What was obvious from the beginning is now admitted to by Crystal Mangum, the former exotic dancer who accused three Duke men’s lacrosse players of rape in 2006, igniting a national firestorm, She confesses that she lied about the encounter.
What Steven Miller says here is correct. Truth doesn’t matter to progressive academics. They’re advancing a political agenda. They can’t be bothered by facts. The agenda aligns with the goals of the Democratic Party. It’s very tribal.
Given the ubiquity of this attitude in the academy, it can be a lonely and alienating place for liberal and conservative faculty and students.
This is why those who had a different position of the Duke case—except Miller—did not speak up at the time. And it’s why progressives don’t change their position in the face of overwhelming evidence contradicting their assumptions.
Duke University in Durham, North Carolina
A new report by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) reveals that half of faculty believe mandatory DEI statement pledges in hiring are “rarely” or “never” acceptable, while two-thirds advocate for institutional neutrality in colleges and universities.
The findings also highlight significant ideological divides, with nearly half of conservative faculty (47 percent) feeling unable to express their opinions due to concerns about negative reactions, compared to only 19 percent of liberal faculty (i.e., progressive academics).
Additionally, 35 percent of faculty admit to self-censoring their written work, a striking increase from the level of self-censorship reported by social scientists in 1954 during the McCarthy era, underscoring a growing climate of caution in academic expression.
Only 20 percent of university faculty say a conservative (and presumably a liberal, as well) would fit in well in their department.
There are many sets of “two kinds of people in the world.” One set is made up of those who identify with a social movement or political party and allow that tendency to sweep them along. If the movement or party changes, they change with it. Truth is what the party says the truth is. George Orwell captured this well in Nineteen Eight-Four.
The other side of this particular set are those who are true to themselves, truth arrived at through fact and reason, and support movements or parties if these advance the goals based on truth. The reasonable don’t allow themselves to be carried off by the movement or party. And, crucially, they can admit when they’re wrong.
The first side of the set is caught making bold claims based not on evidence, but on agendas. This attitude makes them gullible. It also makes them tenacious. When the facts contradict their ideology, they tend not to step forward and admit they were wrong. They’re even less likely to repudiate the ideology that made them that way.
Bubba (@BubbatheOG) goes after Charlie Kirk and the latter’s statements concerning the overrepresentation of blacks in prisons and in serious crime. This video is a load of non sequiturs. I will come to that, but why avoid reality? Or does Bubba not know how to do basic research? Most of the victims of cries perpetrated by blacks are themselves black—more than half of homicides are perpetrated by black (mostly) men and more than half of the victims of homicides are black (mostly men). Moreover, blacks are far more likely to murder (and rob, etc.) whites than the other way around. We can’t solve the problem of crime if we don’t tell the truth. Public safety is a human right. Let’s begin with the black-on-white crime problem.
Daniel Penny and another man restrain Jordan Neely who was threatening passengers on a subway train with violence
We hear a great deal about interracial homicide when it’s white people killing black people. “Racism” we’re told. We were reminded of this in the Daniel Penny acquittal. Penny, who is white, was found not guilty of killing a black man on a subway. Penny acted because the man was threatening passengers. He was not alone. Black men helped. They were never charged. Black Lives Matters claims that whites kill blacks with impunity. But the reality is that far more whites are murdered by blacks than the other way around. Another reality is that the media rarely reports this fact.
Why is black on white murder so much more frequent than white on black murder? Partly because, demographically, as a group, blacks are much more likely to murder compared to other groups. The statistics are quite dramatic. Over 95 percent of murders are committed by men. Blacks commit more than half of all murders. Blacks are around 12 percent of the population. Men are half the population. Black men are eight times more likely to kill than white men. Given segregation, wherein most serious crime is interracial, the intraracial ratio is remarkable Imagine the inverse of that ratio with no media attention. Seems impossible, doesn’t it? (see Why are there so Many More White than Black Victims of Interracial Homicide?) I have been reporting on this on Freedom and Reason for many years (see also Race and Violent Death in America). Below is another graphic representation of the phenomenon.
What about Bubba’s criticisms of Kirk? Blacks are by race 42 percent of the prison population—and with the prison population over 90 percent male, and black males making up only around six percent of the US population, the racial disproportionately is staggering. In contrast, whites are 36 percent of the prison population.
Bubba’s numbers aren’t real. More than this: the Bureau of Prisons, like the Census Bureau, obscures the true number by introducing ethnicity in the mix. A third maybe more of Hispanics are racially black. This is somewhat offset by moving white Hispanics into the white category. But by how much? A lot of Hispanics are indigenous. In other words, not nearly enough to get whites near 50 percent.
The drastic overrepresentation of blacks in prisons is roughly proportional to the amount of serious crime blacks perpetrate—over 50 percent of murders and robberies, and a third to two-fifths of other serious crimes (aggravated assault, burglary, rape). Most mass murders happen in black-majority neighborhoods. Again, if one cares about black people, then he tells the truth about crime in the Blue Cities. He certainly doesn’t obscure the data to deny what any competent observer can find by spending a few minutes on the Internet.
A series of exchanges on X, where charges of transphobia are being leveled at critics of queer theory, have moved me to extend the thesis of this morning’s essay, Noam Chomsky on the Pretentious Character of Queer and Other So Called Theories. Since science contradicts the claim that gender is mutable, of course natural history is by definition transphobic from the standpoint of queer theory. The fallacy of the mutability of gender is a central tenet of queer theory because of its functional utility in advancing the anarchist project of transgressing normative social relations that safeguard children and women and efficacious social relations more generally. So here is yet another essay expounding on the problem of postmodernism.
A well worn illustration of postmodernism
The rejection of science and universal normative systems is true of postmodernist notions generally. Postmodernism contends that science is one of many discourses constituted by power and thus are either programs of liberation or oppression. That this is a paradox for a philosophy that assumes the poststructuralist stance of no binaries is also functional to the project, since, as with all religious and religious-like systems, unresolved contradiction continuously produces liminal states and situations. These leave the populace more amenable to control and suggestion (the Nazis understood this well).
