Author: The FAR Platform

Update (May 22): I am updating the blog to share a real-world example of the hypothetical I posed in this blog. My hypothetical involves the required revision of a proposal in a team-taught class because the student ran afoul of the teachers’ antiracism. The project was deemed “white supremacist” because it rejected the assumptions embedded in critical race theory. In this real-world case, the teacher gave the student a zero on her final project proposal because she used the construct “biological woman.” Follow the thread on Twitter, as there more videos of this student explaining the situation. Then come back here for my analysis, which follows the posted tweet.

College student gets a 0 on an assignment for using the words “biological women.”

The professor wrote that although the proposal was good, the term “ ‘biological women,’ is not allowed in the course because it further reinforces heteronormativity.”

I’m at a loss for words. pic.twitter.com/NtFsaEcZ6O

— Right Side of History™️ (@xxclusionary) May 22, 2023

From a strictly grammatical standpoint, the phrase “biological woman” can be seen as tautological or redundant, as the term “woman” inherently refers to an adult human female, which is a biological category. The adjective “biological” does not add any new information or modify the term in a meaningful way because womanhood is already understood to necessarily contain a biological component. Of course, language and terminology are not solely defined by strict grammatical rules. In certain contexts, people may use the term “biological woman” to emphasize or distinguish the biological aspect from other considerations, such as gender identity or social roles. It can be used to contrast with the concept of a “trans woman” (a male who identifies as a woman), which is what this student did here. If this were my student, I would have let that slide and approved the project.

However, the teacher said that the term “biological women” is “exclusionary” and further “reinforces heteronormativity” and is therefore not allowed in the class. The syllabus for the class says that students will not be graded on their opinion as long as opinions “do not create emotional or mental harm to your diverse classmates or espouse bigoted or anti-scientific views,” a ridiculous rule since, by emotional and mental harm, the teacher means offensive speech, and that could refer to the unanticipated effects of an array of opinions that could be uttered the parameters of which will likely always be undetermined—and because, as the student points out, it’s the teachers who is being anti-scientific in her views.

Heteronormativity refers to the norms and practices that assume heterosexuality as the default sexual orientation, an obvious default since mammalian species ares dioecious, meaning that individuals are either distinctly male or female (anomalies aside), and sexual reproduction requires the contribution of gametes (reproductive cells) from both sexes. Without heteronormativity, the species does not effectively propagate the genome and risks extinction. (This has no bearing one the reality of homosexuality, which appears in nature across many mammalian species. Rather heteronormativity means that the normative pairing is heterosexual and that this is reflected in culture and history.) As the student notes, the teacher is the one apparently assuming the anti-scientific standpoint by punishing a student for differentiating between a biological category and a social construct produced by a quasi religious ideology.

Last fall, a Long Island teacher was forced to remove two Pride flags from her classroom after students complained that one of them, the Progress Pride flag (that’s the one on the far wall in the above photo), left them “feeling uncomfortable.” Why? It had more colors that the traditional Pride flag. Sarah Ecke, a math teacher at Connetquot High School in Bohemia, refused to take down the flags. In response, the district issued a directive banning all flags except the US and state flags, citing its policy that employees should not engage in political activities in school.

The problem of public school teachers engaged in political activities at school isn’t the actual problem. Teachers should be able to engage in political activities at school as long as those activities don’t involve proselytizing children. While they don’t have the authority to indoctrinate child, they do enjoy the same right to free speech and conscience as the rest of their fellow citizens. If a student can wear a “Let’s Go Brandon” shirt, which he should be able to, then a teacher can wear a pink and blue decal somewhere on her body. Rather, the problem is a public facility appearing to endorse an ideological position. If flags or other movement symbols appeared on the teacher’s body or belongings, or maybe even her desk, that’d be one thing; but, as you can see, the symbols appear on the walls of a civic space—and that’s another thing altogether: in light of the First Amendment, public schools should maintain classrooms and hallways as spaces free of political-ideological symbology and inducements.

A civic space is a physical or virtual place where individuals and groups come together to engage in public discussions, exchange ideas, learn new things, and participate in democratic processes. Civic spaces take many forms including community centers, libraries, public parks and squares, and social media platforms. Crucially, public schools and universities are civic spaces—indeed, in many respects, these represent paradigms of such spaces. Yet, today, across the nation, these civic spaces are festooned in movement flags and other symbology. Alongside the visible symbols of ideological commitments, official endorsements of particular political positions, administrators and teachers have been busy developing and implementing a constellation of rules that constrain the range of the discussable and thinkable. These rules have spawned a pervasive culture that makes thinking certain thoughts automatic, punishable, or unthinkable.

I will illustrate my point with a hypothetical. Suppose a team-taught class at a public university designed to encourage students to develop, refine, and articulate political opinions within the theme of democracy and justice. To these ends, students are required to produce a final project, which is submitted to the class for discussion, asking them to work from a particular position. Suppose one student is of the opinion that the criminal justice system is not racist, contradicting claims made by the instructors of his class. The faculty looks down on the project because it assumes what they regard as a bigoted and reactionary position. One faculty member objects on the grounds that the language in the proposal expresses “white supremacy” by raising the problem of black-on-black crime. The professor demands the student revise the project. The other faculty members agree.

The student might not think to ask whether there is any way the language of the project could be revised to engage the controversy without risking being labeled a white supremacist. If he did think to ask, and he was to discover there was not, then we may conclude that there can be no debate about this topic in the class. The side claiming that the criminal justice system is racist and that blacks are an oppressed group is the only side allowed. A consensus over the validity of critical race theory and the antiracist standpoint it informs has become so valorized that contrary opinions become racist. It would be the same if hegemonic white supremacy were the character of the university and anti-racist opinion disallowed. When did society decide that a crackpot postmodernist theory of race relations represents the intellectual foundation of civil rights? It didn’t. But the university is a space siloed from society, and the clerics there work as if they charged with protecting the sacred doctrine from contradiction.

There is the obvious problem that the facts the student wishes to make known not only contradict the lectures delivered by the professor but also reveal that either the professors know these facts and want to censor them or don’t know these facts and are therefore in need of educating. Put another way, either the professors knows they have no argument, or they don’t know enough to make one, and so they answers with disreputational smears which ensues continuation of both. The faculty do this to avoid having to give up their position, which is sustained only by tenacity to doctrine, and to avoid appearing to not know what they’re talking about (the egos of university professors are massive). So the student is censored and shamed. (Professors bully students in this way more often than one might think. See The State of Cognitive Liberty at Today’s Universities; Science Politics at the University of Wisconsin—Deliberate Ignorance About the State of Cognitive Liberty and Viewpoint Diversity on College Campuses; Death of the Traditional Intellectual: The Progressive Corruption of US Colleges and Universities.)

If faculty set the parameters of an assignment such that the project must support critical race theory, or gender ideology and queer theory, multiculturalism, transnationalism, or whatever, while excluding opposing viewpoints, smearing contrary opinion as bigoted, etc., then faculty are no longer engaged in the practice of teaching but rather have rigged the situation in such a way as to facilitate the pushing of an agenda and the indoctrination of students. This is the opposite of what’s supposed to happen in public university. The university system is rooted in the Enlightenment and liberal values of freedom of speech and conscience. These values demand that contrary opinions get a hearing in civic spaces, which the university is supposed to be the paradigm. Yet the illiberal desire to exclude unfavorable opinions prevails. Rights are violated and civic spaces corrupted.

Civic spaces are crucial for advancing democratic values, fostering social cohesion, and promoting civic engagement. The reengineering of these spaces to accomplish the opposite—to undermine democracy, disrupt solidarity, and redirect student energies—should strike those who care about human freedom as a truly distressing development. Civic spaces should provide opportunities for citizens to connect with one another, learn about the issues that affect their communities, and work together to address common challenges. By creating an open and inclusive environment, civic spaces promise to reduce social tensions, promote understanding and tolerance, and build a sense of shared identity and purpose. Instead, they have become spaces of ideological warfare where what is discussable and thinkable is determined by those controlling those spaces. Those who should be protecting our civic spaces from ideological conformity have become instead the commissars. Instead of upholding their duties as defenders of liberty and democracy, they have become the gatekeepers of the corporate state.

This is especially troubling because civic spaces are not always freely available or accessible to everyone. Often, those who seek them have to pay to enter. For students having to encumber debt to obtain the college degree they’re told they must have to enjoy a decent standard of living, finding that the space to which they have gained access is not always ideologically-neutral, not only in the political actions of administrators and teachers, but in the very architecture of the spaces themselves, can be quite demoralizing. The threats to the liberal purpose of civic spaces are found everywhere: corporate control over information, government censorship, and social marginalization. Ensuring that civic spaces remain open and accessible to all is essential for maintaining a healthy democracy and promoting social progress. And this can only be accomplished by establishing and enforcing rules protecting free expression and conscience and promoting a culture in which free expression and heterodox thinking is encouraged.

However, a competing narrative has emerged characterizing freedom of speech and conscience as the political-ideological projection of white Christian men, who use their power to legitimize and protect the speech they use to oppress others. “All knowledge systems, including those of modern science,” writes postmodernist philosopher Sandra Harding in her 1992 essay “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ’Strong Objectivity,’” published in the academic journal Social Research, “are local ones.” The dominance of Western science across the planet is “not because of the greater purported rationality of Westerners or the purported commitment of their sciences to the pursuit of disinterested truth,” but “because of the military, economic and political power of European cultures.” Harding casts science and ideologically-neutral spaces as “politics by other means.”

