George Santos, New York Republican, is the sixth member to be expelled from the US House of Representatives. There were 311 votes to expel George Santos from Congress. One hundred and five Republicans voted to boot Santos. Only two Democrats voted against expelling Santos. Santos is the first to be kicked out of Congress without having fought for the Confederacy or being convicted of a crime. This is an unprecedented and truly dangerous action congress has taken.
Rep. George Santos speaks on the House floor, Nov. 30, 2023
Here’s what folks have to understand about today and why it matters to them. First, this establishes a terrible precedent: if the establishment doesn’t like a member, they get him indicted and remove him from Congress. This is lawfare. Second, Santos was under a federal criminal indictment. He was not convicted of the charges leveled against him. The man is innocent until proven guilty. Congress made itself the judge and jury. Third, expelling Santos disenfranchises the voters of his district. Instead of the voters deciding Santos’ fate, politicians from other districts did.
I don’t care if you don’t like Santos, or you think he did what he is accused of, or you just want to see a Republican suffer. All that is beside the point if you believe in the rule of law and the democratic principle. If Santos is ever convicted of a crime, then that’s a different matter. But if you understand how easy it is for a prosecutor to accuse a person of a crime, then you must know that meting out consequences for somebody not convicted of a crime risks making a whip for your own back. We have to defend legal innocence in this nation or we lose everything. This is one of the few principles standing between freedom and tyranny.
Finally, Republicans actually diminished their narrow majority by expelling Santos. What was up with that? Don’t tell me principle.
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Speaking of tyranny, did you see this?
Heated exchange during Senate Judiciary Cmte. roll call vote.
Chair @SenatorDurbin dismisses calls by committee Republicans to debate two judicial nominations.
As I have noted in previous essays and blog entries, gender refers to genotypes in a sexually dimorphic species. For all animal species gender is binary. For mammals, reptiles, and birds gender is unchangeable. There are females and males, their respective sex determinable by chromosomes and gametes. In our species, adult females are called “women” and adult males are called “men.” In swine, the analogs are “sow” and “hog.” In horses, “mare” and “stallion.” Etcetera. Pronouns refer to these realities. Crucially, gender is not subjective, However/whatever a man might think of himself or believe himself to be, he is objectively a gender—and only one gender. To claim otherwise, to refer to him by his imagined gender, is to deny scientific reality. Gender is not subjective. Truth has its own integrity. An honest society proceeds on the basis of truth.
In a news item from the Yale School of Medicine, dated September 19, 2021, Carolyn Mazure, Professor in Women’s Health Research, and Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, writes, “Perhaps at some point in time [gender and sex] were used as synonyms, but this is no longer true in science.” Not “perhaps.” Gender and sex were synonyms in science for centuries (see, e.g., Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms). Mazure is engaged here in a classic propaganda technique called “mystification,” which involves distorting or obscuring history to make certain facts appear uncertain. The facts are no uncertain. The synonymous character of gender/sex still holds in material science.
The “authority” Mazure cites, now under the umbrella of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), is the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which organized the Committee on Understanding the Biology of Sex and Gender Differences in 2001. “The committee advised that scientists use these definitions in the following ways: In the study of human subjects, the term sex should be used as a classification, generally as male or female, according to the reproductive organs and functions that derive from the chromosomal complement [generally XX for female and XY for male]. In the study of human subjects, the term gender should be used to refer to a person’s self-representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions on the basis of the individual’s gender presentation. In most studies of nonhuman animals, the term sex should be used.”
The committee “concluded there was more than sufficient evidence that, beyond reproductive biology, there were major differences in the biology of women and men that greatly affected their health and influenced treatment and prevention strategies.” Notice that the terms “women” and “men” are used here. It’s a binary. Despite the slogan “Trans women are women,” one would hope that the medical industry would continue treating trans women as a men and vice-versa in light of these major differences. Perhaps now the document would be rewritten to substitute “women” and “men” with “female” and “male,” but clearly these terms are synonyms, merely different words indicating the same reality, and clearly there is a binary. It is difficult to wriggle out of the truth.
Focus on recommendation that medical science drop the term “gender” when referring to “nonhuman animals.” As I have shown, scientists have referred to gender in nonhuman animals—and plants—for centuries and there is no justification from a scientific materialist standpoint for jettisoning the term gender with respect to nonhuman animals or for repurposing the term for human animals to convey “self-representation as male or female,” or to describe how social institutions respond to that person on the basis of the individual’s self-presentation, the human animals. Anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have had no problem conveying human subjectivity or cultural and historical variation in sex roles.
Why gender is dropped for nonhuman animals and repurposed for human animals is because humans can be confused about their gender and this confusion comes with great benefits to the medical-industrial complex. In other words, the redefinition is for commercial purposes (as well as for normalizing paraphilias). The Yale School of Medicine news item is an instantiation of corporate propaganda produced by a functionary of the medical-industrial complex, disinformation designed to market “life-saving gender-affirming health care,” a multibillion dollar transnational enterprise integrating biotech, chemical manufacturers, and pharmaceutical industries with medical firms and health insurance companies. The more people who are confused about gender the more customers for the industry.
