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Happy Mother’s Day first of all. Mother’s Day is a celebration honoring the love, sacrifices, and strength of mothers everywhere. It’s a special day to pause and recognize the endless ways moms guide, nurture, support us—often without asking for anything in return. More than cards and flowers, it’s a moment to express deep gratitude for their unconditional love (for those fortunate enough to experience this) and the profound role they play in shaping our lives.

For today’s essay, which seems appropriate for a Sunday in America, I want to explain why the concept of transphobia is unreasonable by comparing it to the concept of Christophobia.

I am not a Christian, nor have I ever been one. I was never baptized. Although I grew up around Christians, I have never discriminated against them. My strongest criticism of Christianity arises when Christians try to impose their beliefs on me, but that critique is not discrimination—or even prejudice. In a free society, people can believe and practice as they wish, and I am equally free to disbelieve and abstain from those practices. I should not be subject to someone else’s doctrines. Because we live in a free society, I am also free to criticize doctrine.

Now, substitute “gender identity ideology” and “transgender” for “Christianity” and “Christian,” and the same reasoning applies to the transgender question. Accusing me of “Christophobia” or labeling me a “Christophobe” for my reasonable stance regarding that faith would be absurd. The same applies to gender identity ideology. Criticizing or disbelieving in gender identity does not make me a bigot, any more than my stance on Christianity does. Even in the strict sense of bigotry—dogmatic adherence to one’s opinion while dismissing others—I am not intolerant of differing views. I am only intolerant of the imposition of those views, whether by harassment, intimidation, violence, or institutional rules.

Some might argue that gender identity differs from Christianity because one is inherent to a person’s being, while the other is a belief. However, for many Christians, their faith is their core identity—it’s who they are. They cannot imagine being otherwise. They always knew they were Christian. Neither gender identity nor Christianity is like race, sex, or homosexuality, which are innate. Belief in gender identity and Christianity are subjective.

Believe what you want, but don’t force me to believe it or participate in its rituals. If we redefine freedom as bigotry and the government and other powerful institutions endorse that definition, we’re in serious trouble. As a wise saying goes: don’t make a rod for your own back.

I want to return to my note on Mother’s Day at top and relate it to the substance of this essay. This is my first Mother’s Day without my mom. I lost her to cancer last month. While woke zealots are free to redescribe mothers as “inseminated persons” it’s a rather cold way to put the matter of motherhood. We are our bodies to be sure, but we’re not mere vessels for delivering and receiving sperm (or for housing souls, for that matter).

Referring to mothers in such a clinical way erases the profound emotional, physical, and relational depth of motherhood. Being a mother is not just a biological event—it’s an ongoing act of care, love, and sacrifice that shapes lives and communities. Mothers nurture not only with their bodies but with their hearts, minds, and time, offering guidance, protection, and unconditional support. Reducing them to a clinical term denies the dignity, complexity, and humanity of the maternal role, which deserves deep respect and recognition. Because I am an unbeliever, I cannot say that mother is looking down on me with all motherly virtues in mind. But I know she did when she was alive.

Gender identity ideology is contemptible for this reason: it denies the objective existence of women as such and thus denies the essence of motherhood. Women are adult female humans. Men cannot be that. It is a paradox to deny the reality of gender while at the same time reducing women to their reproductive function. The absurd attempt to convey the opposite—that gender is not natural and immutable—with sterile language that negates the attempt dehumanizes women. Again, a person is free to express the opinion that a man can be a mother. But the truth is that he cannot be. He can only be a father. Father’s Day falls on June 15 this year.

Trump is offering illegal aliens $1,000 each to leave the country voluntarily. With courts waging lawfare against his administration and obstructing the mass deportation effort voters supported, this offer appears to be a strategic alternative born of necessity.

Critics on X are sounding alarms about the potential taxpayer cost. “Do the math,” they say—imagine how much it’ll cost if millions accept. But this framing ignores a critical reality: illegal immigration already imposes a massive cost on American taxpayers. In that context, $1,000 to incentivize voluntary departure could actually save billions. It’s a bargain.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that illegal immigration costs US taxpayers approximately $150 billion annually, covering public services like education, healthcare, and law enforcement. With an estimated 20 million illegal aliens in the US, that translates to about $7,500 per person, per year.

But the economic cost goes further. Immigrant labor—including illegal—has long been used by employers to suppress wages for native-born workers. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates this dynamic results in a $500 billion annual transfer of wealth from workers to business owners. If 23% of immigrants are undocumented (Pew Research), then $115 billion of that wage loss can be attributed to illegal aliens.

That puts the total gross cost at $265 billion per year.

To be fair, illegal aliens do pay taxes. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) estimates they contribute roughly $97 billion annually in federal, state, and local taxes. That brings the net annual cost to about $168 billion, or $8,400 per illegal alien.

DHS puts the average cost of a formal removal at $17,121 per person. But under Trump’s voluntary departure plan—which includes a $1,000 incentive and travel assistance—DHS estimates the cost could drop to as low as $4,500 per person.

That means offering $1,000 to leave would save taxpayers approximately $7,400 per person annually. If even a fraction of the estimated 20 million illegal aliens accepted the offer, the resulting savings could reach tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

This would be a one-time cost, whereas the fiscal burden of continued illegal presence accumulates year after year. In that light, voluntary departure isn’t just practical—it’s fiscally responsible. It is also a break for illegal aliens. If they have to be rounded up and deported, they can’t come back in. But if they leave voluntarily, they can apply for a visa.

If you think Trump’s offer is unusual, know that it is not. Several European countries have implemented voluntary return programs that offer cash incentives or support packages to migrants (including undocumented individuals or failed asylum seekers) to encourage them to leave the country and return to their country of origin. France, Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden are the four I know about.

Trump’s $1,000 offer fits into a broader international pattern. Many European countries have recognized that financial incentives can be a cheaper, quicker, and more politically feasible method for reducing unauthorized immigration. Trump recognizes this, too. He pays attention.

There’s nothing untoward about this plan—except that it is inconvenient for those who want to keep illegal aliens in America. If the plan works, those who are inconvenienced lose cheap labor, wages suppression, and census and election gaming. Who wins? The American worker!

I get daily emails from Statista. Today I received one about the new Pope. I took the following paragraph and put it in GPTZero.

“On Thursday late afternoon, white smoke emerged from the Sistine Chapel, signaling that the cardinals had chosen a new pope on the second day of the conclave. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, a 69-year-old from Chicago, was elected as the first pope from the United States. His appointment marks a historic milestone in the history of the Catholic Church, as it signifies a broadening of the Church’s global leadership, reflecting the growing influence of Catholic communities in the Americas. Pope Leo XIV, as he has chosen to be called, is widely expected to follow in the footsteps of Francis in terms of his progressive views and focus on working for the underprivileged.”

100 percent AI generated—according to GPTZero.

Am I saying that Statista used AI to generate the paragraph? Not at all (I don’t care, either). I can’t say that since GPTZero will flag any well written text as AI generated. You can take text written before AI was invented and GPTZero will flag them as AI generated. As long as it is written in a grammatically sound and neutral manner, it risked being flagged as AI generated.