For thinkers of Harding’s ilk, the content of Western civilization—liberalism, rationalism, secularism—is an imposition on the rest of the world; its ideas have not won because they are better, but because those who espouse them—white Christian men—are imperialist. Debates and discussions about critical race theory, queer theory, etc., are portrayed as hateful speech perpetuating oppressive systems that bigots justify by wrapping themselves in the First Amendment. CRT, queer theory, and other critical theories are, in contrast, essentially correct on account of the “epistemic privilege of the oppressed”—and it they’re not entirely correct, it is not up to white Christian men to correct them; that is a bigoted act that those with power impose on those without power. Only those who are have asserted an oppressed status, based on a particular theory of power, can debate amongst themselves questions concerning the nature of their oppression, with one definite premise determining their conclusion: white Christian men are the bane of human existence. Given this, there is no reason to proceed with the ethic of neutrality. Indeed, it must be rejected since it “depoliticizes science” by “dissimulating power.” This basic idea, these notions of sociological relativism and the epistemic privileges it affords those who make claims about their marginalized status in a university that accepts the terms that accompany the religion, is what animates Wokism.

When asked by John McWhorter to define Wokism on a recent episode of the Glenn Loury Show, Mark Goldblatt did so in this manner: “I think that Wokism in generous terms is a cluster of advocacy positions that are designed to promote an understanding of and equity for historically marginalized people historically marginalized communities and I think on that level it’s impossible to object to it. It’s the methodology by which that promotion proceeds that is the problem with Wokism because Wokism is a religion.” He explained: “Fundamentally, the methodology employed by the woke it is a sort of direct assault on the Enlightenment values of rational inquiry, socio-religious tolerance, and individual rights. Doing that puts it in a kind of position of bullying, for lack of a better term, when you have decided that reason, that evidence, objective evidence and rational inquiry and standard modes of logic are not decisive in public discourse, then you are in a position of ‘I’m more powerful than you are therefore I can take what I believe to be true and impose it upon you’ and I think that that’s the sort of underside of Wokism, it’s the problematic side far more problematic side.” 

McWhorter wondered, “Why are these people fighting the Enlightenment? Who does this? What makes them feel like they’re on the side of the Angels, these parishioners, which is indeed what they are? Why are they doing this?”

“I think because arguing on the basis of empirical evidence and logic is hard and your side will not win if you don’t have the best evidence and if you don’t have a coherent logical approach,” Goldblatt responded. “On the other hand, if sentiment is raised as a methodology to counter empirical evidence and standard logical modes and anybody can play and, more importantly, I think what that position, what the woke position does, is it changes the nature of the search for truth. That is, it posits that the identity of the person making a truth claim not only influences but can guarantee the truth of the claim itself, that the truth value of a proposition is related to or a function of the identity of the speaker makes the claim.”

What underpins Wokism is the postmodernist epistemic (closely related to deconstructionism). I am in agreement with the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas concerning the problem with the postmodernist standpoint (if it can even be described as such). Habermas sees as a threat to the Enlightenment values of reason and human emancipation. Habermas argues that postmodernism is characterized by a rejection of universal truth claims and a skepticism toward metanarratives or grand theories of history and society. According to Habermas, this skepticism leads to a fragmentation of knowledge and a loss of faith in the possibility of rational, critical inquiry. Habermas also criticizes postmodernism for its emphasis on language and discourse, which he sees as leading to a relativism that undermines the possibility of universal moral standards and objective truth. He argues that postmodernism ignores the role of intersubjective communication and social interaction in creating shared norms and values. Predictably, the postmodernists criticize Habermas for his appeal to Enlightenment values and his faith in the power of critical rational inquiry to achieve social progress.

To be sure, the concept of neutrality is problematic and rightly contested. Even the most neutral-seeming spaces are influenced by implicit biases and power dynamics that can shape who is included and who is excluded from the conversation, as well as how people see the world. These corrupting forces must be taken into account to maintain maximally objective spaces.

However, following Harding, there are those who argue because of this that civic spaces should actively work to promote certain values, such as human rights (as they define them) and social justice (as they define it). Some see civic spaces as opportunities to transgress the social logic that underpin these spaces (ignoring the possibility that that social logic roots in the norms of human rights and social justice). They see opportunities the subvert the norms of free expression and inquiry, as they see them as excuses for bigotry and hate. For them, a college classroom is not a space where students learn how to hone their arguments and better express their opinions, but a space in which deviant student thought is reformed, purged of opinions that reflect oppressive sentiments as theorized by the clergy.

Consider an analogy I have used before: the appropriateness of hanging a Christian nationalist flag in a civic space. To be sure, this depends on the context and purpose of the space, as well as the ethical and legal considerations surrounding the display of such flags. If the flag is displayed to talk about the ideology of Christian nationalism, and those involved are allowed to criticize that ideology, then the educational purpose of such a display is explicit. If ethical and legal considerations surrounding the display of the flag is consistent with the First Amendment and universal human rights, then the result at which those defending that civic space arrive should be valid.

In general, civic spaces are intended to be inclusive and welcoming to all members of the community, regardless of their religious or political affiliations. Displaying a flag that promotes a specific religious or political ideology may be seen as exclusionary or divisive, and could potentially create a hostile or unwelcoming environment for those who do not share those beliefs. There needs to be a legitimate purpose, then, for displaying the flag.

Christian nationalism is a controversial and polarizing ideology that has been associated with authoritarianism, white supremacy, and xenophobia. If this ideology is accurately conveyed and those participating in the discussion are permitted to criticize that ideology, then there is educational value. Otherwise, promoting such an ideology in a civic space is a violation of the principles of democracy and human rights. The same is true of the Pride and Progress Pride flags.

The difference between hanging the United States flag and hanging a Christian nationalist flag or a Pride flag in a civic space is significant in terms of the values and meanings that are associated with each flag. The United States flag is a national symbol that represents the nation as a whole, including its culture, history, and ideals—among these the rights to conscience and speech. While there may be different interpretations of what those ideals are, the flag is generally seen as a unifying symbol that represents the diversity and unity of the American people.

On the other hand, the Christian nationalist flag, or the Pride flag, represents a specific religious and political ideology that is associated with a particular segment of the population. This ideology promotes the idea that the United States is a Christian nation, or that there is a consensus on the matter of gender ideology and seeks to impose certain values and beliefs on the country’s laws and institutions. These ideologies have been associated with exclusionary and discriminatory practices towards individuals who do not subscribe to Christian nationalism or gender ideology. In discussing either flag, those in that space must have a robust discussion that allows without consequence relevant and contrary opinions.

The town hall of a city or the capitol of a state can be considered civic spaces, as they are public buildings that are intended to serve the community and provide a platform for democratic engagement and participation. Town halls are often the seat of local government, where elected officials and administrators conduct public business and make decisions that affect the community. They may also serve as venues for public meetings, hearings, and other events where residents can voice their opinions and concerns, and engage in dialogue with their elected representatives. Similarly, state capitols are the seat of state government, where lawmakers and officials make decisions and conduct business on behalf of the state. They may also serve as venues for public events, rallies, and protests, as well as for public education and historical exhibits. Here, flags other than the state or national flag should not be allowed to fly.

Civic spaces are supposed to be neutral in the sense that they should allow all people to participate, regardless of their gender, political, or religious affiliation. However, civic spaces are created by people and people come with biases. As a result, it is impossible for any civic space to be completely neutral in practice. But there are some things that civic spaces can do to promote neutrality. They can make sure that all voices are heard and that no one is discriminated against.

One model for defending the purpose of civic spaces was developed by Habermas. Habermas introduced the concept of the “ideal speech situation” in his 1981 two-volume Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas argues that social order is created through communicative processes that involve the exchange of reasons rather than through the exercise of authority and power. The ideal speech situation is a necessary condition for communicative action to be genuine and undistorted by power imbalances or other forms of social inequality.

The ideal speech situation is a construct Habermas developed to describe conditions necessary for genuine, free and open communication to take place. Here, all participants are free to express their opinions and ideas, and they do so in a way that is not influenced by power dynamics. All participants are assumed to be equally knowledgeable about the topic being discussed, and they are all committed to the pursuit of truth and understanding.

In an educational setting, not everybody will always be equally knowledgeable. Here the person organizing dialogue in the space must take special care to uphold the commitment to the pursuit of truth and understanding in enlightenment. It’s cliche, but the idea is to teach people how to think, not what to think.

Habermas was no idealist. He understood that the ideal speech situation can only be approximated in real-life communicative contexts; however, the model provides a useful ideal to aspire to in order to promote genuine dialogue and democratic deliberation. The idea is that by striving for the ideal speech situation, participants create a more open and inclusive public sphere, where all voices are heard and all perspectives are taken into account. Indeed, civic spaces should be open to all people, regardless of their ideology.

When a civic space is organized ideologically, it can create a hostile environment for people who do not share the same beliefs. This can make it difficult for people to participate in civic life and to share ideas. Civic spaces are not meant to be echo chambers; they are meant to be places where people can come together to discuss different ideas and to learn from each other. When civic spaces are organized ideologically, they stifle debate and prevent people from hearing different perspectives.

