Year: 2023

“This passing fad for what is miscalled ‘transsexualism’ has led to the most tragic betrayal of human expectation in which medicine and modern endocrinology and surgery have ever engaged. In the name of gender transmutation they have led people to believe that alchemy was possible, thus fostering in individuals and in our whole culture conscious and unconscious neurotogenic fantasies whose only possible outcome is an intensification of the neurotic fantasies which underlie their expectation and ultimate psychosis.” — Lawrence Kubie (1974)

“In the old days, when I was a medical student, if a man wanted to have his penis amputated, my psychology professors said that he suffered from schizophrenia, locked him up in an asylum and threw away the key. Now that I am a professor, my colleagues in psychiatry say that he is a ‘transsexual,’ my colleagues in urology refashion his penis into a perineal cavity they call a vagina, and Time magazine puts him on its cover and calls him ‘her.’ Anyone who doubts that this is progress is considered to be ignorant of the discoveries of modern psychiatric sexology, and a political reactionary, a sexual bigot, or something equally unflattering.” —Thomas Szasz (1979)

“I don’t change men into women. I transform male genitals into genitals that have a female aspect. All the rest is in the patient’s mind.” —a Casablanca surgeon who operated on hundreds of American men interviewed by Janice Raymond in the late 1970s

According to Helen Lewis, writing for The Atlantic, in her August column, “The Gender War is Over in Britain.” The subtitle sketches the piece albeit inaccurately the situation: “While upholding trans rights, the Labour Party disassociates itself from radical postmodern theories.” Exactly how is the gender war over if the propaganda of trans rights is upheld? What are those rights if they are not the same as everybody else’s? How does one uphold a major tenet of the most radical species of postmodernist thought, namely queer theory, while disassociating oneself from radical postmodern theories?

Labour’s shift is hardly good enough even if it amounts to anything. Perhaps this is the start of the Labour Party’s journey back to sanity on this issue; it’d be understandable that Labour believes it can’t all at once go home to the truth of gender given the zealotry of trans rights activists (TRAs). Maybe Labour means to remain half-crazy. Maybe this is a strategic step backward to secure the footing necessary to take more steps forward.

“When Keir Starmer wanted to change the Labour Party’s stance on sex and gender,” Lewis usefully notes, “he didn’t give a set-piece speech or hold a press conference. Instead, the leader of Britain’s main opposition party stayed in the background, leaving Anneliese Dodds, a shadow minister with a low public profile, to announce the shift in a short opinion column in The Guardian.” In her column, Dodds assures the public, “We will modernize, simplify and reform gender recognition law. Our policies won’t please everyone but we will do what’s right.”

Lewis summarizes Dodds op-ed: “In just over 800 words, [Dodds] made three big declarations. One was that ‘sex and gender are different.’ Another was that, although Labour continues to believe in the right to change one’s legal gender, safeguards are needed to ‘protect women and girls from predators who might abuse the system.’ Finally, Labour was therefore dropping its commitment to self-ID—the idea that a simple online declaration is enough to change someone’s legal gender for all purposes—and would retain the current requirement of a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.”

The first point—that “sex and gender are different”—is demonstrably false. In my essay Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms, I document that these words are synonyms and have been so since entering the English language centuries ago. Separating gender from sex is the work of sexologists in the 1960s. The word “gender” as indicating something other than sex was rarely used in social science and feminist politics before the mid-1970s. Gender as referring exclusively to the cultural-social continuum of femininity and masculinity was introduced into sociology in 1972 with Ann Oakley’s Sex, Gender, and Society. Much of Oakley’s work was informed by medical sociology and a concern for women’s health, wrapped in a Marxist feminist analytical frame; where the distinction appears elsewhere, it’s more often rendered by critical theorists corrupted by the postmodernist epistemic.

I have a lengthy essay documenting the development of gender ideology in history coming out in the near future, but it will suffice to say here that the fact that those promoting the false distinction between sex and gender so effectively socialized the falsehood testifies to the corrupting influence of postmodernism on western institutions. The Labour Party will have to jettison this false distinction if ever it intends to align its politics with history and science. Given that Labour has made the distinction part of the platform, how could anybody rationally expect that to happen? To be sure, the abandonment of self-ID is a major step in returning to the real world. Hopefully it will inform the practice of medicine in that country. There are so many broken bodies there. How many more will it take before people realize the horror of gender affirming care (GAC)?

As for defending girls and women from predators, on the Labour Party’s delcarations, it’s shocking that it could ever have been thought appropriate to allow men into female-only spaces. It not as if no voices have been raised against forcing girls women to defecate, urinate, and shower around boys and men they don’t know or would want to. The gender critical standpoint (GCS) emphasizes the importance of recognizing and preserving sex-based rights, particularly in areas such as corrections, healthcare, private spaces (bathrooms, locker rooms, women’s shelters, etc.), as well as in sports. Advocates believe that these rights were established for a reason and are essential for ensuring the equitable treatment of women in society and, moreover, their safety and their well-being. Gender critical feminists worry not only that men compromise female-only spaces, but also that the broader adoption of gender identity ideology will, by reifying traditional gender roles and obscuring the material reality of sex-based oppression, undermine the historic gains feminists have made in the face of determined opposition.

TRAs characterize the GCS as trans-exclusionary radical feminism, smearing its advocates as TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists)—and worse, assaulting feminists and lesbians gathered in public spaces to collectively defend women’s rights, as well as homosexual enjoyment of the same rights available to every other citizen, rights and access that required decades of struggle to achieve. TRAs argue that every person not only has the right to enter the spaces of the opposite gender, but also has a right to GAC. To deny these rights is the work of transphobia, as if disagreement were akin to a pathological fear and loathing of trans identifying people, an alleged hatred exacerbating the suicidal ideations common to those suffering from gender dysphoria, a symptom among several GAC is purported to relieve. TRAs argue that transphobia warrants harassing those who voice opposition to their views, even inflicting violence on peaceful protestors. (See Self-Castration and TERF-Punching: Trans Rights are What Sort of Rights? Anarchists and Corrupting the Three Arrows; From Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities; Trans Day of Vengeance Cancelled Due to Genocide.)

I begin this essay referencing the British situation because this nation is finally addressing concerns raised by the experience with gender ideology, an experience shared by European countries (cf EngSoc—Jail Time for Gendering in the UK?). While some progress is being made in the United States on this issue, especially in growing awareness of what gender ideology is and the deleterious effects it’s having on children, the for-profit medical-industrial complex represents a major obstacle to save children from the maw of the corporate Moloch. (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; Feeding the Medical-Industrial Complex.)

I argue in this essay that gender affirming care (GAC) can be understood as a form of psychosurgery, like lobotomy or cingulotomy, the former described above, the latter involving the destruction or lesioning of a portion of the cingulate gyrus, a region involved in emotional and pain regulation, used in the past to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and, again, suicidal ideations. Gender dysphoria, what used to be known as gender identity disorder (GID), is the medical theory behind GAC. At the same time, GAC is increasingly being sought as one might seek other forms of body modification as a means of self-expression, with a large and growing body of young people seeking transcendent experiences believing that changing genders is a path to ecstatic joy, which is what Labour is pushing back on, but which doesn’t address the fundamental problem: the party’s irrational faith in medicine. Labour wants to keep the diagnosis and pursue the matter via the medical model. Perhaps somebody at the Home Office calculated how much it would cost the NHS to perform GAC on every individual who requested it.

The Horrors of Psychosurgery and the Fallacy of Gender Identity

There were roughly 60,000 lobotomies performed in the United States and Europe in the two decades after the procedure was introduced in the mid-1930s before authorities finally quit that barbaric practice. At the height of the practice doctors performing the procedure were treated as celebrities. To applause, American neurologist Walter Freeman could disconnect the pre-frontal cortex from the rest of a patient’s brain in a mere five minutes. So-called sex-change operations (so called because mammals can’t change sex) have been occurring for many more decades than this despite questionable efficacy and ethics. Janice Raymond interviewed for her 1979 book Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-Male a Casablanca surgeon who confessed to mutilating the genitals of hundreds of American men.

The belief that radically altering the body through hormonal and surgical procedures—in the case of GAC puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, orchiectomy, mastectomy, phalloplasty, vaginoplasty—as a way to address nonconformity or to relieve psychological distress is not unlike the belief that deviance and psychological distress can be addressed by lobotomy. Indeed, in the era of the lobotomy, if such individuals has existed, one can imagine counting TRAs among those advocating for the procedure, condemning opponents of lobotomy as oppressors who, for reasons of hate and prejudice, wish to prevent the afflicted from obtaining a procedure that will make them happy and well. They would join the voices of medical personnel who, even when the efficacy and adverse effects of the procedure had become obvious, insisted that lobotomies could provide relief for patients with severe mental illnesses (and put money in their bank accounts). Those who profited from the practice argued that lobotomies reduces psychiatric symptoms, including suicidal ideations, leading to improved behavior and functioning in the afflicted. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) endorsed the procedure. Today, the APA endorses GAC.

Beyond defending GAC, TRAs argue that the GCS is exclusionary and harmful to transgender individuals by denying their gender identity and reinforcing cisnormative views. Cisnormativity is a neologism that means to convey that perception of self in accord with the objective facts of the body is a constellation of attitudes, expectations, and societal norms that assume and prioritize gender identities that align with sex assigned at birth. Gender ideologues condemn cisnormativity as the societal belief that being cisgender is the default or normal way of being. Cisnormativity is therefore oppressive since, according to this view, there is no default or normal way of being, which negates the possibility that deviations in this area can be characterized as abnormal psychology or psychopathology. The goal is to manufacture a term that resonates the way heteronormativity does for the fate of homosexuals (just as the slur transphobia leans on the phenomenon of homophobia).

A crucial question is missing in all of this: Who is applying the constellation of substantially culturally and historically bounded attitudes, expectations, and societal norms that mark gender? If a man is effeminate, having qualities or behaviors associated with being feminine in western culture in this era, often represented in a stereotypical way, it is suggested to him not that men vary in the degree of masculine and feminine qualities, that there is no one way to be a man, but rather that the abundance of feminine qualities he possesses suggest an incongruence between the sex of his body and the authentic gender identity trapped inside. Rather than allowing the boy with effeminate qualities to grow up to be a gay man, his authentic self, which is that of a woman, must be released via the procedures of GAC. This, we are told, is not a form of conversion therapy, but instead gender affirming care. A crooked body must be straightened. It would be conversion therapy to tell a boy that he is a boy and work with a psychotherapist to help him negotiate the social problem of gender stereotyping—and change society to tolerate gender nonconformity.

More generally, the rejection of the normal/abnormal dichotomy obvious in all this is part and parcel of the rejection of the concept of binary opposition in structuralism that defines the postmodern standpoint. This is why Lewis gets ahead of Labour when she announces that the party has disassociated itself from radical postmodern theories. Where gender ideologues fallaciously distinguish between sex and gender, they also falsely treat gender identity as possessing the same status as sexual orientation. This is how the acronym LGBTQ becomes possible. But gender identity and homosexuality are not only qualitatively different concepts, the former an ideological construct, the former a natural fact, they are for this very reason diametrically opposed, with gender identity serving as a weapon in the patriarchal project to erase the existence of gays and lesbians. It’s happening in Iran by force (see Since it is Not Possible to Change the Soul, the Body Must be Changed—Manifestations of Clerical Fascism). In the West, it happens through indoctrination. Same end, different means—albeit medicalization of the problem occurs in both contexts. Just as Iranian clerics reject science, gender ideology would be impossible without the postmodernist rejection of materialism. (See Why I am Not “Cisgendered”.)

To guide me the rest of the way through this essay, I rely on the framework of Thomas Szasz, a renowned psychiatrist and prolific author who made indelible contributions to the field of psychiatry by challenging prevailing paradigms and questioning the very foundations upon which the discipline stood. Born in 1920 in Budapest, Hungary, dying just over a decade ago, Szasz’s long life spanned a tumultuous period of medical history, marked by significant shifts in psychiatric practices and societal attitudes. Szasz’s seminal works, such as The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of madness (1971), reflect his unyielding belief in individual autonomy and personal responsibility. Szasz’s exploration of homosexuality and gender identity stands as a testament to his iconoclastic approach, as he provocatively contests conventional psychiatric theories that pathologized homosexuality. At the same time, he is highly critical of the concept of gender identity, to which the passage quoted at the outset of this essay testifies. In examining Szasz’s work on these topics, we gain insight not only into his critique of psychiatry’s power dynamics and diagnostic frameworks but also into his broader vision of a society that respects human rights, personal liberty, and moves on the basis of materialist science.

The Szaszian Critique of Gender Ideology and the Medicalization of Personal and Social Problems

Johann Weyer (1515-1588) was a Dutch demonologist, occultist, and physician known for his work in challenging the beliefs in witchcraft and demons during the time of the witch trials. In his influential book De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Tricks of Demons), published in 1563, Weyer argued against the persecution of witches and questioned the reality of witchcraft. The book was groundbreaking in its time and contributed to a more rational approach to the understanding of supposed witchcraft and demonology; his work challenged the prevailing beliefs of the era and paved the way for more enlightened perspectives on the topic. At the same time, he provided an estimate of the total number of demons, which he claimed was 7,405,926. Such is the power of Weltanschauung.

In his 1970 book Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz presents a critical examination of the modern mental health system, drawing parallels between the historical Inquisition and what Szasz sees as the contemporary “mental health movement.” A reformer much like Weyer, Szasz became a well-known advocate for individual autonomy and personal responsibility, believing that mental illnesses are not objective medical conditions but rather social constructs used to control and stigmatize certain behaviors that society deems undesirable. Unlike Weyer, Szasz does not imagine impossible things. (See also Szasz’s 1980 Sex by Prescription: The Startling Truth about Today’s Sex Therapy and 1984 The Therapeutic State.)

Manufacture of Madness argues that, with few exceptions, the concept of mental illness is used as a tool of social control, just as the Inquisition was used to control dissent and enforce religious orthodoxy. Szasz criticizes the psychiatric profession for its reliance on forced treatment, involuntary commitment, and the medicalization of human behavior and emotion, arguing that psychiatric labeling and the use of involuntary psychiatric interventions violate human rights and individual freedom, depriving people of their autonomy and subject them to potentially harmful treatments. Throughout the book, Szasz challenges the medical model of mental illness and calls for a radical reevaluation of the mental health system. He advocates for a shift away from coercion and paternalism towards a model based on informed consent and voluntary cooperation between individuals and mental health professionals.

In his 1979 essay “Male and Female Created He Them,” a New York Times review of Janice Raymond’s landmark Transsexual Empire: the Making of the She-Male, Szasz writes, “Like much of the medical‐psychiatric mendacity characteristic of our day, the official definition ‘transsexualism’ as a disease comes down to the strategic abuse of language—epitomized by confusing and equating biological phenomena with social roles.” Here Szasz appears to accept the distinction between sex and gender, but it should be noted that this is in the context of the reintroduction of gender in academic literature. Szasz writes, “Because ‘transsexualism’ involves, is indeed virtually synonymous with, extensive surgical alterations of the ‘normal’ human body, we might ask what would happen, say, to a man who went to an orthopedic surgeon, told him that he felt like a right‐handed person trapped in an ambidextrous body and asked the doctor to cut off his perfectly healthy left arm? What would happen to a man who went to a urologist, told him that he felt like a Christian trapped in a Jewish body, and asked him to re‐cover the glans of his penis with foreskin?” Szasz would be horrified to learn of the growing acceptance of limb amputation. But his point remains: faux-foreskin isn’t foreskin. Once the organ is lost, it lost forever. (I oppose circumcision for this reason.)

