“Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” —Václav Havel
Hat tip to Wesley Yang @wesyang on X (formerly Twitter) for alerting me to this June 2018 Goggle business entry: “Adding ‘LGBTQ-friendly’ and ‘Transgender Safe Space’ attributes on Google My Business.” The entry gives a business owner a way to add woke slogans to his web site, actions that will ingratiate him not only to the woke subaltern, whose narcissism feeds on the obsequiousness of others, but to his superiors, the men who control the fate of his business and career. Before getting to the businessman’s superiors, let’s pay attention for a moment to the express intent of attaching to one’s business woke slogans and symbols.
“There’s little that compares to the feeling of walking into a place and being immediately comfortable—your shoulders loosen, your breathing slows, you physically relax, knowing you can be yourself. Finding those spaces has often been hard for the LGBTQ+ community. We want to help celebrate those spaces of belonging and make them easier to find,” the Google entry instructs its users. “One way to do this is with small businesses, which are an important part of any community. Business owners can mark their businesses as ‘LGBTQ-friendly’ and as a ‘Transgender Safe Space’ on their Google listing to let customers know they’re always welcome. These attributes appear on a business’ Google listing on Maps and Search.” The entry neatly appeals to the popularity of making this move into woke sloganeering: “Your business can join the more than 190,000 businesses globally that have already enabled the ‘LGBTQ-friendly’ and ‘Transgender Safe Space’ attribute.” (It is certainly many tens if not hundreds of thousands more since then.)
Why has everything gone woke these days? ESG scores.
Here is BlackRock CEO Larry Fink along with the CEO of AmEx explaining his desire to “force behaviors” (2017): pic.twitter.com/wCoeoJBD8x
I shared the tweet above in mu June 2023 essay The Politics and Purpose of Affirming the Person. The Chair of Asset Management and CEO of the transnational investment management and financial services firm BlackRock, Inc., Larry Fink, brags about establishing and his campaign to legitimize in the corporate world Chinese Community Party style social credit systems that compel corporations to conform to political-ideological agendas. BlackRock can do this because the firm manages eight trillion dollars in assets. In the clip, Fink touts the firm’s project to force behavioral change through financial reward and punishment.
The Corporate Equality Index, popularly known as the CEI-score, published by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world, drives business to BlackRock which then concentrates wealth and power under its transnational governance structure. The CEI isn’t the only social media score used. The principle of ESG, or environmental and social governance, is another benchmarking construct used by BlackRock and other firms. These powerful firms demand from corporations who seek investment funds that they conform to the terms of these social credit systems they control and delegate.
The Human Rights Campaign is one of the organizations socializing the idea that business owners should be compelled to act in bad faith by punishing them for, among other things, failing to affirm the chosen gender identities of other persons. We see other projects in, for example, Black Lives Matter. “But it is not your responsibility to affirm anybody’s subjective identity,” I assert in The Politics and Purpose of Affirming the Person. If you are obligated to affirm the myth of systemic racism, then you know you do not live in a free society. “Rules that tell you must affirm or validate the subjective projections of others—that is, rules that punish you for refusing to participate in affirming the desires and delusions or others—are inherently tyrannical.”
In his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, essayist, dissident, and statesman who played a pivotal role in the peaceful transition of Czechoslovakia from totalitarianism to democracy (such as it is), provides the template for understanding the postmodern character of oppressive power, a manifestation of power that operates by giving those under its thumb a way to adapt to tyranny while maintaining their dignity. Havel regards the need for dignity as an innate trait of human being. This trait is leveraged in compelling individuals to impose upon themselves and others the structure of power by supplying them with For the purpose of adding LGBTQ-friendly slogans and symbols to one’s business is not to make people feel welcome, but to signal one’s obedience to the power structure.
In this entry, save for a short concluding paragraphs, I share passages from Havel’s essay without further commentary. These passages are easily translatable to our current circumstances. If you remain unsure about why these passages apply to your situation living in the West, read more Freedom and Reason.
Václav Havel (1936–2011)
“A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’ This specter has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.
…
“The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
“I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society,’ as they say.
“Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: ‘I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.’ This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
“Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,’ he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, ‘What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?’ Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.
“Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.
“The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization the society under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised. In other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating to the world and of self justification which ideology involves. But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from outside, and the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse. It acts as a kind of bridge between the regime and the people, across which the regime approaches the people and the people approach the regime. This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.
…
“Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.
“The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
…
“We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer’s slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says. Even so, this real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty (and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.
“If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and the individual as an individual, then the moment he steps on to this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual as a component of the system. That is, if ideology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution of power by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the moment that excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becoming an active component of that power. It begins to function as the principal instrument of ritual communication within the system of power.
“The whole power structure (and we have already discussed its physical articulation) could not exist at all if there were not a certain metaphysical order binding all its components together, interconnecting them and subordinating them to a uniform method of accountability, supplying the combined operation of all these components with rules of the game, that is, with certain regulations, limitations, and legalities. This metaphysical order is fundamental to, and standard throughout, the entire power structure; it integrates its communication system and makes possible the internal exchange and transfer of information and instructions. It is rather like a collection of traffic signals and directional signs, giving the process shape and structure. This metaphysical order guarantees the inner coherence of the totalitarian power structure. It is the glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrument of its discipline. Without this glue the structure as a totalitarian structure would vanish; it would disintegrate into individual atoms chaotically colliding with one another in their unregulated particular interests and inclinations. The entire pyramid of totalitarian power, deprived of the element that binds it together, would collapse in upon itself, as it were, in a kind of material implosion.
“As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether. Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.
…
“The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.
“Living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility. In other words, it is clearly a moral act, not only because one must pay so dearly for it, but principally because it is not self-serving: the risk may bring rewards in the form of a general amelioration in the situation, or it may not. In this regard…, it is an all-or-nothing gamble, and it is difficult to imagine a reasonable person embarking on such a course merely because he reckons that sacrifice today will bring rewards tomorrow, be it only in the form of general gratitude.”
…
When a state has as much power and control over a population as the corporate state currently possesses, nothing happens by accident. The application of power may feel arbitrary, the actions of leaders capricious, but the phenomena of experience are not accidental. Your task as a person who wishes to be free is to acquire a theory that will explain the structure and process of power as clearly and thoroughly as possible and wield it to show others power’s purpose. If freedom is not what you wish, then you’re part of the structure and process of power, however incidental to it. A person who does not desire freedom terminally is either a tyrant or a useless person, that is an idiot. The latter is of course not useless to the tyrant; the tyrant depends on the idiot. The idiot is useless to those whose struggle is against tyranny.
Just in case folks were thinking this teacher’s dismissal was unwarranted, Katie Rinderle, formerly an employee of Cobb County School Board in suburban Atlanta, released a statement through the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the disreputable organization that helped represent her, confirming the absolute necessity of jettisoning her from the classroom—and hopefully this occupation. (For more on the SPLC’s efforts to defend indoctrination in public schools, see my recent essay Southern Poverty Law Center Defames Parents Invested in Safeguarding Children.)
Cobb teacher Katie Rinderle, right, embraces a recent Harrison High School graduate, after a Cobb County school board meeting Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023 in Marietta, Georgia. The school board voted to fire Rinderle, who read a book about gender identity to fifth grade students.
“The district is sending a harmful message that not all students are worthy of affirmation in being their unapologetic and authentic selves,” Rinderle said in the statement. “This decision, based on intentionally vague policies, will result in more teachers self-censoring in fear of not knowing where the invisible line will be drawn.”
In March, Rinderle had read to the children of Due West Elementary School the picture book My Shadow Is Purple by Scott Stuart. The color purple is achieved by mixing blue and pink, colors representing the gender binary that gender ideology, rooted in postmodernist nonsense, denies. Stuart fallaciously claims that a person can be both or neither. Here’s the link to My Shadow Is Purple on Google books. Note the gender stereotypes. Gender ideology depends fundamentally on stereotypes. (See Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy.)
The opening pages to Scott Stuart’s My Shadow Is Purple
Parents rightly complained. The board’s Republican faction of four members cast their votes in favor of terminating Rinderle. On the opposing side, three Democrats voted against her dismissal following an unsuccessful attempt to postpone the voting process. A panel of retired teachers had recommended against dismissal (no surprise there). Superintendent Chris Ragsdale had recommended termination.
“It’s impossible for a teacher to know what’s in the minds of parents when she starts her lesson,” her lawyer Craig Goodmark said. “For parents to be able, with a political agenda, to come in from outside the classroom and have a teacher fired is completely unfair. It’s not right. It’s terrible for Georgia’s education system.”
There is no invisible line. Rinderle, who must understand how impressionable children are (indeed, those who brainwash children depend on it), and furthermore must have understood what the point of Stuart’s book (or otherwise prove herself too stupid to be a teacher in the first place) sought to indoctrinate her students—other people’s children—in the perverse notion of gender fluidity. Goodmark raises the specter of an outside political agenda. He means the agenda of parents safeguarding their children from sexualization. Is that political? But Rinderle is self-evidently pushing an outside political agenda, namely that of gender ideology. (Linguistic Programming: A Tool of Tyrants.)
Why is the notion of gender fluidity perverse? Gender is a fact of natural history. One is either male or female. One cannot be both or neither. This is nothing more false than this claim. For many people, their god made children either a boy or a girl ( Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms). In the view of science, the gender binary is the result of mammalian evolution. The gender cult stands in opposition to both systems—as well as and for this reason to the interests of children. If a child feels he is moving between genders he may be on the path to being a gay man. Or perhaps he will be bisexual. Maybe he will be an effeminate heterosexual. To confuse the child by substituting the fallacious construct of gender identity for his expression of sexuality, or for the non-problem of gender nonconformity, is a violation of the boy’s human rights (see Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module; Denying Reality: The Tyranny of Gender-Inclusive Language; Why I am Not “Cisgendered”). It is not the job of the teacher to shape the sexuality of children.
“The district is pleased that this difficult issue has concluded; we are very serious about keeping our classrooms focused on teaching, learning, and opportunities for success for students. The board’s decision is reflective of that mission,” the Cobb County district said in a press release. That’s the job of a teacher in a public school: teaching, learning, and student success. In a free society, public education is not a system of reeducation camps. Rinderle believes it is. She acted intentionally to expose her students to a crackpot premise for the purpose of confusing them. She said it herself: she wants to teach “affirmation” in “authentic selves.”
To be sure, the notions of gender fluid and nonbinary identity are inauthentic for the reasons explained above. But it’s not the job of teachers to “affirm” children’s “authentic selves” any more than it’s the job of teachers to audit children help them find the thetan inside their bodies or to preach to them about Jesus to save their souls from eternal damnation (see Dianetics in Our Schools). Rinderle works from a crackpot ideology that has damaged the lives of countless young people, confusing them about nature, turning them against their parents, putting them on a path of hormone treatments and surgery, a vast and explicit scheme, pushed by the government, to transform them into permanent clients of the medical-industrial complex. (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds; Feeding the Medical-Industrial Complex.)
Teachers like Katie Rinderle are functionaries of an ideological project that not only delivers primary commodities to the contemporary equivalent of Nazi doctors (I’ve been calling for a Nuremberg 2.0), but is designed to disrupt the normal understanding of children as a step in undermining western civilization, which progressives believe is illegitimate (cisnormative, heteronormative, white supremacies, etc.), to allow backwards ideologies—Islam and a myriad of lesser indigenous belief systems, as well as fallacious notions of implicit race bias and systemic racism—to overwhelm rational systems of thought necessary for human rights and individual liberty. This is a political project as much as it is a profit opportunity. And for that reason, Rinderle lost her job. She was the one with the political agenda. Good riddance.
Want to know why they’re trying to discredit Robert F. Kennedy, Jr? Watch his interview with Tucker Carlson and you will understand. Kennedy’s analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war is spot on (see History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War; The US is Not Provoking Russia—And Other Tall Tales). When he gets to the PATRIOT Act, Anthony Fauci, and bioweapons your head will blow up. The Power Elite don’t want you to know about all this. I talk about all this on Freedom and Reason. I even drew the attention of the Bush Administration with my chapter War Hawks and the Ugly American in the book Devastating Society: The Neo-Conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice (you can read a version of the essay here for free). A few others have talked about these things, as well. But RFK, Jr. gets the People to listen to him. So it matters a lot that the corporate state discredit him.
All the things RFK, Jr. tells Carlson in this interview will be known to many people as conspiracy theories. That’s either because they really do believe they’re conspiracies or they want you to believe they’re conspiracies, as if there no such things—except the Trump-led conspiracy to steal the 2020 election and Trump-Russia collusion and so on. But everything RFK, Jr. says is true. And when you stop and reflect on those things, it should trouble you to consider that you live in a country that’s run by a Deep State.
Yes, a Deep State. It exists. And for a lot of people the truth of the Deep State is so distressing they prefer to believe the things that could make them realize how manipulated and powerlessness they truly are are really wild conspiracy theories no rational person could believe. I know, one does get this helpless feeling when you realize the corporate state, which includes the mass media, the entire apparatus of power, is lying to you. But the way to deal with feelings of helplessness is to work through it, not convince yourself that the truth of reality is a lie, not to live in denial.
What are the chances that Russia comes up?
Hillary has been behind almost every false conspiracy theory of the last 25 years: Iraq/WMD; Iraq/Al-Qaeda alliance; Trump/Russia "collusion": Putin controlling the US through blackmail; Hunter laptop as "Russian disinformation," etc. https://t.co/MoPgAmccpF
Greenwald usefully differentiates between false conspiracy theory and conspiracy theory—because there are conspiracies. This is a distinction you will do well to remember and use yourself when thinking about the world. You have to do the work to know the difference between false and true conspiracy theories, of course. This is the purpose of Freedom and Reason, to provide nomenclature and analytical frameworks to make a path through late capitalism, as the tagline says.
Some of you probably already know this, and RFK, Jr. references this fact in his interview with Carlson, but the term “conspiracy theory” was socialized after the JFK assassination to pre-bunk claims that ran contrary to the official narrative of the lone gunman theory (the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald), a narrative developed by the Warren Commission, which was a cover-up of the CIA’s role in the assassination of the President, the commission actually run by recently deposed and inaugural CIA Director Allen Dulles. Kennedy had dismissed Dulles and was planning to reorganize the agency. With the publication of the Warren Commission report, the CIA sent out over the wire to the hundreds of senior editors and editors the agency controlled through its program to command the media, tagged Operation Mockingbird, instructions to label as conspiracy theory any questioning of the official narrative.
