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Today on X, I ran across a conversation between a woman who wanted to know why women should be forced to undress in front of men in female-only spaces and a man who insisted that individuals identifying as the opposite gender are in fact the opposite gender. This is an obvious falsehood, and it is upon this falsehood that gender ideologues demand the inclusion of males in female-only activities and spaces. The man presented no argument not because he was not up to the task—nobody is up the task because there is no rational substance to marshal for it. However, defeating gender ideology requires not only insisting on biological truth, but on making sure public policy concerning gender-segregation in society is based on that truth and not on ideology that denies it.

The power of gender ideology in undermining the science of gender and women’s rights is part of a larger problem: science denialism. A rational secular society must be one that accepts science as a vital part of public policy and the delineation of rights. To delineate something means defining and describing something with clarity and precision. That involves drawing boundaries around or specifying the characteristics of a thing to distinguish it from other things. These boundaries and characteristics are objective, i.e., independent of the mind. Science is the superior way of determining the boundaries and characteristics of things that exist objectively.

Recognizing the role biological science plays in the determination of truth is not a presumption that scientific truths are fixed; science is an open system where claims are subject to scrutiny and disconfirmation. Rather, the establishment of science requires that the truth of the gender binary must be disconfirmed before policies based upon it are replaced. More than this, the claim that a man is a woman because he says he is must be supported by positive science. Given that such a claim is subjective, and that objective claims about gender that contradict science are easily disconfirmed, it is at present impossible to see how gender ideology can replace the science of gender. One can only do this by rejecting science.

Sal Grover’s commentary in the tweet I share below is thus on point. “If I was going to go on national television to say that women should accept men in women’s spaces, you better believe I’d make sure I had a good argument for it,” she writes. “But because there isn’t a good argument for it, everyone who does it ends up making a complete fool of themselves.” As a college professor, I am surrounded by administrators, faculty, and students who believe that women should accept men in women’s spaces. They justify this belief by asserting the same claim as the man in the video. But it is always only an assertion, asserted by someone who refuses to admit the science of the matter. Since the claim is false, and since I don’t want to simply assert something, I thought it would be useful to explain why.

https://twitter.com/salltweets/status/1883078002000707795

Gender (or sex) determination in humans (and other mammals) is guided by chromosomal karyotypes, specifically XX and XY configurations. The presence of the Y chromosome plays a pivotal role, as it carries a critical gene called SRY (sex-determining region Y). This gene, when functional, directs the development of male reproductive tissues, leading to the production of small gametes known as sperm (or spermatozoa). In the absence of the Y chromosome, as in individuals with an XX karyotype, reproductive tissues develop to produce large gametes called eggs (or ovum). Occasionally, the SRY gene on the Y chromosome may not function properly. When this occurs, the reproductive tissues are unable to produce either sperm or eggs. Sometimes monotremes (echidnas and platypuses) are held up as examples of mammals that do not fit this model. However, even in monotremes, gender is binary; despite their unique system of gender-determining chromosomes, monotremes still produce individuals that develop as either male or female. There are no exceptions to the rule.

This is also true of birds, although sex determination operates through a different chromosomal system known as the ZZ/ZW system, the reverse of the system found in mammals. In the avian system, females are the heterogametic sex (ZW), while males are the homogametic sex (ZZ). The presence of the W chromosome determines female development, whereas its absence leads to male development. In birds, the DMRT1 (doublesex and mab-3 related transcription factor 1) gene, located on the Z chromosome, plays the critical role in male development. Because males have two Z chromosomes, they express more of this gene, which promotes the development of male characteristics. In females, who have only one Z chromosome, lower levels of DMRT1 and the presence of the W chromosome drive female differentiation. To be sure, there are complexities in avian biology. For instance, cases of sex reversal have been observed, typically influenced by environmental and hormonal factors rather than chromosomal anomalies. However, as with mammals, these exceptions do not negate the fundamentally binary nature of gender in birds.

In fact, the gamete system is fundamentally binary across all animals and plants (so I need not go through the reptile, fish, insects, and all the other varieties of life). In all sexually reproducing organisms, there are two types of gametes. This distinction defines the binary nature of gender at the gamete level and underpins the biological classification of male and female across species. This binary system arises in natural history (evolution) from the fundamental constraints of reproduction; small gametes are optimized for mobility and quantity, increasing the likelihood of fertilization, while large gametes are optimized for nutrient provision, ensuring the initial support of a developing zygote. This complementary strategy has evolved independently in many lineages because it is highly effective for sexual reproduction. Evolution is not intentional but it is remarkably rational.

Putting the matter simply, the gender binary is a feature of the chain of life across these kingdoms, whatever the variation in how these gametes are produced and distributed among individuals. Even in cases where secondary sex characteristics, reproductive roles, or chromosomal systems introduce complexity or variation within species gender remains binary.

This is an essential biological truth; it cannot be changed by ideology. Rejecting biological science only makes a person unscientific in his thinking. It does not change reality. It will not do to say that a man who claims he is a woman really is one and therefore should be allowed to participate in activities and be present in female-only spaces. If this demand proceeds on the ground of truth, then it must advocate for eliminating sex-segregated spaces altogether. Otherwise it is entirely arbitrary. Why women must accept men in their activities and spaces must proceed via a different argument, for example that individuals should have access to the same activities and spaces regardless of their gender. This argument proceeds on the grounds of strict equality of treatment, which must eschew recognition of grouped differences. If this is accepted, the principle of equity is abandoned. As it stands right now, the gender ideology crowd wants the have their cake and eat it, too.

Equity is why gender-segregated spaces exist in the first place. Gender-segregated spaces were established because they provide comfort, privacy, and safety in settings where material differences between males and females can have practical or social implications. In changing facilities, locker rooms, and restrooms, segregation generally ensures personal privacy during such activities as attending to hygiene needs. In sports, gender segregation allows for fair competition by accounting for physiological differences, such as muscle mass and strength, that can influence performance. In gender relations, it protects women from male violence, which has a profound and devastating impact on females. Male violence perpetuates gender inequality and undermines women’s autonomy, safety, and well-being. Victims may suffer long-term physical injuries, mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression, and trauma, and a diminished sense of self-worth. These effects perpetuate a cycle of fear and marginalization, as women feel and are unsafe in areas of life where they are especially vulnerable.

Even if there are women who don’t mind men in their spaces, the fact that there are women who do is sufficient for maintaining gender-segregated spaces. Likewise, the fact that not all men harass or perpetrate violence against women does not negate the fact that some do, including those men who claim to be women, and therefore the safety of women depends on the integrity of these spaces. The woman in the video makes several important points, one of which is the question of why it should be men who decide the fate of women. For that matter, why should some women decide the fate of all women?

Throughout this essay I have used gender and sex interchangeably. This is because, as I have shown in numerous essays on Freedom and Reason, they are synonyms and have been for eight centuries. I have shown on this platform that biologists still use the term gender in describing reproductive anatomy and processes. Moreover, I have documented the rise of gender ideology and the political project to falsely divorce gender from sex by arbitrarily changing the definition of the former and appealing to the subjective construct of gender identity. Disconfirmation requires identity to be an objective thing, this so we can determine what sort of thing it is.

There is no evidence in science that validates the claim that a person can be born in the wrong body, and it is difficult to imagine how this could even be possible given the fact that the brain of a male is by definition a male brain, this because the brain in question, like the heart, kidneys, and everything other organ and system, exists in a male body, however it may appear in a scan. That grouped differences come with trait variation in the myriad of attributes that delineate the gender binary does not obviate the qualitative differences inherent in sexual dimorphism. Moreover, altering physiology chemically or changing its appearance cosmetically through surgery doesn’t change what the organism is genetically. Those interventions only simulate gender. Simulations of things are not the things themselves. When they are not used to predict the working out of a theory, they are deceptions.

If reason and science were followed, there would be no controversy concerning gender since this whole thing would have been over before it started. But, over a period of decades, anti-science sentiment infected the thinking of those whose hands grasp the levers of power, and through this power an ideology has emerged that misleads people into believing impossible things. It is in this sense that I describe gender ideology as a religion. Unfortunately, it is a religion that state respects, which, considering the separation of religion and public policy articulated in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, it should not. The relevant clause in the article is specifically worded this way: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and the free exercise piece requires freedom from its exercise.

The other items in that same article, the rights to freely speak and publish, are necessary conditions for the advancement of science. The goal of establishing a secular republic for the advancement of science and technology was paramount in the intent of the Founders. If they were alive today and looked at the corruption of our sense-making, law-making, and policy-making institutions by gender ideology they’d ask when America lost the plot. My essays on Freedom and Reason explain how this happened. My commitment to science compels me to do this work. But I cannot alone push ideology out of our sense-making institutions and governmental agencies and set the nation back on the path of enlightenment. That will require those of us who work from reason to pull together. It’s not that a man should be punished for claiming he is a woman. It’s that women shouldn’t be punished because he does.

John Cleese over on X, reacting to the claim that God saved Trump from death in Pennsylvania, asked “Why did God put the shooter on the roof in the first place?”

https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1883037560794185823

As you know, I’m an atheist—and, if you didn’t know, an admirer of John Cleese for his comic genius. Nobody can take away his body of work. But what Cleese says here grossly distorts the Judeo-Christian view on divine intervention. No, I don’t think Cleese is being funny here. He has established a pattern concerning matters of religion.

Contrary to Cleese’s straw man, Christians and Jews believe that man’s capacity for free will is a feature of creation. God didn’t need to put a shooter on the roof. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had his own motivation—and he represented the will of a great many people, as we have seen in polling on the question. Indeed, we infer his motive based on popular sentiment, since Crooks cannot be questioned because of the fact that he is deceased, shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.

The actual question is why God prevented the shooter from accomplishing his goal, the very question Cleese is trying to avoid or obscure. That’s a question of divine intervention. Divine intervention is a species of miracle. Miracles are extraordinary events, not the routine force behind human action or natural processes. God set the universe in motion and only occasionally intervenes. Miracles are for major course corrections or assists. God leaves everything else to the unfolding, a big part of which depends on the successes and failings of men, which we know as history.

Human agency is a vital part of God’s plan, and its importance is revealed straightway in the Bible. The first woman, Eve, transgresses God’s command that she and her mate, Adam, not partake of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil God planted in the Garden of Eden. God made Eve so that she could be deceived by a serpent. The meaning of the story is that it’s left to all of us to make good and right judgements, not be forced by God to do so. Eve should have resisted temptation. She didn’t, nor did Adam, and for that they were kicked out of Eden. Their wrongful deed was ultimately a good thing; as Erich Fromm notes in his 1941 Escape from Freedom, without transgression, human history would not be possible.

