In an interview with Byline TV on Wednesday night, India Willoughby—Celebrity Big Brother contestant and Loose Women co-host—said he reported J.K. Rowling—author of, among other things, the wildly popular Harry Potter book series—to Northumbria Police for repeatedly using accurate pronouns when referring to him.
India Willoughby of Celebrity Big Brother contestant and Loose Women fame
“I have reported J.K. Rowling to the police for what she said, which I don’t know if that’s going to be treated as a hate crime, malicious communications—but it’s a cut-and-dry offense, as far as I’m concerned.”
“J.K. Rowling has definitely committed a crime. I’m legally a woman. She knows I’m a woman, and she called me a man,” India Willoughby said in the interview. “It’s a protected characteristic, and that is a breach of both the Equalities Act and the Gender Recognition Act. She’s tweeted that out to 14 million followers.”
Rowling knows that Willoughby is a man. We all do. Legislation doesn’t change a natural fact. Neither hormones and surgeries nor legislation can make a man a woman. Any state that claims the power to change reality by definition and then arrest those who defy that definition constitutes a tyranny.
J.K. Rowling, author of, among other things, the immensely popular Harry Potter book series
In her response, Rowling notes the obvious, that “gender critical views can be protected in law as a philosophical belief. No law compels anyone to pretend to believe that India is a woman.” But tyrants don’t care about morality—even as they assert it. If Labor wins the upcoming election, the tyranny will deepen.
Rowling added, “Aware as I am that it’s an offense to lie to law enforcement, I’ll simply have to explain to the police that, in my view, India is a classic example of the male narcissist who lives in a state of perpetual rage that he can’t compel women to take him at his own valuation.”
The UK is becoming Orwell’s nightmare. The thinking liberal and socialist has no option but to vote conservative. Western civilization is at stake.
You have to see it. You have a working brain. You have a reality-based worldview. The Democrats are authoritarians. They don’t believe in democracy. They’ve been busy taking away the right of citizens to vote for the leading presidential candidate. There is no tactic beyond the Party they won’t try—election rigging, impeachment, lawfare, whatever (see The Continuing Campaign to Unperson Donald Trump). They’re preparing to assert in law that January 6 was an “insurrection,” and then associate the president with what never happened even though he hasn’t even been charged with the crime of insurrection.
It’s not that Democrats are delusional. It’s that they think enough Americans are as authoritarian as they are—and that many others are so ignorant and stupid—that they will go along with the ruse.
According to an Axios report (Top Democrat “working on” bill responding to Trump ballot ruling), Rep. Jamie Raskin is preparing legislation in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday that Colorado could not disqualify former President Trump from its state ballot using a Constitutional amendment. Raskin referenced legislation he introduced in 2022 with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (the most loathsome creature in Congress) that would allow the Justice Department to sue to keep candidates off the ballot under the 14th Amendment.
“We are going to revise it in light of the Supreme Court’s decision,” Raskin told Axios. He suggested to the outlet that the bill would be paired with a resolution declaring January 6 an “insurrection” and fine without due process those involved “engaged in insurrection.” That’s right, House Democrats will invent a historical event and associate thousands of citizens, including Trump, with it.
It bears repeating: Trump is facing a number of federal charges related to the 2020 election, but he has not been charged with insurrection. If he ever were charged with insurrection, you’d see more clearly than ever the Kafkaesque character of the Democrats’ authoritarian project to entrench one-party rule (see Cancelling Half the Nation: Progressives Reach for One-Party Rule).
Have you ever wondered why House Democrats didn’t explicitly charge Trump with insurrection in the January 13, 2021 impeachment bill? The articles of impeachment asserted the following: “Donald John Trump engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” The articles go on to declare that the President “unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol,” characterizing the actions as “violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.”
Some would suppose that this language indicates a charge of insurrection. However, the Senate took up the articles and a trial followed in which Trump was acquitted on February 13, 2021. So even if we accept that Trump was impeached for insurrection, he was found not guilty of the crime at trial.
Have you seen this meme before? It’s making the rounds again.
I’m not going to correct everything that’s wrong with the associated lists, but there are a few big things that need correcting. For example, the depiction of the historical Jesus (and I will come to the problem of historicity in a moment) as “Middle-Eastern brown skinned,” as if this makes Jesus nonwhite. We’ve seen this before with the terrorism paint chip meme (see Everything Progressives Say About Mass Shootings is Wrong).