AI generated image
That’s right, the Deep State, which includes the Plans Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, renamed the National Clandestine Service (NCS) by George W. Bush, establishing the CIA as the hub of all human intelligence operations, including the Special Activities Division (SAD), runs a substantial portion of the mass media and uses its control of the communications apparatus to spread disinformation in order to manipulate the American public into supporting the goals of the Power Elite.
Recently, we were offered a window into how this works when Elon Musk took over Twitter, rebranded X (see Twitter Interfered in the 2020 Election). The Twitter Files represent what intelligence agencies call a “limited hangout,” where the public is given a peak into the world of Deep State control over the mass media system, in this case with the focus on the FBI, for the purposes of obscuring the reality that suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn’t exceptional but an ordinary matter (see New York Post Drops a Bombshell on the Biden Campaign). The Power Elite, represented primarily by the Democratic Party, with controlled opposition in tow, i.e., establishment Republicans, don’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe in republican government. They don’t believe in individual liberties and rights.
The ideological-political manifestation of this is progressivism, a fascistic philosophy of technocratic control. The left and the right believe it’s some sort of socialism. It’s not. It’s authoritarian corporatism. It’s the administration not of things but of people.
The corporate media and Power Elite functionaries like Hillary Clinton use the term “conspiracy theory” to delegitimize people like me who tell you the truth about the structure of power and our situation. So do a lot of the people you know—and perhaps you yourself—because they (you) have been conditioned to respond to accounts that go against the official narrative by dismissing the messenger as a conspiracy theorist, a paranoid, a whacko, etc. This testifies to the efficacy of the program of cognitive and emotional manipulation by the Deep State, the fact that so many smart people accuse those who tell the truth of spreading misinformation and disinformation.
We saw this in the COVID-19 pandemic. We obviously had in our midsts a bioweapon that had either been released or escaped from a Chinese lab in November of 2019 that quickly spread around the globe. To be sure, it could be deadly for the very elderly and those with multiple co-morbidities, but it was unremarkable for the vast majority of the population, as it had been engineered from a cold virus (the coronavirus). Nonetheless, governments forced the masses into lockdown, the wearing of masks, mandated vaccines, and lied about therapeutics that could treat the illness. They wildly inflated the the number of those who were killed by the virus. Even The New York Times admitted this past July that nearly a third of US deaths ascribed to COVID-19 were actually caused by something else, citing data from the CDC (and this still downplays the lie). I was reporting the scheme of inflation at least as early as May of 2020 (see More on the Unreasonableness of the COVID-19 hysteria; How Deaths are Classified, Good and Bad Comparisons, and Other COVID-19 Insanity). The same irrational scheme was rolled out throughout the transatlantic community. It was all an exercise in mass control. A big lie to terrify the masses and prepare them for even more a draconian control regimes. The COVID-19 pandemic was proof of concept. (See Biden’s Biofascist Regime; Eugenics 2.0.)
Some of us could see that during the summer of 2020 the government used the COVID-19 pandemic to change election rules, contrary to constitutional norms, and, under cover of chaos run a color revolution based on the lie of systemic racism in criminal justice, disrupt the normal functioning of society, all of which served the function of election rigging (see Color Revolution, Joe from Scranton, and PEDs). Some of us could see how they mopped up in the early morning hours of the day after the election when the scheme didn’t work as well as expected when massive numbers turned out on game day to vote to reelect Donald Trump. Some of us can see that they’re in the final mop-up phase of operation, where they are attempting to throw those who objected to the stolen election, including the former President, in prison.
A testament to the power of conditioning, which has the greatest effects on those who are politically progressive and highly intelligent (something Chomsky is pointed out years ago), my university a couple years ago had a campus theme all about the problem of conspiracy theory. If you look at the content of that theme, it has all the appearance of being organized by an Operation Mockingbird like operation. But it didn’t need to be. It only needed to be organized by those who have been successfully conditioned by Operation Mockingbird and other thought control programs. (See Refining the Art and Science of Propaganda in an Era of Popular Doubt and Questioning; Cognitive Autonomy and Our Freedom from Institutionalized Reflex.)
Safe spaces refer to physical or virtual environments where individuals from marginalized or vulnerable groups may be present and at liberty to express themselves and engage in discussions without fear of judgment or being offended. Of course, individuals should be free to express themselves and engage in discussions. Where the concept of the safe space breaks down is in the expectation that those present should be able to express ideas and opinions without being judged or offended. For one thing, who may be judged or offended in a safe space depends on group membership. A safe space is not a space where participants enjoy equality. For another, what’s wrong with judging or offending others in the first place?
Safe spaces are ostensibly designed to foster open dialogue and a sense of belonging for individuals who are represented as having faced systemic discrimination, oppression, or trauma. When not applied to spaces that exclude members of select racial or ethnic groups, such as when whites are not allowed into a space blacks have secured for members of their own group (affinity groups), safe spaces are said to welcome and support all identities. Such safe spaces may be signaled through stickers, such as the one you see below, diversity posters and flags (Black Lives Matter, Pride), brochures and pamphlets affirming select identities, and so forth. Such spaces, we are told, reflect an effort to create environments where individuals can engage in productive and respectful dialogue, enabling personal growth and education through the free exchange of ideas.
A sticker signaling the presence of a safe space or safe space advocate
The concept of safe spaces emerged within social justice activist circles as a response to the need for inclusive and respectful environments in a world marked by exclusion and systemic oppression. The worldview operating behind the safe space concept presumes an interlocking array of power hierarchies in which those presumed disadvantaged by the oppressive array enjoy an epistemic and moral privilege that allows them to criticize their presumed oppressors while being “safe” from the challenges of those who seek to perpetuate their oppression. (See The False Doctrine of “Weapons of the Weak”; Speech Acts as “Systemically Harmful”: More on the “Weapons of the Weak”.) The ostensive aim of safe spaces, found in various contexts, including educational institutions, online chatrooms, support groups, and workplaces, is to create an atmosphere where people can be their authentic selves, discuss sensitive topics, and learn from one another without the fear of facing prejudice or harm.
So what does it really mean to be “safe” in the context of a safe space? This is where we see the Orwellian character of the woke concept of the safe space (the same with trigger warnings, etc.; see Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words). It doesn’t mean being physical safe, safe from violence, or safe from harassment and intimidation, what is what is normally meant by the term safe: to be protected from or not exposed to danger or risk; a situation where one is unlikely to be harmed or lost. When one asks you if you or some thing is safe, this is what he means. My wife’s care breaks down on the Southside of Chicago. She phones me to let them know her situation. It is probable that I will ask if she is safe or if there is somewhere she can go to be safe. I may ask her to call the police in addition to our insurance company. One should be free from danger, harassment, harm, and intimidation in all the spaces through which he moves, or he should know or at least consider the risks involved in spaces he enters. Sometimes one finds oneself in an unsafe situation. One of the safest places to be in the world is in a room at a corporation or university where opinions are expressed in a free and open manner.
So safety is not what the social justice activists have in mind. What they have in mind is censorship and thought control. The social justice activist or the administrator is talking about spaces where members of certain groups don’t have hear opinions they don’t like or sentiments that hurt their feelings. These individuals and their handlers are concerned not for their physical safety but for the integrity of their subjectivity of self-perceived victimhood, a state of mind they very much desire, since it privileges them in a myriad of ways, such as not hearing disagreeable opinions—which makes them ever more dependent on their handlers, those who actually benefit from the structure of diversity, inclusivity, and equity programming.
If you are white, then you know that you’re continually subject to anti-white prejudice that blames you for things you could not possibly have done or would never do—and you make the room unsafe when you resist accepting blame. You are a carrier of implicit race bias, a colonizer, a segregationist, a slave master, the reason BIPOC have it so bad. You are the living personification of systemic racism. It is inherent in you by virtue of your identity. You make the room unsafe when you correct a falsehood, for example exploding the myth that racial violence typically takes the form gangs of whites visiting violence upon black men by sharing statistics showing that racial violence in America is very much the inverse, with black gangs perpetrating violence against whites in most instances of interracial violence. Your opinion, factual and important as it is, disturbs and offends those in the room or, worse, might sway somebody in that room to reconsider his opinion, thus making the space unsafe. (See Offense-Taking: A Method of Social Control.)
Richard Bilkszto, 60, a former principal at the Toronto District School Board took his own life after filing a lawsuit against the district after he faced harassment for calling out an anti-racism instructor.
Richard Bilkszto, aged 60, formerly served as an interim principal within the Toronto District School Board. His reputation was damaged after he was unjustly labeled a supporter of white supremacy. This labeling occurred when he objected to a claim made by a black instructor during an anti-racism training session in 2021. The instructor claimed that Canada was more racist than the United States. Bilkszto disagreed. He hadn’t considered that in this space he was not allowed to utter opinions that offend a black person by publicly contradicting her. He was committing the act of undermining a black person’s (unearned) authority. She received his criticism as contempt. Bilkszto did not know this was a safe space for her opinions but not his. For this, his colleagues bullied him. Lisa Bildy, Bilkszto’s legal representative, issued a statement asserting that despite a Workplace Safety and Insurance Board investigation (WSIB) concluding that Bilkszto had indeed been a target of workplace bullying, the ramifications of this mistreatment ultimately led the man to tragically take his own life (a month ago today). The relentless stress and consequences stemming from these incidents haunted Richard, she reported.
I experienced the repercussions of not considering the classroom as a safe space. As readers of Freedom and Reason are aware, I have consistently expressed my critical viewpoints on Black Lives Matter (BLM) in my essays. I have highlighted that many of the central assertions made by BLM and other advocates of social justice, which attribute racial disparities in fatal encounters with the police and mass incarceration to implicit race bias and systemic racism, are in fact contradicted by scientific research. In my capacity as an expert in criminology, I discuss these contentious topics in my classes. Given the expectations students (and faculty) have that the classroom should be a safe space, I expected sooner or later that my students would challenge my critiques of BLM. I had hoped that these challenges would manifest in the form of healthy debates within the classroom. However, as anticipated, the students chose a different path and reported me to the administrators.
As I reported in The State of Cognitive Liberty at Today’s Universities, the administrator with whom I conversed was affable and assured me that my engagement in political activities as a private citizen within an open and free society was my prerogative, a sentiment I genuinely appreciated albeit seeing no reason why my First Amendment rights required affirming. It seemed a rather unnecessary gesture at a university. At any rate, he conveyed the students’ concerns that my speech seemed to diverge from the mission of the program in which I teach. He then noted that discordant expressions could potentially affect retention rates among BLM supporters. Why would the facts affect retention rates? Because my classroom would no longer be seen as a safe space.
During our discussion, the administrator inquired as to whether I engage in the role of Devil’s advocate during my classes. He elucidated that he adopts this approach in his literature classes, purposely arguing positions he may not endorse to stimulate discussions and debates, thereby challenging or scrutinizing the validity of specific arguments or concepts through alternate perspectives, irrespective of personal convictions. I clarified that I do not use this particular strategy. Instead, I rely on dismantling unfounded beliefs with factual evidence and scientific method. I emphasized that while I do present stronger versions of opposing arguments by steel-manning them (forming strongly falsifiable arguments), I do not consider this equivalent to playing Devil’s advocate, as I find the latter akin to a religious ritual (that is its origins). To me, it lacks the intellectual rigor to which I am accustomed.
Kike Ojo-Thompson holds anti-racisim training sessions for public and private organizations.
There is more to be said about this in the context of the present essays. Devil’s advocate is manipulative way of reinforcing a standpoint one wishes to impart by holding up against it a straw man then easily demolished through sophistry. Antiracist training sessions are clinics in sophistry. Bad analogies abound. Ad hominem are piled on to amens from the trainees. Red herrings tossed about. Intentional misrepresentation of fact and study. Sophistry is what the woman in charge of the struggle session that changed Richard Bilkszto’s world was doing. When the man resisted “the truth” he was reported and bullied by his colleagues. That his right to a space safe from harassment and intimidation was affirmed by the authoritative body in his domain was tragically not enough to undo the psychological effects of bullying.
DEI Trainer Robin DiAngelo
In the worldview of race hustlers like Robin DiAngelo, Bilkszto suffered from “white fragility.” Addressing white readers now, if you take issue with the claims those around you—including other whites—make about whites, you suffer from a condition marked by defensive reactions and emotional discomfort experienced when confronted with discussions about race privilege and structural inequality. You are an instantiation of the tendency of white people to become avoidant, defensive, and emotionally distressed when their racial biases and complicity in systemic racism are pointed out or discussed. Your fragility manifests as a range of reactions—anger, defensiveness, denial, disengagement, minimizing the impact of racism.
You have lived a life shielded from conversations about race. Moreover, you do not experience racial discrimination yourself. You lack the tools to engage in constructive dialogue about racism. And so you respond defensively when your privilege is challenged. You should instead express humility and show willingness to engage in critical self-examination. You need to be more self-aware. That’s what will make you a good ally. And if you don’t seek allyship, then you’re a racist for that, too. In fact, all your actions prove you’re a racist. If you speak frankly about race and crime, then you are a racist. If you say you are not racist, then you’re a racist in denial. If you resist the work of racial reconciliation, then you are a recalcitrant racist. If you agree that whites are racist, then you will have confessed to being one. You can’t win. Your attendance is required.
Safe spaces are echo chambers where individuals are exposed to viewpoints that align with their own or with what should be their own (and everybody knows that that is), inhibiting critical thinking and reinforcing existing beliefs. This results in confirmation bias, where people accept only information that supports their preconceptions, instead of engaging with diverse perspectives that might challenge or expand their understanding. To this, the controllers add condemnation of information that contradicts preconceptions in order to marginalize those who would challenge the narrative. The fear of offending or triggering others in safe spaces lead to self-censorship, where individuals refrain from expressing their genuine thoughts and ideas to avoid causing discomfort or conflict. There are very real consequences for speaking up, as Bilkszto could tell you if he were still alive.
