (See The Ethic of Transparency in Public Education—and the Problem of Indoctrination; If QAnon is Not a Deep State Construct, It Certainly Functions that Way; The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida.)

* * *

In its pivot to blame Trump for pressuring the FDA on vaccines, the media is now admitting that vaccines are a problem. Take note of this moment. Elites are going to walk back the panic on COVID-19 and wash their hands of their responsibility in sickening and killing scores.

In the article, “Trump White House exerted pressure on FDA for Covid-19 emergency use authorizations, House report finds,” Politico is reporting, “The Trump administration pressured the FDA to authorize unproven treatments for Covid-19 and the first Covid-19 vaccines on an accelerated timeline, according to a House report released Wednesday.” This is how they will pivot on vaccines: blame Trump.

Why do they need to pivot? Haven’t you wondering when the media is going to come around and say, “What’s up with all these young healthy athletes dropping dead?” What about the vast increased in unexplained deaths in the trans-Atlantic sphere? Unexplained deaths surpassed all other causes of death in Alberta, Canada.

I wondered out loud a couple of days ago on Facebook whether elites would even attempt to pivot after they pushed mRNA so hard. They literally mocked those who refused to be injected with spike protein. They celebrated hospitalizations and deaths of the “unvaccinated,” gleefully reporting cases that put those who avoided the shot in the worst possible light while hiding the cases that contradicted the corporate state narrative. And governments mandated the damn thing. I asserted in that thread that the truth will have to be a popular truth, since elites will continue to lie. But I underestimated how clever the elite are. They do need to pivot.

* * *

Good Lord, how did I miss this? Miley Cyrus made a big to-do about this in 2017. Brothers and sisters, you have to keep me up on what’s happening in the pop culture world. Good thing it says “diversity” and not “equality.” I mean, it could have been worse: it could have been inaccurate. (Maybe you have noticed that “diversity” and “equity” have replaced equality as the goals of a “just society,” as determined by the ruling class. Equality is such a liberal value—and liberalism is white supremacist.)

I posted this on Facebook and a friend wondered why they didn’t just come out with a new character. I explained that they needed Barbie to put on the hijab. It’s a political act by the Culture Industry—as well as a marketing strategy to bring new customers to the Barbie franchise. Folks may claim that it is only about latter, but Mattel says openly that the doll, modeled after Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, is part of its “Sheroes” series and that the doll serves as an “inspiration for countless little girls who never saw themselves represented in sports and culture.” The goal is to manufacture the perception that Muslim women do not have a presence in American society by visibly “rectifying” their “marginal status” with a doll celebrating a cultural requirement that signals subordination to a patriarchal god. (I have written quite a lot on the subject of the hijab and the problem of multiculturalism. Here’s a sampling: Squaring the Panic over Misogyny with World Hijab Day; The Democratic Party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism.)

Another friend (whom I have known since kindergarten) remarked that he has never seen a Barbie nun. Good point. Where is Catholic Barbie? Or Pentecostal Barbie? Or Satanic Barbie? A relative then asked when transgender Barbie was coming out. I responded with:

I then shared this from my essay Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds:

Some doctors believe persons who want to transform their bodies in disfiguring ways should be allow to do so. Such surgery is already occurring in the United States. Align Surgical Associates Inc., a medical firm based in San Francisco, endorsed by, among others, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American Medical Association, and the Aesthetic Society, will perform a surgical procedure known as “nullification” on those who wish “to enjoy a relatively smooth genital area,” a “mostly unbroken transition from the abdomen down.” The firm offers this procedure for those who wish to “enjoy a body that looks closer on the outside to the way they feel on the inside.” Some people wish to have no genitals and Align Surgical Associates Inc. will make that happen. For a fee, of course. (The firm’s website has a gallery, if you are interested.) 

I learned about Hijab Barbie from a YouTuber named Persy who I discovered upon reading this tweet:

The Danes should see Sweden as a warning. They’re on the same trajectory, just a bit behind. Even smaller towns are noticeably more ‘diverse’ than just a couple of decades ago, now that all those millennium babies from huge families are growing up. https://t.co/h6R4QDoQ2i

— Persy (@PersyLives) August 23, 2022

I have blogged extensively about this (see, e.g., Observations from Sweden; Sweden – Caught Between Two Irrationalisms; Avoiding Civil War in Europe; The Courage to Name the Problem). This is what I have been telling readers about this matter in a nutshell: How Islam will take over the West: progressives and social democrats of western countries invite them in—and woke feminists take the students to mosques to try on the hijab to signal their virtue.

What comes with Islamization is not only misogyny and homophobia and a sharply reduced capacity for free thought (and a profound hatred of dogs), but drastically higher crime rates and greater social disorganization. It’s bad for everybody—as every totalitarian ideology is. Let this happen and prepare for clerical fascism.

Ask a truthful Swede what’s in store for the rest of civilization if western nations allow this trend to continue. But recognize that a lot of Swedes are deluded by a pathological displaced humanitarianism and will deny the empirical evidence. The fact is that Sweden is very different now than it was when I first started traveling there.

I weep for the Danes and Swedes. I fear for the West. Not all cultures are adequate for the humanity of the people they colonize (Culture Matters: Western Exceptionalism and Socialist Possibility; Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration). So do borders.

* * *

“In 2020, you and 81 million Americans voted to save our democracy,” Biden told a roaring crowd. “That’s why Donald Trump isn’t just a former president. He is a defeated former president.” Was the crowd roaring? I didn’t see the speech. Biden makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t like being made to pity a man I loathe. But I can understand how CNN could describe the crowd this way given the headline of the story: “Biden criticizes ‘semi-fascism’ underpinning the ‘extreme MAGA philosophy’ in fiery return to the campaign trail.” Fiery? Biden?

Every time Biden says this all I hear is insecurity. He doesn’t really believe he won. He may not fully grasp everything that went on during 2020 (Too Soon to Call: Developments in the Improbability of a Biden Election Victory; “A republic, if you can keep it.”) , but he surely saw those huge Trump rallies and reflected on his own pathetic events those few times he poked his head up out of his basement. He can’t believe he got more votes than the wildly popular Obama or even Clinton. Of course, maybe he is that egotistical and self-deluded.

Populist-nationalism isn’t “semi-fascist.” This is absurd. This characterization is part of the elite effort to paint popular opposition to transnationalism and woke progressivism as beyond the pale (“A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous; MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin; Liz Cheney: MAGA is Neo-Marxist). It’s projection—and distraction. The principal advocates of key elements of fascism—the corporate state, technocratic control, and identitarianism—are the Democrats and establishment Republicans (Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; Biden’s Biofascist Regime; From Inverted to Naked Totalitarianism: The West in Crisis).

