Author: The FAR Platform

A note before I make my critique. This man, Thomas Willet, a London-based PhD candidate, constantly joins homophobia and transphobia as if they’re similar things. They’re not. Homophobia is fear and loathing of people based on sexual orientation. Transphobia is a propaganda term that, like the construct “Islamophobia,” is used by propagandists to smear people who accept the fact that gender is binary and immutable.

I have corrected Willet on his feed about this but he insists on doing it anyway, which means that he is purposefully muddying the waters. In this case, he joins the fallacious pairing with gender critical views. Gender critical views have no inherent bearing on the question of homosexuality. They concern the claims of trans activists that men can be women and that this delusion or doctrine entitles trans identifying people to trespass upon activities and spaces reserved for women. In reality, trans activism is anti-women’s rights.

Homophobia and transphobia shouldn’t be welcome in the workplace.
GC views are, at their heart, transphobic; they invalidate trans people and their rights.
Believe what you want, but to act upon GC thought is to discriminate against trans people.

— Thomas Willett (@ThomasWillett9) May 22, 2024

What Willet is effectively articulating is a call for organizations and institutions to discipline and punish people who advocate for and defend sex-segregated spaces and the rights of women. If a woman’s place of employment changes its policy to allow men to use the women’s bathroom, and she objects, then she will be the one said to discriminating against trans identifying employees not the company for compelling her and her female coworkers to use the toilet with a man. This is despite the fact that her gender is the protected characteristic. This is (at least it should be) an obviously illiberal point and, if put in practice, the establishment of an authoritarian policy framework.

This is a massive problem with gender ideology that people should have picked up on a long time ago: the cooptation of the rhetoric of discrimination and oppression to discriminate against and oppress women, to deconstruct the regime of sex segregation that not only protects women from intimidation and violence, but makes possible opportunities that they would not otherwise have access to because of the inherent differences between men and women. The grand irony here is that those who go on about equity deny it when and where it actually matters.

Willet’s argument is a variation on the riff about trans genocide and erasing trans people by denying gender ideology. “My identity is not an ideology,” we hear it repeated ad nauseam. But gender identity is the central component of a quasi-religious doctrine. As such, it is an ideology. It’s not like race, where, if I denounce all the alleged features of whiteness (punctuality, rationality, attention to the written word) then I am no longer white. It’s not even like gender, where if I denounce all the things that make me a man (the desire to be a father, to defend my family, to make sure their needs are met), I am no longer one. A person is trans because he says he is and it changes what and who he really is (a man) nary a jot. A free people enjoy religious liberty, which includes any religious-like ideology—really any ideology, as we can’t have the state picking and choosing which deeply held convictions are allowed and disallowed. Naturally, the right includes those who reject other ideologies. Of course it does. I’m not a Muslim and the government should not make me so—not in a free society. Likewise, religious freedom and free speech necessarily include those who do not accept gender ideology and express instead gender critical views. Just as one is free to express his opinions, he is free from having to accept opinions expressed by others.

Note that Willet says that gender critical views invalidate trans people and their rights. I hear this line all the time from trans activists. But whether denying somebody’s beliefs invalidates them as believers is not the problem of the denier. Do Muslims cease to exist because I find the doctrines of Islam invalid? It’s a ridiculous argument, really. Muslims keep on existing whatever I believe about their religion. They don’t like it that I deny the validity of their beliefs, to be sure, and many of them wish the government would punish those who do, and if they get their wish you and I and generations to come will live in a totalitarian society. It is the same with gender ideology. The desire to compel any of us to accept the premise that trans women are women instead of affirm the truth that they are not, and moreover reorganize our society on that basis, signals as clearly as anything could totalitarian desire.

The desire for total control over others is most strongly expressed by those whose faith in their own beliefs is weak, even if that weakness lurks beneath the zealotry. It explains the zealotry. This is what lies behind the demand for “affirmation” (which has taken the place of the worn out “validation”). Suppose the myth of Muhammad receiving sharia from the archangel Gabriel were exploded and the billions of devotees to Islam suddenly came to reject the doctrine based on the myth. There would be no Muslims. Do I wish those billions would come to see the light? Of course. I am a humanist. But the fact that I already see the light doesn’t disappear those who don’t. Obviously. Look at what’s happening to Sweden. Or Minnesota.

It’s not news to me that people don’t believe the same things I do. I may disagree with them (and they may disagree with me). But I don’t labor to drive them from their livelihoods or destroy their reputations. I don’t surround them and intimidate them. The only reason I write about gender ideology and Islam is that these zealots can’t leave the rest of us alone. Rational people who care about freedom and human rights don’t do things that harass people over their beliefs and opinions. Fascism is beneath them. People who care about other humans beings don’t behave like the Stasi and report others to the authorities for the things they say or agree with and their associations.

We are all human beings, and respecting human rights means respecting the freedom to believe what one will—and to not believe what one won’t—and associate with whom they wish to and assemble to express their opinions collectively. When female employees as a university join their voices and raise them to demand spaces safe for women, they aren’t engaged in an act of discrimination against men any more than denying Muslims the hallways where others travel for their daily prayers to Mecca discriminate against the followers of Muhammad—or telling leather freaks they can’t show up for work (or parade around where children are present) in all kinds of leather. If you’re into bondage and humiliation, there are other spaces appropriate to those kinds of expressions. Don’t let my opinion that it’s weird stop you.

Regular readers of Freedom and Reason may recall that there was a recent attempt to have me fired from my position at the university where I have been teaching for nearly a quarter of a century because of views I have expressed here and on social media (see “UW-Green Bay students want professor fired for alleged racism, transphobia”; The Snitchy Dolls Return). In the original news report (which can be found here), my administration told NBC26 reporter Andrew Amouzou, “We are aware of the situation and the students’ concerns. The process by which students report concerns is being followed and will move forward as appropriate.” Perhaps it was a way to get Amouzou off their backs and humor the students, but it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the First Amendment or the core principle of academic freedom.

Academic freedom is a cornerstone of higher education, embodying the freedom of scholars and students to explore, discover, and discuss ideas without undue interference. It encompasses the right to conduct research without censorship, publish findings without fear of reprisal, and teach with autonomy. This principle also extends to the freedom of expression, allowing members of academic communities to voice their opinions and engage in intellectual discourse without constraint. Ultimately, academic freedom fosters an environment where diverse perspectives can flourish, contributing to the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of society. What the administration should have done was inform NBC26 and its audience that the university stands by its professors and academic freedom and more broadly their rights as human beings to be free from discipline and punishment for exercising their free speech rights.

While the university spokesman (whoever that was) did not say what he should have, my faculty later surprised me with a struggle session during our last meeting of the semester. Had that been an agenda item, I probably would have declined the meeting, or at least reached out to one of the numerous attorneys who reached out to me eager to represent me if the university moved to discipline me for my speech—either facially or via some proxy method (for the record, I am concerned about the weaponization of post-tenure review in my case). However, in the moment, I let those I hired, tenured, and mentored turn on their elder for its immediate sociological value. That is to say, I found the situation interesting and instructive—not to mention amusing. To be sure, as soon as I said that not only would I not apologize for my gender critical views but that I was going to continue to criticize gender ideology, the intervention became rather pointless. It continued nonetheless.

