We’re in the middle of a crime wave the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. We know this despite the Biden Administration failure to update the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer—the new dash-boarding system that should be giving criminal justice experts and the public as near to up-to-date crime data as possible. We know this because crime is a concrete manifestation of immorality that directly affects our lives. People experience crime and disorder in their lives. And social media has provided a means for seeing even more through other people’s eyes. We suspect the reason the FBI is not reporting the facts is because the facts will confirm what we already know: governments have utterly failed to protect the public from crime and violence.
Above the crime wave is represented at the national level by the rates of homicide and aggravated assault, both of which rose precipitously with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, what has been dubbed the “Ferguson Effect.” Because much of American is rural and suburban, and crime rates are typically much lower in these contexts compared to urban areas, the rise in these rates, as dramatic as they are, are made less so by aggregation. You may explore states and police areas by following the link with the caveat that these data have not been updated since 2021.
What explains the crime wave? “If crime is a product of poverty and discrimination as they say endlessly, why was there so much less of it when poverty and discrimination were much worse than today?” Thomas Sowell once said. “If massive [social] programs are the only hope to reduce violence in the ghetto, why was there so much less violence long before anyone ever thought of these programs?”
The implication of Sowell’s observations is correct: poverty doesn’t cause crime. The cause of crime is multifactorial. Structural inequality and material deprivation associated with poverty must be accompanied by family disintegration, demoralization, and the emergence and nurturance of a subculture that delegitimizes normative structures conducive to the development of a law abiding character. To be sure, without a system of determined wealth redistribution the capitalist mode of production produces inequality and material deprivation, but it’s the custodial state that progressives built over the twentieth century that demoralizes populations under their control and undermines their moral integrity, and these pieces are necessary for the emergence and persistence of a criminogenic culture.
The lull in crime between the early 1990s and the current rise in crime over the last decade was achieved by a massive expansion of the criminal control apparatus—more police on the street, greater technological prowess, better organization of command-and-control structure, aggressive policing and prosecution, tougher laws and sentencing, and a drastic increase in the incarceration of serious offenders. This effort was mounted at all levels of government—local, state, and federal. After decades of rising crime and violence beginning in the late 1960s, crime plateaued in the early 1990s and then began declining, this occurring in the face of rising inequality and poverty caused by globalization, i.e., offshoring of production and mass immigration.
Since then, a comprehensive political project, involving both propaganda of the word, seen in the rhetoric of antiracism and critical race theory, blaming the plight of poor disproportionately black and brown people on the western way of life, and propaganda of the deed, has delegitimized American institutions, especially the criminal justice system. The project has targeted the police with respect to its interactions with those subpopulations drastically overrepresented in crime, primarily black males, with the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” accompanied by the systemic depolicing of vulnerable communities under the banner of “Defunding the Police,” the politicization of prosecutors’ offices by transnational financiers, the widespread practice of cashless bail, and a myriad of other “reforms.”
This massive stand down of the criminal justice apparatus has unleashed those socialized in the criminogenic environments created by progressive policymakers and managed by Democratic Party members to prey on each other and those living near them. The millions flowing across the southern border fuel the fire. The effort to tamp down popular recognition of these facts is marked by accusations of bigotry and racism. But the public is becoming desensitized to the smears of woke progressivism. Situations often carry their own radicalizing effects. The people want law and order. They demand their human right to public safety. The violence of the present moment has shaken loose the memory of our disorderly past. We’ve been here before. And we don’t like it.
What happened in California on September 11, 2023 is startling, I know. It doesn’t even sound real. But this really happened. We have arrived at the point where a crackpot ideology will soon have the force of state behind it. Governor Gavin Newsom (the likely 2024 Democratic nominee for President of the Untied States) is sure to sign this monstrosity into law. It will mean that the state can commandeer children and destroy families if parents do not affirm the delusion that humans can change their gender and try to stop the genital mutilation of their children.
The pride Progress flag
Here are the details (I relying on coverage of this story by Tristan Justice writing for the Federalist): On Friday, the California legislature approved Assembly Bill 957, that could potentially lead to parents losing custody of their children if they express reservations about their child’s desire to undergo hormone treatments or surgeries to transition to the opposite sex. Originally, the bill was introduced to require courts to consider whether parents were supportive of their child’s identification as transgender during custody disputes. However, in June, as if the original intent of the bill weren’t bad enough, lawmakers amended it to include provisions that could hold parents accountable for child abuse if they were not considered adequately “affirming” of their child’s gender identity.
Republican state Senator Scott Wilk strongly criticized the bill, advising parents to consider leaving the state to protect their children. “In the past when we’ve had these discussions and I’ve seen parental rights atrophy, I’ve encouraged people to keep fighting,” Wilk said in June. “I’ve changed my mind on that,” Wilk added. “If you love your children, you need to flee California. You need to flee.”
The legislation is part of a broader trend of government actions in California that have sparked concerns about parental rights. In another recent development, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued a school district over rules compelling teachers to notify parents about changes related to their child’s gender identity. A local judge temporarily suspended this policy, pending further litigation. Last fall, Governor Newsom signed a bill stripping out-of-state parents of their ability to protect children seeking transgender medical procedures in California. This law mandates that doctors withhold medical information related to “gender identity” from parents.
Proponents of such laws argue that they protect transgender and gender-nonconforming students, citing studies that purportedly suggest that easing access to medical interventions for adolescents pursuing gender transitions may increase the risk of mental health issues, including suicide, which, as I discussed in yesterdays blog entry, is a form of emotional blackmail used by the queer lobby to bully parents into supporting “gender affirming care.” However, there are no studies supporting the claim that denying access to puberty blocked, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries increases risk of suicide among adolescents.
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Holy sh*t
The Secretary of State in Illinois came to speak out against “book bans” at school
Senator John Kennedy then reads directly from the books he is defending for kids
His reaction: "Those words are disturbing coming from your mouth."
