Year: 2022

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” —Declaration of Independence (1776)

In Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US Supreme Court held that abortion is not a protected right under the Constitution of the United States, thus overruling Roe v Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992) and returned the matter to the states.

Five states—Alabama, Arizona, Michigan, West Virginia and Wisconsin—have state bans on abortions already in place, which could soon and are likely in some cases to, be enforced. There are thirteen states—Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming—that have “trigger bans” that will outlaw abortions within a month. Georgia, Iowa, and South Carolina have passed bans or severe restrictions that are likely to go into effect. Florida’s recently passed ban on abortions after fifteen weeks takes effect in July. And Ohio just criminalized all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. On the horizon, Indiana, Montana and Nebraska are likely to restrict abortion.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito authored the majority opinion : “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’ It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas, joined Alito in the majority. Chief Justice Johns Roberts pitched in, upholding Mississippi’s fifteen week ban, which was the case at hand. Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Thomas are all Catholics (see Judging the Religious; Religious Liberty, Relative Theocratic Threat, and Keeping the Supreme Court Divided; Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism).

I will address the matters of abortion as a right “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” later. (I have addressed these matters in a number of past blogs. See The End of Roe and Beginning Again; The Fetus is a Person. Now What?; Abortion is Really About Freedom; Liberty is America’s raison d’être. Preserving Reproductive Freedom for the Sake of the Republic.) As the reader will learn, Alito is wrong on both counts. I want to pursue at the outset an argument—and observation really—that the understanding of the purpose of republican government represented by the Court’s majority and its grasp of the nature of rights in a liberal society, which America was founded as, is profoundly misguided and, frankly, unAmerican.

To wit: rights are not given by men. As Thomas Jefferson makes clear in the Declaration of Independence, rights are a priori, inhering in human nature and universal principle—from the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” to use Jefferson’s majestic (and deistic) phrase. People, as Jefferson contends, are “entitled” to these by virtue of an authority beyond men. Moreover, governments recognize and defend these rights by identifying and removing obstacles to liberty and happiness (intelligent and fair-minded people accomplish this). Indeed, governments are stood up to secure these rights—in free societies, at least. Those who argue that men grant rights deservedly sport a bad label: statist. Conservatives will ape Jeffersonian language now and again, but in truth, they are too illiberal to be of his ilk. The spirit in back their judicial philosophy, such that we can dignify their ideology using such terms, is authoritarian.

The pressing issue here is the conservative assault on substantive due process, with Justice Thomas already asking the court to reconsider a list of rulings that rest upon that principle. Substantive due process is a constitutional law principle that empowers courts to protect from government interference fundamental rights even if those rights are unenumerated in the US Constitution (which includes the Bill of Rights) and state constitutions. The rejection of substantive due process for conservatives on the Court has at its core the fallacy of “states’ rights.” States rights was used, it will easily be recalled, to deny blacks equality with whites. Opposition to marriage equality was justified on the basis of this fallacy. Let the states decide whether to grant same-sex marriage, we were told—you know, like the question of interracial marriage. Thomas has in mind Griswold v Connecticut, Lawrence v Texas and Obergefell v Hodges. We know because he said so. He didn’t saying Loving v Virginia. But why not?

You will have noticed that conservatives like to reference the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This is “states’ rights.” But note that the amendment is about powers. A power finds its authority in common law, constitutional law, or statute. In a free society, power is in principle delegated to institutions by the citizenry to manage their affairs—to keep them safe and make them happy. Before the Tenth Amendment there is a Ninth: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Ninth is the relevant amendment in the debate over the Dobbs decision because it concerns rights, which are fundamentally different from powers. And not certain rights, but those that flow generally from the foundational ones identified in the Declaration: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Ninth Amendment is the key to the whole shebang.

Roe was one of the worst Supreme Court opinions ever written.

Abortion is not in the Constitution.

More #Verdict on YouTube: https://t.co/XPsaul8GRg pic.twitter.com/hDeC1aM2w2

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 25, 2022

Ted Cruz, whom conservatives fancy on the Supreme Court one day, is of the opinion that Roe is among the worst of the Supreme Court’s decisions. (It’s a bad decision, for sure.) He then says “Abortion is not in the Constitution.” He is correct. However, there are a lot of things that are not in the Constitution. This is why the Ninth Amendment exists. The Bill of Rights could not possibility identify all the rights, not only those known to the Founders, but those smart and just men would discover in the future. The Ninth Amendment explicitly states this understanding. This is why conservatives skip over it and head straight for the Tenth.

At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, the principle author of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, advocated for provisions that protected individual liberties and limited the power of government. Crucially, Madison sought the establishment of a national veto over state laws, and he did so explicitly to prevent the tyranny of the majority in the states. The tyranny of the majority (or tyranny of the masses) occurs in democracies where judicial protections for minorities and individuals are weak or lacking. For example, if a majority in a state can through law compel a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, that is, force the woman to serve as an incubator for the interests of the majority, then a tyranny has been obtained. If abortion is a right, on the other hand, then the primary role of government is to defend that right. If state government won’t do it, then the federal government must. This is the principle of substantive due process, and it is an essential feature of the foundation of the American Republic.

During the Constitution’s ratification, in order to secure the support of Anti-federalists (those who opposed the formation of a national government in favor of a loose network of local governments), the Federalists promised a bill of rights. Having lost his bid to limit the power of the states via the mechanism of a federal veto, Madison was skeptical of what a bill of rights could accomplish. Moreover, several states already had bills of rights. Still, the Federalists sought a list of rights to limit government power. The inherent problem of such a list, of course, is that it may be understood to be exhaustive. Madison understood that no such list could be.

After consulting with Thomas Jefferson, who very much wanted the people to have such a bill, Madison reconsidered the matter. In short order, he became a zealot for the cause. The Ninth Amendment was no afterthought, you see. In the original draft of the bill, Madison writes, “The exceptions here or elsewhere in the Constitution, made in favor of particular rights, shall not be so construed as to diminish the just importance of other rights retained by the people, or as to enlarge the powers delegated by the Constitution; but either as actual limitations of such powers, or as inserted merely for greater caution.”

Madison’s understanding that rights exist a priori and cannot be completely enumerated is foundational to Enlightenment thinking. This understanding is inseparable from the spirit that produced the Declaration of Independence. As historian Robert McDonald records, Jefferson himself claimed there were no new ideas in the Declaration of Independence, citing, among other sources, the English struggle for civil liberties, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the great philosophers of freedom, such as John Locke and Montesquieu. In other words, it is a profound expression of humanist, liberal, and secular values.

To be sure, courts may invent rights. But courts also affirm them. The right to control one’s own body is not an invented right, but among the most fundamental of rights. When the United States was founded, most states operated under the English common law right to abortion, which permitted the termination of a pregnancy before quickening (fetal movement). Laws criminalizing abortion did not appear until the late 1800s. In fact, abortion is a fundamental right stretching back millennia. So Alito’s suggestion that abortion is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” is an ignorant one.

As for whether abortion is “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” the matter is straight forward. Either you believe the state can commandeer a woman’s body and use its organs and processes for its own interests and purposes or for the interests and purposes of others or you believe that personal sovereignty and bodily autonomy demand the right to determine what one’s body is used for and who uses it where and when and for how long. The paradigm of individual liberty and self-ownership is found in reproductive freedom. Moreover, because of sex differences, girls and women bear a special burden in this domain. To demand woman serve as incubators not only violates their liberty, but it discriminates against them.

The matter can be put like this: Imagine the state commandeering your body to sustain the life of a person you had sex with. That you chose to have sex with this person does not obligate you to sustain his life. Sex and pregnancy are not intrinsically linked in purpose. If this were true, sex would only occur for procreative purposes, and that notion is an entirely religious perversion.

Rights are not matters for the majority to decide. Rights are inherent and discovered. Rights exist in the face of majority opinion and sentiment. It is the role of government to protect these rights from the majority, not subject them to the whims of the masses or powerful and well-organized elites. By leaving the determination of rights to state governments, conservative judges on the high court are advocating for the tyranny of the majority. They are proponents of majoritarianism, a standpoint antithetical to the Constitution and the liberal traditions upon which it rests.

