Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. My parents were civil rights activists in the 1960s. They involved me in this work, and MLK, Jr., was one of our family’s guiding lights. I don’t have many heroes, but MLK, Jr., is one of them. MLK, Jr., put his life on the line to advance the cause of racial equality. Among other things, King played a key role in securing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which abolished institutionalized racial discrimination nationwide. Tragically, on April 4, 1968, only days after my sixth birthday (I remember this day quite well), his life was taken by an assassin’s bullet.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today will also see the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States in Washington DC, a tradition marking the peaceful transfer of power in the world’s oldest continuous constitutional republic. The US Constitution, which came into effect in 1789, established the framework for the federal government and has been in continuous operation since then. It is the oldest written national constitution still in use. Donald Trump will take the reins of the American Republic today for the second time, having governed the nation during the years 2017-2021.
President Donald Trump and First Lade Melania Trump.
My hope for this occasion is that the American People will today recommit themselves to the principles and values that guide such men. These principles and values are listed in the American Creed, the core values and principles foundational to the United States’ identity and national ethos. The Creed encapsulates the ideals that Americans hold dear—that we should hold dear. Its central themes—liberty, equality, a republic form of government, justice, opportunity, unity, and patriotism—constitute a model for all the peoples of the world.
Today, I explore the case of a transgender male who was the victim of a mob attack planned via Snapchat by a group of his peers in Harrow, a large town in London, England. Many believe that this case provides a real-world instantiation of a form of bigotry transactivists label “transphobia,” defined as an irrational fear, hatred, or loathing of trans identifying individuals. The definition also often includes criticism of the ideology that affirms the existence of gender identity, exalting that identity to a status that effectively holds trans identifying individuals blameless for their harmful actions. The claim made by gender critical voices that the victim in this case is also a perpetrator is thus construed by transactivists as an example of victim blaming.
As such, the Harrow case is useful to elaborating points made in an essay I recently penned, Blame, Fault, and Victimology, in which I distinguish between victimology, a subfield in the discipline of criminology, and the practice of blaming the victim. Victimologists study the legal, psychological, and social impacts of crime on victims, as well as their interactions with the criminal justice system and societal responses. Moreover, victimology provides knowledge to the public useful for avoiding victimization. Victim blaming feels self-explanatory, but the matter is a bit more complex that it might seem at first blush; I detail the practice in that essay. I spend several thousand words on the matter there, so I won’t repeat those details here.
I am moved to write about this today because of a controversy on X (formerly Twitter) in which critics of gender ideology express concern that mainstream media reporting on the Harrow story skirts the problem of “sex by deception,” a crime I detail in the course of the present essay. For background on the X controversy, see the tweets threads below, one by Amy Souza, the other by Helen Joyce, both identified as gender critical voices and smeared by transactivists as “TERFS,” an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.” These two (and many others) are routinely smeared as transphobic by the gender ideology contingent. I will first report the details of the case and then think aloud through the problem Souza and Joyce identify.
Lying about your identity in order to have sex is a crime, it’s called sex by deception and it’s a form of rape.
— Amy E. Sousa, MA Depth Psychology (@KnownHeretic) January 16, 2025
This horrific crime of vigilantism has rightly been seriously punished. Judging from the reporting, it may have been preceded by a very serious sexual assault that was never reported 1/14 pic.twitter.com/Tx9MPSO8Hf
The 18-year-old victim in this case was lured to a meeting under the pretense of roller disco, where he was ambushed, pinned to the ground, and stabbed fourteen times. The victim survived the attack. The assault followed a revelation that he was transgender, portraying a woman and concealing his true gender. Four youths have been convicted for the premeditated attack. One, a female Summer Betts-Ramsey, received an eight and a half-year sentence in youth detention (four and a half years mandatory), three others, Bradley Harris, Camron Osei, and Shiloh Hindes, received three-year sentences, while a 17-year-old boy, whose name is protected because of juvenile status, received a youth rehabilitation order.
Image of Summer Betts-Ramsey from the Mirror story cited below
The media framing assumes the trans activist narrative that this was a “transphobic attack.” Concerning motivation, theMirror reports that the court heard the man was with one of the defendants, Harris, at his house in January last year. While there, a mutual friend called the defendant to tell him that the man he was with was “trans.” Excusing his deception, the prosecutor told the court, “Having been attacked in the past because of her transgender identity, she denied it.” The two then kissed, and the trans identifying male performed oral sex on the defendant. Soon afterwards, another friend told Harris that the individual was a “tranny.” The trans identifying male denied it again, at which point Harris picked up a knife and said, “I’ll stab you if you lie.” The trans identifying male says he felt intimidated and admitted to being transgender. Harris told him to leave.
When Harris told the group that the man had deceived him in order to have sex with him, the Snapchat group turned on the trans identifying man, with one of the other defendants threatening to stab the trans identifying male. When the trans identifying male asked the group when they would next be meeting, Harris responded: “[I’m] not your mate… you tranny.” Phone evidence presented in court revealed that during a call Summer Betts-Ramsey told a gang member: “I have to go to Harrow to beat up some… a fucking tranny bro.”
Bradley Harris
I am determined to address the controversy without denying the wrongfulness of what the defendants did, or the appropriateness of the justice served. So I want to put the matter as definitively as I can: what the mob did was wrong and the sentences were appropriate. Whatever happened before the mob attack cannot justify that attack. However, what the stories about this case leave out or obscure, and this is the point Souza and Joyce with to raise, is the crime perpetrated by the trans identifying man, a crime that goes by different names, but most accurately sex by deception. Alluding to this crime, theGuardian characterizes the situation as “a distorted notion of revenge.” To get the totality of the matter on the table, I will explain the crime of sex by deception and then provide an hypothetical case hoping the reader will grasp the significance of it, as it has broader implications. I will also explore real-world cases that might serve as analogs for thinking through such matters.
Sex by deception, sometimes called “sexual fraud,“ occurs when one person misleads or manipulates another into engaging in sexual activity by providing false information or concealing the truth. This deception can take various forms, including pretending to be someone else, hiding important facts about one’s identity, and lying about the nature of the relationship or intentions. In the Harrow case, the three forms identified apply. It also should also be noted that sex by deception often involves manipulating emotional or psychological vulnerabilities to gain consent. It is unclear whether these elements apply. What seems likely is that sex by deception was at least one of the motivating factors for Harris, whose status as a victim of this crime in not in dispute.
The key element in sex by deception is that consent is given under false pretenses, i.e., the person agreeing to the sexual act would have made a different decision had they known the truth. This form of deception can lead to serious emotional harm, physical violation, and sometimes legal consequences, as it undermines the principle of informed consent in sexual relationships. It’s a breach of personal autonomy and respect for others, leading to the exploitation of the victim’s trust. To be sure, the man who was deceived in this case should have sought out law enforcement and reported the incident instead of participating in mob violence. But the reason he was moved to perpetrate this crime may not be solely explained by antipathy towards trans identifying people. Perhaps antipathy towards trans identifying individuals is a bit clearer in Betts-Ramsey’s statements, but in Harris’ case, evidence that he would have committed violence against this group apart from the deception he suffered is lacking.
To make this relevant to my US readers, sex by deception is illegal in certain situations within the United States, although the legal landscape varies depending on jurisdiction. In some states, sex by deception may be classified as a form of sexual assault, even rape. In other cases, it’s classified as fraud. Either way, it rises to these levels if the deception involves concealing one’s identity, pretending to have a different status, or providing false information about the nature of the act itself. The most common legal concept tied to sex by deception in the US is “rape by fraud” or “sexual assault by fraud.” In cases where deception impacts the consent given, the consent given is invalid.
In England, which shares many of the same foundational legal assumptions with the US, sex by deception is also considered illegal under certain circumstances. If consent is obtained through deception, it may be deemed invalid. On these grounds, the act can be classified under the offense of rape or sexual assault, particularly if the deception undermines the person’s ability to give true and informed consent. This is clarified under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, where consent is defined as the agreement to engage in sexual activity, given voluntarily and with full knowledge of the situation. If one person lies about his identity, and the other person consents based on those lies, the validity of consent given is problematic. An important question in the Harrow case is why the victim in the case has not also been charged with a crime.
I interpret Souza and Joyce’s criticisms to speak to a larger issue—that the act of omitting or obscuring the fact of sex by deception in these stories amplifies the framing of the attack as transphobic and thus serves propagandistic ends. Indeed, the construct “transphobia” is a propaganda term—its functions the same as the construct “Islamophobia”—designed to suggest the presence of a state of mind akin to a mental disorder or a species of discrimination. To the extent that we accept the legitimacy of such terms, the language used by the attackers could be construed as such if the common slang “tranny” is seen as an indicator. At the same time, why is it obvious that any revulsion a straight man feels over same-sex acts is irrational and not natural—as natural as a gay man’s revulsion at having sex with a female? If it’s not, then doesn’t a victims reaction to having been deceived into having constitutes another motive? Furthermore, doesn’t failure to acknowledge the role this played in the crime obscures that motive?
I shared above the two clips of atheist, humanist, and secularist Christopher Hitchens speaking about the consequences of elevating an ideology to an exalted position and enjoying the power of the state behind its propagation to convey the greater problem ideology poses. It is the situation Hitchens describes that redefines words as, and transforms criticisms of an ideology into acts of bigotry, which are then blamed for violence against those who subscribe to the ideology. The devotees of the ideology, on the other hand, are held blameless for their harmful actions, or at least the harm of their acts is diminished. Moreover, the harm caused by their actions is blamed on the victims. We saw this in the Charlie Hebdo case, in which it was at least insinuated that the destruction of property and acts of violence perpetrated against cartoonists in Paris, France with a history of ridiculing Islam and its prophet were provoked by cartoons. With this move, perpetrators are transformed into victims.
We are seeing it again in the characterization of reporting on decades of systematic rape of British girls by Muslims, concealed all that time by the British government, as anti-Muslim bigotry, here through the euphemism of being “overly descriptive”:
Astonishing video from the Welsh Parliament. Tory MS Darren Millar simply states facts about the grooming gangs atrocity, yet Presiding Officer Elin Jones tries to shut him down. She calls his language "overly descriptive" and suggests it fuels hatred. pic.twitter.com/1GkovE1ZSD
The reason for such obscurantism seems obvious in that, for some, it suggests that the victim is to blame for mob violent, that having committed a crime himself gives tacit approval to the mob’s actions. It is an example of victim blaming. To be sure, sex by deception in this case does not justify the actions of the mob. As I have plainly stated in this essay, and in the one I cited at top concerning the matter generally, what the attackers did is criminal and they deserve having had the book thrown at them. At the same time, I cannot say that the act of raising awareness of the crime of sex by deception is of no significance here. If we are to fight this type of crime, speaking here of sexual fraud, the risk of which is heightened by the deception inherent in the conditions established by gender ideology, the matter should have been included in the story—and the perpetrated held to account whatever the actions of the rape victim.
I say this not only to raise the possibility that antipathy towards trans identifying individuals as a “community” (to borrow Hitchens’ observation) may not have provided the motive for each of those involved, which would be fair to Harris, but for the general purposes of raising consciousness about the act that likely motivated his actions. Consider the example of interracial crime. Black Americans are many times more likely to victimize whites than the other way around. Are black Americans motivated to victimize whites because of racial antipathy towards the white race? After all, the problems of black Americans are routinely blamed on the white majority. Yet one will be hard pressed to find in reporting on this matter any suggestion that this was the motivation. On the other hand, when a black American is victimized by a white man, the thought appears in many minds that the action was racially-motivated. A look at the demographics of hate crime statistics indicates that such perceptions are the official ones, as well. However, a violent act perpetrated by either a black man or a white man may have other motives in back of it; but the stats will how that white men are overrepresented in hate crimes. More than this, the criminal actions of black Americans is blamed on white Americans at large—or at least understand in terms of the suffering of blacks in America.