There is a scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex, a juvenile delinquent who murdered a woman, is subjected to the Ludovico Technique, the name given to a form of aversion therapy, in which viewing scenes of crime and violence are paired with a nausea-inducing drug. In the process, he becomes a clockwork orange, a thing that seems outwardly normal and appealing, like a fresh orange, but internally controlled and mechanical in action, like clockwork. A clockwork orange represents a person stripped of free will and manipulated into behaving in a predetermined manner. The virtues of the therapy that made Alex such a thing are extolled by the Minister of the Interior as the future of prison reform.

After demonstrating the success of the procedure at a gathering of political elites and medical doctors, with Alex the experimental subject, the prison chaplain rises to object to the speech of the Minister of the Interior. “Choice!” the chaplain exclaims. “The boy has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

In this scene, the state, acting in God’s stead (the wet dream of every authoritarian), is objectionable because total power makes a bad god, one seeking to determine human action by stealing human agency. This is not God’s plan. At least not the Judeo-Christian God. His plan grants human agency, permitting humans to take matters where they wish to, hopefully pursuing good and right courses of action—and avoiding those that lead to bad ends.

This is why society punishes wrongful behavior: the actions are not determined by God (how could they be bad and wrong otherwise?) but by the free will of the wrongdoer. One must choose to be righteous—which literally means to be right in a moral way—not compelled to be such by the state or an omnipotent being. This is a sign of God’s love. God grants mankind liberty because he loves us. It’s no accident that this is the foundation of the American Republic and a free society.

Do I believe God intervened in Pennsylvania? No. Trump turned his head at the last moment to reference a chart on immigration. That is serendipity (albeit many find it unfortunate). Had Trump not turned his head when he did, he would not be our president. Moments like this happen all the time. How many times have you upon approaching an intersection where cars have crashed thought had you not been delayed in your travels you might have been among the dead or injured? “There but for the grace of God go I” is a powerful sentiment, to be sure, but it represents our reflection upon events and the need to make meaning of them.

If one is determined to criticize religious thinking and other forms of mystification, pummeling straw men will not do. Cleese didn’t think this one through carefully. A lot of those who express irreligious sentiment are guilty of this.

Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed by a Republican Congress in June of 1866 and ratified in July 1868, states “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The amendment is one of three ratified between 1865 and 1870 during Reconstruction to guarantee the rights of black Americans and end the political and social inequities forced upon under Democratic Party hegemony. For this reason the articles are known collectively as the “Reconstruction Amendments.”

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. The order recognizes the historical context of the Fourteenth Amendment, which pertained to the postbellum situation and the situation of recently freed slaves, recognizing their birth in the United States as sufficient for citizenship. Section One thus, to borrow language from Trump’s executive order, “rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.”

Specifying categories not entitled to birthright citizenship, the order challenges the assumption of the blanket granting of citizenship to those born on American soil, a common law principle known as jus soli. “Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

Jus soli, or “right of soil,” originates in English common law, elements of which the United States inherited at its founding. However, the English themselves significantly moved away from birthright citizenship with the introduction of the British Nationality Act of 1981. This legislation shifted the emphasis to jus sanguinis, or “right of blood,” meaning that citizenship is now largely determined by the nationality of one’s parents rather than merely being born on British soil. Jus sanguinis is the standard for determining citizenship for most of the human population. This change was driven by efforts to address immigration concerns stemming from the nation’s former colonial empire and the evolving demographics following the decline of the British Empire. In other words, there is nothing controversial about excluding from automatic citizenship those born on national soil to parents who are not.

As expected, in one court or another, a federal judge in Seattle, US District Court Judge John Coughenour, in a brief 25-minute hearing, ruled that Trump’s order on birthright citizenship is “blatantly unconstitutional” and blocked it with a temporary restraining order. “It boggles my mind,” Coughenour opined. The Executive Order is not obviously unconstitutional, so what exactly boggles Coughenour’s mind is not apparent.

If Section One meant to cover anybody born on American soil is a citizen, then why are there exceptions? A person born in the US to a foreign diplomatic officer cannot be considered a US citizen at birth under the amendment. That’s because such persons are not under the jurisdiction of the United States but the jurisdiction of the country in which they hold citizenship. American Indians born in the US didn’t have citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act (the Snyder Act), which was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. They were born on American soil; why weren’t they automatically counted as citizens under the amendment? The answer is obvious: they weren’t the race with which the legislators who wrote the amendment were concerned. Before the Snyder Act, the Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), that a person born in the United States to Chinese citizens legally residing in America and under the jurisdiction of US law automatically becomes a US citizen. However, there has been no ruling concerning the status of children born to illegal aliens or to those holding temporary visas residing in the United States. The federal judge’s ruling thus goes beyond the scope of precedent, wrongly assuming the matter as settled.

I am encountering a great deal of panic over Trump’s executive order on birthright citizens (and more broadly his executive order Protecting the American People Against Invasion). One of the items panicking them is Elie Mystal’s absurd essay in The Nation “A Line-by-Line Breakdown of Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order.” Mystal falsely claims that the order “attempts to cancel the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.” Adding, “Getting rid of constitutional amendments via executive order is new, and, for me at least, ‘the worst.’” This appears to be what caused a long-time friend of mind to declare on Facebook that Trump was canceling the Fourteenth Amendment and thus bringing about an end to the American Republic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The subtitle of Mystal’s essay, a pull quote—“Almost every sentence of the order is wrong, misleading, or flagrantly unconstitutional”—is ironic. Nearly every sentence of Mystal’s essay presents no rebuttal, just goofy rambling. Perhaps this is to match his cultivated persona. Simply apply makeup and the man becomes full clown. Have I resorted to ad hominem? Listen to this take on Trump taking charge of the dire circumstances Biden left us with and judge for yourself: “In a flurry of lawless, unconstitutional, racist, bigoted, violent, and, in some cases, plainly stupid executive orders and pardons, Trump set his reign of terror in motion.” Reign of terror? This is the alternative clown universe in which progressives like Mystal dwell. If you don’t also dwell in that universe, then you’re a “mouth-breathing racist.” (Remember when those objecting to waring diapers on their faces during the COVID-19 pandemic was described as “mouth-breathers”? Etcetera.)

Of course, as I already indicated, it was inevitable that Trump’s order would trigger judicial review. Many if not all of Trump’s other orders will. But those panicking can relax; neither an executive order nor legislative action outside the amendment-making process can remove or change a constitutional amendment. Even Mystal, who purports to be an expert on constitutional matters, acknowledges this elsewhere in his essay. The US Constitution can only be amended through a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, or by a constitutional convention, which in turn requires ratification by two-thirds of the states (today that’s 38 of 50). That includes repeal of an amendment or any alteration to it, both of which require a new amendment (see the prohibition amendments that uglify an otherwise magnificent document). No president or legislature can remove a right from a constitutional amendment. That requires judicial review—which in principle is all of them.

Consider that the First Amendment rights to free speech and publishing have no trammels. You won’t find anywhere in that amendment language concerning defamation, i.e., libel or slander. However, through legislative action or judicial review (the latter occurs in testing the constitutionality of the former) speech and publishing have been fettered in the case of defamation. Perhaps there should be no exception, but defamation law is the law of the land. The Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches and seizures has been specified through judicial review, as well. Because of conceptual difficulties, such as reasonable suspicion and probable cause, and other matters, it has come before the courts and precedents have been established. This is true of all constitutional amendments—all are subject to judicial review. Indeed, this is true of all law in a democratic society considering the legal principle of stare decisis.

This is the reason the Supreme Court and lower federal courts exist in the first place: to review laws with respect to the Constitution and determine their scope and validity. Section 2 of Article III states: “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution.” Trump’s executive order is now moving through the federal courts. It will almost certainly be argued before the Supreme Court to determine its constitutionality. But to be clear, the matter of whether children born on American soil to those classes described in Trump’s executive order remains an open question. There is precedent in Trump’s favor. In Chae Chan Ping v United States (1889), the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act, affirming Congress’s authority to regulate immigration, in particular its power to set immigration policy and to pass new legislation even if it overrode the terms of previous international treaties (the matter concerned the Burlingame Treaty). As such, the ruling limited the role of the judiciary in shaping immigration to the United States. Considering this, Congressional Republicans have just introduced a bill to codify Trump’s birthright citizenship order.

The bottom line is that the order is not “blatantly unconstitutional.” The education of the public on this matter is urgent business. The media depends on widespread ignorance of constitutional law, separation of powers, and judicial review to mislead the public to save the globalist project to erase borders and advance the managed decline of the American Republic.

“In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning.” —Anti-Defamation League

Democrats and others who see Nazis everywhere insist that Elon Musk gave a Nazi salute (the “Sieg Heil”) during a speech celebrating the inauguration of Donald Trump on Monday. Musk thanked the crowd for “making it happen,” before placing his right hand over his heart and then thrusting it out into air. He then turned to those sitting behind him and repeated the gesture. He then turned back to crowd and put his hand on his heart, thanking everybody for the support of Trump and the populist movement. This has generated the latest moral panic from the left. If it keeps going, we may see full-blown mass formation psychosis in the near future.

I wouldn’t be commenting on the matter if it weren’t for story having legs. It’s so very silly. But the left won’t let it go, despite the ADL tweeting on X, “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.” For his part, Musk said, “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” Musk mocked the accusation on X using references to prominent Nazi figures, which did finally draw the ire of the ADL.

Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!

Some people will Goebbels anything down!

Stop Gőring your enemies!

His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler!

Bet you did nazi that coming 😂

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 23, 2025

The image above is demonstration of the Bellamy salute. You can find lots of photographs of children giving the Bellamy salute on the Internet and in history books. James Upham developed the Bellamy salute in 1892 to accompany Pledge of Allegiance, written by Francis Bellamy. Bellamy was a socialist who advocated for worker rights and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he insisted were ideas intrinsic to the teachings of Jesus. The Bellamy salute was the way to address the US flag until 1942. The flag code was changed to avoid identification with the Nazis. Our monuments still retain the fasces, however (see the adornments in the House of Representatives or the Lincoln Memorial).

The Bellamy salute wasn’t the only symbol the Nazis appropriated. The swastika is another one. Originating in Eurasia, but found in many parts of the world, the swastika is one of mankind’s most ancient symbols, dating back thousands of years. It’s strikes me as odd when a people who win a war change the meaning of symbols or alter traditions because the people they defeated appropriated their elements. But then I think about the politics behind the manufacture of moral outrage and it makes sense.

