Category: Uncategorized

Note: My essay on this nightmare was auto-published this morning. I wrote it yesterday before the matches. I will update when the dirty deeds are done.

“First of all, she’s not really a she. She’s a transgender, post-op person. The operation doesn’t shave down your bone density. It doesn’t change. You look at a man’s hands and you look at a woman’s hands and they’re built different. They’re just thicker, they’re stronger, your wrists are thicker, your elbows are thicker, your joints are thicker. Just the mechanical function of punching, a man can do it much harder than a woman can, period.” —Joe Rogan, 2013

“For the record, I knocked two out [women]. One woman’s skull was fractured, the other not. And just so you know, I enjoyed it. See, I love smacking up TEFS (sic) in the cage who talk transphobic nonsense. It’s bliss!” —Fallon Fox, 2020

Rogan is talking about Fallon Fox, a transgender mixed martial artist who was a focal point of controversy and debate in the sports world. Fox started identifying as a woman in 2006 and underwent “gender confirmation surgery” (a past euphemism for extreme body modification) in 2007. He competed in women’s MMA competitions, including promotions like the XFC and later the UFC. Fox’s physiological advantages—bone density, muscle mass, etc.—gave him an edge over female fighters. Trans activists argued that Fox’s participation should be based on his gender identity and the fact that he had undergone hormone replacement therapy and surgery, which, they argued, levels the playing field—thereby admitting physiology matters. Others saw it for what it was—a male athlete punching female competitors in the face on the ground that self-identification matters more than objective reality. (I have written several essays on the problem of boys and men in women’s sports and other activities and spaces; see The Rapidly Approaching Death of Sex-based Rights; The Thomas-UPenn Episode: A Textbook Case of Institutional Gaslighting; No, The International Powerlifting Federation Did Not Strike a Blow for Women’s Rights; Should Trans Identifying Women Go to Men’s Prisons? The Casual Use of Propagandistic Language Surrounding Sex and Gender; Why Are There Sex-Segregated Spaces Anyway? NPR, State Propaganda Organ, Reveals Who and What have Captured the State Apparatus; Is Title IX Kaput? Or Was it Always Incomprehensible? Burned at the Stake: Another Victim of the Gender Cult.)

No surprise is it. At all 😬 Violent men don't change because they put on make up. #SexMatters #NotOurCrimes

— #WeAreAllDanielBlake KPSS (@KBadlan) June 21, 2022

The 2024 Olympics in Paris have stirred controversy with the inclusion of trans identifying males, or trans women, competing in women’s boxing (Supper in the Spectacular Café). Previously, such athletes were barred from competition under the regulations of the International Boxing Association (IBA), which was responsible for overseeing the sport. However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has taken over the process, cutting out the IBA’s control. With the IOC’s decision, trans women, i.e., males, are now allowed to compete against women in boxing events. Their inclusion is determined based on their sex identification on their passport, which includes those who self-identify as such. This move has sparked debates regarding fairness and safety, given the physical advantages that trans women might retain from male puberty, such as greater muscle mass and bone density. Critics argue that these advantages could pose significant risks to female athletes in a contact sport like boxing. As they did in Fallon’s case, supporters of including trans women emphasize the importance of recognizing and respecting gender identity, advocating for equal opportunities for all athletes regardless of their gender identity.

One of these male athletes is Imane Khelif of Algeria (above). He is set to compete in the women’s under 66kg category (welterweight) on Thursday, August 1. The other is Taiwan’s Lin Yu Ting (below). He will compete in the under 57kg division (featherweight) on Friday, August 2. Both boxers were disqualified from the World Championships in New Delhi last year for failing to pass gender eligibility tests. Both tested for XY chromosomes, i.e., they are male. This should be enough to disqualify them from competition. But, as we say Friday night at the opening ceremony, the Olympics have become infected by the woke mind virus.

“Everyone competing in the women’s category is complying with the eligibility criteria,” said International Olympic Committee spokesman Mark Adams. “They are women in their passports and it’s stated that is the case, and they are female.” Adams emphasized the “incredibly complex” system that determines eligibility criteria for women’s sports saying, “Everyone would love to have a single answer, yes or no. The federations need to make the rules to make sure there is fairness but also the ability for everyone to take part that wants to.” However, one’s sex determination on a passport in the age of self-identification and abandonment of sex-based rights by many governments around the world is based neither on materialist science nor objective criteria. What is more, many governments are induced to send male athletes to compete in women’s sports because of the prestige associated with accumulating gold medals.

The lure of gold medals has caused governments to do terrible things before. Recall the scandal involving East German athletes during the Cold War, which centered on the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs, particularly anabolic steroids. This controversy primarily concerned the doping of female athletes. The East German government had orchestrated a state-sponsored doping program, administering steroids and other banned substances to athletes to enhance their performance in both Olympic and other international competitions. The scandal was brought to light after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, revealing that the doping program was more extensive than initially known. Doping impacted multiple Olympic Games, including the 1976 Montreal Olympics, 1980 Moscow Olympics, and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, where East German athletes achieved notable successes. The revelation of these practices led to significant debates about fairness in sports, health issues for the athletes involved, and a reevaluation of results.

Female athletes from other countries had suspicions about the East German doping practices. As East German female athletes dominated many events during the 1980s, competitors from other nations and their coaches began to notice their unusual performances and physical changes. There were growing concerns and whispers about the possibility of doping, particularly because East German female athletes exhibited pronounced muscle development and physical characteristics that seemed atypical for women athletes at the time. Many people could see what they saw, even if they didn’t speak up. These suspicions were compounded by the fact that the East German sports program was known for its secretive nature. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, investigations and testimonies from former athletes and officials exposed the extent of the doping regime, validating the concerns raised by their international counterparts.

The East German doping scandal remains one of the most significant cases of state-sponsored cheating in Olympic history. Likewise, the current decision allowing males to compete against women, with males enjoying natural advantages even greater that the drug enhanced East German female athletes, has sparked a significant debate about the balance between inclusivity and fairness in sports. We should use the word cheating here just as we did in the case of East German female athletes. The alleged complexities of navigating gender identity within competitive athletics present a different problem only in the sense just mentioned, namely the advantages that trans-identifying males have over female athletes due to innate physiological differences. Whereas steroids masculinized female athletes after puberty, the fact of being male provides advantages over women way beyond the benefit of steroids. There is no navigating this. The bridge should be condemned and closed.

I argue that prioritizing inclusivity over fairness diminishes fairness and objectively endanger women by allowing athletes with male physiological advantages to compete against those without them. This undermines the principles of competition, which are based on providing a level playing field for all participants. Prioritizing fairness over inclusion not only honors traditional sex-based rights but also aligns with the core principles of competitive sports, ensuring that all athletes have an equal opportunity to succeed based on their abilities and training rather than inherent grouped physical advantages. We’re told that balancing these considerations requires careful thought and a nuanced approach to policy-making in the realm of athletics, but it may be the case that the issue is one-sided. Indeed, when one steps into the boxing ring, one is not competing against a self-identification but against a concrete individual whose advantages are determined by his objective sexual identity. (See Decoding Progressive Newspeak: Equity and the Doctrine of Inclusion.) 

The question of whether self-identification trumps objective reality or that decisions about competitive sports are grounded in the facts of natural history has implications well beyond the question of men in women’s sports. Here we encounter the opposition between idealism and materialism. Idealism posits that beliefs and personal perceptions shape reality, allowing individuals to define their identities based on subjective feelings. This perspective holds that one’s internal sense of self can determine their gender, regardless of biological or physiological characteristics. Materialism, on the other hand, asserts that reality is grounded in objective, observable facts. According to this view, gender and sex are determined by physical attributes such as chromosomes, reproductive anatomy, and secondary sexual characteristics (not simulated). The materialist perspective maintains that these biological factors are the basis for categorizing individuals as male or female, and self-identification cannot alter these inherent characteristics. This fundamental question underpins much of the contemporary debate on gender identity, with significant implications for individual rights, legal frameworks, and societal norms. I want the reader to know that I come down resolutely on the side of scientific materialism.

If we accept that gender and sex are different things, which is the central doctrine of queer theory (which is not a theory in the scientific sense), and sex refers to the physical anthropological differences between female and male, we now have the task of determining what we mean by gender. For centuries, gender and sex have been synonyms, meaning that gender also referred to the physical anthropological differences between female and male, determinable primarily by gamete size, but also chromosomes and reproductive anatomy. Historically, a woman was scientifically defined as an adult female human and a man as an adult male human. Gender was binary and immutable, and social institutions were organized around this fact. In the drive to equality with the emergence of modernity, society came to recognize that sex differences were so profound that equitable ends required the recognition of sex-based rights. This recognition is manifest in sex-segregated activities and spaces, sports being one of them. (See (see The Pelvis Tells the Story: Archeology and Physical Anthropology are Most Unkind; Bubbles and Realities: How Ubiquitous is Gender Ideology? Separating Sex and Gender in Language Works Against Reason and Science; Scientific Materialism and the Necessity of Noncircular Conceptual Definitions; The Science™ and its Devotees.)

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anthropologists, historians, human biologists, and sociologists developed the concept of the sex role. During this period, sex became the preferred term (although gender continued to be used in botany). Scientists observed a natural sexual division of labor based on morphological and physiological differences and reproductive roles. By the 1940s, there was still no clear conceptual distinction made between gender and sex. One only needed to refer to the sex role as the gender role; they were interchangeable. Although the sex role referred to natural differences between the sexes, it also included (culturally and historically variable) sociocultural features associated with it—norms, statuses, and typifications (or stereotypes). By using the word gender to refer to roles exclusively and reducing sex to the biological, the sociocultural aspects of sex could be mystified, isolating gender from the biological and establishing a concept. Thus, the sociocultural role was decoupled from sexual dimorphism and the reproductive roles of the species. (See Gender Roles and Stereotypes; Gender and the Gender Role; Gender and the English Language; Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words; Sex = Gender Redux: Eschewing the Queer Linguistic Bubble; There’s No Obligation to Speak Like a Queer Theorist. Doing so Misrepresents Reality; Denying Reality: The Tyranny of Gender-Inclusive Language; Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms; Gender and Sex. Once More for People in the Back.)

If one drops the term “role” from gender, what is gender if not sex? This is a significant problem for those seeking to escape the constraints of material reality. If you pay attention, you will see that gender is often used in place of gender role (it is useful to point that out in conversation). At the end of the 1960s, psychiatrists paired gender with the concept of identity and constructed a new term: gender identity. Normally, identity would be what the thing is, i.e., the thing in itself, so one’s gender would again be determinable by morphological and physiological differences and reproductive roles. However, psychiatrists changed the meaning of identity to refer to what the thing thinks it is, independent of what it really is, thus making it a subjective matter. Because it is subjective, the male sex can think he is the female gender, in which case the male “identifies” as a woman and he expects those around him to also identify him as such. If the subjective definition of identity replaces the materialist definition, and idealism is privileged over objective reality, then a man becomes a woman according to the queer definition of gender, hence the slogan “Trans women are women.”

All this depends on accepting idealism and rejecting materialism and objective reality. If a man can be a woman because he thinks of himself that way, but objectively he remains male by materialist standards, then materialism has been subordinated to feeling, which is subject to the problem of delusion. In other words, whatever the belief, it becomes a reality possessed by only one person, and those around him must take his word for it (consider the problem of alien abduction or commune with angels). The observer will have to accept as true whatever the subject tells him without objective confirmation or verification of the truth of his claim. In other words, those around the man will have to affirm his self-identification or self-report on faith (or at least bad faith). This reliance on faith belief renders the proposition non-falsifiable. However, under the original meaning of gender, the question of a person’s gender is a verifiable fact, confirmed by an examination, which would rarely be wrong, and verification would rarely need to be performed since it would, in the vast majority of cases, be determined (not assigned) at birth.

Even if we accept the queer theoretical terms but do not abandon science altogether, the problem of sex differences remains. To be sure, there is a push to make these arbitrary and subjective, as well, as seen in the practice of changing sex on birth certificates by governments that have abandoned sex-based rights. For postmodernists, science is one of the grand narratives that carries authority only because we believe it does; the categories of the natural sciences are as socially construct as those of literary traditions and the social sciences. Postmodernism of which queer theory is a branch, collapse ontology into epistemology and then pluralize the latter (which is why there are an infinite number of genders). But suppose we compromise and agree to differentiate between gender as defined in queer theory and sex as defined in science. In this scenario, sex-based rights would continue to exist because they are based on the objective of sexual dimorphism. A man would be permitted to “identity” as a woman, but he would not be able to participate as one in sex-segregated activities and spaces. I recognize this is an unacceptable compromise from the standpoint of trans activism. But what about for rest of us?

Assuming the rest of us find value in materialism, let’s turn to the science. From a physical anthropological perspective, sexual dimorphism in humans, the facts of which are empirical and verifiable, reveals significant differences in cognitive and emotional function, connective tissue, musculature, skeletal structure, and other physical attributes between males and females. Physiologically, males tend to have greater muscle mass and a higher percentage of lean body tissue compared to females, who generally have a higher percentage of body fat. This difference in musculature is evident in attributes like upper body strength and punching power, where males typically outperform females. The enhanced musculature in males is linked to higher levels of testosterone, which promotes muscle growth and strength. However, the differences are not reducible to testosterone. Skeletal differences between males and females are pronounced. Males usually have larger and denser bones, contributing to greater overall body strength and support for larger muscles. The male pelvis is narrower and more robust, designed to support heavier loads and facilitate bipedal locomotion. In contrast, the female pelvis is wider and more adapted for childbirth. The center of gravity is different. Facial structural differences are another area of sexual dimorphism, with males generally exhibiting more pronounced brow ridges, a squarer jawline, and larger cheekbones. Again, these features are thought to be associated with greater levels of testosterone during puberty, which influence bone growth and facial morphology.

What explains the profound objective differences between men and women which has since time memorial determined and shaped their social roles and led to the development of sex-segregated activities and spaces, as well as safeguarding norms? We do have the answer to this question. The theory that males engaged in combat and other strenuous physical activities explains many of these differences. Evolutionary pressures favored males who could effectively engage in combat, hunt, and protect the group. This need for physical prowess drove the development of stronger muscles, denser bones, and greater overall strength. The idea that dietary habits alone account for these differences has been largely debunked, with evidence strongly supporting the role of evolutionary pressures related to physical competition and survival.