I ask the reader to imagine a case in which a lesbian becomes intimate with a man pretending to be a woman without the lesbian being aware that the man is a woman. It doesn’t matter whether the man sincerely believes he is what he is pretending to be. Objectively, it cannot be true that the man is the other sex. I do not know for sure if there is no god but Allah or that Muhammad is his messenger, but I do know for sure that a man cannot be a lesbian no matter what he thinks of himself. And since there is no objective way of determining whether he sincerely believes he is what he cannot be, nor do we need to bother with determining this, the only pertinent matter before us is what he is. Objectively, then, what has occurred in hypothetical scenario is rape, since the lesbian did not consent to having sex with the man. To be sure, a woman who prefers women may consent to having sex with a trans identifying male, but in the hypothetical, which parallels the actual case reported in the British press, the consent given is not valid since the woman did not consent to having sex with a man. The victim in the Harrow case is a heterosexual man who was tricked into engaging in a homosexual act. Harris is a rape victim. Yet, to my knowledge, no charges have been filed.
I have written about the problem of deception inherent in conditions established by gender ideology in several essays. In The Queer Project and the Practice of Deceptive Mimicry, I argue that, whenever used to make a false impression, costume and performance are acts of deceptive mimicry. Gender ideology is founded on lies, and the demand is that we not only deny the lies, but that we participate in them. “Deceptive mimicry in the human species almost always result in bad simulation; despite his best efforts, a man rarely passes as a woman. Most men can see what he really is. Even more women can see through the deception. The man engaged in deceptive mimicry has trouble convincing himself that he is the thing he says or wants to be, demanding others participate in the simulation by referring to him using feminine pronouns and chanting obvious falsehoods like ‘trans women are women.’” The “almost always” is important here. In a few cases the simulation is convincing, but in many others it is made so by years of disordering the innate gender detection faculty common to our species. The demand is that this cannot be deception because the person is the gender he says he is. This demand denies science and asks us to lie for the sake of an ideology.
This lie has been institutionalized in common practice. In the essay Is this Dating Site Encouraging Deception and Fraud? I report that Grindr doesn’t allow gay men and lesbians to filter for “cisgender,” i.e., a neologism capturing those whose identity matches the objective reality of their gender (really a propaganda term designed to make equivalent the normal with the pathological). In doing so, Grindr perpetuates the falsehood that trans identifying individuals are the gender they claim they are. I pose the matter rhetorically in the essay: “Is this company engaged in deceptive practices that put personal security at risk by obscuring reality?” In a word: yes. Grindr is giving cover to deceptive mimicry by covering criminal fraud in the language of anti-discrimination. I go on to explain that “[h]umans 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.”
I used the hypothetical of the case involving a lesbian in that essay, as well, noting the problem of a man producing a simulated sexual identity not having to tell lesbians the truth about what and who he is—a heterosexual man. As a libertarian on sexual matters, i.e., tolerating the freedom of consenting adults to engage in sexual relations, I emphasize that there is nothing to do about valid consensual intimacy. I write, “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.” A man may also believe he is a prophet of Allah, etc. If a man desires other men who imagine themselves as such, either a woman or a prophet, I have no desire to prevent sex between them. “But such intercourse must be voluntary and consensual,” I write. “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.”
I conclude that February 2024 essay with this: “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.” That is why the Harrow case is significant, and the deeper reason I think Souza and Joyce have raised the matter. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the act of omission by the media in fully reporting this story feeds the narrative that deceptive mimicry is no problem at all, as least when perpetrated by a trans identifying individuals, that the victim in this case did not commit a crime himself, that the sole motive was antipathy towards trans identifying individuals, and, more broadly, that critics of gender ideology are to blame for that antipathy. But, as Joyce pointed out, two things can be true simultaneously. The victim of the beating in Harrow did commit a crime, and this fact is central to the problem of gender identity and trans identification.
To once more reference the problem of Islamic groomer gangs, suppose one of the thousands of British girls victimized by Muslim men, or a group of her friends or a family members, engage in “a distorted notion of revenge”? That goes to motive. To say it is only the work of anti-Muslim antipathy obscures the real motive. The media works very hard to obscure motive in this case, portraying protests or retaliatory actions as the work of “far-right groups.” But protests or retaliatory actions often emerge from genuine outrage over injustice and the perceived failures of authorities to protect victims or hold perpetrators accountable. While some organized responses may involve groups with specific political agendas, attributing all anger or actions to such groups obscures the real motivations of victims, their families, and ordinary people who feel deeply impacted by these events. Anger and calls for justice—and even retaliatory action—are natural responses to grievous harm, and they often transcend ideological or political labels. Acknowledging nuance is essential to addressing the root causes of such crimes and restoring trust in the systems meant to protect society.
These matters are complex, and solving them requires taking the totality of the situation under consideration. When I teach juvenile delinquency, I ask students to consider the circumstances of the Columbine High School shooting. I tell them that the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were driven by a deep sense of anger and resentment stemming from a range of grievances that they articulated in journals and videos. It was clear from those materials and other information that the boys felt profoundly alienated and isolated, perceiving themselves as outcasts in their school community. Both harbored a particular hatred toward what they saw as the dominant social groups, especially athletes and “popular” students, whom they viewed as representative of a society that had marginalized and rejected them. Both individuals felt a desire to assert power and control, using violence to make a statement about their perceived grievances. The Columbine attack emerged from a toxic combination of personal alienation, societal resentment, and a deep-seated desire for vengeance.
None of that justified their actions. Harris and Klebold are responsible for what they did. I raise this and the Harrow case—and one more before I am through—not to blame victims. I talk about motivations to provide a more complete explanation for why people perpetrate such acts so that those in a position to ensure the safety of others can take steps to do so. It’s clear from the evidence that Harris and Klebold’s motives were far more complex and rooted in a combination of psychological issues, personal insecurities, and a broader hatred of society. Framing the Columbine attack purely as a reaction to bullying oversimplifies the intricate web of factors that led to their actions. At the same time, bullying is a problem in society, and failure of those in authority to intervene in such cases leaves some of those who suffer it (thankfully, a small minority) to feel justified in taking matters into their own hand.
In the case I am reporting in this essay, Bradley Harris may have felt that he would not go to the authorities and report the rape he experienced at the hands of the trans identifying male for the same reason that the victims of Britain’s groomer gangs were reluctant to report their victimization to the police. One of the scandals in the groomer gang controversy is the existence of documented instances where police and local authorities failed to respond adequately to concerns raised by victims and their families about grooming and sexual abuse. For example, the Jay Report on Rotherham (2014) exposed a pattern of systemic neglect, where authorities dismissed or ignored complaints despite overwhelming evidence of exploitation. A significant factor was fear of being accused of racism or damaging community relations. Moreover, there was found a tendency to underestimate victims, many of whom came from disadvantaged or troubled backgrounds and were unfairly judged as complicit or unreliable. A culture of indifference within law enforcement and child protection services allowed this exploitation to persist for years, leaving victims without the support or justice they deserved.
Perhaps feeling that there was no receptive authority to handle such a case, Harris may have taken matters into his own hands. I reject this justification, just as I reject as justified the actions taken against the Muslim minority in the UK in retaliation of the systematic rape of British girls. But I think readers would agree that there are scenarios where many would sympathize with a victim taking revenge for an act perpetrated against her or him. As a sociological exercise, empathy helps us understand such situations. Had Harris been a woman raped by a man, how many people reading this essay would have sympathy for her? Would they characterize her actions as “a distorted notion of revenge”? If so, what is the source of the distortion? Was Harrow not also an event possibly enabled by a culture that makes it difficult for a victim to seek redress through legitimate avenues of justice? I think the point Souza and Joyce are making is that the fact of sex by deception can be so easily skirted in this case testifies to the existence of a culture that elevates some statuses over others, holding some individuals responsible for their actions, but not others, the double standard determined by ideology.
I close with a case that illustrates the problem, and to once more reiterate my position that matters of justice are to be adjudicated in courts of law, not in our homes or on the street, where violence is only justified in acts of self-defense or the protection of others. I wrote about this case in the essay I cite at the top of the present one. To recall the facts, on December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel in Manhattan. The suspect, Luigi Mangione, was arrested and charged with murder. In that essay I write, “Slain United Health CEO Brian Thompson was not responsible for Luigi Mangione’s action. Those defending the assassin’s actions are engaged in blatant victim blaming. But those working in health insurance are today thinking about where they are and who is present in the wake of an action that anarchists call ‘propaganda of the deed.’”
In its reporting, the Hill connects the practices of the medical-industrial complex to Mangione’s actions. This incident, they note, has intensified discussions about the US healthcare system, particularly regarding the practices of health insurance companies. Critics argue that these companies prioritize profits over patient care, often denying or delaying claims, which can lead to severe health and financial consequences for individuals. Such actions are perceived by some as systemic violence, fostering deep resentment among those affected. The killing of Thompson has thus been viewed by many individuals as a manifestation of this pent-up frustration, interpreting the act as a form of retribution against a system they believe has caused widespread harm through the denial of necessary medical services. Public opinion polls revealed significant sympathy for the shooter’s motives among Americans. A NORC poll, conducted by the University of Chicago, indicated that 69 percent of respondents believed health insurance coverage denials bore at least “a moderate amount” of responsibility for Thompson’s death. An Emerson College poll found that among voters aged 18–29, 41 percent considered the killing “acceptable or somewhat acceptable.”
AOC to @BrownJaala on the murder of Brian Thompson
“This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that ppl interpret and feel & experience denied claims as an act of violence…” pic.twitter.com/52aIINUDlH
Alexandrea Ocasio-Cortez put it this way to CBS associate producer Jaala Brown: “All of that pain that people have experienced is being concentrated on this event. It’s really important that we take a step back. This is not to comment and this is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.” I strongly suspect that those who sympathize with Mangione could very likely be among those attacking Souza and Joyce over their tweets concerning the Harrow case—which is not to say that sympathy for Souza and Joyce’s position requires sympathy for Mangione. What I asking readers to consider is why in the reporting of the Harrow case readers are not asked to consider how people who are the victims of sex by deception interpret and feel and experience sex by deception as an act of violence against them? However we classify the actions of health insurance companies in denying claims, one has to tie himself into knots, or cover himself with the gloss of gender ideology, to deny that sex by deception is an act of interpersonal violence.
In his Farewell Address, Joe Biden cast a foreboding shadow over the American landscape, warning of the emergence of an oligarchy that consolidates immense wealth, power, and influence. He invoked imagery of the Gilded Age robber barons, framing his concerns in the rhetoric of safeguarding democracy and ensuring fairness for all.
Joe Biden delivers his farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, January 15, 2025
“I’m so proud of how much we’ve accomplished together for the American people. And I wish the incoming administration success, because I want America to succeed,” he said. Alluding to the narrative that Trump attempted to prevent a peaceful and orderly transition of power in the wake of the 2020 election, he declared, “I’ve upheld my duty to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition of power to ensure we lead by the power of our example.” Then, attempting to capture the tone of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ominous Farewell Address of 1961 (see We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears), Biden pivoted to a warning, intended to connect Trump to the Big Tech oligarchs:
“In my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is the dangerous concern—and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before, more than a century ago. But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts.”
