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Recently I organized a session at the 2020 Mid-South Sociological Association Meetings, held virtually: Contemporary Penology: Thinking About Transformation of Systems and Persons. I am Associate Professor in the Democracy and Justice Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay where I teach mostly on matters of criminology and criminal justice. My paper was titled “Rehabilitation in the Norwegian Correctional System,” and I want to present the textual basis for my talk. Here is The FAR Podcast covering the talk:

I am on sabbatical conducting a crossnational comparative study of the character and efficacy of various correctional approaches in the reduction of criminal recidivism for a range of purposes: providing scholars and practitioners with detailed and focused knowledge on advancements in penology; developing programs for students studying and preparing for careers in the fields of criminology and criminal justice administration; and making available to the public sound information and methods appropriate to the development and implementation of policies conducive to building inclusive, safe, and just communities. In this talk I discussed is an evaluation, very much in development, of US-style penology in light of the innovative approach of Norwegian penology, with some attention paid to the Swedish situation as a near comparison. This text is the rough sketch of a paper, which I am working up for publication.

A little bit of background. I traveled to Norway and Sweden in the summer of 2018 to gain access to educational and correctional institutions in the cities of Oslo, Stockholm, and Göteborg. In Norway, I traveled to the University College of Norwegian Correctional Service (KRUS), or Kriminalomsorgen, in Lillestrøm, outside of Oslo. My trip to Stockholm involved meetings with researchers at the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (SPPS), or Kriminalvården, in Liljeholmen, a district in the Stockholm archipelago. 

In the fall of that year, I was invited by Sociology and Work Science to come to the University of Göteborg for my sabbatical semester. They agreed to host my visit and provide me with office space. In June 2019, I was awarded a sabbatical for fall 2020 to travel to Norway and Sweden to continue my research. Unfortunately SARS-CoV-2 emerged in early spring of this year and my university cancelled all international travel until at least the end of the year. My research continues, but under obviously constrained conditions.

In his landmark 1940 work, The Prison Community, Donald Clemmer coins the term “prisonization,” which he defines as “the taking on” by inmates “of the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary” (270). According to Clemmer, the phenomenon plays a critical role in determining the success of rehabilitation. The acquired habits of institutional life replace the inmate’s prior sensibilities to the detriment of reformation. “The net results of the process,” Stanton Wheeler writes in his 1961 American Sociological Review article “Socialization in Correctional Communities,” is “the internalization of a criminal outlook, leaving the ‘prisonized’ individual relatively immune to the influences of a conventional value system” (697).

While Clemmer identifies several structural elements shaping prison society, including the antagonistic relationship between correctional officers and inmates, cliques and gangs, and prisoner demography (age, ethnicity, race, and so forth), he is concerned primarily with detailing the dynamics and results of prisonization, not with the origins of the “convict code,” that is the system of sanctions (McCorkle and Korn 1962), or the structural features underpinning it. Clemmer’s insights provoked the development of a large body of literature on prison culture and socialization, the findings of which have generally supported his thesis that imprisoned individuals are at risk in time to acquire the prevailing role-specific beliefs, norms, and values of the institution, and, crucially, adumbrated the institutional logic that gives rise to the dynamic.  

Many observers root prisonization to the austere realities of incarceration. Like concentration camps, military service, and psychiatric facilities, the penitentiary is a manifestation of what Erving Goffman described in his 1961 Asylums as “total institutions,” sites where all life unfolds according to externally imposed inelastic rules and schedules. Responsibility for decision-making largely removed from his purview, the inmate finds himself fundamentally reliant upon the penitentiary routine, which is markedly different from the outside world. Goffman argues that total institutions produce a “self-mortification” that sharply limits personal autonomy and stamps the inmate with a new identity. Ann Cordilia’s 1983 The making of an inmate: Prisons as a way of life characterizes this as a form of “desocialization.” We might say that prisoners are resocialized and new loyalties and solidarity relations emerge.

Prisonization is a species of institutionalization, specifically assimilation or integration with inmate culture, what Gresham Sykes (1958) characterizes as “a society of captives.” It’s Sykes’ catalog of the “pains of imprisonment” that informs the conceptual model used in this paper. Sykes identifies five deprivations underpinning inmate adaptation to prison life, deprivations of autonomy, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, liberty, and security. This is commonly known as the “deprivation thesis.” Those things prison deprives are understood as human needs that inmate culture ameliorates, corrupts, or serves.

In his landmark 1958 work, Gresham Sykes characterizes prison as “a society of captives.” His catalog of the “pains of imprisonment” informs the conceptual model used in this paper. Sykes identifies five deprivations underpinning inmate adaptation to prison life: deprivations of autonomy, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, liberty, and security. I will come to those in a moment. Sykes also explores in The Society of Captives the question of power, which he believes is not naked in the penitentiary setting but based on legitimacy. In other words, power as authority. This is arguably true in any complex real-world relationship. According to Sykes’ thesis, what he calls the “the defects of total power,” power involves a twin dynamic of (a) inner moral compulsion to obey by those who are controlled and (b) the legitimate effort or right to exercise control. Control over coercive machinery is not enough to control a society of captives. Although correctional officials are vested with the power to demand compliance from prisoners, their power is in actuality limited and depends to a very real degree on inmate cooperation. It is not possible day-to-day for correctional officials to coerce prisoners into compliance. This suggests that correctional officials can leverage recipricol social relations in the rehabilitative process. Prisons are a community, as Clemmer noted, but a community built upon power asymmetries. This is where degradation and abuses come in.