Source: @NoGender on X (formerly Twitter)
At the bottom of the article is a brief glossary which includes the construction “cisgender,” defined as a term used to describe “an individual whose gender identity aligns with the one typically associated with the sex assigned to them at birth.” The entry tells readers that this term that is preferable to “non-trans,” “biological,” or “natal” man or woman. This neologism is preferred because it is paradoxical and thus furthers the mystification. Consider once more the slogan “trans women are women.” If one accepts that trans women are women, i.e., that some men are women, then the category women no longer refers to all women, as only some women are women. Women become defined as a subclass of a greater class of women, which means that there really is no such thing as a woman in gender ideology. One might object that a woman is “a person who identifies as a woman,” but that is merely a circular definition with no meaningful content (see Scientific Materialism and the Necessity of Noncircular Conceptual Definitions). It is true that non of these terms—“non-trans,” “biological,” or “natal” man or woman—are desirable. That’s because we already have a term exclusive of men. The term is woman.
In an October 7, 2021 video report, VICE News obtained access to the tunnels Hamas’ built to conduct terrorist operations against Israel. Reporter Isobel Young conducted an interview with a 25-year-old individual who had joined Hamas during adolescence. During the interview, Young stated, “You guys fired the first rockets,” to which the Hamas terrorist responded, “The first aggression is the occupation.” Rank-and-file Hamas are taught to think this way by such figures as Omar Baddar, an anti-Israel propagandist based in Washington DC associated with the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) and other pro-Palestinian organizations, who argues that Palestinians shouldn’t bear the blame for violence, citing Israel’s status as an occupying power as the root cause. Torturing and massacring Jews is not an act of terrorism, in this view, a rationalization that many Western intellectuals are eager to soften, but just retaliation for Jews occupying their land. Muslims burning babies and raping and killing women is the Jews’ fault. They’re responsible. Indeed, what the West calls “terrorism” is actually the righteous struggle the Algerian psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon cast as that of the victim against his executioner, today couched in the rhetoric of “oppressed and oppressor.”
If you listen to what Hamas sympathizers in the West are saying, which parrots what the Hamas terrorists are saying, you can see how easy it has been for Western youth, taught to think this way in their college courses, and even by ideas embedded in K-12 curriculum, to rationalize the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Jewish and other civilians in Israel. It’s what also permits Western youth to rationalize the extraordinarily high levels of criminality in black-majority neighborhoods, i.e., to define deviance down. It’s what allows Western youth to rationalize violent Antifa, Trantifa, and Black Lives Matter action in America’s streets. And it’s why the core ethics of the West, ethics based on the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, are rejected, while those chanting “No Justice! No Peace!” embrace authoritarian and illiberal ideas and practices. The new fascism in our streets comes to us wrapped in a rhetoric of social justice and victimhood.
This viewpoint absolves those who portray themselves as the oppressed for any moral responsibility for their actions—for the theft and destruction of property and the maiming and killing of civilians. Just as whites, however much they seek allyship, no matter how many feet they wash, are a permanent problem for the woke progressive, the mere existence of Israel is the problem for Palestinians—and this justifies the violence. The narrative of Palestinian victimhood is fueled in the West by the body of critical theory corrupted by postmodernism, a viewpoint that at once asserts and denies universal truth, while reducing discourse to action all around. The narrative serves to empower terrorists foreign and domestic. It also serves to rationalize the invasion of the West by Third World culture bearers who refuse to integrate with the social and cultural systems of the host countries. The call to reject these ideologies and prevent their propagation in universities is emphasized by the rational to counteract this belief system; however, the oppressed-oppressor narrative has successfully colonized Western institutions and its agents in positions of power portray attempts to return to sanity as chauvinist, fascist, and racist.
In his 1961 The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocated violence not simply as legitimate action in the struggle for liberation but as a necessary step in overcoming the psychic complex of black inferiority, which was the result of centuries of demeaning white European colonization. Because all blacks are demeaned in this way, the victims of intergenerational trauma, they are not merely justified in using violence against any white person, but should do so for purposes of collective self-dignity and self-esteem. Social justice from the Black Power standpoint is not about justice, then, but about retribution. But it’s not only about settling the score. It doesn’t seek equality after that, but instead a new racial hierarchy, one that flips the script, with whites are on bottom and blacks and other oppressed minorities on top enjoying appropriated white wealth.
Frantz Fanon 1961 The Wretched of the Earth. Note the subtitle.
Fanon’s thesis, what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “a classic of anti-colonialism in which the Third World finds itself and speak to itself through his voice,” has been taken up by Third Worlders everywhere to cover for the criminal desire to appropriate what the West built. The success of the West is perceived by Fanon and his followers as not only purchased at the experience of wretched, but as the source of their wretchedness. The Third world looks the way it does not because the people there neither developed nor adopted the ways of the West but because the white man is a racist. Fanon’s thesis was joined with Mao Zedong thought to globalize the social logic of revolution against the West and shift the struggle from social class to racial identity (see The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological; Maoism and Wokism and the Tyranny of Bureaucratic Collectivism; The Cultural Revolution; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones).
