Author: The FAR Platform

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.

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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.

“How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!” —Samuel Adams

Dictionaries are becoming tools of tyrants. Ask your dictionary to define “woman” and you might see what I mean.

Merriam-Webster still defines woman as an “adult female person,” but it defines a girl as “a person whose gender identity is female,” with “gender identity” defined as “a person’s internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female.” A “female” is defined a person “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”

How does an invention of gender ideology, i.e., the construct “gender identity,” make it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary?

Cambridge includes among its definitions of “woman” “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” Here again we see gender ideology at work valorizing the queer theory claim that gender identity is a person’s internal sense of being female.

It’s odd to see such a convoluted definition to a basic word with a plain meaning in such a prestigious dictionary, but that’s the result of having to put things in a way that (hopefully) does not enrage the gender ideologist—charitably assuming that Cambridge is not associated with tyrants.

Ask yourself, is a rectangle “a closed 2-D shape, having 4 sides, 4 corners, and 4 right angles (90°)”? Or is it “a thing we call a rectangle”? Go look and see. And a square? That’s “a closed 2-D shape, having 4 equal sides, 4 corners, and 4 right angles (90°)” (emphasis mine).

You may not even be aware that some of the major dictionaries you ripping the meaning and usage of some of the surest words in your language right out from under you, not on the grounds that the majority is using those words differently today (they aren’t—not yet, anyway), but because the elite have embarked on a project to change the meaning and usage of words.

Many of you find it hard to believe. Why would elites do such a thing? The answer is rather obvious if you study the history and nature of totalitarian regimes. Tyrants change the meaning and usage of words to put the people in a state of confusion. Once confused, humans are more receptive to ideological programming.

In his 2004 Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China, Ji Fengyuan argues that language was used as a tool for political control during Mao Zedong’s rule in China. Through a detailed analysis of Maoist language and discourse, Ji argues that language played a crucial role in shaping the political and social reality of Maoist China. The Chinese language was “reformed” to promote ideological conformity. The book provides a fascinating insight into the relationship between language and politics in one of the most tumultuous periods of China’s history.

Confusing the population over the meaning of words was one of the tactics used during the Cultural Revolution in China. Mao Zedong and his followers believed language was a tool of class struggle, and that by manipulating language, they could control the thoughts and actions of the Chinese people. One of the main goals was to reduce the influence of traditional culture. Maoist slogans and terminology were used to create a new revolutionary vocabulary that reinforced Mao’s ideas and delegitimized opposing viewpoints. This resulted in a situation where words and phrases took on new meanings that were often ambiguous or contradictory, making it difficult for people to understand each other and communicate effectively.

As a species, humans desire and activity seek ontological security, and if made to be unsure of what they thought they knew to be true, they will accept in the place of sure knowledge of objective reality and healthy social relations other truths to reestablish their sense of security. They will demand things from others for these ends. They will even hurt other people for achieve it.

The tactic of disrupting normal thinking through meaning manipulation is part of a intentional campaign to produce conditions of anomie. Anomie is a word sociologists use to describe a situation where the normal moral and social standards of collective life become uncertain.

I say intentional because, in queer theory, arguably the most influential instantiation of postmodernist critical theory today (perhaps even more so that critical race theory), this is explicitly part of the praxis. You hear it in the rhetoric of “transgression.”

“Transgression” refers to the warping and breeching of social boundaries and norms, in this case boundaries and norms surrounding gender and sexuality. The concept of transgression is closely tied to the idea of “queering”—disrupting or subverting dominant expectations and prevailing norms related to gender and sexuality. By breaking these norms, individuals believe they are challenging and destabilizing power structures they imagine oppress them. Yet the power structure that runs the world not only embraces queer theory but is a co-creator (more on this in a future blog).

Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist who developed the concept of anomie in his 1893 The Division of Labor in Society. Durkheim defined anomie as a state of normlessness or moral confusion that arises in society when traditional norms and values are weakened or undermined. In modern industrial societies, anomie is the consequence of rapid social change and a lack of social cohesion.

In his 1897 Suicide, Durkheim argued that the presence of anomie leads to higher rates of suicide, as individuals become disassociated with reality, seeking to escape the nightmare world such disassociation brings. In other words, suicidal tendencies can be induced by confusing the individual over the most basic of things, for example gender, and then offering that individual euphoria and salvation through the transformation of his body.

“The nightmare par excellence is the experience of the shattering of the taken-for-granted worlds of everyday life,” Peter Berger writes in his 1967 The Sacred Canopy. “In the face of this disorienting experience, the individual may find a new sense of order and meaning by investing in the symbolic universe of a religious tradition, or in any other symbolic universe that offers a comprehensive view of reality. This is particularly true in the case of the primary group, where the individual’s identity is most closely tied to the symbolic universe of the group. The nomic significance of the group’s symbolic universe can be so powerful that the individual is willing to die for it or find death preferable to its loss.”

Berger argues that this is why joining a cult of religious group is a risk for disoriented persons: because immersion in a fantastic doctrine “provides a new sense of order and stability, and a new basis for the individual’s identity and sense of self.” It’s how Mao more fully integrated the Chinese population into the political-ideology of the communist regime.

If any reader doubts that an entire society can be put through such a transformation, all he needs to do is study the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He can also study the rise and installation of National Socialism during 1930s Germany.

When a person becomes confused about who and what they are, they become vulnerable and easily manipulated. Those who are confused about basic reality are at higher risk to accept irrational belief systems. Totalitarianism depends on disordering the people’s thoughts by throwing them into confusion over the most basic things. One way to accomplish confusion is to change the meaning of the ordinary words people use, for example the words we use to accurately describe sex and gender.

Ji leans heavily on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the concept of “Newspeak.” However, before Nineteen Eighty-Four (his last publication), in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell examined the relationship between language and politics, and his observations here are as important as those in the novel.

Orwell contends that the corruption of language—contamination by ideology—has caused a decay in critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Orwell argues that political language is often deliberately designed to obfuscate meaning—and that this is done to obscure reality and manipulate public opinion. This kind of language is characterized by meaningless words and phrases and pretentious verbiage used to create the illusion of clarity and precision. Orwell insists that language should be used to express ideas rather than conceal them, and that in the spirit of conveying rational and true ideas, writers should strive for clarity and precision in language use.

To summarize, words do two things: (a) describe reality; (b) manufacture reality. Describing reality is a rational act; the goal is to keep people grounded and coordinating activities around real things. Manufacturing reality is the work of the manipulators, the people who mean to dominate us through control over our minds.

To be sure, sometimes we need new words or to respecify them to convey discoveries or novel insights. But that’s part of describing reality. That’s not the problem we’re talking about. We’re talking about the alteration of the meanings of words or common knowledge of history and situations in order to manipulate us. We are moreover talking about the way the standards of dialogue have been trashed to get around the rational demands for fact and logic. Watch this brief video for a brilliant analysis of the moment:

Academia, the administrative state, the corporate media, the culture industry—all these institutions have been captured by a revolution-from-above that is changing the language in order to steer the people into supporting its agenda: the agenda of the transnational corporate state, i.e., global totalitarian monopoly capitalism. Citizens are being disordered to prepare them for reintegration in a new order, one that abolishes democracy and liberalism.