The suppression of differing viewpoints hinders the open exchange of ideas and stifles intellectual exploration. Differing opinions, even if uncomfortable, are crucial for intellectual growth and the development of critical thinking skills. Without the challenge of engaging with diverse viewpoints, individuals become complacent and fail to fully examine and refine their own ideas. But these warning fall on deaf ears. One falsely presumes that the point of the exercise is growth and development. The point of the exercise is conditioning and indoctrinations.
The safe space can do youth no good from the standpoint of doing good for youth. Sheltered environments shield individuals from the complexities and disagreements that exist in the broader society. In the real world of suppressing opinion and the expression of sentiment, it is those for whom the safe space exists who become fragile. That a Muslim student would fall apart in an art history class because a depiction of Muhammad appeared testifies to fragility of adherents to that religion—that and how the community rallied around her (see The Islamists Make Another Move). The chair of the sociology department at Columbia department cancelled Jonathan Rieder’s class “Culture in America” because he quoted Eminem (The Power of the N-Word). Why? Because students complained about a word. He was told by students that because he was white he is not allowed to say certain words. And so his chair cancelled the class he was most proud of.
To say whites are fragile for denying their complicity in racism when in fact they couldn’t possibly have perpetrated segregation and slavery misuses that term. The pushback against anti-white bigotry does not exhibit the quality of persons easily broken or damaged. Quite the opposite. Crumbling in the face of irreligious criticism or at hearing anti-black prejudice in the facts about black crime in America—these are instantiations of fragility. Insulation from the truth prevents individuals from developing the skills—the resilience—needed to navigate real-world disagreements and conflicts, as well as address the critical needs of communities. Overly protective safe spaces hinder students’ ability to engage in rigorous academic inquiry and debate. Higher education should prepare students for a complex and diverse world—diverse in terms of ideas and opinions—by encouraging them to grapple with difficult and controversial topics. (See My Right to My Views is Your Right to Yours.)
Moreover, safe spaces are divisive. Organizing spaces so that members of certain groups are presumed to enjoy the privilege of freely expressing their thoughts while being immune from criticism by restricting the expression of other thoughts conveys the unequal relations established by the structure of those spaces. This contributes to societal fragmentation by organizing participation based on shared identities and beliefs, with one of those groups expected to serve as controlled opposition. In the case of safe spaces based on affinity, this encourages self-segregation, when a free and open society rooted in individual should foster assimilation and integration by emphasizing viewpoint diversity over identity. The latter circumstance hinders the potential for meaningful dialogue and collaboration among people from different backgrounds. By avoiding discussions that challenge their beliefs, individuals miss out on opportunities to develop empathy and gain a deeper understanding of the experiences and perspectives of others. Open and respectful dialogue, even if uncomfortable, is essential for building bridges of understanding. Thus, by its own professed lights, the safe space is counter productive. But, as I noted above, this is not the actual goal of the safe space. Those who organizing these spaces accomplish what they mean to accomplish. Safe spaces re counterproductive for a reason.
The reality is not merely that safe spaces may suppress free thought, speech, and mutual understanding. It is their purpose to accomplish these things. The existence of safe spaces, in DEI training or in the organization of a classroom, the materials, the pedagogy, the seating, the festooning, is to achieve these ends. To be sure, the trainer or instructor may believe this is the right thing to do, but that only exposes her incuriousness, ignorance (of fact and right), and shallowness of thought. Those who design these ideas and programs, on the other hand—they know the objective.
It is not that safe spaces are well-intentioned but inadvertently limit open discourse, hinder intellectual growth, and prevent meaningful interactions among diverse individuals; their design and function is to contain and frame discourse and model interaction in such a way as to reinforce the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to perpetuate the myth that western society is illegitimate because white people built and sustain it—and because it exists for them. Never mind that this would be said of no other people or culture. Whites are an exceptional evil. The myth of white supremacy, of whites as uniquely racist, is perpetuated because it provides the motive for dismantling the West for the benefit of the corporations that strive to run the world. The safe space is a demonstration of the social logic that westerners are supposed to assume structures our collective existence. The character of that false assumptions tells us something about what those who control us have in mind.
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Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher and social theorist, introduced the concept of the “ideal speech situation” as a key element of his theory of communicative action and his broader philosophy of communicative rationality. Habermas’ work is concerned with the nature of communication, understanding, and the potential for rational discourse in human interactions. The ideal speech situation is a theoretical construct that represents a set of conditions under which communication can occur in its most pure, rational, and undistorted form. It serves as a normative benchmark against which real-world communication situations can be evaluated.
In the ideal speech situation, participants engage in open, honest, and uncoerced dialogue, free from various forms of power dynamics and constraints that might hinder the free exchange of ideas. This concept aims to establish the conditions necessary for achieving genuine understanding and consensus in communication. Key features of the ideal speech situation include: Sincerity: Participants are genuinely committed to expressing their true beliefs and intentions. They refrain from manipulating or deceiving others. Truth: Participants strive to convey accurate and reliable information. Equality: Participants interact as equals, without any inherent power imbalances. Their contributions are valued based on the strength of their arguments rather than their identity and social status. Inclusivity: All relevant information and perspectives are available and considered. No relevant viewpoint is systematically excluded. Freedom: Participants engage voluntarily and without coercion. They are free to express their opinions and engage in discourse without fear of reprisal. Rationality: Arguments are based on reason and logical justification. Emotional appeals and fallacious reasoning are identified and diminished. Critique: Participants are open to critical examination of their positions and are willing to revise their views considering valid counterarguments.
Habermas introduced the concept of the ideal speech situation to emphasize the importance of communicative rationality in fostering genuine dialogue, understanding, and consensus formation in democratic societies. He argued that while real-world communication often falls short of the ideal, striving towards the conditions of the ideal speech situation can lead to improved discourse and more legitimate decision-making processes. Some have questioned the feasibility and practicality of achieving the ideal speech situation in complex and diverse societies. Others highlight the challenges posed by structural inequalities and power dynamics that can impede genuinely equal and open communication. This latter claim is precisely the argument proponents of safe spaces make. Juxtaposing Habermas’ ideal speech situation to the social justice advocacy of safe spaces provides the contrast that exposes the latter’s authoritarian desire.
A federal judge has ruled that Senate Bill 1100, an Idaho law banning transgender students from using the bathroom of their choice, would change the school-by-school status quo and temporarily blocked the bill from going into effect—right before many schools start in the fall. So, despite there having been a public discussion about this and the people having spoken through their elected representatives in an open democratic process, a single individual unilaterally decides that the people are wrong and blocks the law so boys can enter spaces where girls are at their most exposed and vulnerable.
“The court’s ruling will be a relief for transgender students in Idaho, who are entitled to basic dignity, safety, and respect at school. When school is back in session, they should be focusing on classes, friends, and activities like everyone else, rather than worrying about where they are allowed to use the restroom,” Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Peter Renn said (reported here). “No one’s return to school should be met with a return to discrimination.”
Except girls. They’re not entitled to basic dignity, safety, and respect at school. They aren’t allowed to focus on classes, friends, and activities like everybody else. They have to instead worry about where they are allowed to use the restroom where they won’t be in the presence of boys. There may be no such places now. When girls are developing UTIs because they are afraid to enter bathrooms where males are present this will be of no concern to the authorities whose task or is to protect them. It s all about affirming the trans identifying boy. His rights trump the girls’ rights to spaces free of the male gaze and presence.
Why do we have sex-segregated spaces? To discriminate against trans identifying males? Or to defend the basic dignity, safety, and respect of girls and women? Why does everybody have to bend to the small number of males who for whatever reason want access to female-only spaces? These are questions you’d better start asking yourself. The death of sex-based rights is rapidly approaching. (See Why Are There Sex-Segregated Spaces Anyway? Also NPR, State Propaganda Organ, Reveals Who and What have Captured the State Apparatus.)
In my state of Wisconsin, in the city where I live, in a closed-door meeting Thursday night between Green Bay school officials and parents concerned about a trans identifying male playing with their daughters, the parents were told that a boy will play for the girl’s team.
In the run up to the meeting parents told the media that their daughters will not be participating if the boy is allowed to be on the team. “They’re just not used to the ball coming at them that hard,” said Ryan Gusick, one of the parents. “A lot of these girls are specifically quitting this team because they’re concerned for their safety.” Parents are reporting that their daughters leaving with welts and bruises they’ve never received before.
After the meeting, Local 5 (CBS affiliate WFRV) interviewed Gusick who told them that the meeting was about fifteen minutes long and involved about forty parents, some district officials, and a lawyer who explained Title IX, which states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Before the meeting, the Green Bay Area Public School District had declined to provide anyone for an interview with Fox 11 News, but instead sent a statement claiming that the district “cares about the well-being of every student. All decisions regarding a student’s ability to participate in co-curricular athletics/activities are made in accordance with Title IX law, Board policy, and WIAA regulations.” It was clear that this was a matter fait accompli. The meeting was to give the appearance of hearing the parents’ concerns.
The WIAA (Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association) policy states that its goals are equity, physical safety, and competitive equity. That is a lie. The policy explains that “a male-to-female transgender student must have one calendar year of medically documented testosterone suppression therapy to be eligible to participate on a female team.” Suppressing testosterone is hardly sufficient to negate the differences between male and female bodies. Boys on average have physical advantages over girls even before puberty. Allowing males to compete against women is patently unfair—and dangerous.
WFRV reports that during the meeting a lawyer explained to the parents that, according to Title IX, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” If we are to take this framing literally, then how can there be sex-segregation in facilities or sex-based athletics? Clearly a girls team is established on the basis of sex and boys are as a matter of their sex excluded from participation on girls teams on the basis of their sex. That’s sexism, right?
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a federal law in the United States that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity that receives federal financial assistance. While Title IX does promote gender equality in education and sports, it also recognizes exceptions and allows for sex-segregated facilities and sex-based athletics under certain circumstances. These exceptions are typically based on ensuring fair competition and maintaining privacy and safety considerations. These concerns resonate with WIAA’s stated goals (which are at odds with its policy).
Title IX allows for sex-segregated facilities, such as bathrooms, locker rooms, and dormitories, as long as the facilities provided for each sex are equal in quality and availability. The key principle is that any differences in facilities must be based on genuine physiological, privacy, or safety concerns, and not simply on discriminatory grounds. Title IX also allows for sex-based athletics, mandating that educational institutions provide equal athletic opportunities for both sexes. This means that institutions must offer equitable athletic programs and opportunities for male and female students. While there are separate teams for male and female athletes, they should receive equivalent resources, facilities, coaching, and support.
Given this, it should be an easy decision to exclude boys from girls spaces and sports teams. The charge that this is discriminatory is false on its face, albeit a dramatic one that conjures the specter of racial segregation. The fact of sexual dimorphism in the human species, i.e., that is the fact that male and female are distinct and unalterable genotypes (the meaning of the synonyms sex and gender), makes segregation by sex fundamentally different from racial segregation, where separate but equality facilities and activities are inherently discriminatory since there is no objective or rational reason for separating people on that basis.
Louder for the fools on the hill: Title IX recognizes that there may be inherent physiological differences between the sexes that could lead to disparities in athletic performance. As a result, in some cases, schools may establish separate teams for male and female athletes to ensure fair competition. These separate teams can be justified by the need to provide a level playing field and to accommodate the physiological differences that could affect performance. (See my essay Is Title IX Kaput? Or Was it Always Incomprehensible?)
Judges and school districts allowing males in female spaces and activities present communities with a hard paradox, one that they’re being asked to lie about in order to obscure that paradox. The lie is that there is a class of boys that constitutes a new type of woman, a trans woman, who can be classified with the other type of women, the cis woman. But the reality is that, if the team is girls only, then a trans identifying boy must be excluded since he is a boy. Female is an exclusive category. It is not excluding the boy from the girls only team that violates Title IX, but rather allowing the boy to play on the girls team that violates the rule, as well as the principle the rule expresses: that males in female competition creates an unequitable, unfair, and unsafe situation.
The only way out of the paradox it to either exclude the boy or end the girls only rule. Before the claims goes up that the boy is being denied participation in sports, the fact is that the boy can try out for the boys’ team. If he doesn’t make the team he will be one among others who did not make the team. Sometimes a boy isn’t good enough to make the team. The girls team is not a fall back position for the failed male athlete. (See The Thomas-UPenn Episode: A Textbook Case of Institutional Gaslighting.)
If sex-segregated sports is discriminatory because it excludes males on female teams, then it is irrelevant that the boy is trans identifying. Make it so that any boy can join any girls team, i.e., disband girls teams, since they are an establishment of sex-based rights which, under an interpretation of Title IX that abandons science and principle, is discriminatory. In other words, no more sex-based rights or sex-segregated spaces. Girls and boys (and men) can be in the same bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms together. Girls and boys can compete against each other in sports. To be sure, it will mean that girls will be violated, injured, and marginalized, but to hell with equity, safety, and fairness.
Can you see how all this is built upon a lie? The lie is intolerable and never should have been allowed to spread so far and wide that we actually find a significant proportion of the population who believe that a boy can be a girl. I apologize for my own role in perpetuating this. I hadn’t thought about the matter much before 2017. I thought keeping trans identifying males out of women’s bathrooms was discriminatory until I looked into the history of sex segregation and the consequences of dismantling the rules protecting women’s privacy, safety, and opportunities.
So let’s tell the truth about this. One doesn’t get to say he another gender and be another gender. Gender is not a subjective matter. Gender is an objective fact about the body. Roughly half of the human population is male (XY chromosomes and small gametes) and not one of these individuals can change this fact by taking substances that change his hormone levels or undergo surgeries that change the appearance of his bodies. He will remain male whatever he does. If you see him as female, then you are sharing in his delusion about himself (presuming he is deluded). Either boys are excluded from tryouts because the integrity of women’s sports must be defended, or women’s sports must come to an end because they exclude boys and men and are therefore discriminatory. (See The Casual Use of Propagandistic Language Surrounding Sex and Gender.)
In my state, there are two bills, Senate Bill 377 and Senate Bill 378, that would exclude trans identifying students in elementary, high schools, and public colleges and universities from participating in sports teams consistent with their identified gender. But the ACLU sees this as a bad thing. “Lawmakers should tackle the real issues with gender parity in sports, including unequal funding, resources, pay equity, and more,” Dr. Melinda Brennan, Executive Director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, said in a media release issued Thursday. “Promoting baseless fears about trans athletes does nothing to address those fundamental problems.”
