“Ironically, in seeking to free people from sexism, these efforts have instead reinforced it by inventing a plethora of identity labels for people who do not conform to narrow conceptions of gender roles rather than challenging those norms. This is not progress. Using my own experiences as an example, I argue instead for a return to a separation of sex and gender, and a rejection of this new gender ideology.” —Kaylee Walker.
This paragraph is from an interesting and well-written essay, “Gender Policing on the Left,” published by the Queer Majority. The first sentence is correct, as is the second; however, a problem occurs with the third sentence: the author says that she will argue for a return not to a distinction between gender (i.e., sex) and gender (or sex) role but for a separation of sex and gender. But sex is gender, and the reasonable left is always going to undermine its politics if it accedes to language falsely making a distinction between what have been synonyms for six centuries.
The reasonable left needs to return not to a separation of sex and gender, but a distinction between gender, on the one hand, and gender role on the other, while rejecting Stoller’s entity “gender identity.” There is no reason why a woman cannot express herself in culturally or historically masculine ways. Moreover, because of overlapping distributions, there are women with comparatively more masculine traits and attitudinal and behavioral proclivities. The same is true for men obviously. But there are no men with women’s brains, as Hirschfeld claimed in the early twentieth century. Like all other animals, humans are our bodies. Of course there are men who present with traits more commonly associated with women. This has always been true and is entirely normal. What is not normal is telling a tom boy that she is really a boy. That’s what queer ideology teaches girls—it teaches them to be estranged from their bodies. This estrangement is yet another feature of the alienation that marks a society in which the masses make history, but do not control the history they make, and are falsely conscious of the situation because they lack a cogent theory of the world.
A long time ago, in the 7th century CE, there lived a man named Muhammad ibn Abdullah. Muhammad was a merchant, managing caravans engaged in trade mostly in the Arabian Peninsula, including trade in slaves.
At age 40, while allegedly meditating in a cave on Mount Hira, located near Mecca, Muhammad told others that he had received a revelation from an angel named Gabriel. Gabriel commanded the merchant to “Read aloud.” Muhammad told the angel he could not, as he was illiterate.
Muhammad meeting with Gabriel in a cave on Mount Hira
The angel then embraced Muhammad and compelled him to recite the words of what would become the first verses of the book Quran, which means “Read aloud.” This hallucination continued over the next twenty-three years until his death. Muhammad filled his book with Gabriel’s words. People believed Muhammad, and his hallucinations became a new religion.
The book details a system of rules and values known as “sharia,” which guide all aspects of life. Muhammad called his hallucinations “Islam,” which means “submit” or “surrender.” Submit and surrender to what? To the will of an invisible entity he invented. The entity is known to the world as “Allah,” which means “god” in Arabic, but the entity has 99 names.
The book tells its adherents of a Day of Judgment, where they will be held accountable for their deeds. This is possible because each of them has an ethereal entity inside them known as the “ruh” (plural “arwah”) or soul. Paradise or hell awaits ruh based on faith and actions.
Today, Muhammad’s religion boasts of more than a billion and a half followers.
Joseph Smith Jr. was born in Vermont in 1805. He grew up in western New York during the Second Great Awakening. Smith’s family, involved in this religious fervor, was influenced by various denominations, including Baptist, Methodists, and Presbyterians.
At the age of 14, Smith claimed he had a vision in which God and Jesus Christ appeared to him. In 1823, Smith said he had an encounter with an angel named Moroni who revealed the existence of an ancient record written on golden plates buried in a nearby hill called Cumorah. According to Smith, these plates contained the religious history of ancient inhabitants of the Americas, including their interactions with God.
Joseph Smith meeting with Moroni on the Hill Cumorah
Smith was allowed to retrieve the golden plates in 1827. With the help of divine instruments the Urim and Thummim, he translated the writings on the plates into English. This resulted in the Book of Mormon, which he published in 1830. The book tells the story of several groups of people who migrated from the Middle East to the Americas thousands of years ago. It covers their religious teachings and eventual encounters with Jesus Christ after his resurrection.
The Book of Mormon is considered scripture by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith claimed additional revelations. Today, the LDS Church is one of the fastest-growing Christian denominations in the world, with millions of members worldwide.
L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific writer of science fiction, he developed a system that he said could address various psychological issues and improve mental well-being. He called this system “dianetics,” publishing a book by that name in 1950. This was when he was around 40 years old.
In Dianetics, Hubbard conceives of an idea he calls the “reactive mind,” which was the source of irrational fears, insecurities, and other emotions and psychological problems. He claimed that, by using his system, individuals could rid themselves of the negative influences of the reactive mind (called “engrams”) and achieve a state called “clear,” where they would be free from these mental burdens.
The Church of Scientology
Hubbard pivoted from dianetics and created a church he called “Scientology.” According to the secret doctrine of the church, there exists an entity called “Xenu.” Xenu was ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, an ancient civilization that existed 75 million years ago. Xenu gathered large numbers of people from various planets, including Earth, under the guise of tax audits, and then subjected them to mass genocide by exterminating them with hydrogen bombs.