Although there are adaptive advantages to sexual dimorphism, there are other effects that can be deleterious if not controlled and steered in the proper way. Male violence, including against women, is an important aspect of understanding human sexual dimorphism. Historically, males have been more prone to aggression and violent behavior, which can be linked to the evolutionary need for males to compete for mates, resources, and social status. This aggression is evident in the higher rates of violent crime committed by males compared to females. Violence against women, in particular, can be understood through the lens of evolutionary psychology, where control over female reproduction and dominance may have been historically advantageous for males. It’s essential to recognize that while these behaviors may have roots in evolutionary history, they are not justifiable and are influenced by cultural and social factors in contemporary society. Addressing male violence requires a nuanced understanding of both biological predispositions and the impact of societal norms and values.

Misogyny is the ingrained disdain, hatred, loathing, and prejudice towards women, manifesting in various forms including belittlement, discrimination, and violence. Misogyny is embedded in cultural, organizational, institutional, and social frameworks, perpetuating gender inequality and hindering women’s opportunities and limiting their rights. Misogyny can be overt, such as in derogatory language and physical abuse, or subtle, such as in workplace biases and societal expectations that limit women’s roles and contributions. This pervasive bias not only harms individual women but also undermines the fabric of a just and equitable society by sustaining power imbalances and stifling self-actualization, the full development of the personality. This is why just societies recognize sex-based rights and establish sex-segregated activities and spaces.

This weekend, the whole world will see misogyny in its most overt manifestation when male athletes will enter the squared circle and batter women about the head and body. They will see this because leading organizations and major institutions have accepted the fiction that gender is self-identified and that self-identification trumps the objective science of physical anthropology. Everybody who allows this—and supports it—participates in misogyny. This is what queer praxis seeks, among other things, the elimination of sex-based rights and the erasure of principle of equity with respect to gender. The fact that it is actually happening tells us that postmodernism has won over the institutions of society. Modernity has been replaced by atavisms and perversions. Woke progressivism is an authoritarian and regressive project, a neoreligion that eschews whatever good could be found in the old religion. A neoreligion that, in canceling the Enlightenment, portends a New Dark Ages.

* * *

What about this hackneyed straw man concerning genital policing? I’m 62 years old, and in those many years, I have never seen nor had it suggested to me that we police each other’s genitals in daily life. Stating that men shouldn’t trespass upon women’s activities and spaces is certainly not a call for genital policing. Indeed, genital policing is generally unnecessary for two reasons.

First, since for nearly everybody in the modern period, gender is documented on a birth certificate, which carries over to driver’s licenses, passports, etc., with the expectation that individuals are for the most part decent human beings who will respect the dignity and safety of girls and women and thus observe the norms that safeguard them. All we need to ensure is that governments don’t abandon sex-based rights and arbitrarily change sex identification on birth certificates, drivers licenses, passports, etc. To be sure, men will still use deceptive mimicry to enter spaces exclusive to girls and women, but one need not check their genitals to enforce sex-based rules. As for the Olympics, we see that how gender is sorted for sex-based competition is, per the current rule, what is listed on the passport. Even if this system had not become corrupted by ideology and politics, we might still need to test athlete to determine their gender because they may be lying for the same reason we test for steroids, etc.

Second, thanks to natural history, humans are remarkably accurate in determining whether faces and bodies are male or female—independent of sociocultural cues or seeing them nude. There are fairly convincing simulated sexual identities out there that may fool some people, but they’re rare (see  (Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy). Most men don’t pass as women even with extensive body modification or less evasive cosmetic applications (makeup, wigs, etc.). The proportions are different. The gait is different. The infliction of the voice. Etc. (See The Story the Industry Tells; Wait Until You’re Older; The Body as Primary Commodity: The Techno-Religious Cult of Transgenderism; Mystification in the Marketing of “Live-Saving Gender-Affirming Health Care”; Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; The Function of Gender Ideology in Rationalizing Physician Harm). AI is good at gender detection, too, much to the consternation of ideologues who deny the material reality of the gender binary. (See The Queer Project and the Practice of Deceptive Mimicry; Magical Thinking and Perception Management in Gender Ideology’s Imperial Ambitions.)

As implied in Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module, I suspect we are seeing in the younger generation a gradual diminishment of the gender detection facility due to early and intentional disruption of its developmental unfolding, which is a goal of educational and mass media programming around the false distinction between sex and gender delineated by the pseudoscience of gender identity. But, for now, most women know when a man is in their space. Tragically, because of the more subtle impositions of misogyny, most women don’t speak up for fear of retaliation or shaming. This explains why most women do not speak up when those who are supposed to safeguard them put them dangerous activities and spaces with men.

Two days ago, MSNBC columnist Anthea Butler wrote about “the ridiculous moral panic over the Olympics’ opening ceremony.” She should have waited a day. Yesterday, The New York Post confirmed what I knew all along: “A Paris 2024 Olympics spokesperson admitted the controversial drag show version of ‘The Last Supper’ seen in Friday’s opening ceremony was indeed inspired by the iconic da Vinci mural—despite attempting to vehemently deny it following fierce backlash.”That’s right, they threw Jolly under the bus. They knew he was lying and they didn’t want to caught up in a scandal. Too many people knew. And they liked the performance and its purpose. Remember, they said mission accomplished.

The Wrap confirmed the statement from Paris 2024 producers that it was in fact inspired by Da Vinci’s famous painting. “For the ‘Festivities’ segment, Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting.” The producers said in the statement, “Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief.” And then the rationalization used by many before switching to the Feast of Dionysus ruse: “He is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous work of art. From Andy Warhol to The Simpsons, many have done it before him.”

Acts of irreligious criticism don’t need to point to the myriad other acts of irreligious criticism to justify themselves. France is a free society. As I said yesterday, just stand by the product. Don’t lie, rationalize, and gaslight. I didn’t need confirmation (see my earlier essay Apollo is Crucified and Butch Dines on Dionysus; see also The Paris Olympics and the War on Western Culture). I have eyes in my head and a depth understanding of mythology, Christianity iconography, and postmodernist thought and praxis. Apparently others don’t and are well rehearsed to add two and two and come up with five (they are obedient to the Party). I hope they’re prepared to accept the producers’ confession, but I doubt many will be. Like Butler, they went all in on conservative bashing. They embarrassed themselves.

I keep getting a version of the question. “Why do you care so much?” As I explained yesterday, I care so much because I reject lies and rationalizations and refuse to be gaslit by the ideologically bamboozled and blinkered. It moves me to social critique because the intent to deceive is sociopathic. I’m a criminologist. I have that kind of mind. As I have always understood it, my profession of sociology calls on its practitioners to expose the pathologies of the Power Elite (see C. Wright Mills’ 1956 The Power Elite and his 1959 The Sociological Imagination for guidance). This Olympic thing from the beginning has been a clinic in lies, rationalizations, and gaslighting—all to push an agenda with totalitarian ambitions. The media and your Democrat fiends have been telling you that you did not see what you saw. Christians, recall the kings and prophets who do not see what you see (Luke 10:24, Matthew 13:17)—until you allow yourself to be blinded by ideology and partisan loyalty. I’m not a Christian, but this is one of the best pieces of advice the New Testament has to offer. (I will have more negative things to say about Christian doctrine in my Sunday Sermon.)

Friday night could not have provided a better example of what I have been arguing for years now on Freedom and Reason. But this not merely about me being right. It’s about the seriousness of the moment, and the fact that this imperial ideology has men punching women in the face at the Olympics for the first time in the history of the Games couldn’t punctuate more loudly the seriousness of the moment. Hearing the denials of its significance by those around you is further confirmation of the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves. Don’t let them shame you into doubting your judgment.

Here is the IOC’s spokesman Mark Adams ⁦@Marq⁩

Before this statement he says it would be ‘invidious’ and ‘unfair’ on the male boxers in the women’s category to comment on them individually.

Just that bit clipped off the top: this is the rest. pic.twitter.com/wQEu2dxuAm

— SEENinJournalism (@JournalismSEEN) July 30, 2024

The misogynistic spectacle celebrating male battering of women is scheduled for this Friday and Saturday. I discuss the matter in depth tomorrow. But I wonder if the producers will actually air the bouts? I’m struggling over whether to watch women being pummeled by men with female passports. I have seen one of the men (Imane Khelif) assaulting a woman at a 2022 Golden Belt Series bout and it sickened me (I am sharing it below). The look on the woman’s face when she realizes she didn’t stand a chance haunts me. The man appears to carry her to humiliate her. For those who don’t know boxing, carrying a fighter means allowing them to finish the fight when the other fighter could stop this opponent any time he wanted. In this case, probably not because the man feels bad, but to downplay the reality that men really do have natural physical attributes that give them a decisive competitive advantage. If he felt bad he wouldn’t be in the ring with her in the first place. Seeing her congratulate him on his win looks like the work of internalized woke scolding.

The social theorist in me always asks, what cultural critic and social theorist could best help me negotiate the terrain here? I can think of five off the top of my head, most immediately George Orwell, but I have given readers enough Orwell lately. The French Marxist Guy Debord, best known for his 1967 The Society of the Spectacle next comes to mind. Debord critiques the pervasive nature of modern capitalist society, which he argues has transformed human interactions and relations into commodities and superficial representations. According to Debord, the “spectacle” refers to the dominance of appearances in society, where social life is mediated by consumer culture and mass media, leading to an alienated and passive populace. The spectacle perpetuates a false reality that obscures the true conditions of existence, reinforcing the power structures of capitalism and alienating individuals from authentic social connections and self-awareness. These circumstances rob people of their agency and capacity to think deeply about the world around them.

A Debordian analysis of the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics would emphasize the point that the ceremony, with its grand displays and global media coverage, serves as a quintessential spectacle that transforms the authentic cultural and human elements of the Olympics into commodified images for mass consumption. The function of ceremony, in Debord’s view, would be to reinforce dominant and emerging capitalist ideologies by promoting consumerism and corporate sponsorship. The highly choreographed and visually stunning event, whatever its artistic merit (in this case not a lot for the segment in question), would function to mask underlying social realities, such as the exploitation of human labor and of vulnerable minorities. Ultimately, Debord would see the opening ceremony as a means of perpetuating the illusion of consensus and progress, while obscuring the deeper divisions and inequalities within society. The popular reaction tells us that the spectacle failed spectacularly. That’s good news.

However, Debord does not speak to the transgressive element. This is the moment that prepares the stage for misogyny in the squared circle this weekend. For an analysis focused on that, that is, the spectacle aimed at undermining common sense understandings to prepare the masses to accept a new and inorganic common sense, one might turn to the works of Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Michel Foucault. Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony explores how dominant groups use cultural institutions to maintain power and how counter-hegemonic ideas can challenge and change societal norms and values (I have written quite a lot about Gramsci of late, so I will leave it there). Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School who bridges critical theory and postmodernism (which is not a kind thing to say from my perspective, although I am being charitable), examines how advanced industrial societies manipulate consciousness and integrate individuals into the system, particularly through the co-optation of transgressive elements in culture and art. See his books Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man for more. Perhaps in the future I will critique Marcuse’s work. I have already critiqued him for his authoritarian position on free speech and the corruption of critical theory (see The Noisy and Destructive Children of Herbert Marcuse). The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of discourse, power, and and knowledge reveals how societal norms are constructed and maintained, offering insights into how spectacles are used to shape thought and control populations by shifting perceptions and understandings. Widely recognizes as the “father of queer theory,” Foucault is arguably the figure most responsible for the nihilistic direction of latter poststructuralism. I am preparing a major piece on queer theory, so I will leave my analysis of Foucault to the future.

These thinkers provide frameworks for understanding the menu at the Spectacular Café, its various appetizers designed to challenge existing norms and prepare the masses for the main course, novel dishes whipped up from old ways of thinking and organizing society. Upon inspection, the café serves nothing but bad food. The ingredients are subpar, the dishes are poorly prepared, and the hygiene standards are questionable at best. Despite numerous complaints from patrons who fall ill after dining there, the café remains open. The reason? The government, which should be responsible for ensuring public health and safety, is either indifferent or complicit. Perhaps the café owner has influential friends in high places, or maybe the bureaucracy is so sluggish and corrupt that no action is ever taken. In any case, the food there is tainted and it will make you sick.

“[This] deeply secular postmodern society knows who its enemy is, they are naming it, and we should believe them.” —Bishop Robert Barron, Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota

“In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.”—Artistic director Thomas Jolly.

Why would Thomas Jolly say that initially if this performance were something other than what the world immediately understood it to be? Right not to be worshippers of what exactly? Nobody worships Greek gods anymore. Right to dissent from ancient pagan religions? Why would that be noteworthy? What he meant was that he is not bound by the blasphemy rules of Christianity. I agree with him. France has religious liberty. And should. But if this were about the Feast of Dionysus, Jolly would have said so then rather than saying so after the controversy had legs. The Greek pantheon is an ad hoc rationalization. If this were a depiction of the pantheon, where is Poseidon’s trident? Why would any director miss out on a prop that would clearly convey the meaning?

You can see in the picture I have provided that Barbara Butch is performing the iconic Sacred Heart Jesus. This is so the identity would be unmistakable to the audience. The composition apes da Vinci’s work, albeit many of the dancers are jockeying for camera time and disrupt the symmetry. Dionysus, the god of chaos, debauchery, and ecstasy, does make an appearance. He is the disruptive force inserted into the scene. That’s the political point of the performance: to juxtapose Christian super/ego rigidity with the pagan id, i.e.,the pleasure principle, the unbridled Eros. It was a transgressive action by a queer artistic director. He denies that he was being subversive, but the method behind a piece like this is to deconstruct traditional norms and values through subversive imagery and revel in the libertine. Hedonism is typical of these expressions, which is why Dionysus is fetishized.