Have you read Nineteen Eighty-Four? No? You should. If you have already, read it again. Update it in your mind to fit today’s situation. The Party is inventing external enemies to frighten the masses (Russia is portrayed as the great threat, while the real threat of China is downplayed or ignored). The Party is punishing crimethink, i.e., thought crimes. You get the picture.

Below is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has thrown his hat in the ring for the presidency. This is a long interview, so you may not have time to listen to the whole thing. But at the very least, you must watch the brief opening. Kennedy crystalizes the problem we are facing.

Steel yourself now before you lose the ability to reason. The time to recognize totalitarianism is not after it has been fully installed. The most effect totalitarianism will make it impossible to resist. Your brothers and sisters will regard themselves as perfectly free. The time to recognize totalitarianism is when you can still resist its installation.

The solution to the problem of anomie, Durkheim argued, is the development of strong social norms and institutions that provide individuals with a sense of purpose and belonging. Our founders provided those norms and institutions. We don’t need to develop an alternative to woke progressivism. We just need to reclaim the American Creed.

Mark Goldblatt, American author, educator, and theologian, recently appeared on the Glenn Loury show to explain the disconnect between homosexuality and gender ideology. Homosexuality concerns one’s sexual preference, whereas the trans gender phenomenon is about “gender identity,” i.e., the internal or personal sense of one’s own gender, which may correspond to or differ from a person’s sex. Homosexuality is not an ideology, but an orientation. The notion of gender identity is a construct of the fastest growing religion in the West: wokism.

In a recent blog, I identified the postmodernist epistemic, which reduces objective reality to a construction of discursive power, as a major corrupting force in the ability of individuals to ask appropriate ontological questions in the current environment. Queer theory, which posits gender identity as a thing, stands upon the postmodernist epistemic. As I explained in that blog, this epistemic is contrary to scientific inquiry since it denies a reality common to all. It purports different truths, with some truths more righteous than others. Liberties and rights are determined by the righteousness of the truth in question. Because there is no standard for determining whose truth is more righteous, the predictable response is hysteria, intimidation, shouting, suppression, and violence.

When asked by Loury to address the construct “LGBT” specifically, Goldblatt begins by noting the scientific consensus that homosexuality is very likely heritable, i.e., it has a probable genetic basis, which means it is not something chosen or very malleable. Put another way, a man does not so much choose his genital preference as he finds himself inclined in one way or the other or to prefer both. (See note at the end of the blog for a bit more on this. This is still an open question.) If true, even to some extent, this shows us why conversion therapy is so wrong: it forces a person to desire something he doesn’t or stop desiring something he does, a desire over which he has little or no control. In light of this, Goldblatt contends that if one believes that a man becomes a woman by his sincere belief that he is a woman, then his homosexuality is instead chosen; becoming a woman when you are male-attracted means becoming heterosexual.

Goldblatt rhetorically asks, what leads children to decide they are living in the wrong body? Many times it is attraction to the same sex, he answers. A boy who likes other boys may believe that he is a girl since, to his immature mind, girls are attracted to boys and vice-versa. If the boy is left to sort all of this out for himself, he will likely become a well-adjusted adult gay man (the British journalist Douglas Murray has made a similar point). Goldblatt notes that many of the children identifying as trans today would have in the past been gay children. Now that children have the option to stop their puberty and change their anatomy (not really, but cosmetically), surrounded by activists, educators, and parents telling them they’re trapped in the wrong body, they don’t have to be gay anymore. This sounds a lot like conversion therapy, doesn’t it? (Follow the link in the caption above to see where the purpose of transition is explicit.)

This is problematic in others ways, as well, Goldblatt notes. For example, recalling the question asked by Andrew Sullivan, a gay man: Am I a bigot because I am not attracted to trans men because they lack a penis? After all, being gay, and this is true for lesbians, too, indicates a genital preference. As I noted in a previous blog (follow the link below to read more), lesbians are attracted to persons with vaginas—actual vaginas. In other words, lesbians are attracted to women.

In a comment section to the video shared at the start of this blog (open the link in YouTube), the following observation can be found (sansacro007): “I’m a gay man. I am attracted to biological men. But ‘trans’ is connected to issues of gender as a social construct. Trans has nothing to do with biology and I can’t see it as anything other than a psychological condition. Gender (a social construct) certainly plays a role in my attraction to men, but my attraction to men is rooted in biology. Trans erases the biological aspect of what it means to be a biological woman or man and therefore essentially erases what it means to be gay or straight.”

The commenter continues: “Trans is completely retrograde in that it reinforces gender binaries while it erases biological sex. There are effeminate men and butch women (not necessarily gay), but such true diversity of gender expression has been erased while the binary has been reinforced despite the even less convincing and illogical claims by many young people of being nonbinary, which essentially not only attempts to erase biological sex but reinforces gender binaries.” Journalist and podcaster Katie Herzog makes a similar point in “Where Have All the Lesbian Gone? She answers, “They’re coming out as nonbinary or as men.”

It follows that, if a gay man identifies as a woman he becomes straight, then a straight man who identifies as a woman becomes gay. We see the logic at work in the construct of the “trans lesbian,” who possesses a “shenis.” To be strictly politically correct, one should drop the “trans” from the construct “trans lesbian.” Since the trans woman attracted to women is really a woman, “she” is also a lesbian. But sex cannot be changed, and since sexual orientation is a sex-based phenomenon, either opposite-sex or same-sex attraction, a trans woman cannot be a lesbian. Nor can a trans woman be a woman. People are losing their careers over refusing to be sucked into the vortex of such delusions.

Note: Several studies have found that sexual orientation tends to run in families, suggesting that there may be a genetic component to homosexuality. However, the specific genes and genetic mechanisms involved in determining sexual orientation are not yet fully understood. Other research has suggested that hormonal influences during fetal development may also play a role in determining sexual orientation. For example, studies have found that exposure to certain hormones in the womb can influence the development of the brain in ways that may be related to sexual orientation. To be sure, genetic tendencies aren’t the only things children inherit from their parents; environment, experience, and socialization are powerful force in transmitting attitudes, beliefs, and inclinations. However, these factors are thought to be less important than genetic and hormonal factors in determining sexual orientation.

“I don’t trust authority. I need to see the details. I need to see the science.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Before getting to the main topic of this blog, I’m hearing once more that I was “radicalized” by Steve Bannon’s War Room, which I started listening to in the winter of 2020 (and have been listening to ever since). Folks who say things like this haven’t taken the time to listen to what I have been saying and writing well before 2020. Just read Freedom and Reason to see where my head is at. Scroll back to 2018 and read my blogs on immigration, left-libertarianism, the false rhetoric of anti-racism, etc. Keep reading through. I’m an open book—the small-d democratic liberalism and populism that animates my politics is plain for all to see. And I am still a Marxist.

I started talking about Bannon publicly in the spring of 2020 because I was only a couple of weeks into listening to his program when I knew the claims that he was a fascist and a racist were propagandistic lies and that his knowledge of international political economy was as sophisticated as the best of the experts on this topic. I ought to know about this, as one of my areas of specialization is international political economy. To put this another way, it wasn’t that he swayed me to some position I did not before hold; I knew he knew what he was talking about. Even for progressives who bother to listen to him at all, his sophistication escape their comprehension. At least most progressives. There are those who know enough to “prebunk” Bannon’s utterances, which is the topic of this blog.

