The fact that the deep state and the establishment media brazenly lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop makes the Matt Gaetz case proof of the corporate state hegemony spearheaded by the Democratic Party and establishment Republicans (the neoliberal and neoconservative wing allied with progressives).
Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but I have seen the contents of the Biden laptop, and if reckoned rationally, and reported accurately, not only would the laptop have brought down the Biden regime, but likely would have prevented the last four years from happening at all.
We all know that if that laptop has belonged to Don Jr., with one-tenth of the incriminating evidence contained on it, it would have dominated the corporate propaganda cycle for months. The Democrats would have impeached Trump over it. Hell, they impeached Trump over trying to get to the bottom of the Biden laptop, which, as Chief Magistrate, was his duty, certainly his prerogative. Remember the phone call to Ukraine? That was what that was about.
Never forget this moment in history—the COVID-19 pandemic, the BLM color revolution, the impeachments, the rigged election, the censoring and deplatforming on social media, the imposition of gender ideology on our children, the celebration of Islamic terrorism, the (twice) attempted assassination of the President. If you couldn’t see it before, you have to be willfully blind to not see it now.
The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills called it more than 60 years ago when he told us about a power elite. Reading that book (which everybody should), it feels as if the situation were intractable. But that all changed with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and RFK, Jr. Finally, there is hope. The sunlit uplands is in view. We’re not there yet, but the potential to reclaim the American Creed is greater today than at any point in my lifetime.
Update on the partisan political situation and some observations about what it means. I have some other comments, too, actually a few tweets to share, one with Ronald Reagan, the other Milton Friedman. First, the present situation.
As of December 2024: Republicans control 28 state legislatures, accounting for 59 percent of all states. Republicans hold 27 governorships across the United States, accounting for 54 percent of US state executive branches. The US Supreme Court is 6-3 conservative majority. Federal appellate courts are approximately 55 percent Republican-appointed. Over 60 percent of state supreme court justices are affiliated with or appointed by Republicans. In the House of Representatives, Republicans have secured at least 218 seats, the minimum required for a majority. In the Senate, Republicans have gained a majority with 53 seats. Republicans have captured the White House, with a majority of states, including all seven battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Crucially, there were no counties in the United States that shifted blue in 2024. Eighty percent of counties shifted red. All the states did.
Trump giving out MAGA hats
The quibbling over the size of Trump’s popular vote victory (the most votes of any Republican President) distracts from the more significant fact that Republicans are the majority party across America. This represents a significant change in partisanship during my life. When I was born in 1962 (the year Ronald Reagan switched parties) and many years after, aside from the Executive, Republicans were in the wilderness. Today, Democrats are in the wilderness, and by all indications will stay that way.
One might be tempted to ask Democrats to look at what they stood for when they were in the majority and then at what they stand for today. But this assumes that the party was substantially different when it was in the majority. Moreover, it assumes that the American populace has remained substantially the same over the last several decades. To be sure, some Democrats who have left the party have said the party left them (I think Reagan coined the cliche). But both assumptions are partly or entirely wrong. Democrats have been progressive and corporate statist for more than a century, and racialist from the start. The people, hammered by globalization—mass immigration, the transnationalization of production—have come to the realization that progressivism and corporate statism are the cause of their woes.
The people have finally come to the conclusion that don’t like neoliberalism and neoconservatism. They don’t want indoctrination camps masquerading as educational institutions. They’re tired of cultural managers telling them how to think and feel about things. They want an end of the forever wars. They want the freedom to hold and express opinions, including the right to criticize the things they don’t like or want. They don’t want big intrusive government. They want to return to the American Republic their ancestors established.
True, the Democratic Party shifted loyalties from private sector blue collar unions to the unions of the credential class. Union density peaked at the end of World War II. It began its decline with the Cold War. There were no public employee unions. That changed in the 1970s. By 2016, private sectors unions comprised only around seven percent of the population—the lowest level since the nineteenth century. At the same time, public employee union density is more than one-third. True, the Democratic Party walked away from the rule of law (after finding it in the 1990s). Democrats shifted on many other things, as well, most notably free speech and the right of the people to their own conscience. But the party’s core attributes—technocratic control of the population, identitarian politics—has not changed since Woodrow Wilson’s administration.
The cumulative effect of decades of Democratic Party control of the government on the American people changed them.
Newt Gingrich described the shift as a revolution back in 1994. With hindsight, he wasn’t wrong. He saw it coming. Ross Perot had a lot to do with that. We think of revolutions as sudden. But if you pay attention, the rate at which awakenings occur is variable across history. The slow moving (attempted) coup of MAGA during Trump’s first term told us that the revolution had substantially already occurred. The power elite saw it, too. But their counterrevolution failed. The revolution is restored.
In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell writes, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” Orwell was a democratic socialist in the sense that he believed in addressing social inequalities through democratic means rather through authoritarianism or revolutionary violence. Therefore, as he understood it, it was not the way progressives and social democrats use that term, i.e., command of the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus, including the education system, to compel individuals to ape the language of the Party.
Still from a 1956 dramatization of George Orwell’s novel.
