Year: 2023

Because Fox News won’t let you see the original interview Tucker Carlson had with Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, Carlson conducted a second interview with Sund and broadcast it on X (formerly Twitter). Here you will hear here will disturb you. At least it should if you are a thinking person. If the actions of authorities doesn’t make sense to you, this is because you’re refusing to apply the most—really only—plausible explanation for what happened on January 6, namely that is was a set up. The authorities expected trouble and welcomed it. Judging by the many videos I have examined, it looks to me like they instigated it. January 6 was a key piece of the color revolution the deep state ran to remove Trump from office.

Ep. 15 Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund reveals what really happened on January 6th. Our Fox News interview with him never aired, so we invited him back. pic.twitter.com/opDlu4QGlp

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 10, 2023

Watch the entire interview, of course. But pay close attention to the dialogue from 50:37 mark. You will be shocked to learn that the June 2020 riots in DC, where more officers were injured than were on January 6, somebody prevented the DC Police Department from assisting the Secret Service when the White House was under attack from Antifa and BLM. Antifa/BLM brutally assaulted Secret Service and other law enforcement officers. Antifa/BLM set St. John’s church on fire. Antifa/BLM tried to set the Hay-Adams Hotel on fire—which was occupied. All charges were dropped against Antifa and BLM. Meanwhile, January 6 protesters are still languishing in federal jail, while others have been sentenced to years in federal prison.

I have written quite a lot about January 6 and its implications and purpose. But if you want depth analysis of January 6th and more broadly the color revolution of which it was a piece, please visit Darren Beattie’s Revolver. I will leave you to search the site for what Beattie calls the “fedsurrection.”

* * *

You will also find on Revolver stories about Craig Deleeuw Robertson, a woodworker and Mormon, was killed on Wednesday morning, 6:15 am local time, in a hail of bullets at his home in Provo, Utah. Robertson was a disabled obese 75-year-old man (with a blind son) known to the FBI for years by his inflammatory posts, which for some reason Facebook allowed to remain posted and publicly available, which is strange if, like me, one has experienced the intensity of Facebook moderation. After the agents shot him, they dragged Robertson out to the sidewalk in front of his home where he was left to bleed out in front of his neighbors and their children.

Arguably, Robertson’s postings did rise to the threshold of true threats. But Robertson’s threats against prominent Biden and Democrats exist alongside similar threats against Trump and prominent Republicans. The FBI uses such threats selectively to make examples of individuals expressing disfavored political sentiments. It is understandable if one suspect that the agency is sending a signal to populists and nationalists. This is the case in the political persecution of Donald Trump and his supporters. Democrats are allowed to fight like hell for the causes to believe in. Populists are insurrectionists for fighting for their beliefs and causes.

I am not comparing Trump’s comments on January 6, 2021 to those Robertson made on Facebook. Robertson’s threats on Facebook are highly disturbing. I am noting the selective action of the administrative state and the obvious political-ideological basis behind who is selected for FBI raids and federal prosecutions. As I am sure I don’t have to tell readers, Trump has been indicted for his actions on January 6, actions I have shown on Freedom and Reason to be protected by the First Amendment. See “He Summoned a Mob to Washington.” The Selective Application of the First Amendment (see also “A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous).

* * *

I did not report on this back in September of 2022 when it occurred, but I want to recount the story of Mark Houck, which illustrates the highly biased character of FBI action. During a pre-dawn operation in Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, a group of approximately twenty FBI agents arrested Mark Houck at his residence. Houck resides with his spouse and their seven children. Houck had no criminal record. The arrest of Houck by FBI agents was executed based on a federal indictment. Houck is a pro-life advocate and holds the position of president at The King’s Men, an organization affiliated with the Catholic faith. The indictment was for an alleged breach of the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, more commonly known as the FACE Act.

The FACE Act (18 U.S.C. § 248) prohibits acts such as physically obstructing, intimidating, injuring, or interfering with individuals seeking or providing reproductive health services. Congress has made it clear that the FACE Act does not infringe upon “expressive conduct” safeguarded by the First Amendment, which includes peaceful demonstrations outside such facilities. Houck frequently traveled two hours from his home to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia to partake in prayer and protest outside the establishment, often in the company of his twelve-year-old son. The indictment by federal authorities asserts that almost a year prior, on October 21, 2021, Houck engaged in a “verbal confrontation” with and “shoving” an escort assisting an abortion patient, ultimately causing the escort to fall. The indictment accuses Houck of “intentionally injuring, intimidating, and interfering” with the escort.

However, the indictment omits crucial details about the context: the pro-abortion escort had subjected the Houck’s son to offensive and inappropriate language, including vulgar slurs. Houck implored the escort to cease the harassment, but to no avail. When the escort came uncomfortably close to his son, Houck took action to protect him, resulting in the escort’s fall. The injury sustained by the escort was minor. In fact, the assault allegation against Houck was so feeble that even Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, known for his unconventional approach, declined to press misdemeanor charges. Moreover, a civil lawsuit filed by the escort against Houck was dismissed by the court. Yet, almost a year later, the Justice Department charged him with two felonies for an injury that merited nothing more than a Band-Aid and the FBI conducted a forceful operation at Houck’s home.

Houck was acquitted in early 2023. He facing severe penalties, including up to eleven years in prison, three years of supervised release, and substantial fines. The timing of Houck’s indictment raises questions about the intentions behind the Justice Department’s actions. Even if one interprets the situation favorably towards the government’s narrative, the incidents at hand amount to, at most, minor episodes of misdemeanor assault. One can speculate that the arrest closely tracks the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and the regime of unrestricted abortion rights in the United States. This orchestrated raid on Houck’s residence seemed intended to send a strong message to pro-life activists who engage in constitutionally protected activities. (See MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin.)

🚨BREAKING: Sanctuary state Massachusetts’ governor Maura Healey declares a state of emergency over influx of illegals.

As of today, close to 5600 migrants families living in government funded facilities across Massachusetts. That figure is 80% higher than it was last year.… pic.twitter.com/eRULqTNxag

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) August 8, 2023

This is how bad Biden’s migrant crisis has become. As of today, close to 5600 migrants families living in government funded facilities across Massachusetts. Sanctuary state Massachusetts’ governor Maura Healey has declared a state of emergency over influx of illegals. We’ve heard New York City mayor’s plea to the federal government for help in that city’s migrant crisis. This is the story in cities across the United States as millions of illegal immigrants have cross the souther border under Biden’s watch.

Remember when Trump had the border under control? I do. Remember when he tried to build a wall to thwart illegal immigration? I do. We were told that his policy was fascist (see Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps). AOC cried to an empty parking lot after making up stories about how migrants were forced to drink water from toilets (Ocasio-Cortez and the Powers of Expectation and Identity). We were shown pictures of children in cages taken during Obama’s presidency and told the cages were Trump’s. Lie after lie after lie. Don’t let them lie and then forget they lied. Remember. Don’t forget that Biden told migrants to come to America. Remember.

The power elite are spending hundreds of millions of dollars of tax dollars to defend Ukraine’s borders while pursuing an effective policy of open borders at home. If a fraction of those dollars Biden is sending to Ukraine were spent on border security this wouldn’t be happening. But they don’t want to defend Americas borders. Democrats don’t believe in America. America invented slavery. America is white supremacist. America is illegitimate. They say all this and more.

Why are Democrats following the country with illegals? I have explained this before, but here’s a itemized summary of points: (1) because they are illegal they are easy to force into conditions of super exploitation, with poverty wages and unsafe working conditions; (2) their cheap labor makes immigrants attractive to employers, who hire them over native workers (yes, South Park, they’re taking our jobs); (3) cheap labor drives down the wage floor impoverishing native workers in addition to displacing them; (4) the strategy of the Democratic Party has been to knit together a coalition of racial and sexual minorities who feel indebted to the Party and who are conditioned to believe that their enemy is white people and well-off Asians—this way, the Party can abandon the working class and serve the interests of the professional-managerial and corporate strategy they represent; (5) when illegals become citizens (and they will push amnesty is Democrats become the majority), the belief is that the new citizens will vote Democrat; (6) in the meantime, the illegals will vote anyway, not only in municipal elections where they are given the franchise, but illegally in state and federal elections, which is why Democrats support postal voting and oppose voter ID and post-election canvasing; (7) a white majority is bad for society, an argument that manifests in a myriad of ways, for example in the claim that diversity is vital to a comprehensive college experience, as if a white majority white limits the college experience. (See The Democratic Party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism; Rationalizing the Border Crisis with Hysteria, Lies, and Smears.)

I have covered this before, as well, but it bears repeating that the negative consequences of immigration, while varying depending on the context and specific circumstances, are nonetheless substantial. A sudden increase in population due to immigration exacerbates housing shortages and lead to rising rent and housing prices in already competitive housing markets. Concerns rightly arise about immigrants accessing social welfare programs, particularly if they have not contributed to the system through taxes. This raises concerns about the fairness and sustainability of providing social benefits to newcomers. An influx of immigrants puts pressure on public services such as education, healthcare, and social welfare systems. If these systems are not adequately prepared to handle the increased demand, it can lead to resource shortages and longer wait times for native citizens, particular the most vulnerable. A sudden influx of immigrants can lead to increased demand for resources such as energy, food, and water, potentially putting additional strain on the environment and local ecosystems.

As noted above, immigrants are willing to accept lower wages for the same work, which drives down wages and worsens working conditions for native workers. This creates tension and resentment among native workers who lose their jobs to immigrants while suffering the deterioration their communities. Rapid changes in cultural diversity and demographics leads to cultural clashes and social tensions. Some native citizens perceive immigrants as a threat to their cultural identity or as unwilling to assimilate into the host society, which are legitimate concerns. Immigrants and their host communities face challenges in terms of cultural differences and language barriers, but also religious and tribal affiliations are obstructive. Crime and violence have become terrible problems across the trans-Atlantic space.

Al Sharpton shocked by Congressman's claim: The United States is a republic, not a democracy.

🙄🙄 pic.twitter.com/nLxXtBgpAT

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 4, 2023

Al Sharpton strikes again. First he thinks that the revolutionaries who founded our republic would never overthrow a government (see below). Now he is incredulous that somebody would say that the US is not a democracy. There is an argument to be had here. But Sharpton isn’t up to it. Why is Al Sharpton on TV? He’s a street preacher. A charlatan. A confirmed anti-intellectual type. A blow hard. How did he get to this place? Because MSNBC appreciates grifters and race hustlers, that’s how. You’d think, though, they’d want to protect their reputation (they must believe they have one).

Al Sharpton Asks: Can you imagine if James Madison or Thomas Jefferson tried to overthrow the government?

🙄🙄 pic.twitter.com/7ahlPile7x

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 3, 2023

Congressman Doug Collins is right. The founding fathers of the United States did establish a republic, not a democracy. The author of our constitution, James Madison, is adamant on that point. He condemns democracy in the Federalist Papers. It’s true that the terms “republic” and “democracy” are often used interchangeably, and moreover that a republic can have democratic elements, but these terms refer to distinct forms of government. In a constitutional republic, the government’s authority is derived from the people and representatives are chosen to make decisions on their behalf, but the government is vested in a territory and a creed. In the United States, citizens elect representatives who make and enforce laws. A democracy, in contrast, is a system of government in which the power is vested in the people. Citizens participate in decision-making, often through votes on laws and policies. A democracy risks majority rule without a strong system of checks and balances—and then it becomes a republic.

In a recent article on Freedom and Reason, America is a Republic (It is also a Democracy), I referred to this debate as something of a fake issue. You can see my blog for details. There I discuss Madison’s argument. Briefly here, in Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison discusses the dangers of factions and how they could threaten the stability of a government. He argues that pure democracies, where all citizens directly participate in decision-making, are susceptible to the harmful effects of factions. Madison defines factions as groups of citizens united by a common interest, often adverse to the rights of other citizens or the interests of the community as a whole. “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

The founding fathers established a system that blended elements of both a republic and a democracy. While citizens have the power to elect their representatives, the structure of the government includes checks and balances among the branches (executive, legislative, and judicial) to prevent any one group or the people from becoming too powerful. This intricate system was designed to protect individual rights and promote stability and to thwart majoritarianism.

To understand what “the people” means in this formulation think individual not masses. This is indeed, as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. He also said this is a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The individual is the people. Though it says the people, the Second Amendment articulates an individual right to keep and bear arms. When the First Amendment guarantees the right of the people peaceably to assemble, it means to guarantee the individual his right to join his voice with others to express conscience and opinion in unison. We are not a society of tribes (factions) or of a mass, but a society of individuals, each autonomous and rational—and equal in our standing before the law and in principle. This is the fundamental thing the identitarians don’t understand. They seek mob rule. This they understand democracy to be. And so we must remind those who hear that we are a republic, and diminish those who don’t.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”—LP Hartley (1953)

“My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”—Karl Marx (1867)

This settles the question of whether AP African American and Florida’s new standards say the same thing:

In Florida’s Public School Curriculum is Malinformation, I curated the words of Crystal Etienne, a seventh-grade civics teacher in Miami-Dade County, who said, “It’s disgusting to use children as pawns in their adult scheme.” She called the changes to Florida’s public school curriculum “indoctrination” in “white, Christian nationalism.” She said, “They feel like if you’re teaching the bad, it somehow takes away from the good and it doesn’t.” That is an interesting way of putting the matter, I noted in so many words. I also curated the words of Dwight Bullard, a former high school history teacher, who said that he couldn’t fathom telling his students that there’s a “silver lining in slavery.” He’s referring to the lesson plan that has enjoyed the most publicity, which reviews the wide range of habits and skills Africans acquired during slavery that they applied to their lives after Emancipation. “Imagine the blowback of the same teacher trying to give you the upside of Nazi Germany,” said Bullard, using the Hitler analogy. “Not only would it not be allowed, there would be bipartisan outrage over the idea that any teacher, a teacher or a curriculum trying to give the sunny side of Adolf Hitler. Yet we now have an African American history statute that is supposed to now give you this notion of the benevolent master, or the upside or benefit of being enslaved in America. It’s crazy.” As I noted in that essay, Bullard makes explicit, inverts, and leans into Etienne’s irony: if you’re teaching the good, this takes away from the bad.