You may remember a moral panic many years concerning handbags manufactured by an India supplier and sold by Spanish fashion chain Zara (owned by the world’s second largest fashion retailed Inditex) decorated with swastikas. The swastika is commonly used Hindu symbol conveying “well-being.” The customer complained. A British anti-fascism group claimed the bags were an attempt to legitimize fascism and the Daily Star ran a picture of Adolf Hitler next to its story headlined, “Fury over Nazi Fashion Bags.” Does anybody believe that nobody caught up in the panic didn’t know that the symbol carried no Nazi intent? I don’t. But truth doesn’t matter to anti-fascists—their goal is to panic the public to gain political advantage. Zara retired the handbags.

Recall the German phrase “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates to “Work sets you free,” was appropriated and used by the Nazis during their regime. The phrase is most famously associated with its appearance on the gates of several Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau (the latter where the surgeon who pioneered vaginoplasty, Dr. Erwin Gohrbandt, carried out medical experiments on prisoners). The phrase was around long before then, originating in a 1872 novel by Lorenz Diefenbach, a German nationalist. Labor reform movements in German-speaking countries and territories advocating work-ethic principles adopted the phrase to promote the idea of self-reliance and redemption through honest labor. The phrase thus conveys a sentiment similar to that of the Protestant work ethic. Say it today and risk being condemned for insensitivity.

The pairing of Nazis with liberal and right-wing politics progressives and social democrats seek to delegitimize is commonplace today, and are articulated by elites at the highest levels of government. A day after Musk’s hand gesture, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, speaking at the World Economic Forum, a gathering of transhumanists and transnationalists, said on Tuesday that Germany respects free speech but does not support freedom of speech when used to support extreme-right views. “We have the freedom of speech in Europe and in Germany. Everyone can say what he wants, even if he is a billionaire. And what we do not accept is if this is supporting extreme-right positions,” he said.

The paradox of his statement is rather obvious. You can say anything you want but you can’t saying everything you want. Why would Scholz say this? Because Alternative for Germany, or AfD, a right-wing populist political party that is Eurosceptic and opposes immigration into Germany, especially Muslim migrants, is more popular than Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). The power elite must find away to censor and delegitimize the AfD to advance the European project of transnational corporate statism. Scholz is the same man who urged the construction of a firewall against the right after the AfD had a tremendous showing in Thuringia and Saxony. Just as with speech, Germans can have their politics in Germany as long as it’s the politics chosen by the establishment.

Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, an economist by training (having worked for Allianz Global Investors and Goldman Sachs), holding a doctorate in international development, is openly lesbian, living with her partner, Sarah Bossard, a Swiss filmmaker and producers, and their two sons (it is unclear whether they are legally married, as Switzerland only legalized same-sex marriage in 2022). Apparently her extremism is evidenced by her advocacy for mass deportations and dismantling wind farms. Surely it cannot be that, in a conversation with Elon Musk on X, she emphasized the importance of protecting Jewish communities from antisemitism, which attributed to immigration from Muslim-majority countries and said has become prevalent on the political left in Europe.

Weidel is correct, and one doesn’t have to work hard to see why presents a problem for the corporate state. Antisemitism is a central feature of the alignment of left-wing political groups (anti-colonial, progressive, and socialist) and Muslim organizations, particularly those supporting pro-Palestinian causes, and we see it not only in Germany, but in the United Kingdom and the United States. It’s the glue that holds the movement together—than and loathing of Western civilization. This is speech Chancellor Scholz is not seeking to restrict. Moreover, it sounds to me like Weidel is extreme because corporations who depend on what is effectively indentured servitude stand to lose profit if they can’t super-exploit immigrant labor and drive down the wages for native workers—and because she opposes the Islamization project and the crime it brings to Europe (rape has skyrocketed).

No symbol is immune from the project to delegitimize liberal and rightwing politics. You may remember Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character created by artist Matt Furie in 2005 for his comic series Boy’s Club. Pepe gained widespread popularity as an internet meme. By the mid-2010s, Pepe was appropriated by alt-right groups, and thus, in a media campaign and resulting moral panic, associated with hate speech and right-wing political propaganda. The ADL classified Pepe as a hate symbol. Furie launched efforts to reclaim Pepe’s original meaning, but to no avail. Today, a cartoon frog is forever associated with fascism. Again, it is very silly. But also serious.

When were Nazis allowed to spoil everything? It coincides with the ramping up of the corporatist transnationalist project to turn populism and nationalism into right wing fascist ideas to delegitimize opponents to the globalist agenda to erase nation states. Those of you who are my age (I am 62) remember that things were very different when we were kids. Gestures and symbols appropriated by the Nazis were not condemned in the same way as they are today. The punk movement used such symbology as a sign of their rejection of authority. We saw this as well in industrial music—and heavy metal, too. It was the same spirit that metal bands used Satanic imagery to convey a sense of evil (there was moral panic over that, as well). Skits with performers wearing Nazi uniforms were not deemed offensive but send-ups of the pomposity of authoritarian regimes. We even watched a TV show growing up that humanized Nazis, Hogan’s Heroes. You can still catch that show on some rerun channels, but can you imagine a reboot? I can’t.

I also find it curious that sporting a swastika is deemed today as horribly offensive, but waving the hammer and sickle is not generally seen as a problem, even though the Soviet Union was one of the most authoritarian and brutal regimes in world history, killing millions of their own citizens and sending millions more to the Gulag. Moreover, the hammer and sickle convey a similar sentiment to the German phrase the Nazis appropriated about freedom through work. A person wearing a Hitler or Mussolini shirt would be immediately suspect (it would likely get a person kicked out of a college classroom), but a Che Guevara shirt? No problem. When I was in Denmark in 1989, I bought such a shirt in Freetown Christiania and used to wear it around Green Bay. When I learned the truth about Che (suffice it to say that he was not a nice guy), I retired it. I still have it in a closet somewhere. But before I retired it, a young person asked me if the image was Charlie Manson. Knowing what I know today, I would have said, “No, worse. Much worse.”

George Orwell was troubled by this double standard long before I was. Orwell was an anti-fascist, but he chose to focus on communism in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four not because he overlooked the horrors of fascism or Nazism—he took up arms against Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War—but because he believed that the atrocities of Hitler and Mussolini were already well understood and condemned. He was alarmed by the widespread admiration for Soviet-style communism among Western intellectuals, despite its glaring abuses of power and suppression of liberty. Orwell saw this uncritical support as insidious, cloaking totalitarianism in the guise of justice and progress. His most well-known works are indictments of how authoritarian regimes manipulate ideology to control and oppress the people they claim to serve. Admiration for communism is still palpable on the left today. If I am being honest, I have in the past been guilty of this myself. You can find writings on Freedom and Reason (I started this platform in 2006), that are properly criticized as communist apologetics.

Ever heard of the Thomas theorem? It is also called the “definition of the situation.” It’s related to the concept of “framing.” The theorem goes like this: “If men define situations as real, they are real in“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” It was developed by sociologists William and Dorothy Thomas. The idea is central to symbolic interactionism. What the couple are saying is that people’s actions are based on their subjective interpretation of a situation not on objective reality. If they define things in a particular way, then they will see them and act towards them as if they are that way. This is how two people can look at the same thing and see it differently—and react to it differently. Here is French President Macron making the exact same gesture. Is Macron a Nazi?

Did anyone accuse President Macron of being a Nazi? pic.twitter.com/TEMfxfpv0m

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 23, 2025

Of course, the thing is one way actually. So the goal of the rational thinker is to see the thing as it really is. That’s hard for humans because they want to believe that the way they see the world is the way the world is. If it’s not, then a lot of other things they think about the world are probably wrong, too. This could lead to a change of frame. A change of frame risks alienating the tribe. Belonging is a powerful human impulse. So people stick with ideology. Ideology makes a man see what he wants to see.

Apparently Tim Walz is a Nazi.

it’s only a Nazi salute when Elon Musk does it, when Tim Waltz does it then it’s just a hand gesture. pic.twitter.com/5k6CfGzI5h

— World Hall Of Fun (@WorldHallOfFun) January 23, 2025

Predictably, I have been labeled a “bigot” for supporting Donald Trump’s executive order ending affirmative action in federal government and for federal contractors. It’s not as if my opposition to affirmative action is unknown. I turned against affirmative action fifteen years ago. My change of mind occurred in stages in the context of teaching upper-division college courses. I want to tell that story here. I provided a short version of the story in June 2021 (you can read it here) and elaborated the argument a few days later in Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment. I will expand upon the circumstances of transformation here (my ability to change my mind is explained in the essay I published yesterday) and then pivot to the problem of affirmative action, which, as I will show, is a species of racism, and the importance of Trump’s actions in ending it.

The first moment of my transformation on this issue came in the spring of 2010. I had assigned, among other books, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction in Law and Society (the forward penned by Angela Davis). When I went through the assigned texts on the first day of class, I told my students that we would not be do the classroom exercises suggested by the book. I said this because I wanted them to critically evaluate the arguments at hand—arguments I largely agreed with at the time—not engage in activities that would require a captive audience to participate in the transformation of consciousness such activities sought. I am a lifelong free speech advocate, and I understood that having students engage in ideological exercises constituted compelled speech. As we worked through those ideas during lecture and discussion, I came to regret having assigned the book for the same reason I would later regret having assigned another piece of ideological work, namely Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow in my course Criminal Justice Process. Why? The problem of ideology. 

It was either during the during the summers of 2010-2011, or the spring of 2012, perhaps even before that (that earlier essay seems to imply that), in the context of my Foundations of Social Research class, while lecturing on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and the related problem of reification, that I realized why Delgado and Stefancic’s book had troubled me so: critical race theory is built around those fallacies. To elaborate, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness refers to the error of treating an abstract concept or theoretical model as if it were a concrete, fully accurate representation of reality. Reification is the act of treating abstract concepts, such as relationships or social constructs, as though they are tangible and independently existing entities. While both involve a conflation of the abstract and the concrete, misplaced concreteness emphasizes the mistake of overvaluing simplifications, often in the guise of logical reasoning while leveraging group averages, whereas reification critiques the sociological tendency to treat abstractions, in this case “racial categories” as if they have agency or physical existence. Essentially, reification can be seen as a specific form of misplaced concreteness within broader contexts.