Raymond scrutinizes the role of transsexualism, particularly the psychological and surgical approaches, in perpetuating conventional gender stereotypes. The work critiques the medical-psychiatric complex for pathologizing “gender identity,” an invention of Robert Stoller (which I details in an upcoming essay) and explores the socio-political context contributing to the normalization of transsexual treatment and surgery as conventional medical practices. Raymond contends that transsexualism is rooted in “patriarchal myths,” such as “male mothering,” and the “making of woman according to man’s image.” She argues that these myths serve to colonize feminist identification, culture, politics, and sexuality. Moreover, transsexuals, by transforming the female form into an artifact, effectively violate women’s bodies. Raymond suggests that transsexuals, by undergoing surgery, merely eliminate the most overt means of intruding upon women, presenting themselves as non-invasive. (See Raymond’s other work, e.g., Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism; Trafficking in the United States: Links Between International and Domestic Sex Industries; Women in the International Migration Process: Patterns, Profiles and Health Consequences of Sexual Exploitation.)

“Isn’t it—in the grandly deceptive phrase of the American psychiatric establishment used to characterize all ‘mental diseases’—‘just like any other illness’? No, it is not,” Szasz asks and answers. He elaborates: “The transsexual male is indistinguishable from other males, save by his desire to be a woman. (‘He is a woman trapped in a man’s body’ is the standard rhetorical form of this claim.) If such a desire qualifies as a disease, transforming the desiring agent into a ‘transsexual,’ then the old person who wants to be young is a ‘transchronological,’ the poor person who wants to be rich is a ‘transeconomical,’ and so on. Such hypothetical claims and the requests for ‘therapy’ based on them (together with our cognitive and medical responses to them) frame, in my opinion, the proper background against which our contemporary beliefs and practices concerning ‘transsexualism’ and transsexual ‘therapy’ ought to be viewed.” (See my recent essay Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy for a discussion of the Orwellian transition in language from “transsexual healthcare” or “transsexual medical care” to “transgender health care” and “gender affirming care.”)

Szasz finds “flawless” Raymond’s thesis (much maligned then and now). “Arguing that ‘medicine and psychology . . . function as secular religions in the area of transsexualism,’ she demonstrates that this ‘condition’ is now accepted as a disease because advances in the technology of sex‐conversion surgery have made certain alterations in the human genitals possible and because such operations reiterate and reinforce traditional patriarchal sex‐role expectations and stereotypes. Ostensibly, the ‘transsexers’ (from psychologists to urologists) are curing a disease; actually, they engage in the religious and political shaping and controlling of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ behavior.” Szasz writes, “The claim that males can be transformed, by means of hormones and surgery, into females, and vice versa, is, of course, a lie. (‘She‐males’ are fabricated in much greater numbers than ‘he‐females.’) Chromosomal sex is fixed. And so are one’s historical experiences of growing up and living as boy or girl, man or woman.” (Note: the first epigraph to this essay is from Lawrence Kubie’s critique “The Drive to Become Both Sexes,” published in a 1974 issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. See also Barry Reay’s 2014 critique “The Transsexual Phenomenon: A Counter-History,” in the Journal of Social History.)

“What, then, can be achieved by means of ‘transsexual therapy’?” Szasz asks. “The language in which the reply is framed is crucial—and can never be neutral. The transsexual propagandists claim to transform ‘women trapped in men’s bodies’ into ‘real’ women and want then to be accepted socially as females (say, in professional tennis). Critics of transsexualism contend that such a person is a ‘male‐to‐constructed‐female’ (Miss Raymond’s term), or a fake female, or a castrated male transvestite who wears not only feminine clothing but also feminine‐looking body parts.” Here Szasz is referencing Renée Richards, the male tennis player, endorsed by Billie Jean King as a “real woman,” accepted by the authorities monitoring women’s professional tennis as a “real woman,” who competed against women in the US Open in 1976. Szasz notes that this authentication of a “constructed female” as a real female stands in contrast to the standard rules of Olympic competition in which the athletes’ appearance counts for nothing; their sexual identity is based solely on their chromosomal makeup.

The Renée Richards case is revealing in many ways. Renée, formerly Richard, underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1975. Shortly afterward, he expressed his desire to compete in the women’s tennis circuit. In 1976, the United States Tennis Association (USTA) initially denied Richards the right to compete in the women’s singles division of the US Open. The USTA cited a policy that required female players to be born female. In response, Richards filed a lawsuit against the USTA, arguing that his exclusion from women’s tennis was a violation of his rights under New York state law, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. The case, Richards v USTA, went to trial in 1977. Judge Alfred M. Ascione ruled in the face of the most basic science: “This person is now a female,” and held that requiring Richards to pass the Barr body test (to determine sex chromosomes) was “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and a violation of her rights.” 

The court’s decision has long been celebrated as groundbreaking for transgender rights, what were at the time referred to as transsexual rights, an early victory in the struggle. Despite the marking of Richard’s being allowed to compete against women in tennis as a grand moment for social justice, what is rarely remarked upon is his acknowledgment upon reflection a change of mind regarding men in women’s sports. “I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me,” he said. “And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.” (“Genetic women.” This is like the construct “biological women.” Is there any other kind?)

Szasz’s views on coercive psychiatry are intertwined with his broader skepticism about the concept of mental illness. He lays out these arguments in several books. In addition to his landmark 1961 Myth of Mental Illness, Szasz argues in his 2008 Psychiatry: The Science of Lies that psychiatric coercion is incompatible with the principles of a free society and that psychiatry should be based on voluntary relationships and informed consent. He repeats his thesis that mental illnesses are not real medical conditions but rather metaphorical expressions of various forms of human suffering and social deviance. According to Szasz, labeling someone as mentally ill is used to control nonconformity, silence dissent, and justify the exercise of coercive power in the name of treatment. In an earlier work, Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry: An Inquiry into the Social Uses of Mental Health Practices (1963), Szasz examines the legal and ethical implications of coercive psychiatry and questions the legal justifications for involuntary psychiatric interventions. He discusses how the medicalization of behavior and the expansion of psychiatric power is used by authorities to suppress individual freedoms.

There has been a significant shift in the treatment approach for gender dysphoria over the years, moving away from traditional psychoanalysis and towards GAC, a shift that may lead the causal observer to think Szasz would have supported gender ideology as he did in his arguments against the medicalization of homosexuality. As the psychiatric profession underwent significant changes in their understanding and attitudes toward homosexuality, Szasz became increasingly critical of psychiatric labeling and the use of mental illness as a way to pathologize and control certain behaviors and identities. In the 1970s, during the gay rights movement and the removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder from the DSM, Szasz argued that homosexuality was not a mental illness and should not be treated or stigmatized as such. Szasz believed that homosexuality was a personal choice and expression of individual autonomy. He defended the rights of individuals to engage in consensual sexual relationships of their choosing without interference from medical or psychiatric authorities. In his 1994 work, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society’s Unwanted, Szasz takes a stronger position against the pathologization of diverse sexual orientations and argued for the decriminalization and destigmatization of homosexuality.

Gender Angels, Problematizing Puberty, and Medical Freedom

The old psychiatric category of GID was defined by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), published in 1994. GID is characterized by a persistent and strong cross-gender identification and discomfort with one’s sex at birth. This identification is often manifested through cross-dressing, adopting the behaviors and mannerisms of the opposite gender, and a preference for playmates and activities stereotypically associated with the opposite gender, as well as significant distress or discomfort with their reproductive anatomy, i.e., genitalia or secondary sexual characteristics. The category was changed with the DSM-5, published in 2013, to reflect a shift in understanding, acknowledging that the distress experienced by individuals was not inherent to their gender identity itself but rather due to the incongruence between their gender identity and assigned sex.

It might be useful, in light of the ideas that gender identities are actually-existing things, to consider the problem of the existence of gendered souls, which is what it seems to me to mean when saying that gender identity exists independently of the sexualized body that is the source of the distress if incongruent with stereotype (see Step Away From the Crazy; Resisting the Imposition of Non-Existing Things). The problem here is in part how one conceptualizes the relation of the mind to the body. There is a dualism suggested in all of this, often associated with philosopher René Descartes, positing that the mind and body are separate substances with distinct properties. To the extent that we might argue that the mind is something that is not there in the beginning, but that it is an emergent property, as is the position of, for example, symbolic interactionism, then it is a matter of developing the self and, with that, the gendered self, the social self, and so on (see George Herbert Mead, William James, and so forth).

There is certainly something to socialization in the production of the self; however, the suggestion that there is no fundamental relation between the body and the self, and that the later is entirely cultural, as sexologist John Money theorized, attempting and failing miserably to raise a child to be the gender he wasn’t, is obviously fallacious (I will take up the problem of sexology in a future essay). It denies the axioms of materialist science. Gender is not something in the head, but the result of natural history. To be sure, custom and circumstance shape the gendered self, but gender is of the body—as is the mind. The reason sex and gender are treated as distinct phenomenon in queer theory is to confuse the audience on this point.

Szasz’s argument regarding the mind-body relationship is rooted in his philosophical stance of libertarianism and his rejection of the traditional medical model of mental illness. The Szazian view is that mental illnesses are not equivalent to physical diseases and that the mind should not be treated as an object that can be medically diagnosed and treated like a physical ailment. Szasz argues that many so-called mental disorders were socially constructed concepts and therefore not of the same quality as genuine medical diseases. By applying medical language and concepts to behavioral and emotional issues, labeling them as illnesses needing medical intervention, Szasz contends that authorities and practitioners obscure the true nature of the human condition.

The medicalization of certain behaviors allows authorities to exert control over individuals who deviate from societal norms. This is most dramatically instantiated today in the hormonal and surgical correcting of bodies whose owners and their guardians believe don’t fit the stereotype of the gender they believe they are. Szasz is critical of the psychiatric profession’s tendency to label unconventional beliefs and behaviors as pathological conditions, arguing that these practice unjustly stigmatize and marginalize individuals. This is not so much dualism but Szasz insistence on cognitive liberty, free will, human dignity, and individual freedom. Szasz often emphasizes the importance of autonomy and personal responsibility in dealing with emotional and psychological struggles. He criticizes the practice of involuntary psychiatric treatment, asserting that it violates individual rights and reinforced societal control over nonconformist behavior.

Based on this ethic, Szasz argues that such psychiatric treatments as lobotomies violate individual autonomy and fundamental rights. He considers the lobotomy to be a symbol of the medicalization of human behavior and the overreach of psychiatric authority. He criticizes the medical establishment’s reliance on invasive procedures like lobotomies as a means of controlling and normalizing individuals who did not conform to societal norms. As noted, Szasz famously challenges prevailing notions of homosexuality on these grounds and the medicalization of sexual orientation; less well known is his critique of the emerging notion of gender identity during a pivotal period of societal transformation in the 1970s. Just as he opposed the medicalization of homosexuality, so he opposed the medicalization of those who wished to present in gender nonconformist ways.

The Szazian views is that supposing deviations from gender stereotypes reflect a mental disorder is an act of medicalizing gender nonconformity. The discomfort one would feel from being a girl who acts in a manner contrary to the stereotype of girls at a particular place and time is not experienced because the person is in the wrong body, a construct that amounts to a religious doctrine, but rather due to the stress resulting from the expectations of others that the girl behave in a gender conforming manner. It’s an act of societal oppression to expect the girl to behave according to the cultural rules concerning gender. If he were alive today, I have little doubt that Szasz would argue that it’s not the girl’s body but the society around her that needs changing. (See Embedding Misogyny and the Progressive Mind.) Knowing this she can develop the strength of character to live as she would like without having the experience the stress of societal reaction to her failure to meet expectations is empowering and indicates the role of a good therapist. Whether defining gender dysphoria as a mental illness or as a religious-like desire to transcend one’s sex, the solution is not GAC but psychoanalysis and social change.

As a libertarian, Szasz does not support arbitrary restrictions on how individuals wish to present themselves. For example, transvestism, the act of dressing in the clothing typically associated with the opposite sex, often accompanied by autogynephilia, and today reconceptualized as exploration of gender identity, has been historically pathologized and labeled as a mental disorder in diagnostic systems. Given Szasz’s emphasis on individual liberty and personal autonomy, it can be assumed that he would have been critical of pathologizing transvestism or any form of non-conforming gender expression. He would have argued against using medical or psychiatric interventions to control or regulate individual choices related to clothing or gender identity. The problem with gender ideology is the work of the medical-industrial complex and other powerful entities to drug and operate on individuals on the basis of gender identity, a concept he obviously rejected based on the foregoing.

Informed consent and medical freedom are crucial ethical principles in any free society that requires medical professionals to inform patients about the nature of their proposed treatment, the potential risks and benefits, and any available alternatives. The patient must have the capacity to understand this information and make a voluntary and informed decision about their healthcare. Szasz is a strong proponent of medical ethics, and his views on this matter are closely related to his broader emphasis on individual autonomy and personal responsibility. He argues that patients should have the right to make their own decisions about their treatment, including the right to refuse treatment if they wish.

Szasz is highly critical of coercive practices that violate the principle of informed consent. He strongly opposes involuntary hospitalization, forced medication, and other forms of coercive treatment that take away an individual’s right to make decisions about their own mental health. Szasz’s position on informed consent is particularly relevant to his critique of the mental health system and the use of psychiatric power to control individuals deemed mentally ill. He believes that psychiatric coercion, which often bypasses the principle of informed consent, was a violation of personal liberty and human rights.

This is especially true when it comes to children. The evidence of psychiatric coercion is clearly evident in the rapid gender transitioning of children and at earlier and earlier ages. Szasz critical views on the use of psychiatric medications, including those prescribed to children, for conditions like ADHD, for example, are well known. Szasz is a vocal critic of what he sees as the excessive medicalization of behavioral and emotional issues and the over-reliance on psychiatric drugs to address complex human problems.

Specifically concerning pediatric use of medications, Szasz’s work raises a concern about the use of puberty blockers. Many childhood behaviors that get labeled as psychiatric disorders are often just variations of normal behavior. Szasz argues that pathologizing these behaviors and prescribing medications for them was a way of medicalizing ordinary aspects of human development. That children find puberty to be a stressful stage in the development of their person is something true across space and time. Puberty as optional has never be a consideration in human history—until now. This is the work of gender ideology and the medical-industrial complex.

* * *

Update (November 15): What do you know, gender is binary.

I explained to a Facebook friend that, for centuries, for millennia, the Jews have had land stolen from them, their territories occupied by foreign powers. Colonized and conquered by Egyptians, Romans, Arabs, to name a few, Jews have been forced into exile, taken captive, enslaved, and exterminated. The Jews are so loathed by so many that many don’t believe they have any claim to land they have continually inhabited for 3500 years despite all that has befallen them as a people.

My friend insisted that the conflict is caused by the behavior of the Israeli state. But nothing Israel has ever done justifies October 7. October 7 is justified by those who perpetrated the act—and those who celebrate it and support the cause of the perpetrators—by one thing: Jew-hatred. The rest is rationalization. She objected that it is typical of the defenders of Israel to smear its critics as antisemites, when in truth they are only anti-Zionist. I noted that antisemitism has a long history of being coded that way.

She then wanted to assure me that Muslims helped Jews during the Holocaust. I responded that Arabs and Muslims are not monolithic groups. Yes, a small number of Muslims sheltered Jews (a few dozen Albanian Muslims, for example). But that doesn’t negate the fact of widespread Jew-hatred in the Arab-Muslim world. In fact, the evidence for eliminationist antisemitism among Arab-Muslims populations is well documented.

Remember when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, visited Hitler in Berlin in November 1941? He sought the Axis powers public approval for an Arab state and the end of the proposed Jewish homeland in the region then called Palestine. He wanted this approval as a condition for the uprising in the Arab world allied with the Axis powers. Hitler was sympathetic, but declined to give al-Husseini the public approval he sought. We know what they discussed because we have the transcripts of the meeting. 

(I will be referencing the official German record of the meeting between Hitler and al-Husseini, on November 28, 1941, at the Reich Chancellory in Berlin. Here is the full transcript.)

