Year: 2024

Five times a day. Every. Single. Day. pic.twitter.com/Ox6JsqrQ9S

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 11, 2024

I missed this when it happened. Apparently this happened last year. Minneapolis changed the noise ordinance to allow the call to prayer (adhan) to be broadcast from the rooftops of mosques five times a day everyday. The residents of Minneapolis have to put up with this racket throughout the day now. Why? For the sake of religious freedom as understood by woke progressives. You know, the doctrine of “inclusion.” But that’s not what’s really going on. Progressives could give a shit about the religious liberty of the majority of the American population. This is an ideological project.

Doesn’t religious liberty necessarily entail freedom from the imposition of religion? Yes, it does. Assumed in the First Amendment is not just the freedom to believe, say, and write what one will, which includes the right to receive the beliefs, utterances, and writings of others, but also the freedom to not believe, speak, or write what one won’t—or hear or read what one won’t in the privacy of his home. If you’re in my house and I find your speech annoying or offensive I will ask you to stop talking or leave my house because you have no right to compel me to hear what I do not wish to hear. If you don’t leave, then I can have you removed. And I will. If you have a sign where you falsely claim to believe in science in your yard (you know “This house believes…”), I don’t have to look at it. If you put that sign in my yard, then there’s going to be trouble.

Religious tolerance only obliges me to allow you your beliefs and rituals as long as they don’t interfere with my liberty. This is the way freedom works. Believe what you will, but don’t force me to have to endure your beliefs.

Religious liberty means that a people are free from zealots shouting their calls for prayers at captive populations, which is the residents of this blue city are: a captives. How can the people enjoy their right to religious liberty when a religious call to prayer invades their spaces five times a day everyday? Is it not enough to suffer the mosques everywhere? To step around the ever growing number of supplicants on prayer cloths in school hallways, sidewalks, and roads? Can’t Muslims put an app on their phone that notifies them when it’s time to pray and then find some space to do it so that the rest of humanity doesn’t have to participate in their religious rituals? (What’s next? Arrows pointing to Mecca on every ceiling?) No, because then they wouldn’t get to pump their ideology into every home and business and every ear in Minneapolis.

Eventually this will be in your city. This is what the Islamization project looks like. This isn’t religious liberty. It’s religious imperialism. And your politicians will make it possible. Care to guess which party is the party that will make this happen in your city? Do I have to tell you? You know.

“Oh, but what about church bells?” You mean the melodious sound heard on the first Black Sabbath record? Like the sleepy sound of a distance train in the rain? You mean the sound of traditional Western culture that only occasionally appears on the aural landscape and then only locally and then only briefly? You know, the sound we don’t have to hear five times a day everyday through amplified systems broadcast to every ear in the city telling us that our culture is disintegrating? That sound? Spare me the false equivalencies.

“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” —Minnesota Governor Tim, December, 2022

When Walz used a fake story about Vance during the first speech as a vice-presidential candidate, I knew he was not to be trusted. (Of course, I knew before then. The way he handled the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis is disqualifying.) Walz himself had been the victim of a fake news story himself, yet he used a fake story to mock Vance, a fellow veteran, all to further the Democratic Party line about “weird”—this coming from the party of ball gags, drag queens, puppy play, and transing children. (It was Walz who came up with the idea to call Vance weird.)

A man saying he served in war when he didn’t is not “misspeaking.” It’s a deliberate misrepresentation of one’s biography and military service record. This is what the Harris campaign wants the public to think, that Walz “misspoke” about his military rank and exploits. People know whether they served in war or not. Walz was deployed to Italy in a support position of active military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003. He never served in Afghanistan or Iraq. He therefore cannot say he served in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) or Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). This is stolen valor.

Unaware of Walz’s penchant for misrepresenting his record, the Harris-Walz campaign posted a (now removed) video of Walz, a hunter, speaking about his decision to change his position and support an assault weapons ban following the 2018 Parkland shooting. In the video, Walz states, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” Walz did not carry weapons in war. (That the Harris-Walz campaign seeks to ban so-called assault weapons, i.e., certain semi-automatic rifles, it itself disqualifying.)

People also know what rank they’ve achieved. Walz claimed for years that he was a retired Command Sergeant Major, the highest rank possible for an enlisted man, but he always knew that this wasn’t true. Walz retired before completing coursework at the US Army Sergeants Major Academy, along with other requirements associated with his promotion. Walz in fact retired at the rank of Master Sergeant. To give you sense of the stretch, a Master Sergeant claiming to be a Command Sergeant Major would be like a Colonel claiming to be a General.

Which brings us to another misrepresentation: the timing of his retirement. According to the Guard, Walz retired from military service in May of 2005. In August 2005, the Army issued a mobilization order for Walz’s unit. The unit mobilized in October of that year before deploying to Iraq in March 2006. We’re told that Walz retired before the mobilization order. But Walz knew the mobilization order was pending. We know he knew this because, as he ramped up for a congressional bid in 2005, his campaign issued a statement in March saying he still planned to run despite a pending mobilization of Minnesota National Guard soldiers to the theater of operations. The media desperately wants to spin this, but Walz knew the order was imminent and he bailed. Others went in his place. His unit suffered casualties.

Walz leans into his biography for political purposes, so he has no excuses. I’ve now watched numerous videos of Walz misrepresenting his record or failing to correct his record when others misrepresent his biography. They misrepresent his record because the bio they’re sent by his staff provides facts about his record—facts that are false. Media elites trust Walz because they’re fellow progressives (this is why the Harris team did not properly vet Walz). They are therefore also to blame for building Walz into something he is not. Of course, Walz is the most deserving of blame here because he misrepresented himself. But he could not have gotten away with it for so long if the media hadn’t covered for him.

Combine these misrepresentations with his numerous extreme positions on matters of freedom and democracy—lockdowns, mandatory vaccination, parental rights, transing children—and he is beyond the pale. This is a man who has openly expressed his hostility towards free speech. In December 2022, Walz went on MSNBC to support censorship and deplatforming, declaring, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” This is a man whose biggest applause line is to tell everyone to “mind your own business,” yet set up a hotline in Minnesota for citizens to report residents who violated COVID-19 mandates. This is the Stasi mentality, and it is fundamentally un-American. A man who lies about his biography who presumes to tell other people what’s true and what’s false is a threat to democracy.

(Update (4:04pm) Confirming what we already knew. Khelif’s Trainer Confirms “Problem With Chromosomes.” The next move for those who denied this is to say that it shouldn’t matter that Khelif is a male. Inclusion is more important than fairness. This is the progressive two-step. It’s a reflex. “They aren’t amputating the healthy breasts of 14 year olds.” Actually they are. “Good. They should.” They will never admit they’re wrong. They will only reveal what they thought about it the whole time they were dragging the red herring across the truth path.

Update (12:19pm, August 11): We learned yesterday that Bach is stepping down. Good. He’s either a coward or an incompetent. He should not have been in charge of the Olympics, albeit there are others who repeat the same absurdities.