Orwell would not have stood with the side claiming to be “on the left” today. He was clever enough to sniff out even the softest totalitarianism. What progressives and social democrats seek is what Orwell named “Ingsoc” in his masterwork Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ingsoc is Newspeak, i.e., short for “English Socialism,” the totalitarian ideology that governs the fictional society of Oceania, where the Party holds absolute control over every aspect of life. Ingsoc is a distorted and perverted form of socialism, co-opted by the ruling Party to maintain its dominance. Although it uses the language of socialism, such as equality and collective control over the means of production, it is ultimately a system of extreme oppression where the people have no real power. This tells you what Orwell understood as the true meaning of socialism, and it was not what the progressives have on tap.
The defining feature of Ingsoc is its totalitarian nature, with the Party exerting absolute control over not only political and economic life but also the personal lives and thoughts of citizens. Under the leadership of Big Brother, a figurehead (likely a third-order simulacrum) who symbolizes the Party’s omnipotent power, every action is monitored, and dissent is crushed through manipulation of information, surveillance, and fear of what will happen if one doesn’t obey Big Brother. The Party’s control is so complete that citizens cannot even think freely; the Party manages not only their actions but also their very thoughts. The famous formulation of “2+2=5” does not merely represent the desire that the people repeat the “truths” of the regime, but that they believe them, and do so without hesitation. Acceptance of the Party’s line is to mimic reflex.
Ingsoc uses Newspeak, a language designed to limit the range of thought. By simplifying language and eliminating words that could facilitate subversive thinking, Newspeak prevents rebellion by removing the means to express dissent. This manipulation of language is coupled with doublethink, the ability to accept two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. These methods allow the Party to control the perception of reality itself. Citizens are taught to accept the Party’s version of truth, no matter how obviously false or contradictory it may seem.
This desire is exemplified in the Party slogans, such as “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” These exemplify the contradictory thinking the Party encourages. Likewise, the modern slogans and demands of today’s Party—“Transwomen are women,” the rebranding of discrimination as “diversity,” the exclusionary demands of “inclusivity,” all which invert reality, as well as fallacious claims that “speech is violence” and “words are weapons,” and the pursuit of speech codes, cancel culture, and deplatforming—is authoritarian desire achieved through the control of thought via the manipulation of language.
There are many parallels between woke progressivism and Orwell’s nightmare dystopia world of Oceania. In that world, the Party rewrites history, using the Ministry of Truth to continuously alter past records, ensuring that the Party’s narrative always aligns with the present power structure. By erasing or changing historical facts, the Party ensures that it can never be questioned, as there is no objective past to compare against. Ingsoc’s control over history is a key method by which the Party asserts its dominance over the people, as citizens are unable to look back at past events for clarity or understanding. The constant surveillance by the telescreens and the ever-present threat of the thought police make it clear that no aspect of life is beyond the Party’s scrutiny. Big Brother represents the Party’s absolute surveillance and control, symbolizing the fear that the Party instills in the Proles, reminding them that they are always being watched, even in their private thoughts. And, of course, those who deviate from the line are sent to the Ministry of Love for rehabilitation.
The way this manifests today is through the establishment of something along the lines of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), albeit not explicitly. The core premise of NLP is that the way people use language shapes their attitudes, cognition, emotional state, and ultimately their behaviors. According to NLP, by changing the language patterns of individuals, it’s possible to shift how they think, feel, and act. For example, if children are likely to grow up with an understanding of gender as binary and immutable, which children have since time immemorial, and the goal is to interrupt that naturally emergent pattern, something like NLP can be deployed to, through techniques like anchoring and reframing, alter those patterns, which leads to changed attitudes, emotions, thoughts, and thus behaviors sought by elites. By altering language, elites reprogram popular responses to various situations.
One of the ways individuals are so reprogrammed is to confuse corporate statism and dependency on the government for democratic socialism. However, in Orwell’s novel, Ingsoc, while using the rhetoric of socialism, is not concerned with improving the welfare of the people. Instead, it’s an authoritarian system that seeks to maintain power at any cost. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, this power is sought for its own sake, much like the situation in the Soviet Union. If the corporate state context, power is sought to secure an endless source of profit and privilege for the capitalist class.
In either case, Orwell’s depiction of Ingsoc is a warning about the dangers of any ideology—whether left-wing or right-wing—hijacked by authoritarian rulers who manipulate it to justify repression. Through the Party’s totalitarian control, Orwell shows how ideologies are constructed serve the interests of those in power, leading to a society where freedom and truth are obliterated in the name of maintaining absolute control—for whatever end.
We see this today in the demand for obligatory use of preferred pronouns in government and public agencies. I just finished arguing with somebody on X who deployed all the Orwellian tricks to argue that compelling children to use a teacher’s preferred pronouns is not only fair but necessary in order to avoid discrimination—as if speech acts signaling the truth of things and situations can be discriminatory—as if it is not a fundamental violation of the child’s right to freedom of conscience and speech.
Is compelling children to speak the language of gender ideology for the sake of power itself? Part of it, for sure. There are people who delight in forcing or shaming others into affirming their delusions. We describe such person with several words—narcissists, sadists, sociopaths. And they need this affirmation since either they themselves know they are not what they claim to be or the constant reminder they are not triggers their dysphoria. But the other part of this is the source of profit and privilege children represents to corporate elite. It’s the same thing that feeds the pharmaceuticals and foods industries, and the toy companies. This is why elites are eager to put children on the path for physiological and morphological modification in the medical-industrial complex: the profits are massive and, since they make permanent medical patients of the individuals ensnared, sustainable.