Among the things I have learned working in higher education for some thirty years now is that academics, however capable they are in their intellectual capacities, are a clergy, peddling an ideology, and, as such, are ignoramuses. Ideology makes people stupid because being smart spells the unraveling of the ideology that makes folks dumb. I came around, and continue coming around (most recently on the matter of guns), because I am a dissent clergyman. I’m a heretic. I’m an atheist to the bone. I am because of this capable of being wrong and, therefore, capable of changing my mind. I am my own best opponent.

* * *

Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are two challengers who have emerged (so far) to challenge Joe Biden’s bid for a second term for president. The Democratic National Committee has announced that it will not allow primary debates because the corporate state elite running the Democratic Party know these two things for certain: (1) giving RFK, Jr. a national platform exposes tens of millions of Americans to this compelling figure and his message; (2) RFK, Jr. will destroy Joe Biden in debate. (Marianne Williamson is a crank; she is of no concern to the power elite running the show.)

As for (1), ABC-Disney appears to regret having given RJK, Jr. a platform last night, even issuing disclaimers before and after the interview to explain why they censored key parts of their interview with him. ABC News admitted to editing remarks by the candidate concerning vaccine safety. Why? Because they don’t trust their audience with information about the link of vaccines to autism, etc. RFK, Jr. brings the receipts, and this makes him a dangerous man (this is why Bannon is so dangerous). Linsey Davis warned viewers ahead of the interview that RFK, Jr. peddled misinformation and disinformation about vaccines. At the same time, she used the moment to reinforce the industry narrative about vaccine efficacy and safety. (Good coverage here.)

This is a propaganda tactic known as “prebunking.” The way its advocates explain it, prebunking is the proactive effort to prevent the spread of misinformation and disinformation before it is widely circulated, to kill it in the crib if possible, but manage it otherwise. The premise of the strategy is that it is easier to stop false information from spreading than it is to correct it after it has already gained traction. The goal is to prevent the establishment of assumptions that risk moving thought and belief in an undesirable direction by establishing a framework that builds in assumptions that function to steer the receiver of information towards the desired narrative.

Prebunking involves a variety of strategies: educating people about the tactics used by those who spread misinformation and disinformation; providing accurate and credible information on a topic before false information can take hold; and promoting critical thinking skills that help people identify and evaluate the credibility of information they encounter. Prebunking is a widespread practice used by government, legacy media, and social media platforms. Many of my readers will have experienced prebunking in the form of social media algorithms that flag potentially misleading content or provide fact-checking information alongside posts that contain disputed information.

This is the spin of the pre bunkers. However, prebunking is highly similar to a tactic George Orwell warned readers about in his anti-authoritarian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He called the tactic “crimestop.” Crimestop is a form of thought control used by the Party in Oceania to suppress dissent and prevent rebellious thoughts from taking root in the minds of the citizens. Crimestop is “the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” Crimestop is taught to the citizens of Oceania as a way to avoid committing “thoughtcrimes,” i.e., unapproved thoughts the Party considers subversive. Installed and continually reinforced, crimestop is a mental habit of self-censorship that prevents individuals from fully exploring or considering any idea that goes against the Party’s ideology, i.e., to avoid engaging in “crimethink.”

The Party encourages crimestop through propaganda and by promoting a culture of fear and paranoia, where citizens are taught to distrust their own thoughts and instincts and to seek guidance from the Party on all matters. Through constant disinformation and punishment for disobedience, the Party aims to maintain a population that is obedient and subservient to its authority. What Orwell is conveying in his novel is that crimestop is a feature of totalitarian systems, as oppressive regimes seek to control not only the actions of the subjects of control but also their emotions, thoughts, and beliefs.

Orwell’s dystopian future is quite grim, so really-existing people do not recognize the really-existing world as Oceania. But one should not let that deceive him into thinking that thought-stopping is not a tactic in real-world corporate state arrangements. There are many scholars who have analyzed this. I will focus on one here: Sheldon Wolin and his book Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism.

Wolin argues that the United States (and the analysis applies to other western countries, as well) has been transformed into a form of managed democracy that threatens the core principles of popular sovereignty. Managed democracy is characterized by the dominance of large corporations, the marginalization of political dissent, the manipulation of public opinion through propaganda and mass media, and the erosion of civil liberties and individual rights. In this system, the appearance of democracy is maintained through regular elections and the façade of political debate, while the actual power lies with a small elite who control the levers of economic and political power. One sees this is in the social logic of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

I have blogged extensively about this, but briefly here, in what he describes as “inverted totalitarianism,” Wolin argues that a new form of totalitarianism has emerged that operates in a way that is fundamentally different from the classical forms of totalitarianism seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and it is this difference that permits even greater efficacy in controlling the masses. Under these arrangements, a large proportion of the population mistake their control for their freedom, confusing consumerism with citizenship. In inverted totalitarianism, the state’s power is diffused among multiple centers of power, including large corporations, the military-industrial complex, and the legacy and social media. Instead of using overt repression and coercion, this diffuse power operates through the manipulation of public opinion, the manufacture of consent, and the co-optation of political opposition.

Finally, given (2), how can his handlers even allow Biden to debate Trump? In his last speech, Trump looked solid. The President is once more finding his populist voice and exhibiting greater discipline in messaging. To be sure, he still says outrageous things (executing drug dealers is red meat in the extreme), but saying outrageous things wasn’t a problem in 2016 when he crushed Hillary Clinton. Nor was it a problem in 2020 when he received millions more votes than he generated with his 2016 performance.

Biden, on the other hand, has continued to deteriorate. He is a puppet whose master cannot refurbish. Moreover, all the things Biden said was a lie about him and his family in the 2020 debates are now demonstrably true. They can’t allow Trump to reinforce in the public that the Hunter Biden laptop is real. Indeed, Biden is only still president because the deep state and corporate media have systematically obscured the truth about the Biden crime family by waging psychological warfare on the public, and Republicans know they would never obtain a conviction in the Senate if they impeached him. Trump would pursue the debate as a prosecutor with no consequence for not obeying the commands of the judge. It would serve as a grand jury indictment. Yes, Trump is that smart.

The power elite that run the Democratic Party really believes in its ability to manufacture a consensus of reality. Let’s hope they’re wrong about that. Let’s do our part to make them wrong. Let’s hope that we do not yet live in George Orwell’s dystopia nightmare.

Dr. Phil held a debate between those who advocate gender ideology, which rests on the queer theory claim that gender is a performance, versus those who operate from a reality-based standpoint, which assumes gender is associated with sex, both of which are rooted in natural history and universal sociocultural understanding. In this blog, I explain how gender ideology obscures reality to advance a cultural-political agenda and show why sex and gender are relatively uncomplicated features of material reality.

The clip I want you to view, which starts at 13:34, is cued, but if it doesn’t automatically start from that mark, then please scroll to it. You will have to manually stop the clip at 15:`19. You can watch the entire discussion, but there is a particular point Kara Dansky, the author of The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls, makes that I want to amplify in this blog. Dansky is a powerful voice on this issue and I want you hear this from her.