Amin al-Husseini began first by conveying to Hitler that the dictator was “admired by the entire Arab world,” and thanked him for “the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially the Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches.” He then declared that the Nazis and the Arabs shared the same enemies: “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” The belief held at the time, by Nazis and Arabs alike, was that both the British Empire and the Bolsheviks were instantiations of the Jewish control over the world. “Therefore they were prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion.”

al-Husseini proposed an Arab revolt across the Middle East to fight the Jews, as well as the English, who governed Palestine and controlled Iraq and Egypt, and the French, who controlled Syria and Lebanon. al-Husseini explicitly expressed his eagerness to stop the reestablishment of the Jewish state, which was the likely outcome of the British having secured a mandate for Palestine at the Paris peace conference in 1919. Indeed, throughout the conversation, it was recognized by both parties that Palestine, so named in the second century AD by the Roman Empire (Syria-Palestine), was the Jewish homeland. al-Husseini asked Hitler to declare publicly, as the German government had privately, that it favored “the elimination of the Jewish national home” in Palestine.

Hitler told al-Husseini that Germany stood for “uncompromising war against the Jews.” Hitler told al-Husseini that Germany was presently engaged in “a life and death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia.” He argued that this “naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests.” He insisted that, while England was capitalist and Russia communist, “Jews in both countries were pursuing a common goal.”  Ideologically, “the war was a struggle between National Socialism and the Jews”—the struggle echoed by the Arab world; in that case, National Socialism’s analog was the clerical fascism of Islam. What al-Husseini wanted from Hitler, which Hitler did not agree to, was permission to launch a revolt against the colonial powers in the Middle East to eliminate the Jewish population in Palestine. In due time, Hitler assured him. 

“The Fuhrer then made the following statement to the Mufti, enjoining him to lock it in the uttermost depths of his heart:

1. He (the Fuhrer) would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.
2. At some moment which was impossible to set exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.
3. As soon as this had happened, the Fuhrer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations, which he had secretly prepared. When that time had come, Germany could also be indifferent to French reaction to such a declaration.”

The Jews have been conquered and oppressed for centuries—the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Roman Empire. During the rise of Islam, a plagiarism of Old and New Testaments, Jews living in the Arabian Peninsula were massacred and driven out. Since, Persian Jews have been driven out of Iran, the country with the largest proportion of Jews in the region outside of Israel. There was an exodus of Jews from Iran in the 1950s, and then another wave of out-migration during and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Jewish population had been reduced to approximately 80,000 prior to the Revolution. During the Revolution, the number dropped to fewer than 20,000. That this is the largest population of Jews anywhere in the Middle East and Central Asia will give you a good sense of how inhospitable that part of the world is to the Jews.

What explains the pervasive antisemitism? Jews are hated because they have been a remarkably successful people despite continual persecution and outsider status. Successful ethic groups are envied and resented by emotionally stunted cultures and subcultures (see, for example, in black American hatred of and violence towards Asians). The Arab-Muslim world remains backwards, fraught with primitivisms. In addition to Jew hatred, Muslims are profoundly misogynistic and heterosexist. Jews are also hated because they are westernized. Islam hates the West because it’s liberal and secular. Muslims hate the West also because their first attempt to colonize Europe was thwarted by Christendom. Their second attempt to Islamize the West is proving much more successful, as western nation-states have invited the barbarians to reside inside the city walls. But that’s for another thread.

Are you starting to understand that this is not actually about the Palestinians? pic.twitter.com/5thbben3Qw

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 12, 2023

What motivates Hamas is the desire to build an Islamic world. Hamas is an instantiations of the sharia supremacist movement. What also motivates Hamas is Jew hatred. They seek the elimination of Jews from those territories they control or seek to control. This was Hitler’s motivations: build a global national socialist world and eradicate all Jews in it.

As I have shown, the motivations of the Islamist have been recoded as a struggle for justice under cover of an academic pretense, namely postcolonial studies and related fields. But Israel’s struggle against Islamism is not to be understood, as Barack Obama wishes it were, as a result of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. There is a lot to criticize there, but it is irrelevant to what Hamas is doing. This is not a struggle over land. This is a struggle for the type of government people in Israel—and the world—will live under. Will Israel be a free state or will it be a totalitarian one? That is the question. Hamas could care less about Palestinian or any other lives. Hamas is an expression of clerical fascism.

Israel is not only defending herself today, but defending tomorrow for the West. Israel’s struggle is our struggle. To be sure, many the students on campus and the mob on the streets don’t understand this, but it doesn’t matter; they hate the West. Even if they understood the struggle, they would still side with Hamas—and many of them because they understand what this is about. They think they want this. Moreover, whether they grasp this or not, they have become a conduit through which the latent antisemitism that runs through Western culture is manifest (itself the legacy of the same force that saved the West from Islam, namely Christendom). The indoctrination centers that go under the label “education” prepared them to be ethicists and racists whose hatred and loathing is already trained, with Jews, whites, and Asians in the crosshairs.

What they don’t understand was well put by my friend Kevin Bobout: “The blind side of their hatred of our current system is they will be slaughtered by the same hands they empower.”

Ayaan Hirsch Ali on Christianity: “That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity—from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvelous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms—of the market, of conscience and of the press—find their roots in Christianity”

Bill Maher thinks progressives are liberals when he calls out the contradiction between the values he supposes they hold and the fact that they’re out in the streets supporting the Party of God. But progressives are not liberals. There is no contradiction. Progressives have always been illiberal.

Progressivism articulates the soft fascism of corporate governance, a system that emerged in the late nineteenth century in which an administrative state, subservient to corporate power, directs the masses for the benefit of the master it serves. With this development, technocratic rule is recoded as democracy. But it’s really a species of authoritarianism.

Under technocratic rule, all the rights Maher identifies that liberalism brought the world—the result of Western Civilization and European culture and the global spread of capitalism—become subject to the determination of administrators and regulators. They are in effect negated as rights and become functionally arbitrary.

In Europe, the analog to progressivism is social democracy. In the UK, the analog to the US Democratic Party is the Labour Party. These parties are not working class parties, but elite organizations representing the interests of the professional-managerial strata that directs the working class for the benefit of the corporate elite. Programs such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reflect the work of progressive thought. DEI and its analogs represent the antithesis of liberal freedom. They are regressive and tribal. Yet Maher stands with the Democrats.

Maher also forgets to mention, or perhaps in his case his atheism makes it impossible to see or tells him to omit, the source of these principles: the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially after the Protestant Reformation. The idea of the individualism that emerges from this worldview is a game changer. From this follows human rights and religious liberty.

Maher’s dig at Republicans is especially noteworthy given the trajectory of his political-ideological transformation. His performance here appears to be an act of self-suppression. He has had quite a few of these in recent years. He must know that it’s the populist Republicans who represent his values, while the Democrats represents the soft fascism (and sometimes the hard fascism) of corporate governance. But because Republicans are committed Christians, Maher can’t bring himself to admit it. So while he’s getting more things correct as he walks this path, he seems unsure of where the path leads.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I have for years appreciated, and appreciate no less for her conversion, albeit I find it surprising and unnecessary, has become a Christian. It’s surprising because emancipation from faith belief for many is caused by and causes a radical shift in cognitive style. I had thought this was the case with Ali. To believe again in the supernatural after leaving a faith seems difficult for this reason. Indeed, it’s usually the true believer who can hop from one set of incredible beliefs to another. I don’t for a second believe Ali is a true believer. I thought perhaps her move was a show of solidarity with the West, but she argues that atheism can’t equip us for civilizational war. I don’t agree with that. I do agree that we are in a civilizational war, and in that war we must count among our comrades Christians and Jews.

And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all.

I welcome your feedback. https://t.co/m4ddFxb9rG

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali (@Ayaan) November 11, 2023

The Russell Ali is referring to in the tweet is Bertrand Russell who, in a 1927 lecture, “Why I am Not a Christian,” touches various philosophical and theological issues in critiquing the rationality and validity of Christian beliefs. Expressing skepticism about the existence of God, Russell argues that there’s insufficient evidence to support the belief in a deity. He addresses historical aspects of Christianity, questioning the authenticity of biblical narratives and highlighting what he sees as inconsistencies in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings. He discusses moral and ethical issues, suggesting that the moral teachings of Jesus, while often admirable, were not unique to Christianity and could be found in various philosophical traditions. He raises the classic philosophical problem of evil (theodicy), questioning how the existence of evil and suffering in the world could be reconciled with the idea of an all-powerful and benevolent God.

All these are solid points to make. But what Russell does not address sufficiently is the logic of Christianity that allowed for the development of the Enlightenment and Modernity—humanism, individualism, liberalism, rationalism, and secularism. That the supernatural elements of Christianity are irrational does not render inert the rational elements of the faith. It’s difficult to see outside of Judaism, other religious logic enshrining Christian values. Moreover, as we see with Islam, basing a religion on Judaism doesn’t mean its logic is carried over. And not all forms of Christian carry over this logic. As Max Weber rightly notes in his his most work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalism emerges in the places where Protestantism takes hold. The only other source of those values is Judaism, which Protestantism allowed Christians to behave like.

Weber tells us in a series of religious essays written during World War I (the ending of which today we commemorate) that included—really centered—ancient Judaism, “For the Jew, the social order of the world was conceived to have been turned into the opposite of the one promised for the future, but in the future it was to be overturned so that Jewry could be once again dominant. The world was conceived as neither eternal nor unchangeable, but rather as being created. Its present structure was a product of man’s actions, above all those of the Jews, and of God’s reaction to them. Hence the world was a historical product designed to give way to the truly God-ordained order.” 

Weber continues: “There existed in addition a highly rational religious ethic of social conduct; it was free of magic and all forms of irrational quest for salvation; it was inwardly worlds apart from the path of salvation offered by Asiatic religions. This ethic still largely underlies contemporary Middle Eastern and European ethics. World-historical interest in Jewry rests upon this fact.” His conclusion is dramatic and prophetic: “Thus, in considering the conditions of Jewry’s evolution, we stand at a turning point of the whole cultural development of the West and the Middle East.” Except of the Island that is Israel, the Middle East has lost these ethics. It is now overrun by clerical fascists.

The German-American sociologist Reinhard Bendix, in summarizing Weber thesis, writes, “Free of magic and esoteric speculations, devoted to the study of law, vigilant in the effort to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord in the hope of a better future, the prophets established a religion of faith that subjected man’s daily life to the imperatives of a divinely ordained moral law. In this way, ancient Judaism helped create the moral rationalism of Western civilization.”

In an early essay, Karl Marx also remarked upon these qualities of Judaism and how they crossed over into Protestantism in a manner like Weber thesis. “Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.” One sees here that while Marx is highly critical of the egoistic and selfish attributes of individualism he nonetheless recognizing this as a form of emancipation of man from automatic embeddedness in societal institutions. Marx concludes that, “From the outset the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is, therefore, the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.”

This is why the Christian West must stand with the Jew in his struggle against the forces of irrationalism, the sharia-supremacist drive pursued by the Party of God—the Islamist. This is why the Islamist hates the Jew and the Christian West. And this is why the woke progressive marching in the street finds affinity with the Islamist. He, too, hates the Christian and the Jew. Our struggle is therefore not just an external one. The enemy is within. And he e joins the barbarian inside the city walls.

Ali could never entertain these arguments because she is, as a right-wing intellectual, is a sworn enemy of Marxism. If she possessed what cognitive style I attributed to her, perhaps she would benefit from understanding this argument, one that would allow her to throw in with the Christian without adopting his faith. But this is the problem with intellectuals like Ali—and commentators like Maher; blocking avenues of possible thought constrains one’s choice of comrades. In Maher’s case, it means he will continue to vote for candidates from the Democratic Party while taking potshots at the Republicans who are defending Western Civilization. At least Ali is on the right side.

The woke (so-called) left sides with Islam and loathes Jews and Christians. They hate western civilization. They despise European culture. They loath white people. Lamis Deek tells the mob “The West is a lie.” Deek cofounded the anti-Israel Al-Awda New York chapter (Al-Awda NY). Deek is affiliated with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and the anti-Israel activist group Within Our Lifetime (WOL). See this profile from Canary Mission and follow the links. These are part of the network of leftwing groups organizing the mob I document in my recent essay: Woke Progressivism and the Party of God. Deek is a dime a dozen.

WATCH the crazed rant of BDS leader @Lamis_Deek at an anti-Israel protest in Washington DC. As the crowd cheers wildly, Deek glorifies the "martyrs" of Hamas & threatens members of Congress as well as "every media outlet" that doesn't repeat pro-Hamas propaganda. pic.twitter.com/TXKlDXD7eW

— Canary Mission (@canarymission) November 8, 2023

The organic intellectuals of the network see in Judaism and rational Christianity the foundations of capitalism, the economic system that intertwines with the Enlightenment—humanism, individualism, liberalism, republicanism, and scientific rationalism. This is the same culture that produced Karl Marx and his materialist conception of history. The woke intellectual isn’t wrong about the origins of the West (they are wrong about Marx, however). It’s the truth that they resent the success of the system and they promote and mobilize the resentment of others to create a power base for their own self-aggrandizement that exposes the movement as factitious. Because, in reality, the reaction is a beast of the transnationalist project to dismantle the modern nation-state. This is why its ideology is found in the corporate boardroom.

As I have demonstrated many times in the pages of Freedom and Reason, the marches and protests, the destruction and violence—Antifa, BLM, TRAs, and now clerical fascism—are street-level expressions of the destructive post-/trans-humanist monster fathered by transnational corporatism, mainstreamed for decades by progressivism and social democracy, coded as multiculturalism, pressed into popular consciousness and conscience by the administrative state, the culture industry, the education system, and captured religious institutions. This is globalism. The transnational corporation, today’s Victor Frankenstein, means to make serfs of us. The limbs of its monster work primitivisms—blood guilt, collective punishment, intergenerational trauma, racism, tribalism. These atavisms reduce the capacity of man to reason.

Islamism—clerical fascism—is the exemplary soul of such a monster. Go find and read Michel Foucault gushing over the Islamic Revolution that Jimmy Carter failed to stop, now propped up by Joe Biden, who over decades established himself as a chief operative in the managed decline of America, carrying over Obama’s balancing act rooted in crackpot neoconservatism. Yes, one party in America has been at this for a long time. Those who conditioned million to support clerical fascism, to celebrate the massacre of Israelis, are for the most part progressive Democrats in their electoral behavior. They’re the ones who smear the American patriot as a fascist even while they themselves stand with both the soft and the hard corporatism that underpins the new fascism I have described in the pages of Freedom and Reason.

Here’s the truth of the matter:

The most important report on the war you will likely see.

Ignore the idiot @piersmorgan asking @DouglasKMurray about how he “feels” about being rocketed.

Listen to Douglas explain how the Gazans are worse than the Nazis ever were. pic.twitter.com/no6yO4tnUs

— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) November 10, 2023

Douglas Murray is a voice of reason and moral clarity in the whirlwind of ideological distortion. Take it in. Hamas is worse than Nazis, he said. Why? Because Hamas slaughtered civilians with glee; at least the Nazis felt shame. Too many in Gaza are behind the gleeful butcher. They are Hitler’s willing executioners (to borrow the title of Daniel Goldhagen’s insightful work that people should revisit). Like the Nazis, the Party of God must be smashed. What happened to Israel on October 7 requires the elimination of Hamas root and branch in the same way the belligerence of Germany during WWII required the bombing of German cities. The Nazis were responsible for civilian deaths in Germany. The death and destruction in Gaza is on Hamas.

Today’s so called left couldn’t be more wrong—about everything. Nobody believed there wouldn’t be civilian casualties. It was the predictable consequences of Hamas’ actions. Hamas knew there would civilian deaths. They were counting on it. A cessation of hostilities will allow Hamas to remain and regroup—and Hamas has promised that the massacres of October 7 will happen again and again. It’s a genocidal death cult that cannot be negotiated with. It must be eliminated with prejudice.

Israel has learned a painful lesson. Negotiating with Hamas was a mistake. This was never about land. Hamas is motivated by a pathological hatred of Jews and a desire to impose sharia on the world. Jew-hatred is rampant in the Arab space. Muslims bring it with them to the West. And while Jew-hatred cannot be pushed out of the masses, its organized forms can be crushed, and its spread limited (close the borders and deport the enemy). The people will see that the misery many rank-and-file Arabs wish to visit on others results in misery they would never wish upon themselves. That’s also a painful lesson. Make sure the mob sees it.