Whatever you think about “MAGA” ideology, it’s not fascist (The Social Character of the Trump Moment; The Economic Nationalism of Steven K. Bannon). These are conservatives and liberals working together to resist globalism and the managed decline of the American republic (Bridging the Left-Right Divide to Confront the New World Order). Whatever you think of Trump, he is not a fascist (Scapegoating in the Era of Inverted Totalitarianism). “MAGA” Republicans are building grassroots coalitions that emphasize popular democratic participation and action. They threaten the hold progressives and elites have on our institutions (Why I am not a Progressive). That’s the problem with them. They’re the “deplorables.”

* * *

Breaking: Kevin McCarthy is demanding Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress following his admission on the Joe Rogan Experience that Facebook censored Hunter Biden’s laptop stories for ten days in run-up to election.

For those of you who aren’t up on this, the FBI met Facebook employees and told them Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian propaganda.” They knew that wasn’t true. Facebook took direction from a deep state operation to protect Joe Biden from information that would have changed the outcome of the election.

The FBI—or some group internal to it—worked for the Establishment to prevent Trump’s re-election. And they are today working to prevent Trump’s return and, more generally, stifle the populist-nationalist movement. The FBI has become the Gestapo of the Democratic Party.

A couple of days ago Sp¡ked published “How trans ideology hijacked the gay-rights movement.” It author, David Allen, was chair of the Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality (TORCH) from 1996 to 1999. An old warrior for the struggle for the right of gays and lesbians to stand equally before the law with straight men and women.

I will leave you to read the piece (it’s a terrific read). In this blog, I want to share something Allen’s piece moved me consider: the trouble an academic would seek for sharing this essay in a college classroom or suggesting to the director of a Pride center that perhaps the diverse needs of students are not met by a single office.

Why are there risks associated with such things? Because the ethic of free speech is not really a valued one in institutions of higher education. Don’t be misled by stories of universities hastily moving to take up the free speech question; this is occurring in the face of conservative and libertarian challenges to the culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), a system of woke progressive attitudes and theories that have taken root everywhere in America. That’s right, it’s not happening because faculty and administrators are worried about where woke has taken the institution. It’s public relations.

As I reported in April (Science Politics at the University of Wisconsin—Deliberate Ignorance About the State of Cognitive Liberty and Viewpoint Diversity on College Campuses), the University of Wisconsin System delayed a free speech survey scheduled for the spring (2022), pushing out its administration at least until the fall semester (where it enjoyed no funding), because they did not want the public to know how intellectually closed our institutions of higher education have become. It now appears the survey will be supplanted by a year-long series of free speech events emphasizing civil discourse, often a euphemism for the rule of inclusion. I fully anticipate the exercise will be an attempt at a deft recoding of DEI indoctrination.

It won’t be my first rodeo. Given that free speech should be a core value of every public university in the country, one should expect periodic refreshers on the importance of upholding everybody’s right to think and speak freely in order to move civilization towards greater heights of justice and technological prowess. Indeed, a common defense of free speech concerns its function in promoting positive social change. And it’s true: all modern-day social movements have depended on the ability of activists to speak freely—and on those brave enough to speak up for justice even when facing consequences for doing so.

However, what is often neglected in the defense of free speech on college campuses is the practice as intrinsic good, that is the recognition of the human right to cognitive liberty—the right belonging to every human to think and express his thoughts without consequence (which is what it means to say that speech is free).

To be sure, the functionality of speech to the dynamic of social change depends on cognitive freedom—which is precisely why authoritarian and illiberal types want to stifle speech! This is the imperative of blasphemy laws: to prevent heretics and even infidels from challenging the legitimacy of religious doctrine. This is also the imperative of rules compelling inclusive language: to exclude opinions that challenge the legitimacy of crackpot theories currently circulating through modern-day cultural and social institutions. When you are educated about “microaggressions” know that you are being subjected to the practical deployment of a crackpot theory.

When speech is rationalized on the grounds of functionality towards progressive ends, utterances determined to be dysfunctional for those ends are “justifiably” restricted. Thus “regressive” and “reactionary” ideas are disallowable under the speech regime envisioned by the progressives in charge of the institution or organization. This move presupposes what speech is for—and there are always people doing the presupposing (and it’s not hard to identify the commissar). But the free speech right is a neutral vehicle for the expression of human liberty that allows for any utterance to be emitted including (and, I would argue, especially) those utterances that offend the sensibilities of other people whatever their ideology, whatever their worldview—whatever their identity. That’s the human right: your entitlement to the universal freedom to offend others.

We must, therefore, in sussing out the essence of cognitive liberty, consider its obverse: thought control. Thought control is mind control. And if an entity can control a person’s mind, then that person is unfree. The rules of inclusion are thus in the service of mind control. Moreover, where undesirable opinions continue their lives in the privacy of skulls, insistence on inclusion encourages bad faith. The rules foster the development of clandestine groups where members, often suspicious of one another, try to feel free to let down their hair—just like Chinese Christians who meet in secret to pray (the house church). The rules create a culture that causes even comrades to lower their voices when sharing disallowed opinions. You know, like it was the former Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany. Most people don’t even bother to discuss effectively banned ideas anymore; they go along to get along.

"I enunciate 'nigger' in full, out loud w/ some purpose in mind. Usually the aim is to drive home to audiences the pervasiveness of anti-Black prejudice and, more specifically, the way in which this troublesome word has been an integral part of the soundtrack of American racism." pic.twitter.com/7CGkG7eA4r

— Free Black Thought (@FreeBlckThought) August 23, 2022

What is often neglected in the defense of free speech, then, is the false claim that individuals or groups possess a right to be free from insult and offense. One often hears this false claim wrapped in the lofty defense of “human dignity.” Yes, the Muslim is man who believes in a religious doctrine, which is, in the final analysis, an ideology (as all religious doctrines are), and, yes, in theory, all ideologies are subject to criticism, but the man’s identity is at stake, and he has a right to that, so do not insult him for his deeply-felt religious convictions or offend his prophet. Well, to hell with his delusions and fuck his prophet. He has no right to tell me what to think or say. It’s not my religion.

We hear this same claptrap associated with rules punishing those who contradict gender ideology. Contradicting the claim that “transwomen are women” (on the grounds that women are adult human females and transwomen are males and thus cannot be women) are accused of an act approximating genocide. The criticism of gender ideology thus become a speech act erasing the existence of transpeople, an assumption that presumes as given what the critic is doubting (it is thus rendered undebatable) and, moreover, that a speech act is capable of such a thing. But if a man is permitted to doubt God, and surely he must be if he is a free man, then surely he is permitted to doubt the claim that there are “true selves” and “wrong bodies.”