The ACLU opposes the bills because, according to them, this is about what’s best for all kids, and research shows young people benefit from participating in athletics. But there is nothing preventing the boy in this case from trying out for the boy’s team. He is, after all, a boy. See how easily the ACLU slips in the false premise that the boys is in this case a girl who couldn’t be expected to try out for the boy’s team? Did you catch the red herring there about the “real issues with gender parity in sports”? (We heard this in the affirmative action debate when progressives kept asking about legacy admissions as if these have anything to do with race-based discrimination.)
The governor of my state, Tony Evers, has vowed to veto both bills. ACLU’s Advocacy Director Amanda Merkwae told Local 5 that the organization is confident Evers will follow through on his promise to veto, but they are concerned that the renewed debate will make transgender athletes targets. “The fight really isn’t about sports,” Merkwae said. “I think nationwide, we’ve seen this coordinated effort to erase trans people in all aspects of public life. Sports is just one of those examples. They’re trying to create solutions to problems that don’t really exist.”
This is why I resigned from the board of the Northeastern Wisconsin Chapter of the ACLU. The organization has abandoned reason—and girls and women. Nobody is trying to erase trans identifying individuals from all aspects of public life. All folks are saying is that there are males and females and males should not be allowed in female only spaces and activities. The ACLU is engaged in science denialism and at heart a resurgent misogyny in which the liberties and rights of women must bend and break to the desires of men. Either the ACLU defends women’s rights or it doesn’t. The same is true for all of us. I stand with girls and women.
Pro-Trump supporters storm the US Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Where they alone?
Because Fox News won’t let you see the original interview Tucker Carlson had with Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, Carlson conducted a second interview with Sund and broadcast it on X (formerly Twitter). Here you will hear here will disturb you. At least it should if you are a thinking person. If the actions of authorities doesn’t make sense to you, this is because you’re refusing to apply the most—really only—plausible explanation for what happened on January 6, namely that is was a set up. The authorities expected trouble and welcomed it. Judging by the many videos I have examined, it looks to me like they instigated it. January 6 was a key piece of the color revolution the deep state ran to remove Trump from office.
Ep. 15 Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund reveals what really happened on January 6th. Our Fox News interview with him never aired, so we invited him back. pic.twitter.com/opDlu4QGlp
Watch the entire interview, of course. But pay close attention to the dialogue from 50:37 mark. You will be shocked to learn that the June 2020 riots in DC, where more officers were injured than were on January 6, somebody prevented the DC Police Department from assisting the Secret Service when the White House was under attack from Antifa and BLM. Antifa/BLM brutally assaulted Secret Service and other law enforcement officers. Antifa/BLM set St. John’s church on fire. Antifa/BLM tried to set the Hay-Adams Hotel on fire—which was occupied. All charges were dropped against Antifa and BLM. Meanwhile, January 6 protesters are still languishing in federal jail, while others have been sentenced to years in federal prison.
I have written quite a lot about January 6 and its implications and purpose. But if you want depth analysis of January 6th and more broadly the color revolution of which it was a piece, please visit Darren Beattie’s Revolver. I will leave you to search the site for what Beattie calls the “fedsurrection.”
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Craig Deleeuw Robertson killed by the FBI in a raid on his house Wednesday morning.
You will also find on Revolver stories about Craig Deleeuw Robertson, a woodworker and Mormon, was killed on Wednesday morning, 6:15 am local time, in a hail of bullets at his home in Provo, Utah. Robertson was a disabled obese 75-year-old man (with a blind son) known to the FBI for years by his inflammatory posts, which for some reason Facebook allowed to remain posted and publicly available, which is strange if, like me, one has experienced the intensity of Facebook moderation. After the agents shot him, they dragged Robertson out to the sidewalk in front of his home where he was left to bleed out in front of his neighbors and their children.
Arguably, Robertson’s postings did rise to the threshold of true threats. But Robertson’s threats against prominent Biden and Democrats exist alongside similar threats against Trump and prominent Republicans. The FBI uses such threats selectively to make examples of individuals expressing disfavored political sentiments. It is understandable if one suspect that the agency is sending a signal to populists and nationalists. This is the case in the political persecution of Donald Trump and his supporters. Democrats are allowed to fight like hell for the causes to believe in. Populists are insurrectionists for fighting for their beliefs and causes.
Bobbie Trottenberg, far right, a patient escort, waits outside of the Planned Parenthood in Center City while Mark Houck, an anti-abortion protester, stands opposite Trottenberg and the escorts in Philadelphia on Wednesday, July 20, 2022.
I did not report on this back in September of 2022 when it occurred, but I want to recount the story of Mark Houck, which illustrates the highly biased character of FBI action. During a pre-dawn operation in Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, a group of approximately twenty FBI agents arrested Mark Houck at his residence. Houck resides with his spouse and their seven children. Houck had no criminal record. The arrest of Houck by FBI agents was executed based on a federal indictment. Houck is a pro-life advocate and holds the position of president at The King’s Men, an organization affiliated with the Catholic faith. The indictment was for an alleged breach of the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, more commonly known as the FACE Act.
The FACE Act (18 U.S.C. § 248) prohibits acts such as physically obstructing, intimidating, injuring, or interfering with individuals seeking or providing reproductive health services. Congress has made it clear that the FACE Act does not infringe upon “expressive conduct” safeguarded by the First Amendment, which includes peaceful demonstrations outside such facilities. Houck frequently traveled two hours from his home to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia to partake in prayer and protest outside the establishment, often in the company of his twelve-year-old son. The indictment by federal authorities asserts that almost a year prior, on October 21, 2021, Houck engaged in a “verbal confrontation” with and “shoving” an escort assisting an abortion patient, ultimately causing the escort to fall. The indictment accuses Houck of “intentionally injuring, intimidating, and interfering” with the escort.
However, the indictment omits crucial details about the context: the pro-abortion escort had subjected the Houck’s son to offensive and inappropriate language, including vulgar slurs. Houck implored the escort to cease the harassment, but to no avail. When the escort came uncomfortably close to his son, Houck took action to protect him, resulting in the escort’s fall. The injury sustained by the escort was minor. In fact, the assault allegation against Houck was so feeble that even Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, known for his unconventional approach, declined to press misdemeanor charges. Moreover, a civil lawsuit filed by the escort against Houck was dismissed by the court. Yet, almost a year later, the Justice Department charged him with two felonies for an injury that merited nothing more than a Band-Aid and the FBI conducted a forceful operation at Houck’s home.
Mark Houck’s attorney, Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society, joins CBN News to break down the surveillance video of Houck and a Planned Parenthood volunteer.
Houck was acquitted in early 2023. He facing severe penalties, including up to eleven years in prison, three years of supervised release, and substantial fines. The timing of Houck’s indictment raises questions about the intentions behind the Justice Department’s actions. Even if one interprets the situation favorably towards the government’s narrative, the incidents at hand amount to, at most, minor episodes of misdemeanor assault. One can speculate that the arrest closely tracks the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and the regime of unrestricted abortion rights in the United States. This orchestrated raid on Houck’s residence seemed intended to send a strong message to pro-life activists who engage in constitutionally protected activities. (See MDM is the New WMD: DHS Issues a New NTAS Bulletin.)
🚨BREAKING: Sanctuary state Massachusetts’ governor Maura Healey declares a state of emergency over influx of illegals.
As of today, close to 5600 migrants families living in government funded facilities across Massachusetts. That figure is 80% higher than it was last year.… pic.twitter.com/eRULqTNxag
This is how bad Biden’s migrant crisis has become. As of today, close to 5600 migrants families living in government funded facilities across Massachusetts. Sanctuary state Massachusetts’ governor Maura Healey has declared a state of emergency over influx of illegals. We’ve heard New York City mayor’s plea to the federal government for help in that city’s migrant crisis. This is the story in cities across the United States as millions of illegal immigrants have cross the souther border under Biden’s watch.
An Venezuelan immigrant prepares to travel from Martha’s Vineyard to mainland Massachusetts in September 2022
Remember when Trump had the border under control? I do. Remember when he tried to build a wall to thwart illegal immigration? I do. We were told that his policy was fascist (see Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps). AOC cried to an empty parking lot after making up stories about how migrants were forced to drink water from toilets (Ocasio-Cortez and the Powers of Expectation and Identity). We were shown pictures of children in cages taken during Obama’s presidency and told the cages were Trump’s. Lie after lie after lie. Don’t let them lie and then forget they lied. Remember. Don’t forget that Biden told migrants to come to America. Remember.
The power elite are spending hundreds of millions of dollars of tax dollars to defend Ukraine’s borders while pursuing an effective policy of open borders at home. If a fraction of those dollars Biden is sending to Ukraine were spent on border security this wouldn’t be happening. But they don’t want to defend Americas borders. Democrats don’t believe in America. America invented slavery. America is white supremacist. America is illegitimate. They say all this and more.
Why are Democrats following the country with illegals? I have explained this before, but here’s a itemized summary of points: (1) because they are illegal they are easy to force into conditions of super exploitation, with poverty wages and unsafe working conditions; (2) their cheap labor makes immigrants attractive to employers, who hire them over native workers (yes, South Park, they’re taking our jobs); (3) cheap labor drives down the wage floor impoverishing native workers in addition to displacing them; (4) the strategy of the Democratic Party has been to knit together a coalition of racial and sexual minorities who feel indebted to the Party and who are conditioned to believe that their enemy is white people and well-off Asians—this way, the Party can abandon the working class and serve the interests of the professional-managerial and corporate strategy they represent; (5) when illegals become citizens (and they will push amnesty is Democrats become the majority), the belief is that the new citizens will vote Democrat; (6) in the meantime, the illegals will vote anyway, not only in municipal elections where they are given the franchise, but illegally in state and federal elections, which is why Democrats support postal voting and oppose voter ID and post-election canvasing; (7) a white majority is bad for society, an argument that manifests in a myriad of ways, for example in the claim that diversity is vital to a comprehensive college experience, as if a white majority white limits the college experience. (See The Democratic Party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism; Rationalizing the Border Crisis with Hysteria, Lies, and Smears.)
I have covered this before, as well, but it bears repeating that the negative consequences of immigration, while varying depending on the context and specific circumstances, are nonetheless substantial. A sudden increase in population due to immigration exacerbates housing shortages and lead to rising rent and housing prices in already competitive housing markets. Concerns rightly arise about immigrants accessing social welfare programs, particularly if they have not contributed to the system through taxes. This raises concerns about the fairness and sustainability of providing social benefits to newcomers. An influx of immigrants puts pressure on public services such as education, healthcare, and social welfare systems. If these systems are not adequately prepared to handle the increased demand, it can lead to resource shortages and longer wait times for native citizens, particular the most vulnerable. A sudden influx of immigrants can lead to increased demand for resources such as energy, food, and water, potentially putting additional strain on the environment and local ecosystems.
As noted above, immigrants are willing to accept lower wages for the same work, which drives down wages and worsens working conditions for native workers. This creates tension and resentment among native workers who lose their jobs to immigrants while suffering the deterioration their communities. Rapid changes in cultural diversity and demographics leads to cultural clashes and social tensions. Some native citizens perceive immigrants as a threat to their cultural identity or as unwilling to assimilate into the host society, which are legitimate concerns. Immigrants and their host communities face challenges in terms of cultural differences and language barriers, but also religious and tribal affiliations are obstructive. Crime and violence have become terrible problems across the trans-Atlantic space.
Al Sharpton strikes again. First he thinks that the revolutionaries who founded our republic would never overthrow a government (see below). Now he is incredulous that somebody would say that the US is not a democracy. There is an argument to be had here. But Sharpton isn’t up to it. Why is Al Sharpton on TV? He’s a street preacher. A charlatan. A confirmed anti-intellectual type. A blow hard. How did he get to this place? Because MSNBC appreciates grifters and race hustlers, that’s how. You’d think, though, they’d want to protect their reputation (they must believe they have one).
Al Sharpton Asks: Can you imagine if James Madison or Thomas Jefferson tried to overthrow the government?
Congressman Doug Collins is right. The founding fathers of the United States did establish a republic, not a democracy. The author of our constitution, James Madison, is adamant on that point. He condemns democracy in the Federalist Papers. It’s true that the terms “republic” and “democracy” are often used interchangeably, and moreover that a republic can have democratic elements, but these terms refer to distinct forms of government. In a constitutional republic, the government’s authority is derived from the people and representatives are chosen to make decisions on their behalf, but the government is vested in a territory and a creed. In the United States, citizens elect representatives who make and enforce laws. A democracy, in contrast, is a system of government in which the power is vested in the people. Citizens participate in decision-making, often through votes on laws and policies. A democracy risks majority rule without a strong system of checks and balances—and then it becomes a republic.
In a recent article on Freedom and Reason, America is a Republic (It is also a Democracy), I referred to this debate as something of a fake issue. You can see my blog for details. There I discuss Madison’s argument. Briefly here, in Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison discusses the dangers of factions and how they could threaten the stability of a government. He argues that pure democracies, where all citizens directly participate in decision-making, are susceptible to the harmful effects of factions. Madison defines factions as groups of citizens united by a common interest, often adverse to the rights of other citizens or the interests of the community as a whole. “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
A Scheme for Thwarting Majoritarianism
The founding fathers established a system that blended elements of both a republic and a democracy. While citizens have the power to elect their representatives, the structure of the government includes checks and balances among the branches (executive, legislative, and judicial) to prevent any one group or the people from becoming too powerful. This intricate system was designed to protect individual rights and promote stability and to thwart majoritarianism.
