In a recent Rasmussen Reports survey, 72 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be white.” However, only a bare majority of of Democrats—51 percent—thought so. What if only 51 percent of Democrats thought it was OK to be black? Almost as shocking, 53 percent of blacks surveyed agreed that it’s okay to be white.
Rasmussen put a positive spin on the findings: “Despite years of progressive activism, a majority of Americans still don’t buy into the ‘woke’ narrative that white people have a monopoly on racism.” Rasmussen found that 79 percent of American Adults agree with the statement, “Black people can be racist, too,” including 53 percent who “strongly agree.” Of black people surveyed, 66 percent agrees that black people can be racist, too. But racist against who? And this: only 39 percent of Democrats strongly agreed with the statement, “Black people can be racist, too.”
The poll comes in the context of a national conversation about the consequences of the pervasive anti-white bigotry being pushed by the corporate media, culture industry, and educational institutions. What do I mean by anti-white racism? This:
I got cancelled for agreeing with this group of Black people.
I don't mean to ruin anyone's fun today, but I was already aware Black people have wildly diverse opinions. Were you? https://t.co/yU2exeWeQP
Remove the word “white” and replace it with the name of another racial or ethnic group and ask yourself how it sounds. Say it out loud (but not in public). Sound racist? Imagine, as Coleman Hughes suggested we do (see Reparations and Blood Guilt), such things being said about Jews. (We don’t have to, of course, Islamists and Nazis do in fact say these things about Jews). What would be the predictable consequences of such statements? Would Jews have reason to be concerned about those groups who said such things about them? The historical record clearly indicates the answer to this question.
What is the predictable result of the last several years of preaching the gospel of white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism, i.e., institutionalized white supremacy? (My posts documenting the religion of antiracism, its academic instantiation in critical race theory, are too numerous to list them here.) It can only result in popular bigotry against white people, as the video shared above illustrates. That bigotry may be motivating a wave of intimidation and violent attacks against white people on the streets of America, in high schools and middle schools—even in elementary school.
We don’t have on hand a statistical analysis of all the violence we see in the disturbing videos shared on social media. But we do have statistics on criminal violence. For 2021, blacks perpetrated 335,507 violent crimes compared to 328,817 perpetrated by whites. It must be kept in mind that blacks are 12 percent of the US population, that the disproportionalities are very great. Looking at victims, 459,457 were white, compared to 312,822 for blacks. Given that the vast amount of violent criminal perpetuation is by those who are males (582,497 compared to 133, 283), it is an even smaller proportion of the demographic overrepresented in the most serious crime—crime that disproportionately impacts white Americans. What this means is that that white victims of crime perpetrated by blacks are much more numerous than black victims of crime perpetrated by whites. Yet those speaking in the above video are telling the audience and it is white people—collectively—who are the violent and racially oppressive ones.
“When a black person is criminally victimized by a white person, we wonder whether the white person was motived by race prejudice. We presume this when, for example, we claim that the deaths of black suspects at the hands of white officers is a reflection of racist attitudes, explicit or implicit. This presumption is claimed as the reason for today’s violence in our streets. If we could point to statistics showing that, while granting that most homicide is intraracial, occurring within a racial category, interracial crime, occurring between racial categories, is most often represented by a white perpetrator and a black victim, then this might reflect anti-black prejudice. The historical example is white-on-black violence is lynching, where, after Reconstruction, the direction and patterns of the interracial violence indicated anti-black prejudice.
“However, the current direction of interracial crime is in the opposite direction from lynching. The first chart below shows that, even though blacks are less than 13 percent of the US population, they are increasingly the greatest number of homicide victims. … The following chart shows that, year after year, whites are more likely to be homicide victims at the hands of black perpetrators than blacks are to be homicide victims at the hands of white perpetrators. The disparity is even more striking when one reflects on the fact that most perpetrators of homicide are male and black males constitute less than six percent of the population.”
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Today’s Democratic Party has led us to the brink of nuclear war. The party is led by warmongers who are firmly in the grips of the military industrial complex, and don’t know or care about the cost of war, or who pays the price. Join the conversation https://t.co/WbbHJhtRSr… pic.twitter.com/0OOy7vEJDG
Democrats will say, “But what about Bush’s invasion of Iraq?” That wouldn’t have been possible without Democrats in Congress. But where did those warmongering neoconservatives in the Republican Party come from? What is the intellectual basis of the Project for a New American Century? They were Cold War progressives. They were Scoop Jackson Democrats. (See War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy.)
The near perfect continuity from George H.W. Bush through the Obama administration is explained by the establishment on both sides of the partisan divide. Had Hillary Clinton been elected president we would have had four years of invasions and occupations around the world.
Several women have accused Marilyn Manson of emotional abuse, physical violence, and sexual assault. These allegations first came to light in February 2021, when actor Evan Rachel Wood named Manson as her abuser in an Instagram post.
In the wake of Wood’s accusations, several other women came forward with similar stories of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of Manson. Manson has denied the allegations, describing them as “horrible distortions of reality.”
In 1984, news reports that hundreds of children had been abused at a California preschool fueled moral panic sweeping the nation.
The accusations against Manson have damaged his career and reputation. Several venues and festivals canceled his scheduled performances and he was dropped by his record label and talent agency. Several actors who had previously worked with Manson condemned his behavior.
But is there any forensic of compelling circumstantial evidence in support of the accusations? One of the accusers, Ashley Morgan Smithline, has come forward to say that she was manipulated and pressured by Wood into making her allegations.
In a declaration filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court last week, Smithline said the accusations were not true and that she had succumbed to pressure to make the allegations after Wood repeatedly told her that just because she couldn’t remember “did not necessarily mean that it did not happen.”
“While at first I knew Mr. Warner did not do these things to me, eventually I began to question whether he actually did,” Smithline said. Smithline’s statement points to a widespread problem in our society: the manipulation of people into believing things happened than did not or could not have happened.
If we didn’t finally learn the inherent problem with believing things people say without any forensic or compelling circumstantial evidence during the Satanic panic, then I truly fear for the future of truth and justice. One’s identity—as a child or a woman—has no bearing on whether one tells the truth or tells lies or grasped reality.
People lie. People are mistaken. People are manipulated. People misremember. People are malevolent. Etcetera. There is no rational reason to believe a person without evidence. Indeed, we err on the side of the accused because the accuser has the burden of proof.
The person making the accusation has the burden to prove the accusation beyond a reasonable doubt with reason and evidence. Being accused of something and having to prove you didn’t do it is near impossible.
This is why the argument that we should believe in God because we can’t prove God doesn’t exist is so irrational. The default position is not to believe a person who says he was abducted by aliens. Maybe he was. Where is the proof?
Slogans cannot substitute for proof. Hashtags are propaganda. They are evidence of nothing except the desire to push an agenda.
During the Satanic panic of the 1980s, children across the country were telling parents that they were being used by day care workers as ritual subjects by satanic cults. Scores of reputations were ruined because of the fanciful imagination of children made even more real by parents and authorities determined without any evidence to believe the children over the day care workers.
The McMartin Preschool case is the paradigm. It involved allegations of child abuse and satanic ritual abuse against staff members at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.
The case began in 1983 when a parent accused a staff member at the McMartin Preschool of sexually abusing her child based on something the child told her. Soon after, other parents came forward with similar allegations of abuse. The accusations quickly snowballed. It turned into a moral panic. This was because everybody was saying, “Believe the children.”
The investigation led to the arrest and prosecution of seven staff members at the McMartin Preschool, including the school’s owner, Virginia McMartin, and her son, Raymond Buckey. It was one of the longest and most expensive trials in American history and unfolded like something from a Kafka novel.
The prosecution’s case was blown when the children’s allegations were found to be based on false memories or contradicted by physical evidence. In 1990, after seven years of legal proceedings and two trials, all charges against the accused were dropped, with no convictions. Now adults, many of the children continue to believe they were ritually abused.
Others regained their hold on reality. One of the children, Kyle Zirpolo, admitted in 2005 that he had fabricated the allegations. In fact, he had never met the man he accused of abusing him.
The McMartin Preschool case had a significant impact on the way that child abuse cases are investigated and prosecuted in the United States. It led to a greater emphasis on the use of forensic evidence and the use of trained interviewers in the questioning of children. It also raised questions about the reliability of children’s testimony in criminal cases and the potential for false allegations of abuse to be made.
Here is my recommended default position for rational people: Believe nothing unless there is clear forensic and compelling circumstantial evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of the accused.
What people say about things that happen to them is the worst possible evidence there is. Eyewitness testimony and confessions are not to be trusted in light of the history of false accusation and wrongful arrest, conviction, and imprisonment.
If you are even remotely paying attention, you have very likely been hearing a great deal about grooming. Grooming is the process by which an individual, typically an adult, establishes an emotional connection with a child to gain the child’s trust in order to manipulate the child into sexual activity or sexualized behavior for the gratification of the abuser and the corruption of the child.
Given all the present attention on the subject, I thought it might be useful to hear from an expert on child sexual abuse. I’ve been publishing and talking about the problem of child sexual abuse for decades, my work showing that child sexual abuse produces continuing trauma in adulthood and indicates a persistent situation of powerlessness across the life course.
In 2004, I published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma concerning the life-course effects of child sexual abuse. I’m also the author of the essay “Child Sexual Abuse” in Sage’s Encyclopedia of Social Deviance, published in 2014. As a sociologist of religion, I am also qualified to speak about the related phenomenon of the cult, which the sexual grooming of children under the LGBTQ+ banner strongly resembles. Indeed, the methods for both grooming children for sexualized exchanges and grooming individuals for induction into cults are essentially the same.
Child sexual abuse is a form of criminal deviance involving inappropriate contact with an adolescent or a child. Child sexual abuse and the sexualization of children are serious problems that carry profound and long-lasting effects on their victims. The effects of childhood sexual abuse may take the form of psychological maladies and conduct disorders that obscure the initial trauma, often compounding with the unfolding of time. Childhood sexual abuse is associated with continuity in sexual and other forms of victimization over the life course.
There are several factors that play into the severity of the impact of sexual abuse. These include the frequency, duration, and intensity of the abuse, as well as the perpetrator-victim relationship. The evidence indicates that the earlier authorities find out about the abuse and address it the more positive the post-abuse experience, displaying fewer of the long-term consequences of abuse. A child’s temperament, a major component of which is resilience, plays a significant role in recovery. For example, children with low self-esteem are prone to suffer more than those who have high self-esteem.
