Year: 2023

The Venus of Willendorf is an ancient fertility totem or fetish, so named because of the sexual power of the ancient deity Venus, the Roman counterpart of the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, fertility, and love. Both Venus and Aphrodite were associated with the planet Venus, known to the ancients as both the “morning star” and “evening star,” the brightest object in the sky after Sol and Luna. As the only clearly visible inner planet, Venus moves through phases, and these phases, as well as the phases of Luna, can be associated with changes on Earth. (Lucifer, the bringer of reason, is also associated with this star.)

The Venus of Willendorf gets her other name from the village in Austria where archaeologist Josef Szombathly found her in 1908. She is estimated to be around 25,000 years old and believed to have been manufactured during the Paleolithic era. She is quite small, approximately 11 centimeters in height, and made of limestone. The statue depicts a woman with exaggerated sexual features: large breasts, hips, and thighs. Her belly perhaps swollen in pregnancy. Although the Willendorf Venus is the most famous, there are other examples, including the Dolní Věstonice, Hohle Fels, and Lespugue Venuses. While most of the ancient fertility figurines like these Venuses have been found in Europe, similar fetishes have been discovered in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 

The theory is that the ancients would carve and perhaps bury the fetish in the ground to control or shape the forces of fertility towards their benefit, as procreation is to anyone capable of reason the obvious imperative of life. It would not have been lost on the ancients, who grasped many profound things about the often uncertain world in which found themselves, that without mothers there are no children, and that where there are no children there is no future. Not only is it the mother that births the next generation with her body, but is also the mother who feeds the children with her body, and who primes their empathic circuitry.

This is true not only of humans, but of the other animals around them—and of Earth herself. We can see this recognition in the ancient fertility rituals we today call Easter, associated with the spring equinox. In many cultures, spring is the time of the renewal of Earth’s fertility. The egg is a symbol of new life and rebirth. The tradition of decorating eggs at Easter can be found in ancient cultures—the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Persians all decorated eggs as part of their spring fertility rituals. In pagan Europe, eggs were decorated with symbols of spring and new life. The hiding of eggs was common in many cultures during spring celebrations as a symbol of the renewal of life. In today’s Easter rituals, the eggs are hidden in the earth to be discovered by the children whose existence is owed to the mother. Hidden, as the Venus of Willendorf was, in the mother.

Although he penned his theory of the role of the mother in cultural and social life long before the discovery of these Venuses, the German anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen, who influenced Louis Henry Morgan in the development of the thesis of ancient matriarchal society (what Bachofen called “gynecocracy” or the regular rule of women), as well as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the development of their materialist theory of history, argued in his 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (translated as “mother right”) that the rise of the patriarchy represented a fundamental shift in attitudes towards the body and sexuality, with patriarchal societies repressing and controlling sexual behavior in ways that matriarchal societies did not.

Bachofen theorized that in fact early societies worshipped the mother, which was apparent in art and design, and this indicated that women played a central role in the cultural and social life of the ancients. The ancients understood the life-giving power of the female. They saw Earth as the eternal woman. Bachofen argued that because of this women had greater autonomy and power in matriarchal societies. They were able to express themselves in ways that were not possible in patriarchal societies. Woman sat at the center of human life. Without the female, there was no world for humans to animate with their labor—no world to develop with their creative powers, a creativity in their alienation that would come to confuse them about this very truth: that women are real and material and necessary.

The overthrow of mother right and the subordination of the community of women to men, who then defined what a woman was, is, and can be, in contradiction to what natural history made her, changed the character of religion from the focus on fertility and love to the androcentric obsession with destruction and domination, to avarice and greed. Once in power, men established the rule and veneration of the patriarchs and women became their subordinates. Men remade the deities after their likeness—male—eventually become one—and repurposed the existing rituals, for example the association between Easter and eggs, in which Christians took a symbol of new life and resurrection and made it about their creator god incubated in an immaculate womb to be reborn in human form so that god could die for the sins of mankind—if only mankind will accept on faith this claim as valid (the specter of hellfire tells they’d better). The material fact of motherhood became the spiritual lie of father right. So the eggs are decorated and exchanged as gifts on Easter Sunday to represent the tomb from which Jesus was resurrected, not the mother. The mother was only a vessel to be used by a heavenly projection in the image of the male. From agent to incubator.

Today, patriarchal society wishes to deny the real and material and eternal (at least until the sun explodes or man destroys the world). Women are being erased by a new religion, marked by rage and jealousy and poorly made simulacra, that treats actually-existing things as mere social constructions, reifications determined by an ethereal and evil power defined by narcissists in terms of obstacles (the original meaning of “Satan”) blocking the way to their becoming what they are not and can never be. Transhumanism and the destructive and nihilistic character of its workings is everywhere and growing. Those who most grasp the truth are the prime targets of its misogyny. So this year and in the years that follow let Mothers Day take on a different and more urgent meaning. It has never been more important in history as it is right now to recognize the central role of the mother in our lives and the destructive forces that seek to diminish her.

This past Thursday, I blogged about Race and Violent Death in America. In that blog I showed that an examination of the interracial character of murder in America finds far more white victims of black-perpetrated homicide than the other way around, putting the lie to the perception that blacks are at special risk to white-perpetrated homicide, a false perception fueled by selected cases such as the Ahmaud Arbery shooting, where, to quote The New York Times,  “a 25-year-old Black man was chased by white residents of a South Georgia neighborhood.”

There is another phenomenon revealed by the statistics of violent deaths that, in this case generates more questions than answers concerning the racial profile in American lethal violence. This is the vast racial difference in type of violent death: whereas blacks are more likely to die at the hands of other blacks, whites are more likely to die by their own hands.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were a total of of nearly two million homicides and a total of nearly one and half million suicides in the United States between 1968 and 2021. Crucially, the ratio of homicides to suicides is not stable during this period. In the early 20th century, the homicide rate in the United States was relatively high, with rates reaching their peak in the 1970s and 1980s. However, since the 1990s, the homicide rate has generally been on a downward trend (although rising over the last decade). Meanwhile, the suicide rate has been on an upward trend since the early 2000s, and now exceeds the homicide rate. However, the racial pattern of homicides relative to suicides remains roughly stable over this period.

Keep in mind that most homicide during this period is intra-racial, meaning that blacks are more likely to murder other blacks, while whites are more likely to murder other whites (see my recent blog for statistics on this concerning the ten most violent states in America: Is It Guns?). Overall, more blacks than whites are the victims of murder, despite blacks being only around 13 percent of the population. Independent of race, most of the victims are male. It’s when we look at all violent deaths that we find this disturbing pattern: that while most blacks who die a violent are homicide victims most whites who die a violent death die by their own hand. (Note the adjustment in period from 1968 to 2016. This is because of data availability.)

I want suggest a few possible causes and then leave further reflection of this phenomenon for future blogs. First, white suicide has increased with the emergence of transnational capital and the practice of offshoring manufacturing jobs and importing cheap labor. For workers, the loss of livelihood and economic freedom for those for whom these things matter can be emotionally devastating. Second, the life expectancy of whites is much longer than blacks due to the latter’s extraordinary frequencies of homicide. The longer one lives, the more likely their death will be at their own hands. According to various statistics, adults over the age of 65 have a higher rate of suicide compared to any other age group, with the highest rates among white males over the age of 85. (Suicide is rapidly increasing among white youth, so this pattern may change in the future.)

