On January 18 of this year, I posted a blog, Males Do Not Have Periods, in which I shared an OpenAI ChatGPT conversation that had the chatbot returning the following answers to basic scientific questions about sex and gender:
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot January 18, 2023
I reported in that entry that ChapGPT had declined to write an essay on why exposing children to sexualized performances is harmful to their emotional and psychological health. It not only declined to write the essay, but scolded the user for making an inappropriate request. It then suggested that sexualizing children is good for the children (if you don’t believe me, follow the above link and scroll down towards the end of the entry).
I noted in that blog that the OpenAI chatbot’s opinion (for the record, ChatGPT denies it has opinions) cannot possibly be derived from the corpus of knowledge provided to the program but one fed to the program in order to bias the parameters of the frame. My expertise in this area? I’ve been publishing and talking about the problem of child sexual abuse for decades now, my work showing that child sexual abuse produces continuing trauma in adulthood and suggests a persistent situation of powerlessness across the life course. I’m a criminology with more than a decade in experience with evaluation of drug and alcohol treatment programs for women, a large proportion of whom were sexualized as children. In 2004, I published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma concerning the life-course effects of child sexual abuse. I’m also the author of the lengthy entry “Child Sexual Abuse” in Sage’s Encyclopedia of Social Deviance, published in 2014.
I made sure to curate the conversation I had with ChatGPT concerning the two genotypes that comprise the human species (shared above)because I suspected that very soon these will not be the answers provided. I told readers this in that January 18 blog. Turns out that what I wrote there was prophecy. Here’s what Open AI’s chatbot returned one month later:
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot February 18, 2023
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot February 18, 2023
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black political activism as violent,” journalist Trevor Aaronson told theGrio. The podcast Alphabet Boys claims that the FBI paid a felon, Michael Adam Windecker II, to infiltrate Denver’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) action in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Aaronson purports to show how the FBI targeted Black activists and sought to manipulate them into joining a plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.
In statements provided to The Guardian by Wyden’s office, the Senator said, “If the allegations in Mr. Aaronson’s podcast are true, the FBI’s use of an informant to spy on First Amendment-protected activity and stoke violence at peaceful protests is an outrageous abuse of law-enforcement resources and authority.” Also, “The FBI owes the public a full accounting of its actions, including how anyone responsible for attempting to entrap and discredit racial justice activists will be held accountable.”
I agree, but Wyden is misrepresenting BLM. BLM is not a racial justice activist organization but a corporate-funded disinformation group with an operating logic rooted in anti-white bigotry, openly hostile towards traditional family systems, and a clear penchant for violent action. The purpose of BLM is to racially divide the proletariat (see What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it). However, whatever one thinks about BLM, the comparison the Denver ordeal to the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program is appropriate. During that time, FBI agents infiltrated black organizations like the Black Panther Party (see The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left).
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black [sic] political activism as violent,” Aaronson told theGrio, “even though on its face the overwhelming majority of racial justice demonstrations that summer were peaceful.” This is a misrepresentation of what occurred over the summer of 2020. There was widespread violence, including homicide, and extraordinary levels of property destruction and theft. While there is no federal domestic terrorism statute, based on common definition, BLM (and Antifa) actions come pretty close conceptually. For sure BLM is not representative of racial justice movements. So when Aaronson says things like the following, he is engaged in propaganda: “While COINTELPRO no longer exists, you can see very clearly in this case and in the summer of 2020 that many of these methods that were used to a devastating effect against the civil rights movement in the 1960s were used against the racial justice movement in 2020.”
One more thing. Be wary of this claim that the FBI technique of “snitch-jacketing,” where an informant accuses activists of being FBI informants to sow confusion. To be sure, this happens. But I wouldn’t rule out a priori that a significant number of BLM activists were FBI agents and paid informants. The chaos of summer and fall of 2020 carries indications of a color revolution (see “A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous; Color Revolution, Joe from Scranton, and PEDs). Given what we know now about the extensive collaboration between the FBI and other deep state actors and social media platforms in a conspiracy to undermine Trump’s re-election, identification of FBI agents and informants in BLM action cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Everybody loves Jimmy Carter. A lot of people who are old enough to remember the Carter years love Jimmy Carter. Frankly, if I were a religious man, I would worry for their souls. As it is, I am greatly troubled by the poverty of their character and the their apparently endless capacity for doublethink. Is it because Carter is a Democrat that his crimes against humanity go mis/unremembered? Yes, I think so. It’s a matter of party over principle, in this case a warmongering party serving the interests of the corporate state and the transnationalist agenda.
Doublethink is a concept that George Orwell explored extensively in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, punished in 1949. Doublethink is the ability to hold in one’s head two contradictory beliefs or ideas simultaneously and believe them both to be true. But it is more than this. It’s not just the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time; it’s the ability to switch between them as needed without acknowledging the contradiction. It involves the conscious act of suppressing one’s own thoughts while accepting whatever the ruling party tells the individual to believe, even if it contradicts what the person previously believed.
Doublethink is the ability to say, for example, that one opposes war while voting for warmongers. Beyond the dystopian fiction of Orwell, in the real here and now, it’s your Democrat friends adorning their social media profiles with the Ukrainian flag.
President Carter talks with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Oval Office 1977
The purpose of doublethink is to create a sense of cognitive dissonance in the people, which in turn makes it easier for the ruling party to control them. By forcing or inducing people to accept contradictory ideas as true, the party is able to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of the masses, and ultimately, to steer their behavior and command their emotions.
Do folks not know or remember that it was Jimmy Carter who organized Islamists—the mujahideen—to destabilize the socialist government in Kabul to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan? The war Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski contrived lasted a decade. As many as two million Afghans were killed, the majority of whom were civilians. If you didn’t know about this, now that you do, does it change your mind? No? That’s doublethink.
The official story is that the Carter administration began providing covert aid to the mujahideen in 1979 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Did the Soviet Union even invade Afghanistan? Or was it something else?
In 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a socialist political party, overthrew the government of President Mohammed Daoud Khan in a revolutionary moment characterized by Western media as a coup d’état. The new government was led by Nur Mohammad Taraki and the country became the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The new government’s policies included land reform, social and economic changes, and a break with traditional Islamic practices.
The Soviet Union negotiated a mutual defense pact with Taraki government. By funding the jihadists before the Soviet Union entered the country, Carter and Brzezinski forced the Soviet Union to honor that pact in order to drag the Soviet Union into what Brzezinski characterized as their Vietnam War. Brzezinski and the Carter administration saw an opportunity to undermine what they characterized Soviet influence in the region. They provided covert support to anti-government mujahideen groups to draw the Soviet Union into a quagmire.