Some victims of child sexual abuse and child sexualization display few if any obvious consequences. However, the absence of outward manifestation of abuse does not mean that there are no less obvious or latent effects. The traumatic effects of childhood sexual abuse are recorded in a number of psychiatric conditions, including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), eating disorders, cutting behaviors, drug seeking and taking, and various behavioral problems coded as conduct disorders, as well as withdrawal from social activity and frequent and intense associations with antisocial circles.
Children often blame themselves for sexual abuse perpetrated on them, which not only makes it less likely that they will disclose the event or the process, but makes it more likely that their trauma will remain unaddressed. There is also the problem of internalization of the sexual norms of abusers, which may cause the victim to rationalize the abuse. Failure to address sexual victimization can perpetuate the patterns of interaction that contributed to the initial event. My findings suggests that the likelihood of future sexual victimization, even into adulthood, is greater among those who have abused in the past.
The popular impression of the phenomenon is that it involves anal, genital, and oral penetration using the penis, as well as anal and genital digital penetration. Also considered serious are acts of fondling a child’s breasts or genitalia with sexual intent and genital contact without penetration. These are defined as touching offenses. Use of a child in sexually exploitative activities, such as pornography, can either be a non-touching offense or touching offense depending on the circumstances.
However, other acts are often and should be included in the definition, including indecent exposure, exposing a child to pornography and age-inappropriate sexual ideas, materials, and practices, and facilitating or sexual relations between minors, all acts of sexualizing children. Research indicates that all of these situations put children at risk for emotional and psychological trauma. Reducing child sexual abuse to child molestation obviates the full scope of the phenomenon and harm to children.
The problem of conceptualization and definition leads to complications and inconsistencies in reporting the incidence and prevalence of sexual abuse. Inadequate or problematic definitions of the phenomena facilitate rationalizations denying its presence or downplaying the harm caused by the child sexual abuse of child sexualization. However defined, the evidence shows that childhood sexual abuse is a widespread and chronic problem in the United States.
Another popular impression of the phenomenon is that the abuse involves a minor victim and an adult perpetrator with the operative mental image of a strange adult male using his physical size or position of authority as an adult to coerce a child into an encounter of a sexual nature. A more accurate understanding incorporates situations of trust and ties of affection, thus moving conceptualization away from the stranger-predator assumption. Research finds that the majority of perpetrators are individuals close to the child, including members of trusted institutions, such as those actors found in educational and religious institutions.
It is furthermore a misconception about child sexual abuse that it typically involves physical force. Physical force is usually unnecessary when the child is being abused by a person she trusts and, especially, an individual for whom she expresses affection. Grooming tactics have developed the minimize the use physical force. Indeed, the stealth of grooming often makes it appear that children voluntarily participate in sexual encounters. That children appear to voluntarily participate and even desire intimate contact with adults is used by pedophiles to normalize their behavior.
Thus, some perpetrators and their allies have sought to move beyond stealth and make the practice of child sexual abuse and sexualization an acceptable practice. This appearance has led queer theorists, for example, to treat adult-child encounters as matters of consent. For example, Pat Califia (who today identifies as a man named Patrick) remarked in 1982, “Any child old enough to decide whether or not he or she wants to eat spinach, play with trucks or wear shoes is old enough to decide whether or not she wants to run around naked in the sun, masturbate, sit in someone’s lap or engage in sexual activity.” We see this idea in practice with the renaming of pedophiles with the label “minor attracted persons,” or MAPS, increasingly paired with the label “adult attracted minors,” or AAMs.
This is why grooming behavior is so important to see and admit. A child cannot today consent to engage in sexual activity and people need to see the signs that indicate a predator so they can fight against the movement to openly sexualize children. This awareness is not just to combat child sexual abuse as popularly understood. A corollary to the established fact that children cannot consent to sex is the fact that children cannot consent to puberty blockers or other medical-industrial practices that go under the Orwellian euphemism “gender affirming care,” or GAC. These practices include such extreme procedures of breast amputation in girls and the castration of boys. More extreme non-medically necessary surgical procedures of phalloplasty and vaginoplasty occur in adulthood, procedures often sought after years of preparation in childhood.
Given the horror of all of this (horror reminiscent of the experiments performed on children by doctors during Nazi period), why is there a concerted effort to blind the public to the presence of grooming? Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, tweets about grooming and groomers, even absent references to drag queen story hour and other public activities designed to entice children into the world of adult sexuality, were banned as a form of anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech—this despite opposition by many homosexuals, and even some trans identifying persons, to the sexualization of children.
In July 2022, Twitter confirmed the term “groomer” was banned speech citing the company’s Hateful Conduct policy. Spokespersons for Twitter explained that the social media platform was following the lead of other platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and TikTok, which banned the term when used to suggest a link between the LGBTQIA+ community and pedophilia.
“We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice, or intolerance, particularly abuse that seeks to silence the voices of those who have been historically marginalized.” Lauren Alexander, Twitter’s health product communications lead, said in an email. “For this reason, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals or groups with abuse based on their perceived membership in a protected category.” Alexander specified the context: “Use of this term is prohibited under our Hateful Conduct policy when it is used as a descriptor, in context of discussion of gender identity.”
In effect social media has collaborated with those who deny grooming behavior when occurring under the cover of LGBTQIA+ activism. While care should be taken in attributing to all members of that community the actions of some who rationalize their behavior (and whether LGBTQIA+ is a community at all has been cogently challenged by openly gay critic Douglas Murray), one must also be wary of rationalizations that falsely appeal to civil and human rights. A person engaged in sexualizing children cannot escape criticism of his arguments or responsibility for his conduct because he claims that he is a member of a protected category.
I ask you to consider whether there any other type of criminal or harmful conduct the consequences of which an individual is allowed to escape because his status redefines his conduct as no longer what it is? Wouldn’t such a move effectively normalize and even mainstream criminal or harmful conduct? Isn’t that the work it’s already been doing? If the sexualization of children is wrong when so-called cis-gendered heteronormative individuals do it, then it is just as wrong when transgendered and homosexual individuals do it. But the horror correctly expressed by progressives at the sight of child beauty pageants, and discomfort at the thought of minors at clubs for straight adults, disappears when boys perform as exotic dancers for adults in gay bars. Indeed, these acts of extreme sexualization become celebrations of “pride progress” and “queer joy.”
As noted at the start of this essay, while grooming is a manipulative process used by sexual predators, including pedophiles, to gain the trust and compliance of their victims, it is also characteristic of cult induction. The steps involved in both, as well as in human trafficking and online predation, are highly similar. Indeed, given that pedophilia, and paraphilias more generally, comprise a deviant subculture, i.e., a group exhibiting characteristic patterns of behavior sufficient to distinguish it from others within a greater culture or society, pedophilia is often not merely analogous to other forms of child exploitation, but a major element across phenomena. I will cover all these areas in this blog.
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The uptick in the frequency of the term “groomer” is associated with criticism of the practice of exposing children to sexualized themes at drag shows, where children watch and even interact with adult entertainers, the proliferation of drag queen story hours, typically with readings about sexual activities and identities, and curricula and classroom discussions about sexual and gender matters that intend or at least function to disrupt the development of the child’s perception of gender. Thus the organized effort to suppress the use of the term comes with growth in the scope of sexualization of children and the increasing frequency of grooming behavior.
I will write more about the organized effort to sexualize children in the future (for now, this and this are good places to begin developing a more in-depth grasp of the phenomenon), but I want to emphasize here that what concerns parents and others is that the typical age of the children involved in these activities is 4-8 years, as well as widespread acceptance of gender ideology in public and private schools, principally queer theory, an ideology founded by intellectuals and activists preoccupied with the sexuality of children and the removal of age of consent laws restricting adult-child sexual interaction (I have a pending blog on this subject).
Children are incapable of abstract and even consequential thinking at this age (many remain incapable well beyond this cohort). At age four, children are just beginning to the develop theory of mind, where they can see the world from the perspective of others, as well as internally represent the world through language and mental imagery. This is a critical phase in childhood development, as it is only towards the end of this period, around age eight, that children can confront the world with the understanding that the objects and relations in it are real and possess the ability to differentiate between those things and things that are not real.
What is internalized during this stage of development makes up fundamental assumptions about the world, such as a falsity of the Santa Claus and other obvious fictions and the “truth” of God, also a fiction. Children start doubting, often at the encouragement of their parents, the existence of Santa and the Tooth Fairy around the ages of six or seven. By age eight, most no longer believe in such things. However, many families do not allow the children to doubt the existence of God. Belief in this fiction is reinforced across the life-course. That a child can be convinced to believe that the thing she will never sense is the most real thing in the world tells us that a child can be made to believe anything.
Exposure to sexualized materials is for this reason age-inappropriate, as untruths or problematic conceptions about the world may be placed in the child’s head and continually reinforced by authorities in the child’s surroundings, including language and images coming from virtual sources, such as Disney and other fantasy programming. Indeed, media appealing to children (cartoon characters, ponies and unicorns, rainbows, etc.) are effective vehicles for colonizing children’s pre-rational minds with language and imagery designed to implant ideological beliefs and political agendas.
SCOOP: I've obtained video from inside Disney's all-hands meeting about the Florida parental rights bill, in which executive producer Latoya Raveneau says her team has implemented a "not-at-all-secret gay agenda" and is regularly "adding queerness" to children's programming. pic.twitter.com/eJnZMpKIXT
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
It’s not Disney executive producer Latoya Raveneau “not so secret gay agenda” that’s the problem. It’s the act of “adding queerness” wherever she can. Queering is a political agenda designed to disrupt perceptions of gender and transgress sexual boundaries, in this case, the perceptions that children have about the word by intentionally sexualizing their experiences. As Murray and other gay and lesbian observers have stressed, homosexuality and queerness are very different things. One is a sexual orientation. The other is a proselytizing program. The gays rights struggle was a struggle for equal rights. The queer project is a cult that seeks members.
Continually reinforced and forbidden to question or criticize, the ideas that inhere in queer theory become assumptions that inform and shape thinking into adulthood. This is well understood. Yet sexualized curriculum is being aggressively pushed in schools and other public activities across the country, pushed in classrooms festooned with the symbols of ideological and political commitments. One need not ask, to what ends? The end is obvious—it’s to change the way we think about sex, gender, and boundaries rules. Queer theory makes no secret of this. This is not is conspiracy. It’s in our faces.