The Secretary of State in Illinois Alexi Giannoulias came to the United States Senate to speak out against “book bans” at public schools and libraries. Senator John Kennedy read directly from the books the Secretary is defending. It’s straight up pornography. All Boys aren’t Blue and Gender Queer are the books excerpted. These are just two of many books sexualizing and pushing the queer agenda on children. The Secretary’s reaction? “Those words are disturbing coming from your mouth.” Indeed. Are they not also disturbing coming from a teacher or a drag queen?
In this video clip, it is admitted that pornographic materials and materials intended for sexual grooming are being framed in the language diversity, inclusion, and equity to blunt efforts at child safeguarding. Keeping these materials away from children is decried as “book banning.” Those who argue for protecting children are smeared as bigots. The project to normalize paraphilia and sexualize children finds libraries as one of the most important sites to colonize since the appeal can be made that these are taxpayer funded institutions that must remain open to all—including to children who can be lured into a sexualized world where norms are problematized and sexual boundaries transgressed. None of this is happening by accident. It’s all part of a piece.
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Unsure of the source, but this meme is essentially correct:
A short blog entry this morning. I have some longer pieces in the pipeline, but university lectures started this week, and I am always editing, elaborating, and updating my talks with students, so my attention is necessarily split between scholarship and teaching. This will from week to week affect the frequency and length of my essays going forward. At least for the next few months. I only have time for this note. But it is an important one. It’s a clip of Helen Joyce in conservation with Peter Boghossian taking on the toughest of roles: serving as the conscience of the parent who participates in the “transitioning” of a child.
Helen Joyce is an Irish journalist and mathematician and critic of the transgender rights movement.
Joyce speaks with moral clarity and courage. Like the emotional blackmail of suicide, the “I have a trans child” line is another manifestation of emotional bullying. It is designed to shut down criticism of gender ideology and the atrocities it justifies in the minds of those who fail to safeguard children from social contagion and to keep them away from disordered and unscrupulous others.
Whether trans identifying children are at greater risk of suicide is not a valid reason to stop their puberty, administer crosses hormones, and surgically mutilate their bodies. Either humans can change their sex or they can’t. The answer to this question is straightforward: humans are mammals and mammals cannot change sex. The argument that gender is distinct from sex is fallacious, as I have shown on this blog. It’s time to stop turning gay children into the simulacra of the opposite sex and help them accept themselves for who they are. Validate the experience, to be sure; don’t affirm the confusion. Being the parent of a “trans child” does not relieve one of the moral obligation to protect his child from harm.
Helen Joyce, an lrish journalist, spoke about the parents who have harmed their children irrevocably.
I was alerted to this clip by a X (twitter) user who described Joyce as a “startlingly cruel and hateful person.” The truth can be cruel for sure. When people speak the truth, others may indeed find it disturbing. Honest criticism of the choice of others can feel harsh. It must be one of the most difficult things for a parent to live with knowing he failed to safeguard his child from disordered and unscrupulous others. But a parent failing to protect his children doesn’t change the truth of his failure or the need to call him out on it. While truth has its own integrity, it depends on people with integrity to speak it. Helen Joyce has that integrity.
One more thing before I go. This idea that not stopping puberty being the same as forcing a child to participate in something against their will, without his consent, and so forth, or that puberty is like a disease or medical condition (precocious puberty aside)—these arguments are exactly the same as claiming that not stopping a child from getting taller is forcing him to grow taller and therefore to do something against his will and consent. Like sex, growing taller is a fact of life. Would it be right for the parent of a normally developing child to suppress the hormone that produces bone growth because her child—or the parent—wanted to be short? I believe that question answers itself. So what explains the practice of stopping puberty in a normally developing child? That question also answers itself.
It doesn’t matter what country you live in—Canada, Sweden, the United States—progressivism and social democracy, corporatism whatever its stripe, will destroy your country.
The managed decline of the modern nation-state is intentional. It’s organized by globalists through multiculturalism and mass immigration. The transnational corporate agenda involves dissolving democratic-republic forms of government and replacing them with interlinked corporate state apparatuses spanning the globe based on the social credit model road-tested by the Chinese Communist Party. It is a totalitarian model of governance.
The political economy of this system will not be the capitalism you knew—or thought you knew—but a system of corporatist arrangements with a neo-feudalist character and technocratic controls. It will be a high-tech custodial facility. It will be a situation of profound unfreedom. And it won’t need walls.
Source: Internet
You’re being reduced from a citizen to a serf. Tomorrow, you will own nothing. You will lease or rent everything you have—and you won’t be allowed to have those things unless you obey the corporate masters who lease or rent things to you.
Most of you won’t have a job but will be given a universal basic income with a minder who will dictate to you what you will be allowed to have. You minder may not be a human. It probably won’t be. It will probably be a chip on a card. Maybe even in your body somewhere.
You will be forced to take jabs—and all the rest of it—to have the things you need or want. If you want things anymore.
A key part of the process of transforming modern society into this postmodern nightmare is to destroy the integrity of Western civilization through the mass importation of peoples socialized in cultures that are incompatible with liberal ethics and modern values. These peoples will be instructed not to assimilate to Western civilization in any case. They will be taught to hate the West and its Enlightenment values.
This is not a conspiracy. They tell you what they are doing—they have been telling you their plans since the days of Horace Kallen and his crowd and their gospel of trans-nationalism and cultural pluralism. But even if they hadn’t told you, you would know what they are up to by what is in fact happening to you. Science doesn’t need access to or the presence of agency and explicit intent to explain why things happen the way they happen. It only needs the agency of the scientist. Or those who think like scientists. (Same thing.)
You possess common sense. And the professional scientist might mislead you (he is like the priest corruptible). If your leaders cared about your country they wouldn’t allow any of this to happen. These are patriots doing this to you. They are your class enemies. As we can see, this isn’t about allowing anything to happen but about actively making it happen with predictable consequences. We induce the intent from the actions.
Open your eyes. Don’t be gullible. They’re destroying your way of life and smearing and persecuting those of you who resist the project.