The hatred of Jews is not because Jews stole Palestinian land. As I have shown, Jews had a continuous presence in what is today Israel for some 3500 years—before there was even an Arab culture and language (see Jew-Hatred in the Arab-Muslim World: An Ancient and Persistent Hatred). No, the hatred of Jews throughout history has been because Jews have been one of the most successful ethnic groups in history. The source of the hated and loathing is envy and resentment. With the Protestant Reformation, Christians became like the Jews and, like the Jews, became highly successful. Indeed, the most dynamic economic system in history, capitalism, is the result of Christians taking up rational economic behavior exemplified by Jewish culture and spreading it throughout the world. The United States is especially despised by the victims of culture and history because this country is the paradigm not only of capitalism but of civil liberties and rights and democratic-republic government. The US is a secular nation that accepts all races and all religions, that defends freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association. America led the way in abolishing slavery and establishing universal human rights. It follows that America would be portrayed as the “Great Satan” and the founding ethnic group as “white devils.” (See my recent essay The Education of Bill Maher—and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion to Christianity for a longer discussion of this point.)
“Converting to Islam has become the latest trend on TikTok. Purple-haired influencers, including one who identifies as a ‘leftist queer gremlin,’ are donning the hijab in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war,” writes Julie Burchill for Spᴉked. Some of this fascination with Islam is attributable to the viral video of a TikTok influencer declaring an existential crisis after reading mass murderer Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” which garnered over 14 million views on the social media platform before TikTok acted to remove them. The Guardian likewise scrubbed the letter from its platform, which had been the major source of the document. But mass receptivity to a superficial rant by the long deceased al-Qaeda leader comes in the context of a growing fascination among Western youth with a clerical fascism that dovetails with their secular one. Censoring the writings of bin Laden and other Islamists won’t stem the disturbing trend the moment highlights. Indeed, censorship will only make the kids more curious. We need a better solution to the problem.
Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous "Letter to America," in which he explained why he attacked the United States.
The trend did draw some attention in legacy and social media in the United States, but a consensus quickly formed that doing so would feed the trend, so the coverage was light or the trend was repurposed. The latter was the case over at Salon, where Amanda Marcotte exploited the phenomenon to pivot to the desired moral panic over Christian nationalism, telling her readers to worry less about TikTokers and bin Laden and “fret more than Mike Johnson shares the terrorist’s views.” The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, used the opportunity to vow action against social media companies while announcing new strategies to prevent young people from having their “minds polluted by the venom that is being spewed on these sites.” She ordered the director of Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to develop “media literacy tools” for k-12 in public schools to teach students and teachers to “understand how to spot conspiracies, theories and misinformation, disinformation and online hate.” Readers of Freedom and Reason know the focus of such literacy tools will be much less on the problem of clerical fascism and much more concerned with portraying conservative Christians and populist and patriotic Americas as “domestic terrorists.” (I have written about this extensively. See, e.g., The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males. What’s This All About?)
What lies behind this fascination with Osama bin Laden and Islamism and the conversion of young Westerners to Islam? Burchill quotes Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, who theorizes that this trend symbolizes the ultimate form of youthful rebellion. “At this point, what’s more rebellious, what’s more anti-Western and anti-capitalism and anti-establishment, than a conversion to Islam?” Describing the result as “a sort of collage that makes very little sense,” he notes that the desire for rebellion moves youth to pick and choose among “different aspects of different extremist ideologies that are completely incompatible with one another.” This is correct albeit superficial and reductionistic. It won’t do as an explanation to chalk this up to youthful desire to rebel against authority and tradition. The sociological question is why Western youth desire rebellion and why they choose Islam.
As for media analysis, it tends to stay focused on the superficial. Burchill writes in her Spᴉked piece, “One does wonder what strange psychological kink would make someone feel this way—to worship people who would hurt them. We see it most clearly with our short-sighted chums, ‘Queers for Palestine’.” Later in the essay, we find Burchill getting close to something: “Perhaps the worst kind of magical thinking is what I call Commie Colonialism—the left’s insistence that all non-white people are, at heart, liberal or woke.” She correctly observes, “When someone is in the grip of this delusion, there are no limits on the outlandish things they might say.” Reaching for an example, she quotes Susan Sarandon who suggested that fearful jews are “getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.” (For her suggestion, Sarandon’s talent agency dropped her, a move with which I disagree.) But, again, what is the source of the delusion? (Also, as an aside, why do the folks over at Spᴉked consistently mislabel progressivism—and themselves? The first thing that should strike one when reading that publication is how liberal it is.)
These deluded young leftists—deluded by socialization in an institutional web organized by corporatist logic and the obsession with diversity—see Islam as the non-white religion and therefore the good religion. White and nonwhite youth hate whiteness, with whites loathing their race assigned at birth. Unlike their gender, which they are encouraged to deny, they are told that race is an inescapable caste relations, and so Islam becomes the way to escape from freedom. Islam allows for virtue signaling around racial self-loathing. Of course, Islam is not a good religion. Of the Jewish-based traditions, Islam is the worst. But there’s a bad premise in all of this: While there are Muslims who are nonwhite, Islam is not a non-white religion. Arabs are white.