This is why the rigorous defense of free speech is portrayed as “right wing”: it allows criticisms that challenge the legitimacy opinions uttered by those controlling the nation’s cultural and social institutions—while anti-white racism, anti-male sexism, and the remarkable denial that there are such things as men and women at all, are assumed as truth and uttered without consequence and even expecting affirmation. The free speech crowd is given its own identity and left to compete with the myriad other identities who, on the grounds of social justice, claim the right to silence speech they don’t like. Of course, folks are entitled to their crackpot theories. The Muslim enjoys his religious liberty. What they are not allowed to do, however, is establish rules that prevent others from challenging those theories. And that is precisely what the rules of inclusion aim to do—and are doing.

This therefore must be made plain: There is no right to dignity as such because, if there were, then those who claim to take offense at speech are given control over the cognitive liberty of others—and this is a human rights violation, rights to which we are all entitled. This is why those who claim to take offense seek to have the law or some rules at their backs: they desire to control others by punishing them for their opinions. And it should not have escaped your attention that those who complain about offensive speech are not those who might be offended but others who presume to speak for those people. How authoritarian is that? Very authoritarian.

Those who love freedom have allowed this to happen because the love of freedom is at once love for humanity. But this sentiment is misplaced humanitarianism, for it is in the end destructive to humanity.

Before I conclude, I want you to know that I hear your objections: “Fire in a crowded theater” (do I really need to debunk this one?) and “Libel and slander.” On the question of libel and slander, first it cannot apply to identity, as this is group-level abstraction and libel and slander, or defamation, applies to the action of damaging the good reputation of concrete individuals (I am skeptical even of this). Moreover, defamation can only be said to have occurred if a demonstrable lie had been told that causes a demonstrable consequence—all of this wrapped in malice. What demonstrable lie has been told when I openly doubt the claims of imams or gender theorists? Shall I be punished then for telling the truth?

“With bright knives he releases our souls.” —Pink Floyd, “Sheep”

When today we find conservatism to be the closest thing to classical liberalism in the West, the left made a wrong turn somewhere. Several wrong turns. A major one was abandoning the principle of individual liberty for tribalism.

A free man is under no obligation to accept or affirm the delusions, illusions, or lies of others. He is only obligated to tolerate these in those who are not harming others or depriving them of the liberties and rights to which we are each entitled. Toleration does not mean avoiding criticism or ridicule of their beliefs. The fool can stand babbling on the hill. And we can make fun of him.

The desire to compel an individual to accept or affirm delusions, illusions, or lies, or punish him for mocking people who hold or spread them, is an authoritarian desire. The force of law and policy behind such desire cancels the obligation to be tolerant.

The existence of Muslims does not depend on my faith in Islam. Muslims do not need my affirmation to exist. They only need to be convinced of the truth of their doctrine. I only need to tolerate them. Without faith there are no Muslims. But this is their problem, not mine.

To say a man is not exempt from a mandate or a requirement because he does not profess the relevant religious doctrine is to punish him for believing some irrelevant doctrine or no doctrine at all. This is discrimination.

Integration with western society does not require abandoning one’s faith commitments or other opinions. It does, however, require accepting as part of living in the West adherence to the ethics of secularism, rule of law, and diversity of opinion—the very things that permit those who choose to reside in our countries the right to keep or abandon their faith commitments and other opinions. You faith cannot give you any privileges in a free society.

Yet Americans are being told they have to accept and affirm delusions, illusions, and lies and that they will be subject to mandates for not holding approved belief.

Illiberalism is being normalized by the corporate state and its attendant technocracy. Our civil liberties and human rights are at stake. We must recommit ourselves to the Enlightenment. Insist that reason and secularism govern our institutions. Push this woke insanity to the hill where the fool stands babbling.

* * *

If you’re wondering why progressives are so gullible when it comes to accepting the pseudoscience of the state corporate apparatus, you have to grasp postmodernist corruption of the academy and our cultural institutions (A Judge Stands on His Head to Save Woke Progressive Indoctrination and “DeSantis is a Nazi” and the Hysterical Left’s Anti-Working Class Politics covers this issue and provides numerous links to past writings about this). Once academics, administrators, and cultural managers, and the progressives who came through their indoctrination programs, became convinced that science is just another ideology—and, worse, cisgendered, heterosexist, patriarchal, white supremacist ideology—it was only a matter of time before well-known and obvious truths were overthrown for pseudoscientific notions to be displayed on placards and profiles for the tribal purpose of signaling virtue.

One blatant giveaway that science has been rejected are these yardsigns telling us that “This house believes in science.” No it doesn’t. If it did, that sign wouldn’t be in the front yard. (See “In this House…” The Slogans of Woke Progressivism.)

Headline from this morning’s The Hill: “Judge blocks DeSantis’s ‘Stop WOKE Act,’ says Florida feels like a ‘First Amendment upside down’.” US District Court for the Northern District of Florida Chief Judge Mark Walker (the same judge who exploited the COVID pandemic to help engineer voting procedures that advantaged Democrats in 2020 and will again in the upcoming 2022 elections) issued a preliminary injunction blocking the private employer provisions in the law saying it violates free speech protections under the First Amendment and that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause for being impermissibly vague.

“Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down,” the Obama appointee and activist judge wrote in the ruling (in which he compared the law to the fictional “upside down” in the Netflix series Stranger Things). “Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely,” Walker continued. “But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.” Here is the text of the Stop WOKE Act.

Walker’s understanding of burden is embarrassingly superficial but not unusual among progressive judges (and rightwing libertarians) who erroneously use the private status of corporations as justification for the regulation of speech. Burdening speech is not only suppressing certain utterances, which must be disallowed; lifting burdens must be concerned with protecting the cognitive liberty of individuals, which means prohibiting the practice of compelling political and religious speech, which is precisely what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity training conveys (see The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI).

The innovation of the Florida law lies in the act of extending the principle of free speech rights to state-regulated private sector entities, i.e., corporations, in the same way the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits private corporations from discriminating against individuals based on race, sex, etc. Speech is as much a civil right as one’s racial or sexual status—rights individuals do not lose upon entering private institutions. After all, these are places of public accommodations; they cannot discriminate for these reasons. Moreover, corporations exist because they chartered by and answerable to governments. DeSantis’s law should be the law of the land. It plainly follows from the First Amendment (as well as the Ninth).