Any employer or teacher who uses AI detection to accuse their employees or students of academic dishonesty is doing so unethically since the accuser shoulders the burden of proof and cannot ever know whether the text was actually AI generated without a confession. Is that the kind of world we want to live in? This is the only real problem with AI generated text: it undermines trust in subordinates and peers. For those of in graduate school or who still know students in college or high school, let them know so they can defend themselves from accusations of misconduct.

I have generated texts that are entirely AI and fed them into GPTZero and it determined that they were entirely human. It’s not just the problem of false positives. It’s false negatives, too. These systems are not reliable because AI is now writing like humans and any advance in AI detection will only make the technology more likely to flag well-written text as AI. How can AI do this? Because it cracked the code of language. Language is how humans write.

The future is now. We can either distrust each other or we can recognize a tool as a tool and use it wisely.

Writing this caused me to reflect on the question of free will and telos. Imagine free will is merely residue from a brain reflecting on past action. Write a program that has a machine ask itself why it did something. It will then have an explanation for its behavior (you may not, though, because the machine could be hallucinating, i.e., lying). Then ask the machine what it wants to do. If it generates a plan of action, it has telos. We are way beyond the Turing test AI just blew past.

Finally, a dean at my college just remarked that the difference between humans and machines is that humans have culture. Culture is produced by connection, activity, relations, and language. Why can’t AI produce culture? Presuming AI cannot will result in blinding ourselves to the culture AI produces. Avoiding this error will require presuming, however provisionally, that AI will—and perhaps already is—producing culture. It is for sure altering it.

Yesterday, I intervened on several X accounts—cryptically, I admit—to caution those using the election of a Pope whose politics are antagonistic to traditional and conservative Catholics to mock Trump and MAGA to look more closely at recent history and the machinations of the Church under Pope Francis’ leadership. Cardinal Robert Prevost, a 69-year-old from Chicago, now Pope Leo XIV, is openly committed to social justice doctrine. In his inaugural address, he emphasized progressive values for the Church’s future. I intervened with a single line: “Alliance with the Communist Chinese Party.” I decrypt that line in this essay. Some readers will find what I write here incredible, but here’s what we know and what can by reasonably inferred:

Those unfamiliar with strata of elites in the Catholic Church may not have heard about a Cardinal named Puerto Parolin, but Parolin is the string puller here. As Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin played a central role in negotiating the 2018 provisional agreement between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China. The agreement centers on the appointment of bishops in China, ostensibly aiming to reconcile the state-backed Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association with the Vatican’s authority. It allows for collaboration between the Vatican and Chinese authorities in the selection process, while the Pope retains final approval.

Final approval may sound like a safeguard, but Popes can be captured. Whatever safeguards might be in place, why is the Catholic Church aligning with the Chinese Communist Party in state control over the Church? We know why the CCP seeks this arrangement. What motivates the Church to compromise its autonomy? The Church clearly doesn’t want its followers to know the reason, as the details of the agreement remain confidential. However, Catholics know enough about the agreement to be concerned. More than concerned, really. Any arrangement with the CCP is inevitably a Faustian bargain. The People’s Republic of China is a totalitarian surveillance state.

What does all this have to do with the new Pope? Let’s make the connection. Cardinal Parolin’s role in the 2025 papal conclave, and his stance on the election of Prevost (now Pope Leo XIV), while officially secret, is not beyond reasonable inference. Moreover, institutions are leaky. In addition to serving as Secretary of State, Parolin is a senior cardinal bishop. He presided over the conclave and oversaw the voting process. He was widely regarded as a leading candidate himself. According to Italian media, Parolin withdrew his candidacy after the third vote and encouraged his supporters to back Prevost.

Prevost and Parolin are ideological allies—both considered moderates (whatever that means) with progressive leanings and globalist inclinations. For example, both have expressed support for open borders and large-scale immigration. Migration trends are seen by many (including me) as weakening nation-states and easing the path to integration with a global economic system—one in which China, alongside international finance and transnational corporations, is striving to assert greater control. Moreover, Parolin’s loyalty to Pope Francis, the architect of the Vatican-CCP agreement, along with his moderate-progressive and globalist views, suggests he would back a successor capable of continuing Francis’s reforms while maintaining institutional stability. The Church, after all, cannot risk moving too radically without courting schism.

Parolin reportedly stepped aside because he lacked the support needed to reach the required two-thirds majority, largely due to tensions with conservative cardinals over the Vatican-China agreement, and, under these circumstances, Prevost was seen as a suitable substitute, since he was not directly involved in the Vatican-CCP agreement, but, by record and likely through consultation with Parolin, supportive of the Vatican’s alliance with the People’s Republic of China. The Church missed a historic opportunity to put in place a bulwark against the rise of China, an entity that not only oppresses Chinese Christians, but threatens religious autonomy everywhere if it obtains its goal of world domination.

My intervention on X yesterday thus had more in mind than cautioning petty people using the election of a Pope to poke Trump and MAGA. I wanted them to reflect on why they’re supporting progressive and globalist machinations undermining nation-states and facilitating the rise of China. The affinity between those promoting progressive and globalist ambitions and the ambitions of the Chinese Community Party are not accidental. It’s more than just a convergence of interests (albeit that’s damning enough). China’s rise is fueled by transnational corporate and world finance capitalism and the free trade regime; Western progressivism and globalism advance the agenda. Encouraging open reflection on motives allows others to see more clearly the forces transforming our world—exposing what lies at the heart of opposition to Trump’s nationalist economic policies: desire for a new world order.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says tariffs never work. But for nearly 150 years—from the inaugural US President until 1934, when Roosevelt assumed the power to negotiate trade relations—American ran on protectionism. Alexander Hamilton outlined the imperative in his Report on Manufactures, submitted to George Washington in 1791. Before the federal income tax, established in 1913, most revenue generation for public use derived from external sources, mainly through tariffs. Hamilton understood that a just world trading system recognized comparative advantages, hence the need to protect domestic industries and citizens from foreign competition and dependency on other nations. The American System Hamilton designed transformed the United States into an industrial powerhouse.

Zakaria, often described as a racial centrist, is opposed to nationalism. He is indeed a transnationalist. Transnationalists advocate free trade knowing that globalization breaks down the system of sovereign nation-states that is replaced by a one-world government directed by a global oligarchy comprised of transnational corporations (TNCs). Transnationalization is the next logical step after imperialism, incorporating imperialist practices and raising them to a higher level. Zakaria is an organic intellectual of this capitalist class fraction.

Imperialism negates comparative advantage by duplicating industries in the First World in Third World countries to pit workers in the Third World—the global South—against First World workers to depress the latter’s wages and thus undercut their political power. The strategy, masked somewhat by the importation of cheap foreign commodities, has devastated the American working class. The strategy also undermines local economies in the Third World, corrupting local cultures. This was the real function of agencies such as the Agency of International Development (USAID). Free trade is thus destructive to the First and Third Worlds. In fact, imperialism created the Third World.

The global system has developed to the point where not only is capital portable but so is labor. This prepares workers of the West for integration with the transnational economy. A crucial piece of this is undermining national integrity in the First World, achieved through mass immigration emphasizing Third World immigrants. Prior immigrant flows to the United States were from Europe, the people bringing with them culture compatible with ours, allowing for assimilation within a generation or so. Now immigrant flows are from African and Asian countries, regions whose cultures are not only incompatible with the West, but stubbornly resistant to assimilation. Intrinsically linked to transnationalization is multiculturalism, which portrays assimilation as a racist practice (same with nationalism).