The disembodied spirits of these victims, called “thetans,” were implanted with false beliefs through a complex process, which has had lasting effects on humanity. The thetan is the individual’s true identity. According to doctrine, the state of the thetan greatly influences an individual’s personality and outlook on life. Traumas experienced in past lives are believed to affect one’s current state of mind and behavior.
One of the religion’s rituals is called “auditing.” It’s a central technique used to address spiritual trauma and improve the state of the thetan. During auditing sessions, a trained auditor guides an individual through a series of questions and exercises aimed at uncovering and resolving past traumas and negative experiences.
Scientology cannot boast of the numbers enjoyed by Islam or even Mormonism, the numbers of devotees to Hubbard’s religion may be in the millions.
In his late-30s, Robert Stoller, a psychiatrist and dabbler in dream telepathy, discovered an entity he called “gender identity,” which he said exists independent of the characteristics of physical body.
Stoller came upon the idea while working with patients experiencing body dysphoria. What these individuals told him was interpreted as persons experiencing a profound incongruence between their birth sex and the gender they really were.
Stoller took this as a genuine experience and created a system that differentiated biological sex (reality) from gender identity (mythology), arguing that, while the former is determined by physical anatomy, the latter is a deeply ingrained sense of being female, male, or something else.
Stoller taught his followers that “core gender identity,” which he said was a fundamental and unchangeable sense of being male or female, develops by the age of three.
Transgender vector flag with black health care medical sign.
Stoller’s ideas played a key part in the development of gender affirming care, or GAC, which involves chemical and surgical intervention to make a man into a woman. Thus, in this way, bodies of believers are physically and physiologically altered to produce simulacra of the gender identity they believe is their authentic self.
All these doctrines have this in common: concepts central to the respective ideologies enjoy no empirical support. Moreover, their core concepts are conveniently nonfalsifiable. In the case of gender identity, while Stoller’s construct is not falsifiable in terms of itself, the gender of a person is empirically determinable. If a man claims to be a woman, a check of gametes will determine whether this claim is true in nearly every case. But the followers of Stoller’s religion will always fall back on the nonfalsifiability of faith belief. Like the Muslims, Mormon, and Scientologist, the authentic self is a subjective claim impervious to disconfirmation.
The philosopher of science Karl Popper used the falsifiability criteria to distinguish scientific theories from non-scientific ones. According to Popper, for a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable; that is, there must be conceivable empirical observations that could potentially refute or disprove the theory. In contrast, nonfalsifiable claims cannot be subjected to empirical testing or falsification, often because they are formulated in a way that makes them immune to disconfirmation. This characteristic can pose challenges for assessing the validity or reliability of such claims within scientific or rational discourse.
If medicine is to proceed scientifically, then it must not rely on concepts that are impervious to disconfirmation. This is why the practice of auditing is not part of medical practice (that and Hubbard’s hostility toward the profession, not to mention psychotherapy has an established presence). At least presumably. After all, gender affirming care rests on a concept impervious to disinformation and Stoller’s construct is part of medical practice. It justifies the application of powerful drugs and hormones and surgeries to transform gendered bodies into simulations of their opposites.
But you don’t have to imagine a past in which the lives of gender nonconforming children were not riven with strife. If they haven’t forgotten the world of only yesterday, they know that nobody from our generation (I was born in 1962) or the generations before ours, would remember one of every five of us identifying as LGBTQ. That’s not because they were hiding their identities from us. It’s because the queer contagion hadn’t yet swept up impressionable youth into the fad. There were other fads. What Kanakia and his ilk want is for us to forget this and to assume that what is novel is eternal.
“Last year, a staggering 22 states across the U.S. banned gender-affirming care for minors,” writes Kanakia. “The conservative politicians behind this wave of legislation didn’t care that it went against the near-unanimous medical consensus that parents and doctors ought to be able to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether puberty blockers, hormones, or other interventions are what’s needed for a given teen to flourish and live their life authentically. These lawmakers felt the consensus was wrong, that the government should take medical transition entirely off the table, at least until the kids grow up and can make ’informed,’ adult decisions. And in their eyes, there was a bonus: Removing the option of affirming care would surely lower the temperature in afflicted homes; it might well preserve the parent/child relationship until the threat hopefully passed—trans teens could no longer blame parents for not “allowing” them to transition. Parents were now free to say ’There’s nothing I can do. You’ll simply have to wait until you’re older.’”
Articles like Kanakia’s function to cause anybody conditioned by the eternal present to forget the world as it was only a few years ago and feel as if the travails of the trans child has always been an issue, that children have always enjoyed access to “gender affirming care,” only to suffer the oppression of fascists who, suddenly and for arbitrary political and religious reasons, are passing laws forbidding it. The motive to restrict this to those who can consent to it couldn’t possibly be from the rise of GAC and growing awareness of its horrors (see Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy). It must be because they’re bigots.