“My rights should not be a fundraising point for the Democrats.” 💯💯💯 pic.twitter.com/6hNLQ5tZry

— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) June 26, 2022

I cannot leave this blog entry without saying something about the Democrats. Imagine Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had retired when she received her pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2009 (when she was in her late seventies) and Obama had not lost Congress in his first term. I don’t say this to merely engage in counterfactual revisionist snark. There are lessons to be learned.

Another lesson to be learned learned is the point the woman makes in the video I shared above. It looks like green screen. But I checked and this is an MSNBC reporter and there are other videos from this segment. I’m surprised this interview was aired (perhaps why it looks like green screen to me). I’m more surprised the question was asked by an MSDNC reporter. The reporter seems to go out of her way to record the response, knowing what the woman wanted to say—which was very well said! Bravo to the woman calling out Democratic Party manipulations.

Everybody is beating up on Ginsburg, so I will leave her be. With respect to Obama, the nation had a president who enjoyed Democratic control over both houses of Congress and immense popularity. Had his party pursued a national economic strategy involving a massive jobs program and saving the homes of American families across the country, instead of pushing a derivative of Romneycare through Congress, exhausting his political capital while alienating millions of Americans, we’d likely have a court more sympathetic to Roe. Folks say that elections have consequences. But let’s be sure to remember that political policy choices have consequences, as well. Obama was elected. Twice. What does the country have to show for his eight years beyond drone strikes and resurgent conservatism?

But the biggest lesson comes from realizing that the Democratic Party didn’t care about this issue in the way many progressives think they did. Fifty years of progress has been erased, progressives tell us. However, fifty years of progress might have looked more like a body of federal law protecting reproductive freedom rather than a problematic precedent. Instead, Democrats were more interested in leveraging a flawed judicial opinion as campaign strategy rather than fighting like hell to secure a federal guarantee for abortion (and this criticism applies to several states, as well).

Now that the strategy has failed, Democrats are pinning Clinton’s crushing 2016 defeat on those who refused to vote for the neoliberal and neoconservative candidate. Bill Maher used a recent monologue to chastise those of us who on principle do not vote for what Maher regards as a lesser evil. The woman’s answer to the MSNBC reporter’s question negates Maher’s attempt at shaming. The Democratic Party that has failed women. But I hasten to write that conservatives have failed America. Erasing substantive due process from constitutional law is a very grave development for the future of the American Republic.

Roe was a poor decision, but the goal of protecting this most fundamental right of women—the right to bodily autonomy—is the correct one. The struggle begins anew and we must use this struggle to not only secure the right of reproductive freedom for all women, but to reassert the American legal tradition of substantive due process and prevent the rollback of other hard-won victories in the long struggle for greater justice for our people. The movement to re-secure this right and shore up many others must proceed with new energy and determined purpose—and the best arguments. Those arguments are found in the moral logic that founded the United States of America.

Note: I revised the blog from this morning to add the tweet with the MSNBC video clip and weave it into the commentary. The video so nicely punctuated the point I made—indeed, making the point better than I did!—that I had to revisit the essay.

However useful for electoral strategies and mind control the construct “people of color” (“POC”) is sociologically absurd. As John McWhorter wondered on a recent episode of the Glenn Show, how does the experience of a black American put him in the same category as that of the Bangladeshi immigrant? Moreover, how is his experience like that of an American Indian? For that matter, how is his experience the same as another black American—or all other black Americans? The newer construct “black and indigenous people of color” (“BIPOC”) is not much better. At least it doesn’t try to suck every nonwhite majority and minority into a fantastic abstract mass. But it still lumps people of disparate backgrounds in a way in an invalid way.

Consider a black CEO of a major corporation. How does his experience compare to that of a black man living in a ghetto? The most important social fact of all, namely social class (defined as relative position with respect to the means of production), means their life chances and trajectories are highly dissimilar. The CEO lives in a gated community. He is unlikely to be the victim of a drive-by or a home invasion. If he gets sick, he can afford a doctor. If he runs afoul of the law, he can afford an attorney—and the time and resources the attorney needs to properly represent him. The CEO enjoys a better diet. And so on. Reckoned in material terms, everything about his life is better, and that generally translates to better emotional, psychological, and relational quality of life.

If your response is to say both the black CEO in his gated neighborhood and the poor black man are more likely to be pulled over by the cops on their way to work, if we accept this claim as true, is the same true for the Bangladeshi immigrant? Or a Chinese man? They’re “people of color.” Is the greater likelihood of a black man being stopped by the cops compared to a Chinese man the fact that erases all other facts so as to make a homogeneous group out of the more than forty million Americans? What happens to “people of color” as a meaningful category if the Chinese man does not share the black experience? All they have in common is that they are not white. And if a Chinese man is more likely to be assaulted by a black man than a white man, what does this say about the common oppressor? (See The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite.)

Even if we admit that, out of racial bias, cops are more likely to pull over a black man compared to other racial groups, how does that fact sustain the broader claim that white supremacy is the common experience that validly groups blacks? If white supremacy were such a problem, how did that black man become a CEO? His social class may not matter to a cop, but it matters to just about everybody and everything else. And, as I have shown, the claim that the criminal justice is racist is mythical (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; The Myth of Racist Criminal Justice Persists—at the Denial of Human Agency (and Logic); Debunking Mythologies Surrounding the American Criminal Justice System; Again, The Myth of the Racist Criminal Justice System).

How are black bankers, business owners, doctors, executives, lawyers, managers, professors, and so on even possible if we live in Ibram X Kendi’s world? Kendi’s world, he told a fawning crew at CBS News, is one where not teaching children about white supremacy guarantees that they will be absorbed into and perpetuate it. This is why, he argues, we must raise up a generation of “antiracist kids.” According to Brookings Institution, in February 2020 more than 60 percent of black families were middle class. To be sure, the middle class is reckoned here not in Marxist terms, but as incomes between $22,000 and $125,000. However, speaking in Marxist terms, how does one find in a society where white supremacy permeates everything a black capitalist exploiting the labor of a white worker?

Folks need to see the work these constructs are doing. The function of “POC,” if not its intent, is to lump everybody who is not white (or not European or East Asian, in the case of BIPOC) and treat the majority of people on the planet as the collective victims of the white oppressor. Europe, North America, and South American hold less than a quarter of the world’s population, and these are the most diverse regions on the planet; if Hispanics are excluded, the proportion of the world’s population comprised by white people is maybe around fifteen percent. Of course, Chinese and other Asian groups are increasingly identified as “white adjacent.” Indeed, one suspects “BIPOC”is a way to exclude successful minorities from the POC category to save the argument that inequality is the work of racism (and not classism). Nonetheless, white people, as defined by progressives, remain a distinct minority of the world’s population. Touting the victimhood of an abstract mass composed of those who are not white is a contrived act of majoritarianism with political intent.

I want to note before moving on that, according to the standard racial theory, Arabs are white. According to its guidelines, those of Middle Eastern and North African descent are to enter the US Census as white. Some Arabs are rejecting their whiteness and there is a discussion about elaborating the racial and ethnic categories of the census. Central and most South Asians are also considered white. (See my essay Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation.) I raise this issue because those behind the construct “people of color” do not see Arabs, Central, and South Asians as white (it is unclear whether they see Jews as white, but there is some chatter to that effect). You can understand why. If Asian Indians are white, the narrative becomes complicated: one white population (Great Britain) colonized another white population (Indians). This is as problematic as black Africans owning and selling as slaves other black Africans. Also, if Arabs and Indians are white there are lot of white people in the world and most of them do not live in the West.

(There is an interesting history here with respect to Asian Indians. Briefly, in US v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court ruled that Asian Indians were ineligible for citizenship because federal law specified that only free whites could become naturalized citizens. Following the anthropology of the day, which held Asian Indians and white Europeans to be the same race, Asian Indians were declared caucasian, but significant subracial differences prevented them from being legally recognized as white. In other words, according to the Supreme Court not all caucasians are white. In 1946, Congress passed a law that allowed Indians to become naturalized citizens, but I trust you get my point. Race is malleable. Racial designations change to sustain the antiracist doctrine.)