Predictably, the round-robin devolved into emotional appeals mostly centering the feelings of students. But how students feel about my opinions doesn’t count for much in an enterprise that stands on facts and reason and, frankly cold, hard, and often brutal truths. I already had a dean throw at me concern over retention—without even considering how conservative students are avoiding programs and campuses because they find alienating the woke signaling rampant in promotional materials and intolerance among the faculty for opinions that don’t align with progressive ideology (see The State of Cognitive Liberty at Today’s Universities; see also Accountability Culture is Cancel Culture: Double Think and Newspeak in Today’s America).

I may have mentioned this before, but I have had several conservatives come to me (the number has been increasing) and complain about the weight of progressive hegemony on campus (which is ironic given that twenty years ago they, too, tried to cancel me). I never raised their concerns with administrators or faculty because, consistent with principle, I have no desire to constrain the speech of my colleagues by criticizing pedagogy or politics in this way. Instead, after affirming their perception, I tell conservative students to steel themselves against indoctrination and look at it as an opportunity to see upfront and personally the irrationalisms of progressive ideology. I also tell them, if they are so moved, to challenge their professors over the claims they make, always remembering to do so in a respectful and reasoned manner.

If chairs, deans, and provosts are worried about retention, they might focus on making sure administrators, faculty, and staff grasp the important of free speech and academic freedom. To put this another way, and I don’t say this sarcastically, the university should lean into diversity, equity, and inclusion programming centered on viewpoint diversity rather than programming rooted in the identitarian politics that demands the promotion of Islam, reification of race, and dissimulation of gender.

I earned my three university degrees and chose a career in academia because I sought out spaces where ideas can flow freely. I have always embraced the idea of spaces free from restrictions on ideas, and I thought I was joining an enterprise in which others embraced the same. I now know we don’t share the same core of being. Those spaces are becoming increasingly scarce in the era of corporate statism and progressive-captured public institutions. Over the thirty years I have been in higher education, I have seen the project in which I enlisted become a church, the professoriate a clergy, and zealots proliferate among the congregation. Corporate and progressive capture is transforming universities into indoctrination centers that function to prepare students for two tasks: (1) administered lives in corporate bureaucracies; (2) a reactionary army to defend the corporate state from democratic-republican resistance and liberal demands for free thought and conscious.

Thomas Willet is a paradigm of the academic worker who seeks to complete the transformation of the university in the direction I am criticizing. That he is based in the United Kingdom only testifies to the fact that the illiberal threats to freedom and democracy are trans-Atlantic (indeed, they are worldwide). The defenders of speech codes and cancel culture will tell you that views on free speech are changing. The younger generation has a different view. (They say the same thing about the gender.) But the desire to regulate speech according to the ideology of this or that group is not a young idea. It is a very old one. Most human societies have sought to control the minds of their members by punishing those who step out of line with the received wisdom of the thought regime. It hasn’t mattered very much to them that Western civilization advances to the degree that people are permitted to make objectionable utterances. It matters even less to those who seek its termination.

As we approach the 2024 presidential election, which will also see the whole of the House and a third of the Senate up for grabs, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep my blog essays and posts to one a day. I will do my best to resist this. But today will be one of the days that I can’t. So here’s an afternoon post.

Doesn’t the man who tends to the First Amendment—freedom of conscience, speech, press, assembly, petition, association—also have First Amendment rights? Only the progressive left is allowed to have a politics? What if Samuel Alito owns a gun? Can he still sit in judgment of the Second Amendment? Just like the Harrison Butker frenzy, we are once more seeing a pathetic and transparent attempt to manufacture a controversy. (I thought call out culture was for the young and dunderheaded?)

Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of the most politically active justices in the history of the Court. Where were the demands for an investigation of her associations or recusal from key cases in which she clearly had ideological investments? Yet, when Samuel Alito expresses his politics, progressives lose their shit. They don’t merely criticize the justice (that’s fair game), they call for investigations and demand the judge recuse himself from interested cases (we’d hope they’d all be interested cases). They do the same with Clarence Thomas, another outspoke conservative (who is especially despised by progressives because he is the wrong kind of black man, the kind of black man who probably won’t vote for Biden). It’s not just the judges they go after. They go after their wives, too. Progressives really don’t believe in free speech and association. But most of you already knew this.

Democrats believe conservatives have no right to their politics. They don’t believe in an independent judiciary. They’re exploiting the presence of conservative justices to simultaneously delegitimize and politicize the court. Progressives want recusals because this raises the relative number of progressive judges, which they believe helps they interests before the Court. They’re laying the groundwork for court packing if Biden wins reelection.

(It’s looking bad for Biden, but given the full spectrum campaign against Trump, the former president may not be around to trounce him. It’s not only the lawfare being waged in courts across the nation, but the palpable desire to see bodily harm done to Trump. We learned yesterday that the warrant to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate—likely to retrieve, among other documents, the one detailing Crossfire Hurricane, the Obama-Clinton plot to initiate the coup against the Trump presidency—authorized the FBI to use lethal force against occupants of the estate. Newly unsealed court document reveal that DOJ and FBI were prepared for Secret Service resistance during the raid.)

We are reminded why they want recusals and more progressive justices by today’s ruling in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, where the majority held that courts must generally credit lawmakers’ assertions that their goal in redistricting was partisan, which is permissible, rather than based on race, which is not (see The NYTimes coverage here). “We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Justice Alito wrote for the majority. Right, because if maps were drawn to benefit Democrats in states like South Carolina, then it would have to be based on race. Democrats accuse Republicans of racism, not because Republicans draw the maps based on race, but because Republicans don’t draw maps to advantage Democrats.

Since progressives control the institutions that manufacture and control the narrative, even rational people sometimes work within the hegemonic assumptions and are tricked by the antiracist narrative, which is actually the cover for racist law and policy. That’s why it’s so important to extract oneself from the system of tacit assumptions and think through the problem rationally. Progressives are aggressively politicizing the Court because, in the corporatist model, in the racial system Democrats have maintained for centuries (the chattel slavery, Jim Crow, affirmative action, DEI), racism is cloaked in the legitimacy of the law—and to do that the party needs to reduce the presence of and undermine the authority of colorblind jurisprudence and its defenders.

Democrats employ subterfuge to hide their corporate statism, the fascism of which becomes more obvious every day, by smearing Trump as a fascist. Consider the freakout over the video produced by the Dilley Meme Team (named for its founder Brenden Dilley), shared by a Trump operative on his social media platform Truth Social early Monday morning while Trump was in a Manhattan courtroom defending himself from a zombie case arranged by the Department of Justice. The video was initially reported as a campaign ad. “This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court,” Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Soon Biden was piling on, remarking, “A unified Reich? That’s Hitler’s language, that’s not America’s.” (See Reductio ad Hitlerum and the Witch Problem.) The Biden campaign is now punctuating its absurdity daily. “Reich” is the German word for “nation.” The faux-news articles in the video in question, styled like newspapers from the early 1900s, recycles text from reports on World War I, including references to “German industrial strength” and “peace through strength.” The outrage depends on ignorance of basic history and the incurious character of the average Biden supporter. When was World War I? July 1914–November 1918. Hitler came to power in January 1933. (Associating Trump with Hitler has been around for a while. See my June 2018 essay Immigration, Deportation, and Reductio ad Hitlerum. Trump isn’t the only target of the smear. See, e.g., “DeSantis is a Nazi” and the Hysterical Left’s Anti-Working Class Politics.)