As a consequence, any scientific claim that contradicts gender ideology is the expression of oppressive power must be a form of bigotry. This approach means to inoculate queer theory from criticism, as any criticism of the theory is confirmation of the theory. The same is true with critical race theory (CRT). From the CRT standpoint, individualism is an expression of white supremacy, and thus the Western justice system, rooted in individualism, is racist. The alternative to Western-style justice is the atavistic notion of collective and intergeneration guilt and responsibility; the goal is inverting an imagined hierarchy, the validity of which is claimed to rest on subjected status, an assumption achieved through control of major societal institutions. Criticism of CRT is thus also portrayed as bigotry.
From the postmodernist standpoint, the world is divided between allies and enemies (another binary). No argument, no claim, no sensibility is not ideological or political. It is either the argument or claim or sensibility of the ally or of the enemy. Postmodernism is thus nothing more than modern dress on tribalism, a perfect praxis for perpetuating the hegemony of corporate statism. It’s a form of identity politics able to manufacture an infinite number of identities that hypostatize personal truths (i.e., delusions) in order to disrupt normality and assert power over others.
Queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and all the other permutations of postmodernist thinking rest on a praxis rooted in anarchism and nihilism with the express goal of delegitimizing the Enlightenment, overthrowing Western civilization, and resurrecting the primitive—without the regular normative structure. These notions are anti-science and anti-reason. They are backwards and destructive.
This is the praxis that underpins diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming. We find DEI across the corporate and state systems. To be sure, DEI appears to be on the run, but this is a temporary fallback to regroup. Once you recognize why disrupting the norms of Western civilization is advantageous to corporate state ambitions and arrangements, you will understand why queer theory, critical race theory, etc., are portrayed as legitimate ways of (dis/re)ordering the world. They will try to return in another form. Indeed, they will never fully leave on their own. Be determined and vigilant.
“If you look at what’s happening, I think it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. I mean, suppose you’re a literary scholar at some elite university or an anthropologist or whatever. If you do your work seriously, that’s fine, but you don’t get any big prizes for it. On the other hand, you take a look over in the rest of the university, and you got these guys in the physics department and the math department, and they have all kind of complicated theories, which, of course, we can’t understand, but they they seem to understand them. And they have principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles and they do experiments, and they find either they work or they don’t work. And so that’s really impressive stuff, so I want to be like that too. So I want to have a theory in the humanities, you know, literary criticism, anthropology, and so on. There’s a field called ‘theory.’ We’re just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensibly, we can talk incomprehensibly. They have big words, we’ll have big words. They draw far reaching conclusions, we’ll draw far reaching conclusions. We’re just as prestigious as they are. Now if they say, well, look, we’re doing real science and you guys aren’t, that’s white, male, sexist, bourgeois, whatever the answer is. How are we any different from them? Okay. That’s appealing.”
Chomsky is correct on the nonsense hailing from literary studies and philosophy. Critical race theory, queer theory, etc., aren’t theories at all but ideologies that work at cross purposes with science. They are designed to rationalize political goals that threaten prevailing and just normative systems.
The core premise of critical race theory is that law founded on individualism is a white supremacy construct and that race-based social justice—with its atavistic ethics of intergenerational and collective guilt—should replace it. The “logic” of the “theory” rests on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, reifying demographic categories and reducing flesh and blood individuals to personifications of statistical abstractions. For example, because, on average, white men have more wealth than black men, all white men are “privileged.” In the real world, there are black men with vast sums of money while white men live under bridges with no money at all.
The core premise in queer theory is that gender is a social construct independent of natural history. This is said to advance a project to normalize paraphilias. Queer theory’s premise is easily falsified by scientific investigation. Indeed, the objectivity and materiality of gender is one of those rare settled questions in the sciences. But gender activists deny or obscure the truth because truth is an obstacle in their political path. As with critical race theory, I have written extensively on this subject on the pages of Freedom and Reason.
However, compelling Chomsky’s critique of postmodernist literary theory, his extension of this critique to anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences fails. Theories in the social sciences are indeed distinct from those in natural sciences like physics or biology, as I explain in my essay The Four Domains of Reality: Sketching an Analytical Model of Emergent Complexity, but this distinction reflects the different natures of the phenomena studied, not an absence of rigor or intellectual merit. Theory plays a crucial role in the social sciences by providing frameworks for understanding cultural phenomena, human behavior, and social structures, as well as offering explanatory and predictive tools and frameworks.
Theories in the social sciences differ fundamentally from those in the natural sciences because they address human behavior and social phenomena, which are complex, context-dependent, and influenced by myriad factors such as agency, culture, and history. While natural science theories often seek universal laws (e.g., Newton’s laws of motion or Darwin’s theory of natural selection), social science theories are typically more contingent and interpretive, aiming to explain patterns, relationships, and processes in human societies. However, the physical and natural sciences also involve contingency and interpretation. All sciences works both deductively and inductively.
Social science theories are derived from systematic observation, data analysis, and careful interpretation. Theories of social stratification, such as Max Weber’s analysis of class, status, and power, or Karl Marx’s theory of historical materialism, are rooted in empirical study and offer valuable insights into the dynamics of economic, political, and social systems. These theories are not universally deterministic, but rather provide robust tools for understanding complex social phenomena. They enjoy considerable degrees of criterion-related validity.
One of the key roles of theory in the social sciences is to provide frameworks for explaining why and how particular social phenomena occur. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which explains how individual behaviors and perceptions are shaped by social structures and past experiences, illuminates the interplay between agency and structure, helping observers understand how societal norms and individual actions influence each other. Such theories deepen our understanding of social behavior and offer ways to analyze human interactions that would otherwise appear chaotic or random.
Unlike atoms or molecules, humans act within culturally, historically, and socially contingent frameworks that are constantly evolving. Theories in the social sciences embrace this complexity rather than reducing it to oversimplified models. Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology emphasizes the importance of “thick description” in understanding cultural phenomena. This approach does not aim for universal generalizations but instead seeks a nuanced understanding of particular social contexts. Such theories allow researchers to engage deeply with the experiences of individuals and communities, offering insights that are both meaningful and practically relevant.
Theories in the social sciences also have predictive value, more probabilistic than the deterministic, but, again, this is true of the physical and natural sciences, as well. Criminological theories, such as strain theory, provide predictive insights into crime trends and patterns, which can inform policy and intervention strategies.
Critiques like Chomsky’s (Richard Feynman’s critique of sociology is another example) stem from comparing the social sciences to the natural and physical sciences without fully appreciating the unique nature of social phenomena. While it is true that social science theories may lack the precision and universal applicability of some natural science theories, this is a reflection of the subject matter rather than a shortcoming of the discipline. The social sciences grapple with the dynamic, fluid, and meaning-laden realm of human life, which requires theoretical frameworks that are flexible, interpretive, and responsive to context.