Can one imagine a European history curriculum leaving out the initiation of the German Autobahn system during the Nazi regime? That would be like leaving out of an American history curriculum President Dwight D. Eisenhower initiating the Interstate Highway System (IHS). During Eisenhower’s presidency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in covert operations to overthrow foreign governments perceived as threats to US interests (the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and supported the coup that toppled the democratically elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954). These actions undermined the sovereignty of those nations and interfered in their internal affairs. This doesn’t make Eisenhower Hitler, of course. What about the development of the Volkswagen Beetle, initiated by the Nazi government, aimed at making cars accessible to ordinary German citizens? The idea was to create a “people’s car” (literally Volkswagen in German). After World War II, the production of the Beetle continued and became a popular, even iconic vehicle worldwide (I had several as a young man). The Nazi regime invested in rocket technology, which laid the groundwork for later developments in space exploration. Key figures like Wernher von Braun, who worked on Nazi rocket projects, played significant roles in the US space program after the war.

I am a bit of a rocketry nerd, so I want to spend a little time on von Braun work and associations in this area. Wernher von Braun was a German aerospace engineer and rocket scientist who was part of the team that developed the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. He was also a Nazi and an SS member. Towards the end of World War II, von Braun and some of his colleagues surrendered to the United States rather than fall into Soviet hands. In 1945, von Braun and his team were brought to the United States under a program known as “Operation Paperclip.” This program aimed to recruit German engineers, scientists, and technicians who had worked on rocketry and other advanced technologies for the Nazis. The goal was to utilize their expertise in the emerging Cold War competition, particularly in the context of the space race with the Soviet Union. In America, von Braun worked for the US Army Ordnance Corps and later joined the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). At NASA, he played a key role in developing the Saturn rockets, which were crucial for the Apollo program and eventually led to the successful moon landings. Von Braun is considered one of the fathers of rocketry and space exploration, but his association with the V-2 rocket and the Nazi regime has been a subject of controversy and debate throughout history. Should we dismiss his work because the Nazis financed it? Should we dismiss von Braun’s work because he was a Nazi?

Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king, a military conqueror who built an immense empire that stretched from Greece to India at the expense of an untold number of bodies, nonetheless spread of Hellenistic culture during his conquests, facilitating the appreciation of Greek art and ideas across the regions he conquered. This cultural diffusion, known as Hellenism, had a profound impact on the development of art, literature, and philosophy in the societies under his control and afterwards. He established Alexandria, a great city in Egypt that contributed mightily to the dissemination of knowledge and learning in the ancient world. His expeditions included scholars and scientists who documented the fauna and flora, climate and terrain, of the regions they traversed. This knowledge helped advance the understanding of the world during ancient times. Should this be left out of World history curricula because Alexander killed and maimed civilians as he conquered the known world? Shouldn’t we stop calling him “great”? Did the peoples he conquered not benefit from any of it?

Slavery was a common institution in the ancient world, and it played a significant role in the economies of various civilizations, including ancient Greece. As Alexander conquered and expanded the empire, he captured numerous prisoners of war from defeated territories, and many of these individuals were enslaved. These enslaved individuals were put to work as agricultural workers, construction laborers, and domestic servants. The use of slaves was prevalent in many ancient societies, and it was an integral part of the economy, providing a cheap labor source for various tasks. While Alexander is remembered for his military accomplishments and contributions to the spread of Hellenistic culture, the practice of slavery was a characteristic of his time, and it was not uncommon for conquerors and rulers of that era to take slaves from the peoples they subdued. What do we do with this historical fact?

Joseph Stalin, the ruthless Soviet dictator, responsible for countless atrocities, including purges and forced labor camps, nonetheless promoted rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union, which helped modernize the country and turn it into a major economic power. The Soviet Union rapidly developed heavy industries, such as steel, coal, and machinery production, turning it from an agrarian society into a major industrialized nation. This allowed the Soviet Union to prevail in World War II over Nazi Germany. When Stalin died, he could claim a legacy of taking a backward peripheral region of the world capitalist economy and powering it to the second-most technologically-advanced civilization in world history, raising millions out of ignorance and poverty, providing millions with education, housing, and medicine.

I have studied the history of the Soviet Union rather extensively (see my 2003 article The Soviet Union: State Capitalist or Siege Socialist? in Nature, Society, and Thought) and I am always amazed at how dismissive people are about that history because Stalin was responsible for a great many deaths. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government invested heavily in education and science, leading to substantial advancements in these areas. The literacy rate increased significantly, and access to education became more widespread, allowing for a better-educated population. This focus on education and research also facilitated important scientific breakthroughs, particularly in space exploration and technology. The totalitarian regime that overthrew the monarchy of a ruthless tsar trained up tens of thousands of engineers, physicians, scientists, and technicians. he government prioritized healthcare services, providing free medical care to all citizens. This led to improved life expectancy and a decline in infant mortality rates over the years. The Soviet emphasis on gender equality resulted in improvements for women’s rights. Women were granted equal rights to education and employment, leading to increased female participation in the workforce, particularly in traditionally male-dominated fields such as engineering and science. Does recognizing these facts make one an apologist for Stalin? Should we erase the proletarian workers who accomplished all this?

In a region where tribal feuds were common, Genghis Khan demonstrated exceptional diplomatic and military skills, forging alliances and earning the loyalty of the various clans. Through a keen understanding of political and social dynamics, Genghis Khan managed to unite the Mongol people, creating a strong and cohesive nation out of once-fractured tribes. Beyond military conquests, Genghis Khan’s rule had a lasting impact on the territories he conquered. Despite his fearsome reputation as a conqueror, he was also known for his religious tolerance and open-mindedness. He actively promoted cultural exchange and communication along the famous Silk Road, facilitating trade and the flow of ideas between the East and West. His policies ensured relative stability and security, allowing merchants, scholars, and travelers to move safely across the vast empire. Pax Mongolica encouraged the exchange of technologies, goods, and knowledge, leaving a lasting legacy on world history. Genghis Khan’s administrative accomplishments were equally significant. He implemented a legal code known as the Yassa, which served as a set of laws that governed various aspects of Mongol society, including governance, military organization, and social conduct. The Yassa helped maintain order within the vast and diverse territories of the empire and provided a framework for future Mongol rulers to govern effectively.

But what about that fearsome reputation as a conqueror? While Genghis Khan’s accomplishments as a military leader and empire builder are often praised, it is also true that his conquests resulted in the deaths of countless people. The expansion of the Mongol Empire was marked by brutal military campaigns, and his armies were known for their ruthlessness and ferocity in battle. During Genghis Khan’s conquests, entire cities were put to the sword. Cities that resisted the Mongol forces faced severe reprisals, leading to massive casualties. His military campaigns in Central Asia and the Middle East, particularly against the Khwarezmian Empire, resulted in widespread destruction and loss of life. Genghis Khan employed various tactics to strike fear into his enemies, such as killing large numbers of people to terrify and demoralize those who opposed him. These brutal actions were intended to deter resistance and ensure submission to Mongol rule. It is estimated that the Mongol conquests led by Genghis Khan and his successors resulted in the deaths of millions of people across Eurasia, making it one of the deadliest military campaigns in history. Indeed, Jack Weatherford, in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World contends that the large-scale depopulation caused by the Mongol conquests resulted in the abandonment and reforestation of vast agricultural lands and, as a consequence, there was a significant increase in carbon sequestration, which led to a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide and a localized cooling effect in some regions.

While Genghis Khan is celebrated for his military achievements and his role in creating a vast empire, it is essential to acknowledge the darker aspects of his reign. The historical legacy of Genghis Khan remains complex, and his actions continue to be a subject of debate and examination among historians and scholars. Obvious, as a general rules, it is important to remember that acknowledging the achievements of men and movements does not justify the terrible conduct and human rights abuses that result—and Florida’s new curriculum is not at all reticent to require teachers to report on the conduct of oppressors and human rights abuses that occurred under slavery. History is a nuanced tapestry of both dark and light elements, and it’s essential to study and understand it critically. But the desire to deny any good in something is an ideological endeavor not an academic one.

Slavery is one of the oldest modes of human exploitation. Its history dates back thousands of years, and it has been practiced in civilizations and regions around the world. This is crucial to understand in an era when opponents of the United States republic insinuate that the slave trade was uniquely European, chattel slavery uniquely American, slaves uniquely black and their oppressors uniquely white.  The reality is that practice of slavery was widespread across different cultures, societies, and time periods. Slavery was commonly practiced in ancient civilizations, with slaves performing various tasks, including agricultural labor, domestic work, military service, and even skilled crafts. The historical evidence makes clear that the practice existed in ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China. It was also present in pre-Columbian America, Africa, and various other regions. Slaves were obtained through conquest, debt, warfare, or being born into slavery due to their parents’ enslaved status (hereditary slavery). The transatlantic slave trade during the 15th to 19th centuries was a chapter in the history of slavery, where millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas to work on plantations, but the trade in slaves and the system of chattel slavery in the US South is not unique in any of its aspects. That doesn’t make it wrong. It just means that the British colonies and later the US South were not novel. 

When evaluating historical phenomena like slavery, it is essential to be objective, even if the practice is widely considered immoral by today’s standards—even if the practice is considered from the standpoint of universal and eternal human rights. The practice of slavery served as a major economic institution across space and time. In some historical contexts, slave labor provided the foundation for the economic prosperity of empires, states, and world-systems. Slavery allowed for the construction of monumental structures, the development of large agricultural estates, and the production of valuable goods and services. Obviously, the economic contributions of slavery should never be used as a justification for its moral acceptability, but the immorality of slavery does not negate the economic contributions of slavery. Slavery was associated with cultural diffusion, intellectual development, and technological transfer. Cultural practices, knowledge systems, and a universe of skills were transferred between peoples and societies. Agricultural innovations and techniques, architectural design, artistic and musical styles spread through the movement of enslaved individuals. Backwards peoples often experienced significant personal growth and development, knowledge and skills that allowed them to become successful in the societies in which they were enslaved. Moreover, enslaved individuals made significant cultural and intellectual contributions despite their constrained circumstances.

In addition to the double standard with respect to the United States during the antebellum period that the progressive demands, that is in how the oppressive situation of others in history are covered in public school curricula, teaching the good and the bad, the refusal to recognize the phenomenological and practical conditions experienced by individuals under slavery in the United States is odd in light of long-standing left-wing commitments and understandings—presuming for the sake of the point that the commitments of teachers are still left wing (they certainly say they are). Proletarian labor is exploited by capitalists and compelled to do so by a structurally coercive class situation. But no serious Marxist would fail to appreciate that there were and are among the proletariat those who applied skills learned on the job to their lives, such as finding a better job with higher wages and better working conditions, or organizing other workers with similar skills and trades to agitate for higher wages and better working conditions. Why is it well understood that the situation of the industrial workers, which also constitutes an exploitative relation, often characterized by low wages and poor working conditions, has a transformative effect on those who are compelled to work for a living? During the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rise of factories led to a massive influx of rural workers into urban areas seeking employment. Over the course of development, these workers acquired valuable skills in operating machinery and factory processes. They learned to read and write. They developed a sense of solidarity and collective identity, leading to the growth of labor movements and trade unions, which advocated for workers’ rights and better working conditions.

And this development was not exclusive to the proletariat. Convict labor, or penal labor, involves the use of prisoners for various types of work, often as a form of punishment. It was prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in colonial and post-colonial settings, but it still exists today. In fact, the Thirteen Amendment, ratified in 1865, which forbade chattel slavery in the United States, allows for penal labor. Convict laborers faced severe and often brutal conditions. They were subjected to forced labor, sometimes on plantations or in mines, and experienced physical punishment and abuse by overseers or prison authorities. Despite the harsh treatment, many convict laborers acquired skills in various trades or agriculture. To be sure, these skills were sometimes undervalued and not appropriately recognized or utilized after their release, but they also afforded many convicts a way of living after confinement. Today, developing good habits and useful skills is an objective of rehabilitation and reentry into free society.

Indentured servitude involved individuals, often immigrants, signing a contract (indenture) to work for a specific employer or landowner for a set period in exchange for passage to a new country or some other benefit. Indentured servants faced challenging circumstances, including long and arduous labor contracts, limited freedoms, and often poor living conditions. The terms of their indenture could be abused or extended, leading to prolonged servitude. As in other systems of exploitation, indentured servants also acquired various skills based on their work assignments, which could include agriculture, domestic labor, or skilled crafts They also experienced cultural exchange, as many indentured servants came from diverse backgrounds and brought their traditions and practices to their new environments. These realities are often discussed in public school curriculum. Does this practice mean to deny the suffering of indentured servants? Or does it mean to convey the phenomenological and practical experiences of those who struggled through this period in their lives?

In all these cases, it’s important to recognize the exploitative nature of these labor systems, where the rights and freedoms of people were compromised. Nevertheless, individuals in these groups developed various skills and habits, some of which empowered them to resist exploitation and advocate for better conditions and rights. The struggles and contributions of these laboring groups have shaped labor movements and labor laws, influencing social and economic reforms over time. In the Florida curriculum, the list of skills and trades associated with slave labor is expansive. In addition to blacksmithing and carpentry and such, slaves were also cobblers, coopers, healers, hostlers, milliners, musicians, painter, sawyers, shoemakers, silversmiths, tailors, weavers, wheelwrights, and wigmakers. They worked in homes, on farms, on board ships, and in the shipbuilding industry. Children are not supposed to know about all this? My own family history in East Tennessee was enriched by the presence of blacks trained in blacksmithing and other skills and trades associated with mining. These skills allowed blacks to provide for their families after emancipation. The suggestion that blacks had no place in a free America and should return to Africa is understood as an unacceptable argument. How were freed slaves to live in the only country they had ever known?

Consider that Marx himself, in the 1967 Preface to Capital, Volume One, made sure to emphasize the point that exploitation and oppression changes the exploited and the oppressed, and that forecasting how things will develop over time requires understanding how the exploited and oppressed are changed. “Let us not deceive ourselves on this,” he writes. “As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so that in the 19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class. In England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself. Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most important interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally removable hindrances to the free development of the working class. For this reason, as well as others, I have given so large a space in this volume to the history, the details, and the results of English factory legislation. One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.”

Moments later Marx writes, “The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in so many words that in Germany, in France, to be brief, in all the civilized states of the European Continent, radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as evident and inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade, vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day. These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.”