But the ignorance of Western youth doesn’t end there. What about the hundreds of millions of non-whites counted among the 2.4 billion Christians in the world? Christianity is far and away the largest religious faith in the world, its congregation represent a third of all humans on the planet. Christians outnumber Muslims globally by several hundred million people—people of all races and ethnicities found throughout the world. There are tens of millions of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. Most black Americans are Christian (nearly 80 percent). The brown people of Central and South America (albeit still caucasian) are Christian. And there is an untold number of Chinese Christians not counted because the totalitarian People’s Republic of China won’t allow them to freely practice or acknowledge the extent of their existence.
Western youth have been made so dumb by the educational system that they don’t know even the most basic things about the world. Yet the rest of us are supposed to cater to their (ironic) fear of progress and pathological need to have impossible things affirmed as real and righteous. To be sure, the deluded youth are victims of a mass indoctrination program designed to turn them against the West to facilitate the transnational corporate restructuring of the world capitalist economy. But the offspring of any mammalian species possesses the same inherent capacities as its parents, a fact to which tens of millions of young Westerners who haven’t succumbed to the madness testify. Hope lies with them. Still, the elite amplify the voices of the deluded and use the loudness to crowd out reason and cow the sensible. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
All this makes it all the more important that those of us who have the courage to speak the truth never lose our confidence to do so. “Courage is contagious,” as Billy Graham was fond of saying. If Graham’s explicit devotion to Christianity troubles you, remember what probable-atheist Winston Churchill told us (and Steve Bannon garbles): “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” To be sure, many of our youth eschew virtue (choosing instead worship of the self), but there is enough of us still standing, religious and nonreligious, to reclaim Western Civilization. But we need to move quickly and forcefully.
It’s Thanksgiving. Media sources are reporting that the al-Harir US military base in Kurdistan, Iraq, has been attacked for the third time. The Islamic Resistance Group in Iraq issued a statement yesterday, confirming that they utilized drones to directly strike the base. The group stated that the attack was a response to the Israeli occupation’s alleged crimes against Palestinians in Gaza. This development follows a Reuters report, indicating that the US army conducted “precise” strikes on two facilities in Iraq in retaliation for what it claimed were attacks on its forces in the region.
According to several sources (see, e.g., “Islamic Resistance in Iraq appears to be responsible for attacks in the country and there’s no end in sight,” Atlantic Council) US military bases in Iraq and Syria have faced continuous attacks since mid-last month, stemming from a show of solidarity with what the Islamist consider the resistance in Gaza and opposition to the US backing of Israel’s effort to defeat Hamas and affiliated terrorist organizations there.
On November 13, a series of missile and drone strikes targeted US occupation bases in Syria as a response to recent defensive US airstrikes. On November 17, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq declared that its forces had launched attacks on three US bases situated in Syria and Iraq. In retaliation for what they deemed as crimes against their people in Gaza, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq utilized two drones to strike the American occupation base, Tal Baidar, located west of the Syrian city of Hasakah. Prior to this announcement, the coalition had already disclosed the targeting of two additional bases in Iraq: the Harir base and the Ain al-Assad base.
AI generated
As of last week, the Pentagon has disclosed more than sixty attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria since the previous month. The statement noted that 59 US soldiers had been injured. There are reports of deaths with subsequent Islamist actions. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition of various Iraqi resistance groups with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was established last month to express solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. Naim Qassem, the Deputy Secretary-General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, emphasized in a recent interview with El-Mundo that attacking US positions in West Asia is essential to halt the mass killings of Palestinians in Gaza. He argued that US military intervention aligns with the violent Israeli reaction and aims to safeguard what he termed as a “monstrosity.”
Historians will backdate the start of WWIII, but it appears to be underway. This time it’s the West against the clerical fascist, the new Nazis, who are in many ways more brutal than the old ones. This is not a time for a weak president. Yet the elite have installed the weakest and most unAmerican president we’ve ever had (at least in my lifetime). Worse, our young men have been brought up to be less than enthusiastic about their country and the Western way of life that spoiled them. Biden and NATO’s timing in provoking Russia into entering Ukraine will be judged poor in hindsight. Of course, the Islamist pick their spots. They have struck because the West is weak and overextended. We cannot know this for sure, since we cannot rerun history, but it seems highly unlikely any of this would be happening if Trump were president.
A map of every “far right” or “far left” government in Europe. The right governments are in red (source).
On the plus side of the ledger, populist-nationalism is on the move across the West. Argentina on choose on Sunday libertarian Javier Milei as its new president. The way the corporate media tells it, the nation took a gamble on an outsider with unconventional views to address an economy grappling with triple-digit inflation, an imminent recession, and escalating poverty. Riding the tide of voter frustration with the political establishment, Milei secured victory with a larger-than-anticipated margin, garnering approximately 56 percent of the vote, surpassing his rival, Peronist Economy Minister Sergio Massa, who admitted defeat with just over 44 percent of the votes.
In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders is expressing his ambition to become the next prime minister after securing a significant victory in a landmark election. His primary focus, he stated, will be controlling immigration. His election win serves as a warning to mainstream political parties throughout Europe that the issues at the forefront—immigration, the cost of living, and climate change—may turn them out of office. They need no more evidence than the right-wing coalition government in Sweden, which has announced that it’s exploring legislation to enhance requirements for migrants entering the country. The law may include requiring as a condition of residency adherence to fundamental standards of integrity: any foreigner who does not adhere to an “honorable lifestyle” and respects Sweden’s “fundamental values” will be deported.
