Year: 2024

CNN updates an article less than an hour ago mystifying the facts of the mass shooting that left one dead (Lisa Lopez-Galvan) and twenty more wounded at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory rally yesterday. “Three people were detained and an unspecified number of guns recovered as officers converged, said Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves. No charges had been announced by Wednesday night and no suspects had been named.”

If the shooter or shooters had been white the story’s frame would be entirely different. We can know this from the pattern induced from a universe of mass shooting stories. The lengthy article excludes crucial known details, chief among them, that the shooters were black. It’s not as if there are no images of the shooters, yet CNN omits them from the story.

Note the places CNN identifies where mass shootings occur—churches, grocery stores, outlet malls, and schools. These rare sites of mass shootings conjure images of the lone white shooter. The objective is to cast the threat of white men against the backdrop of normality, to make people feel unsafe in daily lives lives in familiar surroundings.

CNN reports that Kansas City “was at least the 48th mass shooting in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which like CNN counts those in which four or more are shot, not including a perpetrator.”

By that definition, and using the Gun Violence Archive, there were 656 mass shootings in 2023. What CNN won’t tell you is where most of those shootings occurred. Nor will they tell you the race of the majority of perpetrators. But I will. Most mass shootings occur in inner-city black-majority neighborhoods and are perpetrated by black men.

Most Americans don’t know this. When you tell them the truth most will disbelieve you. The mass media has done a number on the people’s heads, systematically hiding the truth from the public in order to create a false perception that white men are the chief perpetrators of violence in America.

One would reasonably expect that in a country that is three-quarters white, whites would be responsible for most murders. But, in fact, black men, who comprise only 6 percent of the US population, commit more than half of all murders in the country. In reality, white people are drastically underrepresented in the most violent crimes perpetrated in this nation.

That those who mind control you obscure these facts by framing and through omission gives the game away. That is, it tells you there is an agenda at work. And the character of the lie tells you the character of that agenda. This is why I am compelled to share these facts with you.

I have nothing against black Americans. In fact, more than half of all murder victims are black (Kansas City is hardly unique) and I condemn progressives for the urban policies that create the criminogenic environments that yield this result. It is for the sake of blacks and the agenda to depict white people as racist oppressors that I am moved to tell you the truth.

When people talk about communism, they’re typically referring to the Soviet Union or some country they believe operates on the Soviet model (whatever they think that is). The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), guided by the ideology Marxism-Leninism, did not consider its union to be communist, but rather a socialist state building towards communism, hence the name the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In past writings and debates, I have referred to the Soviet Union as “state socialism,” and sometimes “siege socialism” (following Michael Parenti’s explanation of the deformations), but never “communism,” because, in fact, the Soviet Union was never communism. Communism is a stateless and classless social formation, and is the original human societal type, as I will explain in this essay.

In casual conversation, I find attempts to clarify the matter rather futile and always tedious, so I generally abandon any attempt to do so. Instead, I simply note that the Soviet Union did not represent Marx’s idea of communism, nor did it follow from the logic of his argument. I suspect that I haven’t changed any minds. I have acknowledged the notable achievements of the socialist project in my previous writings (see, e.g., The Soviet Union: State Capitalist or Siege Socialist?), and I stand by those, but I agree with those who criticize the Soviet Union for its totalitarianism and oppressive nature. Indeed, my stance on state socialist projects has hardened in recent years. In recent talks and discussions, I’ve expressed admiration for the positions taken by such figures like Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, as well as appreciated the nuanced understanding demonstrated by Richard Nixon concerning Red China. Nixon’s efforts to disrupt the Sino-Soviet alliance through diplomatic engagement with China were properly motivated.

However, the opening of China, while initially a diplomatic success, was manipulated by corporate power to integrate the People’s Republic (PRC) into the capitalist framework—and adopt authoritarian features of that regime. This strategic move tapped into the vast Chinese population as a source of cheap labor, facilitating the offshoring of production (the spread of the export processing zone or EPZ) and leading to significant profits at the expense of labor unions, often financed with the pensions of Western workers. This development plays a central role in the transnational project, championed by successive administrations from both major political parties, including the Bushes, the Clintons, Obama, and now Biden. Thus, Nixon’s approach, perhaps unwittingly, more likely manipulated, contributed to strengthening the totalitarian regime in China at the expense of the Chinese people.

Although the Soviet Union is no longer in existence, its historical legacy serves as a poignant warning to the world about the perils of totalitarianism as popularly understood. The rise and fall of the Soviet Union, marked by oppressive regimes and human rights abuses, provide a cautionary tale for societies contemplating similar paths. George Orwell’s writings, particularly Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, play a significant role in keeping the lessons from Soviet history alive in popular memory. Orwell’s works vividly depict the dangers of unchecked power and the erosion of individual freedoms, serving as a timeless reminder of the potential consequences when ideologies veer towards authoritarianism. In recognizing the enduring relevance of the Soviet experience and Orwell’s literary contributions, we are reminded to remain vigilant against threats to democracy and human rights in the pursuit of societal progress.

Indeed, despite the ongoing existence of communist China, the Soviet Union persists as the paradigm of communism in the collective global consciousness, a phenomenon that obscures the threat China represents to humanity and its direct oppression of eighteen percent of the global population; the historical imprint of the Soviet Union continues to overshadow the narrative of contemporary China’s communist regime; the iconic imagery and narratives associated with the Soviet era, from the Cold War tensions to the Iron Curtain, dominate discussions on communism, eclipsing awareness of China’s current political landscape. The enduring perception of the Soviet Union as the archetypal communist state reflects the historical significance of its role in shaping the geopolitical landscape and reinforces the tendency to view contemporary communist entities through the lens of the Soviet experience.

This essay’s objectives are to illuminate and rectify the, perhaps inadvertent (although I don’t really think it is), overshadowing of China’s current political landscape by the historical specter of the Soviet Union and to redirect reader’s focus toward a nuanced examination of terminology, clarifying the intricate relationship between the capitalist West and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). By doing so, I mean to untangle the threads that have relegated China to the shadows of the Soviet narrative. Assuming we accept the CCP’s self-designation as valid, the integration of the capitalist West with communist China poses a contradiction: why would the democratic capitalist countries of the West work so closely with an authoritarian communist nation? The answer is that China is neither a communist nor a socialist social formation. It’s not communist for the reason the Soviet Union wasn’t communist: neither countries was or has ever been stateless or classless. It’s not socialist because socialism is a social formation in which those who produce the social surplus own and control the means of production, either through direct democratic procedures (preferred) or through a bureaucracy that administers the nation’s affairs for the good of the nation.