There is something else in all this, as well, and it goes to the method Marx employs, namely the dialectic. I am not a spiritual person (neither was Marx), but I know others are, and I wonder whether they have considered this piece, especially in light of the rhetoric of social justice and an appreciation of liberation theology in teaching programs and elsewhere in the colleges and universities, and that is the matter of Georg Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807, which explores the master-slave relation and finds in it a powerful development dynamic. This is considered one of the most complex and influential pieces of philosophical literature—and it bears directly on the question of life after emancipation. Hegel’s analysis of the master-slave dialectic is part of his broader exploration of human self-consciousness and the development of human freedom through history. The master-slave dialectic examines the fundamental dynamic between individuals engaged in a hierarchical relationship.

In specifying this relation, Hegel describes how two individuals interact with each other and how their identities and self-consciousness are shaped through this interaction. As a sociologist, I find his argument fascinating, but also morally compelling. The dynamic begins when one individual, the master, seeks recognition from the other, the slave. The master attempts to establish his self-worth and identity by asserting dominance and control over the slave, appropriating the creative work of the slave. The slave, on the other hand, becomes subservient and obeys the master’s commands to avoid punishment and death, alienated from his own creative powers. But the master-slave relation is asymmetrical and therefore unstable. While the master gains recognition from the slave, it is a hollow form of recognition because it is based on fear and forced subordination. The slave, on the other hand, finds that his own existence is contingent upon the master’s recognition of it, which denies him autonomy and true self-consciousness.

In Hegel’s view, consciousness and human freedom arise through the acknowledgment of and mutual recognition among individuals. The slave, in his labor and struggle for survival, and in the character of his milieu, develops skills and knowledge, which gives him a sense of mastery over his environment and situation. Through this process, he achieves self-consciousness and self-recognition and gains a level of independence. Hegel believed that human history is a process of continual development and self-realization, where individuals and societies move towards greater freedom and self-awareness through the recognition of each other’s humanity in the progress of working out and through history. To deny that the African grew from his experience as a slave is to deny him the fruit of his struggle for freedom—his emancipation, self-regard, and self-reliance. This is the path to equality, formal and substantive. I have often characterized woke progressives as neo-Hegelian, rejecting the claim by the woke and their conservative critics that progressives are neo-Marxists or in some way Marxist. However, that critique does not involve the insight Hegel had about the struggle for freedom and self-actualization and the raising up of the societal whole society in the process.

Progressives get neither Hegel’s insight nor his method. But the Old Left did. Martin Luther King, Jr. did. As a theologian, Hegel’s allegory could not have been lost on King. Hegel’s dialectical method, which involves the resolution of contradictions through a dynamic process that moves the situation to a greater unity of its parts and lifts it to a higher plane of development, had a profound impact on how modern theologians approached their questions. It encouraged a dynamic and evolving understanding of religious concepts, allowing for the reconciliation of seemingly opposing ideas—the interpenetration of opposites. Hegel’s concept of the “Absolute” or “Geist” (Spirit) as an evolving and self-realizing entity influenced theologians to explore new ways of understanding God’s nature and divine reality and how pragmatism might allow social movements to achieve justice on earth. All this led to discussions about immanence and transcendence in the divine and the relationship between God and the concrete world. Liberation theology and the ethic of social justice (not the identitarian brand) are children of this idea.

Are we not to consider how the black people today are the descendants of those forged by the dialectic, material and spiritual? Are we to think only about the way slavery has hampered the generations, a ghostly ball-and-chain the living drag behind them, to ask for reparations from those who never owned them—or owe them? Or might we have our children consider the character of spirit that resisted exploitation and oppression and took from the now deposed master his knowledge and history to raise themselves above their past? A White House official told NBC News that Kamala Harris was in Jacksonville to discuss ways to “protect fundamental freedoms, specifically, the freedom to learn and teach America’s full and true history.” Did she really mean this?

The presence of slavery in history has also spurred abolitionist movements, where people advocated for the end of slavery and the recognition of the rights and dignity of all individuals. This argument suggests that the presence of slavery in history (the phenomenon) had the purpose or function of spurring abolitionist movements and advocating for the recognition of rights and dignity of all individuals (the outcome). It implies that slavery existed to bring about the rise of abolitionist movements and promote the recognition of human rights. If I left it there, I would be assigning an intention or purpose to the historical phenomenon of slavery without addressing the complex cultural, economic, historical, political, and social factors that led to its existence. Obviously, slavery was not an institution designed to bring about abolitionist movements; rather, it was a deeply ingrained practice that emerged due to various historical circumstances, such as labor demands, economic interests, and deeply rooted societal norms. 

What I mean to argue if I am to be rational about it is that the historical presence of slavery was met with significant resistance from abolitionist movements, which emerged in response to the grave injustices and human suffering caused by the institution. These movements advocated for the end of slavery and the recognition of the rights and dignity of all individuals, highlighting the importance of human rights and social justice. In other words, the struggle for freedom is consciousness raising, deepening understanding, and expanding recognition of species-being and commitment to human rights. Again, I hasten to emphasize that any potential positive aspects mentioned above should never negate or overshadow the profound dehumanization, injustice, and suffering endured by millions of enslaved individuals throughout history. Slavery, as an institution, was and is inherently oppressive and immoral. Modern ethical standards unequivocally condemn slavery as a violation of human rights and human dignity.

* * *

What lies behind the hyperbole over Florida’s new public school standards? Part of it is a desire to delegitimize Ron DeSantis, the progressive boogyman currently serving as Florida’s governor. But that’s an immediate thing. There is a long term strategy behind the “blacks-built-America” rhetoric. “American capitalism was built on the backs of slaves and the slave economy—and not just in the South. Some of these practices are still with us,” declares the website Though Huddle at Arizona State University. “Historian Calvin Schermerhorn explains how slavery built America without returning virtually any of the gains to the enslaved people—or their descendants. He also describes how racial inequality is part of our national DNA and why it persists.” Pharrell Williams writing in the pages of Time: “The activists who tossed chests of tea into the ocean to protest economic injustice were patriots. But they were also oppressors, unwilling to extend the freedoms for which they fought to everyone. America’s wealth was built on the slave labor of Black people: this is our past. To live up to America’s ideals, we must trust in a Black vision of the future.” He is wrong on every count.

This notion of a “national DNA” is a very tired metaphor, one that never really did have any authority behind it. The cliché aims to distract from the ethic and ideal of the American Creed: a set of guiding principles that are deeply ingrained in the American society and culture, principles including democracy, equality, individual liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness. These serve as a moral compass and are rightly expected to influence the behavior and actions of citizens, emphasizing a sense of responsibility, civic duty, and respect for one another. The American Creed is an aspirational vision of what Americans strive to be as a nation. It highlights the desire for a society that upholds the values of equality, freedom, and opportunity for all. The power of the Creed is evident in the abolition of slavery within the founding of the nation and the end of racial segregation a century after that.

What I am about to say is not to diminish the contributions made by Africans and their descendants, who have been a small minority of the US population, concentrated mostly in the South (over 90 percent of blacks lived in the south during slavery and for several decades afterwards), but the truth is that America was primarily built on the backs of European labor and their descendants—convicts, farmers, indentured servants, and proletarians. Primarily the English built this nation, but also the Dutch, the French, Germans, Irish, Italians, Norwegians, Polish, Scottish, Spanish, Swedish, and many other ethnic groups built this nation. And many non-Europeans built this nation, as well. The Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Japanese, and Koreans built this nation. The American Indians built this nation. All of these groups suffered mightily in all of this—and all benefitted from the result, to be sure, by varying degrees, largely depending one assimilation. I know that is a triggering thing to say, but it seems necessary to say it in light of the constant rhetoric that America was built on the backs of black slaves. It wasn’t. Proletarian labor largely built America—black, brown, and white. Even during the time of slavery and before, the indentured servant and the convict were hard at work building America. (See Disney Says, “Slaves Built This Country.” Did They?)

The claim that America was built on the backs of black people is calculated (or at least functions) to do three things: (1) erase social class as the primary form of exploitation under capitalism (this is a capitalist society, and chattel slavery, alongside wage slavery, was a part of the capitalist system); (2) diminish the contributions made by Europeans and their descendants, who have always been the majority in America, to the building of this great nation, great because it mades flesh the Enlightenment spirit, which is a product of the European world system, and which the so-called “New American Revolution” seeks to destroy and replace with an authoritarian tribalist feudalistic system; (3) make it look like Europeans were all slave owners/drivers who sat around on their backsides all day commanding blacks to do everything. This is an utterly false narrative about America. 

This is why you are hearing so much about Florida’s new standards. The curriculum doesn’t wash the feet of Black Lives Matter and woke progressives are furious about that. It interferes with the project to disorder America and maintain custodial control over black people established by paternalistic progressives. That slavery was common place for thousands of years before white people abolished it is history. Just don’t tell that to children. A man sold into slavery suffers no less because he is white. He may derive from his experience knowledge and skill that will advantage him after emancipation. This does not justify his enslavement. It only explains his situation.

The quote above “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is from the novel The Go-Between written by British author LP Hartley. It reflects the idea that looking back at historical periods can feel like observing a different culture or society because of the vast differences in attitudes, behaviors, and customs that may have prevailed in the past. We can still appreciate elements of other cultures while criticizing those elements that limit and oppress people. Islam is a profoundly patriarchal ideology. The mosque is a site of stunning mosaic work. Likewise, gospel music evolved as a form of expression and resistance for enslaved Africans, providing solace and hope amidst the hardships they faced. Blacks didn’t stop singing after Emancipation.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell

Readers of Freedom and Reason know that I view postmodernism as largely a crackpot approach to understanding the world. More than this, it has become a means to undermine reason and science, which in turn brings harmful consequences, as we have seen with the practice of gender-affirming care, previously known as transgender healthcare or transgender medical care, where children are given sterilizing hormones and sometimes surgically mutilated. (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex.) Before the rebranding, such barbaric practices, thankfully infrequent, were known as transsexual healthcare or transsexual medical care. The change in branding reflects the artificial distinction queer theorists and sexologists make between sex and gender, with sex reconceptualized as strictly biological, a distinction that comes with a tacit admission that one cannot change one’s sex. The rebranding has accompanied a drastic rise in those seeking such care.

The lie that a man can change his gender is dependent upon acceptance of the artificial distinction queer theories and sexologists make. The premise of postmodernism—that there is no ultimate truth—is central to the queer theory piece of the alliance determined to problematize fundamental and well-understood truths in this area. Postmodernists problematize reason and science by challenging the idea that they are objective, universal, and unbiased sources of knowledge. Postmodernists argue that reason and science are shaped by cultural, historical, and social contexts, and that reason and science can be used to serve certain ideologies and power structures—both true and not trivial but obvious observations. All this lies at the heart of the transhumanist movement, of which transgenderism is an expression. As I will show in a future essay, all this is rooted in the nihilistic strains of anarchism.

In addition to skepticism of universal truths, queer theory, a field of second-wave critical theory, that is a critical theory corrupted by the poststructuralist epistemic, shares with postmodernism generally a rejection of the assumption of fixed categories and identities, deconstruction of binaries, focus on language and representation, emphasis on agency and resistance, intersectionality (the stacking of oppressions), and embracing ambiguity and complexity. The ideological denial of fixed categories, the political project deconstructing binaries, and living with ambiguity are obviously ideological endeavors. Some of the rest sounds like standard social science. A closer examination of, say, the emphasis on agency and resistance, however, reveals the anarchist, as well as identitarian tendencies, where social norms exist to be transgressed and the only truths are personal ones.

In this essay, I leverage Jean Baudrillard’s description and conceptionalization of the precession of the simulacra to explore the terrain of synthetic sexual identities (SSIs), popularly known as trans gender or trans identification. The subtitle “Trans as Bad Copy” does not deny that there are convincing copies. Blaire White and Buck Angel, especially the latter, from an external point of reference, pass as the gender they wish to. However, most trans identifying individuals, especially taken in their totality, do not pass. Technology has not yet reached the point where convincing simulacra, or simulations, can be made routine in this domain. This is why there is so much effort on changing language to change mass perception in attempt to complete the simulation in the lurch.

Recall the scene from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four where O’Brien is interrogating Winston in the Ministry of Love. During the torture and brainwashing process, O’Brien tries to force Winston to accept the Party’s version of reality, which includes the idea that two and two make five if the Party says so.

O’Brien: Do you remember writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?

Winston: Yes.

O’Brien (holding up his left hand, its back towards Winston, thumb hidden and the four fingers extended): How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?

Winston: Four.

O’Brien: And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?

Winston: Four.

This goes on like this for a while. Winston is repeatedly punished for failing to see as true what is obviously false. He is not allowed to lie. He must believe the falsehood that two and two make five. He must not see the truth in front of his nose.

O’Brien: You are a slow learner.

Winston: How can I help it? How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.

O’Brien: Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

When University of Pennsylvania teammates of swimmer Lia Thomas, deadname William, complained about having a man on the women’s swimming team and naked in the women’s locker room, they were ordered by university officials not to speak the obvious truth and threatened with referral to psychological counseling if they objected to having Thomas on the team. “The Party wants you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” we learn from Nineteen Eighty-Four. “It is their final, most essential command.” Alas, it is indeed not easy to become sane, and in the aftermath of the scandal Thomas’ teammates Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan came forward to to tell the truth, which in the case of Gaines was rewarded with an attack by a mob of trans activists.

The theory of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, developed by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1929, asserts that the way individuals structure language (or language is structured for them), both in terms of grammar and vocabulary, has a profound impact on their perception of the world. Language constructs a shared understanding of events and phenomena unfolding around us. This theory has led to the belief that changing definitions and meanings restructures consciousness, which in turn changes cultural understandings—the collective beliefs, norms, and values of a society—such that individuals are socialized in the new understanding advantageous to those in power. However, the hypothesis runs up against the gender-detection brain module, which is a result of natural history, a very powerful force to attempt overcome linguistically, especially since the language faculty evolved to convey reality in order to organize human action. The innate rigidity of perception necessitates the imposition of language codes enforced through various social control strategies including coercive techniques. (See Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module.)

Before getting to the example of a bad copy and the revealing reflections that copy (his self-designation) makes about the problem of advanced order simulacra, and his attempt to deny the original (“the blueprint,” as he would like to have it in an attempt to put the map before the territory), I will need to explain the precession of simulacra and discuss the problem of simulation generally, which I will do through real-world examples, as well as fictional ones. This will require an overview of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and the method of deconstruction.