Georgia’s Cobb County School Board voted 4-3 along partisan lines to terminate Katherine Rinderle’s employment in their district for reading Scott Stuart’s My Shadow is Purple to her fifth grade classroom. Last week, MSNBC lent Rinderle its platform to claim in an op-ed that she is a casualty of an anti-LGBTQ+ and right-wing crusade that threatens “democracy at its core.” Her bid to be a martyr for woke progressivism is well written and poorly argued. The latter isn’t her fault, really; it is her actions and those of teachers like her that imperil the enlightened principles of liberal democratic society.
Katherine Rinderle was fired for reading My Shadow is Purple to her fifth grade classroom
I’ve read My Shadow is Purple and it’s unapologetically propaganda for progressive gender politics. The message of the book is that a child is not necessarily a boy or a girl but can be both or neither. Its publisher, Larrikin House, tells customers that the book, which it markets to preschool and kindergarten grade level children, is a “heartwarming and inspiring book about being true to yourself and moving beyond the gender binary.” That the book advances the pseudoscientific notion that a human beings can move beyond the gender binary is certainly a problem; it’s the responsibility of public school teachers to accurately convey the natural history of our species—or avoid the subject altogether. But Rinderle’s actions go well beyond disseminating misinformation in a public school classroom (disinformation given what any reasonably intelligent person can be expected to know about our species). Rinderle took advantage of her position to indoctrinate children in her political beliefs.
Parents are of course free to read My Shadow is Purple to their children at home if they wish, but reading this book to fifth graders with the intent clearly expressed by Rinderle is the equivalent of reading Scientology’s central text Dianetics to school children with the goal to positively convey the message contained therein (see Dianetics in Our Schools; Ideology in Our Public Schools). Even if the intent were to be critical of the pseudoscientific claims the book makes, which would be impossible in the current political climate without accusations of bigotry and transphobia, the book would still be inappropriate for a fifth grade classroom for the same reason that it would inappropriate for a teacher to tell children that God isn’t real. It’s simply not the place of teachers to engage in irreligious criticism with children that young. The proper response of a teacher when asked by a student if God is real is to tell them to discuss that with their parents. The same is true if a boy asks his teacher if he can be a girl.
The book in question
Is keeping My Shadow is Purple (or Stuart’s other book My Shadow is Pink) out of public schools censorship? Censorship refers to the act of controlling, prohibiting, or suppressing access to or distribution of certain forms of expression, ideas, or information. With respect to children, censorship is sometimes used to maintain societal standards and protect what is deemed culturally or moral appropriate. Censorship can involve excluding or suppressing content that is considered irrelevant, obscene, offensive, sexually explicit, or traumatizing. Censorship measures may be put in place to shield children and minors from harmful or age-inappropriate content, including explicit material, such as drug use, nudity, sexual activity, or violence. Censorship may also cover the transmission of ideas that advance a particular cultural, ideological, political, or religious agenda. So, yes, the restrictions placed on Stuart’s book constitutes censorship. The question is whether it is wrong to censor Stuart’s book.
Censoring information in public schools is also necessary to prevent the exploitation of situations where captive or vulnerable populations may become subject to indoctrination in a particular standpoint. Public schools are allowed to teach about religion in a neutral and objective manner. In discussing religious systems, teachers can include information about the history of various religions, as well as their beliefs and practices, as part of a well-rounded education. However, they must avoid promoting or endorsing any religious belief. Likewise, public schools are allowed to teach about political ideology in a neutral and objective manner in academically-relevant settings. Teachers can present various ideologies and political viewpoints, fostering critical thinking and even developing civics understanding, while allowing students to voice their opinions regarding such matters. But public schools cannot engage in partisan political activity. Teachers are restricted from advocating for a particular candidate, political party, or ideology. Public schools must maintain a politically neutral environment and refrain from endorsing or opposing specific political viewpoints.
The primary purpose of education is to promote critical thinking, the development of intellectual skills, and the transmission of reliable knowledge. Education aims to empower individuals to think independently and objectively analyze information in order to make informed decisions. A proper education encourages curiosity, exploration, questioning, and a well-rounded understanding of various perspectives and subjects. I know it’s cliché, but education is not necessarily about teaching children what to think but rather how to think. In contrast, indoctrination is part of a project to instill in others a set of beliefs, ideologies, and values that advance a particular agenda. Indoctrination involves a one-sided and systematic approach to dissemination of information aimed at shaping people’s feelings and opinions in a specific way. The goal of indoctrination is to teach children what to think.
Rinderle is an authority figure whose utterances in a classroom are received uncritically by most fifth graders. Even more than this, her teachings are received by them as accurate and prescriptive. She is their teacher. They trust her. They look up to her. This makes her actions exploitative. She knows that the children in her classroom are not equipped to challenge the book’s clearly pseudoscientific premise. How can she not know that it is not her role to socialize children in her ideology of gender identity anymore than it is for her to socialize children in her religious beliefs—whatever they are? Rinderle knowingly violated a rule emplaced to stop the indoctrination of children in the public school system. Indoctrination is not education and Rinderle failed not only in following the law but in the standards of her profession. Surely she was educated to know that the academic freedom she asserts in her op-ed does not cover indoctrination of children in movement ideologies or religious beliefs. Indeed, academic freedom asserts the opposite. The classroom is not her pulpit. The children are not there for her. She is there for them.
But she thinks all this is about her. Her essay suggests that she read this book as an act of civil disobedience. She believes her cause is righteous. Maybe so. However, it is therefore useful to remind people like her that Martin Luther King, Jr. told his followers that an act of civil disobedience is an action that violates the law, warning them that righteous violations of the law do not excuse one from the consequences of her actions. There is no constitutional right to break laws without consequences because the Rinderles of the world think laws safeguarding children are unjust or wrong. Even if we suppose Rinderle’s actions were righteous (they are not), she still has to suffer the consequences. There is no constitutional right to propagandize children in the course of one’s duties as a school teacher. Rinderle is not a victim. She is not a martyr. She is an activists who got caught exploiting a situation to push her political-ideological agenda.