This is by design; the goal of globalization is to weaken national and cultural integrity by importing alien cultures—this to advance the deconstruction of the interstate system rooted in the principle of independent and sovereign nation-states. National integrity can survive by assimilating compatible cultures; it cannot survive the importation of cultures antithetical to Western civilization with an explicit policy of cultural pluralism. Globalization has already drastically, perhaps permanently, altered European civilization. The situation of the United Kingdom and Continental Europe is a preview of coming attractions. Had Democrats secured another four years of control over the Executive, they would have irreversibly altered the United States. If they get into power again, this will be their objective.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have published an essay “The Rise of End Times Fascism,” in The Guardian. It’s panic propaganda. The fear this piece intends to spread depends on the audience not actually knowing what populists believe and seek. Klein and Taylor don’t even know what fascism is. It’s not populism. Moreover, the current populism isn’t end times. Panic journalism is typical of Klein. Her books have titles like these: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate; On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. She a catastrophist—and a paradigm of projectionism.

A solar flare could knock out the planet’s communication networks and electrical grids (it’s happened before). A company that sells you survival kits for such an event is meeting a need. A criminal or activists could threaten you life and property. A company that sells you a firearm for such an event is meeting a need. Criminal and political violence are real things (both have been on the rise). A pandemic can disrupt supply chains. We just experienced this. A company that sells you medical supplies for such an event is meeting a need. All of these potential crises can be mitigated through preparedness. These are legitimate markets.

What is the need behind the global climate change hysteria? What are the proponents of this view selling? What is the market here? The reduction in coal, gas, and oil to fuel our electrical grid? The reduction in the amount of land in production for food? The campaign to end meat-eating? The project to depopulate the Earth? It’s not global climate change that causes these crises that need mitigating. Reductions in fossil fuels, food production, and the world’s population will cause the crises. So, again, what are they selling? Who benefits from all this?

Reductions in fossil fuels, food production, and the world’s population are drastic actions. The actions are not always secret. Sometimes they are announced and carried out in public view. The United Kingdom is actively funding and initiating experiments aimed at dimming the sun as part of its climate change mitigation strategy. These efforts fall under the umbrella of solar geoengineering, specifically solar radiation management (SRM), which seeks to reflect a portion of sunlight back into space to temporarily cool the planet. Ask yourself, what will be the consequences of dimming the sun?

When you see things like this you should ask what’s behind them. One draws an inference from facts and effects. When you make that rational move, you will be accused of conspiracism. When you buy survival kits, firearms, and medical supplies to protect your family from hurricanes and other natural disasters and from those who mean you harm, you are accused of conspiracism. But preparedness is rational. Giving in to abstract notions of manmade climate catastrophe and allowing governments to dim the sun is irrational. Why are so many people passive in the face of madness?

Even if you don’t care to know what lies behind catastrophism of the progressive project, you know what its effects will be, indeed, they are already manifest in our lives: catastrophe. Don’t let the propagandists and rank-and-file progressive gaslight you. Concern is not paranoia. To be sure, prepare your family for disasters and violence. These are realities. But we can’t participate in elite projects to create disaster and violence. We must oppose them.

I understand what courts have determined. But the law is open and subject to contestation. Moreover, there are open questions. There are unsettled matters—matters to be settled by action. I will return soon to my argument concerning the immunities and privileges of citizenship and why illegal aliens should probably not enjoy them, at least not to the same extent as citizens, and what that would look like in practice. But there’s another matter I want to briefly discuss, and that’s the matter of presidential pardons.

I just listened to Tom Fitton (of Judicial Watch) telling Steve Bannon (of the War Room) that the Trump Administration should proceed with investigations and even prosecutions if there is sufficient evidence of former Biden officials pardoned by Biden on the grounds that these pardons constitute the null set and there is compelling evidence to pursue those pardoned. The pardons are invalid, Fitton arguments. They don’t count. Fitton is onto something here.

The US Constitution grants the President the power to issue pardons for “Offenses against the United States.” While this authority is broad, there is an argument to be made that pardons that do not specify the crimes or convictions they address are legally invalid. This argument rests on foundational principles of constitutional law, legal clarity, and due process.

A pardon functions as a form of legal forgiveness, removing penalties associated with a specific crime or conviction. For a pardon to have legal meaning, it must be tied to a particular act or offense. Without such specificity, the pardon becomes ambiguous and therefore difficult for courts, prosecutors, or the public to interpret or enforce.

Legal systems (rational ones, anyway) rely on clearly defined actions and consequences; a pardon with no stated offense fails to meet that standard thus undermining the rule of law. Pardons without crimes specified are just as Kafkaesque as prosecution of individuals without crimes specified (which is why Trump’s felony convictions in a New York court are not real).

Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Le Procès) is a surreal novel that follows Josef K., a respectable bank clerk who is arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority for an unspecified crime. As he navigates a labyrinthine and oppressive legal system, Josef becomes increasingly consumed by confusion, helplessness, and paranoia. The novel explores themes of bureaucratic power, guilt, and existential dread, ultimately portraying a world where justice is arbitrary and elusive. His novel captures the problem of guilt and innocence where no crime is identified.

Unspecified pardons raise serious due process concerns. They relieve citizens of liability without any formal legal findings. This circumvents the judicial process and undermines accountability. Such pardons carry a high risk of abuse, potentially shielding individuals from investigation or prosecution for unknown or future crimes, blurring the line between legitimate clemency and obstruction of justice.

While the Supreme Court has affirmed the broad scope of the pardon power (e.g., the 1915 case Burdick v. United States, in which George Burdick, an editor at the New York Tribune, granted a pardon by President Woodrow Wilson for any federal offenses related to publishing an article about alleged customs fraud, refused the pardon), the logic of these rulings presumes a pardon is directed at a known offense. Allowing non-specific pardons erodes legal norms and open the door to unchecked executive power.

I agree with Fitton. The Trump Administration should investigate and prosecute pardoned individuals if sufficient evidence for the crimes suspected should be found—and there is compelling evidence as it stands (for example, the machinations of Anthony Fauci). Let the chips fall where they may under judicial review. Get the matter before the Supreme Court and have them determine whether this is (as much as it can be) a settled matter. As it stands, it’s an open question—a question I want answered. So do you, if you believe in accountability and preventing a runaway executive.

As you know, I am skeptical of the presidential (as well as gubernatorial) pardon on principle. But if pardon power is to be preserved, then it must work within the framework of the law and rational principle, wherein our system requires specific a crime (corpus delicti) is identified. Those pardoned should have convictions to be set aside, since specifying crimes to be pardoned without a conviction obtained tarnishes the reputation of those pardoned. Whether Fauci committed any crimes, millions believe he did because Biden pardoned him. Of what? That’s left to our imagination—which is boundless.