We need to create civic spaces that are open and truly inclusive—which requires viewpoint diversity. We need to make sure that everyone feels welcome and safe, regardless of their opinions, not by excluding or punishing opinions. We need spaces where people can come together to discuss different ideas to build a more just and equitable society.

Magneto is a fictional character in the Marvel Comics universe. Magneto first appeared in X-Men #1 in 1963. He was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. Magneto is the leader of the mutant supremacist group the Brotherhood of Mutants. Magneto’s name is Max Eisenhardt, aka Erik Magnus Lehnsherr. He is a Holocaust survivor, an experience that (somehow) shaped his belief that mutants are the next step in human evolution and that they should assert their dominance over humanity. He is a villain in the comics, albeit his cause is righteous.

However, Magneto’s Jewish heritage was not a part of his original backstory. In the beginning, and for many years after, he was pretty much a stock supervillain. The “revelation” of his Jewish identity and his experiences during the Holocaust were added to his character’s history in 1981 in X-Men #150. Writer Chris Claremont, whose mother was Jewish, provided Magneto with his Jewish ethnicity because he wanted more Jewish characters in Marvel Comics and to give Magneto a compelling backstory. The idea was to help readers understand Magneto’s intense determination to protect mutants from the same kind of persecution he experienced as a child. In the years following, Magneto’s Jewish heritage became an ever more significant aspect of his character. The transition from Erik Lehnsherr to Max Eisenhardt as Magneto’s actual name occurred in 1991, in a story also written by Claremont.

On May 15, Elon Musk of Tesla, Twitter, and other business endeavors, tweeted this:

Soros reminds me of Magneto

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2023

Musk was immediately attacked by the corporate media as an “antisemite.” CNN: “Elon Musk claims George Soros ‘hates humanity.’ The ADL says Musk’s attacks ‘will embolden extremists’” In his Atlantic essay Elon Musk Among the Anti-Semites, Yair Rosenberg writes, “Criticizing George Soros is not inherently anti-Semitic. But casting him as an avatar of evil is.” The Washington Post: “Musk says George Soros ‘hates humanity,’ compares him to Jewish supervillain.” The story’s subtitle: “The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League condemned Elon Musk’s comparison of Soros to Magneto—a Marvel villain who opposes humanity.” The New Republic: “Elon Musk Goes Full Antisemite After George Soros Dumps Tesla Shares.” The Daily Beast: “ADL CEO Says Musk’s Soros Tweet ‘Will Embolden Extremists.’” Forbes: “Musk Fans Conspiracies About George Soros After Billionaire’s Fund Dumps All Tesla Holdings.” The Jerusalem Post: “Elon Musk says Soros ‘hates humanity’ and likens him to a comic book villain Holocaust survivor.”

Did Elon Musk know Magneto was Jewish? More importantly, does it matter? What is the logic that gets us from a tweet comparing two villains to “Elon Musk is antisemitic”? I can’t find the logic in these (and many other) accounts of the scandal. I have written about this before (see See George Soros and the Cudgel of Antisemitism; George Soros, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism) and I have not yet found a compelling explanation for how one Jew can signify an entire ethnicity such that to compare him to another man (in this case, a fictional man) makes one guilty of disparaging an entire ethnicity. I asked a form of this question in previous blogs, but would it be Teutophobia to compare Klaus Schwab to Red Skull? Does Red Skull represent all ethic Germans? Does the Magneto character represent a Jewish stereotype? Or does the character represent a champion of the downtrodden and dispossessed? Isn’t that what Claremont was after in reconstructing the villain’s biography? Isn’t that how progressives see Soros?

In November 2021, I wrote this about claims that criticizing Soros were antisemitic: “To gain some perspective, compare the characterization of criticisms of Soros with progressive complaints about the Koch brothers, Charles and the late David Koch, two billionaires who fund conservative political causes. Their father, Fred Koch, was the son of a Dutch immigrant. You might ask what that has to do with anything. Good question. What does George Soros’ ethnicity have to do with anything? George Soros is no more the personification of world Jewry than Fred Koch was the leader of a Dutch cabal to change American attitudes towards the fossil fuel industry. Moreover, if you know anything about Jewish politics and opinion, you’d know that Soros doesn’t speak for world Jewry. Indeed, a great many Jews do not like George Soros.” In April of this year I wrote this: “Alan Dershowitz is a high-profile critic of Soros. Dershowitz is a Jew. Does Dershowitz advance anti-semitic conspiracy theories? Or is he a ‘self-hating’ Jew?”

Antisemitism refers to discrimination, hostility, or prejudice specifically directed against Jewish individuals as a religious, ethnic, or cultural group. It involves the perpetuation of stereotypes, conspiracy theories, and hatred towards Jews based solely on their Jewish identity, rather than their actions or behaviors. If criticisms of a Jewish individual’s financial activities are based on evidence, facts, and specific actions, without invoking negative stereotypes or generalizations about Jewish people as a whole, then it can be seen as a critique of an individual’s conduct rather than an expression of antisemitism.

George Soros, a billionaire investor and philanthropist, has been involved in various political activities and initiatives over the last several decades. Soros is well known for his support of progressive causes and outsized capability of moving the transnational project forward. Soros established the Open Society Foundations, which is a network of organizations that operate in over 120 countries providing grants and supporting various groups in advancing woke progressivism. Soros has made substantial political contributions to support candidates and causes aligned with his progressive values, his donations primarily focused on Democrat Party candidates and initiatives related to criminal justice reform, immigration, and social justice issues. Soros has funded media organizations and journalism initiatives that promote these issues. Certainly Soros has the right to donate money to those causes he supports where not restricted by law, but others also have the right to criticize his activities and their consequences. And while there is a free speech right to mischaracterize the sentiments of those who oppose Soros and his activities, those who know these to be misrepresentations must step and call it out.

What I argue in those blogs I argue here: the power elite are reinforcing the notion that one must not criticize a man who funds progressive causes if he is also Jewish or else one is a special kind of racist. Magneto is not a Jewish stereotype. Marvel Comics did not reimagine Magneto to entrench antisemitism. This is a necessary and false assumption. Elon Musk’s tweet is being used to put a chill in the air—to frighten the public into silence about a billionaire aggressively influencing progressive causes. But it’s more than this. It’s yet another opportunity for elites to delegitimize the owner of a powerful social media platform who allows speech that disrupts the progressive narrative. Musk is being labeled a racist because elites want to drive away his business and break him so they can assume greater control over the propaganda apparatus they have used for decades to disrupt political consciousness.

It is crucial that in the days to come that Elon Musk refuses to apologize for this tweet. For to do so would obscure the fallacy that criticizing George Soros is antisemitic. Soros is a powerful force in the world of progressive politics. People must be free to criticize those with power. Musk is not criticizing Jews. He is criticizing George Soros.

Straw man arguments irritate me. As I write this, there are a number of threads over at Twitter about big government and parental rights mocking Republicans for their alleged hypocrisy of on the subject of gender affirming care (GAC). What inspires the threads are the many states rolling out laws protecting children from medical-industrial project to physically alter the bodies of vulnerable children from profit.

The recent actions of Florida Republicans have especially enraged woke progressives; Governor Ron DeSantis, a principal demon in the religion of Wokism, is uniquely triggering to the faithful. Like Trump, DeSantis’ existence robs folks of their capacity for reason. If parents have rights, the progressive argument goes, then don’t they have the right to submit their children to life-altering hormonal treatments and surgical procedures? Who is the government to tell parents they cannot submit their daughters to doctors for breast bud amputation or their sons for castration?

The argument is not only offered in bad faith; the problem is misrepresented. This is illustrated by a person wondering how GAC could be construed as killing or injuring a person, which was a question put to me recently.

We can look at the clinical data. There is the case of physicians killing Nathan Verhelst who begged them to on the grounds of “unbearable psychological suffering” after gender affirming surgery turned him a “monster” (his words, not mine). There is the case of the death from infection of one of the study participants in the Dutch transgender experiment, a 16-year-old who underwent vaginoplasty surgery (this is a procedure to create a faux-vagina) using part of his intestines, which were infected with E. coli.

But we could more generally ask, first, using an exact analogy, whether the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) constitutes an injury to the body, and, second, whether FGM is an injury depends on the ideological perspective that a priori legitimizes forms of injury by denying the injury.

To test the latter proposition, one should ask oneself if the practice of FGM is justified by ideological claims (cultural/religious) to which one does not subscribe. In other words, is FGM only an injury when one does not subscribe to the ideology justifying it?

The reality is that, depending on who is asked, FGM is not only a perfectly legitimate practice, but necessary. The practice of FGM, also known as female genital cutting or female circumcision, which involves the alteration or removal of female genitalia or some part thereof for cultural or religious reasons, reasons its opponents quickly note are non-medical, thus illustrates the problem.

FGM is practiced in many countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as in some immigrant communities in Europe and North America. Although the practice can be performed on women of any age, FGM is most commonly performed on girls between infancy and during and through puberty.

Some cultures see FGM as a rite of passage. Others see FGM as a way for women to conform to traditional gender roles. Crucially, it is the mothers and other members of the community of women in the society who often carry out the procedure. Many of those on whom the procedure is performed look forward to the moment their status will be elevated.

