A New Hope: Populism in the Twenty-First Century

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. 

Joe Biden delivers his farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, January 15, 2025

 “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.

Progressive bugaboo Elon Musk

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).

Biden’s Belated Clemency Action and Malign Neglect of the First Step Act

“Today’s clemency action provides relief for individuals who received lengthy sentences based on discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine, as well as outdated sentencing enhancements for drug crimes,” Joe Biden said today in a statement announcing another round of clemencies at the end of his presidency. “This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars.”

This is the right thing to do, of course, but an old friend of mine asked me on Facebook why Biden didn’t do this four years earlier. For the same reason he didn’t enact the First Step Act that Trump pushed through Congress, I responded, before adding, “Biden waited until now so that Trump could get no credit for the most important piece of criminal justice legislation in decades.”

President Trump signs the First Step Act, December 18, 2018

There is more to the story, so before I get to the First Step Act and explain why many of those who will read this post will not have heard of this piece of legislation, I want to make brief readers on the background of the discredited distinctions between crack and powder cocaine which, among other injustices, the First Step Act addressed. 

The disparity in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine emerged with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, a legislative response to rising concerns about drug use and its societal impacts. This period saw a moral panic fueled by sensationalized media coverage of the so-called “crack epidemic.” Lawmakers, amid a historic crime wave, and seeking to appear tough on crime for their upcoming reelection bids, instituted harsh mandatory minimum sentences. Even though crack and cocaine are the same drug, and even though those who purchased powder cocaine often convert it to crack (I know, I lived in Miami at the time), ready-use crack cocaine, more commonly used in impoverished black-majority communities, was penalized 100 times more severely than powder cocaine. The result was racial disparity in sentencing. 

A good source on this is Michael Tonry, who wrote extensively about disparities in drug sentencing and the broader issues of racial inequality in the criminal justice system in his 1995 Malign Neglect. Tonry argues that these policies were rooted in political motivations rather than evidence-based assessments of drug use or harm. Tonry emphasizes how these policies exacerbated racial inequalities and contributed to the over-incarceration of black Americans. (Tonry exaggerates the role drug sentencing played in the phenomenon, but I will leave that to a future essay. It was nonetheless significant and unjust.) 

It is important for readers to know that, although this occurred during the Reagan-Bush administration, the law was bipartisan, with support from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Of note, Joe Biden was US Senator during the passage of the bill, and he played a significant role in shaping and supporting it. Indeed, Biden, serving as the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he helped craft and promote various anti-drug measures, including mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Biden was a leading advocate for tough-on-crime policies during this period and contributed to the broader legislative agenda of escalating penalties for drug offenses. Biden supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine. I condemned the legislation at the time and wrote about it later in my dissertation. 

Some readers may be aware that in the early 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, Biden played a pivotal role in crafting and advocating for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, often referred to as the 1994 Crime Bill. As now Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden was a driving force behind the legislation, which aimed to address growing public concerns about violent crime in the United States. The 1986 legislation wasn’t a one-off for Biden. More than any other Senator in my recollection, Biden was driven by authoritarian impulse.

Biden’s contributions to the legislation included advocating for expanded mandatory minimum sentences and supporting policies such as “three-strikes” laws, which imposed life sentences for individuals convicted of three serious offenses. The bill also allocated significant funding for law enforcement, enabling the hiring of 100,000 new police officers and supporting community policing strategies. Additionally, it provided substantial federal funding for the construction of new prisons to accommodate the expected rise in incarceration rates.

I supported the 1994 bill at the time and still credit it with bringing down crime and reducing violence. I distinctly remember driving home to Middle Tennessee after vacationing in the Appalachian Mountains when the bill passed just days before my second year of graduate school (the first of my two advanced degrees). While the legislation was initially lauded as a comprehensive solution to crime, its long-term effects, including its contribution to mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on black and minority communities, have been the subject of significant criticism. As a graduate student in my PhD program in the second half of 1990s, I became critical of the law (its detrimental effects were notable soon after its enactment). Since then I have become more sanguine about the legislation overall but remain highly critical of ow it advanced the drug war. 

That said, Biden speech on the Senate floor at the time is contemptible. He described violent offenders as a “predator” class (Hilary Clinton picked up on this, describing drug offenders as “super predators”), arguing that society needed to protect itself from these individuals regardless of the underlying social or economic factors contributing to crime. Biden stated: “It doesn’t matter whether or not they had no background that enabled them to have—to become socialized into the fabric of society.” He said a lot more:

To be sure, individuals should be held responsible for their actions, but for Biden to reject consideration of the root causes of the crime problem hardened the hearts of a nation to interventions that could have ameliorated those conditions and thus reduce crime organically. However, is aware of they history here, one understands why Biden would deny root causes: it was Democratic policies during the 1960s and 1970s that trapped blacks in impoverished inner-city communities, establishing female-headed households as the norm, generating a demoralized criminogenic culture. Biden’s racism is a fact of the historical record, one he is desperate to dissimulate.

Efforts to address the injustice of Biden and others produced began gaining traction in the 2000s, culminating in the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 under the Obama-Biden administration, which reduced the disparity but crucially did not eliminate it. However, before heaping unwarranted praise on that administration, the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the disparity from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1, a move of which I was highly critical at the time. Had the initial legislation ben 18-to-1, I would have condemned it as strenuously as I did at the time. There should be no disparity.

Let’s now return to the matters of Joe Biden’s actions this morning, and why during his four years in office Biden did not grant clemency to those his legislation sent to prison for decades—and why he did not enact the First Step Act Donald Trump signed into law on December 18, 2018. Moreover, if you are asking “What is the First Step Act?” let’s understand your ignorance.

Obviously, the corporate state avoids giving Trump credit for the most significant piece of justice legislation in decades. How significant? The legislation reformed the federal prison system by reducing mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, expanding early release programs and allowing eligible inmates to earn time credits for good behavior and participation in recidivism-reducing programs, improving prison conditions, such as requiring federal prisons to place inmates closer to their families when possible, and addressing the disparities in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine offenses retroactively. That’s right, had Biden enacted the First Step Act, these prisoners would have already been released.

To drill down on the widespread ignorance of the First Step Act, this can be attributed to several factors. Although the law received some initial media coverage when it was signed into law, it lacked sustained attention afterward. As many readers are aware, coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency focused on controversies and polarizing issues. Immigration was a flashpoint, where media bias portrayed Trump as an authoritarian, going so far as misrepresenting photos of children in cages during the Obama-Biden administration as having occurred under Trump. (There was also the ulterior motive of flooding the country with illegal aliens.)

The First Step Act was a bipartisan achievement that required Trump’s intervention to accomplish. Trump pushing through and signing into law legislation releasing thousands of black men from prison put there unfairly, put there by Democrats, ran counter to the narrative the corporate state was determined to push. Elites controlling the narrative understood that people were primed to overlook it because criminal justice reform isn’t perceptually associated with Donald Trump, whose tough-on-crime rhetoric is depicted as anathema to the critical race theory/ social justice paradigm pushed by the apparatus. After 2010 especially, the corporate state, the mass media, the culture industry, and academia united in pushing out anti-white conservative bigotry, setting up Trump to be the champion of the Deplorables, and depicting the Democrats as sympathetic to the plight of the poor and minority.

As for academia, the institutional frame in which I have been ensconced for the last thirty years, criminal justice curricula and research endeavors focus on systemic racism, mass incarceration, and policing. This was the subject of my dissertation. The woke progressive academics who dominate the institution cannot give Trump credit for freeing people from policies Democrats were in a major way responsible. A lack of detailed and widely disseminated academic analysis of the First Step Act has limited its presence in coursework and scholarly discussions. When the rare criminal justice expert does discuss it—I present yours truly as the rare example of providing both sides—students across the university system, indoctrinated in woke progressive ideology by a lifetime spent in public education, disregard who they perceive as a “conservative” professor (even though in my case I am a liberal and a Marxist) and even report him to the dean’s office—as they did to me after a lecture debunking the central claims of Black Lives Matter and Trump’s work in addressing class and racial injustice in the criminal justice system.

The lack of recognition for the First Step Act and its transformative potential exemplifies a broader pattern of selective narrative control within our corporate, cultural, and political institutions. By downplaying and ignoring Trump’s bipartisan achievement, the corporate state, media, academia, and cultural elite perpetuate a skewed understanding of criminal justice reform and its origins. This neglect not only does a disservice to the truth but also undermines meaningful progress in addressing systemic injustices. This should be a time to reflect on the missed opportunities of the Biden administration (I have put this charitably) and the persistent ideological bias shaping the discourse over the last several decades. Instead, we are presented with a simulacra of a president who did far more harm than good to the nation he purports to serve.

Blame, Fault, and Victimology

Recently, on Facebook, I noted a warning issued by Green Bay Police Department (this is in the city in which I reside) about warming up one’s car in the driveway or garage. Car thieves have been taking advantage of the practice, a practice one might understand is desirable given how cold it gets in Northeast Wisconsin.