However conceptualized, centering race polarizes the world in a false way. Peddling lies, antiracism substitutes itself for class struggle; it negates class struggle by obscuring the capitalist imperative and the material relations it necessitates (see The Ruling Ideas and the Faux-Left). By blaming systemic social facts on a mythological etiology, namely that the West operates on the logic of white supremacy, antiracism serves as an ideological obscurantism that defies sound explanations for inequality (see They Do You This Way; What Explains—and Doesn’t Explain—Inequality and Explaining Demographic Disparities Requires a Multifactorial Approach). Antiracism divides the world between whites and their fellow travelers, on one side, and everybody else on the other. On one side is the oppressor—the white man. On the other, the oppressed (see Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; The Wages of Victimism: Leftwing Trauma Production for Political Ends; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones).

As progressives would have it, it’s not a world dividing up into capitalist versus proletariat as Marx and Engels describe in the Communist Manifesto, but a world founded upon the division between whites (and white adjacent) and people of color. The increasingly shrill James Lindsey decries critical race theory as “race Marxism,” but by centering race the politics of woke progressive are anti-Marxist. (The title of Lindsay’s book tells you that its premise is absurd. Marxism is a materialist praxis. If anything, critical race theory is neo-Hegelian—it makes people out of abstractions. CRT, like gender theory, is a form of idealism.) Whites are not a monolithic group any more than any other racial group. There are white CEOs and there are whites homeless on the streets, with a vast working class between these extremes—the same as it is for blacks. Indeed, the working class is multiracial. Their common experience is a proletarian one, not a racial one.

“People of color” is a construct that appears designed to disrupt class consciousness and disorganize the proletarian movement (see The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic). It is advanced by the corporate state, its operatives exploiting the work Third Worldists performed in undermining the socialist struggle for economic justice by substituting race for class (see The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological). This is preparing those living in the periphery for incorporation into the transnational capitalist system.

“POC” is not a valid concept; it commits the fallacy of reification, i.e., it misplaces concreteness by treating abstractions as actual persons, as well as commits the ecological fallacy (see Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment; Critical Race Theory: A New Racism; What Critical Race Theory Is and Isn’t. Spoiler Alert: It’s Racist and Not Marxist; Committing the Crime it Condemns; God is Everywhere—On the Ontology of Systemic Racism and the Faith-Belief of the Progressive). If one operates from the standpoint of scientific socialism, then these constructs are understood to be a counterproductive absurdity. “People of color” is an ideology of class paralysis. And this is why it has become part of the normative language of corporate governance.

https://twitter.com/funkeiro888/status/1536911562560110592?s=20&t=lQTkVAwbPlVxhRW-RsRBTQ

* * *

Horrified by the shooting of school children in Texas, a person asked me why people kill people they don’t know and who never wronged them. I answered that humans do this all the time in war. The wartime mentality escapes the confines of the battlefield. At least the battlefield as traditionally defined. A lot of these mass killers—armed with guns or driving trucks—are at war. They have causes. They have grievances. These are not “senseless” acts (as politicians mindlessly say right before asking for prayers for the victims). They are the actions of profoundly alienated individuals swimming in social currents that have dehumanized populations.

In a world that personifies abstractions, any child can stand in for the one a young man believed bullied him when he was a kid. Any and every white person has privilege and is an oppressor (see Against White Privilege: Clarifying the Critique of a Problematic Term). And so on. When any individual of this or that imaginary community becomes a stand-in for any other “member” of the community imagined, those with grievances feel licensed to take out those grievances against strangers. They can even rationalize that, with their actions, they’re doing justice for others. Social justice. This is the consequence of identitarian thinking. It’s one of the reasons why what I have written in this blog matters.

Not everybody who disagrees with a Supreme Court justice tries to kill him. But when politicians and activists encourage people to go to his home and give them directions, then they enable those who do. This just happened. Around 1:50 am this morning, an armed man from California was arrested near Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home after making threats against the Supreme Court justice. The man was armed with at least one weapon and burglary tools. He told the police he was there to kill Kavanaugh over the leaked opinion in the pending ruling concerning the 1973 Roe v Wade precedent.

This is the spirit on the progressive woke side of American politics: political violence. We saw it over the summer of 2020. The Democratic Party and the establishment media encouraged violence and vandalism in America’s streets while at the same time depolicing communities by either directing law enforcement to stand down or making the consequences of duty personally and professional destructive (see Portland and the Rule of Law). The consequence was dozens of deaths, many more injuries, and billions of dollars in property damage. (See Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism; Democrats Pander While Managing America’s Decline; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it; Color Revolution, Joe from Scranton, and PEDs; What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter)

Ted Cruz sends Senate into stunned silence as he READS LIST OUTLOUD of left wing VIOLENCE and CRIME on national TV pic.twitter.com/KHRfSOMFim

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 7, 2022

The double standard on the progressive side is blatant (see The Selective Application of the First Amendment; The Relative Ethics of Occupying Capitol Buildings; Antifa and the Boogaloos: Condemning Political Violence Left and Right; Buried Lede: Biden Fails to Condemn Antifa at First Presidential Debate; Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism). In the name of woke progressive politics, activists damage and occupy government buildings with impunity. When conservatives enter a public building they are thrown in jail on misdemeanor charges (if they are charged at all). (See The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males; Cancelling Half the Nation: Progressives Reach for One-Party Rule; The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous; Suppressing the Rabble: Portraying Conservatism and Republicanism as Fringe and Dangerous; Bad Comparisons and the Call for Racially Differentiated Law Enforcement; The Michigan Kidnapping Plot and January 6; On Riots and the Postmodern Corruption of the Culture of Protest; “A republic, if you can keep it.”)

Understand that what we are witnessing is not the work of the left—at least not the left with which I have associated since I became political conscious. Rather, this is the work of the corporate state and transnationalist countermovement against democratic-republicanism and liberalism. Woke progressivism (and its European counterparts social democracy and corporatism) represent the political project of state capitalism. This praxis stands alongside neoliberalism and neoconservatism as ideologies of unfreedom. It looks favorable on the work of the January 6 Commission, currently holding hearings in Washington DC pursuing a theory of seditious conspiracy (see The Democratic Party is Not the Party of Liberal Politics for a discussion of the character of this intervention). It applauds DHS harassment of parents speaking up at school board meetings (see MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin).

Jennifer, is Steve Bannon in the room with you right now? https://t.co/6Iw0AGa1Lz

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) June 7, 2022

The appropriate response to this is inclusive nationalism and participatory populism. The establishment media characterizes these politics as dangerous to democracy (see The Atlantic’s recent essay about the “scheming” Steve Bannon “American Rasputin”). They are, however, an expression of the popular democratic spirit. And that is why they are dangerous. Inclusive nationalism and participatory populism are a threat not to democracy but to the corporate state and the transnationalist project that is destroying democracy and liberty everywhere.

In a letter addressed to J B Schweizer published in Der Social-Demokrat, February 1865, Karl Marx criticized Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous slogan (from What is Property?): “Property is theft!” Since theft as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property, which Marx assumes is a category of law, then the anarchist’s slogan is self-refuting. How can the capitalist steal what is lawfully his? This criticism points to the importance of grasping what the criminal represents, namely, to lean on Richard Quinney’s first proposition in his social reality of crime thesis, “crime is a definition of human conduct created by authorized agents in a politically organized society.” In other words, without law there is no crime. And where there is no crime, there is no criminal.

For many of you this is obvious. But for many others it is not. The gun debate has resurrected some old arguments and I once again feel called upon to suit up and slay them. One of those arguments is commonly sloganeered as such: “If guns are outlawed then only outlaws will have guns.” It’s an obvious tautology. Take “guns” off of the bumpersticker and stand any thing in its stead. Try “drugs.” See the problem? It’s clever wordplay perhaps, but not an argument. Another argument is that restricting guns will not stop criminals from breaking the law; therefore, restricting guns is a useless exercise. This argument is often joined by the slogan, the implication being that gun laws will only harm who would otherwise be law-abiding gun owners. The claim the argument is making is more than tautological, but is nonetheless wrong.