Update (2:56pm): Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting has won the gold medal in the featherweight division (57kg or 126lbs) against Poland’s Julia Szeremeta (who will take the silver). The Taiwanese fighter won every round on all judges score cards. Lin Yu-ting is 5’9.” Like Imane Khelif, judges awarded Lin Yu-ting every round of every bout.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has developed a propaganda manual on how to obscure the presence of males in female sports while delegitimizing those who criticize and challenge IOC policy. Everyone associated with the Olympic Games is supposed to use the manual’s words and style when talking about policy and practice. It’s a real world instantiation of what George Orwell called “Newspeak.” The Portrayal Guidelines is based on definitions sex and gender incubated in postmodernist literary and philosophical studies (largely originating in France during the 1960s) known as “queer theory” and disseminated by the corporate-captured sense-making institutions—academia, the culture industry, mass media, etc. (See Judith Butler’s Gender Gibberish.)

Postmodernism is a political-ideological project to deny that knowledge (valid belief) is possible because the world is constructed by a grand narrative privileged by power presumed unjust (just because) and therefore warranting resistance. Resisting the narrative requires deconstructing it from the standpoint of those who deny reality, because reality limits what is possible (this is the source of transhumanist seeking), and who desire to transgress the boundaries that safeguard children and women. By embracing the totalitarian vision of postmodernist world (dis)ordering, the IOC has shown itself to be a throughly corrupt and ideologically-captured institution. But it’s only one of the many transnational organizations dis/reorganizing our language to dis/reorder our thoughts on a mass scale.

IOC president Thomas Bach recently said there is no scientific way to determine sex, but that he is sure sex chromosomes don’t anymore (“International Olympic Committee President Says Chromosomes Don’t Determine Sex: ‘Not True Anymore’”). From a scientific standpoint, this is false. A woman is an adult female human, which is determinable by karyotype, gamete size, and reproductive anatomy. Sex (or gender) is binary and immutable. But there’s a trick of language here because the IOC and other organizations and institutions do not accept science since they operate within the postmodernist frame that denies science as a master narrative, a fact proven by the Portrayal Guidelines in the IOC’s case (and there are lots of such guidelines out there, see for example, NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech). What Bach is really saying is that there can be no scientific way to determine gender because science is not a valid way of knowing—and there are no valid ways of knowing because all narratives are constructed by power, which is tautologically constituted by discursive formations.

In postmodernist thought, truth is not fact and reason but power. Power will tell you what truth is. It follows, then, that who is in power matters very much to your freedom. To be sure, we should pay attention to this. This is the truth of totalitarian systems.

The concept of gender as constructed by queer theory—which is being pressed into the brains of children and young adults in classrooms across the West (What is Grooming? )—is of recent development (Gender and the English Language) and entirely crackpot (Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy). Any pretense to science from this standpoint is pseudoscientific . It is impossible for a man to become a woman, yet everywhere we are told that “transwomen are women” and that men have penises and periods. These claims have no basis whatsoever in science—indeed they contradict science (and common sense). (Bubbles and Realities: How Ubiquitous is Gender Ideology?)

But since science is only one of many narratives, scientific claims are irrelevant—if you accept the premise of queer theory. Get it? 2+2=5 because the Party said so. The New Zealand government is your sole source of truth. Social media will tell you what is or is not disinformation. Fauci is omnipotent. Mask up. Vax up. Lock down. This is all happening right in front of your eyes. Don’t be gaslit. You’re not crazy. They are. (See The Project to Gaslight the Masses is Massive and Comprehensive.)

These crackpot ideas are projections of the corporate power that stands in back of postmodernism. Or, in China, the CCP. Or, in North Korea, the Dear Leader. But science does not derive its power from the corporate state, but from fact and reason. Science is a means to truth. Destroy science and everything reverts to myth, to stories projected by power, stories that may feign science (or indigenous knowledge and so on), but that conceal, deny, or sublimate truth. The postmodernists seek to undermine the authority of science to obscure the truth and then put in its place their ideological vision of the world, which is the corporatist vision.

This is why the tyrants are at war with free conscience, speech, press, association, and assembly. This is why they want to remove effective weaponry from the homes of citizens scheduled for serfdom. This is why they invade our privacy. This is why they deplatform us and debank us and unperson us. This is why they have organized a culture of snitches to report thought-crimes to the authorities. There is no conspiracy here. One need only report the facts—and not deny them—to see. Don’t legitimize their thought-stoping cliches.

This tyranny is known by several names. In America, it’s known progressivism and represented by the Democratic Party (with some Republicans in tow). In the UK it’s the Labour Party (with some Tories in tow). In back of these and other political parties is the corporate state and its attendant technocracy that defines science—if it bothers to define it at all—in ways that advance and entrench the “authority” of the transnational power elite, which is a very real and identifiable apparatus. This is what modern-day totalitarianism looks like.

Another mark of tyranny is the misogynistic denial of women’s rights and equity in sports. The IOC abandoned genetic gender testing in 1999. They have stubbornly refused to reinstitute testing because “every person has the right to practice sport without discrimination.” Does that “every person” include girls and women? If so, then why are males allowed to compete in women’s sports? The reason sports are gender segregated is because males as group have a distinct natural advantage over women in athletic competition. Allowing males to compete against women discriminates against women. So the IOC does not in fact believe “every person has the right to practice sport without discrimination.”

IOC President Thomas Bach, essentially validating the IBA’s findings, said, “It is not as easy as some may now want to portray it—that XX or XY is the clear distinction between men and women. This is scientifically not true anymore.” It is absolutely still scientifically true. The Y is the sex-determining chromosome in mammals. The IOC has embraced the pseudoscience of queer theory. The IOC doesn’t believe in science. It believes in male privilege.

When I post on this subject on social media, I am attacked as a bigot who wants to discriminate against trans and intersex people (both false constructs since a mammal cannot change gender and nobody is between or both sexes). We need to make obvious the assumption behind the smear. The assumption is that trans women are women and therefore they belong in women’s spaces and should be allowed to participate in women’s activities. But trans women are not women, therefore they do not belong in women’s spaces and should not be allowed to participate in women’s activities. Moreover, males with DSD should not be allowed to participate in female sports because they are males. Once the assumption is made obvious, that males are females, an absurdity, an obvious question emerges: Why are progressives so triggered by the defense of women’s rights? Shouldn’t they be first in line to defend these rights given their self-proclaimed feminism?

* * *

As many of you know, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has won the gold medal at welterweight (66kg or 145lbs) in women’s boxing. Khelif won every round on every scorecard in the three matches that went the distance. Standing 5’10”, Khelif is a male with an XY karyotype suffering DSD and likely a 5-ARD case (similar to South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya), meaning that there is endogenous testosterone production (internal testes). Khelif has gone through male puberty. IOC rules against doping diminish the likelihood that androgen analogs were used to produce Khelif’s adult male body. The International Boxing Association (IBA) has confirmed that Khelif is male, and the results were forwarded to Khelif.