Whatever the explanation for this disparity, it is hard to see in this pattern any indication of white supremacy in these statistics—unless one supposes that whites are more likely to commit suicide out of an unbearable sense white guilt. If this were true, it would only further debunk the claim that America is fraught by white supremacy.

Biden’s policy is open borders. They’re lying to you when they tell you it’s not. They lie to you about everything else, so why would you believe them now? 

Who’s lying to you? That’s not hard to figure out. Simply note who’s telling you that the southern border isn’t open. If they’re not lying, then they’re too uninformed or ideological confused to help you understand the situation.

But you don’t need their counsel. The situation isn’t hard to figure out. When an authority hands an illegal alien a slip of paper telling him to appear in court and then allows him to go wherever he wishes in the country he just illegally entered, that’s open borders. 

Who’s coming across our southern border? The border-crossers will claim they’re a desperate lot seeking asylum. They’re coached to say this by the network of forces bringing them here. They’re told they have a right to cross our borders. 

The network is a vast and powerful transnational system that includes UN and US government agencies, NGOs, and other actors, many of whom are religious. Partner agencies and organizations include state and national government actors, such as the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), Department of State, Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Department of Health and Human Services, state refugee coordinators, state health coordinators, and the United States Citizen and Immigration Services. Non-governmental partners and refugee advocacy organizations include Refugee Council USA (RCUSA), InterAction, and the Cultural Orientation Resource Exchange (CORE). Resettlement agencies that partner in the process include Church World Service (CWS), Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM), Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), International Rescue Committee (IRC), US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS), United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), World Relief Corporation (WR), and International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Those streaming across the southern border of the United States may indeed be a desperate lot, but the majority of them are coming to work, which will displace native American workers and drive down wages for all workers in the United States.

Nobody has a right to come to come to America for work. Why doesn’t every native American have a right to a job? If an American worker doesn’t have a right to his job, how does a foreigner have a right to his job?

Why do progressives care so much about the desperate foreigner but so little about the American worker that they will prioritize the needs of the foreigner over the needs of their own countryman?

Consider the ghettoization and custodial management of a large portion of black America—the crime and disorder, the poverty and fatherlessness that plagues black-majority neighborhoods. Who created this situation? Who maintains this situation? The same people clamoring for and rationalizing open borders. Progressivism is the political-ideological project of corporate statism. Progressivism is the operating system of the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus.

Corporations want cheap super-exploitable labor to drive down labor costs and generate greater levels of surplus value—this to accumulate ever greater amounts of capital. Driving down labor costs is not only about exploiting cheap foreign labor. Corporations want cheap native-born labor to exploit, as well. Just as they seek third-world labor globally, corporate power is building a third-world labor force right here at home. They’ve already substantially achieved their dream. Just look around you. Now they want the full-on nightmare version.

Corporate state power—totalitarian monopoly capitalism—seeks one-party rule and the continued decline of the American republic, as well as the substantive destruction of its operating system (democratic-republicanism and classical liberal freedoms) in order to prepare the American worker for full incorporation into the transnationalist neo-feudalist world order they’ve been designing and implementing for decades, a world in which the world proletariat will exist as serfs in a high-tech global control system.

The party scheduled to be that one party is the Democrat Party. Democrats believe that establishing one-party rule requires changing the ethnic and religious composition of the nation. This is the strategy of multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, openly pushed by transnationalists more than century ago. (See An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion. See also my March 2019 blog The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate.)

This is why American workers and their children are compelled to undergoing training in the false belief that concern for their communities and the integrity of their culture and laws is racist and xenophobic. Why would public and private institutions establish DEI offices? The dominant institutions of contemporary America have have become indoctrination and reeducation centers. It’s why the state is telling parents that their children are also its children.

The goal corporations seek depends on entrenching division, fomenting resentment and rebellion, and spreading chaos and confusion. Among the millions streaming across the border under an illegitimate president’s necrotic watch are criminals and psychopaths and drug and human traffickers.

The world is giving up its lumpenproletariat to the network, dumping their social problem on America (and Europe, as well, the peoples of those many countries also scheduled for full incorporation in the new order of things).

The third world capitalism created is dumping its problems on a nation that can’t fix its own problems: rampant crime, structural unemployment, and a public education system captured by ideologues—all problems created by a corporate state that is insinuating itself into the most private and sacred spaces of human life. This is fascism’s second-coming. This is the New Fascism.

I don’t want to leave readers feeling as if the situation is hopeless. There is a way out of this: Bridging the Left-Right Divide to Confront the New World Order (see also Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism).

* * *

How about these xenophobic nativists? Do black Chicagoans not like black and brown people? Racists the lot of them? Or is this protest AI generated?

South Shore, Chicago voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a whopping 97%

This is how residents are reacting to 250-500 migrants coming to their area: pic.twitter.com/X4lbibdStV

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 12, 2023

No, these are citizens who grasp the heart of the matter. The city of Chicago is now facing legal action from residents of South Shore due to its plans to convert an abandoned high school in the area into a migrant respite center. Last week, hundreds of South Shore residents attended a meeting where they criticized the city officials’ plans to open the respite center for incoming migrants in the former school building.

Meanwhile, the city has declared a state of emergency due to the influx of migrants. Chicago has already received over 8,000 migrants since August, with over 200 people arriving daily. The influx is overwhelming police station lobbies, and the city cannot open shelters fast enough. One question critics have is why the city would place migrants in an area where they could be further traumatized. All three temporary shelters, including the proposed South Shore High School location, are on the South Side of the city.

Wake up sleepy people. The red rooster is on the prowl. The Democratic Party doesn’t represent your material interests. It hasn’t for decades. The Party represents the imperative of transnational corporate power. Democrats are the party of global capitalism. Here’s what waking up sounds like. Listen to it. It’s a beautiful sound. Perhaps a little late. And that’s frustrating. Folks will need to go all in the other direction to turn it around now. Half-ass won’t work anymore.

One of greatest myths progressives push is the lie that violent white oppression is the bane of the black community. The public is constantly subject to scaremongering about white supremacy, accompanied by rhetoric about slavery and lynching, historic events portrayed as occurring only yesterday. We are told that, not only are racist whites the major threat to domestic tranquility, but that white supremacy is woven into the fabric of American civilization. But when it comes to interracial patterns of homicide, the direction of the relation lies opposite of what elites tell you. Whites are at much greater risk to be murdered by a black person than the other way around.

Before moving to the analysis, I have to note the effort to paint those discussing this matter as racist. Antiracists point out the vast majority of homicides are intraracial, meaning that blacks are more likely to murder other blacks, while whites are more likely to murder other whites, and that this fact somehow negates the importance of understand interracial character of crime—this coming from the crowd that dwells daily on the alleged threats whites pose to blacks.

The intraracial character of homicide (and many other serious crimes) is well-known and expected for reasons I explain in this blog. Raising the matter is an obvious attempt to obscure the reality that, when it comes to interracial crime, whites are at much greater risk—several times greater, in fact. What is significant about this fact is that it contradicts the narrative that the United States is a country where blacks have to live in fear of whites. And that is why the accusation of racism is leveled: antiracist want to stop Americans from hearing facts that undermine the false narrative that white people represent a threat to black people.