Those who oppose FGM insist that there are no health benefits to the procedure and, moreover, the procedure can cause a range of short- and long-term health problems, including severe pain, bleeding, infection, difficulty urinating, menstrual problems, infertility, and complications during childbirth. In some cases, FGM can lead to death.

For those who have any awareness of the realities of GAC, all of the problems with FGM will sound familiar. So is opposition to FGM condemned by prefix or suffix? Is it an “anti” or a “phobia”? Or is it a recognition that belief can be so powerful that it moves people to cut off parts of a girl’s genitalia, not only putting her at risk of health problems but also possibly robbing her of the ability to fully enjoy sex for the remainder of her life?

As the reader knows, FGM is widely recognized as a human rights violation and a form of gender-based violence. The United Nations and many governments, as well as numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), have launched campaigns to raise awareness of the harms of FGM and to work with communities to end the practice.

Those who oppose this practice are quick to stress that an understanding the cultural context of FGM is vital not for legitimizing the practice but for developing effective interventions to prevent the practice. Indeed. This is why I share the cultural and religious reasons those who claim to care about those they mutilate continue to mutilate them: I want to make the obvious point that it is equally as important to understand the cultural context of GAC.

After all, so-called medical science is a cultural practice. It is a cultural practice underpinned by the imperative of the medical-industrial complex to generate profits for its shareholders and the high salaries commanded by those who administer the service. If you study the reason GAC is “necessary,” you will see that the ideology behind the practice is as sketchy as the ideology behind FGM.

There are many other examples testifying to this reality. Swishing out or disconnecting the frontal lobe of a child to calm him (a procedure called lobotomy) is no different than the practice of boring a hole in a man’s skull to release the demon that makes him wild (a procedure called trephining). Both are justified by ideology. Slapping the label “medicine” on the practice doesn’t change anything.

It is vital that those thinking about the world recognize that there is only one form of knowledge about the world that is objective, and this is the rational and empirical practices of scientific humanism. Don’t be confused by the jargon of so-called “medical science.” Medical science is a form of scientism, meaning that it is ideology that dresses itself in scientific jargon. It is primarily the expression of corporate power.

In the capitalist context, “medicine” is not based on science but shaped by the pursuit of profits, which means that justifications surrounding its practice are tailored to the imperative of capitalist accumulation. This is why I call it the “medical-industrial complex” in my writings: just as the military-industrial complex uses the rhetoric of national defense a cover for making money, so the medical-industrial complex uses the rhetoric of health case as a cover for making money. One finds the same thing with extractive industries, and so forth. The imperative to accumulate capitalism bends knowledge to its needs—that is, the profit motive, rooted in the exploitation of human beings, their labor and their desire (which is manufactured), corrupts knowledge.

To be sure, there are other ways of knowing that are unscientific, even antiscientific. Religion is unscientific. Quasi-religious ideologies, such a queer theory, are also unscientific. Queer theory is derived from the postmodernist epistemic, which depicts science not merely as one way of knowing, but as a no more valid way of knowing than, say, indigenous ways of knowing. More than this, science is a work of evil, as Western civilization raised it to its highest level and Western civilization is white supremacist.

Once science is made to stand equally or in an inferior position to other ways of knowing, then crackpot notions of gender as advanced by queer theory become perceived as viable. The medical-industrial complex, the type of system always on the prowl for legitimizing ideologies, has no problem with taking up the ideas of queer theory to build its transgender services.

One might complain that GAC is no more valid than FGM, but they will be reminded that no knowledge system is valid because there are just a myriad ways of knowing. Given that any way of knowing is at least just as valid, the lived experience of a person suffering from a personality disorder becomes a valid mode of knowledge production and practice based in that production. This explains why the Internet is chockfull of individuals celebrating their disorders. The medical-industrial complex is all too eager to take advantage of disordered individuals.

There is a lot of tweeting about how parents could transition their children. Some diagnose the problem as Munchausen’s-by-proxy. Munchausen’s syndrome is psychological condition in which a person fabricates or induces symptoms of illness in themselves for attention and for project virtue in the sick role. Munchausen’s-by-proxy is where the mother develops the condition and fabricates or induces symptoms of illness in her child. The mother of reality TV star Jazz Jennings is held up as an example of this. But why does this have to be a disorder? Are Muslims disordered? They mutilate the penises of their boys. Do those who practice FGM mutilate the genitalia of there girls because they are disordered? They do it because they are signaling virtue. They are marking the body for tribal identification. It’s a primitive impulse. The religion of Queer Theory apes Islam.

I don’t know a single Republican who believes government should play no role to play in protecting children. Maybe these people exist, but they are too few to be detectable and, if detectable, too few to matter. Certainly the polls don’t indicate this.

The actual question is not whether the government should have a role to play vis-à-vis children but what the nature of that role should be. Should parents be the primary guardians of their children? Or should the state raise children?

That’s the broad question—and if you’re in favor of the latter, then ask yourself who put the fascist in your head. Indeed, the state already plays a major role in socializing children, and the failure to see the problem with that suggests an inadequate concern about the problem of totalitarianism.

We do indeed find parents who believe the government should stay out of some medical decisions, such as the routine vaccination of their children. They are often portrayed as viewing vaccine mandates as a violation of individual freedom and choice (which of course they are) and arguing that parents should have the right to make certain medical decisions for their children without government interference. However, the desire to protect children from vaccine mandates is a safeguarding action that is quite different from the desire of parents to submit their children to unnecessary and potentially harmful medical intervention.

Despite the anthropological fact that the concrete or empirical form of family and its role in society has varied across time and cultures, the family has been since time immemorial the foundation of the social order. In ancient societies, the family was the basic unit of social organization. In Rome, the family or “gens” was an extended kinship group that formed the basis of economic, political, and social life. In ancient Greece, as well as in traditional Chinese society, the family, albeit more narrowly conceived, was the primary unit of social organization. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the family was the unit of economic production, with each family responsible for producing goods and services for their own use and for trade with others. In modernity, the family has continued to play a central role in society. Industrialization and urbanization led to the nuclear family becoming the dominant form of family organization in many societies, a development that only made the role of the immediate family more central to the upbringing of children as individuals, albeit the functional specialization of institutions, such as the system of public education, undermining this primary function, bringing us to the problem we are today facing. In all these cases, however, the family was the primary source of social and emotional support—as it should be.

Despite the centrality of the family in history, there are those who argue for the abolition of the family on the grounds that it is an oppressive system. Abolishing the nuclear family was part of the now deleted manifesto of the Black Lives Matter movement (see Disrupting the Western-Prescribed Nuclear Family Requirement for my discussion of this). And Black Lives Matter, as is Antifa, a trans activist organization.

Queer theorists have long criticized the family as a coercive heteronormative institution that restricts individual freedom and reinforces social inequalities. Judith Butler argues in her book Gender Trouble that the belief that the family is a natural and universal social institution is ahistorical; the family is a historically contingent and culturally specific institution (Butler has a gift for presenting the obvious as discovery). Butler’s argument echoes Michel Foucault, who was more explicit in depicting the family as a manifestation of oppressive power relations. Likewise, in her book, Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick emphasizes that the family is a mechanism for enforcing heteronormative ideals, as if heteronormativity is relative and an imposition, rather than an expression of species-being.

These views have not remained contained in the realm of crackpot academic theory. The controversy over gender-affirming care, a form of medical treatment said to support the physical and psychological well-being of transgender individuals, which includes a range of interventions, from hormone therapy and surgery, represents the struggle between progressive forces seeking to legitimize the control of children by the state over against parents who mean to protect their children from harm.

Parents object to gender-affirming care for a variety of reasons, not only for religious or cultural reasons, but out of concern for the efficacy and safety of these interventions. However, governments in the West, including the United States, Canada, and some European countries, amid increasing recognition of the rights of transgender individuals, including the right to gender-affirming care, establish laws and policies using the language of human rights and social justice, while skirting questions of medical ethics, that prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, which in turn are used to undermine parental authority.

The parental rights movement is not an objection to public safety, the safeguarding of children, etc. It is an objection to the imposition of an expansive notion of the state as parens patriae, i.e., the state as father, beyond its duty to defend the nation from external threats and to protect those who cannot protect themselves. I have yet to meet an advocate of parental rights who thinks, for example, that FGM is appropriate.

The belief that the state and its administrators and technocrats should keep vital information about their children’s health from parents is one of the chief indicators that the totalitarian logic of bureaucratic collectivism has substantially colonized the lifeworld of the people of the West. The parental rights movement has emerged to reestablish the proper boundaries around the state. As a libertarian, I am all for that. As a morally decent human being, I must be for safeguarding children. Where are you?

The Venus of Willendorf is an ancient fertility totem or fetish, so named because of the sexual power of the ancient deity Venus, the Roman counterpart of the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, fertility, and love. Both Venus and Aphrodite were associated with the planet Venus, known to the ancients as both the “morning star” and “evening star,” the brightest object in the sky after Sol and Luna. As the only clearly visible inner planet, Venus moves through phases, and these phases, as well as the phases of Luna, can be associated with changes on Earth. (Lucifer, the bringer of reason, is also associated with this star.)