Khelif was one of two boxers ruled ineligible for competition in women’s boxing, the other, Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, fights for the gold in the featherweight division this afternoon. Lin Yu-ting was also forwarded his test results. While confidentiality rules preclude the IBA from revealing the specific results themselves, both boxers could themselves release these results. Until they do or are retested by a reputable independent body their participation in the Summer Olympic Games will always carry an asterisk in the minds of millions of people across the planet. The IBA raised this issue because the IOC refused to consider the facts in determining eligibility for inclusion in women’s boxing.

For my previous analysis and commentary on this controversy, see Misogyny Resurgent: Atavistic Expressions of a Neoreligion; The Ubiquity of Fallacious Reasoning on the Progressive Left; Sacrificing Equity Upon the Altar of Exclusive Inclusivity; Dignity and Sex-Based Rights; Supper in the Spectacular Café. The last essay confirms the purpose of the open ceremony at the Paris Olympics, which I first discussed in my essays Apollo is Crucified and Butch Dines on Dionysus and The Paris Olympics and the War on Western Culture: Preparing the Masses for the New World Order.

Finally, the case of Nikki Hiltz has been used by social media commentators to challenge my position concerning Khelif. Nikki Hiltz is an American middle-distance runner who specializes in the 1500 meters. Since 2021, Hiltz had identified as “transgender” and “nonbinary” and goes by “them/they” pronouns. In addition to being a prominent athlete, Hiltz is an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. Like all mammals, humans have a gender, so the identity “nonbinary” is a nonsensical construct. But that aside, Hiltz is female and competes against other females, so there is no controversy here. Hiltz has said that she wants to take testosterone and make other changes to her body, but since the IOC will not allow this, she will have to wait. However, even with testosterone, Hiltz could never compete with elite male runners. The natural advantages males enjoy in track and field are for female athletes insurmountable.

The Associated Press today, “Michael Brown’s death 10 years ago sparked change in Ferguson.” But is it the change Ferguson needed? (I have written extensively on this topic. You will find in the following articles links to many other articles: Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect: What the Left and Right Get Right (and Wrong) About Crime and Violence; The Crime Wave and its Causes; G. Floyd’s Death May Have Changed the World. But in What Way? The Myth of Racist Criminal Justice Persists—at the Denial of Human Agency (and Logic); Debunking Mythologies Surrounding the American Criminal Justice System.)

Ferguson is part of the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Per the 2020 census, the population was 18,527, predominantly black. Ferguson is where BLM really took off. It’s the origin of the “hands up” meme, based on mythic circumstances. Now public safety is a concern in Ferguson because of depolicing. Residents know that the police are unlikely to pull them over, so they flaunt traffic laws, the AP tells us. But that ignores the worst of it. Crime—violent and nonviolent—is much higher after the Ferguson riots than before. Moreover, the demographic pattern is alarming. One in five residents in Ferguson is white, yet only six percent of violent crimes and four percent of property crimes were perpetrated by whites in 2022. No whites are identified as perpetrators of either homicide or robberies. One hundred percent of all homicide victims in Ferguson that year were black.

In 2022, using the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Homicide Tracker, the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area, which includes both St. Louis City and St. Louis County, reported at least 360 homicides. This figure places the area among the highest in the United States for homicide rates. The two charts form the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer presented below, St. Louis Police Department and the St. Louis County Police Department, give the reader a sense of the drastic overrepresentation of blacks in homicide. There were a total of 231 homicide victims and 177 perpetrators that year. Whites comprise 77 percent of the population in the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area, according to the 2020 census.

Police presence is the single greatest deterrent to crime. The reason crime is up around the nation is explained in part by depolicing (see John Lott’s recent article “The Truth about the Crime Explosion,” in National Review). Public safety is a human right, so the progressive left’s influence over policing policies has made communities much less safe, especially for black people. The United States enjoyed a long period of declining crime rates after the mid-1990s. This was because of expanded police present and mass incarceration. Unfortunately, police and prisons are necessary because of the conditions of black-majority neighborhoods, the result of progressive urban policy, foremost the destruction of the black family, caused by the idling of the black proletariat and public assistance. Democrats have transformed the cities under their control into danger zones. (See America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame.)

From the AP story: “Brown’s death catalyzed massive change in Ferguson. In 2014, every city leader was white in the majority-Black city. Today, the mayor, police chief, city attorney and other leaders are Black. The mostly-white police force of a decade ago now has more officers that are Black than white.” One might wonder why it matters what race the mayor, police chief, city attorney, and most police officers are. The response would be that the majority of the city is black, so the government should reflect this fact. That the crime situation is so much worse now than before is not a consideration. I am not saying that whites would do a better job (if they are progressive whites, then they won’t, as the crime problem in the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area attests to); I am questioning a metric of progress based on racial identity and not lower crime rates.

Before concluding this essay, note that “Black” is capitalized throughout the story whereas “white” is not. Have you noticed this trend in reporting? Look for it the next time you read a mainstream news story. I capitalize neither, since neither are proper nouns; they are racial categories. Why would AP capitalize one and not the other? Do you think there is a politics in back of this? As these organizations explain it, “Black” is capitalized to honor it as a specific cultural identity with a shared experiences, heritage, and history among people of African descent. This capitalization trend gained traction with the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter as a way to affirm the dignity and significance of Black identity. “White” is often left lowercase because it is viewed as a racial category rather than a unified cultural identity with the same shared heritage and history.

Editorial guidelines from organizations like the AP have adopted these practices to better reflect the distinct social and political meanings attached to these terms. This is what they claim. But who are organizations like the AP to determine the distinct social and political meanings attached to these terms? I teach race and ethnicity as part of my duties as a sociologist, and I have published numerous articles and essays on the topic (race relations lies at the heart of my dissertation Caste, Class, and Justice: Segregation, Accumulation, and Criminalization in the United States), and I can think of only one reason to reduce white people to a racial category and elevate black people to the status of a significant cultural identity, and that is to reify the myth of the racial hierarchy based on white supremacy and then flip it in the public minds for social justice’s sake. So, yes, it’s political.

“[T]he female category in elite sport has no raison d’être apart from the biological sex differences that lead to sex differences in performance and the gap between the top male and female athletes. The suggestion that we could choose to rationalize the category differently—for instance, on the basis of self-declared gender identity—or that we could make increasingly numerous exceptions in the interests of inclusion (as the IOC seems to have done to allow Khelif and Lin to compete in Paris) has no legs outside of certain progressive enclaves.” —Doriane Coleman, Professor of Law, Duke University, writing for Quillette.

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” —Winston, from his diary.