Given these definitions, the current state of China aligns more closely with the designation totalitarian state monopoly capitalism (TSMC). Today, China officially describes its system as “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” the designation introduced by Deng Xiaoping, the late-twentieth century leader, to acknowledge the country’s departure from Marxist-Leninist principles. At an earlier state of its development, it would not have been inaccurate to categorize China as an instantiation of bureaucratic collectivism, a term developed by some Trotskyist thinkers to describe the socioeconomic system that emerged in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, i.e., a distinct social formation characterized by a dominant bureaucracy controlling the means of production (what I have commonly referred to as state socialism); however, China’s market reforms and promotion of private enterprise suggests state monopoly capitalism, with the CCP maintaining strict political control over the population (the totalitarian piece).

A problem arises when TSMC regimes are incorrectly designated as “communist states,” in that the misrepresentation obscures the reality that Western states in their late capitalist phase are themselves instantiations of state monopoly capitalism and are not generally thought of as communist or even socialist social formations, except of course by rank-and-file right-wing observers, as well as progressives attempting to cover up their corporate loyalties. Moreover, many Western states exhibit tendencies towards evolving into more authoritarian structures. These developments are ominous. Here’s why: The term TSMC was coined by Franz Neumann in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, to describe fascist regimes, particularly the Nazi regime in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Neumann’s work highlights the corporatist nature of totalitarian capitalism. It’s crucial to clarify in debate and discussion that the economic and social policies implemented by the Nazi regime were not based on socialist principles advocating for worker ownership of the means of production. In practice, the Nazi regime pursued corporatist economic structure overlayed with authoritarian politics. Private property continued to exist, with the state exercising substantial control over the economy through central planning in collaboration with large corporations and financial institutions.

Corporatist political arrangements have become inherent in the organization of Western states. Some may object that, while corporatism is obvious in European countries, it is not so in the United States; however this objection ignores the role of administrative state in reproducing the corporate structure and the entrenched power of public employees unions, which protect a permanent political elite guided by progressive values and technocratic norms. Thus the mislabeling of social formations creates confusion in political discourse, as seen in the aforementioned tendency of conservatives to categorize progressive Democratic policies as “communist” or “socialist” when, in fact, they are are variations on the corporatist model and function to reproduce corporate power. To advance the populist-nationalist project, especially in raising consciousness about the problem of corporate personhood for those on the political right who are rightly suspicious and critical of concentration of power, in other words, in uniting individuals across the political spectrum, it is imperative to employ a common language with valid terms and draw well-founded conclusions.

Given the goal of this essay to provide conceptual clarity, I want to elaborate my previous points concerning the character of communism. When Karl Marx discusses communism, he refers to something distinct from the really-existing socialism of the Soviet Union (I do not deny that the Soviet Union at points represented some form of socialism, just that it wasn’t communist). Marx is referring to a theoretical construct, a future state of existence or possibility. The concrete instantiation of communism from which Marx abstracts the future state (the abstraction is never elaborated but described in terms of justice principles) is a past state of human existence, what Marx terms “primitive communism.” The American sociologist, Gerhard Lenski, following the nomenclature of anthropology, called this “gatherer-hunter” (actually “hunter-gatherer,” but this gives hunting too big a role in food production) in his work Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification. Lenski’s depoliticized categories are the more commonly used. I will use both terms interchangeably.

Primitive communism, or gatherer-hunter, is a classless and stateless social formation. The existence of primitive communist societies substantially confirms John Locke’s speculations concerning the state of nature, i.e., the original human society, presented in his Two Treatises of Government. Locke supposes a “state of equality” in the beginning, “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.” On the matter the natural right to the fruits of one’s labor, Locke asks his audience to “consider natural reason, which tells us, that men, being once born, have a right to their preservation, and consequently to meat and drink, and such other things as nature affords for their subsistence.” “But this being supposed,” he observes, “it seems to some a very great difficulty, how any one should ever come to have a property in any thing.” It is here that he sets out his labor theory of value and insists that it could not have been God’s desire to leave the world undeveloped by the creative force of human agency. Let’s explore Locke’s point by briefly reviewing the cultural and social evolution of man.

Due to the low level of development in the technological means, there is no social surplus in gatherer-hunter arrangements. Primitive communism is a subsistence-level society where people work to fulfill their needs, their work distributed based on individual ability, with the results of that work distributed to tribal members as they have need. The tribe works together to secure a life-way and protect its members from the elements, including other tribes. There is a natural sexual division of labor rooted in the differences between men and women, but primitive communism was marked by democratic-egalitarian social arrangements, arrangements which, according to Frederich Engels, power-sharing between the genders and a concern for the family. It is from such arrangements that Marx developed the communist principle—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—that should mark the ethic of future communist society.

Initially, humans didn’t have much work to do because they were few in numbers and nature provided for them, thus the pace of technological development was in the beginning slow. We can identify a formula here for explaining the variability in the development and elaboration of the forces of production, i.e., organization and technology: the extent of technological development depends upon the nature of the environment conditions; the greater the technical problems to be solved, the more robust the technological development. As humans migrated from South and Central Africa to Northern Africa and then out into Eurasia, the technological means developed more rapidly, explaining why large-scale agrarian society and civilization appear first in those areas referred to as the Fertile Crescent (Nile River Valley, up through and across the Levant to Mesopotamia, then down into the Indus River Valley). The appearance of social class in history signifies a level of technological sophistication where society has the capacity to produce a social surplus, allowing some to live without working, sustained by value produced by others.

To maintain the unequal arrangement that result from this dynamic, the state, law, patriarchy, and religion come into existence. These form the superstructure upon which arises mass consciousness and ideational culture which function to reproduce normative structures surrounding the new property arrangements; successive generations are born and socialized into the worldview provided by the ideological apparatus and develop a collective consciousness—crucially, a false consciousness—that reproduces the legitimacy of class relations over time and space. As German sociologist Max Weber observed, this is how power becomes authority, namely through legitimization of domination of the whole of the population by a groups within it. Marx characterizes this situation as alienation, i.e., the estrangement of humans from their fellow humans, from their productive capacity, and from their role in world-building. Marx contends that alienation, rooted in exploitation and inequality, along with the distortions in consciousness it produces, is unjust. This is why he becomes a communist.