The Venus of Willendorf gets her other name from the village in Austria where archaeologist Josef Szombathly found her in 1908. She is estimated to be around 25,000 years old and believed to have been manufactured during the Paleolithic era. She is quite small, approximately 11 centimeters in height, and made of limestone. The statue depicts a woman with exaggerated sexual features: large breasts, hips, and thighs. Her belly perhaps swollen in pregnancy. Although the Willendorf Venus is the most famous, there are other examples, including the Dolní Věstonice, Hohle Fels, and Lespugue Venuses. While most of the ancient fertility figurines like these Venuses have been found in Europe, similar fetishes have been discovered in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. 

The theory is that the ancients would carve and perhaps bury the fetish in the ground to control or shape the forces of fertility towards their benefit, as procreation is to anyone capable of reason the obvious imperative of life. It would not have been lost on the ancients, who grasped many profound things about the often uncertain world in which found themselves, that without mothers there are no children, and that where there are no children there is no future. Not only is it the mother that births the next generation with her body, but is also the mother who feeds the children with her body, and who primes their empathic circuitry.

This is true not only of humans, but of the other animals around them—and of Earth herself. We can see this recognition in the ancient fertility rituals we today call Easter, associated with the spring equinox. In many cultures, spring is the time of the renewal of Earth’s fertility. The egg is a symbol of new life and rebirth. The tradition of decorating eggs at Easter can be found in ancient cultures—the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Persians all decorated eggs as part of their spring fertility rituals. In pagan Europe, eggs were decorated with symbols of spring and new life. The hiding of eggs was common in many cultures during spring celebrations as a symbol of the renewal of life. In today’s Easter rituals, the eggs are hidden in the earth to be discovered by the children whose existence is owed to the mother. Hidden, as the Venus of Willendorf was, in the mother.

Although he penned his theory of the role of the mother in cultural and social life long before the discovery of these Venuses, the German anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen, who influenced Louis Henry Morgan in the development of the thesis of ancient matriarchal society (what Bachofen called “gynecocracy” or the regular rule of women), as well as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the development of their materialist theory of history, argued in his 1861 book Das Mutterrecht (translated as “mother right”) that the rise of the patriarchy represented a fundamental shift in attitudes towards the body and sexuality, with patriarchal societies repressing and controlling sexual behavior in ways that matriarchal societies did not.

Bachofen theorized that in fact early societies worshipped the mother, which was apparent in art and design, and this indicated that women played a central role in the cultural and social life of the ancients. The ancients understood the life-giving power of the female. They saw Earth as the eternal woman. Bachofen argued that because of this women had greater autonomy and power in matriarchal societies. They were able to express themselves in ways that were not possible in patriarchal societies. Woman sat at the center of human life. Without the female, there was no world for humans to animate with their labor—no world to develop with their creative powers, a creativity in their alienation that would come to confuse them about this very truth: that women are real and material and necessary.

The overthrow of mother right and the subordination of the community of women to men, who then defined what a woman was, is, and can be, in contradiction to what natural history made her, changed the character of religion from the focus on fertility and love to the androcentric obsession with destruction and domination, to avarice and greed. Once in power, men established the rule and veneration of the patriarchs and women became their subordinates. Men remade the deities after their likeness—male—eventually become one—and repurposed the existing rituals, for example the association between Easter and eggs, in which Christians took a symbol of new life and resurrection and made it about their creator god incubated in an immaculate womb to be reborn in human form so that god could die for the sins of mankind—if only mankind will accept on faith this claim as valid (the specter of hellfire tells they’d better). The material fact of motherhood became the spiritual lie of father right. So the eggs are decorated and exchanged as gifts on Easter Sunday to represent the tomb from which Jesus was resurrected, not the mother. The mother was only a vessel to be used by a heavenly projection in the image of the male. From agent to incubator.

Today, patriarchal society wishes to deny the real and material and eternal (at least until the sun explodes or man destroys the world). Women are being erased by a new religion, marked by rage and jealousy and poorly made simulacra, that treats actually-existing things as mere social constructions, reifications determined by an ethereal and evil power defined by narcissists in terms of obstacles (the original meaning of “Satan”) blocking the way to their becoming what they are not and can never be. Transhumanism and the destructive and nihilistic character of its workings is everywhere and growing. Those who most grasp the truth are the prime targets of its misogyny. So this year and in the years that follow let Mothers Day take on a different and more urgent meaning. It has never been more important in history as it is right now to recognize the central role of the mother in our lives and the destructive forces that seek to diminish her.

This past Thursday, I blogged about Race and Violent Death in America. In that blog I showed that an examination of the interracial character of murder in America finds far more white victims of black-perpetrated homicide than the other way around, putting the lie to the perception that blacks are at special risk to white-perpetrated homicide, a false perception fueled by selected cases such as the Ahmaud Arbery shooting, where, to quote The New York Times,  “a 25-year-old Black man was chased by white residents of a South Georgia neighborhood.”

There is another phenomenon revealed by the statistics of violent deaths that, in this case generates more questions than answers concerning the racial profile in American lethal violence. This is the vast racial difference in type of violent death: whereas blacks are more likely to die at the hands of other blacks, whites are more likely to die by their own hands.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were a total of of nearly two million homicides and a total of nearly one and half million suicides in the United States between 1968 and 2021. Crucially, the ratio of homicides to suicides is not stable during this period. In the early 20th century, the homicide rate in the United States was relatively high, with rates reaching their peak in the 1970s and 1980s. However, since the 1990s, the homicide rate has generally been on a downward trend (although rising over the last decade). Meanwhile, the suicide rate has been on an upward trend since the early 2000s, and now exceeds the homicide rate. However, the racial pattern of homicides relative to suicides remains roughly stable over this period.

Keep in mind that most homicide during this period is intra-racial, meaning that blacks are more likely to murder other blacks, while whites are more likely to murder other whites (see my recent blog for statistics on this concerning the ten most violent states in America: Is It Guns?). Overall, more blacks than whites are the victims of murder, despite blacks being only around 13 percent of the population. Independent of race, most of the victims are male. It’s when we look at all violent deaths that we find this disturbing pattern: that while most blacks who die a violent are homicide victims most whites who die a violent death die by their own hand. (Note the adjustment in period from 1968 to 2016. This is because of data availability.)

I want suggest a few possible causes and then leave further reflection of this phenomenon for future blogs. First, white suicide has increased with the emergence of transnational capital and the practice of offshoring manufacturing jobs and importing cheap labor. For workers, the loss of livelihood and economic freedom for those for whom these things matter can be emotionally devastating. Second, the life expectancy of whites is much longer than blacks due to the latter’s extraordinary frequencies of homicide. The longer one lives, the more likely their death will be at their own hands. According to various statistics, adults over the age of 65 have a higher rate of suicide compared to any other age group, with the highest rates among white males over the age of 85. (Suicide is rapidly increasing among white youth, so this pattern may change in the future.)

Whatever the explanation for this disparity, it is hard to see in this pattern any indication of white supremacy in these statistics—unless one supposes that whites are more likely to commit suicide out of an unbearable sense white guilt. If this were true, it would only further debunk the claim that America is fraught by white supremacy.

Biden’s policy is open borders. They’re lying to you when they tell you it’s not. They lie to you about everything else, so why would you believe them now? 

Who’s lying to you? That’s not hard to figure out. Simply note who’s telling you that the southern border isn’t open. If they’re not lying, then they’re too uninformed or ideological confused to help you understand the situation.

But you don’t need their counsel. The situation isn’t hard to figure out. When an authority hands an illegal alien a slip of paper telling him to appear in court and then allows him to go wherever he wishes in the country he just illegally entered, that’s open borders. 

Who’s coming across our southern border? The border-crossers will claim they’re a desperate lot seeking asylum. They’re coached to say this by the network of forces bringing them here. They’re told they have a right to cross our borders. 

The network is a vast and powerful transnational system that includes UN and US government agencies, NGOs, and other actors, many of whom are religious. Partner agencies and organizations include state and national government actors, such as the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), Department of State, Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Department of Health and Human Services, state refugee coordinators, state health coordinators, and the United States Citizen and Immigration Services. Non-governmental partners and refugee advocacy organizations include Refugee Council USA (RCUSA), InterAction, and the Cultural Orientation Resource Exchange (CORE). Resettlement agencies that partner in the process include Church World Service (CWS), Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM), Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), International Rescue Committee (IRC), US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS), United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), World Relief Corporation (WR), and International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Those streaming across the southern border of the United States may indeed be a desperate lot, but the majority of them are coming to work, which will displace native American workers and drive down wages for all workers in the United States.

Nobody has a right to come to come to America for work. Why doesn’t every native American have a right to a job? If an American worker doesn’t have a right to his job, how does a foreigner have a right to his job?

Why do progressives care so much about the desperate foreigner but so little about the American worker that they will prioritize the needs of the foreigner over the needs of their own countryman?

Consider the ghettoization and custodial management of a large portion of black America—the crime and disorder, the poverty and fatherlessness that plagues black-majority neighborhoods. Who created this situation? Who maintains this situation? The same people clamoring for and rationalizing open borders. Progressivism is the political-ideological project of corporate statism. Progressivism is the operating system of the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus.