Indoctrination relies on emotional manipulation, repetition, and pressure to conform. Indoctrination seeks to create unquestioning adherence to a particular set of beliefs or ideologies. Indoctrination rejects or demonizes alternative views, portraying them as forbidden or unacceptable—as bigoted or heretical. Indoctrination involves coercion, manipulation, or social pressure to conform to a particular belief system, sometimes without regard for an individual’s free choice. Indoctrination violates the child’s civil and human rights. Rinderle was not teaching her students. She was indoctrinating them. Her op-ed is that of a recalcitrant ideologue. May she never be allowed in a public school classroom again.
Update! New Mexico State Representatives Stefani Lord and John Block are calling for the Impeachment of New Mexico Governor Michelle Grisham after her executive order that violates the Second Amendment rights of citizens. “I have a newsflash for the Governor: The Second Amendment is an absolute right, and so is my authority to impeach you for violating your oath to New Mexico and the United States.”
The governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, a member of the Democratic Party, has declared that the right of civilians to carry firearms in public has been suspended for thirty days. The suspension is imposed on Albuquerque and the surrounding county. The reason for Grisham’s action is the sharp rise in gun violence in the city. Grisham says she can do this because no right is absolute and she possesses the power as the executive of her state to unilaterally determine the exercise of that right. She also said that she is not obligated to honor her oath of office in an emergency.
Typical of Democrats, Grisham appealed to the protection of children in justifying her actions. There have been in recent dats a handful of instances of gun deaths involving teenagers. On Wednesday night, eleven-year-old Froyland Villegas was shot and killed outside Isotopes Park, a minor league baseball stadium. At a nearby trailer park, four teenagers opened fire, resulting in a gunshot injury to five-year-old Galilea Samaniego, who was struck in the head. A fourteen-year-old boy used his father’s gun to fatally shoot thirteen-year-old Amber Archuleta. (Overall, Hispanics are overrepresented among both perpetrators and victims of gun homicides.)
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has suspended the Constitution in the state she controls
While it is true that no right is absolute, Grisham’s actions are unconstitutional, and her actions and reasoning should alert the people of New Mexico that they voted into office a dangerous authoritarian. Her actions and reasoning should also signal to the rest of the country what Democrats have in mind for gun rights going forward. They will paradoxically use the rise in gun crimes to argue for more restrictions on gun rights. Put another way, just when Americans need to carry firearms, they are seeing their right to self-defense abridged.
Saying that a constitutional right is not absolute is another way of saying that laws require specification, i.e., that they’re subject to limitations and restrictions, qualifications best determined by the legislators who write the laws and the courts that interpret them—not by administrative fiat. Courts play a special role in determining the constitutionality of government actions that restrict rights, ensuring that any limitations are justified, narrowly tailored, and consistent with the principles of a democratic society.
As a strict constitutionalist, I’m the first person to emphasize that need to balance rights against other important societal interests or rights. In some cases, the exercise of one person’s rights may conflict with the rights or well-being of others or with the broader public interest. Courts recognize that governments can impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place, and manner in which certain rights are exercised. For example, limitations on the location and timing of public protests may be imposed to ensure public safety and prevent disruptions. You cannot sit in the middle of the road and obstruct traffic. This is unsafe and disruptive. It moreover violates the fundamental right of individuals to freely travel.
Restrictions on speech cannot however be for the purpose of preventing the free exercise of speech. If the argument is that the state must suppress speech questioning a government narrative because it is disruptive to that narrative, then the very purpose of free speech is being denied—speech is protected in a democracy because it is a means to challenge the claims of authority. We saw during recent pandemic state agencies working closely with social media platforms to censor speech skeptical of claims made by public health authorities. This was a violation of the First Amendment, not a specification of it.
Examples of rights that are not absolute and can be subject to limitations include restrictions on obscenity or incitement to violence; limitations on religious practices that pose health or safety risks or violate laws of general applicability (i.e., regulations that apply uniformly to all individuals or entities within a specific jurisdiction without targeting a particular group); regulations on firearm ownership and possession, such as background checks and restrictions on certain types of weapons. But the need to specify or qualify a right is not a license to negate that right by administrative fiat.
It is not acceptable for the governor of a state to say that those who have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms cannot exercise that right in a manner consistent with a law passed by the legislature of that state because there has been an increase in gun violence. The right to keep and bear arms exists so that civilians can effectively defend themselves against those who mean them harm. It’s during a time where one is more likely to become a victim of gun violence that possessing a firearm becomes most necessary. To say you cannot defend yourself from gun violence is a direct violation of the right to self defense. A rise in gun violence is a time to remind people of their right to keep and carry firearms not a time to restrict their right to self-defense.
Source: Britannica
I don’t know if readers of Freedom and Reason are aware of this, but over the last several years the Albuquerque Police Department has been compelled by a court-ordered agreement with Barack Obama’s Department of Justice to implement mandated modifications in its operations. This initiative has incurred a financial burden of tens of million of dollars for taxpayers, covering expenses related to equipment, staffing, and training, as well as the appointment of a court monitor. It has also led to an increase in serious crime in Albuquerque. Notably, recent FBI crime statistics reveal a drastic increase in frequency of violent crime, including murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults during this period.
This is the consequence of depolicing, and the citizens of New Mexico are being told that not only will the police not protect you from gun violence anymore, but that you can’t to protect yourself from gun violence, either. Why would the government want to leave citizens defenseless in the face of rising criminal violence? The citizens of New Mexico need to ask Governor Grisham this question.
Ep. 22 Larry Sinclair says he had a night of crack cocaine-fueled sex with Barack Obama, and that Obama came back for more the next day. Assess for yourself. Here’s our interview. pic.twitter.com/R6CXwKv6gs
As of this moment, the 22 episode of Tucker Carlson on X has 13.6 million views. The episode has a way to go to reach the astronomical number Carlson’s show put up with his sit-down with Trump, and it may never make it there, but Larry Sinclair’s account of his interactions with Barack Obama and some of those around the president, will now be known by millions.