Kanakia would never consider whether suicide rates were through the roof back then. In fact, for the general population, after falling in the mid-90s for males and the mid-70s for females, suicide rates for both genders rose steadily during the period of the proliferation of gender clinics and gender ideology—as well as SEL programming and the proliferation of wellness centers in educational institutions. When the data are disaggregated, among youth aged 10-24 years, suicide surpasses homicide in 2008 and soars, while homicide remains relatively stable at less than one percent per 100,000 (and, as readers of Freedom and Reason know, is concentrated in black-majority inner city neighborhoods). As Business Insiderreported in 2019, at that time, suicide among Gen Z is the second leading cause of death, and “a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age.”
It is necessary to believe instead that those denied their authentic selves always preferred death to living as the gender they were born as—to believe that there were millions whose authentic selves were being denied. It is a lie.
George Orwell warned us about organized forgetting in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the story, the Ministry of Truth is a government institution responsible for historical revisionism and the dissemination of propaganda. The Ministry of Truth manipulates information to align with the ruling Party’s ideology. Its workers constantly rewrite history to support the Party’s agenda. The memory hole is a mechanism used by the Party to eliminate inconvenient information. Documents, records, and even people are thrown into incinerators, erasing any evidence of their existence. This ensured the Party’s control over the historical narrative and suppresses dissent by eliminating opposing viewpoints.
Likewise, Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist and filmmaker, wrote about the concept of the “society of the spectacle” and the notion of the “eternal present.” In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord explores the idea that modern society has become dominated by images and representations. The spectacle is a system of alienation and social control, where authentic human experiences are replaced by mediated representations. The eternal present refers to the way in which the spectacle perpetuates a state of constant distraction and superficiality, preventing individuals from engaging with the past or the future.
We are close but not yet submerged in Orwell’s world, and while Debord spectacular society feels ubiquitous, the truth is still available—if you seek and speak it; and the truth is that there is no historical record of centuries of families torn apart because states prevented the administration of puberty blockers, opposite sex hormones, and surgeries to minors. The “need” for health care and compelling everybody to accept gender ideology is recent invention, manufactured by the medical-industrial complex and the crackpots of sexology and queer theory.
To believe articles like Kanakia’s have any validity is to pretend as if we haven’t been alive for decades to know that this is novel phenomenon—and for those who know a bit more to know that this is a social contagion, only this one invented and sustained by power and profit. We were the freaks in high school. We were the clique who would have known before any body about the boys and girls who thought they were the other gender but were oppressed by parents and government. Our generation and the generation before us protested a lot of things, but we never protested sexed reality because there was nothing to protest. Quite the contrary. We were busy trying to get into each other’s pants.
Imagine Christian nationalists didn’t just exist but were aggressively demanding that you affirm their doctrines and practices. Imagining being told that you had to obey the rules of their ideology. Imagine, moreover, that they had the state at their backs to make sure that you did. You would be disciplined and even terminated from employment for refusing to so do. Imagine a DEI program set up along the lines of Christian nationalist thinking. When you complain, they’d tell you that is merely a matter of being kind to Christian nationalists. What’s so hard about that? Respecting Christian nationalists takes nothing from you. What are you, a bigot?
I could have used Islam as my example. Imagine being punished at your work place for failing to obey sharia and its rules against blasphemy. I could have used Scientology, as well. Imagine being required to believe in the existence of thetans and to refrain from criticizing dianetics and the practice of auditing. There are a myriad of other ideologies that make useful examples, but I trust you get the point: A free society depends on individuals being able to believe what they will and others not being compelled to share in those beliefs. I cannot be free if I cannot choose my beliefs. The institutions of a free society must not compel belief any more than they forbid it. Censoring and compelling belief are the signs of a totalitarian society.
What many woke progressives don’t seem to understand, in addition to failing to understand why it’s wrong to compel others to obey the rules of their ideology (a thickness that results from their position in the structure of authority), is that they are, by conditioning people to accept the beliefs of others through the use of coercive tactics, making a whip for their own backs. Put another way, when—and I argue that it is a matter of when not if if this keeps up—another authoritarian ideology replaces the current one as the hegemonic system in American society, progressives are sure to squeal when their speech is censored and compelled.
This is what’s so frustrating about the very long moment of the present time. When right wing activists stand on public grounds or enter public buildings or speak at city council and school board meetings, they are condemned for their presence and speech and the police quickly mobilize to remove them from the premises. The media sparks and spreads panic about their presence and warns of the end of democracy if their presence is tolerated. Right wing voices aren’t allowed to demand election integrity; their actions are portrayed as efforts to undermine free elections. There are many other examples. Whatever the subject, the right wing activist cannot convey his point on his own terms because he doesn’t control the media frame. Progressives do. He is a priori bad and wrong and therefore his speech illegitimate.
When left wing activists do all the same things that the right activist does, indeed, much worse things, they are celebrated as standing up for the democratic values of a free society. Their violent protests are described “mostly peaceful.” Their occupation of public spaces and buildings is portrayed as an exercise of free speech, not as an insurrection. The double standard signals the character of hegemonic power. Progressives have captured our institutions—the academy, the culture, the government, the mass media, the university. People ask how we can know this. The conditions confirm it. Because they are the hegemonic power, progressives are able to frame their politics as normality and cast those who dissent as a dangerous mob.