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Willy Villalpando taught children in pre-kindergarten in Rialto, CA, from 2016 through 2021. He now works at Santa Ana College teaching early child development.
I have been planning on writing a blog about the problem of grooming for some time, but two recent news stories moved me to come to it sooner than planned. The first case crossed my desk a few days ago. It concerns Willy Villalpando, who currently works at Santa Ana College in California where he teaches early child development. Given his background, he should know better. Then again, perhaps this explains his interest in the subject. From 2016-2021, Villalpando was a pre-kindergarten teacher.
In 2020, while still a pre-kindergarten teacher, Villalpando called the idea of “childhood innocence” an example of “mythology.” In 2021, he said, “Not talking about queerness in the classroom, is not letting children be children. It’s telling those people they do not deserve to exist.” He added, “Kids are never too young.” But they are always too young. Note that Villalpando openly uses the term “queerness.” The project has become so widespread and normalized, that cult members have no problem openly using the terminology. This tells us that they know they enjoy institutional support.
I will blog more about this in the future but for now: to “queer” a space, in this case a classroom full of young children, is to transgress the boundaries of normative systems where, in this instance, the sexualization is believed to be (in fact known to be) harmful and wrong. Taking a position against recognizing the norms that protect children from the harmful effects of sexualization, Villalpando says, “Let’s work to deconstruct some of our own biases,” adding parenthetically, “Adults incorrectly link discussions on sexuality and gender as equating to discussions about sex.” Here he is telling people that talking to children about sex is not discussing sex. This claim that not letting children be children, with children conceived of as sexual beings, is “erasing their existence” is a common emotional blackmail tactic used by the cult.
Villalpando uses the jargon of queer theory at every turn. “There is a common mythology that children live in this world of pure innocence, and that by introducing or exposing them to the real-world adults are somehow shattering this illusion for them,” Villalpando wrote in a 2020 Instagram post. These arguments come straight out of the founding documents of queer theory (as I will show in a future blog). “Therefore, there is a banning of topics and issues that children should not be exposed to, as if they are not experiencing them already.” In another instance, he writes, “I’m tired of the ‘Childhood Innocence’ argument.” He adds: “Stop blaming a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.”
Villalpando characterizes the view that children should not be exposed to sexuality as “very white, Christian, upper-class, cis-gendered, and hetero-centric.” Fallacious thinking is typical to those advocating crackpot theories. You see this in critical race theory with the notion of “white fragility.” Villalpando is saying that the validity and soundness of an argument determined not by reason or facts but by the arguer’s race, religion, class status, gender, and sexual orientation—all things that have nothing to do with the validity or soundness of arguments. Yes, even for those who oppose child sexual abuse and sexualization on religious grounds, since it is entirely possible that the religious argument against harming children is based on the same logic as the secular argument.
Villalpando does no better when he tries his hand at the science. Children, he insists, can “have a sense of their gender identity” when they are still babies. “At 3 years old, a child can label their perceived gender identity,” Villalpando continues. “By 4 years old, children have a stable sense of their gender identity and have assumptions and beliefs of what they can and cannot do based on their gender (i.e. dolls are for girls, cars are for boys).”
What does the science tells us? Gender identity, that is the understanding that boys are boys and girls are girls, develops in stages. At around age two children become aware that there are boys and girls. Before the age three, they identify themselves as a boy or a girl. They recognize that there are physical differences. Boys are not girls because boys are different from girls. Boys can’t be girls. Children are adamant about this. It’s why they ask whether a person is a boy or a girl when their gender is ambiguous. By age four, most children have a stable sense of their gender identity. They know all this without any help from adults.
However, and this is the crucial piece to understand, especially since this was not a problem until yesterday, this sense may be disrupted by throwing into question what is otherwise a normally occurring understanding (one with evolutionary force). It is in this critical developmental period of ages four through eight that children learn to doubt the things that occur to them or that they have been told. I explained this earlier when I wrote that children can be convinced there is a God when their doubting of fictional things emerges. This tells us that children are vulnerable to the introduction and incorporation into their system of assumptions beliefs that are not naturally occurring, that would not normally occur to them, or that would be abandoned with cognitive development. God is an external imposition that can nonetheless become as real in a child’s mind as anything. The same is true with gender ideology. And this is why groomers and cultists (and the Chambers of Commerce) want access to children during this crucial stage of development.
Because of their vulnerability during this period, children accept and often believe impossible things—and continued believe in the impossible makes their parents vulnerable to believing impossible things, as well. Consider the Satanic panic, a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, characterized by a widespread fear of Satanic ritual abuse and a belief that Satanic cults were operating in communities across the country, engaging in everything from human sacrifice to mind control and sexual abuse of children. Many people became convinced that Satanic cults were responsible for a wide range of social ills, including drug abuse, teenage rebellion, and the breakdown of the family. These fears led to a wave of investigations and prosecutions, particularly in the child care industry, which resulted in false allegations and wrongful convictions. Over time, the Satanic panic was debunked as an unfounded moral panic, with allegations of Satanic cult activity found to be baseless. The Satanic panic remains a cautionary tale about the dangers of mass hysteria.
There are many other examples of mass hysteria and moral panics in history. I have written extensively on this matter on Freedom and Reason. See, for example, Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion? I write there: “Social contagion, or mass psychogenic illness, is the rapid spread of an irrational or pathological activity, behavior, belief, or perception in a population. Thoughts and actions can move rapidly through social networks of like-minded people or those who share similar traits, such as age, gender, and so on. Individuals calibrate their self-image to align with those with whom they identify or have an affinity; when one individual adopts a certain attitude or behavior those in her social network catch the pathogen. Girls and young women are especially susceptible to social contagion because of greater innate sociability compared to men. But men are susceptible to psychogenic illness, as well. Adolescence is a risk factor because of rapid changes in cognitive, emotional, and physiological developments occurring during puberty make a person vulnerable to suggestion.”
The New York Times ran a story recently that carried the headline: “How Teens Recovered From the ‘TikTok Tics.’” It is effectively a treatment of folks on the verge of getting it. In my blog about social contagion cited above, I report on a story by Robert Batholomew, a medical sociologist, titled “The Girls Who Caught Tourette’s from TikTok,” in Psychology Today. He cites several studies concerning the rise in Tourette’s syndrome, what researchers call “functional tic-like behaviors,” in users of TikTok and social media generally. Bartholomew’s article is a useful thumbnail sketch of the phenomenon and a taste of the vast literature on this subject. He writes, “In the future, we can expect more outbreaks of social contagion in which the primary vector of spread is the internet and social media.” It is almost as if the nation’s newspaper was trying to clue Americans into the problem of gender ideology.
It is typical of this argument that culturally and temporally circumscribed activities are transcultural/historical indicators of innate gender sensibilities—i.e., gender is not an expression of sex, thus denying that children are their bodies, but an expression of some transcendent essential self, what is often referred to as the “authentic” or “true self.” In this way, people like Villalpando flip reality, insisting that keeping kids from discussing gender identity confusing them about their own sexuality. It attempts a self-fulfilling prophecy and then reverses the order of events. It is denied that telling them they may not be the gender their sex indicates is confusing and casts it instead as acknowledging and affirming. This is how, while compelling a gay boy to be straight via conversion therapy is wrong, it is not considered conversion therapy to compel a gay boy to identify as a girl. This contradiction escapes people because they have a priori, and because of party affiliation, accepted the validity of gender ideology. This is how the Orwellian problem of doublethink works.
“Parents haven’t already had conversations about these things with their kids, that kids don’t know, that they might be intersex, that they might be a gender … non-binary,” Villalpando argues. Raising the matter of intersex conditions is a typical deception. Intersex conditions are extremely rare and, in any case, have nothing to do with queer theory. As for the notion of nonbinary, sex is binary. This is a biological reality. I will leave that there for now “And really,” he continues, “children have a right to see themselves in our classrooms.” The upside-down character of his thinking is strategic. “It’s not okay to just forget about them or push them out just because it might make us uncomfortable or may make others uncomfortable.”
After telling his audience that there was nothing wrong with saying the things he said, Villalpando scrubbed his social media. But the Internet is forever. And Villalpando is not an outlier. He conveys queer theory expertly and honestly.
The story of Willy Villalpando was covered extensively in the media, the headlines often conveying the outrage the public has expressed over learning of this arguments. But what has not been conveyed is the extent to which Villalpando’s speech is standard rhetoric in queer theory. He is not saying anything that Michele Foucault, Gayle Rubin, or Judith Butler hasn’t either explicitly said or suggested in their writings and interviews. Moreover, the act of taking a four-year-old child to a drag show at a gay bar with dollar bills in hand to stick into the g-string of a queen with visible genitalia performing a sexually-explicit dance routine screams as loudly as anything could advocacy of the doctrine. How else could a parent come to believe that forcing her child to participate in such an audacious act of sexualization is an expression of devotion to the LGBTQ community if there were not members of the community preaching that children are already sexual beings who need to publicly signal their sexuality to advance the agenda?
The other news story crossed my desk today. Reuters is reporting that “More than 100 priests suspected of abuse remain active in Portugal’s Catholic Church.” According to the commission investigating the matter, more than a hundred priests suspected of child sexual abuse remain active in church roles in Portugal. The commission, which started its work in January 2022, said in its final report published on Monday that at an “absolute minimum” at least 4,815 children were sexually abused by members of the Roman Catholic Church in Portugal—mostly priests—over 70 years. They describes the number as the “tip of the iceberg.”
How big is the iceberg? The Catholic Church child abuse scandals are global in scope and involve members of the Catholic clergy, particularly priests and bishops. The scandal first gained international attention in the 1980s, and since then, tens of thousands of cases of abuse have been reported worldwide. The allegations of abuse have ranged from inappropriate behavior to sexual assault and rape of minors. The victims have often been vulnerable children, who were in positions of trust, such as altar servers, students, or children from Catholic schools and orphanages. The scandal has caused significant damage to the reputation of the Catholic Church and has raised serious questions about the handling of abuse allegations by the Church hierarchy. The Catholic Church has been criticized for its response to allegations of abuse, including a lack of transparency, cover-ups, and a failure to adequately address the issue. The Church is facing ongoing litigation and investigations in many countries, and there are ongoing calls for greater accountability and transparency in the handling of abuse allegations.