A frequent commenter to my Facebook posts wrote, “I don’t condone theft, but who is stupid enough to leave a running car unlocked? They’re basically asking for it to be stolen. Use some common sense, people.” To the snark about those “stupid enough” to leave a running car unlocked, I retorted, “People who live in safe neighborhoods.” When I was growing up in the 1960s-70s, we never used bike locks, locked car doors, or even barred the front door. At the same time, there was a 12 gauge pump action shotgun in the house just in case there was an intruder.

As readers might expect, I had more to say to the commenter. In a follow up comment, I wrote, “Saying somebody is asking for their car to be stolen because they’re warming it up is a lot like saying a woman is asking to be raped because she’s dressed provocatively or that a businessman is asking to be robbed because he’s dressed nice. People aren’t suppose to steal, rape, and rob. Let’s start there.”

AI generated image

But does that mean people should not practice situational awareness and engage in safety measures to protect their property from theft? Maybe I was too harsh; there’s a fine line between preparing people to avoid victimization and victim blaming. The commenter’s remarks stray into the second category. But there’s a way to talk about this that doesn’t. Perhaps people should heed the police warning about this tactic of car thievery. Indeed, they should. In this essay, I leverage my professional bona fides to talk about victimology and hope to show readers how they can promote public safety without engaging in victim blaming. It’s not stupidity. They aren’t asking for their cary to be stolen. But the practice is unwise, and the result unwelcome.

In the realm of criminology, victimology is one subfield, shedding light on the dynamics surrounding criminal behavior, providing knowledge that allows citizens to better defend themselves from those who wish to harm them or separate them from their property. The population of the United States in 1970, when I was eight years old, was 203 million people. In 2020, it had grown to 330 million, becoming more diverse, more unequal, with rising material deprivation. This is associated with a drastic rise in crime over the 1970s-early 90s, quelled by a massive expansion of the criminal justice system.

Open borders and the entrenchment of ghetto culture, a demoralizing force that increases the likelihood that some of our fellow citizens, as well as the new arrivals who lack the moral sensibilities that made America free and safe, an increase in the proportion of the population that works from definitions favorable to the violation of law and transgression of safeguarding norms, in conjunction with leniency in law enforcement, explain the change. But it took more than the expanding the criminal justice apparatus to accomplish crime reduction after the early 1990s; it also took situational awareness among the citizenry. This came with a downside: among other things, children became less free to enjoy the childhood I enjoyed, replaced by virtual activities. Even now, the current crime wave notwithstanding, our freedoms are constrained as much by fear of predation.

However, the threat of crime remains real, and being prepared to avoid victimization may help relieve the fear, reasonable and unreasonable, people may have about being victimized—at least it promises to shake us out of the naiveté that it could never happen to us. This is where victimology studies become useful. Victimologists study the attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics of crime victims, generating insights into the motives and patterns of criminal perpetration, as well as identifying the preventative measures that can be taken to minimize the risks of victimization. Done properly, this can have the effect of increasing our safety while minimizing the impact of fear of crime on personal freedom.

In my interactions with others, I encounter critics of victimology who say the subfield shifts responsibility for crime onto the victim, implying that it blames victims for their own victimization. This can occur in several ways, I’ve been told: focusing excessively on the behavior or characteristics of the victim rather than the actions of the perpetrator; emphasizing factors like victim behavior or vulnerability that may have contributed to the case of victimization. Critics who view victimology this way point out that focusing on victims detract from addressing the root causes of crime and victimization, perpetuates harmful stereotypes, and undermines empathy for victims.

Assuming victimology does these things, the complaints are valid. There is indeed a desire to avoid addressing the root causes of crime and victimization. Anybody with a sufficient grasp of the demographic realities of crime I the context of the politics of our era can also grasp the desire to avoid acknowledging the situation. As I have shown on Freedom and Reason, leveraging the corpus of crime statistics, black Americans, especially males, are drastically overrepresented in serious crime. On a per capita, according to the 2021 NIBRS data, black Americans were approximately 8.8 times more likely to be reported as homicide offenders compared to white Americans. Based on the 2021 NIBRS data, per capita, black Americans were approximately 7.6 times more likely to be reported as robbery offenders compared to white Americans. I will address the other two criticisms over the balance of this essay (and return to the first again).

Supposing victimology shifts responsibility, the problem identified in my response to the Facebook commenter, how do we explain criminal events while at the same time empower individuals to mitigate risk without veering into victim blaming? First and foremost, as stated, it’s imperative to affirm unequivocally the standpoint that the fault of criminal acts resides solely with the criminal. Regardless of actions, attire, or circumstance, the responsibility for any crime lies squarely on the shoulders of those who perpetrate it. Victim blaming, in any form, is not only morally reprehensible but also counterproductive in the endeavor to strengthen public safety. It undermines the fundamental principle of justice and perpetuates harmful stereotypes that exacerbate the trauma experienced by victims.

At any rate, within the field of victimology, there lies a pragmatic approach to crime prevention—one that recognizes the importance of risk mitigation strategies, situational awareness, and understanding the factors that may increase one’s susceptibility and vulnerability to crime. This approach is not about assigning blame to the victim but rather about empowering individuals with the knowledge and tools to safeguard themselves against potential harm.

Consider, for instance, the simple act of locking one’s doors before leaving home. Again, many of us did not do this in 1970, but we should have. (It is still wise to obtain a firearm and learn how to use it.) This basic precautionary measure does not absolve the burglar of responsibility for his actions. He will if determined break and enter whether the door is locked. But locking the door undeniably reduces the likelihood of a break-in, thereby minimizing the risk of victimization. On purely instrumental grounds, burglars seek the path of least resistance.

Similarly, advising women not to enter vehicles with strange men or to avoid secluded areas at night does not imply fault on the part of the assault victim. Men should not assault women or other men. At the same time, women need to be aware that certain environs pose higher risks. They will benefit from the awareness to navigate those environments safely. Hitchhiking was common in my youth. Today, it would be unwise to pick up a hitchhiker—or to be one; that one sees so few hitchhikers anymore is evidence that people are much more reluctant to invite strangers into their cars or to seek rides from strangers.

Victimology illuminates the role of routine activities in shaping vulnerability to crime. While emphasizing that no one should be targeted based on their appearance or actions, an awareness of behavioral characteristics that increase the risk of becoming a crime victim acknowledges that certain attire may inadvertently attract unwanted attention. A conspicuous display of wealth may make an individual a target for theft, not because he deserves it, but because he presents an opportunity for exploitation.

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.” Similarly, individuals who openly display cultural or religious symbols may become targets of hate crimes perpetrated by bigots. The bigots are responsible, but understanding that there are bigots who may harm those they loathe and taking precautionary measures can protect one from harm.

Understanding these dynamics allows for proactive measures to minimize risk, such as avoiding conspicuous displays of wealth or considering alternative routes in high-risk areas—or, if one can afford it, hiring personal security.

Victimology underscores the importance of self-defense training and empowerment initiatives, not as a means of encouraging violence or victim-blaming, but as tools for fostering confidence, resilience, and situational awareness. By equipping individuals with the skills to protect themselves, such as martial arts or self-defense classes, victimology empowers individuals to assert agency over their personal safety and resist victimization. Understanding victim characteristics that attract perpetrators and increase vulnerability to crime is thus crucial in developing effective crime prevention strategies and reducing one’s risk of victimization. Exploring these factors helps to inform risk mitigation efforts and empower individuals to protect themselves more effectively.

Perpetrators often target individuals they perceive as vulnerable or easy targets. This perception may be influenced by various factors, including age, perceived lack of assertiveness, or physical stature. For example, perpetrators may target elderly individuals or those with physical disabilities, assuming they are less likely to resist or defend themselves. Individuals who find themselves in isolated or secluded environments are more vulnerable to certain types of crimes, such as assault, rape, or robbery. Perpetrators are more likely to strike when their victims are alone and unlikely to receive immediate assistance. This underscores the importance of avoiding isolated areas, especially at night, and seeking safety in numbers whenever possible. Individuals who are unfamiliar with their surroundings or are perceived as strangers may be at higher risk of victimization. Perpetrators may exploit their lack of local knowledge to target them for scams, pickpocketing, or other crimes. This highlights the importance of remaining vigilant and seeking guidance when navigating unfamiliar environments.

For example, predators are known to use tactics such as placing sticky substances on car hoods, leaving money, flyers, or other items under windshield wipers to distract or delay a person—often targeting women—while he or she is entering or preparing to drive away in their vehicle. These actions aim to lure the person into diverting their attention, prolonging their vulnerability, or stepping out of the car into danger. To mitigate this risk, it’s crucial to remain alert and prioritize safety over addressing distractions. If you notice an unusual item on or near your car, avoid removing it immediately, especially if you’re alone or in an unfamiliar area. Instead, enter your car, lock the doors, and drive to a safe location before inspecting the item. Maintaining situational awareness, parking in well-lit and populated areas, and trusting your instincts reduces the likelihood of falling victim to such strategies.