The rescission of affirmative action by actions taken by Donald Trump during the first days of his second term as president aligns with my longstanding concerns about the ideological underpinnings of racial preferences that reflection upon those fallacies had raised. It is one thing for an individual to question whether his race affected an opportunity, either acceptance at a university or employment or promotion at a private or public organization. But affirmative action asserts abstract racial categories—simplifications of complex, multifaceted human identities—as the basis for decision-making in education and employment. Thus affirmative action necessarily treats individuals as personifications of abstract and often arbitrary demographic groups (ever looked at a nineteenth century census form?), embodying historical narratives and statistical averages instead of recognizing the unique experiences, merits, talents, and potentials manifest in the flesh-and-blood person. 

Critical race theory, as outlined in Delgado and Stefancic’s work (their primer accurately captures the main arguments), exemplifies this problem. Moreover, the theory has played a central role in rationalizing affirmation action (as well as reparations), by supposing the deterministic role of race in shaping outcomes and experiences, effectively reifying racial categories as concrete, self-contained entities with intrinsic agency—advocating altering the opportunity structure on this basis. A reader might take issue with my characterization of this matter. Fine. But what weight can academic disagreement carry in the law? Anybody who studies the disciplines of history and sociology must admit the myriad accounts one finds there are interpretations and theories built upon or positing essentially contested concepts.

We see these fallacies in the notion of “white privilege,” which refers to the alleged unearned advantages or benefits those individuals identified as white enjoy in societies supposedly structured around racial hierarchies. Those alleged advantages and benefits are said to manifest in systemic ways, such as greater access to education, employment, and housing, as well as in everyday experiences, such as being less likely to face racial profiling by the police or discrimination in businesses. Here, prima facie evidence of disparity, ie the mere fact of group differences, becomes proof of systemic racism. Even if there were empirical evidence supporting these claims at the abstract structural level (I do not a priori rule it out), it is not true that every individual enjoys these privileges.

Moreover, in the legal context, privilege refers to a specific right or immunity granted to a person or group that protects them from certain legal obligations. Such privileges are rooted in statutes, common law, or constitutional protections and are designed to safeguard important relationships or rights. The fact is that laws and policies privileging whites were abolished in 1964, with the Civil Rights Act. There have been no racial privileges for sixty years—at least not for whites and those deemed white-adjacent (shorthand for those groups that on average have accomplished more, command higher incomes, live in better houses, etc.) CRT says difference is because of white supremacy, but that is a theory. (Some say it more crudely; Ibram X Kendi says either group inequality is explained by racism or the racist notion that they are not.) There are other theories, such as cultural traditions that promote academic excellence and hard work. At its core, affirmative action is justified by selective affirmation of particular historical interpretations and sociological theories. It is not the role of government to force us to operate according to particular interpretations and theories by historians and sociologists.

As such, affirmative action reestablishes in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act a lawful system of racial discrimination by appealing to the argument that societal systems and institutions have historically been designed to favor white individuals, often at the expense of marginalized racial groups, and therefore government action is required to repair alleged harms. The cover is that white privilege is not about assigning personal blame or oppressing whites and white-adjacents but about understanding structural inequalities and how they perpetuate disparities across racial lines. But of course, blame must be assigned, after all there is an oppressor and the oppressed in this model, and to raise this supposed dynamic to the level of justice, the legal system must be put in the employ of primitive notions of collective and intergenerational guilt, primitive notions out of step with the modern and enlightened system of justice based on individualism. It is in the individual that rights reside, and equality demands that each individual, except in cases where there are intrinsic differences between groups (such as the case of gender, where equity is required), is equally entitled to those rights.

To put the matter bluntly, affirmative action is a system of discrimination based on race. This is why the US Supreme Court significantly restricted the use of affirmative action in college admissions in its June 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (see Ending Patronage and Co-optation: The Death of Affirmative Action is a Start for details and analysis of the policies hegemonic function). The Court ruled that race-conscious admissions policies at these institutions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision effectively ended the longstanding practice of affirmative action as it had been used in higher education, emphasizing that admissions decisions must focus on individual merits and achievements rather than generalized considerations of race.

Trump’s rescission of Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order 11246 establishing affirmative action follows the line of progress on civil rights law and policy the Court’s decision advanced. If social justice is to have any real meaning, it is found here. The practice of affirmative action undermines the dignity and individuality of persons, reducing them to vehicles of abstract constructs in a program to right the wrongs asserted by a particular historical interpretation and sociological theory. By ending affirmative action, policymakers have an opportunity to refocus on merit-based frameworks that evaluate individuals on their actual achievements and capacities, rather than perpetuating the flawed logic of racial essentialism inherent in reified group identities. There’s feedback loop: the interpretations and theories at work here lose their purpose. After all, one’s skin color is not an achievement, nor are we to prejudge the capacities of individuals on that basis. There’s a word for ideologies that do that, the word is racism. 

As I have explained on Freedom and Reason, the label “conspiracy theorist” functions as an ad hominem attack and a thought-stopping device, dismissing an individual’s arguments without addressing their claims or accessing their merits. By reducing alternative and complex viewpoints to a stigmatized stereotype, the label discourages critical thinking and exploration of evidence. It shifts focus from the substance of the claims to the perceived credibility or rationality of the person presenting them, producing and perpetuating a culture where questioning mainstream narratives is reflexively ridiculed. As such, the label—and this is its intent—undermines open dialogue, creating a binary framework where ideas are either “approved” or relegated to the realm of irrationality, often without genuine examination. The label aims to silence legitimate concern and dissent, impeding the skeptical inquiry essential to a free and informed society.

Ideology also produces a binary framework—a rigid system of “in-group” versus “out-group” beliefs that determine membership within a collective. Ideological belief, which I shorthand as “cult mentality” in this essay, contrasts with the rational approach, that is the approach rooted in facts, logic, and principles that allows for flexibility and thus adaptation to new information. Ideology serves as a shortcut for group cohesion and shared identity that comes at the expense of open inquiry and individual critical thinking. From the ideological perspective, those who do not conform to its tenets are deplorable. This framing prevents genuine engagement with ideas outside the ideology’s boundaries and fosters a tribal mindset, where the primary concern is maintaining group identity over seeking truth. 

The rational person, working outside this framework, risks being misunderstood or maligned by ideologues because his motivations and conclusions do not align with the predefined ideological script. This creates a tension between open-minded rationality and the closed-system thinking that ideology enforces. Those who have attempted to raise awareness of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the role the deep state in portraying the laptop as “Russian disinformation” know very well the power of ideology, as well as the effect of dismissive labeling, in leaving people utterly incapable of entertaining the possibility that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged to replace an outsider president with one compliant to the interests of the corporate state.

“The Marco Polo Report: Overview,” by Strauch Mahoney is where folks can begin to learn about the Biden crime family—if they haven’t already studied the matter. Most haven’t, I know, in part because they don’t care to; others because they can’t find it. I provide this link so you can experience for yourself how Internet nodes aggressively censor the report. Click the embedded links and you will be timed out or told that the site isn’t available. If you use the Tor browser that sends you to IPs around the world, then you may be able to find it. But I checked, and that probably won’t work for you. You will have to do that work, however (Hint: the Internet archives). I would publish the report myself, but then Freedom and Reason might likely be censored or the its ultimate owners deplatform me.

https://twitter.com/mirandadevine/status/1584242791991087104

Mahoney published the overview back in October 2022. Why didn’t I talk about it then? I did. In fact, I talked about long before then (in October 2020 in New York Post Drops a Bombshell on the Biden Campaign). Why I’m back at it is because I was recently told that the laptop was “bullshit” after I posted a story about then-president Joe Biden issuing pardons to several close family members on Inauguration Day in the final minutes of his presidency. “My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden wrote in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.” Because where there’s smoke there’s fire. He continued: “That is why I am exercising my power under the Constitution to pardon James B. Biden, Sara Jones Biden, Valerie Biden Owens, John T. Owens, and Francis W. Biden.” He then added, “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” I checked. In Burdick v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court ruled that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance of a pardon is a confession of it.” Same goes for Biden’s son, Hunter, whom he pardoned on December of last year, the pardon exactly covering the decade of scandal.

The ignorance of those who cry “bullshit” frustrates me. I admit it. I need folks to come to terms with the existence of an establishment—a power elite, C. Wright Mills called it—that enjoys tremendous power to censor and deplatform. Before Zuckerberg’s change of policy, sharing the report would have been censored and Facebook might very well have deplatformed for telling you how to find this information. Twitter certainly would have. The laptop was heavily censored during the 2020 campaign and after. The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper (founded by Alexander Hamilton) was censored and deplatformed for reporting it. Why would the establishment do this? Because the Establishment selected the fading compliant Joe Biden to be its figurehead, and the contents of the laptop—polling shows that this would have been the case—would likely have changed the outcome of the election. This wasn’t the only way the 2020 election was rigged (that was censored, too), but it played a major role.

The story of Hunter Biden’s is a useful example of what George Orwell identified in Nineteen Eighty-Four as “memory-holing.” Memory-holing refers to the deliberate suppression or erasure of information, often to manipulate public perception or rewrite historical narratives. “memory holes” were devices used to destroy documents and records deemed inconvenient or contrary to the ruling party’s agenda. In contemporary usage, it describes attempts to obscure or erase evidence of events, statements, or facts, often in digital contexts. This can include the removal of online content and the revision of records, all to shape collective memory. The practice did not exist only in Orwell’s imagination. Memory-holing was a practice by the Soviet Union. Memory-holing marks the presence of a totalitarian situation. Had Kamala Harris been elected, the United States would have continued down the path towards a totalitarian society.

By moving to revoke the security clearances of the intelligence officials who spearheaded the disinformation campaign to portray the laptop as Russian disinformation (see The Russia Fake News Narrative), Trump is raising consciousness about the existence of a deep state and the function of the mass media as an organ of corporate governance. The Establishment was desperate to stop Trump. It’s why Trump was outspent more than 3:1 during the 2024 election (which he never less won by 77-plus million votes). It’s also why the Biden regime waged lawfare against Trump at the federal level and in multiple state. And why there were two attempts made on Trump’s life (They Tried to Kill Donald Trump Yesterday; Progressives Losing Their Shit Over the Attempt on Trump’s Life; A Second Attempt on Trump’s Life). Yes, Virginia, the deep state is real. I have known it was real since I sat in front of the television set in the 1975 and watched the Church Committee hearings. this is why ignorance frustrates me.

