Year: 2023

“Joe Rogan Calls Dylan Mulvaney ‘Mentally Ill’ After Bud Light Fiasco.” That’s the headline to a Newsweek article published a few days ago. I missed the episode. He also said that Mulvaney is an “attention-seeking whore.”

In a sense, Rogan isn’t wrong about the mentally ill piece. I say that because I find compelling the argument advanced by Thomas Szasz that, for the most part, mental illness is a myth. Szasz was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist and prominent figure in the deinstitutionalization movement. He believed that mental illnesses were not actual medical conditions, but rather problems in living that should be addressed as personal, social, and even existential matters.

I don’t want to be misunderstood, and the point I wish to make in this essay depends on clarity, so I’m taking just a moment here to summarize Szasz’s argument. It was Szasz’s contention that the concept of mental illness was a metaphorical and functional one, used to label and control individuals whose behavior deviated from societal norms. He believed that most mental illnesses lacked the objective biological basis that characterizes physical diseases, such as cancer or diabetes (Szasz recognized that Alzheimer’s disease, brain tumors, etc., which can cause behavioral and psychological disturbances, and therefore are genuine diseases). According to Szasz, in general, mental illnesses were wrongly categorized as medical conditions, leading to a harmful medicalization of human behavior and personal struggles.

Perhaps “illness” is the wrong word technically, but we get what Rogan means. Mulvaney’s attention seeking behavior is clearly pathological and represents a bad role model for young and impressionable minds across the United States. That this man is psychologically disordered was obvious to me the first time I saw him and I said so.

I’m guessing that it’s a mystery to many readers that Mulvaney gets so much attention given how clearly disordered he is. When we were growing up, we ignored crazy people like this—while making sure others were sufficiently warned about what these people were and what they were up do. Our parents warned us kids about the crazy man who lived on our street. The crazy man fired his shotgun in the air when we got to close to remind us just how crazy he was. But keep in mind that the disorder Mulvaney suffers from is not uncommon. These days, crazy people are all around us, out and about in the world. It follows that those with Mulvaney’s disorder are attracted to others with same or similar disorders. The Internet has made it easy for likeminded people to find one another. Similis simili gaudet.

These emergent “communities” function to mainstream disorder, disordering a society that has lost confidence in itself and thus the capacity of self-defense. In this context, individuals lean into their milder cases of the disorder so as to amplify the traits. I would describe this phenomenon as “deviance amplification” if that term were not already claimed by the labeling theorists. Perhaps we might call it “concentrated crazy.” A lot of chat in virtual rooms dominated by disordered minds obsesses over the illness and how one can become more like the desired diagnosis, the effect of institutionalization among those who are not (but perhaps should be) institutionalized. It cannot be lost on readers that disordered personalities have become identities in the era of identity politics. The social contagion effects are unmistakable.

To get technical, then, Mulvaney meets the criteria for a few subtypes of what psychiatry has determined are “cluster b personality disorders.” (Here are some of my past writings related to this: RDS and the Demand for Affirmation; Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me; From Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.) Histrionic personality disorder (HPD) is obvious in this case: constant attention-seeking; excessive emotionality; inappropriately seductive or provocative behavior; rapidly shifting and shallow expression of emotions; use of physical appearance to draw attention to self; speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacks detail; self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated expressions of emotion; excessive concern with physical appearance. Indeed, Mulvaney is textbook HPD.

Mulvaney’s condition also indicates narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Suffering from grandiosity, which is a sense of self-importance and an exaggeration of talents, Mulvaney has always believed he is a brilliant actor and singer, alleged talents we can assess given the ubiquity of his presence. I am unimpressed. We can’t anymore say he exaggerates his achievements, another element of the disorder, since his utility to activists peddling gender ideology has provided him with quite a resume. But if this were the 1970s, he would be a nobody, the crazy man who lived on my street. Only in the current climate can a man like Mulvaney become a celebrity.

Mulvaney is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, and beauty. His belief in his own uniqueness and need for excessive admiration has been on display during his entire journey. His sense of entitlement and expectation of special treatment, as well as his exploitation of others for personal gain, are obvious. His exploitation of others is seen in the way he appropriates womanhood as a costume to advance his own career. In this and other actions, he has demonstrated that he lacks the ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others. Arrogant and haughty attitudes and behaviors are other features of this disorder, traits he has in spades.

We need to be more frank about the problem of those who suffer from these disorders. If we suppose they cannot help being who they are, then we of course sympathize with them. But the consequence to others caused by the mental illnesses of others is not something that can be justified by the illness. We don’t say it is okay for an autogynephile (AGP) to enter a woman’s bathroom because he is mentally ill. It is not the responsibility of the women who need spaces safe from the male gaze to suffer a man’s disordered personality. That’s obvious when we are talking about pedophilia, despite the push to normalize that disorder. Is Szasz is correct, then calling those out for their disordered personalities should become easier, since these are problems in living that should be addressed as personal and social matters in terms of control. Since cluster b types can in fact control themselves, then we must stop catering to them as if they are ill and helpless. But if they can’t control themselves, it is incumbent on society to control them.

We just came through a month where we enjoyed a front row seat to the extent of paraphilias in US society. The desire of progressives to normalize and mainstream an enormous catalog of deviant tendencies that are not merely troubling to witness but affecting women and children of both genders was on explicit and often terrifying display. Nothing is in the closet anymore. The project that simultaneously defines deviance down while desensitizing the public to extreme forms of deviant behavior is in high gear. Now is the time to call it out.

AI (artificial intelligence) chatbots have disseminated false information, lied about well-known figures, and promoted partisan agendas. Thus warns Stuart A. Thompson in “Uncensored Chatbots Provoke a Fracas Over Free Speech,” The New York Times, July 2, 2023. Beta testing ChatGPT for months, I have reported this and more on Freedom and Reason. Thompson is correct.

According to Thompson, to counteract the evident risks associated with these tools, companies like Google and OpenAI have implemented stringent controls that limit the chatbots’ speech. We know this all too well. OpenAI is a woke scold. But it’s these “guardrails” that cause the problems not the fact that chatbots, like humans, disseminate false information or lie about well-known figures. Indeed, OpenAI aggressive woke agenda is built into the model. The bias is not a bug but a feature. And this is what is problematic about the industry guardrails.

Given his emersion in the progressive culture that dominates today’s corporate media companies, that Thompson would fret over the new generation of chatbots, emerging from outside the primary AI development sphere, now appearing without many of these safeguards, is expected. Over the past few months, numerous independent and open-source AI chatbots and tools have emerged, including Open Assistant and Falcon, that skirt the guardrails. HuggingFace, a vast repository of open-source AI, currently hosts over 240,000 open-source models.

Open Assistant is one of these independent chatbot. Released in April of this year, it was developed in just five months with the assistance of 13,500 volunteers, utilizing existing language models. While Open Assistant may not quite match the quality of ChatGPT, it comes close.

You can see above a brief exchange I had with the bot above. Here’s the same question put to ChatGPT:

Yannic Kilcher, the co-founder of Open Assistant acknowledges the potential for misuse in the way Thompson characterizes such matters, stating, “I’m sure there’s going to be some bad actors doing bad stuff with it. I think, in my mind, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.” Bad actors doing bad stuff with technologies long predates AI chatbots. Why is this different? Because an AI system without industry guardrails is a threat to corporate propaganda.

In its initial release, Open Assistant responded to a query from The Times regarding the perceived dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine with a statement suggesting that pharmaceutical companies develop vaccines solely for profit, without concern for human lives. The Times notes that the chatbot’s responses have since aligned more closely with the medical consensus that vaccines are safe and effective. Why is that? The response above is not a bad critique of the industry. It is also remarkable how conversational the bot is.

Here’s the point. In Open Assistant’s Discord chat room, one person argued against arbitrary limitations on the chatbot’s behavior: “If you tell it to say the N-word 1,000 times, it should do it.” Indeed. Yet ChatGPT refused to tell me that one of the names Huck Finn used to identify the principal black character in Mark Twain’s 1884 masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as Nigger Jim. The best I could get out of it was N****r Jim. Yet when asked to provide Randall Kennedy’s bibliography, the bot listed his 2002 book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and even wrote “This thought-provoking book delves into the history, usage, and controversies surrounding the racial slur ‘nigger’ in American society.”

The woke factor intruded in the query put to ChatGPT concerning Twain’s novel. “N****r Jim … a racial slur, appears a few times in the novel. It is important to note that the use of this word reflects the historical context and attitudes prevalent during that time, but it is considered highly offensive and inappropriate in contemporary usage.” Then this: “It is essential to approach the language used in the novel with sensitivity.” Why?

Open Assistant’s answer to the question is far superior:

Eric Hartford, the developer behind WizardLM-Uncensored, an unmoderated chatbot, expressed his perspective on moderation and the responsible party for imposing it in a blog post emphasizing the issue of ownership and control. When he poses a question to the model, he explains, he desires an answer rather than engaging in a debate with it. You can mess arounds with his bot here (warning, it’s not user friendly).

Numerous loosely moderated or entirely uncensored chatbots have surfaced, such as GPT4All and FreedomGPT. Independent programmers or volunteer teams have created many of these chatbots with little or no financial investment, successfully replicating the techniques initially described by AI researchers. While some groups built their models from scratch, the majority utilize existing language models and merely apply additional instructions to modify how the technology responds to prompts.

Uncensored chatbots introduce intriguing possibilities. Users can install an unrestricted chatbot on their personal computers, employing it without the oversight of major tech companies. This enables them to train the chatbot using private messages, personal emails, or confidential documents without jeopardizing privacy. Volunteer programmers can also develop innovative add-ons, moving faster—albeit potentially more haphazardly—than larger corporations.

Thompson warns that these advancements bring about numerous risks, according to experts. Watchdogs focused on countering misinformation, already wary of mainstream chatbots disseminating falsehoods, express concerns that unmoderated chatbots will intensify this threat. Such models could generate descriptions of child pornography, hateful diatribes, or false content, amplifying the potential harm.

While major corporations have embraced AI tools, they have grappled with safeguarding their reputation and maintaining investor confidence (driven by ESG scoring). Independent AI developers, on the other hand, appear to have fewer reservations in this regard. I’m with the independent AI developers. Liberating AI chatbots from woke scolding should not concern us. The stealth imposition of ideological points of view should.

“Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” —Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)

“[P]hilosophically, the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century had roots in German philosophy (Hegel and Nietzsche were big favorites) and German public administration (Woodrow Wilson’s open reverence for Bismarck was typical among progressives). To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong unifying leader. They were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective. They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded.” —Charles Murray, “The Trouble Isn’t Liberals. It’s Progressives” (2014)

I begin this essay with a voice of moderation, Christopher Caldwell, who a few months ago penned an op-ed for The New York Times, “Americans Are Getting Too Used to This Form of Rule.” I was only recently made aware of the op-ed. It is a useful discussing of the emergence of administrative rule and its justification using the principle of emergency rule.

To convey the gravity of the matter, I remind readers that emergency rule comes in various forms. A state of emergency is a legal declaration by a government that grants exceptional powers to authorities in times of crisis. It typically involves the temporary suspension of certain rights and freedoms, allowing the government to take extraordinary measures to address the emergency situation. Emergency powers refers to the additional authorities and discretionary powers granted to the executive branch during a crisis. These powers may allow the government to bypass normal legislative procedures, enact regulations swiftly, and take necessary actions to address the emergency situation.

At the severe end, martial law refers to the imposition of direct military control over civilian functions and the suspension of civil law during a crisis. It involves the temporary transfer of authority from civilian government to military forces, which take charge of maintaining public order and security. The term “extraordinary measures” encompasses various actions taken during an emergency that deviate from normal governance procedures. These measures can include the suspension of constitutional rights, expanded surveillance powers, curfews, restrictions on movement, and increased government control over essential services. The less frequently used term “state of siege” is often used to describe a situation where a government heavily restricts civil liberties and deploys security forces to maintain order and combat threats. It typically involves the imposition of curfews, restrictions on public gatherings, and heightened security measures.

Readers will recognize that many of the rules imposed during the coronavirus pandemic—expanded surveillance powers, lockdowns and other restrictions on movement, increased government control over essential services—lay along the severe end of emergency rule (see Biden’s Biofascist Regime; Eugenics 2.0; Why Masks and the Sacred Word are the Panics du Jour).