I hope I never have a day in my life when I won’t or can’t be thankful for living in the greatest republic that ever existed—the United States of America. Although I am not responsible for the actions of those now dead and gone, I can be thankful for my ancestors who founded and built and defended this great nation. I worry about the future, though, not only because of the threats abroad, but the rot inside. The enemies of America are in charge of the machinery of the republic. I’m not religious, but I know many of you are and will pray for America. I’m thankful for that, too. We need more than prayers, though. We need action.
The Nation has just published a piece by John Nichols wondering why, if Marianne Williamson is polling just as well against Biden as Nikki Haley is against Trump, the media is obsessed with Haley and ignoring Williamson. This isn’t obvious? Unfortunately, Nichols doesn’t provide the comprehensive explanation needed. So I will do that in today’s blog.
With Ron DeSantis not ready for primetime, Nikki Haley is rising in the polls—and in the eyes of the establishment
Despite being well behind Donald Trump in polling (as are all Republican hopefuls), Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations, signals that she will serve as a pliant functionary for the permanent political class, She is rapidly become the darling of the donor class, the billionaire hedge fund managers, etc., who own the leadership of the Senate on both sides of the aisle. Haley is the authoritarian and warmonger they love to love. Although Haley walked backed her demand that social media ban anonymous accounts after massive pushback, her emphatic advocacy of the position signaled the desired illiberal personality type, and her commitment to funding Ukraine to perpetuate Biden and NATO’s disastrous proxy war with Russia has garnered support across the military-industrial establishment. Nikki Haley would therefore be the worst possible president—if the metrics are democracy, freedom, and peace. But those aren’t the metrics, are they.
The other piece of this is the media’s pathological obsession with Donald Trump. Trump is a clear and present danger to corporate governance and the globalist agenda. The establishment drove Trump out of office and they’re determined to prevent his return. The resort to lawfare, with states attempting to take Trump off the ballot (failing in Colorado, but several more suits are ready to go) and jurisdictions hitting him with all manner of criminal charges, with one court even trying to take from him his business empire, tells us what the end goal is, to prevent Trump from running, with Haley the last Republican standing. We’ve all seen the polls. If they hold, and there’s no reason to think they won’t, Trump will be the next president. That’s why the establishment is in total meltdown. With DeSantis clearly not ready for primetime, Haley is their gal.
Marianne Williamson has also been rising in the polls—with no help from the establishment media
As for Williamson, she’s a crackpot. But that’s not why the elite don’t want her. Nicholes tells his readers that “Williamson proposes deep cuts in Pentagon spending, and a new approach to international relations that focuses on diplomacy and peacemaking.” That’s certainly part of the explanation. “Polls indicate that Williamson’s strongest support comes from young Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, who have been particularly critical of Biden’s approach to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and who have been supportive of more ambitious responses to economic inequality, racial injustice and the climate crisis.” For some of the same reasons, the establishment doesn’t want Robert Kennedy, either; but they couldn’t ignore him, so they discredited him instead. Now that he is no longer a candidate for the Democratic Party, the establishment media is giving Kennedy the Williamson treatment. But if Williamson continues to rise in the polls, the establishment will give her the Kennedy treatment.
The establishment needs a functionary like Gavin Newsom or Hillary Clinton to be their president. These figures can promise the elite to not be our president. Newson and Clinton can be counted on to continue the globalist agenda, promoting off-shoring of production and defending mass immigration—i.e., the super-exploitation of foreign labor at home and abroad—starting more wars and deepen those in which the US is already involved, expand the national security apparatus, and continue the woke agenda in our schools. Put simply, what is needed from both parties are establishment operatives who will push the transnational project of managed decline of America and the West.
What terrifies elites is the populist-nationalist movement that promises to restore the American Republic—that right, the bipartisan movement to put America first and make her great again by going back to first principles. We see how terrified elites are in their reaction not only to Trump but also to Kennedy. Trump and Kennedy are populist-nationalists committed to democratic-republicanism and classical liberal ideals. We see this also in the attack on Supreme Court justices. Progressives are desperate to portray conservative justices (especially Clarence Thomas) as corrupt to delegitimize their liberal approach and originalist legal philosophy. Constitutionalism, nationalism, and populism are diametrically opposed to illiberal and collectivist praxis of progressivism and globalism, and so those who represent these things must be destroyed.
It feels good to have one’s argument validated by somebody like Yascha Mounk, even if I disagree with him about the implications of populism to liberal democracy (in my view he has misunderstood the anti-establishment impulse of the movement). Mounk is a German-born Jewish political scientist associated with Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University. Mounk is also a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He is known for his work on issues related to democracy, populism, and political theory. See, for example, his 2018 book The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, where he makes the point with which I disagree.
Yascha Mounk is a German-born Jewish political scientist associated with Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the German Marshall Fund
I haven’t red Mounk’s new book, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, but I was fortunate to catch his interview with Glenn Lowry (see below). Nearly everything Mounk says about woke ideology in this interview I have been saying on my blog Freedom and Reason for years. In the interview, Mounk reflects on a significant transformation in the beliefs of his social circle over the past decade, noting a substantial shift in left-wing ideologies in America. In 2023, the understanding of being left-wing is markedly different from that of 2005 or 2010. This change is attributed to the proliferation of new ideas, often termed “woke” (Mounk doesn’t like the word) or linked with identity politics, though Mounk prefers the term “identity synthesis” to encapsulate the nuanced evolution. Acknowledging historical instances of white identity politics, Mounk argues that the current left’s ideology is distinctive, rooted in influences such as postmodernism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory. Key intellectual figures like Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak have significantly shaped the discourse on power, identity, and oppression.