This was not the first time Americans have met Larry Sinclair. However, the first time, very people knew about it and the media suppressed the story. It’s not as if the press weren’t present when Sinclair publicly presented his account for the first time. I remember the 2008 press conference well, and the room was full of reporters. But if you had not caught it on C-SPAN, you would not have known about it.
Larry Sinclair speaking at his 2008 press conference
I found Sinclair believable then and I find him believable now. To be sure, an account won’t do for evidence obviously, but there are elements of the story that really make you think. It makes sense. It’s probably true. Can’t know for sure. But I believe the man.
For the record, I did not vote for Obama. Twice I did not vote for him. I had a colleague say to me before the election in 2008 (this was at convocation), “You, Andy, you must be especially excited to see a black man elected president.” I thought about asking her why she would assume that, but I said instead, sarcastically, “You mean Alan Keyes?” She was astonished. I hated the question and the snide remark just came out of me. I knew she didn’t mean Keyes. She couldn’t have meant Keyes. (If you don’t know about Keyes, look it up.)
I didn’t vote for Obama because (a) he was obviously CIA (see A Company Family: The Untold History of Obama and the CIA); (b) he was installed as president by the corporate state to continue the neoconservative agenda with a handsome brown face (count the wars he waged); (c) he acted like a Christian with a neon cross when only a few years before he mocked Christianity (Barack Obama: Doing the Lord’s Work; Obama’s Religious Speech); and (d) I had no doubt that he was going to set back race relations fifty years. In fact, on point (d) part of his function was to recreate the racial politics that Democrats have depended on since the founding of the nation. Oh, and (e) the rallies and flags were serious fascistic. It just wasn’t right. He would give speeches with no content and the crowd would swoon. Creepy. Orwellian. Hitlerian. For more reasons, see my July 2008 blog entry Why I am Not Voting for Barack Obama.)
Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States
I said what I said to my colleague because it could not be a black conservative that I was supposed to be excited about. Remember how they smeared Clarence Thomas? Remember how they mocked Herman Cain? And then, later, how they would mock Ben Carson? It’s the same thing with celebrating the first woman anything. Sarah Palin? Elizabeth Dole? “No, not those kind of women. We mean Hillary Clinton or Rachel Levine—those kind of women.” For progressives, the identity politics piece is not about the first black person, the first woman, the first gay person, etcetera. It’s about a progressive who happens to be black, or woman, or gay, or trans, or Muslims, or whatever. The identity piece is contingent on the politics. It’s so obvious. I’m always astonished by how stupid intelligent people are getting sucked in by such obvious con men.
So, no, I could not vote for Obama. Not because he blew Larry Sinclair in the back of a limo in 1999. Who cares about that? So he’s gay or bisexual. So what? I couldn’t vote for Obama because he represented—and continues to represent—the managed decline of the American Republic.
Enrique Tarrio was sentence to federal prison for 22 years for the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021
Why are progressives cheering the fact that it is a black man, Enrique Tarrio who gets the longest sentence in the January 6 show trials—a black man who wasn’t even at the Capitol that day? Because black men are not supposed to associate themselves with western chauvinism and conservative and populist politics.
Harrison Floyd is shown in a police booking mugshot released by the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia
It’s the same reason Harrison Floyd, who served as director of Black Voices for Trump, was the only one of the nineteen defendants in Fani Willis prosecution of those who questioned the 2020 results denied bail and sat in an Atlanta jail for several days.
Black men are supposed to be in the progressive camp, not on the side of democratic-republicanism and restoring the American Republic. The cultural left believes they own blacks and therefore define who they are and what they should believe. When blacks act contrary to their designated role, they are viewed as especially offensive to the progressive establishment.
Remember when Joe Biden told Charlamagne (a black man) on the radio show The Breakfast Club that “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”? That didn’t come out of the blue. Biden is fully embedded in the progressive ideology that sees black conservatives as not really black. They’re imposters. They’re race traitors. They’re called other things I cannot say or I will be censored or de-platformed.
For progressives, black is not about ancestry but about politics. Black Lives Matter is a slogan of the hegemonic power of the progressive establishment.
If some thing doesn’t exist but people very much think it does or wish that it did, then they may insist on its existence. For example, a man may believe, or at least wishes that you would believe, that he has magical powers. If you tell him that magic is a scientific impossibility, he may engage in subterfuge or sophistry to make it seem, perhaps to his sastifaction only, that he does in fact possess magical powers. Whatever you say to reinforce the truth of the scientific impossibility of such powers, the man remains confident in his claim that he possesses divinity and this makes him capable of performing miracles, such as turning one thing into another thing. He is helped in this delusion if what is transmuting is an invisible thing.
While you remain skeptical of his claims, you may find that there are others who are not so skeptical. Indeed, there are some who believe this man to in fact be divine and capable of performing miracles. When objective evidence of these powers is requested, his followers repeat and even contrive rationalizations as to why no such evidence appears—or they will connect in a spurious way some event or thing, often misconstrued, to the utterances or actions of the miracle man. A miracle, they will note, is defined as a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.
The attribution of coincidence to divine agency is an act of faith of course. You ask his followers whether faith is a strong belief in some thing, as in this man’s divinity, based on spiritual apprehension rather than evidence. You do this because you wish to put them on the path of scientific objectivity. No, they will say, faith is realized when you believe in something and on this basis come to know it its truth. Perhaps you have heard this convenient rationalization. Few clever persons who wish to deceive others fail to prepare their devotees to confront reason with clever-sounding sayings.
W🤡W. ~ The most insane word salad & ignorance I have seen & this is where we are headed if we don’t stop it.