In an op-ed masquerading as a news article published by The NYTimes, Chris Cameron tells readers about a recycled headline in the video that suggests that a second Trump term would reject globalism, misleading his audience by claiming that the term “has been widely adopted on the far right and that scholars say can be used as a signal of antisemitism.” Actually, “globalist” is a term used by left-wing international political economists. One of two areas of specialization in my PhD credential is political economy. I have shelves overflowing with left wing critiques of globalism, globalization, and transnationalism. It’s the bread and butter of international political economy. Progressives do the same thing with the word “cosmopolitan,” linking it to antisemitism, as well.

The NYTimes is lying without shame here—and they think they can get away with it because they think you don’t know enough to know they’re lying. They’re not only trying to tie Trump to antisemitism to deepen the propaganda portraying Trump as fascistic (for the most part, the man is a typical liberal from Queens), but they’re also trying to whitewash the role of transnational corporations in the practices of off-shoring and mass immigration that is hammering the working class. Indeed, Joe Biden (not a Jew) has been one of the major proponents and enablers of globalization since the late 1970s.

But Cameron is a like a dog on a bone. He writes that “Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced Jews who vote for Democrats, accusing them of hating their religion and Israel. In one video this month, he said that ‘if Jewish people are going to vote for Joe Biden, they have to have their head examined.’” Is that more offensive than what Joe Biden said about black people? Remember what he told Charlemagne? “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Trump didn’t say that Jews who voted for Biden weren’t Jews. He was perplexed why Jews would vote for Biden. So am I. I am also perplexed why blacks would vote for the man or his party.

You may doubt that what I am about to tell you is real. It sounds like a hoax. It’s not. I checked. It’s real. Illinois Democrats have passed a bill (HB 4409) that changes the term “offender,” as in criminal offender, you know, murderers and carjackers, to—wait for it—“justice-impacted individual.”

Maybe you aren’t surprised. Maybe you already know that this is just the latest move by Democrats to make it harder for the proles to talk with each other about the real world. Maybe, like me, you’ve read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” or Nineteen Eighty-Four and understand the function of newspeak.

It’s a term that has been floating about for awhile, as you can see above. To give you a flavor of what’s behind the term. the Minnesota social justice organization JIIVE (Justice Impacted Individuals Voting Effectively) claims that its “dynamic system allows the social welfare organization and political action committee political power to guide, educate, register, and effectively influence campaigns to regain equity that has been stolen through the slave trade system.” This is the attitude behind the term, which a brief Internet search indicates that the term has become ubiquitous in the leftwing penology jargon.

Here is a challenge for you. What is it that a “justice-impacted individual” does to cause him to be impacted by justice? Can somebody come up with a Orwellian euphemism for this? You know, the way the impact of doctors killing patients is lessoned in the popular mind by calling such events “therapeutic misadventures”? Or the way torture is euphemized as “enhanced interrogation” (“Verschärfte Vernehmung,” in the original German, a term coined in 1937 by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller).

The newspeak dictionary overflows with examples. But we can’t have justice-impacted individual “perpetrating crimes.” We need euphemisms for “perpetrating” and “crimes.” We also need to recode “crime victims.” What term should we use there to confuse people about what’s happening?

Some members of the Illinois house have pointed out that changing the term across government documents will cost taxpayers thousands of dollars. That’s a problem. But the much greater problem is the continual downplaying by Democrats of street crime—and who is overrepresented in the perpetration of street crime.

What is the goal here? That’s obvious, isn’t it? Changing language changes thought. Confusing language confuses thought. The goal is to create a specialized language that sanitizes the harm Democrat policies cause the citizens and make it harder for the people to be able to produce mutual knowledge around the intersection of progressive urban policy and street crime.

I don’t know if you heard Joe Biden’s speech at Morehead College the other day (I report on here: The Hunt Family and the Basket of Deplorables). He told the all-male graduates of the historically-black college that black men are dying in the streets. But he didn’t tell them who is killing them. This is called lying by omission. Biden’s goal was to make the graduates believe that white civilians and police officers are killing black men in the streets. In reality, the perpetrators are soon to be described as “justice-impacted individuals.”

Did you see Michael Cohen’s op-ed in The Daily Beast, “The Antisemitic Innuendo in Harrison Butker’s College Commencement Speech.” Progressives are relentless this election season. Antisemitism is rampant on college campuses in pro-Hamas demonstrations the corporate media adores, but when Butker alerts the audience to a very real problem with the propagandistic definition of antisemitism used in new federal legislation, the Daily Beast uses that very propagandistic definition to accuse Butker of antisemitism (and once more misrepresenting his remarks concerning women and the family for good measure).

The bill in question is House Resolution 6090 (118th Congress), the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, that “provides statutory authority for the requirement that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights take into consideration the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism when reviewing or investigating complaints of discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.” Those of us who have been following the trajectory of this definition have long worried that Congress would adopt as its working definition the IHRA’s laundry list of antisemitic manifestations.

What does that list include? Everything and the kitchen sink (you can read it here), including what Butker references in his speech, the suggestion that Jews participated in killing Jesus. Alongside this example is the example of blood libel, a false accusation historically leveled against Jewish communities alleging that they kidnap and murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, particularly for Passover. This accusation has been a recurring theme throughout history, often leading to persecution and even massacres of Jewish communities. The blood libel persists, and so we educate and advocate for religious tolerance. But the question of whether Jews participated in the killing of Jesus—assuming Jesus is a historical figure—is a historical question.

Jesus was a Jew, the Messiah according to the Christian tradition, predicted in Second Temple Judaism, and the point of the Gospel of John (who was also a Jew) was to bring everybody to worship the King of the Jews. It states in John’s gospel that somebody wrote all this down so that people might believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and seek salvation in that belief.

Jews don’t believe Jesus is the Messiah obviously. According to Jewish teaching, the Messiah has yet to appear. Thus Jews during the first century CE regard Jesus’ claims (or claims attributed to him) to be heresy. At trial, under Mosaic law, Jesus was convicted of a number of crimes, including practicing sorcery/witchcraft, performing exorcisms, violating the Sabbath restriction, threatening to destroy the temple, and, of course, claiming to be the Messiah (Jesus was quite the troublemaker). The adjudication of case took place in the Sanhedrin, a Jewish judicial body, with the high priest Caiaphas presiding. Up to that point, I think it is safe to say that the matter was a Jewish affair.

Because the Jewish people under Roman colonial rule did not have the authority to put a man to death, Jesus was turned over to Pontius Pilate, the governor (or prefect) of Roman-occupied Judea. There Jesus was to be tried for his claim to be the King of the Jews. The Jewish elders asked Pilate to condemn Jesus (i.e., execute him), arguing that Jesus had transgressed Roman law, as well, since by claiming to be king he had committed a treasonous act against the true emperor, who was at that time Tiberius.