Before his sideways attempt to portray Trump as anathema to the interests of the American Republic, he tainted the history of America by feigning wonder at a portrait of the Statue of Liberty that hangs in the White house and waxing sentimental about the Republic’s Founders: “A nation of pioneers and explorers, of dreamers and doers, of ancestors native to this land, of ancestors who came by force, a nation of immigrants who came to build a better life, a nation holding the torch of the most powerful idea ever in the history of the world that all of us—all of us are created equal. That all of us deserve to be treated with dignity, justice, and fairness. That democracy must defend and be defined and be imposed, moved in every way possible. Our rights, our freedoms, our dreams.” (Emphasis mine)
He was not merely contrasting the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant to those others progressives see as his victims, a standard tactic of delegitimizing the purpose of America, but to prepare the audience to engage in acts of resistance against the reclamation of America’s purpose: the supposed pending abuse of power by Trump. “But we know the idea of America—our institution, our people, our values that uphold it—are constantly being tested. Ongoing debates about power and the exercise of power, about whether we lead by the example of our power or the power of our example, whether we show the courage to stand up to the abuse of power or we yield to it.”
Biden’s characterization of the situation—while cloaked in populist alarmism—obscures a very different reality, one that with a proper grasp of history and power dynamics lays bare the dissonance between his proclaimed ideals and the policies enacted under his administration, and more broadly the plan the Corporate State and its small army of progressive elites have for its future. Beneath the veil of warnings lies a profound irony: the very oligarchy Biden cautions against has flourished through the machinations of the Corporate State, of which Biden himself has been a central figure—to be sure, not the actual manipulator of the levers of power (he is himself a shell of the person he used to be and always only an instrument), but rather a simulation of an American president.
We must never forget that the Biden administration, in concert with the CIA, DHS, and FBI (the Deep State), exercised unprecedented influence over Big Tech platforms, platforms owned by the very oligarchs he alluded to in his remarks. Under the guise of combating misinformation and protecting public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as appearing to ensure electoral integrity, federal agencies pressured platforms like Facebook and Twitter to suppress dissenting voices. Accounts were deactivated, content flagged, and alternative narratives silenced. Far from being independent arbiters of public discourse, these platforms were conscripted into service by the Administrative State. The alignment of Big Tech with federal power epitomized the very abuse of power Biden claimed to decry—a collusion that undermined open dialogue and democratic deliberation, the lifeblood of a free society.
The implications of this collusion extended far beyond the mere suppression of information. It revealed the interdependence between corporate elites and state actors, a relationship not unlike that of the old monopolies and political machines of the late nineteenth century, collusion that progressivism and the regulatory regime (the FDA, USDA, etc.—later the CDC, ED, EPA, etc.) were and designed to conceal and obscure. Rather than protecting the democratic ideal, this alliance entrenched a system of governance that served the interests of the few over the many.
In this sense, Biden’s rhetoric about standing against oligarchy represents an exercise in dissimulation—a propagandistic effort to obscure the fact that his administration, like those of his predecessors (the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas), embodied the consolidation of corporate governance. Biden, like his predecessors, is a creature of the Establishment—the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, the censorship-industrial complex, and the other complexes whose insatiable desire for wealth and power require control over mass consciousness.
However, history seldom moves in a single direction. No control system is total—at least not in the long run. The rise of a populist movement, encapsulated by the persistence of Donald Trump and the America First agenda, marked a decisive counterforce to Corporate State’s hegemony. Despite the relentless efforts to delegitimize the MAGA movement, its force of purpose proved resilient, amassing tens of millions of supporters who defied the narratives propagated by the mind control apparatus—the mass media, the culture industry, and the academy. Trump won more than 77 million votes, winning more than 14 million more votes than he won in 2016. Hardly the unpopular figure the media portrayed; Trump became more popular over the intervening eight years. This groundswell of populist energy catalyzed a shift that even the Big Tech oligarchs could not ignore.
Progressive bugaboo Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s October 2022 acquisition of Twitter, rebranded as X, signaled a pivotal moment in this transformation. Recognizing the inevitability of Trump’s re-election and the ascendancy of populist nationalism, and his own interests in a free and open society (which we must admit has not been perfectly consistent), Musk dismantled the platform’s legacy of censorship and realigned it with the popular will. Following Musk’s lead, especially in the wake of Trump’s landmark victory, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders pivoted, opening their platforms to reflect the preferences of a burgeoning populist majority. This transition marked the erosion of the Establishment’s dominance over Big Tech and the beginning of a new era in which these platforms became subservient to the democratic-republican ethos.
In this new paradigm, the power once wielded by corporate elites in concert with the administrative state has been supplanted by a renewed commitment to the classical liberal values of free association, conscience, publishing, and speech, to grassroots activism, and to popular sovereignty. This shift, far from being confined to the United States, echoes as well across Europe, where similar populist-nationalist movements are challenging the entrenched power of bureaucratic elites and transnational corporations. The global resonance of this transformation underscores the universality of the struggle for self-determination against centralized power.
Considering this, Biden’s Farewell Address takes on a new dimension, not as a clarion call against oligarchy but as an attempt to misdirect the American people and prepare the ground for the coming corporate-organized resistance to the popular will. By framing the populism that unites the left and the right as a threat rather than a corrective, Biden and his administration seek to reinforce the very power structures they claim to oppose. His warnings about the abuse of power ring hollow when juxtaposed with the actions of his administration, which weaponized federal agencies to suppress dissent and uphold the interests of the Corporate State. Progressivism, in this context, reveals itself not as a synonym for populism but as its antithesis—a tool of corporate governance masquerading as egalitarian ideal.
The rise of populist-nationalist movements, bolstered by the realignment of Big Tech, represents a reclamation of power by the people. It’s a reminder that democracy is not a gift bestowed by elites but a right fought for and exercised by citizens. As America transitions into this new era, the oligarchs who once served the Corporate State are now compelled to answer to the desires of the populace. In these developments we see a vindication of the ideals upon which the nation was founded—a testament to the enduring power of self-government. With the resurrection of reason and truth, the destructive ideologies that plague the West—CRT, DEI, TQ—are on the run. Don’t let up (see my recent Tasks for the Rebel Alliance).
“Today’s clemency action provides relief for individuals who received lengthy sentences based on discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine, as well as outdated sentencing enhancements for drug crimes,” Joe Biden said today in a statement announcing another round of clemencies at the end of his presidency. “This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars.”
This is the right thing to do, of course, but an old friend of mine asked me on Facebook why Biden didn’t do this four years earlier. For the same reason he didn’t enact the First Step Act that Trump pushed through Congress, I responded, before adding, “Biden waited until now so that Trump could get no credit for the most important piece of criminal justice legislation in decades.”
President Trump signs the First Step Act, December 18, 2018
There is more to the story, so before I get to the First Step Act and explain why many of those who will read this post will not have heard of this piece of legislation, I want to make brief readers on the background of the discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine which, among other injustices, the First Step Act addressed.
The disparity in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine emerged with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, a legislative response to rising concerns about drug use and its societal impacts. This period saw a moral panic fueled by sensationalized media coverage of the so-called “crack epidemic.” Lawmakers, amid a historic crime wave, and seeking to appear tough on crime for their upcoming reelection bids, instituted harsh mandatory minimum sentences. Even though crack and cocaine are the same drug, and even though those who purchased powder cocaine often convert it to crack (I know, I lived in Miami at the time), ready-use crack cocaine, more commonly used in impoverished black-majority communities, was penalized 100 times more severely than powder cocaine. The result was racial disparity in sentencing.
A good source on this is Michael Tonry, who wrote extensively about disparities in drug sentencing and the broader issues of racial inequality in the criminal justice system in his 1995 Malign Neglect. Tonry argues that these policies were rooted in political motivations rather than evidence-based assessments of drug use or harm. Tonry emphasizes how these policies exacerbated racial inequalities and contributed to the over-incarceration of black Americans. (Tonry exaggerates the role drug sentencing played in the phenomenon, but I will leave that to a future essay. It was nonetheless significant and unjust.)
It is important for readers to know that, although this occurred during the Reagan-Bush administration, the law was bipartisan, with support from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Of note, Joe Biden was US Senator during the passage of the bill, and he played a significant role in shaping and supporting it. Indeed, Biden, serving as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he helped craft and promote various anti-drug measures, including mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Biden was a leading advocate for tough-on-crime policies during this period and contributed to the broader legislative agenda of escalating penalties for drug offenses. Biden supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. I condemned the legislation at the time and wrote about it later in my dissertation.
Some readers may be aware that in the early 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, Biden played a pivotal role in crafting and advocating for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, often referred to as the 1994 Crime Bill. As now Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden was a driving force behind the legislation, which aimed to address growing public concerns about violent crime in the United States. The 1986 legislation wasn’t a one-off for Biden. More than any other Senator in my recollection, Biden was driven by authoritarian impulse.
Biden’s contributions to the legislation included advocating for expanded mandatory minimum sentences and supporting policies such as “three-strikes” laws, which imposed life sentences for individuals convicted of three serious offenses. The bill also allocated significant funding for law enforcement, enabling the hiring of 100,000 new police officers and supporting community policing strategies. Additionally, it provided substantial federal funding for the construction of new prisons to accommodate the expected rise in incarceration rates.
I supported the 1994 bill at the time and still credit it with bringing down crime and reducing violence. I distinctly remember driving home to Middle Tennessee after vacationing in the Appalachian Mountains when the bill passed just days before my second year of graduate school (the first of my two advanced degrees). While the legislation was initially lauded as a comprehensive solution to crime, its long-term effects, including its contribution to mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on black and minority communities, have been the subject of significant criticism. As a graduate student in my PhD program in the second half of 1990s, I became critical of the law (its detrimental effects were notable soon after its enactment). Since then I have become more sanguine about the legislation overall but remain highly critical of ow it advanced the drug war.
That said, Biden speech on the Senate floor at the time is contemptible. He described violent offenders as a “predator” class (Hilary Clinton picked up on this, describing drug offenders as “super predators”), arguing that society needed to protect itself from these individuals regardless of the underlying social or economic factors contributing to crime. Biden stated: “It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to have—to become socialized into the fabric of society.” He said a lot more:
To be sure, individuals should be held responsible for their actions, but for Biden to reject consideration of the root causes of the crime problem hardened the hearts of a nation to interventions that could have ameliorated those conditions and thus reduce crime organically. However, is aware of they history here, one understands why Biden would deny root causes: it was Democratic policies during the 1960s and 1970s that trapped blacks in impoverished inner-city communities, establishing female-headed households as the norm, generating a demoralized criminogenic culture. Biden’s racism is a fact of the historical record, one he is desperate to dissimulate.
Efforts to address the injustice of Biden and others produced began gaining traction in the 2000s, culminating in the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 under the Obama-Biden administration, which reduced the disparity but crucially did not eliminate it. However, before heaping unwarranted praise on that administration, the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the disparity from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1, a move of which I was highly critical at the time. Had the initial legislation ben 18-to-1, I would have condemned it as strenuously as I did at the time. There should be no disparity.
Let’s now return to the matters of Joe Biden’s actions this morning, and why during his four years in office Biden did not grant clemency to those his legislation sent to prison for decades—and why he did not enact the First Step Act Donald Trump signed into law on December 18, 2018. Moreover, if you are asking “What is the First Step Act?” let’s understand your ignorance.