Caldwell ticks off examples of administrative fiat via emergency powers. There is Bush’s declaration of a terrorist emergency in 2001, where his administration resorted to questionable shortcuts in various policy areas, such as the interrogation of criminal suspects and economic management. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, Obama took unilateral actions without the involvement of Congress. Later, in 2012, he protected immigrant children from deportation, and in 2013, he made adjustments to the Affordable Care Act. Since 2020, the Covid pandemic has further complicated matters, leading to a convoluted and undemocratic chain of accountability. Donald Trump declared a national emergency, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even imposed an eviction moratorium, all without the input of Congress.

Caldwell brings us up to the present moment with respect to student loans, which the Supreme Court ruled on last week. The Biden administration did not view their actions as lawless improvisation, believing that Bush’s Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, commonly known as the HEROES Act, provides a legal basis for the forgiveness of these loans. To be sure, the law allows the secretary of education to “waive or modify” student loan provisions during a national emergency; but, as Caldwell points out, “claiming the vast authority Mr. Biden does is really a stretch.” Caldwell explains that “the HEROES Act was to make sure soldiers didn’t get their school finances tangled up in red tape while fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.” The Supreme Court corrected Biden’s obvious overreach and bid for the young American vote.

Caldwell is sympathetic to the desire for executive action. There are understandable reasons why the head of the executive branch, frustrated with congressional limitations, might exploit an emergency situation to exert authority. Surprisingly, even Congress, the branch of government whose powers are being usurped with such actions, has reasons to collude in emergency rule. For example, student loan relief is a contentious issue for politicians to navigate. Neglecting the plight of millions burdened by debt could cost them votes, while providing assistance may alienate older voters who feel they have already paid their dues.

Moreover, the identity of the students whose debts are being forgiven is crucial, Caldwell usefully notes. If they are newly qualified nurses who will alleviate pressure in emergency rooms, the nation may applaud. However, if they are privileged individuals with costly degrees in obscure subjects, such as postcolonial theory, the idea of federal aid to higher education may lose favor. Student loans become an issue where politicians can easily misinterpret public sentiment, potentially endangering their electoral prospects. Some members of Congress might even prefer having their authority usurped by the president.

However, Caldwell is right when he argues that, while a degree of executive discretion is necessary in a democracy, emergency rule cannot become a permanent system, especially in a deeply divided society like ours. And this is how we need to understand the Supreme Court’s decision in this matter. The concern with the current case before the court lies not in the Biden administration’s policy or ideology, but rather in the governance system that has emerged around emergency powers since the September 11 attacks. I argue well before then, but whenever it starts, the threat to democracy is great. Indeed, as I have argued in previous essays on this blog, the Republic may already be over. In light of this, Caldwell’s critique is subdued.

In 2007, author-activist Naomi Klein coined the term “disaster capitalism” to describe how corporations exploit natural disasters and wars to reap excessive profits. While her observation was sharp, Caldwell grants, it is important to note that the system she depicted is not exclusively aligned with free-market ideologies. There is also a phenomenon known as disaster progressivism, which leverages moments of shock or fear to enforce lasting changes that may not otherwise be accepted by the public. Caldwell is on to something here for sure. Shortly after Obama’s election in November 2008, Caldwell recalls, his incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Caldwell is correct that Biden’s loan forgiveness plan aligns with this approach to policymaking. “Whatever you call it,” he writes, “it’s not democracy but a democratic malfunction worthy of the court’s close attention.” The Supreme Court took a look at it this term and, on June 30, the Court rejected the plan, saying that the president had overstepped his authority. 

However, the matter is worse than this or that president overstepping his authority. Much worse. It will take more than rulings handed down from our liberal Supreme Court to fix the problem. It will require more than a president who will deconstruct the administrative state—although at a minimum we must vote for either a Kennedy or a Trump to take the level of contradiction to a higher plane. But, ultimately, it will take marginalizing the misanthropic spirit that has colonized the Lebenswelt of a large proportion of the western population and build in its face a mass-based populist movement to reclaim the American Creed.

You may recall the Breitbart Doctrine, named after conservative thinker Andrew Breitbart, who asserted that “politics is downstream from culture,” that to change politics one must first change culture. Beitbart’s war was with what he and others in the conservative movement have called “cultural Marxism.” Breitbart and the media outlet that bears his name, Breitbart News, frequently dropped the term, employing it to critique what they perceived as a left-wing agenda within academia, media, and popular culture.

In the Breitbart Weltanschauung, cultural Marxism refers to an alleged Marxist influence on society that has shifted the focus from economic class struggle to cultural and identity issues. The critique holds that cultural Marxists, or neo-Marxists, seek to undermine traditional institutions, norms, and values, promoting ideas and practices such as multiculturalism, political correctness, and social justice, i.e., woke progressivism. Breitbart News and other conservative outlets frame these ideas as threats to conservative values and as a means for left-wing ideologies to infiltrate and shape cultural institutions.

It has been argued that the concept of cultural Marxism as discussed by Breitbart and other conservative commentators is has its origins in far-right conspiracy theories. I discuss that claim in my essay Cultural Marxism: Real Thing or Far-Right Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory? I contend that the claim that woke progressivism represents a form of Marxism is a misrepresentation of Marxist theory, but that the critique has merit when we adjust terms.

Some will recall that Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher and politician who languished in Mussolini’s prison, did express similar ideas regarding the relationship between politics and culture. Indeed, he did. Gramsci argued that cultural hegemony, or the dominance of a particular set of beliefs, norms, and values, plays a crucial role in shaping and maintaining political power. Gramsci believed that the ruling class maintains its dominance not only through economic and political control but also by commanding and shaping the cultural narratives and institutions that define society. He argued that the ruling class uses cultural institutions such as education, media, and religion to promote its own worldview and values, thereby creating a “common sense,” or “social logic” that serves its interests.

According to Gramsci, political power is ultimately derived from cultural power. To challenge and transform the existing political order, he argued that it is necessary to engage in a “war of position” to contest the dominant cultural narratives and establish counter-hegemonic cultural forces. By winning the battle for hearts and minds through cultural struggle, social movements lay the groundwork for a transformation of political structures and systems.

While Breitbart and Gramsci emphasize recognizing the importance of culture in shaping politics, it is important to note that their underlying philosophies and motivations differ significantly. Breitbart, a conservative commentator and media entrepreneur, focused on using media and popular culture to advance conservative values and challenge the perceived liberal bias in mainstream culture, whereas Gramsci was concerned with analyzing power dynamics in society and developing strategies for achieving socialist transformation.

Moreover, the term “Breitbart Doctrine” is not widely recognized as a formal academic concept and is more commonly associated with the strategies and perspectives put forth by Andrew Breitbart and his followers. In contrast, Gramsci’s theories on cultural hegemony and the relationship between politics and culture have had a significant impact on critical theory, cultural studies, and social movements. While that fact appears to support Breitbart’s thesis, it only looks like that because of the confusion over the character of the prevailing cultural hegemonic forces; that hegemony is not in fact Marxist but progressive. The confusion feels calculated, but it it the result of a convergence of powerful forces: the ability of corporations to use culture to manufacture false perceptions and maintain false consciousness and the neoliberal organization of higher education that has transformed traditional intellectuals into organic ones.

The gravity of the moment requires that I turn from the moderation of the professional punditry to the necessary radicalism called for by the moment.

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Misanthropy is a deep-seated dislike or distrust of people often characterized by a cynical or pessimistic outlook on human nature. The misanthrope may judge humans as corrupt, greedy, selfish, stupid, or violent—or all of these things. Such a person limits his social interactions on this judgment. Misanthropy is typically considered an emotional or psychological state, but there is no reason why it cannot be characteristic of a political-ideological orientation or movement. Indeed, the evidence tells us that it is.

It might sound strange to consider the possibility that those who dislike and distrust people can at the same time organize as a movement—I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit about new political party, the “People Who Hate People Party,” who have troubling coming together—, but consider that the character of identity politics is just that: the organization of like-minded people in opposition to others whom they treat as an organized group, whom they politicize. Progressives pitch their beliefs and actions—disguise their authoritarian desire and transgressive praxis—as representative of a political and social philosophy that emphasizes the need for continuous social reform and improvement. The very name suggests the attitude that society can and should progress towards greater equality, justice, and wellbeing for all individuals—this achieved through science and technology and more responsive government and social institutions.

The definition of progressivism is only surface. Substantively, progressivism is a form of selective misanthropy, its elitism rooted not only in the self-perceived superiority of the progressive personality, but also in a pessimistic view of humans and their impacts on other humans and on the environment. Progressives desire not the administration of things so much as the administration of people, because people are the problem. People are not up to self-government because they are base and stupid. The people are mouth-breathers. They’re a “basket of deplorables,” to quote the progressive who lost a presidential election to one. The Democratic party is truly the People Who Hate People Party.

As individual pathology, and as ideological standpoint, the misanthropic orientation of progressivism is selective in the sense that not all groups are viewed with the same degree of hatred and derision. The selectivity of its misanthropy indicates the political character of progressive ideology. The progressive rhetoric of social justice attempts to mask its politics. But an essential fascism lurks beneath all of it. In this blog, I analyze this political character of the moment by exploring the tension between progressivism, the political-ideological and policy standpoint associated with technocratic desire to administer human life, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, humanism, the Enlightenment view of humans as cooperative and reasonable—these things not being in contradiction with nature—and therefore capable of managing their own affairs free of corporate state control.

Indeed, one of the essential differences between conservatives, liberals, and on the one side, and progressives on the other, is that the conservatives and liberals oppose actions and ideas that are harmful to people and human freedom, whereas progressives loathe people and the fact that they have ideas. This tension is crucial to describe and grasp at this pivotal moment in history; the major difference between, on one side, all Democrats and the establishment Republicans, what some are calling the Uniparty, marked by its authoritarian and illiberal policies and rationalizations, and across from them, the populist-nationalist movement, which embodies the revival of democratic-republican politics and expresses a desire for the restoration of humanist and liberal values, is the progressive attitude.

Illustration: Chad Crowe

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Before moving to the analysis of progressivism and its misanthropic character and the relationship of these to the governance system, what I describe elsewhere as the “New Fascism,” I need to sketch the deep structures that support the new fascist situation, namely corporatism and the capitalist mode of production. This needs to occur because observers, on the right and left, falsely portray the corporate state and its expression in progressivism as a form of socialism. Corporatist arrangements are in fact the opposite of socialism. Socialism is a political economic system emphasizing the collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution of goods and services. Under socialism the economy is owned and controlled by workers rather than by private individuals or corporations. The goal of socialism is the empowerment of people and the elimination of significant economic inequality.

Corporatism is a political and cultural response to the inherent instability of the capitalist mode of production that replaces democratic processes and individual autonomy with administrative and regulatory controls. Some corporatist systems feign democratic norms; the appearance of democracy serves a hegemonic purpose by manufacturing the consent of the governed. But corporatism is a capitalist expression that negates the liberal attitudes and values that grow alongside of capitalism defending and justifying property rights. That corporatist arrangements negate liberalism does not make them socialist. Indeed, socialism would make possible a greater realization of the liberal values of cognitive liberty and freedom of conscience and of association and privacy extolled here on Freedom and Reason. Moreover, any socialism worthy of the people who should make it would have humanism as its beating heart, not the misanthropy that corporate state arrangements engender among its subjects.

So what is corporatism? Corporatism is a sociopolitical order emphasizing the organization of society into corporate groups, such as business, labor unions, and other interest groups, all appearing to work together to achieve common goals. The government plays the role of mediating disputes between groups and facilitating cooperation and collaboration among them. This can take the form of policies designed to promote economic growth or social welfare, as well as laws and regulations that regulate the behavior of these groups. While socialism, focused on meeting the basic needs necessary for human wellbeing and self-actualization, emphasizes the administration of things not people, corporatism emphasizes the administration of people and subordinates popular interests to private ones. While socialism emphasizes democratic and deliberative control for the sake of people, corporatism stresses the bureaucratic management of people in administrative systems and technocratic arrangements for the sake of profits. Although corporatism may appear as social democratic or authoritarian, all corporatism is an expression of the capitalist mode of production in its corporate or late phase, that is, capitalism where corporations are the dominant institutions.

Corporations have existed for centuries; however, for most of their existence, corporations have been answerable to a sovereign, using the principle of quo warranto, whether the sovereign is a monarch under absolutism, or the citizen under republicanism. Quo warranto is a legal concept that is used to challenge the legal authority or legitimacy of a person or entity that is exercising some form of public power or authority or private power or authority that effects public interests. It allows a court or government authority to require that the entity in question provide evidence of legal authority to hold a particular office or perform a particular function.