Brzezinski later admitted that the strategy was to provide support to the mujahideen in order to provoke a Soviet military intervention, which he believed would be a costly and draining conflict for the Soviet Union. This, in turn, would weaken the Soviet Union’s hold on Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. He confessed this in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski described the strategy and admitted to the crime: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”
The US government provided weapons, training, and other support to the mujahideen through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other channels. The goal was to destabilize the Afghan government and force the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan. The CIA and other US agencies worked with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to funnel weapons and money to the mujahideen. The US also encouraged other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, to provide support to the Afghan resistance.
The US support for the mujahideen helped to create a culture of violence and extremism in Afghanistan, as well as a generation of fighters who would go on to fight in conflicts around the world, including against the US. The conflict and US backing of oppressive and terroristic forces contributed to the growth of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The state the war left Afghanistan in allowed for the establishment of theocratic tyranny where women, who enjoyed under the socialist government great freedom, participation in politics, and careers in academia, engineering and science, and medicine, including as physicians, were brutally repressed by an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam. This remains true to this day and it’s because of Jimmy Carter’s actions in 1979. I probably don’t need to remind readers that it was from Afghanistan that al-Qaeda launched its multi-pronged attack against the United States on September 11, 2001. See my blog Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan for an in-depth exposé on this subject.
Remember how Carter pretended the invasion wasn’t of his doing and punished our athletes by boycotting the 1980 Olympics? He also imposed restrictions on trade with the Soviet Union, including an embargo on the export of grain and high-technology goods; suspending arms control talks (including the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT II, and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe); and provided military and economic aid to Pakistan, aid that included weapons, military personnel, and training.
Do people not know or remember that it was Jimmy Carter who provided military assistance to Indonesia during the period of its invasion and occupation of East Timor and the genocide perpetrated on the Timorese people? In 1978, the US government lifted an arms embargo that had been in place for more than a decade. He then provided Indonesia with millions of dollars in military aid, including weapons and training.
With Carter’s weapons and training, the Indonesian military committed extensive human rights abuses in East Timor, including extrajudicial killings, torture, forced relocation and birth controlled. Girls were used by Indonesian forces as sex slaves. During the occupation, an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 East Timorese, or about a third of the population, died due to the conflict, including killings, starvation, and disease.
Have people forgotten that the negation of Persia that came with the establishment of the Islamic republic in Iran in April 1979 came under Carter’s watch? Carter not only watched it unfold—he stood by while dozens of Americans were held hostage in Tehran for 444 days.
Long ago, I wondered whether Carter’s actions after his presidency—pounding nails into boards and promoting election integrity around the world (if that was what he was indeed doing)—came from the deep shame he must have felt at having betrayed so many people during his presidency, for being not merely one of the worst presidents in American history, but in actively participating in oppression and genocide.
Then I reflect on the fact that he was groomed for the job by David Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission, the cabal that also staffed his administration, and I realize that all his actions post-presidency are designed to obscure his associations with and machinations in the service of corporate state power. See my recent blog Jimmy Carter, Trilateralist, Entering Hospice for details.
There is no atoning for the sins Carter committed. If there is a hell, he is destined to spend all of eternity there. But there is no hell. So he will die an old and broken man with blood on his hands.
A few weeks ago I reported the results of a survey conducted by UW-Stout’s Menard Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation and the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service that interviewed more than 10,000 University of Wisconsin System undergraduate students. Questions covered such topics as the First Amendment, whether speech considered harmful should be reported to administrators, and if speakers some students find offensive should be disinvited by campuses.
University of Wisconsin-Stout
As I reported in the spring of last year, the survey was originally scheduled to be administered in April 2022 but was delayed for months due to opposition by administrators and faculty. Democrats worried that the survey would confirm what they and the public already knew, that the university has become a lot like a cathedral, with professors functioning as a clergy, preaching to a congregation of faithful youth, sitting in the pews and uttering amen to the faculty’s preachments.
You can read the full report here. I highlighted these findings in my February 7 blog: students classified by the survey as “very liberal” were the least likely to report feeling pressured by an instructor to agree with a specific political or ideological view being expressed in class (15.1 percent), most likely to agree that university administrators should ban expressions of views they feel cause harm (40.2 percent), and most likely to agree that the students should report an instructor to university administrators if the instructor says something that some students feel causes harm (71.4 percent). A majority of students described as “somewhat liberal” also agreed that students should report teachers to administrators.
My interpretation of these results is that “very liberal” students find the campus environment one in which their views will be reflected and are the most likely to express illiberal attitudes. Indeed, the number of students expressing illiberal attitudes indicates a deep and profound authoritarianism among those students classified as “very liberal.” I clarified in that blog that this means that they are not in fact very liberal but woke progressive, a sensibility that, while rare in the world outside college, shapes the climate of college campuses across the nation.
I contrasted these attitudes with those students the survey classified as “very conservative.” With “somewhat conservative” students were not far behind them, very conservative students were most likely to report feeling pressured by an instructor to agree with a specific political or ideological view being expressed in class (64.4 percent), least likely to agree that university administrators should ban expressions of views they feel cause harm (79.7 percent), and least likely to agree that the students should report an instructor to university administrators if the instructor says something that some students feel causes harm (13.6 percent).
Some might rationalize the first finding by claiming that conservative students are prepared to overreact and feel that their ideas are repressed. But knowing what we know about the strident anti-conservative views expressed by today’s faculty, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and in light of the two other findings indicating the highest degree of tolerance for a diversity of ideas among conservative students, this could only be a rationalization. In fact, students described by the survey as “very conservative” are the most liberal.
In my February 7 blog, I spent more time clarifying terms, as well as looking at the political leanings of the general population (relying on Pew numbers for comparison), in order to show that what the survey mischaracterizes political leanings. The important point to keep in mind here is that progressives are overrepresented among academics, as well as their students in the humanities and the social sciences. Keeping this in mind helps readers understand the points I make in this blog.
The opinion that students should report teachers to university administrators if the instructor says something that some students feel causes harm was furthermore correlated to the field of study, with students majoring in the humanities and social sciences to be most Stasi-like at 53.7 percent and 48.3 percent respectively. I used this characterization in my previous blog, so I want to explain it here.