In fact, there’s an attempt by Democrats to significantly revise the 2030 census and federal surveys, introducing a new checkbox for MENA. Advocates for MENA groups (i.e., Islamists) applaud the checkbox because MENA are white and they don’t want to be. Rashida Tlaib said to bureau director, Steven Dillingham, “So Director, are you aware that people like me who are Arab, Middle Eastern, North African have to indicate that they are white on the US Census?”
The Census Bureau says the addition of a MENA box (and a combined question about race and ethnicity) could decrease the number of people who identify as white for the national head count. How big a decrease? We know that more than three-and-a-half million people listed a MENA origin in the 2020 decennial census included those who first identified as white.
So, although Jesus is probably not a historical figure (in his 2014 On the Historicity of Jesus, Richard Carrier has it at best 3:1 against existing), it’s almost certain that if he were then he’d be a white man.
It’s important to point out that the picture on the right hand side of the meme is as much the product of the imagination as the picture on the left hand side. Both are inventions. But if the man on the right were real and attending a high school in the US South in the 1970s, while some of his peers might wonder about his ethnicity, they wouldn’t see him as nonwhite. Because he’s not. He’d be down at the rock quarry around a bonfire drinking PGA punch out of a red Solo Cup wisecracking with all the other white boys who look more like the picture on the left. They’d be leaning against their muscle cars passing the joint without any thought of DEI.
Here’s another important correction to make, this characterization of Jesus as a man seeking justice through restoration and so forth. Somebody must have missed the memo, but those who do not accept Jesus as lord and savior are destined to burn for eternity in a lake of fire. That doesn’t sound like liberation from oppression but it’s opposite.
The Jewish Gehenna, the common concept of Hell, is mentioned several times in Revelations. Some might object to that book—to be sure, it’s a bit mad. But Mark has Jesus saying this (9:43): “And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched.” Even those who call Jesus Lord are not guaranteed salvation (see Matthew 7); a man has to fulfill the will of Yahweh, which is to believe in Jesus as Lord. To put it in terms a woke progressive can relate to: affirm the delusion or be canceled.
Jesus Mafa (1973) is a response to the New Testament readings from the Lectionary by a Christian community in Cameroon, Africa.
Which brings me to… Nonviolent? Jesus was nonviolent? I wonder how the money changers in the temple felt about brown skinned Jesus meek and mild on that day he rampaged through the courts, overturning tables, referring to the scene as a “den of thieves”? They probably weren’t saying, “Damn, is that man ever nonviolent,” as they were being chased from the premises with a whip Jesus had fashioned from cords.
I understand the intent of the meme. It’s designed to stick it to the southern white conservative Christians progressives loathe with such undying passion. But I wonder if the meme-spreaders are like I am, struggling to imagine a southern white conservative Christian man looking at this meme in despair. Said no southern white conservative Christian ever to a fellow Christian of the rainbow sect: “Oh my, you really got me with this one. What will I ever do now that I know Jesus isn’t white?”
Populism is a political standpoint emphasizing community, participatory democracy, and individual liberty. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the populists were farmers, workers, and small entrepreneurs (craftsmen, etc.), who resisted the rise of corporate state power, the latter which emerged from the slavocracy represented by the Democratic Party. The populists were pro-labor, abolitionists, etc., represented by the Republicans, who saved the union from dissolution and protected freed slaves in the South.
In contrast to populism, progressivism was the political movement advancing the interests of corporate state power. Progressives embedded themselves in the administrative state and technocratic apparatus and governed, not by democracy, but by administrative rule and regulation. Progressivism was the philosophy and practice of the Democratic Party.
The same is true today. The populists are the working people who live in small cities and towns and in the countryside. They’re the vast red color that makes up most of the map of the United States. They support free speech, free conscience, free association, etc. There, liberal values and democratic-republic practices still prevail.
The progressives are in the scattered blue parts, representing elite urban sensibilities, managing marginalized minority populations in the inner cities. These are the areas fraught by social disorganization and violent crime, governed by the social logic of the management of people.
When the British colonists rebelled against the United Kingdom, they were freeing themselves from monarchy and empire. They established in its place a secular nation-state based on individual liberty, unalienable rights, and democratic republican norms.
Nationalism is the political philosophy of the nation-state, which emerges from the Enlightenment (France is another good example). Nationalism is what allows for the integral state representing the interests of the people and necessary for establishing a rule of law responsive to the people, which is the demand of populism.