In James Austin and John Irwin 2001 It’s about time: America’s incarceration binge report affective dimensions to Gresham’s pains, finding among inmates’ feelings of alienation, detachment, meaninglessness, normlessness, and powerlessness. From Austin and Irwin’s perspective, the culture of penitentiaries in which inmates are socialized is caused by their anomic state of existence, as inmates, struggling to make sense of their world, develop their own normative and value systems. The general hypothesis is that empirical research should find a negative relationship between degree of prisonization and the success of rehabilitation but also the presence or absence of pains. Thus, the deleterious effects of imprisonment on life beyond prison depend on the frequency and intensity of association with other inmates, the length of time spent in penitentiary settings, and the character of the prison experience. Putting the matter simply, the more time inmates spend with other prisoners, and the longer their sentences, the more prisonized they will become. But it also depends on the pains of imprisonment—that is, which deprivations are present and in what degree.

Presently, the US incarcerates more persons than any other country and has the highest incarceration rate in the world (see chart below). According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 2.09 million persons in state and federal prisons, jails, and juvenile correctional facilities (738,400 in jails, 1,176,400 in state prisons, and 179,200 in federal prisons), with an incarceration rate of 639 per 100,000 residents. Nearly ten percent of prisoners are female. The US carceral system is notable for significant class, ethnic, and racial disparities, which largely reflect the demographics of crime commission using the categories from the Uniform Crime Report.

The United States overall has a poor record of rehabilitating those it incarcerates (there is wide variations among the states). According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, recent data show that 68% percent of those released from prison in 2005 were rearrested within three years of their release. This rises to 83% in nine years. This measure of recidivism is a rough but useful indicator of the problem of reoffending after leaving custodial supervision. The United States is well-known among advanced democracies for its punitive approach to corrections, policies guided by deterrence theory. The typical punishment regime in the United States emphasizes harsh and degrading conditions. 

During approximately the same period, according to the World Prison Brief published by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, prison population in Norway in 2020 stood at 2,653 in 34 correctional facilities, with a rate of 49 per 100,000. Just over six percent are women (see chart below). Twenty-nine percent of prisoners are foreign born. Evidence presented by the Norwegian government indicates that 20 percent prisoners in Norway are recidivists. Correctional institutions in Norway are 73 prercent of capacity. 

According to the same source, inmates in Swedish correctional facilities in 2020 numbered around 7,000 in 79 correctional institutions, with a rate of 68 per 100,000 (see chart below). Just over six percent are women. Just over 22.1 percent are foreign born. Recidivism rates, at around 40 percent within three years, are lower in Sweden than in the United States but considerably higher than in Norway. Sweden’s correctional system is 101.6 percent capacity. 

When I began my project, the evidence indicated that prison populations were rising in Norway while falling in Sweden. Norway was on a get-tough-on-crime kick, while Sweden was in a period of lienency. However, since 2016, the respective trends have reversed in each country. I want to explain this in the following manner, and this is based on other work that I am doing on the political economy of penal institutions and political-sociological trends in these three countries. 

Reduction in the size of the penitentiary in the United States is a function of historically low rates of crime and especially violence in the United States. The country has seen significant reforms over the last few years, but we likely won’t see the results of that, all things being equal, for a few years now. Why crime has fallen is beyond the scope of my talk today. 

While crime has declined in the United States over the last several years, it has increased in Norway and Sweden. There are complex reasons for this, but what is relevant here is that the two countries have responded to the crime increase very differently. Until recently, while Sweden did not move aggressively to control crime through the traditional means of criminal justice, Norway, on the other hand, did. This has a great deal to do with the politics, with Norway having moved substantially to the right politically over the last 15 or so years, while Sweden has kept its more progressive attitudes. This changed over the last few years. We now see prison populations rising in Sweden while falling in Norway. 

One might be inclined to credit the downward trends in Norway to the deterrent effect of a more aggressive Norwegian response, which involves a major shift in the focus of crime control to more serious criminal offenses. To be sure, deterrence probably explains some if not much of it. However, at the same time, Norway endeavored to become a model of rehabilitation in order to reduce recidivism, which its penologists agreed would further enhance public safety and reduce the size of the prison population. While Sweden prisons are now at capacity, Norway’s prisons have gone from overcrowded to three-quarters capacity.

A big piece of understanding the Norwegian system is understanding what Norway calls the “principle of normality.” The normality principle limits punishment to restriction of liberty only. No other rights are explicitly compromised by the sentencing court. Punishments are designed so that no one will exist in stricter circumstances than necessary for the sake of the community, a principle that emphasizes placement in the lowest possible security regimes. Life inside prison is to resemble, as much as possible, life outside prison.

When in Norway, I toured the services and shown a cluster of prison cells where correctional workers are trained. Prisoner cells have a living space with a bed, bookshelves, desk and chair, television, and private bathroom with a toilet, sink, and shower. When we asked about the efficacy of various alternatives, the explanation is that alternatives are ordered as a progression that is part of an overall process of rehabilitation. By the time they are freed from the system, they require no more engagement with the system (unless they reoffend).

The Nordic model is focused on preparing inmates for successful reintegration with society after release by focusing on individual variability or within-subject change and the needs of people in the greater society. Norway is especially known for an emphasis on restorative justice, an approach that seeks to repair the harm caused by the offense rather than punish the perpetrator. Restorative justice puts victims, offenders, and community members in charge of determining harm done, the needs of those involved, and ways the damage may be repaired. Moreover, Norway and Sweden stress the importance of avoiding isolating prisoners in order to prevent the phenomenon of prisonization, a type of institutionalization that makes it difficult for ex-convicts to transition to life outside of custodial care. 

A very good documentary is Breaking the Cycle, directed by Tomas Lidh and John Stark,  concerning Halden Prison in Norway. They compare to Attica Correctional Faculities in Wyoming County, New York. They also show North Dakota State Penitentiary which is taking the inititative to build a more efficacious rehabilitation experience. 