Obviously, the corporate state avoids giving Trump credit for the most significant piece of justice legislation in decades. How significant? The legislation reformed the federal prison system by reducing mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, expanding early release programs and allowing eligible inmates to earn time credits for good behavior and participation in recidivism-reducing programs, improving prison conditions, such as requiring federal prisons to place inmates closer to their families when possible, and addressing the disparities in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine offenses retroactively. That’s right, had Biden enacted the First Step Act, these prisoners would have already been released.
To drill down on the widespread ignorance of the First Step Act, this can be attributed to several factors. Although the law received some initial media coverage when it was signed into law, it lacked sustained attention afterward. As many readers are aware, coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency focused on controversies and polarizing issues. Immigration was a flashpoint, where media bias portrayed Trump as an authoritarian, going so far as misrepresenting photos of children in cages during the Obama-Biden administration as having occurred under Trump. (There was also the ulterior motive of flooding the country with illegal aliens.)
The First Step Act was a bipartisan achievement that required Trump’s intervention to accomplish. Trump pushing through and signing into law legislation releasing thousands of black men from prison put there unfairly, put there by Democrats, ran counter to the narrative the corporate state was determined to push. Elites controlling the narrative understood that people were primed to overlook it because criminal justice reform isn’t perceptually associated with Donald Trump, whose tough-on-crime rhetoric is depicted as anathema to the critical race theory/ social justice paradigm pushed by the apparatus. After 2010 especially, the corporate state, the mass media, the culture industry, and academia united in pushing out anti-white conservative bigotry, setting up Trump to be the champion of the Deplorables, and depicting the Democrats as sympathetic to the plight of the poor and minority.
As for academia, the institutional frame in which I have been ensconced for the last thirty years, criminal justice curricula and research endeavors focus on systemic racism, mass incarceration, and policing. This was the subject of my dissertation. The woke progressive academics who dominate the institution cannot give Trump credit for freeing people from policies Democrats were in a major way responsible. A lack of detailed and widely disseminated academic analysis of the First Step Act has limited its presence in coursework and scholarly discussions. When the rare criminal justice expert does discuss it—I present yours truly as the rare example of providing both sides—students across the university system, indoctrinated in woke progressive ideology by a lifetime spent in public education, disregard who they perceive as a “conservative” professor (even though in my case I am a liberal and a Marxist) and even report him to the dean’s office—as they did to me after a lecture debunking the central claims of Black Lives Matter and Trump’s work in addressing class and racial injustice in the criminal justice system.
The lack of recognition for the First Step Act and its transformative potential exemplifies a broader pattern of selective narrative control within our corporate, cultural, and political institutions. By downplaying and ignoring Trump’s bipartisan achievement, the corporate state, media, academia, and cultural elite perpetuate a skewed understanding of criminal justice reform and its origins. This neglect not only does a disservice to the truth but also undermines meaningful progress in addressing systemic injustices. This should be a time to reflect on the missed opportunities of the Biden administration (I have put this charitably) and the persistent ideological bias shaping the discourse over the last several decades. Instead, we are presented with a simulacra of a president who did far more harm than good to the nation he purports to serve.
Recently, on Facebook, I noted a warning issued by Green Bay Police Department (this is in the city in which I reside) about warming up one’s car in the driveway or garage. Car thieves have been taking advantage of the practice, a practice one might understand is desirable given how cold it gets in Northeast Wisconsin.
A frequent commenter to my Facebook posts wrote, “I don’t condone theft, but who is stupid enough to leave a running car unlocked? They’re basically asking for it to be stolen. Use some common sense, people.” To the snark about those “stupid enough” to leave a running car unlocked, I retorted, “People who live in safe neighborhoods.” When I was growing up in the 1960s-70s, we never used bike locks, locked car doors, or even barred the front door. At the same time, there was a 12 gauge pump action shotgun in the house just in case there was an intruder.
As readers might expect, I had more to say to the commenter. In a follow up comment, I wrote, “Saying somebody is asking for their car to be stolen because they’re warming it up is a lot like saying a woman is asking to be raped because she’s dressed provocatively or that a businessman is asking to be robbed because he’s dressed nice. People aren’t suppose to steal, rape, and rob. Let’s start there.”
AI generated image
But does that mean people should not practice situational awareness and engage in safety measures to protect their property from theft? Maybe I was too harsh; there’s a fine line between preparing people to avoid victimization and victim blaming. The commenter’s remarks stray into the second category. But there’s a way to talk about this that doesn’t. Perhaps people should heed the police warning about this tactic of car thievery. Indeed, they should. In this essay, I leverage my professional bona fides to talk about victimology and hope to show readers how they can promote public safety without engaging in victim blaming. It’s not stupidity. They aren’t asking for their cary to be stolen. But the practice is unwise, and the result unwelcome.
In the realm of criminology, victimology is one subfield, shedding light on the dynamics surrounding criminal behavior, providing knowledge that allows citizens to better defend themselves from those who wish to harm them or separate them from their property. The population of the United States in 1970, when I was eight years old, was 203 million people. In 2020, it had grown to 330 million, becoming more diverse, more unequal, with rising material deprivation. This is associated with a drastic rise in crime over the 1970s-early 90s, quelled by a massive expansion of the criminal justice system.
Open borders and the entrenchment of ghetto culture, a demoralizing force that increases the likelihood that some of our fellow citizens, as well as the new arrivals who lack the moral sensibilities that made America free and safe, an increase in the proportion of the population that works from definitions favorable to the violation of law and transgression of safeguarding norms, in conjunction with leniency in law enforcement, explain the change. But it took more than the expanding the criminal justice apparatus to accomplish crime reduction after the early 1990s; it also took situational awareness among the citizenry. This came with a downside: among other things, children became less free to enjoy the childhood I enjoyed, replaced by virtual activities. Even now, the current crime wave notwithstanding, our freedoms are constrained as much by fear of predation.
However, the threat of crime remains real, and being prepared to avoid victimization may help relieve the fear, reasonable and unreasonable, people may have about being victimized—at least it promises to shake us out of the naiveté that it could never happen to us. This is where victimology studies become useful. Victimologists study the attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics of crime victims, generating insights into the motives and patterns of criminal perpetration, as well as identifying the preventative measures that can be taken to minimize the risks of victimization. Done properly, this can have the effect of increasing our safety while minimizing the impact of fear of crime on personal freedom.
In my interactions with others, I encounter critics of victimology who say the subfield shifts responsibility for crime onto the victim, implying that it blames victims for their own victimization. This can occur in several ways, I’ve been told: focusing excessively on the behavior or characteristics of the victim rather than the actions of the perpetrator; emphasizing factors like victim behavior or vulnerability that may have contributed to the case of victimization. Critics who view victimology this way point out that focusing on victims detract from addressing the root causes of crime and victimization, perpetuates harmful stereotypes, and undermines empathy for victims.
Assuming victimology does these things, the complaints are valid. There is indeed a desire to avoid addressing the root causes of crime and victimization. Anybody with a sufficient grasp of the demographic realities of crime I the context of the politics of our era can also grasp the desire to avoid acknowledging the situation. As I have shown on Freedom and Reason, leveraging the corpus of crime statistics, black Americans, especially males, are drastically overrepresented in serious crime. On a per capita, according to the 2021 NIBRS data, black Americans were approximately 8.8 times more likely to be reported as homicide offenders compared to white Americans. Based on the 2021 NIBRS data, per capita, black Americans were approximately 7.6 times more likely to be reported as robbery offenders compared to white Americans. I will address the other two criticisms over the balance of this essay (and return to the first again).
Supposing victimology shifts responsibility, the problem identified in my response to the Facebook commenter, how do we explain criminal events while at the same time empower individuals to mitigate risk without veering into victim blaming? First and foremost, as stated, it’s imperative to affirm unequivocally the standpoint that the fault of criminal acts resides solely with the criminal. Regardless of actions, attire, or circumstance, the responsibility for any crime lies squarely on the shoulders of those who perpetrate it. Victim blaming, in any form, is not only morally reprehensible but also counterproductive in the endeavor to strengthen public safety. It undermines the fundamental principle of justice and perpetuates harmful stereotypes that exacerbate the trauma experienced by victims.
At any rate, within the field of victimology, there lies a pragmatic approach to crime prevention—one that recognizes the importance of risk mitigation strategies, situational awareness, and understanding the factors that may increase one’s susceptibility and vulnerability to crime. This approach is not about assigning blame to the victim but rather about empowering individuals with the knowledge and tools to safeguard themselves against potential harm.
Consider, for instance, the simple act of locking one’s doors before leaving home. Again, many of us did not do this in 1970, but we should have. (It is still wise to obtain a firearm and learn how to use it.) This basic precautionary measure does not absolve the burglar of responsibility for his actions. He will if determined break and enter whether the door is locked. But locking the door undeniably reduces the likelihood of a break-in, thereby minimizing the risk of victimization. On purely instrumental grounds, burglars seek the path of least resistance.
Similarly, advising women not to enter vehicles with strange men or to avoid secluded areas at night does not imply fault on the part of the assault victim. Men should not assault women or other men. At the same time, women need to be aware that certain environs pose higher risks. They will benefit from the awareness to navigate those environments safely. Hitchhiking was common in my youth. Today, it would be unwise to pick up a hitchhiker—or to be one; that one sees so few hitchhikers anymore is evidence that people are much more reluctant to invite strangers into their cars or to seek rides from strangers.
Victimology illuminates the role of routine activities in shaping vulnerability to crime. While emphasizing that no one should be targeted based on their appearance or actions, an awareness of behavioral characteristics that increase the risk of becoming a crime victim acknowledges that certain attire may inadvertently attract unwanted attention. A conspicuous display of wealth may make an individual a target for theft, not because he deserves it, but because he presents an opportunity for exploitation.
Slain United Health CEO Brian Thompson was not responsible for Luigi Mangione’s action. Those defending the assassin’s actions are engaged in blatant victim blaming. But those working in health insurance are today thinking about where they are and who is present in the wake of an action that anarchists call “propaganda of the deed.” Similarly, individuals who openly display cultural or religious symbols may become targets of hate crimes perpetrated by bigots. The bigots are responsible, but understanding that there are bigots who may harm those they loathe and taking precautionary measures can protect one from harm.
Understanding these dynamics allows for proactive measures to minimize risk, such as avoiding conspicuous displays of wealth or considering alternative routes in high-risk areas—or, if one can afford it, hiring personal security.
Victimology underscores the importance of self-defense training and empowerment initiatives, not as a means of encouraging violence or victim-blaming, but as tools for fostering confidence, resilience, and situational awareness. By equipping individuals with the skills to protect themselves, such as martial arts or self-defense classes, victimology empowers individuals to assert agency over their personal safety and resist victimization. Understanding victim characteristics that attract perpetrators and increase vulnerability to crime is thus crucial in developing effective crime prevention strategies and reducing one’s risk of victimization. Exploring these factors helps to inform risk mitigation efforts and empower individuals to protect themselves more effectively.