🤡:“I am a biological woman… I am biological… and woman is basically anyone that says they are a woman.” = Biological Woman ⚠️This is their end game⚠️ pic.twitter.com/922cqrSXyb
In this video, the man says he is a woman. He even declares that he is a biological woman. He is biological, he argues, because the standard dictionary definition of biological is some thing with “living processes” and his existence is obviously an instantiation of that definition. He then says that “a woman is basically any one who says they are a woman.” It’s a “social construct,” he says, “an internal sense of self,” “how that person wants to present themselves to the world,” and “how they want to be perceived.” “That’s all a woman is, he contends: “somebody who says they are a woman,” adding “and who truly means it.” So if a man says he is a woman and he “truly means it” (I don’t think he does or he wouldn’t have made the video), then he is a woman—just as the man who says he can work magic and “truly means it” is divine.
Suppose the followers of the miracle man, backed against the wall in their desire to appear reasonable, make the argument that his divinity is social construct, by which is meant a concept that exists not in objective reality but as a result of human interaction. It is some thing that exists because humans agree that it exists. The man is divine because his followers agree that he is. I define social construct differently, and I will come to that later, but gender ideology means to convey with this term some thing that has no objective a priori existence and, moreover, a thing that is true because we agree that it is. One can push this to the point where everything is socially constructed because everything only exists because we agree that it does, but the man in the video appears to accept biology as an objective fact, that’s because he insists that he is physically existing, a fact that nobody would deny, and therefore he is a biological entity. But what if I do not agree that gender is a social construct?
AI-generated image of a faith healer
Used in the way the man is defining women he is presenting is a circular definition, i.e., a concept without any meaning. It’s exactly like saying a square is a geometric shape we identify as a square. Saying that a square is a geometric shape we identify as a square would mean that, if a circle is identified as a square, let’s call it a “trans square,” then a circle is a square. If a little kid gets it wrong, then he will be correct and hopefully educated. But if everybody around him insists he get it wrong, he’s bow being indoctrinated. “A trans square is a square,” I can hear the woke progressive geometrician chanting. But it’s not a square. It’s a circle. We know it’s not a square because the word “square” has a non-tautological definition; “a plane figure with four equal straight sides and four right angles.” (It’s a special type of rectangle.) Likewise, a woman is an “adult human female” (or “adult female human,” if you like). A man is an “adult human male.” Therefore, a man cannot be a female.
The person in the video is indeed a biological entity. He is a mammal. A primate. This person is a male mammal. And the argument this primate is making is utterly ridiculous. Also utterly ridiculous is the language “gender assigned at birth.” A baby is not assigned a gender at birth. Gender is determined by the adults in the room and whoever that is gets that determination right almost every time. That’s because gender is a description of external anatomical features, which are objective. The adults in the room can make sure that these features are not superficially male or female by determining the karyotype (a check of the chromosomes) and/or looking at the internal reproductive organs. The adults in the room don’t usually do this because the external indication of the person’s gender almost always conforms to the gender of the person. Anomalies aside, since there are only two genotypes (everybody has a gender and gender is binary), it’s a simple thing to figure out. So usually folks just leave it at that.
And it’s not just the genitalia that marks males from females. We know this is a man not because he told us but because he doesn’t pass. Thanks to the evolutionary process, natural history has provided for us a gender detection faculty, which rarely fails us. It’s how we survived as a species: among other things, being able to tell the difference between males and females. Men can’t give birth. (This man probably can’t even get women pregnant.) Whoever this dude is, his lack of sophistication (and, really, the ideology is no deeper than this no matter how well dressed it is) is exposing the lie he lives by trying to convince you of something that’s impossible. Mammals can’t change their gender. Humans are mammals. Therefore, humans cannot change their gender. That’s not just a valid syllogism. That is a natural fact. Moreover, to note another natural fact, there is no such things as divinity.
Remember Nineteen Eighty-Four and how George Orwell told you that the Party would do this? That the Party would tell you that “2+2=5”? Here you go. The Party is doing that. Remember when Orwell told you that authoritarians would misuse language and engage in sophistry to trick you into believing falsehoods and destructive doctrines? Yep, you’re looking at a living instantiation of Orwell’s warning. The man in the video, like the miracle man, needs you to affirm his identity because he knows that he is not what he claims or wants to be. He needs your help to pretend along with him that he is a woman because only if everybody believes the lie can he go about the world being regarded as a woman. This type of attitude is seen in aggressive theocrats who demand you say that their god is real. You’ve seen it. They want you pray. They will harass, intimidate, and punish you if you criticize or deny that their god is real. But their god is not real. To be sure, it’s illusion not delusion only because millions believe it. But there are no angels or devils. There are no boys born in girl’s bodies. There are no gendered souls. There are no souls.
Both the miracle man and the man in the video are offering their publics religious belief. Reject it. Live in the light of scientific truth. Don’t let disordered and dishonest people disorder your consciousness and muddle your conscience. Don’t let them elevate their delusion to a societal-wide illusion. Don’t let them bully you into bad faith. Don’t let them make you lie. Integrity is not bigotry.
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Merriam-Webster gives as an example of a social construct class distinctions, defining social construct as “an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society.” However, class distinctions are objective features of society determined by one’s actual relationship to the means of production. He is not a worker because this attribution is accepted by the people in a society but because it is the term given to an actually-existing phenomenon. If one sells his labor for a wage, he is a worker. The worker would not cease to exist if we decided there were no such things as workers—just as we cannot no imagine away the poor. The worker just wouldn’t be called that. The worker would only cease to exist if the capitalist mode of production were abolished and with it necessary labor.
To say that class distinctions are created and accepted by the people in a society is like arguing that ecosystems, with their distinctions between plants and animals and so forth, only exist because people in a society created and accepted the idea of the ecosystem, rather than having come upon an ecosystem, contemplated it, and given it the name we use to refer to it today.