The most significant part of the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, I recently told a Facebook group, is when, instead of the self-described “love activist,” Butch and her apostles feasting on the body of Apollo, the Greek god of sun, light, healing, music, poetry, and prophecy, they were instead served the living body of Dionysus, aka Bacchus, the god of wine, fertility (odd choice there), ecstasy, and theater. Apollo, who represents harmony, order, and reason was a no show. He was held up at his crucifixion. Instead the world got the god of frenzied dance and rituals bent on breaking down the barriers of individuality and transgress social norms. Was this the Feast of Dionysus, also known as the Dionysia, occurring around the same time in the calendar year as the currently enacted Feast of the Sacred Heart in Christian practice? Or was this “The Last Supper”? (The video has since been deleted according to Breitbart.)

Whether this was the Dionysia, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, or the Last Supper, it was the perfect choice given the politics projected by performance and the justification given by those who put on the performance. In gender ideology, there is a praxis known as “queering” the situation or space. A key part of queering activities, situations, and spaces is to subvert traditional religious beliefs and practices, as well as Enlightenment values, and substitute for them debauchery and nihilism. We see this in the example of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), also called Order of Perpetual Indulgence (OPI), a street performance protest movement that uses drag and Christian religious imagery to problematize moral thinking around issues of gender (recall the 2023 Los Angeles Dodgers scandal). We saw the same thing in Paris, Butch’s Sacred Heart Jesus made obvious by the inclusion of halo pressed onto her head and flashing the heart gesture (see above).

So it was a send up of the Last Supper and the Christian ritual period surrounding the passion and crucifixion of the Christ. It seemed immediately obvious to me. But perhaps you have to grasp both postmodernist politics and study of mythology to see it for what it was (you don’t). To be sure, at a vulgar level, the purpose of the performance explained itself. Especially when a man in black with his testicles hanging out of shorts rubbed up against the child near the “love activist.” But denials in the aftermath, including from Jolly himself, require that we make it clear the significance of the imagery and the intent of the performance we can infer from that. Jolly and others are lying about the work.

Before moving to my analysis, I wish to say a few things about Christianity and the double standard surrounding irreligion criticism and parody. I’d like the reader to imagine the Games had presented a sendup of Muhammad on his winged horse. There was a ghostly mechanical horse gliding across the Seine River. Viewers were told that it was not Death on that pale horse, but Sequana, the Goddess of the Seine River (previous depictions of Sequana show her rowing a boat). But suppose Allah’s prophet were upon that horse instead. There’d be blood on the streets of Paris and likely in a lot of other major European cities. Christians are a super tolerant bunch. Nietzsche went hard on them for that. I won’t, though.

It’s not that I am too troubled by irreligious criticism, parody, even ridicule. I’m an atheist. I’ve never laughed as hard as I laughed during Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (except for two scenes in Something About Mary that almost gave me an abdominal hernia). The problem is not the mocking of religion per se but the political-ideological purpose of the performance. Queer activists used the mega platform of the Olympics to push an ideology that is destructive to sound family systems and the safeguarding norms governing the relations between adults and children. More broadly, the figure of Dionysus, rather than that of Apollo, represented the postmodernist assault on modernity. Butch’s Jesus looked favorably upon Dionysus. World Apollo?

As I noted in The Paris Olympics and the War on Western Culture: Preparing the Masses for the New World Order, this isn’t the first time the Olympics have been used to propagandize a captivated audience (there, I discuss the Berlin Olympics in 1936). This is an agenda, plain for the world to see, one with a very long history, and it’s what we should be talking about. Instead, we’re talking exclusively about whether we saw what we saw and whether what we saw was offensive to (at least some of) the 2.4 billion Christians around the world, many of whom are in peril in the Islamic world and living the sphere of the CCP. Not that we shouldn’t be concerned about that. This wasn’t playful. And the Games added insult to injury by apologizing not for having offended Christians but for Christians having taken offense (not a subtle slight if you get the difference). The Games also declared: mission accomplished. So they weren’t really sorry.

Western civilization, with its once mighty pillars of progress, order, and reason, finds itself adrift in a sea of trepidation—and nihilism. This crisis of legitimacy, which I have been documenting on the pages of Freedom and Reason for many years now, is not merely an economic or political phenomenon but a profound cultural crisis steeped in existential malaise. It is a spiritual crisis (you can take that as literal or figurative). The Olympics have given us cause to revisit the ancient duality of Apollo and Dionysus, as these two encapsulate the eternal struggle between chaos and order, passion and reason, dissolution and structure, to elucidate the problem. The Dionysian elements in postmodernist thought and anti-humanist culture has played a significant role in the situation in which the West finds itself by challenging the foundations of Western civilization and paving the way for a nihilistic ethos. Even if the opening ceremony really has been about Dionysus, as Jolly insisted two days later after receiving an outpouring of hate and ridicule, the purpose would be the same.

I cannot work with this subject without acknowledging Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis of the Apollonian and Dionysian, primarily presented in his work The Birth of Tragedy, wherein he explores the duality of human nature and art through these two contrasting concepts. For Nietzsche, the Apollonian represents individuality, logic, and order, the personification of these the Greek god Apollo, symbolizing rationality and structured beauty. In contrast, the Dionysian embodies chaos, emotion, and ecstasy, reflecting the instinctual and primal aspects of life. Nietzsche argued that the fusion of these forces in Greek tragedy created a profound aesthetic experience, with the Apollonian providing form and the Dionysian offering emotional depth. This dynamic interplay is essential for the creation of authentic art and understanding the complexities of human existence.

But that is not how the transgressors view the matter. In postmodernist thought, the dialectic of Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian elements is viewed through a lens of deconstruction and relativism. Unlike Nietzsche’s idea of a productive tension between these forces, postmodernism interprets this duality as a situation where one side’s dominance leads to the negation or cancellation of the other. And the postmodernists have picked their side. In the darkness of postmodernist nihilism, which pushes the idea that traditional norms and values lack inherent meaning, are confining and limiting, and therefore worthy of overthrowing, the cancellation of one force by the other is the natural outcome of the collapse of absolute truth and inherent value—and where nature takes too long, transgressive action accelerates the collapse. Instead of lamenting the loss of reason, postmodernist view its collapse as an opportunity for the creation of new possibilities; the absence of fixed structures or definitive resolutions is a space for ongoing reinterpretation and individual creativity, which comprise a gloss for the anarchist desire for no boundaries or rules.

The loss of the Apollonian is the loss of the Enlightenment. Apollo, the god of harmony, light, and reason represents the Apollonian spirit that has traditionally underpinned Western civilization. It is through Apollo that humans seek knowledge, impose a structure on the world, and aspire to ideals of beauty and order. This Apollonian drive has manifested in the great achievements of arts, philosophy and science embodying the Western quest for meaning and truth. Dionysus, in contrast, is the god of ecstasy and unbridled passion—of debauchery. The Dionysian spirit embraces chaos, dissolution, and the irrational aspects of human nature, as well as in social relations. It celebrates the emotive, the instinctual, the primal, often in direct opposition to the Apollonian pursuit of order and reason.

The Dionysian impulse leans into the inherent chaos and unpredictability of existence and suggests itself not merely as a counterbalance to the alleged rigidity of Apollonian ideals, but to the overthrow of structure—that is, it is poststructuralist. So whether it was a sendup of da Vinci’s “Last Supper” or the Dionysia, Jolly chose the body of Dionysus for the drag queens and trans-identifying to feast upon—in the presence of children while the world watched.

The crisis of legitimacy in Western civilization stems impart from a disillusionment with the Apollonian project, a disillusionment organized by the transgressive forces of the corporate state in the context of late capitalism. The Enlightenment promise of progress through reason and science in the context of corporate statism has given way to a deep skepticism about the foundations of knowledge and truth. To be sure, the skepticism is not entirely unfounded, as the excesses of rationalism and technocratic governance have often led to alienation, environmental destruction, and social fragmentation (see Marx and Weber). But this is not an indictment of the idea of modernity, only its corruption by corporate power. In this vacuum, the Dionysian forces emerge with gusto. Postmodernist thought, with its radical deconstruction of grand narratives, epitomizes this development. It challenges the Apollonian ideals of objective knowledge, stable identities, and universal values. Postmodernism revels in the fluidity of meaning, the plurality of perspectives, and the celebration of the marginalized and the fragmented. It thrives on chaos. But people seek order in the whirlwind.

I can’t leave the subject without touching on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory concerning the internal tension between order and chaos within the human psyche. For Freud, the instinctual, primal part of the psyche, the Es, or “it,” is driven by the “pleasure principle.” It embodies chaotic and uncontrolled desires, seeking immediate gratification without regard for societal norms or reality. This component of the psyche is analogous to the concept of chaos, as it operates from basic impulses and drives that can disrupt a person’s sense of order. It contains in it two forces, each named after a Greek deity. Thanatos is the “death drive,” the instinctual tendency for aggression, destruction, and a return to an inorganic state. Eros is the life drive or libido, the instinctual tendency towards life, love, and self-preservation. It includes nurturing and sexual instincts, fundamental to the pursuit of pleasure and the formation of relationships.

Thanatos and Eros exist in the psyche as a dynamic tension that requires a control structure. In the well-adjusted person, the Es is governed by the Ich, the “I” or “ego,” which functions as a rational mediator between the demands of the Es and the constraints of the external world and social environment. The ego operates on the “reality principle,” striving to satisfy the Es’ desires in a manner that is socially acceptable and practical. The ego’s role is to manage and balance these conflicting forces, akin to the principle of order, by employing judgment, planning, and problem-solving to navigate life’s complexities. Later, Freud added the idea of the Über-Ich, the “over-I” or “superego,” which imposes a sense of order by regulating behavior through conscience, ensuring that actions align with accepted norms and values. This aspect of the psyche reinforces order by counteracting the Es’ impulses and guiding the ego in maintaining ethical and societal compliance.

The postmodernist and nihilistic push to transgress social norms and boundaries is a project to dismantle the superego’s moral constraints and distort the ego’s regulatory functions. By embracing radical individual freedom challenging traditional values, this movement often seeks to strip away the superego’s role in enforcing societal standards, thereby enabling the ego to prioritize unrestrained gratification of the id’s primal urges. This produces the libertine, who is characterized by a lack of moral restraint, especially in matters of personal behavior and sexuality. The libertine rejects conventional moral and social norms in favor of pursuing personal pleasure and freedom without regard for ethical or societal constraints. Libertinism is marked by an indulgence in hedonistic pleasures and a disregard for traditional values related to morality and propriety.

With the erosion of normative boundaries and the destabilization of the superego, the ego becomes increasingly driven by the most destructive aspects of the pleasure principle, leading to harmful consequences for both individuals and society. The causa sui of the queer project is nihilism.

Postmodernism’s critique of metanarratives claims to have exposed an arbitrariness in our cultural and intellectual constructs. However, in making this claim, it undermines the possibility of constructing new, coherent systems of meaning. The relentless deconstruction of norms, values, and truth leaves those enacting the rituals in a state of nihilism, where nothing is certain, and all is relative. This nihilistic turn is particularly evident in contemporary culture and praxis. Art and literature have become exercises in irony and pastiche, devoid of sincere engagement with the human condition, which the opening ceremony of the Games demonstrates in spades; people are still arguing about what it was, but whatever it was it was complete shite artistically. The aesthetic was crude and obnoxious. It was an instantiation of a politics that has devolved into vulgar spectacle, where power, unmoored from any substantive vision of the common good, is sought for self-aggrandizement, the social fabric fraying as communities splinter into isolated and antagonistic identities, each claiming its own truth and rejecting any notion of a shared reality. None of this is accidental. Nihilism is an instrument of control.

* * *

I now want to attempt—in vain I am sure, since the indoctrinated see what they want to see and not what they see (Matthew 13:17)—to put to rest the desperate rationalization that what we witnessed this Friday was anything other than the mocking of “The Last Supper,” the celebrated fifteenth century painting by Leonardo da Vinci, used on Friday as a backdrop to the celebration of Dionysus. Significantly, the painting is in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. It was commissioned by Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, as part of the renovations to the convent’s refectory (or dining hall). It is a religious work that carries great meaning for both the faithful and the secular humanist. As a child, among my many idols (Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, Galileo, Marx, Newton) there was de Vinci. Like him, I had an early interest in anatomy, and I was left-handed—and wrote backwards. My identification with him led me to study his works and his biography. Like the names of all the dinosaurs and NASA programs, I knew da Vinci front to back. The “Last Supper” fascinated me even though I have never heard the call of the divine.

The “Last Supper” depicts the moment Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him. Leonardo’s composition captures the dramatic reactions of the disciples to this news, each responding in a unique way. This creates a powerful narrative with emotional intensity. The symmetry of the array of reaction is crucial to the piece. Jesus is at the center, forming a calm and balanced focal point, while the disciples are grouped in threes, a dynamic and religiously salient arrangement of figures (you will note the pattern in the images from the opening ceremony). Leonardo’s mastery of linear perspective creates a sense of depth, drawing the viewer’s eye to the center (how could it be otherwise). The use of light and shadow enhances the three-dimensionality of the figures. It’s a work that defies but a glance. It invites the observer to dwell in the moment and contemplate its significance.

Did da Vinci draw inspiration from the Greek myth of Dionysus as some have suggested? Typical of the man, his process for creating “The Last Supper” involved meticulous study and preparation, so we have a record of the thought and process. Da Vinci is legendary for his extensive use of live models and cadavers, which helped him capture realistic human expressions and movements (he did the same with horses). He spent hours observing and sketching people to understand their gestures, facial expressions, and physical forms. He would often roam the streets of Milan, studying people and making detailed drawings in his notebooks. He would attend public executions to capture tortured bodies and the end of life. Those around him looked upon him with suspicion—his morbid interests and left handedness and all. This practice allowed him to create highly realistic and dynamic figures in his paintings. His knowledge of anatomy rivaled the physicians of his time. When I was a child, my parents bought me a reproduction of one of his sketch books. I would study it for hours. 

What I am saying is that if da Vinci was importing Greek mythology, we would very likely know about it. There is no evidence that Leonardo da Vinci was inspired by the myth of Dionysus in the design of “The Last Supper.” Leonardo’s source of inspiration for this work was the biblical narrative, which is found in all four Gospels. Indeed, “The Last Supper” depicts arguably the most significant moment in Christian theology, focusing on Jesus Christ and his apostles and negation of human agency in the work of Satan to fulfill prophecy. The scene captures the moment when Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him, prompting a range of emotional reactions. Religious context and the narrative structure and content guided Leonardo’s composition.