* * *

One of the tools postmodernists and queer theorists use in undermining reason and science is deconstruction. Deconstruction is a literary theory associated with French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It emerged in the late twentieth century as a central component of poststructuralist thought, a reaction in French philosophy to structuralism, a theory and method emphasizing the study of patterns and their underlying structures. Structuralism held sway in a number of fields, including anthropology, linguistics, literary theory, and sociology. Structuralists seek to identify the organizing principles that give coherence and meaning to phenomena. Poststructuralists doubt this is possible, expressing special distain for the idea of binaries and binary oppositions. Structuralists argue that these binary oppositions are fundamental to the way we think and create meaning. The pairings of contrasting elements that are found in various aspects of human life, such as good and evil, male and female, and culture and nature. The meaning of each element in a binary is defined in relation to its opposite. For example, we understand what “good” means because it is in contrast to “evil.” Poststructuralists deride this view as an oversimplification. This criticism is primarily associated with thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.

Deconstruction seeks to challenge and destabilize traditional assumptions about language, meaning, and truth. At its core, it is concerned with revealing the inherent complexities and contradictions within language and texts—it’s looking for patterns after all—and questions the idea that language can accurately and precisely convey fixed and objective meanings, doubting even there are any such things. Instead, deconstruction emphasizes the fluidity of language and the multiple interpretations that can arise from any given text. It doesn’t matter so much what the actor intends or means, but how others react to his words and actions—that is, how those words and actions make the receiver feel. (See Watch What You Say; Those Who Read and Hear are Alive.)

How does this jibe with the project to change perception with language? Postmodernism is a political project in which language is seen as a useful means of inventing reality rather than conveying reality. There is intentionality; it means to assert the legitimacy of its method by changing assumptions. If language conveys reality, this suggests that there is an external and shared world that exists independently of language; the function of deconstruction is therefore what postmodernists call “problematization.” The praxis of problematization destabilizes fixed meanings and challenges and even transgresses established norms. By selectively embracing multiple perspectives through the epistemic privileging of knowledge systems and experiences of marginalized groups, postmodernists undermine dominant discourses they claim to marginalize certain identities. Thus deconstruction represents a destabilizing move that clears the way for an alternative description and explanation of reality, one that moves from shared and objective truth to individual and subjective “truths.”

Normally, we use language to communicate and gain insights into shared reality. In natural history, language evolved to coordinate social action. Science depends on this function. To say language invents reality is different from saying language shapes perception of reality, which is a well-known anthropological fact; our understanding of reality is not fixed or absolute but is subject to the cultural, historical, and social influences of language; rather, if language invents reality, then ontological claims, i.e., claims about being, dissolve in a prevailing epistemological system, with truth claims depending on who commands the system. I will put aside the paradox of such a conflation for now and focus on the claim that what is real reduces to construction through language and other forms of symbolic communication.

Deconstructionism becomes significant in the way postmodernism and critical theory corrupted by it view the role of language in constructing reality. Postmodernism emphasizes the subjective nature of knowledge, the influence of discourse and language in shaping reality, and the plurality of interpretations, which means there is no one truth to be ascertained. It’s all a matter of standpoint, which can be reduced to each individual. Deconstruction aligns with postmodern principles by critiquing the notion of stable meaning and the existence of fixed truths, supporting the postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives, i.e., grand overarching explanations of history or society, and the rejection of essentialist concepts that claim to capture the essence of any subject. (There’s another paradox here with respect to queer theory, which I will take that up in a future essay.)

Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist known for his influential ideas on postmodernism, hyperreality, and his formulation of the concept of the simulacrum. I teach Baudrillard in my freshmen seminar People, Machines, and Monsters. One of his notable works, the book my students read, is Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981, in which Baudrillard explores the concept of the “precession of simulacra.” The concept means to convey the idea that, in contemporary society, the relationship between reality and its representation has been fundamentally altered to the point where the representation precedes and shapes our understanding of reality, rather than the other way around. For Baudrillard, simulations or copies of reality have become more powerful and influential than the actual reality they are (at least were) meant to represent. This is the postmodern condition.

Baudrillard’s treatment is useful because his sociology grounds him in a method realistic enough to distinguish between postmodernism as an epistemic approach to interpretation of images and texts and postmodernism as a condition of late capitalism. I would use different language, of course, describing the present situation as authoritarian state capitalism dependent upon what Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism” rather than naked force is usefully captured by the concept of the postmodern—for a society governed by the social logic of modernity would appear very differently than contemporary society. (See Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint.) I will leave to the reader to learn, if he has not already, more about the way Baudrillard reworks Marx’s theory of the commodity (use and exchange value) for the postmodern condition. It is not necessary to know the totality of Baudrillard’s contribution in the area to understand his thesis regarding the precession of simulacra.

A simulacrum is a representation of a presumptively actual thing. Simulacra abound. There is hyperreal tourism (Disneyland and Disney World), which create artificial and idealized versions of experiences and real-world places that often bear little resemblance to the original cultural and geographical contexts that inspires them. Virtual reality and video games provide simulated and highly-immersive experiences; players interact with artificial worlds that have no direct connection to the physical reality they actually inhabit (which postmodernist suggest are themselves artificial). In modern media culture, news stories and representations of events are simulated. Well-known brands and logos have become simulacra, representing more than just the products or services they offer; they symbolize aspirations, cultural meaning, and lifestyles that go beyond their original functional purposes. The development of virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri presents simulacra in the form of computer-generated voices that interact with users. These virtual entities have no physical existence as sentient things but simulate human-like interactions, and the humans in the interaction treat them as persons. On social media platforms, individuals construct idealized versions of themselves as avatars, online personas that may differ significantly from their real-life identities, leading to the routine practice of self-representation as simulacra. Buildings and entire towns designed to replicate famous landmarks from different cultures are simulacra, offering artificial representations with no direct link to the original cultural and historical contexts. Pushing this idea further is the town Disney constructed, Celebration, that has no original but is a simulacrum constructed from architectural and cultural typifications of small towns. It is simultaneously a real town.

This idea of simulacra is explored in numerous novels and movies. The one that stands out in my estimation is the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in which author Philip K. Dick explores themes of authenticity and identity and the blurred line between humans and machines. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner is based on this book. This story is the jewel at the heart of my freshman seminar. Set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future, where, due to radiation poisoning, many humans have emigrated to off-world colonies, leaving behind a desolate and decaying Earth, the story follows Rick Deckard, an Earth-bound bounty hunter tasked with “retiring” (terminating) rogue androids which are virtually indistinguishable from humans and are equipped with advanced AI and synthetic emotions. The central conflict of the film involves six highly sophisticated Nexus-6 androids, referred to as “replicants” in the film, which escape from an off-world colony and come to Earth. The replicants wish to reach Tyrell in order to be modified; they have been given a four-year lifespan and want more life (which in the end they discover is not possible given their design). The book and film have significant differences, but the problem of differentiating reality from simulation is common to both.

In a theme fleshed out in the book, hinted at times in the film, owning a living animal has become a status symbol in this culture. Most animal life has been wiped out, and actual animals are expensive. Many possess artificial animals in a desperate attempt to connect to nature, and the goal of the industry producing them, the Rosen Association (the Tyrell Corporation in the film), is to make as realistic as possible the simulations. In the book, Rick Deckard owns a synthetic animal, an electric sheep, which he keeps as a substitute for a real one. In the film, in an interaction with a replicant named Rachael, Deckard notes an owl in a conference room at the Tyrell Corporation:

Rachael: Do you like our owl?

Deckard: It’s artificial?

Rachael: Of course it is.

Deckard: Must be expensive.

Rachael: Very.

Later, Deckard asks the replicant Zhora, employed as an exotic dancer at a nightclub called The Snake Pit, whether the snake she dances with it real.

Deckard: Is this a real snake? 

Zhora: Of course it’s not real. You think I would be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?

In both the book and the film there is a test called the “Voigt-Kampff test” that bounty hunters (or blade runners, in the film) use to determine if an individual is human or an android. The Voigt-Kampff test is a fictional empathy test designed to assess emotional responses, as androids lack genuine human emotions and empathy. The test involves posing a series of questions and scenarios to the subject while monitoring physiological responses such as changes in heart rate, perspiration, and pupil dilation. The theory is that humans will respond emotionally to questions about morally challenging situations, while androids will lack the appropriate empathetic reactions. As the story unfolds the distinction between humans and androids becomes increasingly ambiguous, raising questions about the nature of consciousness, empathy, and what it means to be human.

Deckard experiences moments of uncertainty about his own identity, whether he may be an android himself, and grapples with existential questions similar to those he hunts. What drives Deckard is the quest for authentic experiences in a dystopian and hyperreal world. One of the lines from the film, uttered by Eldon Tyrell, the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation, a man driven to engineer replicants with heightened emotional capabilities and complex cognitive functions, seeking to surpass the boundaries of what is traditionally considered human, speaks to the end of the precession of the simulacra, which we are now coming to: “‘More human than human’ is our motto,” Tyrell tells Deckard.

Baudrillard identifies four stages in the precession of simulacra. In the first order of simulacra, representations are based on a simple reflection of reality. There is a clear connection between the sign (representation) and the referent (the real object or event it represents). It is a faithful copy of the referent, the original. For example, a photograph is something of a first-order simulacrum, as it is a direct representation of the object or scene it captures. It is of course one-dimensional and cannot capture the thing itself. No copy of something can represent the thing itself, thus simulacra vary in their capacity to represent reality. In the second order of simulacra, representations are no longer a direct reflection of reality but a simulation or copy of the original. There is still a semblance of connection to the real, but the representation starts to deviate from the actual referent. An example of this is the use of advertising, where images or slogans depict products in idealized ways that may not necessarily reflect the reality of the product. It is here that stereotype and typification are found, which serve as the basis of successive-order simulacra.

Stereotypes are simplified and standardized representations about a particular group of people based on shared characteristics or attributes. These characteristics are often exaggerated or oversimplified. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neutral. Stereotyping is a natural cognitive process that helps individuals process large amounts of information quickly. Typifications are similar to stereotypes, but are more focused on categorizing individuals based on specific observable characteristics or behaviors. A typification involves abstracting and classifying individuals or groups based on certain traits or actions they display. Typifications can be useful in understanding general patterns and tendencies among individuals. However, like stereotypes, they can also be limiting if they prevent people from recognizing individual differences or lead to unfair judgments and prejudicial treatment. They are the source of generalized second-order simulacra.

In the third order of simulacra, the simulation or representation has completely detached from any connection to reality. It becomes a hyperreal, a self-referential system that bears no resemblance to the original. The simulation becomes its own reality, and the distinction between the representation and reality blurs. An example of third-order simulacra is the simulated reality in video games or virtual reality, where users can interact with lifelike environments that have no direct correspondence to any physical reality or fact of nature. This is the arena of the hyperreal, the creation of representations that have no referents. Rachael and Zhora are third-order simulacra.

In the fourth order of simulacra, the hyperreal has become so pervasive that the idea of simulation collapses altogether; there is no distinction between reality and simulation. It becomes a world of pure simulation, without any reference point to reality. In this stage, everything is a simulation, and there is no original reality left to refer back to. This is the situation presented in the Matrix, a 1999 film written and directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Larry and Andy, both of whom are now trans identifying). The difference between virtual reality and the matrix is that one lives in the latter—and doesn’t know that he lives in it. Neo, the central character in the Matrix, is pulled from the only world he has ever known and delivered into the reality he never knew, a brutal and unforgiving world, then shown the desert of the real, a simulation of the actual world the Matrix conceals.

* * *

Baudrillard warns that as we move into higher orders of simulacra, the relationship between signs and their referents becomes more complex, and the direct connection to reality is gradually diminished, leading to the emergence of hyperrealities and simulations that are removed from the original reality they were meant to represent. Somewhere towards the end of the precession, we no longer see the symbols that communicate the simulation, as the liberated could in the Matrix—and Neo unaided by technology. All we see if the stimulation, which could very well include us. As I noted, Deckard has doubts about himself. And so does this individual:

A couple things that show how blatantly male this video is:

1. Framing the value of a woman as dependent on the utility of her vagina to men “[your vagina] didn’t because valuable until you were an adult?” 🤔

2. This statement alone: “why is it that we call this thing that… pic.twitter.com/kWuiXtu5gu

— Right Side of History™️ (@xxclusionary) July 25, 2023

I do not subscribe to TikTok, the presumed source of the video. I do not know this person’s name. I don’t care to. I do know the person’s gender, however. This is a man. This man very much desires to be a woman but knows he is not one, so he needs to erase women as an essential category and replace them with a simulacrum, one that he can step into—a woman suit, if you will. A stereotype. This is what serial killer Jame Gumb, whom the media has dubbed “Buffalo Bill” because he “skins his humps,” is seeking in Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs; denied gender-affirming surgery by the industry, autogynephile Gumb is building a woman suit out of the skins of young obese women he kidnaps and keeps in his basement. (In the movie Blade Runner, Detective Harry Bryant, the chief of the Replicant Detection Unit and Rick Deckard’s boss, refers to replicants as “skin jobs.”)

The man in the TikTok video admits that, while in Asgard he can be anything he wishes, back on Midgard, back on Earth, on the other end of the rainbow bridge, he is not a woman, so he means to convince his audience (himself) that nobody really is. It is a mythical thing. After all, a woman is only a woman because she was assigned that status at birth. She is a therefore a “cis woman,” whereas the “trans woman” achieves his status. “Trans woman are women,” Stonewall tells us, since anyone can be one, and the claim that they are not leans into privilege—a special right only cis women do not deserve; owning and asserting the privilege makes the cis woman a bigot; attempting to resist the erasure of that privilege makes her a reactionary, a fascist (a lesbian is that for just being).

With the construct cis gender defined as somebody who “identifies” with the gender they were “assigned” at birth, as if the category woman could be either an achieved or an ascribed status, gender ideology tacitly assumes that if an individual identifies as a woman that person conforms to societal stereotypes associated with women. Otherwise, even if one cannot define what one is, how would one know if one is not one? The trans identifying man dresses as he imagines women are supposed to dress. Sometimes he significantly alters his body’s appearance with hormones and surgeries to look like what he imagines women look like. Imagine that he may in the future have parts of braindead women grafted on and transplanted into his body. A slippery slope? This is something the man in the video tells us is on the way. And he is not the only one. Indeed. Not as slippery slope. A project.