Remember when, in 2016, President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden spent the last year of their murderous regime bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen? Well, I’m reminding you. It wasn’t the only year Obama and Biden bombed people. Obama and Biden bombed people every year. And they weren’t all bad people. 

Remember when, in 2010, President Obama joked about sending a Predator drone after the Jonas Brothers? “Sasha and Malia are huge fans,” he said during the May Day White House Correspondents Association Dinner. “But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” He then added, with a serious look, “You think I am joking.” A year later, he killed 16-year-old American Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis. Deadly funny, that Obama. 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in on the killing, too. Remember her cackling over the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi? “We came. We saw. He died.” I can’t forget it.

* * *

Those pushing Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 It Can’t Happen Here as capturing our current moment fail to acknowledge that Trump—if we agree he resembles in some fashion the main character of that book, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip—refutes the author’s thesis. The past four years prove the comparison wrong. 

To be sure, Trump did run on a platform of patriotism and populism to restore national greatness. Lewis thinks there’s something wrong with that, so he associates it with fascism. But where are Mussolini’s Blackshirts? Where are Hitler’s Brownshirts? We see instead black-clad anarchists and other left-wing extremists attacking American cities and American citizens, and progressive politicians are doing very little to stop it. Where are the concentration camps? (No, immigration detention facilities don’t fit the description. But you know what does, don’t you?) How is it that Congress is still here? Didn’t Windrip eliminate Congress in Sinclair’s work of satire? Where are Windrip’s kangaroo courts? They’re just on the other side of the aisle. It was the very Congress Trump was supposed to have eliminated that impeached him over his desire to expose what Facebook and Twitter have been trying to suppress: the fact that Trump’s opponent is a corrupt politician. Why do minorities and women still have rights under Trump? Windrip took those away, as I recall.

The irony is that Windrip’s corporatist philosophy is emanating not from the Trump administration but from his establishment opposition. They’re the ones mounting a revolution-from-above—the usurpation of democratic-republicanism by a powerful elite. Again, in his work, it is clear that Lewis believes populism and patriotism are bad things, so he links them to a fictitious outcome in an attempt to warn people away from politicians expressing such sentiments. That’s because Lewis was a progressive. Progressives have always held in contempt the desires of ordinary Americans. The “deplorables,” Hillary Clinton called them. 

Elites want to tell a story about how the people choose wrongly. It is best, therefore, to leave decision-making to the academics, administrators, bankers, corporate executives, cultural managers, experts, and media elites. This philosophy runs through the professional classes of Sinclair’s day. The same is true today. The technocrat believes he is entitled to power because he knows better.

Speaking of Biden, it’s telling that is took a few days before the Democratic presidential nominee was finally asked about the New York Post report alleging that emails show his son, Hunter, made millions trading on his father’s influence (New York Post Drops a Bombshell on the Biden Campaign). An avalanche of questions should have landed on him, the answers dominating the news cycle. All week this should have been all we heard. Biden didn’t even get a question about it during the town hall.

I asked Joe Biden: What is your response to the NYPost story about your son, sir?

He called it a “smear campaign” and then went after me. “I know you’d ask it. I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.” pic.twitter.com/Eo6VD4TqxD

— Bo Erickson CBS (@BoKnowsNews) October 17, 2020

“I know you’d ask it,” Biden fired back at CBS reporter Bo Erickson. “I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.” As if the establishment news media has been tough on Biden.

Imagine that had been Trump. We would have heard about it nonstop. Unverified and leaked sources flying. Instead, the media’s effort to get to the bottom of things has been more about smearing Steve Bannon and Miles Guo than about addressing the substance of the contents of what is almost certain to be Hunter Biden’s hard drive.

What goes largely unreported is the fact that, in one of the biggest scandals of our lifetimes, the Tech Giants have interfered in the 2020 election (America at a Crossroads: Corporations Poised to Take Control of the Republic). This is a very great danger to everything we stand for as a country. Corporate power has intervened on behalf of the Democrats to further its goals of world domination. Where America goes, so goes the world.

If you truly care about democratic republicanism, then you need to speak out. The republic is in serious jeopardy from the fascist impulse of corporatism. The Democrats have teamed up with the tyrants.

* * *

Finally, every once in a while, Trump will let you in on how much he truly understands the public mind. He may not sound like the most intelligent person on the planet, but he is high in emotional intelligence and astutely reads people and situations.

I learned about a poll from Trump. It concerns lying to pollsters. Not only did he know about the poll in detail, but he also understood the direction in which people are likely to lie about their intentions.

The brilliant economist (Brown University) Glenn Loury crystallizes the dynamic that the poll captures. He identifies two possible worlds. In one, he is voting for Joe Biden. In the other, he is voting for Donald Trump. In the first world, he votes for Biden and tells you he voted for Biden. Because of the political character of the moment, for an academic of Loury’s stature, there is no world in which he votes for Biden and tells you he voted for Trump. In the second world, he votes for Donald Trump and tells you he voted for Biden. There is no world in which he votes for Trump and tells you he voted for Trump.

Loury is a professor at a university. He can’t openly declare his vote for Trump because the consequences are too great. He would not only lose out on opportunities for career progression, but would also lose a lot of friends. Moreover, the vilification that would ensue would be potentially emotionally and psychologically devastating. We are all human beings, and the mob can get to us in a damaging way. Loury is no masochist. At the same time, he is a public figure and makes political arguments, so he will expect this question. If he meets the question with silence, then this will be interpreted to mean he voted for Trump. Under the principle that one has no obligation to tell the truth in a situation where the questioner has no right to know the answer (it is a secret ballot, after all), to be as honest as he can, Loury states the problem this way: “I am voting for Biden. But you should not believe me.”