Modern communism, as envisioned by Marx, anticipates a future state where technological advancement allows everyone to live without working or with only minimal work required. In his day, and in our day, also, this condition doesn’t yet exist, but clearly the trend is in the direction of eliminating necessary labor in production—and the gap between work and its disappearance is disastrous for humanity. Under capitalism, technological development is in fact driven by the imperative to reduce the variable labor component in production, thus raising the organic composition of capital, which in turn displaces labor. There is not getting around this; for capitalism that is not growing is dying, and things don’t act right when they’re dying. History abounds with concrete instantiation of this, the madness of National Socialism being one of them. But the madness is becoming all to normal now.

Marx theorizes that a socialist revolution could accelerate development towards these ends with the goal of liberating people from necessary labor, thus freeing them to engage in creative endeavors of their own choosing. One might suppose that humanity can allow the process to unfold under capitalist relations, and Marx and Engels were impressed by capitalism’s ability to drive social and technological development (late in his life, Christopher Hitchens argues that capitalism had yet more work to do in denying not his Marxism but his socialist credentials); however waiting for technological possibility to establish the basis for a different society poses challenges for the reasons noted above, which I elaborate here. Today, corporation are aggressively replacing human labor with automated systems and AI. The drive to eliminate human labor from production processes represents a contradiction in the system, since capitalism relies on the circuit of workers earning wages, taking them to the market, realizing surplus value as profit. As technology advances, capitalism faces a realization crisis, requiring the state to fix the broken circuit (the money presses are humming). The result is capitalist crisis and ever greater corporate state control.

Central to corporate state control is the social logic known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is an economic and political ideology that announced itself in the mid-twentieth century, ostensibly advocating for free-market principles and emphasizing minimal government intervention in the economy; however, in practice, it is the transfer of functions and powers native to governments to corporations, institutions without democratic redress. Neoliberalism rationalizes this move by promoting the idea that markets are efficient allocators of resources, which promises increased economic efficiency. Global economic integration and free trade are encouraged, involving the removal of barriers to international trade. In other words, neoliberalism is the handmaiden to the transnationalization of the corporate state. Neoliberals advocate for privatization of public assets and services, including sectors such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure. It places a strong rhetorical emphasis on individual responsibility and self-reliance, arguing that individuals should take charge of their economic well-being through market participation and competition, even while it makes it more difficult for individuals to do any of this.

David Harvey’s critique of neoliberalism, presented in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism, in part involves an analysis of the geographical and spatial consequences of neoliberal policies. He shows how these policies reshape urban landscapes, exacerbating social and economic inequalities. He argues that the implementation of neoliberal principles often results in distinct spatial arrangements that favor certain groups over others. Rather than being a neutral economic framework, Harvey contends that neoliberalism inherently serves the interests of the capitalist class, concentrating wealth among a select few and reinforcing existing power dynamics. The rise of financialization emerges as a crucial element in Harvey’s analysis, highlighting the growing influence of financial markets and the prioritization of financial interests over productive economic activities. The financialization trend is one more indication of the late capitalism Freedom and Reason is devoted to analyzing.

Helping us understand the governance structure that emerges from this situation, Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism offers a critical examination of contemporary political and economic structures, emphasizing the impact of neoliberalism on democratic governance. One of the central concerns in Wolin’s critique is the transformation of democracy into what he terms “inverted totalitarianism.” He argues that, under the influence of neoliberalism, traditional democratic ideals are subverted, leading to a system where corporate and economic interests wield significant influence over political institutions. Wolin contends that, to be sure, the formal trappings of democracy remain, but real political power is concentrated in the hands of a managerial elite and powerful corporate entities.

The intertwining of corporate and political power, according to Wolin, poses a threat to the core principles of democratic governance. The political strategy of “managed democracy,” plays a major role in this dynamic marked by the management and manipulation of the electoral process by powerful elites. He discusses how the formalities of elections may persist, but the substance of democracy is hollowed out as economic elites exercise disproportionate influence over political outcomes. Wolin’s analysis delves into the erosion of civic engagement and the decline of active citizen participation. Neoliberalism, he argues, contributes to a form of political apathy and disengagement as citizens feel increasingly marginalized in a system dominated by corporate and economic interests.

There is a story to tell about political developments in late capitalism that I cannot pursue here, but promise to in the near future. I will leave readers with the observation of Jürgen Habermas, a German sociologist and philosopher, who in his 1973 book Legitimation Crisis, explores the challenges faced by modern states in terms of maintaining legitimacy and securing the consent of their citizens amid these developments. The legitimation crisis arises when the traditional institutions and mechanisms that have historically provided legitimacy to a political system come under strain and begin to falter. Habermas argues that modern societies rely on three primary systems of legitimation: the economic system (market and economic institutions), the political system (government and legal institutions), and the sociocultural system (norms, values, and cultural institutions). When these systems experience dysfunction, such as corruption in politics, cultural alienation, and economic inequality, a legitimation crisis may result. Citizens begin to question the authority and legitimacy of the existing institutions, leading to a loss of trust in the system. This crisis can manifest as political protests, social unrest, or a general decline in confidence in the established order.

I hardly need to announce in this essay that we are presently in a legitimation crisis. It remains to be seen if the power elite can reestablish control as they did in the 1970s (which is the political story I promised a moment ago). Habermas suggests that, during a legitimation crisis, societies face the challenge of restructuring the three systems to regain legitimacy and restore the social contract between citizens and institutions. He emphasizes the need for open communication, democratic deliberation, and the active participation of citizens in addressing the underlying issues causing the crisis. Of course, this is not how the previous crisis was resolved. And given that the goal of transnationalism and the development of a world corporate state rooted in neofeudalism is to hinder the transition to a technologically-advanced communist society, where everyone benefits from machines working for us. The current trajectory points towards managing useless eaters on vast custodial estates resembling serfdom rather than emancipation.

Under any rational understanding of informed consent what happened in the account I share below constitutes sexual assault. If there is no law regulating this where this occurred, there ought to be. The victim in this case is a heterosexual man who thought he was going to have intimate relations with a woman. At no point did the man representing himself as a woman tell the man that he was actually a man. The man discovered this man’s penis during the process. What is being described here is sexual assault. The perpetrator is presenting himself as the victim. If you are tempted to rationalize this by saying it didn’t happen, you’re missing the point. The scenario is real world.