Will the people in that region ever tire of losing? Who knows. But a free people cannot allow bitter resentment to win. That’s as true for the countries of the West as it is for Israel. Any anti-fascist true to the character of that label will agree. That’s the litmus test, isn’t it? One’s choice of comrades tells the truth about them. And the truth is that what passes for anti-fascism today is today’s fascism. The same is true with anti-racism. This is an Orwellian moment.

* * *

As I have noted in previous essays, self-identified Marxists get Karl Marx very wrong an awful lot. Since the left lays claim to Marxism, straightening them out is in order. Marx was critical of attempts to turn his theories into rigid dogmas or to reduce them to a set of fixed principles. He argued that his ideas were not meant to be a dogmatic doctrine but a method for analyzing and explaining analyzing social relations. Marx’s critique of interpretations of his work doesn’t mean he rejected his core critique of capitalism and theory of class struggle. Instead, he was critical of attempts to turn his ideas into a rigid and inflexible ideology.

(What follows is in part self-plagiarized from an essay I wrote in October 2018 Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism. But as I have said before when I borrowed from myself, since these are my words, I will not place quotes around them. I wish to avoid tedium,)

In Marx’s materialist conception of history, freedom and solidarity are objectively integral, alienated under conditions of segmentation, whether in class, gender, or religious estrangement. Justice and rights demand that adequate sociocultural arrangements empower individuals to participate fully in the production and shaping of the economic and political relations of which they are an integral part. Anywhere an individual is limited in his species-being, for example by rigid religious doctrine and practice, unfreedom and injustice prevail.

Marx’s critique of capitalism represents a vigorous defense of the necessity and universality of human dignity and human rights, necessarily social rights in their fullest form, that will form the ground of what Abraham Maslow defined as self-actualization. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is inspired by Marx and Engels conception of a free society as “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” as they write in the 1948 pamphlet Communist Manifesto. The conditions of freedom must be established for all before all people can be free. This formulation presupposes a particular conception of freedom.

In “Zur Judenfrage,” published in 1844 (in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher), Marx argues that the freedom of conscience (the right to practice any religion one chooses) is, like private property, an expression of the bourgeois conception of liberty, based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. Religious association is reduced to personal choice, its coercive nature concealed, enabling its perpetuation under the guise of a rhetoric of freedom. Liberty of this sort is the possession of “egoistic man,” Marx contends, an individual who enjoys his rights “without regard to other men.”

Drawing a distinction between the droits de l’homie (the rights of man) and the droits du citizen (the rights of the citizen), Marx finds that “it is not man as citoyen, but man as bourgeois who is considered to be the essential and true man.” Estranged from his species-being (the self as social being, not atomized existence), egoistic man becomes “natural man,” and the rights of man appear as “natural rights,” to be protected by the state from society, as well as from the state itself.

The bourgeois conception of freedom is a negative one in which the person moves from the unfreedom of group identity, where he is defined in racial and religious terms, to the unfreedom of isolation, where he is an individual but also alone. As Erich Fromm writes in Escape from Freedom (1941): “freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity.” 

Civil society, the domain of natural man, is emancipated from politics. Thus, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx writes in “Zur Judenfrage,” “man was not freed from religion; he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property; he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business; he received freedom to engage in business.” The heart of Marx’s argument is this: “The political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism.” 

The solution to the problem? It is not to regress to the tribalism of the woke left. A truly left wing movement cannot join with the clerical fascism of the Party of God as we see the rank-and-file progressive and socialist organizations doing today. An authentic man of the left must either be liberal (which modern conservatives largely are) or socialist. For the authentic socialist, moving beyond liberalism is not a rejection of the liberal freedoms embodied in the US Bill of Rights. It is rather moving beyond the right of a few to own and control the means of production for purposes of accumulating and concentrating value and wealth in the hands of a globe-trotting elite at the expense of everybody else.

Private control of capital by the few, a special right in the true sense of a privilege, is the negative core of liberalism that constrains the positive rights identified by the Founders of the American Republican, rights Marx wanted to bring to the people. Thus, the strict liberal conception of “freedom from” must be joined by the positive conception of “freedom to.” This was Marx’s sense of socialism, which he equated with democracy. The woke left’s sense of socialism is a regressive one. The unacknowledged paradox is that what both the ideological left and the right today describes as left wing—Antifa, BLM, TRAs, the Party of God, the religious conservative, the right-wing libertarian—is actually right wing: it seeks a hierarchy only with the roles of oppressor-oppressed—imagined or real—flipped.

This is Marx’s formulation: Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished. 

This brings us to the role of the modern nation-state and democratic-republican politics. The notion of abstract citizen points to the historical necessity of the nation-state as the ground for organizing political action; consciousness cannot be raised among large groups of people—required for the overthrow of the capitalist state—when they are segmented by ethnicity, language, race, and religion, identities that the nation-state subordinates to shared liberties and rights, however incomplete they may be. To be sure, the modern nation-state falls short of completing the historic mission of the proletariat, but the proletariat cannot move from klasse an sich (“class in itself”) to klasse für sich (“class for itself”) without common ground upon which to move on the objective facts of structural contradictions and class antagonisms with the subjective practice of class struggle.

Marx is known for his critique of capitalism, but he finds capitalism not only impressive but revolutionary. It is in hindsight a necessary step in the struggle for human freedom. His assessment of capitalism was complex and included both recognition of its progressive features and its inherent contradictions. Marx recognized that capitalism, through the development of industrialization and technological advancements, had greatly increased the productive capacity of society. The capitalist mode of production, with its emphasis on machinery and large-scale production, brought about a level of productivity that had not been seen before.Marx saw capitalism as a progressive force that broke down traditional barriers and opened up new possibilities for human development—indeed, a force that was creating the basis for a society in which the needs of all people could be met, and necessary labor eliminated.

In its role of breaking down feudal social relations, characterized by limited technological progress, rigid social hierarchies, and serfdom, the rise of capitalism represented a radical departure from these old structures. At the same time, capitalism, while creating immense wealth and technological progress, did so on the basis of class exploitation, which produced alienation and inequality, and was moreover fraught by economic crises. Capitalism’s internal contradictions would eventually lead to the downfall of capitalism and the emergence of a new social order. today these contradictions are seen, for example, in the displacement of workers by automation and artificial intelligence.

In this, Marx was prophetic. He was hopeful that the proletariat would serve as the gravediggers who would pick up their shovels and bury the corpse of the system and face a new dawn of humanity. But the rise of corporate governance and technocratic rule intervened. The Enlightenment, rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics, was turned against the people (see Max Weber). The desire by global elites is now to establish a high-tech neo-feudal world system in which the bulk of humanity will be managed in a vast custodial state. The elite seek this because they, too, grasp the situation of late capitalism, and they wish to save their life of opulence and privilege in the face of the movement-potential to bring that technological prowess to instead work to eliminate necessary labor and provide comfort for and guarantee freedom to every man and woman. Rather than smash the proletariat movement, the capitalist-cum-lord played his greatest trick ever by coopting and misdirecting those scheduled to be wards of his new estate.

I’m repeating myself when I say that the struggle today is between, on the one side, the populist-nationalist, the patriotic man fighting for liberal values and a capitalism close to home, those things that must be preserved to continue the journey towards a greater democratic order based on human rights and individual autonomy, and, on the other side, the progressive-transnationalist who embraces the global corporate project to established a world neofeudalism that will allow a tiny elite and its managerial strata to keep the power and wealth they usurped from the people. The latter have created the useful idiots that they believe will deliver them the new world order. These are the people you see on the streets of our cities across the trans-Atlantic space. History has assigned the former the task of stopping them. Central to this task is waking the people from their walking slumber and stir them to defend humanity. I established this blog for that purpose. Thank you for reading it.

Update (4.17.2024): The hearing to determine whether Audrey Hale’s manifesto should be released to the public is underway (some details). The public needs to see in full these writings so they can determine for themselves whether the motive behind the shooting was formed from movement ideology. There is a suspicion—in my view confirmed by the leak and fact pattern—that Hale’s writings represent an indictment of woke progressive thought’s role is motivating violent extremism. You can’t indoctrinate young people to hate and loathe themselves without expecting that some will become Audrey Hales.

On March 27, 2023, at the Covenant School, a Presbyterian Church-affiliated elementary school located in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a 28-year-old woman identifying as a transgender man named Aiden, and a former student of the school, carried out a mass shooting, killing three nine-year-old children and three adults before two officers from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD) shot and killed her.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, law enforcement officers recovered what was initially referred to as a “manifesto” attributed to Hale. However, David Rausch, the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), disabused the media of that representation; this was, he insisted, a “mischaracterization.” He instead characterized the writings as documents outlining Hale’s plan with entries that resembled journal-like rantings, insisting that there was no ideological content.

The Director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, David Rausch, has released new information about the diaries and writings of Trans Shooter Audrey Hale:

“It’s been characterised as a manifesto, I think that’s a mischaracterisation”.

He then describes the diaries and… pic.twitter.com/PBVZyo08lj

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 14, 2023

Requests for access to these documents by those who preferred to determine for themselves what these writings represented were denied by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department (MNPD). The FBI, which took custody of the documents, also declined to make them available because they contained, according to a Metro Nashville councilwoman by the agency, a “blueprint of total destruction,” a design that had the potential to inspire other individuals to commit similar acts of violence. (That sounds like a manifesto.) Neither the MNPD nor the FBI have budged on the matter.

We now know, thanks to comedian Steven Crowder, host of the popular Internet show Louder with Crowder, who obtained three pages from two notebooks from a confidential source inside the MNPD, why local police and the FBI suppressed the document: it disrupts the narrative that mass shootings are the work of white supremacists. Moreover, the contents show that Rausch of the TBI misled the public. Crucially, the released pages raise a question about what the FBI meant when it said the pages contained a “blueprint of total destruction”: a blueprint for the total destruction of what?

In the manifesto, Hale looks forward to “DEATH DAY” for the “little crackers” with “white privileges.” “I’m a little nervous,” she writes on March 27, “but excited too.” She continues, “Can’t believe I’m doing this but I’m ready,” adding “I hope my victims aren’t.” Hale, who was white, writes, with optimism, “I hope I have a high death count,” before announcing: “Ready to die.” A page from a spiral notebook dated March 2 reads, “Kill those kids!!!” “Fuck you little shits. I wish to shoot you weakass dicks with your mop yellow hair. Wanna kill all you little crackers!! Bunch of little faggots with your white privileges. Fuck you faggots.” Another page, perhaps from the same notebook, details Hale’s hour-by-hour schedule for the massacre, including “get dressed,” “eat breakfast,” “prepare for attack,” and “time 2 die.”

On April 10th, in my essay Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities, I note the Hale case in a comprehensive analysis of transgender terrorism. I write there that “based on the totality of the circumstances,” the motive is so obvious that, “if the manifesto does not contain a clear motive, or suggests one that doesn’t fit the circumstances, an objective observer might suspect official manipulation.” Well, we see now that the pages confirm the suspected motive. MNPD, the FBI, and the TBI have a lot to answer for, as well as the media, who appear to have seen the manifesto.

In that essay Delusion to Illusion, I also note that Islamism and trans activism (TRA) are highly similar in form and content. In a recent essay (November 6), Woke Progressivism and the Party of God, I show how TRA politics, along with antifascism and antiracism, are steered into an alliance with Islamism by a political-ideology underpinned by post-colonial studies and related species of postmodernist critical theory, such as critical race theory and queer theory. (I have written several essays on this, so be sure to browse the table of contents: https://andrewaustin.blog)

In Woke Progressivism and the Party of God, I suggest that what lies beneath the academic veneer of this brand of critical theory (not all critical theory is reactionary) is a profound anti-whiteness, coded as antiracism. I want to be more obvious in my thesis and show more explicitly how the Convent School shooting is a piece of a whole. Indeed, the anti-white bigotry comes along with anti-male bigotry, i.e., misandry, couched in a critique of patriarchy and misogyny (Embedding Misogyny and the Progressive Mind). Anti-whiteness and anti-maleness are wrapped in misanthropy, i.e., a hatred and loathing of humanity—post-humanist/trans-humanist—depicting human beings as a virus destroying the planet (The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint).

Eminem, a cultural icon for millions, provides a useful instantiation of the self-hating/loathing sentiment. The beloved rap artist says that being white is so embarrassing that he wants to kill himself. We hear something similar from the transgender community—being trapped in the wrong body will drive them to suicide unless society pretends along with them that they really are what they believe they are but can never be and support the hormonal and surgical transformation of their bodies into a bad copies of the other gender or no gender at all (Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy). The difference here of course is the guilt is heaped on others and used as emotional blackmail to manipulate the public.

Eminem has dedicated his life to what often goes by black music/culture. The culture industry, equating whiteness with western civilization, manufactures and promotes a pop culture advertised as the antithesis of white culture, whatever that’s supposed to mean (The Myth of White Culture). The people who built the West were working largely from European cultural beliefs, norms, and values. Elites racialize that as white culture for political-ideological purposes: if the West is an expression of whiteness, and whiteness is racist, with white supremacy supposed as the motive behind colonialism and imperialism, unalloyed evils (despite accelerating the development of backwards societies), then western culture must be rejected and replaced. The good and decent person opposes whatever is white and embraces whatever is non-white.

This atavistic desire causes a large proportion of the white majority to loathe its race and ethnicity and become allied with nonwhites (excepting the white adjacent), and imbibe in the alternative culture, manufactured and promoted by the culture industry, that constellation of powerful corporations producing mass art, fashion, and music. These allies must be careful to stay in their lane, watch their language, avoid obvious cultural appropriation, and be sure to signal virtue. Not just in the aesthetic realm; rejecting western civilization and culture means rejecting its literary traditions, language rules, science, and rational systems of law and politics (Critical Race Theory: A New Racism; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones).

None of this is to condemn “black culture” or promote “white culture.” Rather, it is to say there are no such things. Culture is not a function of race (Culture and Race—Not the Same Thing). However, there is an ideological subculture that is poisoning the West and corrupting its youth. In fact, it is mentally deranging them.

Young men are tormented over their toxic masculinity, so they seek feminization, some of them deluding themselves into believing they’re women, and thus stepping into oppression. Young women are conditioned to believe male success is a function of the patriarchy; they seek empowerment in what have been traditionally male social roles, sometimes deluding themselves into believing they’re men. Some conflate the binary, rejecting gender altogether. All see gender as an oppressive social system of boxes they must escape—into what, who knows? (Utopia, perhaps—literally nowhere.) Gender ideology, which on its face is crackpot, becomes seductive because of the profound alienation of the masses from their bodies, estranged under the corporatist arrangements of late capitalism, gender ideology providing them with a rationalization for rejecting objective reality and believing instead that through drugs and surgeries they can become something they cannot—that they can transcend those bodies (Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex).

This is the context of post-humanism/trans-humanism, explaining also the actions of the climate activist destroying great works of art to protest oil. Observers rightly wonder why those who claim to care about other people block the way to hospitals, airports, and workplaces, violating the fundamental rights of a free people. It’s because those rights are the result of western civilization, which is oppressive—classist, racist, sexist—and therefore worthy of violating. Never mind that the real threat to the environment and health of living things is the contamination of the body, soil, and water with forever chemicals and micro plastics generated daily by the system the protestors reproduce with their ignorance. Everybody has to sacrifice for their movement—except them. Like queer theory, global warming is a quasi-religious ideology that takes advantage of a proportion of the masses made ignorant by woke progressivism.

My blog’s subtitle is “Path through Late Capitalism.” Why did I choose that subtitle? The things I talk about in my blog are manifestations of a pathological phase in the development of capitalism: the New Fascism. The reason why MNPD and the FBI suppressed Hale’s manifesto is because the administrative state is determined to continue the globalist project of dismantling the nation-state, crushing democratic-republicanism, abolishing liberal freedoms, i.e, civil, politics, and human rights, disrupting western beliefs, norms, and values. To accomplish this, they need to dissimulate the indoctrination of western youth in anti-humanist/post-humanist ideology. The objective is to disempower the working class from within to continue the ceaseless accumulation of value and wealth and concentrate it in the hands of the transnational corporations that run the world economy—a concentration of value and wealth that provides global elites with the ideological and material means to command the political power necessary to rule the planet.