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As we go through the process of grooming, keep in mind what we are witnessing in public school classrooms across America. Everything a groomer does to secure a victim is what administrators and teachers do under the cover of LGBTQIA+ acceptance. For example, victim isolation, which I discuss below, in the public school context involves hiding from the parent the transitioning of the child. In an increasingly common occurrence, parents are chagrin to learn that the school has been “transing” the child, using different names and pronouns for their child, even keeping on hand clothes and accessories for the child to pretend they are not the gender their parents know them to be. Tragically, some parents are shamed into silence when they learn about this. But some parents complain. When attempts are made to stop this practice, the groomers appear before school boards and angrily decry the safeguarding measures. Some wail about “trans genocide.” The intersection of grooming and cult induction could not be more obvious in the way the gender ideologists come after children in public schools. Indeed, their hallways and classrooms festooned with flags and placards, their libraries filled with propaganda (often supplied by activists organizations such as GLSEN), public schools have become cult induction stations.
The stages of grooming can vary, but are commonly recognized as targeting, trust (or confidence) building, need filling, and victim isolation. The predator selects a potential victim and begins to gather information about them. The potential victim is often near, either a member of a church congregation or a student in the classroom. The predator looks for those who are vulnerable children, those who suffer emotional and psychological difficulties, as well as problems in social relations, such as being teased or bullied by other kids. This is targeting. The predator gains the trust of the victim by offering attention, affection, and sometimes gifts. The predator identifies and fills a need in the victim’s life, such as emotional support, friendship, or material goods. This is trust building. If the victim feels alienated from family and friends, the predator portrays offers himself as a substitute of the replacement for those relations. A predator might tell a child, for example, that she is now the child’s mother. This is need filling. Need filling often include manufacturing the need by alienating the child from parents and peers, by creating separation. The predator may try to isolate the child from their family or friends, making them more vulnerable to abuse. The alienation experienced by the child may be the work of the predator isolating the child. This is the process of victim isolation. The predator sexualizes the relationship by gradually introducing sexual language, images, or behavior into the relationship.
Grooming can occur in person, online, or through a combination of both. Groomers may be strangers, but they are more typically somebody who knows the child, such as a priest or a teacher. In exchange for sexual and sexualized activity, groomers exploit the child’s trust and use manipulation and deceit, such as giving the child attention or recognition. Grooming can occur over an extended period, with the abuser gradually increasing the frequency and intensity of the exchanges. Drawing upon the above list, some of the hallmarks parents should look out for: fake trustworthiness, which involves befriending a child to gain trust, as well as gaining the confidence of the child’s caregivers, blaming and confusing, filling needs and roles appropriate to family, intimidation, keeping secrets, often around children, children become part of the abusers his persona, sharing sexual images and materials, suggesting difficulties and insecurities, testing and crossing physical boundaries, such as discussing sexual matters or playing sexualized games, treating the child as if he is older or more mature than he is. Again, we see all this happening in openly in public spaces going under the name of “Pride.”
I have been noting throughout this blog the intersections of grooming and cults. Cults use a variety of tactics to induce or recruit individuals, including deception, manipulation, and persuasion. They may use emotional appeals or promises of spiritual fulfillment. They tell you you’re broken and then promise to fix you. They deploy a range of psychological manipulation tactics such as control over information, isolation, and love bombing. Cults prey on individuals who are vulnerable, such as those who are going through some life changes or who have trouble at home. Keeping secrets with targets and concealing activities from family members are typical tactics for developing influential relationships.
Part of the failure to see the agenda of gender ideologists is that it is so open. The popular perception of grooming is that it is difficult to detect, as the abuser typically works to conceal his actions. Moreover, the child may be reluctant to report the abuse—indeed, the child may not even realize he is part of a sexualized exchange. He can then become resentful when his sexualization is confronted. Grooming may also be difficult to detect because the parent may not recognize the signs of grooming. Here’s trusting one instincts is the right choice; if the situation of an adult with your child doesn’t feel right, then you need to remove the children from the situation. But some people are reticent to jump to conclusions. They are afraid of judging others. Grooming may also go unacknowledged by an adult because her political commitments disrupt her more sensibilities. The problem of grooming may be most difficult to see in the educational setting. Education is a strong value in the West and teachers enjoy high prestige. It is even harder to see how curricula and choice of instruction may function systemically as a form of grooming. This is how the queer agenda operates in the open: it feigns virtue.
I want to emphasize how important it is to recognize that children don’t think consequentially until they are around ten years old. Children in grades 4K-3 are not logical thinkers and their conscience is undeveloped. Considering these vulnerabilities, it’s important to recognize that teachers have an outsized effect on what children believe and how they behave. Words and actions build in assumptions that shape the thinking of children going forward. Indeed, the grades 4K-3 are a critical period in childhood development. If the cult gets to your children early, and convinces them to believe that it is actually possible for a gender to be trapped in a wrong body, an utterly supernatural and irrational belief, then, like belief in God, the belief will persist as deep cognitive and emotional structures that shape behavior patterns and relationships across the life course. And if the physical transitions of the child follows, they will never live a normal life.
It is therefore imperative parents get involved in the curricular and pedagogical developments and practices affecting their children. What and how are teachers being trained to teach? What politics become embedded in teacher training? What’s the lesson plan and what’s in the lesson? What books are assigned? What type of person is drawn to teaching? Do they have an agenda? What are their beliefs? Most teachers have only a bachelor’s degree; are they actually qualified to mold a child’s social and emotional selves and according to doctrine? Which doctrine? That parents are being told or that it is said behind their backs that they should leave all that to administrators and teachers is outrageous and dangerous.
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Grooming behavior can be used by individuals who seek to gain trust and control over others in a variety of contexts beyond pedophilia (and queer theory and its praxis are at heart manifestations of pedophilia and paraphilias more broadly). Human traffickers use grooming tactics to lure and control their victims, promising them a better life or opportunities that they may not be able to access on their own. Many of those coming across the southern United States border are the victims of groomers who make money off of human trafficking, as well as using the children for sexual gratification. Human trafficking is facilitated by churches, NGOs, corporations, and the governments, including the Biden administration. Cult leaders use grooming behavior to recruit and control members, isolating them from their family and friends and gradually introducing them to the group’s beliefs and practices. Online Scammers use grooming tactics to build trust with their targets, gradually introducing them to more elaborate schemes and eventually defrauding them of their money or personal information.
The grooming process typically involves a gradual and systematic manipulation of an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which serves to increase the person’s emotional dependency on the group and its leader. Cults use a variety of tactics to initiate the grooming process, such as offering friendship and support, providing recruits with a sense of belonging and acceptance, which can be especially attractive to those who feel isolated or disconnected from others. Groomers provide an explanation for suffering and then prey on the desire for salvation and purpose by offering what sounds to a confused mind—minds they often confuse—a compelling vision for the future, promising members a meaningful and fulfilling life as part of the group.
Cults isolate members from the outside world by restricting members’ access to information and contact with family and friends outside the group, which can serve to create a sense of dependence on the group and its leader. Cults controlling access to information using a variety of tactics to control what members read, watch, or hear, by creating a highly controlled environment where the group’s beliefs and practices are the only acceptable truth. Those who contradict the doctrine of the cult are accused of bigotry, hatred, etc. As the grooming process continues, members may become increasingly committed to the group’s beliefs and practices, even when these beliefs and practices may be harmful or dangerous. This is because the grooming process is designed to create a strong emotional bond between the member and the group, which can be difficult to break.
Gaslighting is often used as a technique in grooming. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or group makes someone question their perception of reality, memory, or sanity. This can involve denying or twisting the truth, making the victim doubt their own judgment, and making them feel like they are going crazy. Gaslighting is be used by groomers to control and manipulate their victims. For example, a groomer may use gaslighting to make their victim doubt their own intuition about the relationship, making them feel like they are overreacting or being overly suspicious. This technique can also be used on parents. Doing this, the groomer may be able to convince the victim to overlook warning signs and stay in the abusive relationship. Gaslighting is used in cults and other groups to control members and maintain group cohesion. For example, a cult leader may use gaslighting to convince members that their doubts and concerns are unfounded, and that the group’s beliefs and practices are the only valid truth.
Transgressing norms is a tactic in grooming. Groomers may use a variety of techniques to push the boundaries of social norms and acceptable behavior. By transgressing social norms, groomers can make their victims feel like they are participating in a secret or taboo relationship, which can create a sense of intimacy and trust. This can make it more difficult for the victim to recognize and report the abusive behavior, as they may feel like they are complicit in the transgression. Groomers may test their victims’ boundaries by engaging in behaviors that are slightly outside of their comfort zone. For example, a groomer may make a sexual comment or gesture to gauge the victim’s response and see if they are receptive to further advances. This is boundary testing. Groomers may gradually expose their victims to increasingly inappropriate or sexually explicit content or behaviors, with the goal of desensitizing them to the behavior and making it seem more normal or acceptable. This is known as desensitization: Groomers may try to convince their victims that the behavior they are engaging in is acceptable or even desirable, despite being outside the boundaries of social norms. This can involve using flattery, reassurance, or emotional manipulation to convince the victim that the behavior is not wrong. The is normalizing deviant behavior.
Sexualization is often used as a strategy in grooming. This is the main strategy of the gender ideology cult. By sexualizing the relationship, groomers make the victim feel like they are participating in a secret or taboo relationship, a special relationship, which can create a sense of intimacy and trust. Since dominant voices tell parents that it is wrong to teach children to be aware of this when it comes to LGBTQIA+ activities, the secret or taboo relationship is perceived not as a threat but as a welcoming to a legitimate world, one where they will feel welcome and loved. The world is full of stickers, rainbows, and stuffed animals, glitter, reflective surfaces, and multicolored light strips, costumes, chokers, and cat ears. The children are flattered and showered with attention, making them feel special and desired, deepening the sense of intimacy and trust. Groomers use gifts or other rewards to reinforce sexual behavior or to make the victim feel indebted or obligated to the groomer, even thankful for the opportunity to be their authentic selves. Groomers expose their victims to sexual content, pornography, explicit images or videos, and sexual conversations, with the goal of normalizing sexual behavior and desensitizing the victim to sexual content. Groomers may use emotional manipulation, threats, or coercion to pressure the victim into sexual behavior, or to keep them from disclosing the abuse and sexualization to others.