We don’t need to flip all that by putting the right wing parallel in power. We need to instead push progressivism out of our institutions and establish the principle that our institutions are for everybody and should govern themselves in the neutral fashion that a free and open society demands.
* * *
In a recent conversation, I was accused of articulating heterodox ideas. But my ideas are heterodox only in relation to the orthodoxy of the university, captured by progressive ideology. In the light of the population at large, the same ideas become orthodox. It may be heterodox in the academy to deny that men can be women, but, if we take everybody’s beliefs into account, that assertion is exposed as campus orthodoxy. Most people don’t believe men can be women. Part of the reason they don’t is because they intuitively know that can’t be true. In the absence of a corrupting ideology, their experience with the actual world tells them that. Anybody who had spent any time on a farm knows this is true. The other part of this is that they look at the crackpot ideas of the left and call bullshit because their own bullshit beliefs inoculate them against other bullshit beliefs. We might mock this, but not all bullshit is of the same quality.
People in the academy, many of whom came straight out of high school to pursue their undergraduate college and advanced degrees, live in a bubble where they come to believe that what are bullshit ideas constitute the orthodoxy. This happens to people when they exist in a cloistered environment. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences. It probably didn’t escape readers that, in the natural and physical sciences, the crackpot “theories” of CRT and queer theory are much less pronounced. Some of these ideas aren’t even tolerated. It’s in the humanities, where imaginations run wild, and in the social sciences, disciplines that risk corruption by ideology because their finding are less sure than their hard science counterparts, that we see smart people believing stupid things.
The desire of trans activists to compel others to affirm their imagined identities is the same desire of progressive academics to demand ideological conformity in the humanities and the social sciences. They only way the junk beliefs can appear to have any truth value is if everyone suspends their disbelief and for whatever reason upholds the validity the doctrine. It’s the same logic of affirmation that trans identifying people depend on to ease their self-doubts.
I’m old school. I’m a scientific materialist. I don’t accept crackpot ideas. And I never will.
Part of the elite project known to observers as the managed decline of the American Republic—and of the West generally—is Islamization. Because of the Muslim’s faithful adherence to his irrational beliefs, Muslims are a desirable constituency for the New World Order based on the corporate state model (global neo-feudalism).
This is a long haul project. For example, France, in the 1970s, used Muslims and the prayer room as weapons to break industrial unions. I write in a November 2019 essay, Culture Matters: Western Exceptionalism and Socialist Possibility, “By the 1970s, for example, the government of France, under … president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, sought in Islam ‘a stabilizing force which would turn the faithful from deviance, delinquency or membership of unions or revolutionary parties,’ here quoting Paul Dijoud, minister for immigrant workers. ‘When a series of strikes hit car factories in the late 1970s,’ [Kenan] Malik writes [in Multiculturalism and its Discontents], ‘the government encouraged employers to build prayer rooms in an effort to wean immigrant workers, who formed a large proportion of the workforce, away from militant activity.’”
I conclude, “Keeping newcomers away from native-born workers is an effective strategy to disorganize the national proletariat. How effective? In the 1950s, roughly one-third of French workers belonged to a trade union. Today, less than one in ten,” noting that “[t]his mirrors the decline in organized labor in the United States during the same period.”
I have been writing about this problem for years, so I recommend you search my blog for more stories (one of my summer projects is to index my essays by topic to make it easier for visitors to search content). Others have written about this in much greater detail and for much longer than I have. I urge you to read work by Bruce Bauer, Chris Caldwell, and Douglas Murray, and, as always, speeches and talks on this subject by Christopher Hitchens. Sam Harris also has useful things to say about this matter.
In the United States, we’re now seeing students at Ivy League universities across the nation participating in Islamic prayer. Not a few of them are converting to the religion, which, as many of you know, is also a political ideology, indeed, a totalitarian one. Islam offers its followers a complete plan for life. We already have cities in the United States that are effectively Muslim enclaves governed by representatives of that religion. They’ve even sent their ideologues to Congress.
Because the West is free and open, there is always a risk that enemies of human reason and freedom will establish a fifth column in the countries they’re colonizing. Make no mistake about it, the West is being colonized by culture bearers who are bringing norms and values antithetical to the those of the enlightened West. It is vital for you to know what is at stake here. We need to speak frankly about this. You do not want you children and grandchildren to live under Islamic theocracy.
In the United States, our rights are unalienable and derive from the laws of nature or nature’s god (the creator of deism)—that means that these rights are inherent in each of us whether or not we are religious. In Islam, matters of law and governance are handed down from a particular construct of god known to the world as Allah. Allah’s rules were dictated to an ancient people by an illiterate merchant/warlord who claimed he received them from an angel in a cave. In Islam, there are no rights intrinsic to the individual—what you may or may not do is determined not by your will but by the will of Allah, determined by clerics who interpret the law, a system called sharia.