There’s a lot I’m going to leave out, obviously. But an item that should be mentioned is when Pilate sends Jesus to appear before Herod Antipas, since Jesus was a Galilean, and that was Herod’s jurisdiction. Not insignificantly, Herod was the son of Herod the Great, who, while of Edomite and Nabatean descent, was raised as a Jew. Herod found Jesus to be of no threat and sent him back to Pilate. This is important because in John’s gospel, Pilate also seems to find Jesus to be no threat and, more than sit in judgment of the man, appears to advocate for him during the proceedings. John describes Pilate as very troubled by the whole affair, having the man pacing back and forth.

Hence the controversy over whether John minimizes the actions of the governor while exaggerating the role of the Jewish authority. Two points are key here, and together they have to do with the problem of legitimacy that translate power into authority: (1) in law and theory, provincial governors possessed total control over their respective jurisdictions; (2) in practice, provincial governors worked closely with leaders of the provinces under their jurisdiction to secure hegemony.

To be sure, it was Pilate who ultimately ordered the execution of Jesus, obvious of course since, as noted earlier, the Jewish elites did not have the authority to carry out capital punishment. However, according to John’s account, while Pilate ordered the execution, he appears to have done so reluctantly, aggressively pushed into the deed by the Sanhedrin. To say that it is antisemitic to recall this history and apply this interpretation—and anybody who knows the story of Catholicism knows that the Gospel of John plays a central role in that story—almost feels designed to make Catholicism, especially the Latin Mass variety, appear inherently antisemitic.

For those readers who do not know the significant of John’s Gospel, it is this Gospel that emphasizes Jesus’ divinity, presenting him as the living and eternal word of God who became incarnate for the salvation of humanity. The concept of the Logos (the Word), through which all things were created, the incarnation of Jesus as the Word made flesh, and the promise of eternal life through belief in him (salvation) are unique elements in John’s Gospel. Many foundational Catholic teachings find their origin in the Gospel of John. The sacraments, especially baptism and the Eucharist, the doctrine of the Trinity, which teaches the unity of God in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—all these are found there. John’s Gospel also provides key insights into Jesus’ ministry, the miracles, his teachings on love. And then there is the passion, Jesus’ death and resurrection. Indeed, John’s Gospel provides the most detailed account of the passion. It is John’s Gospel that is centered in the Catholic liturgy, particularly during Easter.

Does Butker believe that Jews as a mass have agency and that Jesus was killed by the entire Jewish population past and present? I don’t know. I know he didn’t say that. What he said was “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.” To determine whether jail is among the consequences of the legislation readers can determine for themselves by reading the text of the bill. But was Butker accurate when he said that the matter of who killed Jesus is a biblical teaching? Yes, he was. Is he right to be concerned that Congress would pass legislation establishing any consequences for expressing opinions based on biblical teaching? For sure. The First Amendment protects religious liberty and the right to express one’s beliefs and opinions. Yet the fact that the House of Representatives legislated on the basis of IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism received minimal media attention. How many days are we out from Butker’s speech? It’s still front-page news.

The campaign to cancel Harrison Butker is one of the most extreme cases of woke progressive fury I have seen to this point. This story has dominated the news cycle for several days now, as the speech is mined for new seams of outrage. I never thought I would say this, but the progressive left is really starting to sound Christophobic. The loathing of Christendom is part and parcel of the anti-conservatism/traditionalism, anti-family, and anti-whiteness of the woke left. No doubt Butker is getting it with both barrels because the left is losing their shit over the pending return to power of Trump and the MAGA Republicans. The heightened race baiting—seen in Joe Biden’s Morehead College speech (see the coda to The Hunt Family and the Basket of Deplorables) and the resurrection of the “Hands up, don’t shoot” myth (The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter)—is yet another indicator of the panic.

Kansas City Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt’s wife, Tavia, and eldest daughter, Gracie, are talking publicly about Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College. Tavia has been married to Clark for more than three decades. She’s a homemaker. Both Tavia and Gracie has good things to say about Butker.

“I’ve always encouraged my daughters to be highly educated and chase their dreams,” she wrote on Instagram. “I want them to know that they can do whatever they want (that honors God). But I also want them to know that I believe finding a spouse who loves and honors you as or before himself and raising a family together is one of the greatest blessings this world has to offer.”

“Affirming motherhood and praising your wife, as well as highlighting the sacrifice and dedication it takes to be a mother, is not bigoted,” she continued. “It is empowering to acknowledge that a woman’s hard work in raising children is not in vain. Countless highly educated women devote their lives to nurturing and guiding their children. Someone disagreeing with you doesn’t make them hateful; it simply means they have a different opinion.”

She then encouraged people to “celebrate families, motherhood and fatherhood.” “Our society desperately needs dedicated men and women to raise up and train the next generation in the way they should go,” she wrote. “We need more dialogue (and VALUES, IMO) in this country and less hate.”

Her daughter Gracie shared her thoughts on Fox and Friends. “I’ve had the most incredible mom who had the ability to stay home and be with us as kids growing up.” She continued: “I understand that there are many women out there who can’t make that decision. But for me and my life, I know it was really formative and in shaping me and my siblings into who we are.”

Asked if she understood what Harrison was talking about in his speech (slightly condescending), Gracie responded, “For sure, and I really respect Harrison and his Christian faith and what he’s accomplished on and off the field.”

So Harrison Butker is probably not going to lose his gig—and not just because of his talent on the field. He reflects company values.

What we’re seeing in the progressive reaction to Butker’s speech is the same sentiment expressed by Hillary Clinton when she described Americans in the heartland as “a basket of deplorables.” Remember that? That was about two months out from getting beaten in the 2016 presidential election which was supposed to be her coronation.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters [tens of millions of Americans] into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” She added, “Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.”

Actually, Hillary, they are America.

The same sentiment was expressed just recently by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who called those who may see themselves as part of the populist movement just “poor souls who are looking for some answers.” “We’ve given answers to them, but they’re blocked by some of their views on guns.” Oh, so you given people the answers. Then she lifted a line from Obama: “They have the three Gs: guns, gays, God.”

Democrats are sailing towards disasters this November 5 and running down ordinary Americans is only hardening popular opinion against the party. The controversy over Butker’s speech is amplifying the elitist attitude widespread among Democrats. They can’t help themselves, though, even when it’s politically stupid to keep jerking knees.

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On May 19, Joe Biden gave the keynote address at the Morehouse College commencement, a historically-black all-male college in Atlanta. Biden vowed “to call out the poison of white supremacy,” and “to root out systemic racism.” That’s the bit that stood out to me. Biden elaborated: “You started college just as George Floyd was murdered and there was a reckoning on race. It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you. What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black—black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?” And Bukter’s speech was polarizing?

Here are these words again with annotations containing corrections and clarifications: “You started college just as [career criminal] George Floyd [overdosed] and there was a reckoning on race [arson, assault, intimidation, looting, murder]. It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you [given that the Democratic Party represents the interests of corporate elite with open borders and all the rest of it]. What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street [by other black men in progressive-run cities]? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises [by Democrats] still leave black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot [if we have to discriminate against whites and other races and ethnicities attempting parity]? And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it [the Democratic Party] doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

I remarked recently on my Facebook feed, “Not a fan of Mitch McConnell, but mad props for keeping Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court. The man is utterly without principle.” This was before he was found in contempt of Congress by the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees (see AG Garland Found in Contempt and MTG’s Hypothesis Confirmed). Somebody responded that he was a lot better than the Republican appointees on the Court. So I added that Garland was an authoritarian, as well. I was then asked for an example. I gave several. This essay is based on my response.