It must also be recognized that, when the problem of black-on-black homicide was raised by liberals like Heather Mac Donald in 2016 in the context of a moral panic over fatal police shootings, discussing the matter was also racist. (Disclaimer: Back in 2016, I was one of those who was blasting Mac Donald for raising the matter of black-on-black crime. See my essay Changing the Subject From the Realities of Death by Cop, published by by TruthOut in June of that year.)

Here’s the formula behind the thought-stopping: when the subject turns to interracial homicide, those who discuss it are smeared as racists; when the subject turns to intraracial homicide those who discuss it are smeared as racists. The only side that is allowed to raise the matter of black-on-black crime are those who appeal to those statistics to obscure the facts about black-on-white crime.

Now on to the analysis.

The United States population is mostly comprised of white people. Estimates of the proportion made up by whites range from around 67 percent if Hispanics are excluded to as much as 75 percent if white Hispanics are included (two-thirds of Hispanics are racially white). Blacks comprise around 13 percent of the US population. Based on data from the US Census Bureau in 2020, the sex ratio (the number of males per 100 females) for non-Hispanic whites was 95.1. For the demographic category of non-Hispanic blacks, the sex ratio was 88.6. (Due to Hispanic male immigration to the US, the sex ratio disparity is washed out if ethnicity is included.)

The prevailing narrative, organized and peddled by the elite apparatus of cultural and intellectual production, is that the white majority oppresses blacks and that while racism is in most walks of life subtle it is obvious in its effects. Among the most obvious effects of entrenched white supremacy are the demographic patterns in criminal justice. Two facts stand out. First, despite the reality that cops kill twice as many whites as blacks every year, blacks, representing a quarter of these deaths, are overrepresented in lethal police shootings relative to population. Second, despite constituting only 6 percent of the US population, black men comprise around 36-38 percent of state prisoners. These two facts propel the rhetoric of antiracist organizations such as Black Lives Matter.

I have debunked both of these claims on Freedom and Reason. The first is dismissed by the large body of scientific literature showing that, controlling for benchmarks and situational factors, the unexplained variation in racial patterns of lethal police shootings indicates that cops are more likely to shoot white suspects than black ones, with close examination of these studies suggesting that cops are more reluctant to shoot black suspects than white suspects because scrutiny will be greater the costs to their careers and reputation are too great if they shoot a black suspect. (See my June 2020 blog The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters for a review of the literature.)

The second is dismissed by statistics indicating the overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime. Blacks perpetrate most homicides and robberies, as well as a disproportionate amount of other crimes, including aggravated assaults and burglary. For the most part, the demographics of crime statistics align with the prison statistics, which is to say that there is no evidence supporting the claim that prison demographics reflect systemic racism in the criminal justice process. Consider that, according to the latest statistics, more than 60 percent of state prisoners were convicted of violent index crimes, e.g., murder and robbery. (See my August, 2019 blog Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History.)

I have also blogged about the problem of the interracial character of crime (see my August 2020 blog Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?), which, if the claim that whites oppress blacks were true, should find that blacks are more likely to be the victim of white violence rather than the inverse, a perception reinforced by media-hyped cases of white-on-black violence portrayed as racially-motivated. But the facts show the opposite. I want to dwell on this fact for most of the remainder of this blog. However, I will close with a set of statistics that raise profound questions about where American civilization been for the last fifty years and where it will go from here.

First, on the question of interracial crime, which you will have heard phrased as “black-on-white” and “white-on-black” crime, you will find below a chart showing the yearly estimates of homicide, the most serious form of violent crime in America, from the years 1968 to 2021. Homicide is a frequent occurrence in America; hundreds of thousands of Americans have been the victims of homicide since 1968—nearly 700,000, in fact. It is important to recognize that homicide is one type of violent death. Another is suicide, a matter that I will turn to in closing.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, between 1968 and 2021, there were 697,952 homicides. Among the 194,500 interracial homicides that occurred during that period recorded by the FBI, there were 145,500 white victims of black-perpetrated homicide. Contrast this with 48,000 black victims of white-perpetrated homicide. This means that black-on-white homicide comprised 75.3 percent of the total. In other words, comparing the relative frequency of these types of interracial homicides, for every black victim of white-perpetrated homicide, there are approximately three white victims of black-perpetrated homicide.

When we consider the sex of the victim in the numbers, we find that the ratio is worse when the victims of murder are women. Blacks murdered 35,000 white women compared to 6,000 black women murdered by whites. This means that 85.4 percent of female murder victims were killed by blacks. Put another way, for every black female victim of white-perpetrated homicide, there are approximately 5.83 white female victims of black-perpetrated homicide.

When the occasional story appears in the media suggesting a disparity (e.g., here, in which US News & World Report examines the period 2001-2015), the story quickly fades. The statistics are hidden in plain sight; the elite know most people don’t have the training to locate them, let alone interpret them. It’s enough that the media doesn’t dwell on them. They’re hidden in this way because they contradict the narrative of a racist nation that thrives on the oppression of blacks. But you can find them (all my sources are provided in this blog).

What explains these ratios? There are probably lots of reasons; however, I am convinced that one of them is the narrative I am debunking. When blacks are repeatedly told that white people are the cause of their misery, that blacks as a group have been subjected to centuries of white oppression, that whites owe black people a debt they won’t pay, individual whites come to be seen as representatives of a collective target of retribution, their alleged crimes serving as a technique of neutralization that diminished the moral concerns one human might have for another.

Put bluntly, the disparity is in part explained by a pervasive anti-white prejudice that has been cultivated over the course of several decades by the elites who control the means of cultural and intellectual production. Some blacks target whites out of a desire for retribution. Blacks target white-owned businesses in acts of street-level reparations. It is, as Karl Marx and Frederich Engels conceptualized it a century and a half ago, primitive rebellion—in this case against a situation that doesn’t materially exist, but is rather the product of elite manufacture, the function of which is to disorder proletarian consciousness.

We had an explicit case of this recently in the racist murder of Lawrence Herr.

Lawrence Herr was murdered on April 11th while fixing a mailbox

He was killed by 2 thugs who went hunting for a white person to kill

Say his name: Lawrence Herr pic.twitter.com/xaBa6UHe2t

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 10, 2023

“If the risk of homicide were random, given de facto patterns of residential segregation and the routine activities of humans,” I wrote in an August 2020 blog, “one should not expect these numbers. It might follow then that, based on the logic we see in arguments concerning implicit bias and systemic racism, the numbers suggest systemic anti-white prejudice.” I have in the meantime become convinced that this it the case.

I also noted in that blog that this argument should not be objectionable to progressives one can expect will object to the argument even if there is no evidence of anti-white prejudice in these crimes. “Keep in mind, according to antiracists, for the argument of systemic racism to work, we don’t need explicit race prejudice. We need only disparate patterns to make the call.” However, I think it’s clear that we have quite a lot more than merely aping the rationalizations of the antiracist. One will find no shortage of videos of blacks attacking whites with clear racist intent.

I have learned that Jordan Neely had numerous arrests (nearly four dozen), some for serious offenses, including felonies. He was twice accused of randomly assaulting elderly persons on the subway, the last time in November 2021 when he broke the nose and orbital bone of a 67-year-old woman as she exited the subway in the East Village. At the time of his death, there was a warrant out for his arrest in that case. In July 2018, he threatened the conductor and terrorized passengers on a train that had left the 207th Street station. He was convicted in 2015 for attempted kidnapping of a seven-year-old girl. He was seen dragging the girl down the street. He pled guilty of child endangerment and received four months in jail. In 2010, he threatened to kill his grandfather. There’s more, but you get the point.