Orwell was pro-working class, as I am and have always been. Orwell was a populist, deeply concerned with the welfare of ordinary people, and therefore he believed, as I do, that economic systems should be structured to ensure equality and fairness, as well as to have provisions of care for those who could not take of themselves. But, then, even a hardcore neoclassical liberal like Friedrich Hayek believed that the state had an obligation to take care of the elderly and the affirm. In the end, Orwell believed in the common man and his right to free conscience, speech, publishing, assembly, association, the right to keep and bear arms, privacy, and the rule of law—and the democratic-republican process necessary to change the law.
In the X debate I referenced earlier, Trump and Musk were portrayed as “fascists.” If in their collective guts progressives sense Trump and Musk as the enemy, it is because Trump and Musk actually stand closer to Orwell, whereas progressives stand closer to the administrative state and technocratic control over populations, which they do not only because we can see them, but because they admit to what we see. This is why they have no trouble compelling speech in public schools. What is “misinformation” and “hate speech” is the information they want corporations to censor because it undermines their authoritarian ambitions. They see indoctrination as education. They see technocracy as democracy. They’re fascists hiding behind the language of sympathy.
I have quoted this passage before, but it’s relevant here given what I just said. CS Lewis: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
The culturally pluralistic kafir who believe removing pork from menus is inclusive of Muslims are sanitizing Western culture for the sake of a religious ideology. When this happens in public schools it contradicts the Establishment Clause. The text of the First Amendment is explicit—Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. But if you need a translation, it means that the government cannot establish an official religion or favor one religion over another. The First Amendment applies to federal, state, and local governments and agencies.
What about serving alternative meals for Muslims without pork? I guess, but that’s a slippery slope. How many religions have dietary restrictions? Buddhists generally avoid meat and meat-based foods. Hindus avoid foods believed to retard spiritual development, which include garlic and onion. Etcetera. With respect to Islam, Muslims forbid meat that is dead before butchering. You heard that right: the animal must be conscious and alive when the slaughtering takes place.
Inclusivity as conceptualized by woke progressivism has an anti-working class origin. Cultural pluralism is a transnationalist project. It was initiated by progressives early in the development of their movement. See for example the early twentieth century writings of Horace Kallen (you can find his 1915 Nation piece online without much trouble). Cultural pluralism, or what today we call multiculturalism, is designed to undermine assimilation and instead keep ethnic and racial groups in their boxes and subservient to the corporate elites.
The Tower of Babel
Cultural pluralism is analogous to the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible where Yahweh, the Hebrew deity, confuses the speech of the masses to keep them from building a tower to get to heaven. In Genesis 11, we learn that the people had one language and a common speech. The deity came down to see the tower the people were building and said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” In the real world, organic intellectuals of the industrial class like Kallen colonized the administrative apparatus and established law and policy that disorganized the masses to keep them from developing class consciousness and politically organizing to achieve their right. (See An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion.)
The transnationalists have been so successful that, today, assimilationism is portrayed as racist because it robs immigrants of their culture. Of course this is a false portrayal, but those conditioned to accept the explanations from the woke progressive ideologue feel it in their bones to be true. At the same time, robbing the indigenous peoples of Europeans of their culture (and livelihood) is not portrayed as racist. Quite the contrary—it’s portrayed as reparations and social justice. Indeed, Europeans themselves are portrayed as racist for celebrating and striving to preserve their culture, which the multiculturalist portrays as white supremacist.
This is why it’s so important to examine the motives of those who presume to tell you about justice. Who do they speak for? What is their ulterior motive? Well, look around you. What are the effects? Those with the most power produce the most profound effects. You don’t need smoking guns. You just need to understand cause and effect. When public policy is the cause, it’s not hard to determine why the policy looks like it does. Public policy doesn’t write and enforce itself. It’s written and enforced by people with power.
* * *
A related note on woke.
Without the social justice blacks used the term to refer to awareness of social and political issues affecting starting around the 1930s. The slogan was often “Stay woke.” It strictly meant an awareness of issues affecting black people. That was a useful exercise before the mid-1960s. What woke means today is radically different from this original meaning. Today it is the belief that there is a de facto hierarchy of oppression invented by various postmodernist epistemics (critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies) in which white straight people and adjacents (such as Asians and Jews) are the oppressors and all the rest of the people—black, brown, trans—are the oppressed.
In this warped view of the world, oppressors are said to use individualism, free speech, perfectionism, rational thinking, timeliness, etc., as tools to keep down the oppressed. The oppressed therefore must wield group power based on identity (imagined communities) and feelings and confront reason and speech with suppression and violence. The woke are successful in this endeavor because the corporate elite have found woke ideology to be a powerful means for undermining political consciousness and class solidarity. The ruling class used to use racism to divide the people. They still do, but have flipped the hierarchy and added a growing number of other identity groups to the mix. It’s the way kings have maintained control of territories for millennia. It’s a very old model updated for our times.
As such, woke is antithetical to the democratic-republican and classical liberal foundation of the American Republic, which is based on individual, free conscience, speech, publishing, privacy and many other wonderful things. We see the perversity of woke in its atavistic, primitive, and tribalist notions of collective and intergenerational guilt and responsibility.
Incorporation refers to the legal doctrine under which the Bill of Rights, originally applicable only to the federal government, made applicable to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The First Amendment’s protections against government establishment of religion and free exercise of speech and publishing, which extends to state and local governments and agencies, indicates these rights preclude ideological symbols in public schools to avoid government endorsement of exclusive movement politics. To be sure, the principle of free speech selectively protect certain displays, depending on the context and purpose, but as a general rule, a government endorsement of exclusive politics is constitutionally problematic.