Theories in the social sciences are indispensable for understanding the complexities of human behavior and social systems. While they differ from the theories of natural sciences in their approach and scope, this difference is a strength, not a weakness. Social science theories provide crucial explanatory frameworks and offer practical tools for addressing societal challenges. Far from being a detriment to the intellectual landscape, the theoretical work of the social sciences enriches our understanding of the human condition and equips us to navigate an increasingly complex world.
This is not true of postmodernist literary theory. Its incorporation of theoretical language is pretentious. Postmodernist approaches employ dense and abstract terminology that can obscure meaning rather than clarify it. Unlike the empirically grounded and practically applicable theories in the social sciences, postmodernist theory avoids empirical engagement—even denying that universalism is possible since science itself is just another discourse. Postmodernists emphasize rhetorical style over explanatory power. It is more performative than substantive. The obscurantism inherent in such postmodernist “theories” as critical race theory and queer theory is not a bug but a feature. In fields serving the interests of corporate power, one should not expect otherwise.
Unless you live near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, or teach and research in the field of juvenile delinquency as I do, you may be unfamiliar with the “Kids-For-Cash Scandal.” Michael Conahan, pictured below, was convicted, alongside former judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., for funneling juvenile defendants to two private, for-profit detention centers in exchange for 2.1 million dollars in kickbacks.
Michael Conahan
Conahan pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy in 2011 and was sentenced to 17 years and six months in prison. Ciavarella, Jr., was sentenced to 28 years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Conahan petitioned for, and won “compassionate release,” citing concerns that he was “in grave danger of not only contracting the virus, but of dying from it.” In June 2020, Conahan was released to home confinement in Florida under federal supervision.
Outgoing President Joe Biden just commuted Conahan’s sentence. Even members of his own party are calling his action outrageous. “Some children took their lives because of this. Families were torn apart,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said of the scandal. “There was all kinds of mental health issues and anguish that came as a result of these corrupt judges deciding they wanted to make a buck off a kid’s back.”
Sandy Fonzo confronts Judge Chiavarella on the courthouse steps after he was convicted in the “Kids for Cash” scandal in 2011.
Sandy Fonzo, whose son killed himself after being placed in juvenile detention, called the Biden pardon of Conahan development “deeply painful.” “Conahan’s actions destroyed families, including mine,” she said in a statement. “My son’s death is a tragic reminder of the consequences of his abuse of power. This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer. Right now, I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back.”
One quibble with her remarks. Biden’s action doesn’t “feel” like an injustice. It is an injustice. There’s a reason why Joe Biden is widely seen as the worst President in modern American history—because he is the worst President in modern American history.
The apparatchik of the communist cell has to toe the party line handed down from the commissar. All members must act to drag comrades who deviate from the line back to conformity. This may take the form of the struggle session, in which members take turns scolding the deviant, who must confess his crimes against the party. In the worst case scenario, the deviant will be punished by or expelled from the party.
A struggle session of Liu Shaoqi
The public university in a free society should not be like a communist cell. There is no party line in a free university. The core value of the public university is providing a space where individuals are free to express opinions however much they deviate from the presumed orthodoxy. The administration must therefore be ideologically and politically neutral in its policies and pronouncements.
Imagine a college teacher kicking a student out of class who uttered an opinion with which the teacher or other students disagreed or found offensive. Imagine a university administration expelling students for disagreeable or offensive opinions. Imagine a college student being expelled from school for posts on social media.
Have these things happened? If they have, they’re violations of the First Amendment. As long as students are honoring time and place rules and not disrupting the classroom, they are entitled to their opinions—however disagreeable or offensive. People can believe and say whatever they want in America. It’s a free country, after all.
The same is true for college teachers. Punishing or expelling a college teacher for opinions expressed at the appropriate time and in the appropriate place is a violation of the teacher’s civil rights.
How did we ever wind up in a place where this was not obvious? The first thought an administration should have at a complaint from students, faculty, or the community should not be “We are looking into it,” or “We have a process,” but “At this institution we uphold the First Amendment and the principle of academic freedom.” Anything less than that pronouncement is an act of cowardice or equivocation, the latter a troubling sign of the commitment to the foundational ethic of a free and open society.
I wrote this essay April 27, 2022 and never hit publish. I found it buried in the cue searching for something else and, after some light editing, I am publishing it today. I have neither added nor subtracted any of its original content. I have since written numerous related articles elaborating this thesis, but there are some unique elements to this essay, and it represents the foundation of my arguments since.
The threat I identified in the spring of 2022 has been mitigated somewhat, not only with the reelection of Donald Trump, but the success of the populist movement across the Western world. But progressivism is still the operating system and moral pretense of the corporate state. The election of Trump, as well as a Republican Party more reflective of the general will, is only the beginning of the People’s campaign to deconstruct government by administrative rule and the Deep State that protects it. This essay, written at the midpoint of the simulation of a presidential term (the Biden-Harris regime), will thus serve as a marker of the New Dark Ages we are just now escaping. My hope is that these words will motivate my fellow populists to stay focused and engaged.
* * *
“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.” —George Orwell, “Why I Write” (1946)
As readers of Freedom and Reason know, I have long subscribed to the theory of regulatory capture, which the CFA Institute succinctly defines as “a phenomenon that occurs when a regulatory agency that is created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate an industry or sector the agency is charged with regulating.” But the more I learn about the history of progressivism, the more I am convinced that our regulatory agencies were never really independent bodies created to act in the public interests but rather were always the instruments of corporate power and its search for legitimacy in a system to which it stands as the antithesis. These agencies have in any case functioned to thwart popular control over local concern and stifle mass democratic action.
As I will show in this essay, it is no coincidence that progressivism and the regulatory system to which it gives voice appear with the establishment of corporate personhood, which, in the United States, entitles business firms to First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment protections, a development occurring in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. What were before privileges granted by government—then corporations were considered “artificial persons” subject to writs of quo warranto, whether sought by king or citizen—became the same rights as those to which actual flesh and blood persons were entitled, while the privilege of capital remained exclusive to the firm. Under the governance of the corporate person, the sovereign people, the republican citizen, became once more a subject.