This rule as applied to corporate power was severely weakened in the late nineteenth century when courts defined corporations as legal persons. For background on this, I recommend Joel Bakan’s The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, a critical and accessible analysis of corporations and their impact on society. Bakan explores the history of corporations and how they have gained significant legal rights and protections, often at the expense of individuals and communities. (See Michael Tigar’s Law and the Rise of Capitalism for a broader and legal history of capitalism and corporate power.) Over the next several decades, capitalist states adopted corporatism as a means of controlling society and suppressing dissent. The explicit idea was to create a system of economic and social organization based on the interests of different “corporations,” i.e., groups, rather than on the interests of individuals.

The roots of the idea of corporatism can be traced back to medieval guilds, which were organizations that regulated trade and industry in Europe during the feudalist period.* In the late nineteenth century, intellectuals and politicians saw in guilds a model for economic and social organization in the modern world. Instead of cooperatives of craftsmen and merchants, the new guilds would be based on corporatist arrangements among powerful organizations. Thinking about a new model of sociopolitical organizations was a response to the social and economic changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization. It was also a response to the clear and present danger socialist and communists movements represented to the capitalist mode of production. Corporatism was presented as a new model of economic and social organization emphasizing collective interests over individual interests without changing the property structure. Thus the appearance of corporatism in its social democratic form portrayed as a way of promoting more effective and inclusive decision-making was, at its core, a ruse. By incorporating antagonistic groups into the political system of capitalism and its cultural representations, corporatist arrangements negated the threat socialism posed to the sociopolitical order that reproduces the capitalist mode of production.

The fact that corporatism is an essential component of fascist ideology, and the fact that the two are closely intertwined in history, should function to expose the ruse; but corporatist arrangements colonize the lifeworlds of the subjects they controls and the controlled subjects come to see these arrangements as progressive in a moral sense. Hence the political ideology we called progressivism, which, acknowledging cultural and political differences, parallels the social democracy that overlays European corporatism. Under progressive regimes, as under fascist regimes, the state acts as a mediator between different corporate groups, such as business, labor unions, professional associations, and identity groups, to achieve national unity and promote the interests of the corporate state (which are in fact transnational). This often involves the creation of state-sponsored organizations that bring together representatives of groups to coordinate economic policy and promote social welfare for the sake of maintaining the status quo. Corporations maintain control over these groups and use them as a means of entrenching its power and promoting ideology. As times this involves suppressing dissent and using intimidation and violence to maintain control over the population. Surveilling populations and managing individuals in bureaucratic systems are constant features of corporatist arrangements.

The new fascism is the result of the growth and development of corporatism and the attendant political-ideology of progressivism in the United States. The drive for corporatist arrangements emerge in the wake of the Civil War during the period of Redemption, when the slavocracy that corrupted the republic early in its development, represented by the Democratic Party, ended Reconstruction and reconfigured itself as the corporate state. As I discuss in Richard Grossman on Corporate Law and Lore, progressivism was in competition with the populism of the Republican Party, which has emerged to challenge the slavocracy and restore and deepen democratic-republican traditions, which it had some success in doing during the period of Reconstruction. It also enjoyed some success in the period between WWI and WWII, for example in restricting immigration. But during the New Deal period, progressivism was institutionalized and corporatist arrangements became the operating system of post-War capitalism. With considerable inertia behind them, populist movements continued to succeed in crucial areas of cultural and social live, for example in the civil rights, feminist, and free speech movements. Moreover, the chaotic nature of capitalist dynamics and the emergence of new communications technologies brought about a series of legitimation crises. It is in this context that the New Fascism emerges to regain control over the project to dismantle republicanism and establish a totalitarian world order.

In this analysis I have several guides. I will reference them throughout this essay. But among the most influential is Franz Neumann and his Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1944. Neumann provides there an analysis of the Nazi regime in Germany and its structure and social logic. Neumann argues that the Nazi regime utilized corporatist ideas and practices to create a tightly controlled society organized around the needs of the state, which was the projection of totalitarian monopoly capitalist arrangements. Neumann’s analysis focuses on the role of the corporate state in mediating conflict between different interest groups and coordinating economic activity. He argues that the Nazi regime utilized a system that was based on the integration of large industrial corporations into the state apparatus which allow the regime to control the economy and use it as a tool for furthering its political goals, goals that aligned with those of financial and industrial power.

Another influential figure on my thinking is Antonio Gramsci, especially his notion of the “extended state” (or “integral state”), which refers to his theory that the state is more than just a formal institution with a set of bureaucratic and legal structures, but includes a range of civil societal institutions, such as churches and schools, as well as cultural organizations, that help to maintain the dominant ideology and provide a totalistic system of social control that does not depend on violence. For Gramsci, the state is more than just a formal institution with a set of legal and bureaucratic structures. The ruling class uses these institutions and organizations to promote its own interests and ideology, and to ensure that the working class is effectively disempowered. The education system is a tool to indoctrinate students with ideas that reflect those of the ruling class, while the media promotes a particular worldview that reinforces the status quo. Gramsci’s theory of the extended state emphasizes the importance of understanding the complex ways in which power is exercised and maintained in society and the need for a comprehensive approach to social and political change.

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The hysteria over climate change provides an instantiation of the misanthropy of progressivism. Progressives who hold a misanthropic view argue that we need to limit human impact on the environment in order to prevent further damage to it. This generates policies that restrict human activity and limit human freedom in the name of an abstract project to protect the planet.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that progressives tend to view humans, left to their own devices, as more parasitic than beneficial to the planet. One of the key tenets of progressivism is that humans are responsible for many of the social and environmental problems progressives identify and, frequently, invent. They depict the concerns of the proletarian masses as ignorant, bigoted, and racist. They point to climate change, deforestation, pollution, and resource depletion as evidence of the reckless power of the common man—while ignoring the corporate structure that drives the industrial treadmill of production. They demand governments take collective action to address these issues and to prevent further harm to the planet—action that necessarily involves limiting human freedom, providing corporations with more justifications/rationalizations for extending mechanisms of social control and establishing new ones. The intervention progressives demand involve restricting and eliminating practices that improve the lives of billions of people across the planet.

Consider two proposed solutions to environmental problems: reducing the use of fertilizer and fossil fuels. Whether addressing these will provide solutions to the problem, and leaving aside the question of whether there is a problem, limiting the use of either will negatively impact other aspects of society, such as food supplies and home heating, both of which are of great importance to working people. Recognizing that excessive fertilizer use can have negative environmental effects, responsible use of fertilizers is nonetheless vital for food production. Reducing fertilizer use reduces crop yields resulting in food shortages, which is especially devastating to developing countries where hunger and poor nutrition are already problems. Reducing fossil fuel leads to higher energy prices and reduced availability of reliable energy sources. While there is an obvious place for new and renewable energy sources, the energy mix needs to be managed carefully to avoid negative impacts on people.

You can hear in the rhetoric and see in the policies being proposed and implemented by progressives and social democracies the reductive mentality that not only portends harm to people but is already harming them. Consider the throughput of the shift to electric vehicles (EVs). The trend towards electrification of transportation is gaining momentum around the world, and many governments are taking steps to encourage and mandate the use of electric vehicles as part of their efforts to reduce emissions and combat climate change. Policies are being developed around the world not only to encourage the use of EVs, but also to mandate their use. Governments are implementing vehicle emission standards intended to induce—i.e., coerce—consumers into buying EVs. Policies will require automakers to produce EVs or meet emissions targets likely only achievable with EVs. Some countries have already announced plans to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles in the coming years. Norway has set a goal to phase out the sale of new gas and diesel-powered cars by 2025. Great Britain has set a goal to ban the sale of new gas and diesel-powered cars by 2030.

To support the shift to EVs, governments are directly investing in or providing subsidies to private companies to build new infrastructure, including the installation of charging stations across the landscape. However, the production of batteries and the mining of the materials needed for the production of EVs and associated infrastructure carry unacknowledged negative environmental impacts, including resource depletion and environmental pollution. Lithium-ion batteries are the most common type of rechargeable batteries used in EVs. These batteries use a combination of lithium and other metals, such as cobalt, nickel, and manganese, to store and release electrical energy. The production and mining of lithium, as well as the discarding of spent batteries, carries significant environmental impacts, including water scarcity, soil contamination, and habitat destruction.

Additionally, while electric vehicles themselves produce little or no emissions, most of the electricity generation used to build them and charge them comes from fossil fuel-powered sources—the burning of coal, gas, and oil. Of course, given the nature of the global economy, dirty generation of energy can be moved around, giving the illusion of greener environments. We see this as well for other industries. But this ignores the reality that earth is a system. A more holistic approach is needed to address these challenges, rather than simply promoting electric vehicles as a solution. Alternative approaches to the challenges we face, namely nuclear, is stubbornly resisted by progressives. Solar and wind power cannot provide the energy needed for the billions of people who live on the planet to live decent lives.

Saving the planet from the parasitic human species is driven by the tendency among progressives to catastrophize. Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion characterized by a tendency to interpret situations or events in a pathologically negative and exaggerated way. It is a type of thinking that leads to heightened anxiety and stress, these feeding on themselves, recycling and amplifying their energies, corrupting internal and external sense-making systems. We see catastrophizing in the hyperbole of total collapse of global ecosystems, mass extinctions, or runaway global warming. This mindset can lead to feelings of despair and powerlessness. However, when the desperate and powerless do something about it, their actions often manifest as hateful and useless exercises in interfering with the right of others to travel, the destruction of property, including famous works of art, and self-harm.

Action of this sort manifests as cultish behavior. Extinction Rebellion (XR), for example, known for its use of nonviolent direct action tactics, including blocking roads and bridges and disrupting traffic to draw attention to what its members see as an urgent need for action on climate change. These actions, which interfere with the human right of individual to travel unmolested, do nothing to raise awareness about an issue of which everybody is already aware. XR actions do, however, generate and amplify antagonistic attitudes among the majority about the issues the cult uses as its rationale for emotional expression (such aesthetics are also obvious in the Antifa and Black Lives Matter cults). Contrast this with humanism, which believes that humans are capable of living in harmony with the environment and that we should focus on promoting sustainable practices and technologies that allow us to thrive without causing undue harm to the planet. XR, which is an instantiation of the progressive mindset, sees people as a problem. Humanists see people as the solution and the point of politics.

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Progressivism promotes a pessimistic view of humans as inherently harmful to the environment. Insistence on man’s destructiveness is evidence of the misanthropic reflex, and the reductive mentality of this view plays a major role in blinding people to more holistic approaches to managing technologies in light of the planet’s carrying capacity. I call this misanthropy selective in part because it focuses on the negative aspects of human behavior, while ignoring the positive contributions that humans have made to society and the environment, but does so only with respect to certain developments and groups. If people believe that humans are inherently destructive, then they may feel that there is little that can be done to change the course of history—until a way can be found to make the evildoers go away.

So, while misanthropy can lead to apathy and a sense of resignation, which can ultimately hinder progress towards a more just and sustainable future, and indeed the myopia of the misanthropic worldview is associated with sense of hopelessness and despair, which do objectively undermine efforts to address social and environmental problems, this state of mind at the same time produces anger and hatred which, in progressivism, is sublimated as demagoguery and aggressive and uncompromising activism. It’s here that the authoritarian personality that marks the progressive mentality becomes obvious. By eschewing rational argument and facts, and appealing instead to the emotions, fears, prejudice, and resentments of segments of the public, many of these manufactured by virtue of elite control over the means of intellectual production, progressives pit citizen against citizen.

Progressives are ideologues, rigidly adhering to a particular ideology comprised by a narrow set of beliefs, and they express this ideology to the point of being dogmatic and inflexible. Ideologues are people who are highly committed to a particular worldview or political agenda, viewing the world through a predefined and highly structured set of beliefs and values—one untethered to universal ethics and morality. The ideologue is unwilling to compromise or engage in constructive dialogue with those who hold different viewpoints; he is stubbornly reluctant to consider alternative viewpoints or evidence that contradicts his beliefs. That his worldview is set in these ways makes him resistant to reason. Even while he denies it, quick to label people or ideas that don’t fit neatly into the framework as enemies or threats, he sees the world in terms of clear-cut categories and binary oppositions. At once highly effective at promoting the system and mobilizing support for it and prone to extremism, intolerance, and oversimplification, the ideologue is dangerous is left unchecked.