In the context of biology and natural history, the term “gender” was originally used to describe the genotypic differences between male and female plants and animals. The term was used at least as far back as the 17th century to describe the differences between male and female plants of the same species. The English botanist John Ray is likely the first to do so, at least we know that he did, and usage of the term became widespread among botanists in the following centuries. In 1872, the British biologist Charles Darwin used the terms “gender” and “sex” to differentiate between the female and male genotypes of animal species.

Gender ideology has, with the help of some dictionaries, redefined basic terms in this area and manufactured an overcomplicated explanation to disguise the original meaning and usages. One should always be suspicious when confronted with convoluted and jargon-laden verbiage designed to appear as if the author is conveying deep meanings that elude non-specialists. As somebody trained in the social sciences, it was obvious to me from the beginning that postmodernist language was manipulation in this way. Queer theory is founded on postmodernist epistemic. It was Michel Foucault, the godfather of queer theory, who told his devotees that sexuality is “socially constructed.”

Gender and sex is not complicated when working from the standpoint of natural history. Mammals are a class of warm-blooded vertebrate animals characterized by several distinct features, including having fur or hair, mammary glands that produce milk for their offspring, and (with few exceptions) a four-chambered heart. All mammals reproduce sexually, with males and females each producing specialized reproductive cells called gametes. Gametes are haploid cells, meaning they contain only one set of chromosomes. In mammals, male gametes are called sperm cells, while female gametes are called eggs or ova. Sperm cells are produced in the testes of male mammals through a process called spermatogenesis, while ova are produced in the ovaries of female mammals through a process called oogenesis.

During sexual reproduction, a male mammal will release sperm cells into the female’s reproductive system, where they will travel through the fallopian tubes to reach the female’s egg cell. If one of the sperm cells successfully fertilizes the egg, the resulting zygote will contain a complete set of chromosomes and will, if everything goes well, eventually develop into an embryo. Gametes thus play a crucial role in the reproduction and survival of mammalian species, allowing for genetic diversity and the continuation of life through sexual reproduction.

Mammalian species always come in two genotypes: female and male. As it is in nature, there are genetic and hormonal abnormalities (e.g., chromosomal, androgen insensitivity syndrome, congenital adrenal hyperplasia), that can affect the development of the sex of the species, but these defects are rare and anomalous and do not represent a continuum of sex in the species. Humans, like all mammals, are either female or male. The sex binary is real and unalterable.

Humans have developed language to communicate with one another, and a key feature of language is accurately and efficiently conveying the reality of the world, which is of vital necessity in collectively exploiting and navigating the environment and negotiating social interactions. Gender has become a way that individuals can discuss sexual matters a species-specific way.

Suppose you are on a farm and the farmer is telling you about his bull. A bull is the adult male of the bovine species. The pronouns follow intuitively. The bull is a he because he is a male. When the farmer is talking about the bull, you don’t need to process the information concerning the animal’s gender and sex. You instead focus on what the conversation is about, which is probably not the obvious fact that the bull is a male bovine. There are other males and females of other species on the farm, but you know which species of animal is under discussion because of the species-specific gender.

Judith Butler tells us that gender is a performance. A person many perform gender, such as when a man performs as a woman in drag, a performance that typically demands of the audience suspension of its disbelief. But gender in itself is not as a performance. It is not in its essence a social construction (albeit aspects of gender are socially constructed, which we can plainly see in cultural and historical variability in the categories). The man in drag only pretends to be a woman. He cannot be one, just as the bull cannot, even if we suppose male bovine are clever enough to perform as cows, be a cow. While a person, because he can imagine, may suppose he is many things (an alien, Jesus, a cat, whatever), he is really only what he is from an objective standpoint. One isn’t what he thinks he is unless what he thinks he is what he really is. Otherwise, he has fallen pray to delusion or illusion. It does not matter what a person thinks of himself. It matters what he is. There is no gender identity apart from the objective fact of the man’s gender. His body is not a vessel in which he travels. He cannot trade in his body for another. He is his body.

Postmodernism, the epistemic upon which Foucault and Butler stand up their arguments, is the main source of language contamination in the current period. Postmodernism rejects the possibility to objective truth, which leads to relativism, a standpoint where all ideas are deemed equally valid, regardless of their empirical validity or logical consistency. Postmodernism views all cultural practices are viewed as equally valid and worthy of respect, regardless of their impact on human rights or individual freedoms. As such postmodernism is fundamentally anti-science, viewing science as just another way of knowing, rather than as a rigorous method for uncovering objective truths about the world. Postmodernism focuses on identity politics and social justice issues at the expense of objective analysis and inquiry. With its rejections of all claims to objective truth, morality, and meaning, postmodernism promotes nihilism. Postmodernism is a corrupting force and it has left in its wake a trail of confused, broken, and ruined people.

Carlson was forced out because he had become a populist. He was speaking the language of democratic-republicanism, rational Christianity, and liberal ethics. The more he sounded like a founding father, the more the corporate state loathed him.

Carlson’s opinions are contrary to the goals of the managed decline of the American republic. And he had millions tuning in every night. Populist-nationalism represents the single greatest threat to the emerging transnational order of things.

Carlson was hammering away nightly at the administrative state, economic inequality, the suppression of thought and conscience, and the military-industrial complex. He wasn’t reckless like Trump. He had facts in back of him. And integrity.

Subservient to corporate state interests, putting a stop to consciousness raising is something around which all cable news media can come together. Carlson is still under contract. Can he go to another network? If not, then Murdoch has effectively silenced him for the 2024 election cycle.

But they misread the moment. Populist-nationalism is on the move. The elite won’t stop it by legally hassling Bannon and Trump or kicking Carlson off of Fox. They won’t stop it by menacing parents in the heartland. All that does is strengthen the case against them.

You may have heard that the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020. Red states are therefore more violent than blue states and that’s because red states have lax gun laws and lots of guns. That’s the claim, anyway.

According to Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, writing for Politico, “On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country—in cities and rural areas alike—where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.”

We are hearing this a lot: that where there are more guns there are more guns violence—and the South is where there is the greatest concentration of guns in the United States. Several aggregate studies purport to show this. I stipulate that the evidence generally supports the correlation. However I dispute the claim that it is the prevalence of guns or lax gun laws that produces high rates of gun violence in the South. A closer analysis taking into account demographics supports my argument.

We should note before getting into it that most gun deaths are suicides. The CDC reports that 54 percent of the 45,222 gun deaths in 2020 were suicides, whereas 43 percent were homicides. The remaining percentages were accidental, police-related (at least some of which were suicide-by-cop), or undetermined. Woodard’s charts show that the region with the most suicides is not the region with the most homicides. We should also note that the 19,384 gun homicides is a subset of the 24,576 homicides perpetrated in 2020. Thus, nearly 79 percent of homicides in 2020 were perpetrated by somebody using a firearm. Most of those homicides involved handguns.

Recently CNN treated its readers to an anecdotal account, making a connection between the mass shooting at a downtown Louisville Old National Bank location, perpetrated by a 25-year-old bank employee named Connor Sturgeon, and Kentucky’s lax gun control laws. In “Kentucky has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the US,” Josh Campbell and colleagues report: “Experts attribute gun violence across the state to relaxed laws in obtaining firearms and the absence of any training requirements to handle a legally purchased gun.”