Aside from the obvious truth of point Coleman is making, I am happy to see mention of “certain progressive enclaves.” One of the things the progressive left perceives about itself is that it represents a large proportion of the population. In fact, according to Pew Research, the progressive left makes up only around six percent of the public and seven percent of the electorate in the United States. They are a distinct minority of voters even if we expand the definition (there are self-described liberals who are actually progressives). Another thing the progressive left perceives about itself is its righteousness. Progressives elevate themselves to the position of moral arbiter of justice and morality—asserting as just and moral a system that contradicts the tents of Western Civilization.

Why, then, are progressive left views so amplified? How did such a small group come to make others so fearful that they keep quiet about so many things? Because left progressivism is useful to the power elite who control the sense-making institutions—the administrative state, the culture industry, the educational system, and the mass media. Left progressivism is a major piece of the corporate agenda. Why? At the heart of left progressivism is the postmodernist project to undermine common sense and obviate normal pattern recognition systems—even artificial ones. The gender detection module, essential for reproduction of the species and maintaining safeguarding norms, is the primary target for disordering; if common understanding of something so basic and natural can be disrupted, then the population will be conditioned to accept whatever the Party tells it.

The gender project is the equivalent of the demand O’Brien makes of Winston in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: the falsehood “two and two equals five.” During his struggle session in the Ministry of Love, after insisting on giving the true answer to the number of fingers O’Brien holds up, which is four, Winton finally tells O’Brien what he wants to hear. O’Brien tells Winston that this isn’t good enough. “No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?” Winston again gives the false answer. “You are a slow learner, Winston.” Broken, Winston asks O’Brien for help. “How can I help it?” He pleads. “How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two make four.” O’Brien responds, “Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

“Sometimes, Winston, a man is a woman. Sometimes a woman is a man. Sometimes an individual is both man and woman at once. Sometimes the person is neither of them. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

PBS: “Olympic boxer Imane Khelif says misconceptions about her gender ‘harms human dignity.’” Saying that the criticisms of the inclusion of males in women’s boxing is “something that harms human dignity,” Khelif said in Arabic, “I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic Charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects, massive effects.” He continued: “It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people. And because of that, I ask them to refrain from bullying.”

(Note, I use pronouns based on gender, which is a synonym for sex. The male of our species, and every other mammalian species, is referenced in the English language using “he/him” pronouns. The demand that society use pronouns corresponding to the gender an individual prefers to be, rather than using the pronouns that refer to the person’s gender, is a project to rewire our native understanding of gender. See Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words; Linguistic Programming: A Tool of Tyrants; Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module. There is no controversy concerning the accurate gendering of other mammals. For example, if one uses “she/her” pronouns in reference to a dog (not a bitch), the owner will likely correct you. Admittedly, I struggle a bit in these cases because it may be the case that these individuals were raised as female. I do sympathize with a person who discovered they are not the gender they thought they were.)

But the question of dignity lies in the opposite direction. Keeping males out of women’s sports may hurt their feelings, but it does not harm their dignity. However, allowing males to compete in women’s sports does harm the dignity of girls and women. You can have sympathy for individuals who suffer from a disorder, and you can accommodate them—as long as doing so does not violate the liberties and rights of others.

In the context of sex-based rights, dignity for girls and women involves recognizing and upholding our respect and their inherent worth by ensuring they live free from discrimination, exploitation, and violence. It encompasses providing them with equal access to meaningful and rewarding opportunities, while also ensuring their voices are heard and valued in decision-making processes. Upholding dignity means acknowledging the contributions of girls and women and fostering an environment where they can thrive without fear of harm or prejudice.

Equitable conditions are essential in this regard, as they involve recognizing and addressing the differences between females and males to achieve substantive or true equality. This means acknowledging that, while all individuals deserve equal respect and opportunities, their unique experiences and needs—shaped by biological, cultural, and social factors—require class-based approaches. Such approaches include combating gender-based discrimination and violence. By considering these differences and providing the necessary framework for securing opportunities, the dignity of girls and women is upheld by ensuring everyone has the conditions they need to thrive, reflecting both their specific circumstances and their worth as persons. (See Sacrificing Equity Upon the Altar of Exclusive Inclusivity.)

The practice of allowing males to compete against girls and women in sports violates the sex-based rights that modern societies have instituted to make sure that, in light of the vast differences between female and male bodies, girls and women enjoy equitable conditions in which they may thrive and realize their potential. Sex-segregation where it does not harm girls and women, that is where it does not impede their liberties and rights, is established to ensure that girls and women are not treated as second class citizens in a historically patriarchal world with a natural history of substantial sexual dimorphism, but as equal and full members of society.

Contrary to Khelif’s claim, criticizing the practice of allowing males to trespass upon girls’ and women’s activities is not harmful—it is not bullying—but rather it affirms the demand for and righteousness of human dignity. Indeed, to know one is male, with all the natural advantages that entails, and continue to step into the ring with females suggests an act of bullying. It is to elevate one’s own selfish interests over the collective interests of an entire class of people in a way that violates the principle of fairness in an act of physical domination. In reality, the harm Khelif claims is the harm that critique causes his argument, which is in substance that girls and women have no absolute sex-based rights, which is the argument made when the demand is that trans identifying males or males with DSD conditions should be allowed to compete against girls and women in athletic competition.

The belief that gender identity is an internal sense of one’s gender and that this supposed identity should be allowed to trump the material interests of girls and women is to assert as universal criteria the specific and suspect belief of an ideological system. Objectively, the identity of something is what that thing is in-itself not what it thinks it is (which most things have no capacity to do). Gender identity in the ideological sense is subjective and cannot meet objective criteria. Boxing is physical. It is not imaginary. Saying or believing oneself to be female does not make one female. Femaleness is not a subjective category. It is a natural or biological category. The claim that gender identity in the subjective sense entitles anybody to anything beyond tolerance is identical to the claim that because the child is Muslim, no children at the school shall eat pork.

Khelif declined to answer reporters when asked whether there were tests given other than doping tests. We know that there was. There was a test that determined that Khelif has XY chromosomes. Moreover, the DSD condition in this case, if we accept the claim that this is a DSD case (and photographs seem to indicate that Khelif was raised as a girl), is either of the type that allows for significant natural testosterone production, or androgens were given to produce or enhance male puberty.

Khelif was given an opportunity to appeal the IBA decision but dropped the appeal (the other boxer,  Lin Yu-ting, never sought one). This was strategic, as both camps knew it would allow their athletes to compete in the Olympics in the women’s division (they would have never made it into the men’s division). The IOC does not test for gender eligibility (it drop genetic testing decades ago), rather accepting sex designation on passports, which is not a valid objective determination of sex for obvious reasons.

If one believes in equity and fairness, which I do, then all athletes, in addition to subjecting themselves to doping tests, must also subject themselves to tests determining whether they meet sex-based criteria for eligibility based on objective evidence, chromosome test being the most useful since, unlike hormonal tests, karyotyping determines the overall degree of physical advantage an athlete has over other athletes belonging to the specific class in which that athlete seeks to compete. Because of the myriad of advantages males enjoy over women as a class, XY karyotype is disqualifying. These individuals should never have been allowed to compete in the Olympics.