“The Last Supper” is a paradigm in scene setting. In John’s Gospel, Jesus announces that one of the disciples will betray him, which confuses the disciples and prompts them to seek clarity on the identity of the betrayer. Simon Peter signals to another disciple, often identified as John, the “beloved disciple,” to ask Jesus for more details. Jesus responds that it is the one to whom he will give a piece of bread after dipping it in the dish. Jesus then dips the bread and gives it to Judas Iscariot. After Judas takes the bread, Satan enters into him, and Jesus tells Judas to do quickly what he is about to do, referring to the betrayal. This moment is crucial to the narrative, marking the beginning of Judas’ destruction and emphasizing themes of betrayal, loyalty, and prophecy fulfillment. De Vinci’s painting does not explicitly depict Satan entering Judas, but rather captures the tension and emotional turmoil among the disciples following Jesus’ announcement. Judas is shown holding a small bag (he is at the front of the group to Christ’s left) likely containing pieces of silver, his reward for betraying Jesus. His body language and expression reflect his guilt and inner conflict.

While Leonardo was no doubt well-versed in classical mythology and almost certainly familiar with the stories of Dionysus (how could he not be), his emphasis was on conveying the phenomenological realism of the biblical scene, achieved through careful study of human expressions and interactions. Leonardo’s approach was generally more aligned with the humanistic and religious themes of the Renaissance rather than incorporating allusion from Greek mythology into this particular work. His focus was on creating a powerful and emotionally resonant depiction of a key moment in Christian history. Again, remember where the painting exists—in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. Jolly may not regard the Olympics to be an occasion in which dignity should be respected. But da Vinci held great reverence for places in which he worked. To be sure, da Vinci’s personal religious beliefs are a matter of contention, but that he was deeply interested in religious themes and his work often reflected a sincere engagement with Christian iconography is not disputed.

As for the spectacle at the opening ceremony of the Paris Games, Jolly’s denials notwithstanding, this was self-evidently not a depiction of the Dionysian feast. Jolly is trying to clean up after the performance got wrecked by critics for both its offensive character and its vulgar aesthetics. He got the rise he wanted, but now he is afraid. This was a mocking exploitation of da Vinci “The Last Supper” with the Pagan god of debauchery dropped into the scene to disrupt the identification of the betrayer who set into motion the events leading to Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, a necessary moment in order for Jesus to press his love into the world, here leaning on Thomas Altizer’s thesis concerning the death of God, which centers on the idea that God’s death represents a profound transformation in the nature of divine presence and love.

I want to briefly clarify what might be an obscure reference for those who haven’t studied theology. According to Altizer, the death of God is not merely an abstraction, but an historical and existential reality that signifies God’s total immersion into the world. In the moment of God’s death, manifest in the crucifixion of Jesus, God pours his love into the world, signifying the complete and unconditional embrace of the world by the divine, manifesting love in its most radical and tangible form. This act would simultaneously bring light and truth—the virtues of the Apollonian spirit. In this moment, the culmination of a dialectical process unfolding, God’s transcendence becomes immanent, engaging the human condition and transforming fundamentally the dialectical relationship between the divine and the world.

It is this love that Jolly negated on Friday night with the inclusion of Dionysus—Jolly seeks to reduce love to the pleasure principle. The day of the performance Jolly said, “In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.” This line, we have the right not to be worshippers, is an admission that the performance was an act of religion blasphemy (and Greek mythology is a dead religion). This line, we have the right to love whom we want, makes sure we understand what follows.

Jolly is aware that homosexuality is an abomination in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The entrance of Dionysus, the transgressive god, into the scene of the Last Supper is in part symbolic of the desire to negate the scriptural prohibition on homosexuality. This is one of the goal of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), as well. I have no want for homosexuality to be illegal. Nor do I think homosexual relations are not loving. I have gays and lesbians close to me. But there’s more to the queer project than that. The letters of the acronym don’t stop at “LGB.” The project it is not about normalizing sexual equality but about liberating erotic desire in an unbridled manner—of normalizing paraphilia, the reckless desire of the Es. You have seen the signs: “Love is love.” That tautology avoids defining love. This is not about altruistic love (agape), familial love, platonic love, romantic love, of self-love (not in the narcissistic sense, for this is really self-obsession). This isn’t about emotional attachment, care, and the desire for the well-being of the loved one. The meaning of love in the sense conveyed by the performance is fetish and kink and transgressing the norms that safeguard children and women.

The negation of the prohibition of homosexuality has already been achieved. Same-sex marriage became legal in France on May 18, 2013. This is not what is being pushed here. It is not about the right to love whom we want. It is about the right of the individual to be the other gender, or no gender, or both genders—and compel everybody else to accept delusional thinking. This is why Hermaphroditus, a child of Aphrodite and Hermes, a member of the Erotes, a species of winged entities associated with fornication, who was, at the request of a prominent Naiad (nymph), fused with her body to produce a deity that was both genders/sexes simultaneously, is being thrust before us, trans activists sharing images of representations of Hermaphroditus to claim that such beings existed in history (see Anti-Minotaur: Reclaiming The Truth of Gender From the Labyrinth of Lies). The postmodernist project is a project to make it impossible for people to distinguish between reality and simulation, between good and evil.

In the end, the dead giveaway is the halo worn by the “love activist” and the heart hand gesture. The attempt to deny what we all saw is an insult to our intelligence. That’s Sacred Heart Jesus. Butch was there to make sure the audience knew what was being mocked—and why. Those of us who see what we see know what that was and we have heard the message before. So the transgressive Greek god of debauchery crashes the party. That doesn’t indicate anything but the thing itself. Jolly should just lean into it. All those defending the performance should lean into it with him. The people aren’t stupid. Stand by your work, I always say. Be proud of it. Own it.

Transgressive theater is a big part of queer praxis. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a notable example. But public displays of Pride are generally transgressive. Bondage and humiliation, sado-masochism, and puppy play are performed in public and in front of children. There is no shortage of pictures and video if you need evidence. Jesus is a common theme at events and parades. Christianity is targeted for its allegedly stifling sexual norms. I think the reason people are accepting Jolly’s rationalization is that, as allies, they can see what this looks like and they want the movement to project a positive imagine, so they cover for the movement when it goes to far. They think, “If this is about the Feast of Dionysus, since he’s a Greek god, then no big deal. It’s the Olympics, after all.” But Jolly knew what he was doing. and now you do, too.

* * *

“This is no big deal. Why are you spending time on it?” It must be a big deal or else the world wouldn’t be talking about it. I am political sociologist who is keenly interested in ideology and religion. The essays on Freedom and Reason are about power and knowledge and the corruption of understanding. “Why do you care?” I have also been asked. Because I am committed to the principles of Enlightenment and to the safeguarding of children. And because I hate people lying and gaslighting others. As soon as everybody started saying this was something other than it was, something this high profile, I had to write about it. It’s what I do: I debunk false claims.

And this: “Boxers who failed gender tests at world championships cleared to compete at Olympics”: “The situation has arisen because the world championships last year was run under the auspices of the International Boxing Association, whose president, Umar Kremlev, told the Russian news agency, Tass, that DNA tests had ’proved they had XY chromosomes and were thus excluded from the sports events.’” It wasn’t just the opening ceremony that pushed the delusion that men can be women. Now they’re allowing men to compete against women in combat sports in the Olympics.

How was this allowed? The International Boxing Association (IBA) was barred from running the Olympic boxing tournament in Paris. Boxing in Paris is now being run under the auspices of the IOC’s Paris 2024 Boxing Unit, “which has more relaxed rules than the IBA.” Is that the new euphemism for endangering the health and safety of women to advance woke ideology and let men perpetrated sanctioned violence against women: “more relaxed rules”?

“Rules regarding who should compete in the female category have been hotly contested in recent years. But there has been less debate about combat sports, where the risk of serious injury and even death is far higher. Scientific research has also found that the average punching power is 162% greater in those who have gone through male puberty compared to females.” That’s on average. There are men who punch many times harder than that. But punching power is not the only metric. Men have a much different facial structure from women, one evolved for combat. Men have deeper eye sockets, heavier brow ridges, thicker cheek bones, bigger mandibles, and more facial musculature and connective tissue. A man punching a woman in the face can cause serious damage—bone fractures, blindness, and brain damage.

How is this “hotly contested”? Even without these risks, why is it fair to let men compete against women in any sport? Why is the fact that a man may break a woman’s face a special reason? It’s women’s sports. It’s not men’s sport. Men shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports—because men are not women. Some issues have two sides (some have more). This is a one-sided issue. This is the only side: men should compete in the men’s category. And before you say, “But trans women are women,” let me remind you of the truth: trans women are men. Our species cannot change gender. This is an anthropological fact.

I hope that my critics can now see why I spent so much time talking about the opening ceremony. The spectacle the world saw last Friday was not just aesthetic garbage (to be sure, it was utter shite). It was propaganda aimed at normalizing the queer praxis of transgressing of boundaries between men and women (and adults and children). It’s all connected. Trans activists are disordering normal gender relations for a reason. I’m telling you what that reason is. Those who say, “Nobody cares?” or “Why are you so interested in this?” are doing the work of the sociopathic overlords who are destroying everything good about the world.

Michael Parenti warned us a long time ago that the rich have ever wanted only one thing—and that is everything. And everything includes your ability to say that 2+2 = 4 and to keep safe children and women from male predation.

Here’s how you know the news media aren’t all meeting in a room and coordinating their lies, because if they did, you’d expect at least one person to speak up about how obvious the lies and double standards are and implore the gate-keepers and mind-controllers to vary the intensity of their lies to create a more convincing illusion. That’s the way it used to work when there were only a handful of TV and radio stations and major national papers.

Why it looks like talking heads met in a room is because of what I call groupthink-at-a-distance (which is not exactly original), which is the result of a profession’s common function. Journalists and editors are progressive and globalist (in Gramscian terms, they’re “organic intellectuals”) determined to thwart the restoration of the American Republic. Their function is to manufacture consent (what Gramsci called “ideological hegemony”).

On second thought, if there were variation in the intensity of lies and double standards, then the patriot’s voice would break through, and that would be a bad thing. For example, if Trump and Harris rallies were covered the same, then the audience would see that Trump is filling stadiums and Harris can’t fill the small halls churches rent for potlucks and bingo. “But her polls!” Exactly. Remember Clinton’s polls?

The situation is such that the rank-and-file and some of the subalterns who are “with her” can no longer grasp the truth of anything—with other subalterns making sure that every perception and statement and clip aligns with the ends and the means to those ends. That’s why those who stand outside the bubble are smeared with identitarian epithets.

Think about the insane amount of projection coming from Democrats. “Trump is going to put us in prison!” It’s the Democrats who are putting their opponents in prison (or at least trying like hell). “Trump is going to end democracy!” Democrats are in a frenzy to protect the unelected administrative state. “MAGA are violent extremists!” Antifa/trantifa, BLM, the pro-Hamas crowd, the climate catastrophe nutters are the ones occupying buildings, vandalizing property, and assaulting civilians and police officers. “Trump won’t accept the results of the election.” It’s Democrats who are doing everything they can to rig elections (drop boxes, no IDs, no signature verifications, postal voting). “Trump doesn’t trust our institutions!” Democrats are moving to pack the court, institute term limits on justices, corrupt the independence of the judiciary.

It is a sign of the authoritarian reflex to see in others what one sees in himself, to accuse others of the thing that he is doing or wants to do. A lot of this comes from self-loathing, which is partly the result of estrangement of late capitalism. Absorbed into the bureaucratic machine, progressives more keenly feel the alienation. This is where all the whining about unfairness comes from, even when many subalterns have it pretty damn good. Rather than push through the muck of life, they blame others for the muck and demand government come rescue them. And if they have no muck to suffer under, they dwell on the often imagined muck of others and demand the same thing, then present themselves the saviors of the people they teach to be helpless and to see themselves as victims.

Who is it that is putting long-range missiles in Germany? Who is expanding NATO? Who opened the borders? Who is de-policing the most crime-ridden neighborhoods? Who promotes the prosecutors and judges who go after political enemies but let murderers and rapists walk? Who undermines the readiness of the law enforcement and the military with woke ideology? Who demands our institutions make hiring decisions based on race and other suspect categories? Who is working with big tech to censor speech and demonetize and deplatform users? Who sends the DHS and FBI out to intimidate civilians with knock and talk tactics? Who demands lockdowns, masking, and social distancing, and vaccine mandates? Who is pushing globalism? Who is working with transnational elites to weaken national sovereignty? Who wants to take away rifles while ignoring the epidemic of gang violence in our inner cities and white male suicide in the heartland overwhelmingly perpetrated with handguns? Who is sexualizing children in public schools? Who defends unnecessary medical interventions that radically modify and sterilize children and young adults? Who is teaching young Americans that their country is white supremacist and illegitimate?

All this obvious, but you will never hear it on the news. At least it can’t make it past the filters without the label “conspiracy theory.” It’s a lie, of course, but lies are necessary to advance and protect the status quo. These are noble lies, with those in power determining virtue. Those truths that challenge and undermine the status quo? These are now the lies. Or, if effective parody, “manipulated video.”

This is amazing 😂
pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024

“A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself.” —Terry Eagleton (1991)

“If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” —Karl Marx and Frederich Engels (1845)

“Marx rejects the [Feuerbachean] disjunction as being neither exhaustive nor exclusive. It is true that there is no action without a violation of some right or interest. It is not true that such action need be blind, uninformed by theory or reason. It is true that one can think without acting directly but it is not true that no injustice is thereby done. For existing injustices are tolerated and remain unaltered. Philosophical activity may be conceived as action in behalf of values and interests which have been criticized by knowledge and reason. The very fact that philosophy is an activity in a world of space, time and incompatible interests, makes it clear that its goals cannot be absolute truth or absolute justice. But the fact that action is thoughtful makes it possible to achieve beliefs which are truer; the fact that thought leads to action makes it possible to achieve a world which is more just.” —Sidney Hook (1936)

George Orwell is arguably best known for Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, wherein he imagines a totalitarian regime that governs a state called Oceania. The regime manipulates reality through language (see Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words). Inverting reality as a mechanism of ideational control is the central theme of the novel. The fictional government, Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism), led by the Party and (probably simulated) leader Big Brother, a metaphor for omnipotent power and total surveillance, exercises complete control over the lives of the proles by presenting an inverted image of society in which slavery is portrayed as freedom.