Who are the experts? The journalists cite CNN contributor Jennifer Mascia, founding staffer at The Trace, a nonprofit outlet (activist group) focused exclusively on gun violence. However, Kentucky is not in the top ten states with the highest rate of homicide in America. This blog will focus instead on those ten states: Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Maryland, Illinois, and Georgia.

There is possibly another reason why gun homicides are so high in reds states: the proportion of blacks in the state population in red states is generally much greater than the proportion of blacks in blue states. Fifty-six percent of blacks live in the South. Since blacks commit most murders in the United States—62 percent last year, according to the FBI, despite comprising 13 percent of the population—it follows that these states with a larger proportion of the population comprised by blacks would have higher gun homicide frequencies and rates.

This is not to argue that blacks are naturally more homicidal than whites. This is not a racial thing, if by race we mean grouped genetic differences between demographic categories coded as racial identity; the genetic differences between blacks and whites are trivial. But even if they were significant, where is the evidence that violent tendencies are inherited? (Didn’t Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirsch debunk those claims decades ago?) Rather, blacks are overrepresented in those neighborhoods that are associated with higher rates of murder.

This is not to suggest that the difference in murder rates between neighborhoods is entirely directly linked to structured inequality, either. To be sure, structure plays a major role in the production of social disorganization associated with higher rates of crime and violence. However, culture is a source of attitudes unfavorable to obeying the criminal law. From a materialist standpoint, culture grows out of social structure. Culture is not reducible to that structure. It moreover, in dialectical fashion, shapes social structure. Government policy also plays a role in culture formation, seen for example in the destruction of the black family (see Poor Mothers, Cash Support, and the Custodial State). Overrepresentation of black in serious criminal violence is a product of a subculture that encourages disobedience to authorities and law. (See How Progressive Criminal Justice Policy Puts Black Lives at Risk; America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame; Progressive Panic Over Guns; Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect.)

Here are the ten states mentioned earlier. Except for Illinois and Missouri (the latter status as a southern state is debatable), the states with the highest homicide rates are southern states. First, the percentage of the state population comprised by blacks in parenthesis:

Louisiana: 16.7 per 100,000 (31%)

Missouri: 11.8 (11)

Mississippi: 10.6 (37)

Arkansas: 10.6 (15)

South Carolina: 10.5 (25)

Alabama:  9.6 (26)

Tennessee: 9.6 (16)

Maryland: 9.1 (29)

Illinois:  9.1 (14)

Georgia: 8.8 (31)

Here are homicide frequencies for each state in 2020, in the order specified above, with race identified. The tables are from the FBI Crime Data Explorer.

The data are very clear. In states with high rates of gun homicide and violence, those lawfully possessing guns, disproportionately whites, are underrepresented in gun violence. The solution to gun violence is not gun control. Indeed, if the presence of guns does not explain variability in homicide rates, and it doesn’t, then gun control measures are not merely unnecessary, but they could make citizens less safe. The solution to the overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime is to address the structural inequality that continues to disorganize these neighborhoods, while also confronting the culture of lawlessness associated with these disorganized conditions. Key to this is the rollback of progressive government and restoring the black family.

“How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

He laid his head back against the pillow and sighed deeply. He was not any nearer to understanding O’Brien’s mind, but it had become more and more obvious that he was dealing, in some way or another, with the Party’s most characteristic mental disease—the belief that reality is not only describable in terms of matter-of-fact, but can be changed by the human will.

—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

From the Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office of the National Institutes of Health (NIH): “Intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights.” Note the assumption conveyed by the adjective I have italicized. The relevance of this will become clear as the analysis unfolds.

The main point of the essay concerns the claim that misgendering is a civil rights violation. In fact, compelling a person to use preferred pronouns is a violation of civil and human rights. Punishment for characterizing pronouns as “preferred” or “chosen,” wrong adjectives, as this directive explains, is also a civil rights violation. As the reader will learn today, employees at NIH are being compelled to affirm with their utterances tenets of gender ideology.

The NIH cites as its authority Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, among other things, expressly prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of sex. In 2020, a majority of the United States Supreme Court ruled (three dissenting) that Title VII’s prohibition against sex discrimination includes discrimination based on an employee’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

The Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County is among its worst, standing alongside such notorious rulings as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Schenck v. United States (1919), and Buck v. Bell (1927).

While sexual orientation is reasonably part of what we mean by the term sex, a matter of objective reality (what gametes are produced), gender identity apart from a person’s sex is a subjective matter. It is a feeling. Today, a person may identify as a gender opposite their sex and gain access to sex-based resources intended or reserved for the other sex, compelling men and women to regard men as women and all that entails.

Leveraging the opportunity created by this decision to press gender ideology into the state bureaucracy, the NIH guidance would have its employees believe that “misgendering” a person (rendered in quotes here because by calling either sex the gender of the other it is literally the opposite of misgendering) is a civil rights violation when in fact the rule is the violation of civil rights at its most fundamental level.

To clarify, this has nothing to do with content of speech. It doesn’t matter whether a person believes that a man can be a woman. One is free to believe that if he wishes. This has everything to do with fundamental rights to speech and conscience and whether the government can make a person speak as if a man can be a woman. The same right that allows a man to present himself as a woman (as long as this is not for the purposes of committing fraud), makes it wrong to compel others to regard him as such.

Ask yourself whether it would be appropriate for the government to tell a man he cannot believe he is a woman. Again, a man can believe anything he wishes. Men believe men have souls. Men are convinced men did not land on the moon. (Wouldn’t it be something if that were true?)

It is terribly worrisome that the administrators and bureaucrats at a public institution in a constitutional republic with a bill of rights that explicitly identifies freedom of speech and conscience as paramount among those rights either don’t understand the principle at hand or mean to disregard the principle altogether (as we will see, it is both).

Compelling an employee to use “correct” pronouns, i.e., those pronouns preferred by another person, by discipling (and this includes mandatory DEI training), punishing, or terminating an employee for refusing to do so is a violation of civil and human rights for what ought to be obvious reasons. But since it too often is not, I will provide the reasons.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution (also known as Article One of the United States Bill of Rights) states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

These rights have been applied to all persons under the authority of the United States government through a process known as incorporation involving the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which states that no state may deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

Initially, the Bill of Rights did not apply to state governments. However, over time, through a series of Supreme Court decisions, many of the provisions in the Bill of Rights have been made applicable to the states. This means that states must also uphold and protect the same fundamental rights and protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech and religion.

In the mid-20th century, the Court applied the First Amendment’s protection of religion to state and local governments. In the landmark case Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Court held that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from establishing an official religion, applied to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court reasoned that the First Amendment’s protections of religious freedom were “fundamental” to the American way of life and therefore applied to all levels of government.

Since Everson, the Court has continued to interpret the First Amendment’s protections of assembly, free speech, petition, press, and religion to apply to state and local governments through the doctrine of incorporation. The principle is that these fundamental rights are “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” and are therefore protected from infringement at all and by all levels of government.

(And while the First Amendment to the United States Constitution does not specifically mention freedom of conscience, it was assumed in its formulation and agreed upon during debate that freedom of conscience is a vital aspect of the broader protections for freedom of expression, religion, and thought enshrined in the amendment. Think of your right to privacy: not mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but necessarily assumed for the Fourth Amendment to work.)

This is a powerful package of rights. The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were committed to limiting the power of the government and protecting the individual rights of citizens from the government and tyranny of the majority. The First Amendment was seen as a key safeguard against government overreach and the suppression of dissenting and offensive opinions.