To wit: if people lie, they are lying about voting for Trump because the hegemonic sensibility makes a person reluctant to proclaim their Trump vote. They will suffer too much for telling the truth. So they lie. This is what happened in 2016. The polls were wrong because people were lying. They have even more reason to lie this time around. The establishment has made a vote for Trump out to be a vote for Hitler. The Trump question is destroying marriages.

The establishment knows this. That’s why they are trying to steal the election. It’s why they are portraying the Republican Party as in meltdown. They know that Trump is likely ahead, really. Or at least even. The lying is somewhere between 10 and 15 points, I’d estimate. That’s pretty much Biden’s lead on paper. The Biden campaign just released a bulletin: Trump could win this thing.

The American citizen has to understand how significant the Joe Biden situation is. This is America against the enemies of freedom and reason. Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he responded. 

Biden is corrupt to the bone. More than this, he is a Manchurian candidate, an agent of a globalist network integrating Big Finance, Silicone Vally and the Chinese Communist Party. Biden is not merely a national security risk (as if that weren’t bad enough); he is a quisling for the enemies of the American republic. What did George Washington say about foreign entanglements? Biden can’t be president.

But the crisis of democracy goes well beyond Joe Biden. The digital utilities provisionally operated by the tech oligarchs—Facebook, Twitter, etc.—are openly censoring organs of United States government, as well as suppressing the traditional media, whose freedom is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Twitter locked out White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing the New York Post story reporting on Hunter Biden’s hard drive. She is not the only one.

The New York Post was founded by the Federalist Alexander Hamilton, a founding father, way back in 1801. Hamilton, an advocate of a strong central government, is spinning in his grave right now. If you’re alive, your head should be spinning right now.

The founders would never has stood for corporations usurping government power. The individual, the press, the religious establishment—these have independence from the government, an independence protected by the Constitution, all fifty states incorporated. Corporations are not mentioned among the entities the First Amendment protects. The corporation is a creature of the government. This has been true for centuries. The corporation must be governed by the state for freedom to prevail. We cannot allow the state to be governed by the corporation.

I quote myself from May 11, 2020 on this blog:

“As [Richard] Grossman points out [in his talks ‘Defining the Corporation, Defining Ourselves’ and ‘Challenging Corporate Law and Lore’], not even the monarchs of feudalist and early capitalist period tolerated corporate power when it threaten sovereignty. Indeed, as Grossman tells us, corporations held power under absolutism, as well, but it was power delegated by the monarch. Corporations that exceeded their authority were called before the king to be reprimanded, the recalcitrant not dressed down but dismantled, their charters revoked. This is why Thomas Jefferson, a primary author of the American Republic, said of banks and corporations that ‘the selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.’ His conclusion from the observation: ‘I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.’ The ‘aristocracy of moneyed corporations’ is an accurate description of power in the present-day state of affairs.” (We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears)

The republic is democratic. It is by law designed to defend personal liberty and freedom of association. Corporations are supplanting the republic. Representing the technocratic arm of corporate governance, progressives are okay with that. Corporations are private tyrannies. Democrats are the party of corporate tyranny. If corporations assume total power, then you will live in a totalitarian society. You may be able to buy spinning gadgets. But you will not be free.

Do you love your country? Do you value your freedom? These are questions Americans have to ask themselves right now. America is at a crossroads.

I realize the nation is consumed by the Amy Coney Barrett hearings before the United States Senate. But something much bigger is breaking. Much, much bigger. A smoking gun on the Biden crime family is now on the table. See War Room: Pandemic Episodes 437 and 438.

Here’s why you should pay attention to the things I tell you on my blog (which has now been accessed by thousands of people around the world). Let the record reflect the fact that in December of last year (“The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President”) I told you about the Biden crime family, how Don Biden bullied the Ukrainian government to drop an investigation into the energy company that employed his son, Hunter.

New York Post dropped a bombshell this morning: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” This is just a wedge of the massive pie of evidence against the Biden crime family.

Joe Biden is not small-time hoodlum. This is audacious. Joe from Scranton? No, Don Biden of the Biden crime family from Delaware. This is a criminal network that goes to the highest levels of the United States government and extends from Delaware to China. Biden says he knows nothing about what he family does. That’s what every mafia leader says. The media never follows up. That’s because they know. How does Obama not know about this?

President Trump was impeached for doing his job as president. He was attempting to expose the Biden crime family for the sake of our country. They tried to remove him from office to shut him up, to stop him from getting the bottom of this.

If the president knew about this, then you can’t tell me the FBI didn’t know this. What is FBI Director Wray up to? What master is he serving? Don’t forget, we know Clinton and the intelligence services of the deep state manufactured the Russian evidence against Trump. I tell you about that in that blog, as well. I’m not the only one who knew about this.

Please share this information with everybody you know. Read and share the New York Post story exposing Biden. Biden straight up lied during the last (and many only) debate and on many other occasions.

Biden just called a lid on today’s schedule. He’s heading back to his basement bunker.

* * *

Update (12:30 PM): CNBC headline: “Facebook makes editorial decision to limit distribution of story claiming to show ‘smoking gun’ emails related to Biden and his son.”

“While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners,” tweeted Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”

While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020

Under Biden and the Democratic Party, this practice will become commonplace. Progressives will portray the de facto abrogation of the First Amendment as reasonable corporate governance. They already are. Biden is the chief state representative of corporatist philosophy. We are in the waning days of the American Republic.