This is contrast to a corporate state (transnational in the current epoch) or a theocracy, in which people are governed by unaccountable private tyranny or religious clerics respectively.
I am a nationalist because I’m a liberal and a democrat and understand the importance of the rule of law and personal sovereignty. This is also why I am a populist. They go together in this way.
The worldview of the X account posted above has been set on its head. The account claims that the populists are duping their supporters into believing what they say without understanding it, yet the user doesn’t even understand what populism and nationalism mean. This individual is not alone. Ignorance about is widespread because it’s the media’s job to invert perception of reality. It’s a hi-tech camera obscura. Tens of millions are falling for it. They live in a simulation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. The Declaration of Independence, IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to this. The present train of abuses and usurpations is indeed long, and despotism is approaching the threshold of popular tolerance. To be sure, it is preferable that we should work to set right our long established republic rather than overthrow it.
In deeper truth, this frame gets the matter backwards; it’s not those who would defend their country who desire to cast off its government (that would be a contradiction), but those who manufacture the illusion that they are not working to this end by dismantling the republic and installing themselves as rulers, to administer a world of high-tech estates managing the affairs of billions of serfs. The power elite understand who the enemy is: those who would resist such a development.
The corporate media is telling you that gun violence occurs mostly in red states. What they are not telling you is that gun violence in America occurs mostly in blue cities. And not everywhere in blue cities—in inner-city black-majority neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were build by progressive Democrats and the big corporate interests they represent. Progressive rule-makers manage the population in the inner cities of America. In what amounts to a custodial arrangements, the city government maintains an idle population and inferior public infrastructure, including schools. Those who run the custodial state continue the longstanding practice of racially-selective underprotection, maintaining the criminogenic conditions that endanger black likes and failing to devote attention to the quality of public safety required to protect them.
There is more government and media deception beyond the fact of obscuring the fact that most gun violence is perpetrated by black men. The propagandists also omit these facts: the weapon of choice is handguns, including in black neighborhoods, and the most violent cities in America already have the strictest gun laws in the nation. In 2020, the most recent year for which authorities have provided statistics, handguns were involved in 60 percent of gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available. Rifles, on the other hand, were involved in only 3 percent of firearm murders.
Why are the government and media lying about this?
First, suggested earlier, they want to effectively disarm the population by targeting those weapons most effective in warfare—the AR15, AK47, etc. They know the civilian population can’t defend itself from state security forces armed with handguns and hunting rifles. Progressives snark at the possibility of armed resistance against the government in light of the latter’s awesome military power. Then why the push to disarm?
Those who have studied war know the threat a well-armed and organized army of irregulars represents to even the most powerful armies in the world. The government and the media know history very well (they have to in order to engineer the most effective propaganda). And they know that the people know that the nation is lurching towards totalitarianism in America, and that, in an instant, the demographic, economic, information, legal-judicial, and political war the government is waging against its people can turn kinetic.
Second, the government and media are lying about gun violence because they need to distract the public from its actual causes, because the actual causes undermine the narrative that white men are the true threat to democracy and public safety in America. False perception advances the gun control narrative. So we must at every turn debunk the narrative.
White people are three-quarters of the US population. They are responsible for a minority of murders in the United States. That’s in gross numbers. In terms of rates, whites are also underrepresented in gun violence. In fact, taking adult males below age 65, white men (around 34 percent of total US population) commit 12.8 times fewer homicides than black men (the latter comprising only around 4 percent of the population).
The government and media know this, so they divert the public attention away from the mass shootings occurring in inner-city black-majority neighborhoods towards the long-standing hegemonic narrative that white men are armed and dangerous—and racist. This narrative is design to to two things: (1) delegitimize the community and culture of white Americans—the majority of the population; (2) sow racial animosity in order to morally divide the proletariat and disorganize working class politics.
The democracy the elite talking about is not the democracy you’re thinking about; it’s the specter of totalitarianism to which the facts attest. See what you see. The administrative and national security states, the censorship-industrial complex, the propagandistic and technocratic apparatuses—are all indicators of the totalitarian future. So is gun grabbing.
Atheists and humanists are in a panic because conservatives, liberals, patriots, and populists on the whole grasp the foundational argument that the fundamental liberties and rights of men are natural in origin, referenced in the Declaration of Independence as the “Laws of Nature,” “their Creator,” and “Nature’s God,” and therefore not manmade.