* * *

For those firmly ensconced in a cult, a term that I will use here as shorthand for emersion in a belief system, an ideology, that rests on nonfalsifiable propositions, i.e., faith-belief, and that rejects facts that contradict doctrine, those who appear to leave the cult, an interpretation of the situation that rests on the presumption that they ever were in one, appear as if they have instead stepped into new one, that they have become “brainwashed,” a determination that presupposes that one is not in a cult. Ironically the act of condemning a presumed apostate is a sure sign that the condemner is in fact himself in a cult. If he weren’t, then somebody changing his mind would be the sign of a freethinker, a man not beholden to a cult. This is the essence of identity politics, which sees the world as a collection of cults. These are the people who have been running our society of late.

This interpretation of the situation is unavailable to those ensnared by cults because they have a particular cognitive style that inoculates them from reason. That’s why it’s nearly impossible—unless an unethical action such as deprogramming is pursued—for a cult member to be reasoned out of his beliefs. I have listened to quite a few people who were once in the cult of Scientology. To a man, they were not talked out of their situation. Rather, they found their way out on their own. And, to a man, once free of cult doctrine, they demonstrate the cognitive style that made that freedom possible. Listening to them, it becomes clear that they were never quite sure of doctrine or their place in the cult in the first place. Doubt left the door ajar just enough to allow their escape.

There is a lesson in this. Having doubts about what one believes is a prerequisite for escaping belief systems—and for accept beliefs on a factual and rational basis. As I have confess on Freedom and Reason, some of the positions I held in the past suggested that I was in a cult, namely the cult of woke progressivism. I used to believe things like global warming, black people are incapable of bring racist (except those who take up the views of white conservatives, you know, the proverbial “Uncle Tom”), systemic racism in the criminal justice system and, more generally society at large, transgenderism was gay-adjacent, and a few other beliefs. But I have also always moved from facts and logic. These were transient beliefs. However long I believed them (some longer than others), I remained a liberal throughout, even during graduate school (academia is something of a cult), open to disconfirmation of my ideas—seeking disconfirmation for the sake of being a reasonable person. The door was never closed for me. Once determined to open wide the door, escape was inevitable.

Others aren’t so fortunate. I have noted before on this platform before that quite a few people have wondered what happened to me. “What has happened to Andy?” Some of my Facebook friends have seen it for themselves. There are a few recent examples. One, a few months ago, involved a former student who, playing the game of “gotcha,” searched my Facebook history to find past statements he believed would trap me. When it only proved my investment in reason and the ability to change my mind, he resorted to ad hominem (I wrote a lengthy essay on this but never published it). More recently I encountered the rage of a friend I have known for decades. Freak outs are not unexpected. Whenever the political flow is disrupted, the likelihood of denouncing and shaming increases. When years ago I shifted the target of my irreligious criticism from Christianity to Islam, it upset a lot of progressives. Progressives are quite fond of Muslims, you may have noticed. Longtime Facebook friends unfriended me. When Trump was president the last time around, several of the Facebook folk caused quite a ruckus, condemning me, then unfriending me. How could I agree with Trump about anything? Some took parting shows on Messenger, essentially praying I would return to my previous positions, that I would “come home,” etc. (Only one ever apologized.)

The assumption is that the Trump column contains checkboxes that no good person would ever check. But I have never ordered my life around such columns. Those columns aren’t rationally ordered anyway. Not even close. They’re ideological and political constructions that simple-minded people, or more generously close-minded people, use to order their speech acts, a substitute for principle used to justify to themselves the act of blackening their social media profiles, or to unfollow, unfriend, block, contact your employer. There’s no reason why a liberal cannot oppose critical race theory, gender ideology, or mass immigration, or criticize the medical establishment, etc. The only things a liberal cannot oppose are those enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And I never have.

I will have to explain myself here since there are those who will counter that liberalism is itself a belief system. Perhaps. But for sure it’s not a cult. Nor is it a mental disease, as conservatives like to say (they’re talking about woke progressivism, not liberalism). Science is a system of beliefs, too. But unlike the belief systems of cults, liberalism and science are rational and based on the objective adjudication of facts. Indeed, they are systems determined by facts and logic. The notion that all belief systems—like all cultures, religions, etc.—are equal, or to be regarded as arbitrary or relative, is postmodernist (or post-truth) sensibilities. Proponents of this essentially nihilist view of the world attempt to delegitimize rational thinking by bringing it down to their level, ideas that appear to deny the possibility of facts and reason. But this genre of speaking and thinking is contradictory, since it’s inherent to the belief system that postmodernism and its various species—post colonialism, critical race theory, queer theory—are superior ways of grasping the world, which in turn leads to rejection of the Enlightenment and loathing of Western civilization, actually superior ways of grasping and living in the world.

This inherent contradiction returns us to the contest of ideas, the validity and invalidity of which are found in their relative fruits. Which ideas are better? That’s a useful question. Look around you. The answer to the question is everywhere. Liberalism and science have given us freedom and progress. Freedom is not subjective. Stealing the freedom of wolves and bears in cages by putting them in cages sickens their bodies and twists their minds (and clearly they do have minds since they act with intention and puzzle at things that escape their understanding). That I am able to convey my ideas on a computer terminal and the readers of this blog receive them validates science. One can argue about whether we should plant an American flag on Mars (I think we should). But if we do ever plant that flag (or somebody beats us to it), it will not be the result of cult mentality, but the fruit of free, and even unfree men, using reason to solve problems, working from falsifiable propositions.

Postmodernism is not the only problem when it comes to reason. What has conservatism brought the world? Where it is not a euphemism for liberalism (and these days it often is), atavisms and intolerance prevail. Both postmodernism and traditional conservatism (excluding the modern conservatism that aligns with the American constitutional principles and the spirit of the Enlightenment) have given the world backwardness and regression. Progress will always depend on freethinking or those who wield science under duress. However, freethinking alone is the unbridled spirit of open-mindedness, the ability to change one’s mind, and to pursue personal liberty based on facts and reason. This spirit is not uncompromising, to be sure. Sometimes one has to support a tendency in which there are some beliefs one would rather see excluded; compromise is part of working with other humans. This is where the liberal value of tolerance has great value. The columns with checkboxes don’t map the lay of the land. I cringe when a Republican appeals to God, even when the speech is the speech I want to hear. That was the case on Monday, January 20, 2025. As long as nobody tries to force me to worship this or that god, or make me live under the rules of this or that religion, I’m fine with it.

Update! In a major win for those committed to the principles of a colorblind society, Donald Trump has revoked Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 of September 24, 1965. The revocation of this and a myriad of other orders is detailed here: “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” To summarize, federal civil-rights laws protect Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, fostering equality of opportunity. Yet institutions across society, including the federal government and major industries, implement race- and sex-based preferences under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA). These practices often violate civil-rights laws, undermining national unity, individual merit, and traditional values like hard work and excellence. They also pose risks to safety by prioritizing identity over qualifications in critical sectors like government, medicine, and law enforcement. Trump’s order reaffirms and enforces civil-rights laws by eliminating unlawful discrimination and preferences. To put the matter succiently, affirmative action has been rescinded.

* * *

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ―George Orwell

I generally don’t like government assertions of the truth. Indeed, I have in the past been highly critical of state affirmation of particular historical interpretations, for example the official recognition of genocides in law. Such affirmations raise the problematic of historical revisionism, a problematic captured by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was based on the actual practice in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, considering the way its synonym “gender” has been repurposed by ideologues to deny its binary and immutability nature, Trump’s executive order affirming the scientific fact of gender, mandating the exclusive use of the term “sex” to refer to this reality in law and policy, is not merely affirming basic biology but affirming the empirical premise upon which such law and policy is formed and implemented. The executive order is therefore not analogous to an order affirming the status of Pluto as a plant or other astronomical disputes among physicists.

Summarizing the order, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” emphasizes the recognition of sex as a fundamental and immutable reality, explicitly rejecting the concept of “gender identity” as a basis for legal and policy decisions and forbidding the use of gender ideology in determine matters pertaining to gender. It declares the federal government’s commitment to protecting sex-based distinctions in American institutions, laws, and policies, arguing that such measures are necessary to safeguard women’s rights, dignity, and safety. The order mandates the enforcement of sex-based definitions for terms, namely “male,” “female,” “man,” and “woman,” while prohibiting the promotion or recognition of “gender ideology” in federal agencies.

It’s sad that gender ideology has become so pervasive that a president finds it necessary to assert the truth that there are only two genders. But it is necessary. In federal agencies, a demand is made upon free people that they misgender others based on gender ideology. As I document in my April 2023 essay NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech, if a man says he’s a woman, then the NIH requires his mangers and colleagues to refer to him by feminine pronouns. From the Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office of the National Institutes of Health (NIH): “Intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights” (emphasis mine). This means that using objectively correct pronouns to refer to individuals is subject to disciplinary proceedings. The NIH rule sets usage and meaning on their heads and punishes individuals for refusing to comply with an Orwellian inversion. Because such a man is a male and cannot be a female, the NIH is ordering public employees to lie. This tyranny must end. It is an affront to free conscience, speech, and writing.

The order directs federal agencies to revise forms, guidance, and regulations to align with these definitions and rescind prior policies inconsistent with this approach, crucially including those supporting gender identity as a basis for discrimination protections. Additionally, the order prioritizes maintaining single-sex spaces, such as prisons and shelters, based on sex, and prohibits federal funding for medical procedures that alter appearance to conform to a different gender identity. The order thus restores the First Amendment and affirms the necessity of sex-based rights. Put another way, it affirms the basic civil rights of Americans working in public institutions.

President Donald Trump on Monday also signed an executive order proclaiming that the US government will end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal agencies. “Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions” rescinds numerous directives and orders from the previous administration, which the Trump administration correctly determines promotes divisive and unlawful initiatives. The order emphasizes a return to principles of merit, equality, and common sense within the federal government. It directs agency heads to immediately end the implementation of DEI-related policies, mandates reviews of federal actions tied to the rescinded orders, and tasks the Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, and National Security Advisor with identifying additional measures to rescind or replace. Once more, President Trump has affirmed the basis civil rights of Americans working in public institutions.

The rescinding of executive orders related to DEI and those specifically addressing gender identity reflects a broader effort to reverse policies that incorporate principles of identity-based equity, which include gender ideology as a component of DEI. DEI frameworks typically emphasize addressing systemic inequities across various demographic factors, including race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. By targeting DEI as a whole, the order inherently encompasses policies related to gender identity, as it is a key aspect of these frameworks. By removing both, the administration signals an intent to move away from policies promoting identity-based protections and accommodations in federal governance. This shift aligns with Trump’s stated purpose of prioritizing “merit” and “equality” over what his administration correctly views as divisive or preferential policies rooted in identity-based considerations. The linkage is thus conceptual and practical: eliminating DEI policies involves dismantling broader systems and protections for gender identity within federal practices.