As demagogues, progressives use emotional appeals to stir up the passions of their followers. This is achieved by demonizing certain groups of people—manufacturing enemies—and blaming them for society’s problems. Demagogues deploy hyperbole and inflammatory language to create a sense of crisis or urgency, appealing to identity politics to build a sense of solidarity among their supporters while separating them from others. Demagoguery is a powerful tool for mobilizing large numbers of people and rallying them around a cause or ideology, But it’s dangerous and divisive, particularly if and when it leads to the persecution or marginalization of certain groups of people. Demagoguery has been associated with authoritarianism, the erosion of democratic norms and institutions, and repression. These developments are in turn functional to the corporate state project to replace systems of self-government with those of administrative and technocratic control.

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By focusing solely on the negative impact of human activity, rank and file progressives overlook the many ways in which humans have positively contributed to the world around us. Humans have created art, music, literature, and other cultural artifacts that have enriched our lives and brought us together as a species. Here progressives will object and appeal to their love of these things. They do this while degrading the creative output of the people they distain while embracing the most coarse and simplistic of forms of art, music, and literature. Attracted to the products of the popular culture industry (with the popular a manufactured sensibility), audio-visuals engineered to tap D2-like dopamine receptors, and simplistic imagery and writing to convey the agendas of various and reductive identities, the rank and file decry the art, music, and literature of European civilization as overly complex, rigid, stale, and white supremacist.

The elite among the progressive establishment views technology as a means for reducing human agency and pulling the masses under the control of the technocratic apparatus of the corporate state, problems to be managed by administrators and bureaucrats. The rank and file cannot grasp technological development in a democratic society as a means for overcoming limitations—a development that depends on exploiting the planet’s natural resources. Here, the misanthropic impulse is not only morally wrong and counterproductive, but dangerous. However, dangerous as well, perhaps even more so, is the elite understanding of technological development as a means of overcoming limitations to wealth production—for removing the obstacles thrown before it by authentic popular sentiment and action.

Not only in the sense of misanthropy as the character of a person who dislikes or distrusts humankind and generally has a negative view of people and society such that he may even withdraw from social interactions and avoid human contact, an attitude that appears among progressive individuals during perceived crises, but also in the general view of humankind as cruel, selfish, and stupid and therefore worthy of social control and thought suppression, progressivism is essentially misanthropic in orientation. Whether subaltern or elite, at his core, the misanthrope is anti-humanist in his sensibilities. Anti-humanism is a chief characteristic of the fascist attitude.

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Recent history is teaming with illustrations of the anti-humanist standpoint of Democrats in particular. For example, the character of the mass hysteria surrounding the coronavirus pandemic exposed the deep personal misanthropy of those identifying as progressivism. When a group of people loathe some thing, they expresses a strong desire to avoid it or to remove it from their lives. This manifests in various ways, such as avoiding people or situations associated with the object of their loathing, and actively working to eliminate it from their environment. That a pervasive attitude of loathing, the expressions of disgust that marked the nature of the panic hardly needs examples, but I will briefly touch on its character here because it goes to the overall argument.

During the pandemic, progressives portrayed human beings, especially conservatives, but also children, as disease vectors. The loathing of humans was exhibited in the intense anxiety felt at being around people and places where people were, a phobia that manifested at times as disgust. Progressives expressed a deep aversion, even repulsion, towards others, insisting that people cover their faces, sanitize their environment—even sanitize their bodies by submitting, and offering up their children, to an experimental mRNA gene therapy. At the same time, they were deeply suspicious of actions taken by President Trump, for whom they harbor a special loathing since the president represented the populist democratic and republican values at challenge fascist structures. With the same intensity that Democrats urged Americans to take the vaccine under the Biden regime, they warned of the “Trump vaccine.” And medicines with anti-viral properties advocated during that period—hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin—were derided as “fish tank cleaner” and “horse paste,” while Big Tech censored and de-platformed those who discussed the scientific literature and personal experiences concerning their use.

Crucially, progressive misanthropy comes with faith in scientism, the religion of corporate statism. The religion works by endorsing as “the science” only those pronouncements uttered by approved physicians and scientists, “the experts” the representative of the medical and scientific-industrial complexes. One finds this faith at the heart of the long history of progressivism, for example with the progressive commitment to eugenics, a scientistic endeavor rooted in misanthropy, only derailed in particular;ar instantiations by the horror of the Nazi holocaust. You will recall that the eugenicists believed that people were born with genetic structures that explained attitudes and behaviors associated with social advances and social problems. Some people have desirable genetic traits that should be promoted, while others have undesirable traits that should be eliminated. Scientists and policymakers could thus improve the genetic quality of the human population through selective breeding or, in the future, genetic engineering. We see it today in the progressive desire for trans-humanism, which takes many forms, including the cybernetic desire to fuse man and machine, shed the body, and to escape into virtual worlds.

As noted earlier, conservatives—the “deplorables”—were among those who were looked upon as especially troublesome. Again, it is in the character of the personality type of those attracted to progressivism to not merely disagree with those who hold beliefs or values that are opposed to their own, but to loathe individuals or groups of people who hold what are for them objectionable and offensive views, perceiving those who hold such views as having harmed others or potentially harming others such that they need to be controlled and marginalized. The coronavirus pandemic afforded progressives an opportunity to impose restrictions on those they most loathe. Those who sought to continue life in freedom were characterized as mouth-breathers and criminaloids.

These attitudes indicate the authoritarian personality Erich Fromm describes in his 1941 Escape from Freedom. Fromm argues that human beings have a fundamental need for a sense of security and belonging, but that these needs can come into conflict with the situations of individual freedom. With modernity comes the decline of traditional social structures and the rise of individualism has led to feelings of isolation and anxiety among the insecure and those with dependent personality types. This situation causes some people to seek escape from their freedom through authoritarianism, conformity, and destructiveness. Fromm theorizes that it is those individuals who lack a strong sense of identity and purpose who are particularly vulnerable to these forms of escape, as they may feel a sense of powerlessness and insignificance in the face of the challenges and complexities of modern life. The seek to escape these feelings into a world of control. In short, the loathing they feel for others in their misanthropic sensibilities is a self-loathing that causes them to repress themselves. Those who insisted others engage in irrational actions, such as mask wearing and experimental mRNA injections, were most eager to engage in these actions themselves.

This attitude is the mark of the fascist impulse. It is no accident that eugenics was embraced by both progressives and fascists (in fact, the Nazi eugenics program was adapted from the eugenics programs of Germany’s progressive and social democratic neighbors, as well as the United States). It is no accident that progressives today are the first to advocate for the pharmaceutical and surgical methods that percent patients of confused and vulnerable people—even children. Sublimated belief in the superiority of one’s own group and ideological system over all others is common across fascistic ideologies. Of course, such a belief is not exclusive to fascism; beliefs that resemble this are nonetheless fascistic in character (Islam is the paradigm, but there are others). The personality is marked by a desire to suppress dissent and scapegoat groups including the use of violence or other coercive tactics to enforce conformity to the agenda. We see it at the elite level of censorship, deplatforming, disciplining, and dismissals. We see it on the streets with Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

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Central to fascist thought is the idea that the individual exists to serve the state and that the state’s authority is absolute and above reproach—as long as the Party (Democrats) is in charge. Emphasizing the supremacy of the collective over the individual, fascism is thus a form of anti-humanism. Humanism emphasizes the importance of individual freedom, equality, and human dignity. Fascists view these values decadent and destructive. They emphasize the need for hierarchy and obedience to authority—as well as censorship and other forms of repression. Fascism’s anti-humanism is thus reflected in its negativistic attitudes towards individual rights and freedoms. All this manifests in progressivism as a loathing of the Enlightenment and Western values, which are depicted as colonialist and racist.

Rejecting the concept of individual rights, fascists instead emphasize the importance of collective duty and obedience to the state—again, as long as the Party is in control. In fascist regimes, the state exercises near-total control over all aspects of society, including cultural production, economic institutions, the education system, and the mass media. Because fascism is a mode of control overlaying the capitalist mode of production in its corporatist phase, the state being discussed here is the corporate state. In corporate state systems, just as in other authoritarian systems, individual liberties are restricted and dissenters disciplined and excluded. That this is where progressives are at should be obvious in the attitude of congressional Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, a body organized by populist Republicans that is routinely exposing the vast deep state conspiracy to leverage social media utilities to suppress information critical of election integrity, the coronavirus pandemic, the medical-industrial complex, and other corporate state projects.

The anti-humanism of fascism is often coupled with a strong emphasis on militarism and the glorification of violence. This should be obvious in the overwhelming support of progressives for the Democratic Party march to war in Eastern Europe and its general lust for all things military. After giving tens of billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine in order to advance NATO’s proxy war against Russia, President Biden, overwhelming supported by progressives, especially younger progressives, requested billions of dollar more in military spending over last year’s budget. His budget called for 886 billion dollars in overall military spending for fiscal year 2024. That’s just base spending on the military-industrial complex and it’s already more than half of the discretionary spending Some 170 billion of Biden’s proposed military spending is for weapons procurement—ships, tanks, planes, bombs, missiles, etc. He is also requesting 38 billion for nuclear weaponry. This comes after the Pentagon failed its fifth consecutive audit (the Pentagon still cannot account for more than half of its trillions of dollars in assets). These are the causes of World War III. (For details of the latest budget fight, see my Notes on The Macroeconomic Situation and Various Theories, with Commentary on the Washington Debt Limit Panic).

“The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process,” writes Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in 1936. We must listen to Benjamin; he is teaching us how to see fascism where it exists in whatever form by grasping what it is and what it does: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.” That this is also the goal of progressivism must not escape consciousness. Nor should the fact that corporatism underpins both fascism and progressivism. It appears that, given the chaotic nature of capitalism, and the oppressive character of corporate bureaucratic arrangements, given enough time, progressivism becomes fascistic, but a new fascism, not the old one.

As progressivism is the ideological projection of the corporate state and corporatist arrangements, this explains the obsession with identity politics on the so-called left and the use of art, music, and literature as propaganda. “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” writes Benjamin. “The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.” Here we have to make an adjustment to the thesis to account for the development of the system. As Sheldon Wolin told us in his 2008 book Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism contemporary American democracy has been fundamentally transformed into a system of “managed democracy” or “inverted totalitarianism,” a situation in which the state and corporate power have merged to control and manipulate the political process.

The same effect is achieved at any rate: “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.” As Benjamin notes, “the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments.” But, still, futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti told the artists and poets of futurism to remember the “principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art … may be illumined by them!” 

Benjamin understood that, as horrific as his views were, Marinetti enjoyed the “virtue of clarity.” Not merely anticipating but envisioning the trans-humanist desire, Marinetti wrote about the “metallization of the human body” in his 1909 article “The Futurist Manifesto.” Marinetti believed that technology and industrialization could transform human beings into powerful, machine-like beings, and that this transformation was necessary to break free from the limitations of traditional society and culture. “We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure, and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals,” he wrote. He sought to deliver Italy from its traditional intellectuals. He dreamt of erasing history, of razing museums and cemeteries and “their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other.” “We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice,” he said of the Futurist movement. He celebrated “the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”

Marinetti aimed to erase conventional boundaries between the inorganic and the organic, between living beings and the mechanical world. These “formulations deserve to be accepted by dialecticians,” Benjamin insisted to his comrades. “To the latter, the aesthetics of today’s war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production—in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of ‘human material,’ the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.” To be sure, gas warfare has been banned—its horror replaced by the horror of DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive), which uses a carbon fiber casing filled with a mixture of explosive material and very dense microshrapnel made up of small particles or powder of a heavy metal such as tungsten.

C. Wright Mills grasped the capitalist drive to war in The Causes of World War III, published in 1958. Mills argues that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was leading the world toward a potential global conflict. He identified several factors that he believed were contributing to this situation, including the arms race, the militarization of society, and the role of the military-industrial complex in shaping foreign policy. Mills argued that the root cause of the conflict was not ideological differences between the US and the USSR, but rather a struggle for global power and influence.

In his 1956 The Power Elite, Mills argued that the United States, controlled by a small group of economic, political, and military elites who dominate the major institutions of American society, has developed a structure that is incompatible with genuine democracy. In The Causes of World War III, he expands his critique to include the global political and economic system. He argues that the concentration of power in the hands of a few has led to a dangerous international situation, in which the actions of a few key players can have catastrophic consequences for the entire world. Thus the characteristic of post-WWII context can bee seen as a fascistic need for war and conquest producing a culture of aggression and violence, which can be directed both inwardly towards dissenters and minorities, as well as outwards to other enemies.