The regulatory system is thus an integral part of what Richard Grossman, founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, calls the “corporate state,” the power that now towers over the republic, turning its legal and political machinery, the legitimate gears of justice, into the powerful instruments of tyranny. Regulation is not, as advertised, the “spirit of reform,” but a strategy the power elite deploys to humanize exploitation while, by dividing and disorganizing the masses upon which advocates for the interests of the common man depend for the success of their democratic work, draining social activism of its power. Regulation is one weapon the progressive wields to block and dissipate populist desire. The citizen demands his right to determine the conditions of his existence in a free society; the corporate state denies his right and returns him to serfdom.
Seeing how the left has been, for the most part, sucked into the vortex of progressive praxis, the center of gravity of the gathering populist storm is the political right. This is a transformative historical moment with which we must engage; the political right has swung around to working class interests and politics, challenging the corporatist establishment even of the Republican Party (and threatening to take that party back to its roots in labor). That establishment is controlled by the same power that controls the Democratic Party, and is marked by the same ideologies, namely neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The rank-and-file political left in the United States, and in Canada and Europe, as well, is aligned with the professional-managerial strata that controls the education system, the culture industry, the legacy and social media, and runs the administrative state. Comprising the populist forces are working people and small businesses.
The validity of left-right divisioning of political power has thus been cast in serious doubt. “Left” and “right” are becoming legacy terms once describing the habit of the liberal and radical political parties to sit to the left of the presiding officer’s chair, while those representing the nobles and the clergy, the true conservative parties, sat to his right. It’s an old story. The left was comprised of the bourgeoisie and the laboring masses seeking transformation of the social order. The right sought to preserve the traditional order of things. As time passed, the democratic republican form was accepted by both sides, conservatives and liberals (the former moving towards the latter) became more alike, and the socialist ambitions of the proletarian masses emerged as a threat to both. All this occurred in the context of bourgeois civil society and the juridical-political frame of the modern nation-state.
In both the Ancien Régime and, until recently (in historical terms), the new liberal order, the corporation was answerable to the sovereign. By what authority could a corporation behave in such a manner as to contradict the interests of the sovereign? But then the corporate state was established and the political jargon of left and right was mapped onto the new hyper-rational structure, and the party of the slaveocracy, of the feudal-like arrangements of the plantation system, the Democratic Party, insinuated itself into the political left, while the populist Republicans, the party of small “d” democracy and limited government and all that entails for liberty, the party that was founded by abolitionists and socialists, became identified with the political right. Corporate power and its technocracy, enabled by Democrats, advanced the progressive movement. This essay concerns this history.
George Orwell, a democratic socialist, was right to name the totalitarian nightmare world of Airstrip One “Ingsoc,” New Speak for English socialism, which abandoned the tradition of English common law and instead took after Stalin’s Russia. Aldous Huxley before him was right to describe his dystopian World State as standing on the foundation of the bureaucratic-rationalist principles of consumerism, homogeneity, mass production, predictability, and uniformity. Christopher Hitchens succinctly noted the difference between these fictional accounts: the former was a house of horrors; the latter, hedonistic nihilism. But both were destructive to human freedom—and they are coming together in the New World Order.
Populist nationalism is a movement to save the world from all that and deepen the foundation of Western civilization—and that means subordinating corporate power to the sovereign, which is today the citizen of modernity. The progressive globalist, in contrast, wants to tear down the West for corporate power and reduce citizens to serfs in a neofeudalist world order. Progressive globalism is a real-world work of synthesis—of Orwell and Huxley. Its vision, concrete history of much of the last century, is anti-Enlightenment, anti-human, postmodern. (see Global Neo-Feudalism: Backwards to the Future; George Soros, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism.)
Thus there is a confusion of terms. Oftentimes populism gets mixed up or conflated with progressivism. Because of this mixup, I hear complaints from liberals that the original ideas of progressivism have been betrayed. Sometimes liberals, self-identifying of course, even condemn liberalism for betraying them (see The Democratic Party is Not the Party of Liberal Politics; The Problem of the Weakly Principled). But progressivism and liberalism aren’t the same things and progressivism has always been what it is (just as liberalism has). Progressivism has always been regulatory and transnationalist in orientation. And now, in full ascendency, it is in many ways the New Fascism.
* * *
What is the history of this madness masquerading as progress and reason? Progressivism was established as a system of population management in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The two principle targets were workers and consumers. Progressive government is designed to prevent the proletariat from developing class consciousness and rising up against industrial capitalism and concentrated financial power by assuming the worker into efficiency regimes and methods of legal and extralegal social control. For example, progressives pushed alcohol prohibition to sober up workers and keep them home at night to make them more productive for the capitalist class, generate more surplus value for the realization of profit in the market, the products with which they would be seduced to buy with their meager wages. Before alcohol prohibition, there was sharp regulation of narcotics to control populations under the guise of public health. And afterwards, when prohibition of alcohol was ended in the 1930s, modern drug prohibition was rolled out under the progressive regime of Franklin Roosevelt with the control of cannabis.
Antonio Gramsci, author of the Prison Notebooks, penned while jailed under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini
The history of industrialism is one in which the capitalist class, in fundamental ways, has waged war with human nature. In his Prison Notebooks, building on Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic corporate rationalization, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci writes, “In America, rationalization has determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to the new type of work and productive process.” Industrialism is “a continuing struggle against the ’animality’ in man.” The goal is to transform man, which involves “psycho-physical adaptation to the new industrial structure.” “It has been an uninterrupted, often painful and bloody process of subjugating natural (i.e. animal and primitive) instincts to new, more complex and rigid norms and habits of order,” Gramsci continues. “exactitude and precision which can make possible the increasingly complex forms of collective life which are the necessary consequence of industrial development.” Gramsci tells us that the process is “developing in the world to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing productive operations exclusively to the mechanical, physical aspect.”
This is the cybernetic function Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (written 1904-1905). “Military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalist factory,” writes Weber. “Organizational discipline in the factory has a completely rational basis. With the help of suitable methods of measurement, the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production. On this basis, the American system of ‘scientific management’ triumphantly proceeds with its rational conditioning and training of work performances, thus drawing the ultimate conclusions from the mechanization and discipline of the plant. The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines—in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is robbed of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism; in line with the demands of the work procedure, he is attuned to a new rhythm though the functional specialization of muscles and through the creation of an optimal economy of physical effort. This whole process of rationalization, in the factory as elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, parallels the centralization of the material implements of organization in the hands of the master. Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized. This universal phenomenon more and more restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct.”