The violation of Americans’ civil rights is what trans activists intend when they demand “trans rights.” The construct means that trans identifying persons claim a right—really a privilege—that supersedes the fundamental civil and human rights to conscience, speech, publishing, and association to which all Americans are entitled. It is on the assertion of this privilege that men claim a right to engage and enter female-only activities, occupations, and spaces. The fallacious construct of “gender identity” is thus a means by which boys and men violate the rights of girls and women. Nobody is entitled to privilege of this kind. Trans identifying people have the same rights as the rest of population. No more. No less. The elimination of DEI bears directly on the matter. DEI is the program that, among other things, socializes the lies that deny the truth of gender.

The path out of madness begins with the assertion of plain truths. To make these assertions, we must be free to speak and write them. It is the role of the Executive of the United States to make sure that our rights to conscience, speech, and writing are preserved. The Orwell quote at the top of this essay, taken from Nineteen Eighty-Four, underscores how the Party—today in America that is the Establishment, the Administrative State, represented primarily by the Democratic Party—seeks to obliterate objective truth—and seeks to accomplish this by requiring public employees to repeat the lies that gender is subjective and depends on the nonfalsifiable assertions of individuals. By clarifying that sex is a biological matter, Trump returns the determination of gender to the realm of the falsifiable. And by eliminating DEI, Trump keeps the promise of the Constitution that the individual will be judged on his merits and treated equally before the law, entitled to the rights he shares with his fellow citizens.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. My parents were civil rights activists in the 1960s. They involved me in this work, and MLK, Jr., was one of our family’s guiding lights. I don’t have many heroes, but MLK, Jr., is one of them. MLK, Jr., put his life on the line to advance the cause of racial equality. Among other things, King played a key role in securing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which abolished institutionalized racial discrimination nationwide. Tragically, on April 4, 1968, only days after my sixth birthday (I remember this day quite well), his life was taken by an assassin’s bullet.

Today will also see the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States in Washington DC, a tradition marking the peaceful transfer of power in the world’s oldest continuous constitutional republic. The US Constitution, which came into effect in 1789, established the framework for the federal government and has been in continuous operation since then. It is the oldest written national constitution still in use. Donald Trump will take the reins of the American Republic today for the second time, having governed the nation during the years 2017-2021.

My hope for this occasion is that the American People will today recommit themselves to the principles and values that guide such men. These principles and values are listed in the American Creed, the core values and principles foundational to the United States’ identity and national ethos. The Creed encapsulates the ideals that Americans hold dear—that we should hold dear. Its central themes—liberty, equality, a republic form of government, justice, opportunity, unity, and patriotism—constitute a model for all the peoples of the world.

Today, I explore the case of a transgender male who was the victim of a mob attack planned via Snapchat by a group of his peers in Harrow, a large town in London, England. Many believe that this case provides a real-world instantiation of a form of bigotry transactivists label “transphobia,” defined as an irrational fear, hatred, or loathing of trans identifying individuals. The definition also often includes criticism of the ideology that affirms the existence of gender identity, exalting that identity to a status that effectively holds trans identifying individuals blameless for their harmful actions. The claim made by gender critical voices that the victim in this case is also a perpetrator is thus construed by transactivists as an example of victim blaming.

As such, the Harrow case is useful to elaborating points made in an essay I recently penned, Blame, Fault, and Victimology, in which I distinguish between victimology, a subfield in the discipline of criminology, and the practice of blaming the victim. Victimologists study the legal, psychological, and social impacts of crime on victims, as well as their interactions with the criminal justice system and societal responses. Moreover, victimology provides knowledge to the public useful for avoiding victimization. Victim blaming feels self-explanatory, but the matter is a bit more complex that it might seem at first blush; I detail the practice in that essay. I spend several thousand words on the matter there, so I won’t repeat those details here.

I am moved to write about this today because of a controversy on X (formerly Twitter) in which critics of gender ideology express concern that mainstream media reporting on the Harrow story skirts the problem of “sex by deception,” a crime I detail in the course of the present essay. For background on the X controversy, see the tweets threads below, one by Amy Souza, the other by Helen Joyce, both identified as gender critical voices and smeared by transactivists as “TERFS,” an acronym for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.” These two (and many others) are routinely smeared as transphobic by the gender ideology contingent. I will first report the details of the case and then think aloud through the problem Souza and Joyce identify.

Lying about your identity in order to have sex is a crime, it’s called sex by deception and it’s a form of rape.

I’m sorry he was stabbed, but he’s a perpetrator as well. pic.twitter.com/IGpI3MKx6t

— Amy E. Sousa, MA Depth Psychology (@KnownHeretic) January 16, 2025

This horrific crime of vigilantism has rightly been seriously punished. Judging from the reporting, it may have been preceded by a very serious sexual assault that was never reported 1/14 pic.twitter.com/Tx9MPSO8Hf

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) January 17, 2025

The 18-year-old victim in this case was lured to a meeting under the pretense of roller disco, where he was ambushed, pinned to the ground, and stabbed fourteen times. The victim survived the attack. The assault followed a revelation that he was transgender, portraying a woman and concealing his true gender. Four youths have been convicted for the premeditated attack. One, a female Summer Betts-Ramsey, received an eight and a half-year sentence in youth detention (four and a half years mandatory), three others, Bradley Harris, Camron Osei, and Shiloh Hindes, received three-year sentences, while a 17-year-old boy, whose name is protected because of juvenile status, received a youth rehabilitation order.

The media framing assumes the trans activist narrative that this was a “transphobic attack.” Concerning motivation, the Mirror reports that the court heard the man was with one of the defendants, Harris, at his house in January last year. While there, a mutual friend called the defendant to tell him that the man he was with was “trans.” Excusing his deception, the prosecutor told the court, “Having been attacked in the past because of her transgender identity, she denied it.” The two then kissed, and the trans identifying male performed oral sex on the defendant. Soon afterwards, another friend told Harris that the individual was a “tranny.” The trans identifying male denied it again, at which point Harris picked up a knife and said, “I’ll stab you if you lie.” The trans identifying male says he felt intimidated and admitted to being transgender. Harris told him to leave.

When Harris told the group that the man had deceived him in order to have sex with him, the Snapchat group turned on the trans identifying man, with one of the other defendants threatening to stab the trans identifying male. When the trans identifying male asked the group when they would next be meeting, Harris responded: “[I’m] not your mate… you tranny.” Phone evidence presented in court revealed that during a call Summer Betts-Ramsey told a gang member: “I have to go to Harrow to beat up some… a fucking tranny bro.”

I am determined to address the controversy without denying the wrongfulness of what the defendants did, or the appropriateness of the justice served. So I want to put the matter as definitively as I can: what the mob did was wrong and the sentences were appropriate. Whatever happened before the mob attack cannot justify that attack. However, what the stories about this case leave out or obscure, and this is the point Souza and Joyce with to raise, is the crime perpetrated by the trans identifying man, a crime that goes by different names, but most accurately sex by deception. Alluding to this crime, the Guardian characterizes the situation as “a distorted notion of revenge.” To get the totality of the matter on the table, I will explain the crime of sex by deception and then provide an hypothetical case hoping the reader will grasp the significance of it, as it has broader implications. I will also explore real-world cases that might serve as analogs for thinking through such matters.

Sex by deception, sometimes called “sexual fraud,“ occurs when one person misleads or manipulates another into engaging in sexual activity by providing false information or concealing the truth. This deception can take various forms, including pretending to be someone else, hiding important facts about one’s identity, and lying about the nature of the relationship or intentions. In the Harrow case, the three forms identified apply. It also should also be noted that sex by deception often involves manipulating emotional or psychological vulnerabilities to gain consent. It is unclear whether these elements apply. What seems likely is that sex by deception was at least one of the motivating factors for Harris, whose status as a victim of this crime in not in dispute.

The key element in sex by deception is that consent is given under false pretenses, i.e., the person agreeing to the sexual act would have made a different decision had they known the truth. This form of deception can lead to serious emotional harm, physical violation, and sometimes legal consequences, as it undermines the principle of informed consent in sexual relationships. It’s a breach of personal autonomy and respect for others, leading to the exploitation of the victim’s trust. To be sure, the man who was deceived in this case should have sought out law enforcement and reported the incident instead of participating in mob violence. But the reason he was moved to perpetrate this crime may not be solely explained by antipathy towards trans identifying people. Perhaps antipathy towards trans identifying individuals is a bit clearer in Betts-Ramsey’s statements, but in Harris’ case, evidence that he would have committed violence against this group apart from the deception he suffered is lacking.

To make this relevant to my US readers, sex by deception is illegal in certain situations within the United States, although the legal landscape varies depending on jurisdiction. In some states, sex by deception may be classified as a form of sexual assault, even rape. In other cases, it’s classified as fraud. Either way, it rises to these levels if the deception involves concealing one’s identity, pretending to have a different status, or providing false information about the nature of the act itself. The most common legal concept tied to sex by deception in the US is “rape by fraud” or “sexual assault by fraud.” In cases where deception impacts the consent given, the consent given is invalid.

In England, which shares many of the same foundational legal assumptions with the US, sex by deception is also considered illegal under certain circumstances. If consent is obtained through deception, it may be deemed invalid. On these grounds, the act can be classified under the offense of rape or sexual assault, particularly if the deception undermines the person’s ability to give true and informed consent. This is clarified under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, where consent is defined as the agreement to engage in sexual activity, given voluntarily and with full knowledge of the situation. If one person lies about his identity, and the other person consents based on those lies, the validity of consent given is problematic. An important question in the Harrow case is why the victim in the case has not also been charged with a crime.

I interpret Souza and Joyce’s criticisms to speak to a larger issue—that the act of omitting or obscuring the fact of sex by deception in these stories amplifies the framing of the attack as transphobic and thus serves propagandistic ends. Indeed, the construct “transphobia” is a propaganda term—its functions the same as the construct “Islamophobia”—designed to suggest the presence of a state of mind akin to a mental disorder or a species of discrimination. To the extent that we accept the legitimacy of such terms, the language used by the attackers could be construed as such if the common slang “tranny” is seen as an indicator. At the same time, why is it obvious that any revulsion a straight man feels over same-sex acts is irrational and not natural—as natural as a gay man’s revulsion at having sex with a female? If it’s not, then doesn’t a victims reaction to having been deceived into having constitutes another motive? Furthermore, doesn’t failure to acknowledge the role this played in the crime obscures that motive?