Perpetrators often target individuals they perceive as vulnerable or easy targets. This perception may be influenced by various factors, including age, perceived lack of assertiveness, or physical stature. For example, perpetrators may target elderly individuals or those with physical disabilities, assuming they are less likely to resist or defend themselves. Individuals who find themselves in isolated or secluded environments are more vulnerable to certain types of crimes, such as assault, rape, or robbery. Perpetrators are more likely to strike when their victims are alone and unlikely to receive immediate assistance. This underscores the importance of avoiding isolated areas, especially at night, and seeking safety in numbers whenever possible. Individuals who are unfamiliar with their surroundings or are perceived as strangers may be at higher risk of victimization. Perpetrators may exploit their lack of local knowledge to target them for scams, pickpocketing, or other crimes. This highlights the importance of remaining vigilant and seeking guidance when navigating unfamiliar environments.
For example, predators are known to use tactics such as placing sticky substances on car hoods, leaving money, flyers, or other items under windshield wipers to distract or delay a person—often targeting women—while he or she is entering or preparing to drive away in their vehicle. These actions aim to lure the person into diverting their attention, prolonging their vulnerability, or stepping out of the car into danger. To mitigate this risk, it’s crucial to remain alert and prioritize safety over addressing distractions. If you notice an unusual item on or near your car, avoid removing it immediately, especially if you’re alone or in an unfamiliar area. Instead, enter your car, lock the doors, and drive to a safe location before inspecting the item. Maintaining situational awareness, parking in well-lit and populated areas, and trusting your instincts reduces the likelihood of falling victim to such strategies.
Substance use, including alcohol and drugs, can impair judgment and decision-making, making individuals more vulnerable to exploitation or victimization. Perpetrators may take advantage of intoxicated individuals, rendering them less capable of defending themselves or recognizing potential dangers. Never leave a drink at a bar unintended. If somebody buys you a drink, watch his hands. If somebody offers you drugs, make sure you know the person well and the type and the effect of the drugs you are taking. Educating yourself about the risks associated with substance use and promoting responsible consumption can help mitigate vulnerabilities. I am not preaching the anti-drug message. What you decide to do with your body is your business. But if you are going to use drugs, do so safely and with those you trust. This won’t completely eliminate the risks surrounding drug use, but it will decrease the likelihood that you will fall victim to somebody who means you ill and other problems associated with drug use.
In recent years, subway riders have increasingly been opting to lean against the walls while waiting for trains, a behavior driven by safety concerns. As incidents of people being pushed onto the tracks have become more frequent, passengers are seeking safer alternatives to the edge of the platform. For example, in New York City, commuters at stations like Times Square and Grand Central are now more likely to position themselves along the wall, where they feel less vulnerable to sudden pushes or accidental falls. This shift in behavior highlights growing fears about personal safety and the desire to avoid the risk of tragic accidents, prompting some transit systems to reconsider platform designs and security measures to ensure rider safety. A person standing on the edge of the platform is not blameworthy if somebody shoves them on to the tracks. However, leading against the wall while waiting for the train minimizes the risk.
Unfortunately, individuals belonging to visible minority groups may face an increased risk of victimization due to prejudice or hate-motivated violence. Perpetrators may target individuals based on their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, seeking to intimidate or harm them based on their perceived identity. Being openly gay does not justify the actions of anti-gay bigots. When I was growing up, I would hear males talking about what they would do if a gay man ever propositioned them. I always spoke up in those situations, condemning the sentiment. I don’t want to make meeting people any more difficult than it already is, but whether you’re homosexual or heterosexual, making advances to strangers comes with risks. It is not your fault if another person victimizes you, but there are ways to avoid victimization.
Given the statistics I cited earlier, and in light of the anti-white bigotry that plagues American society, the rule of decades of blaming “white privilege” for the situation of black Americans, there is a much greater likelihood that a white person will be the victim of a black person than the other way around. While it should be that white people can feel safe walking in black-majority neighborhoods, the statistical reality indicates that it is not. For example, blacks are approximately 13 times more likely to murder a white person than are whites to much a black person. Blacks are overrepresented not only in robbery, but also in burglary and theft. Therefore, whites should consider avoiding certain neighbors and situations. For those who say this is unfair to the majority of blacks who don’t engage in crime, Heather Mac Donald put it well in an interview with Glenn Loury, observing this particular typification is a tax imposed by some on others given the overrepresentation of blacks in crime commission.
I confess that I struggle with victimization studies because I understand how it can sound like victim blaming. As I type these words, I review them carefully for the potential to cross that line. I moreover understand that raising awareness of danger promotes fear of situations and strangers. This is probably an unavoidable problem, one perhaps best captured by considering type I and type II errors, which in this case reflect the balance between identifying threats and avoiding false alarms.
A type I error, or false positive, occurs when a person perceives an individual or a situation as a threat when it’s not, potentially leading to unnecessary fear or avoidance. When a woman assumes that someone following her in a parking lot is a predator when the stranger is simply walking to his car, a type I error has occurred. A type II error, or false negative, occurs when an actual threat is dismissed or overlooked, such as ignoring someone’s suspicious behavior that later escalates into victimization. Both errors have consequences: type I errors may lead to unwarranted stress or false accusations; type II errors have implications for safety. Situational awareness and trusting one’s instincts may help mitigate these errors. My view is that it is better to overreact than be too trusting.
* * *
Before leaving this essay, I want to note the problem of cultures that blame the victims of violence for the perpetrator’s actions. Islam’s concept of “purdah,” which means to “avoid temptation of society,” is one of those cultural items. In the concrete, this is manifest in the practice of requiring women to stay behind a curtain, live in a separate room, or dress in all-enveloping clothes, for the purpose of keeping out of the sight of men. Purdah is used by Muslims and their apologists to blame European women for rape by Muslim men.
One may remember a few years ago when Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, faced backlash after he blamed victims of rape for wearing “very few clothes.” When Khan was questioned by the Axios journalist Jonathan Swan about the ongoing “rape epidemic” in Pakistan, the then-prime minister responded by saying: “If a woman is wearing very few clothes it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots. It’s common sense.” This common sense has been imported to the West, where rape has skyrocketed with the mass migration of Muslim men into European countries. It is not women going uncovered that is to blame. But Muslim men use purdah to justify raping “kafir,” i.e., those ungrateful to Allah—a denier, disbeliever, infidel, or pagan.
However, not all gender segregated spaces are oppressive to women. Gender ideology, originating in the West itself, is establishing a culture where men can enter women’s spaces by claiming they themselves are women. As bizarre as that sounds, by repurposing the synonym for sex, namely gender, queer praxis holds that men are entitled to the gender identity of women and therefore to women-only spaces and activities. Women-only spaces exist in the West not for religious reasons, but because of a recognition of the inherent difference between men and women and the risk men pose to women. Spaces free of men foster provide a sanctuary where women are not only freely express themselves, address shared experiences, and build community without fear of harassment or intimidation often present in mixed-gender settings, but also enjoy safe spaces. Indeed, safety is the primary justification for women-only spaces, particularly in contexts like bathrooms and domestic violence shelters, where privacy and security are paramount.
Nonetheless, in both cases, in the presence of purdah or the absence of safe spaces for women, women are blamed for the things that happen to them. In the Islamic worldview, a woman who is not properly covered is blamed for having tempted the man with her body. The analogy given by clerics is that of the apex predator snatching his prey. The shepherd must therefore guard his flock. From the standpoint of gender ideology, women who defend their right to spaces free of men are smeared as TERFs, lose opportunities and reputations, and even subjected to violence. Both of these cultures blame the victims of violence for the abuse and violence perpetrated on them.
There has been growing concern in some European countries, for example in Sweden, about harassment and victimization faced by women, particularly in urban areas with significant Muslim populations. Muslim men are harassing women for not adhering to certain cultural norms, such as the principle of purdah. This issue has extended to other aspects of public life, such as the perception of harassment towards Europeans walking their dogs in certain areas. Dogs are considered dirty in Islamic culture. Additionally, there have been reports of “no-go zones” in cities and towns, where non-Muslim Europeans are cautioned or even discouraged from entering due to safety concerns or tensions between different cultural groups. These developments have fueled debates over assimilation and integration, as well as the practice of cultural pluralism, typically framed as the challenge of balancing freedom of expression with respect for local norms and safety.
For my purposes in this essay about victimology, women and those taking their dogs for a walk must consider the risks of doing so when around Muslims. To be sure, it is not their fault if they are harassed or victimized, but they have to exercise caution for their sake and the sake of their pets. However, the authorities who have not acted to return communities to the level of public safety they once enjoyed are to blame. In this sense, those who continue to support those authorities shoulder some of the blame themselves. This is not blaming the victim, but rather observing the paramount importance of electing to office representatives who grasp the problem of public safety and work to solve it by restricting immigration, deporting those who have no legitimate asylum claim (which should be very narrowly defined and verified), deporting any alien who commits a serious crime, and integrating new arrivals permitted to enter or remain into the national culture to which they have chosen to migrate.
As for gender ideology in the West, this needs to be removed from the nations of Europe and North America root and branch—as should those ideologies that blame white people generally for the problems of black people (critical race theory) and the global North for the problems of the global South (ideas disseminated by postcolonial studies).
A cockroach in the concrete, courthouse tan and beady eyes A slouch with fallen arches, purging truths into great lies A little man with a big eraser, changing history Procedures that he’s programmed to, all he hears and sees
Altering the facts and figures, events and every issue Make a person disappear, and no one will ever miss you
Rewrites every story, every poem that ever was Eliminates incompetence, and those who break the laws Follow the instructions of the New Ways’ Evil Book of Rules Replacing rights with wrongs, the files and records in the schools
—Dave Mustaine and Danny Ellefson, “Hook in Mouth” (1988)
Before the election, at a small gathering on my front porch, when it was still warm outside, a neighbor expressed his concern about the uninformed people reading and believing misinformation and disinformation on X. Platforms like X, he said, should be policed to remove misinformation and disinformation for the good of society. Given his politics, pro-Democrat and progressive, I felt I could make assumptions about who he thought should serve as commissar. Recently, on Facebook, a former colleague expressed a similar sentiment in the wake of Facebook dropping its fact-checking regime. I asked him whether the “lot of people out there who believe whatever they read, hear or are told at face value” (his words) should believe the fact-checkers. His answer: “[I]f something is verified by multiple reliable sources then yes.”
But how would the people who take things at face value know the fact checkers are reliable? Knowing his politics, I noted that one of Facebook’s factchecking services was Check Your Fact, a service associated with right-wing magazine The Daily Caller, co-founded by Tucker Carlson. The service’s tagline is “We check the facts so you don’t have to.” From the organization’s site: “The Daily Caller’s fact-checking team is funded by The Daily Caller’s general news budget, as well as revenue generated through advertising. Check Your Fact is also partially funded by Meta, which contracts the outlet to do third-party fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram.” I posed the question to my former colleague: “Were you confident during Meta’s factchecking era that an organization owned by former Fox News host and current Trump advocate Tucker Carlson would steer those who take things at face value in the right direction?” Obviously, it is a rhetorical question.