The argument that laws are useless because criminals break them forgets of what Marx is reminding Schweizer, namely that what makes criminals is criminal law. The existence of crime presupposes laws criminalizing behaviors and sometimes the identities or statuses. Moreover, the existence of a criminal presupposes an adjudicative process by which that definition becomes formally applied to a person accused of perpetrating the targeted behavior or being of some such thing or another. Again, if there were no laws, then there would be neither crime nor criminal. This is not to say that there are no things that should be criminalized (polluting rivers comes to mind). Rather, it’s to simply point out that until behaviors or identities are criminalized, those who act in those ways or who are this things cannot be criminals. This is true by definition.

Because there are people who break a law criminalizing murder, should we have no laws against unjustified killing? Remember, not all killing is unjustified. We may say that murder is “the unlawful taking of a life,” but what this means is that the killing was not justified or is not excused in light of the law. Do laws against those behaviors the law defines as criminal stop those behaviors? Not always. But sometimes. Deterring the behavior we criminalize is part of justification for doing so. Would I kill a person if it weren’t illegal? Only for the same reasons I would kill a person with the law the way it is presently (self-defense, defense of others who cannot defend themselves, overthrow of tyranny). But I’m confident that there are people who would see the absence of law against killing as a license to kill somebody whom they otherwise would not with a law in place.

Furthermore, we have laws not only because we want to reduce the wrongful behaviors the law defines as criminal but because we want to signal their wrongfulness. Here we confront the moral question. Not all law morality finds its way into law. And not all law is rooted in morality. Indeed, some laws transgress moral rules, such as those that segregate public facilities on the basis of race. It follows that we may oppose laws because we believe they are bad laws, not because they are ineffective. I am sure you have heard people argue that we should end drug prohibition because it doesn’t work or because it’s counterproductive (in generating other behavior defined as criminal by other laws and even more of the undesired behavior itself). We often hear this argument applied to the failures of alcohol prohibition (often not carried over to the case of other drugs). But that’s not the reason I oppose drug laws. I oppose drug laws because I don’t believe that it’s the government’s place to tell a person whether they can alter their conscious states or blunt their emotions.

I oppose laws against homosexuality for the same reason: it’s not the government’s place to tell people with whom they may have consensual sex. However, I can assure you that there were a lot of gay men who endured heterosexual appearance and relations because homosexuality was illegal. And, yes, laws against homosexuality drive homosexual behavior underground. But, again, that’s not why it was a bad law. It was bad law because it violates bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty. These are fundamental rights that lie beyond law. To be sure, we may need to prohibit state actors from passing laws that violate these rights. This is why our rights are recognized in bills of them—not because the state gives us our rights, but because we demand in writing assurance that the state recognizes them. Nobody gave women the right to vote; men in power stopped denying women an effective voice in politics via the ballot box. Etcetera.

It will not do as a counterargument against those advocating for stricter gun laws to say that laws are of no purpose because some people choose or are compelled to break them. Such defeatism applies to all law (and, remember, without law there can be no punishment). Moreover, strict gun laws would very likely reduce gun death and injury, just as taking cars off the streets would reduce traffic accidents. There is a deeper issue here: the matter of rights. A successful defense of the freedom to own firearms must proceed on the basis of showing that there is a right or rights gun possession secures, i.e., that gun possession affects rights already recognized in foundational law.

What are these foundational rights? Life and liberty. Like locks on doors and alarm systems, firearms are tools in the defense of these rights. How can I effect my right to life, for example, if access to the means to this end is prohibited or sharply constrained? If an intruder enters my home, I must be able to defend myself and my family from possible harm. What role should the government play in the type of firearm I use to effect that right? A firearm is, after all, a tool. I have no objection to registering weapons and showing authorities I know how to use them. But to deny me access to the tool I believe appropriate for the task must lie beyond the authority of the government of a free people. These rights must be reserved for the people. The Second Amendment was specific in guaranteeing the people the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of a free state because it was assumed that people had a natural right to possess arms for defense of person and home. This was assumed in English common law.

The question, then, is whether it is wrong for the people to possess the means to successfully effect their rights. Only under tyrannical government is the defense of one’s rights wrong—and this is because tyranny is wrong. This question does not depend on whether the inhabitants of impoverished inner-city zones murder each other with guns on a daily basis. Nor does this question depend on whether a mentally-deranged teenager walks into a grocery store and shoots a dozen people. We don’t prohibit the possession of trucks because a black nationalist drives his through a Christmas parade in a small city in Wisconsin. We hold him accountable for his actions and inquire into what caused him to act in this way. The truck was only a means to an end. There were many people driving trucks in Waukesha that day (many of them gun owners). A truck did not murder Dancing Grannies. Darrell Brooks did. What happened in Salvador Ramos’ life that made him a mass murderer? Talk about that.

* * *

A quick empirical note regarding a bad cartoon. For most of the period of video games with simulated violence, gun homicides have sharply declined over the period before their appearance. This is also true for simulated violence in movies, which has, over the last several decades, become more extreme and graphic. Gun homicide has only very recently started rising again, and this is mostly in areas dominated by gangs where progressive depolicing policy has compromised public safety. Video games are not a cause of mass shootings, which remain a small proportion of homicide deaths. Some mass shooters also enjoy playing video games.

Frank discussion about the epidemiology of monkeypox is out there, but not enough. I’m talking specifically about demography here and who is most at risk. Monkeypox is disproportionately affecting a particular segment of western populations, namely gay men and men who have sex with men. There are two problems with failing to accurately report this fact.

First, by failing to tell the truth about demography, gay men and men who have sex with men—and women who have sex with these men—may not fully appreciate the risks associated with certain activities. I understand why there’d be reluctance to talk about this for fear of stigmatizing homosexual relations. But blunt talk is necessary in the face of a disfiguring and potentially deadly disease. Political correctness can literally be lethal in this case.

Second, by not discussing the demography of disease transmission, the general population is left with the presumption that monkeypox is a free-range virus, if you will, one transmitted across the general population. We have suffered too greatly from the hysteria generated by COVID-19 fear porn to go through this again with monkeypox. Indeed, COVID-19 hysteria was fueled in major part by public health officials and establishment media not informing the public—and in some cases censoring information to this effect—that COVID-19 was only especially dangerous to the very old and those suffering from autoimmune and severe metabolic disorders.

I hear a lot of griping among elites that large swaths of the population no longer trust authorities—that our institutions are losing legitimacy. Whose fault is this? When authorities don’t level with the public there will be a significant number of people who will come to distrust the government’s claims and, moreover, wonder whether there is an ulterior motive behind what is at times effectively disinformation being pumped out by our major institutions. Time will tell. Maybe it is too soon to try again to bamboozle the masses.

At an event honoring those who died at the hands of a deranged gunman (Salvador Ramos) who entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Joe Biden said, “They said a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out—may be able to get it and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.” Who said? Doctors? Did they dig the .22 caliber bullet out of a living perpetrator who went on to do more harm? Or were they looking at the lung of a predator in the morgue who was stopped by a 9mm projectile before he could do any (more) harm?

Joe Biden: " the 9mm bullet blows the Lung out of the body "

Gun owners worldwide : the fuck did he just say https://t.co/pE4Z4XYosp

— 𝖁𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝕱𝖑𝖆𝖌Ⓐ𝖗𝖙🏴‍☠️ (@blackflagart) May 30, 2022

At any rate, the man’s ignorance is astounding. Embarrassing. This is the President of the United States, the Command-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces. He appears to know nothing at all about firearms—while he gives away billions of dollars worth of them to countries he courts for the new world order he and comrades are building for the future state sought by their corporate masters. Yet he has no hesitation in talking about the subject—and always in the same uninformed way.