Why do I say Stasi-like? Stasi was the secret police of East Germany during the Cold War. Its primary mission was to maintain the political stability of the totalitarian government by suppressing dissent and opposition. With an estimated 90,000 full-time employees and over 170,000 informants among the population of 17 million people in East Germany, it was one of the most pervasive and oppressive secret police forces in history. The Stasi not only operated a vast network of spies and informants, it also engaged in psychological warfare, including disinformation campaigns to discredit those whose speech was believed to undermine the hegemony of the prevailing cultural and political ideology.
That almost three-quarters of the most progressive and well more than half of the somewhat progressive students, think that students should report an instructor to university administrators if the instructors say something that some student feel causes harm—with the harm they have in mind views critical of the prevailing ideologies, i.e., critical race theory, queer theory, and other crackpot standpoints advanced by progressive administrators, faculty, staff, and students—is a frightening level of repressive desire expressed by those who should be demanding an environment that doesn’t shy away from critical inquiry but makes live Karl Marx’s well-known motto regarding the importance of criticism, that is “the ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Like Marx, I am fond of the latin De omnibus dubitandum est, meaning “everything must be doubted.”
Marx believed that critical analysis was essential in understanding and changing the world. He encouraged the examination of cultural, economic, political, and social structures to expose their underlying contradictions with the goal of creating a more just and equitable society. One would think, given the “social justice” and “critical consciousness” rhetoric of the woke progressive, that those identifying themselves as such would be the leastlikely to report teachers who said things that students feel causes “harm,” i.e., challenges orthodoxy, given that the idea of critique means not holding back for fear of offending or upsetting people. The irony here is that, by subjecting all aspects of culture and society to critical examination, Marx believed that individuals could better understand the underlying causes of inequality and oppression, and work towards creating a more egalitarian and democratic world. But those who are most likely to identify themselves as Marxist have the opposite attitude. Of course, the Stasi, who served a regime that was at least nominally Marxist, were likely to identify themselves in the same way.
Yes, I did mean to describe this attitude as repressive. That word is used to describe a system or climate that suppresses or restricts the expression of free speech or other forms of individual liberty. We see as repressive government censorship of certain books or restricts access to information. We are also coming to see this as also true of private action in the era of corporate statism (Marxists and left-libertarians always have). However, a workplace or social environment where individuals are discouraged from expressing their opinions or ideas due to fear of retribution is also repression. Reporting teachers for saying things that some students find “harmful creates a chilling effect where teachers who might deviate from the woke progressive doctrine so pervasive in today’s university will cause those who are supposed to challenge ideology to avoid arguments and subjects they fear will cause students to report them to administrators—who are inclined to follow up on their complaints.
When I don’t there are consequences. This happened to me last week. As readers of Freedom and Reason know, I have been very critical of Black Lives Matter on my blog. I have shown that major claims BLM and other social justice activists have advanced over the last several years, that racial disparities associated with lethal police encounters and mass incarceration are the consequence of systemic racism, are refuted by the scientific research. Since, in my capacity as an expert in criminology, I talk about these issues in class. I knew it was only a mater of time before students would take issue my criticisms of BLM. I had hope this would have taken the form of challenges in class. But instead, and not unexpectedly, they reported me to administrators. They did so anonymous.
The administrator who spoke with me was very pleasant and reassured me that my political activities as a citizen in a free and open society were my business. I appreciated that. He conveyed that the students felt my speech was contrary to the mission of the program I teach in (I built the program and wrote that mission) and that this may impact retention among, not only devotees to BLM, but LGBTQ+ students, as well. This is because I am also critical of queer theory—not in class, but on my blog—and have pointed out (again on my blog) that both Antifa and BLM are trans-activist organizations. Imagine a world where we are reported to the authorities because we are critical of an ideology. Imagine furthermore that those reporting their professors to authorities for thought crimes do so anonymously. We don’t have to.
One question put to me by the administrator was whether I play Devil’s advocate in class. This was after I confessed my opposition to Black Lives Matter. He explained that he does this in his literature classes, arguing a position that he doesn’t necessarily agree with or believe in for the sake of stimulating discussion or debate, specifically to challenge or test the strength of a particular argument or idea by presenting alternative viewpoints, regardless of one’s personal beliefs. I explained that I don’t use this strategy; rather, my method is debunking mythology with facts. I do steel man arguments, I hastened to add, but I don’t think this is the same thing. I steel man arguments because burning effigies is a religious exercise. I find that distasteful.
Speaking of straw men, it is not without irony that the term “Devil’s advocate” comes from the Catholic Church, where it refers to a person who presents counterarguments during the canonization process of a potential saint. The Devil’s advocate was expected to present arguments against the saint’s worthiness for sainthood, in order to ensure that the canonization process was thorough and rigorous. In other words, the Devil’s advocate puts the potential saint’s faith to the test—as well as the faith of those involved—in order to make sure the saint could in no way afterward be said to fall short of the stature sought at the end of the status elevation ceremony.
This is not the first time I have been reported to the administration, although it is the first time by students. I have been the target of ongoing campaigns of harassment and suppression since coming to Green Bay. I want to talk about this here to establish a coherent public record of the harassment. The facts in support of the narrative I present here are well-known by multiple individuals and already a matter of public record.
In 2002, early in my professorial career, I published “Advancing Accumulation and Managing its Discontents: The US Anti- Environmental Countermovement,” in Sociological Spectrum. I would win an award for that article in 2003, and I was set to testify in a lawsuit in Connecticut, but the case never went to trial. In October 2002, at the Mid-South Sociological Association conference in Memphis, Tennessee, I presented the paper “Paper Mills and Science Mills: The Battle for the Fox River.” I wouldn’t know this yet, but my work in this area put me on the radar screen of polluting corporations who would attempt to sabotage my bid for tenure in 2004.
In the meantime, I had turned my attention to criticisms of the Bush/Cheney regime which was warmongering over Iraq in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks against the Untied States. I published two articles in the newsletter of the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association, From the Left, critical of the war plans—“A Shrill Cry for War” in 2002 and “God’s Gift to Humanity” in 2003—as well a March 2003 article in The Public Eye (a publication of the anti-fascist organization Political Research Associates) “Faith Matters: George Bush and Providence.” Just before my Public Eye essay, on March 4, I gave a speech before hundreds of students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (“Bush’s Dream of a Democratic Middle-East”). My polemics were delivered on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I was highly critical of the government and the machinations of the Project for a New American Century that was driving the war push.