I have written about this, but it bears repeating: one of the difficult things to deal with in light of the rapid shift in left-wing sensibilities is that I remained stubbornly resistant to the ideas that currently corrupt left-wing thought, which alienated a lot of colleagues and friends (even family). Unaware that it is in fact those around me who have changed, many people came to perceive me as the one who has changed; they see themselves as on the left, so the perception was that I had moved to the right. To be sure, I have changed in some ways; but that change has come about by recognizing that there was programming during my graduate school experience that put into my epistemic system ideas from post-colonial studies and critical race theory, a system that was not yet sophisticated enough to exclude bad ideas. The new millennium found me reviewing and reassessing my understanding of the world and the myriad ways thinkers attempt to grasp it and purging from the system the worst of those ideas I found there.
I have also taken great pains to emphasize that woke is not Marxist. This is one of the most satisfying moments of this interview is Mounk explaining why woke progressive ideology—critical race theory, inter sectionalism, post colonial studies, race essentialism—is not is not Marxist, neo-Marxist, or cultural Marxism, or any of those other labels that both the left and the right attempt to attach to progressive ideology. Today’s progressivism is postmodernist. Whatever monsters one wishes to credit to Karl Marx, the man is not the creator of this one.
Lowry asks Mounk to trace the intellectual and political history of the identity synthesis. Mounk begins with Foucault, who rejected grand narratives and grand theoretical attempts to structure our comprehension of the world and history, attempts that encompassing both philosophical liberalism and Marxism. Foucault’s skepticism extends to the notion of societal progress, especially concerning the treatment of the mentally ill, criminals, and sexual minorities. Departing from conventional perspectives, Foucault redefines power, rejecting the naive top-down view associated with laws, bureaucratic states, and enforcing police forces, and focusing instead on power as deeply embedded in our discourses, evident in conversations and audience engagement, where the framing of ideas becomes an exercise of power. This intellectual solvent effectively enables critiques of democratic institutions, as well as post-war France’s limitations, albeit lacking a distinctly activist stance, positing that any set of discourses could be as oppressive as the next, leaving no definitive ground for refusal.
In the subsequent phase, post-colonial thinkers are drawn to these ideas, seeking to reconstruct their newly independent countries without adopting Western ideologies like liberalism or Marxism. Recognizing the need for more than critique, they endeavor to infuse politics into postmodernism. Edward Said emerges as a pioneer in this field, utilizing Foucault’s discourse concept as a primary tool. Said goes beyond exposing discourses, employing them as a form of political power. In works such as Orientalism, Said endeavors not only to reveal how the West’s representation of the East justified colonial rule but also to invert the discourse, providing a means to resist. This marks the genesis of discourse critique as a political tool, a politicized form of discourse critique that is observable in contemporary politics. We see the fruit of Said’s labor in the mob on the street. We also see these ideas in contemporary feminist politics, where engagements range from advocating for abortion rights to scrutinizing and critiquing cultural artifacts like the Barbie movie.
Another significant contributor to this trajectory is Gayatri Spivak, an Indian literary theorist. Spivak accepts the critique of stable identity categories presented by figures like Foucault. Acknowledging the limitations of essentialist understandings of identity, she introduces the concept of “strategic essentialism.” While recognizing the philosophical flaws in essentialist notions, Spivak argues that, for practical purposes, identity categories are essential to advocate for the most oppressed individuals in places like Kolkata who may lack a voice. This results in a paradoxical term, acknowledging the philosophical discrepancy while asserting the strategic necessity of essentialism; Spivak underscores the paradoxical need for identity categories despite critiquing essentialist notions. The narrative further explores the popularization of these ideas, including the concept of intersectionality, in social justice movements.
Mounk puts all this together for Lowry. The movement gleans from Foucault the rejection of neutral forms of truth, embracing a perspective that challenges the idea of objective truths. Although he leaves this out in the interview, it is from Said that activists derive their fetish for marginalized and peripheral people. Spivak contributes a politicized form of discourse analysis to the intellectual toolkit, offering a lens through which activists assume control over the political dimensions of language. Enter critical race theory. From Kimberlé Crenshaw, activists adopt the popularized iteration of intersectionality, a concept that has taken on a life of its own in contemporary social justice movements. We can add to Mounk’s list queer theory and the work of individuals such as Judith Butler. This amalgamation of ideas serves as a comprehensive framework for understanding and engaging with the complexities of modern social justice activism.
Beyond intellectual history, Mounk scrutinizes the transformation of these ideas into a dominant political and cultural force, particularly evident in 2020 with the riots surrounding George Floyd’s death. In light of the protests on our streets, The Identity Trap could not have landed at a better time. Mounk also touches on the concept of the “successor ideology,” distinct from but related to “wokeism” (see my recent post The Threat of Successor Ideology). This ideology, championed by the administrative state and the technocratic elite, encompasses a set of ideas that justifies the moral norms enforced by the woke. The subsequent political economy analysis reveals how this ideology, once marginal, became the prevailing moral orthodoxy in major American institutions. Mounk highlights the paradoxes within the successor ideology, including the privileged background of many proponents and its extreme self-denunciation, where individuals are expected not only to accept guilt but to affirm it.