Substance use, including alcohol and drugs, can impair judgment and decision-making, making individuals more vulnerable to exploitation or victimization. Perpetrators may take advantage of intoxicated individuals, rendering them less capable of defending themselves or recognizing potential dangers. Never leave a drink at a bar unintended. If somebody buys you a drink, watch his hands. If somebody offers you drugs, make sure you know the person well and the type and the effect of the drugs you are taking. Educating yourself about the risks associated with substance use and promoting responsible consumption can help mitigate vulnerabilities. I am not preaching the anti-drug message. What you decide to do with your body is your business. But if you are going to use drugs, do so safely and with those you trust. This won’t completely eliminate the risks surrounding drug use, but it will decrease the likelihood that you will fall victim to somebody who means you ill and other problems associated with drug use.

In recent years, subway riders have increasingly been opting to lean against the walls while waiting for trains, a behavior driven by safety concerns. As incidents of people being pushed onto the tracks have become more frequent, passengers are seeking safer alternatives to the edge of the platform. For example, in New York City, commuters at stations like Times Square and Grand Central are now more likely to position themselves along the wall, where they feel less vulnerable to sudden pushes or accidental falls. This shift in behavior highlights growing fears about personal safety and the desire to avoid the risk of tragic accidents, prompting some transit systems to reconsider platform designs and security measures to ensure rider safety. A person standing on the edge of the platform is not blameworthy if somebody shoves them on to the tracks. However, leading against the wall while waiting for the train minimizes the risk.

Unfortunately, individuals belonging to visible minority groups may face an increased risk of victimization due to prejudice or hate-motivated violence. Perpetrators may target individuals based on their race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, seeking to intimidate or harm them based on their perceived identity. Being openly gay does not justify the actions of anti-gay bigots. When I was growing up, I would hear males talking about what they would do if a gay man ever propositioned them. I always spoke up in those situations, condemning the sentiment. I don’t want to make meeting people any more difficult than it already is, but whether you’re homosexual or heterosexual, making advances to strangers comes with risks. It is not your fault if another person victimizes you, but there are ways to avoid victimization.

Given the statistics I cited earlier, and in light of the anti-white bigotry that plagues American society, the rule of decades of blaming “white privilege” for the situation of black Americans, there is a much greater likelihood that a white person will be the victim of a black person than the other way around. While it should be that white people can feel safe walking in black-majority neighborhoods, the statistical reality indicates that it is not. For example, blacks are approximately 13 times more likely to murder a white person than are whites to much a black person. Blacks are overrepresented not only in robbery, but also in burglary and theft. Therefore, whites should consider avoiding certain neighbors and situations. For those who say this is unfair to the majority of blacks who don’t engage in crime, Heather Mac Donald put it well in an interview with Glenn Loury, observing this particular typification is a tax imposed by some on others given the overrepresentation of blacks in crime commission.

I confess that I struggle with victimization studies because I understand how it can sound like victim blaming. As I type these words, I review them carefully for the potential to cross that line. I moreover understand that raising awareness of danger promotes fear of situations and strangers. This is probably an unavoidable problem, one perhaps best captured by considering type I and type II errors, which in this case reflect the balance between identifying threats and avoiding false alarms.

A type I error, or false positive, occurs when a person perceives an individual or a situation as a threat when it’s not, potentially leading to unnecessary fear or avoidance. When a woman assumes that someone following her in a parking lot is a predator when the stranger is simply walking to his car, a type I error has occurred. A type II error, or false negative, occurs when an actual threat is dismissed or overlooked, such as ignoring someone’s suspicious behavior that later escalates into victimization. Both errors have consequences: type I errors may lead to unwarranted stress or false accusations; type II errors have implications for safety. Situational awareness and trusting one’s instincts may help mitigate these errors. My view is that it is better to overreact than be too trusting.

* * *

Before leaving this essay, I want to note the problem of cultures that blame the victims of violence for the perpetrator’s actions. Islam’s concept of “purdah,” which means to “avoid temptation of society,” is one of those cultural items. In the concrete, this is manifest in the practice of requiring women to stay behind a curtain, live in a separate room, or dress in all-enveloping clothes, for the purpose of keeping out of the sight of men. Purdah is used by Muslims and their apologists to blame European women for rape by Muslim men.

One may remember a few years ago when Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, faced backlash after he blamed victims of rape for wearing “very few clothes.” When Khan was questioned by the Axios journalist Jonathan Swan about the ongoing “rape epidemic” in Pakistan, the then-prime minister responded by saying: “If a woman is wearing very few clothes it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots. It’s common sense.” This common sense has been imported to the West, where rape has skyrocketed with the mass migration of Muslim men into European countries. It is not women going uncovered that is to blame. But Muslim men use purdah to justify raping “kafir,” i.e., those ungrateful to Allah—a denier, disbeliever, infidel, or pagan.

However, not all gender segregated spaces are oppressive to women. Gender ideology, originating in the West itself, is establishing a culture where men can enter women’s spaces by claiming they themselves are women. As bizarre as that sounds, by repurposing the synonym for sex, namely gender, queer praxis holds that men are entitled to the gender identity of women and therefore to women-only spaces and activities. Women-only spaces exist in the West not for religious reasons, but because of a recognition of the inherent difference between men and women and the risk men pose to women. Spaces free of men foster provide a sanctuary where women are not only freely express themselves, address shared experiences, and build community without fear of harassment or intimidation often present in mixed-gender settings, but also enjoy safe spaces. Indeed, safety is the primary justification for women-only spaces, particularly in contexts like bathrooms and domestic violence shelters, where privacy and security are paramount.

Nonetheless, in both cases, in the presence of purdah or the absence of safe spaces for women, women are blamed for the things that happen to them. In the Islamic worldview, a woman who is not properly covered is blamed for having tempted the man with her body. The analogy given by clerics is that of the apex predator snatching his prey. The shepherd must therefore guard his flock. From the standpoint of gender ideology, women who defend their right to spaces free of men are smeared as TERFs, lose opportunities and reputations, and even subjected to violence. Both of these cultures blame the victims of violence for the abuse and violence perpetrated on them.

There has been growing concern in some European countries, for example in Sweden, about harassment and victimization faced by women, particularly in urban areas with significant Muslim populations. Muslim men are harassing women for not adhering to certain cultural norms, such as the principle of purdah. This issue has extended to other aspects of public life, such as the perception of harassment towards Europeans walking their dogs in certain areas. Dogs are considered dirty in Islamic culture. Additionally, there have been reports of “no-go zones” in cities and towns, where non-Muslim Europeans are cautioned or even discouraged from entering due to safety concerns or tensions between different cultural groups. These developments have fueled debates over assimilation and integration, as well as the practice of cultural pluralism, typically framed as the challenge of balancing freedom of expression with respect for local norms and safety.

For my purposes in this essay about victimology, women and those taking their dogs for a walk must consider the risks of doing so when around Muslims. To be sure, it is not their fault if they are harassed or victimized, but they have to exercise caution for their sake and the sake of their pets. However, the authorities who have not acted to return communities to the level of public safety they once enjoyed are to blame. In this sense, those who continue to support those authorities shoulder some of the blame themselves. This is not blaming the victim, but rather observing the paramount importance of electing to office representatives who grasp the problem of public safety and work to solve it by restricting immigration, deporting those who have no legitimate asylum claim (which should be very narrowly defined and verified), deporting any alien who commits a serious crime, and integrating new arrivals permitted to enter or remain into the national culture to which they have chosen to migrate.

As for gender ideology in the West, this needs to be removed from the nations of Europe and North America root and branch—as should those ideologies that blame white people generally for the problems of black people (critical race theory) and the global North for the problems of the global South (ideas disseminated by postcolonial studies).

Mandatory Perception and the Fact-Checking Regime

A cockroach in the concrete, courthouse tan and beady eyes
A slouch with fallen arches, purging truths into great lies
A little man with a big eraser, changing history
Procedures that he’s programmed to, all he hears and sees

Altering the facts and figures, events and every issue
Make a person disappear, and no one will ever miss you

Rewrites every story, every poem that ever was
Eliminates incompetence, and those who break the laws
Follow the instructions of the New Ways’ Evil Book of Rules
Replacing rights with wrongs, the files and records in the schools

—Dave Mustaine and Danny Ellefson, “Hook in Mouth” (1988)

Before the election, at a small gathering on my front porch, when it was still warm outside, a neighbor expressed his concern about the uninformed people reading and believing misinformation and disinformation on X. Platforms like X, he said, should be policed to remove misinformation and disinformation for the good of society. Given his politics, pro-Democrat and progressive, I felt I could make assumptions about who he thought should serve as commissar. Recently, on Facebook, a former colleague expressed a similar sentiment in the wake of Facebook dropping its fact-checking regime. I asked him whether the “lot of people out there who believe whatever they read, hear or are told at face value” (his words) should believe the fact-checkers. His answer: “[I]f something is verified by multiple reliable sources then yes.”

But how would the people who take things at face value know the fact checkers are reliable? Knowing his politics, I noted that one of Facebook’s factchecking services was Check Your Fact, a service associated with right-wing magazine The Daily Caller, co-founded by Tucker Carlson. The service’s tagline is “We check the facts so you don’t have to.” From the organization’s site: “The Daily Caller’s fact-checking team is funded by The Daily Caller’s general news budget, as well as revenue generated through advertising. Check Your Fact is also partially funded by Meta, which contracts the outlet to do third-party fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram.” I posed the question to my former colleague: “Were you confident during Meta’s factchecking era that an organization owned by former Fox News host and current Trump advocate Tucker Carlson would steer those who take things at face value in the right direction?” Obviously, it is a rhetorical question.