Islam literally means “submission” or “surrender.” The demand is that you submit to the authority of Allah’s earthly clerics, that you surrender your liberties and rights to their interpretation of the judgment of Allah. There is no more totalitarian ideology than Islam; it is the paradigm of clerical fascism. You should be deeply concerned about the proliferation of Muslims in your communities in light of the rejection of assimilation and the embrace of multiculturalism by the administrative state. Things have already gone badly off the rails in France, Germany, Sweden, and the UK.
Protestors at UCLA participating in Islamic prayer
There’s more to come. The war package that recently passed Congress comes with moneys designated for establishing centers in Gaza to prepare Muslims for relocation to the United States. We have to resist this. However, rather than restricting immigration from Islamic societies, which any sane and rational government would do, the Democrat Party is ramping up the importation of Muslims into your communities. This is in addition to the millions of illegal immigrants that have already crossed the border, with large numbers of Muslims among them.
We have a lot of work to do to repair the damage Democrats have wrought. That work begins at the ballot box this November, when we remove these traitors from office.
The time is late. Lawrence Fox knows what time it is. Read his tweet posted above, but for your convenience, here it is in an easily digestible form:
“The Mayor of London is a Muslim. The mayor of Birmingham is a Muslim. The Mayor of Leeds is Muslim. Mayor of Blackburn—Muslim. The mayor of Sheffield is a Muslim. The mayor of Oxford is a Muslim. The mayor of Luton is a Muslim. The mayor of Oldham is Muslim. The mayor of Rochdale is Muslim.
“All this was achieved by only 4 million Muslims out of 66 million people in England: Today there are over 3,000 mosques in England. There are over 130 sharia courts. There are more than 50 Sharia Councils. 78 percent of Muslim women do not work, receive state support + free accommodation. 63 percent of Muslims do not work, receive state support + free housing. State-supported Muslim families with an average of 6 to 8 children receive free accommodation. Now every school in the UK is required to teach lessons about Islam.
“Has anyone ever been given an opportunity to vote for this?”
The answer to Fox’s presumably rhetorical question is no, peoples of the West were never asked whether they wanted this. Muslims colonized the West over time, establishing themselves in our communities, and using the democratic machinery to rise to power—like Adolf Hitler did before abolishing democracy.
The West has to act now and decisively if our children are to inherit the Enlightenment. Otherwise, they will toil as slaves in a New Dark Ages where women will be bagged like garbage and homosexuals hanged from cranes and thrown from towers.
Christopher Hitchens writes in his memoir Hitch 22, “[T]he very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as ‘white’ and ‘oppressive,’ mass illegal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon. (These people are not called nihilists for nothing.) Of all of this we were warned, and Salman was the messenger. Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator: Change only the name and this story is about you.”
I know how I will be voting, but I’m not optimistic about the outcome either way, though. Christopher Hitchens warned us many years ago in the bluntest of language, as you can see below. That would have been the time to head off the coming crisis at the pass. But we didn’t heed his warning. So Lawrence Fox can write a terrifying tweet that feels more like a postmortem than a plan of action.
It’s as if none on the self-declared left have read postmodernist philosopher Sandra Harding’s landmark 1992 essay “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ‘Strong Objectivity’” (published in Social Research), where, after quoting historian Robert Proctor, who writes—
“It is certainly true that, in one important sense, the Nazis sought to politicize the sciences…. Yet in an important sense the Nazis might indeed be said to have ‘depoliticized’ science (and many other areas of culture). The Nazis depoliticized science by de- stroying the possibility of political debate and controversy. Authoritarian science based on the ‘Führer principle’ replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous spirit of politicized debate in and around the sciences. The Nazis ‘depoliticized’ problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms. The Nazis depoliticized questions of crime, poverty, and sexual or political deviance by casting them in surgical or otherwise medical (and seemingly apolitical) terms…. Politics pursued in the name of science or health provided a powerful weapon in the Nazi ideological arsenal.”
—Harding adds: “The institutionalized, normalized politics of male supremacy, class exploitation, racism, and imperialism, while only occasionally initiated through the kind of violent politics practiced by the Nazis, similarly ‘depoliticize’ Western scientific institutions and practices, thereby shaping our images of the natural and social worlds and legitimating past and future exploitative public policies.”
On the other side from postmodernism, Immanuel Wallerstein, in his 1997 American Journal of Sociology paper, “Social Science and the Quest for a Just Society,” mocked the early hopes of positivists who thought “they could be modern philosopher-kings,” the same ilk pushing the technocracy woke progressives adore so much (another irony in the light of their attempt at revolutionary posturing, in full and embarrassing display on today’s college campuses). In the light of history, Wallerstein tells us, their self-aggrandizement proved “totally vain” and they became the “handmaidens of governmental reformism” (not to mention corporate profit).
“When they did this openly, they called it ‘applied social science,’” Wallerstein writes. “But for the most part they did this abashedly, asserting that their role was merely to do the research, and that it was up to others—the political persons—to draw from this research the conclusions that seemed to derive from this research. In short, the neutrality of the scholar became the fig leaf of their shame in having eaten the apple of knowledge.”