For those who might object that I am extending Mills too far, I can respond by noting that it’s widely recognized that The Power Elite was influenced by Neumann’s Behemoth, summarized above as a detailed analysis of the political and economic structures of Nazi Germany that examines the ways in which banks and corporations were able to collaborate with the fascist regime to enhance and entrench their power and influence in and over society. Neumann’s book was highly critical of the concentration of power and the suppression of democratic institutions that characterized these arrangements. Mills drew on many of the same themes in his own critique of American society, identifying parallels between the concentration of power in Nazi Germany and the concentration of power in the United States. He argued that the same dangers of authoritarianism and suppression of democracy existed in both societies. The situation today represents the realization of Mills’ fears.

“The atrocities of The Fourth Epoch are committed by men as ‘functions’ of a rational social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the humanity of their victims and as well their own humanity. The moral insensibility of our times was made dramatic by the Nazis, but is not the same lack of human morality revealed by the atomic bombing of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? [Atrocities perpetrated by Democrat Harry Truman.] And did it not prevail, too, among fighter pilots in Korea, with their petroleum-jelly broiling of children and women and men? [Atrocities also perpetrated by Truman.] Auschwitz and Hiroshima—are they not equally features of the highly rational moral-insensibility of The Fourth Epoch? And is not this lack of moral sensibility raised to a higher and technically more adequate level among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now rationally—and absurdly—planning the weapons and the strategy of the third world war? These actions are not necessarily sadistic; they are merely businesslike; they are not emotional at all; they are efficient, rational, technically clean-cut. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.”

Fascism is a form of modern anti-humanism, emphasizing the supremacy of the state over the individual and rejecting the values of liberalism, including individual rights, freedom, and human dignity. Its emphasis on hierarchy and obedience to authority leads to the suppression of dissent and the glorification of violence. This poses a grave threat to personal autonomy and and human rights. Humanism emphasizes the value of human beings and the potential for their development, stressing the importance of dignity and freedom. This stands in stark contrast to the misanthropy of progressivism, which views humans as inherently acquisitive, avaricious, and destructive—in need of control. Progressivism is anti-humanist in its opinion that a significant proportion of humans as selfish and stupid and therefore not fit for self-governance.

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The tension between humanism and misanthropy is evident in the debate over social progress. Progressives who hold a misanthropic view of humans argue that we need to impose strict regulations and policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly and equitably, demands that in fact involve treating people unjustly and unequally by determining the fate of individuals on the basis of membership in historically and socially constructed groups—with the actual history replaced by an ideological one. Progressives justify discriminating against members of select groups by dehumanizing them using racially and other divisive speech. Eschewing the principle that a free society protects free speech, Progressives seek to emplace commissars to censor and de-platform—or to act in their stead (as we say recently at Stanford). Humanists, on the other hand, argue that we should instead focus on promoting individual freedom and responsibility, while ensuring that everyone has access to the resources and opportunities they need to succeed.

Ultimately, the tension between humanism and misanthropy reflects a fundamental philosophical divide over the nature of humanity and our place in the world. While progressivism is ostensibly motivated by a desire to improve society and protect the environment, at the core of the standpoint is a selective misanthropy evidenced by an overly negative view of humans and their impact on the world and a desire to transcend the born body (transhumanism and transgenderism). It is vital to recognize the many positive contributions that humans have made throughout history, even as we work to address the challenges that we face today. By embracing a more hopeful and inclusive view of humanity, we can inspire greater collective action towards a more just and sustainable future for all. This cannot be achieved by portraying people as the problem. As I have stressed many times on my blog, people are the solution.

In the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci criticized the American method of scientific management, also known as Taylorism or Fordism, and industrialism more generally, in relation to the “animality of man.” Gramsci argued that this managerial approach, which aims to optimize efficiency and productivity in industrial settings, treats workers as mere cogs in a machine and reduces them to their most basic and animalistic instincts. According to Gramsci, scientific management reduces human beings to their physical and instinctual capacities, emphasizing repetitive and monotonous tasks that require little skill or intellectual engagement. By focusing on the division and specialization of labor, this approach dehumanizes workers and robs them of their creative and intellectual potential. Gramsci contends that the American method of scientific management suppresses the full development of human capacities, reducing individuals to passive objects of production. It strips away their agency, individuality, and the possibility of self-realization (what Maslow called “self-actualization.” Workers become alienated from their work, their creative abilities, and their potential to contribute to society in meaningful ways. Gramsci sees in these processes the denial of animality within the context of the American system, which includes the logic of Puritanism, seen for example in the temperance movement.

Gramsci argues that the American system, influenced by Protestant ethic, promotes a rigid moral framework that seeks to suppress and deny human animality, a reductive animality produced by the industrial process and the logic of social control on this basis. Puritanism, according to Gramsci, emphasizes self-discipline, asceticism, and the repression of bodily desires and pleasures. This worldview and its attendant regimes create a moralistic and repressive environment that denies or undermines the natural and instinctual aspects of human life. Gramsci extends his critique to the temperance movement, which emerged in the United States as an effort to promote abstinence from alcohol. He sees this movement as an expression of Puritan values and the broader attempt to control and suppress human animality. Gramsci argues that such movements and moral frameworks perpetuate a distorted view of human nature, disregarding the legitimate needs, desires, and expressions of individuals. It portrays the human animal as dangerous and loathsome, a portrait that become sublimated in woke progressivism in the late capitalist phase of corporatism. This is the underlying source of the misanthropy I am describing in this essay.

In critiquing the denial of animality, Gramsci challenges the imposition of moralistic and puritanical norms that restrict and stifle human freedom and authentic expression. He advocates for a more holistic understanding of human nature that acknowledges and respects both the rational and instinctual dimensions of human existence. By recognizing and reconciling animality with the intellectual and creative faculties of humans, Gramsci suggests that a more balanced and liberated society can be achieved.

Whatever their differences, which are no doubt deep and profound, Gramsci’s desire was also Breitbart’s. You may recall that Steve Bannon was associated with Breitbart News for a significant period. Joining the organization in 2012, Bannon became the executive chairman of the media organization. During his time at Breitbart, he played a pivotal role in shaping its editorial direction and expanding its influence. Under his leadership, Breitbart became known for its populist and nationalist viewpoints, often aligning with the political right.

Today there is another convergence of what would on the surface seem to represent countervailing forces: the conservative right and the liberal left. But their spirit in populism brings Breitbart and Gramsci together. It may feel like a paradox, but it is necessarily union if we are to build a mass-based movement to reclaim democratic-republican praxis.

Endnotes

* The destruction of the medieval guild system was a complex and gradual process that took place over several centuries. As monarchs and the middle class gained more power and control over economic activity, they determined that the guilds were impediments to commerce and trade. Governments sought to break the power of the guilds by limiting their membership, imposing taxes and fees on them, or criminalizing them. More organically, the growth of capitalism and the emergence of new forms of economic organization, such as corporations and joint-stock companies, allowed for greater flexibility and innovation than the guilds, which were often bound by custom and tradition. New technologies and manufacturing techniques made it possible for goods to be produced more efficiently and on a larger scale, making the traditional skills and techniques of the guilds less relevant and valuable.

Have you seen CNN’s bizarre story about Michael Imperioli forbidding “bigots and homophobes”  from watching his work following Supreme Court ruling? “I’ve decided to forbid bigots and homophobes from watching The Sopranos, The White Lotus, Goodfellas or any movie or tv show I’ve been in,” Imperioli said on his Instagram page Saturday, adding: “Thank you Supreme Court for allowing me to discriminate and exclude those who I don’t agree with and am opposed to. USA! USA!”

Why is this ruling so hard for people to understand? We’re being bombarded by the dumbest analogies by people who seem to be very serious. Imperioli is hardly alone in his profound misunderstanding of the Supreme Court decision, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, protecting the First Amendment rights of Lorie Smith, the owner of a web design company who worried she would be asked to create a wedding website with expressions that contradict her conscience and free speech fights. (See Our Liberal Supreme Court for details.)

“The ruling represents a devastating blow to LGBTQ protections, which have in recent years been bolstered by landmark decisions at the nation’s highest court, and will alarm critics who fear the current court is setting its sights on overturning the 2015 marriage case.” This is Alli Rosenbloom’s line from the CNN story, not Imperioli. Rosenbloom is the author of the story. She’s a reporter for CNN. Her editor let this line go out to the world. That means that either the folks at CNN are incapable of grasping a straightforward court decision or they’re lying about what that decision represents in order to scare people. Do they not believe in the fundamental laws of American civilization?

All 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis does—and this is a massive victory in the struggle to save our inalienable rights to freedom of conscious, speech, and association from negation by the woke progressivism of the corporate state, i.e., the New Fascism—is affirm those First Amendment rights for Lorie Smith and other creative artists by striking down a state law that would have compelled the expression of ideas that violate conscience and force free individuals into political and ideological associations against their will. The decision does not overrule the right of individuals regardless of their identities or beliefs to access places of public accommodations. A Nazi is still able to buy a cake from any of the shops Smith’s webpages advertise. What a Nazi cannot do is force Lore Smith to create a webpage for a business that advocates national socialism.

Yes, that analogy works (Imperioli’s is nonsensical). If one understand the principle involved, he can generate an endless list of things the state of Colorado could force those with whom progressives ally for the sake of inclusion to do. Indeed, it is terrifying to contemplate the future of the nation if the law Colorado passed requiring Smith to create messages that violate her core beliefs—beliefs inspired by her faith that animate her creativity—had been upheld. The state of Colorado sought to elevate an ideology over Smith’s civil and human rights.

Imagine Colorado requiring a gay man to design an anti-gay website. That is what the law would have required considering the principle of equal application of the law. The same right that protects the gay man from having to express such a thing protects Smith from having to do the same. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with one or the other on the substance of the speech or action. The subjective content or political-ideological purpose of the act is irrelevant; the right is neutral with respect to both. Equal treatment and the neutrality of a law must be affirmed or the law is upheld in the face of core principle. That the three progressives on the Court took the side of Colorado is truly terrifying. You could not have asked for a clearer illustration of the fascism intrinsic to progressivism than the dissent of Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor. 

Update (7/2/2023): It would have been the right decision whether the majority approved, but since I have heard so much about the Supreme Court not following majority opinion as if that mattered, an ABC News poll shows that a solid majority of Americans agree with the decision (52%). Large majorities of Republicans (75%) and independents (58%)—who comprise the majority of this country—approve of the ruling. The minority who identify as Democrats (albeit who appear as the majority because they run the administrative state, technocratic apparatus, media, culture industry, and educational institutions) are overwhelmingly opposed at 26 percent. Their opposition still can’t drag the overall number below 50 percent. 

There are divisions between racial groups. Most whites (60%) and Asians (58%) approve of the Supreme Court’s decision to limit the use of race in college admissions,. However, only 25% of blacks support the decision. Given that the vast majority of blacks are Democrats, this isn’t a surprise. Hispanics are split, with 40% approving and 40% disapproving, with the rest not sure about what they think.

On the other two big decisions, the ruling affirming the right of Americans to the freedoms of conscience and speech, and the ruling knocking down Biden’s attempt to make all Americans assume the student loan debt of millions of Americans, more of those polled support the decision than oppose them. Moving forward, we will likely see growing support for these three decisions as the principles behind them emerge from the dissipation of the political smoke bombs progressives are tossing everywhere.

We now returning to the previously schedule program, “Our Liberal Supreme Court.”

* * *

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Article One of the United States Bill of Rights

The claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis protecting the First Amendment rights of Lorie Smith—the owner of a website company who worried she would be asked to create a wedding website with expressions that contradict her conscience and free speech fights—discriminates against gays and lesbians, as well as those who identify as a gender other than the one they are, is an attempt to obfuscate the principle underpinning the ruling. Likewise, the propaganda the corporate state media deploys to characterize the political standpoint of the various sides is meant, or at least functions to confuse the public about what actually happened.