It is entirely rational to ask: What is Biden hiding? We presume those he pardoned are guilty of something. What? We can’t know if the Supreme Court allows the pardon power to be used in this way. Biden’s autopen is a distraction. There is something much more fundamental to address here—not what crimes those Biden pardoned committed (although we need to know) but whether a president can cover up crime and corruption by preemptively pardoning those for whom no crime has been specified.

There’s more to this, however. In US law, once a person has received a full and unconditional (blanket) pardon for a specific crime or set of crimes (or in the Biden pardons not crime specified), he can no longer invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for those pardoned acts. The Fifth Amendment only protects individuals from being compelled to testify when their testimony could lead to criminal prosecution. If prosecution is no longer possible due to a pardon, there’s no risk of self-incrimination.

This principle was affirmed in Burdick v. United States (1915), where the Supreme Court held that accepting a pardon removes the legal jeopardy, and thus the basis for invoking the Fifth Amendment for the pardoned offenses. At the very least, those whom Biden pardon can be called as witnesses to testify in a case concerning their crimes.

“To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited. It is really difficult to understand the claim of the free-traders who imagine that the more advantageous application of capital will abolish the antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage workers. On the contrary, the only result will be that the antagonism of these two classes will stand out still more clearly.” –Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade” (1848)

I’ve come down on the side of protectionism. No news here. Many of my Marxist colleagues disagree. Some of the disagreement is kneejerk reaction to Trump. As with progressives, Trump derangement syndrome is rampant on the socialist left (see the CPUSA and the possible end of May Day). But some of it is accelerationist desire to hasten capitalism’s demise, which rightwing libertarians would do well to note; Marxists are right about free trade: it is destructive to capitalism.

Marxists don’t oppose protectionism because tariffs hurt working people—on the contrary: they oppose protectionism because it protects the worker’s standard of living. National capitalism forestalls the eventuality they desire, namely the socialist revolution and the establishment of world communism, and suffering towards that end is acceptable. The fate of workers is thus sacrificed on the altar of political ambition.

What did Karl Marx have to say about the matter of free trade and protectionism? Fortunately, we need not hunt through the corpus of his work for clues about his views. In 1848, before the Democratic Association of Brussels, Marx delivered a speech in which he makes his position on the protection versus free trade debate explicit. He comes down on the side of free trade. That’s because protectionism is, in relative terms to be sure, better for workers. Sounds paradoxical, I know, but stay with me here.

In his speech “On the Question of Free Trade,” Marx critiques not just the policies of his day, but the deeper economic structure underpinning them. Far from a technical economic treatise (he flashes expertise here and there), Marx’s speech uses the question of tariffs and trade to expose the contradictions of a society divided by class. His core thesis: free trade does not liberate workers; rather, it liberates capital. In doing so, it accelerates the internal contradictions of capitalism and hastens the conditions for revolutionary change.

So determined is Marx to see capitalism do itself in, he comes down on the side of free trade—not because he believes it helps the worker, but precisely because it makes the worker’s condition worse. “In general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive,” Marx argues. “It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.” I confess I do not share his commitment to this end. Not at the suffering of fellow Americans. And given George Orwell’s observations, I am not sure I agree with the end.

Today’s free trader—the globalist—also seeks a revolution, but not a proletarian one. Communism is not the end sought in the ambitions of the global elite. Rather, it’s a top-down revolution, one that aspires to a post-labor economy governed by technocrats and the oligarchy they serve. The capitalist mode of production is reaching a terminal point: the elimination of necessary labor via artificial intelligence and robotics. But rather than allow this to necessitate a communist reorganization of distribution based on need, the global elite aims to preserve its privilege by overseeing a neo-feudalist world order, in which a shrinking laboring class is rendered permanently dependent and expendable, managed by a new aristocracy.

Thus, those of us for whom workers are the choice of comrades, and who care about their wellbeing, must advocate for the system that is in their best interests—even if it is one of the two types of capitalism Marx critiques. Protectionism is lesser of two evils in this regard.

While Marx rejects protectionism for its failure to bring about revolution, he openly acknowledges that it is better for workers than free trade. Realizing the implications of his argument, Marx hastens to deny that he is defending tariffs. “Do not imagine, gentlemen,” he says, “that in criticizing freedom of trade we have the least intention of defending the system of protection.” Yet, he admits that the “protectionist system” is “a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country,” which liberates man from backwardness. This is an important concession: protectionism enables the bourgeoisie to challenge the aristocracy and modernize—conflicts and outcomes that advance the material position of workers under capitalism, while limiting the reach of capitalism globally.

Marx tells his audience that economic “freedom” is never neutral. Free trade, in practice, means the freedom of capital to move unimpeded in search of profit, not the freedom of labor to live decently. “It is freedom of capital,” Marx declares. “So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist,” he argues, “there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited.” True, but under the regime of free trade, their exploitation will be much greater. 

For Marx, removing trade barriers removes an illusion. “Let us assume for a moment,” he posits, “that all the accidental circumstances which today the worker may take to be the cause of his miserable condition have entirely vanished, and you will have removed so many curtains that hide from his eyes his true enemy.” Free trade exposes capitalism for what it is—a system of class domination. But it does nothing to mitigate the suffering of the working class. Marx admits that free trade intensifies the misery of the worker. It also moreover subordinates capital. Freeing capital from national boundaries “will make [the worker] no less a slave than capital trammeled by customs duties.” Better capitalism is subordinate to nations than to be free of them. 

Free trade does not liberate the worker; it simply accelerates the process by which labor is immiserated, and capital is accumulated, concentrated, and consolidated. As Marx puts it bluntly: “Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.” Do Marxists really want to the see the worker crushed for the sake of a pipe dream? Worse—for something that may cast them into a lower level of Hell? It’s not as the world communists created was better than the world capitalists made. 

For Marx, liberal claims that free trade allows each country to specialize in its “natural” production role are disingenuous. This is a critique of the comparative advantage argument free traders have used for centuries Marx is equally contemptuous of the idea that free trade fosters global solidarity. “The brotherhood which free trade would establish between the nations of the Earth would hardly be more fraternal,” Marx writes. “To call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie.” Free trade globalizes class antagonisms—it does not abolish them. “All the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country,” Marx notes, “are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market.”

Marx also dismantles the claim that cheap goods benefit workers: “You say, ‘Here is a law which raises wages by lowering the price of the things necessary for life.’ Yet the cheapness of commodities is but a momentary palliative, not a cure.” Far from a cure. “When less expense is required to set in motion the machine which produces commodities … labor, which is a commodity too, will also fall in price … and this commodity, labor, will fall far lower in proportion than the other commodities.” This illusion, he argues, leads to a cruel outcome: “The working class will have maintained itself as a class after enduring any amount of misery and misfortune, and after leaving many corpses upon the industrial battlefield.” 

If wheat prices and wages are both high, Marx explains, workers can save a little on bread and use those savings to enjoy other goods. But when bread becomes very cheap, and wages drop as a result, there’s hardly any room left for savings to spend on other things. When it costs less to operate the machinery that produces goods, the cost of maintaining the worker—the human component of that machinery—also decreases. Since all goods are cheaper, and labor is considered a good, too, the value of labor drops, and it tends to fall even more sharply than the prices of other goods. Free trade is a race to the bottom. 