It is generally problematic for the government to endorse exclusive politics because it undermines principles of equal treatment and neutrality, which are foundational to democratic governance. While the Establishment Clause specifically addresses religion, broader principles of the First Amendment and equal protection indicate that government should avoid taking actions that appear to favor one political ideology over others, particularly in public institutions like schools and libraries. Moreover, the clear intent of the Establishment Clause covers conscience, as the Founders made clear in their pronouncements and writings—am intent explicitly stated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Such endorsements alienate individuals or groups with differing views, thereby compromising fairness and inclusivity. This displays must come down.
Florida is seeking to ban the display of Pride Progress, Black Lives Matter, and other political flags on government property.
To this end, Florida is seeking a ban on displays of Pride Progress, Black Lives Matter, and other political flags on government property. This is appropriate and necessary because government spaces, such as public schools and libraries, must be ideologically-neutral spaces if we are to have a free and open society wherein individuals are at liberty to develop their own opinions and feel free to express them.
A Pride Progress flag on the wall of a classroom put up by a teacher or an administrator is self-evidently government endorsement of a particular ideology. It would be the same if the Christian nationalist flag were hung on the wall of a classroom. It’s one thing for a student to express an opinion, and even have it appear on the wall of a classroom in a display where other students are allowed to express different and contrary opinion. But if a teacher or administrator endorses particular movement ideologies by posting their symbols, especially while restricting others, encouraging some expressions while discouraging others, then those have to be taken down and those endorsements sanctioned. Teachers and administrators represent the government. They therefore cannot impose their views on parents and students.
It may help to understand the importance of this point by imagining a Confederate or Nazi hanging on the wall of a public school classroom. To be sure, these particular flags can and should be shown in the context of a discussion about Nazi Germany or the Civil War. But to hang them on the wall to signal affirmation of the ideologies they represent would be scandalous. The public would rightly ask for them to be taken down. Why should it be different for any other ideology? It shouldn’t. Either that, or Nazi and Confederate flags can go up. I can hear the objection: “Are you seriously comparing the Pride Progress flag to the Nazi flag?” Yes, I am. Sincerely. BLM, too. All of it, except the American and state flags (which I will come to in a moment).
Such a law should not be controversy worthy. Ideally, it’s shouldn’t be necessary. If accomplished, Florida would simply be putting in positive law form the negative liberty articulated by the First Amendment—at its core the freedom of conscience and the principle of free expression. It’s a shame that it has had to come to this, but woke progressives don’t believe in ideologically-neutral spaces. They feel compelled by ideology to festoon our public spaces with their movement symbology. The desire to decorate public spaces in exclusive movement and political symbols has a clear intent: to push the ideology on children. Progressives want classrooms not to be centers of learning but of indoctrination. As George Leef observed in a recent National Reviewarticle: “One of the main goals of the so-called progressive movement, going back more than a century, was to capture our educational institutions and use them to shape the way people think.”
To advance their agenda, progressives feel they must instill in every successive generation woke ideology, and they need to get to future adults early in life to build in the foundational assumptions that will guide political decisions and ideological commitments. This is about turning America into something it is isn’t. Progressives don’t believe in individual rights and free minds. They believe in exclusive group rights, which means the interests of some groups must prevail over the interests of others, with many of the favored groups purely imagined communities. They don’t want free spaces where individuals can form opinions based on reason and freely articulate the results. That’s why they seek speech codes, required use of preferred pronouns, and all the rest of it.
An objection has been raised on social media that the American flag counts equally among other flags. We see the same objection over “cisgender” symbology, as if the gender binary and individuals displaying romantic attraction (and this includes homosexuality) is not the normal. The progressive goal is to make the normal exclusionary and objectionable. This is, of course, a core method of the queer praxis of transgressing normative boundaries—make the normal and ordinary problematic and strange. Calling a woman “cisgender” is propaganda aimed at socializing the false notion that there is more than one kind of woman. Calling a man a “trans woman” is propaganda aimed at socializing the false notion that a man can be a kind of woman. Suggesting that the American flag is an imposition in the same way a Pride Progress flag is follows the same queer logic. But the American flag is fundamentally different from movement flags because the American flag represents the nation as a whole—all the people—rather than a particular ideology, religious, or political standpoint.
Unlike movement flags, which symbolize specific and exclusive beliefs, causes, or groups, the US flag serves as a unifying emblem of collective national identity. The US flag is for all citizens, a nonpartisan reflection of the foundational principles of the constitutional republic—liberty, justice, and the rule of law. It represents our right as citizens, and this includes children, to be free from the imposition of a partisan group dominating a public space with the arbitrary approval of a government official. Just as queer (or most) parents would rightly not want the Christian nationalist flag hanging on the wall of his child’s classroom, parents would not want the Pride Progress flag hanging on the wall of their children’s classroom. This is the what the equality principle entails. This distinction is crucial when considering the purpose of public spaces like schools, which are designed to be ideologically neutral in order to establish ideal speech situations. Public schools are not indoctrination camps for the various social movements; they are politically partisan-free spaces for learning and developing the skills of critical thinking.