To understand what “the people” means in this formulation think individual not masses. This is indeed, as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, a government of the people, by the people, for the people. He also said this is a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The individual is the people. Though it says the people, the Second Amendment articulates an individual right to keep and bear arms. When the First Amendment guarantees the right of the people peaceably to assemble, it means to guarantee the individual his right to join his voice with others to express conscience and opinion in unison. We are not a society of tribes (factions) or of a mass, but a society of individuals, each autonomous and rational—and equal in our standing before the law and in principle. This is the fundamental thing the identitarians don’t understand. They seek mob rule. This they understand democracy to be. And so we must remind those who hear that we are a republic, and diminish those who don’t.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”—LP Hartley (1953)
“My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”—Karl Marx (1867)
This settles the question of whether AP African American and Florida’s new standards say the same thing:
AP African American standards
In Florida’s Public School Curriculum is Malinformation, I curated the words of Crystal Etienne, a seventh-grade civics teacher in Miami-Dade County, who said, “It’s disgusting to use children as pawns in their adult scheme.” She called the changes to Florida’s public school curriculum “indoctrination” in “white, Christian nationalism.” She said, “They feel like if you’re teaching the bad, it somehow takes away from the good and it doesn’t.” That is an interesting way of putting the matter, I noted in so many words. I also curated the words of Dwight Bullard, a former high school history teacher, who said that he couldn’t fathom telling his students that there’s a “silver lining in slavery.” He’s referring to the lesson plan that has enjoyed the most publicity, which reviews the wide range of habits and skills Africans acquired during slavery that they applied to their lives after Emancipation. “Imagine the blowback of the same teacher trying to give you the upside of Nazi Germany,” said Bullard, using the Hitler analogy. “Not only would it not be allowed, there would be bipartisan outrage over the idea that any teacher, a teacher or a curriculum trying to give the sunny side of Adolf Hitler. Yet we now have an African American history statute that is supposed to now give you this notion of the benevolent master, or the upside or benefit of being enslaved in America. It’s crazy.” As I noted in that essay, Bullard makes explicit, inverts, and leans into Etienne’s irony: if you’re teaching the good, this takes away from the bad.
Can one imagine a European history curriculum leaving out the initiation of the German Autobahn system during the Nazi regime? That would be like leaving out of an American history curriculum President Dwight D. Eisenhower initiating the Interstate Highway System (IHS). During Eisenhower’s presidency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in covert operations to overthrow foreign governments perceived as threats to US interests (the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and supported the coup that toppled the democratically elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954). These actions undermined the sovereignty of those nations and interfered in their internal affairs. This doesn’t make Eisenhower Hitler, of course. What about the development of the Volkswagen Beetle, initiated by the Nazi government, aimed at making cars accessible to ordinary German citizens? The idea was to create a “people’s car” (literally Volkswagen in German). After World War II, the production of the Beetle continued and became a popular, even iconic vehicle worldwide (I had several as a young man). The Nazi regime invested in rocket technology, which laid the groundwork for later developments in space exploration. Key figures like Wernher von Braun, who worked on Nazi rocket projects, played significant roles in the US space program after the war.
Wernher von Braun (in suit) with German officers in 1941.
I am a bit of a rocketry nerd, so I want to spend a little time on von Braun work and associations in this area. Wernher von Braun was a German aerospace engineer and rocket scientist who was part of the team that developed the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. He was also a Nazi and an SS member. Towards the end of World War II, von Braun and some of his colleagues surrendered to the United States rather than fall into Soviet hands. In 1945, von Braun and his team were brought to the United States under a program known as “Operation Paperclip.” This program aimed to recruit German engineers, scientists, and technicians who had worked on rocketry and other advanced technologies for the Nazis. The goal was to utilize their expertise in the emerging Cold War competition, particularly in the context of the space race with the Soviet Union. In America, von Braun worked for the US Army Ordnance Corps and later joined the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). At NASA, he played a key role in developing the Saturn rockets, which were crucial for the Apollo program and eventually led to the successful moon landings. Von Braun is considered one of the fathers of rocketry and space exploration, but his association with the V-2 rocket and the Nazi regime has been a subject of controversy and debate throughout history. Should we dismiss his work because the Nazis financed it? Should we dismiss von Braun’s work because he was a Nazi?
The Macedonian king Alexander the Great built an immense empire that stretched from Greece to India
Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king, a military conqueror who built an immense empire that stretched from Greece to India at the expense of an untold number of bodies, nonetheless spread of Hellenistic culture during his conquests, facilitating the appreciation of Greek art and ideas across the regions he conquered. This cultural diffusion, known as Hellenism, had a profound impact on the development of art, literature, and philosophy in the societies under his control and afterwards. He established Alexandria, a great city in Egypt that contributed mightily to the dissemination of knowledge and learning in the ancient world. His expeditions included scholars and scientists who documented the fauna and flora, climate and terrain, of the regions they traversed. This knowledge helped advance the understanding of the world during ancient times. Should this be left out of World history curricula because Alexander killed and maimed civilians as he conquered the known world? Shouldn’t we stop calling him “great”? Did the peoples he conquered not benefit from any of it?
Slavery was a common institution in the ancient world, and it played a significant role in the economies of various civilizations, including ancient Greece. As Alexander conquered and expanded the empire, he captured numerous prisoners of war from defeated territories, and many of these individuals were enslaved. These enslaved individuals were put to work as agricultural workers, construction laborers, and domestic servants. The use of slaves was prevalent in many ancient societies, and it was an integral part of the economy, providing a cheap labor source for various tasks. While Alexander is remembered for his military accomplishments and contributions to the spread of Hellenistic culture, the practice of slavery was a characteristic of his time, and it was not uncommon for conquerors and rulers of that era to take slaves from the peoples they subdued. What do we do with this historical fact?
Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who held power from 1922-1953
Joseph Stalin, the ruthless Soviet dictator, responsible for countless atrocities, including purges and forced labor camps, nonetheless promoted rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union, which helped modernize the country and turn it into a major economic power. The Soviet Union rapidly developed heavy industries, such as steel, coal, and machinery production, turning it from an agrarian society into a major industrialized nation. This allowed the Soviet Union to prevail in World War II over Nazi Germany. When Stalin died, he could claim a legacy of taking a backward peripheral region of the world capitalist economy and powering it to the second-most technologically-advanced civilization in world history, raising millions out of ignorance and poverty, providing millions with education, housing, and medicine.
I have studied the history of the Soviet Union rather extensively (see my 2003 article The Soviet Union: State Capitalist or Siege Socialist? in Nature, Society, and Thought) and I am always amazed at how dismissive people are about that history because Stalin was responsible for a great many deaths. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government invested heavily in education and science, leading to substantial advancements in these areas. The literacy rate increased significantly, and access to education became more widespread, allowing for a better-educated population. This focus on education and research also facilitated important scientific breakthroughs, particularly in space exploration and technology. The totalitarian regime that overthrew the monarchy of a ruthless tsar trained up tens of thousands of engineers, physicians, scientists, and technicians. he government prioritized healthcare services, providing free medical care to all citizens. This led to improved life expectancy and a decline in infant mortality rates over the years. The Soviet emphasis on gender equality resulted in improvements for women’s rights. Women were granted equal rights to education and employment, leading to increased female participation in the workforce, particularly in traditionally male-dominated fields such as engineering and science. Does recognizing these facts make one an apologist for Stalin? Should we erase the proletarian workers who accomplished all this?
Genghis Khan, leader of the Mongols
In a region where tribal feuds were common, Genghis Khan demonstrated exceptional diplomatic and military skills, forging alliances and earning the loyalty of the various clans. Through a keen understanding of political and social dynamics, Genghis Khan managed to unite the Mongol people, creating a strong and cohesive nation out of once-fractured tribes. Beyond military conquests, Genghis Khan’s rule had a lasting impact on the territories he conquered. Despite his fearsome reputation as a conqueror, he was also known for his religious tolerance and open-mindedness. He actively promoted cultural exchange and communication along the famous Silk Road, facilitating trade and the flow of ideas between the East and West. His policies ensured relative stability and security, allowing merchants, scholars, and travelers to move safely across the vast empire. Pax Mongolica encouraged the exchange of technologies, goods, and knowledge, leaving a lasting legacy on world history. Genghis Khan’s administrative accomplishments were equally significant. He implemented a legal code known as the Yassa, which served as a set of laws that governed various aspects of Mongol society, including governance, military organization, and social conduct. The Yassa helped maintain order within the vast and diverse territories of the empire and provided a framework for future Mongol rulers to govern effectively.
But what about that fearsome reputation as a conqueror? While Genghis Khan’s accomplishments as a military leader and empire builder are often praised, it is also true that his conquests resulted in the deaths of countless people. The expansion of the Mongol Empire was marked by brutal military campaigns, and his armies were known for their ruthlessness and ferocity in battle. During Genghis Khan’s conquests, entire cities were put to the sword. Cities that resisted the Mongol forces faced severe reprisals, leading to massive casualties. His military campaigns in Central Asia and the Middle East, particularly against the Khwarezmian Empire, resulted in widespread destruction and loss of life. Genghis Khan employed various tactics to strike fear into his enemies, such as killing large numbers of people to terrify and demoralize those who opposed him. These brutal actions were intended to deter resistance and ensure submission to Mongol rule. It is estimated that the Mongol conquests led by Genghis Khan and his successors resulted in the deaths of millions of people across Eurasia, making it one of the deadliest military campaigns in history. Indeed, Jack Weatherford, in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World contends that the large-scale depopulation caused by the Mongol conquests resulted in the abandonment and reforestation of vast agricultural lands and, as a consequence, there was a significant increase in carbon sequestration, which led to a reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide and a localized cooling effect in some regions.
While Genghis Khan is celebrated for his military achievements and his role in creating a vast empire, it is essential to acknowledge the darker aspects of his reign. The historical legacy of Genghis Khan remains complex, and his actions continue to be a subject of debate and examination among historians and scholars. Obvious, as a general rules, it is important to remember that acknowledging the achievements of men and movements does not justify the terrible conduct and human rights abuses that result—and Florida’s new curriculum is not at all reticent to require teachers to report on the conduct of oppressors and human rights abuses that occurred under slavery. History is a nuanced tapestry of both dark and light elements, and it’s essential to study and understand it critically. But the desire to deny any good in something is an ideological endeavor not an academic one.
Slave brick-makers, depicted in the tomb of the vizier Rekmire, c. 1450 BCE.
Slavery is one of the oldest modes of human exploitation. Its history dates back thousands of years, and it has been practiced in civilizations and regions around the world. This is crucial to understand in an era when opponents of the United States republic insinuate that the slave trade was uniquely European, chattel slavery uniquely American, slaves uniquely black and their oppressors uniquely white. The reality is that practice of slavery was widespread across different cultures, societies, and time periods. Slavery was commonly practiced in ancient civilizations, with slaves performing various tasks, including agricultural labor, domestic work, military service, and even skilled crafts. The historical evidence makes clear that the practice existed in ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China. It was also present in pre-Columbian America, Africa, and various other regions. Slaves were obtained through conquest, debt, warfare, or being born into slavery due to their parents’ enslaved status (hereditary slavery). The transatlantic slave trade during the 15th to 19th centuries was a chapter in the history of slavery, where millions of Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas to work on plantations, but the trade in slaves and the system of chattel slavery in the US South is not unique in any of its aspects. That doesn’t make it wrong. It just means that the British colonies and later the US South were not novel.
When evaluating historical phenomena like slavery, it is essential to be objective, even if the practice is widely considered immoral by today’s standards—even if the practice is considered from the standpoint of universal and eternal human rights. The practice of slavery served as a major economic institution across space and time. In some historical contexts, slave labor provided the foundation for the economic prosperity of empires, states, and world-systems. Slavery allowed for the construction of monumental structures, the development of large agricultural estates, and the production of valuable goods and services. Obviously, the economic contributions of slavery should never be used as a justification for its moral acceptability, but the immorality of slavery does not negate the economic contributions of slavery. Slavery was associated with cultural diffusion, intellectual development, and technological transfer. Cultural practices, knowledge systems, and a universe of skills were transferred between peoples and societies. Agricultural innovations and techniques, architectural design, artistic and musical styles spread through the movement of enslaved individuals. Backwards peoples often experienced significant personal growth and development, knowledge and skills that allowed them to become successful in the societies in which they were enslaved. Moreover, enslaved individuals made significant cultural and intellectual contributions despite their constrained circumstances.
In addition to the double standard with respect to the United States during the antebellum period that the progressive demands, that is in how the oppressive situation of others in history are covered in public school curricula, teaching the good and the bad, the refusal to recognize the phenomenological and practical conditions experienced by individuals under slavery in the United States is odd in light of long-standing left-wing commitments and understandings—presuming for the sake of the point that the commitments of teachers are still left wing (they certainly say they are). Proletarian labor is exploited by capitalists and compelled to do so by a structurally coercive class situation. But no serious Marxist would fail to appreciate that there were and are among the proletariat those who applied skills learned on the job to their lives, such as finding a better job with higher wages and better working conditions, or organizing other workers with similar skills and trades to agitate for higher wages and better working conditions. Why is it well understood that the situation of the industrial workers, which also constitutes an exploitative relation, often characterized by low wages and poor working conditions, has a transformative effect on those who are compelled to work for a living? During the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rise of factories led to a massive influx of rural workers into urban areas seeking employment. Over the course of development, these workers acquired valuable skills in operating machinery and factory processes. They learned to read and write. They developed a sense of solidarity and collective identity, leading to the growth of labor movements and trade unions, which advocated for workers’ rights and better working conditions.
And this development was not exclusive to the proletariat. Convict labor, or penal labor, involves the use of prisoners for various types of work, often as a form of punishment. It was prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in colonial and post-colonial settings, but it still exists today. In fact, the Thirteen Amendment, ratified in 1865, which forbade chattel slavery in the United States, allows for penal labor. Convict laborers faced severe and often brutal conditions. They were subjected to forced labor, sometimes on plantations or in mines, and experienced physical punishment and abuse by overseers or prison authorities. Despite the harsh treatment, many convict laborers acquired skills in various trades or agriculture. To be sure, these skills were sometimes undervalued and not appropriately recognized or utilized after their release, but they also afforded many convicts a way of living after confinement. Today, developing good habits and useful skills is an objective of rehabilitation and reentry into free society.
Indentured servitude involved individuals, often immigrants, signing a contract (indenture) to work for a specific employer or landowner for a set period in exchange for passage to a new country or some other benefit. Indentured servants faced challenging circumstances, including long and arduous labor contracts, limited freedoms, and often poor living conditions. The terms of their indenture could be abused or extended, leading to prolonged servitude. As in other systems of exploitation, indentured servants also acquired various skills based on their work assignments, which could include agriculture, domestic labor, or skilled crafts They also experienced cultural exchange, as many indentured servants came from diverse backgrounds and brought their traditions and practices to their new environments. These realities are often discussed in public school curriculum. Does this practice mean to deny the suffering of indentured servants? Or does it mean to convey the phenomenological and practical experiences of those who struggled through this period in their lives?