Update: (8:00 PM):

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

—Article VI, Clause 3, The United States Constitution

Much of The Guardian article “‘It instilled such problems’: ex-member of Amy Coney Barrett’s faith group speaks out” is a distraction. But one bit at the end gets at an issue that should be raised in the hearing now occurring before the American public, namely the liberal value of church-state separation. The United States is a liberal democratic republic. Right wingers and progressives have both confused the people about the character of liberalism. Liberals aren’t progressives. In many ways, liberals appear as conservatives today. I insist on progressives being honest about the authoritarian and technocratic character of their politics. And I appeal to conservatives to be open about their liberalism.

Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University, points out that groups like People of Praise reject a secular view of separation between church and state. “I don’t think we should put her Catholicism on trial, but the Catholic conservative legal movement is putting liberalism on trial,” he said. “They want to change a certain understanding of the liberal order of individual rights, and that is coming from the religious worldview of Catholic groups.” (See my lengthy piece Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism for my views on the role of Catholicism in the Western and American history.)

I have been pointing this out for quite some time now. And I do worry about reproductive freedom. I have been accused of anti-Catholic bigotry for it. I won’t apologize for my criticism of Catholicism any more than I will apologize for my criticism of Islam, fascism, or any other “ism.” I have been called an Islamophobe on that score. I remain undeterred. Religion is an ideology, and all ideology are legitimately subjected to criticism and even ridicule. (Just look at the silliness that accompanied the appearance of a fly on the Vice-President’s head. Or white people prostrate on the ground before Black Lives Matter activists or washing the feet of its black members.) 

I don’t care what arrangement Barrett has with her husband. She can speak in tongues. She can lay on hands. It’s weird, but whatever. That’s religion. Religion is weird. What I care about is whether Barrett believes in the core liberal values upon which American is founded, and among these is individual freedom from the religious standpoint of other people. Freedom of conscience is fundamental to human rights and dignity. I have said this before: as much as I don’t like to accuse people of being anti-American, the one sure fire way to draw that accusation from me is to insist that separation of church and state is not a founding principle of the republic. There is no interpretation involved here. It is explicit in the body of the Constitution itself and in the First Amendment to that document. 

I am an atheist. But even if I were a Christian, if you attempt to make me live under any religious doctrine that is not an obvious restatement of secular one, I will resist. If you persist, I will rebel. I am very interested to know whether anybody who may take a seat in our judiciary at any level has a clear understanding of religious liberty. We cannot agree to disagree on this one. Freedom is at stake.

All that being said, there is a meme circulating that asks whether conservatives would treat the matter of Barrett’s nomination to the high court differently if she were a Muslim. Presumably, progressives would make all the same arguments conservatives are making in Barrett’s defense if a Muslim woman were nominated to the court. Any questioning of her Muslim faith would be met with accusations of Islamophobe, racism, and xenophobia. I would ask whether Christianity, an idea system rooted in Western culture and shaping its development fundamentally, is commensurable with an idea system rooted in Oriental culture sufficient to suggest such an analogy. I say this as a secularist with a healthy fear of religious systems generally while, at the same time, grasping the truth that history and culture are crucial to understanding the relative threat religious systems, again which are ideological systems, pose to our way of life.

Western civilization is both secular and Christian (secularism is, after all, part of the Christian doctrine). But a world governed by sharia cannot be a secular society. All life is put under doctrine in a society governed by sharia. Nuns choose to don the habit. Under sharia, women do not choose to wear the burqa, hijab, or niqab. Under sharia, there is no religious liberty. Non-Muslims are second class citizens. Muslims themselves tell us that Islam is the total solution, the answer to everything. However regressive some tendencies in Christianity may be, Islam is as ideologically close to fascism as any modern idea system gets. It is, indeed, a system of clerical fascism. 

There are many examples of the superiority of Christianity to Islam. Here is an outstanding one: For all its faults, Christian civilization inherited a world where slavery was normal and abolished it. There never was an indigenous abolitionist movement in Islam. Slavery in the Muslim world was only limited by the force of Christian civilization during the expansion of the European world economy.

Finally, returning to Barrett’s hearings, readers need to understand why Democrats are trying to derail the nomination process. Leading Democrats are trying to mislead the public by substituting the question of court packing with filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Democrats are projecting upon Republicans their own hypocrisy. For them, this is not just about keeping Barrett off the Court because of the Affordable Care Act. The Democrats mean to sink the 2020 election into chaos. The Democratic Party is a key player in a color revolution that involves the tactic lawfare. Democrats are already leveraging the judicial system to subvert the voting process. An evenly divided court makes a deadlock possible on matters that will surely come before the court. If they can’t win outright on election day, and if they can’t get every vote they produce certified, they will tie up the process until the election goes to the House where the House Speaker (and we know who this is) will conduct a special election. A potentially divided court could prove crucial for implementing this strategy.

Remember in the 1990s when the progressive left was in full meltdown over the violent actions of anti-government, anti-police right-wing types, that amalgamation of conservative and nationalist movements, far-right militias and survivalists? The name “Michigan Militia” was etched on the public mind. Remember how horrified progressives were to hear the police described as “jackbooted thugs” and their societal function characterized as oppressing the people on behalf of a privileged elite? It sounded crazy. All this talk of the New World Order and something about the “sovereign citizen.”