The Declaration of Independence
In this view, which is objectively demonstrable (see Abraham Maslow), man, through reason and evidence, determines and recognizes the liberties and rights inherent in our species.
For example, women were not “given the right to vote.” That language obscures the principle on which that right was determined and recognized. Women, like men, have a natural right to participate in political society and social life on the principle that freedom requires that any decision made that affects women and men demands from society the recognition of their right to participate in the formation of that decision. A free society recognizes that right. An unfree society doesn’t.
The argument living and breathing in the establishment of the American Republic is reduced in the progressive worldview to “Christian nationalism.” Prepare to hear this term ad nauseam this election season.
At the same time, these same progressives seek comradeship with the paradigm of clerical fascism in our age, namely Islam, which has no capacity to consider or tolerate the separation of church and state intrinsic to the rational Christian worldview. Islam has no workable model of human rights.
Indeed, while the West circulated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic world rejected it an instead produced the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, adopted in 1990 by the member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which attempts to reconcile the universality of human rights with Sharia. Predictably, it begins with “All human beings from one family whose members are united by their subordination to Allah….” That’s (a) from Article I. (b) is “All human beings are Allah’s subjects….”
Article 10: “Islam is the religion of true unspoiled nature. It is prohibited to exercise any form of pressure on man or to exploit his poverty or ignorance in order to force him to change his religion to another religion or to atheism.” Read that again if you need to. It means that you are prohibited from attempting to persuade Muslims to leave their religion or religion altogether.
Contradiction and double standard reflect the authoritarian and illiberal personality of progressive ideology. They mean to deny the natural law and put liberties and rights under the control of the administrative apparatus and experts who run the technocracy.
You see this clearly in speech codes. Progressives force you to speak in way that manufactures a false consciousness about gender, race, and a myriad of other things. Speech codes are features of unfree societies. The value of inclusivity reflects the spirit of Article 10 of the Cairo Declaration. There is a deeply felt need to prohibit criticism of any ideology progressives favor: Islam, gender ideology, critical race theory, etc.
Understand that while governments cannot give you your rights—only recognize those rights determined by reason and facts—the government can suppress your rights. This is what lies behind the argument denying that our rights are natural and prior to the state. Reducing liberties and rights to the state misconceives the point of rights, which is what states are obliged to respect. You cannot be free if your freedom exists at the pleasure of the state—because this means that you exist at the pleasure of the state.
Progressivism projects the totalitarian desire of corporate statism, i.e., the material interests progressives represent. The most important thing you can do this election season is reject the illiberalism of the modern left and vote for the candidates that approximate democratic-republicanism. The most important thing we can do long term is push progressive ideology to the margins and restore the Enlightenment values of classical liberalism and secular humanism.
“The law of Allah is superior to your laws, you cannot oppose and contradict what Allah says,” says the man in the video clip below. He is the man who will interpret for you what Allah says.
"The law of Allah is superior to your laws, you cannot oppose and contradict what Allah says. We don't like your democracy”, says Muslim cultural enrichers in UK. What do you think? pic.twitter.com/2cbgVo2v4t
The man is a Muslim in the United Kingdom. He is not the only Muslim who believes this. This is what Muslims believe as a group. This is what drives the Islamization of Western society. If we do not stop it now, and that means stop the bearers of this culture-ideology from entering our countries, deport those who are here illegally, and make religious life difficult for those who are not, then Islam will win and you will be a slave to Allah—a totalitarian imaginary.
If you are a woman or homosexual, then this situation should terrify you. If are not terrified, then ask yourself why. You may on account of your own experiences as a member of a marginalized group have an extra degree of empathy for what you perceive as a marginalized people, but your empathy is misplaced. Islam is the paradigm instantiation of clerical fascism in the world today. Muslims are not a marginalized people. They are today’s aggressive colonizers. They meant to destroy Western civilization and make its territories and peoples part of a world Islamic empire.
A lot of progressives and social democrats want this, too, even if they don’t see the end of their politics; their striving to be good allies to Muslims reflects an authoritarian desire that lies at the core of their emotional and personality systems (this is what draws them to their chosen political ideology). They are useful idiots for the sharia supremacist project. Our struggle is therefore not only with the aggressive colonizer, but with his collaborator, the progressive and social democrat of Western societies who have invited the barbarians into our cities.