It is as clear as anything could be that compelling a person to regard a man as a woman is government overreach and the suppression of dissenting and offensive views. It is just as clear that the mob can’t compel such a thing, as well.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects speech and thought as fundamental rights, too. Article 19 of the declaration states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Freedom to express one’s beliefs, ideas, and opinions means doing so without fear of censorship or retaliation. The right to free speech and thought is a cornerstone of democratic societies and is essential for the advancement of knowledge and understanding, exchange of ideas and information, and the promotion of individual liberty.

Moreover, the preceding right in this document protects freedom of conscience as a fundamental human right. Article 18 of the declaration states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

Article 18 emphasizes, among other things, the right to express the tenets of one’s conscience without fear of discrimination or persecution. The right to freedom of conscience is essential for the promotion of diversity, individual liberty, and tolerance.

If a woman expresses her view that a man is not a woman and, furthermore, insists that she will not regard a man as such in the utterances she makes in describing the world and in advocacy, as a matter of free thought or conscience, disciplining, punishing, or terminating her employment would constitute a violation of her civil and human rights.

Yet the administrators and bureaucrats at the NIH will tell you that it is the other way around. The institution’s policy upends civil and human rights.

The administrators and bureaucrats at NIH are telling the public that the failure to discipline, punish, reprimand, or terminate the employment of the person refusing to comply with demands violative of her civil and human rights violates the rights of a man who seeks to compel her to regard him as a woman, a right that exists nowhere in the fundamental law I have been citing nor, if supposed by abstract argument surrounding them, cannot stand over the right to speech and conscience.

A woman’s right to describe reality cannot be justifiably trumped by the power to force her to lie. Such power has no authority in law and is therefore illegitimate.

* * *

Compelled speech, which is precisely what a rule forcing an individual to use another person’s preferred pronouns when he does not wish to constitutes, is a violation of the right to free speech and freedom of conscience because it forces the individual to express views or beliefs that are not his own, or that he find objectionable or offensive. It forces him to act in bad faith.

The right to free speech includes not only the freedom to express one’s own ideas and opinions, but also the freedom not to speak or express views with which that person does not agree. The right to freedom of conscience includes the right to hold and practice one’s own beliefs without interference or coercion.

Of course the right to be free to express ones views is at the same time the right to be free from expressing the views of others.

When individuals are compelled to speak or express views that are not their own, this not only violates their freedom of speech and conscience, but it also has a chilling effect on dissent. Compelled speech creates an environment in which individuals are afraid to speak out or express their own views for fear of reprisals or punishment, forcing them into bad faith, making them to lie about the world.

That this situation carries harmful effects diversity of thought, exchange of ideas, and individual liberty—all essential components of a free and democratic society—is so obvious that having to remind people of it tells us that we are far down the road to tyranny. The NIH hopes people don’t consider their rights.

A free man has no more of an obligation to affirm the gender identity of another person as he has to affirm the existence of the angels and devils that populate the religious worldview of a colleague. It violates his freedom to think and speaks according to his beliefs and values to force him to think and speak according to someone else’s beliefs and values. It corrupts the integrity of his person to compel him to think and speak according to somebody else’s “truth.” It dehumanizes him.

* * *

Changing how people think in ways that would not naturally occur to them and for the sake of others at the expense of themselves is tricky business. Check this out:

“Encouraging the disclosure and use of gender pronouns can create inclusive and welcoming work environments for SGM employees and their allies,” the NIH document states.

“One of the simplest ways to promote the appropriate and correct use of pronouns is by being open about your own in everyday communications (introductions, PPT slides, etc). Disclosing personal pronouns at the start of a conversation or adding them to one’s email signature block may make others more comfortable to disclose their own and prevent misgendering in the workplace.”

Here we see the demands of compelled speech as part of a systematic effort as changing the culture of belief for the sake of a particular doctrine, i.e., gender ideology. Thus the policy assumes as given that which demands debate.

One might object to my argument by noting that the document reassures employees that “pronoun disclosure remains an individual choice and not a mandate.” But this is not because it would be wrong to make employees do so. “An employee may not be ready to ‘come out’ and disclose their gender identity to their colleagues, and a mandate would create unnecessary pressure and stress.” Did you think the directive was centering you and your concerns?

Furthermore, the document continues, soaked in the jargon of woke progressivism, “mandating all employees to use pronouns may come off as performative allyship, especially if employees are uncertain or unable to articulate why correct pronoun usage is important.”

“Performative allyship” is a term used to describe when someone outwardly expresses support for a marginalized group, but their actions or actual beliefs do not align with their words. This occurs when someone performs allyship for the sake of appearing to be an ally, rather than truly committing to doing the work of being an ally and advocating for change. It occurs when someone engages in acts of charity or tokenism without addressing the systemic and institutional forces and practices that perpetuate discrimination and inequities.

Performative allyship is harmful, we’re told, because it gives the impression of support without actually doing anything to create real change. It also centers the ally’s feelings and need for validation, rather than the needs and experiences of the marginalized group they claim to be supporting. True allyship involves an ongoing commitment to learning, listening, and actively working to dismantle systems of oppression, rather than simply performing support for appearances.

Given widespread prejudice against trans people, the unwashed are regarded suspiciously by the clergy. When individuals are forced to identify their gender for the sake of appearing to be committed to an ideology, it may be the case that they are really doing so out of fear or are acting opportunistically rather than actually believing in the doctrine.

In other words: Don’t fake it. Believe it. The powers-that-be want more than bad faith; they want obsession with privilege checking.

There appears here a concern with what Orwell calls “doublethink,” suggested by the passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four quotes above.

Orwell tells us about a conversation between Winston and O’Brien where Winston’s “mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Like the Inner Party, those who wish to change our minds really do not want exercises in bad faith. They want changed minds. They want true believers.

* * *

I noted earlier that employees are warned about using “preferred” or “chosen” to characterize pronouns. “Using either word suggests that gender identity is a preference or a choice, when it is neither.” According to who?

We find once more a government agency assuming as true a claim that has not been proven. On what empirical grounds is it true that pronouns are not in the case of a trans gender person preferred or chosen? What is the evidence that a person is born with a gender that does not align with his sex? What is a gender if it is not the species-specific name of a sex genotype?

Are employees being told that there are no cases in which a man identifies as a woman as a matter of choice, for example, for opportunistic reasons? I find it incredible that there are no cases in which a man lies about who he is to get something he wants. I’m a criminologist. My profession demands that I grasp this. Criminology is the scientific study of, among other things, men who lie about who they are to get things they want.

But don’t worry about that. Worry about this non-exhaustive list of “correct pronouns”:

Disclaimer: In this blog, I illustrate the argument with some hypotheticals. This is not the first time I have done this. To make these hypotheticals obvious, the interactions with my dean are fictional. Why I need this disclaimer is because the fictional interactions illustrate a truth in today’s society and so they feel very real.

Assume I am a Christian (I am not, but go with me on this for the sake of argument). As an article of faith, I believe Jesus is the son of God. One day I say so around others in the faculty lounge and a Muslim at the table tells me that this is a false doctrine. In Islam, he explains, Jesus is recognized as a prophet and messenger of God, but he is not the son of God. He cannot be, the Muslim tells me. God is one, indivisible, and does not have any associates in his divinity.