Imagine the horror if the Michigan Militia took over the streets of our cities, burned down buildings, looted stores, overturned police cars, assaulted black and brown people, physically attacked cops with bottles, clubs, sticks, and firearms, invaded and occupied neighborhoods, and marched through black communities demanding residents get out of their homes—the flags of white supremacy held aloft. Imagine how proud progressives would be to finally see an armed black couple defending themselves and their property against a white mob on the prowl for the black mayor of their beloved city. Imagine that the Michigan Militia received millions of dollars in financial support from corporate America.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter are out in the streets engaged in anti-government, anti-police action, characterizing the police as “fascists,” “racists,” and “Nazis” whose function it is to oppress the people on behalf of a privileged elite. “All cops are bastards.” “Fuck the police.” Such anti-police rhetoric is commonplace in these circles. The things I just asked the reader to imagine the right-wing militia doing, Antifa and BLM are actually doing. They are armed, extremist, organized, and violent. Yet the progressive left, when it’s not encouraging the violence, rationalizes it as “chickens coming home to roost.” White people had it coming. “No justice no peace.” Corporations fund the rebellion.

The doublethink ramped up recently when the FBI thwarted an alleged plot (there is a criminal complaint supported by an affidavit by an FBI agent that has yet to be subjected to cross examination) to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The FBI arrested thirteen men, seven of whom were members of the Wolverine Watchmen, a militia group based (of course) in Michigan. In court documents, Michigan law enforcement authorities write that “the Wolverine Watchmen have called on members to identify law enforcement officers’ home addresses in order to target the officers, have made threats of violence to instigate a civil war leading to societal collapse, and have engaged in planning and training for an operation to attack the Capitol of Michigan, and kidnap Government officials including the Governor of Michigan.” Sound familiar? Antifa and Black Lives Matter dox law enforcement officers (leading police and other law enforcement personnel to hide their names on their uniforms). Antifa and BLM are explicitly rebelling to establish a new social order, one without the police. They plan and carry out attacks on city governments. 

The media are associating the alleged Whitmer kidnapping plot with the libertarian anarchist movement the Boogaloo. To learn about this movement, see “The Boogaloo Movement Is Not What You Think,” at Bellingcat. Boogaloo joins Antifa and BLM on the streets for anti-police action. Yet the news media separates them out by claiming they are “fascists” and “white supremacists.” Is this true? No, it’s not.

The Boogaloo movement is neither fascist nor white supremacist. They are for the most part non-racist, libertarian anarchist. In fact, the Boogaloo, like the Proud Boys, has a multiracial membership. The anarchist flag behind Brandon Caserta featured in his anti-government rants is intentional. There are plenty of pictures of Boogaloo members standing alongside Antifa and Black Lives Matter protestors during anti-police protests. The Boogaloo folk do indeed have a gun fetish. Because the movement is open, there is no mechanism for policing membership; a few white supremacists and neo-Nazis have claimed to be fellow travelers, but there are few actually involved, and they appear to be unwelcome. Gun enthusiasm is a powerful attractor.

Why are the people who are supposed to be informing us about such matters writing about it but not bothering to research it? Or are the running interference? If you feel the need to look and see what the Southern Poverty Law Center has to say about it, be my guest. Just remember that the SPLC is the same organization that claimed Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz were Islamophobes. However, I have an advantage. I am a criminologist whose hobby has been for decades keeping up with extremist groups. But it’s not like this information is hard to find. After all, J.J. MacNab, a fellow for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, recently testified before the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism Committee on Homeland Security, on July 16, 2020, and talked about Boogaloo. J.J. MacNab is one of the nation’s leading experts on sovereign citizens, tax protesters, U.S. paramilitary militia groups, and related anti-government extremist organizations. What does she say about them?

MacNab tells us that, among other things, “Guns are common denominator in most anti-government extremist groups. Racism is not. For that reason, you could find the Oath Keepers taking to the streets to protect police from Antifa while Boogaloo members join forces with Black Lives Matter against the police.” As for any fondness for Trump, she said, “The non-racist side of the Boogaloo proponents are the exception in that consider themselves Libertarian and therefore prefer Jo Jorgensen.” Who’s Jo Jorgensen? She is the presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party. Frankly, I would support Jorgensen myself, but I cannot get past her stance on immigration. It’s pretty much open borders. But isn’t that interesting? White nationalists supporting the open borders candidate. Yeah, that seems likely.

The Boogaloo (that’s the name for the civil war devotees wish to provoke) consider Trump a tyrant—just like the progressive left, Antifa, and BLM do. They see Whitmer as a tyrant, as well. Of course, corrupted by doublethink, the progressive left does not see Whitmer that way. The media is telling the public that Trump inspire the kidnapping plot against Whitmer. But this is untrue. Whitmer’s draconian lockdown is what motivated the protests and plot against her. As libertarian anarchists Boogaloo do not recognize the official government as legitimate, in their minds they were going to affect a citizen’s arrest and try the governor for what they believe were crimes against liberty. It’s a lot like how Antifa and Black Lives Matter pursue justice on the streets.

Do I need to emphasize that I oppose anti-police and anti-government movements? I do. That’s why I oppose Antifa and Black Lives Matter. I am a small “R” republican who believes we need a police apparatus to secure public safety in order to keep citizens safe from crime and violence in order to maintain a functioning democracy. That means I oppose the Boogaloos. I just can’t sit by and corporate propaganda proceed unencumbered by facts.

I am aware that shitposting taken literally can lead to very wrong conclusions about the ideology of a group. Just because libertarian anarchists truck in Nazi tropes doesn’t make them Nazis. They’re being silly. They’re fucking with people. It’s a form of trolling. Most libertarian anarchists are not plotting to hurt anybody. They are keyboard warriors sitting in their parents basement. Many of them are just kids. Too many “experts” of extremism don’t know about shitposting or other activities on the Internet. But they do know how to work the public into a hysteria.

If we find it abhorrent to even consider commandeering a man’s body to keep alive with his organs another man with failing ones, then we must find it abhorrent to commandeer a woman’s body to keep alive a fetus who depends on her organs to exist.