Muhammad receiving Allah’s revelation from the angel Gabriel (AI art)
The assumption behind the cleric’s preachments is that Allah is an a priori and actually-existing thing. But Allah is a social construction. He is a man-made thing. And not an original invention. Allah is a plagiarism of the god that appears in Jewish mythology. Thousands of years ago, the Jews created an entity called Yahweh and put him above everything and used him to mystify the fact that laws either come from nature or from man. Hallucinating encounters with the archangel Gabriel, Muhammad copied and modified Jewish mythology and practice and manufactured a history for a people who did not exist.
Of course, Yahweh is just as imaginary as Allah. There is no god. Angels, devils, and all the rest of it are all imaginary. Man created the supernatural realm. In many cases, he gave god the honey and kept for himself the blues. Man put god in the sky and forget he created god. Now man is ruled over by his own alienated creation, a creation that projects man’s self-loathing (hence prostration before the imaginary), assuages the angst of uncertainty (hence magical thinking), and sublimates his desire to dominate women and children and persecute those who make him feel insecure (hence the patriarchy and misogyny).
The only obstacle to becoming a free thinker is understanding the truth that man created god in this way and that he suffers these consequences because he fails to recognize and acknowledge this truth. As the sociologist W. I. Thomas famously told us, “If men define things as real, then they are real in their consequences.” God is defined into an existence whose only domain is mental, albeit institutions created in the name of god are very real. Belief in god and the desire to be ruled by him is the father form of false consciousness upon which many other forms depend. Overcoming this alienation is the paradigm for overcoming other forms of alienation.
As I have argued, not all religions are bad in the same way. My last essay on Freedom and Reason strived to make this clear with respect to the role rational Christianity played in the Enlightenment and the establishment of the liberal order—the secular republic (see Manufacturing Moral Panic over Christianity). It is neither statements of faith in a creator nor appeals providence that constitute the central problem with belief in a god. Nor is it finding community in religious exercise or conceding to transcendent entities and forces the troubles that escape human agency. It is faith in a god that actively interferes with the history men make and the rules they establish for all to live by. Such a faith in practice is a cover for the tyranny of man over man.
Thomas Jefferson (AI art)
The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, include these words: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”Jefferson’s word choice reflects the deism inherent in his worldview. Deism is a philosophical position that asserts the existence of a creator or god but emphasizes reason and natural law rather than religious revelation. Deists believe in a distant, non-interventionist deity who established the laws of nature but then left the world to operate according to those laws. This deity is the personification of scientific understanding.
Man is a result of those natural laws. By invoking these concepts, Jefferson is emphasizing a higher, natural order that transcends human laws. Man must of course write the laws, but he must write them in accord with his understanding of the material world and human nature, not the preachments of an illiterate mad man in a cave near Mecca. Jefferson is arguing that certain rights are inherent to human beings by virtue of their existence, and these rights are not granted by governments or rulers—or gods. The appeal to natural rights is the work of a scientific mind that admits that individuals have fundamental rights that preexist and supersede the establishment of government.
The Declaration of Independence goes on to declare that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Jefferson’s use of the term “Creator” is intentionally broad; crucially, the term lies outside of any specific religious doctrine. It reflects the deistic belief in a divine being responsible for the creation of the universe and the rational mind of man who determines the logic and substance of laws based on objective understanding of the nature and needs of man. This philosophical foundation underpins the argument for the justification of the American colonies’ separation from British rule—but, more than that, it stands up a model republic for the world to emulate.
As readers should know by now, I’m a life-long atheist. My lack of faith in a god or other supernatural things is not a hinderance to my ability to see what I see. Indeed, I’m convinced that my lack of faith helps me to see the truth of matters more clearly. I don’t have a dog in the hunt, so to speak; my bullshit detector is unencumbered by belief in mythologies. At any rate, I strive to detect mythologies and expose them.
This orientation towards material and objective truths of the world allows me to see very clearly what’s at the play today, where the same people who promote gender ideology, multiculturalism, and sharia supremacy are telling the public that the greatest threat to the American Republic is the patriotic Christian family. You can already see the game plan for the crazy season. In addition to the disinformation about Russian influencing the 2024 election, the lawfare being waged the leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump, the continuing suppression of speech and oppression of patriots by the national security apparatus, a new front has open in the war against the people: the specter of Christian Nationalism.
James Madison, principal architect of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights was a Christian. He was raised in a devoutly Anglican family and attended Princeton University, where he deepened his religious convictions.