Recordings from this speech, and likely additional content from classroom lectures from that semester, were played on the Bill LuMaye show (AM 1360) for several days. My colleagues heard the programs. The host and callers were incensed at my rhetoric and analysis. I was “anti-American” and a “communist.” The College Republicans, who had attempted to disrupt the March 4 teach-in, and who had likely been the source of the recordings, sought to publicly ridicule me on campus, naming me “Man of the Year” and distributing flyers around the school of my image draped in American flags. Students overwhelmingly expressed support for me and condemned the College Republicans. At another event on campus, which I did not attend, community members disrupted the proceedings complaining about the “mistreatment” of conservative students on campus. Their complaints concerned the fallout from my treatment—the College Republicans had lost their faculty sponsorship. Faculty had also rallied around me.
Then, in May of 2004, as I was preparing to the come up for tenure that upcoming fall, the chancellor, Bruce Shepard (who later became president of Western Washington University), received an email from somebody who claimed to have “discovered” on the Internet writings by me critical of administration and faculty. The Secretary of the Faculty forwarded the letter to me (it never made it into my personnel file) and I could see that the phrases were taken from that 2002 speech in Memphis and twisted around to make it appear as if I had slandered my colleagues—at least that was the Chancellor’s spin on my words. I wrote the chancellor back explaining what was going on. He didn’t have the decency to respond. As it turned out, he had written the email in a white heat—in the presence of the university attorney, who either could not or did not try to stop him from hitting send.
Again the faculty rallied around me and I was awarded early tenure in June of 2005. But I was now in the crosshairs of some powerful forces. I had not let up on the corporate polluters and their political operatives. And I continue to condemn the warmongers. In 2004, I delivered a keynote address at a sociology conference in Tennessee, “Threatening Uncertainties: Fossil Fuels, Climate Change, and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century,” that lambasted the Bush administration. I published an essay that same year, first in the German language, then in English in 2005 (with Pluto Press), titled “War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Central Asia and Middle East Policy,” in the collection Devastating Society–The Neo-Conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice. The essay came out in Arabic a year later (and Indonesian after that). The collection contained an additional essay by me criticizing the Bush energy policy. Throughout all this I continued to hammer away at the government with essays in From the Left, for example “Bush and Sharon: Securing the Realm” (2004) and “The Downing Street Memo—Why it Matters” (2006).
In fall of 2006 and spring of 2007 I accepted two stints at the United Nations University International Leadership Institute, held in Amman, Jordan, giving two high profile lectures, in addition to running workshops and participating in roundtables with individuals from across the planet. The first was called “Youth Leadership, the Politicization of Religion, and the Future of Democracy in the Middle East” (see Journey to Jordan, November 2006) and “Democracy and Human Rights in Transition: Challenges of the Globalizing World” (see Journey to Jordan, April 2007). At the second meeting, I was confronted in the back of the room by a Bush official, serving in the US embassy in Jordan, about my political activities. He told me that he had been informed of the contents of my speech the day before and that he was there on this day to provide the administration’s position. This was right after the new US embassy building had been built and the US and Jordan had renewed their security arrangement. My institution had been working closely with the University in Jordan at Amman, a process in which I was deeply involved. Apparently word had gotten back the university about all this and I was never informed of another meeting of the committee after that.
Me and US Embassy’s Counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs Philip Frayne
The ramifications of all this have been rather significant. Permit me to speculate here. I do not have evidence to support my suspicions. However, with the release of the Twitter files, which exposes the collaboration between the administrative state and social media companies, it seems apparent to me why, after more than ten years on Twitter, I have only 180 followers. Compare this to my number of followers on Gettr, the right-wing version of Twitter, where, despite being open about my Marxism, I have more than 700 followers, this after only being on that site for a year or so. Was my name entered into the shadow banning algorithms at the inception of the Twitter? This might explains why, when I search Google for blog entries from Freedom and Reason, certain ones of a certain character are not returned (you can probably guess which ones). (See Is Freedom and Reason Being Shadow Banned?)
However, even with my marginal(ized) presence on Twitter, I still managed to find a way to get reported to the administrators of my university. Before this recent anti-BLM dustup, and after the campaign of right-wing harassment, I was reported for informing Nikole Hannah-Jones about the uptake of mRNA in the black community (see Cognitive Autonomy and Our Freedom from Institutionalized Reflex). Instead of educating the person who complained about the vital importance of academic freedom and the political and intellectual autonomy of teachers and researchers in the university’s employ, the complaint was sent down the chain of command and I was asked to consider not identifying my affiliation with the university in my Twitter profile. My response was to ask the colleague, who is also on social media, and politically active in Democratic Party politics, as well as in organized labor, whether his university affiliation also appears in his profile. There is an obvious double standard.
The soul-crushing part of the attempts to suppress me are the anonymous letters and messages from colleagues who beg me to come home to the tribe they think owns me (I even get this from some relatives). When people who have claimed to like and love you, people with whom you have had a social life, gaslight you it does some work on you emotionally. It’s also terribly disappointing because you want to respect people and that becomes very difficult in that situation. Even when they apologize, it goes to character. The point I want to make before moving on (and I am getting near the end of this blog) is how obvious suppression makes the prevailing hegemony. That quote shared on social media wrongly attributed to Voltaire is spot on: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” That apparently white nationalist Kevin Alfred Strom penned that quote doesn’t change its power (although I am sure it does among the identitarians whose logic is necessarily rooted in the fallacy of ad hominem).
That reminds me! White supremacist Paul Nehlen sent cryptic and somewhat threatening messages to me and a colleague (who is Jewish) several years ago. The messages came as cards with text scrawled in Sharpie in big white envelopes delivered to our campus mailboxes. Why us? We turned over the messages to campus police, who returned them to us after determining that there was nothing to be done about it. The faculty around us condemned the letters. I can with almost 100 percent certainty guarantee you that I will never find faculty rallying to my side when the harassment comes from progressive students, colleagues, and community members.
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During the Cold War in the United States, there was a period known as the “Red Scare” where citizens were made afraid of the perceived threat of communism and Soviet influence. This led to a culture of suspicion where people were encouraged to report any potential communist sympathizers to the authorities. As part of this culture, there were instances where students were encouraged to report their professors to authorities if they believed that they held communist beliefs or were teaching subversive material.
These reports were made not only to government agencies such as the FBI, which would investigate the allegations and potentially take action against the accused professors, but were most frequently reported to department chairs, college deans, and chancellors and presidents of colleges and universities. Many professors had their careers destroyed and their lives ruined as a result. I don’t need to tell historians that the culture of surveillance and suspicion that developed during this time was a dark chapter in American history and a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked government power and the importance of protecting civil liberties.
But I feel that I do need to tell them that it is no different now that it’s those claiming to have communist and left-wing sympathies who are reporting teachers they suspect of holding conservative beliefs and teaching subversive materials, i.e., criticism of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and gender ideology.