If we believe that the woman can be treated as a human incubator against her will, then we must also believe it is appropriate to hold a lottery to procure kidneys for those who need them. After all, one needs only one healthy kidney to live and most humans have two healthy ones. More than one hundred thousand Americans are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, and around twelve of them die every day because they cannot find a suitable donor.

Based on a right to privacy, which is assumed but not explicit in the Bill of Rights, leaves the reasoning behind Roe vulnerable. However, liberty is blatantly central to the foundation of the republic. (The late jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg made this point in criticizing Roe.) Personal sovereignty and individualism represent the essence of the American way of life, explicitly identified in our founding documents. It is, moreover, universally true if human rights is to mean anything objectively.

Roe should have been decided on the basis that forcing a man to sustain with his organs the life of another man is paradigmatically tyrannical, a negation of everything for which the American republic stands. Liberty is America’s raison d’être.

I agree with those who argue that because women have the unique burden to bear children equal treatment requires we recognize this unique burden. (Ginsburg made this point, as well.) But there is also a general principle that makes the feminist struggle to secure reproductive freedom at the same time the struggle of men to preserve their freedom. Men are not allies in this fight; they are in this fight side-by-side with women for themselves as humans.

The desire to control a woman’s reproductive capacity, whatever the ideology, represents a moral double standard. Advocates of restrictions would never willingly agree to a regime that commandeered men’s bodies to exploit their organs for the sake of exclusively preserving individual life. They would find this offensive to morality. But women? It is so easy for too many to disregard their sovereignty. A stealth misogyny lurks there, masquerading as empathy. It’s worst form of objectification; it denies the woman’s humanity.

To be sure, we agree to commandeer bodies to defend liberty in war. This is in itself a difficult moral dilemma. But that’s not a contradiction. On the contrary. The fact that most of us would agree to war in defense of liberty makes the aborted fetus a martyr for human rights. I offer that consolation to those who feel anguish over the aborted.

I have said this before, but I want to reiterate the fact that I am on the left. I have voted for Democratic party candidates and Green party candidates in the past. I have never voted for a Republican in my life. I oppose war and imperialism. I am an atheist, a Marxist, a feminist, an environmentalist, pro civil rights, and gay and lesbian rights all the way. I am a trained sociologist with a specialization in political economy. That makes me about as left as one can be. I say all that because I want readers to understand that what I am writing about this election and the choice we face is not because I am right wing or conservative. It’s because I am objective and refuse to be gaslit by corporate propaganda.

I am fifty-eight years old, and I have never seen the profound depth and intensity of bias in our academic, cultural, and mass media institutions than I have witnessed over the last four years. As the election approaches, the hysteria is reaching a fever pitch. The establishment is carrying one candidate—a corporatist, transnationalist, neoliberal, neoconservative career politician—across the finish line, while vilifying his opponent—a pro-American, democratic-republican, populist, nationalist, free-speech businessman and political novice—in the most over-the-top manner conceivable.

Joe Biden is not merely the most dismal candidate the Democratic Party has put forward in my lifetime, but he is quizzing of the first order, a sell-out to global corporate power and the Chinese Communist Party. The forces animating him—he is a puppet—seek to denationalize our republic while portraying tens of millions of working class Americans as backwards deplorables. Biden and his masters are working to transfer governance of our nation from our political institutions to the banking and corporate apparatus.

The globalists had effective control over the United States for 28 years (and I deeply regret supporting some of its operatives in electoral action). These elites mean to assume total control and crush popular nationalist resistance. They are so eager to get back in the driver seat that they’re waging open information and political warfare on the American population. They’re doing to the United States what they’ve been doing to Third World counties for decades (it’s called a color revolution). If they return to power, that’s what we’re destined to become: a Third World country.

Their cause is global neofeudalism. If Biden wins this election, prepare for serfdom under the new aristocracy of the transnational banking and corporate elite, where an indebted population will be delusioned by consumerism and identity politics. They won’t be free. But they will feel happy. “Their” country will appear diverse in everything but ideas. A cosmetic pretension to justice.

Enjoy your gadgets, clothes, and hair styles.

According to the BBC article, “Pence v Kaine: Who won the vice-presidential debate?” by North America reporter Anthony Zurcher, “It was a scattershot debate marred by frequent interruption, where moderator Elaine Quijado lost control of the discussion for stretches.”

Having your cake and eating it looks something like this: An ambitious woman of color, in debate with a white man, proves the place of accomplished and courageous women of color in the rough and tumble world of political argument when she takes charge of a conversation and interrupts her opponent. But when her opponent interrupts her, which white men do all the time in argument with other white men (as occurred in the Vice-Presidential debate held on October 5, 2016 between Republican Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine), the ambitious woman of color can accuse her opponent of “mansplaining” and “microaggressing,” of which he is guilty by virtue of his sex and race.

This is the beauty of identity politics. It is a clever strategy. The woman of color delegitimizes her ideological opponent while scoring unearned debate points via the extra-rational means of ad hominem and red herring, cleverly avoiding answering questions or saying much of anything of substance and asserting superior moral virtue. After the debate, her side, which largely controls the narrative and the major institutions, can distract the public from all her lying and misdirection on critical policy questions by howling about sexism and racism—by portraying her as the victim of white male aggression. Her hefty record as the Attorney General of California and United States Senator notwithstanding. If critics describe her approach and attitude as “abrasive,” “arrogant,” “condescending,” and “smug,” the woke crowd can accuse them of sexism and racism for that, too.