Freedom and Reason strives to chart a path through this pathology of late capitalism with essays that expose the agenda in all its facets. Either we do nothing and become serfs in a global neofeudalism (The Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism; Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow) or we organize to save our republics and build a new economic system that provides a standard of living worthy of our species being.

Douglas Murray warned the West about this a long time ago. So did Bruce Bauer. So did Christopher Hitchens. Their warnings went unheeded. Branded “Islamophobes,” a propaganda term devised by Islamists to advance the project to Islamize the West by recoding the defense of civilization as bigotry, their observations of the fascistic character of Islamism were dismissed. And so here we are, the Islamization of Europe well underway, and the North American allies of the project letting their presence be known in cities across the continent, especially the youth.

What is the occasion that brings Islam’s useful idiots out of the woodwork? On October 7, Hamas militants launched thousands of rockets into Israel and invaded and infiltrated the country via air, land, and sea. A large number of armed Hamas fighters breached a border security fence, targeting Israeli civilians and soldiers who were caught off guard by the flash attack. Militants used motorboats to storm Israeli beaches, while others descended from the sky using paragliders. Israeli officials have reported over 1,400 casualties, including children, and more than 4,500 people injured as a result of these attacks. Babies were beheaded. Families were burned alive. Girls and women were raped. People of all ages were kidnapped.

Even before the bodies were cold the anti-Israel crowd was in the streets celebrating, a reaction that’s the analytical subject of the present essay. For their part, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) moved rapidly to neutralize Hamas in Gaza, operating forcefully on all fronts to destroy the terrorist organization’s capacity to perpetrate more atrocities against Jews. As Israel entered Gaza, the crowd gathered about its reactionary impulse growing numbers, the size of the protests a barometer for the historical stage of the West’s managed decline.

Many in the international community, including the Biden regime and the lunatics in Congress, wasted little time in calling for a humanitarian ceasefire. Former President Obama appeared and mumbled through an exercise in victim blaming. The sentiment of much of the world was obvious in the reaction to the United Nations’ General Assembly’s failure to secure an amendment to condemn Hamas’ terroristic actions. Many member states were not merely reluctant to condemn Hamas but applauded with the outcome of the vote was announced. By a recorded vote of 120 in favor to 14 against (with 45 abstentions), the Assembly adopted the resolution titled “Protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations” (A/ES-10/L.25). However, prior to adopting the resolution, the Assembly failed, by a recorded vote of 88 in favor to 55 against (with 23 abstentions), to adopt A/ES-10/L.26, an amendment unequivocally rejecting and condemning the terrorist attacks by Hamas that took place in Israel starting on October 7. The rejected amendment also condemned the taking of hostages and demanded the safety, well-being and humane treatment of those hostages in compliance with international law and call for their immediate and unconditional release. 

A ceasefire would only give Hamas time to regroup. Israel has its right to collective self-defense against aggressors (The Ethics of Collective Self-Defense). Israel now stands as a bulwark against the civilized world and the barbarian. Really, it always has. Many are eager to talk about the occupation and the settlements. But that’s not relevant right now. The West must first face down the enemies of the Enlightenment—both external and internal. No peace, no justice.

As noted, what I want to focus on in this essay is the phenomenon of (faux)leftwing groups celebrating the terrorist action and the meaning behind the decades-long critique of Israel as an “apartheid state,” as an instantiation of “white settler colonialism,” despite Jews having a continual presence in what the Romans renamed in the second century AD “Syria Palestine,” previously known as Judaea, the homeland of the Jews for more than three thousand years. (See Cornering Jews and the Falsification of History.)

Who are these leftwing groups? On the ground, it’s the usual collection of misfits: Antifa, Black Lives Matter (BLM), communists, democratic socialists, and trans rights activists (TRAs). They’re joined by Muslim immigrants who subscribe to Islamism, the politicized form of Islam, i.e., clerical fascism—although, in light of the fact that Islam is intrinsically political, desiring a world were everybody lives under the thumb of sharia, the term is really more as denotation of extreme extremism. It’s a hateful and dangerous mix of very bad ideas, disordered personalities, and religious zealotry.

They’re joined by the usual suspects—the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and the World Workers Party (WWP), as well as by student groups on campuses across the United States. Seeing each other as part of a common struggle against a common oppressor, an oppressor corrupted by humanism, individualism, and reason, ideas they associate with capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism—in a word, the West—, a small but noisy proportion of America is sympathetic to the array of illiberal and reactionary forces that mark today’s political terrain. At the core of this movement lies hatred, loathing, and resentment of white people and European civilization—and the Jewish people.

BREAKING: Pro-Palestine protesters appear to be threatening to storm through the White House fences and are threatening Secret Service agents.

Multiple video angles show hundreds of angry protesters up against the White House fence.

They also threw red paint on the fence as… pic.twitter.com/zt3092X79x

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 5, 2023

False consciousness of this depth and extent isn’t accidental. Beyond the alienating and anomic conditions of late capitalism, the illiberal reaction is the result of decades of cultivation by powerful ideational and institutional forces working to corrupt and undermine western civilization. Woke progressivism is the gravitational force that lies at the heart of postmodernist reactionary action, pulling allegiances into a comprehensive quasi-religious system around which today’s youth in particular revolve.

The socialist organizations identified above are not influential enough to have created this situation. Major mainstream institutions are responsible for the malignant system of untoward thought and behavior, including the corporate media, private and pubic education systems, and the culture industry. Sometimes the fruit of their labors go sideways, but whichever way they go, they’re useful for the disordering of the West and its reconstitution as a territory of the New World Order. Let’s see how long the transnational elite can ride the chaos they have sown.

A recent essay on the conflict came from a place of white heat (We are the Rebels Now). In the present essay, I detail these elements of the system and explain the overarching social logic that weaves each element into a comprehensive whole. I want to expand on Murray’s excellent analysis, in particular the part about post-colonial ideology. Taken together, this social logic, steeped in neo-Hegelian, post-colonialist, and poststructuralist / postmodernist ideologies, represents an existential threat to free and open societies predicated on the norms and values of the Enlightenment. I have written in-depth about these elements before on Freedom and Reason, so be sure to scroll through the blog’s table of contents and read more.

Antifa is a street-level fascistic and an ostensibly anti-policing organization. Appealing to the anarchist tactic of “propaganda of the deed,” members target for violent action free speech events by aggressively disrupting assemblies and harassing individuals based on their associations. The administrative state denies the organized character of Antifa, downplaying the magnitude of the threat the organization represents to public safety, easy to obscure given the large number of misfits and cluster B personality types (antisocial, borderline, narcissist) the organization counts among its ranks. (See The Problem with Antifascism).

“It’s not a group or an organization,” FBI Director Chris Wray told lawmakers in September 2020. “It’s a movement or an ideology.” In his debate with President Donald Trump a few week later, signaling the existence of talking points, then-nominee Joe Biden defended Antifa as “an idea, not an organization.” (“When a bat hits you over the head, that’s not an idea,” Trump countered.) In his testimony, Wray stressed that his agency does not police on ideological grounds, but is rather concerned with the violent threat groups pose to domestic security. Yet, Antifa is allowed operate without the level of attention and concern that peaceful patriotic groups receive (see Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism; MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin).

Black Lives Matter is a corporate-backed racist and anti-policing organization that enjoys the support of the Democratic Party and tens of millions of progressives and social democrats across the West—and millions more who are ignorant of what BLM actually represents (see What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it). Founded by three self-described neo-marxists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, ostensibly in response to the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, who shot a black man, Trayvon Martin, in self-defense in Sanford, Florida, in 2012, BLM moves from the fallacious standpoint of critical race theory (CRT), which reduces persons (living and dead) to personifications of abstract demographic categories. The movement sees all whites who do not ally with their cause as enemies of the people.

BLM activism ostensibly focuses on raising awareness about police violence and advocating for an end to the disproportionate use of force against black individuals, however there is very little evidence of racially disproportionate use of force in policing. BLM highlights the existence of “systemic racism” in various institutions, such as education, and employment. There’s very little evidence that blacks suffer discrimination in these institutions, either. Indeed, this is why the construct of systemic racism was manufactured by activist-academics. Systemic racism is the notion that white supremacy has been pushed so far down into the warp and woof of Western society that it requires critical social theory to find it. Depending on the force of circular reasoning, where demographic inequalities become self-explanatory, the movement calls for “structural changes” to rectify injustice. BLM contends that issues of race intersect with other forms of oppression, such as gender and sexuality, for example in emphasizing the unique challenges faced by “Black [sic] queer people.”

Trans rights activism is the street-level expression of the queer movement advocating for the rights of transgender and gender-diverse individuals. The movement promotes attitudes and policies that mainstream and normalize gender ideology; advocates work to secure legal protections against discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression in areas such as education, employment, housing, and public accommodations. This often involves advocating for the inclusion of gender identity in non-discrimination laws and policies, including the inclusion of non-binary and genderqueer identities in legal documents and institutions and compelled speech, e.g, forced misgendering. TRAs emphasize access of transgender individuals to trans healthcare, including hormonal treatments and irreversible surgeries, what is euphemized as “gender-affirming care” (GAC). They’re especially focused on “youth rights” over against the rights of parents to safeguard their children. TRAs are obsessed with gaining unfettered access to children. One of its expression is manifest in anti-family communism, which I covered in my previous blog entry.

Another obsession of TRAs is with TERFs, or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” a pejorative used to denote women, especially lesbians, who advocate for the preservation of sex-based rights and genital preferences, rights and preferences TRAs reframe as exclusionary of transgender women, i.e., males. TERFs are otherwise known as gender critical feminists (GCFs), meaning that they reject the obviously false premise that men and women can swap genders, be both genders, or have no gender at all. GCFs argue that only girls and women should be considered as such and allowed to enter and participate in female spaces and activities. TRAs complain that this lead to the exclusion of transgender women from these spaces and the denial of their gender identity. To be sure, gender critical feminism is not in line with the principles of inclusivity, equality, and intersectionality that is central to the woke progressive ideology that animates trans rights activism. That’s a good and necessary thing.

In addition to their association with BLM, TRAs routinely join with Antifa to disrupt women’s events. As I have shown on Freedom and Reason, many Antifa wear trans patches with images of AR15s embroidered on them on their uniforms to publicly signal their allegiances and their intent. In short, TRAs are anti-gay misogynists who demand others suspend their disbelief in obviously delusional claims. (See Self-Castration and TERF-Punching: Trans Rights are What Sort of Rights? Antifa is Trans Activism; From Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy.)

BREAKING: Massive pro-Palestine rally taking place in Washington DC. The rally is so large that the planned meeting location of Freedom Plaza can no longer hold the crowd. WATCH pic.twitter.com/5fILMuJtuQ

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) November 4, 2023

The Islamists these groups ally with seek to impose clerical fascism on the West. Clerical fascism is a political ideology and social movement that combines elements of both fascism and religious fundamentalism, especially evident in religious authorities or institutions playing a significant role in supporting or legitimizing authoritarian regimes. We need to socialize this term so the public understands what it is up against. Clerical fascism is the goal of the project to Islamize the West, to prepare the ground for totalitarianism by exploiting the western value of tolerance and religious pluralism.

Clerical fascism can manifest in various ways, such as the use of religion to justify authoritarian rule and the suppression of dissent or opposition by religious authorities. It can also manifest as politicized religious extremism. We saw the first type historically in the case of Fascist Italy. During the rule of Benito Mussolini, the Catholic Church aligned with the Italian fascist government, leading to the Lateran Treaty in 1929, which recognized the Vatican City as an independent state and established the Roman Catholic Church as the state religion of Italy. The regime of General Francisco Franco in Spain, which began in the late 1930s, was characterized by its close relationship with the Catholic Church. The Ustashi regime in Croatia, allied with Nazi Germany, had ties to the Catholic Church and promoted a form of fascism with a strong religious component.

The second type is what prevails today. The current state of Iran is the paradigm (see Since it is Not Possible to Change the Soul, the Body Must be Changed—Manifestations of Clerical Fascism). The Iranian Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 resulted in the establishment of an Islamic theocracy with authoritarian features (see Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?). Although an autocratic leader is not longer necessary in the inverted totalitarianism of the West (to use Sheldon Wolin’s concept), Iran still operates on the dictatorial model, its ultimate authority resting with the Supreme Leader, who holds significant power over all branches of government, the military, and the media. The Supreme Leader is not elected by the people but chosen by the Assembly of Experts. While Iran holds elections for various government positions, the Guardian Council, an unelected body, has the authority to vet and disqualify candidates. This restricts the range of political choices available to Iranian citizens.

The Iranian government has a history of cracking down on human rights activists, political dissidents, and others who criticize the government. This includes censorship of the internet, media, and social platforms, as well as arrests and imprisonment of activists and journalists. There are significant restrictions on freedom of expression, particularly regarding criticism of the government, the Supreme Leader, and religious authorities. Bloggers and journalists have been prosecuted for “insulting Islam” or “spreading propaganda.” This control is used to limit the flow of information and suppress dissent. The government enforces strict dress codes for women and restricts the rights of religious minorities.

Iran has been accused of supporting various armed groups and militias in the Middle East, which has raised concerns about regional stability and security. Iran has been a known and significant supporter of Hezbollah, a Shiite militant and political organization based in Lebanon. Hezbollah receives financial, ideological, logistical, and military support from Iran. Financial and military support for Hezbollah is channeled through various means, including diplomatic and non-governmental channels. Iran’s support for Hezbollah is driven by both ideological and geopolitical considerations, and it’s seen as a key element of Iran’s regional influence in the Middle East. This support has allowed Hezbollah to maintain its military capabilities and exert considerable influence in Lebanon and the broader region.

Hezbollah was formed in the early 1980s during the Lebanese civil war. The group is inspired by the Iranian Revolution and its founding ideology includes the promotion of Shiite Islamic values, resistance to Israeli occupation, and opposition to Western influence in the region. Hezbollah is both a political party with representation in the Lebanese parliament and a powerful armed militia. It has its own military wing, often referred to as the “Islamic Resistance.” Hezbollah has been involved in various conflicts and proxy wars in the Middle East, often in alignment with Iranian interests. It played a significant role in the Lebanese civil war, the conflict with Israel, and has been involved in the Syrian civil war in support of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Its political arm is known as the “Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc.”

A Palestinian political and military organization operating in the Palestinian territories, Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by multiple countries and organizations, including the United States, the European Union, Israel, Canada, and others. Hamas is an Arabic acronym that stands for “Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya,” which translates to the “Islamic Resistance Movement” in English. Founded in 1987 during the First Intifada, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood (a transnationalist Islamic organization), Hamas operates primarily in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has been involved in armed conflict, rocket attacks, and suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. It also has a significant presence in Palestinian politics and governs the Gaza Strip, which has been under its control since 2007.

The relationship between Hamas and Iran is complex and has evolved over time, but it is established that Iran has been a key supporter of the group. Iran provides funding, weapons, and other forms of assistance to Hamas, viewing the group as an ally in the broader geopolitical context of the Middle East. This support is part of Iran’s broader regional strategy to exert influence in the Palestinian territories and the wider Middle East. The assistance from Iran has allowed Hamas to maintain its military capabilities and continue its activities, including rocket attacks and other forms of resistance against Israel.

Thus the youth of America identifying as leftwing are or ally with the reactionary and murderous forces of clerical fascism—and one gets the sense that, if they felt that they could themselves be a murderous force, they would. They are certainly prepared to use violence and property destruction to convey their politics. You should ask yourself why the media is not reporting this and providing the necessary analysis to raise consciousness about the domestic security threat these groups pose. Jonathan Turley is reporting that that media organizations are telling their reporters not to characterize Hamas as a terrorist organization. Yet the corporate media has no problem defining American patriots as “domestic terrorists.” (Just the other day I heard a reporter refer to House Republicans as “legislative terrorists.”)