What this judge clearly fails to understand—or to take into account—is the fact (not the feeling) that DeSantis’ law is not burdening speech but instead preventing an institution or organization from compelling an individual to speak and think in ways he wishes not to. The law does not burden speech by prohibiting mandatory DEI training; on the contrary, it is mandatory DEI training that burdens speech. The law is correcting this problem by protecting individuals from the imposition of having political and religious speech forced down their throats in required struggle sessions at institutions where they are receiving an education or earning a living, activities in which they must engage to enjoy an acceptable quality of life. Forced into such training sessions, as such they are captive populations—who are moreover required to affirm the political and quasi-religious ideologies they are receiving. Judge Walker must be standing on his head to get the law so wrong.

* * *

DEI training and other instruction in critical theories where these are presented as the definitive explanations of the phenomenon people experience is an attempt by the administrative state and technocracy to indoctrinate employees and students with a moral philosophy derived from a illiberal ideology. I was therefore excited to hear the thoughts of Christian theologian and ecclesiastical historian Carl Trueman speak to the comedians on Triggernometry about how technocracy cannot answer moral questions. However, I was struck by how quickly the guest made it impossible to actually take up the question posed as the title of the podcast.

Trueman argued that, without the absolute standard of religion, morality is merely an exercise in pragmatism. But there are plainly many religions and they differ drastically from each other. It follows that religion cannot be an absolute standard for anything. (You will recall that Feuerbach blew up Hegel over this point nearly two centuries ago. See A Humanist Take on Marx’s Irreligious Criticism.) This is why we have religious liberty. Religion, like critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, and the other quasi-religious standpoints of the moment, fails to provide adequate moral rules, even while, unlike these critical theories, claiming there are such things.

Moreover, religion is notorious for undermining those moral rules that must necessarily lie beyond religion, for example, women’s rights. How are we otherwise able to objectively determine what is a just law or policy if there is no universal standard? There must be such a thing as an objective standard if we are to judge the adequacy of any given religious system to human thriving and well-being, which are objective criteria. The Jewish Bible positively sanctions slavery. Is slavery not wrong? On what basis is it wrong? Plainly not a biblical one (see Slavery and the Abrahamic Traditions).

Fortunately, there is such a standard: human rights as determinable by the approach secular humanism, i.e., a concern for and the science of our species: Homo sapiens. This is possible because human rights are inherent in our species-being, however much they are warped by such ideologies as Christianity, queer theory, etc. This is pragmatic if by that word we mean discovering the truth and putting it into practice (see Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). We find, then, that religion—or anything approximating it—is unnecessary. More than this, it is oppressive. Yet new religious are being forced upon employees and students across the West in the form of DEI training, new religious that contract human rights, indeed that deny the species being necessary for human rights to be possible.

* * *

Thinking about this morning as I was dropping my son off at work, I was reminded that I wanted to put down something I have said in discussions with family and friends—and in classroom instruction (via the arguments of Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks and Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)—that there are those who are desperate to deny the animality of man, to deny that the species is the product of natural history and that the ideas people express, rational and irrational, result from environmental contexts and social arrangements that either promote or corrupt development and justice.

Slogans that find their way into boardrooms and classrooms, such as “transwomen are women,” or the compelled use of pronouns, or statements recognizing the spiritual connection an American Indian tribe has to the land upon which the buildings of a university stand—these are political and quasi-religious activities that must deny reality in order to work. And to do this destructive work, the activists must shift the function of education from one of enlightenment and the ruthless search for the truth to one of indoctrination and ideological production. Replacing truth with doctrine requires indoctrination. It’s right there in the name. Such beliefs as individuals can change sex or American Indians are in possession of transcendent privilege require compelling since most free and rational person would rightly dismiss such irrational claims and therefore wouldn’t come to them naturally. The goal is to conscript all of us in the project to make falsehoods appear as the truth. This is the essence of all religion.

It should terrify all of us that, increasingly, an individual will be disciplined, ostracized, and punished for not only telling the truth but for failing to affirm a lie. DEI is part of the system seeking to supplant the ordinary understanding of humans, which is generally intuitive correct, and even knowledge of natural facts, with a political-ideological view of the world prepares employees and future employees for incorporation into an illiberal existence beneficial to corporate power and profit. This is an environment where the administrator, cultural manager, and employer can depends on the student and employee believing whatever those in authority tell them (this was a major objective of the COVID-19 mask and vaccine compliant strategies). DEI training, its basis in critical race theory, gender theory, etc., demands of those compelled those attending affirmation of the lie—and to go forth and spread this lie throughout the institution and the community.

* * *

Consider the appearance of the term “cisgender,” a transparent and cynical attempt to erase the notion of the abnormal by defining the ordinary as so problematical as to require a qualifying prefix. Such propaganda terms proliferate as the transgressive practice of postmodernist critical theory colonizes academic jargon. This is why Freedom and Reason does not critique gender ideology independent of the consequences of doing so—gender ideology is at once a system of claims about the world and an authoritarian politics that punishes people for skepticism regarding those claims. If I am hauled before a disciplinary committee for this blog, the truth of what I am saying will enjoy dramatic confirmation.

Consider the preachment found in the programming that heteronormativity and cisnormativity are at once oppressive ideologies (see the work of Christopher Rufo). These notions depend on the denial of necessary facts in human evolution and the perpetuation of the species across time and space. It is a religious notion even if expressed in a nominally secular fashion, one that sees man as not merely separate from nature but not really a natural being at all. Rhetoric about the “dominantly situated” and “negatively privileged” and “marginalized” groups, terms that populate the transgressive literature of critical gender studies and find their way into DEI training manuals—such rhetoric cannot obviate reality if we remain free from compelled speech.

Some will object that those forced into struggle sessions over these matters are not really compelled to accept the programming. They are still free to believe as they did. At best then, you will have forced everybody into bad faith. We all know that those who, for example, deny that males can be women will be attacked for “denying the existence” of transpeople. But what is denied is the claim that a transwoman is a woman on the grounds that a woman is an adult human female and, with the transwoman’s sex determined by such objective unchangeable things as chromosomes and gametes, the individual cannot actually meet the definition. I other words, those who refuse to affirm the slogan do so on definitional grounds that a woman must be a female which is rooted in scientific truth. For this, they are demoted, disciplined, expelled, ostracized, and smeared.

But rejecting transgenderism is no more discriminatory against transpeople as rejecting Islam is discriminatory against Muslims. The existence of Muslims does not depend on my faith in Islam. Muslims do not need my affirmation to exist. They only need to be convinced of the truth of the doctrine. And I only need to tolerate them. Without faith there are no Muslims. But this is their problem, not mine. Yet employees and students across the country are being compelled to undergo training in which affirming these ideas are a requirement for certification.

* * *

I risk being accused of transphobia for this blog (and for future ones dealing with this topic). However, readers should consider the history of using accusations of phobia to delegitimize criticisms of their views. Consider, for example, the propaganda term “Islamophobia.” Exploiting the construct “xenophobia” as inspiration, Islamists invented the term at the end of the 1970s to portray rational criticisms of Islam as a type of racism. But Islam is an ideology. It is the rational obligation of free people to criticize indeed resist ideology.