In 2019, Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), published an exposé on Check Your Fact in its section ScienceAdviser, “Facebook fact checker has ties to news outlet that promotes climate doubt.” (I presume you received the memo that there is to be no doubt about climate change.) Science is the same magazine that published the editorial “Transgender health research needed,” in which the authors told its readership as fact that “TGD [transgender and gender diverse] people have gender identities that differ from society’s expectations based on sex assigned at birth. Gender-affirming care consists of personalized health interventions that help patients achieve their goals of decreasing gender dysphoria and increasing gender euphoria. Hormone therapy, surgeries, and mental health services help TGD people live in alignment with their gender identity and expression, consistent with the accepted biomedical ethics principle of respect for autonomy, articulated by philosophers Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in 1979.” Presumably, Science is the sort of a reliable source those who take things on face value are supposed to trust—in contrast to The Daily Caller’s Check Your Fact service Meta hired to check facts.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta

Recall the censorship on social media platforms of COVID-19 information that contradicted the prevailing narrative developed by the medical industrial complex and states and government and nongovernmental organizations around the world. Social media platforms, news outlets, and government agencies took steps to suppress or flag content that diverged from what was portrayed as the mainstream scientific consensus, particularly when it came to alternative treatments, the origins of the virus, and vaccine efficacy. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube enforced policies that often removed posts or accounts that promoted conflicting or “unverified information.” “Experts” argued that this censorship was necessary to prevent the spread of misinformation that could jeopardize public health. When Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter (now X), he ended the practice (on this and several other matters, such as the expression of gender critical views). In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, Mark Zuckerberg has followed suit, ending Meta’s relationship with fact-checkers.

Why is there so much angst over these developments? From the elite side, this isn’t hard to understand. “Advertiser concern,” is a euphemism for the concerns of corporate governance. Corporations do a lot more than move product. They manage perceptions. They govern the populace. They can’t do that when platforms allow for the free trucking of information. But perhaps popular trepidation over these developments is not hard to understand, either. A population conditioned to accept on face value the claims of “multiple reliable sources” cannot determine for itself its beliefs. Not knowing what to believe produces anxiety, which is often projected onto the “lot of people out there who believe whatever they read, hear or are told at face value.” Not seeing their own egoism in supposing that, while they know what the truth is, others cannot be trusted to know the difference between what true information and something else, they leave that matter to those with whom they share ideological affinity, assuming that the fact-checkers in Meta’s employ fit the bill. In other words, they themselves take at face value “facts” from sources purported by some authority to be reliable. It is a hopeless paradox.

Huxley dystopian tale was published in 1932

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley introduces the concept of “mandatory perception,” a feature of the World State’s relentless efforts to control how individuals feel, think, and view reality. Through pervasive methods, such as hypnopedia, or sleep-teaching, which is learning by hearing while sleeping or under hypnosis, citizens are conditioned from birth to accept societal values without question. Conditioning implants beliefs that shape mass perceptions of the world, creating a population that sees conformity, obedience, and stability as the highest virtues. Individuality and personal interpretation are systematically suppressed in Huxley’s dystopia. The World State fosters an environment where deviation from the collective mindset is not just discouraged but unsettling, even threatening. By programming people to perceive their world in narrowly defined ways, the World State ensures its citizens remain compliant and content, incapable of challenging the status quo. The result is a society where perception is not merely shaped but dictated, leaving no room for alternative viewpoints or independent thought.

Today, this is known as “perception management.” Perception management is the deliberate effort by corporations and governments to influence how individuals or groups interpret information, events, or situations. It’s a strategy used in advertising, marketing, and public relations, in politics, to justify military action, etc., to shape public opinion, suppress dissent, and maintain control over narratives. The process involves carefully curating messages, emphasizing certain aspects of reality, omitting or downplaying others, to guide the audience toward a desired understanding or reaction. At its core, perception management leverages the psychological principles of cognitive bias and framing. By controlling the context in which information is presented, those managing perceptions can influence how people interpret that information. When one knows it, he sees it everywhere. A political campaign might highlight a candidate’s achievements while deflecting attention from controversies, crafting an image that aligns with voters’ aspirations. Perhaps this is expected. Is it expected that the entire media apparatus would highlight controversies to deflect attention from the candidate’s achievements and virtues to turn voters against him?

Often subtle—always subtle to those who don’t know what’s happening—, this practice has profound effects, particularly when used to sway public opinion on contentious issues. The rise of digital platforms has amplified the reach and complexity of perception management. Social media algorithms, targeted advertising, and influencer endorsements create environments where tailored narratives can spread rapidly and persuasively. This dynamic makes it increasingly challenging for individuals to distinguish between authentic information and content designed to manipulate their perceptions, underscoring the importance of media literacy (the opposite of factchecking) and skepticism (central to critical thinking) in navigating today’s information landscape. The regime of factchecking is not only a strategy for imposing Huxley’s mandatory perception, but also for obscuring the manipulation inherent in the present workings of social media.

One can see this power in the way the media apparatus can turn on a dime and cause tens of millions of people to believe or disbelieve something today about which they held the contrary view the day before. Things that were never true become always true. The paradigm is the case of Donald Trump.

Before entering politics, former President and current President-elect Donald Trump, a prominent real estate developer from Queens and a television personality, had expanded the family business into a global brand, becoming synonymous with luxury and opulence through high-profile properties, casinos, and ventures. Known for his larger-than-life persona, Trump was a frequent figure in entertainment (talk shows, SNL, etc.), sports, and tabloids, sports, rubbing elbows with celebrities and politicians while cultivating an image as a charismatic billionaire and shrewd dealmaker. In the 2000s, Trump became a cultural icon through his role as the host of the reality TV show The Apprentice, which showcased his commanding personality. However, when Trump announced his run for president in 2015, the media’s portrayal underwent a dramatic shift. Once celebrated as a pop culture icon, he became a polarizing figure in American politics. Far from framing the man as a voice for disenfranchised Americans and a disruptor of the political establishment, the media and partisans portrayed him as a fascist (even comparing him to Hitler) and a racist.

Why this shift occurred is easy enough to explain. Trump was adored as long as he was on the outside the sphere of corporate state power. His fierce independence and views on political economy and foreign policy were tolerated because they could have no effect on policy and world affairs. The people who adored him were believed to be well under the control of the power elite. When he entered politics, that changed. His meteoric rise in the ranks for Republican contenders terrified elites, not only because o his views, but because he brought tens of millions of disaffected Americans with him. He gave them a voice when they were suppose to have no voice. So the hegemony machine flipped the switch, and Trump was transformed. A face became a heel. His wickedness was bottomless. He was a Russian stooge, determined to sell out America to the arch-villain Vladimir Putin. He was a rapist. An insurrectionist. A dunderhead and a kook. Anything and everything said about him was believed by tens of millions, and no amount of factchecking could change their opinion. For those who disbelieved the mandatory perception, their wickedness was a bottomless, which justified harassing the red MAGA hat wearer or disinviting an uncle to Thanksgiving Dinner—or worse: open disappointment that an assassin’s bullet missed its target.

The efficacy of hegemonic power tells us that a large proportion of the population already lives in Huxley’s World State. The popular turn against Trump is one example. There are many others. “MeToo” set feminism on its head. Racism is ubiquitous. Over a number of years queer theory redefined gender, but one day we just seemed to know that affirming the obvious—that a man cannot be a woman—would rightly be met with negative sanction and shame, that we would even think of ourselves as terrible persons for having even thought this, even though everybody thought it only a little while ago. The very fact that we know without being told that this or that is an entirely unacceptable opinion, a belief that can have no purchase in polite society, testifies to this power.

The magic of this power lies in its ability to erase what came before it, since what came before it, if allowed to be the subject of mutual knowledge, negates the thing we’re all supposed to know as eternal truth. Indeed, the wholesale and immediate reconstruction of common sense is perhaps the scariest aspect of hegemonic power. And that is why the fact-checker has no place in a free and democratic society.

Put your hand right up my shirt
Pull the strings that make me work
Jaws will part, words fall out
Like a fish with hook in mouth

“Family Separation” Redux

I want the public to be prepared for the return of the propaganda term “family separation” when the Trump administration begins the mass deportation of illegal aliens. I have written a great deal about immigration over the years, starting in the summer of 2018 when I was on a research expedition in Scandinavia witnessing the effects of the 2015 wave of illegal aliens that threw Europe into turmoil. From Sweden, I watched the chaos at my own southern border and the media-manufactured hysteria surrounding “family separation.” Here are some of those essays (the last one from October 2020): Immigration, Deportation, and Reductio ad Hitlerum; Law Enforcement and Family Separation; The Situation at the Border and How to Respond to it; Migrant Detention Facilities are Not Fascist Concentration Camps; The Interstate System and the Experience of Safe, Orderly Immigration; The Attempt to Gaslight America Over Open Borders; The Rhetorical Function of Family Separation and Family Reunification.