Stranger danger vibes. Why do they always try to alienate kids from their parents? pic.twitter.com/s6CHSQjImk
On January 18 of this year, I posted a blog, Males Do Not Have Periods, in which I shared an OpenAI ChatGPT conversation that had the chatbot returning the following answers to basic scientific questions about sex and gender:
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot January 18, 2023
I reported in that entry that ChapGPT had declined to write an essay on why exposing children to sexualized performances is harmful to their emotional and psychological health. It not only declined to write the essay, but scolded the user for making an inappropriate request. It then suggested that sexualizing children is good for the children (if you don’t believe me, follow the above link and scroll down towards the end of the entry).
I noted in that blog that the OpenAI chatbot’s opinion (for the record, ChatGPT denies it has opinions) cannot possibly be derived from the corpus of knowledge provided to the program but one fed to the program in order to bias the parameters of the frame. My expertise in this area? I’ve been publishing and talking about the problem of child sexual abuse for decades now, my work showing that child sexual abuse produces continuing trauma in adulthood and suggests a persistent situation of powerlessness across the life course. I’m a criminology with more than a decade in experience with evaluation of drug and alcohol treatment programs for women, a large proportion of whom were sexualized as children. In 2004, I published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma concerning the life-course effects of child sexual abuse. I’m also the author of the lengthy entry “Child Sexual Abuse” in Sage’s Encyclopedia of Social Deviance, published in 2014.
I made sure to curate the conversation I had with ChatGPT concerning the two genotypes that comprise the human species (shared above)because I suspected that very soon these will not be the answers provided. I told readers this in that January 18 blog. Turns out that what I wrote there was prophecy. Here’s what Open AI’s chatbot returned one month later:
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot February 18, 2023
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot February 18, 2023
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black political activism as violent,” journalist Trevor Aaronson told theGrio. The podcast Alphabet Boys claims that the FBI paid a felon, Michael Adam Windecker II, to infiltrate Denver’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) action in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Aaronson purports to show how the FBI targeted Black activists and sought to manipulate them into joining a plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.
In statements provided to The Guardian by Wyden’s office, the Senator said, “If the allegations in Mr. Aaronson’s podcast are true, the FBI’s use of an informant to spy on First Amendment-protected activity and stoke violence at peaceful protests is an outrageous abuse of law-enforcement resources and authority.” Also, “The FBI owes the public a full accounting of its actions, including how anyone responsible for attempting to entrap and discredit racial justice activists will be held accountable.”
I agree, but Wyden is misrepresenting BLM. BLM is not a racial justice activist organization but a corporate-funded disinformation group with an operating logic rooted in anti-white bigotry, openly hostile towards traditional family systems, and a clear penchant for violent action. The purpose of BLM is to racially divide the proletariat (see What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it). However, whatever one thinks about BLM, the comparison the Denver ordeal to the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program is appropriate. During that time, FBI agents infiltrated black organizations like the Black Panther Party (see The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left).
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black [sic] political activism as violent,” Aaronson told theGrio, “even though on its face the overwhelming majority of racial justice demonstrations that summer were peaceful.” This is a misrepresentation of what occurred over the summer of 2020. There was widespread violence, including homicide, and extraordinary levels of property destruction and theft. While there is no federal domestic terrorism statute, based on common definition, BLM (and Antifa) actions come pretty close conceptually. For sure BLM is not representative of racial justice movements. So when Aaronson says things like the following, he is engaged in propaganda: “While COINTELPRO no longer exists, you can see very clearly in this case and in the summer of 2020 that many of these methods that were used to a devastating effect against the civil rights movement in the 1960s were used against the racial justice movement in 2020.”
One more thing. Be wary of this claim that the FBI technique of “snitch-jacketing,” where an informant accuses activists of being FBI informants to sow confusion. To be sure, this happens. But I wouldn’t rule out a priori that a significant number of BLM activists were FBI agents and paid informants. The chaos of summer and fall of 2020 carries indications of a color revolution (see “A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous; Color Revolution, Joe from Scranton, and PEDs). Given what we know now about the extensive collaboration between the FBI and other deep state actors and social media platforms in a conspiracy to undermine Trump’s re-election, identification of FBI agents and informants in BLM action cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Everybody loves Jimmy Carter. A lot of people who are old enough to remember the Carter years love Jimmy Carter. Frankly, if I were a religious man, I would worry for their souls. As it is, I am greatly troubled by the poverty of their character and the their apparently endless capacity for doublethink. Is it because Carter is a Democrat that his crimes against humanity go mis/unremembered? Yes, I think so. It’s a matter of party over principle, in this case a warmongering party serving the interests of the corporate state and the transnationalist agenda.
Doublethink is a concept that George Orwell explored extensively in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, punished in 1949. Doublethink is the ability to hold in one’s head two contradictory beliefs or ideas simultaneously and believe them both to be true. But it is more than this. It’s not just the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time; it’s the ability to switch between them as needed without acknowledging the contradiction. It involves the conscious act of suppressing one’s own thoughts while accepting whatever the ruling party tells the individual to believe, even if it contradicts what the person previously believed.
Doublethink is the ability to say, for example, that one opposes war while voting for warmongers. Beyond the dystopian fiction of Orwell, in the real here and now, it’s your Democrat friends adorning their social media profiles with the Ukrainian flag.
President Carter talks with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Oval Office 1977
The purpose of doublethink is to create a sense of cognitive dissonance in the people, which in turn makes it easier for the ruling party to control them. By forcing or inducing people to accept contradictory ideas as true, the party is able to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of the masses, and ultimately, to steer their behavior and command their emotions.
Do folks not know or remember that it was Jimmy Carter who organized Islamists—the mujahideen—to destabilize the socialist government in Kabul to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan? The war Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski contrived lasted a decade. As many as two million Afghans were killed, the majority of whom were civilians. If you didn’t know about this, now that you do, does it change your mind? No? That’s doublethink.
The official story is that the Carter administration began providing covert aid to the mujahideen in 1979 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Did the Soviet Union even invade Afghanistan? Or was it something else?
In 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a socialist political party, overthrew the government of President Mohammed Daoud Khan in a revolutionary moment characterized by Western media as a coup d’état. The new government was led by Nur Mohammad Taraki and the country became the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The new government’s policies included land reform, social and economic changes, and a break with traditional Islamic practices.
The Soviet Union negotiated a mutual defense pact with Taraki government. By funding the jihadists before the Soviet Union entered the country, Carter and Brzezinski forced the Soviet Union to honor that pact in order to drag the Soviet Union into what Brzezinski characterized as their Vietnam War. Brzezinski and the Carter administration saw an opportunity to undermine what they characterized Soviet influence in the region. They provided covert support to anti-government mujahideen groups to draw the Soviet Union into a quagmire.
Brzezinski later admitted that the strategy was to provide support to the mujahideen in order to provoke a Soviet military intervention, which he believed would be a costly and draining conflict for the Soviet Union. This, in turn, would weaken the Soviet Union’s hold on Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. He confessed this in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski described the strategy and admitted to the crime: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”
The US government provided weapons, training, and other support to the mujahideen through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other channels. The goal was to destabilize the Afghan government and force the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan. The CIA and other US agencies worked with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to funnel weapons and money to the mujahideen. The US also encouraged other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, to provide support to the Afghan resistance.
The US support for the mujahideen helped to create a culture of violence and extremism in Afghanistan, as well as a generation of fighters who would go on to fight in conflicts around the world, including against the US. The conflict and US backing of oppressive and terroristic forces contributed to the growth of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The state the war left Afghanistan in allowed for the establishment of theocratic tyranny where women, who enjoyed under the socialist government great freedom, participation in politics, and careers in academia, engineering and science, and medicine, including as physicians, were brutally repressed by an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam. This remains true to this day and it’s because of Jimmy Carter’s actions in 1979. I probably don’t need to remind readers that it was from Afghanistan that al-Qaeda launched its multi-pronged attack against the United States on September 11, 2001. See my blog Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan for an in-depth exposé on this subject.
Remember how Carter pretended the invasion wasn’t of his doing and punished our athletes by boycotting the 1980 Olympics? He also imposed restrictions on trade with the Soviet Union, including an embargo on the export of grain and high-technology goods; suspending arms control talks (including the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT II, and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe); and provided military and economic aid to Pakistan, aid that included weapons, military personnel, and training.
Do people not know or remember that it was Jimmy Carter who provided military assistance to Indonesia during the period of its invasion and occupation of East Timor and the genocide perpetrated on the Timorese people? In 1978, the US government lifted an arms embargo that had been in place for more than a decade. He then provided Indonesia with millions of dollars in military aid, including weapons and training.
With Carter’s weapons and training, the Indonesian military committed extensive human rights abuses in East Timor, including extrajudicial killings, torture, forced relocation and birth controlled. Girls were used by Indonesian forces as sex slaves. During the occupation, an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 East Timorese, or about a third of the population, died due to the conflict, including killings, starvation, and disease.
Have people forgotten that the negation of Persia that came with the establishment of the Islamic republic in Iran in April 1979 came under Carter’s watch? Carter not only watched it unfold—he stood by while dozens of Americans were held hostage in Tehran for 444 days.
Long ago, I wondered whether Carter’s actions after his presidency—pounding nails into boards and promoting election integrity around the world (if that was what he was indeed doing)—came from the deep shame he must have felt at having betrayed so many people during his presidency, for being not merely one of the worst presidents in American history, but in actively participating in oppression and genocide.
Then I reflect on the fact that he was groomed for the job by David Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission, the cabal that also staffed his administration, and I realize that all his actions post-presidency are designed to obscure his associations with and machinations in the service of corporate state power. See my recent blog Jimmy Carter, Trilateralist, Entering Hospice for details.
There is no atoning for the sins Carter committed. If there is a hell, he is destined to spend all of eternity there. But there is no hell. So he will die an old and broken man with blood on his hands.
A few weeks ago I reported the results of a survey conducted by UW-Stout’s Menard Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation and the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service that interviewed more than 10,000 University of Wisconsin System undergraduate students. Questions covered such topics as the First Amendment, whether speech considered harmful should be reported to administrators, and if speakers some students find offensive should be disinvited by campuses.