How does a person like this wind up on a subway threatening passengers so that it required them to collectively restrain him? Shouldn’t public safety—and Neely’s safety—have required humane confinement? What kind of government not only doesn’t protect people like Neely, who was clearly unwell (sounds like paranoid schizophrenia), but also allows him to be a danger to others? From the sound of it, it was only a matter of time before Neely seriously injured or killed another human being. That he is no longer menacing residents across New York City is a fate city authorities left him to. His death is on their hands. Hopefully they won’t scapegoat the young marine who was one of the passengers restraining him.

Another question observers might have about his case, since it indicates a pattern, is why woke progressives find angels in dangerous criminals like George Floyd and Jordan Neely. Remember when murals of Floyd included angel wings and a halo? You may also remember that Floyd kidnapped and brutally beat a woman named Araceli Hernandez during a home invasion. He was looking for drugs and money. She was pregnant and Floyd shoved his gun in her belly and asked her if she wanted her baby to live. That was just one of the many criminal actions perpetrated by Floyd during his life. None of those facts are useful for the elite project to divide the proletariat.

And that brings us to the answer to these question: the lionizing of street criminals and the failure of the state to control them is the work of left idealism, one of the central programs of the woke progressive operating system. Left idealism is a doctrine in a religion where black people serve as fetishes for white virtue signaling and for engendering the ritual ecstasy of social unrest. It’s energy the power elite channel towards corporate state ends. They used this energy in 2020 to fuel a color revolution organized by the deep state ran against Trump’s reelection bid. I will write more later about how Black Lives Matter, fueled early on by two fake media accounts, was organized as a major corporate state player in 2020.

There is also this: The drastic overrepresentation of blacks in the most serious street crimes in American cities, especially homicides and robberies where they commit a majority of these offenses, and statistics showing that whites are far more likely to be the victims of black offenders than blacks are victims of white-perpetrated violence, facts I have documented on Freedom and Reason several times, dramatically contradict the narrative that it’s whites who are violently oppressing blacks. These facts moreover reflect badly on blacks as a group, a situation that progressives are keenly sensitive to since it is progressives who move on the ground of group identity: if all whites are to be blamed for racism against blacks, then it follows that all blacks are to be blamed for the high crime rates associated with their demographic (not my view). One way to spin difficult facts is to aggressively flip them around. This is a tactic of big lying. So turn black criminal offenders into the saints of their race. It’s something blacks should on the whole resent, but Democrats, the party of the establishment, have been highly successful in controlling the race narrative. Part of their success at this is due to the cultivation of a black misleadership class, what the Black Panthers would recognize as colonial collaborators. Meanwhile, progressives look at blacks who tell the truth as Uncle Toms.

There are protests at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Is this practice for summer 2024?) A petition is circulating. The protestors are upset at a student who was videoed engaged in the thoughtcrime of “racist speech” and they want to ruin her life over it. Students and campus organizations are demanding UW-Madison expel the student after she riffed on a fantasy where, after she kills herself, she goes back and haunts every black person who ever wronged her and make them pick cotton until they die of thirst. Her rant, expressed through what appear to be tears (there is some pain there), is peppered with the racial slur “nigger.”

Despite calls from numerous students and organizations for the expulsion of the student, university officials have stated that the speech in question is protected under the law. On Monday, UW-Madison released a statement saying that it is unable to restrict the content of personal social media posts made by students and employees or take action against posts that are not unlawful. In a subsequent email statement on the following day, LaVar Charleston, UW-Madison’s deputy vice chancellor of the diversity and inclusion, reiterated the university’s stance, explaining that “the law does not permit the university to punish individuals for words spoken in private spaces, even when those words are racist or hateful.”

Charleston’s statement to students is troubling given that he only references “words spoken in private spaces.” To be sure, the UW System cannot control citizens beyond its reach. But the principle of free speech must apply even more so public speech. The student the mob is hounding is a citizen of a republic with a bill of rights that enshrines her freedom to express herself without abridgment. Surely the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion (a position that sounds like it’s from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) misspoke. Why is the university even commenting on what a student said? To try to keep histrionic personalities from burning down the campus? Are they trying to continue the ruination of the student’s reputation?

Not that this would trump the First Article of US Bill of Rights, amendments to the US Constitution that protect the fundamental freedoms of people, but authorities are noting (albeit sounding regretful over having to do so) that the current administrative code of the UW System Board of Regents provides little regulation of student “hate speech.” Chapter UWS 17 of the code, which outlines actions that can result in disciplinary action for nonacademic misconduct, does not specifically address “hate speech” on or off campus. Nor should it, authorities should hasten to add. More than this, the very concept of “hate speech” is problematic, and the way in which the authorities are speaking in this case assumes its validity as a category of speech and therefore functions to valorize the legitimacy and utility of the term.

Policing “hate speech,” a practice that is rising throughout the West, is synonymous with the totalitarian practice of punishing individuals for thoughtcrime, the tyranny Orwell so named in his warning to the world Nineteen Eighty-Four. To punish speech based on content violates the core principle of free speech, which allows individuals to express any viewpoint, even those that are controversial or offensive, without fear of legal or social repercussions. Restrictions on “hate speech” can thus be seen as a form of censorship that infringes upon a fundamental right.

What office will determine what speech is allowed and disallowed? Who will determine what is “hate speech“? Who shall be commissar? “Hate speech“ is self-evidently subjective and difficult to define because it depends on who is defining it—and that depends on who has power. Different individuals and groups have different interpretations of what constitutes “hate speech,” which inevitably leads to inconsistencies—indeed, injustices—in how it is enforced and on who it is imposed. Depending on who is in power, what constitutes “hate speech” will vary, and this tells you that the control of speech is an expression of power, with the goal to prevent speech that might upset that power. The policing of “hate speech” results in a chilling effect on speech, where individuals self-censor for fear of being accused of thoughtcrime, even if their statements are not intended to be hateful as defined by the powers-that-be.

Paradoxically, restrictions on bigoted speech are counterproductive, as they drive extremist views underground and make them more difficult to combat through open dialogue and debate. The best way to counter hateful views is through open and voluntary discussion, where facts and reason are brought to challenge and undermine extremist ideologies more effectively than legal restrictions. Americans largely stopped using racial slurs, such as “nigger,” not because they were punished for using the word, but because open discussion about the ideology that word expresses, as well as the passing of laws criminalizing the material practice that ideology legitimized in the nation’s institutions, led to the word’s disuse in its original intent. (The word continues to be uttered, of course, but for the most part for a different purpose, albeit not without controversy.)

Because of the rising threat of thoughtcrime, and its growing institutionalization across Europe, a ringing endorsement of free speech is especially crucial at this moment. At a Wednesday demonstration organized by student organization The Blk Pwr Coalition, students called for Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin to establish a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech across all UW System campuses. One of their demands included the creation of bylaws that would enable expulsion for “overt racial hostility” under the Board of Regents’ nonacademic disciplinary procedures. This demand should have immediately been met with condemnation by UW System representatives. Instead, the authorities expressed regret that they couldn’t do more. This should scare the shit out of students across the system.