The presence of the American flag in public spaces does not violate the First Amendment because it represents the nation’s system of laws and rights for all, rather than any one ideological agenda for some against others. Movement flags violate the Constitution when displayed in public institutions as they signal affirmation of specific viewpoints, which contradicts the principle of state neutrality. The American flag is thus categorically different from movement flags because the American flag represents the nation as a whole—all of its citizens and people—rather than those of a particular ideological, religious, or political standpoint.
It’s a shame that all this is not obvious. It’s a shame that displaying of the US flag—or the flags of the various state required to establish a republic form of government, which is guaranteed to every citizens—in public spaces is an affirmation of shared national identity that values education and respects the sovereignty of the people as a whole, rather than an endorsement of any specific belief system. It’s a shame that people either cannot see that movement flags promote particular ideologies and policies, that their presence in public spaces represents government endorsement for those positions, which alienates individuals who do not share those perspectives. Of course, many do see this. Movement flags by design divide and function to antagonize. That’s the point—to chills the air of the space, to make parents and children who oppose gender ideology reluctant to speak against it for fear of reprisal. This is the effect of apparent state endorsement of movement politics. This is exclusive and unfair.
That we have to even have a law protecting our First Amendment rights testifies to the failure of our educational system, as well as the decades of woke progressive control over our institutions. But here we are. It must be recognized that progressives are at heart authoritarian. They do not believe in individualism but a hierarchy of group power. Since the authoritarians can’t help themselves (and don’t want to), we have to. The squealing betrays their motives.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” ―CS Lewis
The meme is to social history what the gene is to natural history. A gene is passed from one individual to another by genetic means. The meme is an element of a culture or social system passed from one individual to another by imitation. They are like viruses in that they are contagious, infecting the weak minded; the weakened mind is the result not only of predisposition, but also of demoralized social contexts. However, to describe such memes as “mind viruses,” as we hear in the rhetoric from some on the libertarian right, is to my ears problematic.
People often forget—or perhaps never realize—that there are different forms of inheritance. One form is ancestry. Another form is wealth. With memes, the inheritance is cultural. Enculturation and socialization explain a great deal of attitude and behavior. This is obvious. Yet there is a double standard in the political space that grasps the obvious when explaining the behavior of one group, while denying it for another group. Perhaps out of frustration, this has led to the development of the idea of the “woke mind virus.”
Gad Saad, one of the progenitors of the “woke mind virus” concepts
On average, a black men is eight times more likely to murder than a white man. Is this genetic? Some believe it is. I don’t see the evidence for that. For the science of our times, the assumption is something of a nonfalsifiable proposition, which is to say that, presently, we are lacking an adequate method for showing that the greater likelihood of criminal behavior in the son of a criminal father is in any part genetic. Any man, black or white, may or may not mimic his relatives’ criminality. There are many false positives, so even if we could show this, what could we do about in a just society founded upon individualism?
Indeed, this may be something not even worth bothering with. As Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi show in their general theory of crime (see Chapter 8 of their popular book by the same name), even if we generously suppose such a genetic inheritance, even with very large samples, the variance explained is near zero.
Gottfredson and Hirschi’s book is worth a read
But the son can inherit his criminality from his father through cultural transmission in the same way that the son can inherit criminality from his peers. Moreover, wealth inheritance is highly correlated with cultural transmission, as well, which is why crime is strongly correlated with the economic situation of families and communities. Perhaps we need to tease this apart from genetics, but we don’t really need to.
For sure, the cultural attitude that devalues law-abidingness is transmitted in social contexts. The less committed one is to obeying the law and social norms generally, the more likely he is to commit crime and other forms of deviance. Why progressives are obsessed with denying the facts of this truth for their favored groups is also memetic.
Early in my career as a criminologist, I denied the power of cultural transmission. I was wrong. Culture is powerful. Only the ideological deny this. My personal project is to get out of my head such ideological distortions.
To return to what I said early regarding “mind viruses,” i.e., the problem of those who conceptualize memetics as a kind of germ, propagating in spite of fact, logic, and truth, I don’t dismiss the idea, but rather dislike the metaphor, even while I use the construct of social contagion. I don’t like biologisms. My view is that they may lead to dangerous ends in the same way that fetishizing genetic inheritances led to eugenics.
Either way, the maxim is thus and valid: beliefs that survive aren’t necessarily good or true, and are moreover associated with groups. Put another way, memes that survive and their associated behaviors and rituals are neither intrinsically necessary nor rationally justifiable, and we must therefore judge groups on the basis of their memes.
Memes that support law-abidingness are to be promoted. Social contexts that support commitment to just laws and functionally-beneficial actions and tolerances are worth defending and preserving. We do this through laws and proper moral teachings. Memes that don’t support law-abidingness are to be recognized and discouraged openly and without hesitation.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
We are presently living in a time where deviancy is tolerated. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s mid-1990s thesis “defining deviance down,” published in Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, lays out the problem with this (this argument was also advanced a decade earlier in The Atlantic by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in their “broken windows” thesis). The results of this perverse tolerance are all around us. We are told to be nonjudgmental. But the demand is often arbitrary and, in any case, invalid. We all judge others. And we should.
I don’t agree that the “woke mind virus” is communism rebranded. What Elon Musk is referring to is not communism but really the New Fascism that I have described on the pages of Freedom and Reason. It is progressivism. The mind virus that concerns Musk—and rightly so—exists in the context of corporate statism. It is an illiberal praxis. As George Orwell showed, communism as instantiated by Soviet-style socialism parallels many of the aspects of fascism, but to misdescribe it makes it harder to combat it, as it exists in the capitalist mode of production, a system that presents with a class structure very different from that of the Soviet Union.