University of Wisconsin-Stout
As I reported in the spring of last year, the survey was originally scheduled to be administered in April 2022 but was delayed for months due to opposition by administrators and faculty. Democrats worried that the survey would confirm what they and the public already knew, that the university has become a lot like a cathedral, with professors functioning as a clergy, preaching to a congregation of faithful youth, sitting in the pews and uttering amen to the faculty’s preachments.
You can read the full report here. I highlighted these findings in my February 7 blog: students classified by the survey as “very liberal” were the least likely to report feeling pressured by an instructor to agree with a specific political or ideological view being expressed in class (15.1 percent), most likely to agree that university administrators should ban expressions of views they feel cause harm (40.2 percent), and most likely to agree that the students should report an instructor to university administrators if the instructor says something that some students feel causes harm (71.4 percent). A majority of students described as “somewhat liberal” also agreed that students should report teachers to administrators.
My interpretation of these results is that “very liberal” students find the campus environment one in which their views will be reflected and are the most likely to express illiberal attitudes. Indeed, the number of students expressing illiberal attitudes indicates a deep and profound authoritarianism among those students classified as “very liberal.” I clarified in that blog that this means that they are not in fact very liberal but woke progressive, a sensibility that, while rare in the world outside college, shapes the climate of college campuses across the nation.
I contrasted these attitudes with those students the survey classified as “very conservative.” With “somewhat conservative” students were not far behind them, very conservative students were most likely to report feeling pressured by an instructor to agree with a specific political or ideological view being expressed in class (64.4 percent), least likely to agree that university administrators should ban expressions of views they feel cause harm (79.7 percent), and least likely to agree that the students should report an instructor to university administrators if the instructor says something that some students feel causes harm (13.6 percent).
Some might rationalize the first finding by claiming that conservative students are prepared to overreact and feel that their ideas are repressed. But knowing what we know about the strident anti-conservative views expressed by today’s faculty, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and in light of the two other findings indicating the highest degree of tolerance for a diversity of ideas among conservative students, this could only be a rationalization. In fact, students described by the survey as “very conservative” are the most liberal.
In my February 7 blog, I spent more time clarifying terms, as well as looking at the political leanings of the general population (relying on Pew numbers for comparison), in order to show that what the survey mischaracterizes political leanings. The important point to keep in mind here is that progressives are overrepresented among academics, as well as their students in the humanities and the social sciences. Keeping this in mind helps readers understand the points I make in this blog.
The opinion that students should report teachers to university administrators if the instructor says something that some students feel causes harm was furthermore correlated to the field of study, with students majoring in the humanities and social sciences to be most Stasi-like at 53.7 percent and 48.3 percent respectively. I used this characterization in my previous blog, so I want to explain it here.
Why do I say Stasi-like? Stasi was the secret police of East Germany during the Cold War. Its primary mission was to maintain the political stability of the totalitarian government by suppressing dissent and opposition. With an estimated 90,000 full-time employees and over 170,000 informants among the population of 17 million people in East Germany, it was one of the most pervasive and oppressive secret police forces in history. The Stasi not only operated a vast network of spies and informants, it also engaged in psychological warfare, including disinformation campaigns to discredit those whose speech was believed to undermine the hegemony of the prevailing cultural and political ideology.
That almost three-quarters of the most progressive and well more than half of the somewhat progressive students, think that students should report an instructor to university administrators if the instructors say something that some student feel causes harm—with the harm they have in mind views critical of the prevailing ideologies, i.e., critical race theory, queer theory, and other crackpot standpoints advanced by progressive administrators, faculty, staff, and students—is a frightening level of repressive desire expressed by those who should be demanding an environment that doesn’t shy away from critical inquiry but makes live Karl Marx’s well-known motto regarding the importance of criticism, that is “the ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Like Marx, I am fond of the latin De omnibus dubitandum est, meaning “everything must be doubted.”
Marx believed that critical analysis was essential in understanding and changing the world. He encouraged the examination of cultural, economic, political, and social structures to expose their underlying contradictions with the goal of creating a more just and equitable society. One would think, given the “social justice” and “critical consciousness” rhetoric of the woke progressive, that those identifying themselves as such would be the leastlikely to report teachers who said things that students feel causes “harm,” i.e., challenges orthodoxy, given that the idea of critique means not holding back for fear of offending or upsetting people. The irony here is that, by subjecting all aspects of culture and society to critical examination, Marx believed that individuals could better understand the underlying causes of inequality and oppression, and work towards creating a more egalitarian and democratic world. But those who are most likely to identify themselves as Marxist have the opposite attitude. Of course, the Stasi, who served a regime that was at least nominally Marxist, were likely to identify themselves in the same way.
Yes, I did mean to describe this attitude as repressive. That word is used to describe a system or climate that suppresses or restricts the expression of free speech or other forms of individual liberty. We see as repressive government censorship of certain books or restricts access to information. We are also coming to see this as also true of private action in the era of corporate statism (Marxists and left-libertarians always have). However, a workplace or social environment where individuals are discouraged from expressing their opinions or ideas due to fear of retribution is also repression. Reporting teachers for saying things that some students find “harmful creates a chilling effect where teachers who might deviate from the woke progressive doctrine so pervasive in today’s university will cause those who are supposed to challenge ideology to avoid arguments and subjects they fear will cause students to report them to administrators—who are inclined to follow up on their complaints.
When I don’t there are consequences. This happened to me last week. As readers of Freedom and Reason know, I have been very critical of Black Lives Matter on my blog. I have shown that major claims BLM and other social justice activists have advanced over the last several years, that racial disparities associated with lethal police encounters and mass incarceration are the consequence of systemic racism, are refuted by the scientific research. Since, in my capacity as an expert in criminology, I talk about these issues in class. I knew it was only a mater of time before students would take issue my criticisms of BLM. I had hope this would have taken the form of challenges in class. But instead, and not unexpectedly, they reported me to administrators. They did so anonymous.
The administrator who spoke with me was very pleasant and reassured me that my political activities as a citizen in a free and open society were my business. I appreciated that. He conveyed that the students felt my speech was contrary to the mission of the program I teach in (I built the program and wrote that mission) and that this may impact retention among, not only devotees to BLM, but LGBTQ+ students, as well. This is because I am also critical of queer theory—not in class, but on my blog—and have pointed out (again on my blog) that both Antifa and BLM are trans-activist organizations. Imagine a world where we are reported to the authorities because we are critical of an ideology. Imagine furthermore that those reporting their professors to authorities for thought crimes do so anonymously. We don’t have to.
One question put to me by the administrator was whether I play Devil’s advocate in class. This was after I confessed my opposition to Black Lives Matter. He explained that he does this in his literature classes, arguing a position that he doesn’t necessarily agree with or believe in for the sake of stimulating discussion or debate, specifically to challenge or test the strength of a particular argument or idea by presenting alternative viewpoints, regardless of one’s personal beliefs. I explained that I don’t use this strategy; rather, my method is debunking mythology with facts. I do steel man arguments, I hastened to add, but I don’t think this is the same thing. I steel man arguments because burning effigies is a religious exercise. I find that distasteful.
Speaking of straw men, it is not without irony that the term “Devil’s advocate” comes from the Catholic Church, where it refers to a person who presents counterarguments during the canonization process of a potential saint. The Devil’s advocate was expected to present arguments against the saint’s worthiness for sainthood, in order to ensure that the canonization process was thorough and rigorous. In other words, the Devil’s advocate puts the potential saint’s faith to the test—as well as the faith of those involved—in order to make sure the saint could in no way afterward be said to fall short of the stature sought at the end of the status elevation ceremony.
This is not the first time I have been reported to the administration, although it is the first time by students. I have been the target of ongoing campaigns of harassment and suppression since coming to Green Bay. I want to talk about this here to establish a coherent public record of the harassment. The facts in support of the narrative I present here are well-known by multiple individuals and already a matter of public record.
In 2002, early in my professorial career, I published “Advancing Accumulation and Managing its Discontents: The US Anti- Environmental Countermovement,” in Sociological Spectrum. I would win an award for that article in 2003, and I was set to testify in a lawsuit in Connecticut, but the case never went to trial. In October 2002, at the Mid-South Sociological Association conference in Memphis, Tennessee, I presented the paper “Paper Mills and Science Mills: The Battle for the Fox River.” I wouldn’t know this yet, but my work in this area put me on the radar screen of polluting corporations who would attempt to sabotage my bid for tenure in 2004.
In the meantime, I had turned my attention to criticisms of the Bush/Cheney regime which was warmongering over Iraq in the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks against the Untied States. I published two articles in the newsletter of the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association, From the Left, critical of the war plans—“A Shrill Cry for War” in 2002 and “God’s Gift to Humanity” in 2003—as well a March 2003 article in The Public Eye (a publication of the anti-fascist organization Political Research Associates) “Faith Matters: George Bush and Providence.” Just before my Public Eye essay, on March 4, I gave a speech before hundreds of students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (“Bush’s Dream of a Democratic Middle-East”). My polemics were delivered on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I was highly critical of the government and the machinations of the Project for a New American Century that was driving the war push.
Recordings from this speech, and likely additional content from classroom lectures from that semester, were played on the Bill LuMaye show (AM 1360) for several days. My colleagues heard the programs. The host and callers were incensed at my rhetoric and analysis. I was “anti-American” and a “communist.” The College Republicans, who had attempted to disrupt the March 4 teach-in, and who had likely been the source of the recordings, sought to publicly ridicule me on campus, naming me “Man of the Year” and distributing flyers around the school of my image draped in American flags. Students overwhelmingly expressed support for me and condemned the College Republicans. At another event on campus, which I did not attend, community members disrupted the proceedings complaining about the “mistreatment” of conservative students on campus. Their complaints concerned the fallout from my treatment—the College Republicans had lost their faculty sponsorship. Faculty had also rallied around me.
Then, in May of 2004, as I was preparing to the come up for tenure that upcoming fall, the chancellor, Bruce Shepard (who later became president of Western Washington University), received an email from somebody who claimed to have “discovered” on the Internet writings by me critical of administration and faculty. The Secretary of the Faculty forwarded the letter to me (it never made it into my personnel file) and I could see that the phrases were taken from that 2002 speech in Memphis and twisted around to make it appear as if I had slandered my colleagues—at least that was the Chancellor’s spin on my words. I wrote the chancellor back explaining what was going on. He didn’t have the decency to respond. As it turned out, he had written the email in a white heat—in the presence of the university attorney, who either could not or did not try to stop him from hitting send.