Total control is achieved over the population of Oceania through various means. By controlling language with Newspeak, a specialized jargon designed to limit the range of expression and therefore thought, the Party controls the way people communicate, making it difficult for them to convey dissenting or heterodox ideas. Indeed, Newspeak makes it difficult for people to even think, since the strategy reduces their conceptual inventory, shrinking the range of meanings associated with signs and symbols, and, crucially, planting limiting reference frames in their heads. It even allows for contradictory thoughts to be held simultaneously, an effect Orwell calls “doublethink.”

In this way, and with a caveat we will come to, the distortion of reality in the Orwellian dystopia is analogous to the way an image is inverted in a camera obscura. The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an inverted image of the external world onto a surface, usually a screen or wall, via a small aperture or lens (see above illustration). It was an important tool for early artists and scientists in developing an understanding about the principles of optics and perspective. It works the way the lens of the human eye works. Natural history has made our brains such that the organ rights the image so we see the world in its correct orientation. However, while the brain naturally and normally corrects the physical image, ideology can invert understanding of history and society and lead the people to the wrong conclusion and thus habituate self-oppressive behaviors.

In The German Ideology, published in 1845, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels use this metaphor to convey the way ideology and false consciousness work in a capitalist society (presumably any socially-segmented mode of production). Under capitalism, people are alienated from the true nature of the social relations that govern their lives. This alienation can be seen as a distortion or inversion of reality, similar to how the camera obscura projects an inverted image of the outside world.

Marx and Engels write, “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”

In this interpretation, Marx and Engels’ work can be understood as an attempt to invert the prevailing ideologies and false consciousness created by capitalist systems, much like how the camera obscura inverts the external world, only in this move using critique to right the image that ideology inverts, what Ludwig Feuerbach, in his 1842 work The Essence of Christianity, described as the transformative method. Feuerbach was Georg Hegel’s star pupil. What the pupil did was stand Hegel on his feet, as Marx once metaphorically put it.

The paradigm of how this works lies the fact that billions of people think they were created by gods when really the gods are the invention of people—inventions some use to control others. The transformative method involved examining religious and metaphysical concepts and revealing in them their human, material, and psychological bases. Feuerbach sought to demonstrate how abstract ideas could be understood as projections or sublimation of human desires, emotions, and needs. Feuerbach argued that traditional religious ideas, including the concept of God, were not expressions of supernatural realities but were instead anthropomorphic representations of human qualities and ideals. In this way, he aimed to “transform” religious thought into an understanding of human nature and society.

“Feuerbach takes his point of departure from the fact of religious self-alienation, from the splitting up of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one.” Marx and Engels write. “His achievement consists in dissolving the religious world and revealing its secular foundations.” They then make a critique: “He overlooks the fact, however, that after completing this work the chief thing stills remains to be accomplished. The fact that the secular foundation lifts itself above itself and fixates itself as an independent empire beyond the clouds can only be truly explained in terms of the internal division and contradictions of this secular foundation. The latter must first be understood in its contradictions and then through the elimination of the contradictions practically revolutionized. For example, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family it must be theoretically criticized and practically transformed.”

There are several features of the totalitarian system Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four that deepen our understanding of ideological control by drawing our attention to inversions of the sort Marx and Engels describe. Here we come to the caveat I hated at a moment ago. For, in Orwell, the camera obscura is not a result of an intrinsically contradictory situation in need of resolution into a higher unity (or a lower one), but the result of a determined effort by the Party to control the population for the purpose of perpetuating the oppressive order. For Marx and Engels, estrangement from reality is a condition of the capitalist mode of production.

I noted earlier Orwell’s concept of doublethink. Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accept both of them as true. This concept is used to manipulate citizens into accepting false information and cultivating the ability to individuals to change their beliefs to align with the Party’s needs of the moment. The proles must be taught to the technique and are punished when they don’t acquire it. The Party uses slogans like “War is Peace,” “Ignorance is Strength,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” These are paradigmatic of the linguistic expression of inversion—of the camera obscura. The Party disseminated these slogans through various media, including posters, public speeches, and the two-way telescreen, which bears some resemblance to today’s social media system.

The Party constantly rewrites history to align with its current narrative, altering documents and records to erase the evidence that contradicts the present version of events. For the standpoint of historical materialism, the false history of the bourgeois historian is not the result of party demand; the bourgeois historian sees history through the ideological lens provided him by the social system in which he prospers. His failure to critically engage the system is what prevents him from writing history truthfully.

In both worlds, Orwell’s dystopia and Marx and Engels’ social history, false narratives make it difficult for citizens to access accurate historical information or remember historical events, since these are altered by the imposition of ideology. In Orwell’s world, the Thought Police monitor citizens for any signs of dissent or independent thought. The black helicopters hover above (in the 1984 film). Those who deviate from the Party’s ideology are arrested and subjected to torture until they conform to the Party’s beliefs. In Marx and Engels’ world, there are those who police thought, but, again, the thought control apparatus is more structural than consciously engineered.

Orwell’s warning is that when those in power control the narrative and manipulate reality to their advantage, they can maintain their authority and suppress opposition, while hiding their power. This recalls Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, which refers to the ways in which a dominant group, often the ruling class, maintains its power and control not just through force or coercion, but through ideological means that win the consent of the subordinate classes (I recently used Gramscian analysis in the essay The Paris Olympics and the War on Western Culture: Preparing the Masses for the New World Order). To secure its dominance, the ruling class establishes a cultural and ideological consensus that permeates society’s institutions, including education, family, media, and religion. This ideological dominance shapes the beliefs, norms, and values of the populace, making the existing social order seem inevitable—natural. By embedding a visione del mondo into the cultural fabric, the ruling class ensures that their power remains unchallenged, as subordinate classes internalize and accept their subjugation as the status quo.

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony highlights the importance of cultural and ideological struggles in the fight for political and social change and order, suggesting that any challenge to the dominant order must also engage in a battle of ideas and values. For Marxists, a key part of the battle is righting the image and therefore the truth of this world. Inverting the perception of reality not only deceives the populace, but also erases the truth, leaving citizens in a state of perpetual confusion and subjugation.

If we are to apply Orwell’s insights concerning the power of conceptual inversion, an ideological technique that covers for an undemocratic method of power and control, then we should be looking for instances where language is being manipulated and be able to reveal to what ends it is being so shaped. We should find the media employing euphemisms and carefully crafted language to make undemocratic actions appear democratic and acceptable. Phrases like “protecting national security” or “preserving law and order” might be used to justify actions that undermine democratic principle. At the same time, these slogans may also cover the opening of borders and depolicing. The populace is encouraged to simultaneously believe in the importance of democracy while supporting policies and actions that erode democratic institutions—the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus, corporate governance and neoliberalism, a vast military apparatus and global projection of transnational power, all wrapped in progressive ideology. Citizens may be told that curtailing civil liberties is necessary for their own safety, thus practicing a form of doublethink.

The media disseminates propaganda that portrays those who question the undemocratic methods as extremists or threats to democracy—enemies of the Party. Populists become redefined as fascists, while the actual fascists are presented as the defenders of democracy (I talked about this in yesterday’s essay Stripped of its Historical Bounded Features, What is Fascism?). Propaganda requires extensive historical revisionism. This is to erase past assumptions. The establishment manipulates historical narratives to any evidence of undemocratic actions or corporate control, portraying the actions and control as good and necessary, while portraying the republic as evil, the perpetrator of genocide, slavery, white supremacy—a completely illegitimate institution. This makes it difficult for citizens to discern the truth about their democracy’s history.

The policing of thought is comprehensive. Dissent or criticism of the establishment’s actions are marginalized or suppressed. People expressing concerns about the influence of corporations and the erosion of democracy are painted as conspiracy theorists or troublemakers or traitors—fascists and racists. Corporate governance is redefined as democracy while actual democracy is portrayed as mob rule. The media portrays corporate interests as essential to the functioning of democracy, framing the consolidation of power and wealth as a natural and beneficial outcome of democratic processes.

Sheldon Wolin, in his classic Democracy, Inc., beheld a world where the very institutions that claim to uphold democracy are, in fact, complicit in its erosion. The media, instead of serving as a watchdog, would be portrayed as a tool for shaping public perception and maintaining the status quo. The populace, deceived by carefully constructed narratives, unknowingly supports actions and policies that undermine the core principles of democracy, all while believing they are defending it.

Wolin argues that contemporary democracies, particularly in the United States, have evolved into “managed democracies.” In these systems, with elections and democratic rituals still in place, are largely managed and controlled by powerful elites, including the administrative state, corporate interests, and political parties. One key aspect of inverted totalitarianism is the overwhelming influence of large corporations on the political process. Corporations exert significant control over government policies, elections, and the media. This corporate dominance often occurs behind the scenes and is not always transparent to the public. Inverted totalitarianism is characterized by the apathy and political disengagement of the general population. While citizens still have the right to vote, they are often disenchanted with the political system and may feel that their voices have little impact on policy decisions. This disengagement serves the interests of the powerful elites who can manipulate the system without significant opposition. Inverted totalitarianism is thus marked by a lack of true accountability. While democratic institutions remain in place, they are often co-opted or manipulated by the powerful, making it difficult for citizens to hold those in power responsible for their actions.

Wolin emphasizes the role of media and spectacle in inverted totalitarianism. Political campaigns and news coverage become highly focused on entertainment and sensationalism, diverting attention from substantive policy issues and reinforcing a sense of passive consumption rather than active political engagement. This observation is also found Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. They present the thesis that mass media in the United States serves as a propaganda system that promotes the interests of elite groups. They developed a “propaganda model” that outlines how media content is shaped by a set of filters, including ownership, advertising, sourcing of information, flak, and ideology. These filters ensure that news coverage and political discourse align with the interests of powerful corporations and government entities, effectively “manufacturing consent” (a concept borrowed from the work of Walter Lippmann, similar to Edward Bernays’ “engineering consent”) among the public for policies and actions that benefit the elite. Chomsky and Herman argue that the media’s role is not to inform the public but to serve as a tool for ideological control and maintenance of the status quo.

Both Orwell and Wolin emphasize the manipulation of language and information to control public perception. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party uses Newspeak and propaganda to control thought; in inverted totalitarianism, corporate-controlled media and political messaging shape public discourse and obscure the true nature of power. Both authors highlight the undue influence of powerful entities. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party represents totalitarian control, while in inverted totalitarianism, it’s the corporations and elites who hold sway over the political process. Wolin’s concept of managed democracy and Orwell’s portrayal of a totalitarian regime both depict the erosion of true democracy; the appearance of democracy is maintained while its substance is hollowed out. The media plays a significant role in both Orwell’s and Wolin’s critiques. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the state-controlled media spreads propaganda, while in inverted totalitarianism, corporate media serve to distract, entertain, and promote the interests of the powerful. Both authors address the problem (success) of public disengagement. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, citizens are manipulated into apathy and obedience, while in inverted totalitarianism, the public’s disillusionment and disinterest in politics serve the interests of the elites.

In summary, Wolin’s concept of inverted totalitarianism provides a contemporary framework for understanding the erosion of democracy in a corporate-dominated political landscape. When viewed alongside Orwell’s insights into totalitarianism, it underscores the enduring relevance of their critiques and the importance of vigilance in safeguarding democratic principles and protecting the integrity of political discourse. Marx and Engels remind us that all this is possible because of the estrangement of people from aspects of their nature as a consequence of living in a class-divided society. In a capitalist system, workers become alienated from the products of their labor because these products are owned and controlled by others (namely the capitalists). This alienation manifests in several dimensions: workers are alienated from the products they create, as these goods do not belong to them; they are alienated from the production process, as they do not control the means or conditions of their labor; they are alienated from other workers, as competition and class divisions foster disconnection and hostility; they are alienated from their own humanity, as the repetitive and dehumanizing work undermines their creativity and potential. This estrangement distorts a worker’s perception of reality, making it difficult to understand his true place in the world and the nature of their exploitation. Because workers are separated from the products of their labor and the process of creation, workers struggle to see the broader economic and social structures that shape their lives, leading to a fragmented and incomplete view of the world. This is the work of the camera obscura.

“We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, so they want to make of the country miserable too,” JD Vance, Tucker Carlson Tonight, July 29, 2021

“You should never say anything to hurt anybody’s feelings, but when you look at all these interviews by JD, he was talking about how the Democratic Party has abandoned the traditional family. So this idea of trying to marginalize JD and make him some kind of bad person is not going to work. He’s not a bad person, he’s a good person.” —Lindsey Graham, Face The Nation, July 28, 2024

As is well known, JD Vance isn’t from Kentucky. Apparently that’s a big deal to the folx. Vance was born in Middletown Ohio, about a hundred and eighty miles from where both sides of his family lived in Jackson, Kentucky. To give you some perspective, that’s about the same distance as between Nashville and Knoxville. For Wisconsinites, it’s a little shy of the distance between Green Bay and Kenosha. That’s not very far. A tank of gas. Vance used to spend time during his summers in Franklin (much like I would spend time during my summers in Blackman, TN, and Terre Haute, IN).

And yes, it’s true, JD Vance is not the man’s original name. He was born James Donald Bowman. His parents were divorced when Vance was a toddler and he was adopted by his mother’s third husband, Bob Hamel. Vance’s mother, Beverly Carol, changed the boy’s name to remove his father’s name, choosing “David “ to keep his nickname “JD.” Somehow Vance was able to find a time machine and mastermind all this because it’s deceptive and he’s a bad person. Or haven’t you heard?