Merrick Garland’s authoritarianism and lack of principle are well documented. More than any attorney general in recent memory, Garland has not merely politicized the Department of Justice but weaponized it against the political opponents of the Democratic Party and the corporate state establishment. The evidence for this is extensive.

Garland has initiated legal actions to block the implementation of state laws, effectively pitting the federal government against elected state bodies aligned with their constituents’ preferences. These actions undermine the principle of federalism that lies at the heart of our republican system of governance. He has, moreover, pursued in a highly selective manner matters where the DOJ might have cause to act, a pattern indicative of political bias. For example, Garland has sued red states over redistricting yet left alone blue states to gerrymander. Eschewing strict adherence to evidence-based pursuit of justice for crimes falling beyond state jurisdiction, Garland’s pursuit of criminal prosecutions is typically framed in such a way as to capture mass media attention. He uses his position as propagandist for the administrative state and the Democratic Party.

Garland has employed federal investigatory powers in a coercive manner even when cases haven’t reached the courtroom. For those that have reached the courtroom, Garland’s actions have been disproportionate. Taking up the second first, his pursuit of January 6 protestors has been relentless even though only a handful of protestors were involved in violent confrontation with police officers. The vast majority of those present in and around the Capitol at best committed misdemeanors (trespassing and obstruction of official proceedings, for the most part, the latter elevated to felony obstruction), yet hundreds were kept in pretrial detention for months and some for years. When tried, prosecutors recommended prison terms of excessive length. Nearly 1300 individuals have been arrested and charged so, most of them convicted, and nearly 500 thrown into prison. 

The DOJ’s creation of a task force used to intimidate parents challenging school boards over masks and vaccine mandates, school closures, the distribution of pornographic materials, the employment of SEL, as well as gender and race indoctrination in public schools is an example of his abuse of federal power. Garland claims those persons were targeted for violent action or making threats of violence. But most incidents involved neither violence nor threats of violence. When hauled before Congress to explain this, Garland perjured himself over the memo in question and misled Congress about why he wasn’t dismantling the task force. Even senior FBI veterans sounded the alarm over Garland’s misuse of anti-terrorism tools to intimidate concerned parents. Undeterred, Garland enlarged the program to include the intimidation of citizens with FBI’s “knock and talk” tactics.

Garland has issued policy directives that circumvent congressional legislation, positioning the Justice Department not just as an enforcer but a determiner of law. Indeed, Garland’s selective application of federal statutes is notorious. No charges were brought against individuals protesting and threatening violence against individuals outside a Supreme Court justice’s home, which is against federal law, yet Garland pursued charges again Mark Houck, a Pennsylvania anti-abortion demonstrator who peacefully protested outside an abortion clinic. Thankfully, Houck was acquitted, but he and his family had to suffer the terrifying experience of a federal SWAT raid on his house. Douglass Mackey was not so lucky. The DOJ went after Douglass Mackey for satirical voting ads on Twitter and secured a prison sentence.

In the raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Logo to retrieve documents implicating the Obama Administration in an unlawful counterintelligence operation (Crossfire Hurricane) against Hillary Clinton’s political opponent, Donald Trump, Garland allowed the leak of classified information by the DOJ (remember that Edward Bernays-style frameup?) classified information manipulated by FBI agents. This is why the documents trial has been indefinitely suspended. In the resurrected zombie case in Manhattan, Garland deployed a top prosecutor in his Washington officer, Matthew Colangelo, to handle the case because Alvin Bragg wasn’t up to prosecuting a case for which there is no underlying felony. The DOJ is playing a central role in the lawfare campaign being waged against the front runner for the President of the United States. 

Having a man like this on the Supreme Court knowing that he might have an opportunity to rule on matters of the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments, etc., was so terrifying of a prospect that the Republican Party took the extraordinary step of not even allowing his nomination to proceed to a congressional vote. Thank God. Imagine had Garland not been stopped and Clinton had won the 2016 election. Given their illiberal governing philosophy, with two of three more Supreme Court justices, these authoritarians would have control over the court for a generation—a truly terrifying possibility. We dodged a huge bullet in 2016 with the election of Trump. After the 2020 steal, it only made sense that Garland would be the Attorney General of the United States. You can add to his unprincipled and authoritarian character a desire to hit back at the party that kept him off the Supreme Court.

My response is based on numerous sources. Most helpful were articles and op-eds published in the National Review over the last couple of years.

Did you miss it? Or did you see the coverage that put the “newsworthy” exchanges in the wrong order? The House Oversight Committee Congress (as did House Judiciary) found US Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for withholding an audio recording bearing on the question of whether Joe Biden is fit to be president and therefore should be criminally prosecuted for stealing top secret documents when he was vice-president or whether, on the other hand, he is unfit to be president and therefore incompetent to stand trial for his actions which put the nation’s security at risk. The Biden regime exerted executive privilege at the last minute because the audio of him disclosing to a ghostwriter state secrets he illegally obtained while vice-president has him on the horns of a dilemma.

We all know about the corrupt and compromised man in the White House. Today, I want to sort out for you the chaos occurring during debate and deliberation that overshadowed the vote itself. Like ozone in the atmosphere, you could feel the storm coming. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R)) was sensing that Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D) and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) were seething. One giveaway was Crockett’s response to Greene query to the committee whether any Democrat present had employed the services of party operative Loren Merchan, the daughter of Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing the zombie case against Trump in Manhattan.

Greene’s query, while rhetorical, was not unsolicited. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) wanted to ensure that members of his party were not taking any actions on the Oversight Committee in order to solicit campaign contributions. This was in response to the usual clown show by Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D), who insulted the chair, Kentucky Rep. James Comer (R) without objection. Greene wanted to make it transparent that at least once member of the party on the committee, New York Rep. Daniel Goldman (D), had in fact retained the services of the judge’s daughter. Greene also knew Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez are easily triggered and, when drawn into a cat fight, resort to embarrassing themselves by trash talking. Both Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez are well spoken, but when triggered channel (or revert to) the argot of the street. So Greene tested her hypothesis by casually commenting on Crockett’s false eyelashes.

Greene (recognized by the chair for five minutes): “I’d like to know if any of the Democrats on this committee are employing Judge Merchan’s daughter.”

Crockett: “Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland.”

Raskin: “Is she a porn star?”

Greene: “Oh, Goldman that’s right.”

Crockett: “Do you know what you are here for?”

Greene: “I don’t think you know what you’re here for. I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

Crockett: “Ain’t nuthin—”

And the cat fight was on. Hypothesis confirmed. After Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch (D) called into question Comer’s ethics. Ocasio-Cortez made a point of order to take down Greene’s words. “That is absolutely unacceptable! How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person.”

Greene: “Aww, are your feelings hurt?”

Ocasio-Cortez: “Oh girl, baby girl—”

Green: “Oh really?

Ocasio-Cortez: “Don’t even play.”

Greene: “Baby girl? I don’t think so.”