In 2019, Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), published an exposé on Check Your Fact in its section ScienceAdviser, “Facebook fact checker has ties to news outlet that promotes climate doubt.” (I presume you received the memo that there is to be no doubt about climate change.) Science is the same magazine that published the editorial “Transgender health research needed,” in which the authors told its readership as fact that “TGD [transgender and gender diverse] people have gender identities that differ from society’s expectations based on sex assigned at birth. Gender-affirming care consists of personalized health interventions that help patients achieve their goals of decreasing gender dysphoria and increasing gender euphoria. Hormone therapy, surgeries, and mental health services help TGD people live in alignment with their gender identity and expression, consistent with the accepted biomedical ethics principle of respect for autonomy, articulated by philosophers Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in 1979.” Presumably, Science is the sort of a reliable source those who take things on face value are supposed to trust—in contrast to The Daily Caller’s Check Your Fact service Meta hired to check facts.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta
Recall the censorship on social media platforms of COVID-19 information that contradicted the prevailing narrative developed by the medical industrial complex and states and government and nongovernmental organizations around the world. Social media platforms, news outlets, and government agencies took steps to suppress or flag content that diverged from what was portrayed as the mainstream scientific consensus, particularly when it came to alternative treatments, the origins of the virus, and vaccine efficacy. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube enforced policies that often removed posts or accounts that promoted conflicting or “unverified information.” “Experts” argued that this censorship was necessary to prevent the spread of misinformation that could jeopardize public health. When Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter (now X), he ended the practice (on this and several other matters, such as the expression of gender critical views). In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, Mark Zuckerberg has followed suit, ending Meta’s relationship with fact-checkers.
Why is there so much angst over these developments? From the elite side, this isn’t hard to understand. “Advertiser concern,” is a euphemism for the concerns of corporate governance. Corporations do a lot more than move product. They manage perceptions. They govern the populace. They can’t do that when platforms allow for the free trucking of information. But perhaps popular trepidation over these developments is not hard to understand, either. A population conditioned to accept on face value the claims of “multiple reliable sources” cannot determine for itself its beliefs. Not knowing what to believe produces anxiety, which is often projected onto the “lot of people out there who believe whatever they read, hear or are told at face value.” Not seeing their own egoism in supposing that, while they know what the truth is, others cannot be trusted to know the difference between what true information and something else, they leave that matter to those with whom they share ideological affinity, assuming that the fact-checkers in Meta’s employ fit the bill. In other words, they themselves take at face value “facts” from sources purported by some authority to be reliable. It is a hopeless paradox.
Huxley dystopian tale was published in 1932
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley introduces the concept of “mandatory perception,” a feature of the World State’s relentless efforts to control how individuals feel, think, and view reality. Through pervasive methods, such as hypnopedia, or sleep-teaching, which is learning by hearing while sleeping or under hypnosis, citizens are conditioned from birth to accept societal values without question. Conditioning implants beliefs that shape mass perceptions of the world, creating a population that sees conformity, obedience, and stability as the highest virtues. Individuality and personal interpretation are systematically suppressed in Huxley’s dystopia. The World State fosters an environment where deviation from the collective mindset is not just discouraged but unsettling, even threatening. By programming people to perceive their world in narrowly defined ways, the World State ensures its citizens remain compliant and content, incapable of challenging the status quo. The result is a society where perception is not merely shaped but dictated, leaving no room for alternative viewpoints or independent thought.
Today, this is known as “perception management.” Perception management is the deliberate effort by corporations and governments to influence how individuals or groups interpret information, events, or situations. It’s a strategy used in advertising, marketing, and public relations, in politics, to justify military action, etc., to shape public opinion, suppress dissent, and maintain control over narratives. The process involves carefully curating messages, emphasizing certain aspects of reality, omitting or downplaying others, to guide the audience toward a desired understanding or reaction. At its core, perception management leverages the psychological principles of cognitive bias and framing. By controlling the context in which information is presented, those managing perceptions can influence how people interpret that information. When one knows it, he sees it everywhere. A political campaign might highlight a candidate’s achievements while deflecting attention from controversies, crafting an image that aligns with voters’ aspirations. Perhaps this is expected. Is it expected that the entire media apparatus would highlight controversies to deflect attention from the candidate’s achievements and virtues to turn voters against him?
Often subtle—always subtle to those who don’t know what’s happening—, this practice has profound effects, particularly when used to sway public opinion on contentious issues. The rise of digital platforms has amplified the reach and complexity of perception management. Social media algorithms, targeted advertising, and influencer endorsements create environments where tailored narratives can spread rapidly and persuasively. This dynamic makes it increasingly challenging for individuals to distinguish between authentic information and content designed to manipulate their perceptions, underscoring the importance of media literacy (the opposite of factchecking) and skepticism (central to critical thinking) in navigating today’s information landscape. The regime of factchecking is not only a strategy for imposing Huxley’s mandatory perception, but also for obscuring the manipulation inherent in the present workings of social media.
One can see this power in the way the media apparatus can turn on a dime and cause tens of millions of people to believe or disbelieve something today about which they held the contrary view the day before. Things that were never true become always true. The paradigm is the case of Donald Trump.
Before entering politics, former President and current President-elect Donald Trump, a prominent real estate developer from Queens and a television personality, had expanded the family business into a global brand, becoming synonymous with luxury and opulence through high-profile properties, casinos, and ventures. Known for his larger-than-life persona, Trump was a frequent figure in entertainment (talk shows, SNL, etc.), sports, and tabloids, sports, rubbing elbows with celebrities and politicians while cultivating an image as a charismatic billionaire and shrewd dealmaker. In the 2000s, Trump became a cultural icon through his role as the host of the reality TV show The Apprentice, which showcased his commanding personality. However, when Trump announced his run for president in 2015, the media’s portrayal underwent a dramatic shift. Once celebrated as a pop culture icon, he became a polarizing figure in American politics. Far from framing the man as a voice for disenfranchised Americans and a disruptor of the political establishment, the media and partisans portrayed him as a fascist (even comparing him to Hitler) and a racist.
Why this shift occurred is easy enough to explain. Trump was adored as long as he was on the outside the sphere of corporate state power. His fierce independence and views on political economy and foreign policy were tolerated because they could have no effect on policy and world affairs. The people who adored him were believed to be well under the control of the power elite. When he entered politics, that changed. His meteoric rise in the ranks for Republican contenders terrified elites, not only because o his views, but because he brought tens of millions of disaffected Americans with him. He gave them a voice when they were suppose to have no voice. So the hegemony machine flipped the switch, and Trump was transformed. A face became a heel. His wickedness was bottomless. He was a Russian stooge, determined to sell out America to the arch-villain Vladimir Putin. He was a rapist. An insurrectionist. A dunderhead and a kook. Anything and everything said about him was believed by tens of millions, and no amount of factchecking could change their opinion. For those who disbelieved the mandatory perception, their wickedness was a bottomless, which justified harassing the red MAGA hat wearer or disinviting an uncle to Thanksgiving Dinner—or worse: open disappointment that an assassin’s bullet missed its target.
The efficacy of hegemonic power tells us that a large proportion of the population already lives in Huxley’s World State. The popular turn against Trump is one example. There are many others. “MeToo” set feminism on its head. Racism is ubiquitous. Over a number of years queer theory redefined gender, but one day we just seemed to know that affirming the obvious—that a man cannot be a woman—would rightly be met with negative sanction and shame, that we would even think of ourselves as terrible persons for having even thought this, even though everybody thought it only a little while ago. The very fact that we know without being told that this or that is an entirely unacceptable opinion, a belief that can have no purchase in polite society, testifies to this power.
The magic of this power lies in its ability to erase what came before it, since what came before it, if allowed to be the subject of mutual knowledge, negates the thing we’re all supposed to know as eternal truth. Indeed, the wholesale and immediate reconstruction of common sense is perhaps the scariest aspect of hegemonic power. And that is why the fact-checker has no place in a free and democratic society.
Put your hand right up my shirt Pull the strings that make me work Jaws will part, words fall out Like a fish with hook in mouth
I’m a criminologist. I am focused on the matter of arrest, detention, and incarceration. Today, some two million people are in prisons and jails in America. That figure is somewhat misleading since it doesn’t convey the phenomenon of “churn” in our jails, where some ten million people flow through jails across America every year. Quite often, when a man or a woman is arrested and either detained in jail or sentenced to time in jail or prison, he or she is separated from their families. In the case of long-term imprisonment, this separation could be for years. Yet you rarely if ever hear people talking about family separation in this context. You won’t hear the media saying that we should end arrests, detention, and incarceration because it separates families. Nor will you hear this in other countries across the globe. Arrest, detention, and prison are common items in the world inventory of state practices. It’s called “public safety.” It would be as absurd to advocate for ditching public safety because of family separation as it would be to advocate for sending children to prison to be with their parents.
Why is this term being used in the context of deportation? It isn’t obvious? Because the corporate state does not want deportation of illegal aliens because businesses need illegal aliens for super-exploitable labor, to drive down wages for native workers (which disproportionately affects black and brown workers), and to change the demographic composition of the country for political purposes. (To read some my recent essays on this, see The Project to Replace Native Born American Labor; A Case of Superexploitation: Racism and the Split Labor Market in Springfield, Ohio; The Defenders of Mass Immigration Insult Native-Born Labor; The H-1B visa Controversy: The Tech Bros Make Their Move.) So a propaganda term has been devised—used extensively during Trump’s first term—and selectively deployed to undermine the very project the American voters sought in the 2024 election: the mass deportation of illegal aliens. As I wondered rhetorically in those earlier essays, did you hear that term during Obama’s administration? Obama deported millions of illegal aliens. No, you did not hear that term.
That being said, mass deportation has an advantage that incarceration does not. A man who is put in the back of a police car, detained in a jail cell, or sent to prison cannot—and should not—take his family with him. Family separation in these cases is a matter of course. Sometimes tragically, sometimes to the benefit and relief of the family, a criminal suspect or convict is separated from his or her family. But for a man or woman who is here illegally, his or her family can—and should—be deported together, or at least deported to the same place so they can be reunited. If they don’t seek reunification, then they can work that out in their home country. Of course, a great many of those who have entered our country illegally are not here with their family. They are military-age males here to take advantage of the wealth we built. They must go first. But the families must also go. Without borders and immigration controls, we don’t have a country. Don’t let misguided humanitarian sympathies cause you to falter at a time where patriotism and nationalist resolve are needed to save our republic.
I want to urge you to watch this interview. You will learn a lot from it. It could change your life. I teach this material in my Freedom and Social Control class. It appears at several points during the semester. I do media and propaganda as thought control. Thats obvious. But I also do it when I cover the sick role, and the medical-industrial complex (psychiatry being the focal point) and the reason it manufactures life-long patients, namely profit. (The government does this by creating dependents.)
I have several essays about this on my platform Freedom and Reason: A Path Through Late Capitalism. This subject, like many of the other subjects I cover, would never be accepted for publication in academic journals, and so I publish here. But it would be pointless even if academic outlets permitted this information to appear given that only a handful of people—often the most deeply indoctrinated among us—read academic journals. The paywalls are too high for the ordinary person. Perhaps that’s okay because most of what one finds there is nonsense. What might be useful to masses is obscured by jargon.
Here’s what’s not nonsense (I will try to avoid using too much jargon): You are being managed, and there’s a lot of effort invested in obscuring that fact. Those managing you know that popular awareness of how you are being managed will give you insight into your personality and help you resist your managers’ schemes. The managers know, or at least those who developed the techniques they use know, that gullibility and suggestibility are variable across individuals, and that everybody is to some degree capable of being conditioned. They use that knowledge to tailor the techniques of mind control. Knowing where you lie along the distribution of these traits and the different management techniques used to leverage that variability could help you avoid being manipulated.
Since most of you are not in that universe, you may not be aware that universities offer courses and organize thematics around the topics of conspiracy theory and dis/misinformation. These courses and thematics are designed, whether the curricular designers and administrators are aware of it (most aren’t, frankly) to dissimulate the technology of thought control by making awareness of its techniques appear as the product of paranoia. Talk the way I talk and you are the type of rube who listens to Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and that crowd. Obviously, I am guilty as charged.