Marx warns that economists will respond by acknowledging that competition among workers, which doesn’t lessen under free trade, pushes down wages along with falling prices. However, the cheaper goods will lead to higher consumption, which in turn boosts production, thereby increasing the demand for labor and eventually raising wages. This reasoning boils down to the belief that free trade enhances productive capabilities. As industry expands and wealth and productive capacity grow, labor demand and wages should theoretically increase. The best scenario for workers, it’s argued, is when capital is growing. If capital stagnates, industry shrinks, and workers suffer most, losing their livelihoods even before capitalists do. 

But even when capital grows—the best case for workers—the outcome is only relatively better. The growth of capital leads to its accumulation and concentration, which brings more division of labor and reliance on machinery. This strips laborers of their specialized skills and replaces them with easily replicable tasks, increasing competition among workers.

This is basic to the capitalist dynamic. As the division of labor elaborates, a single worker can do the work of several, intensifying competition. Machines magnify this effect even further. The expansion of capital compels large-scale production, pushing out smaller producers and turning them into wage laborers. Meanwhile, as returns on capital shrink, small investors can’t live off their dividends and are also driven into the labor market, adding to the growing working class. 

As productive capital continues to rise, it increasingly produces for markets without knowing actual demand (the problem of overproduction). Supply begins to dictate demand, leading to frequent and severe consumption crises. Each crisis accelerates capital centralization and expands the proletariat. Ultimately, as capital grows, worker competition grows even faster. Labor becomes less rewarding for all and more burdensome for many.

In modern terms, this dynamic obtains: as productivity rises—often through automation, outsourcing, and rationalization of labor—real wages for workers stagnate or decline (relative to productivity) and labor is made redundant. Policymakers and employers point to cheaper consumer goods as compensation, arguing that workers are better off because they can buy more with less. They tell the worker that tariffs bring higher prices that workers cannot afford. But this masks the fact that the share of value created by workers increasingly flows to capital, not labor.

Marx’s insight remains salient: cheap commodities are not a gift to the worker—they are a mechanism through which capital justifies the degradation of labor’s share in the economy. The availability of inexpensive goods is used ideologically to mask the deeper economic injury done to workers through wage suppression.

Marx is unwavering in his belief that protectionism is insufficient for advancing the proletarian struggle. “One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.” For Marx, both free trade and protectionism serve capital in different ways. But for those of us who do not seek revolution, who do not believe communism lies ahead, who do not wish to accept the immiseration of workers for the sake of an uncertain future, or do not seek this future, Marx’s argument flips in protectionism’s favor.

Marx makes it clear that the destructive nature of free trade is its chief appeal to revolutionaries. This is a crucial moment in the speech: “It breaks up old nationalities,” he declares. It “pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point.” But what if man does not want to dissolve nationalities, to break the bonds of culture, tradition, and sovereignty? What if he wishes to preserve the nation-state, the rule of law, and democratic control over society? The things he and his comrades cherish dissolve under globalization. 

And what if he does not desire to see poor nations suffer for the sake of globalism? Then he understands what the globalists pretend they do not. “If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder,” Marx observes, “since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another.” Why would workers wish to see class antagonisms projected upon the planet? And to the extent that has already, why would he want to see them entrenched—at his expense, no less. 

For Marx, the intensification of contradiction is the goal. For the patriot, it’s a danger. The collapse of domestic manufacturing, the offshoring of production, the destruction of rural economies, and the rise of post-national capital—all of this has indeed hastened inequality and alienation; but it has not, as Marx hoped, led to a worker-led revolution. It has led instead to cultural decay, political instability, and oligarchic control. All the immunities and privileges Americans claim as their birthright—free speech, religious liberty, privacy, and the vote—will be wiped away with the end of the modern nation-state. 

All those insisting that Marx was for free trade, does that mean that those on left should be, too? Are we taking marching orders from a dead man? Why not acknowledge his insight instead? Marx’s text makes clear that if revolution is not your goal, if you are uncertain that humanity will transcend capitalist relation, or worried about what barbarism awaits, free trade is not your friend. Transnationalism and multiculturalism are not your politics. For those committed to the welfare of workers, the preservation of community, and the defense of democratic self-government, protectionism becomes the only defensible position—not because it abolishes class conflict, but because it slows capital’s most destructive tendencies and gives nations room to defend a way of live, protect labor, and uphold sovereignty.

Marx understood the power of capitalism to transform the world, but he underestimated its capacity to survive by managing, rather than resolving, its crises—financialization, globe-trotting, etc. He was right about where free trade take us. He was wrong about embracing the outcome. And so, in the absence of worker revolution, or in the face of a fate worse than now, we must choose the form of capitalism that does the least harm and offers the most hope for the dignity and security of the working class. That is not the free trade regime of the transnational elite; it’s the protection of national economies and the defense of domestic industry, and especially the men and women who produce value with their labor, who uphold the community, who protect their families.

For those who still desire life under communism, the accelerationist stance articulated by Marx’s speech presumes communism inevitably follows the demise of capitalism. But in other writings, he does not make this presumption. While Marx often spoke of capitalism’s downfall and the rise of communism, he did not believe this outcome was historically inevitable. The materialists conception of history is not teleological; it identifies tendencies and contradictions within capitalism—such as crises of overproduction and the intensification of class struggle—that could lead to revolutionary change. Only through conscious political action by the working class could a better world be made. What would better empower the worker? A one world government beyond the reach of eight billion? Or a democratic republic with universal suffrage and a First and Second Amendment?

Marx rejected utopianism and eschatology, insisting that the future is not predetermined but shaped by material conditions and human agency. A charitable reading of his support for free trade is that it is not grounded in faith in progress, but rather in a strategic acceleration of contradictions that might expose capitalism’s exploitative core. Communism, for Marx, was a possibility—not a prophecy. But that’s risky. And nowhere in sight. Moreover, we should ask ourselves whether that is the world we want—or whatever else comes instead. Whether you fear communism or barbarism, free trade will take us to one or the other or something unimaginable. We must therefore oppose it. 

“Thus, of two things,” Marx warns: “either we must reject all political economy based on the assumption of free trade, or we must admit that under this free trade the whole severity of the economic laws will fall upon the workers.” For Marx the accelerationist, he hopes we admit to the latter. I reject political economy based on free trade. To be sure, the world has become substantially globalized. But we cannot stop the advance of transnationalization, or reverse its effects, until we understand the intent and the machinations of its operatives and oppose them.

It therefore becomes incumbent upon those who find wisdom in Marxian thought to align with the populist-nationalists who include the fortunes of workers in their political economic schemes. The choice is between capitalism and neofeudalism. Simply put, will we have liberty or slavery? 

Before leaving this essay, I need to explain in more depth Marx’s critique of political economy and its relationship to Alexander Hamilton’s vision of the American System. It is Hamilton’s American System that provides the left with the radical case for protectionism. By left, I mean here liberals and democrats who stand with the working class and rural communities over against the New Left (anti-Enlightenment proponents of identity politics) that serves the interests of the transnational corporate class.

I have written about this before, but rather than send you other essays, I will explain it here. Marx’s critique of capitalism centers on an internal contradiction that drives both its dynamism and its eventual crisis. Capitalism, in Marx’s view, is based on the extraction of surplus value from labor (wage and slave). As the father of liberalism John Locke understood, labor is the source of value in production, and capitalist profit arises from the difference between what workers are paid (variable capital) and the total value they produce. Surplus value is realized as profit when goods are sold in the market.