News outlets have instructed reporters not to call Hamas a terrorist group. Not only was Hamas previously defined as a terrorist group, but the acts defined the actors. These were terrorist acts and those who committed them were by definition terrorists. https://t.co/lb2p3IlLFp

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) October 25, 2023

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization I’m not wont to cite, has generated a useful list of some of the leftwing organizations that provide the ideological substance consumed by the misfits and often join them in public action (“Fringe-Left Groups Express Support for Hamas’s Invasion and Brutal Attacks in Israel”). There are several political groups identified by the ADL, including the DSA, the PLP, and the WWP. What is particularly useful here are direct quotes from these organizations. I have independently verified the ADL’s work on this page and provide sources for these quotes. For the sake of time, I will summarize the ADL document here and add some more evidence to the case file. At times this is close paraphrase.

From the ADL: “Some fringe-left groups are aligning with anti-Zionist organizations in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel, by expressing support for Hamas’s atrocities in the name of ‘resistance’ and ‘liberation.’ The Party for Socialism and Liberation, the World Workers Party, chapters of the Democratic Socialists for America, independent chapters of Black Lives Matter and more have shared these views in official statements and on social media. These groups are also helping to organize in-person, anti-Israel events, where participants are sharing further support for terrorism and violence, as well as expressing antisemitic rhetoric.”

DSA Salt Lake City published a “Statement on Palestinian Liberation” on October 7, expressing “unwavering solidarity with the people of Palestine in their decades long fight for national liberation” and urging Americans “to stand up against settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid.” The statement rationalize its support for the attack on Israeli civilians writing that “it is not terrorism or anti-semitism to fight against this injustice.” Pay attention to the denials here. The statement is voicing support for actions against Israeli civilians, arguing that such actions should not be labeled as terrorism or anti-semitism. The chapter repeated the genocidal slogan of Hamas: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” 

Two days later, DSA San Francisco put out a statement condemning “Israel’s ongoing occupation and the apartheid regime” and “the US’s continued funding and support of Israel’s decades-long colonization of Palestine.” Notably, the statement does not denounce the violence committed by Hamas. It emphasizes the concept that violent oppression can lead to resistance and expresses support for the right of all people, including Palestinians, to fight for their liberation and self-determination. “Violent oppression inevitably produces resistance,” the statement reads. “Socialists support the Palestinian people’s, and all people’s, right to resist and fight for their own liberation. This weekend’s events are no different. Decolonization is the only path towards peace. A better world is possible. We call on all those who share our vision of global working-class emancipation to join the fight to end the occupation and decolonize Palestine—from the river to the sea.” Again, we see the genocidal slogan.

DSA Long Beach wrote the next day that their chapter “fully supports and stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle for liberation from military occupation, colonialist oppression, and the brutal apartheid system imposed by the state of Israel.” The group alleged that, “for far too long, Israel, a settler colonial regime, has dispossessed, incarcerated, tortured, and murdered Palestinians by the thousands” and made a distinction between the Palestinian people’s struggle and what they termed as the actions of the Israeli state, adding that, “there is no symmetry between the Palestinian people’s struggle and the genocide being carried out by the Zionist terror state.”

That same day, DSA Pittsburgh released a statement of unwavering comradeship with Hamas, expressing “continued full and unequivocal support for the Palestinian struggle for freedom.” The statement linked Israel and the U.S. to the acts of violence committed by Hamas, framing them as responses to the conditions imposed by Israeli occupation. The statement argued that the conflict can only end if the apartheid regime is dismantled throughout the region, stating, “Violent opposition is the inevitable response to the conditions imposed by Israeli occupation. The conflict can only end if the apartheid regime is lifted from the river to the sea.” DSA Pittsburgh might object to conflating Hamas with the Palestinian people, but these words used here is Hamas propaganda. Just as a great deal of anti-semitism is laundered using the rhetoric of anti-Zionism, so is support for Hamas concealed by pro-Palestinian rhetoric.

The Twin Cities chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America said in their statement: “We are resolved in our fight to support the efforts of Palestinians, in Palestine and in the diaspora, in their efforts to free their people. Just as Palestinians took to the streets after George Floyd was murdered, we are resolved to show the same solidarity in defense of Palestinian liberation. We are resolved to build our capacity as a chapter to take our fight to city halls, to the state capitol, and to the halls of national power in the USA—to end all US financial support for the Israeli settler apartheid regime. We are resolved to strengthen ties between Indigenous movements, locally and across Turtle Island, and the anti-racist and anti-colonial international movement for Palestinian liberation. We are resolved to work toward rematriation of land in good relationship in the movements against the violent state and state-sponsored settler dispossession and mass killing of the Santee Dakhóta, the Anishinaabe, and other Native communities of present-day Minnesota. Justice for our Palestinian relatives can also unequivocally be named ‘Land Back’. We are resolved to enshrine the right to freedom of movement in Palestine, in the USA, and around the globe, and to fight border fascism wherever it rears its hideous head.” Yet when clerical fascism calls, the Twin Cities chapter of the DSA is all too eager to answer.

The Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, characterized the actions against Israeli civilians as “decolonial action in real-time.” They expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people’s pursuit of liberation from colonization and apartheid in their social media statements, stating that the organization “stands in solidarity with the palestinian [sic] people in the pursuit of their liberation from colonization and apartheid.” Put a pin in the rhetoric of “decolonial action.” In a now restricted X (Twitter) post, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

On October 8, a representative from BLM Philadelphia made a statement: “We need to ensure that even those who identify as progressive and advocate for justice must address the Palestinian issue…. The same law enforcement that takes lives in our streets here in Philadelphia are being trained in tactics deployed in Palestine. Those responsible for gentrifying our neighborhoods and taking land from its rightful owners in Palestine sit comfortably with their actions.” A day later, BLM Grassroots released a statement in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The statement justifies the actions of Hamas as a form of legitimate resistance, stating, “When a population has endured decades of apartheid and extreme violence, their resistance shouldn’t be condemned but should be understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”

BLM Chicago shared several social media posts supporting for Hamas. In a post on X (Twitter) on October 10, they posted an image of a paraglider, making reference to Hamas’ use of paragliders to infiltrate Israel and attack civilians, with the message “I stand with Palestine.” The next day in another post the group emphasized, “It’s important to remember that Israel’s actions have played a role in the creation of Hamas, and Zionism is seen as a betrayal of peace within Judaism, not a representation of those who oppose its harmful effects on Palestine.”

BLM Phoenix endorsed and shared a statement initially published by Arizona State University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The SJP statement declared that “Palestinian freedom fighters are not terrorists.” In response to a social media comment questioning their use of the term “freedom fighters” for Hamas, BLM Phoenix responded by saying, “We, too, are freedom fighters who have faced unjust labeling and violent retaliation for our stance against injustice. So, you can call them what you want, but we will refer to them as freedom fighters and stand in full support of the resistance efforts in Palestine.” They added, “The Palestinian action represented a revolution and an attempt to reclaim their freedom.”

BLM Detroit shared various social media posts that criticized Israel, including a biased infographic created by the Instagram account @Key48Return. This infographic contained support for Hamas and disputed claims regarding violence against Israeli civilians. For instance, it alleged that the few Israeli “hostages” were actually Israeli soldiers and generals who played a role in maintaining Palestinians as hostages in what is described as the world’s largest open-air prison. This contradicts the reality that many civilians, including children, were among those held captive by Hamas. The infographic also defended Hamas, asserting that criticism of the organization is rooted in disinformation.

The World Workers Party (WWP) issued an official statement on October 8 expressing “solidarity with Palestine,” praising the attack as “a heroic example for people yearning for liberation from imperialism worldwide.” The statement refrained from denouncing Hamas or the significant violence perpetrated against civilians, instead attributing the Hamas attack to the “white supremacist Zionist state.” The WWP statement argued that the actions of the Israeli regime, including illegal settlements, killings, land seizures, and occupation, made a response from the Palestinian people and their liberation organizations both inevitable and justifiable. The statement maintained that the Palestinian movement and people possessed the right to choose their methods of resistance, emphasizing their determination to confront the enemy with direct action. The WWP has actively participated in on-the-ground protests, co-sponsoring events, and providing posters for demonstrators. WWP-branded posters displayed at major rallies, such as those in New York City, carried messages like “Zionism is genocide!” and “Long live the intifada!” The WWP and its local chapters throughout the country shared similar messages on social media. One post conveyed the need for unwavering, unconditional support for Palestinian liberation, declaring, “By any means necessary, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.” They also used hashtags like “#”#itisrighttorebel,” and “#SmashTheZionistState.”

On October 7, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) issued a statement strongly endorsing the actions of Hamas, emphasizing that “resistance against apartheid and oppressive regimes is a fundamental right, not a criminal act.” They argued that such resistance is an inevitable response for people striving for self-determination rather than living under oppression. The PSL’s statement commended the efforts of “Palestinian resistance forces” and rejected the characterization of their actions as terrorism. PSL chapters across the country echoed the official PSL statement on social media, sharing multiple posts criticizing Israel and expressing support for Hamas’s violent actions.

PSL Seattle posted, “Tacoma proudly stands in unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian resistance and their just counter-offensive. Contrary to media and political narratives, Israel’s actions are not merely self-defense against ‘terrorism.’ Instead, the resistance’s actions are seen as a morally and legally legitimate response to occupation.” Beheading babies, burning people alive, raping girls and women, and throwing grenades into cramped structures where Jews were hiding was moral and legally legitimate. PSL has played a prominent role in organizing numerous anti-Israel protests nationwide since the recent events, collaborating with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the ANSWER Coalition, the Palestinian Youth Movement, Al-Awda NY, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and others. Some of these co-sponsored protests have featured rhetoric, occasionally from PSL-affiliated speakers, that included explicit utterances of Jew hatred and endorsements of the Hamas attacks.

For example, a PSL speaker at an October 14 protest in Tampa, FL, defended Hamas’s actions, arguing that “armed resistance is the only recourse left for Palestinians, and this is well within their rights under international law.” Several days earlier, at a PSL co-sponsored protest in New York (on October 8), speakers declared that “resistance should not be equated with terrorism” and encouraged resistance against “the Zionist entity by any means necessary,” presumably including what we any reasonable person would conceptualize as terrorism. In Anaheim, CA, same day, in a protest also co-sponsored by PSL, a speaker celebrated the “moment where Hamas is taking control and resisting.” At a rally in San Francisco, a speaker stated, “The spirit of intifada lives, and Palestine persists!” A day later, at a PSL co-sponsored protest in Cambridge, MA (on October 9), carrying the tagline “victory is ours,” a protester waved a flag bearing the symbol of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a recognized terrorist organization, while a speaker declared, “Settlers are not civilians, and they have no right to security.”

In an October 7 statement, the New York-based progressive legal non-profit, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), expressed support for the attack against Israel by reframing Hamas’s actions against civilians as a lawful attack on what they consider military targets. The statement referenced international law, stating that under these laws, armed groups like Palestinian resistance fighters are legally permitted to carry out attacks on military objectives. The statement placed the blame on Israel for what they termed as the erosion of international norms and the protections required for occupied populations and civilians.

On October 11, the Black Alliance for Peace, a human rights-focused group led by former Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka, issued a statement condemning the “murderous assault on occupied Palestine” by what they referred to as “the illegal Zionist settler-colonial, apartheid state,” then asserted the right of colonized people to resist occupation and fight for self-determination using any necessary means. Red Nation, a left-leaning Native American advocacy group, shared several posts expressing support for Hamas. A post on October 11, stated “Zionists are nazis without god or mercy.” The group also hosted Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah on an “emergency episode” of The Red Nation Podcast on October 9, during which he blamed the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on Israel.

Finally, the CPUSA has coverage of their minions here. I want to personal note about the US Communist Party. In the early 1990s, in Nashville, Tennessee, a friend of mine was contacted by the party. New York party members were doing a tour through the South and they wanted to visit. They found his name on a mailing list. This was in the wake of the split (in 1991) between the party and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), a democratic socialist group in the CPUSA. My friend and I invited several other friends and we had a meeting on his back porch. The pitch was to form the communist club of Nashville. My friend and I were given an autographed copy of Gus Hall’s Working Class USA: The Power and the Movement. He was still alive then. It was criticism of Hall by the CCDS in light of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the desire to reject Leninism and embrace democratic socialism that caused the split. Angela Davis was a major figure leading the split. We never formed a CPUSA club, but I worked with the party to support the failed Bridgestone-Firestone strike. I also never considered joining the CCDS. I stayed in touch with the party and in the aughts wrote some essays for the newspaper, which was by then the People’s World (the Daily Worker during its heyday). It is noteworthy that the CCDS permits dual membership in the DSA, the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA), and the CPUSA. I have long since denounced the CPUSA and these other organizations for their progressivism. My reading of Karl Marx was that he never intended communist politics to seek illiberal ends but rather to emancipate the man from the traditional structures that limited him—caste, class, property, and religion.

* * *

Since this list was compiled, the protests have only grown. The anti-western reaction is the result of an ideology that sees the world in stark terms of oppressor-oppressed, with the oppressor identified as non-allied white and white adjacent (principally Asians), cis gender (heterosexuals and homosexuals alike), and those who still believe in the humanist values of a secular West, which includes adherents to the Jewish and Christian traditions. It is rather obvious, then, who are the oppressed: black and brown people, including non-Jewish Middle Easterners, the mentally ill, and trans identified individuals—groups often referred to as the “marginalized” and “dispossessed.” The political right is fond of arguing that this scheme is an expansion of the basic logic of Marx and Engels’ materialist conception of history.

This is a mischaracterization of the logic of their method and politics. To be sure, Marx and Engels would not have walked back these famous words from The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” As noted, the passage does contain the dichotomy oppressor-oppressed.

However, Marx and Engels accept natural history as the source of wealth (not value) and reproduction of the species, facts that preclude most obviously the alienation of gender from sex, and moreover theorize that the oppression they sought to overthrow was the socioeconomic domination of the bourgeoisie, with racism one of the ideological means of class control, not to be centered in analysis, and certainly never elevated above the class dynamic.

Again, the end goal of communism in Marx’s eyes was to realize for everyone the liberals values of the Enlightenment and to further a secular society based on scientific rationalism. The ends of woke progressivism is totalitarian. It has an obvious quasi-religious character. This is why today’s left aligns with Islam, a backwards ideology Marx would have rejected, rejection obvious in his critique of religion and the problem of ideological superstructures. Where is the irreligion criticism on today’s left? A movement with a religious character can hardly be expected to articulate a cogent irreligious criticism. These are people who believe men can be women simply by think they are (since they cannot any other way).

So from where does this Manichean scheme originate? The superficial reading of Marx and Engels dynamic aside, it comes from conditioning and indoctrination, either directly in or through propaganda and curriculum influenced by, among other things, postcolonial studies, an interdisciplinary field rooted in literary studies and philosophy that emerged in the mid-20th century to critique the cultural, economic, political, and social implications of colonialism and the lasting impact of colonial legacies on formerly colonized nations and peoples.

Drawing from a wide range of methodological approaches and philosophical and theoretical frameworks, especially postmodernist critical theory, postcolonial studies intersects with other academic disciplines, such as anthropology, cultural studies, history, literary criticism, political science, psychology, and sociology. This means that these ideas are conveyed to students across many university programs. Typically these ideas are organized around radical conceptions of identity, power, representation, and resistance. The rhetoric is attractive to disaffected young people in search of meaning and purpose.

Postcolonial studies instruct young people to “deconstruct colonial narratives,” which, according to this view, organize the global system, dominated by rich white male abstractions, and portray colonized peoples as backwards, exotic, or inferior. Scholars/propagandists in this field ostensibly aim to provide a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the colonial experience, with an emphasis on “decolonizing knowledge” by questioning euro/western-centric perspectives while recognizing the validity and value of indigenous knowledge systems and local worldviews.