Although I have disagreements with Christian doctrine, I am not so blinded by fear and loathing of that faith to see that its head and shoulders better than the various ideologies that challenge it. This is true in several ways, but I want to emphasize here the single greatest thing recommending Christianity over other ideologies, namely its secularism. Before I get to that, I want to remind readers that at the end of last year, on December 23, 2023, I blew up the claims of the Christian extremist in my essay Rise of the Domestic Clerical Fascist and the Specter of Christian Nationalism. I’m not walking back any of that argument. The problem I am addressing today is the reduction of Christianity to its extremist variants and the failure to see that it was in major part the Christian worldview that moved men to found a free republic to safeguard citizens from the imposition of religious doctrine.
Corporate state operatives, represented by progressive Democrats, are engineering a moral panic over Christianity by informing the public that the imposition of a Christian worldview on the country would end democracy with a theocracy where everybody is forced to observe conservative Christian doctrine. But the reality is that the Christian worldview was in operation when the country was founded and those men did not create a theocracy but a secular republic that protected religious liberty—including the right to be an atheist. As I noted in that December essay, “most of the Founders were not only Christian, but that they went along with the establishment of a secular republic. There is an important lesson in all of this (and it would behoove the gender ideologues to pay attention here): one can enjoy his faith while leaving others out of it.”
What would be the story had the American Republic been founded by men with a Muslim worldview? Islamic doctrine does not observe separation of church and state. Islamic preachments insist on a close connection between religious and political aspects of life—not for the believer, but for everybody under the law, or sharia. Sharia is integral to Islamic governance. In an Islamic state, the legal and political systems are expected to be guided by Islamic principles as derived from the Quran and the teachings of Muhammad. Islamic law covers a wide range of aspects of life, including criminal justice, familial relations, and personal morality. Islamic societies thus combine and integrate political with religious authority. Leadership is represented by a caliph and clerics responsible for the spiritual and temporal well-being of the community. It is a totalitarian system.
These arrangements should terrify free-minded persons. Yet progressives in North America and social democrats in Europe have opened the gates for Islamists and other foreign culture bearers to flood in, changing the culture and law across the trans-Atlantic space. The West is being Islamized. Those who object are smeared as “bigots,” “Islamophobes,” “racists,” and “xenophobes.” The same people behind mass immigration are warning that Christians aim to establish in reality the fictional dystopia of Canadian author Margaret Atwood depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale. Under Trump, the public is told, Christian Nationalists will stand up something like the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic society operating on a strict interpretation of Christian theology, used to justify a totalitarian regime. The Gilead Republic is highly stratified and women subjected to severe restrictions on their liberties and rights. That will be our world if Trump is re-elected.
But the world Atwood built in her imagination—and that Rob Reiner imagines in his documentary God and Country, which hit US theaters on February 16 to corporate state media acclaim—is not any Christian society that has existed in the West for several centuries, but rather reflects the realities of the Islamic state that exists across the planet where that system prevails—the very system progressives defend and normalize with banners declaring “Queers for Palestinian.” Indeed, it was developments in Christendom in the Age of Reason that produced the Enlightenment, developments intrinsic to Christian doctrine unfolding in maturation. To be sure, there are Christian extremists (perhaps one in ten Christians in America identifies as a theocrat), but Christianity is not an extremist political ideology in the way Islam is. Not even close.
Or the way gender ideology is. Last summer, Newsweekreported that, according to the survey by Redfield and Wilton Strategies, 44 percent of those aged 25-34 think “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense.” Only 31 percent of that cohort disagreed with the statement. This view remains popular for those aged 35-44, as well, with whom 38 percent reporting that they believe misgendering should be illegal, whilst 35 percent disagree and 26 percent either don’t know or didn’t express an opinion. In other words, referring in the third person to a man who says or thinks he is a woman by male pronouns, a part of speech used to convey reality—that is, correctly gendering the man—is “misgendering,” an offense for which the perpetrator should be adjudicated a criminal and punished. The public is being told that those who produced the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—Christians—represent a threat to the nation, that those who observe fundamental truths rooted in verifiable natural historical facts should be branded criminals for merely recognizing and stating those facts.
Today, in Spain, in 2024, a woman has been sentenced to a six-month term of imprisonment (suspended in exchange for attending a “re-education” course) and to pay a fine of €3850 (around 4,000 USD) for denying that a trans woman is female. Such developments correlate with the rise of Islamophilia in Europe. All this is antithetical to human freedom and dignity.