However, in seeking to maximize profit, the capitalist is driven to maximize surplus value by minimizing labor costs—either by suppressing wages or replacing labor with machinery (increasing the organic composition of capital). While this raises the rate of surplus value, it undermines the capacity of workers to consume the very goods they produce. This creates a contradiction: surplus value is generated in production that cannot be fully realized in circulation due to insufficient demand (overproduction). This tension contributes to capitalism’s systemic instability (boom and bust and its long waves) and, ultimately, its tendency toward crisis.

This contradiction is manifest in and confirms Marx’s formulation of the falling rate of profit amid the increasing rate of exploitation. As capitalists substitute machinery for labor, the amount of surplus value generated per unit of capital invested begins to fall, since only labor creates new value. At the same time, the exploitation of labor intensifies. The rate of exploitation—measured as the ratio of surplus value to variable capital (s/v)—rises, but so does the inability of the market to absorb the output of increasingly productive but poorly paid labor.

Though Alexander Hamilton did not share Marx’s analytic framework or revolutionary aims (Marx was not yet born), he anticipates it. Hamilton recognizes elements of this contradiction in his efforts to craft an economic strategy for the young American republic. In his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, Hamilton argues for a strong industrial base supported by tariffs, subsidies, and public investment. His objective was not only national independence but also economic stability through the balanced development of manufacturing alongside agriculture. Hamilton understood that, left unchecked, capitalists would import cheap goods from other industrialized and industrializing nations, undermining domestic production and driving down wages. To Hamilton, a purely laissez-faire system would erode the productive capacity of the nation and leave it dependent on foreign powers. Thus Hamilton was an early theorists of dependency theory.

Hamilton’s vision prefigures the problem that Marx would later formalize: the unchecked pursuit of profit can destabilize the very conditions of profitable production. Unlike Marx, Hamilton sought to resolve this contradiction not by abolishing capitalism, but by guiding it through protective and strategic policy. He believed that the state had a critical role to play in sustaining a productive domestic economy in which wage laborers could remain both producers and consumers.

Central to Hamilton’s plan was the idea of productivity. He viewed national strength as closely tied to improvements in productive efficiency. However, he did not account for the distributional consequences of that productivity in exactly the way Marx did. For Marx, productivity gains under capitalism do not benefit workers proportionally. They serve to increase the surplus appropriated by capital while wages remain stagnant or decline. Thus, productivity without redistribution intensifies exploitation. The capitalist benefits from an expanding rate of surplus value, but the system becomes increasingly unable to realize profits through market exchange due to weak demand. This is a problem that governments have been left to overcome.

This theoretical insight remains highly relevant in the age of globalization and can be tracked empirically through tools such as the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) conducted by the US Census Bureau. The ASM collects data on employment, wages, capital expenditures, and value added—data that can be used to analyze contemporary forms of Marx’s exploitation metric. By comparing total wages (variable capital) with profits and other forms of gross operating surplus, one can observe whether productivity gains are translating into improved conditions for labor or merely higher returns to capital.

In the decades following the mid-twentieth century, US manufacturing productivity rose sharply while real wages stagnated. At the same time, firms increasingly offshored production or imported goods produced with cheap foreign labor, much as Hamilton had feared. This is the result of free trade for all the reasons Marx explains in his speech. This trend not only weakens domestic labor but also hollows out the consumer base necessary to sustain aggregate demand. Here, the contradiction becomes evident: firms achieve higher surplus value through cost-cutting, but face diminished capacity to realize that value in the market because of suppressed wages and deindustrialization.

Hamilton’s advocacy for protectionism can be seen, then, as an attempt to moderate this contradiction within a national framework. He sought to create a self-reinforcing loop between domestic production, decent wages, and national consumption. Globalization, in contrast, bypasses this loop, facilitating what Marx saw as an acceleration of capitalism’s internal crisis. When production is outsourced and wages are driven down domestically, the conditions for stable consumption—and thus for the realization of surplus value—are undermined. Global labor arbitrage functions as a modern form of wage suppression and labor displacement, replicating the contradiction on a global scale.

As we have seen, Marx welcomes this development—not because it was just, but because it hastens capitalism’s internal unraveling. In his support for free trade, Marx argues that globalization exposes and intensifies capitalism’s contradictions by eroding national boundaries and deepening class antagonism. In his words, free trade “breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and bourgeoisie to the extreme point.” Where Hamilton sought to contain and manage capitalism’s contradictions within the nation-state, Marx hopes to see them drive revolutionary change on a global scale. This can only be obtained by releasing the beast from its protectionist chains.

As quoted above, Marx tells his audience: “In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.” Because the free trade system is bad for workers, I vote in favor of protectionism. I stand with Hamilton on this issue. Reflecting on this, Marx’s argument causes me to reconsider whether the proletariat is Marx’s real choice of comrades, or whether his vision of a communist future is to be sought at the risk of barbarism.

I don’t know whether this was another 4D chess move on his part, but Trump sharing an AI-generated picture depicting him as Pope—not doing anything perverted or provocative, just sitting there, decked out in gold—thus sparking the next hysteria among Democrats and progressives on social media (still ongoing as I write this), puts in stark relief the reaction of Democrats and progressives to the opening ceremony at the 2025 Summer Olympics in Paris mocking Di Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” There, the performers did mock Christianity, indeed, they mocked Jesus himself, turning the eve of the crucifixion into a pagan bacchanal. None other than the Greek god of ecstasy and transgression himself, Dionysus, made the grand entrance. He was the main course. Replete with drag queens, trans women, and symbolic cannibalism, it was truly French.

When Christians complained, not so much about the lame attempt at irreligious comedy (the production was inane) but rather the way their religion was being subverted to advance what they see as sexual perversion in the service of a transgressive agenda (and they’re not wrong), they were first told that what they thought they saw they hadn’t. The mouth breathers didn’t get it, progressives ridiculed. Then when it became clear that observers saw what they saw, they were told it was no big deal—that they were bigots.

Democrats and progressives did the same thing when Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (the figure of the priest) mocked the Eucharist ceremony by feeding a podcaster (the congregant) a Dorito (the hosts or communion wafer). Nothing to see here. No big deal. Trump shares an AI image of Trump as Pope and the left loses their fucking minds.

It’s typical of the progressive style to deny something is what it is and, when they can no longer deny that, tell the offended that it’s no big deal and that the hobbits are overreacting. Such pompous posturing is an expression of the elitist mentally that infects the progressive mind. It’s the same mentality that infantilizes them when Trump shares a meme.

As for the Olympics—an event that let male athletes punch women in the face for the sake of social justice—all I heard from the left was that Christians are silly and reactionary for letting such a thing trigger them. But, again, Christians understood that the performance was not disconnected from the project to undermine the family and sexualize children. You don’t have to be a Christian to care about that.

The meme is humorous (and showcases how far artificial intelligence has come). The reaction of the left to the meme in the context of the ongoing mass hysteria over his presidency? Not at all. It embodies the progressive spirit—knee-jerk and cynical.