Corporations want cheap super-exploitable labor to drive down labor costs and generate greater levels of surplus value—this to accumulate ever greater amounts of capital. Driving down labor costs is not only about exploiting cheap foreign labor. Corporations want cheap native-born labor to exploit, as well. Just as they seek third-world labor globally, corporate power is building a third-world labor force right here at home. They’ve already substantially achieved their dream. Just look around you. Now they want the full-on nightmare version.

Corporate state power—totalitarian monopoly capitalism—seeks one-party rule and the continued decline of the American republic, as well as the substantive destruction of its operating system (democratic-republicanism and classical liberal freedoms) in order to prepare the American worker for full incorporation into the transnationalist neo-feudalist world order they’ve been designing and implementing for decades, a world in which the world proletariat will exist as serfs in a high-tech global control system.

The party scheduled to be that one party is the Democrat Party. Democrats believe that establishing one-party rule requires changing the ethnic and religious composition of the nation. This is the strategy of multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, openly pushed by transnationalists more than century ago. (See An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion. See also my March 2019 blog The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate.)

This is why American workers and their children are compelled to undergoing training in the false belief that concern for their communities and the integrity of their culture and laws is racist and xenophobic. Why would public and private institutions establish DEI offices? The dominant institutions of contemporary America have have become indoctrination and reeducation centers. It’s why the state is telling parents that their children are also its children.

The goal corporations seek depends on entrenching division, fomenting resentment and rebellion, and spreading chaos and confusion. Among the millions streaming across the border under an illegitimate president’s necrotic watch are criminals and psychopaths and drug and human traffickers.

The world is giving up its lumpenproletariat to the network, dumping their social problem on America (and Europe, as well, the peoples of those many countries also scheduled for full incorporation in the new order of things).

The third world capitalism created is dumping its problems on a nation that can’t fix its own problems: rampant crime, structural unemployment, and a public education system captured by ideologues—all problems created by a corporate state that is insinuating itself into the most private and sacred spaces of human life. This is fascism’s second-coming. This is the New Fascism.

I don’t want to leave readers feeling as if the situation is hopeless. There is a way out of this: Bridging the Left-Right Divide to Confront the New World Order (see also Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism).

* * *

How about these xenophobic nativists? Do black Chicagoans not like black and brown people? Racists the lot of them? Or is this protest AI generated?

South Shore, Chicago voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a whopping 97%

This is how residents are reacting to 250-500 migrants coming to their area: pic.twitter.com/X4lbibdStV

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 12, 2023

No, these are citizens who grasp the heart of the matter. The city of Chicago is now facing legal action from residents of South Shore due to its plans to convert an abandoned high school in the area into a migrant respite center. Last week, hundreds of South Shore residents attended a meeting where they criticized the city officials’ plans to open the respite center for incoming migrants in the former school building.

Meanwhile, the city has declared a state of emergency due to the influx of migrants. Chicago has already received over 8,000 migrants since August, with over 200 people arriving daily. The influx is overwhelming police station lobbies, and the city cannot open shelters fast enough. One question critics have is why the city would place migrants in an area where they could be further traumatized. All three temporary shelters, including the proposed South Shore High School location, are on the South Side of the city.

Wake up sleepy people. The red rooster is on the prowl. The Democratic Party doesn’t represent your material interests. It hasn’t for decades. The Party represents the imperative of transnational corporate power. Democrats are the party of global capitalism. Here’s what waking up sounds like. Listen to it. It’s a beautiful sound. Perhaps a little late. And that’s frustrating. Folks will need to go all in the other direction to turn it around now. Half-ass won’t work anymore.

One of greatest myths progressives push is the lie that violent white oppression is the bane of the black community. The public is constantly subject to scaremongering about white supremacy, accompanied by rhetoric about slavery and lynching, historic events portrayed as occurring only yesterday. We are told that, not only are racist whites the major threat to domestic tranquility, but that white supremacy is woven into the fabric of American civilization. But when it comes to interracial patterns of homicide, the direction of the relation lies opposite of what elites tell you. Whites are at much greater risk to be murdered by a black person than the other way around.

Before moving to the analysis, I have to note the effort to paint those discussing this matter as racist. Antiracists point out the vast majority of homicides are intraracial, meaning that blacks are more likely to murder other blacks, while whites are more likely to murder other whites, and that this fact somehow negates the importance of understand interracial character of crime—this coming from the crowd that dwells daily on the alleged threats whites pose to blacks.

The intraracial character of homicide (and many other serious crimes) is well-known and expected for reasons I explain in this blog. Raising the matter is an obvious attempt to obscure the reality that, when it comes to interracial crime, whites are at much greater risk—several times greater, in fact. What is significant about this fact is that it contradicts the narrative that the United States is a country where blacks have to live in fear of whites. And that is why the accusation of racism is leveled: antiracist want to stop Americans from hearing facts that undermine the false narrative that white people represent a threat to black people.

It must also be recognized that, when the problem of black-on-black homicide was raised by liberals like Heather Mac Donald in 2016 in the context of a moral panic over fatal police shootings, discussing the matter was also racist. (Disclaimer: Back in 2016, I was one of those who was blasting Mac Donald for raising the matter of black-on-black crime. See my essay Changing the Subject From the Realities of Death by Cop, published by by TruthOut in June of that year.)

Here’s the formula behind the thought-stopping: when the subject turns to interracial homicide, those who discuss it are smeared as racists; when the subject turns to intraracial homicide those who discuss it are smeared as racists. The only side that is allowed to raise the matter of black-on-black crime are those who appeal to those statistics to obscure the facts about black-on-white crime.

Now on to the analysis.

The United States population is mostly comprised of white people. Estimates of the proportion made up by whites range from around 67 percent if Hispanics are excluded to as much as 75 percent if white Hispanics are included (two-thirds of Hispanics are racially white). Blacks comprise around 13 percent of the US population. Based on data from the US Census Bureau in 2020, the sex ratio (the number of males per 100 females) for non-Hispanic whites was 95.1. For the demographic category of non-Hispanic blacks, the sex ratio was 88.6. (Due to Hispanic male immigration to the US, the sex ratio disparity is washed out if ethnicity is included.)

The prevailing narrative, organized and peddled by the elite apparatus of cultural and intellectual production, is that the white majority oppresses blacks and that while racism is in most walks of life subtle it is obvious in its effects. Among the most obvious effects of entrenched white supremacy are the demographic patterns in criminal justice. Two facts stand out. First, despite the reality that cops kill twice as many whites as blacks every year, blacks, representing a quarter of these deaths, are overrepresented in lethal police shootings relative to population. Second, despite constituting only 6 percent of the US population, black men comprise around 36-38 percent of state prisoners. These two facts propel the rhetoric of antiracist organizations such as Black Lives Matter.

I have debunked both of these claims on Freedom and Reason. The first is dismissed by the large body of scientific literature showing that, controlling for benchmarks and situational factors, the unexplained variation in racial patterns of lethal police shootings indicates that cops are more likely to shoot white suspects than black ones, with close examination of these studies suggesting that cops are more reluctant to shoot black suspects than white suspects because scrutiny will be greater the costs to their careers and reputation are too great if they shoot a black suspect. (See my June 2020 blog The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters for a review of the literature.)

The second is dismissed by statistics indicating the overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime. Blacks perpetrate most homicides and robberies, as well as a disproportionate amount of other crimes, including aggravated assaults and burglary. For the most part, the demographics of crime statistics align with the prison statistics, which is to say that there is no evidence supporting the claim that prison demographics reflect systemic racism in the criminal justice process. Consider that, according to the latest statistics, more than 60 percent of state prisoners were convicted of violent index crimes, e.g., murder and robbery. (See my August, 2019 blog Mapping the Junctures of Social Class and Racial Caste: An Analytical Model for Theorizing Crime and Punishment in US History.)

I have also blogged about the problem of the interracial character of crime (see my August 2020 blog Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?), which, if the claim that whites oppress blacks were true, should find that blacks are more likely to be the victim of white violence rather than the inverse, a perception reinforced by media-hyped cases of white-on-black violence portrayed as racially-motivated. But the facts show the opposite. I want to dwell on this fact for most of the remainder of this blog. However, I will close with a set of statistics that raise profound questions about where American civilization been for the last fifty years and where it will go from here.

First, on the question of interracial crime, which you will have heard phrased as “black-on-white” and “white-on-black” crime, you will find below a chart showing the yearly estimates of homicide, the most serious form of violent crime in America, from the years 1968 to 2021. Homicide is a frequent occurrence in America; hundreds of thousands of Americans have been the victims of homicide since 1968—nearly 700,000, in fact. It is important to recognize that homicide is one type of violent death. Another is suicide, a matter that I will turn to in closing.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, between 1968 and 2021, there were 697,952 homicides. Among the 194,500 interracial homicides that occurred during that period recorded by the FBI, there were 145,500 white victims of black-perpetrated homicide. Contrast this with 48,000 black victims of white-perpetrated homicide. This means that black-on-white homicide comprised 75.3 percent of the total. In other words, comparing the relative frequency of these types of interracial homicides, for every black victim of white-perpetrated homicide, there are approximately three white victims of black-perpetrated homicide.

When we consider the sex of the victim in the numbers, we find that the ratio is worse when the victims of murder are women. Blacks murdered 35,000 white women compared to 6,000 black women murdered by whites. This means that 85.4 percent of female murder victims were killed by blacks. Put another way, for every black female victim of white-perpetrated homicide, there are approximately 5.83 white female victims of black-perpetrated homicide.