Is it appropriate for me to demand that the Muslim affirm my belief in Jesus as the son of God or, at the very least, to not deny it? I find his denial of a core tenet of my faith offensive. My religion means everything to me. My core identity is Christian. It is who I am. The Muslim should be sensitive to that and at least not deny Christian doctrine in my presence. So I ask my dean to admonish the man for offending me. What do you think the dean will do? Did you say “nothing”? You are correct.

Suppose I am a college professor who teaches sociology of religion (I am this, so you don’t have to suspend your disbelief on this point for this illustration, or the two after it). For lecture today I will be introducing the unit on Islam, and the opening slide is a painting originating in Tabriz from the year 1307 of the Muslim prophet Muhammad solving a dispute over who should rebuild the Kaaba and dedicate the sacred black stone (which they do cleverly and collaboratively by use of a cloth). I will also share another painting from this place and time: Muhammad receiving his first revelation from the angel Gabriel.

A Muslim student in the class complains that my showing pictures of Muhammad in class violates her religion’s prohibition against depicting Allah or the prophets in art, statues, or other representational media. This prohibition is called aniconism. It is the belief or practice found in many religions prohibiting the manufacture or use of icons, idols, or images of religious entities. I am unsympathetic to her complaint. The student complains to administrators and I am summoned to the dean’s office who tells me that my training should have taught me to be sensitive to such matters and threatens me with formal disciplinary action if I do not apologize to the class and promise never to do this again. (See The Continuing Problem of Compelled Expression.) What should I do?

Suppose I am teaching a class on ethnic and race relations and, in the context of a lecture about the history of anti-black bigotry, I use the word “nigger.” Black students in the class tell me that, as a white man, I am not allowed use that word. I try to explain the difference between using the word in a derogatory manner and using it to accurately convey the language used in historical situations, but they’re having none of it. They want an apology. I don’t apologize and they report me to the dean. The dean is even more forceful with me this time. He is close to moving the matter to a disciplinary level and placing a reprimand in my personnel file. He suggests sensitivity training. Maybe I need tutoring in how to create an inclusive classroom. How shall I respond?

Now suppose I am lecturing on gender and sex. At some point during the semester, a student asks the question, “What is a woman?” I respond with a objective non-tautological definition: “A woman is an adult human female.” “So a trans woman is not a woman?” “No, a trans woman is a male who identifies as a woman.” Another students angrily asserts, “Trans women are women!” A lot of cross talk and dramatic body language ensues and, unable to regain command of the room, I dismiss the class. A group of students follow me to my office, taunting me with accusations of “transphobia.” Within a few minutes I receive a call from the dean. The students told on me. This time, he is formally reprimanding me and enrolling me in a DEI training course. Should I speak with the union? A free speech organization? A lawyer?

Except for refusing the admonish the Muslim for denying an article of my faith, all the actions the dean has taken are inappropriate. Just contacting me with concerns about showing a depiction of Muhammad, uttering the word “nigger,” or observing the objective fact that men can’t be women is a violation of my free speech right and academic freedom.

The dean’s actions reinforce the chilling effect of patterns of suppression. I was already hesitant to show pictures of Muhammad or say “nigger” in class. And I was dreading the question “What is a woman?” I had often thought about how I would answer that question—and what I would do when students reacted to my answer, since I had decided my response would have to be straightforward.

I have discussed the free speech right on Freedom and Reason before, and I have a post coming soon delving more deeply into the matter. But some readers might be unfamiliar with the principle of academic freedom, which is something of an added layer of protection for scholars and teachers. Academic freedom refers to the idea that educators and researchers enjoy the freedom to engage in intellectual inquiry and communicating their findings and the findings of others without fear of censorship, interference, or retribution from those who pull the levers of power.

Academic freedom is essential for the advancement of critical thinking, the production of knowledge, and the pursuit of truth. By respecting scholar’s freedom to research and teach controversial or unpopular ideas, challenge existing assumptions and paradigms, and express their views and opinions freely, without fear of persecution or retribution, to choose their research topics, use their preferred methods and approaches, and select their teaching materials and pedagogical styles without undue interference or pressure, society benefits the diversity of ideas necessary for innovation and progress—while respecting the humanity of the individual, from whom cognitive liberty and free of conscience are the most essential rights of being.

Some will counter that academic freedom does not mean unlimited freedom, noting that scholars and educators are subject to academic standards, institutional policies, and professional ethics. They also have a responsibility to promote intellectual diversity, tolerance for others’ views and standpoints, and maintain a safe and inclusive learning environment. Indeed! But if standard and policies are written in such a way as to infringe on academic freedom, the standards and policies are contrary to the purpose of a free and open system of inquiry and communication and are therefore illegitimate.

Moreover, the right to free speech, a constitutional right, one recognized in international law, cannot be abridged by standards and policies of any sort in the public sphere except time and place restrictions and real threats. Promoting intellectual diversity is part of academic freedom; tolerating other viewpoints is part of the free speech standard generally. These comprise the foundational right with which the students are interfering in demanding the dean address my speech acts in any thing other than a supportive way. Maintaining a “safe and inclusive learning environment” is code for suppression of free speech and academic freedom. The rules of equity and inclusivity constrain free speech and academic freedom. They are therefore illiberal and contrary to the core mission of the university.

Again, why should the dean even call me to his office to explain myself in the first place? Can’t he explain free speech and academic freedom to the complainants? He is still an educator. I remind him every time we speak that the United States is a country with a formal bill of rights and that the first article of this bill protects freedom of speech and conscience from restriction by authorities in public institutions and spaces. I quote to him not only the First Amendment, but the 18th and 19th articles of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I remind him about the doctrine of academic freedom, found in the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and his obligation as an administrator to protect both the fundamental law and the institutional practice.

He tells me that the issue here is that there are asymmetries of power in the United States that mean that minorities cannot be treated the same way as the majority. The demands of social justice make special demands of me as a Christian white cisgendered man. The Muslim, black, and trans communities lack power. They are vulnerable populations. The intersection of my identities make me the most privileged person in history and justice requires that take that privilege into account in designing course structure and content and shaping my pedagogical style. While a Muslim can deny Jesus is the son of God, blacks can refer to whites as “crackers” and to each other as “niggers,” and trans gender individuals can assert that men are women, exceptions they should be allow because of their marginal status in a Christian, white, and cisgendered world and the long history of oppression they have experienced, a man of that world, who has not experienced oppression, cannot speak in this way because of the unearned power he inherited and possesses. The dean, who also exists at the intersection of my identities, is the paradigm of how such a man is supposed to act.

This is woke progressivism and it’s a quasi-religious ordering of institutions that violates the core principles of a free and open system, as well as the ethical demand to regard individuals as sovereign and autonomous. It is at best one theory about the world. (See Free Speech Friday: The False Doctrine of “Weapons of the Weak.”)

One obvious problem with the dean’s argument is that the free speech right, both in United States and international law, is a human right that obtains at the individual level. We don’t have differential access to free speech on the grounds of group membership and an abstract theory about asymmetrical power relations. Voting is the obvious analog. My vote counts the same as everybody else’s. Black Americans don’t get two votes to my one. Likewise, white Christian men are no less entitled to exercise their free speech right than members of any other group.