I shared above the two clips of atheist, humanist, and secularist Christopher Hitchens speaking about the consequences of elevating an ideology to an exalted position and enjoying the power of the state behind its propagation to convey the greater problem ideology poses. It is the situation Hitchens describes that redefines words as, and transforms criticisms of an ideology into acts of bigotry, which are then blamed for violence against those who subscribe to the ideology. The devotees of the ideology, on the other hand, are held blameless for their harmful actions, or at least the harm of their acts is diminished. Moreover, the harm caused by their actions is blamed on the victims. We saw this in the Charlie Hebdo case, in which it was at least insinuated that the destruction of property and acts of violence perpetrated against cartoonists in Paris, France with a history of ridiculing Islam and its prophet were provoked by cartoons. With this move, perpetrators are transformed into victims.

We are seeing it again in the characterization of reporting on decades of systematic rape of British girls by Muslims, concealed all that time by the British government, as anti-Muslim bigotry, here through the euphemism of being “overly descriptive”:

Astonishing video from the Welsh Parliament. Tory MS Darren Millar simply states facts about the grooming gangs atrocity, yet Presiding Officer Elin Jones tries to shut him down. She calls his language "overly descriptive" and suggests it fuels hatred. pic.twitter.com/1GkovE1ZSD

— Mike Jones (@technopopulist) January 14, 2025

The reason for such obscurantism seems obvious in that, for some, it suggests that the victim is to blame for mob violent, that having committed a crime himself gives tacit approval to the mob’s actions. It is an example of victim blaming. To be sure, sex by deception in this case does not justify the actions of the mob. As I have plainly stated in this essay, and in the one I cited at top concerning the matter generally, what the attackers did is criminal and they deserve having had the book thrown at them. At the same time, I cannot say that the act of raising awareness of the crime of sex by deception is of no significance here. If we are to fight this type of crime, speaking here of sexual fraud, the risk of which is heightened by the deception inherent in the conditions established by gender ideology, the matter should have been included in the story—and the perpetrated held to account whatever the actions of the rape victim.

I say this not only to raise the possibility that antipathy towards trans identifying individuals as a “community” (to borrow Hitchens’ observation) may not have provided the motive for each of those involved, which would be fair to Harris, but for the general purposes of raising consciousness about the act that likely motivated his actions. Consider the example of interracial crime. Black Americans are many times more likely to victimize whites than the other way around. Are black Americans motivated to victimize whites because of racial antipathy towards the white race? After all, the problems of black Americans are routinely blamed on the white majority. Yet one will be hard pressed to find in reporting on this matter any suggestion that this was the motivation. On the other hand, when a black American is victimized by a white man, the thought appears in many minds that the action was racially-motivated. A look at the demographics of hate crime statistics indicates that such perceptions are the official ones, as well. However, a violent act perpetrated by either a black man or a white man may have other motives in back of it; but the stats will how that white men are overrepresented in hate crimes. More than this, the criminal actions of black Americans is blamed on white Americans at large—or at least understand in terms of the suffering of blacks in America.

I ask the reader to imagine a case in which a lesbian becomes intimate with a man pretending to be a woman without the lesbian being aware that the man is a woman. It doesn’t matter whether the man sincerely believes he is what he is pretending to be. Objectively, it cannot be true that the man is the other sex. I do not know for sure if there is no god but Allah or that Muhammad is his messenger, but I do know for sure that a man cannot be a lesbian no matter what he thinks of himself. And since there is no objective way of determining whether he sincerely believes he is what he cannot be, nor do we need to bother with determining this, the only pertinent matter before us is what he is. Objectively, then, what has occurred in hypothetical scenario is rape, since the lesbian did not consent to having sex with the man. To be sure, a woman who prefers women may consent to having sex with a trans identifying male, but in the hypothetical, which parallels the actual case reported in the British press, the consent given is not valid since the woman did not consent to having sex with a man. The victim in the Harrow case is a heterosexual man who was tricked into engaging in a homosexual act. Harris is a rape victim. Yet, to my knowledge, no charges have been filed.

I have written about the problem of deception inherent in conditions established by gender ideology in several essays. In The Queer Project and the Practice of Deceptive Mimicry, I argue that, whenever used to make a false impression, costume and performance are acts of deceptive mimicry. Gender ideology is founded on lies, and the demand is that we not only deny the lies, but that we participate in them. “Deceptive mimicry in the human species almost always result in bad simulation; despite his best efforts, a man rarely passes as a woman. Most men can see what he really is. Even more women can see through the deception. The man engaged in deceptive mimicry has trouble convincing himself that he is the thing he says or wants to be, demanding others participate in the simulation by referring to him using feminine pronouns and chanting obvious falsehoods like ‘trans women are women.’” The “almost always” is important here. In a few cases the simulation is convincing, but in many others it is made so by years of disordering the innate gender detection faculty common to our species. The demand is that this cannot be deception because the person is the gender he says he is. This demand denies science and asks us to lie for the sake of an ideology.

This lie has been institutionalized in common practice. In the essay Is this Dating Site Encouraging Deception and Fraud? I report that Grindr doesn’t allow gay men and lesbians to filter for “cisgender,” i.e., a neologism capturing those whose identity matches the objective reality of their gender (really a propaganda term designed to make equivalent the normal with the pathological). In doing so, Grindr perpetuates the falsehood that trans identifying individuals are the gender they claim they are. I pose the matter rhetorically in the essay: “Is this company engaged in deceptive practices that put personal security at risk by obscuring reality?” In a word: yes. Grindr is giving cover to deceptive mimicry by covering criminal fraud in the language of anti-discrimination. I go on to explain that “[h]umans are mammals and, as such, natural beings with a natural history. A man who appears as a woman, no matter how sophisticated the simulation is, is still a simulation of a woman. No simulated appearance can change the reality the appearance seeks to obscure. So when a trans identifying man claims to be a woman he is engaged in deception.”

I used the hypothetical of the case involving a lesbian in that essay, as well, noting the problem of a man producing a simulated sexual identity not having to tell lesbians the truth about what and who he is—a heterosexual man. As a libertarian on sexual matters, i.e., tolerating the freedom of consenting adults to engage in sexual relations, I emphasize that there is nothing to do about valid consensual intimacy. I write, “If a man seeks intimate experiences with other men simulating women (or any other being or object), then this is something no government should regulate. In a free country, men are allowed to appear as women, and other men are allowed to seek intimacy with them, etc.” A man may also believe he is a prophet of Allah, etc. If a man desires other men who imagine themselves as such, either a woman or a prophet, I have no desire to prevent sex between them. “But such intercourse must be voluntary and consensual,” I write. “If a man lures a heterosexual man or a lesbian on a date posing as a woman, this should carry criminal penalties; it is, at bare minimum, fraud; if intimate contact occurs, rape or sexual assault.” 

I conclude that February 2024 essay with this: “Why this isn’t obvious with rules rendered in black letter law everywhere is Exhibit A in the success of the progressive war on justice, rights, science, and truth. It’s a signal that we’re in the grip of a new religion, one that, because the government stands behind it, has become the official dogma—the state religion.” That is why the Harrow case is significant, and the deeper reason I think Souza and Joyce have raised the matter. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the act of omission by the media in fully reporting this story feeds the narrative that deceptive mimicry is no problem at all, as least when perpetrated by a trans identifying individuals, that the victim in this case did not commit a crime himself, that the sole motive was antipathy towards trans identifying individuals, and, more broadly, that critics of gender ideology are to blame for that antipathy. But, as Joyce pointed out, two things can be true simultaneously. The victim of the beating in Harrow did commit a crime, and this fact is central to the problem of gender identity and trans identification.

To once more reference the problem of Islamic groomer gangs, suppose one of the thousands of British girls victimized by Muslim men, or a group of her friends or a family members, engage in “a distorted notion of revenge”? That goes to motive. To say it is only the work of anti-Muslim antipathy obscures the real motive. The media works very hard to obscure motive in this case, portraying protests or retaliatory actions as the work of “far-right groups.” But protests or retaliatory actions often emerge from genuine outrage over injustice and the perceived failures of authorities to protect victims or hold perpetrators accountable. While some organized responses may involve groups with specific political agendas, attributing all anger or actions to such groups obscures the real motivations of victims, their families, and ordinary people who feel deeply impacted by these events. Anger and calls for justice—and even retaliatory action—are natural responses to grievous harm, and they often transcend ideological or political labels. Acknowledging nuance is essential to addressing the root causes of such crimes and restoring trust in the systems meant to protect society.

These matters are complex, and solving them requires taking the totality of the situation under consideration. When I teach juvenile delinquency, I ask students to consider the circumstances of the Columbine High School shooting. I tell them that the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were driven by a deep sense of anger and resentment stemming from a range of grievances that they articulated in journals and videos. It was clear from those materials and other information that the boys felt profoundly alienated and isolated, perceiving themselves as outcasts in their school community. Both harbored a particular hatred toward what they saw as the dominant social groups, especially athletes and “popular” students, whom they viewed as representative of a society that had marginalized and rejected them. Both individuals felt a desire to assert power and control, using violence to make a statement about their perceived grievances. The Columbine attack emerged from a toxic combination of personal alienation, societal resentment, and a deep-seated desire for vengeance.

None of that justified their actions. Harris and Klebold are responsible for what they did. I raise this and the Harrow case—and one more before I am through—not to blame victims. I talk about motivations to provide a more complete explanation for why people perpetrate such acts so that those in a position to ensure the safety of others can take steps to do so. It’s clear from the evidence that Harris and Klebold’s motives were far more complex and rooted in a combination of psychological issues, personal insecurities, and a broader hatred of society. Framing the Columbine attack purely as a reaction to bullying oversimplifies the intricate web of factors that led to their actions. At the same time, bullying is a problem in society, and failure of those in authority to intervene in such cases leaves some of those who suffer it (thankfully, a small minority) to feel justified in taking matters into their own hand.

In the case I am reporting in this essay, Bradley Harris may have felt that he would not go to the authorities and report the rape he experienced at the hands of the trans identifying male for the same reason that the victims of Britain’s groomer gangs were reluctant to report their victimization to the police. One of the scandals in the groomer gang controversy is the existence of documented instances where police and local authorities failed to respond adequately to concerns raised by victims and their families about grooming and sexual abuse. For example, the Jay Report on Rotherham (2014) exposed a pattern of systemic neglect, where authorities dismissed or ignored complaints despite overwhelming evidence of exploitation. A significant factor was fear of being accused of racism or damaging community relations. Moreover, there was found a tendency to underestimate victims, many of whom came from disadvantaged or troubled backgrounds and were unfairly judged as complicit or unreliable. A culture of indifference within law enforcement and child protection services allowed this exploitation to persist for years, leaving victims without the support or justice they deserved.