For those unfamiliar with the term, dissimulation is the opposite of simulation. The latter involves making something that doesn’t really exist, or is actually something else, appear as if it does or is what is presented. This is happening all the time now, for example in the phenomena of simulated sexual identities. Once artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality are fully realized, Baudrillard’s precession will be fourth order. In contrast, dissimulation is making something that does in fact exist—such as the fact that you are being managed—appear as if it doesn’t really or that it is not what you think it is. The most convincing simulations will thus be those for which the process by which they are produced is dissimulated.
With thought control techniques, you’re “supposed” to know that these things exist but disbelieve that they have real effects and distrust those who tell you what the purpose behind it all is. The dissimulation of thought control is key to maximizing its effectiveness.
The Great and Powerful Oz
We all remember TheWizard of Oz (here referring to the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film). The Great and Powerful Oz was a simulation. Toto, because he is a dog, is free of the capacity to be manipulated by dissimulation (dogs are affected by simulations for the same reason), pulls back the curtain to expose the huckster pulling the levels that work the simulation.
At first you see evil. This man is an exploitative narcissist (which he is). But by humanizing the huckster and rationalizing his manipulations, and by leaning into his charisma and confidence (both simulations), the human and humanoid characters continue to trust him even after he is exposed as a huckster. Indeed, he becomes even more powerful in his naked moment (which is still fiction, but I ask you to suspend your disbelief for our purposes here).
Remember, the technicolor part of the film is a dream. The huckster appears in both the black-and-white “real world” and the technicolor dream (ponder that juxtaposition later—or now, if you wish) expressing empathy. But his life is hucksterism. He appears to have more power in his manufactured authenticity. At least his power is more subtle. He uses it to exploit the gullibility and suggestibility of the fellowship for his own profit, whether it’s sustaining his life at the edges of black-and-white communities in his traveling van or ruling the Emerald City, where he uses parlor tricks like the Horse of Many Colors to amaze the citizens there.
While the huckster can give the humanoids—the Tin Man, the Straw Man, and the Cowardly Lion (all metaphors)—a symbolic item that completes them, they are all figments of Dorothy’s imagination—or rather sublimations of personalities in her black-and-white life. Dorothy and Toto are real (the Fourth Wall is only broken by the Wicked Witch of the West in the dream world). Oz cannot complete Dorothy. Only Dorothy can do that. And she finds, in the final analysis, that she is already complete. She was all the time. There’s no place like home.
It’s a good life
Remember the short story “It’s a Good Life?” Maybe you saw the Twilight Zone adaptation. The world was destroyed and only Peaksville left untouched. This was home. Those trapped in Anthony Fremont’s dream (nightmare) never wake up—if it was a dream at all. They couldn’t kill Anthony because he would know. Dorothy sought the dream Land of Oz because she felt trapped. She found adventure after being knocked unconscious. The dream was very real. It was in color. Any everybody around her was in it.
Governor Gavin Newsom complains about the politicization of California’s wildfires. But these fires are the consequence of his politics—the politics of woke progressivism. The consequences of ideology in the actions of powerful people (more accurately in the hands of those who have been given power because of their subservience to it) are inherently political. Newsom and his crowd are to blame for the catastrophe. The tactic of depoliticization to meant to create the illusion that the situation is not political by claiming that others are politicizing it, and they do this not only to stay in power, but to keep in place the policies that created the problem.
I am not going to provide a detailed analysis of an unfolding situation for that very reason—it’s unfolding. But I do want to acknowledge the unfolding situation and make a few comments about it. At this point, we can draw some conclusions.
Putting the matter charitably, this situation is in large measure the result of misguided environmentalism. Donald Trump was right when he explained the problem to Joe Rogan on the latter’s podcast in October 2024. But this wasn’t the first time Trump had said this. Back in August of 2020, for instance, he told a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, “I see again the forest fires are starting.” Like an oracle, he continued: “They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests—there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”
Here is Trump saying it to Newsome’s face in November 2018:
Politicians and the punditry make fun of Trump’s criticism of forest management. “Come on, man!” was the response of out-going president Joe Biden, mocking Trump’s observation that California “sweep” the forest floor. Representations of Trump’s criticism dwell on the phrase “rake the forest.” They did this Trump’s COVID-19 response. They had Trump telling Americans to “inject bleach” and “drink fishtanks cleaner.” They had Rogan eating “horse paste.”
However, Trump did indeed recommend raking and sweeping the forest floor, and for good reason: effective forest management can significantly reduce the severity and spread of wildfires in areas like California. While it may not be possible to prevent all wildfires (it’s not, if we’re honest), proper management strategies can greatly mitigate their effects.
The consequences of the current wildfires is not the result of global warming, as progressives tell us, but the result of government failure to properly maintain California’s forests, and because elites have diverted water to the Pacific—water shortages have hampered firefighting efforts. Trump has also talked about California’s water policy.
What about the problem DEI in firefighting? That also plays a role in preparedness. There is a need to hire based on aptitude, attributes, integrity, and talents, not on the basis of identity. If a woman can fight fires alongside the men and do so effectively, then by all means she should be allowed do so. But lowering standards so more women can fight fires alongside men undermines preparedness. The need for strength and stamina in this occupation (and many others) tells us that, by and large, it is men we seek for this role, and men within a certain distribution of attributes and skills.
Even in the face of such obvious truths, progressives insist that we blame the fires on the abstraction of climate change. They do this to divert attention from their failure to properly manage the forests and the consequences of California’s water policy, and the institution of DEI.
This situation is not merely due to incompetence and bad policy, but because those who push the climate change narrative, and woke progressivism more generally, have influenced authorities to formulate and establish destructive policies. We can’t control the wind. We can’t stop crazy people and saboteurs (often the same person) from setting fires. We have to know what we can control and get ideology out of preparedness.
Why Californians continue to vote for politicians and policymakers who fail them testifies to the power of partisan politics and the role of woke ideology in making people stupid. The best thing any man can do is get as far away from progressive thinking as he possibly can and insist that society replace ideology with common sense and practical science and reap the benefits of reason and truth. California is on its way to being a failed state (which probably explain why Canada wants to annex it, along with other failing states such as Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington).
* * *
Progress is being stymied by those suffering from the imposed idiocy of ideology—and others are made to suffer on account of it. They call the stupidity “progressive” to convey what is not there, a genuine commitment to progress for the sake of humanity.
It’s no accident that progressivism emerges in the United States during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century at the same time the conscious and intentional manipulation of public attitudes via manufacture of propaganda (renamed “public relations”) emerges. Progressivism presents itself as a reform movement aimed at addressing problems associated with corporate governance, for example political corruption. These are problems that cannot be denied. The ideology is designed to obscure the harmful effects of corporate power, which is inherently corrupting, and to handle the problem of popular resistance to the situation corporate personhood produces. It’s why the crime of bribery is sublimated as the normal practice of campaign finance. Etcetera.
Progressivism should refer to the belief in human progress, modernization, and social improvement, and the popular governance structures that will realize these commitments in our daily lives. But it’s a common propaganda tactic to conceal the opposite of what something is by calling it what it is not—and accusing those wise to the deceit of “politicizing” what it really is.
“Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man, where he seeks and must seek his true reality.” —Karl Marx (1843)
More and more, organizations critical of religion, or that demand the separation of religion and government, have become advocates for religion. We see this with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the latter from which I resigned a few years ago for this very reason. That these orgs don’t appear to understand what constitutes religion is part of the problem. But, more than this, they have become captured by an ideological tendency that advances belief systems that share with religion the key characteristics that define this social phenomenon. Indeed, religion is a species of ideology, a chief characteristic of which is alienation from reality.
On December 28, 2024, in a letter published on Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is Real, Steve Pinker resigned from the Honorary Board of the FFRF. Pinker wrote “With sadness, I resign from my positions as Honorary President and member of the Honorary Board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The reason is obvious: your decision, announced yesterday, to censor an article by fellow Board member Jerry Coyne, and to slander him as an opponent of LGBTQIA+ rights.” I left the embedded link so readers can read for themselves the way those who defend the ideological corruption of science twist language, perhaps in part to convince themselves, but in effect if not in intent to disorder the thinking of the general populace, which prepares them also for ideological corruption.
I want to reproduce here the first paragraph of that organization’s justification for censoring and slandering Coyne to convey my point: “The Freedom From Religion Foundation is dedicated to protecting the constitutional principle of state/church separation, which ensures religious beliefs do not dictate public policy. While advocating for LGBTQIA-plus rights is an indirect component of our mission, we recognize that many attacks on these rights are rooted in attempts to impose religious doctrines on our secular government.” Do you see what FFRF did there? In reality, the imposition comes from queer praxis demanding that government (which includes academic) institutions respect the establishment of religion, which is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment. FFRF does this by failing to recognize or obscuring the fact of queer theory as religious faith.
We also see this corruption in the actions of academic institutions retarding the progress of science by permitting religious belief to determine how, for instance, anthropologists and archeologists go about their work. Consider the case of Elizabeth Weiss. Weiss is an anthropologist and professor emeritus, formerly associated with San José State University (SJSU), whose work on the study of human remains, particularly in the context of indigenous repatriation laws and ethical considerations in archaeology and anthropology, has been made controversial. Weiss is known for her outspoken criticism of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a 1990 US law that requires institutions to return certain cultural items, including human remains, to affiliated indigenous tribes. Weiss has argued that restrictions imposed by laws like NAGPRA hinder scientific research, particularly studies that rely on skeletal remains to advance forensics (useful for criminalistics, for example) and our understanding of health, human history, and human evolution.
In 2021, Weiss posed with a human skull on social media to promote her book (coauthored with bioethicist James Springer) Repatriation and Erasing the Past, which critiques NAGPRA and raises concerns about what Weiss describes as the politicization of science and the loss of research opportunities due to government policies. This image and her commentary was portrayed as insensitive and framed as part of a long history of desecration of indigenous burial sites in the name of scientific research. Because her discipline has been captured by ideology, Weiss’s actions and views have drawn criticism from scholars who advocate for ethical and respectful treatment of human remains, particularly those remains belonging to what are described as marginalized and historically oppressed communities.
Weiss’s stance and that of her opponents represent incommensurable standpoints, providing a paradigm of why the separation of science and democratic government, on the one hand, and religion and other ideologies, on the other, is vital for the progress of knowledge and technology.
Weiss’s autobiographical account of her struggle with ideology
I must digress here and note that Weiss was married to J. Philippe Rushton, a Canadian academic widely condemned for his research on race, intelligence, and behavior. I suspect this relationship had something to do with the controversy over Weiss’s work. Rushton, who served as president of the Pioneer Fund, a foundation known for supporting research on heredity and eugenics, is best known for his application of r/K selection theory to human populations. In his work, Rushton argued that racial groups differ in traits like intelligence, reproduction, and social behavior, attributing these differences to genetic factors. His research has been widely criticized for the promotion of scientific racism, perpetuating stereotypes and misrepresenting the complexity of human diversity. Many scholars have condemned Rushton’s work as pseudoscience.
I am not here to condemn Rushton’s work. However, readers should know that when I cover it in my course on criminological theory, I am critical of it. That’s my job as a teacher. I am here to defend science from ideology, and in this regard it is relevant to note that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rushton’s work became the subject of an investigation by the University of Western Ontario, where Rushton was a professor, to determine if it constituted misconduct or violated academic standards. The investigation ultimately concluded that while Rushton’s research was controversial and offensive to many, it fell within the bounds of academic freedom.