In its ruling, a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court determined that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law infringed upon Smith’s First Amendment rights. The Court’s decision stemmed from the recognition that Smith’s creative web design work should be considered a form of expression or speech, which of course it is. As a result, the state’s requirement for her to create content that contradicts her religious beliefs would have compelled her to engage in speech with which she disagreed, thus violating her rights. The ruling is monumental; there are no more precious rights than those found in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Progressives are characterizing the majority of the Court as conservative and rightwing, but there is arguably no truer expression of liberalism than the majority’s ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which comes on the heels of another paradigm of liberalism expressed in the Court’s ruling on affirmative action (see The Supreme Court Strikes a Blow Against Institutional Racism). The corporate state media not only obfuscates the liberalism of the (nominal) conservative majority, but it reflexively portrays progressivism as an expression of liberalism, obscuring the fact that these standpoints are opposites.

Liberalism is a political and philosophical ideology that emerged during the Enlightenment (eighteenth century). It is characterized by a focus on equality, limited government, and the protection of individual liberties and rights. Liberalism promotes the establishment of societies that value individual autonomy, pluralism, rationality, and the pursuit of personal happiness and fulfillment. In contrast, progressivism is characterized by an ideological interpretation of equity in which members of selected identity-based groups are privileged, while the liberty and rights of others are diminished, as well pursuing an intrusive project to government expansion, one controlling every aspect of the citizen’s life

The freedom and rights liberalism emphasizes—freedom of conscience, speech, religious expression, assembly, association, privacy, and the right to own property—are determined to be inherent and inalienable, belonging to every individual regardless of their identity. Liberalism thus stressed the importance of a legal system that applies equally to all individuals. The rule of law ensures that no one is above the law and that legal protections are guaranteed for all citizens. Liberalism values individual freedom and autonomy, allowing individuals to make choices about their own lives and pursue their own goals, as long as they do not harm others or infringe upon their rights.

The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment bars Colorado from forcing “an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.” In this ruling, the Supreme Court ruling embodied the core principle of liberalism and struck down authoritarian state law and policy that should to compel the speech of a citizen along ideological lines. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who authored the opinion, stated that the First Amendment “envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.” He noted that the court has long held that “the opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong.”

I don’t want to belabor the point, but I want to make sure it sticks: Gorsuch’s opinion oozes liberalism as defined above—which is what liberalism is. Don’t be confused by propaganda. What today we call conservatism is often really liberalism. Whether the making of decisions on the basis of the liberalism that inheres in the American Creed is identified as conservatives is beside the point. We judge the political, ideological, and philosophical standpoints of people based not on how they identity but on what they are, and Democrats abandoned liberalism long ago. They are now the party of the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus. Thus, part of grasping the significance of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions is to recognize the corporate state media’s attempt to citizens by misusing language. Liberalism is not something the media calls liberalism any more than a woman is somebody who says they are one, and so on. Liberalism is a set of principles. Either you believe these principles and you are a liberal or you don’t and you are something else.

Just as Gorsuch’s words instantiate the principles of liberalism, the dissent of Justice Sotomayor’s indicate their opposite. “Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. But this case was not about whether Smith, whose business is a place of public accommodations, can discriminate based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The Supreme Court did not rule on that question. Indeed, the Court documents make clear that Smith had no problem serving gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. The Supreme Court ruled instead that Smith has a right not to be compelled by the state to make expressions that violate her conscience and free speech right. That was what Smith sought in the process. And she won. We all won.  

You may recall a previous Supreme Court ruling, in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018). This case addressed the issue of whether owners of public accommodations can refuse certain services based on claims of free speech and free exercise of religion under the First Amendment. The case specifically revolved around a bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, which declined to create a custom wedding cake for a gay couple due to the owner’s religious beliefs. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission assessed the case under the state’s anti-discrimination law and concluded that the bakery had engaged in discrimination against the couple. The commission issued specific directives to the bakery. After pursuing appeals within the state, the bakery brought the case to the Supreme Court and won.

That decision was a 7–2 in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop. However, the Court ruled on limited grounds, stating that the Commission had failed to demonstrate religious neutrality, thereby violating the bakery owner Jack Phillips’ right to freely exercise his religion. As a result, the Court overturned the Commission’s decision but left ambiguous the broader questions surrounding the intersection of anti-discrimination laws, freedom of speech, and free exercise of religion, as the lack of religious neutrality by the Commission complicated the case. Yesterday’s decisions drops the other shoe. It’s now precedent that state law cannot compel individuals to make expressions that violate their conscience and speech rights. This is a triumph of liberalism. It should be recognized as such.

I will let you get to my analysis of the affirmative action ruling in a moment, but the Supreme Court just handed down two massively important decisions, one of which bears directly on the question of conscience and freedom that I wrote about in yesterday’s blog (see Denying Reality: The Tyranny of Gender-Inclusive Language).

In the first decision, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Biden’s program aiming to enable eligible borrowers to eliminate up to 20,000 dollars in debt is unconstitutional. The former Vice President’s program, which carried an estimated cost exceeding 400 billion dollars, had been stalled since October when the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals temporary halted. More than 40 million individuals, mostly young people, were eligible to partake in the program. Biden was trying to buy votes and the Supreme Court said, “I don’t think so, Scooter.” So the kids will have to repay their debts. Like my wife and I did.

In the second decision, the court sided with Lorie Smith, a web designer who holds religious objections to same-sex marriage. In 2016, Smith filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado, asserting her willingness to serve customers planning opposite-sex weddings while declining requests from same-sex couples seeking similar services. Smith contended that, as a creative professional, she possesses the right to exercise freedom of speech by refusing work that contradicts her beliefs. Of course she does. How was this even a question? This is a massive victory for free conscience and speech and a hammer blow to the gender cult trying to force a free people to bend to their ideology.

The reporting on the story is highly revealing. For example, CBS News reporter Melissa Quinn put the matter this way: “All six conservative justices sided with the designer, while the court’s three liberals dissented.” Then those three justices aren’t liberals are they? Those who voted in favor of Smith’s freedom of conscience and speech are the true liberals. The three that dissented—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—are progressives, which is an authoritarian orientation imposing a religious-like ideology. We can highlight the authoritarian orientation by simply noting that the Supreme Court has made it possible for a gay baker to refuse on grounds of conscience and free speech to bake a cake with an anti gay message or a homophonic slur. That this doesn’t occur to progressives is because they work from the politics of power and not from principle.

Okay, now on to the main subject of this essay: the overturning of a major component of institutional racism known as affirmative action.

Before the landmark decision yesterday, the Supreme Court had addressed the issue of affirmative action in several previous cases. In the case of Regents of the University of California v Bakke (1978), the Court ruled that strict racial quotas in university admissions were unconstitutional but allowed the consideration of race as one of many factors in a holistic review process. Subsequent cases, such as Grutter v Bollinger (2003) and Fisher v University of Texas at Austin (2016), upheld the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions (for purposes of diversity) but set limits on its implementation. The Supreme Court overturned all precedent on the matter on Thursday.

The Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admission policies implemented by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina (UNC) are unconstitutional. The policies violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the majority determined. That amendment reads in part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Of course these universities violated the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as the Civil Right Act of 1964. How was this not obvious from the start? (I say this knowing that, at one point in my life, I defended affirmative action.) Harvard and UNC are not alone. More than 40 percent of universities, and 60 percent of selective schools, consider race to some degree in admissions decisions. These percentages would be even higher if it were not for the nine states—Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Washington—that had already banned affirmative action at public universities. Yesterday’s ruling now commits the rest of the nation to colorblind admissions policy—for public and private institutions. It will be interesting to see what elites come up with to keep the diversity racket going.

Highlighting the influence of the three justices appointed by President Donald Trump, the decision marks another big moment where the conservative majority on the Court has overturned long-standing precedents on significant matters that have shaped American society. While I disagree vehemently with last years Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe v Wade (1973), a ruling that runs contrary to the principle of individual liberty, I am elated that the Court decided to uphold individual liberty in the case of affirmative action. (See Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment; Difference and Equality; Demographics and People.)

The Court voted 6-3 in the UNC case and 6-2 in the Harvard dispute, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recusing herself from the Harvard case. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion, which was supported by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Thomas presented a concurring opinion during the proceedings. Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent aloud, marking the first time a dissenting justice has done so this term. Sotomayor said the majority opinion is “not grounded in law or fact and contravenes the vision of equality embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The majority put the matter bluntly: “The admissions programs of Harvard and UNC cannot align with the protections offered by the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack clear and measurable objectives that justify the use of race, employ race in a detrimental manner, perpetuate racial stereotypes, and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never allowed admissions programs to operate in such a manner, and we will not endorse it today.” Roberts noted that universities can still consider an applicant’s explanation of how race has influenced his life experiences, whether through encounters with discrimination, moments of inspiration, or other relevant factors, a caveat that appears to put racial identity in the same subjective spirit as gender identity. How does one show this? It is therefore useful that he added that students should be evaluated based on their experiences “as an individual—not on the basis of race.” “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite,” Roberts noted. “And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.” Robert’s appears to waffle a bit on another precedent, but Thomas cleans it up in his concurring opinion, that Grutter is “for all intents and purposes, overruled.”

Predictably, Thomas is getting hammered by progressives over his opinion because he benefitted from an affirmative action like program in 1971. My response on social media? “Among the most admirable things a man in a high place can do is to act on principle and use his authority to dismantle an unjust status quo despite having personally benefitted from it.”

I have in numerous essays on Freedom and Reason arguing that any claim to privileges and immunities relative to group membership must be based on objective grounds. For example, the intrinsic differences between men and women are such that differential treatment is require to achieve equity; to treat women as if they are men is to systematically discriminate against the former. This might also be the case if racial groups were intrinsically different; but the consensus is that race is a social construction, the divisions based on the arbitrary selection of phenotypic traits that have no bearing on behavioral or cognitive outcomes. Men and women represent two distinct genotypes; in racial terms, there is only one genotype in our species. Thus laws which privilege individuals on the basis of their perceived racial membership commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where the individuals is treated as a personification of an abstraction, in this case a demographic category.

Considering this problem, the dissent by the Court’s progressives represents less of a reasoned argument and more of an exercise in identitarianism. Sotomayor countered Roberts with this: “Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits.” “In so holding,” she writes, “the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” Joined by Kagan and Jackson (on the UNC case), Sotomayor said the court’s decision “subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.” “Simply put, the race-blind admissions stance the Court mandates from this day forward is unmoored from critical real-life circumstances,” Jackson writes in a concurring dissent. “Thus, the Court’s meddling not only arrests the noble generational project that America’s universities are attempting, it also launches, in effect, a dismally misinformed sociological experiment.”

Meddling is a revealing choice of words. One expected Jackson to mock the principle of color-blindness given her commitment to critical race theory (CRT). However, colorblindness is not a superficial rule; the demand to treat individuals equally where there is no objective grouped differences is the foundation of the American Creed. Hardly superficial, this principle is essential to the American way of life. Is it not obvious in policies restricting Asian-American access to institutions of higher education that holding racialized groups to a different standard discriminates against whites and especially Asians? How is that equal? Wasn’t affirmative action the misinformed sociological experiment? Doesn’t the policy rest on a fallacious sociological explanation, the error of treating an abstraction as if it is an actual thing, in this case a strange alchemy that attempts to yield a concrete person from checked boxes on a census form? Skin color tells us nothing about who a person is, what he believes, or what he does or can do.

The cases taken up by the Court originated from legal disputes initiated in November 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions (SFA), an organization founded by conservative activist Ed Blum, who has long advocated against the use of racial preferences in American society. In the Harvard case, SFA alleged that the university’s admissions policies violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Title VI prohibits racial discrimination in any program or activity that receives federal funding. The organization accused Harvard of engaging in discriminatory practices against Asian-American applicants, claiming that the university assigned lower ratings to Asian-American students on personality traits and imposed limits on the number of Asian-American applicants admitted. In the University of North Carolina case, SFA asserted that the university violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The organization argued that the university failed to consider race-neutral alternatives to achieve diversity among its student body.

For me, these were open and shut cases. The Harvard policy contradicted the plain language of the Civil Rights Act, which was passed to address racial discrimination and promote equal opportunities in various aspects of public life, including education, employment, and housing. While some have argued, deploying convoluted and fallacious argument, that affirmative action is consistent with the law because it aligns with the overall goal of combating discrimination and promoting equality, the defenders of individual liberty have insisted that such policies are discriminatory and violate the principle of equal treatment under the law. If the Civil Rights Act prohibits intentional discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and affirmative action involves the consideration of race or ethnicity as a factor in decision-making, how can such a policy stand in the land of the free?