Mother arrested for driving drunk with her three young children

I’m a criminologist. I am focused on the matter of arrest, detention, and incarceration. Today, some two million people are in prisons and jails in America. That figure is somewhat misleading since it doesn’t convey the phenomenon of “churn” in our jails, where some ten million people flow through jails across America every year. Quite often, when a man or a woman is arrested and either detained in jail or sentenced to time in jail or prison, he or she is separated from their families. In the case of long-term imprisonment, this separation could be for years. Yet you rarely if ever hear people talking about family separation in this context. You won’t hear the media saying that we should end arrests, detention, and incarceration because it separates families. Nor will you hear this in other countries across the globe. Arrest, detention, and prison are common items in the world inventory of state practices. It’s called “public safety.” It would be as absurd to advocate for ditching public safety because of family separation as it would be to advocate for sending children to prison to be with their parents.

Why is this term being used in the context of deportation? It isn’t obvious? Because the corporate state does not want deportation of illegal aliens because businesses need illegal aliens for super-exploitable labor, to drive down wages for native workers (which disproportionately affects black and brown workers), and to change the demographic composition of the country for political purposes. (To read some my recent essays on this, see The Project to Replace Native Born American Labor; A Case of Superexploitation: Racism and the Split Labor Market in Springfield, Ohio; The Defenders of Mass Immigration Insult Native-Born Labor; The H-1B visa Controversy: The Tech Bros Make Their Move.) So a propaganda term has been devised—used extensively during Trump’s first term—and selectively deployed to undermine the very project the American voters sought in the 2024 election: the mass deportation of illegal aliens. As I wondered rhetorically in those earlier essays, did you hear that term during Obama’s administration? Obama deported millions of illegal aliens. No, you did not hear that term.

That being said, mass deportation has an advantage that incarceration does not. A man who is put in the back of a police car, detained in a jail cell, or sent to prison cannot—and should not—take his family with him. Family separation in these cases is a matter of course. Sometimes tragically, sometimes to the benefit and relief of the family, a criminal suspect or convict is separated from his or her family. But for a man or woman who is here illegally, his or her family can—and should—be deported together, or at least deported to the same place so they can be reunited. If they don’t seek reunification, then they can work that out in their home country. Of course, a great many of those who have entered our country illegally are not here with their family. They are military-age males here to take advantage of the wealth we built. They must go first. But the families must also go. Without borders and immigration controls, we don’t have a country. Don’t let misguided humanitarian sympathies cause you to falter at a time where patriotism and nationalist resolve are needed to save our republic.

The Land of Oz, the Good Life, and the Techniques of Mind control

I want to urge you to watch this interview. You will learn a lot from it. It could change your life. I teach this material in my Freedom and Social Control class. It appears at several points during the semester. I do media and propaganda as thought control. Thats obvious. But I also do it when I cover the sick role, and the medical-industrial complex (psychiatry being the focal point) and the reason it manufactures life-long patients, namely profit. (The government does this by creating dependents.)

I have several essays about this on my platform Freedom and Reason: A Path Through Late Capitalism. This subject, like many of the other subjects I cover, would never be accepted for publication in academic journals, and so I publish here. But it would be pointless even if academic outlets permitted this information to appear given that only a handful of people—often the most deeply indoctrinated among us—read academic journals. The paywalls are too high for the ordinary person. Perhaps that’s okay because most of what one finds there is nonsense. What might be useful to masses is obscured by jargon.

Here’s what’s not nonsense (I will try to avoid using too much jargon): You are being managed, and there’s a lot of effort invested in obscuring that fact. Those managing you know that popular awareness of how you are being managed will give you insight into your personality and help you resist your managers’ schemes. The managers know, or at least those who developed the techniques they use know, that gullibility and suggestibility are variable across individuals, and that everybody is to some degree capable of being conditioned. They use that knowledge to tailor the techniques of mind control. Knowing where you lie along the distribution of these traits and the different management techniques used to leverage that variability could help you avoid being manipulated.

Since most of you are not in that universe, you may not be aware that universities offer courses and organize thematics around the topics of conspiracy theory and dis/misinformation. These courses and thematics are designed, whether the curricular designers and administrators are aware of it (most aren’t, frankly) to dissimulate the technology of thought control by making awareness of its techniques appear as the product of paranoia. Talk the way I talk and you are the type of rube who listens to Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and that crowd. Obviously, I am guilty as charged.

For those unfamiliar with the term, dissimulation is the opposite of simulation. The latter involves making something that doesn’t really exist, or is actually something else, appear as if it does or is what is presented. This is happening all the time now, for example in the phenomena of simulated sexual identities. Once artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality are fully realized, Baudrillard’s precession will be fourth order. In contrast, dissimulation is making something that does in fact exist—such as the fact that you are being managed—appear as if it doesn’t really or that it is not what you think it is. The most convincing simulations will thus be those for which the process by which they are produced is dissimulated.

With thought control techniques, you’re “supposed” to know that these things exist but disbelieve that they have real effects and distrust those who tell you what the purpose behind it all is. The dissimulation of thought control is key to maximizing its effectiveness.

The Great and Powerful Oz

We all remember The Wizard of Oz (here referring to the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film). The Great and Powerful Oz was a simulation. Toto, because he is a dog, is free of the capacity to be manipulated by dissimulation (dogs are affected by simulations for the same reason), pulls back the curtain to expose the huckster pulling the levels that work the simulation.

At first you see evil. This man is an exploitative narcissist (which he is). But by humanizing the huckster and rationalizing his manipulations, and by leaning into his charisma and confidence (both simulations), the human and humanoid characters continue to trust him even after he is exposed as a huckster. Indeed, he becomes even more powerful in his naked moment (which is still fiction, but I ask you to suspend your disbelief for our purposes here).

Remember, the technicolor part of the film is a dream. The huckster appears in both the black-and-white “real world” and the technicolor dream (ponder that juxtaposition later—or now, if you wish) expressing empathy. But his life is hucksterism. He appears to have more power in his manufactured authenticity. At least his power is more subtle. He uses it to exploit the gullibility and suggestibility of the fellowship for his own profit, whether it’s sustaining his life at the edges of black-and-white communities in his traveling van or ruling the Emerald City, where he uses parlor tricks like the Horse of Many Colors to amaze the citizens there.

While the huckster can give the humanoids—the Tin Man, the Straw Man, and the Cowardly Lion (all metaphors)—a symbolic item that completes them, they are all figments of Dorothy’s imagination—or rather sublimations of personalities in her black-and-white life. Dorothy and Toto are real (the Fourth Wall is only broken by the Wicked Witch of the West in the dream world). Oz cannot complete Dorothy. Only Dorothy can do that. And she finds, in the final analysis, that she is already complete. She was all the time. There’s no place like home.

It’s a good life

Remember the short story “It’s a Good Life?” Maybe you saw the Twilight Zone adaptation. The world was destroyed and only Peaksville left untouched. This was home. Those trapped in Anthony Fremont’s dream (nightmare) never wake up—if it was a dream at all. They couldn’t kill Anthony because he would know. Dorothy sought the dream Land of Oz because she felt trapped. She found adventure after being knocked unconscious. The dream was very real. It was in color. Any everybody around her was in it.

There’s no place like home

The Wildfire Problematic

Governor Gavin Newsom complains about the politicization of California’s wildfires. But these fires are the consequence of his politics—the politics of woke progressivism. The consequences of ideology in the actions of powerful people (more accurately in the hands of those who have been given power because of their subservience to it) are inherently political. Newsom and his crowd are to blame for the catastrophe. The tactic of depoliticization to meant to create the illusion that the situation is not political by claiming that others are politicizing it, and they do this not only to stay in power, but to keep in place the policies that created the problem.

Image source

I am not going to provide a detailed analysis of an unfolding situation for that very reason—it’s unfolding. But I do want to acknowledge the unfolding situation and make a few comments about it. At this point, we can draw some conclusions.

Putting the matter charitably, this situation is in large measure the result of misguided environmentalism. Donald Trump was right when he explained the problem to Joe Rogan on the latter’s podcast in October 2024. But this wasn’t the first time Trump had said this. Back in August of 2020, for instance, he told a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, “I see again the forest fires are starting.” Like an oracle, he continued: “They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests—there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”

Here is Trump saying it to Newsome’s face in November 2018:

Politicians and the punditry make fun of Trump’s criticism of forest management. “Come on, man!” was the response of out-going president Joe Biden, mocking Trump’s observation that California “sweep” the forest floor. Representations of Trump’s criticism dwell on the phrase “rake the forest.” They did this Trump’s COVID-19 response. They had Trump telling Americans to “inject bleach” and “drink fishtanks cleaner.” They had Rogan eating “horse paste.”

However, Trump did indeed recommend raking and sweeping the forest floor, and for good reason: effective forest management can significantly reduce the severity and spread of wildfires in areas like California. While it may not be possible to prevent all wildfires (it’s not, if we’re honest), proper management strategies can greatly mitigate their effects.

The consequences of the current wildfires is not the result of global warming, as progressives tell us, but the result of government failure to properly maintain California’s forests, and because elites have diverted water to the Pacific—water shortages have hampered firefighting efforts. Trump has also talked about California’s water policy.