The fact that there was even an investigation, and the fact that the university distanced itself from his views (as a public institutions, they should have no position on the matter other than to defend the academic freedom of their faculty, as well as uphold the principles of the First Amendment, namely the freedoms of conscience, speech, and publishing) testifies to the ideological corruption of our academic institutions. Moreover, in 1989, Rushton was investigated by the Ontario Provincial Police under Canada’s hate crime laws. No charges were filed, but the fact that such laws exist have a chilling effect on free speech and scientific practice. It is not the role of government in a free society to police speech and research interests. Public institutions free of ideology do not behave this way.
Returning to Weiss’s situation, in 2021, she was removed as curator of the university’s skeletal remains collection and had her access to these materials revoked, actions she perceived as retaliation for her stance. How could she not? In response, Weiss filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the university, alleging that her academic freedom was being infringed upon. After a legal battle lasting more than a year, she reached a settlement with the California State University Board of Trustees in June 2023. As part of the agreement, Weiss agreed to retire at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, with included being granted emeritus status. Following her departure from SJSU, Weiss has continued to advocate for academic freedom and scientific inquiry. She joined Heterodox Academy, an organization that promotes viewpoint diversity in academia, and remains active in public discussions about the influence of sociopolitical factors on scientific research. (A brief account of her situation was reported on in Higher Education.)
One objection to my argument in this essay is that some of what I have identified as religion in my writing is not in fact religion, or even ideology, but ways of being that exist outside of those parameters, often accompanied by reference to homosexuality, assuming that homosexuality and gender identity are commensurable rather than oppositional. It is therefore important to determine what counts as religion. In my career as a sociologist, I am not merely well read in the area of religion studies, but have taught sociology of religion and published in journals and presented in conference sessions that center the study of this social institution. Moreover, as an undergraduate, I minored in anthropology and could have, with a few additional courses, declared a major in the field. I want to give you the definition of religion I have derived from these disciplines, both of which are purported to be scientific disciplines.
Religion, from both anthropological and sociological standpoints, is broadly understood as a system of beliefs, practices, and symbols through which individuals and groups relate to the sacred or transcendent, often providing cohesion, meaning, and structure to human existence. Religion encompasses the moral codes, narratives, and shared rituals that shape social organization and cultural identity while addressing existential questions about being, as well as life and death. Both disciplines emphasize the embeddedness of religion in social and cultural contexts, examining how religion informs and shapes, and is shaped by human interaction, power dynamics, and historical processes. Religion is a social institutions, and both history and prehistory suggest the existence of a need in humans to seek the transcendent and to ritualize their behavior. We might put it this way: religion is the sublimation of human instincts and primal fear, acts of reification foreign to other animals because they lack the depth of reflexive consciousness common to humans.
The obvious examples of religion in the Western world are Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, collectively known as the Abrahamic traditions. But Scientology, with its notion of the thetan, a being that exists in all of us that must be revealed through acceptance of doctrine and participation in a ritual (auditing), is also a religion. There are others that I will come to, and one of these—the matter of queer theory—lies at the heart of Coyne’s situation. All of these doctrinal systems have at their core nonfalsifiable propositions, i.e., claims that are by their very instantiation not subject to empirical confirmation or refutation. Examples of such claims are angels and devils, heaven and hell, and souls and thetans. When a person testifies to an otherworldly experience that requires that you accept or affirm their claims based on faith, i.e., belief without evidence, then you have been provided with such an instantiation.
Gender ideology, or queer theory, shares all of the characteristics of religion. The construct of “gender identity” is the analog to the soul in Christianity or the thetan in Scientology. Seeing this is really just a matter of swapping out terms: Queer theory is a system of beliefs, practices, and symbols through which individuals and groups, seeking transcendent experience, typically framed as the enlightened seeking of euphoria (the religious experience), manifest in the desire to transform bodies to achieve this state, related to what is defined as the sacred, that is the queer person, a living fetish or totem, which in turn provides cohesion, meaning, and structure to their existence, as well as to those who have chosen the queer person to be their totem, an existence said to be fraught with dysphoria, understood as the unbearable discomfort of being trapped in the wrong body, thus demanding sympathy and allyship.
The associated ritual moves beyond mere agreement among congregants to this church that these claims contain truth to involve the medical-industrial complex, where doctors serving as a priesthood apply drugs and surgeries in an alchemic manner to release the trapped gender identity by altering the physiology and modifying the apparent morphology of the physical body of the congregant. Moreover, demonstrating imperialist ambition, the church of gender demands that those who disbelieve the doctrine nonetheless observe it and participate its its sacraments, such as treating sex and gender as distinct phenomenon, referring to men as women and vice-versa (or as capable of having both, other, or no gender at all), and tolerating men in activities and spaces reversed for women (thus assaulting the institution of women’s rights). Those who resist doctrine and oppose the associated ritual are subject to censorship and other punishments. In this way, queer theory is highly similar to militant Islam (which explains why the former has become allied with the latter).
That gender ideology advances falsifiable claims does not it return to the brink of religious status. In the past, I have characterized queer theory as “religious-like” and “quasi religious.” Sometimes I still do. But close examination of the ideology reveals it to be a full-blown religious system. The claim that a man is a woman is indeed a falsifiable claim, since gender is a scientific term denoting gametes, sex-determining chromosomes (or other systems of sex determination), and reproductive anatomy, all of which can be confirmed or disconfirmed through objective examination of the claim. However, those who subscribe to the doctrine of queer theory attempt to side-step falsification by redefining gender as something other than a synonym for sex and disappearing it into the subjective realm. One is the gender one say he or she is, and that is all that is needed to demonstrate the existence of gender identity.
The nonfalsifiable character of gender as so rendered by the religion is why congregants to the church of gender either cannot or refuse to provide a definition of gender beyond the mantra that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, a tautological formula common to religious claims. We see this in the Orwellian chant “Transwomen are women” (a slogan that at once denies its purported truth). Readers will have confronted such tautological forms before. How do we know there is a soul? God told us there is. How do we know there is a God? Because the Bible tells us so. Why should I accept the Bible as an authoritative source on the matter? Because the Bible is the inspired word of God transmitted through men. Rinse. Repeat. Apply the same tautologies to Islam, Mormonism, or any other religion. Indeed, where such formulas appear, it suggests the presence of religious thinking.
For the record, a woman is an adult female member of the species Homo sapiens. As a scientific matter, gender is binary in mammals (and other classes of animals) and immutable. That means there is neither third or other genders, nor individuals without gender. It also means that mammals cannot change their gender; only simulations of other genders may be manufactured (occasionally convincing copies), simulations made possible by technologies made possible by science taken up by ideologically-captured and profit-generating institutions—in the same way the doctors in Nazi Germany enlisted science in the commission of atrocities during the Holocaust.
These facts constitute a brutal truth, one that a person only escapes (but not really) by resort to religious thinking, however twisted to make it appear that they are working from a rational standpoint. Denial of truth is a sure sign of anti-science sentiment. This is why it is so bizarre to see self-identified humanist and rationalist organizations like FFRF and the ACLU embracing queer theory and censoring those they find have committed the offense of working from a gender critical standpoint, that is the stance that accepts the truth of gender as I defined it above.
For those who accuse me of merely claiming the truth of the matter, they can do this by having assumed the post-truth stance of postmodernism and critical theory corrupted by its nihilism. I can’t claim the truth really, as this crowd sees it, because what pretends to be the truth is only a narrative constituted by power—and power means there is an “oppressor” and an “oppressed.” Lurking there is the “truth” of the “epistemic privilege of the oppressed.” Hence we have governments working with indigenous people to retard the progress of science. Ironically, the postmodernists tell us that there is in fact truth—but their truth, the one they claim they have the power to make it so.
Alongside post colonial studies and queer theory is critical race theory (CRT), which also constitutes a religion. I have written about CRT many times before (as I have about post-colonial studies and queer theory), arguments that are usefully summarized here. CRT as with post-colonial studies and queer theory, form the doctrines that underpin the dissemination of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI (perhaps arranged alphabetically, but perhaps so arranged so as to avoid an acronym that spells out an undesirable conveyance, one that itself conveys a truth, as we can see by the collapse of complex systems across the West).
CRT constitutes a religion for the following reasons. First, it treats individuals as personifications of abstract demographic categories. In this way, it makes a pretense to science. To be sure, abstractions can be useful for scientific work. For instance, they can identify areas requiring further inquiry. For example, if the average median income for black men is significantly lower than it is for white men, then we might then try to determine why we see this. It is an important question. But the disparity is not in itself an explanation of anything. Moreover, it does follow that every actual black or white man has an income identical to the group average. To quote Karl Marx from his critique of Georg Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, an essay that begins with a critique of religious consciousness, “man is no abstract being squatting outside the world.”
Second, CRT advances correctives to the social injustices it calls into existence based on abstraction-as-explanation that are characteristic of many religions, namely the doctrines of collective and intergenerational guilt, responsibility, and punishment, the adjudication of which is left to DEI and civil rights law, places these doctrines have not place to be in. Indeed, the government respecting the establishment of the religion of CRT is a major source of injustice with respect to actual people. To wit, the practice of collective guilt, responsibility, and punishment finds individuals experiencing treatment on the basis of race and ethnicity (the latter often conflated with race in this ideology) and not on the merits of their accomplishments, aptitudes, character, and talents. The great diversity of these merits in any given demographic category are ignored such that individuals from purportedly disadvantaged and oppressed are given opportunities and dispensations based on selected attributes that construct the abstraction rather than those that should merit their include. Likewise, intergenerational guilt, responsibility, and punishment holds individuals responsible for things they did not do but rather on the basis of assigned membership in an arbitrarily (albeit not randomly) selected abstract demographic category.
Gender ideology, as informed by queer theory, mirrors the essential characteristics of a religion, built on non-falsifiable claims, tautological reasoning, and ritualized practices that demand both personal transformation and societal adherence. Central to this system is the construct of “gender identity,” functioning as an analog to the soul in traditional religious frameworks, upheld through institutional mechanisms such as the medical-industrial complex, which facilitates its physical and symbolic manifestations. Like other belief systems rooted in abstraction, queer theory, alongside critical race theory and postcolonial studies, elevates subjective narratives to the level of sacred truths, enforcing conformity through social penalties and institutional power.
This ideological framework, by rejecting objective scientific inquiry in favor of relativism and power-centered epistemologies, fosters anti-scientific sentiment and undermines reason, even as it paradoxically claims alignment with progressive, humanist values. The imposition of its doctrines, from redefining language to reordering societal structures, reflects a broader cultural regression that prioritizes group identity and ideological purity over individual merit and empirical truth. As with other ideologies that take on the trappings of religion, this movement demands scrutiny. Its unchecked influence risks eroding the foundational principles of rational discourse, scientific progress, and individual liberty.
There is no better time to proactively exclude religious ideologies from our public institutions than right now. It is way past time to do this, which the current situation testifies to. As bad as it is, it will get worse if we don’t fight harder. Once ensconced in bureaucratic arrangements, ideologies determine the organic appetites of once-democratic institutions meant to serve us and not our masters. This is true also for corporate arrangements. The longer religious ideologies—or any ideologies, for that matter—are permitted to define our respective statuses and determine the workings of public and sense-making institutions, the more they determine us, and the greater the negative consequences are for societal progress and the paramount necessity of making sense.
freedom and reason 