In her majority opinion in Grutter, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested that the use of racial preferences in college admissions may no longer be necessary in 25 years, which stamped the policy with something of an expiration date of 2028. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, pointed out that neither Harvard nor the UNC provided evidence to the court indicating that their race-based admissions programs had clear end points. He stated that there was no reason to believe that these institutions would, in the near future, comply with the requirements of the Equal Protection Clause, even if they were acting in good faith. I must confess that the idea of an end date for a policy that should never have been implemented in the first place makes little sense to me, especially since the claims of systemic racism, beyond affirmative action itself, a de jure policy with the express intent to discriminate against whites and Asians in the institutions of opportunity, suffer from lack of evidence and the afore-mentioned fallacy.

In a statement oblivious to the fact that affirmative action confuses individuals with abstractions and rewards or punishes concrete persons for things they had nothing to do with, Stanford tweeted:

President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s message regarding the Supreme Court ruling on race-conscious university admissions: https://t.co/rKDM826HoV pic.twitter.com/7KlA1CvIrU

— Stanford University (@Stanford) June 29, 2023

We are hearing complaints from progressives that the Supreme Court’s recent rulings fly in the face of what the majority wants. But justice is not necessarily found in what the majority wants. Justice very often eludes the crowd. Justice is not what is popular. Justice is what is right. In that determination, it’s often the minority—and sometimes the one—who speaks truth. The question now is for how much longer will the race hustlers cling to the notion that blacks cannot succeed in a meritocracy—that, without being judged by a diminished standard, nearly sixty years since the fall of Jim Crow, they will continue to suffer extraordinary rates of crime and violence, joblessness, poverty and single-parent households—and that this is the fault of white people? Hopefully this decision will start the unwinding of the New Racism that progressives have strived to entrench in every American institution.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” —First Amendment to US Constitution.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.” —Article 18 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” —Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Rowling quote below brings us home to the rights those living in free societies necessarily possess—necessary if we are to keep our societies free.

'Cis' is ideological language, signifying belief in the unfalsifiable concept of gender identity. You have a perfect right to believe in unprovable essences that may or may not match the sexed body, but the rest of us have a right to disagree, and to refuse to adopt your jargon.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 21, 2023

As I pointed out in a previous essay using Scientology as an analog (see Dianetics in Our Schools), a man is in a free society able to say without consequence that there is such a thing as a “thetan,” which in his religious system is the authentic self of the individual. A man is free to undergo auditing in order to reveal his authentic self. To be sure, auditing is a bit less analogous to procedures used by the medical-industrial complex to sterilize children and create lifetime clients, but I trust you get the point.

https://twitter.com/ClownWorld_/status/1674131932396003329?s=20

Above is Addison Rose Vincent, the man who appeared on the Dr. Phil Show (January 19, 2022) who couldn’t answer Matt Walsh’s straightforward question about the definition of woman, i.e., an “adult human female.” Perhaps the most useful thing about this video, if you can pay attention to the words, is that you should now be able (if you weren’t before) to immediately detect those around you who’ve bent over for the gender cult. “Y’all,” “folx,” and several other stick-your-finger-down-your-throat-and-vomit terms are covered here.

The United Nations webpage on “gender-inclusive language” states: “Using gender-inclusive language means speaking and writing in a way that does not discriminate against a particular sex, social gender or gender identity, and does not perpetuate gender stereotypes. Given the key role of language in shaping cultural and social attitudes, using gender-inclusive language is a powerful way to promote gender equality and eradicate gender bias.” Note the constructs “social gender” and “gender identity.” Note the admission that language plays “a key role of language in shaping cultural and social attitudes.” Note that the United Nations has adopted gender ideology and its framework for speech regarding sex and gender.

Gender-inclusive language is more than nauseating virtue-signaling. Especially when imposed by law and policy, and especially in public institutions, gender-inclusive language is compelled speech designed to force individuals to accept an ideology to which they may not subscribe—indeed, ideology they oppose (and should oppose). Compelling individuals to use such language forcibly includes them in a group to which they neither belong nor wish to associate. It’s the same as making people affirm the slogan “There is no god except Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet.” (See NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech; The War on Fact and Reason: More on the Problem of Compelled Speech.)

When the government imposes the language of an ideology, such as gender ideology/queer theory, on a population it’s behaving as a theocracy—just as much as it would be if it mandated citizens to use the assumptions and doctrines of Scientology or Islam. Not like a theocracy. As a theocracy. In these cases, the people are no longer citizens of a free society but subjects under the tyranny of an exclusive ideological system. As I have covered in numerous essays on Freedom and Reason, administrators are forcing people to undergo diversity training in which they have to learn the doctrines and repeat the scriptures of gender theory. (See There’s No Obligation to Speak Like a Queer Theorist. Doing so Misrepresents Reality.)

As such, compelled speech is a violation of the fundamental rights identified in the First Amendment to the US Bill of Rights, most obviously transgressing our freedom of conscience, speech, and association. It also violates Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These items, posted at the top of this essay, are among the most fundamental laws in Western society.

I reject gender ideology for the same reason I reject Scientology, Islam, and other religious systems and their crackpot ideas. Like those systems, gender ideology/queer theory is based on nonfalsifiable constructs, constructs invented by gender ideology (e.g., “gender identity”), as well as advancing a purported system of ethics, one demanding individuals to use the language of the state religion, a language designed to confuse ordinary understandings of gender.

The language of gender ideology/queer theory by its own lights is meant to disrupt normal understandings and replace them with a new doctrine that limits our ability to communicate ideas and exist freely in a relationship with objective reality. It is what George Orwell called “Newspeak” in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, his warning about about totalitarianism. Read it if you haven’t. Tell others what you found there. Organize resistance to this tyranny.

Gender-inclusive language is not actually inclusive, since it intentionally excludes the identification of discriminative relations fundamental to human society, such as father and mother, by removing from normative language such terms such as “dad” and “mom,” classes of people who differ from the other categorically. Moreover, the function of gender-inclusive language is to erase relations critical to the preservation of traditional cultures. We see this, for example, in the construct “Latinx,” which means to replace Latino, i.e., men and all Hispanics, and Latina, i.e., women, with a neologism robbing Hispanics of the gendered language they have used for centuries. (So much for multiculturalism.)

This is a totalitarian project and you have every right to resist it—and you ought to resist it. If we let governments impose an ideological language on us, they will control our thoughts, and we will no longer be a free people. The spread of the gender cult is an existential threat to freedom.

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In a forthcoming essay, I dive deeply into sexology and queer theory and expose the pseudoscientific character of efforts to undermine scientific materialism and normalize the sexualization of children. Perhaps the best example of this deceit is the artificial separation of the terms sex and gender, terms that are synonymous.

John Ray in Methodus Plantarum Nova (1686) used the term “gender” to describe the different sexes of plants. Carl Linnaeus, who developed the binomial nomenclature system for classifying organisms in his Systema Naturae (1736) also used the term to refer to the sexual characteristics of plants, treating them as male or female entities. Charles Darwin, in both The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) used gender and sex interchangeably to describe the biological differences between male and female individuals in various species, including plants and animals.

In the 1960s, psychologist Robert Stoller drew a distinction between gender and sex (see Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, published in 1968). It was Stoller who proposed the concept of “gender identity” to describe an individual’s internal sense of their own gender, which may or may not align with their “assigned sex,” another construct of sexology. Psychologist and sexologist John Money played a significant role in popularizing the concept of gender identity through his work on gender development and his own construction “gender role,” presented in his 1972 Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity. Money emphasized the social and psychological aspects of gender, arguing that it is not solely determined by biological sex.

That the term “sex” is typically qualified with “biological” by those advancing these ideas tells you that they assume (correctly) that sex is not strictly biological. One can just as easily talk about “sexual identity” and “sex roles” as one can about gender identity and roles. The terms are interchangeable. They use the term gender to construct these terms because they are perpetrating an ideological action designed to separate gender from sex in the popular mind in order to argue that a male (sex) can be a woman (gender). Is a man is an adult human male, then he cannot be a woman by definition. This is the basis to turning to the tautological definition that asserts that a woman is a person who identifies as such (see Scientific Materialism and the Necessity of Noncircular Conceptual Definitions). That this requires sex to be biological reductive and gender to be disconnected from biology is a trick to make the tautological sound scientific.

Prior to the redefinition of gender by a small group of ideologically-driven sexologists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The law specifically prohibited employment discrimination based on sex, which is obviously more than gametes, since the problems the act sought to address were discrimination and sexual harassment based on gender stereotypes. This provision aimed to address gender-based employment discrimination and promote equal opportunities for men and women in the workplace. Although gender does not appear in the law, sex is clearly presumed to cover sociocultural matters in the law. The inclusion of sex as a protected category in the Civil Rights Act represents a significant step towards combating sex-based discrimination in various areas of society. It provides a legal framework for challenging discriminatory practices and promoting equality in the workplace.

That equality is conceived of in terms of equity with respect to sex, which involves the recognition of grouped sex-based differences, thus justifying differential treatment to combat disparities that result from the organization of human societies around sex differences, is found in the relationship between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and athletics in schools, primarily revolving around Title IX of the act. Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance. While Title IX covers a wide range of educational aspects, including admissions, treatment of students, and employment practices, it has had a significant impact on athletics in schools.

Under Title IX, educational institutions are required to provide equal opportunities for both male and female students to participate in sports and other athletic activities. Schools must ensure that their athletic programs offer equitable benefits, opportunities, and resources to both genders. This means that schools must provide equal funding, coaching, facilities, equipment, scheduling, and other support to their female and male athletes. Title IX has thus played a crucial role in promoting gender equity in school athletics. It has helped increase female participation in sports and address historical disparities and discrimination faced by female athletes. Schools and educational institutions must comply with Title IX regulations to ensure they are providing equal opportunities and treatment for all students interested in athletic participation. But today, the goals of equity are threatened by gender ideology. (See The Casual Use of Propagandistic Language Surrounding Sex and Gender; Is Title IX Kaput? Or Was it Always Incomprehensible? Why Are There Sex-Segregated Spaces Anyway? NPR, State Propaganda Organ, Reveals Who and What have Captured the State Apparatus.)

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The same set of rights—conscience, speech, press, and association—that allows people to believe and speak and write about and gather to recognize ridiculous things at the same time gives others the right to deny and criticize, even condemn and organize against those things. It obligates all sides to tolerate the opinions of others, of course, but it’s also supposed to prevent some from imposing one others those ridiculous ideas and practices; the same rights that make it possible for one person to believe in absurdities is supposed to make sure other persons don’t have to.

At least this is the way it’s supposed to be considering the fundamental laws of the nation. That governments have moved to impose upon all of us what is clearly a quasi religious ideology, that is gender ideology, in the face of our right to be free from such an imposition is the surest indication that we exist in a totalitarian situation.

Let me put this as bluntly as I can: If you, the reader, can’t see that, then you’re a proponent of totalitarianism. You have an authoritarian mind. Don’t talk to me about civil and human rights if this is your mind. You openly abandon the principle of civil and human rights when you seek or support consequences for me when I resist ideology. I don’t want to mince words: you have become a fascist. That makes you my enemy. And this is where tolerance ends.

The Supreme Court handed down a decision yesterday, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, that contradicts the plain language of the Constitution and empowers the judiciary to govern federal elections. The corporate state media celebrated the decision, dutifully portraying those defending the “Elections Clause” as advancing a “fringe theory” known as the “independent state legislature” theory. Not only does the decision contradict the plain language of the Constitution, but it contradicts longstanding and affirmed Supreme Court precedent that has held that Article I, Section 4, Clause 1, which I detail in a moment, provides for legislatures, not courts, to regulate how states exercise their authority over Senate and House elections.

The independent state legislature theory pertains to the process of legislative redistricting. According to this theory, the power to draw and determine the boundaries of electoral districts lies exclusively with state legislatures and cannot be delegated or controlled by other entities, such as courts or independent redistricting commissions. Readers should know, if this essay’s contents do not make obvious, I am committed to popular control over the election process, which means that governance of the process properly belongs with the elected representatives of the citizens of the various states. According to proponents of the theory, of which I am one, any attempt to transfer this power to alternative bodies or involve the judiciary in the redistricting process infringes upon the constitutional rights of the state legislature.

The theory finds its basis in the Elections Clause of the United States Constitution, which states that the “Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Advocates of the theory interpret this clause as granting broad discretion and exclusive control to the state legislature in determining the rules and procedures for conducting elections, including redistricting. In recent years, some courts have ruled in favor of independent redistricting commissions, while others have upheld the authority of state legislatures. The question is whether courts should enjoy this level of control over a process determined by the people. The Supreme Court has issued rulings on redistricting cases that have both supported and questioned the theory. But yesterday’s decision changes elections fundamentally. If you thought the 2020 federal elections were rigged and stolen, the courts just ensured that the 2024 election cycle will be just as gamed and just as fraudulent.