The appearance of women is variable. The man’s only reference in fashioning his SSI is something he must appropriate from his environment, a stereotype, a reductive representation of women in a particular place at a particular time, often the type of women he’s attracted to, which is why he most often appears as a commercial exaggeration, an unreasonable facsimile of a woman, typically an exotic dancer, a porn star, or a prostitute—a sex worker. Do you now see the function of exposing children to drag queens in libraries and night clubs? (See Clowns are Scary; Luring Children to the Edge; If All This Strikes You as Perverse, You’re Right. It is; ) Do you now see why children are asked by the counselors and teachers whether they really are what they think they are? (See Ideology in Public Schools—What Can We Do About It?) Do you now see why it is so important for you to use the chosen or preferred pronouns, which we are now being told are not chosen. (See NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech.)

By reducing natural history of a metanarrative and then rejecting the truth of the narrative, gender ideology simultaneously denies and disrupts the ontological character of the category while overlooking the complexity and diversity of manifestations of women, their appearances and their experiences, assuming that all women conform to a stereotype or one in a set of stereotypes, historically defined by men, by identifying as women—that women identify as women instead of being women. Woman is a persona, a costume; it’s a role, John Money told us; it’s performative, Judith Butler tells us; the category is not fixed. But the reality is that gender is neither achieved nor ascribed; it is a natural category, an adult female human, an evolved being, the result of natural history, that can present and act in an infinite number of ways. The tom boy is not a boy, but is a girl. Without or without her breasts, she will become a woman.

Gender ideology defines women and men in terms of what is perceived as feminine and masculine, attributes that are themselves abstract representations of the gender binary that is denied by poststructuralism in its rebellion against structure and science. We see this not only in the way trans identifying men appropriate a stereotype of a woman, but in those who claim to be genderfluid, presenting one day (or moment) as feminine, the next day (moment) as masculine, both presentations stereotypical—and then completely giving away their gender on the days they present as androgynous (if they can manage to pass otherwise). The binary presentations are always representations of stereotypes in a cultural space and time, in the pink and the blue of the trans flag. But few can pass as what they are not. Genderfluid, like the unicorn of the trans woman, is make-believe. Admitting that unicorns are make-believe doesn’t erase the fact of unicorns, it just specifies what sort of fact the unicorn is.

We see this elsewhere, in the switching of personas (in a system of, often comical, often terrifying stereotypes) by those claiming to have multiple personality or dissociative disorder (MPD). We see this in young people sharing DSM-5 diagnoses and then learning to wear the checklist convincingly (self-institutionalization). We see this in pods of girls in social media chatrooms catching Tourette’s. (See Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?; See also The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.) We see this in the disappearance of lesbians, a phenomenon Katie Herzog analyzes in her 2020 article “Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?” We see this with furries, individuals who have a strong interest in anthropomorphic animal characters, often represented in art, literature, and media. Anthropomorphic characters are animals with human-like traits and characteristics, such as walking on two legs, talking, and exhibiting human emotions. These are just some of simulacra that walk on the postmodern landscape.

* * *

In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard discusses the “map-territory relationship.” This concept explores the relationship between representations (maps) and the reality they are intended to represent (territory). Baudrillard refers to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “On Exactitude in Science.” In the story, Borges presents a fictional tale about an ancient civilization that creates a map so detailed that it covers the entire empire to the point where it becomes the same size as the territory itself. Baudrillard uses Borges’ story as a starting point to discuss the concept of hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation, drawing parallels between the map in Borges’ story and the modern society’s tendency to create simulations, images, and signs that begin to replace or overshadow reality. For Baudrillard, the proliferation of simulations and signs in contemporary society leads to the blurring of the distinction between reality and hyperreality, where the signs and simulations become more real or significant than the original referents they are meant to represent. By referencing Borges’ story, Baudrillard is warning of the appearance of copies or simulations that have no original or reality to refer to. We can apply this observation to the function of praxis in gender ideology where activists are encouraged to transgress boundaries rationalized as arbitrary and oppressive, action presuming that norms are constructed a priori to meet imperatives of an oppressive society. (The fallacy of illegitimate teleology appears baked into French philosophical traditions.)

In traditional cartography, a map is a representation of a geographical territory; in Baudrillard’s analysis, the proliferation of simulations and representations in our society has led to a situation where the map (the representation) precedes the territory (the reality). Simulations and media representations become dominant, shaping our perceptions and experiences of reality. With the proliferation of simulations, we have moved beyond the mere representation of reality into a state of hyperreality. In this condition, simulations and representations become more real and significant than the original reality they are meant to represent. The simulacra become more convincing and influential than the reality they copy. The result of this is the loss of referentiality. The traditional map-territory relationship relies on the referentiality of the map to the territory it represents. For years cartographers have sought a map of the world that accurately conveys its dimensions. In the hyperreal state, simulations no longer have a direct reference to an underlying reality. Accuracy and precision are irrelevant. The relationship between representation and reality becomes detached, leading to a loss of the connection between the two. Baudrillard argues that, in contemporary culture, the boundaries between the simulated representations (maps) and the actual reality (territory) have not only become blurred to the extent that the representations can be mistaken for the reality itself, but that the synthetic would be preferable to the original if awareness were obtained.

This is depicted in the film The Matrix when the character called Cypher, a crew member of the rebel group led by Morpheus, who seeks to free humanity from the Matrix where most humans are unknowingly trapped, betrays the group. Cypher becomes disillusioned with the harsh reality of the real world outside the Matrix and makes a deal with the sentient AI program Agent Smith to be reinserted into the simulated reality and have his memory erased. In exchange, Cypher provides information on the location of Morpheus, who is considered a significant threat to the machines. Similarly, we see with trans activists, for the most part trans identifying men, who are prepared to betray others to validate the simulation they desperately wish to live in—right down the demand that we erase their existence as a man by demanding the state punish those who deadname them or misgender (i.e, correctly gender) them. We are to erase our memory of the truth of gender and replace it with a simulation without any actual referents. And so the corporate state tells us how we must think about gender, even if it contradicts the evidence of your eyes and ears—until that time when your eyes and ears will betray you. (See Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module.)

As I wrote above, a woman, the adult female human, can be represented in many ways, and has been throughout history and across culture, but gender ideology cherry picks culturally and temporally specific attributes of women’s identities and experiences without considering or acknowledging the individual perspectives and choices women make in their lives. The trans identifying man is not what he wishes to be—or how he wishes others would see him. He cannot even know what it feels like to be that which he isn’t, so he seeks to blur the lines between reality and simulation, attempting to craft a map that precedes the territory, the lay of this land determined by stereotype and typification but which is said to essential and nonessential simultaneously, a pending entry in the Newspeak dictionary. This is why we are told that a man does not think he is a woman when he identifies as such but that he is in fact a woman, his authentic self there from the beginning. His gender, preexisting, and contrary to his sex, is found and affirmed. “Trans women are women.” To fail to affirm his gender is an act of genocide, for he is at once a woman and a member of an oppressed sexual minority. But what he is has not actual definition. It is whatever he says it is.

The same is true for all individuals who imagine themselves to be what they are not. A furry may have a cat identity, but he cannot know what it feels like to be a cat. Like a child, he can only pretend to be such a thing. (Remember how much it annoyed your parents when you acted like a cat or a dog? That’s because badly acting like something you’re not is obnoxious and creepy.) But he does not have to be a cat since he can be a cat-human, walking about upright.

In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith long ago told us that the only way any of us can know what some other person thinks or experiences is through our imagination, and our imagination depends on the cultural and social materials available to us, by abstracting from concrete instantiations of the thing itself a symbolic representation of it. If we attempt to render the abstraction in concrete form, we find that it is a copy of a copy or a representation of a representation, not the thing itself, a degree of abstraction distancing representation of some thing from its original referent, thereby, and only falsely, disconnecting women from the reality of the category. This is what “cis” means to convey: an actual woman is not really a woman, but a person who identifies as that which she was assigned at birth.

By assuming the term “cis,” and the Ministry of Love demands we all do, it is implied that women who identify as such are endorsing the stereotypes that the trans identifying man appropriates to convey his belief that he is what he cannot know internally, that is, what it is to be women. The slogan “Trans women are women” is like “2+2=5,” and it is not merely a demand to lie, but a demand to believe what cannot be true: that women are nothing essential, they are not natural things, but some thing to be acquired, possessed. A woman suit. Denied the truth that she is her body, the woman becomes arbitrary in order to make way for the copy to assert its authenticity; the trans identifying man is no mere symbol, but an intentional agent affecting reality. There is a thing-in-itself there—and it is a man wishing to impose a self-serving order on the world at the expense of others. Not erasing him requires erasing women.

When the trans-identifying man says he is more of a woman than the woman who can only assume she is a women, because the man has, to use the words of the man in the video, “picked out his own curtains” (sometimes the line is rendered with “drapes”), he boasts of his effort to be what the cis woman has been ascribed while denying that woman is not anything but what she is: the result of natural history, which can be many things, including appearing as stereotypically male—something the trans woman could accomplish without changing a thing. (He would of course suffer the pain of his alleged misgendering far more than the stereotypically butch woman.) This creates a system in which women are assumed to support feminine stereotypes merely by not choosing an alternative identity; hence the need for a special name of the category of simply being a woman. 

When a woman, an adult female human, says that she is real, the trans identifying man hears her telling him that he is fake. Fake implies inferior, he complains, as if he is a bad copy of a woman. He is indeed a bad copy, only slightly less frightening than Buffalo Bill. You hear danger when the trans identifying man says that being born with a “pussy cat” (a vagina) only makes the woman a coward (a fraidy cat, he should have thought to say). He asks why so many men would rather kiss a puppy dog than a kitty cat. Would they? He is, of course, thinking of himself. He is an autogynephile, a narcissist who is in love with himself imagined as a woman, prepared to use women to reach this end. In truth, he sees women as inferior, as he is a misogynist, a man more woman than woman if he just puts his mind to it. A man more human than a woman, which is why the woman possesses a privilege—a special right to be who she is—and not an objective sex-based right. After all, he had to make an effort to appear as a stereotype of a woman, a simulacrum locked in space and time—and even then with cultural and regional variation. He asks rhetorically, What makes a woman a woman intrinsically? Babies? But trans men have babies. The ability to conceive? They’re working on that in labs all over the world. Soon “cis-women” won’t be necessary. See? There is nothing essential about womanhood after all.

Here’s the better slogan, then: “Transgenderism is transhumanism.” The man in the video is more human than human because he is a simulacrum of a woman, a bad copy, to be sure, but one that is superior because it is not the original, which is deceit. And it will be getting better with technological advance, a project in which we must involve everybody. He laments, “You are the blue print, and I am the copy.” Then he attempts to save himself from his insight: “Then why do you change all the same things we do?” Why do women seek plastic surgery? The patriarchy? Internalized misogyny? Isn’t that what is causing young females at an alarming rate to remove their breasts and sterilize themselves? On his question of whether the original blue print, the mother of our species, the mitochondrial Eve, would recognize the original and its copy as the same species, the answer is, yes, of course she would; humans have an evolved gender-detection module, and it is almost never fooled. Eve would never confuse this man with a woman. She had a few. He never will.

The man has warped his body into a bad copy of a woman, a shabby third-order simulacrum. He is desperate to live in the fourth order where he doesn’t have to defend his existence to those who live in the actual world. He has allies who affirm his delusion. He enjoys the power of the state and the law at his back. But it is not enough. He knows others know he is not really what he thinks he is—and they know that he knows he is not really what he thinks he is. The only shot he has as validating himself as something he cannot be is if he can find some way to compel the rest of us to live in the fourth order with him. To deny the real and enter the Matrix. That’s what is at stake here. Transgender ideology is totalitarian ideology. Resist it while you can.

The trans woman is not even liminal except in the effect he has on others—and he only has that effect if we let him, which we do when we treat him as a ritual object, a totem, a fetish, in this religion of wokeness. He is not really betwixt and in between. He is not somehow across from his gender. He is deeply deluded and profoundly alienated from self. He is at once a frightful sight and an unstable weapon. However, with respect to gender, he is nothing else but a man.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one’s subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one’s thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled…, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.” —George Orwell, “In Front of your Nose” (1946).

Global climate change (GCC) is like the lie of systemic racism in policing and incarceration—both are designed to achieve a political goal. The same group of people are behind it: transnational corporatists advancing woke progressive ideology. This tells you the goal, but to make it explicit: The goal is a new world order rooted in a new but familiar mode of production, a global neofeudalism that erases democratic-republican values and liberal freedoms and transcends national boundaries, imaginary boundaries that may be maintained for show, with an extensive planetary social control apparatus. The United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Union (EU), along with non-governmental organizations, such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), seek a new world order, are designing and implementing the control apparatus, which includes policing powers and a global military for (NATO). China is the proof of concept for music of the domestic control apparatus. This is the Great Reset. The 15-minute city. Social credit scores. De-banking and De-platforming. Total and perpetual surveillance.

China's Surveillance State

Facial recognition and ID check required for entering gas station.

If you are being blacklisted by Social Credit System, no gas for your car!! 🚨🚨🚨

🔊 pic.twitter.com/aMimrws29t

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) July 27, 2023

You will remember that Europe was also engulfed in the Black Lives Matter hysteria, too. Why? To delegitimize western civilization and the enlightenment by making it appear to be a racist project. And we cannot forget the COVID-19 pandemic, which was designed and implemented to advance the socialization of social control techniques and technologies. The global climate change hysteria has both these objectives in its logic.

Where is the panic over the fact that China—with 1.4 billion people—is building the equivalent of about two new coal fired plants daily? India—also 1.4 billion people—pumps astonishing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere every year—some 4 billion metric tons of it. China generates 11.5 billion metric tons of CO2 annually. China is a brutally racist country (look at the treatment of the Uyghurs). China runs on wage slavery. For whom do the slaves toil? Chinese and western transnational corporations. Where is the panic over the treatment of ethnic groups in China, or with the super exploitation of proletarian labor?