I have compassion for males who were misgendered at birth and raised as females. I have compassion for anybody with a disorder. Khelif recently asserted that he is female and that he will stay female. Perhaps he did not know he was male and it determined to now allow a test change his perception of himself. However, it is not the burden of girls and women to sacrifice their aspirations and put their health and safety at risk because of somebody else’s disorder or situation. Moreover, it violates the ethics of competition to fail to guarantee as best as can be a level playing field for athletes in light of significant group-based differences.

As a society, we have worked very hard to create opportunities for girls and women in athletic competition. We must not go backwards in this area—or any involving girls and women. Girls and women have a right to expect an equitable treatment so that they have the same opportunities as boys and men. Justice demands this.

I do this periodically to help people understand the underpinning of my standpoint. I do it because political thought today is organized by partisan ideological and propagandistic frameworks that confuse terminology and distort the relationships between ideas. The misuse of the word “liberal” to convey progressivism especially irks me, as regular readers of Freedom and Reason well know (and probably wish I would quit complaining). Depictions of populism and nationalism as indicating the presence of authoritarianism and racism are other examples of political-ideological distortions. So I feel the need to clarify matters now and again not only so people will understand me, but also so they will have a reasonable chance at entertaining ideas they may wish to take up and advance or at least defend. Moreover, I do it to clarify matters for myself: Freedom and Reason is a project of sharpening the resolution of my perception.

My political stance reflects a blend of democratic-republicanism, classical liberalism, populism, and nationalism—all hailing from what has traditionally been described as left wing. At its core, my standpoint values the principles of democratic self-governance and individual liberties, emphasizing the importance of a government that is accountable to the people but protective of individual and natural group rights. Examples of natural groups are gender (or sex) and family (child safeguarding, inheritance, and parental rights). These commitments align with classical liberal ideals of free markets, limited government, and personal freedom. These ideals wrapped in a secular humanist ethic focused on self-actualization. My populist inclinations express a desire that our institutions represent the interests and will of the people over again excessive elite and corporate influences that undermine democratic processes and individual liberty. I am skeptical of administrative rule, corporatist arrangements, and technocratic control.

Nationalism in my view emphasizes a strong sense of national identity and sovereignty, promoting policies that prioritize the nation’s interests and unity. More than this, it is the view that a people should be governed by the rule of law, with a common culture and language, in a state system with clear separation of powers—executive, judicial, and legislative—preventing the leveraging of the democratic machinery to establish tyrannies of the majority or the minority. It is in the context of a secular nation-states founded on constitutional republicanism (which avoids the problems of parliamentary democracy and technocracy) that we exist as citizens rather than serfs, slaves, or subjects. Together, these elements form a political philosophy that seeks to establish and perpetuate a system of government resistant to corporatist influences, ensuring that governance remains rooted in the values of equality, liberty, and popular sovereignty.

I often refer to myself as a Marxist. I recently wrote about this, but I want to restate my position because I know the term is off-putting. I describe myself as a Marxist in the social scientific sense, which expresses an adherence to Marx’s analytical framework for understanding societal structures and dynamics and historical development. Much like a Darwinist who uses Darwin’s theory to explain natural history, I utilize Marx’s theory to analyze class structures, economic systems, and social relations, as well as a critique of ideology, without necessarily endorsing the political regimes or policies that have historically claimed Marxism as their foundation. Indeed, I am highly critical of societies claiming to be founded on Marxist ideas, declaring that I am not a socialist in the pages of Freedom and Reason. The Marxist approach, which is sometimes referred to as the “materialist conception of history,” or just “historical materialism,” focuses on the critical examination of capitalism, the role of labor, and the interplay between economic base and superstructure in shaping society, while maintaining a distinction from the political implementations seen in places like Cuba or China.

My approach to Marxism offers a distinct advantage by allowing me to critique capitalism while also explaining its developments from a comprehensive analytical-theoretical framework. By utilizing Marx’s analytical framework, I can differentiate between a Marxist critique of capitalism and the realities of societies that claim to be Marxist, thereby critiquing both. This perspective enables me to highlight the incoherence of right-wing attributions of Marxism to corporatism and progressivism, arguing that these are manifestations of corporate statism rather than societies rooted in worker ownership and control over the means of production. This nuanced understanding allows for a more precise critique of contemporary capitalist societies and the various political and economic systems that arise within them.

Marxism in sociology focuses on the analysis of class struggles, and economic systems, and social relations, emphasizing how economic factors and material conditions shape societal structures and historical developments. In contrast, the Durkheimian framework, after Emile Durkheim, from which structural functionalism emerges, views society as a complex system of interrelated parts that work together to maintain stability and social order, emphasizing the importance of social norms, values, and institutions. Symbolic interactionism, stemming from the work of George Herbert Mead, centers on the subjective aspects of social life, focusing on how individuals create and interpret meanings through social interactions and how these meanings shape their actions and societal roles. The Weberian framework, derived from Max Weber’s theories, emphasizes the role of beliefs, ideas, and values in shaping social action and institutions, highlighting the importance of understanding the subjective meanings individuals attach to their actions and the influence of bureaucracy and rationalization in modern society.

Marx’s and Sigmund Freud’s systems are similar in that both provide comprehensive frameworks for understanding human behavior and societal structures by examining underlying, often hidden forces. I would describe myself as a Freudian thinker on psychological matters (see Erich Fromm’s 1966 Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Reality). Marx’s analysis focuses on economic structures, class relations, and material conditions as the driving forces behind societal dynamics, positing that the economic base shapes the superstructure, including culture, politics, and ideology. Freud, on the other hand, delves into the psyche, exploring how unconscious conflicts and desires influence individual behavior and mental health. Both Marx and Freud emphasize the importance of uncovering these hidden forces—economic exploitation in Marx’s case, repressed desires and unconscious conflicts in Freud’s—to achieve a deeper understanding and potential liberation. Additionally, both theories suggest that individuals are often unaware of the true sources of their behavior and suffering, whether it be false consciousness in Marxism or unconscious repression in Freudian psychoanalysis.

Fun fact: Did you know that Kamala Harris' father, Donald J Harris, was a post-Keynesian & Marxian economist?
His research focused on economic inequality, uneven development & how the growth rate of an economy is fundamentally dependent on the class structure of society. pic.twitter.com/490r3uJXWi

— Maxine Fowé (@maxinefowe) July 21, 2024

There’s nothing wrong with this. Political economy is one of my areas of expertise in my sociology PhD. I had great professors—Asafa Jalata and William Robinson. It was definitely a Marxist program. I was appointed to my present position because of my other expertise, criminology. But my approach is a synthesis of these fields yielding the political economy of crime and punishment. Students get a lot of critical and historical economic thought in my courses, which are organized around the materialist conception of history, which is what Marx called his version of the dialectical method. Donald Harris and I work in the same tradition.