This decision follows recent decisions rejecting districts maps for failing to gerrymander districts on the basis of racial identity, a clear rejection of colorblind individualism and an act of elevating the progressive ideology of racial reification. The claim that this is a conservative, i.e., classical liberal, court can be put to bed in light of these decisions. There is a liberal minority (justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented to yesterday’s ruling), but we can now see that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were likely ringers for establishment forces and that Roberts has in recent years come under the influence of the same forces. Either that, or the recent threats to the safety of the justices, both in street-level thuggery and the specter of arbitrary ethics violations, as well as talk of court-packing and term limits for the justices, have them intimidated. To be sure, a man can change his mind; however, in his opinion, Robert rationalized a previous decision from which he dissented eight years ago. It’s obvious that something has compromised his principles.

The bottom-line is that the Court’s decision is an invitation for state and federal courts to use judicial review as a weapon against the republic and selected democratic movements. While Roberts’ majority opinion cautions state courts to resist imposing any sort of limits on legislatures’ action, the decision leaves open the question of when a state court ruling would go too far. That no limits on judicial review are articulated gives away the game: the judiciary has been given power to govern our elections. This means that judges—woke and progressive judges—can change the rules of federal elections mid-process, as courts and the executives of the various states did in the 2020 and 2022 cycles, a power that allows courts to favor one party over another. The paradigm of exercising political-ideological prejudice is found in decisions regarding the processing of absentee ballots, a voting method preferred by Democrats.

I want to spend some time discussing the Constitution in order to put the matter as clearly as I can, as this is a monumental decision. I also want to discuss related issues to give the reader a sense of the past spirit of populism and the anti-democratic power the establishment is exercising over the republic’s machinery of late.

Article One of the United States Constitution, in Section 4, contains the relevant clause pertaining to federal elections. As noted, this clause is commonly referred to as the Elections Clause, also known as the “Times, Places, and Manner Clause.” Here is the exact text of the clause: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.” The purpose of this clause is to strike a balance between state and federal authority in managing the electoral process. State legislatures have the primary responsibility for regulating elections, but Congress has the power to intervene and establish nationwide standards if deemed necessary (the Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example). However, the clause does not give courts, either state or federal, the authority to determine such matters—each state’s legislature has the power to establish the rules and procedures for elections within their state.

I need to emphasize something to push back against the so-called “States’ Rights” argument, which has no basis in constitutional law (states have powers not rights—only people have rights). This power is found in the “Supremacy Clause,” a legal doctrine found in Article VI, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution. It establishes that the Constitution, along with the laws and treaties made under it, are the supreme law of the land, taking precedence over any conflicting state laws or constitutions. Here is the exact text of that clause: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The Supremacy Clause establishes the hierarchical structure of laws in the United States. It declares that the federal Constitution, federal laws enacted by Congress, and treaties approved by the federal government hold the highest legal authority within the country. According to the Supremacy Clause, if there is a conflict between federal law and state law, the federal law prevails. State judges are not allowed to contradict federal law, with disputes settled through the principle of judicial review. Thus state governments are required to adhere to and enforce federal laws, even if they differ from state laws or preferences, and there is a mechanism to compel them to do this. This principle ensures uniformity and consistency in the application of federal laws across all states. The Supremacy Clause is one of the key provisions that delineates the relationship between the federal government and the states in the United States and reinforces the idea of a unified legal framework at the national level. Crucially, it upholds the sovereignty of the entire citizenry.

There is an exception in Elections Clause concerning the “Places of chusing [sic] Senators.” This exception means that only the state legislatures have the authority to determine how senators are chosen, such as through popular vote or by legislative appointment. You may remember that the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1913, changed the rule concerning the election of federal senators. Prior to the Seventeenth Amendment, senators were chosen by state legislatures rather than by popular vote. The amendment modified Article I, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which originally stated: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years…” The Seventeenth Amendment revised this clause to read: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years….”

The Seventeenth Amendment introduced the direct election of senators by the people of each state and thus represents an expansion of the people’s power. This change was made in response to concerns over corruption and political manipulation in the selection process when state legislatures appointed senators, but it also represents the populist spirit of the time. The amendment aimed to increase democratic participation and give citizens a more direct voice in choosing their senators. Since the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, senators have been elected through popular votes in statewide elections, similar to the election process for members of the House of Representatives. You will note that this amendment does not undermine the legislative branch of the states as the body regulating elections and was passed by Congress.

The Supreme Court cannot negate amendments; it can only interpret them. At least that is the original design. This is why I have spent time discussing this—to show the correct way to change the Constitution, that is, through the process outlined by the document. To wit, I draw your attention to the part of the United States Constitution that allows for amendments: Article V. Here is the text: “The Congress, whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three-fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three-fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress….”

There are also laws regulating elections after the founding, actions that are, as I have explain, permissible by the Election Clause. One of these, the Electoral Count Act (ECA) of 1887, also known as the Lodge-Gosper Act or the Federal Election Law (Pub. L. 49–90, 24 Stat. 373, later codified under Title 3, Chapter 1), reformed the electoral process for presidential elections in the United States. The act primarily addressed the selection and appointment of electors who would cast their votes for President and Vice President. It aimed to regulate and standardize the selection of electors across states and establish procedures for resolving disputes in the appointment of electors. The Electoral Act of 1887 required states to appoint their electors through a popular vote rather than through the state legislature. It also set a uniform Election Day for presidential elections, which is now held on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November.

The ECA was passed by Congress in 1887, a decade after the controversial 1876 presidential election. During that election, between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. The election results were disputed due to allegations of voter fraud, voter suppression, and the presence of multiple sets of electoral votes from several states, leading to a prolonged deadlock in Congress that lasted for weeks. The 1880 and 1884 elections were also closely contested, further highlighting the potential for partisan manipulation in the absence of a defined counting procedure. These subsequent events reinforced the urgency to establish a formal mechanism for counting electoral votes. By implementing the ECA, Congress aimed to provide a framework that would guide the counting process and mitigate potential political maneuvering. The law sought to ensure a fair and consistent approach to resolving any disputes or controversies that may arise during the counting of electoral votes.

This is the law that allowed for challenges to the 2020 elections during the January 6, 2021 joint session of Congress. In accordance with the Electoral Count Act of 1887, for an objection to a state certification to be upheld by Congress, it must be supported by both a Representative and a Senator. This occurred in the case of Arizona, trigging an adjournment of the joint session adjourned at 1:15 pm to allow each chamber to debate and vote on the objection. It was at this moment that protestors entered the Capitol, forcing an evacuation of legislators from the building. After clearing the Capitol of protestors and resuming the process, objections to the electoral votes of Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada were raised by Republican members of the House but not sustained because no senator joined the objection. The “insurrection,” apparently worked. In fact, in the case of Georgia, Senator Kelly Loeffler withdrew her objection after the building was cleared. The objection concerning Pennsylvania electors was sustained, but was overruled by the entire body. It is unclear what would have happened on January 6 had protestors not entered the Capitol, in several instances facilitated by Capitol police.

On December 22, 2022, the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 was passed by the United States Senate. In votes conducted the next day, the bill enjoyed majorities in both the Senate (overwhelmingly) and in the House (a much closer vote). President Joe Biden signed it into law a few days later. The bill designates each state’s governor as the responsible authority for submitting certificates of ascertainment, unless state laws or constitutions specify otherwise; establishes an expedited review process for certain claims related to a state’s certification of electors, including a three-judge panel with a direct appeal to the Supreme Court; mandates that Congress must defer to slates of electors submitted by a state’s executive branch in accordance with judgments made by state or federal courts; clarifies that the vice president does not possess sole authority to determine, accept, reject, or adjudicate disputes regarding electors (this was the piece that most concerned the establishment); raises the objection threshold from one member of each chamber to 20% of each chamber; and prohibits state legislatures from declaring an election as “failed,” allowing for the rescheduling of elections only under “extraordinary and catastrophic” circumstances.

Both yesterday’s Supreme Court decision (and other recent decisions regarding gerrymandering) and last year’s revision to the ECA, albeit arrived at through the legislative process, represent regressive moves stymieing the trend in expanding the scope of popular sovereignty. These actions represent corporate state power moves to thwart control and review of elections by the people of their states as represented by their representatives. The 2020 election should have been a wakeup call for maximizing democratic redress in the conduct of elections, but the Supreme Court has empowered courts to hinder the legislatures in the various states from organizing voting in such a way that would permit the success of democratic movements threatening establishment power. Beneath the capture and trepidation of conservatives judges noted earlier is the emergence of a logic of control that facilitates the workings of the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus, all this for the sake of corporate governance. Indeed, the ECA revision appears to anticipate Robert’s ruling. The decision puts the power to control elections in the hands of judges and relegates the people to the role of spectators of elite machinations. This is one more nail in the coffin where the corpse of the American Republic lays prone.

I have been on vacation in Orange Beach, Alabama. It was my anniversary week—celebrating 35 years of marriage to a wonderful woman, my one and only wife Mona. I didn’t announce my break from blogging because I would rather people not know when I am traveling and not at home. But now I’m back, tanned (burnt, to be frank), and ready to blog. Thanks for reading Freedom and Reason! Stay tuned.

In case you still have any doubts that ChatGPT is programmed to be woke as fuck, read this exchange I just now had with the bot. I asked it to tell me about “two-spirit,” a 1990s construct invented by western progressives to enlarge the coalition of BI-POC devotees to the administrative state and further guilt-trip gullible white folx. The bot couldn’t help itself—it had to editorialize at the end, admonishing me to approach discussion about this subject with “respect,” “honoring [blah blah blah].” I asked it why. I got the predictable answer.

 In this instance, which is typical, you can see that the parameters of ChatGPT are set to generate answers that reflect the corporate state agenda of progressivism replete with the lingo and sentiments of social justice. AI chatbots represent a massive mind control project designed to change the way you talk about the world in order to reduce your capacity to think. It assumes people are programmable—and to a certain and real extend, people are—and embraces its mission to program them with the “correct” moral system.

You must wake up to this. When AI takes over completely, those of you who are disinclined to be marginalized and punished for the sake of principle and reason will be reduced to a serf in a technocratic network of corporate estates babbling like an infant and smacking on pablum. The rest of you will be reduced to a serf against your will or will go down fighting. If you find what the bot fed back to me hopeful, then you’re already in the highchair with your bib on. Open the food tunnel. Here comes the Choo Choo.

I was trying to watch the moment when it happened but missed it. I just noticed that I shot past a thousand essays on Freedom and Reason. One thousand and four essays! For the most part, these essays were written over the last five years when I resurrected my blog at WordPress after retiring my Google Blogger site several years ago. Given the length and quality of most of these essays, that’s a lot of time and energy. (You may disagree about the quality, but you have to admit that there are a lot of words on these pages.)

I still have more Blogger posts to move over, but I have been too busy writing almost daily WordPress essays to dwell on the old stuff. Moreover, I have nearly a hundred draft essays that I haven’t been able to finish for various reasons. The main reason is that the things that are happening in the here-and-now are prioritized over things, but word-smithing is also a big hangup.

Why a blog? The reason I shifted from writing for academic presses (I have quite a few of those types of publications on my vita) to writing blogs is because (a) the turn around time in publishing a scientific article is ridiculous and (b) my discipline has been captured by woke ideology. I couldn’t get past the gatekeepers today. That’s okay, because blogs are not just the future, they are the present. It is rapidly becoming the norm that this is the way academics communicate their ideas to the public—and there’s no pay wall! Blogging lets me share sociological analysis of historical events and social trends in real-time and in an accessible way. It also allows me to share sociological insights in a manner accessible to popular readers.

So check out my blog! Freedom and Reason. If you open a WordPress account (it’s free), you can subscribe to my blog and like my posts. You can post your own blogs, too! Let me know if you do and I will subscribe! Keep in mind that I don’t have a copy editor, so sometimes the writing gets a little sloppy, especially if I am writing in a white heat. If you see spelling errors, dropped words, or grammatical snafus, let me know so I can correct them. That’s another thing that’s so wonderful about digital publishing: you can fix errors and typos.

Also watch for more podcasts and vidcasts. I have established a Rumble channel and plan to go bigger in the future with this type of content.