“So, the idea of these high-caliber weapons is, uh, there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection, hunting.” He said this. For self-defense, stopping an attacker is paramount. The 9mm has stopping power at close range. If you know how to place shots, then its stopping power extends quite a bit farther. There is, therefore, a rational basis for possessing such a weapon; the 9mm it is ideal for self-protection. To be sure, it’s not particularly good for hunting, because of loss of energy at distance. But if you were face-to-face with a big animal, you could definitely bring it down with a 9mm. With what weapon would you rather face a bear? A .22 caliber or a 9mm handgun?

“Remember, the Constitution, the Second Amendment was never absolute,” the President said. Somebody should tell this authoritarian hack that rights pretty much are absolute. It’s sort of the point of them. Rights are something you possess by virtue of your existence. Just a few days ago, Biden said that our rights come from God. He says he is a believer. That sounds pretty absolute. Now he presumes to speak for God. Limitations on rights depend only on the rights of others and then only in their real effects and depending on actual circumstance. Self-defense is a fundamental human right—however you think it comes to you.

Let me be clear: the right to self-defense depends on just exercise. This is no so much a limitation as it is an ethic. The efficacy of the means to accomplishing that end is a question for the person who seeks to exercise the right under just circumstances. Leaving a man with only a knife to defend his life and family undermines his right to effective self-defense. Drastically rising crime under Biden’s presidency indicates a need to protect the right and the means to effective self-defense. We have to survive in the world the progressives have made for us.

WATCH: Trudeau announces that he will put forward a BAN on the selling, transfer, or import of handguns in Canada.

A “national freeze on handgun ownership.” pic.twitter.com/XKtkCPSN0w

— Roberto Wakerell-Cruz✝️ (@Robertopedia) May 30, 2022

However, this seems to be the purpose of compromising that right: to leave men effectively defenseless. Ask yourself: why does Biden wish to disarm the populace? He’s not the only (mis)leader seeking this end. The tyrant to our north—the smarmy Justin Trudeau of Canada—just announced an effective ban on all handguns. A “freeze,” he calls it. There are many other similarities between the moves Canada, the United States, and other western countries are making these days. The same people who seek one world government also seek to curtail to ability of their populations to possess firearms—except, of course, if those populations can be weaponized to threaten Russia.

“You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed,” Biden said. Yes, you could. The Second Amendment allows for a cannon. Why wouldn’t it? There is nothing in the Second Amendment that says the people have the right to keep and bear arms except for cannons. Go read the amendment. But I can tell you now that it says nothing about prohibiting cannons. Indeed, the author of the amendment, James Madison, confirmed this when, as President, in numerous letters of Marque and Reprisal during the War of 1812 (more than 500), he clarified that the Second Amendment protects the right of private shipowners to acquire and arm their vessels with cannons—cannons purchased as private individuals from private manufacturers.

The 9mm round is the most popular handgun caliber in the United States. Depending on the year, nearly or over half of all handguns produced in the United States over the last several years have been 9mm. Biden wants to ban the most popular type of firearm. Why? Because of the vanishingly small risk of a mass casualty event at a public school? How, in light of the fact that civilian-use AR-15s use .223 Remington, not 9mm? More than this, rifles, the category that includes what activists and politicians refer to “assault weapons” were involved in just three percent of murders effected by firearm in 2020. (I no longer agree with the opinion expressed in this May 2018 blog, The Truth About the AR-15, but the facts are sounds and useful. Moreover, the contrast demonstrates how a rational person changes his mind in the face of facts. On the other hand, even as late as August 2019, I was still stubbornly resisting the opinion I now hold—and in dramatic moralistic tones. See A Truly Awful Commentary on Gun Control and the Value of Life.)

So Biden is stupid. We get that. (We cannot say his gun talk is the result of diminished capacity because he has always talked about guns in this way.) But his handlers allow him to be stupid because they believe Americans are too dumb to know that Biden is clueless on this subject. That’s not the entire reason; there’s also this: his handlers want the leader of the Democratic Party to repeat clichés and slogans because they know they’re effective among the cultural managers who manufacture attitudes useful to corporate power. But people who understand firearms know bullshit when they hear it. So the effect of his speech is further delegitimization of government in eyes of tens of millions of Americans. Arguably, that’s a good thing. But it is certainly no way to build consensus around gun regulation to talk in a way that tells millions of Americans that you don’t have the first clue about what you’re talking about.

The reality is that most gun death is suicide, with the plurality of those who take their lives being 75 years of age or older (and I think you can figure out why for yourself). Most gun homicides involve handguns, and many are perpetrated during robberies and gang violence, which are largely urban phenomena. Moreover, in these cities, guns are already banned or sharply restricted. We are not dealing with the real crisis at hand. Most homicide victims are black males—and black males are only around six percent of the population. Most perpetrators of homicide are black males. Most perpetrators of robbery are blacks males, as well, and guns are used in a large proportion of these crimes. And most of the the victims are black. (Black Lives Matters were useful for the 2020 color revolution. Not so much for saving black lives in our inner-city poverty areas.)

Progressives spread two false narratives in an attempt to criminalize gun possession (and advance their agenda): (1) mass murder is caused by opponents of open borders and the woke indoctrination of children in public schools, opposition depicted as “white nationalism” (see AOC’s latest rant, which I share here: Bias Coverage of Gun Homicide Distorts Statistical Reality at the Expense of Young Americans); (2) public schools are dangerous places because of the widespread availability of guns. The fact is, as I just explained, most mass murder is perpetrated by street gangs (see How to Misrepresent the Racial Demographics of Mass Murder; The Continuing Media Campaign of Disinformation about Race and Violence; Everything Progressives Say About Mass Shootings is Wrong…and Racist). Mass casualty events at our nations schools are extremely rare. Public schools are among the safest places for children in America. (I have a nuanced position on this. See my blog A Liberal Mugged By Reality. Remember That Old Line?) The unsafe spaces for children in America are largely in our inner cities and progressives are doing nothing to deal with this problem. Indeed, if you talk about it you risk being maligned as “racist.”

There is an odd disconnect. The AR-15 is rarely the instrument of death in gang violence. The Glock 9mm is popular here. The Swedish semi-automatic TEC-9 and its permutations has also been popular historically. It’s also 9mm. The call for comprehensive gun reform leverages the mass shootings perpetrated by most young white males using the AR-15. Yet Biden is talking about the 9mm. Are gun control advocates planning to limit gang violence without talking about gangs violence? One can see the politics necessity a stealth strategy. But is this the way to go about reducing crime in our inner cities? It looks more like a plan to ban everything, from 9mm handguns to AR-15s. If feels like we are being positioned for disarmament, especially with all the talk about “domestic terrorism” and the mobilization of the Department of Homeland Security against American citizens of a particular political persuasion (MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin).

To be sure, there is a violent crime problem in America. As I reported in Bias Coverage of Gun Homicide Distorts Statistical Reality at the Expense of Young Americans, the 45,222 total gun deaths in 2020 were by far the most on record, representing an increase of 14 percent over the year before, a twenty-five percent increase from five years prior and a forty-three percent increase from a decade ago. More than half of those were suicides. However, the growth in gun deaths is largely explained by homicide. The nearly 20,000 gun murders in 2020 were the most since at least 1968 (exceeding the previous peak of 18,253 in 1993). When we look at the homicide statistics, the rise in gun deaths is startling. The 2020 total represented a thirty-four percent increase over the previous year, a nearly fifty percent increase over five years and a seventy-five percent increase over 10 years. (See this recent analysis by Pew Research Center.)

While it is true that the gun death rate in the United States is higher than in many other countries, it is still far below the rates in several Latin American countries (according to a 2018 study of 195 countries and territories by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington), countries to which the Biden Administration address his invitation to come to the United States. (See my blogs The Northern Triangle, the Migrant Flow, and the Risk of Criminal Violence and The Interstate System and the Experience of Safe, Orderly Immigration.) But restricting immigration isn’t the only strategy for reducing violent crime in America. We also need more cops on the street. And while we must demand officers obey the Bill of Rights, we need to make sure that public safety is the number one priority in the list of the job duties.