Because this program is contrary to nature, the control must necessarily be an external imposition and therefore coercive. At least at first. The goal is to make new habits “second nature,” Gramsci contends. When coercion is exercised over society, puritanical ideologies develop as external form of persuasion and consent to the intrinsic use of force. Masses acquire the customs and habits necessary for new systems of living and working or are subject to coercive pressure through elementary necessities of existence.
For Weber, this is what disenchants the world and threatens to destroy individually differentiated conduct, a concept that captures both freedom and individualism. “Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world,” Weber writes, “material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.”
Rationalization of work and prohibition thus become inevitably connected in establishing the worker’s second nature. This included, and these persist, inquiries conducted by industrialists into workers’ private lives (surveillance) and the inspection services created by firms to control the “morality” of workers are necessities of new methods of work. As Frederick Taylor, the founder of scientific management, “expressed with brutal cynicism—the purpose of American society” was to develop “trained gorillas.” “There was a need for worker to spend their money rationally to maintain, renew, and, if possible, increase muscular-nervous efficiency and not to corrode or destroy the body.” Regulating drugs (and potentially many other things) becomes a function of the corporate state. Gramsci writes, “It is in [the capitalists’] interests to have a stable, skilled labor force, a permanently well adjusted complex, because the human complex (the collective worker) of an enterprise is also a machine which cannot, without considerable loss, be taken to pieces too often and renewed with single new parts.”
The corporate collectivist regime also included sexual controls. “The new type of man demanded by rationalization of production could be developed until sexual instinct had been suitably regulated and rationalized,” writes Gramsci. “The new methods of control and production demanded rigorous discipline of sexual instincts—a strengthening of the ‘family’ and regulation of sexual relations.” One might think that under capitalism, the exchange of money and sex would seen as just another market transaction. But in the corporate system, control over the most intimate activities of the working class required regulation. Hence prostitution becomes criminalized, justified by various rhetorics, religious and secular.
Gramsci, aping the propaganda of progressives in their attempt to revise the history of America writes, that “Americanization requires a particular environment, a particular social structure and a certain type of state. The state is a liberal state in the sense of free-trade liberalism or of effective political liberty, but in the more fundamental sense of free initiative and of economic individualism which, with its own means, on the level of ’civil society,’ through historical development, itself arrives as a regime of industrial concentration and monopoly.” He is describing progressivism.
As much as we must fight for liberal values, the economic component supported by these same values is useful to a system that functions to minimize popular democratic practice. In some aspects, democracy and liberalism are not twins, but for the most part opposites, that must exist in tandem and tension. In his essay “Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy” (1994), Immanuel Wallerstein puts the matter in a pessimistic way: “Liberalism was invented to counter democracy. The problem that gave birth to liberalism was how to contain the dangerous classes. The liberal solution was to grant limited access to political power and limited sharing of the economic surplus-value, both at levels that would not threaten the process of the ceaseless accumulation of capital and the state-system that sustains it.” Wallerstein here is obsessing over the capitalist relations piece the liberal order justifies, but he is on to something and we must pay attention to it, especially in capitalism’s late stage of corporate statism. However, the problem in overcoming the restrictions on speech and conscience that exclusive control over the means of production portend involves establishing democratic practices that realize core liberal principles for everybody while negating the illiberal tendency inherent in the majoritarian impulse.
“It is from this point of view,” Gramsci continues, “that one should study the ’puritanical’ initiative of American industrialists like Ford. It is certain that they are not concerned with the ’humanity’ or the ’spirituality’ of the worker, which are immediately smashed. This ’humanity and spirituality’ cannot be realized except in the world of production and work and in productive ’creation.’ They exist most in the artisan, in the ’demiurge,’ when the worker’s personality was reflected whole in the object created and when the link between art and labor was still very strong. But it is precisely against this “humanism’ that the new industrialism is fighting.”
Recall that, in Huxley’s Brave New World, the industrialist Henry Ford becomes a Christ-like figure. One finds citizens of the World State substituting for “God,” Ford’s name; where one would hear “the Year of our Lord,” one hears instead “the Year of our Ford.” It is not, as conservatives suppose, that we have seen a diminishment of the religious impulse amid industrialization. Finke and Stark show in The Churching of America the way in which the rise of religiosity in the United States in the nineteenth century, not at all prominent at its founding, made possible the marshaling of faith commitments in developing the control systems that marked the emergence of large-scaled industrialization. Industrialization generalizes the Protestant Ethic—which was always a projection of the capitalist spirit.
The trans-humanist desire this movement inspires was such that, during this period and for some time after (until Hitler embarrassed the other western nations with his racial nationalism driving the thought and practice underground), progressives pushed eugenics to engineer superior human stock for the same purposes as they sought to control the body. They also stood up the technocratic system of public health, pushing quarantine and vaccination, using the latter as precedent to justify forced sterilization. They even used the newly established penitentiary and reformatory system as mechanisms of preventative incapacitation to prevent the promulgation of deplorables. It was the progressives who pushed for state control over bodies and set up the regulatory agencies that greased the path to corporate governance. Progressives established regulatory agencies—the FDA, USDA, etc.—in order to legitimize capitalist practices in production and in consumer markets.
Progressivism is racist not just in the scientistic practice of eugenics. It is also racist in its advocacy for the institution of racial segregation. Progressive Democrat president Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States (1913-1921), segregated the White House upon assuming office. At the same time, in what may appear to be contradictory, Horace Kallen and urban cosmopolitan ilk jettisoned the “melting pot” for the “salad bowl” metaphor, juxtaposing cultural pluralism in opposition to assimilationism. They also advanced the goal of trans-nationalism. —All this back in the 1910s-20s. Cultural pluralism was used to prevent immigrants from integrating with American values and developing nationalistic attitudes.
Later, in a corporatist move, Roosevelt pulled labor under industry by legalizing labor unions and pulling labor’s fangs. It was under his regime, as Richard Grossman points out, that progressivism was institutionalized. The progressives, in control of the central cities, segregated blacks in the ghettos during the Great Migration and established open borders on the 1960s that made black labor redundant. They created the custodial state to manage black idleness. They engineered globalization that, along with the welfare state, has devastated black families.