To be sure, corporations are polluting the environment. For example, forever chemicals are being pumped into the biosphere that reduce fertility through endocrine disruption and synthetic estrogen production. Chemicals that are known to cause endocrine disruption and synthetic estrogen production when introduced into the environment are called Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs). EDCs interfere with the endocrine system, which is responsible for regulating various physiological processes through the release of hormones, including hormones that regulate the physiology of reproduction. EDCs can alter, block, and mimic the natural hormones in the body, leading to a range of adverse effects in humans and wildlife. One of the well-known effects is the synthetic production of estrogen-like compounds, which disrupt the hormonal balance in animals and carries serious consequences for reproductive development and health and other biological processes.

There are many examples of EDCs. Here are some that disrupt normal reproductive physiology: Bisphenol A (BPA), found in plastic products, food can linings, thermal paper receipts, among other things. BPA mimics estrogen and interferes with hormone signaling. Phthalates, used in plastics, personal care products, and medical devices, disrupt the endocrine system, particularly affecting the reproductive system. Dioxins are released as byproducts of certain industrial processes and waste incineration. These are highly toxic and disrupt hormone function. Atrazine, which you may have heard mentioned recently in corporate state propaganda smearing RFK, Jr., is a widely used herbicide in agriculture. Atrazine has been associated with feminization of male frogs and has been suspected to impact human health as well. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), formerly used in electrical equipment and various industrial applications, while banned, persist in the environment, and disrupt hormone signaling. This is a big issue in the Fox River here in Green Bay with the paper mills, which got me in some trouble several years ago when I presented a paper criticizing the plan of “natural attenuation.” Organophosphate pesticides, widely used in agriculture, interfere with the nervous and endocrine systems. Synthetic hormones, e.g., ethinyl estradiol, are present in some pharmaceuticals designed to regulate the reproductive capacity, and enter the environment through wastewater discharges.

The human population, as well as numerous species of wildlife, are being feminized through the large-scale introduction of forever chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system and alter the hormonal balance of the affected organism. Big Chemical, Big Agriculture, and Big Pharma all know about this. The regulatory agencies all know about this. Whether the effects of these chemicals are the purpose of exposing the environment to them is beside the point. Actions become intentional when those who perpetrate them know the effects of them.

The presence of these chemicals in the environment can occur through various means—agricultural runoff, industrial discharges, improper disposal of products, and wastewater treatment processes (which is recycled as fertilizing water). Many countries have regulations and guidelines to limit the use and release of EDCs to presumptively minimize their impact on the environment and public health. Some still functioning democracies actually work to mitigate their impacts. But more often than not, they disseminate misinformation and disinformation to confuse and distract the public. There is a massive effort in the US to conceal and obfuscate the significances of these chemicals in our environment. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is running as a candidate for president for the Democratic Party, talks about this and the media treats his revelations are paranoid. Alex Jones of InfoWars talked about the effect of endocrine disruptors several years ago. Corporate propagandists extracted a sound bite and AstroTurfed it to mock Jones and indirectly those who might listen to him. They are trying to do the same with RFK, Jr., accusing of being “anti-vax” and “anti-Semitism.”

Resource extraction and pollution of the air, soil, and water is a massive problem. But the elites don’t care about that. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), established in the 1970, is not so much a corporate-captured regulatory agency as it is a cover for pollution after being exposed by environmentalists in the 1960s (for example Rachel Carson and her 1962 blockbuster Silent Spring). This is the function of all regulatory agencies and advisory bodies: to cover for the harm corporations visit on humans and their biosphere. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) exposes populations to a vast inventory of harmful chemicals and therapeutics. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) green lights GMOs (genetically-modified organisms), pesticides—yet another vast inventory of destructive chemicals. These agencies dovetail with non-governmental organizations—the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA), the American Medical Association (AMA), the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)—to legitimize profit generation at the expense of human populations and the biosphere. Elites don’t care about all this harm—for the harm produced it is the source of the opulence and life of leisure (private jets, yachts, mansions, pedophile rings) the elites and their functionaries enjoy. They only care that you don’t know or think about any of that.

https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1684329826524577795?s=20

Elites want you to focus instead on the abstract notion of human-caused global climate change, a theorized phenomenon enjoys no empirical support. They want to blame you, the human population, so they can bring about a regime of total social control under a centralize command structure run by a transnational corporate and world financial alliance.

You already know the experts are lying to you. Everything they told you about SARS-CoV-2—the nature of the disease, the lockdowns, masks, social distancing, the safety and efficacy and benefit of mRNA and V-vector platforms— all of it was either misinformation or disinformation or lying. Since all the information to know this was available while they were rolling out the pandemic, which is how I was able to keep readers of Freedom and Reason informed through the entire episode on this forum which is not yet subject to censorship (I download my blog on a routine basis just in case), elites conspired with legacy and social media platforms to censor and obscure this information. We learned about the Deep State-Twitter collusion a while ago., thanks to Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. Now we have learned the Biden Administration was instructing Facebook to take down posts about COVID’s origins. And Google’s de-boosting of my content is obvious in a cursory search of key terms specific to my site. Why? Because the Chinese origins of COVID (a) implicates the US government in using Chinese (and Ukrainian) laboratories to pursue the gain-of-function experiments that produced the SARs viruses (a paused program Antony Fauci, NIAID Director from 1984 to 2022 covertly restarted using the Trump Administration; and (b) China’s slave labor force produces cheap commodities for western transnational corporation (TNCs).

This is @RobertKennedyJr early in the pandemic when they first did the lockdowns, masks, and were planning the vaccine with warpspeed, long before he planned on running for president.

Righteous indignation. Find yours. pic.twitter.com/gsIB8Cl8sL

— Inversionism (@Inversionism) July 26, 2023

They lied to you about systemic racism. They lied to you about COVID-19. They’re still lying about both those things. They’re lying to you about global climate change. The transnational elite has engineered a vast fog machine. The large wind turbines require a tremendous amount of energy to operate. Wind plants must use electricity from the grid, which is powered by coal, gas or nuclear power. They kill wildlife and generate noise pollution. They rapidly deteriorate and are made of materials that cannot be recycled. Taxpayers subsidize the industry. The lithium batteries that power electric vehicles (EVs) are built from material extracted from from the Earth, destroying ecosystems. The electricity that charges them comes from coal, gas, or nuclear power. The spent batteries contain non-recyclable material that are dumped in a land fill. Wind plants and EVs are means not to reduce use of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. They are means to manufacture the illusion that their “alternatives” will reduce CO2 emissions, conveying the message that CO2 is a problem caused by fossil fuel. With that premise in place, governments move to reduce consumer consumption of gas and oil, which requires a vast infrastructure of social control.

They want to get you out of cars because cars represent autonomy. They want to built cities in such a way that you won’t need a car for work and shopping—and you will need permission if you need to travel further than that. They want to be able to tell you how much food you can eat, how much energy you can use, where you can go, who you can see—and they will be monitoring all of that. They already are. When they control all these things, then they control you. You become entirely dependent on the state. This is what universal basic income (UBI) is about. This is why you see the social credit systems elaborated and socialized around the world. It’s why the Biden Administration had Facebook take down post that showed that argued that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China—because it exposed the agent used to trigger the social control apparatus.

Geologist, Professor Ian Plimer, on the #ClimateScam: "There's nothing unprecedented about [today's climate]."

"This is basically a propaganda campaign by a group who haven't been elected… They want to take over, by changing the whole structure of the economy [and] changing… pic.twitter.com/5nxZ6WYxkg

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) July 28, 2023

You will find in the above tweet very important insights about how elites are able to leverage the deep civilizational socialization of people against them. Elites are taking a very familiar idea to Western people, the myths of the Judeo-Christian faith and putting it in the secular terms—and those on the left are more susceptible to the trick because their faith is not explicit enough to raise suspicion. Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 pandemic works so well for the same reason. Global climate change hysteria is a sublimated form of Christian apocalypticism. Apocalypticism is the belief that the end of the world is imminent. It is accompanied by the idea that civilization, in this case the biosphere, will soon end due to a catastrophic global event. We saw the markers of religious-like faith in the foot-washing and kneeling, the transformation of lawbreakers into martyrs and saints, during the Black Lives Matter riots. We saw the markers of religious-like belief in progressive faith in the technocracy and the expert, analogs to the church and the priest. Woke is a religion, and it is the expression of transnational corporate state power and authoritarian desire. It generates hysteria and and hatred that demands Big Brother.

German MEP, Christine Anderson, has a message for the unelected globalist tyrants at the World Health Organisation:

"This will end if we simply say no. And that's what we're here to do today, because an unelected body like the WHO, [which] is controlled and run by… pic.twitter.com/eXc8Tyou9e

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) July 22, 2023

The corporate state is moving to replace the fundamental law underpinning civil liberties and human rights with an administrative state and technocratic control of populations under cover of pandemic preparedness and combating climate change. We are on the verge of losing our freedom entirely.

Dr. Meryl Nass explains how the WHO's proposed pandemic treaty will enable the WHO "to take over jurisdiction of everything in the world by saying that climate change, animals, plants, water systems [and] ecosystems are all central to health".

In addition to that, it will remove… pic.twitter.com/XKkuN387DP

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) July 27, 2023

I have said this before, but it bears repeating: if the people were united against this we’d have a chance, but the people are not united. On the side, there are people like me who get it and care about democratic-republicanism and humanist and liberal values and principles. On the other side are the progressives who represent the ideological expression of authoritarian state capitalism. They will not change their mind for the same reason a devout Muslim cannot change his mind: the devout Muslim is a zealot. The only way to build the coalition necessary to overthrow the corporate state—or at least limit it severely—will be to reach those out there who are not yet plugged in or who are on the fence. This involves kicking Democrats out of office wherever you can—unless it’s a Democrat like RFK, Jr. who will serve the function of wrecking ball ion the same way Trump broke open the Republican Party. The populist Republicans for the last several months have been kicking open the door and letting America see what the uniparty has done to us for decades. We need more populists like this in office. We need populists to deconstruct the administrative state. If not Kennedy, then Trump. The progressive establishment must be brought down.

USC freshman Bronny James suffered cardiac arrest during practice Monday. Is it commotio cordis, like what allegedly happened Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin? Is it “athletes heart,” what allegedly sidelined Florida basketball forward Keyontae Johnson? “It is definitely not normal for so many mainly young athletes to suffer from cardiac arrests or to die while playing their sport, but this year it is happening. Many of these heart issues and deaths come shortly after they got a COVID vaccine. While it is possible this can happen to people who did not get a COVID vaccine, the sheer numbers clearly point to the only obvious cause.” See the article 1887 Athlete Cardiac Arrests or Serious Issues, 1312 of Them Dead, Since COVID Injection, in Real Science. Facebook has warned me that if I share the link they will de-boost me even more than they already do. “Independent fact checkers” don’t like the link.

You will also find the link on my X (Twitter). I am @andrewwaustin. Don’t leave out the extra “w” (it’s my middle name). While you are there, follow me and like and comment on my tweets. I am still under a strict de-boosting/shadow banning algorithm that was emplaced on my account when I joined in 2012 (likely because of my articles, book chapters, lectures, and speeches on the cabal behind the Second Gulf War. If you are not signed up to X, get an account. Whatever you think of Elon Musk, X is now one of the freest social media platforms out there, and he intimated that he will expand it to end-to-end encryption messaging and other features. The idea is that it will replace YouTube and other single function platforms. This will be a useful development, since YouTube also severely de-boosts and shadowbans me. They have removed several of my vidcasts over the last few years and warned me that they will de-platform me if I continue posting content critical of Big Pharma and the election rigging. I stopped making vidcasts, frankly, because I was endangering my access to the platform which I use to share video lectures for students.

Back to the story, these numbers represent an underreporting of cardiac events among athletes. Many athletes are told not to tell anyone about their adverse reactions and the media is reluctant to report on them. The VAERS woefully undercounts injuries and deaths due to the mRNA shots, but as it stands, this vaccine has injured and killed tens of thousands of people. It’s been an unmitigated disaster—and it neither prevented transmission or illness (but it is altering your DNA). Athletes are disproportionately effected by mRNA, which produces spike protein that attacks ACE2 receptors, which boys and men have more of (yes, gender is real), because of vaccine requirements and strenuous activity and the demands that places on the heart. Many who have cardiac injuries don’t even know their heart has been injured—until it is too late. This is not a matter of becoming aware of cardiac events and deaths among athletes (nor is the rise in autism, the result of the vaccine schedule, a product of greater awareness). This was not happening in the numbers before COVID vaccination. Not even close. And no, catching a cold does not cause more heart injury than the shot. The mainstream media are still not reporting most of these events, but sports news is having real difficulty ignoring the soccer players and other stars collapsing during games and practices due to a sudden cardiac arrest. We also see the announcers dropping on camera. Lots of people are dropping. As of the end of December 2022, the numbers show that most of those athletes who suffer these events die, a staggering 69.4 percent.

I want to take this opportunity to express my sentiments to all of you who shamed people into taking this vaccine, who frightened them with propaganda about protecting parents and killing grandma, who marched their sons to clinics to get jabbed, as well as you who pushed for vaccine mandates (and all the rest of it). Fuck you. I knew about this and told you about this and you treated me like I was crazy and paranoid. Like I can’t read science. Look at the way they’re going after RFK, Jr. Who? Progressives and Democrats. The corporate state. Dr. Joseph Mercola just had his bank accounts cancelled. From Mercola: “Chase bank has shut down our business bank accounts along with the accounts of my CEO and CFO, as well as their family members (including spouse and child). They’ve refused to provide any reason for doing so, the oldest account has been active for 18 years.”They’re hardly alone.

I don’t know how that fascist climbed into your heads but for God’s sake find him and exterminate him. Come back to the side of freedom and human rights. Come home to reason and science. I will welcome you home, but I want to be honest: you will always be sketchy in my eyes until you admit you were wrong. That is a huge part in coming home to reality: admitting you were wrong—wrong on the facts and wrong for trusting the experts. Do it publicly so it counts. Don’t be a sucker. The future of the republic depends on you pulling your heads out of your asses.

The problem is much larger than lethal and injurious mRNA gene therapy. I find it fascinating—troubling, actually—that so many people I know who were all about criticizing globalization, Big Finance, the CIA, the FBI, the DHS, the endless wars, Big Pharma, etc., who were at the same time voting for the Democrat Party, ‘cause, you know, they aren’t the Republicans (no, they’re worse). But then, when it became clear that the Democrats are the party of globalization, the national security state, etc., all the sudden they don’t criticize those things anymore. Rather than abandon the Party they thought represented their allegedly pro-working family views, they jettisoned their principles and values to stay with the Party.