However you feel about gendered presentations (as a libertarian, I don’t really care except where it is used to gain access to spaces reserved for the opposite gender or in cases like the present one), if you believe that it’s ever appropriate for a man or a woman to initiate sexual relations under false pretenses then you have become so submerged in slogans that you have lost your moral compass.

Maybe it would help to flip roles around. Imagine this is trans woman identifying as a lesbian going home with a lesbian and getting to the stage of intimacy where the lesbian discovers he has a penis. The lesbian draws back and asks if it is a penis. The trans woman pretends as if he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. This is after kissing her. This is after groping her body. This is sexual assault. It’s no different the other way around. It would be no different if a gay man went home with a trans man to discover that the trans man had a vagina or had phalloplasty. If a trans man penetrated a woman with his pseudo-penis it would be rape. You don’t get to sexually assault or rape another person because you’re trans identifying.

We need to be very clear about what’s going on here. I just lectured on criminal categories in my criminology class, which I have been teaching now for a quarter of a century, and lately, every time I go through the material, and in taking questions from students, I am reminded about how changing our language puts people at risk of criminal victimization. This is the revised definition of rape under the model statute the FBI uses to categorize these offenses: Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim. Sexual assault is sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim. This broad category includes attempted rape, fondling, or unwanted sexual touching.

A lesbian does not want to be touched by a man. It matters not at all that she believes the man is a woman—or that the man believes he is a woman. A trans woman is not a woman. A trans woman is a man. Apply the principle all around. This is not about judging people by their genitals. This is about the reality of gender and sexual orientation. Reality is not mix-and-match.

The victim in this case was far too forgiving in the situation and should have reported this assault to the police. We have to force the hand of law enforcement to make sure we maintain a legal and normative culture in which it is never appropriate to deceive people into sexual relations they would not otherwise consent to given sexual preference. Clearly the man is not gay and did not intend to have sex with another man. Sexual orientation is the only objective factor in this case. As such, it is the overriding factor. Gender identity is entirely subjective. A man cannot justify raping a lesbian because he identifies as one, etc.

All the trans identifying man had to do was to tell the other man what he was so the man could make a decision about whether he wanted to go home with him. That’s it. But honesty is being destroyed because the truth is being upended by ideology. It’s not just truth that’s under assault here. The falsehood that a man is a woman because he says he is puts others at risk. Even if this case is fictional, the account is entirely possible, and moreover probable.

If this ever happens to you, please report the matter to the police. The time to prevent the dissimulation of rape and sexual assault is before the new culture being stood up robs us of our capacity to understand what is happening to us. Moreover, while some might have the courage to object, a lot of people are afraid and will allow the scene to unfold. They will leave the encounter having been sexually assaulted because they were too afraid to say no. They were too afraid to say no because they feared being condemned as a bigot.

Grindr launched in 2009 and has since grown into the largest social networking app for bi, gay, lesbian, and trans identifying people. Grindr brags about the “millions of daily users who use our location-based technology in almost every country in every corner of the planet.” However, Grindr doesn’t allow gay men and lesbians to filter for cisgender, i.e., those whose identity matches the objective reality of their gender. In doing so, Grindr leans into the fallacy that trans identifying individuals are the gender they claim they are. Is this company engaged in deceptive practices that puts personal security at risk by obscuring reality?

Here are the FAQs announcing the policy change:

Grinder explains that one can choose from a list of more than fifty gender identities. The identities are culturally specific. The user can selected the gender identities of those he’d like to see appear on his grid, which can be saved to his preference. However, users cannot filter for “cis men” or “cis women,” the queer theoretical designation for the two and only genders of the human species.

“When designing gender settings on Grindr,” the service explains, “it was important to us to not further perpetuate discrimination and harm for the trans and nonbinary community. For this reason, we allow filtering based on gender—you can specify that you want to see men or women—but this will include all men or all women, because trans men are men and trans women are women.”

The reality is that trans men are women and trans women are men and acknowledging that reality is not discriminatory—truth is not discriminatory. These are objective mind-independent facts—incontrovertible, unchangeable, and eternal (at least until a molecular reassemble machine is invented that can change genotypic and phenotypic sex).

Humans are mammals and, as such, natural beings with a natural history. A man who appears as a woman, no matter how sophisticated the simulation is, is still a simulation of a woman. No simulated appearance can change the reality the appearance seeks to obscure. So when a trans identifying man claims to be a woman he is engaged in deception.

Grindr risks an environment of deception by not allowing its gay users to search for other gay users. Presumably, a man producing a simulated sexual identity would not have to tell other users the truth about what and who he is. That’s a problem. A lesbian would not being able to filter out trans women who claim to be lesbians. Etcetera.

If a man seeks intimate experiences with other men simulating women (or any other being or object), then this is something no government should regulate. In a free country, men are allowed to appear as women, and other men are allowed to seek intimacy with them, etc. But such intercourse must be voluntary and consensual. If a man lures a heterosexual man or a lesbian on a date posing as a woman, this should carry criminal penalties; it is, at bare minimum, fraud; if intimate contact occurs, rape or sexual assault. Not being able to filter out people who are engaged in deception risks fraud and assault.

Why this isn’t obvious with rules rendered in black letter law everywhere is Exhibit A in the success of the progressive war on justice, rights, science, and truth. It’s a signal that we’re in the grip of a new religion, one that, because the government stands behind it, has become the official dogma—the state religion.

The same libertarianism that decries government regulation of consensual individual sexual conduct is the same libertarianism that finds unacceptable the union of state and religion in a secular republic that forbids such circumstances.

Corporations should be made to follow by law the logic of democratic-republican government, which is ruled by reason and dependent on evidence.

This blog post is about crime, immigration, and economy, not in the form of a systematic analysis of their association, but as a two-part blog post laying out the problem of each. Crime and the economy are of course related, and I trust the reader to put together the implications of economics development in late capitalism for the problem of crime in America. I begin with the media reporting on recent economic trends and connect this to the immigration crisis.

* * *

Today the media is celebrating the strength of the economy, highlighting a tight labor market. To be sure, there was a recent surge in payrolls, but the market is tight because millions of people who quit their jobs over the last several years are not looking for new ones. They have dropped out of the labor market. Since the unemployment rate is determined by those seeking employment, those not looking for work will not be recorded as unemployed. This explains the low unemployment rate, not the genius of withered husk currently occupying the White House.