What about the problem DEI in firefighting? That also plays a role in preparedness. There is a need to hire based on aptitude, attributes, integrity, and talents, not on the basis of identity. If a woman can fight fires alongside the men and do so effectively, then by all means she should be allowed do so. But lowering standards so more women can fight fires alongside men undermines preparedness. The need for strength and stamina in this occupation (and many others) tells us that, by and large, it is men we seek for this role, and men within a certain distribution of attributes and skills.

Even in the face of such obvious truths, progressives insist that we blame the fires on the abstraction of climate change. They do this to divert attention from their failure to properly manage the forests and the consequences of California’s water policy, and the institution of DEI.

This situation is not merely due to incompetence and bad policy, but because those who push the climate change narrative, and woke progressivism more generally, have influenced authorities to formulate and establish destructive policies. We can’t control the wind. We can’t stop crazy people and saboteurs (often the same person) from setting fires. We have to know what we can control and get ideology out of preparedness.

Why Californians continue to vote for politicians and policymakers who fail them testifies to the power of partisan politics and the role of woke ideology in making people stupid. The best thing any man can do is get as far away from progressive thinking as he possibly can and insist that society replace ideology with common sense and practical science and reap the benefits of reason and truth. California is on its way to being a failed state (which probably explain why Canada wants to annex it, along with other failing states such as Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington).

* * *

Progress is being stymied by those suffering from the imposed idiocy of ideology—and others are made to suffer on account of it. They call the stupidity “progressive” to convey what is not there, a genuine commitment to progress for the sake of humanity.

It’s no accident that progressivism emerges in the United States during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century at the same time the conscious and intentional manipulation of public attitudes via manufacture of propaganda (renamed “public relations”) emerges. Progressivism presents itself as a reform movement aimed at addressing problems associated with corporate governance, for example political corruption. These are problems that cannot be denied. The ideology is designed to obscure the harmful effects of corporate power, which is inherently corrupting, and to handle the problem of popular resistance to the situation corporate personhood produces. It’s why the crime of bribery is sublimated as the normal practice of campaign finance. Etcetera.

Progressivism should refer to the belief in human progress, modernization, and social improvement, and the popular governance structures that will realize these commitments in our daily lives. But it’s a common propaganda tactic to conceal the opposite of what something is by calling it what it is not—and accusing those wise to the deceit of “politicizing” what it really is.

The Unchecked Influence of Religion in Public Institutions Erodes Scientific Progress and individual liberty

“Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man, where he seeks and must seek his true reality.” —Karl Marx (1843)

More and more, organizations critical of religion, or that demand the separation of religion and government, have become advocates for religion. We see this with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the latter from which I resigned a few years ago for this very reason. That these orgs don’t appear to understand what constitutes religion is part of the problem. But, more than this, they have become captured by an ideological tendency that advances belief systems that share with religion the key characteristics that define this social phenomenon. Indeed, religion is a species of ideology, a chief characteristic of which is alienation from reality.

Source

On December 28, 2024, in a letter published on Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is Real, Steve Pinker resigned from the Honorary Board of the FFRF. Pinker wrote “With sadness, I resign from my positions as Honorary President and member of the Honorary Board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The reason is obvious: your decision, announced yesterday, to censor an article by fellow Board member Jerry Coyne, and to slander him as an opponent of LGBTQIA+ rights.” I left the embedded link so readers can read for themselves the way those who defend the ideological corruption of science twist language, perhaps in part to convince themselves, but in effect if not in intent to disorder the thinking of the general populace, which prepares them also for ideological corruption.

I want to reproduce here the first paragraph of that organization’s justification for censoring and slandering Coyne to convey my point: “The Freedom From Religion Foundation is dedicated to protecting the constitutional principle of state/church separation, which ensures religious beliefs do not dictate public policy. While advocating for LGBTQIA-plus rights is an indirect component of our mission, we recognize that many attacks on these rights are rooted in attempts to impose religious doctrines on our secular government.” Do you see what FFRF did there? In reality, the imposition comes from queer praxis demanding that government (which includes academic) institutions respect the establishment of religion, which is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment. FFRF does this by failing to recognize or obscuring the fact of queer theory as religious faith.

We also see this corruption in the actions of academic institutions retarding the progress of science by permitting religious belief to determine how, for instance, anthropologists and archeologists go about their work. Consider the case of Elizabeth Weiss. Weiss is an anthropologist and professor emeritus, formerly associated with San José State University (SJSU), whose work on the study of human remains, particularly in the context of indigenous repatriation laws and ethical considerations in archaeology and anthropology, has been made controversial. Weiss is known for her outspoken criticism of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a 1990 US law that requires institutions to return certain cultural items, including human remains, to affiliated indigenous tribes. Weiss has argued that restrictions imposed by laws like NAGPRA hinder scientific research, particularly studies that rely on skeletal remains to advance forensics (useful for criminalistics, for example) and our understanding of health, human history, and human evolution.

In 2021, Weiss posed with a human skull on social media to promote her book (coauthored with bioethicist James Springer) Repatriation and Erasing the Past, which critiques NAGPRA and raises concerns about what Weiss describes as the politicization of science and the loss of research opportunities due to government policies. This image and her commentary was portrayed as insensitive and framed as part of a long history of desecration of indigenous burial sites in the name of scientific research. Because her discipline has been captured by ideology, Weiss’s actions and views have drawn criticism from scholars who advocate for ethical and respectful treatment of human remains, particularly those remains belonging to what are described as marginalized and historically oppressed communities.

Weiss’s stance and that of her opponents represent incommensurable standpoints, providing a paradigm of why the separation of science and democratic government, on the one hand, and religion and other ideologies, on the other, is vital for the progress of knowledge and technology. 

Weiss’s autobiographical account of her struggle with ideology

I must digress here and note that Weiss was married to J. Philippe Rushton, a Canadian academic widely condemned for his research on race, intelligence, and behavior. I suspect this relationship had something to do with the controversy over Weiss’s work. Rushton, who served as president of the Pioneer Fund, a foundation known for supporting research on heredity and eugenics, is best known for his application of r/K selection theory to human populations. In his work, Rushton argued that racial groups differ in traits like intelligence, reproduction, and social behavior, attributing these differences to genetic factors. His research has been widely criticized for the promotion of scientific racism, perpetuating stereotypes and misrepresenting the complexity of human diversity. Many scholars have condemned Rushton’s work as pseudoscience.

I am not here to condemn Rushton’s work. However, readers should know that when I cover it in my course on criminological theory, I am critical of it. That’s my job as a teacher. I am here to defend science from ideology, and in this regard it is relevant to note that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Rushton’s work became the subject of an investigation by the University of Western Ontario, where Rushton was a professor, to determine if it constituted misconduct or violated academic standards. The investigation ultimately concluded that while Rushton’s research was controversial and offensive to many, it fell within the bounds of academic freedom.

The fact that there was even an investigation, and the fact that the university distanced itself from his views (as a public institutions, they should have no position on the matter other than to defend the academic freedom of their faculty, as well as uphold the principles of the First Amendment, namely the freedoms of conscience, speech, and publishing) testifies to the ideological corruption of our academic institutions. Moreover, in 1989, Rushton was investigated by the Ontario Provincial Police under Canada’s hate crime laws. No charges were filed, but the fact that such laws exist have a chilling effect on free speech and scientific practice.  It is not the role of government in a free society to police speech and research interests. Public institutions free of ideology do not behave this way.

Returning to Weiss’s situation, in 2021, she was removed as curator of the university’s skeletal remains collection and had her access to these materials revoked, actions she perceived as retaliation for her stance. How could she not? In response, Weiss filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the university, alleging that her academic freedom was being infringed upon. After a legal battle lasting more than a year, she reached a settlement with the California State University Board of Trustees in June 2023. As part of the agreement, Weiss agreed to retire at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, with included being granted emeritus status. Following her departure from SJSU, Weiss has continued to advocate for academic freedom and scientific inquiry. She joined Heterodox Academy, an organization that promotes viewpoint diversity in academia, and remains active in public discussions about the influence of sociopolitical factors on scientific research. (A brief account of her situation was reported on in Higher Education.)

One objection to my argument in this essay is that some of what I have identified as religion in my writing is not in fact religion, or even ideology, but ways of being that exist outside of those parameters, often accompanied by reference to homosexuality, assuming that homosexuality and gender identity are commensurable rather than oppositional. It is therefore important to determine what counts as religion. In my career as a sociologist, I am not merely well read in the area of religion studies, but have taught sociology of religion and published in journals and presented in conference sessions that center the study of this social institution. Moreover, as an undergraduate, I minored in anthropology and could have, with a few additional courses, declared a major in the field. I want to give you the definition of religion I have derived from these disciplines, both of which are purported to be scientific disciplines.