Resistance to facts is not only frustrating in its tenacity and therefore its function as a barrier to learning, but has become dangerous in the depth of its repressive reflex. Too many students today think it’s their duty to report their teachers to the authorities. They think this is what democracy looks like—just like students thought during the Red Scare when they reported their leftwing teachers to the authorities. And, just like during the Red Scare, compounding the problem are teachers who enable youth by failing to stand up for cognitive liberty and free speech—teachers who deny that repressive praxis is a serious problem when its the other side they think is being repressed.
The word “censorious” is often used to describe this situation. But this is the wrong word. “Censorious” is an adjective that describes someone who is highly critical or disapproving, especially in a fault-finding way. A censorious person is quick to point out the mistakes of others, often in a harsh manner or moralistic tone. The word “censorious” describes an atmosphere, climate, environment that is highly critical or disapproving, such as a workplace or a social group where people are quick to judge or criticize one another.
“Repressive” defines a climate or system or climate that suppresses or restricts the expression of free speech or other forms of individual liberty. This is the word we are looking for. We see as repressive government censorship of certain books or restricts access to information. We are also coming to see this as also true of private action in the era of corporate statism.
However, a workplace or social environment where individuals are discouraged from expressing their opinions or ideas due to fear of retribution is also repression. Reporting teachers for saying things that some students find “harmful” creates a chilling effect where teachers who might deviate from the woke progressive doctrine so pervasive in today’s university will cause those who are supposed to challenge ideology to avoid arguments and subjects they fear will cause students to report them to administrators—who are inclined to follow up on their complaints.
I admit that it has limited my own expressions—that is, I have engaged in self-censorship.
“Repressive” refers to the act of controlling or limiting something, whether by authority or coercion. A repressive culture, regime, organization, system is one that seeks to control its citizens or members by limiting their freedoms and rights. Repressive systems use tactics such as censorship, propaganda, and surveillance to limit the flow of information and to suppress dissent or opposition.
Such actions may be directed towards individuals, groups, or entire populations, and can have serious consequences for human rights, democracy, and social justice—even while appealing to these very things as the motive to repress.
In a social or psychological context, repressive may refer to an individual’s attempt to suppress or deny their own thoughts, feelings, or desires. This can be harmful to an individual’s mental health and may interfere with their ability to form authentic relationships or to fully engage with the world around them. Repressive circumstances forces people to live in bad faith.
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I will close on this business of retention because this is one more rationalization given to cover the pervasive authoritarian character of progressive students. It is not interesting how administrators, who in my experience promote the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, do so while never asking whether the climate at today’s institutes of higher learning make it difficult to retain conservative and liberal students—or, for that matter, deter them from seeking a college education?
It is important for readers to understand is that the argot of DEI is not supposed to be taken on face value. One would think that diversity refers to the recognition and celebration of differences among individuals and groups, and the importance of including diverse perspectives and experiences in all aspects of society. But in practice, diversity means elevating the perspectives and experiences of nonwhite, non-cisgendered, non-heterosexual, and female above those of white, cisgendered, heterosexual men (I am using here the terminology from the UW System survey).
Equity does not refer to the creation of a level playing field where all individuals have access to the resources and opportunities needed to succeed regardless of their background or identity. Rather, diversity and equity are code words for preferences for those of minority status. And inclusion, despite appearing to emphasize practices of actively involving and valuing all individuals and creating a culture where everyone feels welcome and supported, actually means suppressing those attitude and opinions that minorities find harmful and worthy of reporting to administrators.
The reality of today’s university is that there has been an illiberal takeover of higher education by DEI activists and bureaucrats. Their work has been in stifling intellectual diversity, undermining equal opportunity and treatment, and excluding those who dissent from from the rigid orthodoxy of woke progressivism. This agenda that has been pushed down into 4k-12 education, producing students who value identity over liberty and exhibit authoritarian tendencies. By teaching young people that there are expressions that are harmful, teachers encourage young people to behave like the civilian informants that made the Stasi so effective in the repression of thought in totalitarian East Germany.
The solution? First, administrators, staff, and teachers have to explain to young people the importance of cognitive liberty and free speech to their own struggles for justice. The great civil rights victories of history occurred because the norms of free speech, association, and assembly allowed people to develop their arguments, legitimize their struggle, and persuade others to join them. We must also abolish DEI bureaucracies and end mandatory diversity and sensitivity training. Tragically, too many administrators, faculty, and staff are committed to DEI. And there is inertia in bureaucratic systems. Many colleges and universities invite, and some even require current and prospective faculty to demonstrate, often in written statements, what appear as loyalty oaths (and they are just this), their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), statements used not only in hiring decisions, but in evaluations, contract renewals, tenure, and promotion decisions.
I was appointed to my current position in 2000. This was before the madness. If I were entering the job market today, I would either have to lie or find another occupation. Given how fast and how completely the institution of higher education delegitimizing itself, I would probably regret having gone to graduate school in the first place.
“Nothing comes from nowhere,” said Glenn Loury on Substack yesterday. “Today’s woke politics have they’re antecedent in debates about speech and censorship that have been raging in this country for some time. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, I was a vocal opponent of political correctness on college campuses. Student activists, often supported by select faculty members, tried to purge the classroom of language and ideas they deemed unacceptable. Classic texts and harmless figures of speech came under assault in the one place where free inquiry was most vital.”
Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Brown University
Loury continued: “Yesterday’s political correctness is today’s wokeness. The continuities are impossible to ignore. And while, with the benefit of hindsight, I might revise some of what I said about political correctness in the past, it’s more imperative now than ever to push back against censoriousness, nonsensical speech codes, and the erosion of standards.”
Loury is right. We have entered another troubling period in the history of our republic. Just last week I had students report me to administrators for—get this—presenting facts in class that refute the Black Lives Matter’s narrative on lethal police encounters. How presenting facts could be seen as worthy of complaint seems bizarre, but it’s an all too common occurrence these days among those identifying as very progressive. These students found my blog and declared me to be “anti-Black Lives Matter.” Guilty as charged, I told administrators. (I will blog about this tomorrow.)
Woke progressivism is severely hobbled by the “racism of the gaps,” a species of faith-based argument (see my recent Lethal Police Encounters and Criminal Violence). Faith-belief is seen across what passes for the left today. Resistance to facts is not only frustrating in its tenacity (and in the harm it is causing to accountability and reform) but has become dangerous in the depth of its repressive reflex. Too many students today think it’s their duty to report their teachers to the authorities. They think this is what democracy looks like. Compounding the problem are teachers who enable youth by failing to stand up for cognitive liberty—or worse: denying that repressive praxis is a serious problem.