What would it take to bring workers back to work? Higher wages, benefits, better working conditions, and greater job security—all things necessary for an adequate and dignified life. But firms don’t want those things; those things are antithetical to their raison d’etat. So the mass media, i.e., the propaganda apparatus of the corporate state, is spinning the unemployment numbers to obscure the real reason capitalists are importing millions of foreign workers (legal and illegal): to increase competition in labor markers and put downward pressure on wages.

This is the supply and demand effect, where labor is the commodity and wages signal its price, in a market distorted by mass immigration. Instead of allowing the labor market to dictate wages high enough to draw native workers back to work, business firms use cheap foreign labor across sectors to keep the native labor on the sidelines. The corporate state wants to keep the Great Resignation going.

The public needs to grasp the reality that corporations don’t care about the citizens of the country in which they operate. A corporation may fly a US flag over its headquarters, but it’s no patriot. The corporate person is a psychopath. The corporation only cares about maximizing surplus value and delivering for shareholders, which, firm by firm, is achieved by raising the rate of surplus value (the rate of exploitation) by driving down wages deploying the strategy of replacing native labor with foreign labor and displacing labor where it can through rationalization (which explains the rise in productivity over against compensation). But lowering wages via absolute production of surplus value and rationalizing production via relative production of surplus value (altering the organic composition of capital across sectors) leads to a fall in the rate of profit. Why? Constraints on realization by diminishing consumer purchasing power. In other words, rational firm-level activity produces systemic irrationality.

The Fed has been covering this by printing money. The Fed is not stupid; it knows what it’s doing. The smoke and mirrors is designed to raise debt to force austerity down the road. This is a tactic in the managed decline of a republic, while concentrating capital in fewer and fewer hands, disproportionately the pockets of transnational corporations. It’s not that there’s no central planning going on. This is not the result of anarchy. It’s that the central planning at work here has in mind something other than making life better for the citizens of this country. It has in mind the destruction of America. The working man is on the road to serfdom.

Then there is this from Newsweek: “[T]he $150.7 billion spent on illegal immigration last year is more than the total gross domestic product (GDP) of Mississippi ($146.7 billion in 2023), New Mexico ($131.5 billion), Idaho ($119.8 billion), and is more than the GDP’s Wyoming and Vermont combined, at $50.74 billion and $43.38 billion, respectively. With illegal immigration now costing $150.7 billion annually, the burden inevitably trickles down to the taxpayer. Individually, the FAIR study found that each illegal alien or their U.S.-born child costs the U.S. $8,776 annually. Of the $8,776, each American taxpayer is paying roughly $1,156 per year, FAIR found, or about $957 each after factoring in the taxes paid by illegal aliens.” As I have reported in the past, this is in addition to the half a trillion dollars transferred from the native working class to the capitalist class via the latter’s utilization of immigrant labor.

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It’s a shame I had to tell my criminology students Thursday, as we reviewed the official crime statistics, that, beyond the data on homicide (dead bodies are hard to obfuscate), I don’t trust the numbers. Why? Because they’re under the control of an administrative apparatus that systemically deceives users of its services—especially those agencies charged with keeping and monitoring domestic security. They’re lying about crime. Property crime is exploding on our streets and the Crime Data Explorer (CDE), the new dashboard system rolled out by the FBI in 2020, indicates that, with the exception of motor vehicle theft, property crime is declining under Biden. And it shows robbery in decline. That’s not possible.

Part of why the data show a decline is because many high crime areas are not merely failing to record/report numbers to the FBI—the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicates that only 45 percent of criminal victimizations are recorded by law enforcement, and fewer than 12,000 of the 18, 000 reporting authorities are reporting their numbers to the FBI—but that a lot of criminal events don’t meet the thresholds of new laws in high-crime areas that make felony theft a misdemeanor, so they don’t even make it the Index (the FBI’s system of the most serious crime); the stores that are being looted need more than a $1,000 to report a felony and many corporations are instructing their employees to let people steal with impunity. Add to this the perpetrators allowed to walk after arrest and the reality is that we’re in a major crime wave actively dissimulated by the corporate state.

You have to get into the granularity that the CDE dashboard permits to find the agencies that more accurately record and report data. I’m guessing readers probably have some idea which agencies do a better job. Not the progressive cities. The progressives cities have so politicized crime and violence that you cannot trust their numbers—except for homicide. So I guess homicide is now the proxy for crime in America. And homicide is exploding. When you see the demographic profile the CDE provides you will understand why obfuscation is needed. (See How Progressive Criminal Justice Policy Puts Black Lives at Risk; Is It Guns?)

I am hearing the objection that studies show illegal aliens commit less crime than natives. What a braindead way of looking at the problem of immigration and crime. Those who are at risk to commit crime in America are the disemployed and marginalized—made this way by globalization, a capitalist strategy marked not only by off-shoring production, but by displacing native labor through mass immigration. One would expect that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime since they’re gainfully employed.

My point is largely a theoretical one, suggesting that there is a fundamental problem in the approach of studies that compare rates and conclude that native Americans have higher rates compared to illegal immigrants. Those studies (the pro-immigrant Cato think tank is a major source of the reports used by the media) are problematic on their own grounds, since researchers use arrest rates, which underreport immigrant status (immigration status is often determined at a later stage of the criminal justice process), and, moreover, illegals may be more reluctant to report crime for fear of deportation; but accepting the research on their face, researchers ignore the indirect effects of mass immigration.

It is not controversial in criminology to state that street crime is associated with economic deprivation, poor labor force attachment, and social disorganization. To be sure, not everybody experiencing these conditions turns to crime; rather, these conditions are criminogenic, making more likely those living in these conditions will break the law. Workforce participation rates are higher for immigrants than for native workers. Black and brown Americans living in the impoverished inner-city conditions associated with street crime are displaced by immigrant labor. It follows logically that immigration is indirectly associated with crime among native Americans by exacerbating the conditions experienced by these populations. This either makes immigrants appear underrepresented in crime or mediates the much great involvement compared to native Americans. 