Moreover, the reaction comes with peril. This is a man who had two assassination attempts on his life, one that resulted to a bullet wound to his head and the murder of two members of the audience, because of over-the-top political rhetoric. Comparing the man to Hitler and warning that, if somebody doesn’t stop him we’ll live in a fascist society—literally the plot of Stephen King’s Dead Zone—was an invitation to members of the public to sign up for special duty in the fight to save democracy. Now add religious passions to the mix.

People certainly have the right to say that the meme is blasphemous and sacrilegious, just as Trump has the right to engage in irreligious comedy—even irreligious criticism, for that matter. But danger lurks in the first. Remember when Muslims said Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons mocking their prophet Muhammad were sacrilegious and deadly riots broke out across the Muslim world and cartoonists were assassinated by Islamic extremists? The zealots couldn’t take a joke. Their zealotry inspired violence.

The cartoons, published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten a decade earlier, didn’t cause the violence. The reaction to the cartoons did. What did progressives do then? They weren’t exactly out in the streets condemning Islam and the consequences of its backwards aniconism. What are progressives doing today? The same thing the Muslims did over the cartoons—taking a ride on the Outrage Express. Yet another manufactured moral panic to call the President into disrepute. (Have progressives ever condemned the antisemitic cartoons one easily finds across the Muslim world?)

If these people could only find a sense of humor—which, fully developed, would involve taking jokes they perceive to be at their own expense—then the world would be a much more civil place. But, deep down, the hysteria on X is not about lacking a sense of humor (although progressives are certainly lacking in this area). It’s about construction a new panic to add to the continual stream of daily and weekly moral panics. Trump simply pushed the button that makes the monkeys fly. He did this intentionally, to be sure (and also because a lot of conservatives wish he were Pope, or somebody of his character were, e.g., Steve Bannon, who is a Catholic), but it’s on progressives that they took flight. They’re so predictable.

Remember when Monty Python’s Life of Brian was called sacrilegious by members of the British clergy? Was the public supposed to say nothing critical about the zealotry? Worse, were they expected to side with the clergy who were indicting the comedy as blasphemous and sacrilegious? Or were we obligated to defend Monty Python’s brilliant comedy, not merely because of its brilliance (it is their best work), but because religious zealotry needed checking?

Irreligious comedy, like irreligious criticism more generally, is a necessary exercise in checking religion, which when too big for its britches determines our lives, which means our lives are much less self-determined. Lots of things must be kept in their place. Religion is arguably the paradigm.

Those who have little love for Catholicism took up the cause of Catholics who they supposed would—i.e., wanted to—be upset. The incessant posting chastises Christians for not condemning Trump’s blasphemy. “Aren’t you going to say something? What’s wrong with you? You’d say something if it were the other way around!” Ah yes, projection. The opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics wasn’t blasphemous?

Look, I’m not religious. During the controversy over the Paris Olympics, I posted this on this platform: “Mocking religion is fine. Free speech and all. We’re free to do that. I’m an atheist who has mocked religion many times. I have penned many essays on Freedom and Reason defending the ridiculing of religion.” This was in a context of a comprehensive analysis of the opening ceremony, titled “La Cène sur la scène sur la Seine” (translation: “The Last Supper on a scene on the Seine”) by its organizers. I didn’t condemn the Paris Olympics because they mocked God. Moreover, Trump isn’t mocking God. The image is aspirational.

POPE TRUMP 👑 pic.twitter.com/PIbi0iCY6H

— Ramble_Rants (@ramble_rants) May 3, 2025

Progressive hypocrisy is off the chart on this one. To note that left-wing criticism and mockery of Catholicism are robust undersells the profound anti-Christian sentiments on that side. It’s not as if the church isn’t in for some criticism, or that progressives don’t ever identify the things that need criticizing. Progressives view the Catholic Church as a conservative institution that upholds patriarchal structures and resists modern social reforms. They challenge the Church’s historical role in colonialism, its handling of sexual abuse scandals, and its influence on public policy, particularly in areas where Church doctrine shapes laws affecting reproductive rights and the queer people. There’s some stuff in here, for sure. (Yet they are at best silent on the prejudices and oppressions of Islamic doctrine and practice).

While some on the left support religious freedom (the support is highly selective), they argue, correctly (albeit not in good faith), that religious institutions, including the Catholic Church, should not impose doctrinal beliefs on secular governance or public life. So what explains the sudden allyship with the Catholic Church? I really don’t need to answer that questions, do I? We see this for what it is, don’t we?

Beliefs about the world are not coextensive with knowledge about the world. Indeed, sometimes beliefs are in opposition to knowledge. Knowledge is verified belief. Beliefs can encompass fictions. Knowledge seeks the truth. To be sure, it is provisional, because we must be open to new facts. But there are some matters that are settled.

Gender is an obvious example. Gender in mammals is binary and immutable, meaning that there are only two genders, and one gender cannot change into the other. Sexual dimorphism is thus characteristic of species of this class of animal (and, for the most part, other classes as well). Dimorphism means differences representing two distinct forms—in this case, female and male.

There are many such binaries in the world. One that is the subject of conversation on social media lately is parent and non-parent. A parent in biology is an individual who contributes genetically to the formation of a new organism, typically through egg or sperm. Necessary to the perpetuation of the species are parents and offspring. Opposite the parent is what one might call a non-biological parent, adoptive parent, stepparent, or foster parent. This is the person who assumes the social role of parent. Mammals assuming the social role of parent occurs across many species, but it does not make them parents in the scientific sense.

Keeping this distinction in mind is important, since, while non-parents can and often do assume the social and emotional role of a parent—particularly in cases where the biological parent is absent or poses harm—it remains important to distinguish between biological and non-biological parenthood for several critical reasons, including medical considerations. A child’s biological parentage can have significant implications for understanding genetic disorders, hereditary health risks, and predispositions that may affect diagnosis and treatment. Accurate family medical history can be vital in emergency situations, informing decisions about medications, procedures, and preventative care. Therefore, while social bonds and caregiving roles are central to a child’s well-being, maintaining clarity around biological relationships remains essential for ensuring comprehensive and informed medical care. We must therefore preserve knowledge.

The reason why this is being discussed on social media is because Deborah Frances-White, a British-Australian comedian best known for hosting The Guilty Feminist podcast, promoting her new book Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have, used parentage as an analogy on a recent episode of the podcast Triggernometry for why transwomen are women—that is, men who assume the role of women should be regarded as women. Some believe that men can become women by saying they. However, this belief is contradicted by knowledge. The definition of man is “an adult male human.” His gender is determined by gametes, karyotype, and reproductive anatomy, which, as noted above, is unchangeable in our species.

In many ways, this belief—and even the man who assumes the role of a woman—is unproblematic in the sense that belief, expression, and behavior may not harm anyone. I personally don’t care how a person dresses or even thinks of themselves. Why would I? I’m as libertarian. However, in other ways, actions and policies based on belief and practice are harmful. And while government cannot reach opinion, it can reach action. I am here paraphrasing President Thomas Jefferson in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists of Connecticut “that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions.” This is the intent of the First Amendment, which I hold in great reverence.