Kamala Harris was born in 1964. She and her mother and sister left her father in 1970. I don’t know how much time they spent together then or after the breakup. It doesn’t appear that Kamala knows the first thing about political economy (or much else, to be blunt about it). However, the tactic of guilt by association is truly a ratty one, in this case on two levels, the first involving the manufacture of significance about happenstance of blood relation (a child does not pick her parents), the second the presumption that one’s status as a Marxist professor is somehow untoward and disqualifying.

On this latter point, the critique of political economy is necessary to avoid ideological glorification of capitalism. Anticommunism has two purposes: first, defending individual liberty against totalitarianism (George Orwell’s cause); second, preventing the delegitimizing of capitalism by claiming that is a just and reformable system (the cause of the progressive). In the second sense, Marxism is not the economic theory of a new mode of production, but rather a critique of the capitalist mode of production. Karl Marx had very little to say about socialism and communism except to criticize those individuals and movements who identified as such.

Here is Marxist economic thought and political project in a nutshell: The dialectical process in concrete history is the working out of internal contradictions elevating the system to a higher unity by resolving contradictions while retaining the superior features of the previous productive modality. This higher unity does not eliminate all contradictions and creates contradictions of its own. This is why there is history. What Marx sought to do was develop critique-as-praxis so that the higher unity might be steered towards greater equality for the masses, who had been proletarianized with the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, with the eventual elimination of class antagonisms that had marked all previous history after primitive communism (the original state of mankind). At the philosophical level, communism was man coming home to himself, since social segmentation is the source of alienation, which involves self-estrangement, and communism is the elimination of class antagonisms.

I agree with Marx here, but because socialism has been a disaster for people, I no longer identify as a one. Moreover, communism from the Marxist standpoint, understood as a classless and stateless social organization (stateless in as much as it eliminates the oppression of the administration of people), has never existed anywhere in human history on the higher technological plane (which capitalism is rapidly raising). Marx didn’t specify communism because he eschewed utopian thinking. I am in agreement with Christopher Hitchens (Orwell’s biographer), who remained a Marxist until his death, that capitalism has more work to do before the conditions will be such that we can think about moving to a different productive modality. After all, Marx himself said that social revolutions don’t occur until the conditions are ripe for it.

Marx put it this way in his 1853 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Then, in his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, on the subject of revolutionary transformation, he writes, “In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.”

Brilliant stuff. This is the materialist conception of history. Here’s the point: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.” Marx continues: “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”

In my view, corporatism is the late stage of capitalist development. But there is no way of knowing how long the end game will last. Things don’t act right when they’re dying, and we certainly see the signs of its death throes in present conditions. We’re in a period of watch and wait—and the darkness of the approaching upheaval is ominous. The global elite know this, and this is why they are steering the economy towards a global neo-feudal order where proletarians are turned into serfs and managed on high-tech estates. They seek these ends to protect their wealth and privilege.

As Michael Parenti told us, the rich has ever wanted on one thing: everything. “There’s only one thing that the ruling circles throughout history have ever wanted—all the wealth, the treasures, and the profitable returns; all the choice lands and forests and game and herds and harvests and mineral deposits and precious metals of the earth; all the productive facilities and gainful inventiveness and technologies; all the control positions of the state and other major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities; all the protections of the law and none of its constraints; all of the services and comforts and luxuries and advantages of civil society with none of the taxes and none of the costs. Every ruling class in history has wanted only this-all the rewards and none of the burdens.”

Given that they control all the major institutions of modern society, and given the level of disorganization and false consciousness among the proletariat, it is most likely neofeudalism will be our fate. The promise of liberation with the unraveling of the present system will more likely be an even more profound totalitarian system (we already live under conditions of emergent inverted totalitarianism), this time on a world scale.

Orwell warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four is terrifying: “There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” It may be that we live in a cage with a degree of creature comfort to match our lowered expectations. In either case, it will be a state of unfreedom.

But I want to leave you with hope. Frederick Douglass, one of the three great republicans of the nineteenth century (the others being Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx), noted that “the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Douglass is telling us that the power and extent of tyranny is determined by the level of tolerance and endurance of the oppressed people. Put another way, tyrants can only exert as much control and oppression as the oppressed allow. Douglass’ is alerting us to the agency and potential power of the oppressed. If people who are subjected to tyranny refuse to accept their suffering and actively resist, then they can limit or perhaps even overthrow the tyrant’s power. The endurance of oppression by the people is a measure of the tyrant’s control; when the oppressed reach a breaking point and no longer endure the oppression, they can catalyze change and potentially bring an end to tyranny.

It’s a strange debate we’re having in the United States today about race. It’s as if our sense-making institutions have lost all historical memory about what it means to be black in America. That is exactly what has happened. But it is weird only because the weird ones have assumed power and taken control of the narrative. Have you seen this?

George Stephanopoulos repeatedly presses Rep. Byron Donalds on VP Harris' racial identity in heated exchange | https://t.co/iPXKAFbE8c

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) August 5, 2024

Growing up in the 1960s-1970s to parents who were civil rights activists, and then later becoming an expert in race and ethnic relations (my dissertation was on the subject of the political economy of race and many of my articles and courses concern the racial problematic), I learned that to be a black American meant that you were descended from Africans long ago brought to the United States (a very long time ago: the United States abolished the slave trade in 1800, the law taking effect in 1808) to serve as chattel—that “peculiar institution” Republicans abolished in the 1860s at the costs of hundreds of thousands of lives. The descendants of those Africans slaves would later by terrorized by lynch mobs (see Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide), and suffer under de jure segregation, abolished in the 1960s despite Democrats filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Senate (the longest filibuster in US Senate history).

Black Americans were the focus the Civil Rights movement. Affirmative action concerned black Americans in this sense, as well. It was widely understood that an African who immigrated to the United States should not count as an affirmative action hire because the program didn’t fetishize the racial concept but the historical one. After all, race is a social construct. Indeed, Africans who legally immigrate to America typically come from affluent families. They do not descend from those who suffered at the hands of plantation owners, lynch mobs, and Jim Crow—the badges of slavery. They therefore do not need equitable adjustment.

The same is true of Jamaicans, a remarkably successful immigrant group (in the UK, as well). If one is from Africa or the Caribbean, he is not black in the sense that MLK, Jr., was black. Moreover, many Africans are white, either Arab or European (Elon Musk is African, for example). Being African or African American (naturalized citizens) does not necessarily mean one is black in any sense.