That indicates a real shallow thinking on their part. Because it’s very clear they’d rather be a member of a cultural and political tribe than to be an independent thinker and principled person who uses the skills of critical thinking and scientific methodology to pursue a politics that’s actually going to help the people they claim they represents. It’s as if folks saw Orwell’s nightmare and thought, “What the hell, might as well,” and jumped in. It’s very disappointing, because a lot of people I love have been lost to the madness of authoritarian thought. It’s like a religious consciousness—and the religion is shit. I think that may be the thing that’s most shaken me over the last several years. To see how shallow so many people I know truly are. They left me here sticking with principle and truth. And I’m the weird one. I guess it’s true what they say about separating the men from the boys when the shit hits the fan. That goes for women and girls, too.

“Malinformation,” a term coined by Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, describes information disseminated with alleged malicious intent but which is not false. Unlike “misinformation,” which refers to the dissemination of false and harmful information spread without the intention of causing harm, and “disinformation,” which involves the purposeful dissemination of deceptive content with the aim of causing harm to individuals, groups, organizations, or society as a whole, malinformation is accurate and truthful information that undermines the agendas or interests of some individuals or groups. To be sure, there is malinformation that does unjustifiably inflict harm on persons or groups, such as doxing or swatting, but that isn’t what I am talking about here; I will be using the term in the spirit Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. did when he appeared before the House Committee on the Weaponization of Government. “Malinformation is info that is true but inconvenient to the government, that they don’t want people to hear,” Kennedy said.

Ironically, Democrats began today’s @Weaponization hearing on censorship by voting to censor Robert Kennedy Jr’s testimony. Watch @robertkennedyjr’s answer on my question about #malinformation. pic.twitter.com/KTq5V7UkwZ

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) July 20, 2023

This appears to be the problem progressives have with Florida’s public school curriculum. The content is not false but inconvenient. It malinforms the students by teaching them that whites are not responsible for the situation of black America. Progressives don’t want children exposed to that information—and there are parts of the curriculum progressives don’t want adults exposed to, either.

Democrats, most noisily Vice-President Kamala Harris, who called one of the lesson plans an attempt to “gaslight” students, are suggesting that the curriculum, which can be found here, is an instantiation of white supremacy. Others didn’t hold back. “This is fascism at its best,” Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of the union that represents teachers in Miami-Dade public schools, said. “This is exactly what fascist governments do when they censor teachers, when they go after education, when they try and suppress content from being taught.” Crystal Etienne, a seventh-grade civics teacher in Miami-Dade County, said, “It’s disgusting to use children as pawns in their adult scheme.” She called the changes “indoctrination” in “white, Christian nationalism,” the latest smear category progressives use to demonize those who dissent from the woke agenda. “They feel like if you’re teaching the bad, it somehow takes away from the good and it doesn’t,” she added ironically. Outside Florida, LaGarrett J. King, director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo, said the updates to the Florida curriculum were “anti-Black.”

Dwight Bullard, a former high school history teacher (now the senior political advisor of Florida Rising, a voting rights group in Florida), said in an interview with the Miami Herald that he couldn’t fathom telling his students that there’s a “silver lining in slavery.” He is referring to the lesson plan that has enjoyed the most publicity, which reviews the wide range of habits and skills Africans learned during slavery that they applied to their lives after Emancipation. Like Hernandez-Mats, Bullard reaches for the fascism smear: “Imagine the blowback of the same teacher trying to give you the upside of Nazi Germany,” said Bullard. “Not only would it not be allowed, there would be bipartisan outrage over the idea that any teacher, a teacher or a curriculum trying to give the sunny side of Adolf Hitler. Yet we now have an African American history statute that is supposed to now give you this notion of the benevolent master, or the upside or benefit of being enslaved in America. It’s crazy.” Bullard makes explicit, inverts, and leans into Etienne’s irony: if you’re teaching the good, this takes away from the bad.

Pushing back against the hyperbolic rhetoric are two members of the working group that established the curriculum standards, Dr. William Allen and Dr. Frances Presley Rice. They put the matter well when they told CBS News, “Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history. Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.” They added, “It is disappointing, but nevertheless unsurprising, that critics would reduce months of work to create Florida’s first ever stand-alone strand of African American History Standards to a few isolated expressions without context.”

I need to briefly explain the benchmark coding scheme established by Florida’s State Academic Standards before moving on. The standards are associated by what educators call strands. “SS” refers to the subject area “Social Studies.” “AA” refers to the “African American History” strand (there are several, including American History, Civics and Government, Holocaust Education, and Sociology, to name a few). For example, the code “SS.678.AA.1.1” represents “Social Studies.sixth seventh eighth grade.African American History.standard one.benchmark one.” I know this type of coding can make one feel like he’s trapped in Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, but it’s necessary to organize the amount of information contained in the document.

As noted, the item that appears to have especially triggered Democrats is the requirement for instruction on, to provide the exact language, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The standard comes from section SS.68.AA.2.3, which contains a benchmark clarification “Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).”

I am suspicious of this emphasis on this standard. It feels as if the development of consciousness and the application of skills learned to resistance and survival, in the development of a free and autonomous man, is not really what is eating at progressives. To be sure, I think progressives desire that black people believe that there is nothing they did or could learn from Western culture and that most can and should expect a life of dependency on the state. But there are things in this document that must truly terrify progressives more than noting skill development under slavery. Indeed, it feels as if the focus on this section is a move to dismiss the curriculum without telling the public what the curriculum is really doing; doing so would have white children and black children alike discovering that the plight of black America since the end of segregation is really not the fault of white people. In the post-affirmative action era, this can be a liberating piece of good news.

Progressives must really find triggering section SS.68.AA.1.1, which asks instructors to “IdentifyAfro-Eurasian trade routes and methods prior to the development of the Atlantic slave trade.” This standard contains several benchmark clarifications, including instruction on “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures”; “the similarities and differences between serfdom and slavery”; and the “use of maps to identify trade routes.” Additionally, SS.68.AA.1.2, instructs teachers to “Describe the contact of European explorers with systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then there is SS.912.AA.1.

This standard opens students’ minds to the complex ways in which segmented societies are organized and the character of different forms of exploitation and oppression. They learn that slavery is not always race based. Blacks owned slaves—in Africa and the Americas. In America, blacks owned black slaves from at least the mid-17th century right up until the Civil War. In Africa they still do. Blacks bought, owned, and sold black people for thousands of years. American Indians owned black slaves in North America. The Cherokee were particularly prolific in this regard. White Europeans were enslaved. Barbary Pirates (Arabs and Berbers) kidnapped Europeans and sold them into slavery in Muslim countries. There were Muslim slave markets in North Africa, West Africa, Swahili Coast, Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and eastward. The global slave trade was established by the Islamic world system when Europeans were living in the Dark Ages (if we date that period to the fifteenth century). Africans sold Africans to Muslims who enslaved them—and castrated them by the millions.

If you want to see more, follow the link above or in the citations below the image captures. It’s all there. The curriculum instructs teachers to cover such subjects as the development of labor systems using indentured servitude contracts with English settlers and Africans, the reasons behind the transition from indentured servitude to race-based hereditary slavery, slave trading routes and the horrors of Middle Passage, the use of convict labor, and kidnapping the harsh conditions labor suffered in the colonies, as well as in the Caribbean, Central and South America, including detailing conditions: disease, infant and child morality rates, and malnourishment. As students progress through their education they learn very complex historical facts about such matters as the history and development of slave codes, judicial and legislative actions, African resistance to slavery, and so on.

As you can see, all this lays the ground for a great deal of malformation. It was the United Kingdom and the United States that, in a period of only a few years, abolished the transatlantic slave trade. It was the United States that abolished chattel slavery and spread the ethic of abolitionism across the planet, liberating tens of millions of humans from slavery. Slavery was a legacy institution that had existed for thousands of years before the founding of the United States, the founders of the nation inherited it—and abolished it. (See Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project: The United States and the West Did Not Establish Slavery—They Abolished It.) These facts interfere with the project to make white people solely responsible for all of the misery in the world to reinforce racial resentment and push for reparations and other income and wealth transfers. That’s why these facts—the whole story—are not taught to young people. What progressives want to “teach” young people is not actual history, or how to critically think about the past or the present, but to indoctrinate them in race resentment and ethnic self-loathing. Why doesn’t Africa pay reparations? Why don’t the Arabs pay reparations? Why should any nation or people pay reparations? Blood guilt is primitive and immoral.(See Reparations and Blood Guilt; A specter is haunting America—the specter of reparations; Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment.)

* * *

I know without having to ask that the vast majority of the critics of Jason Aldean and his song “Try that in a Small Town” did not know that the video contains footage performed in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, less than an hour from my home town of Murfreesboro, or that this is the site of the 1927 lynching of a black teenager named Henry Choate. Do they know that many lynchings took place in town squares across the South following Reconstruction? I know this because I’m the scholar who coded the Tuskegee lynching data in machine readable form and published papers on it (see Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide). But is this common knowledge? If the rule now is that you can’t use as settings for country music videos town squares where lynching happened, then there are some beautiful historic locations where many great things also happened that are going to have to avoided.

But why does it matter for a country music video? Choate was killed nearly a hundred years ago. Is anybody who was alive at the time still alive? If so, they would have been a very small child. Reflecting on the fate of Choate, besides noting the terrible history of lynching (something that is obviously important to me), might be useful if there was consideration given to the fact that progressive and powerful presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt did nothing to stop the epidemic of lynching that occurred on their watch. Is that in Florida’s new standards? Does the curriculum include the fact that the Democratic Party was the party of the slavocracy and afterwards the part of Jim Crow?

President Biden has just announced his plans to name a new national monument next week after Emmett Till honoring the black teenager who, in 1955, was beaten, tortured, and shot to death by two white men who threw his body into the Tallahatchie River, his disfigured body discovered days later, an event that helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The monument will also honor his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. The murderers believed they could kill Till without any repercussions due to the deeply entrenched racial prejudice and the prevailing culture of impunity for crimes against blacks in the segregated South. Will Biden dwell on the fact that the Democratic Party had a long-standing and dominant presence in the state of Mississippi at that time, that it held considerable control over the political and social landscape of Mississippi during the era of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws? Is this why he is doing this? Don’t kid yourself.

Folks do realize how much woke progressives loathe small towns and the common man, right? That’s what this is really about. Remember Barack Obama’s comment about “bitter” voters who cling to guns and religion during the 2008 presidential campaign? Perhaps it’s fitting that the comment was made during a private fundraising event in San Francisco. “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Note how the very things that created that situation of frustration for small town Americans, namely immigration and globalization, are portrayed as rationalizations that explain away a situation that could have no other explanation than that people who cling to god and guns are backwards and bigoted (Obama and Marx On Religion).

Believe me. I have heard this sentiment many times in the academy. Small town people and the fly-over states are not supposed to play a role in American politics. So when they speak up in defense of their children in public school or against crime and violence and the culture that drives it, they’re smeared as bigots, fascists, and racists. When they ask why our borders are not being defended, they’re smeared as nativists and xenophobes. Good thing the Department of Homeland Security is watching them. (See MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin; Democrats Have Declared Parents Who Care About Their Children “Fascist”; The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males. What’s This All About?; Cancelling Half the Nation: Progressives Reach for One-Party Rule.)

The condemnation of Aldean is a symbolic condemnation of small-town America, where people take care of each other and follow the law. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “Try that in a small town”—and hoped that force would be in back of sentiment. Aldean is channeling the spirit of the people, the dozens of millions of people who live outside the big cities where homelessness, poverty, crime, deviance, decadance, and violence are rampant. Shall I once more point out that the most crime ridden and violent cities in the United States are run by progressives? It is often the case that more black men are killed every year in progressive-run cities that were lynched by whites in the entire history of America. (See America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame; How Progressive Criminal Justice Policy Puts Black Lives at Risk; Race and Violent Death in America) What will solve this problem? Dwelling on a one-side narrative about slavery? Banning guns? (See Is It Guns?) Or focusing on all the ways America has delivered on its promise, all the paths to success that are as much there for black youth as they are for white youth, and criticizing the dysfunctional culture, broken family system, and the welfare state that lies at the heart of the problems confronting black America. (See Poor Mothers, Cash Support, and the Custodial State.)

I think my favorite moment from the Oversight and Accountability Committee of the House of Representatives on July 19, 2023 was when Representative Timothy Burchett, who graduated with his undergraduate degree from the same university where I obtained my graduate degree, the flagship campus of the University of Tennessee, asked IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler (Agent X) how the harassment surrounding his exposing the conspiracy to protect President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden has affected him. In detailing his travails, Ziegler talked about his sexual orientation and his husband. 

I had not known before then that Ziegler is homosexual. Of course, that doesn’t matter. People who know me know that doesn’t matter at all. Maybe not everybody knows me that well so there you go. But it did get my attention. Burchett, a good old boy from Tennessee, already knew this, assuming he had listened to Ziegler’s opening testimony (I missed that part of the hearing), but I appreciated very much that the congressman didn’t flinch in thanking Ziegler for his service to his nation and his devotion to the truth—and acknowledging what he and his husband had been through and expressing sympathy for their plight.

Here is what people don’t understand about the moment we’re in and the threat gender ideology—not a good old boy like Timothy Burchett—poses to the gay and lesbian movement. To be sure, before Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Christian conservatives opposed marriage equality. But then so did leading progressives, including Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary, and Barack Obama.

To digress for a moment, Obama ran in 2008 on a platform opposed same-sex marriage. Why? Because “I am a Christian,” he said (Barack Obama: Doing the Lord’s Work). Obama finally supported marriage equality only a few years out from Obergefell. Obama’s change of heart came when it was clear that, if a case came before the Supreme Court concerning the matter, the court would rule it unconstitutional. Obama could see the writing on the wall; obsessed with his place in history, Obama got ahead of the decision. All those who say he only opposed it for political expediency (yes, Obama’s handler David Axelrod tried to take the fall for it) only testify to the shallow disregard Obama has for anything principled. For the record, Hillary Clinton didn’t change her position until well after Obama did—just in time to lose the presidency she was owed to Donald Trump.