“Transphobia” is a propaganda term designed to accomplish the same thing. It’s designed to silence critics by making them out to be the equivalent of racists. You see this in the slogan “Transrights are human rights,” which Antifa chants while physically assaulting women demanding their rights. A male identifying as a woman has her human rights. There is no human right to be regarded by others as a woman when they perceive you as a male. This is for the obvious reason that an individual cannot force other people to live according to his perception of himself. A white may wish to be black, but those around her are under no obligation to recognize her as such. Indeed, it is violative of the human rights of others to insist they affirm the delusions of other persons.

Yet, while it would be outrageous to compel employees and students to undergo training sessions in Christianity, it is considered so obvious that they should be compelled to undergo training sessions in gender ideology that to pass a law forcing institutions to abide by the fundamental law of this country is somehow oppressive. (I considered using Islam as the example, but with Islamophilia so rampant among woke progressives, I cannot be sure they won’t attempt at some future point to have employees and students affirm the tenets of that totalitarian belief system).

In light of claims to the contrary, then, there is something therefore to be said about the emergence of novel religious standpoints as the old religious institutions fall away in the radical force of modernity. Indeed, the return of religion in new forms marks the postmodern condition. But this condition is not in the end the result of ideas, but the way the death throes of late capitalism manifest in the behavior of the corporate state and attendant technocratic arrangements expressed as ideas in universities corrupted by corporate state propaganda.

Trueman is right about this: technocracy cannot answer moral questions. However, extremists have infiltrated the technocracy and they’re making policy appealing to morality. They dress the appeal in the rhetoric of “social justice.” This must be resisted. We have to unwind all this. We have to bring western society back to reason and the principles of liberty and equality.

* * *

Alongside my libertarianism is a commitment to scientific truth and a concern for human rights, which I argue are universal and objectively determinable things. Because truth matters, while I may choose to lie or go along with a fiction to spare a vulnerable person’s feelings, I must not be made to lie for the sake of affirming the person’s imaginary world. No person should be forced to participate in the manufacture and perpetuation of untruths.

As readers of Freedom and Reason know, I am an atheist. Because I enjoy religious liberty, I cannot be made to repeat Islamic scripture. Also, Islamic belief is false and wrong. There is no God. Muhammad did not talk to an angel named Gabriel. There are no angels (no supernatural ones, anyway). Islam harms people subjected to it. I am not a bigot because I do not use the sacred language of Islam or refuse to affirm the claims made by that religion. More than this, I am free—or at least should be free—to criticize that religion; I am not subject in a secular society to that religion’s blasphemy rules because I am not a Muslim. If ever I am so compelled, then I am no longer a free man.

Today, woke gender ideology is very much a religious praxis. Gender ideology comes with a cosmology positing nonexistent entities, principally a concept of gender as something existing independent of bodies, the truth of which depends entirely on the testimony of the person who, like somebody claiming to have been abducted by aliens, presents an entirely subjective case, one that is, as with alien abduction, more likely to be delusional than anything approximating a true claim. Unlike in the case of Islam (or Christianity), those of us who do not subscribe to the woke religion are nonetheless expected to affirm its slogans. It is not just in the public education system that one is expected to rehearse the slogans of Wokism. Many of those working in corporate bureaucracies are also expected to repeat the preachments.

This slogan “transwomen are women” represents perhaps more than any other the special problem with gender and queer ideologies and the authoritarian desire to impose upon the world a crackpot theory of sex and gender. While I could not be expected to affirm the slogan “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger,” or, perhaps more certainly, “Jesus Christ is the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Him,” I am expected to affirm the slogan “transwomen are women.” That I fear or risk discipline or punishment for publicly refusing to affirm this slogan indicates that gender ideology has become a threat to liberty in America in a way that religion never has been.

Growing up in a Christian community, son to a minister with his own church, I was never expected to openly affirm Christian slogans. Admittedly, other children were not so fortunate. But, then, almost nobody ever had to think about it. They believed by virtue of early socialization (and perhaps genes that predisposed them to religiosity). Yet, several times over the last few years, I have been asked to affirm the slogan that transwomen are women. I have had individuals unfriend and unfollow me on social media not because I said anything critical of transgenderism but because I would not affirm the slogan. When I voice my support for gays and lesbians, which I often do, I am sometimes asked why I neglected transpeople in my advocacy. I ignore the question, which then becomes evidence itself that I am transphobic.

When people refuse or fail to affirm the tenets of this quasi-religion, the gaze cast upon them condemns them of anti-science, as if the science confirms the truth of the ideology, assuming as given that which requires proving (another strange alchemy). Failing to provide proof (as I have shown in past blogs and will show in upcoming ones, all this is far more religious-like than scientific), why, then, is race or gender ideology different from Scientology or Mormonism? Of course, even if the science were there, one should still be free to reject its claims. The state would be no more justified in punishing a person for rejecting Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as it would punishing a person for rejecting L. Ron Hubbard’s theory of dianetics. (Where are the struggle sessions over Darwinism?) But race and gender ideology is so obviously religious in character how did we even get to the point where one has to risk one’s reputation and livelihood for refusing to accept doctrine? Because of the woke progressive assault on scientific truth. Why would it do that? Consider that science has to be delegitimized so that “other ways of knowing” can be used in medicine.

* * *

Here’s what has happened. Scientific truth, however tentative in its self-correcting character (there are things yet to be discovered and concepts still to be worked out), is the rational standard of knowledge, as it is based on verified belief and is universal, that is, it is true regardless of the cultural and historical context, what we may therefore properly call knowledge (over against belief). Scientific truth is challenged by a neo-idealism instantiated by a critical theory, as well as the postmodernist movement in French philosophy. (I am not talking about all critical theory, but specifically the 1960s deformation of critical theory and its offspring, e.g., critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, etc.) These other ways of knowing have found their way into our major institutions because they are functional to corporate governance and profit-making.

These developments have not merely warped ordinary understanding, but have found their way into law and public policy, which find popular support among rank-and-file progressives socialized in the woke church the academia has become. Critical theory in its postmodern turn represent a deviation from reason by defining science as ideology and then, in a move conflating ontology with a subjectivist epistemology expressing distrust of “grand narratives,” reducing scientific theory to “discourses,” thus denying the method for determining objective reality. The radical relativism expressed by these perspectives treat scientific truth and those things concerning reasonable minds as “problematic.” Law and policy proceeds not on the basis of fact and reason but on the basis of a politics corrupted by ideology. In a nation founded on separation of church and state, woke ideology has become the state religion. One only needs to look at the administrative state under President Joe Biden to confirm this.