In light of the incorporation of external areas into the ever-expanding world capitalist system, postcolonial scholars explore the concept of hybridity, which involves the blending of multiple cultural influences in colonized societies. This can be seen in art, language, music, religion, and other aspects of culture. The creation of new cultural cultural forms through cultural mixing is often referred to as “creolization.” Postcolonial studies examines how colonialism has influenced the construction of identities, both collective and individual, and how these identities are represented in art, literature, music, etcetera.

Much of this is obvious albeit superficial—really a cloak hiding a dark desire. Much of my thinking is informed by world-systems theory, the dynamic of development-underdevelopment, and it is inevitable that such a dynamic would produce these results. However, many postcolonial texts and works of art are cast as “resistance literature,” that is, propaganda challenging allegedly oppressive colonial systems and the validity and legitimacy of several of their elements, asserting cultural and national identities, and exploring themes of empowerment, liberation, and self-determination, which are carried over into the core countries themselves using the concept of “internal colonialism.” The goal is not to understand today’s world but to unwind it, with an eyes towards overthrowing the colonial oppressors and redistributing their holdings, in part through mass immigration, what might be called the New Colonialism.

Although postcolonial studies scholars will tell you that this approach is not limited to the examination of European colonialism, but also encompasses the study of colonial and neocolonial dynamics worldwide, including the experiences of indigenous peoples, settler colonialism, and neocolonial practices, in practice it focuses mostly on the history of successive hegemonic states in the modern world system and the capitalist mode of production, a system and modality rooted in European civilization. The focus on the West is to produce an indictment which the woke progressive activist prosecutes—according to rules of evidence and adjudication based on a theory of justice that necessarily stands antithetical to the ethics and morals of the West, since these are by definition unjust and designed to perpetuate injustice.

Atavism and backwardness are not side-effects but features of the ideology. The fields of postcolonial studies, associated with the older field of third world studies, raise epistemological and ontological challenges to the West by elevating and advocating indigenous ways of knowing, particularly in contrast to the rational pursuits of science and truth. One of the historical legacies of colonialism, it is argued, is the imposition of foreign worldviews and knowledge systems on colonized peoples that continue to influence global power dynamics and intellectual paradigms. Postcolonial and third world studies critique western dominance in knowledge production, emphasizing how Eurocentric epistemologies marginalize “other ways of knowing,” which, in the postmodernist way of thinking about such things, are at the very least equally valid and useful, mainly because there is really no such thing as truth, truth being a product of the meta-narrative devised and promulgated by those in power. Indeed, everything is reduced to power, even morality, which in practice results in a dangerous nihilism.

In contrast, indigenous epistemologies, advocates contend, rely on experiential knowledge, oral traditions, and holistic worldviews, which they contend are marginalized and undervalued in western academic paradigms. Indigenous ways of knowing are embedded in worldviews and cosmologies that diverge significantly from Western, often materialistic, perspectives. Indigenous epistemologies incorporate spiritual dimensions and connections to ancestors, aspects challenging Western secularism and positivism, which have dominated (and should dominate) scientific inquiry.

Allah Akbar in Toronto 🇨🇦

Last night, thousands of Muslims lined the streets of Toronto to pray together.
This praying on the streets in large numbers is not as innocent as it seems, I know from experience in Iran and with Friday prayers by Islamists.
It is a political and… pic.twitter.com/lQkYZJrSd9

— Darya Safai MP (@SafaiDarya) November 6, 2023

These differences don’t so much challenge the foundations of how we understand reality as they adulterate knowledge with irrational and supernatural beliefs. This is how modern nation states like Canada can incorporate into their human rights language such notions as “two spirit,” a term used by some indigenous cultures in North America to describe a person who embodies both masculine and feminine spiritual qualities. Two-spirit people a unique gender identity that does not fit within the traditional binary understanding of gender as strictly male or female. This concept, we are told, is not be confused with non-binary or genderqueer identities in Western societies, two other irrational ideas associated with gender ideology. But it is all of a piece.

Ontological challenges in postcolonial and third world studies also relate to the process of decolonization and the reclamation of indigenous knowledge systems in the advocacy of recognizing the right of indigenous communities to define and preserve their ontologies. We see this in the land acknowledgements university administrators have professors include in their email signatures and syllabi, acknowledgements that incorporate primitive notions of ancestor worship in the course of study. There is no rational reason why any of these things should be recognized—except of course as part of a broad strategy of induction into the cult of woke progressivism.

The irony is that the practice of western elites privileging those voices who parrot their academic ideas, i.e., those serving as postcolonial collaborators, means that those individual from these (sub)cultures who disagree with the ideas of postcolonial and third world studies are marginalized by both western elites and formerly colonized populations, which often functions to keep them backwards and inferior to their western counterparts. Put another way, the “indigenous ways of knowing” scheme is often more useful to the western academic elite—the work progressive intellectual—in pushing his own anti-western agenda than these ways of knowing are to the people trying to advance their societies and elevating the conditions of their existence, often by seeking to adopt western ways of knowing and living (because they are demonstrably superior).

All this begs the question of how we choose which views are better than others; for whatever somebody says about the equality of worldviews across cultures, they don’t really believe that. Would somebody say that fascism is a valid way of knowing—presuming they don’t know that their own views are fascist? Probably not. What about Catholicism? The progressive church that is facilitating the invasion of America? Perhaps. What about Islam? Had I started there, they would likely have defended Islam, even though it is the major source of clerical fascism in the world today—indeed, because it is the major source of clerical fascism today. Indeed, we’re now seeing TikTok videos of women reading from the Koran and declaring it to be a feminist text and converting.

So, once more, what is the criteria one uses to weigh and measure the validity and usefulness of worldviews? If its default is that western ways of knowing, the Judeo-Christian tradition, humanism, rationalism, secularism, that all that is bad, then their criteria is not reasonable but issues from anti western bigotry. And since the western tradition is a white European tradition, then rejection on these grounds is anti-white racism. They will say that “racism = discrimination + power” and therefore the oppressed cannot be racist, and, moreover, all whites are either oppressors worthy of being and robbing or allies who recognize they’re oppressors and wash the feet of black and brown people. But this commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, seeing individuals as personification of abstract categories. This is primitive thinking. Collective punishment, blood guilt, and all the rest of it.

Scholars and activists advocate for decolonizing knowledge production and engaging in respectful dialogue between western and indigenous knowledge systems. But who speaks for who? Without an objective way of knowing which viewpoints are better, then those who speak for others will speak in a self-serving way. They contend that this entails acknowledging the value of multiple ways of knowing, “centering” indigenous voices and perspectives (I will keep saying it: which voices and perspectives?), and reconsidering the hierarchies that have historically placed Western science above other forms of knowledge.

Are western ways of knowing—scientific materialism—wrongly placed above other forms of knowledge? Of course not.

The oppressor-oppressed model of analysis is often associated with various theoretical perspectives that examine power dynamics, social inequalities, and systems of domination. Critical theory, which originated in the Frankfurt School, is a broader and interdisciplinary perspective that includes bastardized Marxist ideas but extends to other forms of oppression, including those related to race, gender, and culture. Critical theorists examine how various forms of oppression intersect and reinforce one another. Critical race theory focuses on racial oppression, systemic racism, and white supremacy. Critical theory seeks to understand how power operates and how social norms and institutions perpetuate inequality. Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler are associated with latter critical theory. I have written about all this many times on Freedom and Reason.

To sum up, postcolonial theory examines the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, highlighting the oppression of colonized peoples by colonial powers. It employs the oppressor-oppressed model to analyze the power dynamics between colonizers and the colonized. Queer theory explores issues related to sexuality and gender identity, using the oppressor-oppressed model to examine how heteronormative and cisnormative systems oppress non-heterosexual and non-cisgender individuals. Intersectionality, while not a standalone theoretical perspective, is a framework that recognizes the interconnectedness of various forms of oppression. It emphasizes how individuals can experience multiple intersecting oppressions, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, simultaneously. This is how we can see sentiments as bizarre as “Queers for Palestine.” All the elements of the constellation we have concerned ourselves with in this essay are organized by this Manichean formula and a vulgar dialectic that pretends to deny binaries.

The ethic in operation is this: Western colonialism is so oppressive, so evil, that the self-selected members of the “oppressed” are justified in any action and coding it “resistance.” Western rules of managing conflict—deliberative democracy, rational politics; processes, respect for civil and human rights—are dismissed as weapons of the oppressor, as are liberalism and associated values of free conscience, speech, and thought, assembly and association, humanism and secularism.

With the imaged heft of crackpot intellectualism, the left takes up authoritarian attitudes and raises nihilism to a virtue. The left is now home base for an anti/trans/post humanism, illiberalism, irrationalism, and violence. That the constellation of Antifa, BLM, TRA, socialist, and Islamist groups represents the left’s presence on the streets should be a clear signal that the woke contagion has rendered the left not merely useless for the emancipatory pursuits of democracy, human rights, individualism, liberty, and justice, but made it a serious threat to all those things.

But is this really the left? No, not really. It’s racist, sexist, and homophobic. How could it be? The emancipation these misfits seek is liberation from freedom and reason. They are product of late capitalism under corporatist logic. There’s no building up with them, just tearing down. But since the world thinks this is the left, Old Leftists (like me) will have to, at least for the time being, denounce the label. So, for my part, to be crystal clear, I disassociate myself from this madness.

Bad news for President Biden in latest New York Times poll

“In a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the farther Mr. Biden was behind, and he led only in the whitest of the six.” —The New York Times, November 5, 2023

“Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds,” reads The New York Times November 5 headline. The subtitle: “Voters in battleground states said they trusted Donald J. Trump over President Biden on the economy, foreign policy and immigration, as Mr. Biden’s multiracial base shows signs of fraying.” The article states, “The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.” (Note the NYTimes’ use of Trump’s MAGA name: Donald J. Trump. Is this mocking?)

This poll likely over-represents support for the Democrat candidate, as polls did in 2016 and 2020. Trump has to be ahead in Wisconsin—and leading by more in the other states. Trump is more popular now than he was in previous cycles, especially among minorities. If Republicans can prevent Democrats from the election rigging of 2020 (postal voting, ballot harvesting, drop boxes, limiting voter ID, suppression polls), and end the lawfare against Trump, he likely wins in a landslide in 2024. It will be the third president election victor for a president who will have only served twice.

From the article: “Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that backed Mr. Biden by landslide margins in 2020 are now far more closely contested, as two-thirds of the electorate sees the country moving in the wrong direction.”

And this: “Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years.” And this: “Black voters—long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Mr. Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times.”

If he wins, this time around, Trump will have a better understanding of how the administrative state worked to undermine his presidency the first time around. He needs to move on the Heritage Foundation’s plan to deconstruct the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus (Project 2025) —and begin the journey of stopping the managed decline of our nation and restoring the American Republican to its greatness—returning democracy to the people and securing their individual liberties and rights.

Trump needs to act immediately and decisively to end WWIII and reign in the influence of neoconservatives (i.e., legacy of the cold war progressive), close the border and start mass deportation, reimpose the travel ban from Muslim-majority country, and reform (if not dismantle) the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DoJ), and the FBI and related agencies, as well as Department of Health and Human Services along with its attendance regulatory agencies: the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Agriculture. The departments of Defense and Education are in desperate need of ideological cleansing. Shrinking NATO and reigning in, maybe even defunding the United Nations (UN) are also in order.

The people must restore American sovereignty and reestablish the principles of individual liberty and democratic-republicanism. Europe needs to join the project to save the Enlightenment and Western Civilization. There are hopeful signs in Europe with respect to immigration and deportation. The trans-Atlantic community must strive to regain its confidence as the greatest civilization the world has ever known. Expect belligerent resistance from the crowd of misfits that’s right now marching in our streets condemning “white settler colonialism” and expressing anti-Jewish sentiment. Enough corporate governance, professional-managerial rule, and street-level violence. The people have to crush this movement against democracy, freedom, and justice.

Islam means “submission,” “surrender.” It’s a totalitarian ideology. The clerics will tell you that it is here that you will finally find “peace” and “safety.” But it is a place of unfreedom. Let Islam win and you will be a slave.

Watching a Muslim man burning alive his wife to give her “a teaching,” i.e., submit to the Qur’an and to him, her husband. He doesn’t even care that she will be hideously disfigured and will be in chronic pain. He never cared about her beauty or her happiness. Only her obedience. It’s the Angels of Heaven he longs for, who, if he’s well-regarded, hence the viddying of his own criminal actions, will seek out the amplification of manhood that Allah will have given him.

As I watch the woman barely moving, submitting perhaps to scripture, more likely to shock, I am thinking about the personality type possessed by the husband. He has no empathy. She has no resistance left. It’s been beaten out of her. What did she do? Probably nothing. It’s what he did. This isn’t a one off. Not in this marriage. Not in other marriages.

I see in the perpetrators of the massacres of Israelis on the October 7 no empathy. I see sadism. I have watched the GoPro cameras of the terrorists. I have watched the body cams of the Israeli soldiers in the aftermath. I see and hear joy as the Muslim men as they burn alive Jews and execute others fleeing in terror. The “warriors” laugh as they toss grenades into shelters where Jews are hiding. I see and hear the trauma of the Israeli soldiers who arrive to find no one alive—to find babies beheaded in their cribs and smoldering families in their cars. 

In their own societies, Muslims are waiting for somebody to do something wrong so they can bring out the community to torture and kill them. A woman commits infidelity. What’s her punishment? She is to be buried half underground and stoned to death. It’s sport to them. A man commits a homosexual act. What’s his punishment? He’s to be thrown from a tower or hanged from a crane. In the more civilized Muslim-majority countries, it’s a sharp sword to the back of the neck.

So little do Palestinian lives matter to Hamas that they wish for them to be martyred for propaganda purposes. They hide behind their children. They hide in hospitals. They hide in schools. The travel in ambulances. 

Islam is social contagion. I don’t fully know why. But that’s true of a lot of social contagion. I’m seeing TikTok videos of young non-Muslim women reading the Koran and proclaiming it to be a feminist text—then converting, covering their beauty, declaring religious ecstasy. I look at the state of women in Muslim-majority country. Did the converts look at their state before deciding to ihtida? In what way is Islam feminist? (That’s a rhetorical question. It’s not at all.) But all women should be this way, according to Islam. You’re not human. You’re kafir until you convert. This is Islamization. Take it up one way or another. By sigh or by sword. You’re tolerated while the barbarian bides time.

The woke progressive youth of the West—the disordered and depressed—are drawn to Islam not because it’s feminist, or just. Nothing like that. They’re alienated and self-loathing. They’ve no confidence in their civilization, which has done more good in the world than all others. They reject the history that has given them too much time on their hands. They’re drawn to Islam because ideology has been pressed into their brains by their teachers—ideology that is selfish, narcissist, illiberal, and totalitarian. Selfish and narcissistic, they want their movement. Their illiberalism embraces the totalitarian one.

The left today has succumbed to what Erich Fromm described long ago as the authoritarian personality. This is the phenomenology of the New Fascism. It explains the rampant antisemitism that erupted across the West in the aftermath of October 7. To be sure, it was always there, waiting to be expressed, waiting for an excuse. The ancient hatred lurked in European culture and found expression in the old fascism. If finds expression always in the clerical fascism of Islam. It now finds expression in the West as progressivism, in corporate governance. This is why the left can’t bring itself to condemn terrorism, but rather easily justify atrocities on the basis of a history our young people think they know—on the basis of an ethic of justice rooted in inhumanity. The protest has dead eyes.

This is the consequence of decades of postmodernist critical theory, postcolonial studies, and related crackpot teachings. This is the consequence of the administrative state and the technocratic organization of society—development that require the death of the republic and its democratic institutions and liberal ethics. And a culture industry that ushered in the century of the self. This is why our schools are now easily exposed as indoctrination sites and our workplaces struggle sessions conditioning students and workers in irrational belief. The cover has come off.

The end of the Cold War was not a victory for the West. It was surrender to the irrational forces of atavistic pre-modernisms. The Enlightenment is undergoing mass extinction. The barbarian is inside the gate. And our own elites let him in and gave him the keys to the kingdom. We are in the early years of WWIII. The kinetic phase is now manifest. Except in this war, the struggle is internal to nations. The West is at war with itself. We are the rebels now.