A big piece of this is that there is no crisis justifying large-scale protest action. The perception that there are big problems is fed by myth-makers who spin narratives about systemic racism and sow mass hysteria about climate change. A genuine anxiety makes young people susceptible to these projects, as the conditions of late capitalism are felt but have been made remote not only by fake crises, but by the suppression of proletarian consciousness. There is moreover the narcissistic desire to be a part of something significant. The young want their civil rights struggle. They want a place in history. Progressive teachers do their part in encouraging them to “take action.” But without anything significant to take action about, movement politics just become reactionary, however much they dress up in clothing that looks like cultural revolution–indeed, that’s part of what makes it so reactionary.
The only way we’re going to save openness and tolerance in our institutions is to openly condemn the desire among the youth and their allies in other age cohorts to suppress speech with which they disagree and repress those with whom they disagree. This condemnation has to start well before college. I am not hopeful, frankly. The imperative of the corporate state and technocratic desire are powerful forces against freedom. But we have to try anyway. We have to be very deliberate in our work to save free speech, conscious, association, and assembly from the woke brigade.
“[The] nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force. International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.” —Zbigniew Brzezinski (1969)
Former president Jimmy Carter has accepted hospice care at his house. Carter was a one-term president from 1977-1981. He was defeated in the 1980 election by Ronald Reagan. While many regard Carter as a failed president, this judgment obscures a significant period of intensive consolidation of corporate state power. Carter was not only one of the early and most influential members of the Trilateral Commission, but his administration was comprised of several members of that elite organization.
The Trilateral Commission in 1973. Founders Rockefeller and Brzezinski are siting to the left of Gerald Ford, also a member.
Carter was a member of the Trilateral Commission, a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller, then chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Rockefeller created the organization to coordinate policy development and political cooperation between North America, Europe, and Asia (including the Pacific Rim countries).
Carter was invited to join the Trilateral Commission in 1973 and became a member in 1974. Governor of George from 1971 to 1975, he was seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party. As a member, he attended meetings and contributed to the organization’s research and publications.
In 1975, the Trilateral Commission published The Crisis of Democracy, a report written by members of the Commission’s Task Force on the Governability of Democracies. The report was intended to address what the authors saw as a crisis in democratic governance in the United States and other Western countries.
One author of the report (the Europe chapter) was Michel Crozier, a French sociologist and political scientist. Crozier was associated with the idea of managerialism, which advocates applying managerial techniques to government operations. Another author was Samuel P. Huntington (the North American chapter), a Harvard professor also favorable to technocratic arrangements.
The report argued that the post-World War II era of economic growth had created a sense of entitlement among citizens, who were now demanding more from their governments than they were able to deliver. The authors suggested that this demand for more government services and greater participation in the political process was leading to a breakdown in the ability of democratic governments to govern effectively.
The report proposed several solutions to this crisis, including the need for greater cooperation between government and business, the need for greater technocratic expertise in government, and the need for greater control over the media to ensure that public opinion was not manipulated by special interests. In other words, The Crisis of Democracy reflected the anti-democratic and elitist attitude of its members, advocating for a greater role for technocrats and business leaders in the political process, while reducing the role of ordinary citizens.
In 1976, Carter announced his candidacy for the presidency and while his membership in the Trilateral Commission became an issue in the campaign, the media downplayed the significance of his membership and the organization and Carter went on to defeat Gerald Ford (also a member of the Commission), who had been vice-president under Nixon.
Following his election, Carter appointed several members of the Trilateral Commission to his administration, including Walter Mondale as vice president and Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security advisor (Mondale would run for president in 1984). Brzezinski had been director of the Commission during the publication of The Crisis of Democracy. Brzezinski was a key architect of the Carter administration’s policy of supporting Islamist rebels in Afghanistan to draw the Soviet Union into that country. (See Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan. see also Hell on Earth or Earthly Heaven? The Totalitarian Threats Facing the West.)
Several other members of the Commission also served in the administration: Cyrus Vance served as Secretary of State from 1977 to 1980. James Schlesinger served as Secretary of Energy in 1977 before serving as Secretary of Defense from 1977 to 1979. Michael Blumenthal served as Carter’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1977 to 1979. Andrew Young served as Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979.
There were other politicians and policymakers who were members of the Trilateral Commission, most famously George H.W. Bush fame, who was a member of the Commission before he became vice president under Ronald Reagan in 1981. Bush was a member of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 to 1979, He served US Ambassador to the United Nations during this time, as well as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Readers may remember when Bush mentioned the phrase “new world order” in a speech to a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990. The speech was given in the context of the Gulf War, which had just begun. In the speech, Bush discussed the need for international cooperation and for the United States to play a leading role in shaping a new world order after the end of the Cold War.
“We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment,” he said. “The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge.”
Other members worth noting include Antony Blinken, Secretary of State under Biden, Jeffrey Epstein, former hedge fund manager (convicted of human trafficking in 2008), Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO since 1988 (also CFR board member and WEF trustee), Henry Kissinger, a former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, and Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve (under both Carter and Reagan).
Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary under George W. Bush and president of the World Bank, was also a member. Wolfowitz was associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative think tank that operated from 1997 to 2006 known for its advocacy of a more aggressive foreign policy and a more robust military posture for the United States.
The PNAC’s most famous publication was a 2000 report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, which argued for increased defense spending, the development of new military technologies, and a more interventionist foreign policy. The report was influential in shaping the foreign policy priorities of the administration of President George W. Bush, several members of which had been associated with the PNAC prior to taking office. (See War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy; Christian Neo-Fundamentalism and US Foreign Policy.)
Several members of the Trilateral Commission were also associated with the Project for the New American Century, including Paul Wolfowitz, who served as a member of the PNAC’s board of directors. Other prominent members of the Trilateral Commission who were also associated with the PNAC included Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and William Kristol.
They may come and go like Jimmy Carter, and George Bush before him, but these are the people who run the world. And they do it in the open. You only have to allow yourself to see it.
Based on the most recent statistics, the annual rate of lethal police encounters is around 1.67 deaths per 100,000 civilians. Almost all of those deaths are explained by benchmarks, i.e., area rates of violent crime, and situational factors, i.e., suspect armed and/or a danger to officer and/or civilians.
Bodycam video shows suspect shooting officer before being killed
Benchmarks and situational factors explain racial disparities. The only studies that don’t account for disparities using these metrics finds police more reluctant to shoot black suspects compared to white suspects. Police kill twice as many whites as blacks every year despite whites being proportionally underrepresented in serious crime and committing less than 50 percent of all murders and robberies.