When the occasional story appears in the media suggesting a disparity (e.g., here, in which US News & World Report examines the period 2001-2015), the story quickly fades. The statistics are hidden in plain sight; the elite know most people don’t have the training to locate them, let alone interpret them. It’s enough that the media doesn’t dwell on them. They’re hidden in this way because they contradict the narrative of a racist nation that thrives on the oppression of blacks. But you can find them (all my sources are provided in this blog).

What explains these ratios? There are probably lots of reasons; however, I am convinced that one of them is the narrative I am debunking. When blacks are repeatedly told that white people are the cause of their misery, that blacks as a group have been subjected to centuries of white oppression, that whites owe black people a debt they won’t pay, individual whites come to be seen as representatives of a collective target of retribution, their alleged crimes serving as a technique of neutralization that diminished the moral concerns one human might have for another.

Put bluntly, the disparity is in part explained by a pervasive anti-white prejudice that has been cultivated over the course of several decades by the elites who control the means of cultural and intellectual production. Some blacks target whites out of a desire for retribution. Blacks target white-owned businesses in acts of street-level reparations. It is, as Karl Marx and Frederich Engels conceptualized it a century and a half ago, primitive rebellion—in this case against a situation that doesn’t materially exist, but is rather the product of elite manufacture, the function of which is to disorder proletarian consciousness.

We had an explicit case of this recently in the racist murder of Lawrence Herr.

Lawrence Herr was murdered on April 11th while fixing a mailbox

He was killed by 2 thugs who went hunting for a white person to kill

Say his name: Lawrence Herr pic.twitter.com/xaBa6UHe2t

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 10, 2023

“If the risk of homicide were random, given de facto patterns of residential segregation and the routine activities of humans,” I wrote in an August 2020 blog, “one should not expect these numbers. It might follow then that, based on the logic we see in arguments concerning implicit bias and systemic racism, the numbers suggest systemic anti-white prejudice.” I have in the meantime become convinced that this it the case.

I also noted in that blog that this argument should not be objectionable to progressives one can expect will object to the argument even if there is no evidence of anti-white prejudice in these crimes. “Keep in mind, according to antiracists, for the argument of systemic racism to work, we don’t need explicit race prejudice. We need only disparate patterns to make the call.” However, I think it’s clear that we have quite a lot more than merely aping the rationalizations of the antiracist. One will find no shortage of videos of blacks attacking whites with clear racist intent.

I have learned that Jordan Neely had numerous arrests (nearly four dozen), some for serious offenses, including felonies. He was twice accused of randomly assaulting elderly persons on the subway, the last time in November 2021 when he broke the nose and orbital bone of a 67-year-old woman as she exited the subway in the East Village. At the time of his death, there was a warrant out for his arrest in that case. In July 2018, he threatened the conductor and terrorized passengers on a train that had left the 207th Street station. He was convicted in 2015 for attempted kidnapping of a seven-year-old girl. He was seen dragging the girl down the street. He pled guilty of child endangerment and received four months in jail. In 2010, he threatened to kill his grandfather. There’s more, but you get the point.

How does a person like this wind up on a subway threatening passengers so that it required them to collectively restrain him? Shouldn’t public safety—and Neely’s safety—have required humane confinement? What kind of government not only doesn’t protect people like Neely, who was clearly unwell (sounds like paranoid schizophrenia), but also allows him to be a danger to others? From the sound of it, it was only a matter of time before Neely seriously injured or killed another human being. That he is no longer menacing residents across New York City is a fate city authorities left him to. His death is on their hands. Hopefully they won’t scapegoat the young marine who was one of the passengers restraining him.

Another question observers might have about his case, since it indicates a pattern, is why woke progressives find angels in dangerous criminals like George Floyd and Jordan Neely. Remember when murals of Floyd included angel wings and a halo? You may also remember that Floyd kidnapped and brutally beat a woman named Araceli Hernandez during a home invasion. He was looking for drugs and money. She was pregnant and Floyd shoved his gun in her belly and asked her if she wanted her baby to live. That was just one of the many criminal actions perpetrated by Floyd during his life. None of those facts are useful for the elite project to divide the proletariat.

And that brings us to the answer to these question: the lionizing of street criminals and the failure of the state to control them is the work of left idealism, one of the central programs of the woke progressive operating system. Left idealism is a doctrine in a religion where black people serve as fetishes for white virtue signaling and for engendering the ritual ecstasy of social unrest. It’s energy the power elite channel towards corporate state ends. They used this energy in 2020 to fuel a color revolution organized by the deep state ran against Trump’s reelection bid. I will write more later about how Black Lives Matter, fueled early on by two fake media accounts, was organized as a major corporate state player in 2020.

There is also this: The drastic overrepresentation of blacks in the most serious street crimes in American cities, especially homicides and robberies where they commit a majority of these offenses, and statistics showing that whites are far more likely to be the victims of black offenders than blacks are victims of white-perpetrated violence, facts I have documented on Freedom and Reason several times, dramatically contradict the narrative that it’s whites who are violently oppressing blacks. These facts moreover reflect badly on blacks as a group, a situation that progressives are keenly sensitive to since it is progressives who move on the ground of group identity: if all whites are to be blamed for racism against blacks, then it follows that all blacks are to be blamed for the high crime rates associated with their demographic (not my view). One way to spin difficult facts is to aggressively flip them around. This is a tactic of big lying. So turn black criminal offenders into the saints of their race. It’s something blacks should on the whole resent, but Democrats, the party of the establishment, have been highly successful in controlling the race narrative. Part of their success at this is due to the cultivation of a black misleadership class, what the Black Panthers would recognize as colonial collaborators. Meanwhile, progressives look at blacks who tell the truth as Uncle Toms.

There are protests at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Is this practice for summer 2024?) A petition is circulating. The protestors are upset at a student who was videoed engaged in the thoughtcrime of “racist speech” and they want to ruin her life over it. Students and campus organizations are demanding UW-Madison expel the student after she riffed on a fantasy where, after she kills herself, she goes back and haunts every black person who ever wronged her and make them pick cotton until they die of thirst. Her rant, expressed through what appear to be tears (there is some pain there), is peppered with the racial slur “nigger.”

Despite calls from numerous students and organizations for the expulsion of the student, university officials have stated that the speech in question is protected under the law. On Monday, UW-Madison released a statement saying that it is unable to restrict the content of personal social media posts made by students and employees or take action against posts that are not unlawful. In a subsequent email statement on the following day, LaVar Charleston, UW-Madison’s deputy vice chancellor of the diversity and inclusion, reiterated the university’s stance, explaining that “the law does not permit the university to punish individuals for words spoken in private spaces, even when those words are racist or hateful.”

Charleston’s statement to students is troubling given that he only references “words spoken in private spaces.” To be sure, the UW System cannot control citizens beyond its reach. But the principle of free speech must apply even more so public speech. The student the mob is hounding is a citizen of a republic with a bill of rights that enshrines her freedom to express herself without abridgment. Surely the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion (a position that sounds like it’s from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) misspoke. Why is the university even commenting on what a student said? To try to keep histrionic personalities from burning down the campus? Are they trying to continue the ruination of the student’s reputation?

Not that this would trump the First Article of US Bill of Rights, amendments to the US Constitution that protect the fundamental freedoms of people, but authorities are noting (albeit sounding regretful over having to do so) that the current administrative code of the UW System Board of Regents provides little regulation of student “hate speech.” Chapter UWS 17 of the code, which outlines actions that can result in disciplinary action for nonacademic misconduct, does not specifically address “hate speech” on or off campus. Nor should it, authorities should hasten to add. More than this, the very concept of “hate speech” is problematic, and the way in which the authorities are speaking in this case assumes its validity as a category of speech and therefore functions to valorize the legitimacy and utility of the term.

Policing “hate speech,” a practice that is rising throughout the West, is synonymous with the totalitarian practice of punishing individuals for thoughtcrime, the tyranny Orwell so named in his warning to the world Nineteen Eighty-Four. To punish speech based on content violates the core principle of free speech, which allows individuals to express any viewpoint, even those that are controversial or offensive, without fear of legal or social repercussions. Restrictions on “hate speech” can thus be seen as a form of censorship that infringes upon a fundamental right.

What office will determine what speech is allowed and disallowed? Who will determine what is “hate speech“? Who shall be commissar? “Hate speech“ is self-evidently subjective and difficult to define because it depends on who is defining it—and that depends on who has power. Different individuals and groups have different interpretations of what constitutes “hate speech,” which inevitably leads to inconsistencies—indeed, injustices—in how it is enforced and on who it is imposed. Depending on who is in power, what constitutes “hate speech” will vary, and this tells you that the control of speech is an expression of power, with the goal to prevent speech that might upset that power. The policing of “hate speech” results in a chilling effect on speech, where individuals self-censor for fear of being accused of thoughtcrime, even if their statements are not intended to be hateful as defined by the powers-that-be.