Indeed. Neutrality is ideology. Objectivity is what we strive for in science. Tragically, in the epoch of the corporate state, with its administrative rule and technocratic control, the enterprise has become thoroughly corrupted. Of the sciences that feign objectivity, medical science is the worst. Even the captured FDA has to recall thousands of pharmaceuticals, devices, and procedures annually to make the appearance of legitimacy.
Sometimes I think that if the views of flat earthers generated mega-profits, or there was no therapeutic competitor to Scientology, the corporatists would find a way to shoehorn those species of hokum into the academic literature, too.
If you change the environment and make it harder for capitalists to (super)exploit foreign labor, native-born working class families will enjoy a rising standard of living because their wages will increase. Supply and demand. But there’s more to it than that.
A 1921 political cartoon portraying America’s new immigration quotas. Library of Congress
As I explained back in the last decade, restricting immigration in the 1920s allowed for the integration of foreigners into a unified working class that strengthened worker solidarity and led to the rise of unions. The restricted labor pool, combined with union power raised, the standards of living for American families by raising wages and benefits. It moreover improved working conditions.
It was the opening of the borders in the mid-1960s that played a major role in decoupling wages and benefits from productivity, which was associated with a relative decline in real wages, the destruction of private sector unions, and the rise in public employee unions representing functionaries of the permanent administrative class.
President Lyndon Johnson sits at his desk on Liberty Island in New York Harbor as he signs a new immigration bill on Oct. 3, 1965.
This was a purposeful strategy by the corporate state: to disorganize the civil society of native born workers and drive down their wages by introducing foreign workers into the national economy, as well as offshoring work to the third world, further decimating the American working class. Globalization is the problem. Immigration is integral to globalization.
The only way to restore the economic golden years of the mid-20th century is to sharply restrict immigration and re-shore manufacturing. We have to rebuild the private sector union to recouple productivity with wages and compensation, and the only way to do that is rebuild a unified working class.
A US Border Patrol agent watches over migrants waiting to be processed after crossing from Mexico into the United States, December 17, 2023 in Eagle Pass, Texas. (Source: Getty Images)
We can’t do what we need to do with millions of culture bearers pouring into our country who do not share the values that created the broad and well compensated working class of previous generations. We need time to assimilate all these foreigners. And this time it will be even more difficult; the last time they were mostly Europeans who had experienced the Enlightenment and had a grasp of the classical liberal values and principles of democratic-republicanism. Today’s newcomers in contrast are anti-West. We need closed borders and mass deportations to put the country back on the path to peace and prosperity.
Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, a large and sparsely populated frontier state with frontier values, is being criticized for confessing to having once killed a dog. The dog, Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, was a female with an aggressive personality. The behavior that prompted Noem to euthanize the dog was an attack the dog made on her neighbor’s chickens. When Noem went to restrain the dog, the dog bit her. Noem determined that the dog was untrainable. So, she put the animal down.
For this action, Noem is being branded a “murderer.” One cannot of course murder a dog; but resort to that word, besides resulting from ignorance of the law, also conveys the outrage felt by those with more cosmopolitan sensibilities, as well as the partisan nature of the present moment. We would be in denial if we claimed that a lot of reaction was driven by politics.
Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota
To the extent that the same people who condemn Noem for her action would condemn a Democrat who did this (and I assure you that there are Democrats who have), part of the explanation for the reaction is the cultural divide between town and country. In rural areas, the relationship of people to dogs can be complex. While many rural residents care for their dogs on an emotional level and consider them valuable companion and working animals, there are circumstances that prompt euthanizing them. A bullet is one of the most humane way to accomplish that end.
It’s not unheard of for rural residents to resort to such measures when they perceive a dog as a threat to their livelihood, property, or safety. Factors such as inadequate fencing, the roaming habits of dogs, or the presence of packs of feral dogs can exacerbate conflicts between dogs and livestock in rural areas. There are dogs that are diseased, injured, or old and a choice is made to humanely end their suffering. In many communities, dogs may be used for specific functions such as hunting or herding livestock. In cases where a dog fails to perform its intended function or exhibits behavior detrimental to its role, individuals may euthanize the dog. Cricket ticked several of these boxes.
Noem’s critics should consider the circumstances. They should also remind themselves that, while euthanasia rates for dogs in shelters have been declining due to increased efforts to promote adoption, spaying and neutering, and responsible pet ownership, hundreds of thousands of dogs are euthanized in shelters each year due to factors like behavior problems, health issues, lack of resources to care for them, and overcrowding. That doesn’t make what Noem did right (I am not saying what she did was wrong, either), but it highlights the complex and culturally variable relationship between humans and dogs, as well raises questions about the selective outrage.
The relationship between humans and nonhuman animals generally is complex. Most of us feed on the flesh of animals. According to the CDC, approximately 95 percent of American report consuming meat, poultry, or fish. This requires killing them. Most Americans would never eat dogs, however, putting on our anthropology hats, in cultures around the world, particularly in parts of Africa, Asia, and some regions of South America, we recognize that dogs are consumed as food. Immigrants from these parts of the world continue the practice here. The practice is rooted in various cultural, economic, historical, and social factors. It is the unique relationship between people and dogs cultivated in urban and suburban American communities that contributes the shock value of this case—which is not to say that many rural folks disagree with what Noem did.