The question of Harris’ racial identity is not an offensive question—at least not the way older observers understand it. (Donald Trump, for example; see The Perils of Racecraft.) It is treated as such because elites don’t want you asking questions about it, and the rank-and-file are ignorant enough of history to be bamboozled. When progressives and the media say that Harris’ racial background is off limits, what they are doing is trying to prevent young people from learning about the history of blackness in America. This is how younger generations are controlled—through the socialization of thought-stopping devices (Orwell warned us about it). The older folks are intimidated by the younger folks very much like they were during Mao’s cultural revolution in the 1960s.

We witnesses the same thing with Obama. Obama’s mother was white. Obama was raised by his white grandparents. He had an African father with whom he had limited interaction. Obama was not black in the historic sense of the term. He moved himself to Chicago and joined the black church to manufacture racial authenticity because he had political aspirations and these were advanced by sporting a black identity (which is why black critics in the day referred to Obama as a “Magical Negro”). Blacks and whites were told they were bigots for suggesting Obama was “not black enough,” even those this was mostly coming from black commentators—white guilt couldn’t wait vote for the man. Elites presented Obama as black because it was politically useful. (See Progressive Hypocrisy and scroll down the paragraph about Alan Keyes.)

Harris does the same thing. When it’s useful to push her Asian ancestry, she does so (San Francisco, for example, where black-Asian relations are notoriously antagonistic). When she needs to be black, however, Harris goes to a record store and buys albums to bolster her racial bona fides (does she even have a record player?). She puts on a stereotypical black accent, which the progressives dutifully rationalize as “code switching,” which is something white people wouldn’t understand.

Who gets to define race in America? The answer to that question is obvious: progressives. They get to define everything. They’ve captured the sense making institutions. They’re the gatekeepers of identity. They and their minions (the army of college students they’ve trained up Saul Alinsky style) get to decide whether you’re a racist. They get to decide what words you can use. What jokes you can tell. They’re the brain police.

This is why a white ABC talking head, George Stephanopoulos, who was a top strategist for the 1992 Clinton campaign (in charge of “bimbo eruptions,” i.e., Clinton’s many rape victims), can scold Byron Donalds, who is for sure a black man, for questioning Harris’ racial identity. You’d think that the rule is that only a black man can ask such a question, but you’d be wrong. Only a progressive can, since a progressive, even a white one (especially a white one), has been given the power to define people as such. Remember when Biden said that if you were a black man who didn’t know whether you were voting for him or Trump then aren’t really black? He was saying the quiet part out loud. Trump is excoriated for simply noting Kamala’s pandering. Biden says black people who don’t vote him aren’t really black. Crickets.

You’re supposed to believe that questioning a person’s racial identity is racist—but only if you’re not progressive. The media shredded Rachel Dolezal for identifying as black because they will tell you who is who is not black. Dolezal is not black. Khelif is not a man. The pattern is obvious. It’s why young progressives come my Facebook profile and show their ass. They believe they alone enjoy the privilege to define things for everybody else because of their political identification. They’re smarter than everybody else not because they know anything (as you can see, they don’t) but because they are progressive. They’re like Islamists: their religion is a formula for truth. Identity = correctness and virtue. This is why you will never hear an actual argument. They don’t know the rules of reasoning because they don’t need to. Universities don’t teach these anymore anyway (I do, but who cares?).

My problem with Dolezal is not that she presents herself as a black woman despite being born to white parents, but that she didn’t descend from black slaves. Had that been the case, even if she appeared white, she could claim to be black. Not an insignificant number of blacks appear white. My students will always wonder aloud in Race and Ethnicity who those white children are in the photographs of freed slaves. It’s possible that Dolezal lived in South Africa as a child, and we know for a fact that from 2002 to 2006 her parents and siblings lived in South Africa as Christian missionaries. So she might claim to be African American in some sense (which is not the same as black). But if it’s wrong to question somebody’s racial identity, then why was Dolezal so viciously attacked? Because it’s only wrong if you’re the wrong person. It depends on who is doing the questioning and whether that person is the right person. The right person is the progressive person. (See The Strange Essentialisms of Identity Politics.)

Remember when the Marxist political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. (a black man) was attacked for asking why Dolezal couldn’t be black and was destroyed over it but Bruce Jenner could be a woman and given awards? (See “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much” to learn about this case.) I asked the same question and people got really mad. Richard Dawkins (a white man) asked the same thing and his humanist award was revoked (see Racecraft and Witch Hunts). “It’s not the same thing,” progressives said. Yeah? Why not? “If you don’t understand why these cases are not analogous, you’re transphobe.” Really? Why? “It’s just not.” “Bigot.” These aren’t answers. Sometimes, like a case of Tourettes, the Cluster B comes out and “Go fuck yourself.”

The question of Harris’ racial identity is relevant. Identity is not what people say about themselves but what they are. Most things in the world have no capacity to identify themselves. It’s up to objective observers to identify what the thing is according to valid criteria. The question “what is a woman?” has an answer (this is why Matt Walsh’s documentary “What is a Woman?” is so powerful). A woman is an adult female human. What does female mean? In mammals it means XX karyotypic and large gametes with corresponding reproductive anatomy. There’s a Y present? Then this is not a woman. But the person identifies as a woman. Right, and that person identifies as a lizard. That’s subjective. People think all kinds of things about themselves. Dolezal believes she is black (to this day). But, if we’re rational, we work from objective criteria. What is a black American? There is valid criteria to consult (I showed it to you earlier in this post).

A historical note: the party of the slavocracy, of the Ku Klux Klan, of the people who lynched blacks, the authorities who instituted Jim Crow—that’s the Democratic Party. The progressive movement grew out of this, as did the corporate state progressive administer. This is same party of the modern-day ghetto that engineered the destruction of the black family (over 80 percent of black children in the inner city are born in one-parent households). This is the party who underprotects black neighborhoods, and are therefore responsible for the fact, while black men make up only 6-7 percent of the US population, more than half of all murder victims are black men. Half of all murderers are black men, as well.

As for the Republicans we’re instructed to loathe? They had nothing to do with that. They don’t run blue cities. But they did do these things: they abolished slavery; they organized and administered reconstruction; they voted in overwhelming numbers of end Jim Crow (80 percent of Republican in the House and the Senate). Republicans are the choice of the vast majority of US counties. In those counties, children have fathers and grow up in safe neighborhoods.

If you hear these truths and think “racist,” then you’re a progressive—which means you’re the racist (weird, right?). What you think and say about the world is corporate state programming, which socializes racial thinking to disorganized the working class. It is successful because progressive control the sense making institutions.

People on X have been saying this thing that Trump never laughs. It’s like that thing they say about him mocking a disabled reporter. That wasn’t true. Or the thing about him saying that if he were elected people wouldn’t need to worry about voting any more. He didn’t say that. Nor did he say he would by “dictator on day one.” He never told Americans to inject bleach or drink fish tank cleaner. The “very fine people” line in South Carolina is a myth. So I shared video of him laughing because those videos exist (just like the videos of him doing the spaz routine). Rational people would say, “Oh, okay, I was wrong.” But most people who say these types of things about Trump are never be wrong, so most came back with, “It was just a chuckle, not a laugh.” I’m not going to get into why that is an absurd rationalization, and I’m not exactly sure why Trump deranges people so, but he certainly does (I think it’s because they are manipulated into being deranged by him—and they want to be deranged). However, I had one person say that my video of Trump laughing at least proves he isn’t Jesus, because Jesus never laughed.