Religion, from both anthropological and sociological standpoints, is broadly understood as a system of beliefs, practices, and symbols through which individuals and groups relate to the sacred or transcendent, often providing cohesion, meaning, and structure to human existence. Religion encompasses the moral codes, narratives, and shared rituals that shape social organization and cultural identity while addressing existential questions about being, as well as life and death. Both disciplines emphasize the embeddedness of religion in social and cultural contexts, examining how religion informs and shapes, and is shaped by human interaction, power dynamics, and historical processes. Religion is a social institutions, and both history and prehistory suggest the existence of a need in humans to seek the transcendent and to ritualize their behavior. We might put it this way: religion is the sublimation of human instincts and primal fear, acts of reification foreign to other animals because they lack the depth of reflexive consciousness common to humans.

The obvious examples of religion in the Western world are Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, collectively known as the Abrahamic traditions. But Scientology, with its notion of the thetan, a being that exists in all of us that must be revealed through acceptance of doctrine and participation in a ritual (auditing), is also a religion. There are others that I will come to, and one of these—the matter of queer theory—lies at the heart of Coyne’s situation. All of these doctrinal systems have at their core nonfalsifiable propositions, i.e., claims that are by their very instantiation not subject to empirical confirmation or refutation. Examples of such claims are angels and devils, heaven and hell, and souls and thetans. When a person testifies to an otherworldly experience that requires that you accept or affirm their claims based on faith, i.e., belief without evidence, then you have been provided with such an instantiation.

Gender ideology, or queer theory, shares all of the characteristics of religion. The construct of “gender identity” is the analog to the soul in Christianity or the thetan in Scientology. Seeing this is really just a matter of swapping out terms: Queer theory is a system of beliefs, practices, and symbols through which individuals and groups, seeking transcendent experience, typically framed as the enlightened seeking of euphoria (the religious experience), manifest in the desire to transform bodies to achieve this state, related to what is defined as the sacred, that is the queer person, a living fetish or totem, which in turn provides cohesion, meaning, and structure to their existence, as well as to those who have chosen the queer person to be their totem, an existence said to be fraught with dysphoria, understood as the unbearable discomfort of being trapped in the wrong body, thus demanding sympathy and allyship.

The associated ritual moves beyond mere agreement among congregants to this church that these claims contain truth to involve the medical-industrial complex, where doctors serving as a priesthood apply drugs and surgeries in an alchemic manner to release the trapped gender identity by altering the physiology and modifying the apparent morphology of the physical body of the congregant. Moreover, demonstrating imperialist ambition, the church of gender demands that those who disbelieve the doctrine nonetheless observe it and participate its its sacraments, such as treating sex and gender as distinct phenomenon, referring to men as women and vice-versa (or as capable of having both, other, or no gender at all), and tolerating men in activities and spaces reversed for women (thus assaulting the institution of women’s rights). Those who resist doctrine and oppose the associated ritual are subject to censorship and other punishments. In this way, queer theory is highly similar to militant Islam (which explains why the former has become allied with the latter).

That gender ideology advances falsifiable claims does not it return to the brink of religious status. In the past, I have characterized queer theory as “religious-like” and “quasi religious.” Sometimes I still do. But close examination of the ideology reveals it to be a full-blown religious system. The claim that a man is a woman is indeed a falsifiable claim, since gender is a scientific term denoting gametes, sex-determining chromosomes (or other systems of sex determination), and reproductive anatomy, all of which can be confirmed or disconfirmed through objective examination of the claim. However, those who subscribe to the doctrine of queer theory attempt to side-step falsification by redefining gender as something other than a synonym for sex and disappearing it into the subjective realm. One is the gender one say he or she is, and that is all that is needed to demonstrate the existence of gender identity.

The nonfalsifiable character of gender as so rendered by the religion is why congregants to the church of gender either cannot or refuse to provide a definition of gender beyond the mantra that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, a tautological formula common to religious claims. We see this in the Orwellian chant “Transwomen are women” (a slogan that at once denies its purported truth). Readers will have confronted such tautological forms before. How do we know there is a soul? God told us there is. How do we know there is a God? Because the Bible tells us so. Why should I accept the Bible as an authoritative source on the matter? Because the Bible is the inspired word of God transmitted through men. Rinse. Repeat. Apply the same tautologies to Islam, Mormonism, or any other religion. Indeed, where such formulas appear, it suggests the presence of religious thinking.

For the record, a woman is an adult female member of the species Homo sapiens. As a scientific matter, gender is binary in mammals (and other classes of animals) and immutable. That means there is neither third or other genders, nor individuals without gender. It also means that mammals cannot change their gender; only simulations of other genders may be manufactured (occasionally convincing copies), simulations made possible by technologies made possible by science taken up by ideologically-captured and profit-generating institutions—in the same way the doctors in Nazi Germany enlisted science in the commission of atrocities during the Holocaust.

These facts constitute a brutal truth, one that a person only escapes (but not really) by resort to religious thinking, however twisted to make it appear that they are working from a rational standpoint. Denial of truth is a sure sign of anti-science sentiment. This is why it is so bizarre to see self-identified humanist and rationalist organizations like FFRF and the ACLU embracing queer theory and censoring those they find have committed the offense of working from a gender critical standpoint, that is the stance that accepts the truth of gender as I defined it above.

For those who accuse me of merely claiming the truth of the matter, they can do this by having assumed the post-truth stance of postmodernism and critical theory corrupted by its nihilism. I can’t claim the truth really, as this crowd sees it, because what pretends to be the truth is only a narrative constituted by power—and power means there is an “oppressor” and an “oppressed.” Lurking there is the “truth” of the “epistemic privilege of the oppressed.” Hence we have governments working with indigenous people to retard the progress of science. Ironically, the postmodernists tell us that there is in fact truth—but their truth, the one they claim they have the power to make it so.

Alongside post colonial studies and queer theory is critical race theory (CRT), which also constitutes a religion. I have written about CRT many times before (as I have about post-colonial studies and queer theory), arguments that are usefully summarized here. CRT as with post-colonial studies and queer theory, form the doctrines that underpin the dissemination of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI (perhaps arranged alphabetically, but perhaps so arranged so as to avoid an acronym that spells out an undesirable conveyance, one that itself conveys a truth, as we can see by the collapse of complex systems across the West).

CRT constitutes a religion for the following reasons. First, it treats individuals as personifications of abstract demographic categories. In this way, it makes a pretense to science. To be sure, abstractions can be useful for scientific work. For instance, they can identify areas requiring further inquiry. For example, if the average median income for black men is significantly lower than it is for white men, then we might then try to determine why we see this. It is an important question. But the disparity is not in itself an explanation of anything. Moreover, it does follow that every actual black or white man has an income identical to the group average. To quote Karl Marx from his critique of Georg Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, an essay that begins with a critique of religious consciousness, “man is no abstract being squatting outside the world.”

Second, CRT advances correctives to the social injustices it calls into existence based on abstraction-as-explanation that are characteristic of many religions, namely the doctrines of collective and intergenerational guilt, responsibility, and punishment, the adjudication of which is left to DEI and civil rights law, places these doctrines have not place to be in. Indeed, the government respecting the establishment of the religion of CRT is a major source of injustice with respect to actual people. To wit, the practice of collective guilt, responsibility, and punishment finds individuals experiencing treatment on the basis of race and ethnicity (the latter often conflated with race in this ideology) and not on the merits of their accomplishments, aptitudes, character, and talents. The great diversity of these merits in any given demographic category are ignored such that individuals from purportedly disadvantaged and oppressed are given opportunities and dispensations based on selected attributes that construct the abstraction rather than those that should merit their include. Likewise, intergenerational guilt, responsibility, and punishment holds individuals responsible for things they did not do but rather on the basis of assigned membership in an arbitrarily (albeit not randomly) selected abstract demographic category.

Gender ideology, as informed by queer theory, mirrors the essential characteristics of a religion, built on non-falsifiable claims, tautological reasoning, and ritualized practices that demand both personal transformation and societal adherence. Central to this system is the construct of “gender identity,” functioning as an analog to the soul in traditional religious frameworks, upheld through institutional mechanisms such as the medical-industrial complex, which facilitates its physical and symbolic manifestations. Like other belief systems rooted in abstraction, queer theory, alongside critical race theory and postcolonial studies, elevates subjective narratives to the level of sacred truths, enforcing conformity through social penalties and institutional power.

This ideological framework, by rejecting objective scientific inquiry in favor of relativism and power-centered epistemologies, fosters anti-scientific sentiment and undermines reason, even as it paradoxically claims alignment with progressive, humanist values. The imposition of its doctrines, from redefining language to reordering societal structures, reflects a broader cultural regression that prioritizes group identity and ideological purity over individual merit and empirical truth. As with other ideologies that take on the trappings of religion, this movement demands scrutiny. Its unchecked influence risks eroding the foundational principles of rational discourse, scientific progress, and individual liberty.

There is no better time to proactively exclude religious ideologies from our public institutions than right now. It is way past time to do this, which the current situation testifies to. As bad as it is, it will get worse if we don’t fight harder. Once ensconced in bureaucratic arrangements, ideologies determine the organic appetites of once-democratic institutions meant to serve us and not our masters. This is true also for corporate arrangements. The longer religious ideologies—or any ideologies, for that matter—are permitted to define our respective statuses and determine the workings of public and sense-making institutions, the more they determine us, and the greater the negative consequences are for societal progress and the paramount necessity of making sense.