Here’s the point: Once marriage equality had been achieved, conservatives (despite being Christian) left heterosexism behind, just as they had left white supremacy behind when the landmark civil rights act was passed during the 1960s. Indeed, with the end of segregation, southerners began their journey out of the party of segregation and into the party of individualism and limited government (see Republicanism and the Meaning of Small Government). These are the values that have always been at the heart of southern conservatism, anyway; that spirit is instinctively opposed to collectivism and big government. With the dismantling of racial hierarchy, there was no reason to associate with Democrats anymore.

“What’s about all this opposition by conservatives in the South to LGBTQ, then?” I can hear readers asking. Here we come upon an instantiation of the way progressives play the public, attaching the objectionable to the accepted and using the result to move the Overton window and then acting as if those who catch them are the bad people. The LGB part of the acronym is qualitatively different from all the rest of it. Sexual orientation is a natural fact; most humans are attracted to the opposite sex (necessary for perpetuating the species), but throughout history some humans are attracted to the same sex. Gender identity, in contrast, is an invention of a small number of sexologists, there crackpot ideas taken up and socialized by gender ideologues who use those ideas to normalize autogynephilia, pedophilia, and other paraphilias.

As gays and lesbians had substantially achieved equality rights, and the momentum clearly indicated that all major goals would soon be achieved, organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign enlarged their focus to perpetuate their bureaucracies and the benefits that accrue to them. Stonewall, the British LGBTQ+ rights organization did the same, including transgender issues in its mission and campaigns gained significant momentum in the early 2010s. Prior to this, Stonewall’s focus was primarily on advocating for the rights of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals. One of the major turning points came in 2015 when Stonewall launched its groundbreaking “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” campaign, demanding legal recognition of gender identity and corporate state policy focused on social inclusion, i.e., promoting trans-inclusive policies in public services, schools, and workplaces.

This phenomenon is often referred to as the “Iron Triangle” or “Issue Network” theory. According to the theory, certain interest groups develop a self-sustaining inertia or momentum due to such factors as financial interest, job creation, and political influence. The close and often cozy relationship between three key actors in the policy-making process, government agencies (executive administrative bodies), legislators (congressional committees), and interest groups (lobbyists) form a mutually beneficial and influential alliance, with powerful forces working together to advance their shared interests. The relationships within the iron triangle can lead to a significant impact on policy decisions, sometimes at the expense of the broader public interest. The Issue Network theory is an extension of the iron triangle concept, recognizing that policy-making involves a more complex web of actors beyond the traditional three (bureaucracy, legislators, and interest groups). In an issue network, multiple actors, including think tanks, advocacy groups, experts, media outlets, academics, and even the general public, engage in a broader discussion around a specific policy issue.

Here’s how it works. Interest groups advocate on behalf of specific causes and seek favorable laws, policies, and regulations that benefit their members. They often have significant financial resources and a strong influence over politicians and policymakers. Congressional committees and executive branch agencies responsible for implementing and enforcing laws, policies, and regulations are brought into the fold. Over time, they develop close ties with specific interest groups, seeking their input and expertise when developing policies. These committees play a crucial role in shaping legislation. They may develop working relationships with interest groups to gain insights into complex issues and receive campaign contributions, which can help them secure re-election. The role of corporate power in all of this ESG, etc. Through this iron triangle, interest groups can have a long-lasting impact on policies and regulations, even when they are nonprofit organizations. The relationships and influence they build with government agencies and congressional committees can perpetuate their existence and allow them to continue advocating for their interests effectively.

Neither articulation can by itself adequately capture the dynamics to explain fully why a special interest group changes or expands its mission to perpetuate its existence. To fully understand this we need to consider the following concepts. First, mission creep or drift for survival. Special interest groups face challenges in maintaining their relevance and financial viability over time, especially after they achieve their objectives. As the political climate, public opinion, and policy priorities shift, an interest group’s original mission may become less influential or less attractive to potential donors. To survive and continue receiving support, the group broadens its mission to encompass related or tangential issues that are currently more prominent.

Thus expanding the mission can be a strategic move to increase the group’s influence and broaden its base of support. By addressing multiple issues, an interest group can appeal to a broader coalition of stakeholders, thereby increasing its political power and fundraising potential. Members and stakeholders of an interest group push for an expanded mission to align with changing objectives or to address emerging challenges in their field, what is coded as “staying relevant.” Additionally, external pressure from competitors or opposing interest groups may necessitate a change in focus to maintain a competitive edge. Special interest groups often rely on financial contributions and resources from their members or donors; to secure ongoing funding, they modify their mission to align with the interests of their major donors or to attract funding from a more diverse donor base. As policies and regulations change, special interest groups adapt their mission to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Expanding the mission enhances the group’s legitimacy and reputation, making it appear more inclusive and responsive to a broader range of issues. 

Conservatives accepted marriage equality. They do not accept gender ideology, which tells them men can be women thus opening a stream of raw commodities for the medical-industrial complex to stamp out synthetic sexual identities. It is the gender ideologues who insist that entirely disparate groups of people must be treated the same and push either for the destruction of sex-segregated spaces (which have zero relationship to the practice of segregating spaces by race) or the selective violation of those spaces by delusion individuals who imperil the achievements of the LGB community. If progressives cared about defending gay liberation, they would decouple from the pathological developments represented by the transgender phenomenon and the queer ideology.  

REVISITING MY DECEMBER 2019 ARTICLE ON THE CONSPIRACY TO REMOVE A PRESIDENT

Thanks to a few brave whistleblowers, Senator Chuck Grassley obtained and has now released the FBI (FD-1023) form accusing Joe Biden and Hunter Biden of coercing Burisma CEO Mykola Zlochevsky into paying them $5 million to remove Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Here’s Grassley’s tweet announcing the release.

🚨 I’ve released the 1023 I’ve been working on getting from the FBI for a yr. Now u can read it for yourself thx to patriotic whistleblowers pic.twitter.com/ooGYR7fU02

— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) July 20, 2023

On December 19, 2019, in an essay titled The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President, I discussed the interest Trump took in Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s activities in Ukraine. Trump had learned that Hunter accepted a board seat on Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings in 2014, which gave the appearance of a political favor to Joe, who was at that time the Vice-President of the United States. But there was something else. There was laptop belonging to Hunter, which former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in possession of, that revealed a global web of corruption by the Biden family that involved elements in Ukraine.

This is a complex web of facts about which I have only touched on a small piece of in my writings. But this piece alone should have, at the very least, prevented Biden from ever occupying the White House. If you scroll down in my December 2019 essay, you’ll find a video of Biden admitting to an audience during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018 that he threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless leadership fired a prosecutor he did not like. Biden brags, “I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

That prosecutor’s name was Viktor Shokin. After Biden’s ultimatum, Shokin was indeed removed from his position as Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, and Yuriy Lutsenko appointed in his place, the man Biden describes in that video as “solid.” Hunter left Burisma in April 2019. Given Joe Biden’s influential role in US policy towards Ukraine, those around former president Barack Obama worried that the Vice-President’s involvement with Burisma would compound the appearance of a conflict of interest and undermine the establishment’s desire to install Biden in the White House after having disposed of Trump on account of the Russian collusion hoax, a piece of the coup that ultimately fell through. Moreover, critical focus on Ukraine might potentially draw attention to the coup the CIA had organized with fascistic elements in Ukraine to draw Russia into a proxy war with NATO, a plot that was eventually successful. (See my February 27, 2022 article for background on this History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War.)

In July 2019, Trump froze $391 million in military aid to Ukraine shortly before a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the current dictator of that country, which is presently at war with Russia. During the conversation, Trump asked Zelensky to initiate an investigation into the Bidens. This incident led to a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump, as it was alleged that he might have used US foreign aid and the Ukrainian government in a quid pro quo to harm Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. It was in essence an establishment-organized reframing of the Ukrainian situation by shifting suspicion from Biden to Trump. In fact, what Trump was doing was acting on his duty as chief magistrate of the federal government to determine whether a former high-ranking government official, namely Biden, had engaged in a quid pro quo with a foreign leader to cover up criminal activity involving his family.

Recall that in July 2019, a whistleblower complaint was filed by a member of the US intelligence community. The complaint alleged that Trump had engaged in improper conduct during a phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky on July 25, 2019. In response to the whistleblower’s complaint and the release of the phone call transcript, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump on September 24, 2019. The House of Representatives drafted and approved two articles of impeachment against Trump, the first charging him with abuse of power for soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 US presidential election, the second accused him of obstructing Congress by refusing to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. The Senate trial took place in the Senate in January 2020 with Chief Justice John Roberts presiding. On February 5, 2020, the Senate voted on both articles of impeachment. To convict and remove Trump from office, a two-thirds majority vote (67 senators) was required. The Senate acquitted Trump on both charges. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with only one Republican, Senator Mitt Romney, voting to convict Trump on one of the articles.

In Grassley’s actions, we can see the other side of Biden’s collusion with corporate powers in Ukraine and why Trump was right to make that phone call to Zelensky—again, it was his duty. The facts are that Shokin was looking into Burisma, and Hunter Biden was brought onto the Burisma board despite having zero experience in this field (energy) in order to leverage his father against that prosecutor to stop that investigation. Here is Grassley’s tweet containing the PDF files of FBI (FD-1023) so you can read them for yourself.

Thx to whistleblowers now the world can see what ive seen & what the FBI tried to conceal Serious allegations from trusted FBI source What did the FBI do to investigate???? pic.twitter.com/7Asokoc6ao

— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) July 20, 2023

Based on information from the FBI’s confidential human source, it is alleged that executives at Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, brought Hunter Biden onto their board with the intention of gaining protection from potential issues through his father, then-Vice President Biden. During that time, Burisma was facing a corruption investigation in Ukraine, led by Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. According to reports, Burisma CEO Mykola Zlochevsky claimed, using the Russian crime slang “poluchili,” that he was coerced into paying $5 million to both Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. He stated that he possesses text messages and recordings indicating that he made these payments to ensure Shokin’s dismissal from the investigation. Zlochevsky mentioned having seventeen recordings in all, fifteen with Hunter Biden and two recordings with Joe Biden, along with documents that contained financial records related to the arrangement.

I want note here that I was telling people about this almost a year before the 2020 election. This was before Emma-Jo Morris, writing for the New York Post (See my October 14, 2020 review of that event: New York Post Drops a Bombshell on the Biden Campaign), who testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government yesterday, exposed the Hunter Biden laptop, which, based on a federal subpoena showing the FBI was in possession of the material her story was based on showing that the government knew about it as far back as December of 2019, the same month and year I published my article on Freedom and Reason—without the benefit of the FBI subpoena. To be sure, it was a circumstantial case, but then the most solid cases are. You don’t need smoking guns or witnesses when you work scientifically. Nothing in the physical universe or in nature provides an observer with a document or a witness explaining what is going on. One determines such things based on the evidence indicating causal relationships. Smoking guns and witnesses only confirm what you already knew.

This is not to diminish Morris’ exposé, which did provide a smoking gun, reporting censored by social media platforms and legacy media, and in which several dozen intelligence agents, including five former CIA directors who, in an historic act of disinformation perpetrated against the American people, lied through their teeth in an open letter to suggest the laptop was Russian disinformation. Those intelligence officials knew that the claim made in that letter wasn’t true. The social media companies knew it wasn’t true. The legacy media knew it wasn’t true. As was shown yesterday during the hearings, the FBI confirmed to Twitter in 2020 before the election that the laptop was real but covered up the details to protect Joe Biden.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate that open letter by intelligence officials concerning the Hunter Biden laptop and Russian disinformation published on October 19, 2020, just weeks before the 2020 US presidential election. If you are not yet convinced that there is a permanent political establishment undermining the integrity of our electoral system, this should do it—if you are a rational being. The letter was signed by fifty former senior intelligence officials alleging that the laptop was potentially tied to Russian disinformation efforts. Some of the notable signatories included John Brennan, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Michael Hayden, former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Leon Panetta, former Director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines – Former Deputy Director of the CIA.

What were the intelligence officials determined to confuse the public about? What is on that laptop? The laptop, abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware, contained a trove of emails and personal documents, as well as photographs and video, indicating criminal behavior and corrupt dealings involving Hunter Biden and foreign entities, particularly in Ukraine and China, activities that include his father, Joe (the “Big Guy”), and Hunter’s uncle, James. The notorious open letter did not provide direct evidence of Russian involvement but cited several factors that raised suspicions, such as the timing of the laptop’s emergence and the suspicious circumstances surrounding its discovery. The letter stated that the signatories believed that the leak of the laptop’s contents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.” It also cautioned the public and the media to be vigilant and not to spread potentially manipulated or false information without thorough verification.

The disinformation campaign continues and has even been take up by artificial intelligence. As you know, I have been beta-testing a few AI systems. I just asked ChatGPT to tell me about the letter and it did. I then asked for a list of the signatories. The chatbot’s response: “I apologize for the confusion, but there seems to be a misunderstanding. As of my last knowledge update in September 2021, there was no ‘open letter by intelligence officials’ concerning the Hunter Biden laptop and Russian disinformation that was signed by 50 former senior intelligence officials or any specific number of intelligence officials.” The chatbot lies and then tells me to consult the very media sources that covered up the laptop story.

We then had this exchange:

I enjoyed seeing Morris gloating yesterday about her vindication by mainstream media concerning her reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop after a concerted effort by deep state and the legacy and social media to censor her work and diminish her as a reporter, all part of a major prong in a color revolution to oust a president the establishment didn’t like and install in his stead a devoted operative in the project to quash populist-nationalism and pursue war in Ukraine. Morris’ gloating was well-deserved and my hat is off to her. I want to take a moment to gloat, as well. My progressive friends and family, as well as colleagues, were so disturbed by what I was talking about in the run-up to the 2020 election that they wondered aloud what was wrong with me. “What’s wrong with Andy?” Nothing. What’s wrong with you? They were wrong and I was right, as has so often been the case over the last several years.

* * *

Note: Consider how sharp he is here. Did something happen between 2018 and 2020? Or is Sleepy Joe Biden an act? Is he trying to manufacture plausible denial if ever his lifetime of corruption comes to light by feigning a dead and desiccated Incan king? Well, it has come to light. You have a front row seat to something—of what I am unsure. Will he resign and be replaced? Or will we continue to be told there is nothing to see here? Whichever it is, you will know now more clearly than perhaps you ever did that there is a permanent political establishment that is working the levers to advance the managed decline of the American Republic. That establishment is in cahoots with the Democratic Party. Wake up to the truth. America will not survive but a few more rounds of this party in power.