Again the faculty rallied around me and I was awarded early tenure in June of 2005. But I was now in the crosshairs of some powerful forces. I had not let up on the corporate polluters and their political operatives. And I continue to condemn the warmongers. In 2004, I delivered a keynote address at a sociology conference in Tennessee, “Threatening Uncertainties: Fossil Fuels, Climate Change, and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century,” that lambasted the Bush administration. I published an essay that same year, first in the German language, then in English in 2005 (with Pluto Press), titled “War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Central Asia and Middle East Policy,” in the collection Devastating Society–The Neo-Conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice. The essay came out in Arabic a year later (and Indonesian after that). The collection contained an additional essay by me criticizing the Bush energy policy. Throughout all this I continued to hammer away at the government with essays in From the Left, for example “Bush and Sharon: Securing the Realm” (2004) and “The Downing Street Memo—Why it Matters” (2006).
In fall of 2006 and spring of 2007 I accepted two stints at the United Nations University International Leadership Institute, held in Amman, Jordan, giving two high profile lectures, in addition to running workshops and participating in roundtables with individuals from across the planet. The first was called “Youth Leadership, the Politicization of Religion, and the Future of Democracy in the Middle East” (see Journey to Jordan, November 2006) and “Democracy and Human Rights in Transition: Challenges of the Globalizing World” (see Journey to Jordan, April 2007). At the second meeting, I was confronted in the back of the room by a Bush official, serving in the US embassy in Jordan, about my political activities. He told me that he had been informed of the contents of my speech the day before and that he was there on this day to provide the administration’s position. This was right after the new US embassy building had been built and the US and Jordan had renewed their security arrangement. My institution had been working closely with the University in Jordan at Amman, a process in which I was deeply involved. Apparently word had gotten back the university about all this and I was never informed of another meeting of the committee after that.
Me and US Embassy’s Counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs Philip Frayne
The ramifications of all this have been rather significant. Permit me to speculate here. I do not have evidence to support my suspicions. However, with the release of the Twitter files, which exposes the collaboration between the administrative state and social media companies, it seems apparent to me why, after more than ten years on Twitter, I have only 180 followers. Compare this to my number of followers on Gettr, the right-wing version of Twitter, where, despite being open about my Marxism, I have more than 700 followers, this after only being on that site for a year or so. Was my name entered into the shadow banning algorithms at the inception of the Twitter? This might explains why, when I search Google for blog entries from Freedom and Reason, certain ones of a certain character are not returned (you can probably guess which ones). (See Is Freedom and Reason Being Shadow Banned?)
However, even with my marginal(ized) presence on Twitter, I still managed to find a way to get reported to the administrators of my university. Before this recent anti-BLM dustup, and after the campaign of right-wing harassment, I was reported for informing Nikole Hannah-Jones about the uptake of mRNA in the black community (see Cognitive Autonomy and Our Freedom from Institutionalized Reflex). Instead of educating the person who complained about the vital importance of academic freedom and the political and intellectual autonomy of teachers and researchers in the university’s employ, the complaint was sent down the chain of command and I was asked to consider not identifying my affiliation with the university in my Twitter profile. My response was to ask the colleague, who is also on social media, and politically active in Democratic Party politics, as well as in organized labor, whether his university affiliation also appears in his profile. There is an obvious double standard.
The soul-crushing part of the attempts to suppress me are the anonymous letters and messages from colleagues who beg me to come home to the tribe they think owns me (I even get this from some relatives). When people who have claimed to like and love you, people with whom you have had a social life, gaslight you it does some work on you emotionally. It’s also terribly disappointing because you want to respect people and that becomes very difficult in that situation. Even when they apologize, it goes to character. The point I want to make before moving on (and I am getting near the end of this blog) is how obvious suppression makes the prevailing hegemony. That quote shared on social media wrongly attributed to Voltaire is spot on: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” That apparently white nationalist Kevin Alfred Strom penned that quote doesn’t change its power (although I am sure it does among the identitarians whose logic is necessarily rooted in the fallacy of ad hominem).
That reminds me! White supremacist Paul Nehlen sent cryptic and somewhat threatening messages to me and a colleague (who is Jewish) several years ago. The messages came as cards with text scrawled in Sharpie in big white envelopes delivered to our campus mailboxes. Why us? We turned over the messages to campus police, who returned them to us after determining that there was nothing to be done about it. The faculty around us condemned the letters. I can with almost 100 percent certainty guarantee you that I will never find faculty rallying to my side when the harassment comes from progressive students, colleagues, and community members.
* * *
During the Cold War in the United States, there was a period known as the “Red Scare” where citizens were made afraid of the perceived threat of communism and Soviet influence. This led to a culture of suspicion where people were encouraged to report any potential communist sympathizers to the authorities. As part of this culture, there were instances where students were encouraged to report their professors to authorities if they believed that they held communist beliefs or were teaching subversive material.
These reports were made not only to government agencies such as the FBI, which would investigate the allegations and potentially take action against the accused professors, but were most frequently reported to department chairs, college deans, and chancellors and presidents of colleges and universities. Many professors had their careers destroyed and their lives ruined as a result. I don’t need to tell historians that the culture of surveillance and suspicion that developed during this time was a dark chapter in American history and a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked government power and the importance of protecting civil liberties.
But I feel that I do need to tell them that it is no different now that it’s those claiming to have communist and left-wing sympathies who are reporting teachers they suspect of holding conservative beliefs and teaching subversive materials, i.e., criticism of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and gender ideology.
Resistance to facts is not only frustrating in its tenacity and therefore its function as a barrier to learning, but has become dangerous in the depth of its repressive reflex. Too many students today think it’s their duty to report their teachers to the authorities. They think this is what democracy looks like—just like students thought during the Red Scare when they reported their leftwing teachers to the authorities. And, just like during the Red Scare, compounding the problem are teachers who enable youth by failing to stand up for cognitive liberty and free speech—teachers who deny that repressive praxis is a serious problem when its the other side they think is being repressed.
The word “censorious” is often used to describe this situation. But this is the wrong word. “Censorious” is an adjective that describes someone who is highly critical or disapproving, especially in a fault-finding way. A censorious person is quick to point out the mistakes of others, often in a harsh manner or moralistic tone. The word “censorious” describes an atmosphere, climate, environment that is highly critical or disapproving, such as a workplace or a social group where people are quick to judge or criticize one another.
“Repressive” defines a climate or system or climate that suppresses or restricts the expression of free speech or other forms of individual liberty. This is the word we are looking for. We see as repressive government censorship of certain books or restricts access to information. We are also coming to see this as also true of private action in the era of corporate statism.
However, a workplace or social environment where individuals are discouraged from expressing their opinions or ideas due to fear of retribution is also repression. Reporting teachers for saying things that some students find “harmful” creates a chilling effect where teachers who might deviate from the woke progressive doctrine so pervasive in today’s university will cause those who are supposed to challenge ideology to avoid arguments and subjects they fear will cause students to report them to administrators—who are inclined to follow up on their complaints.
I admit that it has limited my own expressions—that is, I have engaged in self-censorship.
“Repressive” refers to the act of controlling or limiting something, whether by authority or coercion. A repressive culture, regime, organization, system is one that seeks to control its citizens or members by limiting their freedoms and rights. Repressive systems use tactics such as censorship, propaganda, and surveillance to limit the flow of information and to suppress dissent or opposition.
Such actions may be directed towards individuals, groups, or entire populations, and can have serious consequences for human rights, democracy, and social justice—even while appealing to these very things as the motive to repress.
In a social or psychological context, repressive may refer to an individual’s attempt to suppress or deny their own thoughts, feelings, or desires. This can be harmful to an individual’s mental health and may interfere with their ability to form authentic relationships or to fully engage with the world around them. Repressive circumstances forces people to live in bad faith.
* * *
I will close on this business of retention because this is one more rationalization given to cover the pervasive authoritarian character of progressive students. It is not interesting how administrators, who in my experience promote the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, do so while never asking whether the climate at today’s institutes of higher learning make it difficult to retain conservative and liberal students—or, for that matter, deter them from seeking a college education?
It is important for readers to understand is that the argot of DEI is not supposed to be taken on face value. One would think that diversity refers to the recognition and celebration of differences among individuals and groups, and the importance of including diverse perspectives and experiences in all aspects of society. But in practice, diversity means elevating the perspectives and experiences of nonwhite, non-cisgendered, non-heterosexual, and female above those of white, cisgendered, heterosexual men (I am using here the terminology from the UW System survey).
Equity does not refer to the creation of a level playing field where all individuals have access to the resources and opportunities needed to succeed regardless of their background or identity. Rather, diversity and equity are code words for preferences for those of minority status. And inclusion, despite appearing to emphasize practices of actively involving and valuing all individuals and creating a culture where everyone feels welcome and supported, actually means suppressing those attitude and opinions that minorities find harmful and worthy of reporting to administrators.
The reality of today’s university is that there has been an illiberal takeover of higher education by DEI activists and bureaucrats. Their work has been in stifling intellectual diversity, undermining equal opportunity and treatment, and excluding those who dissent from from the rigid orthodoxy of woke progressivism. This agenda that has been pushed down into 4k-12 education, producing students who value identity over liberty and exhibit authoritarian tendencies. By teaching young people that there are expressions that are harmful, teachers encourage young people to behave like the civilian informants that made the Stasi so effective in the repression of thought in totalitarian East Germany.
The solution? First, administrators, staff, and teachers have to explain to young people the importance of cognitive liberty and free speech to their own struggles for justice. The great civil rights victories of history occurred because the norms of free speech, association, and assembly allowed people to develop their arguments, legitimize their struggle, and persuade others to join them. We must also abolish DEI bureaucracies and end mandatory diversity and sensitivity training. Tragically, too many administrators, faculty, and staff are committed to DEI. And there is inertia in bureaucratic systems. Many colleges and universities invite, and some even require current and prospective faculty to demonstrate, often in written statements, what appear as loyalty oaths (and they are just this), their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), statements used not only in hiring decisions, but in evaluations, contract renewals, tenure, and promotion decisions.
I was appointed to my current position in 2000. This was before the madness. If I were entering the job market today, I would either have to lie or find another occupation. Given how fast and how completely the institution of higher education delegitimizing itself, I would probably regret having gone to graduate school in the first place.