Rumor has it that Vance was never poor. In fact, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Why? Because he went to Yale obviously. But the truth is that Vance grew up in poverty, his mother addicted to drugs. The situation was so bad that he and his sister Lindsey were raised by their material grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, who had moved to Middletown from Jackson. He took the family name “Vance” in appreciation for his grandmother’s sacrifices (she had a tough life, as well). She was the woman who raised him.

These arrangements didn’t improve his life chances, though, not financially at least, so Vance took it upon himself to make things happen and joined the Marine Corps. With the GI bill in hand, Vance attended Ohio State University, where he graduated summa cum laude, which allowed him to secure a full-ride scholarship to Yale for the first year. It was there that a friend persuaded him to write a memoir about his life. It was there that he also met his wife, Usha (they have three children together).

When the book Hillbilly Elegy came out it was not marketed so much as a story about his family’s roots in Appalachia, albeit that piece is crucial, but more about the devastation wrought by globalization and regional deindustrialization and falling away from traditional values. For this reason, the Washington Post called him the “voice of the Rust Belt.” Today, his working class sympathies are getting him accused on X by right-wingers of being more of a socialist than a conservative. Those on the far left are billing him as a rich man (while voting for the party that represents the richest of men).

I haven’t read the book. I watched the movie a few weeks ago. I did research to fill in the gaps. It was easy to suss all this out. The man’s life is, after all, an open book. Wikipedia is not a bad source for things like this.

The experience has been impactful because I remember, in the 1980s, how globalization had emptied my state of electronic subassembly plants and apparel manufacturing factories. We were the subject of the documentary Global Assembly Line, which I often show my students. Nashville was a fading city then. I moved to Miami shortly after graduating high school in 1980 to make a life (lasted about a year in that crime-infested hellhole). Intellectually, with a specialization in political economy, I found Vance’s biography useful as a concrete personification of the harm caused by transnationalization. I find Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me useful for the same reason. I show that in class, as well. All this provides the context for the rise of populism and the persona of Donald Trump.

I also find Vance’s biography impactful because my family on my paternal side has roots in Appalachia. Although I only lived at the foot of the mountains for a little while as a kid, and did my PhD there in Knoxville, I still feel a connection. This connection was reinforced by regular visits to Sparta where my grandfather and his father before him lived, working in the coal mines up on the mountain. My great grandfather Austin was a blacksmith. (I own land up there.) And, of course, the time I spent with my grandfather, who, having come down from off that mountain physically, never left the mountain spiritually.

Our species are culture bearers, which means we humans take our culture with us wherever we go. I know this will sound cliche, but putting it simply goes like this, you can take the man off the mountain, but you can’t take the mountain out of the man. I’d like to believe there’s a little mountain in me. When I say I have roots in Appalachia, I don’t feel like I’m lying. And JD Vance is a lot closer to those mountains than I am.

We all know what this is about. I just wanted to take a minute and share my thoughts about it. By the way, my great grandmother’s name on my grandmother’s side was Mamaw. My grandfather’s name was Papa. Now my father is Papa.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”— Joe Biden, Philadelphia 2022

There is a lot of talk these days about fascism in the United States (and in Europe, as well). Indeed, persistent and widespread rhetoric characterizing Donald Trump and his populist supporters likely played a role in the attempt made on his life two Saturdays ago. The false characterization is based on selective and decontextualized features of fascism and mapping them over the Trump phenomenon— Trump is a demagogue who champions nationalism (as if that is a bad thing), and so forth. I discussed this in previous essays, so I won’t repeat myself here. What I want to do today is identify the inherent features of twentieth century fascism to help readers elaborate their capacity to see fascism in the twenty-first century. Mussolini and Hitler are long gone, but the corporate state they championed is not; it has only become entrenched, its power dissimulated by a culture of futility.

Before proceeding, I want to note that this essay was meant for Saturday, but I instead published The Paris Olympics and the War on Western Culture: Preparing the Masses for the New World Order for obvious reasons. However, the analysis presented there issues from my ongoing analysis of the New Fascism, so they were well together as a series.

I like sharing images of Biden in Philadelphia giving his “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech. Not because the imagery is fascistic; although, as Walter Benjamin told us in 1936 (see “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”), the aesthetics of fascism are not unimportant, fascism does not reduce to aesthetics. Expecting twenty-first century fascism to mirror its historical forms from the first half of the 20th century overlooks significant socio-political transformation and technological advancements that erase and reframe historic features of fascism (the content of Biden’s Philadelphia speech was an instance of such reframing). Indeed, only a few days ago, Biden declined to run for reelection in 2024 at the insistence of his own party. What dictator does that? Indeed, that the establishment could sack a President of the United States and tens of millions would turn on a dime to support his replacement is one more compelling piece of evidence for my thesis.

Fascism in its initial phase emerged in response to unique historical circumstances: economic crisis, post-World War I disillusionment, the rise of mass media and propaganda, to name a few. Today, digital communication, diversified economies, and global interconnectedness present new avenues—and challenges—for authoritarian political projects. Modern manifestations of fascism are seen in the exploitation of the uncertainty rapid change generates, in their deployment of sophisticated propaganda techniques, and adapt to democratic norms rather than overtly rejecting them. Thus examining fascism exclusively through a historical lens risks overlooking its contemporary variations and the more nuanced ways it might manifest and influence modern societies.

A sociologist aiming to understand these dynamics across time and space abstracts and generalizes the underlying features of fascism, isolating patterns that transcend specific historical contexts. This approach involves identifying core elements such as administrative rule, authoritarianism, propaganda, suppression of dissent, and weaponization of the justice system that reappear in different forms under varying economic, political, and social conditions. By focusing on these fundamental characteristics, and taking into account current global trends such the erosion of democratic norms and the increasing use of surveillance technology, the public can better anticipate how fascism might appear today. This broader perspective allows for a more comprehensive understanding of fascism’s contemporary presence in ways that may not be immediately recognizable but are equally pernicious. I begin with a (very) brief account of historical fascism.

The mid-twentieth century witnessed the rise of two prominent totalitarian regimes in Europe, namely Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. Both regimes implemented distinct economic models to consolidate power and achieve their ideological goals, with Italian Fascism striving to create a corporate state, and Nazi Germany establishing totalitarian monopoly capitalism. Too much can be made of the distinction, and in the current period fascism presents as a synthesis of these designs. Indeed, these frameworks not only shaped their respective economic systems and left lasting impacts on European history, but they influenced the post-war integration efforts that led to the formation of the European Union (EU).

Under the leadership of Benito Mussolini (1922-1943), Italian Fascism aimed to establish a corporate state where society was organized into regime-controlled associations or corporations. Corporatism sought to harmonize the interests of various economic and social groups, eliminating the appearance of class conflict through national unity. The Italian state acted as the ultimate authority, integrating all sectors of society into a cohesive framework designed to serve national goals. The result was a totalitarian regime where the state’s interests superseded class and individual interests, promoting a centralized economic structure.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government, in collusion with big banking and corporate power, implemented a form of totalitarian monopoly capitalism (see Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow). While maintaining private ownership of industries, the Nazi regime exercised extensive control over the economy, directing economic activities to align with its ideological and militaristic objectives. In the context of state managed production and resource allocation, particularly in sectors critical to rearmament and war efforts, major corporations such as Volkswagen, Siemens, Krupp, IG Farben, and Deutsche Bank played significant roles in this system, collaborating with the regime to achieve their goals.

One way of looking at Germany under Nazi control is that these corporations benefited from state contracts and support, effectively becoming instruments of the totalitarian state. The other way of seeing it is that the totalitarian state was the instrument of the corporate power. However, these are not mutually exclusive conceptualizations. Indeed, the relationship between state and economy under Nazism can be understood as a reciprocal, intrinsic integration where both entities simultaneously shaped and were shaped by each other in a dialectical process. It can be described, following the work of Barrington Moore, Jr., a “revolution from above.” (See Celebrating the End of Chevron: How to See the New Fascism.)

Under Hitler, corporations thrived on state contracts and support, becoming instruments of the totalitarian state by producing war materials, utilizing forced labor, and aligning with the regime’s goals. Simultaneously, the Nazi state relied on these corporations to bolster its power, using economic resources to fuel its expansionist ambitions and to consolidate control over society. This synergy created a feedback loop where state policies facilitated corporate growth and corporate power reinforced state authority. Thus, the lines between state and economy blurred, revealing a co-dependent relationship where each entity’s influence and strengths were inextricably linked to the other’s. This dialectical integration underscores how the state’s totalitarian nature and the corporate pursuit of profit were mutually reinforcing, leading to a unified, powerful apparatus that drove the Nazi war machine and sustained its oppressive regime.

Crucially, Hitler’s definition of socialism diverged significantly from that of traditional Marxian socialism, wherein the working class takes possession of the means of production and distributes the fruits of their labor on the basis of productivity. Hitler redefined socialism to align with a particular brand of nationalist and racial ideology (essentially the same thing in Hitler’s scheme), emphasizing unity and the subordination of worker interests to those of the nation as a racial community. In Hitler’s view, socialism was not about class struggle or the redistribution of capital as Marxism posited but about the collective welfare of the Aryan race and the German nation. Hitler envisioned a hierarchical society where the state would play a central role in organizing and directing economic and social life, ensuring that all elements of society contributed to the national interest. This form of socialism rejected the idea of class struggle and instead promoted the idea of a Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, where loyalty to the nation and race was paramount. 

As I explain in Republicans and Fascists, at its core, right-wing ideology revolves around the belief in a natural hierarchy and the inherent right of superior individuals to govern those deemed inferior, which this right is determined by divine right or genetics. The masses are seen as inferiors, as rabble to manage. This perspective asserts, albeit often not explicitly, that economic and social inequalities and political symmetry are natural and desirable, reflecting inherent differences in ability, character, and worth. Proponents argue that order and stability are best maintained when society is structured around these hierarchies, with leadership roles reserved for those who demonstrate superiority through power, wealth, and other markers of success. This ideology champions authority and the maintenance of established social structures, if they align with the ideology, viewing these as essential to the proper functioning of society. This is the identitarian model of power embraced by corporatists (social democrats) and progressives.

In contrast, the nationalism found in liberal democracies like the United States is generally based on civic principles, including democratic governance, equality before the law, and individual rights. To be sure, liberal democracies emerge from capitalist relations, liberalism establishing in principle the relative autonomy of markets from state control (see The Individual, the Nation-State, and Left-Libertarianism); but the political system is inclusive in nature, focusing on shared values and political identity rather than racial identity or ethnic purity (see Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism). American nationalism is rooted in the idea of a melting pot, where people of diverse backgrounds can coexist and contribute to the nation’s identity. Therefore, while both ideologies use the term “nationalism,” Hitler’s version was exclusive and racially defined, whereas the nationalism in liberal democracies emphasizes civic identity and inclusivity. The attack on nationalism and populism from the progressive left erases the distinction between different nationalisms to advance transnationalism (see An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion; The Democratic Party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism; The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism).

Historically, populism has been closely associated with popular democracy, as it emphasizes the power and voice of the ordinary people against the elite and the establishment. Populist movements arise from a recognition that the ruling class is disconnected from the needs and desires of the general populace, advocating for greater political accountability and responsiveness to the will of the people. In this sense, populism aligns with the principles of popular democracy by seeking to empower the masses and ensure their interests are represented in the political process. There are politics that appear populist, diverging from the ideals of democratic governance by undermining democratic institutions. The two-term presidency of Barack Obama is a good example of authoritarianism and warmongering moving under cover of populism. We also saw this with the two-term presidency of George W. Bush. In truth, both regimes advanced the establishment projects of neoconservatism and neoliberalism. The two terms represent a combined 16 years of establishment continuity. Adding Bill Clinton’s two terms and the term of George H.W. Bush, and the establishment enjoyed twenty-eight years of relatively undisturbed hegemonic control.

The ideological account of ultranationalism obfuscates many important fact about the historic instantiations of fascism. For example, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany indeed shared a common ideology that articulated the importance of nationalism, yet their ambitions extended far beyond national borders. Both regimes sought to assert their power and influence through aggressive expansionism, driven by a vision of reclaiming perceived historical greatness and securing resources to sustain their ambitions. They sought empire. In Italy, Mussolini’s fascist movement emphasized the restoration of Italy’s former imperial glory, invoking the legacy of ancient Rome to justify expansionist policies. Nationalist fervor was aimed at unifying Italians under a single authoritarian state, asserting dominance both internally and externally. Mussolini sought to revive Italy’s imperial legacy by conquering territories in North Africa, such as Ethiopia and Libya, envisioning a new Roman Empire. Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean aimed to challenge British and French colonial interests, expanding Italy’s influence beyond European borders.

Similarly, Nazi Germany’s nationalism was deeply intertwined with the goal of territorial expansion. Hitler’s regime propagated the idea of Lebensraum (living space) for the German people, which justified aggressive territorial expansion into Eastern Europe and beyond. The invasion of Poland in 1939 marked the beginning of World War II, driven by Hitler’s goal to secure Lebensraum and assert German dominance in Europe. Subsequent campaigns in Western Europe, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union aimed to establish German hegemony across the continent. The Nazis aimed to create a Greater Germany, incorporating ethnic Germans from neighboring territories and establishing hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe.

The nationalist and expansionist goals of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had profound consequences both domestically and internationally. Domestically, these regimes used militarism and propaganda to consolidate power, suppressing dissent and promoting a cult of leadership centered on Mussolini and Hitler. Internationally, their actions destabilized global peace and security, leading to the deadliest conflict in human history. Moreover, the expansionist policies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany fueled atrocities and human suffering on an unprecedented scale. In Italy’s African campaigns, atrocities against local populations and the use of chemical weapons underscored the brutality of imperial ambitions. The Holocaust, perpetrated by Nazi Germany, resulted in the systematic genocide of six million Jews and millions of others deemed undesirable by the regime.

Despite the collapse of these regimes, the corporate power structures that supported them endured and adapted to the post-war context. The aftermath of the war saw the dissolution and restructuring of many companies associated with the Nazi regime. However, several of these corporations, such as Volkswagen, Siemens, Krupp (later ThyssenKrupp), BASF, Bayer, and Deutsche Bank, survived the war and played crucial roles in the economic recovery and development of post-war Europe. Their expertise, infrastructure, and international connections were instrumental in rebuilding Germany and contributing to broader European reconstruction efforts. The European integration process, ostensibly driven by a desire to prevent future conflicts and promote economic stability, was significantly influenced by these economic actors.