Connecting the two parts of this blog entry, since immigrants are taking the job of natives—and preventing the development of tight labor markets that would draw the industrial reserve back into the labor force—the infusion of immigrants in the workforce is exacerbating criminogenic conditions. As I have indicated, black and brown Americans are most affected by Biden’s immigration approach. We might go so far as to suggest that the establishment’s open borders policy is a racist policy. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was followed the very next year by the opening of America’s borders. Opening entry to the US to immigrants other than Western and Northern Europeans, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 significantly altered immigration demographics in the country. You can see all around you where this change has brought us.

My advice to readers is to get a gun and get trained on how to use it. I also recommend that folks get out of the city if they can. I fear that with the millions of illegal aliens and all the native Americans displaced by them this is only going to get worse.

Here’s the text of SB 1780: “Defamation, False Light, and Unauthorized Publication of Name or Likenesses; Providing that provisions concerning journalist’s privilege do not apply to defamation claims when the defendant is a professional journalist or media entity; specifying that certain persons may not be considered public figures for purposes of certain actions; creating a presumption that a statement by an anonymous source is presumptively false for purposes of a defamation action; providing that a public figure does not need to show actual malice to prevail in a defamation action in certain circumstances, etc.” Under SB 1780, anyone in these circumstances wouldn’t have to prove actual malice, which was a standard requirement for defamation suits following the 1964 US Supreme Court case New York Times v Sullivan.

The Guardian renders the matter thusly: “SB 1780, would make accusing someone of being homophobic, transphobic, racist or sexist, even if the accusation is true, equivalent to defamation, and punishable by a fine of at least $35,000. If passed, the bill would severely limit and punish constitutionally protected free speech in the state.” Maybe. In light of the concept of defamation, this is not a slam dunk free speech deal. As critical as I am of the concept of defamation, I am sympathetic to what the Florida legislature is attempting to do here: if those out to destroy the reputation of their critics by smearing them as “transphobes” were not protected speech, maybe the authoritarians and reactionaries would be less inclined to damage the reputations and livelihoods of those with whom they disagree.

Note this bit from the The Guardian rendering: “even if the accusation is true.” In addition to the fact that accusing somebody of being “transphobic” is a smear that may damage his reputation and cause him to suffer harm (such as losing his career), determining whether a person is transphobic is not something that can be shown to be true (or false). This is because “transphobia” is a word invented by reactionaries who want to intimidate and marginalize those who are critical of gender ideology and all that comes with it, for example the practice of subjecting vulnerable and mentally ill individual to radical disabling cosmetic surgery for no objective medical purpose. Branding somebody “transphobic” is the equivalent of calling those who oppose fascism “fascophobic”—in a world where such a smear wouldn’t be laughed out of the room, a distinction that ought to scare the hell out of you.

The power of the legislation is in signifying that a smear not subject to a truth test (analogous to being accused of being a witch or labeled crazy) is nonetheless designed to heap upon him disrepute and may in fact cause reputational damage—which it is clearly intended to do. We live in a world where suffering material consequences for criticizing gender ideology or antiracism is a very real possibility. If we’re going to keep around this concept of defamation, then it is reasonably applied to attempts to destroy a person’s career and good standing for criticizing irrational beliefs and harmful practices. It would be one thing if it was just name calling. But it’s not. Organizations discipline and even fire employees accused of transphobia.

And the direction is towards legal consequences for being the thing one is smeared as. In European countries, the police arrest individuals for saying “transphobic” things. Think about that. The government defines criticism of a pernicious ideology as a criminal offense, thus staking out the content of a word invented to prevent opposition to the ideology by punishing the critics. There is no recourse. You are accused of such and, if it sticks, you can lose your livelihood. That’s totalitarian. Is it really that different if a corporation punishes an employee smeared with a made-up word? Why are powerful institutions doing the bidding of an ideological movement? Doesn’t the law exist to protect individuals from institutional harm? The promise of legislation like this is to prevent our slide into totalitarianism.

Also, the bill isn’t “anti-gay.” This is not the first time the media has pulled this stunt. Remember “Don’t Say Gay”? That characterization of HB 1557 was false. SB 1780 doesn’t criminalize homosexuality, etc. The bill is seeking to protect individuals from reputational damage by the imposition of a de facto system that presently a priori reduces unfavored opinion to a form of prejudice for which there are material consequences. Words like “transphobia” and “Islamophobia” are designed to establish their own truth—as well as the witchfynders who will legitimize the smear.

Do I support the law? I’m still mulling it over. I want to see a law that forbids institutions and organizations from disciplining in any fashion any employee who criticizes any ideology. Such a law promises to obviate the need for a revised defamation law. But I do understand the motive behind the law and why progressive media outlets like The Guardian write entirely uncharitable and inaccurate stories about it. They want to empower authoritarians and reactionaries to destroy the lives of those who criticize their irrational and destructive ideologies and practices. Such a law may be necessary to disempower these fascists.

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Book Riot is reporting that “another state has entered the ranks of those introducing bills to combat the rampant book banning in public schools and libraries.” Washington now joins New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.  House Bill 2331 was introduced by Representative Monica Jurado Stonier and is cosponsored by several other state representatives, including Nicole Macri, Lauren Davis, Gerry Pollet, Julia Reed, and Alex Ramel. There is a companion bill in the state Senate as well, SB 6208.

In other words, if any of the various paraphilias—autogynephilia, autopedophilia, etc.—are deemed a feature of a “legally protected class,” then communities cannot remove hyper-sexualized content from public school libraries deployed there to groom children for cult induction. Pause for a moment to reflect on the terrible truth that gender ideology is becoming for many states the official religion in a country that explicitly forbids theocracy. One more clear signal that the Republic is near over, and that the New Fascism is ascendant.

In the podcast I share below, a debate between Yascha Mounk and Christopher Rufo, moderated by Bari Weiss, Mounk presents the correct history of woke, what he calls “identity synthesis.” Woke progressivism (really all progressivism, since the ideology grows up alongside multiculturalism in the transnationalist project—see my 2019 essay The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate), DEI, critical race theory, queer theory, post-colonial studies, etc., are not Marxist or neo-Marxist but corporatist. These reactionary ideas eschew materialist-scientific class-based analysis for the backwards idealisms of identity politics and therefore work against the objective interests of labor, interests determined by the individual’s material relationship to the means of production. Put simply, woke progressivism stands Marxism on its head. This is in addition to its illiberal character.