The fact is that progressives have always been on the side of big industry, big finance, and the professional-managerial class—the credentialed class—that works the administrative state and the culture industry. They’re behind the lockdowns, passports, mandates, etc, a continuation of the corporate state power that marked eugenics (which they still work—just check and see where Planned Parenthood tends to work—and then check and see what Margaret Sanger believed). And if systemic racism exists at all, then progressive Democrats own it. They were the party of slaveocracy, the party of Jim Crow, and now the party of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the new colorful brand of racism. To be sure, the Civil Rights movement dragged progressives kicking and screaming into equality. But they deftly replaced civil rights with identity politics, using their control of culture and education to turn the narrative on its head.
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The arguments I make on Freedom and Reason are rooted in well-established sociological thought, as well as thinking across disciplines, including anthropology, communications, legal studies, political science, and psychology. I encourage readers to study Max Weber’s analysis of the corporate bureaucracy and its rationalizing effects, what he depicts as a freedom-destroying “iron cage”—or, perhaps a better translation from the German, “steel casing”—surrounding the person. Readers should also consult the work of Antonio Gramsci, which provides an analysis of suffocating force of bureaucratic rationalism, part of a set of observations that landed him in prison under the corporatist regime of Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Crucial to these arguments are the control strategies popularly known as Fordism and Taylorism—automation, mechanization, task specialization, deskilling, and scientific management.
The Frankfurt School scholars, especially Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, separately and in collaboration, carried forward this line of thinking in a unique way, synthesizing Weber’s insights with those of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. In the United States, C. Wright Mills and his analysis of the power elite and the military-industrial complex, indebted to Frankfurt scholar Franz Neumann, moves is in this vein. These thinkers examined state monopoly capitalism and corporate governance and the extinguishing of human freedom and creativity under national socialism and the post-Nazi periods. See also the development of mass persuasion, marketing, and public relations. Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann represent the tip of the spear in this field. There is a large body of literature here. See Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and Chomsky’s 1988 CBC Massey Lectures (collected as Necessary Illusions). See also the work of Robert W. McChesney.
There are many other important lines of research I can cite here, but this essay has gotten long, so I want to conclude by describing the actual sociopolitical space in which we make our lives.
As I noted at the beginning of this essay, it is becoming increasing clear, to me at least, that progressivism did not develop to regulate capitalist production in a manner benefiting the general public, but rather to facilitate capitalist accumulation, which includes the transformation of the culture (including the moral order), law, and the state in order to expand and entrench the power and control of economic elites. Crucially, then, the innovation of regulation, similar to social welfare, is chiefly concerned with establishing the hegemony of the capitalist mode of production.
Academics, big industry, financial elites, cultural and media persuaders, and subservient politicians have always been behind multiculturalism (cultural pluralism) and globalism (transnationalism), core elements of progressive thought. This thought has recently become “woke.” Woke indicates awareness of and the practice of being actively attentive to the alleged existence of various injustices and oppressions, especially concerning claims about the situations of racial and gender identities. Woke progressivism, which has captured all of the West’s major institutions, is a secular religion, a quasi-religion if you will, that developed within the professional managerial class (or strata), emerging with rise of industrial capitalism and the corporatization of economic and social life. The duty of this religious-like ideology (and my conception of ideology includes practice) is to advance the interests of of the corporate class. This ideology has by and large captured the left which has led to a rapid shift in loyalties.
The Democratic Party, historically a coalition of slaveowners, and later segregationists, alongside industrial capitalists, is today the party of the corporate state. Progressivism and its attendant project of multiculturalism, is the organized political expression of these powers and ideologies. The Democrats opposed assimilationist and integrationist policies from the beginning. As soon at they were compelled to relent and end segregation in the 1960s, they passed open borders legislation and promoted globalization, elaborated a custodial state to control the industrial reserve, what President Lyndon Johnson dubbed the “Great Society,” and elaborated the ideology of cultural pluralism and selective moral relativism.
Scholars have described this situation as “embedded liberalism.” The goal was to liberalize trade while at the same time expand the social welfare state to manage the consequences of trade liberalization, i.e., an approach to economic and social dislocation pitched as a set of compassionate domestic policies confronting inequality—which grew as a result of these policy changes. This was necessary because of the fall in the rate of profit brought about in part by the strength of labor to secure compensation aligning with productivity gains while gains in productive, achieved by automation, mechanization, and globalization undermined the ability of capitalists to realize surplus value as profit in the market. These trends are not unique to the United States, but are also features of the social democracies of Europe. Is it these ideas that find their manifestation in the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Emerging from this development is neoliberalism, an extreme market-oriented philosophy that, in addition to deregulating industry and capital markets and lowering trade barriers, progressively privatizes public functions, asserts corporate governance everywhere, and imposes conditions of austerity. The emergence of the transnational corporation and its systems is accompanied by neoconservatism, a rebranding of Cold War liberalism and internationalism (the liberal rule-based international order) focused on the full-spectrum military dominance of the United States in order to facilitate the dismantling of the interstate system and advance the interests of the nascent transnational corporate state.
Although these political and economic forces portray themselves as for the Common Man, the reality is that the Democratic Party and the progressive movement stand in opposition to the working class, the farmer, and the small and medium-sized entrepreneur, who are more liberal and democratically-minded (i.e. personal autonomy and small government), as well as emphasizing the importance of family and assimilation with American values. The attitudes of the working class, the farmer, and the entrepreneur are nationalist and populist in orientation, and so, in an Orwellian move, such attitudes are portrayed in academe, by the culture industry and the mass media, all controlled by progressives, as reactionary and even white supremacist. The progressive movement in turn pulls non-whites (except for Asians) into their coalition through pandering, resentment, and affirmative action, to stitch together a bulwark against popular challenges to power. Corporate power portrays itself as a forward-leaning pro-people movement when in truth it only pushes change where it finds opportunities to accumulate capital.
The ruling class has erected an ideological system that disguises its class interests behind a self-serving narrative. The system manufactures an at once sophisticated and faux-popular ideology that convinces a majority of working people that the interests of the rulers are the interests of everybody. It is a project of constant historical revisionism. When they need to change history, the cultural managers in their employ are more than happy to change the narrative to fit with the demands. Gramsci referred to these workers as “organic intellectuals,” whom he distinguished from “traditional intellectuals.” The latter were devoted to preserving history, advancing science as a general proposition, and other forms of knowledge. The traditional intellectual never goes away; he is, however, marginalized. The former are the functionaries of the ruling class, who now dominate our universities, news organizations, and the world of movies, publishing, etc. They are the experts and authorities and persuaders and influencers. George Orwell wasn’t writing about a possible future. He was writing in future terms about present reality.