There are rules in place that, if they remain in place, afford liberty some protections. These rules were the result of previous free speech struggles. Chapter 17 rules were established, in part, as a result of a 1991 Wisconsin Supreme Court case, UWM Post v Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. In that case, UWM Post, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student newspaper, sued the UW System and others for guidelines on punishable speech that were deemed “too broad and ambiguous.” The lawsuit ultimately resulted in the removal of those rules from UW System policy. But it will take an effort to keep rules like this from again making their appearance.

The situation at our universities has moved Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to encourage the UW System to remove campus diversity offices. The media has gone to some length to pair Vos’s call, which I support wholeheartedly, with the video of that UW-Madison student expressing, to quote the Daily Cardinal, “harmful rhetoric against the Black community.” The harmful nature of the rhetoric is difficult to grasp given that the content of the speech concerned a student imagining committing suicide so that her ghost could haunt black people by making them pick cotton, something that is so far beyond the realm of the possible that it hardly warrants anything other than a puzzled look. At any rate, since Vos called for the elimination of these offices only days after the video appeared, the appearance of the video should have caused him to not call for the elimination of the offices. Or something like that.

* * *

So, the university cannot punish individuals for speech uttered beyond the university, specifically thoughts conveyed in the private spaces (where Winston keeps his journal, just out of the telescreen’s line of sight). And, we’re told, there is some degree of protection for speech uttered on campus, thanks to a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling. Great.

But, to be perfectly honest, it doesn’t feel like it when you are there. These days, the university feels like a cathedral. The professoriate and its administration appear as a clergy, the subjects they profess sounding more like doctrine with religious-like sensibilities than rational instruction guided by Enlightenment values.

The university has become a very illiberal space, and those speaking for UW-Madison, instead of leaning into the principles of free thought and conscience, are apologizing for them. It sounds as if, if they could punish this student, they would. “We’d like to burn the witch at the stake, too, but we are constrained by the legacy of liberalism.”

I will illustrate my trepidation using the ubiquity of gender ideology in academia, an ideology to which I do not subscribe (because it is unscientific and dehumanizing), but with which I avoid engaging on campus because of the probable consequences for doing do.

The censorship is backed by the regime of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The purveyors of the doctrine preach that, in order to recruit and retain faculty and students of diverse identities, identities that deserve systemic privileges because of their alleged marginalized statuses (the equity piece), universities have to establish, elaborate, and entrench and a regime of inclusive language and practices. The regime is managed by officers who monitor faculty and students and generate bias incident reports with which to harass those who would think thoughts contrary to the doctrine of the regime. DEI scares me.

Beyond the walls of the cathedral, I use the terms “woman” and “mother.” I know, we’re told in so many words that, to be inclusive, we should avoid these terms. However, in reality, the terms refer to exclusive properties that inhere in the actual world. One function of language is to accurately convey in speech acts the actual world; since only females can be women and mothers, one should refer to them as such. Put another way, because natural history makes the rules that govern sex, and since nature has made sex in mammals exclusive (anomalies aside), and since gendered terms are species-specific references to the females and males of the various species of the mammalian class, to deny the truth of these categories is to deny the truth of natural history.

Demanding we deny this reality is an instantiation of war against science and the Enlightenment being waged by the forces of postmodernism. And, while the liberal values of the Enlightenment allow those who wish to be women and mothers to deny objective content of those categories, they are not free to compel others to deny those categories.

At least they shouldn’t be. However, as I reported recently in my blog NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech, public institutions in the United States are compelling inclusive language and punishing employees for failing to do so. How long before employees of the NIH will suffer punishments meted out by their employers at the NIH for things they say beyond the confines of their employment?

My ability to express the truths of sex and gender (which are uncomplicated and have been confidently known for millennia) will last only as long as freedom of thought and conscience are respected and protected—and the reality is that these freedoms are in very real danger of extinction by the forces of a new religion, i.e., woke progressivism.

The extinction of these fundamental freedoms is being hastened not only by the trans-Atlantic elite project to erase gender differences in humans, but by the willing adoption of such erasure by the masses. And while my worldview is based on scientific humanism (I never work from supernatural premises), and I apologize for this admission of cowardice, I am compelled in some institutional settings to perform certain rituals in order to survive.

I am more than a few years away from retirement yet (thanks to betrayal of Democrats in 1983), and I wish to keep my job. It would not surprise me if things change where I am no longer free from the reach of my place of employment to utter truths, including those uttered before the rules changed, but I am hoping to retire before the sands of freedom run out and the flying monkeys are let loose.

I have practiced this cowardice before. I do this when I visit your church. I won’t do everything you expect of me at your church, since I don’t accept your religion, but I will go some ways despite my skepticism. I will sit quietly and hear the prayers and sermons. I might even stand when you do. Since the university has become a church, my tolerance for the irrational is expressed in much the same way.

But know this: whatever the ritual in which I partake, in whatever church I am sitting or standing in, in the breeze of whatever doctrine is being professed, my actions convey an act of bad faith. Because I work from facts and reason, if ever you hear me say something in there at odds with the things I say out here, know that I am lying. I am lying either because I am humoring some person or group (that I am unreligious doesn’t mean that I am unsympathetic) or because I’m trying to finish my career and my life without being punished by those who hold my livelihood and reputation in their hands.

In other words, I am not really a free person. But, then, neither are you. You may appear braver than me, but I bet that bravery depends upon your location and situation. I’m not in a good place. And I am all alone there. Maybe you are in a better place. So please accept my apologies for my cowardice and don’t yell at me too much.

From Business Insider: “When the Supreme Court in 2010 handed down its ruling on Citizens United v. FEC, Democrats were scandalized. Then-President Barack Obama warned it would ‘open the floodgates’ to corporations influencing politics by diminishing restrictions on corporate speech.

“But now, as Disney v. DeSantis has become an actual legal battle—with the Walt Disney Corporation suing the Florida governor for retaliating against it after CEO Bob Iger criticized DeSantis’ policies—the political roles have reversed. Liberals remain scandalized (albeit for different reasons) but now seek the protections the Citizens United ruling offers.”

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) was a landmark case that involved the constitutionality of political spending by corporations and unions. The case centered around a political advocacy group called Citizens United, which sought to air a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries. The FEC had prohibited the group from airing the film because it was funded by corporate donations, which were banned under federal election law. However, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, holding that the First Amendment of the US Constitution protects the right of corporations and unions to engage in unlimited independent political expenditures, thereby effectively invalidating portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold), which restricted the ability of corporations and unions to engage in political spending.

The Citizens United decision was controversial and drew criticism from those who believed it would give wealthy special interests an outsized influence in elections. Some have argued that the decision has led to a proliferation of so-called “dark money” in politics, as corporations and wealthy individuals can now spend unlimited amounts on political advertisements without having to disclose the sources of their funding. Others have defended the decision as protecting free speech rights under the First Amendment, a defense that rests in part on corporate personhood.

Corporate personhood is a legal concept that grants corporations the same legal rights and protections as individual persons under the law. This includes the ability to enter into contracts, buy, own, and sell property, and sue or be sued, among other rights. In the United States, the concept of corporate personhood has been affirmed by several Supreme Court decisions, including the landmark case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Critics argue that it grants corporations too much power and influence, as it allows them to make political donations and engage in other forms of political speech as if they were individual persons. Some activists have called for the abolition of corporate personhood, arguing that it undermines democracy by giving corporations undue influence over the political process.