Contrary to the claims of Black Lives Matter and other woke progressive voices favored by the corporate state media, rates and patterns of lethal police encounters are functions of rates and patterns of criminal violence. The United States is remarkable among developed countries for the degree of violent crime. Public safety is a human right. The police are necessary to keep our communities safe. To be be sure, we need better trained officers. But we also need more of them.
The recent rise in crime cannot be explained by the presence of guns. Gun homicide rates are down sharply since their 1993 peak despite the fact that the number of guns per household has remained relatively stable thought out the first two decades of the new millennium and the average guns per person has increased drastically. Both the CDC and the FBI databases make clear that gun homicides is a function of who has guns not the number of or types of guns.
What explains the drop in violent crime since 1993 are policies putting more cops on the street (police presence is a deterrence) and increasing prison commitments (incapacitation keeps violent repeat offenders off the streets). What explains the recent and drastic rise in violence crime? Depolicing, decarceration, greater leniency in the criminal justice process generally, and the anti-public safety policies associated with the sharp rise of social justice politics and the myth of a racist criminal justice system (the Ferguson Effect).
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Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “God of the gaps.” This phrase gets at how god is used as an explanation for phenomena when rational explanations, those that depends on sound facts and valid interpretation, are unavailable. “God of the gaps” is an exercise in faith—a substitute for reason. As science advances, the gaps explained by god disappear. If you are prepared to accept reason, that is.
“Racism of the gaps” is the reflexive attribution of disparities between demographic groups to systemic racism. For example, although cops kill twice as many whites as blacks annually, blacks are overrepresented among those killed by the police. We are told that this is because of systemic racism in policing. Another common example is the claim that blacks are overrepresented in prison commitments because of systemic racism in the criminal justice process. As these disparities are explained by benchmarks and situational factors, the gaps close.
However, not every believer accepts that reason explains phenomena. And they can always appeal to the nonfalsifiable nature of the god explanation to sustain their faith in the supernatural. Yet we cannot say this about the “racism of the gap” phenomenon since we can check to see if there are facts that close the gap (and there are). Still, as is the character of true believers, facts don’t change the minds of those committed to the reflexive attribution of disparities between demographic groups to systemic racism. The reflective attribution is too valuable as an ideological project.
It’s the second anniversary of Rush Limbaugh’s death. On the occasion of his passing from lung cancer, I posted a remembrance on my Facebook newsfeed. It rather surprised people because I’m a Marxist and my politics are antagonistic to the man who probably represented the most unabashedly pro-capitalist voice in this history of talk radio. But I admire talent, and Limbaugh had a lot of it. Moreover, he was my companion in my morning commutes from my tiny cinderblock apartment in Knoxville, Tennessee to the University of Tennessee where I was obtaining my PhD. He was my companion for many years before that. And many year after. Indeed, I listened to Limbaugh from the beginning of his national syndication to the very end of his life. I’m reproducing the gist of that remembrance here for posterity. I have added detail in honor of the Great One.
Rush Limbaugh and his golden microphone
Rightwing radio exploded the year I restarted my undergraduate career in 1988. Thanks to the rescinding of the FCC Fairness Doctrine the previous year, popular program was no longer bounded by arbitrary constraints on free speech. Reagan vetoed an attempt by Congress to preempt the inevitable end of the Doctrine in June 1987. In August of that year, under the leadership of FCC Chairman Dennis Patrick, the FCC abolished the doctrine by a 4–0 vote. The ruling was upheld by a panel of the Appeals Court for the DC Circuit, in February 1989. Democrats tried to reimpose the Doctrine in `1991, but George H. W. Bush threatened to veto the legislation. The Democrats backed down.
My mornings started out with a progressive Democrat for three hours, her gorgeous voice projected out of Nashville, Talk Radio 98.3/1510 WLAC. I’m pretty sure her name was Ruth Ann Harnish. A progressive true believer, Harnish was self-righteous and scolding and routinely owned by callers. I mean no disrespect, but the Doctrine sustained her. I admired her courage, of course. She took calls. In the buckle of the Bible Belt. Progressives always had trouble making it on AM radio (and FM radio, for that matter). That’s because progressives are joy eaters. Soon, she was cancelled.
Before she was cancelled, when she was done, Rush Limbaugh came on—for another three hours. The Rush Limbaugh Show was nationally syndicated on AM and FM radio stations in 1988. He defined right-wing radio.
Soon AM was rightwing radio day and night. Not exactly, but by progressive standards. However, one of the best of the other shows at the time was the Chuck Harder show, “For The People,” based in White Springs, Florida. Starting in 1987, working out of Tampa, often with Pat Choate as cohost, Harder had founded several networks, including the People’s Radio Network and the I.E. America Radio Network, the later bankrolled by the United Auto Workers.
Harder, a left-leaning populist—a fair-trade protectionist waging a war of resistance against the NAFTA/GATT globalist agenda—gave a platform to economic nationalists. Harder fought for the people who Hillary Clinton would years later called the “deplorables,” the average American worker who was losing their manufacturing jobs thanks to the globe-trotting transnationalist corporation.
Opposing outsourcing and exporting of jobs, plant closings and foreign relocations, mass immigration, especially the influx of illegals and porous borders, Harder was a forerunner of Steve Bannon and his crowd. His show laid a lot of the groundwork for the Ross Perot campaign and the formation Reform Party. Ravi Batra would come on. Ralph Nader, too. Later, in the 1990s, Donald Trump became a political player by working the same crowd.
Chuck Harder died on April 10, 2018 from heart failure at age 74. As long as his voice was available, I sought it out.
Yes, I listened to it all. In graduate school, in Knoxville, in the second half of the 1990s, Limbaugh and the parade of AM right and left wing populists were a way to get my head out of the international political economy and postcolonial studies—and the emerging ideologies of critical race theory and queer theory—that would come to be known as woke politics.
Obviously, I didn’t agree with most of the things Limbaugh said, but he was entertaining and I was impressed by his ability to talk cogently for three hours straight five days a week. I learned a lot from him about what my conservative friends and family think about the world.
Love him or hate him, agree or disagree with him, Limbaugh changed America. He paved the wave for the populist-nationalist movement that synthesized his spirit with the working class politics of voices like Chuck Harder. I didn’t know it then, but I sure know it now: Limbaugh was saving the republic.
Rush Limbaugh speaks at the December 2019 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in West Palm Beach, Florida.
I checked it out. The Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project IEEBLP) is a real thing. Check it out: https://www.eeblanguageproject.com.