Anti-science refers to a set of attitudes and beliefs that dismiss or reject scientific methods and principles. Individuals who hold anti-scientific views deny science as a reliable means of generating objective and universal knowledge. This perspective manifests in various ways, such as rejecting the theory of evolution, embracing pseudoscience—claims that present themselves as scientific but fail to adhere to established scientific standards—and falsely asserting that corporate medicine is grounded in genuine scientific practice.
My critique of gender ideology is the same as my critique of Islam or Scientology. To be sure, one can believe in gender identities, thetans, and souls. I don’t care what people believe per se. I don’t care how they appear—and long as appearances are not for deceptive purposes with the intent to harm others. Wear the stereotypical garb of the other gender. Whatever. But deny the rights of others, harm children, undermine the integrity of science, now I care. And so should you.
All ideologies are subject to criticism, the pernicious most necessarily, since the harms involved often elude a great many people. Scientology has been successfully withered by relentless criticism and ridicule, as it should be. Unfortunately, Islam has been rather resilient (some 1.8 billion believers and growing). The state of gender ideology is somewhere in between. People are more aware today of the harms this belief system and its associated practices causes others, especially to women and children. Unlike Scientology, gender ideology has the support of corporate state power. As for Islam, the West remains far too tolerant of its practices.
The central claims of gender ideology, Islam, and Scientology are unscientific, even antiscientific. One of the most settled question in science is that in gender is binary, and in mammals exclusive and immutable. A member of our species cannot change gender. It is an impossibility. Members of the gender cult, and the institutions they have coopted—the institutions that are exploiting them for profit—have substituted a quasi religious ideology for science. That the cult has the corporate state at their backs, and the ideology captured organs claiming to do science, makes the problem of gender ideology a difficult one to unwind.
I continue to confront the objection that gender and sex are different things. But that distinction, portrayed as definitive, is in fact recent and contrary to settled science. As I have shown on the pages of Freedom and Reason, gender and sex have been synonyms for eight centuries. I have provided proof that biologists use gender to refer to gamete size, sex-determining chromosomes, and genitalia in books and journals, and objective research that still work from the standpoint of scientific integrity. That others have substituted ideology for science does not make their ideology scientific. It only shows the power of ideology to corrupt scientific institutions.
Psychiatrists specifying DMS-5 categories (image generated by Grok)
To be charitable, perhaps the problem is being misspecified. Gender dysphoria, like all body dysmorphia may have roots in a brain disorder (it appears as a body mapping problem). But gender identity as anything other than an internal subjective experience is an entirely made up notion—and made up by a man who believed in dream telepathy. And the man before him was a pedophile. Is that unfair? Hitler had some good ideas, I’ve been told. The point is that it’s a crackpot notion invented by crackpots. In the end, gender identity is a nonfalsifiable proposition, which means, like the soul in Islam or the thetan in Scientology, it lies beyond the scope of science. The advocates of this idea are chasing gender angels. It’s a faith belief.
The claim that a man can have a gender identity that is incongruent from his actual gender is indistinguishable from a man who says he has a soul that exists independent of his body (Christianity, Islam) or that a thetan exists inside him that must be realized through auditing (Scientology). These are unscientific concepts. The conjecture that a female brain can exist in a man’s body would have to be definitively shown in every instance where an intervention is sought—and even then, it does not follow that modifying a person’s physiology or morphology is the appropriate intervention. It will take incontrovertible evidence to disprove the obvious, that a brain in a man’s body is by definition the brain of a man, however it appears in scans and scopes.
Identity is not what a sentient being thinks of itself. Such a standard is absurd on its face. That has never been a standard in science. Identity is what the being is, determinable by science. This fact has far reaching implications. Universal humans rights must rest on this standard, since science uncorrupted by ideology is the only universal method of explanation. What gender is a member of any given species of mammal? Look and see.
Unlike most mammals, our species have delusions. Either that or they are lying. They believe in things or claim to believe in things that cannot be demonstrated to be there in actuality, things that are not merely unproven, but at this point unprovable. People who insist that I am wrong are not working from the standpoint of reason and science. Those who want to punish or shame me for working from that standpoint are authoritarian in attitude.
The man is of course free to believe whatever he will, but this remains a faith belief. A free and open society allows for faith belief. Many of my family and friends are Christians and I do not seek an intervention to cause them to believe something else except in debate. People have to voluntarily leave the head space they are in. We may only reach them by persuasion. I have no power to deprogram those captured by cults and religions and I do not seek that power. At the same time, a free and open society cannot allow faith belief to determine the lives of anybody else or to guide government action. We live—or at least should live—in a secular society where decisions that affect everybody are based on rational adjudication of facts and situations. All deviations from that standard undermine reason and the foundation of human freedom. This is the problem.
What gender ideology seeks is to create simulations that stand in the place of reality—and they demand that everybody else agree or risk marginalization, punishment, or reputational harm. The gender affirmation movement is industrial scale delusion and deception. Indeed, it is not a social movement at all, but a reactionary countermovement against reason and science and human freedom (See The Authoritarian Presence).