As some of my readers will know, I was highly critical of the Citizens United v. FEC decision and have long been hostile towards corporate personhood generally. I am a dedicated small “d” democratic—a populist. I believe governments should have the power to control corporations—not the other way around. (See Richard Grossman on Corporate Law and Lore.) Watch now as progressives take the side of Disney because the value the message.

What is the message? Disney aggressively queers its programming for children. It also pushes the anti-racism line (see Disney Says, “Slaves Built This Country.” Did They? See also The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida). Democrats were all worked up when corporate power interfered with their electoral ambitions. Now that one of the main pushers of gender ideology is facing people power in the shape of Ron DeSantis, Democrats can’t allow democracy to happen. For Democrats, what does democracy look like today? Corporate governance and power. Also remember, when you hear Democrats raise the alarm over threats to democracy, what they are really raising the alarm about is threats to the corporate state and the project to change mass conscious.

“How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!” —Samuel Adams

Dictionaries are becoming tools of tyrants. Ask your dictionary to define “woman” and you might see what I mean.

Merriam-Webster still defines woman as an “adult female person,” but it defines a girl as “a person whose gender identity is female,” with “gender identity” defined as “a person’s internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female.” A “female” is defined a person “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”

How does an invention of gender ideology, i.e., the construct “gender identity,” make it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary?

Cambridge includes among its definitions of “woman” “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” Here again we see gender ideology at work valorizing the queer theory claim that gender identity is a person’s internal sense of being female.

It’s odd to see such a convoluted definition to a basic word with a plain meaning in such a prestigious dictionary, but that’s the result of having to put things in a way that (hopefully) does not enrage the gender ideologist—charitably assuming that Cambridge is not associated with tyrants.

Ask yourself, is a rectangle “a closed 2-D shape, having 4 sides, 4 corners, and 4 right angles (90°)”? Or is it “a thing we call a rectangle”? Go look and see. And a square? That’s “a closed 2-D shape, having 4 equal sides, 4 corners, and 4 right angles (90°)” (emphasis mine).

You may not even be aware that some of the major dictionaries you ripping the meaning and usage of some of the surest words in your language right out from under you, not on the grounds that the majority is using those words differently today (they aren’t—not yet, anyway), but because the elite have embarked on a project to change the meaning and usage of words.

Many of you find it hard to believe. Why would elites do such a thing? The answer is rather obvious if you study the history and nature of totalitarian regimes. Tyrants change the meaning and usage of words to put the people in a state of confusion. Once confused, humans are more receptive to ideological programming.

In his 2004 Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China, Ji Fengyuan argues that language was used as a tool for political control during Mao Zedong’s rule in China. Through a detailed analysis of Maoist language and discourse, Ji argues that language played a crucial role in shaping the political and social reality of Maoist China. The Chinese language was “reformed” to promote ideological conformity. The book provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between language and politics in one of the most tumultuous periods of China’s history.

Confusing the population over the meaning of words was one of the tactics used during the Cultural Revolution in China. Mao Zedong and his followers believed language was a tool of class struggle, and that by manipulating language, they could control the thoughts and actions of the Chinese people. One of the main goals was to reduce the influence of traditional culture. Maoist slogans and terminology were used to create a new revolutionary vocabulary that reinforced Mao’s ideas and delegitimized opposing viewpoints. This resulted in a situation where words and phrases took on new meanings that were often ambiguous or contradictory, making it difficult for people to understand each other and communicate effectively.

As a species, humans desire and activity seek ontological security, and if made to be unsure of what they thought they knew to be true, they will accept in the place of sure knowledge of objective reality and healthy social relations other truths to reestablish their sense of security. They will demand things from others for these ends. They will even hurt other people for achieve it.

The tactic of disrupting normal thinking through meaning manipulation is part of a intentional campaign to produce conditions of anomie. Anomie is a word sociologists use to describe a situation where the normal moral and social standards of collective life become uncertain.

I say intentional because, in queer theory, arguably the most influential instantiation of postmodernist critical theory today (perhaps even more so that critical race theory), this is explicitly part of the praxis. You hear it in the rhetoric of “transgression.”

“Transgression” refers to the warping and breeching of social boundaries and norms, in this case boundaries and norms surrounding gender and sexuality. The concept of transgression is closely tied to the idea of “queering”—disrupting or subverting dominant expectations and prevailing norms related to gender and sexuality. By breaking these norms, individuals believe they are challenging and destabilizing power structures they imagine oppress them. Yet the power structure that runs the world not only embraces queer theory but is a co-creator (more on this in a future blog).

Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist who developed the concept of anomie in his 1893 The Division of Labor in Society. Durkheim defined anomie as a state of normlessness or moral confusion that arises in society when traditional norms and values are weakened or undermined. In modern industrial societies, anomie is the consequence of rapid social change and a lack of social cohesion.

In his 1897 Suicide, Durkheim argued that the presence of anomie leads to higher rates of suicide, as individuals become disassociated with reality, seeking to escape the nightmare world such disassociation brings. In other words, suicidal tendencies can be induced by confusing the individual over the most basic of things, for example gender, and then offering that individual euphoria and salvation through the transformation of his body.

“The nightmare par excellence is the experience of the shattering of the taken-for-granted worlds of everyday life,” Peter Berger writes in his 1967 The Sacred Canopy. “In the face of this disorienting experience, the individual may find a new sense of order and meaning by investing in the symbolic universe of a religious tradition, or in any other symbolic universe that offers a comprehensive view of reality. This is particularly true in the case of the primary group, where the individual’s identity is most closely tied to the symbolic universe of the group. The nomic significance of the group’s symbolic universe can be so powerful that the individual is willing to die for it or find death preferable to its loss.”

Berger argues that this is why joining a cult of religious group is a risk for disoriented persons: because immersion in a fantastic doctrine “provides a new sense of order and stability, and a new basis for the individual’s identity and sense of self.” It’s how Mao more fully integrated the Chinese population into the political-ideology of the communist regime.

If any reader doubts that an entire society can be put through such a transformation, all he needs to do is study the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He can also study the rise and installation of National Socialism during 1930s Germany.

When a person becomes confused about who and what they are, they become vulnerable and easily manipulated. Those who are confused about basic reality are at higher risk to accept irrational belief systems. Totalitarianism depends on disordering the people’s thoughts by throwing them into confusion over the most basic things. One way to accomplish confusion is to change the meaning of the ordinary words people use, for example the words we use to accurately describe sex and gender.

Ji leans heavily on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the concept of “Newspeak.” However, before Nineteen Eighty-Four (his last publication), in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell examined the relationship between language and politics, and his observations here are as important as those in the novel.

Orwell contends that the corruption of language—contamination by ideology—has caused a decay in critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Orwell argues that political language is often deliberately designed to obfuscate meaning—and that this is done to obscure reality and manipulate public opinion. This kind of language is characterized by meaningless words and phrases and pretentious verbiage used to create the illusion of clarity and precision. Orwell insists that language should be used to express ideas rather than conceal them, and that in the spirit of conveying rational and true ideas, writers should strive for clarity and precision in language use.