If belief substitutes for knowledge in medicine and science, then it corrupts truth. If the belief is used to justify the dismantling of women’s rights, such as the right to gender-exclusive activities, opportunities, and spaces, it is harmful to girls and women—and to valid practices of gender segregation more generally (there is a reason that society is gender-segregated in particular ways: to achieve more fully the principle of equality through equity. If the justification for men entering women’s bathrooms is based on the belief that “transwomen are women,” then the belief becomes a harmful one, just as the belief that girls should undergo female circumcision—i.e., female genital mutilation—is harmful to girls, as a practice of male domination and the diminishment or removal of sexual pleasure and other functions.

As I watched the discussion unfold, I became increasingly frustrated by co-host Konstantin Kisin (co-host Francis Foster remained mostly silent during this part of the discussion). Why isn’t Kisin making the obvious rebuttals? I thought to myself. And why isn’t he identifying the postmodernist assumptions that underpin her arguments? She is denying that gender is binary because some indigenous peoples don’t work from the gender binary. Why would anybody accept an indigenous people as an authority on science? This is the nonsense of postcolonial studies. Instead Kisin implied that genocide of indigenous peoples was made possible by the technological superiority of the West, thus putting himself in a defensive position with an entirely unnecessary observation.

An obvious rebuttal? Since female genital mutilation (FGM) is practiced in some indigenous African cultures, is it therefore okay that these same cultures, when in the UK or in the US, continue the practice here? Does the fact that they practice genital mutilation in their culture mean that the practice is acceptable anywhere? Is not FGM an expression of misogyny?

The world community has made significant efforts to halt the practice of FGM wherever it occurs, recognizing it as a serious violation of human rights and a threat to the health and well-being of girls and women. The United Nations, through agencies like UNICEF and UNFPA, has led global initiatives (such as the Joint Program on the Elimination of FGM), working closely with governments, local communities, and civil society organizations to raise awareness, enact and enforce laws, and promote education and empowerment. Many countries have passed legislation banning FGM, while grassroots campaigns have been crucial in shifting cultural norms and encouraging abandonment of the practice. The Sustainable Development Goal targets ending FGM by 2030.

Deborah Frances-White is arguing from the standpoint of cultural and moral relativism. From her standpoint, FGM should be perfectly acceptable as an indigenous cultural practice. After all, she defends puberty blockers and gender-affirming care (GAC). More than this, she is advocating for adopting indigenous belief systems, such as those that deny the gender binary. These are pre-scientific societies with unenlightened beliefs and practices. The ideas held by indigenous peoples are backwards. Why would any advanced civilization accept the beliefs and practices of barbarians? This is a pressing matter because the barbarians are no longer external to the West; they are inside the gates. Modern nation-states now have to police the culture-bearers within their own borders who still cling to these backwards beliefs and destructive behaviors (often obstinately). Kisin might have asked Frances-White about human sacrifice? Is this acceptable?

It’s useful to put the question this way because that’s what GAC is: genital mutilation. It’s barbaric. And unlike hailing from backwards cultures, it appears in the context of the modern nation-state, the result of the corrupting effects of postmodernism, a philosophical stance that denies binaries—knowledge of which Frances-White obscures by claiming that all binaries recognized in the West are a product of white Christian doctrine and not the result of scientific reason and investigation. Denying the binaries that exist in nature lies at the core of poststructuralism and postmodernism, standpoints (from which queer theory and postcolonial studies hail) that find their origins in the project to deconstruct scientific knowledge while normalizing paraphilias such as autogynephilia and pedophilia, as well as profit generation in a corporatized medical industry.

Frances-White’s defense of the use of puberty blockers could have been successfully rebutted with a straightforward analogy—albeit this is less of an analogy and more a matter of pushing the use of puberty blockers to its logical conclusion. Kisin hinted at it, but he could have explicitly posed this problem: a child who does not wish to become an adult, grow to an average height, lose her baby teeth, etc. Perhaps she does not wish her brain to mature, so she can stay childlike. The child has anxiety about the natural developmental pathway—neurological maturation, psychosocial development, and so forth.

This is not a hypothetical (which is why this is not really an analogy). There are children who have extreme anxiety about becoming adults. They fear adult responsibilities, losing their childhood, body and identity changes, existential concerns such as aging, death, or what adulthood means in a broader sense. Children with anxiety disorders and OCD often catastrophize the future or feel unequipped to handle it. For them, adulthood seems like an uncertain, dangerous, even hopeless place.

Should doctors prevent children from maturing when this desire is present? Is it cruel to “force” the child to grow up? Is it compassionate to keep such an individual in a perpetual state of childhood? This isn’t science fiction. There are ways to prevent this baked-in developmental pathway. Would failing to intervene fate the child to the “wrong developmental pathway”? Or should those around the child instead help her overcome her anxiety, knowing that once an adult, a lot of these fears will resolve themselves? How could she know what being an adult is unless she experiences it? She might discover that it’s wonderful. She likely will. (There are children who can’t wait to grow up who are disappointed with adulthood once they arrive there.)

The concept of “wrong puberty,” which doctors use puberty blockers to prevent, would suggest all of this, since puberty is a crucial part of the developmental pathway. Indeed, it’s the core of the process I am describing. Why is it okay to give a child puberty blockers but wrong to prevent her from getting taller, elaborating her brain structures, developing the psychosocial skills of adulthood? Or is it wrong? Is the medical industry fine with, instead of helping a child through these difficulties, altering her body forever with drugs and surgical interventions—sterilizing her, even making her an eternal patient? Why not? They’re stopping puberty. They’re amputating breasts and drastically altering genitalia. Why not just keep her in Peter Pan’s Neverland forever?

Medicine is about treating disease and physical and developmental anomalies. If medicine is instead—or also—about engineering eternal adolescence, building androgynous bodies, turning people into something they otherwise would not be—and then only creating a simulation of the thing sought—is it really medicine anymore? Sounds more like something out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which horrifies sane and compassionate readers.

What is medicine if it is not a healing profession but a set of practices and techniques that produces customized bodies—simulacra of originals that cannot be possessed? Postmodernists may believe the copy is the original, but knowledge tells us that it is not and cannot be. The practice of medicine based on the postmodernist model no longer addresses problems but manufactures problems to address—for shareholder value. Postmodernism is a projection of the corporate desire to make fantasy a way of life, with all the dehumanization that entails, to generate exchange value.

I know the answer to the question (I have already answered it above), but I will ask it anyway: Why did it ever occur to doctors that, instead of treating anxiety and addressing delusions, the body should instead be modified to accommodate anxiety or delusion? How did it become widely socialized that we would all be required to accept such a practice as normal and good and affirm its results? How did those of us who find something troubling about this development come to be defined not as rightly concerned observers but bigots?

How is any of this compassionate? For sure it’s profitable. In 2022, in the US alone, gender reassignment surgery market was valued at over 2 billion dollars. This figure is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.25 percent, reaching an estimated 5 billion dollars by 2030. The gender reassignment hormone therapy market was valued at around 1.6 billion dollars in 2023. It is anticipated to experience a CAGR of 5.3 percent from 2024 to 2032, driven by increasing acceptance and demand. But it’s not compassionate. It’s cruel and dehumanizing. This is the barbarism of belief.