I have in mind a future essay that will analyze the matter in greater depth, but briefly here, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), established in 1951 by the Treaty of Paris, marked the first step towards European integration. It aimed to pool coal and steel production among member states, making war between historic rivals France and Germany materially impossible. German companies, including those that had collaborated with the Nazi regime, were integral to this effort, leveraging their industrial capabilities to support the ECSC’s goals. The establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 through the Treaty of Rome further deepened economic integration. The EEC aimed to create a common market and harmonize economic policies among member states. German corporations, having rebuilt and restructured their operations, were key players in this process, contributing to the economic growth and stability necessary for European integration.

Thus, the corporate state framework of Italian Fascism and the totalitarian monopoly capitalism of Nazi Germany not only shaped their respective economic systems but also influenced the post-war trajectory of European integration. The collaboration between the state and major corporations in both regimes created a foundation for economic growth (albeit in the context of the falling rate of profit, hence neoliberalism), ultimately contributing to the formation of the European Union. This integration process, ostensibly driven by the lessons of the past and the desire for a peaceful and prosperous Europe, saw the involvement of many German corporations that had once been allied with the Nazi regime now playing pivotal roles in building a united and cooperative European community.

The European Union is a regionalist project. But regionalization is part of globalist ambition. We should explore that question since one of the claims that we are not currently in a fascist order is the fact of transnationalism. Isn’t fascism an ultranationalist project? Or is it globalism imperialism rebranded? Imperialism has traditionally referred to a state’s policy or practice of extending its power and influence over other territories through colonization, conquest, or political dominance. Historically, imperial powers sought to acquire new territories to assert cultural and political hegemony over subjugated regions and for economic exploitation, strategic advantage, etc. This often involved establishing direct control over colonies, imposing governance systems, exploiting resources, and extracting wealth for the benefit of the imperial center.

In contrast, globalism, or globalization, describes the contemporary trend of increasing interconnectedness and interdependence among cultures, economies, and societies worldwide. Unlike imperialism, which centers on hierarchical control and territorial expansion, globalism emphasizes the flow of ideas, goods, services, and capital across borders. It involves the integration of markets, the spread of technology and information, and the development of global institutions and norms that facilitate cooperation and coordination among nations. At least that’s the way the project is spun. The concept of neoimperialism complicates this distinction—if we agree that the distinction is something deeper than cosmetic. Neoimperialism refers to a modern form of imperialism that operates through cultural, economic, or technological dominance rather than direct political control or military conquest. In this sense, globalism, with its emphasis on economic integration and global institutions, is a continuation or evolution of imperialist ambitions under new guises. After all, under neoimperialism, powerful nations or corporations use global structures to maintain dominance over weaker states, influencing policies, and exploiting resources for their own benefit. Put another way, we are looking a distinctions without a lot of differences.

* * *

"Most conservatives would be fascists if you just didn't use the word but explained it in other terms."

— @TheOmniLiberalpic.twitter.com/LMAKndOxS0

— Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 (@JoshEakle) July 27, 2024

I hate to even bring Steven Bonnell aka Destiny into this, but since he is channeling a common sentiment, and the irony of the moment is perfect, I am compelled to. Bonnell describes the demand for uncritical faith in the corporate captured institutions of state power characteristic of fascism as democracy, while describing the confidence people have in a citizen they know the corporate state sees as an enemy of that state and ascribes to it fascism. He literally has it backwards. What he says here is the equivalent of smearing as fascists those Italians who grasped that Antonio Gramsci was persecuted by the fascist government in Italy (a corporate state) because Gramsci was a critic of fascism. He does this because, first of all, presumably the Gramsci case would be obvious to him, but he can’t work from the principle that makes it true (he is not very well read and he is the paradigm of the Gish gallop). Second, he absurdly thinks that fascism reduces to a charismatic strong man trusted by the people. He has tailored his definition of fascism to meet the Trump moment. It is typical of progressives to see administrative rule and technocratic control as democracy and populist resistance to concentrated power as fascist (I have an essay pending on the camera obscura that will help readers understand how ideology works).

Here is what Bonnell and so many others don’t care to understand. At its core, fascism is an authoritarian political ideology characterized by the concentration of power in a centralized government apparatus that seeks to control all or most aspects of public and private life. It emphasizes social hierarchies, the subordination of individual interests to corporate bureaucracy, and the use of state mechanisms to enforce conformity and loyalty to the prevailing ideology. This ideology involves the glorification of the government and sometimes its leaders, suppression of political opposition, and the use of propaganda to manipulate public opinion. Some sort of race thinking is usually present.

While historically associated with dictators like Mussolini and Hitler, contemporary interpretations must recognize that fascism can manifest in various forms of authoritarian governance, not necessarily dependent on a charismatic leader or a racist ideology. Economic control is typically exercised through the collaboration of government and industry, promoting a managed economy that aligns with the state’s objectives—which at the same means that the state is the instrument of corporate power, the ruling class. Fascism also relies heavily on militarism and the pursuit of strength and unity through aggressive means, fostering a culture of fear and obedience among the populace. The essence lies in the centralization of authority, suppression of dissent, and the imposition of strict controls over society.

Today’s Democratic Party seeks the consolidation of power within the form of a federal government but that seeks to regulate a myriad of aspects of public and private life through control over the judiciary, executive action, and expansive legislation, all coordinated by an unconstitutional, unaccountable, and unelected administrative-technocratic apparatus. The party’s emphasis on social hierarchies through identity politics, promoting selected groups’ interests over individual merit, and the alignment of government initiatives with corporate interests in industries like healthcare and technology, demonstrate the desire to subordinate individual interests to corporate bureaucracy.

The Democratic Party’s policy proposals, such as increased regulation and collaboration with large corporations on issues like climate change and healthcare, promote a managed economy aligned with state objectives, blurring the lines between government and corporate power. The party’s messaging and media strategies glorify selected government leaders while suppressing opposition through social media regulation and other forms of censorship, aiming to enforce conformity and loyalty to its ideology. The party’s support for defense spending and military interventions is an indication of the party’s militarism and the control of the geopolitical environment through aggressive means.

While the Democratic Party does not fit the historical mold of fascist regimes, the elements of centralized authority, economic control through government-industry collaboration, and the suppression of dissent are all present, indicating the presence of the core transhistorical features of fascism. We don’t have to travel down this road to perdition. It is possible to reclaim for the people a nation governed by democratic-republic values in the context of a system of sovereign nation-states ordered by classical liberal values. We still have the ballot box. To be sure, the rigging and fraud were historic in 2020, and they will try to steal this election, too, but if the numbers are great enough and the voters vigilant enough, we can prevent another four years of the West’s slide into the New Fascism.

Antonio Gramsci, Cultural Hegemony, and the Transnational Corporate Elite Project to Reorder Popular Conscious by Assailing Reason and Tradition

Update: 2:21 PM 7.26.24. So much to take in. The best part is when, instead of the self-described “love activist” who played the role of Jesus and her apostles feasting on the body of Apollo, the Greek god of sun, light, prophecy, music, poetry, and healing, they were served the living body of Dionysus, aka Bacchus, the god of wine, fertility (odd choice there), ecstasy, and theater. Apollo, who represents order, reason, and harmony was a no show. Instead we get the god of frenzied dance and rituals seeking to break down the barriers of individuality and transgress social norms. It was the perfect choice given the politics projected by performance. In gender ideology, this is known as “queering” the space. A key part of queering spaces, situations, and activities is to subvert traditional religious beliefs and practices, as well as Enlightenment values, and substitute for them debauchery and nihilism. Hence the role of Jesus played by a “love activist.” You have to grasp both postmodernist politics and the study of mythology to see this for what it was. Although, frankly, it sort of explained itself. Especially when the man in black with his testicles hanging out of his shorts rubbed up against the child right near the “love activist.”

Update: 11:28 PM. I forgot to include this bit. The Olympics are trying to deny the imagery from the opening ceremony. It was not the Last Supper but the Greek god Dionysus they say. “The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.”

The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings. #Paris2024 #OpeningCeremony pic.twitter.com/FBlQNNUmvV

— The Olympic Games (@Olympics) July 26, 2024

Ok, then, Dionysus (the blue Smurf looking dude) was served on a huge dinner plate at a table with an obese woman wearing a halo surrounded by drag queens and cross dressers arranged in such a manner as we see below. (The man in black talking to the child in yellow had his balls hanging out the whole time.) Do a Google search for other depictions of the Last Supper and you will see Jesus with the halo seen in the above image. There is not a chance that this is not mocking Christianity.

Mocking religion is fine. Free speech and all. We’re free to do that. I’m an atheist who has mocked religion many times. I have penned many essays on Freedom and Reason defending the ridiculing of religion. But that’s not really the issue here. The issue is the praxis, i.e., the propagandistic purposes of the performance. I clarify those in this essay. France’s Inter-LGBT President James Leperlier told the Associated Press, “We know in the LGBTQ community in France we are far from what the ceremony showed.” Leperlier is telling us that he wants a France that looks like what was on that stage. This is what I mean by imperial ambition.  Moreover, as I show, it’s not the first time the Olympics have been used for imperial ambition.

One last point. I am hearing from people that this is no big deal. Christians are silly for letting this trigger them, etc. Christians understand that this performance is not disconnected from the project to undermine the family and sexualize children. You don’t have to be a Christian to care about that. However, it is typical of the progressive style to deny something is what it is and, when they can no longer deny that, to say that it is no big deal and that others are overreacting. Such pompous posturing is an expression of the elitist mentally that infects the progressive mind.

* * *

The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics took place along the Seine River, highlighting French culture with athletes parading on boats. Departing from the traditional stadium setting, the event offered picturesque views of Parisian landmarks and featured performances contrasting France’s Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian heritage with decadent postmodern elite culture, one especially focused on elements of trans activism and stylized reflections of the Reign of Terror. The corporate media conveyed the visuals in rhetoric of parody and lightheartedness. In fact, the performances were mocking and subversive. They were, moreover, a clear signal of the presence of the New World Order and its strategy of cultural hegemonic programming.

One notable segment included drag queens parodying Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” which drew criticism from figures like European Parliament member Marion Maréchal. Critics argued that the performance mocked a sacred religious scene and accused the organizers of prioritizing “woke” culture over the traditional Judeo-Christian sensibilities. Indeed. That was its purpose. It was an instantiation of transgressive praxis trans activists call “queering space.” Organizers defended the performance as a celebration of diversity and inclusivity, reflecting contemporary societal values. But these aren’t contemporary societal values. Nor do these performances have anything to do with diversity and inclusivity. These are the “values” of the New Aristocracy, the transnational corporate elite and their subalterns. Performances like this are the products of the culture industrial project to disrupt contemporary societal values to prepare populations for the New World Order, organized by transnational corporate elites.

Using the Olympics to disrupt and reprogram mass consciousness is not a new thing. The 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin, Germany, under Adolf Hitler, were a massive propaganda event for the Nazi regime. Berlin had been awarded the Games in 1931, before the Nazis came to power, but once Hitler assumed control in 1933, the regime quickly recognized the event’s potential to promote National Socialism, the ideology organizing the establishment of totalitarian monopoly capitalism, a system of corporate state control (fascism) not unlike the present-day system being mapped over the world. The Nazis spared no expense in preparing for the Olympics, constructing new facilities like the Reich Sports Field and the iconic Olympic Stadium, all designed to impress visitors and showcase German efficiency and prosperity. (I have published several essays on the contemporary problem of fascism. I have an essay pending on the transhistorical and corporate elements of fascism and their relationship to the European Union. I will provide links to several of these essays there. Stay tuned.)

The regime aimed to demonstrate the supposed superiority of the Aryan race through athletic excellence and efficient organization, ostensibly to bolster national pride and international prestige. More fundamentally, spectacle and personification were designed to prepare mass consciousness for the new world order Hitler envisioned, an order based on corporate statism. The Games provided an opportunity for the regime to soften and sublimate its radical social policies to create a facade of normalcy. The opening ceremony was indeed a grand spectacle, featuring a torch relay from Olympia, Greece, to Berlin, which introduced a tradition that continues to this day. Hitler used the event to present an image of a peaceful, strong, and united Germany. The Nazis skillfully used media, including film and radio, to broadcast the event globally, commissioning filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to create the documentary “Olympia,” which presented a glorified image of the Games and Nazi Germany.

To understand what happened last night in Paris, I find helpful the insights of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist theorist (author of the Prison Notebooks), who introduced the concept of “cultural hegemony” to show how dominant groups in society maintain their power not merely through coercion but by manufacturing consent, that is by controlling mass consciousness, a feat enabled by elite control over the sense-making institutions, including the culture industry, educational institutions, mass media, progressional associations, and regulatory agencies. Cultural hegemony refers to the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values—so that their worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm, the new social logic, or common sense. Ironically, Gramsci’s theory, meant to expose how elite domination worked, became the blueprint for elite domination going forward, as corporatists (social democrats) and progressives colonized the sense-making institutions in part using Gramsci’s insights. The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics was not extraordinary when you understand what is happening to Western Civilization.

In Gramsci’s view, cultural hegemony is achieved through the institutions that produce and disseminate culture, including education, the media, religion, and, crucially, the family, which is why family relations and the organic beliefs and values that sustain them are the main target of elite propaganda and traditional institutional disruption. Although the praxis of queering space was not an element in Gramsci’s criticism, he would certainly have recognized the praxis as a tactic in a project to disorder common sense. Queering space is the act of overthrowing heteronormativity by disrupting the most basic truths of gender and gender relations and the importance of norms safeguarding children and women. Drag queens in this context represents the practice of “woman-face” where men appropriate feminine stereotypes and exaggerate them to degrade women and emasculate men. The costumes are clownish for a reason: they’re aimed at children. the queer project is essentially pedophilic in character. This is what is being mapped over the West. It’s why public school classrooms are festooned in Pride Progress propaganda, etc.