But there’s another problem, and it lies in predicting outcomes based on asymmetrical power relations. If Muslims have little or no power, then why did I worry about showing depictions of Muhammad in my sociology of religion class? Why, if blacks have so little power, are most white people reduced to talking like children, using “N-word” instead of the word itself? Why am I expected in order to avoid admonishment and possibility disciplinary action to affirm gender ideology by agreeing with the slogan “Trans women are women?”

Maybe I hesitated showing depictions of Muhammad because of the tyranny of Islamic terrorism. In the fall of 2020, Chechen refugee Abdullakh Anzorov, who had been living in France for years, beheaded Samuel Paty as he was leaving the Paris middle school where he taught history and geography. Anzorov said the attack was revenge for Paty showing his class the Mohammed cartoons associated with the 2015 massacre of French cartoonists in Paris. It was a lesson on free speech. Maybe I should be happy that all I received was my dean expressing concern over my classroom behavior. (See Threat Minimization and Ecumenical Demobilization.)

I was likewise concerned about the question about defining what a woman is because of the rampant terrorism of trans activists from New Zealand to California. I saw the scenes at San Francisco State. I saw the deranged activist screaming at Gaines as she escaped the mob down a hallway to a safe room, protected by security and university staff. “Yeah you fucking transphobic bitch—I fucking see you!” “Bye bitch! Fuck you,” the activists shouted. Holding “Trans Lives Matter” signs, zombie chanting “Trans rights are human rights” and “Trans women are women.” The mob held Gaines hostage for several hours. The San Francisco Police Department had to be called in to resolve the situation. They made no arrests.

How did vulnerable minorities obtain the power to terrorize, intimidate, and punishment me for using words they don’t like if they are vulnerable minorities? How are the police on their side. Incident after incident, from Antifa to Black Lives Matter, we see who the authorities stand with. How does a trans identifying woman enter a Christian school and massacre children but the state blame the victims? Who is in control of the asymmetrical power relations posted by the theory of intersectionality when the supposed oppressor is the one who feels the weight of boot on the back of his neck?

I cringe at using the word “nigger” because I am the oppressor? Is that how it has worked down through the ages: the oppressor is the one who cannot speak his mind while the oppressed are able to say whatever they will? The oppressor in a cisgender ordered world cannot say a woman is an adult human female, but the oppressed in that same world can insist that trans women are women? A Christian must endure the insult that Jesus is not the son of God, but showing depictions of Muhammad in a classroom is insensitive? How did the oppressed wrest institutional power from the oppressor? How did the oppressor end up less powerful than those he is accused of oppressing?

Yet another problem with the dean’s paradigm is the act of infantilizing supposedly vulnerable minorities by treating them as if they are so fragile that they cannot endure seeing depictions of Muhammad, hearing a derogatory slur they themselves constantly use, or being reminded that men cannot as a matter of objective reality be women. We have seen that the power of these groups the dean feels such paternalism towards is such that they represents the church over against Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno. The church did not suppress the ideas of these astronomers because the clergy were infantile. They suppressed their ideas (and put Galileo under house arrest while burning Bruno at the stake) because they did not want to see the reproduction of mutual knowledge that would bring into question church doctrine. The dean is a bureaucrat for the clergy. Trans activists don’t harass people for failing to affirm the slogan “Trans women are women” because they are infantile. They do this because they need others to affirm the slogan because the delusion the slogan is attempting to support is obviously false.

We see the same infantilization at work in the oft-repeated warning that failing to affirm trans gender identities will cause people to commit suicide. Just yesterday we learned that Zooey Zephyr of the Montana legislature, censured for telling colleagues he hoped the next time “you bow your heads in prayer, you see blood on your hands,” was upset because the censure statement used he/him pronouns in describing him, a transgression the trans community characterizes as “misgendering.” Zephyr is, after all, a man, and the legislators are under no obligation to affirm his delusions. (Nor am I.)

In a tweet sharing a letter in which a trans person threatens suicide because the legislature passed legislation stopping doctors from performing life-altering experiments on children, Zephyr wrote: “When I said there is blood on their hands, I meant it,” adding, “All legislators (& the Gov) received a letter from an ER doctor who dealt w/ a suicide attempt from a trans teen who cited OUR LEGISLATURE as a factor in their suicidality. ‘My state doesn’t want me,’ is what they said.”

Here is Zephyr’s original tweet, along with Zephyr’s follow up tweet with the blackmail letter:

When I said there is blood on their hands, I meant it.

All legislators (& the Gov) received a letter from an ER doctor who dealt w/ a suicide attempt from a trans teen who cited OUR LEGISLATURE as a factor in their suicidality.

"My state doesn't want me," is what they said. pic.twitter.com/DZBslPjJTP

— Rep. Zooey Zephyr (@ZoAndBehold) April 18, 2023

While a child threatening suicide if he doesn’t get his way is not uncommon in human history, in the case of the trans blackmail play, this is a concerted effort to prey on the conscience of the public. The tactic is to stop thought about medical experimentation on children and shift attention to the problem that trans identifying youth, like many other mentally disordered persons, are at elevated risk for suicide. To suggest that disagreeing with a person’s argument or refusing to affirm their delusions means bearing some responsibility for that person’s self-harm or harm was also heard following the Charlie Hebdo massacre and other acts of terrorism justified by the actions of the terrorized. Indeed, the similarity between trans activism and Islamic terrorism should have been obvious from the beginning. Just as the common resort to words with the suffix “phobia” give away the propaganda game.

* * *

The world we are being asked to disbelieve is the one in which offending a trans persons is grounds for discipline, but a trans person can harass, intimidate, even perpetrate violence against the cisgender person and this is rendered as social justice. But this is the world we live in. On the one side, there are those who voice and wear the slogan “Trans women are women.” On the other, there are those who voice and wear the slogan “Women: adult human female.” To each side, these are true statements. Each have their arguments for why this is so. But the former are fighting for human rights (another slogan: “Trans rights are human rights”), while the latter is decried as “bigotry.”

Imagine if those of the latter group—the collection of feminists, lesbians, liberals, and conservatives who believe in free speech and scientific reality—physically assaulted those of the former. They bully the person with the T-shirt bearing the slogan. They wade into an assembly of trans activists and assault the participants. They demand laws punishing those professing gender ideology and queer theory. They demand mandatory training so that everybody can made aware that women are adult human females.

Of course, you will have to imagine this because it doesn’t happen. Liberals and all the rest are prepared to allow those who wish to believe the tenets of gender ideology to have those beliefs and even to express themselves however they wish. Why should they care that a person believes a man can be a woman if that belief does not affect their lives? To be sure, sometimes, though not enough, when it does affect their lives, they speak up, but there is no violence. There are no calls for laws to silence them. There are no calls for mandatory training sessions.

This is not of course true for the advocates of gender ideology. We have a treasure trove of videos feminists, lesbians, liberals, and conservatives being assaulted by trans activists. That it is those opposing Islamization, limits on expression, and affirming delusions who are portrayed as the threat. The threats to religious liberty, free speech and conscience, these are portrayed as good and righteous. This tells you where the power is. Everything we feared about the postmodernist contamination of language has arrived. Why? Control. How are they able to do this? They have captured all the major institutions. It’s the endgame for the republic. Welcome to existential crisis.