To summarize, words do two things: (a) describe reality; (b) manufacture reality. Describing reality is a rational act; the goal is to keep people grounded and coordinating activities around real things. Manufacturing reality is the work of the manipulators, the people who mean to dominate us through control over our minds.

To be sure, sometimes we need new words or to respecify them to convey discoveries or novel insights. But that’s part of describing reality. That’s not the problem we’re talking about. We’re talking about the alteration of the meanings of words or common knowledge of history and situations in order to manipulate us. We are moreover talking about the way the standards of dialogue have been trashed to get around the rational demands for fact and logic. Watch this brief video for a brilliant analysis of the moment:

Academia, the administrative state, the corporate media, the culture industry—all these institutions have been captured by a revolution-from-above that is changing the language in order to steer the people into supporting its agenda: the agenda of the transnational corporate state, i.e., global totalitarian monopoly capitalism. Citizens are being disordered to prepare them for reintegration in a new order, one that abolishes democracy and liberalism.

Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four? No? You should. If you have already, read it again. Update it in your mind to fit today’s situation. The Party is inventing external enemies to frighten the masses (Russia is portrayed as the great threat, while the real threat of China is downplayed or ignored). The Party is punishing crimethink, i.e., thought crimes. You get the picture.

Below is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has thrown his hat in the ring for the presidency. This is a long interview, so you may not have time to listen to the whole thing. But at the very least, you must watch the brief opening. Kennedy crystalizes the problem we are facing.

Steel yourself now before you lose the ability to reason. The time to recognize totalitarianism is not after it has been fully installed. The most effect totalitarianism will make it impossible to resist. Your brothers and sisters will regard themselves as perfectly free. The time to recognize totalitarianism is when you can still resist its installation.

The solution to the problem of anomie, Durkheim argued, is the development of strong social norms and institutions that provide individuals with a sense of purpose and belonging. Our founders provided those norms and institutions. We don’t need to develop an alternative to woke progressivism. We just need to reclaim the American Creed.

Mark Goldblatt, American author, educator, and theologian, recently appeared on the Glenn Loury show to explain the disconnect between homosexuality and gender ideology. Homosexuality concerns one’s sexual preference, whereas the trans gender phenomenon is about “gender identity,” i.e., the internal or personal sense of one’s own gender, which may correspond to or differ from a person’s sex. Homosexuality is not an ideology, but an orientation. The notion of gender identity is a construct of the fastest growing religion in the West: wokism.

In a recent blog, I identified the postmodernist epistemic, which reduces objective reality to a construction of discursive power, as a major corrupting force in the ability of individuals to ask appropriate ontological questions in the current environment. Queer theory, which posits gender identity as a thing, stands upon the postmodernist epistemic. As I explained in that blog, this epistemic is contrary to scientific inquiry since it denies a reality common to all. It purports different truths, with some truths more righteous than others. Liberties and rights are determined by the righteousness of the truth in question. Because there is no standard for determining whose truth is more righteous, the predictable response is hysteria, intimidation, shouting, suppression, and violence.

When asked by Loury to address the construct “LGBT” specifically, Goldblatt begins by noting the scientific consensus that homosexuality is very likely heritable, i.e., it has a probable genetic basis, which means it is not something chosen or very malleable. Put another way, a man does not so much choose his genital preference as he finds himself inclined in one way or the other or to prefer both. (See note at the end of the blog for a bit more on this. This is still an open question.) If true, even to some extent, this shows us why conversion therapy is so wrong: it forces a person to desire something he doesn’t or stop desiring something he does, a desire over which he has little or no control. In light of this, Goldblatt contends that if one believes that a man becomes a woman by his sincere belief that he is a woman, then his homosexuality is instead chosen; becoming a woman when you are male-attracted means becoming heterosexual.

Goldblatt rhetorically asks, what leads children to decide they are living in the wrong body? Many times it is attraction to the same sex, he answers. A boy who likes other boys may believe that he is a girl since, to his immature mind, girls are attracted to boys and vice-versa. If the boy is left to sort all of this out for himself, he will likely become a well-adjusted adult gay man (the British journalist Douglas Murray has made a similar point). Goldblatt notes that many of the children identifying as trans today would have in the past been gay children. Now that children have the option to stop their puberty and change their anatomy (not really, but cosmetically), surrounded by activists, educators, and parents telling them they’re trapped in the wrong body, they don’t have to be gay anymore. This sounds a lot like conversion therapy, doesn’t it? (Follow the link in the caption above to see where the purpose of transition is explicit.)

This is problematic in others ways, as well, Goldblatt notes. For example, recalling the question asked by Andrew Sullivan, a gay man: Am I a bigot because I am not attracted to trans men because they lack a penis? After all, being gay, and this is true for lesbians, too, indicates a genital preference. As I noted in a previous blog (follow the link below to read more), lesbians are attracted to persons with vaginas—actual vaginas. In other words, lesbians are attracted to women.

In a comment section to the video shared at the start of this blog (open the link in YouTube), the following observation can be found (sansacro007): “I’m a gay man. I am attracted to biological men. But ‘trans’ is connected to issues of gender as a social construct. Trans has nothing to do with biology and I can’t see it as anything other than a psychological condition. Gender (a social construct) certainly plays a role in my attraction to men, but my attraction to men is rooted in biology. Trans erases the biological aspect of what it means to be a biological woman or man and therefore essentially erases what it means to be gay or straight.”

The commenter continues: “Trans is completely retrograde in that it reinforces gender binaries while it erases biological sex. There are effeminate men and butch women (not necessarily gay), but such true diversity of gender expression has been erased while the binary has been reinforced despite the even less convincing and illogical claims by many young people of being nonbinary, which essentially not only attempts to erase biological sex but reinforces gender binaries.” Journalist and podcaster Katie Herzog makes a similar point in “Where Have All the Lesbian Gone? She answers, “They’re coming out as nonbinary or as men.”

It follows that, if a gay man identifies as a woman he becomes straight, then a straight man who identifies as a woman becomes gay. We see the logic at work in the construct of the “trans lesbian,” who possesses a “shenis.” To be strictly politically correct, one should drop the “trans” from the construct “trans lesbian.” Since the trans woman attracted to women is really a woman, “she” is also a lesbian. But sex cannot be changed, and since sexual orientation is a sex-based phenomenon, either opposite-sex or same-sex attraction, a trans woman cannot be a lesbian. Nor can a trans woman be a woman. People are losing their careers over refusing to be sucked into the vortex of such delusions.

Note: Several studies have found that sexual orientation tends to run in families, suggesting that there may be a genetic component to homosexuality. However, the specific genes and genetic mechanisms involved in determining sexual orientation are not yet fully understood. Other research has suggested that hormonal influences during fetal development may also play a role in determining sexual orientation. For example, studies have found that exposure to certain hormones in the womb can influence the development of the brain in ways that may be related to sexual orientation. To be sure, genetic tendencies aren’t the only things children inherit from their parents; environment, experience, and socialization are powerful force in transmitting attitudes, beliefs, and inclinations. However, these factors are thought to be less important than genetic and hormonal factors in determining sexual orientation.