Note (November 7, 2023): I was asked a provocative question this morning referencing this essay asking me to consider the question of why child pornography should be criminal and how does my response bear on the arguments presented here. “Isn’t it crime scene photography?” was the question.

When does a photograph, film, or video documenting a crime scene constitute a criminal offense itself. As a criminologist, I have seen quite a bit of crime scene photography, filmography, and videography. I wrote an essay about the matter inspired by James Allen’s 1999 Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America for The Journal of Black Studies several years ago. I compared the atrocities memorialized in those photographs to those of the Holocaust. While the photographs document crimes, collecting, distributing, and distributing them is not criminal. Indeed, it is of great importance that people have access to this material in order to grasp the significance of these crimes.

Memorializing the sexual exploitation of a child, which is a criminal act, since children can’t consent to such acts, recorded in the various media in which they fixed, is a criminal act in the same way that secretly recording women in a dressing room or the rape of a woman for personal or commercial purposes are or should be criminal offenses. To be sure, there is pornography that simulates these things; but if the women in the video consented to the acts depicted, they are not the victim of a crime. Presently, consensual sex acts conducted for the purposes of commercial pornography is legal in the United States. However, surveillance of women or raping them without their consent is not. The fruits of these crimes are also crime.

However, to relate this back to the essay, AI images are not of actual people. They are analogous to cartoons, drawings, paintings, etc., depicting ideas originating in the imagination of a man’s mind. That’s why I noted the work or R. Crumb. I won’t share his cartoons here, but you can find his work online. See, for example, his 1970 comic “Mr. Natural in ‘On the Bum Again’,” collected in Zap-Masters (2009). The story concerns a character called “Big Baby.” I won’t describe the content, but it’s explicitly pedophilic. The question one must ask in determining whether it’s criminal is whether an actual child was victimized in the production of the comic. If the answer no, then criminalizing the comic beyond that is thought crime.

In a 2017 issue of The British Journal of Criminology, in the article, Why Do Offenders Tape Their Crimes? Sveinung Sandberg and Thomas Ugelvik conclude: “New technologies are changing the way crimes are committed and the harmful consequences they have. Researchers, legislators and the victim support system need to take these changes seriously. For researchers, these developments call for an integration of insights taken from cultural, visual and narrative criminology. For legislators and the legal system, the additional harm following the recording and distribution of images of crime should be taken into account when legislating and sentencing in cases involving the use of cameras.”

* * * 

The institution of thought crime sneaks up on folks. You have to know what to look for. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British-based child safeguarding charity specializing in detecting, reporting, and minimizing child pornography, published a story a few days ago: “‘Worst nightmares’ come true as predators are able to make thousands of new AI images of real child victims.” “International collaboration vital as ‘real world’ abuses of AI escalate,” the subtitle goes. You might remember the IWF from its controversy years ago over the original album cover for the Scorpions’ Virgin Killer, which the IWF blacklisted. They dropped their blacklisting, but it was a sign of things to come. (One of many signs. Look them up.)

Those who read my blog know that I take a backseat to no one when it comes to child safeguarding. I’ve punished articles on this topic in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma and Sage’s Encyclopedia of Social Deviance, as well as several posts here at Freedom and Reason (Seeing and Admitting Grooming; Luring Children to the Edge: The Panic Over Lost Opportunities; What is Grooming?). However, if heeded, the implications of the demands of the IWF, threaten fundamental freedoms of conscience, expression, and speech. A sober examination of the problem of virtual child pornography is therefore in order.

For those who conflate the defense of free thought with being guilty of the thoughts authoritarians seek to censor, fuck off. I can’t imagine what would make a person sexually interested in children. I have the same thought about people who fantasize about rape and murder. I can’t emphasize. I can work with statistical patterns in an attempt to predict outcomes, but these are abstractions—and there’s the problem of false positives. What I care about is (a) prosecuting those individuals who actually harm concrete individuals in provable cases in courts of law, and (b) preventing the state from criminalizing art, expression, speech, and thought. Why (b) is important is because I don’t want to live in an Orwellian nightmare. Do you?

The IWF purports to reveal the disturbing extent of AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, having reportedly uncovered thousands of such images, some featuring (fictional) children under two years old. They cite their own work: How AI is being abused to create child sexual abuse imagery. “In 2023, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has been investigating its first reports of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) generated by artificial intelligence (AI).” Cue the moral panic.

CSAM stands for child sexual abuse material. Several organizations, most prominently RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), have stopped using the term “child pornography” in favor of the acronym CSAM because “it’s more accurate to call it what it is: evidence of child sexual abuse” (see “What is Child Sexual Abuse Material”). “While some of the pornography online depicts adults who have consented to be filmed, that’s never the case when the images depict children. Just as kids can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t consent to having images of their abuse recorded and distributed. Every explicit photo or video of a kid is actually evidence that the child has been a victim of sexual abuse.”

I emphasized that last sentence because this is what makes such images illegal: it is the memorialization of actual child victimization. United States law and precedent agree: “It is important to distinguish child pornography from the more conventional understanding of the term pornography.  Child pornography is a form of child sexual exploitation, and each image graphically memorializes the sexual abuse of that child.  Each child involved in the production of an image is a victim of sexual abuse.” (See Citizen’s Guide To U.S. Federal Law On Child Pornography.)

IWF warns the reader about the dark world of text-to-image technology. “In short, you type in what you want to see in online generators and the software generates the image. The technology is fast and accurate—images usually fit the text description very well. Many images can be generated at once—you are only really limited by the speed of your computer. You can then pick out your favorites; edit them; direct the technology to output exactly what you want.” The AI systems that generate virtual child porn work the same way as AI systems generating virtual adult porn. That’s because they’re the same systems. After considerable research, here’s what I understand about the process.

AI image generators work by using neural networks, particularly a class of learning models known as generative adversarial networks (GANs) or variational auto-encoders (VAEs), designed to produce images that resemble a given dataset. The key word here is resemble. The first step in the process is to gather a large dataset of images. These images are used to train the AI image generator. The quality of the generated images largely depends on the diversity and quality of the training data (as well as hyper-parameters and post-processing, but I won’t get into all that); neural networks are designed with specific architectures for image generation. 

GANs consists of two neural networks: a generator and a discriminator. The generator takes random noise as input and generates images. The discriminator is trained to distinguish between real and generated images. These networks are trained simultaneously in a competitive manner. The generator’s goal is to create images that are indistinguishable from real ones. The discriminator’ s goal is to become better at telling real from generated images. VAEs consist of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder maps input images to a lower-dimensional space, i.e., latent space, and generates a probability distribution. The decoder takes samples from this distribution and reconstructs images from them. VAEs are trained to generate images that match the training data distribution. 

During the training process, the generator learns to produce images that fool the discriminator (in the case of GANs) or reconstruct images faithfully (in the case of VAEs). The discriminator or encoder simultaneously improves its ability to distinguish between real and generated images or map input data to the latent space. GANs use a loss function that encourages the generator to produce images that the discriminator can’t distinguish from real ones. VAEs use a loss function that encourages the latent space to be structured in a way that makes it suitable for image generation. After training, the generator or decoder can take random noise or other inputs and produce images. The quality of the generated images improves as the training process progresses. AI systems are always learning.

IWF claims that the AI-generated images are made up of real images of children. But this misunderstands the process. The images generated by AI models are not copies of the source images that are used for training. Instead, these AI systems create synthetic images that are inspired by the patterns and features present in the training data. The generated images are not replicas of any specific source image but rather representations of what the model has learned about the general characteristics and structures of the training data. Put simply, the AI model learns statistical patterns and relationships from the training images and then uses this knowledge to generate entirely new images that may resemble the characteristics, content, and style of the training data. So, while the generated images may share similarities with the source images (e.g., they depict faces, poses, objects, or scenes), they are not copies or duplicates of any specific photograph; they are novel creations produced by the AI model.

In the case of images of children in sexually provocative poses or children involved in sexual activity, AI models never need to see actual photographs of children in sexual activities or situations. They have a universe of adults in sexualized scenarios, as well as a universe of children involved in various activities, to draw from. From its learning, systems re able to synthesize from these data entirely novel images that look photorealistic. The process works in much the same way that a human artist relies on his knowledge of the world to depict children in sexually provocative poses or involved in sexual activity. While we may find his work reprehensible, and would never attempt to draw such images ourselves, it is nonetheless the case that no child is sexually exploited in the process. The great cartoonist and graphic illustrator R. Crumb drew cartoons and illustrations (some photorealistic) that many observers find repulsive; however, they are just that: cartoons and illustrations. His brain generated those images from a universe of data downloaded in much the same way as an AI system does.

Should the generation and accumulation of these images be criminalized? That’s like asking whether R. Crumb is a criminal and his art contraband. Maybe you think so. I don’t. Moreover, the reaction risks assuming that all depictions of naked children are a priori instances of child sexual abuse. You might recall that Facebook and other web sites censored the cover art of Led Zeppelin’s album Houses of the Holy because it featured singer Robert Plant’s children naked on the cover. I have no doubt that there are individuals who find this album cover sexually arousing. Most others, however, find it a beautiful work of art. Whether it’s pornographic or not reflects the mind of the individual. There is nothing inherent in an image of a naked child that’s pornographic.

It is therefore rather beside the point—at least it should be—that the IWF indicates that the majority of AI-generated child sexual abuse images, as assessed by IWF analysts, now possess a level of realism that qualifies them as genuine images under UK law. The most convincing imagery is so lifelike, they claim, that even trained analysts struggle to differentiate it from actual photographs. Moreover, they warn, the use of text-to-image technology is expected to advance further, creating additional challenges for the IWF and law enforcement agencies. But this obscures the actual problem, which is the sexual exploitation of a really-existing child in the production of the image or video in question. If no actual child is depicted in the photograph, the question of whether the child was sexually exploited cannot follow, as no crime could have possibly taken place.

There is an asterisk associated with the second paragraph of the initial article cited above indicating an endnote. When we go to the endnote we find the following “AI CSAM is criminal—actionable under the same laws as real CSAM.” The laws identified are these: “The Protection of Children Act 1978 (as amended by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994). This law criminalizes the taking, distribution and possession of an ‘indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child.’” And: “The Coroners and Justice Act 2009. This law criminalizes the possession of ‘a prohibited image of a child.’ These are non-photographic—generally cartoons, drawings, animations or similar. AI CSAM is criminal—actionable under the same laws as real CSAM.” 

In guidance updated on November 21, 2019, titled “Indecent images of children: guidance for young people,” from the Home Office of the United Kingdom, referenced by IWF, while it does consider illegal “[t]aking, making, sharing and possessing indecent images and pseudo-photographs of people under 18,” that guidance was withdrawn on March 1, 2023. It is however, still instructive. Crucially, the withdrawn document defines a “pseudo-photograph” as “an image made by computer-graphics or otherwise which appears to be a photograph.” What counts as a pseudo-photograph? Photos, videos, tracings, and derivatives of a photograph, i.e., data that can be converted into a photograph. Moreover, while admitting that “‘indecent’ is not defined in legislation,” it “can include penetrative and non-penetrative sexual activity.” It defines “making” broadly as including opening, accessing, downloading, and storing pseudo-photographs. 

The withdrawn document announces that it worked with IWF to ensure every one knows the law and understand that “looking at sexual images or videos of under 18s is illegal, even if you thought they looked older” and that “these are images of real children and young people, and viewing them causes further harm.” But, in the case of pseudo-photographs generated by AI, these are not images of real children. If we return to the definition of CSAM, what lies at the heart of the issue are images that represent evidence of child sexual abuse. In the case of either human-imagined or AI-generated images, there are no sexually exploited children. There are only representations of sexually exploited children, in this case, children who do not exist. These are simulations, simulacra, and while the desire to make and consume them may offend our sensibilities, no crime has occurred except a thought crime, and at the end of that road lies totalitarianism.

People living in the UK beware. UK law does conflate images depicting child sexual abuse with images of child sexual abuse. In its guidance on Indecent and Prohibited Images of Children: “In deciding whether the image before you is a photograph/pseudo-photograph or a prohibited image apply the following test: If the image was printed would it look like a photograph (or a pseudo-photograph)? If it would then it should be prosecuted as such. For example, some high quality computer generated indecent images may be able to pass as photographs and should be prosecuted as such. The CPS has had successful prosecutions of computer-generated images as pseudo-photographs.” This is why IWF is concerned about the realistic nature of AI art.

Things are a bit different in America. Under United States law, which also prohibits CSAM, this does not include virtual child pornography or even all of what many would regard as child pornography. “Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer generated images indistinguishable from an actual minor, and images created, adapted, or modified, but appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor.” Note the emphasis on there being an actual minor involved. The meaning here is a little fuzzy. However, the Supreme Court clarified things in 2002.

In 1996, the ban on CSAM included sexually explicit material that “conveys the impression” that a child was involved in its creation, even if none was actually used. The Court ruled the “virtual pornography” law violated free speech rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy led the court majority, finding two provisions of the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act overly broad and unconstitutional. “The First Amendment requires a more precise restriction,” he wrote. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer joined him. Justice Kennedy asserted in his opinion that virtual child pornography was not directly related to child sexual abuse. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority (writing a separate opinion).

I find it despicable that a person would find children sexually arousing. I am not offended by much, but this is one of those things that shocks the conscience. But in reality, no child is sexually exploited by an individual who does not act to exploit that child. To give the state the power to punish people for their thoughts is to give up man’s most fundamental freedom: the freedom to think what he will. Ask yourself, who will be the ultimate arbiter of what shall be considered criminal thoughts? The state? Don’t make a whip for your own back. States are not to be trusted.

Imagine if one day the United Kingdom falls to Islam (it could happen). Folks there will rue the day they gave the state power over their thoughts. Unfortunately, the British have no First Amendment—and they have given the state too much power over their thoughts already. Keep in mind that they’ve already moved to make frank acknowledgment of reality in the case of gender a hate crime. Conflating art, expression, speech, and thought with actual harm caused to actual people reveals the mind of the authority. And while a person may be free to conflate these things, freedom demands that the state must not take up his conflation. Indeed, such a man is free to think this way because he lives in a democratic society that protects the right of individuals to think freely, whatever the content of those thoughts.

I watched an interesting program tonight, which I have shared at the bottom. Kaylyn Borysenko, an anarcho-capitalist I follow on X (Twitter), shared an anti-family presentation by ME O’Brien. It’s long. Borysenko makes decent points throughout, but the anti-Marxist reflex prevents a more depth analysis of O’Brien’s angle.

I studied Marxism in the 1990s in graduate school at the University of Tennessee. In fact, my PhD carries a specialization in critical political economy—heavily Marxist. My teachers were Marxists (Bill Robinson, now at UC-Santa Barbara, was one of them). What’s being passed off in the discussion as Marxism is really neo-Hegelian philosophy. Marx and Engels were materialists. And although ME O’Brien appeals to humanism at the end, and uses the rhetoric of communalism/communization throughout, O’Brien self-identifies as a Hegelian. They’re a lot of junk stuck to it so it is definitely neo.

Marx and Engels did not advocate for the abolition of the family. Their discussion of the family, in The Communist Manifesto (I wrote the intro to the Skyhorse edition, so check it out) and in Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (adapted from Marx’s notes of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family and Ancient Society), focuses on how the institution of the family is shaped by the mode of production and, in turn, reproduces the prevailing mode of production.

Marx and Engels argue for the abolition of the bourgeois family because, duh, they argue for the abolition of the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels believed that the family is functional to the reproduction of labor and the maintenance of class divisions in a given mode of production; the bourgeoise family, characterized by patriarchal structures, private property, and inheritance, is functional to the capitalist class. Theoretically, bourgeois attributes, such as inheritance, would lose their significance with the passing of capitalism. It’s a pretty obvious sociological observation.

SOCIALISM SATURDAY: Family Abolition with ME O'Brien https://t.co/5s0JX8HH50

— Karlyn Borysenko, the modern day Yuri Bezmenov (@DrKarlynB) October 28, 2023