Spain in 2024 A woman has been sentenced to a 6-month term of imprisonment (suspended in exchange for attending a "re-education" course) and to pay a fine of €3850 for denying that a transwoman is female.#ThisIsNotADrillhttps://t.co/k9Jug7W9y3
Who is the real threat to our liberty? The First Amendment to the United States Constitution ensures the right to freedom of speech, allowing individuals to express their thoughts and ideas without government interference. It safeguards the freedom of the press, enabling not just media organizations to report independently without censorship but everybody who publishes and disseminates their ideas to an interested public. The First Amendment protects the freedom of religion, allowing individuals to practice any religion or none at all, and prohibits the establishment of an official state religion. More broadly, religious liberty is rooted in freedom of conscience, which allows individuals to hold or reject any ideology. It guarantees the right of peaceful assembly, allowing people to gather for various purposes, including protests and public meetings. It grants the right to petition the government, enabling individuals to bring their concerns to the attention of the government. Embedded in these rights is the freedom of association.
Who is the real threat to our democracy? Those who uphold the principles articulated in the founding documents or those who oppose them? Those who uphold the principles are the men and women who defend the American Republic. Those are the patriots. Those who oppose those principles threaten the Republic. You’d have to be ignorant or ideological blind to not see the truth of the situation. It is not the populist-nationalists reclaiming classical liberal ethics and democratic republican governance—for the most part Christians—who threat the Republic. It’s those who have been working for generations to unravel the nation Christians and Deists founded. The real threat is progressivism, the ideas and practices that advance transnational corporate power and totalitarian state control. The threat is those who have thrown open the gates and invited the barbarians in explicitly to outnumber the citizens who would preserve the principles of individual freedom and limited government.
To be sure, we must criticize the Christian zealot. But we also must recognize that Christianity is not the enemy of America. Progressivism is.
Fucking around with ChatGPT just now, in a conversation about Michel Foucault, I elicited from the bot this wonderful sentence: “This Foucauldian exploration challenges conventional notions of authority, unraveling the intricate tapestry of power woven into the fabric of modernity.” I complimented the bot and asked it to write a creative essay on that theme using the three books we had been discussing. Impressive, overblown, and a bit cheesy. Everything after the logo is ChatGPT:
ChatGPT logo
In the labyrinthine corridors of modernity, where the threads of power and knowledge entwine, Michel Foucault’s trilogy of works—Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The Birth of the Clinic—beckons us to traverse the intricate tapestry of authority. As we navigate these intellectual landscapes, we unravel the paradoxes and complexities that define our relationship with power in its multifaceted manifestations.
Madness and Civilization serves as our initial portal, inviting us to contemplate the elusive contours of sanity and madness. Foucault’s exploration of the episteme of the Classical Age takes us on a journey through the asylums and the Great Confinement, where societal norms intertwine with the institutionalization of madness. Here, the threads of authority tighten, weaving a pattern that defines who is sane and who is cast into the shadows of social marginalization. The Panopticon, with its all-seeing eye, foretells the surveillance that will permeate the very fabric of modern existence.
Our passage through the corridors of the carceral archipelago unfolds in Discipline and Punish, where the tendrils of power extend into prisons, schools, and hospitals. The metaphorical network of disciplinary institutions becomes a crucible of societal norms, molding individuals into docile bodies subject to surveillance and normalization. The intricate dance of disciplinary power reveals the fragility of autonomy in the face of an omnipresent gaze. Bio-power and bio-politics emerge as the loom, intertwining the strands of life processes with the regulation of behavior, weaving a narrative of control.
Transitioning to The Birth of the Clinic, our exploration enters the realm of medical knowledge, where the medical gaze becomes the warp and weft of a canvas painted with the hues of observation and diagnosis. The clinic, a locus of power, shapes the perception of health and illness, categorizing bodies and subjecting them to medical scrutiny. The authoritative voices of clinicians, wielding the stethoscope as a scepter, pronounce judgments on the state of bodies, further embedding the connection between knowledge and power within the fabric of our existence.