Nelson Mandela was a Convicted Felon

I’ve been stressing since May 2024, when a Manhattan jury convicted Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, charges stemmed from payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign allegedly to conceal alleged affairs with adult film actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal, that a man is not a convicted felon in the state of New York until the jury verdict is affirmed and recorded by the judge at sentencing.

Judge Juan Merchan

As of this morning, folks can finally repeat with confidence the propaganda line that Trump is a “convicted felon.” In the zombie case against Trump, on the basis of Judge Juan Merchan’s public signaling, an assistant district attorney stood to utter, “We must respect the office of the Presidency. So we request unconditional discharge, as the Court has indicated. This creates the status of convicted felon, as he appeals. The People recommend it.” Excellent choice of words; the ruling does indeed create a status, a manufactured label useful to those desperate to delegitimize the leader of the populist-nationalist movement that threatens Establishment power. Yesterday evening, a divided Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump’s criminal sentencing to go forward. What if Merchan had changed his mind and sentenced the President-elect to prison?

Trump was put through what sociologist Harold Garfinkel, in an article published in a 1956 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, called a “status degradation ceremony.” Since a civilized society can’t just call a man a convicted criminal and have him be so (albeit people do and think so), you have to put him through a formal ritual proceeding that makes him appear as one. It is validation via ceremonial. In the Manhattan hush money case case, by resurrecting expired misdemeanor charges that are very rarely pursued, and conjuring them into felonies by having juries (grand and trial) to image an underlying crime with no requirement that they all agree on the crime they’re imagining, a court has created a convicted felon without prescribing any punishment—no prison time, no community supervision, no fines, no nothing. And while avoiding a constitutional crisis by not sentencing a President-elect to prison, Judge Merchan gave Trump’s opponents a rhetorical weapon to wield against his agenda.

I have a point I am working towards, but before I get to it I have to say something about the substance of the case. Applying the principle of charity to steel man the prosecution’s argument, the theory of the case was that Trump orchestrated these payments to influence the election by suppressing potentially damaging stories. How that constitutes a felony is beyond me. It is common for prominent figures with deep pockets to give into extortionists in order to protect their reputations from false or damaging claims. This is why the prosecution team left it to the jury to rationalize the matter—as long as those rationalizations yielded a unanimous verdict of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Getting to my point, the reflex on the left to work into every discussion of Trump the phrase “convicted felon” carries in it a self-delegitimizing force if made obvious. I have in the past noted that one of every three black man is a convicted felon—and many of these far worse that placating grifters—before wondering aloud whether a third of black men in America should be barred from public service, or whether their status as a convicted felon constantly thrown in their face. We might ask about the case of Nelson Mandela, a convicted felon who is widely seen as a great man who did great things. Should we go around constantly inserting into every conversation about Mandela the fact that he led the militant wing of an anti-government organization that was engaged in sabotage and violence?

Then-President Nelson Mandela revisits his South African prison cell on Robben Island

In 1961, Nelson Mandela co-founded uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), which carried out acts of sabotage against government infrastructure and other violent action. These acts were intended to undermine the apartheid regime and force it to negotiate. Those who make Mandela out to be a hero are quick to note that Mandela’s decision to engage in armed struggle came after years of discrimination, oppression, and systemic violence faced by the black population in South Africa, which left little room for peaceful resolution. He was a reluctant terrorist? No, not a terrorist at all—a freedom fighter leading the struggle against an unjust and oppressive system.

Of course, Mandela’s actions were seen by the government as terrorism. And so he was arrested in 1962, and convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 for his role in planning sabotage and plotting to overthrow the government. After 27 years in prison, Mandela was released, ultimately becoming South Africa’s president in 1994. So a convicted felon served as the president of the country that made him a convicted felon.

If a domestic organization in the United States engaged in similar acts of sabotage against government infrastructure, the US government would almost certainly classify it as a terrorist group. This label would be supported by arguments about the illegitimacy of using violence to achieve political aims and the threat such actions pose to public safety and national stability. The broader public will likely view the group negatively, particularly if media and political narratives emphasized the disruption caused by its actions without adequately addressing the grievances driving the resistance.

The events of January 6, 2021, at the Capitol, provide an imperfect analogy. Imperfect because one must elevate a police riot to terrorist action by those so provoked, and make a sitting president the ringleader of the insurrection. Also imperfect because the Establishment was not able to pull off the charge of insurrection on the legal front. However, it was able to manufacture the impression of an insurrection by constantly repeating the label, and millions of gullible citizens made stupid by partisan ideology were predictably impressed. Where those waging lawfare were able to get a verdict and a conviction, they had to turn to a state court in a blue state (to be sure, orchestrated by the US Attorney General’s office), transmogrifying a trivial matter. And, though he did not move forward with the insurrection charges (or the Mar‑a‑Lago documents case), special prosecutor Jack Smith has a report that Attorney General Merrick Garland has said he will release to the public. The smear merchants are salivating.

Should moral calculus shift depending on context? If the US government were widely recognized as oppressive, systematically denying rights to a segment of its population, surely domestic and international observers might frame the resistance as justified. After all, wasn’t that how the left rationalized the color revolution during the summer and fall of 2020? What about the American Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement—don’t these demonstrate how perceptions of resistance evolve over time? Even figures who were once labeled as dangerous or subversive—for example, Martin Luther King Jr., who was closely monitored by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program—are now celebrated posthumously when their causes are vindicated.

What about the January Sixers? They’re convicted felons. Hundreds are sitting in prison as I write these words. How will public perceptions about them evolve over time? And what about Trump? Will the degradation ritual the Establishment has put him through be sufficient to make the label of “convicted felon” stick, to valorize, as we say in sociology, a master status?

The “Simple Decency” of Jimmy Carter

Today, several former presidents sat in observance of former-president Jimmy Carter’s passing. The current president, Joe Biden, gave the eulogy, focusing on Carter’ s “simple decency.” Former president Barack Obama and former and future president Donald Trump sat next to each another engaged in lively conversation. Vice-President Kamala Harris, sitting in front of the presidents’ row, appeared to roll her eyes at the two. Former president George W. Bush walked into the scene with his chest puffed out.

Jimmy Carter’s funeral in Washington DC

What was not mentioned was Carter’s involvement with the Trilateral Commission, an experience that played a significant role in shaping his political trajectory. In fact, Carter was a founding member of that organization. George H. W. Bush, who was CIA director when Carter entered office, also had strong ties to the Trilateral Commission, particularly through his connections with David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. I say both of these presidents’ names in the same breath because both reflected the Trilateral Commissions desire to establish global governance, expressed as the “New World Order” in Bush’s September 11, 1990 speech before a joint-session of Congress.

The Trilateral Commission, established in 1973 by Rockefeller, aimed to parlay the historic cooperation among North America, Western Europe, and Japan into a New World Order. The commission provided Carter with an opportunity to engage with prominent thinkers and policymakers, those whom Antonio Gramsci would have classified as “organic intellectuals,” in this case those who represented the interests of the transnational corporate and financial elite.

This association with the Trilateral Commission elevated Carter’s visibility on the international stage. To dissimulate the agenda of the Trilateral Commission and Carter as its vessel, the image of Carter the peanut farmer was projected. The narrative portrayed a humble Christian man of simple decency coming from nowhere to lead the nation back from the twin disgraces of Watergate and the Church Committee Hearings, a narrative reinforced by the seeming penance paid during his long ex-presidency by occasionally driving nails into 2X4s before a fawning media.

A key figure in Carter’s connection to the Trilateral Commission was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a political scientist who served as the commission’s first director. Brzezinski became a close advisor to Carter and significantly influenced his foreign policy. Indeed, after winning the presidency, Carter appointed Brzezinski as his National Security Advisor. Brzezinski’s emphasis on geopolitical strategy, particularly in managing US-Chine relations, US-Soviet relations, and the Middle East and Central Asia.

It was Carter who recognized the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate state of the Chinese people. The normalization of diplomatic relations was guided by Brzezinski. Normalization with the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party opened up a range of opportunities, not just in politics but also in science and trade, paving the way for China’s gradual integration into the global economy over the subsequent decades. President Biden was a champion of this cause. His role in the funeral was not merely because he is the sitting president. He played a major role in advancing the agenda. (See Hell on Earth or Earthly Heaven? The Totalitarian Threats Facing the West.)

It was under Brzezinski’s guidance that Carter toppled the democratically-elected government in Afghanistan in order to compel the Soviet Union to honor the mutual defense pact they had established with Kabul, thus ushering in decades of clerical fascism, associated death and destruction, and the total subordination of women under the Taliban (see Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan; Jimmy Carter, Trilateralist, Entering Hospice; Everybody Loves Jimmy Carter). It was also under Brzezinski’s guidance that clerical fascism came to power in Iran, subjecting the Persian people to the brutality of ayatollah and mullahs to this day. (See Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?)

And don’t forget Carter’s action of selling the Panama Canal, a structure the United States built and dozens of men died in building, for one dollar. As I wrote about yesterday, in Monroe Doctrine 2.0, Donald Trump has signaled that America wants it back.