Guns have always been popular in the United States. They are an enduring piece of Americana. I grew up around guns and have no fear of them. Even when I advocated banning certain types of weapons, I did not do so out of fear (but rather out of a misguided understanding of public health). The desire to disarm Americans will likely fail, but not before whipping up more anger and resentment. That in itself can have political benefit by further polarizing—and paralyzing—the proletariat. Guns have become a major ideological element in class warfare, pitting the professional-managerial strata against the working class. But violence is not caused by guns per se. Yes, gun violence does involve the availability of guns; but guns have always been available. The real cause of gun violence is societal disorganization and an uneven commitment to public safety. Fixing those problems requires solidarity, a substance gun hysteria makes elusive. This is not accidental.

“A researcher’s avatar was sexually assaulted on a metaverse platform owned by Meta, making her the latest victim of sexual abuse on Meta’s platforms, watchdog says.” That’s the headline from a Business Insider article. “A researcher entered the metaverse wanting to study users’ behavior on Meta’s social-networking platform Horizon World,” reports Weilun Soon. “But within an hour after she donned her Oculus virtual-reality headset, she says, her avatar was raped in the virtual space.” This is not an isolated case. In November, a beta tester reported that her avatar had been groped in Horizon Worlds.

But the researcher was not raped. The beta tester was not groped. These things could not possibly have happened. The virtual space is not real. You are not your avatar. You are your body—and your body remains on the plane of the actual world.

Soon finds the researcher’s tale in a report by SumOfUs, “Metaverse: another cesspool of toxic content.” The report links to a video that purportedly shows what happened to the researcher’s avatar from her perspective. “In the video, a male avatar is seen getting very close to her, while another male avatar stands nearby, watching. A bottle of what appears to be alcohol is then passed between the two avatars, per the 28-second video. Two male voices are heard making lewd comments in the video.”

The bottle of alcohol is not real, either. It can only appear to be alcohol. And lewd comments are words. It’s bizarre that Weilun Soon treats these occurrences as if they are actually happening. The bottle does not appear to be alcohol because it really isn’t. In Soon’s account, appear is used here as if there may be alcohol in the bottle. You know, the way a cop presumes there is alcohol in the bottle on your dash right before he asks you to step out of the vehicle. But we are here talking about a bottle that doesn’t exist. There is no alcohol.

In discussing this story on Facebook earlier today, a friend said, “Do people know what make believe is anymore? There were safety measures the players turned off themselves. But it is disturbing that some people wanna gang rape others avatars. What kind of sick people want to do this in this imaginary land?! It is imaginary but disturbing.” I responded, “No more disturbing than shooting people in virtual worlds.”

She liked my comment so I did not elaborate my point. But I will here. Why is it weird to pretend to rape avatars in virtual space but unremarkable to shoot them? If a mother were to walk into her teenage son’s room and witness the boy “raping” an avatar, she would likely be very troubled. Yet mothers watch their teenage sons “killing” other players in hyper-realistic first-person shooter games and pay no mind. Isn’t killing as wrong as rape? But nobody is being killed or raped. Nothing wrong is happening. The only potential crimes here are thought-crimes—and only if we allow thoughts to enter into the realm of punishment. Sure, people think these are wrong thoughts. But that’s an opinion.

Another friend noted that Meta’s latest Quest 2 is highly immersive. The game “has multiple forward facing cameras to capture the environment you are in, augment it, and use it to create the experience. You put that headset on and it immediately starts to recorded and utilize what you would be looking at. Having Darth Vader ’stare’ you directly in your eyes (adjusted for height) can give you chills. Rollercoaster experiences can cause physical reactions.” I am reminded of the movie Brainstorm, where a research team, led by Christopher Walken, constructs a system that directly records and replays the sensory experiences, emotional feelings, and physiological reactions of a subject. Predictably, the military-industrial complex seeks control of the technology for military ends. One researcher, played by Louise Fletcher, records her own death from a heart attack. When the recording is played back, it produces a heart attack in the user.

“Obviously, you can take the headset off but I still have papers from when I was an undergraduate making the argument the Facebook would eventually generate an abundance of poor quality social capital that it would have an impact on ’disconnected’ life whether you wanted it to or not,” writes my Facebook friend. “And, well, here we are.” He continues, “The argument I made was that although discourse would increase, corroded networks of associations and the algorithms that utilize would make that distinction of online or offline irrelevant. Does this lend credence to that concept or something similar? Does there need to be a clear distinction similar to computer facilitated assault?”

These are useful observations and important questions. In my initial Facebook comments (which were only these: “It isn’t real. No one was sexually assaulted”), I wasn’t talking about the socially corrosive effects of virtual reality. I was talking about the absurdity of supposing virtual spaces and occurrences are actual. To be sure, people can become absorbed in a false world where they believe the things that are happening to them are actually happening to them.

We see this problem in religion. A religious man may believe he is possessed by a demon. But he is not really. His experience is that of a false consciousness. This is why it is important to help him understand that the entities supposed by by faith are not actual things. They are real to him because he believes they are real (the Thomas Theorem). We help him by telling him that his experiences are not real. We do not help him by joining him in his delusion. We also don’t regulate religious content or put warning labels on religious experience.

There are mentally ill people who believe the things happening in their head are really happening to them, or that they really are the thing they think they are, such as the embodiment of this or that spirit animal. Consider body dysmorphic disorder, in which a person perceives something about his body that cannot be seen by others. To expect others believe his claims is an attempt to break down the distinction between the real and the imaginary. That is the problem. It leads to horrors such as those I cover in my essay Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds. For instance (true story), a person wants to have a smooth genital areas like the ones he imagines space aliens have, and opportunistic surgeons, rather than refer the deluded man to a psychiatrist (one who isn’t woke), they mutilate his genitalia. Now he has only a hole where his genitals used to be. This is not described as mutilation, but “affirmation.” Affirmative is also expected from those the man encounters who are expected to participate in his delusion.

We cannot say this enough. What you imagine is happening to you may not be happening to you. If it is the virtual space created by a computer program, then it is not happening to you—at least not physically. And if you can’t be in a virtual space where rape and murder can only be imaginary without experiencing trauma, then how can you stand to watch horror movies, pornography, or read a graphic novel? A “rape” in the metaverse is not a crime because nobody is actually raped. Nor are you actually who you pretend to be online or in real life, even if your pretending is not intentional. You are lying or delusional. You need either to be called out or helped.

Is it the fault of the computer program that you are confused? If you are inclined to answer in the negative, that is not what Meta representative, Kristina Milian, told MIT Technology Review. She told them that users should have “a positive experience with safety tools that are easy to find—and it’s never a user’s fault if they don’t use all the features we offer.” She continued: “We will continue to improve our UI (user interface) and to better understand how people use our tools so that users are able to report things easily and reliably. Our goal is to make Horizon Worlds safe, and we are committed to doing that work.”

Deploying the word “safe” here evokes the woke notion of “safe spaces” on college campuses. These are not spaces safe from outside interference that would limit discourse, but the opposite: rules limiting discourse to keep people “safe” from ideas that might offend them. In both cases, the motive and effect is infantilization.

Moreover, trying to manipulate the public into believing these are spaces where actual things happen is part of the rot of trans-humanism. It functions to prepare populations for changing self and spaces—real selves and spaces—to align with the avatars we create (or are created for us) and the virtual spaces they inhabit. This is the real danger of this discourse—if it ever finds itself way into law and policy.

The researcher is not her avatar. No one was raped here. No one is actually killed in a virtual world. Ever. That people believe that they are raped or killed in virtual spaces—that’s a problem. We need to help people who have become confused about what is real and what is not. The Business Insider article is to helpful. It is an exercise in reification. The bigger problem is expecting us to agree with the deluded that they are what they think they are and that what they think they are experiencing—which cannot be real—is actually real. We mustn’t join them in their delusions. The majority needs to keep its collective head in actual space and time.