What to Expect in 2026 with Niall Ferguson, John McWhorter, Dr. Mark Hyman, Leandra Medine Cohen, Suzy Weiss, and Sarah Isgur – Honestly with Bari Weiss

This past year wasn’t easy—but it was certainly eventful. Donald Trump returned to the White House, issued a record number of executive orders, deployed the National Guard to American cities—like LA and D.C.—imposed sweeping tariffs on all our trading partners, gutted the government with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and unleashed a massive crackdown on immigration. But that was only the beginning. The administration also reached a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—and all the living hostages came home from Gaza. Israel and the United States struck Iran’s nuclear sites. We got the first American pope. And we haven’t even started listing the pop-culture moments, like the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad, the Travis Kelce–Taylor Swift engagement, or when Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Katy Perry went to space. There was truly so much, and if we kept going we’d be here all day. But this, after all, is a prediction episode. So what will 2026 bring? Bari and Free Press deputy editor Olly Wiseman called up some friends of the pod—and experts in their fields—to get a better sense of what’s in store for the year ahead. They spoke to political analyst and legal expert Sarah Isgur, who told them what to expect in Trump’s second year; to Suzy Weiss on the cultural calendar ahead; to linguist John McWhorter on how new words and language will evolve; to Dr. Mark Hyman on how to get healthier in 2026; to writer and fashionista Leandra Medine Cohen on fashion trends to watch for; and to historian Niall Ferguson on whether or not we’re right to have nightmares about World War III. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. What to Expect in 2026 with Niall Ferguson, John McWhorter, Dr. Mark Hyman, Leandra Medine Cohen, Suzy Weiss, and Sarah Isgur 02:29:29
2. The Birth of Christianity 01:10:00
3. CBS News Presents: A Town Hall with Erika Kirk 53:14
4. Should We Legalize Assisted Suicide? 01:32:05
5. Is Designing Babies Unethical—or a Moral Imperative? 01:24:28

The intellectual origins of the woke phase of progressivism lies in its embraces of anarchism, nihilism, and poststructuralism/postmodernism (which in gender ideology incorporates the sexology project, the synthesis that has handed to the medical-industrial complex its justification for hormonally and surgically altering bodies including children). Woke is an ugly philosophy—a politics of resentment and revenges—dressed up in and deodorized with fancy academic jargon, a crackpot frame for pseudo-intellectuals to seem clever and with which to command power.

I have been writing about this problem for several years on Freedom and Reason. I have been talking to anybody who would listen about this problem much longer than that, since the mid-1990s, actually, when physics professor Alan Sokal admitted that he submitted a hoax article to Social Text, an cultural studies journal, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” arguing that quantum gravity is a social construction. Social Text published his paper!

As I explained in my essay about Mounk in November of last year (see The Peril of Left-Wing Identitarianism), I was familiar with Mounk’s earlier work and was happy to see that his latest book about identify politics, published in September, 2023, confirmed my thesis (his argument sounds derivative of mine, to be honest). However, Mounk inadequately theorizes the big question: how the regression of woke progressivism carries any effect beyond the university. For a system of ideas to prevail, especially one that pretends to be popular and radical, there needs to be real power behind it, and in an overdeveloped capitalist society, the power that socializes big ideas emanates from the ruling class and its functionaries. It must therefore be useful to them. Indeed, woke progressivism is a formation in late capitalism, a corporatist project to disorganize the proletariat for the sake of the transnational project to establish a global neo-feudal mode of production in which workers become serfs managed on high-tech stateless estates and made stupid by tribal identities. Scroll through my blog to read the many essays I have published theorizing this development.

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For the life of me, I will never understand why those who share some version of the meme shown above don’t see that it makes the argument for securing the border, rounding up the invaders, and kicking them out—and calling out the collaborators. Democrats and establishment Republicans are in effect colonial collaborators betraying their people by welcoming the colonizes. They’re selling us out. Who are they selling us out to? Big corporate power.

There were Indians who resisted in the day. But, in the end, they lost. Many of them have failed to assimilate with power that long ago established itself as hegemonic. The truth is that America is not built on stolen lands. Nor do Americans occupy the continent. Europeans came to the New World and conquered it. These lands were won and they are ours. The time to do something about the foreign invasion of one’s land is in the moment. If you can’t resist, then you lose. The stronger side wins and their way of live prevails. In the process, the colonized depend on collaborators willing to betray their people. These are the lessons to be learned.

President Donald Trump crushed his sole remaining opponent Nikki Haley among registered Republicans in the New Hampshire Primary, beating the former governor of South Carolina among that constituency by a three-to-one margin. Yet Haley got around 43 percent of the primary vote, which the media is touting today as Haley having earned the right to “fight on,” while exposing Trump’s “November weaknesses.” How did Haley reach this unlikely number? In the open, operative Democrats manufactured an illusion.

The candidacy of Nikki Haley, the favorite of the globalist donor class, is emblematic of the elite drive to make the United States more like Canada (see exiled Canadian trucker Gord Magill explain to Tucker Carlson how darkness has descended on Canada). This is how the transnationalists operate: they control the opposition by selecting candidates subservient to the neoliberal / neoconservative project and then flood the zone with dollars and voters. They manufacture the perception that the race is competitive, while forcing the Trump campaign to spend time and money on an inevitable victory, as well as bidding time for the lawfare project to do its work.

This strategy dovetails with the project to indoctrinate the youth in anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. The indoctrination program yields zealots who, by command and confluence, vote to keep “fascism at bay,” i.e., entrench the corporatist establishment. This is the army of woke progressives who no longer believe in the American Republic, young Americans who have been trained to loathe their country, the West, and the Enlightenment. (Some of them have been conditioned to loathe themselves. Their race. Their gender. Their religion.) At this point, the parallels between this development and the Cultural Revolution under Mao Tse-tung is so obvious the comparison needs no justification or elaboration.

The elite learned a lot from Antonio Gramsci’s observation that to dominate a society it is not enough to solely focus on suppressing the opposition. A social logic must be installed that brings people to pitch with the force of instinct. The ruling classes maintain their dominance not just through force or coercion but also by shaping the beliefs, norms, and values of society. Gramsci argues that to establish and maintain control, a ruling class needs to gain cultural and ideological leadership in addition to political and economic control. Achieving and sustaining power requires engineering the consent of the governed, influencing their thoughts and values to align with the interests of the ruling class. This involves establishing cultural and intellectual dominance, controlling key institutions—education and entertainment—and commanding the prevailing ideology in society.