We have arrived at a point where “indigenous knowledge systems” are elevated to the status of science—which only means that science has been demoted from its position as the rational standard of knowledge to lay alongside voodoo and witchcraft. Actually, as some would have it, we must go out of our way to value nonscientific ways of knowing. This is a core element of postcolonial consciousness. Critical theory and postmodernism come with a praxis of transgression that portrays normality as arbitrary, imperial, and oppressive, and therefore in obvious need of overthrowing. Science is a western notion, and the West is wicked. Science is white supremacist and cisgendered. The world is in need of purification from this corruption. This is at least the view of the rank-and-file science deniers of woke progressive praxis—despite those obnoxious yard signs that say “In this house…we believe science.” Social media profile pictures extolling the virtues of masks and gene therapies should make things obvious enough.

Because it rests on a neo-idealism that is derivative of Hegelian thought, which sees history as the manifestation of ideas rather than than the other way around (as the materialists do), the arguments are circular. For example, “cisnormativity,” a construct depicting the natural fact that the vast majority of the human population intuitively recognizes the sexual dimorphism inherent (and obvious) in the species as an oppressive expression of gendered power, finds the source of that power in cisnormativity itself, as if males and females who identify as men and women—oppressors the both of them—managed at a point long before modern humans emerged as a species to conspire to construct an oppressive ideology just in case their offspring ever decided to question their gender. (I have more to say about this, but this blog is getting long. Stay tuned.)

* * *

The theories that underpin DEI training are crackpot. They are so religious-like as to qualify as such. I spent some time with them here to give you an idea of the ideology that underpins the training many of you are forced to undergo. Children are being subjected to these ideas and the consequences are becoming apparent. Understanding what and why this is happening is key to understanding why DeSantis and a handful of other political visionaries are acting to stop it.

DEI training and other programs of indoctrination represents political and religious programming of the sort that is strictly prohibited by the First Amendment, these rights and liberties made available to all citizens via the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. This is the whole ball of wax: if these rights and liberties are negated we live in a totalitarian state in which the Party tells us was to think and say. The Orwellian nightmare world under construction is what Florida governor Ron DeSantis is trying to tear down. We need to help him. We need these laws in all of our states.

A few days ago, Fox News posted an article, “Parents push back on American colleges promoting DEI initiatives: ‘DEI is dangerous’,” by Elizabeth Economou and Nicole Pelletiere. They write, “Some universities across America are requiring compliance from faculty in the form of signed diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) statements, as conditions for tenure or promotion—arguing that DEI across college campuses is a top priority.” Their article then sounds an optimistic note: “However, there may be growing pushback in some areas from faculty as well as from parents—who claim that the DEI agenda actually challenges the diversity of viewpoints and opinions of students within the college environment. Some say it also promotes a culture of fear and intimidation.”

The DEI agenda is indeed becoming ubiquitous these days and, while there is some pushback from faculty, parents, and students, it is not nearly enough. The lack of resistance, especially among faculty and students, is in part because of the culture of fear and intimidation that controls discourse and interaction on the modern university campus. I work at a university, and the fear and intimidation is palpable.

I have written about DEI programming on Freedom and Reason (e.g., The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think; Can I Get an “Amen” to That? No, But Here’s Some Fairy Dust). Many of us are required to attend DEI workshops or perform online trainings as a consequence of our necessary existence in helping, learning, and working spaces where DEI ideas and practices are the guiding objectives. The notice just went out at my institution that new staff and faculty are required to undergo DEI training. It is incorporated in the program of employee orientation. Given what universities are turning out, I am sure many of the new arrivals will be eager to express their wokism. For those who aren’t so enthusiastic, they will sit silently or forced into pronouncements of bad faith.

Achieving diversity at any institution, according to DEI doctrine, requires drawing employees, students, etc., from a myriad of identity groups based on gender, race, religion, etc. If, e.g., blacks are “underrepresented” at an organization, then administrators and managers will aggressively seek black applicants and prefer those applicants over white or East Asian applicants. The same is true for advancement and promotion. Managers are not looking for the most qualified individual, but instead looking for personifications of an abstract demographic category to build an institution that “looks like America,” or more ambitiously, since universities are international, that “looks like the world.” (As the most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse society on the planet, America looks like the world.)

Management is also, it must be said, looking for personifications (it goes beyond tokenism) who agree with the progressive agenda of the institution. A black conservative or Republican is highly undesirable. (Is he even black?) It is important to recruit those who are also woke as they will promote the agenda and extend progressive hegemony in their “community.” This is functional, as Swedish Marxist and populist Malcom Kyeyune argues, as “progressive theories of race and gender” secure “influence, employment, and prestige for underemployed university graduates.” He characterizes wokism as the highest form of managerialism. (His participation in Oikos suggests he also understands wokism also as a denationalizing force destructive to individual liberty and civil rights.)

https://t.co/Dk6w7UchI4

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) August 4, 2022

One of the objectives of DEI, whether explicit or not, is to achieve a reduction in the number of straight white men at an institution by replacing them with representatives of the various groups deemed significant and useful to the establishment justified by the problem of “underrepresentation.” East Asians are increasingly unwelcome to help fulfill the scheme, as well, as they tend to excel in various fields central to the work of the university. One finds justification for the diminishment of straight white men, hereafter SWMs, in institutional life in the claim, informed by postmodernism and critical theory (critical race, gender, and queer theories), as well as postcolonial ideology and third worldism, that SWMs reside at the intersection of oppressor categories. (The question of why oppressors are leading the way in disempowering themselves through the deployment of DEI rules left unexplained.)

Achieving equity, a euphemism for SWM depowerment, requires eliminating aggregate differences among individuals in bureaucratic life, a goal that often demands the elimination of any norm or standard that prevents individuals from achieving parity with SWMs, norms and standards said are erected by SWMs to achieve systemic privileges—cis privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, white privilege. However, since all modern institutions are structurally bureaucratic and thus necessarily order roles and statuses hierarchically, parity requires, independent of merit, deliberate promotion of those mired in the intersections of oppressed categories to stations with more power and prestige. In this fashion, members of minority groups possessing victim subjectivities are integrated into the structure of power where their loyalty to the goals of DEI becomes useful for tightening the hegemony of the command-and-control structure.

Inclusion means adopting interaction rituals that, on the surface, make members of various identity groups feel included (hence the inclusivity rhetoric—but we might also say “useful” and “welcome”) in a world unjustly run by SWMs, rules of engagement necessarily requiring that individuals accept the very ideology that, with required speech acts all members are expected to affirm, manufacture and sustain the identity groups based on the oppressor-oppression matrix. Thus by officially treating individuals as personifications of abstract groups, the system reifies the progressive ideology of identity. It is a desire to live in air castles that denies their lords.