If gender is a social construct, then what’s with the insistence that we all accept gender ideology as true? If something only exists because we agree that it does, then being obliged to agree with others about this matter is also a matter of agreement—which, in a free society, should be voluntary. What is the objective basis upon which I am obliged to agree that gender only exists because we agree that it does and then agree with this purported consensus? Power. Is power also a social construct? Or is power the result of control over the institutions stood up to coerce people? It’s the same force that dispenses with the rhetoric of social constructionism and tells that the gendered soul is an actual thing. The use of power in this way is synonymous with tyranny.
The term Munchausen syndrome is named after Baron Munchausen, a fictional character known for telling tall tales. Clinically known as Factitious Disorder Imposed on Self (FDIS), Munchausen syndrome is a rare mental disorder in which a person deliberately and repeatedly fakes physical or psychological symptoms, sometimes even inflicting injuries on his body, with the primary motivation of assuming the sick role and receiving medical attention and care.
People with Munchausen syndrome often go to great lengths to deceive medical professionals, fabricating elaborate stories about their symptoms, medical history, and even undergoing unnecessary medical procedures or surgeries. They may move from one healthcare provider to another, seeking treatment for their fictitious ailments, which can result in significant medical expenses, emotional distress, and potential physical harm from unnecessary interventions.
Treatment for Munchausen syndrome typically involves psychotherapy, however, since individuals with Munchausen syndrome often resist acknowledging their behavior, treatment is challenging. It is crucial, then, that physicians provide the first line of defense in identifying the disorder and referring the individual to competent mental health professionals.
Munchausen syndrome is distinct from other similar presenting mental health conditions in that, with Munchausen, the afflicted subject intentionally feigns illness or injury for personal gain, such as attention or sympathy, rather than experiencing genuine physical or psychological symptoms. This difference means that the target of Munchausen syndrome may be another person. In other words, the person suffering from this disorder project her desire for attention by feigning illness onto other people, seeing them as suffering from a medical condition and obtaining attention by being a dutiful and compassionate caregiver.
This projection is known as Munchausen by proxy (MBP), or as factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA), a mental disorder in which a caretaker, frequently a parent or guardian, deliberately amplifies or manufactures physical or psychological symptoms in the individual under her guardianship. The individual may be a child, an elderly family member, or another vulnerable individual. MBP, which disorders the protective instinct, can have terrible consequences for vulnerable individuals.
The typical case is the mother projecting onto her child a fictitious conditions. For example, a mother may come to believe that her daughter is a boy born in the wrong body and take the girl to a physician or a psychologist in hope of obtaining gender affirming care. Gender identity disorder, now known a gender dysphoria, is an easy illness to fake since there is no detectable physiological basis for the disorder. A diagnosis of gender dysphoria is dependent on what a person saying they have this condition, often corroborated by a parent or teachers.
The daughter, as most children are (but especially girls, who are on average more social compared to boys), is attentive and empathetic to her mother’s concern and, wanting to please her and relieve her mother of her stress, and perhaps coming to believe herself her mother’s delusion about her because of the certainty with which the mother expresses her beliefs, throws herself into the role by wearing her brother’s clothes, playing with her brother’s toys, etc. She may relent to puberty blockers, testosterone, and double mastectomy to help the mother continue the delusion. They may even appear to demand treatment.
Once the process is started, those around the mother and daughter become invested in the child’s fictitious condition and any express skepticism are dismissed as ignorant or prejudiced. It becomes very difficult to unwind the process once treatment for this fictitious condition begins. The drugs and surgeries are irreversible, and they set in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, when physicians believe the mother and child and participate with them in the unnecessary treatment of the child (and there is a financial incentive to do so, as well as peer pressure), the potential for harm to the child increases exponentially.
As with FDIS, the primary motive driving the mother’s behavior in FDIA is attention and sympathy for herself but through a proxy—her daughter. The mother is often ideologically influenced and signals her political identity and tribal membership by transitioning the child. The child may be caught up in the same politics. The mother and daughter are often the victims of social contagion (Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?). It doesn’t have to be a mother. Fathers and other individuals can suffer from MBP. However, while males appear to be overrepresented among those with Munchausen proper, in MBP the perpetrator is nearly always female and is typically the child’s mother.
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You can't be more explicit that you are not doing medicine — a diagnostic practice — at all, but are instead a member of a priesthood enacting body modification rituals in pursuit of transfiguration while operating under the guise of medicine. They are proudly boasting of this. https://t.co/MrvAQiooUQ
Wesley Lang puts the matter precisely when he writes, “You can’t be more explicit that you are not doing medicine—a diagnostic practice—at all, but are instead a member of a priesthood enacting body modification rituals in pursuit of transfiguration while operating under the guise of medicine. They are proudly boasting of this.”
What Dr. McNamara, a pediatrics professor at Yale, is saying is a crackpot. If your kid’s doctor speaks this way find another doctor. Kids have a gender and it’s not a subjective thing. Gender is an objective feature of a child’s biology. If a child perceives his gender is something other than what it is your job is to validate his feelings and help him work that out not affirm him in his delusion.
But doctors are not only failing to protect the children that come to their offices. They are putting them on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgically mutilating their bodies. Pediatricians abandon their child protective duties and sacrifice the health and well-being of children on the altar of a perverse religious ideology.
Crazy and unscrupulous people can and do obtain medical and other advanced degrees. Look at the history of people like John Money and Robert Stoller. Money, the man who coined the term “gender role” (which he plagiarized from the standard term “sex role” in the field of sociology) had doctors turn a boy’s penis into a fake vagina, told the boy he was a girl, and then made the child watch porn with his twin brother—while Money watched. Stoller, the man who coined the term “gender identity” also believed in dream telepathy, the pseudoscientific idea that supposes a man can share dreams with other men unassisted by technology.
Crazy people invented gender ideology. Crazy people came up with the crazy idea that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. And millions of people participate in the crazy.
Have the gullible ever considered the possibility that psychologically disordered individuals obtain medical and other advanced degrees and work their way into positions where they can profit financially while carrying out their fetishes on children? Of course not. They’re gullible. These are the people who fell for everything the doctors told them during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are the people who marched their children to the clinic for mRNA gene therapy shots and took pictures of it signal their virtue on social media platforms.