The motion to strike Greene’s words was seconded, and Greene sat triumphally while the parliamentarians got busy trying to sort it all out. Ocasio-Cortez persisted in waxing indignant, continually repeating “Not today,” while rapping her fingernails on her desk (the woke progressive version of Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe on the table). At one point, Ocasio-Cortez said to those seated around her, “She’s not used to people talking back to her. She don’t want to say sorry to nobody for nothing. She’s going to learn.” When the committee reconvened, Greene agreed to strike her words. This wasn’t enough for Ocasio-Cortez, who demanded an apology, as well. Greene refused to apologize and then challenged Ocasio-Cortez to a debate.

Greene: “Why don’t you debate me.”

Ocasio-Cortez: “I think it’s pretty self-evident.”

Greene: “Yeah, you don’t have enough intelligence.”

More chaos ensued, with Democrats moving to strike those words, too. Channeling her inner Frank Zappa, Greene responded sardonically, “Oh, they cannot take the words.”

What followed was a discussion of parliamentary rules about ad hominem attacks and a demand by Raskin to repeat Greene’s words that she agreed to strike. Raskin attempted to repeat the words himself, something about Crockett taking off her fake eyelashes, to which Comer looked at him and said, “Really? I mean….” (Translation: You have got to be kidding me. That’s what triggered all this?”) Comer then asked the clerk to report the words. They suspended while the clerk reviewed the audio to determine the words. During the pause, Greene quipped, “Release the audio.” (There was also a call to have the media leave the well of the chamber until somebody pointed out that nobody called for the removal of the Netflix crew who accompanied Hunter Biden during his brief appearance in that chamber.

Eventually Comer got around to ruling that, while indecorous, the words did not rise to the level of ad hominem. Comer asked everybody to agree to treat each other with comity, including in his list Moskowitz (he had not forgotten Moskowitz’s snide remark). Raskin appealed the ruling. There was a motion by Republicans to table the appeal. The appeal was tabled. Comer recognized Greene to speak (you will recall that it had been her turn to speak since the beginning of the chaos).

At that point, rather than moving on, Crocket raised a point of order with a sideways insult aimed at Greene. “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

“A what now?” Comer replied. “I have no idea what you just said.”

Amid the crosstalk and calls for Crockett to calm down, Crockett could be heard to say, “’Cause this is what y’all do. Don’t tell me to calm down ’cause y’all talk noise and then you can’t take it. If I come and talk shit about her, y’all gonna have a problem.”

Ocasio-Cortez made a second motion to take down Greene’s words about Ocasio-Cortez’s intelligence and after debate over the rules and a brief recess, the committee finally got back to business and Rep. Green was allowed to complete her opening statement. Her speech was important. She condemned the lawfare against Trump and his associates and called on the committee to find Garland in contempt. But perhaps more important than her speech was her successful goading of the opposition into exposing its performative attempt at political discourse.

Big corporate power and progressives in government legalized private-sector unions, incorporated them (corporatism), and then crushed them with out-sourcing, off-shoring, and mass immigration. They did this while pressing a cosmopolitan worldview onto the proletariat, smearing cultural and national integrity as backwards and bigoted. Unions shifted to cover the public-sector bureaucrats, the very corporate functionaries pushing multiculturalism and transnationalism, adapting its organization to become the mouthpiece for the credential professional-managerial class. We now live in an administrative state living administered lives with unionized bureaucrats administering them.

These are the same big corporations—enabled by the same administrative state, with its regulatory apparatus and technocratic corp—that pump forever chemicals into the earth and atmosphere and mine the human population for forever patients. This is the same ruling elite who push climate apocalypticism and use mass hysteria to rationalize globalization and restrictions on efficient food and energy production. It’s the same ruling elite that demand we agree to overthrowing the most basic truths of the world, such as the gender binary and its immutability.

The Democratic Party is the party of the elite. See what you see. Academic institutions, the culture industry, the mainstream media—these unelected de facto governing bodies push the party line. They are in cahoots, and folks on that side should admit it and lean into their post-truth world. But the folx deny it, and even more than this, tell you that they are the real voice of the common man. They think you’re too dumb to see it for what it is. Maybe some of you have been asleep. I confess, I was drowsy for a spell. But we’re not dumb. And we’re waking up.

Who are the true defenders or free labor and conservationism? I grew up with them. I have come home to them. They’re the rural conservative individualist who uses the earth for survival but does so in a way that preserves the environment he knows he and his wife—and their children and their children—have to conserve to pass down to the next generation of virtuous republican citizens—not an inheritance of grievances, but an inheritance of republic virtue and good stewardship of the earth. They’re the small entrepreneurs who build their business to benefit the members of their community—the organic solidarity of the people, built on the traditional family system, ensuring their loyalty to their customers and employees, thus conserving the social ecology. Today, men and women with this spirit are rising and they’re making the Republican Party their means to return America to its populist roots.

If you ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up, many of the boys will tell you that they want to be police officers and firefighters, sometimes soldiers. Who are these men they want to grow up to be? They are the men who protect the community from danger and help people in need. The corruption of the medical profession aside, helping people is what doctors and nurses do, too, so one finds children wanting to be these things, as well. Yet, by the time they finish their education, the curriculum and pedagogical technique, now fully captured by progressives administrators, staff, and teachers, dispossess many of them of their natural instincts to defend country, protect community, and help the needy—replacing those instincts with a massive state bureaucracy that is not merely remote to their local concerns and needs but antagonistic towards the people and the culture naturally inclined to address those concerns and needs. Progressives seek to dethrone family and community and put big government in their stead. To be sure, policing and the military still find men who lean into their vocation, and there are many men around with broad shoulders who make a path to self-actualization; rural and small town America still exist; but that America is under assault, and the fact pattern attests to it.

Our children are groomed and recruited to be functionaries for the antagonistic force assaulting the republican ideal. Social and emotional learning (SEL) teaches them to focus inward, to dwell on their anxieties, insecurities, and vulnerabilities, while diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) selects the personnel that hones and implements the strategy of cultivating faux esteem and self-loathing. SEL conditions children to think not of how through service to others they may build courage and resiliency, but rather how the world has done them dirty, their ancestors either oppressed or oppressor, manufacturing the trauma of the victim (increasingly a sought status, with people inventing and stepping into novel categories of the oppressed), while at the same time instilling the shame of the oppressor, demoralizing the majority, teaching them to hate the very communities they are naturally inclined to defend and perpetuate—teaching them to hate themselves.

This is what explains the spectacle of campus unrest—and the summer of 2020 and so on. This is the pathological expression of hateful retribution for fictional and impossible harms and deep-seated self loathing learned from socialization in the inverted totalitarian arrangements of managed democracy with an agenda of managed decline. The modern nation-state, and its inherent principles of freedom and reason, are being dismantled by a power elite who seek the establishment of a global neofeudalism rooted in corporate statism where the proletariat of the earth will serve as serfs on high-tech estate. We can see the New Dark Ages approaching. Your comrades are the men and women who are bringing the light.

“Over the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, gun violence, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.” —Jodi Kantor, The New York Times

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. had an upside-down US flag waving over his house following the 2020 election. The flag in this position signals distress. It has been rebranded by The New York Times as a “Stop the Steal” symbol. Alito said that it was his wife, not him, who raised the distress symbol. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in an emailed statement to the NYTimes. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Progressives are countering that even if Alito didn’t raise it, he kept it flying. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia (to get a sense of her politics, here’s Frost’s profile page at the university). This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard,” she said, “which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases.”