A populist revolt is gathering. The people are pushing back. At school boards and in legislatures across the heartland. The pandemic slowed its progress but did not crush it. That’s why elites are clamping down so hard in Europe. The resistance marches are massive there. The elite can see things slipping away. Too many alternative sources of information, which elites are scrambling to contain, have the effect of producing mutual knowledge, which in turn becomes the basis of common purpose and political organizing.
The people the mainstream tells you are “conspiracy theorists,” those to whom you shouldn’t be listening, are the people you should be listening to. They’re the ones who have been getting it right. What folks said was conspiracy theory last month, is concrete fact today. The pandemic was rolled out in impressive fashion, but, because elites have lost control over informational flow, it could only fool some segments of the population and others for only so long. The anarchy of the Internet and the structure of alternative news established by populist forces have changed the character of popular knowledge production forever. I end this essay on a positive note.
I haven’t forgotten about Springfield, Ohio, a flashpoint in the 2024 election that deserves our continued attention. The controversy reminded me of my experience is East Tennessee as a graduate student at the flagship university in Knoxville learning about, among other things, the superexploitation of black workers in East Tennessee during the Manhattan Project at the Oak Ridge site and surrounding areas. That situation provides a historical-comparative point in discussions of the situation in Springfield, Ohio, and the superexploitation of Haitian immigrants discussed in my previous essay A Case of Superexploitation.
I had been wanting to write about the Oak Ridge situation for many years, but moved on to other subjects. The situation in Springfield jogged my memory of that experience—and interest—and so today I finally write about Oak Ridge. I’m relying on my notes from that period and my general knowledge of Cold War history. What you will learn today (if you don’t already know about it) is that Oak Ridge is an instance of environmental racism but also a paradigm of the racialized split labor market I discussed in my essay about Springfield. I connect the Oak Ridge situation to Springfield and elaborate the situation of Springfield residents and what they can look forward to if they don’t organize politically to resist it.
Oak Ridge
During World War II, Oak Ridge was created by the federal government as a secret city. Part of the greater Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, rapid construction of a nuclear facilities required a vast workforce, and black workers (among others) were recruited from the South for this work. The black workers were mostly employed in low-wage, labor-intensive jobs such as construction, janitorial services, maintenance, and other forms of unskilled labor. Despite the promise of higher pay, they were paid significantly less than their white counterparts and were subjected to poor working conditions.
Crammed into hutments, cramped makeshift dwellings that lacked basic amenities like running water and proper insulation, housing conditions for black men were segregated and inferior. Black women, hired primarily as domestic help, faced similar discrimination and marginalization. Employed as cooks, laundry workers, and maids for white families, their wages were among the lowest in Oak Ridge. Black workers were systematically excluded from skilled and supervisory positions, despite some of them possessing the same qualifications as white workers. Racial segregation extended to every aspect of life in the secret city—dining, recreational facilities, and transportation.
The hazardous conditions that black workers faced during the Manhattan Project, particularly in East Tennessee at Oak Ridge, added another layer of exploitation beyond low wages and poor living conditions. Black workers were subjected to toxic materials without proper protective gear or safety protocols. Reports from this time describe black laborers working in dangerous conditions, including being exposed to mercury and other toxic chemicals, sometimes wading knee-deep in these substances. There is film of this, which I and my fellow students watched in seminar. The workers were seen as expendable labor. These exposures had long-term health consequences. Many black workers developed chronic illnesses, including cancers, respiratory issues, and other diseases linked to their work with toxic substances.
Moreover, the surrounding environment in Oak Ridge and other parts of East Tennessee became heavily polluted. Mercury, radioactive materials, and other industrial pollutants contaminated the air, soil, and water. The evidence of environmental racism is clear; black communities were disproportionately impacted by the environmental degradation in the area. The fact that black workers were often housed in segregated, substandard areas close to the most polluted sites exacerbated the injustice. They bore the brunt of both the immediate dangers of toxic exposure and the long-term environmental harm, with little recourse for improving their living and working conditions. Contamination of the environment persists. In the mid-1990s, at a birthday party in a park, there were signs by the creek nearby warning visitors to not touch the rocks, as they may be radioactive.
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If we take the city manager at his word (see that previous essay), in the Midwest city of Springfield, Ohio, in 2024, the US government is contracting with private defense firms to produce advanced military technologies as part of a national security initiative. The city, once part of a thriving industrial region, like so many other Midwest cities hollowed out by globalization, is presented with “new opportunities” made possible by the construction of defense production facilities, where the US government, partnering with private companies, under the guise of “revitalizing the region,” is importing a vulnerable racialized populations for purposes of superexploitation. This is why he Haitians are there and why the corporate state and its media apparatus is obscuring the truth.
So here is the truth: Like the black workers at Oak Ridge decades earlier, Haitian workers in Springfield are segregated from the local population, living in housing repurposed as barracks with more construction on the way. Entire families, but also many young military age men, unable to afford rent on their meager wages, crowd into small rooms. The workers are kept isolated, both geographically and socially, from the local population, their temporary status reinforcing their vulnerability.
What will the conditions be like in the defense factories? Will the African-Carribean migrants work long shifts handling hazardous materials used in the production of cutting-edge military technologies, including experimental weapons systems, advanced electronics, and drone components? Very likely. Can we expect that safety regulations, though officially in place, will be rarely enforced for these temporary workers? Very likely. To shield the defense companies from legal liabilities, the government has cultivated a system where migrant workers are hired through temp agencies. This arrangement allows the companies to maintain plausible deniability regarding labor abuses, passing responsibility onto the agencies, which are less regulated and harder to hold accountable.
The corporate media will be, as they are now, uninterested in investigating and reporting on this developing situation. But we cannot allow the situation to go unnoticed. These temp agencies act as intermediaries, doling out short-term contracts and ensuring that migrant workers remain in a state of precarious employment, easily fired, deported, and replaced at the first sign of unrest. Workers know their situation is exploitative, but many feel trapped, and they need voices like ours to raise their profile. Those with temporary protected status fear the government might not renew their status, while those in the country illegally know any form of protest or refusal could lead to deportation. To be sure, they should be deported. They are here illegally and this work can be performed by citizens who have more control over the life chances because of their citizenship.