This is Gramsci’s concept of “ideological hegemony.” It involves maintaining power not only through achieving control of the administrative apparatus and party machinery but also by influencing the way people think and perceive the world, creating a cultural framework and installing a social logic that supports the goals interests of the ruling class. The elite interests become the perceived interests of the class whose organic interests it objectively opposes. This involves revising the history of a people, replacing it with a pseudo history, and distorting the national ideals, supplanting these with an ideology extolling the virtues of the ruling class and technocratic rule.

TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) is a popular expression of fear of populist-nationalism across the trans-Atlantic space. Populist-nationalism seeks to reclaim the governing philosophy, i.e., democratic-republicanism, and the rights-based system, i.e., liberalism, that marked the period of the greatest awakening and progress of humanity in world history. The popular irrationalism opposed to this reclamation is amplified by the corporate state media and the culture industry and perpetuated by substantial establishment control over the electoral machinery and the means of intellectual production. The transnational elite understand that the United States is the last bastion of the robust expression of democratic-republican spirit in the trans-Atlantic space. They have to undermine that spirit.

Right now, our unique Constitution and Creed are sustaining us through a very dark period. But for how long? If we fall, then the West falls, and the global elite, with their barbarian hordes, finally take over. Then it’s corporate state neo-feudalism and the permanent establishment of that dark period—the New Dark Ages. That will be character of Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever.

This is substantially correct:

Nikki Haley is obviously lying about her experience in the South. It’s not that she’s not very brown. She isn’t. It’s that her characterization of the South is sociologically inaccurate.

Haley was born in 1972. This was several years after the abolition of segregation with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By the time Haley went to high school, schools had been integrated for many years and prejudice had for the most part disappeared—and discrimination was illegal.

I realize that it’s difficult for young people to grasp this given how submerged they have been in the distortions of critical race theory and its historical revisionism, but when I was in high school in the South, blacks and whites used to hang out together—and nobody would have thought of Indians and Hispanics as racialized groups.

Haley is assumed to be white because she is. She doesn’t have a race card to play—and before antiracism, race cards were obviously obnoxious (they still are, of course).

I recognize that Haley is aiming the pseudo-biography/history at young people who don’t know that progressives resurrected racial thinking in the new millennium, but there are enough of us who are old enough to remind everybody of what the world was like before antiracism deranged the minds of the youth.

I just spent several hours viewing my senior high school album (from the year 1980). I hadn’t see book in decades. I was not surprised at all to be reminded that all the races were together and that black students were included in the clubs, pageants, etc. There are three black cheerleaders. Most Congenial was a black male and a white female. Most Likely to Succeed, a white male and a black female. Best Looking, a black female and a white male. A black female on the Royal Court. That was the 1970s—less than an hour and a half from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty destroying MSNBC’s Joy Reid is such a beautiful moment that I watched it twice. My interest wasn’t simply in watching again the destruction of a truly loathsome person (Justice wiped the floor with Reid); I rewatched to take in Reid’s method of propagandizing her audience. Reid does not engage in argumentation; her approach is sophistry for stupid people—and for those whose sentiments align with her progressivism who don’t care how the consensus they desire is reached.

Note her form in this segment: Because removing books from bookshelves is associated with book banning, child safeguarding is a form of book banning. This is akin to arguing that, because physicians sometimes have to cut into bodies with knives, they are therefore engaged in a criminal violence, since violent criminals also cut into bodies with knives. But Justice’s campaign to remove pornographic materials from public schools isn’t campaigning to ban those books. Her argument is that books with pornographic content—cartoon characters wearing strap-on dildos, etc.—shouldn’t be accessible to children in public school libraries because these materials aren’t age-appropriate.

Reid appeals to her audience that the people who want their children to read books with pornographic content are too poor to afford these books for their children. This point moves on the same plane of idiocy as Kamala Harris’ 2021 objection on BET to “racist” voter IDs because poor people don’t have access to Xerox machines (“Kamala Harris slammed for claiming rural Americans can’t photocopy their IDs”). And Reid’s ad hominem attacks on other members of Moms for Liberty is so transparent as to need no elaboration. There is no argument in any of this. Because Reid has no shame, she powers her way through the interaction, feigning confidence in argument. The observer must be careful here; aplomb is as much an indicator of the shamelessness of the propagandist as it is of the sophistication of a master debater.

Sophistry is a widespread mode of discourse. In many of my interactions with people, some of whom quite intelligent, I routinely encounter in place of argumentation sophistry. Sophistry in the hands of those gifted with putting others on their back foot is particularly damaging to enlightened conversation. When a reasonable person is confronted with sophistry and doesn’t respond because no argument has been made, and refuses to stoop because he has integrity, and the other person continues to press the action, the audience thinks the person engaged in sophistry has won the argument.

Those who find sophistry genuinely compelling aren’t going to know what argumentation is—that, or, aligned with the politics of the speaker, the sophisticated individual would rather it appear as if his side won the argument than to have the losing argument tested. This is why we see highly intelligent people habitually engaging in sophistry while never learning the rules of argumentation. Their adroitness has made them lazy and self-assured. The rules of argument require training (logic is only partially innate to the human primate and that part needs priming and elaboration). Sophistry only requires a clever mind and the confidence of a shameless person. Indeed, with the goal of propaganda to persuade people with fallacious discourse, thus a qualification for the job of professional propagandist is the knack for sophistry.

What Tiffany Justice does in this segment is systematically dismantle every attempt that Reid makes to push the extremist agenda of queer activists. In doing so, she puts on a clinic in how to expose sophistry. Reid’s work at every turn is to bring heat without light. Her goal is to obscure what is really at issue and turn everything back to her central “argument,” which is that child safeguarding is an illegitimate exercise by parents and public institutions when public health demands that responsible parents and responsive public institutions protect children from sexualization.

I have reviewed many of the books in question. To say they are not age-appropriate is an understatement. Those who want these books in public schools libraries know these materials aren’t age-appropriate. They are tools in a vast and admitted grooming project. This is what Moms for Liberty is dedicated to stopping. That they are successfully portrayed as book banners tells us how entrenched and widespread public acceptance of child sexualization has become in our society. This is no accident, as I document on the pages of Freedom and Reason. Queering spaces is about sexualizing children and changing popular culture to disarm parents and responsible citizens from meeting their obligation to protect children.