Kristi Noam and President Donald Trump at a campaign event
My point in making these observations is to note that the outrage on social media is driven in part by class and regional-based ethnocentrisms—ironic coming from people who on the daily push the ethic of cultural pluralism—as well as political opposition to the populist character of rugged individualism. The point is punctuated by Michael Daly’s Daily Beast op-ed “R.I.P. Cricket. Now It’s Time to Talk About Kristi Noem’s Goat.”
I’m not denying that some of those who criticize Noem are not genuinely horrified by the story, especially given that the corporate media puts the inadequacies of the dog for its intended purpose as the central motive guiding her actions. But the story is more complex that the media is telling it, and it might behoove people to understand Noem’s actions in the context of culture and consider whether their own reaction is motived by political bias.
Update (5/4/2024): Fox News headline: “NYPD gives chilling update after 56 arrested at NYU, New School: ‘There’s somebody behind this movement.’” The story quotes NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry: “There is some organization behind this movement.” “I just want to say, and I said it before, there’s somebody behind this movement,” Daughtry said. “There is some organization behind this movement. The level of organization that we’re seeing in both of these schools and at Columbia.” He continued, “There are leaflets on how to protest leaflets or how to commit civil disobedience. There are leaflets on what to do when you get arrested, leaflets on what to say to police,” reiterating, “There is somebody funding this. There is somebody radicalizing our students.”
Happy May Day, first of all. Let’s use this great day of remembrance to raise consciousness about the problem of anti-Western agitation.
NBC 4 reports today: “Massive police presence at UCLA following overnight melee on campus.” It was only a matter of time, in the face of insufficient official action against the illegal behavior of anti-Western agitators, before civilians took matters into their own hands. When public authorities fail to safeguard the citizens of a free republic, the citizen has a moral right and obligation to safeguard himself. It’s why we have a constitutional right to arms. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
A CNN headline yesterday: “Columbia suspends pro-Palestinian protesters after encampment talks stall.” Good. Now clear the buildings and camps of anti-Western agitators, deport international students participating in these actions, and severely discipline every American student who took part in these actions.
This is not a First Amendment issue. It’s one thing to gather, chant slogans, and raise fists in the air. It’s another thing altogether to occupy public space and restrict access to others. Everybody has a right to that space. Refusal to voluntarily yield to requests to vacate the premises requires physical removal by law enforcement.
Nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, righteous or otherwise, is no reason for the police to fail to enforce the law. Trespassing and encampments—propaganda of the deed—are illegal. Illegal actions come with consequences. Cops aren’t fascists for upholding the law. The police are enforcing the will of the people and the requirements of a free republic to safeguard them.
For those students having to flush the pepper spray from their eyes, there’s an easy remedy for this: quit your action and walk away. When your attempt to keep others from using public spaces results in a lawful order to disperse, then disperse or be dispersed. It’s a choice. And it’s your choice. You’re effectively spraying yourself with pepper spray.
Civil disobedience, even nonviolent resistance, does not grant individuals immunity from the rule of law. It’s not that your cause is not righteous (it isn’t) that the police are removing you. It’s because your actions are unlawful and you live in a free society. Welcome to liberal democracy.
Of course, it’s a lot more serious than protestors refusing the vacate the public spaces they have illegally occupied. Students at these elite universities are agitating neither for justice nor peace but for the goals of Islamic terrorist organizations—not just the Islamic Resistant Movement, or Hamas, but the constellation of clerical fascist tendencies across the Islamic world, the Party of God, its hook in the West now well in. Their self-loathing and desire to tear down civilization drives them into the arms of what they perceive to be exotic alternative belief systems. It’s what pushed a lot of Germans into the arms of the Nazi Party. Islam is just a clerical form of fascism.
So-called civil rights and woke faith-based groups are expressing solidarity with the anti-West protests; they’re also fundings the occupations. And it’s not just domestic progressive groups organizing the students. US Representative Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House Committee on Education and Labor told NewsNation that the protests are funded and organized by outsiders. “It’s obvious that someone is funding them,” she said. “They were well prepared.”
Even Eric Adams, the Mayor of New York City, questioned who was behind the protests, pointing out that the tents demonstrators used all looked alike. “What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators. We were extremely cautious about releasing our intel information because our goal was to ensure the safety of the students, the faculty, and without destruction to property.”
But Adams got the causal order backwards. “We have sounded the alarm several times before about external actors who attempted to hijack this private protest.”
We can confirm that the agitators are funded and organized by NGOs whose goal it is to topple the United States from its position as world super power—a goal, if successful, would throw the West into the hands of transnational corporate power totalitarian darkness. From the standpoint of the global elite, many of whom work inside the governments of the West, this is the uprising they have been working to foment. Some of the prominent groups they fund include American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). These are front groups of the transnationalist project.