“I don’t trust authority. I need to see the details. I need to see the science.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Before getting to the main topic of this blog, I’m hearing once more that I was “radicalized” by Steve Bannon’s War Room, which I started listening to in the winter of 2020 (and have been listening to ever since). Folks who say things like this haven’t taken the time to listen to what I have been saying and writing well before 2020. Just read Freedom and Reason to see where my head is at. Scroll back to 2018 and read my blogs on immigration, left-libertarianism, the false rhetoric of anti-racism, etc. Keep reading through. I’m an open book—the small-d democratic liberalism and populism that animates my politics is plain for all to see. And I am still a Marxist.

I started talking about Bannon publicly in the spring of 2020 because I was only a couple of weeks into listening to his program when I knew the claims that he was a fascist and a racist were propagandistic lies and that his knowledge of international political economy was as sophisticated as the best of the experts on this topic. I ought to know about this, as one of my areas of specialization is international political economy. To put this another way, it wasn’t that he swayed me to some position I did not before hold; I knew he knew what he was talking about. Even for progressives who bother to listen to him at all, his sophistication escape their comprehension. At least most progressives. There are those who know enough to “prebunk” Bannon’s utterances, which is the topic of this blog.

Among the things I have learned working in higher education for some thirty years now is that academics, however capable they are in their intellectual capacities, are a clergy, peddling an ideology, and, as such, are ignoramuses. Ideology makes people stupid because being smart spells the unraveling of the ideology that makes folks dumb. I came around, and continue coming around (most recently on the matter of guns), because I am a dissent clergyman. I’m a heretic. I’m an atheist to the bone. I am because of this capable of being wrong and, therefore, capable of changing my mind. I am my own best opponent.

* * *

Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are two challengers who have emerged (so far) to challenge Joe Biden’s bid for a second term for president. The Democratic National Committee has announced that it will not allow primary debates because the corporate state elite running the Democratic Party know these two things for certain: (1) giving RFK, Jr. a national platform exposes tens of millions of Americans to this compelling figure and his message; (2) RFK, Jr. will destroy Joe Biden in debate. (Marianne Williamson is a crank; she is of no concern to the power elite running the show.)

As for (1), ABC-Disney appears to regret having given RJK, Jr. a platform last night, even issuing disclaimers before and after the interview to explain why they censored key parts of their interview with him. ABC News admitted to editing remarks by the candidate concerning vaccine safety. Why? Because they don’t trust their audience with information about the link of vaccines to autism, etc. RFK, Jr. brings the receipts, and this makes him a dangerous man (this is why Bannon is so dangerous). Linsey Davis warned viewers ahead of the interview that RFK, Jr. peddled misinformation and disinformation about vaccines. At the same time, she used the moment to reinforce the industry narrative about vaccine efficacy and safety. (Good coverage here.)

This is a propaganda tactic known as “prebunking.” The way its advocates explain it, prebunking is the proactive effort to prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation before it is widely circulated, to kill it in the crib if possible, but manage it otherwise. The premise of the strategy is that it is easier to stop false information from spreading than it is to correct it after it has already gained traction. The goal is to prevent the establishment of assumptions that risk moving thought and belief in an undesirable direction by establishing a framework that builds in assumptions that function to steer the receiver of information towards the desired narrative.

Prebunking involves a variety of strategies: educating people about the tactics used by those who spread misinformation and disinformation; providing accurate and credible information on a topic before false information can take hold; and promoting critical thinking skills that help people identify and evaluate the credibility of information they encounter. Prebunking is a widespread practice used by government, legacy media, and social media platforms. Many of my readers will have experienced prebunking in the form of social media algorithms that flag potentially misleading content or provide fact-checking information alongside posts that contain disputed information.

This is the spin of the pre bunkers. However, prebunking is highly similar to a tactic George Orwell warned readers about in his anti-authoritarian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He called the tactic “crimestop.” Crimestop is a form of thought control used by the Party in Oceania to suppress dissent and prevent rebellious thoughts from taking root in the minds of the citizens. Crimestop is “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” Crimestop is taught to the citizens of Oceania as a way to avoid committing “thoughtcrimes,” i.e., unapproved thoughts the Party considers subversive. Installed and continually reinforced, crimestop is a mental habit of self-censorship that prevents individuals from fully exploring or considering any idea that goes against the Party’s ideology, i.e., to avoid engaging in “crimethink.”

The Party encourages crimestop through propaganda and by promoting a culture of fear and paranoia, where citizens are taught to distrust their own thoughts and instincts and to seek guidance from the Party on all matters. Through constant disinformation and punishment for disobedience, the Party aims to maintain a population that is obedient and subservient to its authority. What Orwell is conveying in his novel is that crimestop is a feature of totalitarian systems, as oppressive regimes seek to control not only the actions of the subjects of control but also their emotions, thoughts, and beliefs.

Orwell’s dystopian future is quite grim, so really-existing people do not recognize the really-existing world as Oceania. But one should not let that deceive him into thinking that thought-stopping is not a tactic in real-world corporate state arrangements. There are many scholars who have analyzed this. I will focus on one here: Sheldon Wolin and his book Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.

Wolin argues that the United States (and the analysis applies to other western countries, as well) has been transformed into a form of managed democracy that threatens the core principles of popular sovereignty. Managed democracy is characterized by the dominance of large corporations, the marginalization of political dissent, the manipulation of public opinion through propaganda and mass media, and the erosion of civil liberties and individual rights. In this system, the appearance of democracy is maintained through regular elections and the façade of political debate, while the actual power lies with a small elite who control the levers of economic and political power. One sees this is in the social logic of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

I have blogged extensively about this, but briefly here, in what he describes as “inverted totalitarianism,” Wolin argues that a new form of totalitarianism has emerged that operates in a way that is fundamentally different from the classical forms of totalitarianism seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and it is this difference that permits even greater efficacy in controlling the masses. Under these arrangements, a large proportion of the population mistake their control for their freedom, confusing consumerism with citizenship. In inverted totalitarianism, the state’s power is diffused among multiple centers of power, including large corporations, the military-industrial complex, and the legacy and social media. Instead of using overt repression and coercion, this diffuse power operates through the manipulation of public opinion, the manufacture of consent, and the co-optation of political opposition.

Finally, given (2), how can his handlers even allow Biden to debate Trump? In his last speech, Trump looked solid. The President is once more finding his populist voice and exhibiting greater discipline in messaging. To be sure, he still says outrageous things (executing drug dealers is red meat in the extreme), but saying outrageous things wasn’t a problem in 2016 when he crushed Hillary Clinton. Nor was it a problem in 2020 when he received millions more votes than he generated with his 2016 performance.

Biden, on the other hand, has continued to deteriorate. He is a puppet whose master cannot refurbish. Moreover, all the things Biden said was a lie about him and his family in the 2020 debates are now demonstrably true. They can’t allow Trump to reinforce in the public that the Hunter Biden laptop is real. Indeed, Biden is only still president because the deep state and corporate media have systematically obscured the truth about the Biden crime family by waging psychological warfare on the public, and Republicans know they would never obtain a conviction in the Senate if they impeached him. Trump would pursue the debate as a prosecutor with no consequence for not obeying the commands of the judge. It would serve as a grand jury indictment. Yes, Trump is that smart.

The power elite that run the Democratic Party really believes in its ability to manufacture a consensus of reality. Let’s hope they’re wrong about that. Let’s do our part to make them wrong. Let’s hope that we do not yet live in George Orwell’s dystopia nightmare.