This desire leads to am authoritarian end. Why, if employees and students are tolerating the behaviors (that do not physically harm or interfere with the liberty of others), identities, and opinions of others, is that not good enough? That is all that is required in a free society. Why must employees and students affirm behaviors, identities, and opinions with which they disagree? Perhaps the chief difference between the liberal and the authoritarian is that the liberal advocates toleration while insisting on cognitive liberty, while the authoritarian, intolerant of opinions with which he disagrees, desires to censor and compel the speech of others. This desire reveals a deep and pathological insecurity, no? Why is it so important to have others affirm one’s beliefs and behaviors? Is the authoritarian unsure of them? Are these delusions that require illusions to sustain? (Recall what S. Freud said about the difference there.) I think so.

What is the character of the modern bureaucratic institution? Is it liberal or authoritarian? A member of a modern organization shaped by DEI goals and objectives is compelled to adopt ideological, political, and subcultural ideas that he may in fact, and for good reason, oppose. These goals and objectives run contrary not only to the individual’s rational interests but to the principles upon which free and open societies are based. The demands of DEI force employees and participants to either change their way of thinking by affirming doctrine and rehearsing slogans drawn from it or to act in bad faith, thereby simulating adherence to doctrine.

The rules so imposed are arrived at neither democratically nor rationally, but developed by largely unelected committees, checked by administrators and managers, and imposed bureaucratically. Bureaucratic rationality, however instrumental its rules may appear, is very often and in an emergent way routinely highly irrational. Moreover, as I have shown on my blog, the theory upon which DEI programming is based is irrational (see Critical Race Theory: A New Racism; What Critical Race Theory Is and Isn’t. Spoiler Alert: It’s Racist and Not Marxist; Crenshaw Confesses: Critical Race Theory is About Racial Reckoning; Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards).

Why would freedom of thought and opinion be constrained in the modern university? Isn’t free thought and debate the main purpose of the modern university—it’s raison d’etat? Did we not win the right to be free from compelled speech in centuries of struggle with authority and tradition? No, diversity in the DEI scheme does not mean diversity of ideas, or cognitive liberty, where individuals at an institution can refuse to affirm the ideology of the various groups represented in that space without discipline, ostracization, or punishment. Intellectual diversity is subordinated in this scheme, even negated by the principles of inclusion. If criticism of or non-adherence to an ideology, such as transgenderism, makes trans people feel excluded, then it follows from the goals of inclusivity that such criticism is to be excised from the common space, which may involve removing from that space the critic, redefined as a bigot. Criticism of ideology is replaced by affirmation of the ideology in question, which must be, without any attempt to achieve a consensus, accepted as truth.

Oftentimes, the ability of a critic of one ideology or another to make his criticisms is not only restricted on the grounds of specific form and content, but the meta-act of criticizing the system that disallows such criticisms (the sin I am committing in this blog) becomes itself the target of suppression. Individuals may be disciplined, ostracized, or punished for asking whether such a system that excludes a range of opinions or recruits, hires, and promotes people on the basis of their race, is fair and just. It is the same here as it is in strict religious systems where criticism of both the doctrine and the mindset and the ruleset that insist on adherence to doctrine is blasphemous and heretical.

That the practice of censoring heretics may not appear as rampant as the defenders of DEI demand it should be for it to be considered a real problem, self-censorship is rampant. What people talk about at social gatherings where they can let down their hair is a lot different than what people talk about at the office. They know—or at least believe—that if they were to express their real opinions publicly they would be risk desired committee and teaching assignments, positions and promotion, and their reputation.

For those of us who are genuinely on the left, it is crucial to understand that, in this way of thinking, equity does not mean achieving class or economic equality but rather obtaining arbitrary advancement in the bureaucratic hierarchy by virtue of membership in imagined communities, the relative aggregate inequalities of which are “explained” by the theorized matrix of group-level oppressions. If not designed to do this work (and I am convinced it is so designed), DEI programming functions to entrench corporate power by directing management to marginalize and make disreputable ordinary understanding and the majority standpoint.

For example, Chris Rufo has documented that, at San Diego Unified School District (and he has found this elsewhere), teachers and students are being taught that heteronormativity, the fact of natural history that heterosexual relations are normative, simply meaning standard and ordinary (not arbitrary), a necessary truth found throughout the animal kingdom of which human beings are a part (necessary for perpetuation of the various species), is “straight privilege.” This notion is especially absurd in light of the fact that same-sex activity is documented among thousands of other animal species. But the goal, or at least the function, of DEI ideology is depicting ordinary understanding as bigoted and hateful in order to marginalize the majority and fracture the proletariat. As a general rule, DEI program exaggerates, manufactures, and promotes inter-group antagonisms and ressentiment and then provides the means to act on those psychological feelings of envy and hatred.

SCOOP: San Diego Unified School District claims that heterosexuality is “a system of oppression,” promotes the idea that girls can have penises, and encourages children to adopt synthetic sexual identities such as “pansexual,” “genderqueer,” and “two-spirit.”

Here's the story.🧵

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 3, 2022

DEI is authoritarian and oppressive because it orders it program with a narrow range of theories selected by elites from a plethora of theories explaining various societal inequities—and the theories selected are the worst of the plethora from an objective and scientific standpoint. However, they are selected not because they are rationally valid or enjoy empirical soundness, but because they advance the interests of the corporate state or some interest group, which for the former functions in much the same way as a king in securing popular legitimacy for his rule by tapping members of the various tribes to sit on his court.

Have readers ever considered this function of DEI before? When you start going through the program with the ethic of individualism in mind and determined to rationally adjudicate its logic, it becomes very obvious very quickly what the program is about: DEI is a corporate state strategy of control that integrates into the command structure individuals drawn from a myriad of groups each of which is created and sustained by the strategy itself. It works by reducing individuals to personifications of imagined communities and, on the basis of a “theory,” determines their “rightful” place in the order of things. It moreover requires all individuals accept the overarching ideology that rationalizes all this. In other words, it is a racist and sexist project governed by a racist and sexist ideology. And, like racism and sexism historically, it functions to divide the working class and advance the interests of elites.

The assumption that inequality in demographic representation is de facto racism has smuggled into recruitment a new racism where concrete individuals are regarded as personifications of abstract categories and discriminated against on this basis. This should be illegal (and the Supreme Court will take up the matter soon). But affirmative action is only one of the more explicit ways the corporate state transgresses the principles of liberalism. There are more subtle maneuvers.