“Nothing comes from nowhere,” said Glenn Loury on Substack yesterday. “Today’s woke politics have they’re antecedent in debates about speech and censorship that have been raging in this country for some time. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, I was a vocal opponent of political correctness on college campuses. Student activists, often supported by select faculty members, tried to purge the classroom of language and ideas they deemed unacceptable. Classic texts and harmless figures of speech came under assault in the one place where free inquiry was most vital.”
Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Brown University
Loury continued: “Yesterday’s political correctness is today’s wokeness. The continuities are impossible to ignore. And while, with the benefit of hindsight, I might revise some of what I said about political correctness in the past, it’s more imperative now than ever to push back against censoriousness, nonsensical speech codes, and the erosion of standards.”
Loury is right. We have entered another troubling period in the history of our republic. Just last week I had students report me to administrators for—get this—presenting facts in class that refute the Black Lives Matter’s narrative on lethal police encounters. How presenting facts could be seen as worthy of complaint seems bizarre, but it’s an all too common occurrence these days among those identifying as very progressive. These students found my blog and declared me to be “anti-Black Lives Matter.” Guilty as charged, I told administrators. (I will blog about this tomorrow.)
Woke progressivism is severely hobbled by the “racism of the gaps,” a species of faith-based argument (see my recent Lethal Police Encounters and Criminal Violence). Faith-belief is seen across what passes for the left today. Resistance to facts is not only frustrating in its tenacity (and in the harm it is causing to accountability and reform) but has become dangerous in the depth of its repressive reflex. Too many students today think it’s their duty to report their teachers to the authorities. They think this is what democracy looks like. Compounding the problem are teachers who enable youth by failing to stand up for cognitive liberty—or worse: denying that repressive praxis is a serious problem.
A big piece of this is that there is no crisis justifying large-scale protest action. The perception that there are big problems is fed by myth-makers who spin narratives about systemic racism and sow mass hysteria about climate change. A genuine anxiety makes young people susceptible to these projects, as the conditions of late capitalism are felt but have been made remote not only by fake crises, but by the suppression of proletarian consciousness. There is moreover the narcissistic desire to be a part of something significant. The young want their civil rights struggle. They want a place in history. Progressive teachers do their part in encouraging them to “take action.” But without anything significant to take action about, movement politics just become reactionary, however much they dress up in clothing that looks like cultural revolution–indeed, that’s part of what makes it so reactionary.
The only way we’re going to save openness and tolerance in our institutions is to openly condemn the desire among the youth and their allies in other age cohorts to suppress speech with which they disagree and repress those with whom they disagree. This condemnation has to start well before college. I am not hopeful, frankly. The imperative of the corporate state and technocratic desire are powerful forces against freedom. But we have to try anyway. We have to be very deliberate in our work to save free speech, conscious, association, and assembly from the woke brigade.
“[The] nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force. International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.” —Zbigniew Brzezinski (1969)
Former president Jimmy Carter has accepted hospice care at his house. Carter was a one-term president from 1977-1981. He was defeated in the 1980 election by Ronald Reagan. While many regard Carter as a failed president, this judgment obscures a significant period of intensive consolidation of corporate state power. Carter was not only one of the early and most influential members of the Trilateral Commission, but his administration was comprised of several members of that elite organization.
The Trilateral Commission in 1973. Founders Rockefeller and Brzezinski are siting to the left of Gerald Ford, also a member.
Carter was a member of the Trilateral Commission, a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller, then chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Rockefeller created the organization to coordinate policy development and political cooperation between North America, Europe, and Asia (including the Pacific Rim countries).
Carter was invited to join the Trilateral Commission in 1973 and became a member in 1974. Governor of George from 1971 to 1975, he was seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party. As a member, he attended meetings and contributed to the organization’s research and publications.
In 1975, the Trilateral Commission published The Crisis of Democracy, a report written by members of the Commission’s Task Force on the Governability of Democracies. The report was intended to address what the authors saw as a crisis in democratic governance in the United States and other Western countries.
One author of the report (the Europe chapter) was Michel Crozier, a French sociologist and political scientist. Crozier was associated with the idea of managerialism, which advocates applying managerial techniques to government operations. Another author was Samuel P. Huntington (the North American chapter), a Harvard professor also favorable to technocratic arrangements.
The report argued that the post-World War II era of economic growth had created a sense of entitlement among citizens, who were now demanding more from their governments than they were able to deliver. The authors suggested that this demand for more government services and greater participation in the political process was leading to a breakdown in the ability of democratic governments to govern effectively.
The report proposed several solutions to this crisis, including the need for greater cooperation between government and business, the need for greater technocratic expertise in government, and the need for greater control over the media to ensure that public opinion was not manipulated by special interests. In other words, The Crisis of Democracy reflected the anti-democratic and elitist attitude of its members, advocating for a greater role for technocrats and business leaders in the political process, while reducing the role of ordinary citizens.
In 1976, Carter announced his candidacy for the presidency and while his membership in the Trilateral Commission became an issue in the campaign, the media downplayed the significance of his membership and the organization and Carter went on to defeat Gerald Ford (also a member of the Commission), who had been vice-president under Nixon.
Following his election, Carter appointed several members of the Trilateral Commission to his administration, including Walter Mondale as vice president and Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security advisor (Mondale would run for president in 1984). Brzezinski had been director of the Commission during the publication of The Crisis of Democracy. Brzezinski was a key architect of the Carter administration’s policy of supporting Islamist rebels in Afghanistan to draw the Soviet Union into that country. (See Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan. see also Hell on Earth or Earthly Heaven? The Totalitarian Threats Facing the West.)
Several other members of the Commission also served in the administration: Cyrus Vance served as Secretary of State from 1977 to 1980. James Schlesinger served as Secretary of Energy in 1977 before serving as Secretary of Defense from 1977 to 1979. Michael Blumenthal served as Carter’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1977 to 1979. Andrew Young served as Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979.
There were other politicians and policymakers who were members of the Trilateral Commission, most famously George H.W. Bush fame, who was a member of the Commission before he became vice president under Ronald Reagan in 1981. Bush was a member of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 to 1979, He served US Ambassador to the United Nations during this time, as well as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Readers may remember when Bush mentioned the phrase “new world order” in a speech to a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990. The speech was given in the context of the Gulf War, which had just begun. In the speech, Bush discussed the need for international cooperation and for the United States to play a leading role in shaping a new world order after the end of the Cold War.
“We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment,” he said. “The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge.”
Other members worth noting include Antony Blinken, Secretary of State under Biden, Jeffrey Epstein, former hedge fund manager (convicted of human trafficking in 2008), Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO since 1988 (also CFR board member and WEF trustee), Henry Kissinger, a former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, and Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve (under both Carter and Reagan).
Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Secretary under George W. Bush and president of the World Bank, was also a member. Wolfowitz was associated with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative think tank that operated from 1997 to 2006 known for its advocacy of a more aggressive foreign policy and a more robust military posture for the United States.
The PNAC’s most famous publication was a 2000 report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, which argued for increased defense spending, the development of new military technologies, and a more interventionist foreign policy. The report was influential in shaping the foreign policy priorities of the administration of President George W. Bush, several members of which had been associated with the PNAC prior to taking office. (See War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy; Christian Neo-Fundamentalism and US Foreign Policy.)
Several members of the Trilateral Commission were also associated with the Project for the New American Century, including Paul Wolfowitz, who served as a member of the PNAC’s board of directors. Other prominent members of the Trilateral Commission who were also associated with the PNAC included Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and William Kristol.
They may come and go like Jimmy Carter, and George Bush before him, but these are the people who run the world. And they do it in the open. You only have to allow yourself to see it.
Based on the most recent statistics, the annual rate of lethal police encounters is around 1.67 deaths per 100,000 civilians. Almost all of those deaths are explained by benchmarks, i.e., area rates of violent crime, and situational factors, i.e., suspect armed and/or a danger to officer and/or civilians.
Bodycam video shows suspect shooting officer before being killed
Benchmarks and situational factors explain racial disparities. The only studies that don’t account for disparities using these metrics finds police more reluctant to shoot black suspects compared to white suspects. Police kill twice as many whites as blacks every year despite whites being proportionally underrepresented in serious crime and committing less than 50 percent of all murders and robberies.
Contrary to the claims of Black Lives Matter and other woke progressive voices favored by the corporate state media, rates and patterns of lethal police encounters are functions of rates and patterns of criminal violence. The United States is remarkable among developed countries for the degree of violent crime. Public safety is a human right. The police are necessary to keep our communities safe. To be be sure, we need better trained officers. But we also need more of them.
The recent rise in crime cannot be explained by the presence of guns. Gun homicide rates are down sharply since their 1993 peak despite the fact that the number of guns per household has remained relatively stable thought out the first two decades of the new millennium and the average guns per person has increased drastically. Both the CDC and the FBI databases make clear that gun homicides is a function of who has guns not the number of or types of guns.
What explains the drop in violent crime since 1993 are policies putting more cops on the street (police presence is a deterrence) and increasing prison commitments (incapacitation keeps violent repeat offenders off the streets). What explains the recent and drastic rise in violence crime? Depolicing, decarceration, greater leniency in the criminal justice process generally, and the anti-public safety policies associated with the sharp rise of social justice politics and the myth of a racist criminal justice system (the Ferguson Effect).
* * *
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “God of the gaps.” This phrase gets at how god is used as an explanation for phenomena when rational explanations, those that depends on sound facts and valid interpretation, are unavailable. “God of the gaps” is an exercise in faith—a substitute for reason. As science advances, the gaps explained by god disappear. If you are prepared to accept reason, that is.
“Racism of the gaps” is the reflexive attribution of disparities between demographic groups to systemic racism. For example, although cops kill twice as many whites as blacks annually, blacks are overrepresented among those killed by the police. We are told that this is because of systemic racism in policing. Another common example is the claim that blacks are overrepresented in prison commitments because of systemic racism in the criminal justice process. As these disparities are explained by benchmarks and situational factors, the gaps close.
However, not every believer accepts that reason explains phenomena. And they can always appeal to the nonfalsifiable nature of the god explanation to sustain their faith in the supernatural. Yet we cannot say this about the “racism of the gap” phenomenon since we can check to see if there are facts that close the gap (and there are). Still, as is the character of true believers, facts don’t change the minds of those committed to the reflexive attribution of disparities between demographic groups to systemic racism. The reflective attribution is too valuable as an ideological project.
freedom and reason 