Today’s New York Post headline, “Guns now leading cause of death for American children, CDC says,” comes against the backdrop of two nearly back-to-back shootings by young white males, both eighteen years old, the first shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, the second at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Between them, the shootings left thirty-one people dead, mostly children. These are the latest in high profile mass shootings occurring over the last several decades. But mass shootings seem to be ramping up.

The NYP story summarizes an analysis published by the New England Journal of Medicine on May 19, “Current Causes of Death in Children and Adolescents in the United States,” which, based on data recently released from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reports that firearms are now the leading cause of death for American children. More than five deaths per 100,000 Americans between the ages of one and nineteen were due to guns in 2020, the most recent year for which the CDC has data, a figure that represents a nearly 30 percent increase in firearms deaths among children over 2019. That’s more than twice as high as the relative increase in the general population.

The CDC data shows 45,222 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2020 (2021 will likely show an even great number). The NEJM reports that this is a new peak. “Although previous analyses have shown increases in firearm-related mortality in recent years (2015 to 2019), as compared with the relatively stable rates from earlier years (1999 to 2014), these new data show a sharp 13.5% increase in the crude rate of firearm-related death from 2019 to 2020.” Significant, the increase is not driven by suicide, which remains however the largest proportion of gun-related fatalities. “This change was driven largely by firearm homicides, which saw a 33.4% increase in the crude rate from 2019 to 2020, whereas the crude rate of firearm suicides increased by 1.1%.”

“The increase was seen across most demographic characteristics and types of firearm-related death,” note the authors of the analysis (professors at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). The authors provide a link to Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix if readers wished to follow up. I followed up because I had a suspicion about where this increase was occurring; politically hot subjects are often conspicuous in their absence. Scientific norms push scientists to be honest (not that they always are), but those norms don’t usually compel them to make finding all the relevant information easy. You usually have to do that work yourself (the COVID-19 pandemic made that abundantly clear).

I provide a screenshot of significant parts of Fig. S1 below (what is left out is the overall increase, which is reported above, and sex differences, which finds that the vast majority of most homicide victims are male, as expected). One crucial piece included in the screenshot left out of both the NYP story and the NEJM analysis is race and ethnic differences, which is substantial. Take a look:

You will note that, after Asian/Pacific Islander, which shows a decrease in gun homicide over the period, Non-Hispanic White shows the lowest overall rate of gun fatalities and the lowest increase during the period for all racial and ethnic categories. In contrast, Black or African American shows the largest number of gun fatalities and the largest increase, followed by American Indian/Alaska Native and Hispanic White. Also included in the screenshot is the higher rate of homicide relative to suicide among those one-to-nineteen years of age, which is reversed in those over the age of nineteen. I do not have access to the relative race/ethnic distinctions among victims of homicide over against suicide. It is entirely possible that the increase of homicide victims is even greater for one or more groups.

I am highlighting the demographic profile of the evidence because the almost exclusive media attention given to shootings perpetrated by white males (Salvador Ramos is Hispanic but racially white) can lead to a false perception of the cause of the rise in gun homicides is a young white male problem. In fact, as I have reported here on Freedom and Reason many times (most recently on April 18, The Continuing Media Campaign of Disinformation about Race and Violence, which contains links to other past blogs), most homicide victims in America are black men and their deaths come at the hands of other black men. Moreover, most mass shootings occur in black and brown neighborhoods and their victims are mostly black and brown people. However, the dominant MSM narrative, amplified by Democratic Party members, is that mass shootings are the result of white male pathology.

Putting aside for now the question of why the MSM and Democrats portrays white males as the source of violence in American society (it’s part of why Douglas Murray calls his latest book The War on The West), we must ask why black and brown victims of gun violence are ignored by the MSM (except when their deaths are at the hands of white perpetrators, a statistically uncommon occurrence)? This is an important question; if we wish to understand gun violence we need to understand its dynamics, and a narrow focus on the unusual case of the young white male mass shooter, which typically involves significant psychiatric illness, leaves the dynamics of most gun violence lying in darkness, where it continues to wreak the most havoc.

The fact is that most gun violence is perpetrated by young black men without fathers in their lives socialized in a subculture that diminishes the capacity for empathy and conditions individuals to see others as means to ends. Most gun deaths in America are associated with robbery, gang warfare, and other crimes of disorganized neighborhoods where generations of black and brown families have been idled by progressive policy (see Michael Shellenberger’s 2021 San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities).

Progressives have for decades installed a mechanism in popular consciousness to deflect from their failure to make American cities thriving centers of personal success. By treating subculture as an authentic expression of racial type, those who draw attention to criminogenic pathologies in the majority-black neighborhoods in our cities are branded racist. This political move comes at the expense of the thousands of young black men victims by young black male perpetrators.

We also have to ask why the United States government is prepared to mobilize the Department of Homeland Security to address the relatively rare phenomenon of white nationalist terrorism but are silent on the remarkably high rate of gun violence occurrence in America’s inner cities. The question is largely rhetorical. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on here: progressives are portraying white working families as the real problem of America in the longstanding project to dismantle the American republic.

AOC: "Let's dispense with this myth of mental illness." pic.twitter.com/KfWmyTXrm1

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) May 26, 2022

The NEJM analysis reports that “drug overdose and poisoning increased by 83.6% from 2019 to 2020 among children and adolescents, becoming the third leading cause of death in that age group.” This is significant for the reason the NEJM analysis notes: “The rates for other leading causes of death have remained relatively stable since the previous analysis, which suggests that changes in mortality trends among children and adolescents during the early Covid-19 pandemic were specific to firearm-related injuries and drug poisoning; Covid-19 itself resulted in 0.2 deaths per 100,000 children and adolescents in 2020.”

However, pandemics are largely manmade phenomena. Those in power lock down societies, not pathogens, whether naturally occurring or lab enhanced. To be sure, alienation from isolation and social distancing explain some of the increase. This piece is acute. The persistent conditions of America’s cities that produce globally extraordinarily high rates of gun violence and death are the result of a much more profound situation of isolation and social distancing. These are the consequence of decades of progressive policy.

Did you know that when I choose who sees my posts or when I unfriend somebody on Facebook or block somebody on Twitter this does no violence to my expansive position on free speech? Do you realize that I when I use the word “violence” in the rhetorical question I just posed it is purely as a figure of speech and that speech is not actually violence? Did you know that silence is also not actually violence? On the other hand, violence can be a form of speech. Do you understand how that works?

Did you know that censoring content for adults is not the same thing as censoring content for children? That’s because the body of science in child development finds that, because of variation in imagination, sense of self, and degree of maturity in the capacity for abstraction and reason, not everything from the adult world is age-appropriate and that the regulation of childhood experience is important for normal development of children into adulthood.

In figuring out the world and their place in it, their role in the system of roles and statuses, children often pretend to be things they encounter in their environment. Children may obsess over certain thoughts. Children are easily influenced and manipulated.

Did you know that hate speech and offensive speech and other forms of objectionable speech shared in spaces containing consenting adults are covered under the doctrine of free speech? The merits of these forms of speech are a subjective matter and a commissar who determines what speech in a public space is permissible and what is not for consenting adults necessarily depends on subjective judgment backed by illegitimate force. However, there are time and place restrictions to speech, a matter that I next take up.

Suppose a progressive is giving a talk at a university and conservatives in the audience bring noisemakers and make noise sufficient to disrupt the ability of the speaker to make her points and the audience to receive them under conditions that permit maximal consideration. The disruptive conservatives in the audience are violating the free speech rights of the speaker and and the audience. Since the government is obliged to defend the free speech rights of citizens, it is entirely legitimate, and in fact a dereliction of duty to fail to do so, for the police to forcibly remove the disruptive students from the hall and arrest them for violating the civil rights of the speaker and the audience.

Here is another example. It does not violate the speech rights of a kindergarten teacher to discipline her for talking to her students about gender identity, since elementary school is not an appropriate time and place for such talk. Why is this? It is not age-appropriate; children this young are not developmentally ready for this subject matter. They are minors and cannot freely consent to receiving this information. They are a captive audience; they cannot reasonably leave if they object to this speech. There are reasons for subjecting children to speech to which they cannot consent, such as language arts, math and science, American history etc. But the teacher’s religious or other deeply-held beliefs are not germane to the classroom. Nor are sexually intimate facts about her life.