So are progressives really saying that Alito—a man sworn to defend the Constitution—should censor his wife’s speech? Are these the same progressives who lost their minds over Harrison Butker’s graduation address at Benedictine, a private catholic college in Atchison, Kansas? This is a serious question: are feminists now good with husbands censoring the speech of their wives? Speaking as a feminist myself, I’m not good with that at all. Mrs. Alito has a right to fly any flag she wishes over her house.

* * *

Speaking of Harrison Butker, the Kansas City Chiefs kicker, I listened to his speech yesterday. I got curious because the speech was being described as demeaning towards women and the LGBTQ+ community and inappropriate for a graduation. Inappropriate at a Catholic university? A petition for Butker’s dismissal from the Chiefs has nearly reached its goal of 150,000 signatures. Here is a video of his speech if you’re interested in listening to it:

After listening to the whole thing, I am at a loss to understand what is so objectionable? I don’t agree with some of his opinions, but none are outrageous. They are consistent with his religious teachings—which he has a right to—and mild compared to the preachments of Islamic clerics. There are things he said that I do agree with. The things he said about the rile of fathers, for example (Kansas City residents should take those sentiments to heart). He impressed me; he is an accomplished public speaker and, what is more, I learned a lot about a worldview that is different from mine, namely the Latin Mass. I appreciate men rising and expressing their opinions in an honest and direct way.

It did not surprise anyone, I think, when the NFL condemned the speech. “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization,” said Senior Vice President Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. (Nice, they assigned their DEI man to articulate the criticism.) “The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.” Why does the NFL articulate positions on such matters? The NFL is an impersonal corporation. Shouldn’t it be an apolitical organization?

However, it did surprise many when Whoopi Goldberg came to his defense. Speaking on her show, The View, she said, “I like when people say what they need to say—he’s at a Catholic College, he’s a staunch Catholic, these are his beliefs, and he’s welcome to them. I don’t have to believe them, right? I don’t have to accept them. The ladies that were sitting in that audience do not have to accept them.” (Apparently the ladies in the audience liked them just fine, if the enthusiastic applause throughout the speech was any indication.) “I have the right to say what I say, he has the right to say what he says.” Goldberg continued. “When you say to somebody, ‘I don’t like what you said and I’m going to get your job taken away because you disagree with me,’ for me, that is an issue.” Of course, she had to twist the thing into a rant about how Trump is all about taking away the rights of everybody and we don’t want to be that way. Of course we don’t. Neither does Trump.

She ran into another issue when she compared the situation to Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49er who sat during the national anthem to protest what he described as oppression against black people. Goldberg said “The same way we want respect when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee, we want to give respect to people whose ideas are different from ours.” Kaepernick was on the job when he did this. Butker was giving a speech at a private university. While I think free speech rights should be upheld everywhere, the current interpretation of the First Amendment permits private corporations to censor speech and discipline those who speech the corporation finds objectionable. But that’s beside the point, some will argue. Kaepernick was let go not because of his protests but because he was no longer a competitive player in the NFL.

“Dr. Charnock had only one observation to make on Mr. Harris’s paper. The latter made a distinction between plants and the genus homo, that in the former both sexes are sometimes found in the same plant. Now, it had never been proved that the human spermatozoon was any gender, and the gender of the ovum depended upon the time fecundation; i. e., upon chance. Dr. Charnock spoke on the authority of Pouchet, Hofaeker, Lucas, Huber, and others.” —J. McGrigor Allan, “On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London (1869)

In an essay I published earlier this week (Gender and the English Language), I documented the use of the word “gender” to denote reproductive anatomy in the natural science literature over the course of several centuries. As the reader can see in the above quote, anthropologists used “gender” in the same way. Indeed, in the passage, the subject is reproductive anatomy. The same is true for sociology. The concept of “gender role” appears later on, but as a concept it was available long before its appearance; the concept of the “sex role” appears in the anthropological and sociological literature well before John Money’s alleged coining of the term “gender role.” Since I have established that gender and sex are synonyms, either construction is appropriate for denoting the societal roles organized around gender and the expectations and values that attach to those roles.

By way of example, in a 1942 issue of the American Sociological Review, “The Adjustment of the Individual to his Age and Sex Roles,” Leonard Correll, Jr. writes, “By way of further clarification it is necessary to call attention to the distinction between the use of the term role to refer to a modal system of responses which constitutes the culturally expected behavior and the particular system of responses with which a specific individual operates. Thus, when we speak of the individual’s ability to perform in his sex role, we refer to the relation which his behavior, in situations in which sex classification is relevant, bears to some modal pattern expected in a given cultural or subcultural group.” The concept of role is as basic to sociology as the concept of status.

The sociologist most famously associated with the concept of “sex roles” is Talcott Parsons. In his work, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, Parsons discussed the division of labor based on gender within the family and society. Parsons introduces his concept of “sex roles” in his book The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937. Parsons argued that in traditional societies, there is a clear division of labor between men (instrumental roles) and women (expressive roles), and this division is functional to the stability of the family and the reproduction of society as a whole. His ideas were highly influential in shaping discussions around gender roles and social expectations.

The historical materialists understood this long before Parsons. Friedrich Engels, building on Lewis Henry Morgan’s work in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877), as well as his collaboration with Karl Marx, argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), that in primitive societies, there existed a form of social organization he and Marx called “primitive communism,” what today’s anthropologists call “hunter-gatherer,” characterized by communal ownership of property, egalitarian social relations, and a natural gendered division of labor. Engels theorizes the transition from primitive communism to class-based societies, particularly focusing on the emergence of private property and the patriarchal family structure.

Engels posits that, in early human history, societies were organized around maternal kinship and inheritance, with descent traced through the mother’s line (matrilineage). He argues that the development of agriculture led to the accumulation of surplus resources and the rise of private property, which, in turn, gave rise to class divisions and the oppression of one group by another. With the development of private property, men sought to ensure the paternity of their offspring to pass down property and thus instituted patriarchal family structures. This shift, according to Engels, involved the overthrow or subjugation of matriarchal systems by patriarchal ones, leading to the rise of male dominance in family and societal affairs. Thus we see the existence of gender roles in primitive societies and the transformation of those roles over time. Gender is not a social construct but an objective matter of natural history around which humans have always organized social roles.

Engels writes in the preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.”

He continues: “The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.”

The Internet will tell you that Money introduced the term in 1955 as if the history of the concept begins there. In reality, Money, a psychiatrist by training, lifted the concept from anthropology and sociology, substituted for “sex” the synonym “gender,” and passed himself off as the originator of an insight that already basic to social science. Another trick played is the reification of Robert Stoller’s invention of “gender identity,” which the psychiatrist used to denote an individual’s internal and individual experience of gender. In Stoller’s formulation, “gender identity” is a subjective thing to the person who “experiences” it—a sense of being a man, a woman, both, neither, or anywhere along the spectrum said to comprise gender (in fact, gender is binary and you can be neither both nor neither)—that others are told they must treat as if it is real. That’s a trick in itself; however, between 1968 and today, the words “role” and “identity” were dropped, and the word “gender” elevated to a socially constructed and subjective category of being.