These intellectual currents underpin the destructive ideology pushed throughout the education system and pressed into the brains of Western youth, from k-12 through colleges and universities, by administrators, counselors, teachers, and staff. Mounk tells us how this happened. In the page of Freedom and Reason, I tell you why this is happening. This is not a communist takeover of the trans-Atlantic system. It’s the fascist destruction of Western Civilization—which is why elites in the West promote the clerical fascism of the Islamists—with a new world order as the end goal (this is what Mounk misunderstands about populism). Of course, not all of today’s youth seeks totalitarianism. But too many of them do.
So what is to be done? In The Identity Trap, Mounk argues for the restoration of liberalism in the democratic sense, advocating for core values like free speech, due process, and open inquiry. Mounk challenges the illiberal tendencies within the successor ideology and calls for a return to the Enlightenment principles that underpin a multiracial democracy. As readers of my blog know, this is my argument, as well. I look forward to getting my hands on The Identity Trap. Readers of this blog should grab a copy, too. We need more voices like Yascha Mounk.
People are always telling me that big organized events can’t possibility be the result of government or elite conspiracy because somebody would say something somewhere at some time. Then, when a man says something lots of places and lots of times, the government and media cover for him, presenting as a harmless well-meaning sad sack a central player in the conspiracy. Several years later, as the truth starts to come into focus (a truth I knew all along, for the record, documented on the pages of Freedom and Reason), the government charges the man with a misdemeanor, he cops a plea, and disappears.
Ray Epps imploring people to breach the Capitol on January 6, Washington DC, 2021
Check out the first paragraph of this News 1 story on his guilty plea and marvel as the sheer beauty of top-notch propaganda: “Ray Epps, a onetime Donald Trump supporter who was the target of a right-wing conspiracy theory about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack that forced him into hiding, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a misdemeanor charge for his role in the US Capitol riot.” I need to translate: “one-time,” i.e., the role he performed as a Trump supporter in organizing the riot to be blamed on Trump; “target of right-wing conspiracy theory,” i.e., called out by people who believe their lying eyes; “forced into hiding,” i.e., making Epps unavailable for questioning.
The Deep State chose poorly when they selected Ray Epps to be among the federal agents and contractors who organized the January 6, 2021 riots in Washington DC. He was prone to braggadocio. The Deep State is desperate to distract the public from learning about the appearance of new video and audio of Epps bragging about his role in January 6. This evidence joins the a voluminous record to leave no doubt who Epps was. Indeed, the video of Epps is so ubiquitous that it exposes for all to see the function of the January 6 Committee and the corporate media apparatus.
The first time Ray Epps approached @bakedalaska and told him to go into the Capitol, Baked Alaska left to an area far away from him.
Epps then followed him, repeating his calls for protesters to enter the Capitol.
Ray Epps tried to incite the riots at the Capitol, but we are learning this is all on Pelosi as she is responsible for the insurrection. Thanks to Speaker Johnson for releasing the J6 tapes! pic.twitter.com/wdt0IGSkNT
Epp is not the only one who spilled the beans. Look up a cat named John Earl Sullivan. Ray and John even appear together. You won’t hear much about Sullivan in the news, but the District of Columbia Attorney’s Office announced the following on November 16, 2023 (yep, two days ago): “A Utah man was convicted today by a jury in the District of Columbia of five felonies and two misdemeanor charges related to his conduct during the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the US Capitol. His actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the US Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the 2020 presidential election.” Assisting DC Attorney’s Office in Sullivan’s prosecution was the Department of Justice National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section. Noting the respective race of the two men, the cynical might wonder whether Epps got off easy and Sullivan had the book thrown at him; however, the vast majority of those the government threw in prison are white men.
To clarify the Attorney’s Office memo, the purpose of the Capitol breach was to prevent the process of making legal challenges and reviewing vote certifications under the 1887 Electoral Count Act (ECA), a process Democrats had used in previous elections to challenge Republican victors. Several of the state certificates were fraudulent and the Administrative State needed a mechanism for thwarting what would have almost certainly been a successful challenge of the 2020 election. Trump supporters had no interest in preventing the process from going forward by rioting. That’s why Trump held a rally and implored them to peacefully and patriotically make their voices: to steel the spines of Republican lawmakers Trump had also requested National Guard troops to police the event four days before the riots.
In case readers missed it, Congress changed the ECA in a stealth reform, i.e., the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), tucked away in an omnibus appropriations legislation passed on December 2022. They did this to obstinately, to use the language from the talking points memo, “reform and modernize the outdated 1887 Electoral Count Act to ensure that electoral votes tallied by Congress accurately reflect each state’s public vote for President.” Another translation is necessary: “accurately reflect each state’s public vote for President,” i.e., make it all-but-impossible to challenge a state certification on future January 6 joint sessions.
Why was Epps scouting Baked Alaska in the weeks before January 6?