In all these cases, it’s important to recognize the exploitative nature of these labor systems, where the rights and freedoms of people were compromised. Nevertheless, individuals in these groups developed various skills and habits, some of which empowered them to resist exploitation and advocate for better conditions and rights. The struggles and contributions of these laboring groups have shaped labor movements and labor laws, influencing social and economic reforms over time. In the Florida curriculum, the list of skills and trades associated with slave labor is expansive. In addition to blacksmithing and carpentry and such, slaves were also cobblers, coopers, healers, hostlers, milliners, musicians, painter, sawyers, shoemakers, silversmiths, tailors, weavers, wheelwrights, and wigmakers. They worked in homes, on farms, on board ships, and in the shipbuilding industry. Children are not supposed to know about all this? My own family history in East Tennessee was enriched by the presence of blacks trained in blacksmithing and other skills and trades associated with mining. These skills allowed blacks to provide for their families after emancipation. The suggestion that blacks had no place in a free America and should return to Africa is understood as an unacceptable argument. How were freed slaves to live in the only country they had ever known?
Consider that Marx himself, in the 1967 Preface to Capital, Volume One, made sure to emphasize the point that exploitation and oppression changes the exploited and the oppressed, and that forecasting how things will develop over time requires understanding how the exploited and oppressed are changed. “Let us not deceive ourselves on this,” he writes. “As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so that in the 19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class. In England the process of social disintegration is palpable. When it has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent. There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself. Apart from higher motives, therefore, their own most important interests dictate to the classes that are for the nonce the ruling ones, the removal of all legally removable hindrances to the free development of the working class. For this reason, as well as others, I have given so large a space in this volume to the history, the details, and the results of English factory legislation. One nation can and should learn from others. And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.”
Moments later Marx writes, “The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in so many words that in Germany, in France, to be brief, in all the civilized states of the European Continent, radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as evident and inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade, vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day. These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.”
There is something else in all this, as well, and it goes to the method Marx employs, namely the dialectic. I am not a spiritual person (neither was Marx), but I know others are, and I wonder whether they have considered this piece, especially in light of the rhetoric of social justice and an appreciation of liberation theology in teaching programs and elsewhere in the colleges and universities, and that is the matter of Georg Hegel and his Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807, which explores the master-slave relation and finds in it a powerful development dynamic. This is considered one of the most complex and influential pieces of philosophical literature—and it bears directly on the question of life after emancipation. Hegel’s analysis of the master-slave dialectic is part of his broader exploration of human self-consciousness and the development of human freedom through history. The master-slave dialectic examines the fundamental dynamic between individuals engaged in a hierarchical relationship.
In specifying this relation, Hegel describes how two individuals interact with each other and how their identities and self-consciousness are shaped through this interaction. As a sociologist, I find his argument fascinating, but also morally compelling. The dynamic begins when one individual, the master, seeks recognition from the other, the slave. The master attempts to establish his self-worth and identity by asserting dominance and control over the slave, appropriating the creative work of the slave. The slave, on the other hand, becomes subservient and obeys the master’s commands to avoid punishment and death, alienated from his own creative powers. But the master-slave relation is asymmetrical and therefore unstable. While the master gains recognition from the slave, it is a hollow form of recognition because it is based on fear and forced subordination. The slave, on the other hand, finds that his own existence is contingent upon the master’s recognition of it, which denies him autonomy and true self-consciousness.
In Hegel’s view, consciousness and human freedom arise through the acknowledgment of and mutual recognition among individuals. The slave, in his labor and struggle for survival, and in the character of his milieu, develops skills and knowledge, which gives him a sense of mastery over his environment and situation. Through this process, he achieves self-consciousness and self-recognition and gains a level of independence. Hegel believed that human history is a process of continual development and self-realization, where individuals and societies move towards greater freedom and self-awareness through the recognition of each other’s humanity in the progress of working out and through history. To deny that the African grew from his experience as a slave is to deny him the fruit of his struggle for freedom—his emancipation, self-regard, and self-reliance. This is the path to equality, formal and substantive. I have often characterized woke progressives as neo-Hegelian, rejecting the claim by the woke and their conservative critics that progressives are neo-Marxists or in some way Marxist. However, that critique does not involve the insight Hegel had about the struggle for freedom and self-actualization and the raising up of the societal whole society in the process.
Progressives get neither Hegel’s insight nor his method. But the Old Left did. Martin Luther King, Jr. did. As a theologian, Hegel’s allegory could not have been lost on King. Hegel’s dialectical method, which involves the resolution of contradictions through a dynamic process that moves the situation to a greater unity of its parts and lifts it to a higher plane of development, had a profound impact on how modern theologians approached their questions. It encouraged a dynamic and evolving understanding of religious concepts, allowing for the reconciliation of seemingly opposing ideas—the interpenetration of opposites. Hegel’s concept of the “Absolute” or “Geist” (Spirit) as an evolving and self-realizing entity influenced theologians to explore new ways of understanding God’s nature and divine reality and how pragmatism might allow social movements to achieve justice on earth. All this led to discussions about immanence and transcendence in the divine and the relationship between God and the concrete world. Liberation theology and the ethic of social justice (not the identitarian brand) are children of this idea.
Are we not to consider how the black people today are the descendants of those forged by the dialectic, material and spiritual? Are we to think only about the way slavery has hampered the generations, a ghostly ball-and-chain the living drag behind them, to ask for reparations from those who never owned them—or owe them? Or might we have our children consider the character of spirit that resisted exploitation and oppression and took from the now deposed master his knowledge and history to raise themselves above their past? A White House official told NBC News that Kamala Harris was in Jacksonville to discuss ways to “protect fundamental freedoms, specifically, the freedom to learn and teach America’s full and true history.” Did she really mean this?
The presence of slavery in history has also spurred abolitionist movements, where people advocated for the end of slavery and the recognition of the rights and dignity of all individuals. This argument suggests that the presence of slavery in history (the phenomenon) had the purpose or function of spurring abolitionist movements and advocating for the recognition of rights and dignity of all individuals (the outcome). It implies that slavery existed to bring about the rise of abolitionist movements and promote the recognition of human rights. If I left it there, I would be assigning an intention or purpose to the historical phenomenon of slavery without addressing the complex cultural, economic, historical, political, and social factors that led to its existence. Obviously, slavery was not an institution designed to bring about abolitionist movements; rather, it was a deeply ingrained practice that emerged due to various historical circumstances, such as labor demands, economic interests, and deeply rooted societal norms.
What I mean to argue if I am to be rational about it is that the historical presence of slavery was met with significant resistance from abolitionist movements, which emerged in response to the grave injustices and human suffering caused by the institution. These movements advocated for the end of slavery and the recognition of the rights and dignity of all individuals, highlighting the importance of human rights and social justice. In other words, the struggle for freedom is consciousness raising, deepening understanding, and expanding recognition of species-being and commitment to human rights. Again, I hasten to emphasize that any potential positive aspects mentioned above should never negate or overshadow the profound dehumanization, injustice, and suffering endured by millions of enslaved individuals throughout history. Slavery, as an institution, was and is inherently oppressive and immoral. Modern ethical standards unequivocally condemn slavery as a violation of human rights and human dignity.
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What lies behind the hyperbole over Florida’s new public school standards? Part of it is a desire to delegitimize Ron DeSantis, the progressive boogyman currently serving as Florida’s governor. But that’s an immediate thing. There is a long term strategy behind the “blacks-built-America” rhetoric. “American capitalism was built on the backs of slaves and the slave economy—and not just in the South. Some of these practices are still with us,” declares the website Though Huddle at Arizona State University. “Historian Calvin Schermerhorn explains how slavery built America without returning virtually any of the gains to the enslaved people—or their descendants. He also describes how racial inequality is part of our national DNA and why it persists.” Pharrell Williams writing in the pages of Time: “The activists who tossed chests of tea into the ocean to protest economic injustice were patriots. But they were also oppressors, unwilling to extend the freedoms for which they fought to everyone. America’s wealth was built on the slave labor of Black people: this is our past. To live up to America’s ideals, we must trust in a Black vision of the future.” He is wrong on every count.
This notion of a “national DNA” is a very tired metaphor, one that never really did have any authority behind it. The cliché aims to distract from the ethic and ideal of the American Creed: a set of guiding principles that are deeply ingrained in the American society and culture, principles including democracy, equality, individual liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness. These serve as a moral compass and are rightly expected to influence the behavior and actions of citizens, emphasizing a sense of responsibility, civic duty, and respect for one another. The American Creed is an aspirational vision of what Americans strive to be as a nation. It highlights the desire for a society that upholds the values of equality, freedom, and opportunity for all. The power of the Creed is evident in the abolition of slavery within the founding of the nation and the end of racial segregation a century after that.
What I am about to say is not to diminish the contributions made by Africans and their descendants, who have been a small minority of the US population, concentrated mostly in the South (over 90 percent of blacks lived in the south during slavery and for several decades afterwards), but the truth is that America was primarily built on the backs of European labor and their descendants—convicts, farmers, indentured servants, and proletarians. Primarily the English built this nation, but also the Dutch, the French, Germans, Irish, Italians, Norwegians, Polish, Scottish, Spanish, Swedish, and many other ethnic groups built this nation. And many non-Europeans built this nation, as well. The Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Japanese, and Koreans built this nation. The American Indians built this nation. All of these groups suffered mightily in all of this—and all benefitted from the result, to be sure, by varying degrees, largely depending one assimilation. I know that is a triggering thing to say, but it seems necessary to say it in light of the constant rhetoric that America was built on the backs of black slaves. It wasn’t. Proletarian labor largely built America—black, brown, and white. Even during the time of slavery and before, the indentured servant and the convict were hard at work building America. (See Disney Says, “Slaves Built This Country.” Did They?)
The claim that America was built on the backs of black people is calculated (or at least functions) to do three things: (1) erase social class as the primary form of exploitation under capitalism (this is a capitalist society, and chattel slavery, alongside wage slavery, was a part of the capitalist system); (2) diminish the contributions made by Europeans and their descendants, who have always been the majority in America, to the building of this great nation, great because it mades flesh the Enlightenment spirit, which is a product of the European world system, and which the so-called “New American Revolution” seeks to destroy and replace with an authoritarian tribalist feudalistic system; (3) make it look like Europeans were all slave owners/drivers who sat around on their backsides all day commanding blacks to do everything. This is an utterly false narrative about America.
This is why you are hearing so much about Florida’s new standards. The curriculum doesn’t wash the feet of Black Lives Matter and woke progressives are furious about that. It interferes with the project to disorder America and maintain custodial control over black people established by paternalistic progressives. That slavery was common place for thousands of years before white people abolished it is history. Just don’t tell that to children. A man sold into slavery suffers no less because he is white. He may derive from his experience knowledge and skill that will advantage him after emancipation. This does not justify his enslavement. It only explains his situation.
The quote above “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is from the novel The Go-Between written by British author LP Hartley. It reflects the idea that looking back at historical periods can feel like observing a different culture or society because of the vast differences in attitudes, behaviors, and customs that may have prevailed in the past. We can still appreciate elements of other cultures while criticizing those elements that limit and oppress people. Islam is a profoundly patriarchal ideology. The mosque is a site of stunning mosaic work. Likewise, gospel music evolved as a form of expression and resistance for enslaved Africans, providing solace and hope amidst the hardships they faced. Blacks didn’t stop singing after Emancipation.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell
Readers of Freedom and Reason know that I view postmodernism as largely a crackpot approach to understanding the world. More than this, it has become a means to undermine reason and science, which in turn brings harmful consequences, as we have seen with the practice of gender-affirming care, previously known as transgender healthcare or transgender medical care, where children are given sterilizing hormones and sometimes surgically mutilated. (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex.) Before the rebranding, such barbaric practices, thankfully infrequent, were known as transsexual healthcare or transsexual medical care. The change in branding reflects the artificial distinction queer theorists and sexologists make between sex and gender, with sex reconceptualized as strictly biological, a distinction that comes with a tacit admission that one cannot change one’s sex. The rebranding has accompanied a drastic rise in those seeking such care.
Roy Liechtenstein
The lie that a man can change his gender is dependent upon acceptance of the artificial distinction queer theories and sexologists make. The premise of postmodernism—that there is no ultimate truth—is central to the queer theory piece of the alliance determined to problematize fundamental and well-understood truths in this area. Postmodernists problematize reason and science by challenging the idea that they are objective, universal, and unbiased sources of knowledge. Postmodernists argue that reason and science are shaped by cultural, historical, and social contexts, and that reason and science can be used to serve certain ideologies and power structures—both true and not trivial but obvious observations. All this lies at the heart of the transhumanist movement, of which transgenderism is an expression. As I will show in a future essay, all this is rooted in the nihilistic strains of anarchism.
In addition to skepticism of universal truths, queer theory, a field of second-wave critical theory, that is a critical theory corrupted by the poststructuralist epistemic, shares with postmodernism generally a rejection of the assumption of fixed categories and identities, deconstruction of binaries, focus on language and representation, emphasis on agency and resistance, intersectionality (the stacking of oppressions), and embracing ambiguity and complexity. The ideological denial of fixed categories, the political project deconstructing binaries, and living with ambiguity are obviously ideological endeavors. Some of the rest sounds like standard social science. A closer examination of, say, the emphasis on agency and resistance, however, reveals the anarchist, as well as identitarian tendencies, where social norms exist to be transgressed and the only truths are personal ones.
In this essay, I leverage Jean Baudrillard’s description and conceptionalization of the precession of the simulacra to explore the terrain of synthetic sexual identities (SSIs), popularly known as trans gender or trans identification. The subtitle “Trans as Bad Copy” does not deny that there are convincing copies. Blaire White and Buck Angel, especially the latter, from an external point of reference, pass as the gender they wish to. However, most trans identifying individuals, especially taken in their totality, do not pass. Technology has not yet reached the point where convincing simulacra, or simulations, can be made routine in this domain. This is why there is so much effort on changing language to change mass perception in attempt to complete the simulation in the lurch.
Blaire White
Recall the scene from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four where O’Brien is interrogating Winston in the Ministry of Love. During the torture and brainwashing process, O’Brien tries to force Winston to accept the Party’s version of reality, which includes the idea that two and two make five if the Party says so.
O’Brien: Do you remember writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”?
Winston: Yes.