Mitch McConnell has implied that “America First” rhetoric parallels the sense of that rhetoric in the 1930s in the run up to WWII. In an interview with the Financial Times, McConnell cautioned against the perils of isolationism, stating, “We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of the period before World War II.” He continued, “Even the slogan is the same—‘America First.’ That’s what they said in the ’30s.” Addressing foreign conflicts, McConnell remarked, “For most American voters, the instinctive response is, ‘Let’s stay out of it.’ That was the argument made in the ’30s, and it simply won’t work.”
The “America First” concept has a long and evolving history in US political discourse, associated with prioritizing American interests above international commitments. You might wonder what is wrong with putting America First. The short answer is, for the common man, nothing. But McConnell wants you hear “America First” rhetoric pro-Hitler talk, even though Hitler hasn’t been around for almost as long as McConnell has been living—which is a very long time. Why? Because he is a functionary for transnationalist corporate power, the real fascist force in the world today.
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky
One might remark that McConnell apparently forgets Ronald Reagan employed “America First” rhetoric during his political career, albeit his usage, and crucially the context, differed from some of its earlier and later invocations. In distinction to the Bush family, the Clintons, and Obama, Reagan was an economic nationalist, emphasizing American competitiveness and self-reliance in the global economy rather than subservience to it. His “America First” appeal conveyed economic revival, including policies to strengthen American manufacturing, reduce government regulation, and lower taxes to enhance the nation’s competitive edge. He criticized policies he believed disadvantaged American workers or businesses. “Our present troubles,” he said in his Inaugural Address, could be conquered by “reawakening this industrial giant” and beginning “an era of national renewal.” Was Reagan expressing the “palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” Roger Griffin details in his work on fascism? Hardly (even if we accept Griffin’s definitions are valid).
Reagan is often portrayed as belligerent for his expansion of military spending (which began, for the record, under his predecessor, Jimmy Carter). But Reagan’s focus on military strength was connected to his belief in national sovereignty and defense of the homeland in the context of the Cold War (as late as it was). His foreign policy, especially his stance against the Soviet Union, focused on restoring American military might, framing it as essential for national security and leadership in the world. He emphasized the need for the US to act independently, when necessary, placing American interests above multilateral agreements or international constraints. Reagan’s spirit was that of optimistic patriotism. His “Make American Great Again” and “Morning in America” slogans, and overall messaging, highlighted “American exceptionalism.” His rhetoric invoked a vision of America as a “shining city on a hill,” America is a moral leader, a nation with a special destiny. His rhetoric aligned with populist “America First” sentiments by asserting America’s unique role and preeminence.
As with Reagan’s use of “America First” rhetoric, Trump’s use of the rhetoric lacks the isolationism associated with the pre-World War II America First Committee, which opposed US entry into the Second World War. For those who see parallels between the threat posed by Hitler’s Germany and that of Putin’s Russia, there are frankly no parallels really to be seen here. There are no indications that Putin harbors ambitions to conquer Europe or other parts of the world. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is a territorial dispute antagonized by the West. The association of Trump’s foreign policy with those of the America First Committee is a cover for expansion of the transnational power eastward. It is indeed the Mitch McConnells of the world who are pushing military belligerence and expansionist policies. We know what his ilk’s goals are.
Where Reagan and Trump differ significantly are on matters of immigration and free trade. However, concerning the latter, Reagan also sought protections for US industries when necessary. Trump’s is far more reaching, understanding that for much of American history, governments sought to protect American business, and, furthermore, generated revenue through tariffs, which have largely been replaced by the income tax. As for immigration, Reagan did not enter office with his predecessor having induced the largest immigration increase in American history. Average annual immigration under Reagan was fewer than a million. A conservative estimate of the average under Biden has been around two and a half million annually. In four years of Biden, the nation has experienced millions more immigrants than during the entire eight years of Reagan. The influx under Reagan could not threaten the integrity of the nation; by the end of Reagan’s presidency, roughly eight percent of the US population was immigrants. Today, more than fourteen percent of the US population is foreign born—and they are coming from all over the world, where cultural sensibilities are often antithetical to those that sustain America.
McConnell’s insinuation that Trump’s patriotism smacks of those who delayed the United States entry into World War Two is shameful. But more importantly, it tells you whose side he is on. And it’s not ours.
The attitude that there should be punishment or other some other serious consequence for the expression of opinions one is presumably not supposed to have indicates the presence of the authoritarian personality.
Galileo at trial
Take, for example, the belief that transwomen are women. This belief rests on the redescription of gender as a social construct, an internally sensed identity, or both (although holding both is a contradictory position). I have examined both assumptions (you will find those examinations on Freedom and Reason) and found the first routinely misdescribed and the second nonfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.
Of course, people are (or should be) free to believe that transwomen are women, but when this belief is imposed on others, and by imposed I mean some coercive means applied, a situation of tyranny is manifest. Tyranny is not diminished by claiming those subject to it are bigots as popularly understood (e.g., “transphobes”), since the charge issues from the side claiming to have the truth. It’s a substitute for substance.
For there is another side, and that is the belief that gender is a synonym for sex and that gender is binary and immutable. This is the majority position. To be sure, the majority can be mistaken. In this case, the majority is not mistaken because the science is as settled as science can be on the particular question; the belief is justified and therefore constitutes knowledge. But supposing it were not, and it wouldn’t matter for the right to express either side if it were (after all, people are free to believe in God and souls), the fact remains that there are two (or more) sides, and in a free and open society, individuals have the right to their side and to express their opinions without fear of consequences that limit their freedom.