Democrat witness can’t name ONE study that shows how transgender procedures are beneficial for kids
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 14, 2023
You have to understand that gender affirming care is a massive fraud. Here is the same Dr. McNamara cannot cite a single systematic review of the evidence that indicates benefits from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Congressman Dan Crenshaw puts in her face systematic studies—the work of meta-analysis that she agrees is the gold standard after saying that this or that study is not how science works—that do not find benefits and all she can cite is “the standards of care.”
Which standards are these? Those established by a group called WPATH, or the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. The organization was founded in 1979 by social psychologist Paul Allen Walker as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA).
Who is Harry Benjamin? Benjamin was a German endocrinologist and sexologist who was an early pioneer of gender ideology. In 1985, a year before his death, Benjamin admitted the following: “I do remember going, as a young person, to a lecture by Auguste Forel, whose book The Sexual Question was a sensation at the time and which impressed me greatly. I also met Magnus Hirschfeld very early on through a girlfriend, who knew the police official Kopp, who was in charge investigating of sexual offenses. He, in turn, was a friend of Hirschfeld’s, and so I met both men. That was around 1907. They repeatedly took me along on their rounds through the homosexual bars in Berlin. I especially remember the ‘Eldorado’ with its drag shows, where also many of the customers appeared in the clothing of the other sex. The word ‘transvestite’ had not yet been invented. Hirschfeld coined it only in 1910 in his well-known study.” After this experience Benjamin became obsessed with what sexual medicine. (I will soon be following on all this in a length essay.)
Janus, the Greek deity of transitions (AI generated)
Who was Allen Walker? Walker conducted research with none other than the crackpot pedophile John Money in the Office of Psychohormonal Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the clinical psychologist who mutilated that young boy to prove he could raise him as a girl—an experiment that failed utterly with the subject taking his own life.
Walker was also in charge of the Janus Information Facility which oversaw the early surgical “transitions” of people who believed they were the other gender. Readers know who Janus was, right? Janus is the Greek god with two faces. He’s the god of doors, gates, and transitions. When you say somebody is Janus-faced you mean that they tell you one thing while doing another. Sexual deviants tell parents what they are doing to their faces by pitching it as medicine and depending on parents believing them, which, thanks to a constellation of personality and socialization factors, they often do.
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Interviewer: How do you explain the meteoric rise in numbers of kids in Australia presenting at gender clinics?
The professor’s sociological point is nonsense. There were no large numbers of children saying they were in the wrong body before this fad emerged. The emotional blackmail tactic of threatening suicide typical of gender dysphoria—where was this historically? What explains drastic differences in cross-national and cross-cultural rates of suicide? If objectively existing, shouldn’t the proportions of boys born in girls’ bodies in any given population be roughly the same across time and space? Are there racial and ethnic variations? The professor wants you to believe that little boys were scared to tell their parents they were really girls before gender ideology colonized schools and internet chat rooms. He doesn’t really believe this because he knows it is a lie.
Step 1: All the scientists agree. Step 2: Here’s a scientist that doesn't. Step 3: <censored> Step 4: All the scientists agree. pic.twitter.com/1iHUuB8AFa
How the industry shuts down opposition: it portrays those doctors who raise questions about the affirmation model as a danger to children. Teachers do this, as well, when hiding from parents the knowledge that their children believe they are in the wrong body, arguing that parents who do not subscribe to the affirmation model are a danger to their children. (See The Problem with parental Rights.)
Jillian Spencer describes her opposition to the affirmation model as a child protective matter. She is entirely correct to say that it’s the duty of governments and parents to protect children from cults and unscrupulous doctors. Why did woke progressives freak out about The Sound of Freedom? Because progressives want to weaken the child protective instinct and they understand that the more parents known about child sexualization and grooming the more they will see it in their everyday lives, because it goes on all around us. Gender ideology operates in the open. All we need to do is help people see what gender ideology is actually about.
Why are governments and so many parents failing to protect their children? Why is the government is failing to protect children is because (a) agencies have been captured by gender ideology and (b) the medical-industrial complex is making bank on drugging and mutilating children. Why parents are failing to protect their children is (a) faith in authority, (b) ignorance, and (c) an ideology that disorders their common sense and natural instincts and recruits them to play the key role in cult induction.
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Diane Ehrensaft, Mental Health Director, Child and Adolescent Gender Center Benioff CHildren’s Hospital
A prominent California director of a gender clinic and a professor at a medical school, Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, has asserted that there is an extensive spectrum of gender identities, even including one whimsically termed a “gender Tootsie Roll pop.” Dr. Ehrensaft, who has been a leading figure advocating for progressive gender concepts within the fields of medicine and psychology for many years, holds the positions of director of mental health and chief psychologist at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Children’s Hospital gender development center, in addition to being a professor at UCSF School of Medicine.
In a presentation on gender ideology, as reviewed by Fox News, Dr. Ehrensaft explored the concept of a “gender Tootsie Roll pop” identity as part of what she has referred to as “The New Gender Wars.” She has previously characterized this movement as a “Gender Revolution.” Ehrensaft advocates for early childhood social transitions, emphasizing that “gender encompasses a limitless range, and children should have the opportunity to live in their affirmed gender as soon as they recognize it,” as stated by Ehrensaft.
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To my American readers, the Democratic Party supports the madness. Remember that when you go to the polls. A lot of people lean into insanity so hard that they will think I just put in a plug for their party. Good. Keep leaning in. Stick out your chins. The boomerang is on its return trajectory.
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The Canadian shop teacher I dubbed “Busty Lemieux” because if his massive prosthetic breasts has shown up for work without his fetish gear and significant razor stubble—or, as the mass media reports it, “Kayla Lemieux is now dressing as a man.” I wondered aloud earlier today on social media whether the media would use he/him pronouns. Why they used she/her pronouns in the first place tell us how deeply gender ideology has burrowed into western culture. We will see.
freedom and reason 