Consider the lie that critical race theory is not being taught in our nation’s public schools. There is a slight-of-hand at work in this claim. Finding few lesson plans specifically identifying CRT as the learning objective, we are supposed to believe that CRT is not present in the curriculum. But CRT doesn’t need to be explicitly taught to be present in the curriculum. What is required is that CRT is part of the operating system of the school system. The curriculum is then developed consistent with the “normative” framework of the institution. And so it is (see The Ethic of Transparency in Public Education—and the Problem of Indoctrination; Banning CRT in Public Instruction). We see the same thing with normalization of gender and queer theory in public education (see If QAnon is Not a Deep State Construct, It Certainly Functions that Way; The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida). I raise the issue of CRT and other ideologies because these are in back of DEI training.

DEI is antithetical to the struggle for free and open societies based on the ethic of individualism and equality. DEI and its guiding ideologies are anti-Enlightenment and illiberal. They are anti-democratic and anti-republican. That DEI is a major component of the prevailing corporate operating system, which also marks the university (which pioneered it) indicates that the institutions of the West have been hijacked by a powerful force the goals of which are contrary to the principles establishing and sustaining western nation-states, especially the United States. These forces are not mysterious. It is the work of transnational corporate power.

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“Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.” —Douglas Murray

Have you ever wonder how society became confused about the role of words in our lives? The errors that disagreement is oppression, argument is assault, and words are violence are, in part, the result of a theory derived from literary thinking wherein words do the work of actions in the minds of readers who have difficulty living in the real world. It may be said that words do violence to one thing or another, but words don’t do actual violence. The figurative is not real. However, those who live in fictional worlds find the things in it real.

It is very much the same with religious doctrine. This is why challenging the speech of the (quasi)religiously-minded produces such a profound reaction—up to and including actual violence. Short of that, excommunication, ostracization, and disciplinary action.

“Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.” —Douglas Murray

Here with some Sunday thoughts. There is so much that can be thunk. First up are some of the things I am not going to talk about.

The Biden Administration has quietly resumed building the wall at the southern border. Biden’s press secretary characterized it as cleaning up the mess Biden’s predecessor left.

The mayor of Washington DC has called out the National Guard to deal with the problem of illegal aliens who have been arriving in large numbers to her city on busses. Other cities are also experience large influxes of illegal aliens.

The economy is in recession, but the Biden Administration changed the definition of that term (and so did Wikipedia for a short time), so it’s okay.

Speaking of changing definitions, Merriam-Webster has changed the definition of “girl.” A girl is now “a person whose gender identity is female.” While they were at it, they changed the definition of “female,” too. A female is now a person “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”

And speaking of gender identity, more sports associations are banning transwomen in female sports.

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I have been involved in a long twitter thread started by Laurence Fox:

https://t.co/TBHBtVYB7l

— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) July 28, 2022

The point of contention in the thread is free speech. I defended free speech as a human right. Humans rights, the counter ran, are invented by law, so their restriction is tautological.

“If rights are invented,” I pointed out, “then they can be anything—even their opposite.” I them demonstrated how one can know that rights are a priori: “There is no reason to deny women the franchise, therefore they must be allowed equal access to the ballot box. Women, therefore, a priori, possess the right to vote. The law denies—not gives—them that right.”

There was a lot more to back-and-forth, but I will summarize my argument and move one: Humans come with rights. See Maslow’s hierarchy. Human nature. Natural history. Law does not create rights. Rights are not given by men. Rights are discovered and recognized. Or denied. Rights were not established by the United Nations in 1948 or the United States in 1789. They are progressively found and articulated in law and defended by government—if law and government are just.

The notion that rights are invented is a dangerous subjectivist game with very real consequences. As I note in a recent blog, The Behemoth Returns: The Nazis Racialized Everything, it is a characteristic of National Socialism to see the law as politically constructed, unmoored to any universal ethical or moral system. This makes human rights merely a tool of social control.

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Some on the left appeal to populism and progressivism in the same breath. They used to do it a lot more. Awareness that populism comes along with nationalism has causes a general distaste for the term. However, progressivism was invented to supplant populism. And, so far, progressivism has been winning.

Want to know why the left today pushes the agenda of the corporate state? Progressivism. The problem with the left is not, as the conservative believes, creeping socialism or communism. The problem is that progressivism cannot lift up working people because it was evolved to do the opposite.

I have a blog pending on this topic, but it may be a while before I post it, so this earlier blog will have to tie you over: Why I am not a Progressive.

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I am Dr. Ian Malcolm.

The “explanation” for the marked increase in “unexplained” (non-COVID-19) deaths (heart attacks and strokes) among 18-49 year olds now appears to be “cold showers. These deaths have nothing to do with being injected with the spike protein associated with cardiovascular trauma. Right. Textbook instantiation of “blame the victim.” Nobody forces you to take a “cold shower.”

Okay, so tell your loved ones in this age cohort—especially if they’re young men—to avoid “cold showers.” Make sure you to enlighten them about euphemism while you’re at it. Buried lede: At least the corporate media and sellout physicians and scientists are admitting that it’s not just selective attention that’s causing all these young healthy people to drop dead.

(With all the synthetic estrogens in the environment, why do young people even need cold showers?)

It will be damn hard for many more than the tens of millions who have expressed regret at taking the shots and repeating the corporate state narrative to admit regret after they fell for the deception hook, line, and sinker. Admitting regret reveals gullibility. Gullibility indicates a larger judgment problem. Moreover, they’d have to admit that the Dr. Ian Malcolms of the world were right after all. Good Lord, we can’t give those insufferable skeptics any encouragement.

I knew from the beginning the medical-industrial complex and the administrative state were lying and that they will keep on lying. It has been fascinating to watch people around me buy into obvious lies and then scold those who told the truth. Of course people can’t admit they were wrong. Their gullibility goes to judgment.

More mainstream media finally telling the truth about vaccine 👇 pic.twitter.com/aR43FJMyol

— pygs40 (@GarnerDarell) July 30, 2022

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I applaud Republicans for exposing the persistent FBI strategy of manufacturing the threat of “white supremacy” by entrapping dumb and confused Americans in plots to commit domestic terrorism hatched and bankrolled by the FBI themselves. Remember how outraged progressives were when the FBI did this to Islamists? They don’t care at all if the targets of FBI machinations are Christians conservatives.

What we need to know (and there is evidence indicating this) is whether and to the extent January 6, 2021 was at least in part an DHS/FBI operation. But how can we in the context of a hearing that does not follow the basis rules of rationally adjudicating facts?

The establishment, including many Republicans (Liz Cheney, most prominently), does not care about the truth. The establishment only cares about thwarting the populist-nationalist movement, because the movement threatens the corporate state and its ambitions.

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