What can the legal residents of Springfield expect? Will the waste from the defense factories leak into nearby rivers, poisoning the water supply? Will toxic air emission cause respiratory illnesses among both workers and residents in the surrounding areas? Past experience tells us that these and other outcomes are almost certainly guaranteed. The factories, inevitably located in the poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods of the city, will disproportionately affect these vulnerable communities, but they will in the end affect everybody. This is why the greater community must organize against corporate power and the collusion with federal, state, city, and local governmental bodies. Importing migrant labor is a key part of disorganizing political resistance. This was why the corporate media ridiculed Trump, Vance, and Republicans who were speaking up for the legal residents of Springfield. Their job is to protect the corporate state by obscuring its machinations and marginalizing its critics.
Recall the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which occurred on February 3, 2023, when a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed. Around fifty cars went off the tracks, with twenty of them containing chemicals like vinyl chloride, a toxic and flammable substance. Ostensibly, authorities conducted a controlled release and burn of the chemicals, which created a massive smoke plume. The incident raised concerns about air and water contamination in the area. Residents were temporarily evacuated, and although officials initially stated that the air and water were safe, many people reported health issues, including respiratory problems, rashes, and nausea. Many readers won’t readily recall that situation because they never learned about it. This is the function of the corporate media: to hide the facts by not covering them and then treating those who have concerns as “conspiracy theories,” etc.
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Springfield, Ohio has become a microcosm of twenty-first century labor exploitation, where the superexploitation of migrants, facilitated by temp agencies and backed by the state, echoes the racialized labor systems of the past. Hidden behind the rhetoric of economic stability and national security, the government and private companies have constructed a system of modern indentured servitude, where the most vulnerable bear the heaviest burdens in the name of economic revitalization and defense. The corporate media obscures the truth of the situation by deft deployment of propaganda tactics developed over the course of decades. But for the free and open spaces on the Internet, it would be virtually impossible to know and raise awareness about this situation.
In my previous essay on this platform cited above, I spent considerable time explaining why resistance to the foreign culture undermining the traditions of Springfield is not racism. However, those attacking the residents of Springfield for their resistance to the superexploitation of immigrants and the destruction of their neighorhoods are doing so to obscure the actual racist practices of the federal and state governments under the control of the historically racist party—the Democratic Party—and the corporate interests they serve.
ZeroHedge reports “Trump Taps Chris Rufo To Help De-Wokify Ivy Leagues Receiving Federal Funds.” Funding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by favoring certain ethnic, racial, religious, or gender groups, the latter only legitimate where it is based on recognition of objective gender differences (what equity actually means, not the Kamala Harris’ notion of “equality of outcomes”).
Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Project
Why we have allowed affirmative action and DEI to persist for more than half a century after that monumental piece of legislation liberating individuals from group categories testifies to the corruption of our institutions and mass consciousness by progressivism. We were supposed to have eliminate the boxes, not double down on putting people in them. Capitalists found a new way of disordering the proletarian ranks, essentially flipping discrimination from minorities to the majority.
I confess that I was for a long time part of the problem (I have confessed this before on Freedom and Reason), having bought into the arguments of systemic racism and related notions. This was due to my upbringing—I escaped religion of Christianity, but not the religion of progressivism—and my training in sociology, a discipline that teaches its students to treat abstractions as if they were real and concrete things.
The past decade has for me been a journey of awakening and rediscovery of the liberal in me. It forced me to rethink some of my positions to align with my core values. This work straightened me out. I am in a much better place now. Waking up is more than an intellectual exercise; it’s an emotional and psychological experience. One finds peace of mind in consistency. It takes courage. And losing people along the way. But it’s worth it.
Activists like Rufo are playing a crucial role in the movement to reclaim our freedom and reason. The Manhattan Institute has quite a few of these types of thinkers. Heather Mac Donald is another one. Check out the site.
Donald Trump’s second-term Cabinet nominations reflect a focus on alignment with his policy priorities and loyalty. I will name a few of them here: For Attorney General, he selected Pam Bondi, a staunch ally, emphasizing reform of the Justice Department. Marco Rubio, a vocal supporter of Israel and opponent of Iran, was selected as Secretary of State. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat, was named Director of National Intelligence. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also a former Democrat, was selected for Health and Human Services. Doug Burgum, a proponent of fossil fuels, was selected as Secretary of the Interior. Howard Lutnick, aligned with Trump’s trade policies, was tapped for Commerce. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, known for her pro-labor stance, was chosen for Labor. Scott Bessent, a hedge fund CEO, was chosen as Treasury Secretary.
Members of the Senate have signaled their displeasure as several of the choices and indications are that they will try to stop some of Trump’s nominees from taking office.
Washington’s Cabinet
Our first President, George Washington, selected the men for his Cabinet (then only four—Attorney General, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of War), drawing upon his own judgment of their expertise, loyalty, qualifications, and trustworthiness. Washington had the constitutional authority to appoint officials, subject to the Senate’s confirmation. And so they were confirmed. The same is true of Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet (which included the aforementioned plus Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of the Navy, and Postmaster General). Lincoln put together a “Team of Rivals.” His picks were controversial and many opposed them for one reason or another. But they were confirmed and together led the nation through the Civil War.
Lincoln’s Cabinet
The belief that these posts—and all the other offices that would be created afterwards—should be relatively autonomous of the Executive reflects the emergence of the Administrative State and the notion of agency independence guided by progressivism, a philosophy alien to democratic-republicanism and the liberalism that founded the American Republic and the ethic of self-governance. This philosophy became entrenched in our system of governance with the emergence of the corporate state—the hijacking of democracy by the power elite, the technocratic apparatus, and the drive for globalization. Uprooting this anti-American philosophy will take decades. This requires keeping progressives away from power for a generation or more and reestablishing American nationalism as the organizational philosophy of United States.
Resistance to Donald Trump’s picks for his Cabinet marks the presence of those who wish to continue the anti-American corporate state paradigm. Pay attention to what’s happening during Senate confirmation and call your Senators to let them know that you support these nominees. Demand that the Senate follow the will of the people and confirm them. November 5 was only the first moment of putting the team in place that is to guide our nation out of the darkness. The team is being assembled and must be confirmed to begin the real work ahead. Democrats and establishment Republicans are going to try to stand in the way. It’s up to us to push them aside.
freedom and reason 