Paradoxically, restrictions on bigoted speech are counterproductive, as they drive extremist views underground and make them more difficult to combat through open dialogue and debate. The best way to counter hateful views is through open and voluntary discussion, where facts and reason are brought to challenge and undermine extremist ideologies more effectively than legal restrictions. Americans largely stopped using racial slurs, such as “nigger,” not because they were punished for using the word, but because open discussion about the ideology that word expresses, as well as the passing of laws criminalizing the material practice that ideology legitimized in the nation’s institutions, led to the word’s disuse in its original intent. (The word continues to be uttered, of course, but for the most part for a different purpose, albeit not without controversy.)

Because of the rising threat of thoughtcrime, and its growing institutionalization across Europe, a ringing endorsement of free speech is especially crucial at this moment. At a Wednesday demonstration organized by student organization The Blk Pwr Coalition, students called for Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin to establish a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech across all UW System campuses. One of their demands included the creation of bylaws that would enable expulsion for “overt racial hostility” under the Board of Regents’ nonacademic disciplinary procedures. This demand should have immediately been met with condemnation by UW System representatives. Instead, the authorities expressed regret that they couldn’t do more. This should scare the shit out of students across the system.

There are rules in place that, if they remain in place, afford liberty some protections. These rules were the result of previous free speech struggles. Chapter 17 rules were established, in part, as a result of a 1991 Wisconsin Supreme Court case, UWM Post v Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. In that case, UWM Post, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student newspaper, sued the UW System and others for guidelines on punishable speech that were deemed “too broad and ambiguous.” The lawsuit ultimately resulted in the removal of those rules from UW System policy. But it will take an effort to keep rules like this from again making their appearance.

The situation at our universities has moved Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to encourage the UW System to remove campus diversity offices. The media has gone to some length to pair Vos’s call, which I support wholeheartedly, with the video of that UW-Madison student expressing, to quote the Daily Cardinal, “harmful rhetoric against the Black community.” The harmful nature of the rhetoric is difficult to grasp given that the content of the speech concerned a student imagining committing suicide so that her ghost could haunt black people by making them pick cotton, something that is so far beyond the realm of the possible that it hardly warrants anything other than a puzzled look. At any rate, since Vos called for the elimination of these offices only days after the video appeared, the appearance of the video should have caused him to not call for the elimination of the offices. Or something like that.

* * *

So, the university cannot punish individuals for speech uttered beyond the university, specifically thoughts conveyed in the private spaces (where Winston keeps his journal, just out of the telescreen’s line of sight). And, we’re told, there is some degree of protection for speech uttered on campus, thanks to a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling. Great.

But, to be perfectly honest, it doesn’t feel like it when you are there. These days, the university feels like a cathedral. The professoriate and its administration appear as a clergy, the subjects they profess sounding more like doctrine with religious-like sensibilities than rational instruction guided by Enlightenment values.

The university has become a very illiberal space, and those speaking for UW-Madison, instead of leaning into the principles of free thought and conscience, are apologizing for them. It sounds as if, if they could punish this student, they would. “We’d like to burn the witch at the stake, too, but we are constrained by the legacy of liberalism.”

I will illustrate my trepidation using the ubiquity of gender ideology in academia, an ideology to which I do not subscribe (because it is unscientific and dehumanizing), but with which I avoid engaging on campus because of the probable consequences for doing do.

The censorship is backed by the regime of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The purveyors of the doctrine preach that, in order to recruit and retain faculty and students of diverse identities, identities that deserve systemic privileges because of their alleged marginalized statuses (the equity piece), universities have to establish, elaborate, and entrench and a regime of inclusive language and practices. The regime is managed by officers who monitor faculty and students and generate bias incident reports with which to harass those who would think thoughts contrary to the doctrine of the regime. DEI scares me.

Beyond the walls of the cathedral, I use the terms “woman” and “mother.” I know, we’re told in so many words that, to be inclusive, we should avoid these terms. However, in reality, the terms refer to exclusive properties that inhere in the actual world. One function of language is to accurately convey in speech acts the actual world; since only females can be women and mothers, one should refer to them as such. Put another way, because natural history makes the rules that govern sex, and since nature has made sex in mammals exclusive (anomalies aside), and since gendered terms are species-specific references to the females and males of the various species of the mammalian class, to deny the truth of these categories is to deny the truth of natural history.

Demanding we deny this reality is an instantiation of war against science and the Enlightenment being waged by the forces of postmodernism. And, while the liberal values of the Enlightenment allow those who wish to be women and mothers to deny objective content of those categories, they are not free to compel others to deny those categories.

At least they shouldn’t be. However, as I reported recently in my blog NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech, public institutions in the United States are compelling inclusive language and punishing employees for failing to do so. How long before employees of the NIH will suffer punishments meted out by their employers at the NIH for things they say beyond the confines of their employment?

My ability to express the truths of sex and gender (which are uncomplicated and have been confidently known for millennia) will last only as long as freedom of thought and conscience are respected and protected—and the reality is that these freedoms are in very real danger of extinction by the forces of a new religion, i.e., woke progressivism.

The extinction of these fundamental freedoms is being hastened not only by the trans-Atlantic elite project to erase gender differences in humans, but by the willing adoption of such erasure by the masses. And while my worldview is based on scientific humanism (I never work from supernatural premises), and I apologize for this admission of cowardice, I am compelled in some institutional settings to perform certain rituals in order to survive.

I am more than a few years away from retirement yet (thanks to betrayal of Democrats in 1983), and I wish to keep my job. It would not surprise me if things change where I am no longer free from the reach of my place of employment to utter truths, including those uttered before the rules changed, but I am hoping to retire before the sands of freedom run out and the flying monkeys are let loose.

I have practiced this cowardice before. I do this when I visit your church. I won’t do everything you expect of me at your church, since I don’t accept your religion, but I will go some ways despite my skepticism. I will sit quietly and hear the prayers and sermons. I might even stand when you do. Since the university has become a church, my tolerance for the irrational is expressed in much the same way.

But know this: whatever the ritual in which I partake, in whatever church I am sitting or standing in, in the breeze of whatever doctrine is being professed, my actions convey an act of bad faith. Because I work from facts and reason, if ever you hear me say something in there at odds with the things I say out here, know that I am lying. I am lying either because I am humoring some person or group (that I am unreligious doesn’t mean that I am unsympathetic) or because I’m trying to finish my career and my life without being punished by those who hold my livelihood and reputation in their hands.

In other words, I am not really a free person. But, then, neither are you. You may appear braver than me, but I bet that bravery depends upon your location and situation. I’m not in a good place. And I am all alone there. Maybe you are in a better place. So please accept my apologies for my cowardice and don’t yell at me too much.

From Business Insider: “When the Supreme Court in 2010 handed down its ruling on Citizens United v. FEC, Democrats were scandalized. Then-President Barack Obama warned it would ‘open the floodgates’ to corporations influencing politics by diminishing restrictions on corporate speech.

“But now, as Disney v. DeSantis has become an actual legal battle—with the Walt Disney Corporation suing the Florida governor for retaliating against it after CEO Bob Iger criticized DeSantis’ policies—the political roles have reversed. Liberals remain scandalized (albeit for different reasons) but now seek the protections the Citizens United ruling offers.”

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) was a landmark case that involved the constitutionality of political spending by corporations and unions. The case centered around a political advocacy group called Citizens United, which sought to air a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries. The FEC had prohibited the group from airing the film because it was funded by corporate donations, which were banned under federal election law. However, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United, holding that the First Amendment of the US Constitution protects the right of corporations and unions to engage in unlimited independent political expenditures, thereby effectively invalidating portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold), which restricted the ability of corporations and unions to engage in political spending.

The Citizens United decision was controversial and drew criticism from those who believed it would give wealthy special interests an outsized influence in elections. Some have argued that the decision has led to a proliferation of so-called “dark money” in politics, as corporations and wealthy individuals can now spend unlimited amounts on political advertisements without having to disclose the sources of their funding. Others have defended the decision as protecting free speech rights under the First Amendment, a defense that rests in part on corporate personhood.

Corporate personhood is a legal concept that grants corporations the same legal rights and protections as individual persons under the law. This includes the ability to enter into contracts, buy, own, and sell property, and sue or be sued, among other rights. In the United States, the concept of corporate personhood has been affirmed by several Supreme Court decisions, including the landmark case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Critics argue that it grants corporations too much power and influence, as it allows them to make political donations and engage in other forms of political speech as if they were individual persons. Some activists have called for the abolition of corporate personhood, arguing that it undermines democracy by giving corporations undue influence over the political process.

As some of my readers will know, I was highly critical of the Citizens United v. FEC decision and have long been hostile towards corporate personhood generally. I am a dedicated small “d” democratic—a populist. I believe governments should have the power to control corporations—not the other way around. (See Richard Grossman on Corporate Law and Lore.) Watch now as progressives take the side of Disney because the value the message.

What is the message? Disney aggressively queers its programming for children. It also pushes the anti-racism line (see Disney Says, “Slaves Built This Country.” Did They? See also The LGBTQ Lobby Sues Florida). Democrats were all worked up when corporate power interfered with their electoral ambitions. Now that one of the main pushers of gender ideology is facing people power in the shape of Ron DeSantis, Democrats can’t allow democracy to happen. For Democrats, what does democracy look like today? Corporate governance and power. Also remember, when you hear Democrats raise the alarm over threats to democracy, what they are really raising the alarm about is threats to the corporate state and the project to change mass conscious.