According to an NBC investigation, Within Our Lifetime (WOL) is sponsored by a progressive New York-based nonprofit group called Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation (WESPAC), which collects and processes online donations. Tax law allows nonprofit groups with a 501(c)(3) status to collect money on behalf of smaller organizations. This is the way finding sources are dissimulated. But fingerprints can be dusted. George Soros has donated $132,000 to WESPAC, according to the New York Post.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former Treasury Department official, told NewsNation: “These [events] are not spontaneous. They are not necessarily organic. They are cultivated by groups that have an axe to grind.” He added, “They’re extremely organized. There are a lot of the Islamist-leaning groups that I think many of us have come to expect here.” That’s putting it mildly. The axe they’re grinding seeks the head of enlighten civilization.
The New York Post ran this headline on April 26: “George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests.” It’s not just WESPAC. Soros and his allies (the same forces behind the lawfare being waged against Republican activists and politicians) are paying agitators across the country to fuel the explosion of anti-Israel protests across the country. We’ve seen the tent cities at Berkeley, Emory, Harvard, Ohio State, and Yale Adams talks about—they’re organized by Soros and other enemies of the West.
The protests are being encouraged by paid radicals, “fellows” of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based fellows in return for spending eight hours a week organizing campaigns led by Palestinian organizations. Here is a slide from an organization info session document:
A page from the info session
The group has received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019. CNN culture writer Harmeet Kaur tells us all this is a lie. CNN carries here headline: “Examining the long history of the ‘outside agitator’ narrative.” Kaur covers race, identity and social justice. That’s all you need to know to know that she is a propagandist for the enemies of freedom. They want to disarm the rational observer. They want to disorganized the collective instinct to safeguard the nation.
At Harvard, anti-Western agitators raise the Palestinian flag where the US flag previous waved.
The rallies are openly promoting sharia supremacism; masses of students are submitting to Islam and bowing in prayer to the totalitarian god of clerical fascism. Imagine these students were right wing conservatives agitating for Christian nationalism, a standpoint not remotely as nightmarish as Islamism in power, where women are forced to dress in cloth bags and gay men are thrown from towers or hung from cranes. Imagine if students in the wake of 9-11, funded by al-Qaeda, were occupying university campuses shouting “Death to America!” Imagine during WWII, American youth occupying public buildings and replacing the American flag with the Nazi rag. You don’t have to imagine these things. You are here. The Party of God is the postmodern Nazi Party—and the youth of America have been prepared to embrace it by their teachers and other influencers.
This isn’t about students protesting Israel action in Gaza—which is Israel righteous response to the forces of reaction. This is about the throng calling for the destruction of Israel and world Jewry, the United States, and the enlightened West. This is a cultural revolution, and no rational citizen should tolerate conditions that portend insurrection and rebellion against they country they are obligated to defend. Remember how the failure to put down the riots of 2020—because it benefitted the Democratic Party politically—inspired unrest across Europe? The Muslims are already flexing muscle in Germany and the UK.
New York City police enter an upper floor of Hamilton Hall on the Columbia University campus using a tactical vehicle, in New York Tuesday, April 30, 2024, after a building was taken over by protesters earlier Tuesday. (AP Photo)
The pro-Palestinian tendency among the American youth is a fifth column organized by an external enemies of democratic republics. These are the minions of the globalists who weaken the West to prepare its populations for incorporation into the new world order.
How exactly does a young Westerner work himself into such severe ideological corner that he finds himself supporting the clerical fascism of sharia supremacism? What concentrated bubble of bullshit can twist a brain into pathological self-loathing? This can’t be only because our universities have become indoctrination camps. There has to be, at least among some, a preexisting personality disorder that makes a person susceptible to losing touch with reality. As Erich Fromm told use in Escape from Freedom, some segment of the human population is always open to becoming a vehicle for authoritarian.
From a rational standpoint, there is nothing to be accomplished by these actions even if their alleged motive is accepted as righteous. The United States will support Israel as it should. The last ounce of decency in the Democratic Party is found in its support for the lone outpost of Western civilization in the land of the barbarians (yet this same party has invited the barbarians inside the gates). What can universities do about it anyway? Why should they do anything about it? Israel has a right to collective self-defense. Calls for a ceasefire are calls for allowing Hamas to regroup.
What we are seeing across America is in part a vanity project by clinical narcissists groomed by the culture industry and DEI programming, deranged by CRT, queer, and other neo-religions to self obsess, substituting identity for accomplishment, fashion for purpose. Many of the throng don’t know why they’re there. They confess their ignorance to reporters. They embarrass higher education. Arrested development has them stuck in the pre-operational stage of Piaget’s cognitive development scheme. Others have been made mentally ill by SEL and wellness centers designed by woke ideologues who long ago abandoned reason and science.
They hate the West and they hate themselves. They’ve been told they’re more wise than their elders. They believe in magic and think they have superpowers. They can’t differentiate the real from the imaginary and the virtual. They can’t even grasp that there’s no undo button in chemically and surgically altering their bodies.
The only way out of this morass is to clean out the rats nests. Sweep clean the campuses of the rabble and raze the encampments. Make the action harsh; they’ll be out of jail soon enough. Make the process the punishment.
freedom and reason 