Transnational corporate capitalism, characterized by the globalization of markets and the concentration of economic power in multinational corporations, has extended this hegemony on a global scale and, with it, established cultures of futility and perversion intentionally designed to confuse and disorganize the masses, undermine the family, and take control over individuals. These corporations wield commanding influence over global institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the United Nations (UN), which play pivotal roles in shaping economic policies, health guidelines, and political decisions that affect billions of people worldwide. Professional associations, such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), its mission to promote the medical-industrial project of producing simulated sexual identities through body modification euphemized as “transgender health,” depend on the successful disordering of social logics organic to the species to accumulate ever more power and privilege.

The people must see what they see and resist the woke mind virus. Global institutions, ostensibly created to promote international cooperation and development, exist to serve the interests of the global corporate elite. The policies advocated by these institutions reflect the priorities of transnational corporations and wealthy nations, leading to economic practices that exacerbate inequalities and entrench corporate power. For example, structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank require countries to adopt neoliberal economic policies, such as austerity and the deconstruction of democratic governance structures, which benefit transnational corporations at the expense of local economies and governments. Today, austerity and antidemocratic machinations have been come standard operations. This is the function of climate hysteria and pandemic preparedness. All these institutions embrace and project the elite queer project, which is being pressed into the rest of society across institutions private and public. The spectacle of last night’s opening ceremony was a high-profile moment to push the agenda even deeper into mass consciousness, to make paraphilias appear popular and normal.

The media, as part of the broader culture industry, plays a crucial role in maintaining cultural hegemony. Owned and controlled by a small number of powerful conglomerates, the media shapes public perception by framing issues, selecting what news to report, and how to report it. This concentration of media ownership limits the diversity of viewpoints and reinforces the dominant capitalist ideology. News outlets and entertainment media propagate narratives that support consumerism and the legitimacy of the corporate state, while marginalizing or vilifying alternative perspectives, including populism and substantive critiques of corporate power and authoritarian governments. As outrage was expressed across the West at the mocking of Christianity, the media’s role was to reframe it as exceptional and playful.

What the world saw last night was the work of the culture industry. Cultural hegemony works in realm of beliefs and values. Hollywood, popular music, social media platforms (X excluded), television—the culture industry portrays traditional institutions such as Christianity and the family in a negative light, while elevating the perversions of gender ideology. This can be seen as part of a broader effort to undermine these institutions’ authority and replace them with values that align more closely with corporate interests, such as bureaucratic collectivism and technocratic control. By mocking or devaluing traditional family relations and religious beliefs, the culture industry contributes to a cultural environment where the corporate worldview is normalized, and alternatives are marginalized. It replaces the family with the corporation and the old religion with the neoreligion of gender ideology and other postmodernist notions.

What is the New World Order? It’s a globalized world where national boundaries are effectively erased, and economic and political power is concentrated in the hands of a world elite who control all sense-making institutions. It’s not a conspiracy. It isn’t a Jewish cabal. It is right in front of you if you only open them and see it for what it is. Fully integrating populations of the world into the new order is facilitated by the establishment of cultural hegemony which is mean to close your eyes to all it. Through corporate media, the culture industry and transnational institutions, the global elite promote values that support their interests at the expense of democratic governance, local cultures, and national sovereignty. Because the nation-state system is dependent upon the Judeo-Christian traditions and Enlightenment principles from which it emerged to sustain its integrity, those traditions and principles must be destroyed.

But we can stop it if we understand and organize against it. Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony provides a powerful framework for understanding how transnational corporate capitalism maintains its dominance in the contemporary world. The corporatists certainly understood that, and used the man’s work, penned in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, to mastermind their long march through the institutions. By controlling global institutions and shaping cultural and moral narratives, the transnational corporate elite perpetuate a system that serves their interests while marginalizing alternative viewpoints and undermining traditional institutions. Understanding cultural hegemony is crucial if are to challenge and promote instead a more free and just world, a world governed by democratic-republic values in the context of a system of sovereign nation-states ordered by classical liberal values.

Over on X, Colin Rugg has identified five big lies that the media is telling in a comprehensive effort to rewrite history. These are worth sharing and elaborating with facts, which I will add here. There are more lies than these five, and there will be more lies forthcoming, so we need to become hyperaware of the Democratic Party-corporate media fog machine. Here’s Rugg’s tweet:

REPORT: The media is currently rewriting history in an effort to help the Harris campaign.

Here are 5 hoaxes the media has launched in the past week.

5. CBS claims Trump is lying by saying Harris donated to Minnesota Freedom Fund, bailing out “dangerous criminals” during the… pic.twitter.com/HEjlJnE8Kx

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 26, 2024

The first big lie is that Kamala Harris was never border czar. What is happening here is a paradigm of historical revisionism and memory-holing. The media spent the past week scrubbing and revising their own reports since 2021 that Kamala was in charge of the border. I have already shared with you clear evidence that makes it absolutely clear that Harris was the border czar—still is, as far as I now. Obviously, she has utterly failed in her assigned task. At one point, Harris even admitted never going to border. Her rationalization? “I haven’t been to Europe, either.” Way to bolster one’s bona fides.

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A post shared by Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger)

The second big lie is that Harris was not a DEI pick for Vice President. I went back through the record this morning. The record makes clear that Harris was absolutely a DEI pick. In March 2020, President Biden vowed that he would pick a woman. By at least June, those around Biden were pressuring him to make that woman a black woman. In July, Biden said he had a group of four black women from which he would make his pick. In August, he picked Harris. This is what DEI is: choosing people not based on the accomplishments, qualifications, and talents, but on the basis of gender and race. (Biden did the same thing with Ketanji Jackson for the Supreme Court.)

Here’s what I don’t understand (I do understand, but for rhetorical effect…). If DEI is so great, if this is why it exists, then why would anybody deny that a person is a DEI pick or hire? Wouldn’t they celebrate the success of the project? This is a common tactic with progressives. They want DEI, the practical expression of their identitarian worldview, but if you talk about what DEI actually involves, then they accuse of you of “racism.” They do the same thing on the trans issue. They talk about the importance of trans rights, but when you talk about what that actually entails, for example, transgressing child safeguarding norms, or, for another example, the trampling of women’s rights, they accuse you of “transphobia.” These are thought-stopping cliches. They smear you to silence you. I get it all the time and they can just fuck off with that shit.

Third, JD Vance had sex with a couch. Have you heard this one? (I will spare you the details, but if you are interested, go here.) Bizarre, I know, but there are no depths to which Democrats and progressives won’t sink. The rumor was that Vance told the story in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. There is no such story in the book. This didn’t happen. To be honest, I am not sure it matters if it had. Puberty is hard. The struggle is real. Some boys will fuck anything. But Vance isn’t a couch-fucker, so if you accuse him of it, you would be wrong. However, it’s a weird rumor for progressives to spread given that they insist on curating obscene children’s books for public school libraries that go well beyond couch-fucking. Indeed, had Vance been a Democrat, his couch-fucking technique might have been included in sex education curriculum (maybe add a butt plug to the story).

Fourth, President Biden dropped out of the race to save democracy. We all watched this unfold in real time. That’s not what happened. It is well known that Biden refused to drop out of the race. Like many Democrats, Biden doesn’t know how bad off he is. His wife, Jill, who serves as his nurse and minder, has been his enabler-in-chief (she is on the cover of Vogue). The reality is that Biden was forced out by top Democrats and donors who threaten to withhold money from the campaign and even invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. What we witnessed was a coup that replaced Biden with a DEI pick. Turns out, the Democratic Party is not very democratic (of course, we knew that from the 2008 and 2016 primaries).

Fifth, CBS claims Trump is lying by saying Harris donated to Minnesota Freedom Fund, a fund that was bailing out individuals accused of serious crimes during the George Floyd riots. The fact is that Harris promoted the fund on X and encouraged people to donate. She did a lot more than that, as you will remember. She encouraged the rioters on many occasions. She even called Jacob Blake, a Kenosha man who tried to knife police officers during a crime in progress, and praised him (Unacceptable: Evers and Biden Inflame Insurrectionist Passions). The crime? He was kidnapping children.

Biden and Harris’ intervention helped feed the rioting that destroyed much of Kenosha. Those were the riots in which a young man named Kyle Rittenhouse had to defend himself against career criminals and pedophiles that make up the street-level troops of the Democratic Party. (I was publishing articles on all this in real time. Here is a sampling: Suicide by Cop and Victim-Precipitated Homicide; A Clear Case of Self-Defense: The Trial of Kyle Rittenhouse; Rittenhouse’s Real Crime and Corporate State Promotion of Extremism; The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males. What’s This All About? My articles on Antifa and Black Lives Matter violence are many and I may return later to share links to them.)

* * *

An update on the attempt to revise the history of the assassination attempt on Trump (see FBI Director Feeds Narrative Questioning True Facts About Assassination Attempt), The New York Times published an article today reporting that “a detailed analysis of bullet trajectories, footage, photos and audio by The New York Times strongly suggests Mr. Trump was grazed by the first of eight bullets fired by the gunman, Thomas Crooks. Subsequent bullets wounded two rally goers and killed a third.” That’s what I said from the beginning (see They Tried to Kill Donald Trump Yesterday).

Kamala Harris proposes a regime of "equity" based on a simple principle: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. This should sound familiar.pic.twitter.com/PO6vUSrJ5m

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 25, 2024

Christopher Rufo deals in oversimplifications (he’s not dimwitted like James Lindsay, though), but he gets shit done and there’s a very real problem here. If you want to understand Harris’ worldview, then watch this collection of video clips Rufo shares in the above tweet (original to End Wokeness, an X profile I recommend you follow). Harris is telling you what’s in store for you and your family in these clips. She defines “equity” not as accounting for difference for equal opportunity’s sake (for example, keeping women’s sports for women). She means making everybody equal in outcome—despite the obvious fact that we are all different.

Harris wants to be your Handicapper General. Have you heard that name before? I am about to arm you with some potent weaponry against the collectivists if you haven’t. Find Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron” and read it. Here, I will make it easy for you—just follow the link. I will also tell you about F.A. Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom and his 1960 The Constitution of Liberty. We have to make sure to use our vote in the most effective way to keep this woman out of office. You think Biden was bad; this woman will be an unmitigated disaster for free people everywhere.

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argues that central economic planning and government control over the economy inevitably lead to totalitarianism and the erosion, even erasure of individual freedoms. He warns that well intentioned efforts to achieve economic equality and social justice through extensive state intervention result in a loss of democracy and personal liberty. Have you heard? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Hayek contends that economic freedom is the foundation of personal and political freedom, and that decentralized decision making and open markets are the best safeguards against the dangers of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Hayek doesn’t object to social security and other interventions and programs to help and protect the vulnerable. He rejects the centralization of power in the hands of the corporate state, in administrative rule, and technocratic control—the very things Harris and her ilk seek. In other words, Hayek foresaw the emergence of the high-tech estate system of the coming neo-feudalism (hence the book’s name). No doubt Hayek’s book influenced Vonneguts’ 1961 story.

I assign my students a summary of The Road to Serfdom to read in my Freedom and Social Control class. It’s the second thing I ask them to put their eyes on—right after “Harrison Bergeron.” I also assign a chapter from Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. Perhaps it is this book that really got Vonnegut thinking (probably both). (After those three words, I have them read Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto, the forward to which was penned by yours truly.)

Whereas The Road to Serfdom is a polemic, The Constitution of Liberty is Hayek’s comprehensive treatise on the principles of a free society. He emphasizes the importance of the individual liberty, limited government, and the rule of law, with an emphasis on equal treatment.

Hayek argues that real liberty is freedom from coercion and that it is best preserved through a system of general rules that apply equally to all individuals. He critiques collectivist and interventionist policies, advocating instead for a framework where individuals are free to pursue their own goals within the parameters of a legal structure that protects private property and voluntary exchange. The book emphasizes the value of classical liberalism in fostering human flourishing. He’s right. 

See, when you’re told that these leftwing maniacs are liberals, they are misdirecting you by misusing words. They want you to think that liberalism is a form of collectivism. Then you won’t want it and, by rejecting it, you reject the very thing that will liberate you and your family. Harris is not a liberal. She is in fact profoundly illiberal. Harris is a progressive. Progressivism is the authoritarian ideology of the corporate state, what Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism,” which operates via a mass control strategy called “managed democracy.” 

Which reminds me. There is one more Hayek book that should be on your “must read” list: The Fatal Conceit, published in 1988. Here, Hayek critiques the fundamental assumptions and ideological foundations of socialism, arguing that the hubris of socialist thinkers lies in their belief that they can design and control complex societies through centralized planning and the command economy. By dismissing the importance of culture and tradition, and the decentralized nature of knowledge, socialism inevitably leads to inefficiencies and the erosion of individual liberties. Once more, Hayek provides us with a powerful defense of classical liberalism and a warning against the dangers of collectivist praxis.

Democrats and the corporate media go on about “the threat to democracy” presented by Donald Trump and the “MAGA extremists” who represent the second coming of fascism. In fact, it’s the other way around. Kamala Harris and the progressive left, if allowed to prevail in November, will continued the managed decline of the American republic and the consolidation of political and economic power in the hands of the transnational corporate elite. They are building a world neofeudal order and your role is to be that of a serf. We have to stop it at the ballot box. Talk to your friends and family. Make sure they understand what’s at stake. Then vote like your life depended on it. Because it does. For without freedom, there is no life worth living.

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In local news (the authoritarian rot is at all levels): “Mayor [Eric] Genrich broke state and federal laws and violated the Constitutional rights of numerous citizens. His actions were so egregious that a federal court took the rare step of stripping Mayor Genrich of qualified immunity,” Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said in a statement.

A statement from LeMahieu says the settlement includes a payment of 200 thousand dollars from the City to cover legal fees and a public statement from Mayor Genrich indicating that he will not illegally record citizens in City Hall again. LeMahieu says the Mayor’s actions have cost the City of Green Bay more than 500 thousand dollars.

What an authoritarian little shit this mayor is. On top of his violation of the privacy rights of those he claims to represent, he flies the Pride Progress flag over City Hall in clear violation of the First Amendment (see City of Green Bay Violates the First Amendment and Flying Pride Again—Or Are They?). Democrats have no respect for civil liberties. At all.