O’Brien (holding up his left hand, its back towards Winston, thumb hidden and the four fingers extended): How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
Winston: Four.
O’Brien: And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?
Winston: Four.
This goes on like this for a while. Winston is repeatedly punished for failing to see as true what is obviously false. He is not allowed to lie. He must believe the falsehood that two and two make five. He must not see the truth in front of his nose.
O’Brien: You are a slow learner.
Winston: How can I help it? How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.
O’Brien: Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
When University of Pennsylvania teammates of swimmer Lia Thomas, deadname William, complained about having a man on the women’s swimming team and naked in the women’s locker room, they were ordered by university officials not to speak the obvious truth and threatened with referral to psychological counseling if they objected to having Thomas on the team. “The Party wants you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” we learn from Nineteen Eighty-Four. “It is their final, most essential command.” Alas, it is indeed not easy to become sane, and in the aftermath of the scandal Thomas’ teammates Riley Gaines and Paula Scanlan came forward to to tell the truth, which in the case of Gaines was rewarded with an attack by a mob of trans activists.
The theory of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, developed by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1929, asserts that the way individuals structure language (or language is structured for them), both in terms of grammar and vocabulary, has a profound impact on their perception of the world. Language constructs a shared understanding of events and phenomena unfolding around us. This theory has led to the belief that changing definitions and meanings restructures consciousness, which in turn changes cultural understandings—the collective beliefs, norms, and values of a society—such that individuals are socialized in the new understanding advantageous to those in power. However, the hypothesis runs up against the gender-detection brain module, which is a result of natural history, a very powerful force to attempt overcome linguistically, especially since the language faculty evolved to convey reality in order to organize human action. The innate rigidity of perception necessitates the imposition of language codes enforced through various social control strategies including coercive techniques. (See Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module.)
Before getting to the example of a bad copy and the revealing reflections that copy (his self-designation) makes about the problem of advanced order simulacra, and his attempt to deny the original (“the blueprint,” as he would like to have it in an attempt to put the map before the territory), I will need to explain the precession of simulacra and discuss the problem of simulation generally, which I will do through real-world examples, as well as fictional ones. This will require an overview of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and the method of deconstruction.
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One of the tools postmodernists and queer theorists use in undermining reason and science is deconstruction. Deconstruction is a literary theory associated with French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It emerged in the late twentieth century as a central component of poststructuralist thought, a reaction in French philosophy to structuralism, a theory and method emphasizing the study of patterns and their underlying structures. Structuralism held sway in a number of fields, including anthropology, linguistics, literary theory, and sociology. Structuralists seek to identify the organizing principles that give coherence and meaning to phenomena. Poststructuralists doubt this is possible, expressing special distain for the idea of binaries and binary oppositions. Structuralists argue that these binary oppositions are fundamental to the way we think and create meaning. The pairings of contrasting elements that are found in various aspects of human life, such as good and evil, male and female, and culture and nature. The meaning of each element in a binary is defined in relation to its opposite. For example, we understand what “good” means because it is in contrast to “evil.” Poststructuralists deride this view as an oversimplification. This criticism is primarily associated with thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.
Deconstruction seeks to challenge and destabilize traditional assumptions about language, meaning, and truth. At its core, it is concerned with revealing the inherent complexities and contradictions within language and texts—it’s looking for patterns after all—and questions the idea that language can accurately and precisely convey fixed and objective meanings, doubting even there are any such things. Instead, deconstruction emphasizes the fluidity of language and the multiple interpretations that can arise from any given text. It doesn’t matter so much what the actor intends or means, but how others react to his words and actions—that is, how those words and actions make the receiver feel. (See Watch What You Say; Those Who Read and Hear are Alive.)
How does this jibe with the project to change perception with language? Postmodernism is a political project in which language is seen as a useful means of inventing reality rather than conveying reality. There is intentionality; it means to assert the legitimacy of its method by changing assumptions. If language conveys reality, this suggests that there is an external and shared world that exists independently of language; the function of deconstruction is therefore what postmodernists call “problematization.” The praxis of problematization destabilizes fixed meanings and challenges and even transgresses established norms. By selectively embracing multiple perspectives through the epistemic privileging of knowledge systems and experiences of marginalized groups, postmodernists undermine dominant discourses they claim to marginalize certain identities. Thus deconstruction represents a destabilizing move that clears the way for an alternative description and explanation of reality, one that moves from shared and objective truth to individual and subjective “truths.”
Normally, we use language to communicate and gain insights into shared reality. In natural history, language evolved to coordinate social action. Science depends on this function. To say language invents reality is different from saying language shapes perception of reality, which is a well-known anthropological fact; our understanding of reality is not fixed or absolute but is subject to the cultural, historical, and social influences of language; rather, if language invents reality, then ontological claims, i.e., claims about being, dissolve in a prevailing epistemological system, with truth claims depending on who commands the system. I will put aside the paradox of such a conflation for now and focus on the claim that what is real reduces to construction through language and other forms of symbolic communication.
Deconstructionism becomes significant in the way postmodernism and critical theory corrupted by it view the role of language in constructing reality. Postmodernism emphasizes the subjective nature of knowledge, the influence of discourse and language in shaping reality, and the plurality of interpretations, which means there is no one truth to be ascertained. It’s all a matter of standpoint, which can be reduced to each individual. Deconstruction aligns with postmodern principles by critiquing the notion of stable meaning and the existence of fixed truths, supporting the postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives, i.e., grand overarching explanations of history or society, and the rejection of essentialist concepts that claim to capture the essence of any subject. (There’s another paradox here with respect to queer theory, which I will take that up in a future essay.)
Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist known for his influential concept of simulacra
Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist known for his influential ideas on postmodernism, hyperreality, and his formulation of the concept of the simulacrum. I teach Baudrillard in my freshmen seminar People, Machines, and Monsters. One of his notable works, the book my students read, is Simulacra and Simulation, published in 1981, in which Baudrillard explores the concept of the “precession of simulacra.” The concept means to convey the idea that, in contemporary society, the relationship between reality and its representation has been fundamentally altered to the point where the representation precedes and shapes our understanding of reality, rather than the other way around. For Baudrillard, simulations or copies of reality have become more powerful and influential than the actual reality they are (at least were) meant to represent. This is the postmodern condition.
Baudrillard’s treatment is useful because his sociology grounds him in a method realistic enough to distinguish between postmodernism as an epistemic approach to interpretation of images and texts and postmodernism as a condition of late capitalism. I would use different language, of course, describing the present situation as authoritarian state capitalism dependent upon what Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism” rather than naked force is usefully captured by the concept of the postmodern—for a society governed by the social logic of modernity would appear very differently than contemporary society. (See Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint.) I will leave to the reader to learn, if he has not already, more about the way Baudrillard reworks Marx’s theory of the commodity (use and exchange value) for the postmodern condition. It is not necessary to know the totality of Baudrillard’s contribution in the area to understand his thesis regarding the precession of simulacra.
A simulacrum is a representation of a presumptively actual thing. Simulacra abound. There is hyperreal tourism (Disneyland and Disney World), which create artificial and idealized versions of experiences and real-world places that often bear little resemblance to the original cultural and geographical contexts that inspires them. Virtual reality and video games provide simulated and highly-immersive experiences; players interact with artificial worlds that have no direct connection to the physical reality they actually inhabit (which postmodernist suggest are themselves artificial). In modern media culture, news stories and representations of events are simulated. Well-known brands and logos have become simulacra, representing more than just the products or services they offer; they symbolize aspirations, cultural meaning, and lifestyles that go beyond their original functional purposes. The development of virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri presents simulacra in the form of computer-generated voices that interact with users. These virtual entities have no physical existence as sentient things but simulate human-like interactions, and the humans in the interaction treat them as persons. On social media platforms, individuals construct idealized versions of themselves as avatars, online personas that may differ significantly from their real-life identities, leading to the routine practice of self-representation as simulacra. Buildings and entire towns designed to replicate famous landmarks from different cultures are simulacra, offering artificial representations with no direct link to the original cultural and historical contexts. Pushing this idea further is the town Disney constructed, Celebration, that has no original but is a simulacrum constructed from architectural and cultural typifications of small towns. It is simultaneously a real town.
Disney’s Celebration
This idea of simulacra is explored in numerous novels and movies. The one that stands out in my estimation is the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, in which author Philip K. Dick explores themes of authenticity and identity and the blurred line between humans and machines. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner is based on this book. This story is the jewel at the heart of my freshman seminar. Set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future, where, due to radiation poisoning, many humans have emigrated to off-world colonies, leaving behind a desolate and decaying Earth, the story follows Rick Deckard, an Earth-bound bounty hunter tasked with “retiring” (terminating) rogue androids which are virtually indistinguishable from humans and are equipped with advanced AI and synthetic emotions. The central conflict of the film involves six highly sophisticated Nexus-6 androids, referred to as “replicants” in the film, which escape from an off-world colony and come to Earth. The replicants wish to reach Tyrell in order to be modified; they have been given a four-year lifespan and want more life (which in the end they discover is not possible given their design). The book and film have significant differences, but the problem of differentiating reality from simulation is common to both.
In a theme fleshed out in the book, hinted at times in the film, owning a living animal has become a status symbol in this culture. Most animal life has been wiped out, and actual animals are expensive. Many possess artificial animals in a desperate attempt to connect to nature, and the goal of the industry producing them, the Rosen Association (the Tyrell Corporation in the film), is to make as realistic as possible the simulations. In the book, Rick Deckard owns a synthetic animal, an electric sheep, which he keeps as a substitute for a real one. In the film, in an interaction with a replicant named Rachael, Deckard notes an owl in a conference room at the Tyrell Corporation:
Rachael: Do you like our owl?
Deckard: It’s artificial?
Rachael: Of course it is.
Deckard: Must be expensive.
Rachael: Very.
Later, Deckard asks the replicant Zhora, employed as an exotic dancer at a nightclub called The Snake Pit, whether the snake she dances with it real.
Deckard: Is this a real snake?
Zhora: Of course it’s not real. You think I would be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?
In both the book and the film there is a test called the “Voigt-Kampff test” that bounty hunters (or blade runners, in the film) use to determine if an individual is human or an android. The Voigt-Kampff test is a fictional empathy test designed to assess emotional responses, as androids lack genuine human emotions and empathy. The test involves posing a series of questions and scenarios to the subject while monitoring physiological responses such as changes in heart rate, perspiration, and pupil dilation. The theory is that humans will respond emotionally to questions about morally challenging situations, while androids will lack the appropriate empathetic reactions. As the story unfolds the distinction between humans and androids becomes increasingly ambiguous, raising questions about the nature of consciousness, empathy, and what it means to be human.
Deckard experiences moments of uncertainty about his own identity, whether he may be an android himself, and grapples with existential questions similar to those he hunts. What drives Deckard is the quest for authentic experiences in a dystopian and hyperreal world. One of the lines from the film, uttered by Eldon Tyrell, the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation, a man driven to engineer replicants with heightened emotional capabilities and complex cognitive functions, seeking to surpass the boundaries of what is traditionally considered human, speaks to the end of the precession of the simulacra, which we are now coming to: “‘More human than human’ is our motto,” Tyrell tells Deckard.
Baudrillard identifies four stages in the precession of simulacra. In the first order of simulacra, representations are based on a simple reflection of reality. There is a clear connection between the sign (representation) and the referent (the real object or event it represents). It is a faithful copy of the referent, the original. For example, a photograph is something of a first-order simulacrum, as it is a direct representation of the object or scene it captures. It is of course one-dimensional and cannot capture the thing itself. No copy of something can represent the thing itself, thus simulacra vary in their capacity to represent reality. In the second order of simulacra, representations are no longer a direct reflection of reality but a simulation or copy of the original. There is still a semblance of connection to the real, but the representation starts to deviate from the actual referent. An example of this is the use of advertising, where images or slogans depict products in idealized ways that may not necessarily reflect the reality of the product. It is here that stereotype and typification are found, which serve as the basis of successive-order simulacra.
Stereotypes are simplified and standardized representations about a particular group of people based on shared characteristics or attributes. These characteristics are often exaggerated or oversimplified. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neutral. Stereotyping is a natural cognitive process that helps individuals process large amounts of information quickly. Typifications are similar to stereotypes, but are more focused on categorizing individuals based on specific observable characteristics or behaviors. A typification involves abstracting and classifying individuals or groups based on certain traits or actions they display. Typifications can be useful in understanding general patterns and tendencies among individuals. However, like stereotypes, they can also be limiting if they prevent people from recognizing individual differences or lead to unfair judgments and prejudicial treatment. They are the source of generalized second-order simulacra.
In the third order of simulacra, the simulation or representation has completely detached from any connection to reality. It becomes a hyperreal, a self-referential system that bears no resemblance to the original. The simulation becomes its own reality, and the distinction between the representation and reality blurs. An example of third-order simulacra is the simulated reality in video games or virtual reality, where users can interact with lifelike environments that have no direct correspondence to any physical reality or fact of nature. This is the arena of the hyperreal, the creation of representations that have no referents. Rachael and Zhora are third-order simulacra.
In the fourth order of simulacra, the hyperreal has become so pervasive that the idea of simulation collapses altogether; there is no distinction between reality and simulation. It becomes a world of pure simulation, without any reference point to reality. In this stage, everything is a simulation, and there is no original reality left to refer back to. This is the situation presented in the Matrix, a 1999 film written and directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Larry and Andy, both of whom are now trans identifying). The difference between virtual reality and the matrix is that one lives in the latter—and doesn’t know that he lives in it. Neo, the central character in the Matrix, is pulled from the only world he has ever known and delivered into the reality he never knew, a brutal and unforgiving world, then shown the desert of the real, a simulation of the actual world the Matrix conceals.