Perhaps feeling that there was no receptive authority to handle such a case, Harris may have taken matters into his own hands. I reject this justification, just as I reject as justified the actions taken against the Muslim minority in the UK in retaliation of the systematic rape of British girls. But I think readers would agree that there are scenarios where many would sympathize with a victim taking revenge for an act perpetrated against her or him. As a sociological exercise, empathy helps us understand such situations. Had Harris been a woman raped by a man, how many people reading this essay would have sympathy for her? Would they characterize her actions as “a distorted notion of revenge”? If so, what is the source of the distortion? Was Harrow not also an event possibly enabled by a culture that makes it difficult for a victim to seek redress through legitimate avenues of justice? I think the point Souza and Joyce are making is that the fact of sex by deception can be so easily skirted in this case testifies to the existence of a culture that elevates some statuses over others, holding some individuals responsible for their actions, but not others, the double standard determined by ideology.

I close with a case that illustrates the problem, and to once more reiterate my position that matters of justice are to be adjudicated in courts of law, not in our homes or on the street, where violence is only justified in acts of self-defense or the protection of others. I wrote about this case in the essay I cite at the top of the present one. To recall the facts, on December 4, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel in Manhattan. The suspect, Luigi Mangione, was arrested and charged with murder. In that essay I write, “Slain United Health CEO Brian Thompson was not responsible for Luigi Mangione’s action. Those defending the assassin’s actions are engaged in blatant victim blaming. But those working in health insurance are today thinking about where they are and who is present in the wake of an action that anarchists call ‘propaganda of the deed.’”

In its reporting, the Hill connects the practices of the medical-industrial complex to Mangione’s actions. This incident, they note, has intensified discussions about the US healthcare system, particularly regarding the practices of health insurance companies. Critics argue that these companies prioritize profits over patient care, often denying or delaying claims, which can lead to severe health and financial consequences for individuals. Such actions are perceived by some as systemic violence, fostering deep resentment among those affected. The killing of Thompson has thus been viewed by many individuals as a manifestation of this pent-up frustration, interpreting the act as a form of retribution against a system they believe has caused widespread harm through the denial of necessary medical services. Public opinion polls revealed significant sympathy for the shooter’s motives among Americans. A NORC poll, conducted by the University of Chicago, indicated that 69 percent of respondents believed health insurance coverage denials bore at least “a moderate amount” of responsibility for Thompson’s death. An Emerson College poll found that among voters aged 18–29, 41 percent considered the killing “acceptable or somewhat acceptable.”

AOC to @BrownJaala on the murder of Brian Thompson

“This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that ppl interpret and feel & experience denied claims as an act of violence…” pic.twitter.com/52aIINUDlH

— Alan He (@alanhe) December 12, 2024

Alexandrea Ocasio-Cortez put it this way to CBS associate producer Jaala Brown: “All of that pain that people have experienced is being concentrated on this event. It’s really important that we take a step back. This is not to comment and this is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.” I strongly suspect that those who sympathize with Mangione could very likely be among those attacking Souza and Joyce over their tweets concerning the Harrow case—which is not to say that sympathy for Souza and Joyce’s position requires sympathy for Mangione. What I asking readers to consider is why in the reporting of the Harrow case readers are not asked to consider how people who are the victims of sex by deception interpret and feel and experience sex by deception as an act of violence against them? However we classify the actions of health insurance companies in denying claims, one has to tie himself into knots, or cover himself with the gloss of gender ideology, to deny that sex by deception is an act of interpersonal violence.

In his Farewell Address, Joe Biden cast a foreboding shadow over the American landscape, warning of the emergence of an oligarchy that consolidates immense wealth, power, and influence. He invoked imagery of the Gilded Age robber barons, framing his concerns in the rhetoric of safeguarding democracy and ensuring fairness for all. 

 “I’m so proud of how much we’ve accomplished together for the American people. And I wish the incoming administration success, because I want America to succeed,” he said. Alluding to the narrative that Trump attempted to prevent a peaceful and orderly transition of power in the wake of the 2020 election, he declared, “I’ve upheld my duty to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition of power to ensure we lead by the power of our example.” Then, attempting to capture the tone of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s ominous Farewell Address of 1961 (see We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears), Biden pivoted to a warning, intended to connect Trump to the Big Tech oligarchs:

“In my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is the dangerous concern—and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before, more than a century ago. But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts.”

Before his sideways attempt to portray Trump as anathema to the interests of the American Republic, he tainted the history of America by feigning wonder at a portrait of the Statue of Liberty that hangs in the White house and waxing sentimental about the Republic’s Founders: “A nation of pioneers and explorers, of dreamers and doers, of ancestors native to this land, of ancestors who came by force, a nation of immigrants who came to build a better life, a nation holding the torch of the most powerful idea ever in the history of the world that all of us—all of us are created equal. That all of us deserve to be treated with dignity, justice, and fairness. That democracy must defend and be defined and be imposed, moved in every way possible. Our rights, our freedoms, our dreams.” (Emphasis mine)

He was not merely contrasting the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant to those others progressives see as his victims, a standard tactic of delegitimizing the purpose of America, but to prepare the audience to engage in acts of resistance against the reclamation of America’s purpose: the supposed pending abuse of power by Trump. “But we know the idea of America—our institution, our people, our values that uphold it—are constantly being tested. Ongoing debates about power and the exercise of power, about whether we lead by the example of our power or the power of our example, whether we show the courage to stand up to the abuse of power or we yield to it.”

Biden’s characterization of the situation—while cloaked in populist alarmism—obscures a very different reality, one that with a proper grasp of history and power dynamics lays bare the dissonance between his proclaimed ideals and the policies enacted under his administration, and more broadly the plan the Corporate State and its small army of progressive elites have for its future. Beneath the veil of warnings lies a profound irony: the very oligarchy Biden cautions against has flourished through the machinations of the Corporate State, of which Biden himself has been a central figure—to be sure, not the actual manipulator of the levers of power (he is himself a shell of the person he used to be and always only an instrument), but rather a simulation of an American president.

We must never forget that the Biden administration, in concert with the CIA, DHS, and FBI (the Deep State), exercised unprecedented influence over Big Tech platforms, platforms owned by the very oligarchs he alluded to in his remarks. Under the guise of combating misinformation and protecting public health during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as appearing to ensure electoral integrity, federal agencies pressured platforms like Facebook and Twitter to suppress dissenting voices. Accounts were deactivated, content flagged, and alternative narratives silenced. Far from being independent arbiters of public discourse, these platforms were conscripted into service by the Administrative State. The alignment of Big Tech with federal power epitomized the very abuse of power Biden claimed to decry—a collusion that undermined open dialogue and democratic deliberation, the lifeblood of a free society.

The implications of this collusion extended far beyond the mere suppression of information. It revealed the interdependence between corporate elites and state actors, a relationship not unlike that of the old monopolies and political machines of the late nineteenth century, collusion that progressivism and the regulatory regime (the FDA, USDA, etc.—later the CDC, ED, EPA, etc.) were and designed to conceal and obscure. Rather than protecting the democratic ideal, this alliance entrenched a system of governance that served the interests of the few over the many. 

In this sense, Biden’s rhetoric about standing against oligarchy represents an exercise in dissimulation—a propagandistic effort to obscure the fact that his administration, like those of his predecessors (the Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas), embodied the consolidation of corporate governance. Biden, like his predecessors, is a creature of the Establishment—the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, the censorship-industrial complex, and the other complexes whose insatiable desire for wealth and power require control over mass consciousness.

However, history seldom moves in a single direction. No control system is total—at least not in the long run. The rise of a populist movement, encapsulated by the persistence of Donald Trump and the America First agenda, marked a decisive counterforce to Corporate State’s hegemony. Despite the relentless efforts to delegitimize the MAGA movement, its force of purpose proved resilient, amassing tens of millions of supporters who defied the narratives propagated by the mind control apparatus—the mass media, the culture industry, and the academy. Trump won more than 77 million votes, winning more than 14 million more votes than he won in 2016. Hardly the unpopular figure the media portrayed; Trump became more popular over the intervening eight years. This groundswell of populist energy catalyzed a shift that even the Big Tech oligarchs could not ignore.

Elon Musk’s October 2022 acquisition of Twitter, rebranded as X, signaled a pivotal moment in this transformation. Recognizing the inevitability of Trump’s re-election and the ascendancy of populist nationalism, and his own interests in a free and open society (which we must admit has not been perfectly consistent), Musk dismantled the platform’s legacy of censorship and realigned it with the popular will. Following Musk’s lead, especially in the wake of Trump’s landmark victory, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders pivoted, opening their platforms to reflect the preferences of a burgeoning populist majority. This transition marked the erosion of the Establishment’s dominance over Big Tech and the beginning of a new era in which these platforms became subservient to the democratic-republican ethos.

In this new paradigm, the power once wielded by corporate elites in concert with the administrative state has been supplanted by a renewed commitment to the classical liberal values of free association, conscience, publishing, and speech, to grassroots activism, and to popular sovereignty. This shift, far from being confined to the United States, echoes as well across Europe, where similar populist-nationalist movements are challenging the entrenched power of bureaucratic elites and transnational corporations. The global resonance of this transformation underscores the universality of the struggle for self-determination against centralized power.

Considering this, Biden’s Farewell Address takes on a new dimension, not as a clarion call against oligarchy but as an attempt to misdirect the American people and prepare the ground for the coming corporate-organized resistance to the popular will. By framing the populism that unites the left and the right as a threat rather than a corrective, Biden and his administration seek to reinforce the very power structures they claim to oppose. His warnings about the abuse of power ring hollow when juxtaposed with the actions of his administration, which weaponized federal agencies to suppress dissent and uphold the interests of the Corporate State. Progressivism, in this context, reveals itself not as a synonym for populism but as its antithesis—a tool of corporate governance masquerading as egalitarian ideal.

The rise of populist-nationalist movements, bolstered by the realignment of Big Tech, represents a reclamation of power by the people. It’s a reminder that democracy is not a gift bestowed by elites but a right fought for and exercised by citizens. As America transitions into this new era, the oligarchs who once served the Corporate State are now compelled to answer to the desires of the populace. In these developments we see a vindication of the ideals upon which the nation was founded—a testament to the enduring power of self-government. With the resurrection of reason and truth, the destructive ideologies that plague the West—CRT, DEI, TQ—are on the run. Don’t let up (see my recent Tasks for the Rebel Alliance).