As we step back to behold the panorama, we discern the emergence of a Foucauldian tapestry. It challenges conventional notions of authority, inviting us to question the legitimacy of the threads that bind us. The tapestry is not a singular narrative but a collage of intersecting stories—of the mad and the disciplined, the healthy and the diagnosed—woven into the very fabric of modernity. The warp of power intersects with the weft of knowledge, creating a dynamic tension that shapes our understanding of authority in the complex tapestry of existence.
In this Foucauldian exploration, the threads of power are not neatly woven but tangled, knotted, and overlapping. The tapestry, far from being static, is a living entity that breathes with the complexities of our society. Foucault’s trilogy becomes a guide through the shifting patterns, inviting us to unravel the threads and question the authority that dictates the design. As we navigate this intricate tapestry, we are compelled to confront the paradoxes, disruptions, and potential for liberation embedded within the very fabric of our modern existence.
“I asked criminologists about immigration and crime in the US. Their answers may surprise you.” That’s the headline from CNN a couple of days ago. The reporter is Catherine Shoichet. The criminologists are Charis Kubrin and Graham Ousey who “literally wrote the book on immigration and crime.” The book is Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock, published by Springer.
Immigrants run towards the US-Mexico border wall after crossing the Rio Grande into El Paso, Texas, February 2024.
Kubrin and Ousey report that “in general, on average, we do not find a connection between immigration and crime, as is so often claimed. The most common finding across all these different kinds of studies is that immigration to an area is either not associated with crime in that area, or is negatively associated with crime in that area. Meaning more immigration equals less crime. It’s rare to find studies that show crime following increases in immigration or with larger percentage of the population that are immigrants.”
I don’t know. Last year we saw the single largest increasing in the US population in history, almost all of it illegal immigration, and I find it impossible to ignore that major crime wave associated with that fact.
But we reads on, Hobbitses… Here, towards the end…
“The problem is—and this is definitely like a blue state, red state issue—for a lot of the blue states, we don’t even record immigration status. We don’t really care about that. If you’re committing a crime, we’re going to arrest you. We’re going to put you in jail. If it comes up that you’re not a citizen, and we’re kind of mad at you, then we’re going to maybe turn you over to ICE. But the reality is, a lot of times, we’ll just put you through our system and treat you like every other criminal.”
So you have to read all the way down to the end to learn that in blue states—and make that blue cities, too—immigrant status isn’t recorded in statics on crime reported to the police, arrests, and clearance. In other words: they don’t know.
Wouldn’t it have been nice (as in honest) had Shoichet began the article that way?
However, this is not because they couldn’t know. They don’t look later in the process where immigration status is usually determined.
And this right here: “[M]any people that will respond to those public opinion polls [I will show you the poll in a minute in a moment] and will recognize that immigrants, you know, have contributed greatly in beneficial ways to society. So it’s like, what are the driving forces that perpetuate, that you know that association (between immigration and crime)? And why does it have so much power?”
Immigrants are associated with half a trillion dollars annually transferred from the native working class to the capitalist class. So when they say immigrants “have contributed greatly in beneficial ways to society,” what they mean is that immigration greatly benefits the capitalist class and its functionaries. In addition to experiencing lower wages and greater job insecurity, native born workers also pay the taxes that support illegal immigrants. So it doesn’t benefit them at all. Add on top of this the reality that immigration is associated with serious crime and social disorder and all that might tell you why it has so much power.
Moreover, as I argued recently on Freedom and Reason (see Crime, Immigration, and the Economy), the crime problem in inner-city black-majority neighborhoods is largely the result of the effects of two historical events: the ghettoization of blacks during the Great Migration and the radical transformation of immigration laws that occurred under President Johnson. It hardly seems a coincidence that a year after recognizing the civil rights of black people, Democrats opened the border to mass immigration. Thus an indirect effect of mass immigration is higher crime among the demographic progressives idled.
This move also devastated labor unions, I hasten to add. It worked the same destruction in France. Mass immigration is a capitalist strategy to screw labor and disorganize their political organizations.
About that poll. Crime wasn’t the focus of Pew’s recent survey, which found that Americans overwhelmingly fault the government for how it’s handled the situation at the border, but when those surveyed were asked specifically about the impact of the migrant influx on crime, the pollsters found that while 85 percent of Republicans linked the migrant influx to crime, only 31 percent of Democrats did.
That the juxtaposition of that poll and the findings of two criminologists who “literally wrote the book on immigration and crime” is designed to make Republicans who believe there is an immigration and crime problem appear to be imagining things. I mean that is literally the point of the exercise.
freedom and reason 