Tyranny is obvious in the official suppression of belief because sanctioning sides requires a commissar, an office that has the authority to sanction dissidents. The commissar is the office with personnel who decides which side is a priori true or not and silence the side it deems false by fiat.
A priori involves denoting knowledge that proceeds from theoretical or ideological deduction rather than from observation or shared experience. Theoretical deduction presumes the validity of the theory in use, and in science all theories are open and subject to revision. The deduction used in the case of the commissar’s sanction flows from ideological presupposition, that is axioms or postulates derived from politics not from scientific reasoning. Therefore, the imposition of the deduction in such a case is the imposition of ideology, which is the central feature of totalitarian societies, from Soviet-style socialism to Nazi-style fascism.
Free and open societies liberate individuals from mandatory ideological systems, allowing them to choose or resist any ideological system. They are also free to choose or resist any theoretical system. The advancement of the heliocentric views of the social system, for example, depended fundamentally on dissent from the Ptolemaic system of geocentrism. Thankfully, even in the face of the commissar, dissidents persisted—but not without consequences.
The same is true with other controversial questions. For example, in the aggregate, blacks have a lower IQ than whites and Asians. In various literatures, this fact is chalked up to genetic inheritance, cultural inheritance, economic inheritance, etc (these are not mutually exclusive). To a priori rule out of order any argument positing genetic inheritance is an instantiation of tyranny. In a free and open society, a person has the right to consider and express the claim that there are distinct races and that grouped IQ differences are explicable on the basis of genetics.
One more example: grouped differences between men and women. Admitting wide variability and overlapping distributions, the means of a myriad of attributes deviate significantly. As a group, men are faster than women. They are stronger than women. They punch harder than women. They have greater lung capacity. They are taller. Moreover, there are differences in perception, reasoning, and temperament. One can say that, then, at swimming, for example, men are better than women. Another way of putting this is that men are superior in this domain. Inversely, women are inferior in this domain. To use the word “inferior” in this case will draw the charge of bigotry or prejudice. But, if it is true, the intent of the charge is to distract from the argument at hand by making it about the character of the arguer, not the substance of his argument. (It must be noted here that crossing over from prejudice to discrimination occurs when women are compelled to compete against men in sports.)
In all the examples used above, while people are certainly free to call people names, a free and open society tolerates the arguments the name callers seek to suppress, the truth of the claims arrived at through a rational examination of the available evidence. Yet we find ourselves in a situation where such rational examinations are suppressed or disallowed by various means—and these means undermine the foundation of a free and open society.
George Stephanopoulos, ABC host of This Week, who formerly ran “bimbo” interference for confessed philanderer Bill Clinton during his 1992 run for President, deplatformed himself on X recently, presumably because ABC has agreed to give fifteen million dollars to President-Elect Donald Trump’s presidential library fund to settle a lawsuit filed because Stephanopoulos falsely claimed Trump raped E. Jean Carroll.
In 2019, two years into the #MeToo movement, Carroll claimed Trump sexually assaulted her in a New York City department store dressing room roughly thirty years ago (she also accused CBS CEO Les Moonves of rape). Trump says he didn’t. Carroll sued Trump for defamation because he said he didn’t rape her. Incredibly, in May of 2023, Carroll won her case. But perhaps it’s not so incredible given that the case was pursued in New York, a state notorious for its harassment of Donald Trump. (See the 2023 zombie case Alvin Bragg, New York County District Attorney covering Manhattan, brought against Trump.)
E. Jean Carroll
Let’s review the twisted logic at work in the Carroll v Trump civil case, although I am not promising that I can make it make sense. In order for the defamation case to work, the fact of rape must be a priori established. This would have to be the case for Trump to have lied about it. How else could this be if it were only a matter of Trump denying he raped a woman? Wouldn’t most of men deny they had raped a woman whether they had or not? In fact, almost all men accused of rape deny it. In the end, the jury fell short of saying it was rape, instead saying it was sexual abuse, and found Trump liable for defamation, and awarded her five million dollars.
The judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, insisted sexual abuse meant rape, and dismissed Trump’s countersuit by asserting that Trump had raped Carroll “in common modern parlance” although not “in the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.” If you were thinking judges in New York work from the technical meaning of the penal law, you were mistaken.
Judge Lewis Kaplan
Kaplan is a driven man. Trump was never found guilty of, or even charged with rape or sexual assault in a criminal case where the burden on the state would have been to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Here’s reasonable doubt: Carroll and her lawyers claim Trump’s DNA is on the dress she wore the night she said she was raped. But when Trump’s team offered a DNA sample, Judge Kaplan ruled, “There is no DNA evidence in this case, and none will be introduced at trial.” Why would he rule this way? Because Carroll changed her story about when the rape occurred when it was revealed that the Donna Karan dress she insists she was wearing that day (the one with an unidentified male’s DNA on it) wasn’t produced by Donna Karan until after Carroll initially claimed the sexual assault occurred, which was in 1994.
The logic of this case would be like me accusing you of stealing my car stereo speakers in 1995, and when you deny it, sue you for defamation, with the jury having to establish that you did in fact steal my stereo speakers and therefore my denial constitutes defamation. This even though I didn’t even own a car in 1995.
New York is Kafka World. This case and the hush money case are among the most bizarre cases I have ever seen. And we know why. Because Trump was the target.
freedom and reason 