She and her allies can do all this with absolutely no evidence of either sexism and racism and in the face of clear evidence that her opponent would do the same thing if she were a white male (again, as Pence did to Kaine). She and her allies can do this even though her appearance on the national stage—along with many other women of color—is confirmation that sexism and racism are, for the most part, no longer barriers to an ambitious woman’s rise to political power. For they find advantage in a quiver of magical arrows that only individuals lying at the intersection of her identities may wield. There is a caveat: the women of color must hold the correct opinions. We all know that, in the progressive universe, conservative women of color are only one of those things really.

Interesting how we find ourselves four years and a few days later in a similar situation: “For the last week, it’s felt a bit like Donald Trump was routed. His woeful first presidential debate performance was compounded by a series of unforced errors, capped by an early morning Twitter tirade and a damaging New York Times story about his near billion-dollar business losses in 1995. His poll numbers headed south. The Republican vice-presidential nominee’s [Pence] primary job—really his only job—was to stop the bleeding and give the [Trump] campaign an opportunity to regroup. Mr Kaine’s goal was to keep him [Pence] from doing that. Mr Pence succeeded. Mr Kaine, while unloading a crate of opposition research on Mr Trump, failed.”

But it is not exactly the same situation, is it? Tim Kaine is a white man. Too bad for him that he couldn’t charge Pence with mansplaining and microaggressing after his poor debate outing.

In invited commentary on infectious diseases in JAMA Network Open, published September 25, 2020, Rohan Khananchi, Charlesnika Evans, and Jasmine Marcelin make several claims about systemic racism’s role in an infectious disease in “Racism, Not Race, Drives Inequality Across the COVID-19 Continuum.” I do not find the article compelling. However it is illustrative of the problems with this type of research.

Demographic disparities are not automatically indicators of racism. If one argues that racism drives demographic differences, then one cannot at the same time a priori define demographic differences as racism. That move conflates the dependent variable (difference/inequality) with the theorized independent variable (racism). The argument becomes circular/self-confirmatory/self-sealing. The argument commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by treating abstractions in a concrete way, as well as the ecological fallacy (I explain below). That the paper sneaks a claim of lack of fairness or justice into the situation by using the term “inequity” gives away the political agenda. The assumptions made in this article are unscientific.

If the paper were to proceed on a rational basis, it would define racism in a way that allowed for its evaluation as a causal factor (conceptualize/operationalize). The claim that race explains differences in human populations and/or laws/policies based on purported racial differences defines racism. What is the evidence that any human beings supposed in the literature were motivated by racist beliefs? Where are the laws and policies based on this belief? If there were laws/policies in place that segregated medical care on the basis of race, or forced blacks to live in impoverished communities, then institutional/systemic racism might play a contributing role in the demographic inequalities identified. But these systems were dismantled more than fifty years ago in America. Today it is illegal to discriminate against blacks on the basis of race.

The article states that “fundamental causes of COVID-19 inequity include systemically racist policies, such as historic racial segregation and their inextricable downstream effects on the differential quality and distribution of housing, transportation, economic opportunity, education, food, air quality, health care, and beyond.” To be sure, historic racial segregation was based on systematically racist policies. But the operative word here is “historic.” Past policies are not present policies. And while history is not irrelevant to understandings of the present, history is also not the present. Keep in mind that “inextricable” means impossible to disentangle. The pairing of “inextricable” with “downstream effects” is obscurantism. The authors assume as given a foundation that they must demonstrate. This is strange alchemy. An exercise in mystification.

The article continues, “Each of these factors is associated with the risk of COVID-19 exposure and severity through direct (e.g., work conditions, crowded housing, carceral overrepresentation) and indirect (e.g., limited access to health information or insurance; increased prevalence of comorbidities; cumulative life-course exposure to discrimination, low socioeconomic status, and other health risk conditions) mechanisms.” However, since the racial and ethnic differences are not about race, according to the article, but about racism, then one would expect to find white people living in these conditions do not suffer the same fate. But the article commits the ecological fallacy by substituting for the situations of concrete individuals aggregate demographic differences.

Controlling for cultural factors (but perhaps not all, since we can draw too fine a distinction between racial groups in this regard), is it true that whites living under near-identical conditions are differentiated from blacks vis-à-vis COVID-19? Do we suppose that “low socioeconomic status” whites living in conditions of crowded housing, with limited access of health information or insurance and increased prevalence of comorbidities, etc., have better outcomes than blacks living in these conditions? (If so, that might suggests actual racial differences). What is the measure of “life-course exposure to discrimination”? Again, that’s an awfully big assumption.

These types of studies are part of a general approach in academic work that operates from an epistemological frame (critical race theory) that manufactures an ontology built upon arbitrary abstractions. At the core of this is the problem of reification in science. Such work proceeds on assumptions that are far too sure of themselves. There is nothing in this article that presents racism as conceptualized and operationalized as either belief in genetic differences in human populations and/or laws and policies based on such purported differences. The structural problems identified are class-based and explicable in terms of the processes of capitalist accumulation. The term “socioeconomic status,” which eschews class analysis, should alert readers to the probable race-centric bias of the research frame. There may be cultural/ethnic differences, as well (for example diet and obesity), but these are unexplored in the study.

There is a twin tragedy with this approach that works to perpetuate capitalist class oppression. First, by obsessing over race, social class as a casual factor is relegated to the outskirts of social consciousness. The real dynamic working behind the scenes to produce differential health outcomes is thus mystified. Second, by obscuring class effects with the rhetoric of systemic racism, poor white people are disappeared. The situation is made to appear as if black people are the primary victims of social oppression, moreover victimized by a system privileging white people. In this way, the woes of the working class are denied and those who exploit and live off their labor, who are both black and white, are absolved of their responsibility in disparate health and other outcomes. Critical race theory works to disrupt class consciousness and entrench the capitalist mode of production.