I conclude by noting that many of those who criticize restrictions on what teachers can expose children to in elementary school are the same people who object to books currently sitting on shelves in high school libraries and who, using the rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusion, seek to remove curriculum using historical and scientific facts they find objectionable in light of their political-ideological beliefs. as a general rule, no books should be censored. However, in the case of children, material designed to sexualize them, censorship is appropriate.

Here’s the trick that the transnationalists have played on you. They have for decades conflated culture and race to facilitate the spread of an ideology, namely cultural pluralism, what today we more commonly call multiculturalism. Cultural pluralism is an ideology useful to the normalization of transnationalism, an elite program that aims to disintegrate national cultures, dissolve the nation-state model, and dismantle the international rules-based order, the Westphalian system via the means of globalization, e.g., off-shoring and mass immigration. This end is sought to impose a global corporate state system governing world populations via technocratic methods. The program is managed by transnational corporate power and the network of governmental, nongovernmental, and quasigovernmental institutions and organizations serving its interests.

When liberals and modern conservatives push back against cultural pluralism, progressives, the professional-managerial stratum managing the technocracy, as well as representing most ideational managers across the dominant culture and educational industries, accuse critics of multiculturalism of opposition to multiracialism, an accusation that comes with the smear of racist (see Multiracialism Versus Multiculturalism). Moreover, the trick permits the progressive claim that western civilization is “white culture”—that is that western civilization was raised up by the white race to secure its interests at the expense of the interests of the nonwhite races who comprise most of the world’s population (see The Myth of White Culture). Those who oppose multiculturalism for its effect on western civilization, are portrayed as white supremacist fearful of losing racial power.

It’s a brilliant trick. At least it has worked brilliantly over the last several decades. However, the trick falls apart when one simply recognizes that culture and race are not the same things (see Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation; Casual Conflation of Categories). Culture is an emergent ideational and action system composed of beliefs, customs, norms, practices, traditions, and values. Race is the construct of an ideological system called racialism or racism. The attributes of racial categories are generated from socially selected geographically and historically variable heritable phenotypic characteristics. which are falsely claimed to predict attitude, behavioral proclivity, cognitive ability, and moral aptitude. Essentially, what we call race is not more than the result of ancestry. Offspring tend to look like their parents and parents tend to select mates who look like them in part because of convenience; one would expect that mates are selected from those in one’s environment.

Culture is spatially and temporally variable—that is, there is geographical and historical variation. Some systems are better for humans than other systems (See Culture Matters: Western Exceptionalism and Socialist Possibility). One can judge the adequacy of cultural systems using objective standards. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which incorporates universal human rights, which are scientifically determinable, with science representing a transcultural and transhistorical method, is a valid and useful model. The model makes clear that racism, which constrains individual liberty, transgresses human rights, and therefore the idea should be discouraged and practices and systems operating on this idea should be dismantled and outlawed. Indeed, racism is an example of a harmful cultural system.

Crucially, racism holds that culture is a projection of race. Why are the people of one culture worse off than another culture? The racist’s answer is that this is because those worse off are racially inferior. But this is not what liberals think. Liberals are proponents and defenders of the Enlightenment, an ethical and philosophical view advancing the humanist notion of liberating individuals from the premodern institutions and tendencies that limit them. Liberals oppose backwards cultures not because they are racist but because they believe in human thriving. Liberals are critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming because these undermine cognitive liberty, equality, and the just and open society.

Working from this standpoint, one can see that it is not only racist to argue that cultural variation is tied to racial variation, but that it is also racist to use culture as a weapon against members of a racial group, which is exactly what antiracists do when they attack white people for their “privilege,” etc. This is why antiracism as it is currently practiced is a form of racism. (See The Myth of White Culture; Critical Race Theory: A New Racism; The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think Smearing Amy Wax and The Fallacy of Cultural Racism.)

Since human beings are culture bearers, liberals and conservatives recognize open borders as a strategy for replacing native workers with foreign workers, thereby fracturing proletarian consciousness, undermining organized labor, lowering the price of labor, and superexploiting economic migrants, as well as organizing an army of new voters who owe a debt to the transnationalists who gave them a better life to vote for their policies. Of course, some liberals and conservatives support open borders for this reason and stand alongside progressives in fighting to keep open borders (see The Koch Brothers and the Building of a Grassroots Coalition to Advance Open Borders; Bernie Sanders Gets it on Open Borders Rhetoric—At Least He Did in 2015; Words and Pictures: What is a “liberal” and Who is Responsible for Migrant Deaths?). But progressives are the ones using the fallacy of conflating culture and race to claim that opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism are racist.

* * *

Speaking of culture and race, there is a story out to today about a Michigan teacher who used an assignment in class showing a photo of Barack Obama alongside several other animals asking which of the animals was a primate. She is now on leave and the school has posted guards around the school after receiving death threats. The assignment concerned evolution and asked, “Which of the following are primates?” As a factual matter, if students checked the box with Obama’s picture, they would be correct. Human beings are primates. However, the historic association of monkeys with black people made the exercise problematic.

Before readers have a fit about me appearing to problematize the controversy over this, know that I am a sociologist who teaches the history of racialism and show in class instances of racist illustrations from the nineteenth century to make students aware of how ideology can corrupt science, specially instances when images and diagrams were used deceitfully to convey assumptions and theories about racial hierarchies and inferiority. Please don’t lecture me as if I don’t understand why some observers would find such a classroom exercise offensive. I get it. But I am an optimist that one day we might transcend this association. And I want to make the point that I do not believe this is what this teacher intended.

Carolyn Lett, the director of diversity for the Roeper School where this incident occurred explained, “She [the teacher] had her biology hat on, but didn’t realize the awareness that she should have had culturally.” It is central to the teaching of evolution to confirm that Homo sapiens share a common ancestor with the other apes. We are in fact a species of the great apes and there is perhaps no more powerful illustration of science over ideology than having young Americans understand that they are primates. Using the popular president is sure to make the exercise memorable, especially for those who positively identify with the president. Perhaps this is what she was thinking. So this was a misfire.

However, as a general problem, we might ask why the teaching of human evolution should be limited by cultural, ideological, or political hats at all. What if the teacher had used a photo of Trump instead, a man who has been compared to an orangutan? I can imagine some MAGA parents would be offended and raise objections. One wouldn’t want to put an illustration of a generic human in a worksheet with photos of other animals. Whose photo should appear? And what race should the person be? One could replace all the photos with illustrations. I wouldn’t mind if a person with phenotypic features associated with the white race were used in either case. A realistic looking computer-generated image of a generic white person perhaps. Science books have long used these phenotypic features in illustrations. As long as children learn that human beings are primates, mission accomplished.

However offended some people where, the teacher should not be punished, disciplined, retrained, or made to apologize. She is almost certain to never do this again. What evidence is there that the exercise was designed to push a racist view or advance a racist agenda? Doesn’t sound like there is any. Indeed, it is conceivable that to her mind using Barack Obama as the exemplary human being in such an exercise conveys the opposite. Perhaps the teacher should have been wearing her culture hat. She should have at least been aware given the current climate of how some would receive the exercise. But spare her cancellation.

This story reminds me a bit of the woman who was attacked for calling children swinging in a tree monkeys. Some of the children were black. If I had a nickel for every time an adult called me a monkey. Every playground I have ever played on has had monkey bars to swing on. I presume they are called this on the playgrounds in majority black neighborhoods. Whenever I watch video of a monkey the first thought that pops in my head is that I am watching a close relative.

Again, I get the sensitivity around the comparison. However, I look forward to the day when we can recognize all humans as a genus of primates without having an image provoke in our brains offensive and ideological displays from the nineteenth century racism. I also look forward to the day when calling human beings animals is understood as simply a true statement and not an attempt to degrade humans. We are, after all, animals. We are the result of natural history. There is no shame in that. Racism is so poisonous.