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Baudrillard warns that as we move into higher orders of simulacra, the relationship between signs and their referents becomes more complex, and the direct connection to reality is gradually diminished, leading to the emergence of hyperrealities and simulations that are removed from the original reality they were meant to represent. Somewhere towards the end of the precession, we no longer see the symbols that communicate the simulation, as the liberated could in the Matrix—and Neo unaided by technology. All we see if the stimulation, which could very well include us. As I noted, Deckard has doubts about himself. And so does this individual:
A couple things that show how blatantly male this video is:
1. Framing the value of a woman as dependent on the utility of her vagina to men “[your vagina] didn’t because valuable until you were an adult?” 🤔
— Right Side of History™️ (@xxclusionary) July 25, 2023
I do not subscribe to TikTok, the presumed source of the video. I do not know this person’s name. I don’t care to. I do know the person’s gender, however. This is a man. This man very much desires to be a woman but knows he is not one, so he needs to erase women as an essential category and replace them with a simulacrum, one that he can step into—a woman suit, if you will. A stereotype. This is what serial killer Jame Gumb, whom the media has dubbed “Buffalo Bill” because he “skins his humps,” is seeking in Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs; denied gender-affirming surgery by the industry, autogynephile Gumb is building a woman suit out of the skins of young obese women he kidnaps and keeps in his basement. (In the movie Blade Runner, Detective Harry Bryant, the chief of the Replicant Detection Unit and Rick Deckard’s boss, refers to replicants as “skin jobs.”)
The man in the TikTok video admits that, while in Asgard he can be anything he wishes, back on Midgard, back on Earth, on the other end of the rainbow bridge, he is not a woman, so he means to convince his audience (himself) that nobody really is. It is a mythical thing. After all, a woman is only a woman because she was assigned that status at birth. She is a therefore a “cis woman,” whereas the “trans woman” achieves his status. “Trans woman are women,” Stonewall tells us, since anyone can be one, and the claim that they are not leans into privilege—a special right only cis women do not deserve; owning and asserting the privilege makes the cis woman a bigot; attempting to resist the erasure of that privilege makes her a reactionary, a fascist (a lesbian is that for just being).
With the construct cis gender defined as somebody who “identifies” with the gender they were “assigned” at birth, as if the category woman could be either an achieved or an ascribed status, gender ideology tacitly assumes that if an individual identifies as a woman that person conforms to societal stereotypes associated with women. Otherwise, even if one cannot define what one is, how would one know if one is not one? The trans identifying man dresses as he imagines women are supposed to dress. Sometimes he significantly alters his body’s appearance with hormones and surgeries to look like what he imagines women look like. Imagine that he may in the future have parts of braindead women grafted on and transplanted into his body. A slippery slope? This is something the man in the video tells us is on the way. And he is not the only one. Indeed. Not as slippery slope. A project.
The appearance of women is variable. The man’s only reference in fashioning his SSI is something he must appropriate from his environment, a stereotype, a reductive representation of women in a particular place at a particular time, often the type of women he’s attracted to, which is why he most often appears as a commercial exaggeration, an unreasonable facsimile of a woman, typically an exotic dancer, a porn star, or a prostitute—a sex worker. Do you now see the function of exposing children to drag queens in libraries and night clubs? (See Clowns are Scary; Luring Children to the Edge; If All This Strikes You as Perverse, You’re Right. It is; ) Do you now see why children are asked by the counselors and teachers whether they really are what they think they are? (See Ideology in Public Schools—What Can We Do About It?) Do you now see why it is so important for you to use the chosen or preferred pronouns, which we are now being told are not chosen. (See NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech.)
By reducing natural history of a metanarrative and then rejecting the truth of the narrative, gender ideology simultaneously denies and disrupts the ontological character of the category while overlooking the complexity and diversity of manifestations of women, their appearances and their experiences, assuming that all women conform to a stereotype or one in a set of stereotypes, historically defined by men, by identifying as women—that women identify as women instead of being women. Woman is a persona, a costume; it’s a role, John Money told us; it’s performative, Judith Butler tells us; the category is not fixed. But the reality is that gender is neither achieved nor ascribed; it is a natural category, an adult female human, an evolved being, the result of natural history, that can present and act in an infinite number of ways. The tom boy is not a boy, but is a girl. Without or without her breasts, she will become a woman.
Gender ideology defines women and men in terms of what is perceived as feminine and masculine, attributes that are themselves abstract representations of the gender binary that is denied by poststructuralism in its rebellion against structure and science. We see this not only in the way trans identifying men appropriate a stereotype of a woman, but in those who claim to be genderfluid, presenting one day (or moment) as feminine, the next day (moment) as masculine, both presentations stereotypical—and then completely giving away their gender on the days they present as androgynous (if they can manage to pass otherwise). The binary presentations are always representations of stereotypes in a cultural space and time, in the pink and the blue of the trans flag. But few can pass as what they are not. Genderfluid, like the unicorn of the trans woman, is make-believe. Admitting that unicorns are make-believe doesn’t erase the fact of unicorns, it just specifies what sort of fact the unicorn is.
An AI-generated image of a furry, representing layers of simulacra with no original
We see this elsewhere, in the switching of personas (in a system of, often comical, often terrifying stereotypes) by those claiming to have multiple personality or dissociative disorder (MPD). We see this in young people sharing DSM-5 diagnoses and then learning to wear the checklist convincingly (self-institutionalization). We see this in pods of girls in social media chatrooms catching Tourette’s. (See Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?; See also The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.) We see this in the disappearance of lesbians, a phenomenon Katie Herzog analyzes in her 2020 article “Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?” We see this with furries, individuals who have a strong interest in anthropomorphic animal characters, often represented in art, literature, and media. Anthropomorphic characters are animals with human-like traits and characteristics, such as walking on two legs, talking, and exhibiting human emotions. These are just some of simulacra that walk on the postmodern landscape.
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In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard discusses the “map-territory relationship.” This concept explores the relationship between representations (maps) and the reality they are intended to represent (territory). Baudrillard refers to Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “On Exactitude in Science.” In the story, Borges presents a fictional tale about an ancient civilization that creates a map so detailed that it covers the entire empire to the point where it becomes the same size as the territory itself. Baudrillard uses Borges’ story as a starting point to discuss the concept of hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation, drawing parallels between the map in Borges’ story and the modern society’s tendency to create simulations, images, and signs that begin to replace or overshadow reality. For Baudrillard, the proliferation of simulations and signs in contemporary society leads to the blurring of the distinction between reality and hyperreality, where the signs and simulations become more real or significant than the original referents they are meant to represent. By referencing Borges’ story, Baudrillard is warning of the appearance of copies or simulations that have no original or reality to refer to. We can apply this observation to the function of praxis in gender ideology where activists are encouraged to transgress boundaries rationalized as arbitrary and oppressive, action presuming that norms are constructed a priori to meet imperatives of an oppressive society. (The fallacy of illegitimate teleology appears baked into French philosophical traditions.)
In traditional cartography, a map is a representation of a geographical territory; in Baudrillard’s analysis, the proliferation of simulations and representations in our society has led to a situation where the map (the representation) precedes the territory (the reality). Simulations and media representations become dominant, shaping our perceptions and experiences of reality. With the proliferation of simulations, we have moved beyond the mere representation of reality into a state of hyperreality. In this condition, simulations and representations become more real and significant than the original reality they are meant to represent. The simulacra become more convincing and influential than the reality they copy. The result of this is the loss of referentiality. The traditional map-territory relationship relies on the referentiality of the map to the territory it represents. For years cartographers have sought a map of the world that accurately conveys its dimensions. In the hyperreal state, simulations no longer have a direct reference to an underlying reality. Accuracy and precision are irrelevant. The relationship between representation and reality becomes detached, leading to a loss of the connection between the two. Baudrillard argues that, in contemporary culture, the boundaries between the simulated representations (maps) and the actual reality (territory) have not only become blurred to the extent that the representations can be mistaken for the reality itself, but that the synthetic would be preferable to the original if awareness were obtained.
This is depicted in the film TheMatrix when the character called Cypher, a crew member of the rebel group led by Morpheus, who seeks to free humanity from the Matrix where most humans are unknowingly trapped, betrays the group. Cypher becomes disillusioned with the harsh reality of the real world outside the Matrix and makes a deal with the sentient AI program Agent Smith to be reinserted into the simulated reality and have his memory erased. In exchange, Cypher provides information on the location of Morpheus, who is considered a significant threat to the machines. Similarly, we see with trans activists, for the most part trans identifying men, who are prepared to betray others to validate the simulation they desperately wish to live in—right down the demand that we erase their existence as a man by demanding the state punish those who deadname them or misgender (i.e, correctly gender) them. We are to erase our memory of the truth of gender and replace it with a simulation without any actual referents. And so the corporate state tells us how we must think about gender, even if it contradicts the evidence of your eyes and ears—until that time when your eyes and ears will betray you. (See Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module.)
As I wrote above, a woman, the adult female human, can be represented in many ways, and has been throughout history and across culture, but gender ideology cherry picks culturally and temporally specific attributes of women’s identities and experiences without considering or acknowledging the individual perspectives and choices women make in their lives. The trans identifying man is not what he wishes to be—or how he wishes others would see him. He cannot even know what it feels like to be that which he isn’t, so he seeks to blur the lines between reality and simulation, attempting to craft a map that precedes the territory, the lay of this land determined by stereotype and typification but which is said to essential and nonessential simultaneously, a pending entry in the Newspeak dictionary. This is why we are told that a man does not think he is a woman when he identifies as such but that he is in fact a woman, his authentic self there from the beginning. His gender, preexisting, and contrary to his sex, is found and affirmed. “Trans women are women.” To fail to affirm his gender is an act of genocide, for he is at once a woman and a member of an oppressed sexual minority. But what he is has not actual definition. It is whatever he says it is.
The same is true for all individuals who imagine themselves to be what they are not. A furry may have a cat identity, but he cannot know what it feels like to be a cat. Like a child, he can only pretend to be such a thing. (Remember how much it annoyed your parents when you acted like a cat or a dog? That’s because badly acting like something you’re not is obnoxious and creepy.) But he does not have to be a cat since he can be a cat-human, walking about upright.
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith long ago told us that the only way any of us can know what some other person thinks or experiences is through our imagination, and our imagination depends on the cultural and social materials available to us, by abstracting from concrete instantiations of the thing itself a symbolic representation of it. If we attempt to render the abstraction in concrete form, we find that it is a copy of a copy or a representation of a representation, not the thing itself, a degree of abstraction distancing representation of some thing from its original referent, thereby, and only falsely, disconnecting women from the reality of the category. This is what “cis” means to convey: an actual woman is not really a woman, but a person who identifies as that which she was assigned at birth.
By assuming the term “cis,” and the Ministry of Love demands we all do, it is implied that women who identify as such are endorsing the stereotypes that the trans identifying man appropriates to convey his belief that he is what he cannot know internally, that is, what it is to be women. The slogan “Trans women are women” is like “2+2=5,” and it is not merely a demand to lie, but a demand to believe what cannot be true: that women are nothing essential, they are not natural things, but some thing to be acquired, possessed. A woman suit. Denied the truth that she is her body, the woman becomes arbitrary in order to make way for the copy to assert its authenticity; the trans identifying man is no mere symbol, but an intentional agent affecting reality. There is a thing-in-itself there—and it is a man wishing to impose a self-serving order on the world at the expense of others. Not erasing him requires erasing women.
When the trans-identifying man says he is more of a woman than the woman who can only assume she is a women, because the man has, to use the words of the man in the video, “picked out his own curtains” (sometimes the line is rendered with “drapes”), he boasts of his effort to be what the cis woman has been ascribed while denying that woman is not anything but what she is: the result of natural history, which can be many things, including appearing as stereotypically male—something the trans woman could accomplish without changing a thing. (He would of course suffer the pain of his alleged misgendering far more than the stereotypically butch woman.) This creates a system in which women are assumed to support feminine stereotypes merely by not choosing an alternative identity; hence the need for a special name of the category of simply being a woman.
When a woman, an adult female human, says that she is real, the trans identifying man hears her telling him that he is fake. Fake implies inferior, he complains, as if he is a bad copy of a woman. He is indeed a bad copy, only slightly less frightening than Buffalo Bill. You hear danger when the trans identifying man says that being born with a “pussy cat” (a vagina) only makes the woman a coward (a fraidy cat, he should have thought to say). He asks why so many men would rather kiss a puppy dog than a kitty cat. Would they? He is, of course, thinking of himself. He is an autogynephile, a narcissist who is in love with himself imagined as a woman, prepared to use women to reach this end. In truth, he sees women as inferior, as he is a misogynist, a man more woman than woman if he just puts his mind to it. A man more human than a woman, which is why the woman possesses a privilege—a special right to be who she is—and not an objective sex-based right. After all, he had to make an effort to appear as a stereotype of a woman, a simulacrum locked in space and time—and even then with cultural and regional variation. He asks rhetorically, What makes a woman a woman intrinsically? Babies? But trans men have babies. The ability to conceive? They’re working on that in labs all over the world. Soon “cis-women” won’t be necessary. See? There is nothing essential about womanhood after all.
Here’s the better slogan, then: “Transgenderism is transhumanism.” The man in the video is more human than human because he is a simulacrum of a woman, a bad copy, to be sure, but one that is superior because it is not the original, which is deceit. And it will be getting better with technological advance, a project in which we must involve everybody. He laments, “You are the blue print, and I am the copy.” Then he attempts to save himself from his insight: “Then why do you change all the same things we do?” Why do women seek plastic surgery? The patriarchy? Internalized misogyny? Isn’t that what is causing young females at an alarming rate to remove their breasts and sterilize themselves? On his question of whether the original blue print, the mother of our species, the mitochondrial Eve, would recognize the original and its copy as the same species, the answer is, yes, of course she would; humans have an evolved gender-detection module, and it is almost never fooled. Eve would never confuse this man with a woman. She had a few. He never will.
The man has warped his body into a bad copy of a woman, a shabby third-order simulacrum. He is desperate to live in the fourth order where he doesn’t have to defend his existence to those who live in the actual world. He has allies who affirm his delusion. He enjoys the power of the state and the law at his back. But it is not enough. He knows others know he is not really what he thinks he is—and they know that he knows he is not really what he thinks he is. The only shot he has as validating himself as something he cannot be is if he can find some way to compel the rest of us to live in the fourth order with him. To deny the real and enter the Matrix. That’s what is at stake here. Transgender ideology is totalitarian ideology. Resist it while you can.
The trans woman is not even liminal except in the effect he has on others—and he only has that effect if we let him, which we do when we treat him as a ritual object, a totem, a fetish, in this religion of wokeness. He is not really betwixt and in between. He is not somehow across from his gender. He is deeply deluded and profoundly alienated from self. He is at once a frightful sight and an unstable weapon. However, with respect to gender, he is nothing else but a man.
freedom and reason 