The EEBLP says our terminology is not “inclusive.”
The group says that the words “male” and “female” should be phased out in science because they reinforce ideas that sex is binary. I’m guessing this is because sex is binary and the EEBLP wants to take science denialism to the next level in the woke project to cancel the Enlightenment and stamp out humanism—and women.
Researchers studying ecology and evolutionary biology should be encouraged instead to use terms such as “egg producing” and “sperm-producing” or to differentiate between XX and XY individuals, the EEBLP suggests. We should do this, the organization says, to avoid emphasizing “heteronormative views.” Apparently biology is bigotry.
Of course it’s better to dehumanize members of our species by reducing them to their reproductive function rather than to refer to them as “men” and “women.” Dehumanizing language has always made life better for people.
Reality denial syndrome, or RDS, is a defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge unwanted or unpleasant facts, feelings, realities, or thoughts, or the rationalization of them. Denialism for short, RDS is the act of denying reality as a way to avoid an emotionally or psychologically uncomfortable truth. I am paraphrasing standard definitions found in a Google search. These definitions are derived from diagnostic criteria developed in the domains of psychiatry/psychology.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis
It can be said that RDS is a form of delusional thinking, as the RDS sufferer insists on the reality of some thing that does not really correspond to anything that is actually real or true or that is contradicted by reality. An example is belief in a god or gods.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, referred to religious belief as delusional in “The Future of an Illusion,” published in 1927. He argued that belief in the supernatural serves as a defense mechanism against anxiety and fear of the unknown. Because the god delusion was shared by millions (even billions), Freud described them as illusions, which he defined as false beliefs that people hold onto despite evidence to the contrary. Religious beliefs are perpetuated because they provide comfort to people by creating a sense of order and control in a world that is often chaotic and unpredictable. The god delusion is thus a form of magical thinking characteristic of a pre-scientific world or among those who have not yet found science.
What is it called when a person with RDS berates others for not participating in her or his denialism/delusion—participation so desired because it reinforces RDS? We see this with religious zealotry. The person insisting on dwelling in the real world who denies Allah or questions the revelation of Muhammad may in a culture governed by sharia face annihilation. He can certainly expect to be persecuted. Leaving the illusion makes him an apostate. Questing the illusion makes him a heretic. Mocking the illusion makes him a blasphemer.
Here’s another example. Humans have an evolved capacity to detect gender. It’s a trait expressed in children at a very young age. At the same time, children, in making sense of gender, incorporate into their development the sociocultural markers of gender. This sometimes produces confusion. It is a common experience of teachers to school children asking if a boy with long hair is a girl. They ask because they are confused. The evolved capacity and the acquired sociocultural understanding are in conflict. An RDS sufferer might insist, even when there are no sociocultural markers, that children deny their innate capacity, a demand that may contradict reality. This demand is made of adults, as well. However this is turned around in Orwellian fashion, the demand is that children and adults misgender the person.
Libs of TikTok provide a useful example of what I am describing. The person in the video is complaining that people do not respect the pronouns plainly written on the button the person is wearing. Anything could be on the button. Are people required to repeat what is written on a button a person is wearing? The person feels disrespected, but one might ask whether it’s respectful to others to berate them for not overriding their instinctive capacity to correctly gender a person. Is it not an act of gaslighting to tell a customer that reality isn’t real but rather that reality is what a barista says it is? What authority does this person have to determine the speech of others? Can anybody ever possess or be such an authority?
Yes, it’s a form of gaslighting obviously, and it’s a part of RDS. But it seems more than this, since not all RDS sufferers demand others participate in their delusion. Some suffer quietly. I have many Christian friends who do not demand that I affirm their illusion. They respect others enough to not do that. Those who demand others participate in their delusions are on an ego trip and most people aren’t on ego trips. For those who are, it’s not enough to be content in whatever belief they find comfortable. They demand that others share that belief. They demand that others affirm the delusion.
The personality type that often underpins such a demand is narcissism, a cluster B type. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a mental health condition in which individuals have an exaggerated or inflated sense of self-importance, feel they deserve privileges and special treatment, such as the right to transgress rules and social norms, expect to be recognized as important even without achievements (identity is often a substitute for accomplishment in this disorder), express envy over what others have, and lack of empathy, that is the ability to understand or care about the feelings of others. The lack of empathy comes with using others for the narcissist’s own purposes. There is an arrogance here that conveys the unimportance of others, for example for their cognitive liberty, i.e., the freedom to express their beliefs without consequences. Behind the narcissists demands for affirmation and attention is inner doubt in self-worth. This is why narcissists are easily upset by why they perceive as criticism. narcissists live in a bubble that is all about them. Pop their bubble and they often fall apart and lash out in fury (hence Antifa).
Again, there may also be delusional disorder at work (what used to be called paranoid disorder, which doesn’t really capture the spirit of the thing). This is a type of psychotic disorder where the sufferer can’t tell what’s real from what is imagined. A delusion is an unshakable beliefs in something that isn’t true or based on reality. A narcissist may not suffer from delusional disorder. Some narcissists suffer from some degree of psychopathy and get off on making others obey their demands. Thus the problem is sometimes a combination of cluster B types. When delusional disorder is also present, the combination of pathologies compounds the situation, sometimes to the point of danger to self and others.
Freud’s view on religion as a delusion has been widely debated and criticized by philosophers, theologians, and other scholars. Some argue that Freud’s interpretation of religion is reductionist and fails to take into account the complexity and diversity of religious experiences and beliefs. Perhaps. The same argument is made about other forms of delusion. Philosopher and even scientists and medical professionals construct elaborate rationalizations to support the delusions and denials of those of whom they make their clients and patients. As it turns out, enabling disorders is profitable.
What is it called when governmental or corporate bureaucratic systems require individuals to participate in speech and behavior that perpetuates denialism and delusional thinking? That’s is an easy one. It’s is called tyranny.
You are free to believe in anything or identify as anything. As I have said before, I am a libertarian; I have no interest in forcing anybody to think anything or be anything. But that ethic tells you that I have a keen interest in others forcing me to think something or be something. If you are free to think and be anything, then I am also free to think and be anything—within the limits of reality. Of course, living in reality is my standard. Others choose a different path. They don’t have to walk my path. But by the same token I don’t have to walk theirs. I don’t have to live in unreality. The only non-oppressive environment is one that permits us both to live freely. Otherwise, we live in a state of tyranny—the opposite of living freely. You may feel that such a state is fine as long as you are the tyrant. But know that you are making a whip for your own back.
freedom and reason 