I like unique comments, and I vaguely remembered hearing something about Jesus never laughing. So I Googled it and ran across an article by Kevin Considine, a writer for US Catholic magazine, who, in 2022, said, “There is no evidence in scripture to confirm that Jesus laughed. He gets angry, he weeps, he shows affection, he agonizes over his fate. And the Jesus depicted in Revelation definitely lacks a sense of humor.” But Considine says that’s okay because “Jesus is also God, the author of life and master of the banquet. And this is the same Messiah who has friends, goes to dinner parties, and turns water into wine at a wedding.” And there you go. You don’t have to laugh to be a mighty and good fellow. (I like Jesus, even if he wasn’t real, and, if he was real, even if he was a charlatan.)

Over on Facebook, where Christians who are also Democrats (I know conservatives don’t think that’s possible) are still determined to rationalize the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, even though they should be troubled by it (not just for producers, directors, and performers mocking their religion but for what their mocking intended), they’re sharing this thing by a Baptist preacher who wants to make sure people know that Jesus would have supper with any of the people who were involved in that obnoxious production. I have seen this thing a few times now. I don’t want to make people upset, and that’s the reason I have moderated my irreligious criticisms over the years, but I will return to form for a moment to remind readers that I am unconvinced that Jesus was an actual person, albeit I am sure that he could not have done the things attributed to him, as these things are impossible, so I have good grounds to reject any accounts of his exploits, and I don’t think if he were real he would have had supper with that crew. (It will also give me an opportunity to represent some of my essays from several years ago when my interest in the topic was more keen. See, e.g., Zoroastrianism in Second Temple Judaism and the Christian Satan.)

I do have reason to think that Paul was a historical figure, and, moreover, reason to believe that the figure of Jesus was the work of Paul for the purposes of establishing a salvation cult (see my December 2017 essay Paul: “The gospel I preach is not of human origin.”) Paul did this work thought a process known as Euhemerization, a technique where a mythological figure is worked into history to make it appear as if he were an actual man (see my December 2019 essay The Trick of Euhemerus). This is opposite of deification, where a great man is made into a god. I agree with Richard Carrier that Jesus was likely based on an entity in Jewish angelology who had roots in ancient Middle Eastern and Persian mythologies (see videos here and here). Whatever we might imagine were Jesus’ views on the spectacle we witnessed last Friday at the Olympics, and the aims of it, it is certainly the case that Paul would have identified it as an instance of God turning people against themselves as a consequence of having wandered well of the righteous path with no desire to find their way back to it. Romans 1, which Paul is widely accepted to have authored, is brutal. At the very least, it is difficult to image that Paul would have broken bread with any of the individuals on that stage on Friday night.

Again, I want to remind readers that I am an atheist. Moreover, I see gays and lesbians as deserving of the same rights that I enjoy. I hold many gay and lesbians dear in my life (I want to be careful and not out anybody) and I have my whole life advocated for their movement (see, e.g., this 2007 essay Marriage, Equal Protection, and the Separation of Church and State). I have no ulterior motive in this essay other than engaging in a moment of critique regarding progressive interpretations of the Christian faith, which are deeply flawed, and revealing of an odd denial coming from that camp. While Jesus may have been an actual person, Jesus meek and mild is not the figure one reads about in the New Testament (see Cleansing the Temple: White Colonizer Jesus vs Brown Jesus Meek and Mild). I think Nietzsche had a point when he suggested that this interpretation turned the doctrines into a slave morality. (If that wasn’t exactly his argument, I will claim it.) If I might make one last point on this, as the myth has it, Jesus did not go to his death because he was a nonviolent man. His rampage in the temple indicated the opposite. Jesus went to the cross because it was his purpose to die and give up the ghost and pour God’s love into the world. But love is not unconditional. Neither testament tells us that. Certainly God’s love is not conditional. Hell is worse than annihilation if you think about it; you wouldn’t be in hell for long before you wished for annihilation. Jesus judged. Or at least Paul did. Often quite harshly. Here’s what I mean:

Romans 1 God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity (verses 18-32):

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

That last line is particularly interesting. It’s not just those whom Christians watched blaspheme God and Son during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics who deserve death according to Paul. Remember, Leviticus 20:13 states: “If a man practices homosexuality, having sex with another man as with a woman, both men have committed a detestable act. They must both be put to death, for they are guilty of a capital offense.” Paul also believes that those who approve of those who practice them are worthy of “God’s righteous decree.” I not asking Christians to get caught up in scripture per se, but to see scriptures in terms of what they consistently suggest about the faith, which is that it is heterosexist. Of course, it was written a long time ago and attitudes have changed (not everywhere, obviously). But the old and new testaments are the divinely inspired word of God, at least that’s what we’re told, and the latter submits to the person the path to salvation. Given that this is as direct a line there can be between the Christian and his savior, if the savior or his accepted mouthpiece condemns homosexuality, doesn’t the believer put himself above the authority of God’s word? The would suggest that the absolute were the product of man and that its form and content would be negotiable, or at least alterable. (As it turns out, it’s both.)

It is not for me to answer this question. As I just reminded the reader, I’m an atheist. Always have been. The gene for religious sentiment is absent from my karyotype. But a Christian cannot simply be a person who identifies as such, can he? Anybody can say they are anything. The relevant questions must be these: What does the doctrine say and mean and how do those who subscribe the doctrine act? I am not advocating for Christians to consistently act on scripture. Heavens no. Please don’t. Thankfully, the United States is a secular nation where the doctrine can have—or should have—no purchase in the law (see Rise of the Domestic Clerical Fascist and the Specter of Christian Nationalism; The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom; Submission to God and Secular Society; Neither God nor Gods Give you Liberty; as well as the aforementioned Marriage, Equal Protection, and the Separation of Church and State). This constrains Christians in a way that Islamic states cannot constrain Muslims, with all the hell on earth that makes (Hell on Earth or Earthly Heaven? The Totalitarian Threats Facing the West; Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?). This is what has allowed the good ideas found in the Christian spirit to prevail for all people—and kept the truly bad ideas at bay (see Understanding Christians: The Protective Hand of Nature’s God; Manufacturing Moral Panic Over Christianity; Denying Natural Rights at the Heart of Authoritarian Desire). Is one a zealot? A cafeteria Christian? Or a cultural Christian who respects the framework of the secular republic? Whichever you are, you cannot—at least for truth’s sake should not—rationalize the scriptures you’d enforce, that you have abandoned, or have fallen into disuse with the passage of time. You can certainly argue over interpretation.

As for me, I find wisdom where I can.