FED? @laralogan has exposed the fact that Ray Epps had been scouting Baked Alaska weeks before J6. Ray claims he wasn’t working with the Feds so who was he working with? We need hearings @mtgreenee. pic.twitter.com/o8FQpJSpFZ
There’s more. The first two busses of “insurrectionists” to arrive that day were ghost vehicles full of FBI and other government agents.
#J6 was a setup. Ghost busses, tapes not released, coordinated media coverage, Ray Epps, Ukrainian Spy, hidden data from the head of capital police, Intel officer getting cushy payoff with a job at Berkley .. its clear as day what was going on at this point. pic.twitter.com/uxe8DvHUjh
The questions I ask are rhetorical. This was a fedsurrection. The reason the Washington DC and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined Trump’s request to bring in the National Guard was that the riot was planned. The Deep State knew Republicans were going to challenge state certificates and that their actions were warranted. The reason the Denver judge ruled late last night that Trump incited the violence on January 6 but declined to remove him from the Colorado ballot is a thing called “discovery.” Kash Patel’s testimony blew up everything. Which is why you haven’t seen it. Go find it. Watch it.
For more, I direct you to Darren Beattie’s Revolver News. I have to go rake leaves on this beautiful fall day.
Woke “Critical Whiteness” lecture at the University of Denver teaches students that white people are inherently guilty of racism. pic.twitter.com/ls0SE5Ma17
This University of Denver teacher just told students that critical race theory is a religion. This is the analogy I have used for years (see for example my June 3, 2020 essay Such a Beautiful Moment—The Self-Flagellating of White People). CRT is a religion that appeals to supernatural entities and forces and rests on the notion of original sin, blood guilt, intergenerational and collective responsibility—all based on race. It’s a paradigm of Erving Goffman’s “tribal stigma.”
There are those whom the gods of social justice keep immaculate (it wasn’t that Mary was a virgin but that her vaginal canal was cleansed by the Holy Spirit). In the CRT religion, blacks are sacred in this way. Living fetishes and totems.
There’s a version of this in critical feminism. A man is an oppressor because patriarchy. But if he performs the role of a woman (don’t get mad at me, that’s Judith Butler talking), if he steps into oppression by making himself a minority (trans), then he leaves that sin behind and becomes a protected class. He becomes a fetish in the religious sense. Trans is not just a move from the dysphoric to the euphoric. Gender ideology is a salvation cult.
But there’s one big difference: race is caste. You can’t wriggle out of it (Rachel Dolezal tried and look what happened to her). At best, no matter how many feet they wash, whites can only be allies; they’re always sinners. They must repent, of course, but remain permanently fallen. They must apologize for themselves and go to the back of the line.
Whatever the differences, it’s all primitive superstition and crack pot academic theory. All of it. CRT. Queer Theory. Islamism. It’s crap. Yet these crappy ideas have colonized our institutions. We’re being required to adopt the doctrines, recite the scriptures, engage the rituals. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is the manifestation of these atavisms in corporate boardrooms and educational institutions. We’re forced to act in bad faith. It’s corrupting history, fiction, art, and music. It’s corrupting everything.
The Woke are waging war on civilization. Resist it while you can. The rational know what this is. It’s totalitarianism.
Archbishop: “There's a secular belief system that is its own religion—it has infallible dogmas it’s forcing on the populace, it punishes dissenters, it has its rituals & its saints and martyrs—so it has these markings of a religion and it's allowing no space for other beliefs.”
— Independent Truths with Dr. Scott Atlas (@ScottAtlas_IT) September 4, 2023
The archbishop is on to something. I’ve been telling readers of my blog for years now that woke progressivism is a religion—an imperialistic religion at that. Strategically, to keep it from protecting itself behind the shield of freedom of conscience, let’s call it a quasi-religion, but let’s also capitalize it—like we capitalize National Socialism. Those who push it suspend the principle of disestablishment and use the doctrines of Woke to push out other religious faith—except Islam, which is its sister totalitarianism—and take control over the individual, selectively negating his fundamental rights to conscience, speech, assembly, association, etc. The Woke are a colonizing army that has marched across the West and captured its institutions. It’s inquisitions abound.
Muslim America (AI generated image)
I know people are concerned about Christian nationalism. So am I. But I suspect there is a high degree of correlation between those who express this concern and those who advocate woke progressivism. However, the only people who can validly express fear of Christian nationalism—that is, moving from the ground of secularism—are those who also stand against Woke and Islam and every other form of illiberal religion, ideology, ritual, and practice. Who are the people who have that ground to stand on? Those would be the liberals.
Central to liberalism is secularism. Secularism is not non-religious. A man can be a Christian and be a secularist. I know several such men. Secularism means the disestablishment of religion. Secularism emancipates religion from state sanction. It’s up to individuals to emancipate themselves from religion. The ideology of the Christian Nationalist is antidisestablishmentarianism. Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but I learned it as a kid, back when people were talking about the problem in a rational way. It’s time to talk about the problem again. Frankly, the concern is not Christians frustrated with American secularism. The threat to our liberties and freedoms is the imperial religion of Islam—the sharia supremacist movement—and the quasi-religion of Woke. That these totalitarianisms have become allied amplifies the threat.
freedom and reason 