Knowing these linguistic tricks allows the rational among us to expose the agenda at work here. There is nothing complex about any of this; it only requires we use the English language accurately and precisely. When somebody tells you that sex refers to reproductive anatomy and gender refers to cultural values and societal norms, they are simply saying that there are social roles associated with gender. It has always been true that gender in our species, and in many others species, as well, has been socially organized. Another way of saying this is that there is sex (reproductive anatomy) and sex roles (the cultural values and societal norms). It is important in conversation that you make that clear for everyone participating. Don’t accept the propaganda purpose of these terms; instead, insist on the important of using scientific terms to convey reality not ideology.

As for the identity piece of this, it is enough to observe that the gender of the organism, whether it is female or male, is the identity of the organism. Identity is the fact of being who or what a person or thing is—not who or what a person says he is. In the preface to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx writes, “Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” I use this quote to emphasize the importance of grounding knowledge in scientific materialism and realism. We don’t judge an individual by what he thinks about himself because what he thinks of himself may be the product of delusion or indoctrination. We judge the individual on the basis of what he is—that is, his identity—in the same way we judge historical epochs in terms of themselves, not by the distorted ways in which those epochs are represented by ideology (religion, etc.).

If an individual genuinely believes that his gender is what it isn’t, then he is either delusional or indoctrinated (he is possessed of an illusion, as Sigmund Freud put it). Those who affirm his subjectivity are either themselves delusional or indoctrinated, or they are exploiting the man. If he is mentally ill, which is possible, then the treatment for his delusion is to be found in psychotherapy. But this is not the approach of gender affirming care. Delusional individuals or those possessed of an illusion are referred to the gender clinic. Without mystifying gender, feminism sought to escape the constraints of the social roles and stereotypes that attach to gender in a given cultural space and historical period. By untethering gender from gender role, trans activists and the medical industry mystify gender to suppose individuals can escape the constraints of biology, which in turn justifies the use of chemicals and surgeries to produce simulated gender identities—and compel others to act in bad faith by affirming the validity of all this.

The constructs “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria” play vital roles in this, as well. With gender identity, shorthanded to simply “gender,” the mystification is totalized; gender is now not a cultural or social thing, i.e., an observable thing conceptualized by social science rooted in natural science, but an essential thing without any empirical indicators—that is, something like a soul or thetan. Gender dysphoria, which indicates a psychiatric disorder where a man or a woman is confused about his or her identity, again, a thing that is objectively determinable, is then reduced to the distress felt by a person when their subjective experience is at odds with reality, albeit the same thing but with different treatment options, options that generates large and sustainable profits for corporate firms and their stockholders.

In my blog on gender and the English language, I cited an article by David Haig who reviewed more than thirty million academic articles from the years 1945-2001 to determine the occurrences of the words “sex” and “gender.” Haig found that, at the beginning of the period, the usages of the word “sex” were more frequent than usages of the word “gender,” but flipped with the emergence of feminism. This shift is reflected in my discipline of sociology, which is to say that the sociology of today is quite different fro the sociology of yesteryear.

Testifying to the sorry state of contemporary sociology is this op-ed by Finn Mackay in a January 2024 issue of The Guardian. Mackay is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England in Bristol. “Gender ideology is real,” she writes, “but it wasn’t invented by trans men or trans women, and it doesn’t just apply to trans or transgender people. The real gender ideology is the binary sex and gender system that requires all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual; and which attaches harsh penalties to those who deviate from this script. Almost all of us will have been socialised on to pink or blue paths from birth, if not by our immediate family, then by the books, TV, toys, clothes and adverts that surrounded us in wider society. This socially prescribed gender informs our gender identity.”

“Trans people didn’t create ‘gender ideology’,” she writes, “and should not be blamed for somehow making gender visible. Rather than pathologising a stigmatised minority, we need to focus instead on the gendered majority. Gender criticism should start at home.” 

Make it make sense, the reader may be asking at this point. I can do that. Gender ideology does not rest on the fact of the gender binary; quite the contrary. What is strictly true is not ideological (although ideology may conceal or obscure truths nonetheless embedded in it). The gender system, by which Mackay means gender roles, at least not in enlightened Western society, carries no harsh penalties for deviation from stereotypes associated with those roles. For the most part and without consequence, girls and women wear pants and eschew makeup, and many of them cut short their hair. It is not true that almost all of us were put on paths of blue and pink (ironically the colors that comprise the trans flag). Boys have appetites for things that trans ideologues identify as blue (an arbitrary designation) because it is the nature of boys to have such appetites. The gender role is rooted in gender, which is the result of natural history. Whatever the concrete expressions of masculinity over space and time, and whatever the variable frequency of masculine and feminine traits in the overlaying distributions of the gender binary, boys and girls today are more like the boys and girls that came before them than they are different, and this will be true in the future presuming that the project to confuse children about gender fails in its totalitarian desire.

As we see, she doesn’t quite pull it off, but Mackay is performing the postmodernist trick of treating the eternal one of many possible narratives, this one prevailing because of the power arrayed against the trans identifying individual. The natural is recast as a form of social oppression, liberation from which requires consciousness raising that comes about by turning schools into indoctrination centers where children are gaslighted over gender and their gender-detection modules disrupted. Mackay writes that “in its guidance, the Department for Education states that gender identity is a contested belief, and that many people don’t consider themselves to have one at all. They define gender identity as a person’s sense of their own gender, which may or may not be linked to their biological sex. In the document’s explanation of pupils’ ‘social transition,’ this is described as using different names, pronouns, clothing or facilities from those provided for their biological sex.” This is indeed the queer project formula.

However, Mackay sabotages her own magic trick by finding in this “the bizarre claim that things like this have a biological sex in the first place. How can names, the fabric of clothes, or the porcelain of toilets possibly have a biological sex?” By her own lights, she regards these matters as gender not sex. Much of the essay is disjointed in this way. However, this immediately follows: “The fact is that all children should be ‘gender questioning’ and this is the natural state of children—it is something to be encouraged. If only adults could unlearn the lessons of gender ourselves, rather than subjecting our children to it.” Here is the agenda. This is grooming.

For Mackay, the queer project is not just another narrative, but the true view of the world, a world in which gender is learned along blue and pink paths constructed by the gender tyrants. It is not queer theory that’s ideological. The ideology is found in the practice of gender roles. The natural state of children, she supposes, is to question their gender. In this view, conservative ideas of gender roles suppress the natural proclivities of children. But for gender role socialization, children could have no predictable response that would align with gender as it is now constructed by the patriarchal heteronormative, cisgendered oppressors. This is John Money’s argument. The boy Money used to prove his case committed suicide. He is not the only won in the meantime. (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy.)

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In looking up a fact about Money, I ran across a story concerning Janet Frame, an author who attended some of Money’s classes at the University of Otago. Money was, like a lot of psychopaths, a charming man, and Frame found herself drawn to him and was eager to please him. In October 1945, following an essay in which Frame mentioned her thoughts of suicide, Money persuaded her to admit herself to the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Public Hospital, where she was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. She spend eight years in psychiatric institutions, undergoing electroshock and insulin shock therapy. She narrowly escaped a lobotomy. See An Angel at My Table. The man was a monster.