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“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

Words have meanings—the underlying sense or significance—and usages—how they are employed in language. When people say that meanings and usages change over time, they’re making a trivial observation. The relevant and substantive questions are how fast is the language shifting and why? Normally, language evolves slowly. Here there may be some sort of natural-history-like logic at work. However, when a language changes rapidly, a project to alter the meaning system to some end—be it commercial, ideological, political—is indicated.

For centuries, the words “gender” and “sex” existed in the English-speaking word as synonyms. The concept of gender was used by scientists in studies of animals and plants to refer to reproductive biology. It wasn’t until later, much later, only recently, in fact, and not everywhere, that the project to alter mass understanding of men and women by changing the meaning and usage of “sex” and “gender” appeared. At its back, the project enjoyed the power of the academy (eventually even 4k-12), culture industry, mass media, and the medical-industrial complex. Dictionaries dutifully revised definitions. Everything changed in a unified way. That sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident.

Yesterday, I recounted on Freedom and Reason an X (Twitter) exchange with users, unwittingly perhaps, committed to obscuring the meanings of sex and gender (see “The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands”). I was told, as if I didn’t know, that not all of the world’s languages past and present are gendered. That fact does not erase gender, of course. “How could propagation of the species in those cultures occur if there were no gender?” I asked. After all, plants have gender, I noted (I’m fond of noting this, as regular readers know), and plants have no culture or language. The flower contains a stamen (male organ) or pistil (female organ). It’s rather straightforward.

When I say that “sex” and “gender” are synonyms, I mean they are interchangeable. However, the term sex is used in a few different but related ways. Sex, like gender, may refer to the female and male of a species of plant or animal. Sex is also an action, i.e., how organisms reproduce. When an X user said he had never heard of anybody wanting “to have gender” with another person, I mocked him, but he was onto something. Apart from its use as a grammatical subclass (not entirely, of course), gender refers to reproductive anatomy, but can also be a verb in the sentence: “He gendered her correctly.” As I noted in yesterday’s blog, sex can also be a verb, as in “The farmer sexed his chickens,” i.e., he determined (not assigned) their gender. Like plants, chickens have genders. The male chicken we call a “rooster.” Although he could never list them on his social media profiles, the rooster has “he/him” pronouns. The female chicken is a “hen.” She has “she/her” pronouns. The hen is the one who lay the eggs.

It is a relatively easy matter to show that gender is a term in natural history, used by scientists to describe the reproductive anatomy of plants and animals. However, none of those who push the queer propaganda line will make any effort to enlighten themselves about it. They may run across the evidence supporting my argument, but they would never produce it themselves, opting instead to repeat the assertion that “while sex refers to this, gender refers to that,” or treating gender as if it were a category appropriated from grammar and that’s just fine as long as it furthers the political-ideological agenda of decoupling of sex from gender. Appropriating the category to use as a synonym for sex is entirely inappropriate for precisely the same reason.

In her article “Gender in Plants,” published in 1998 in Resonance, ecologist Renee Borges writes, “Recent studies have shown … that many hermaphrodite plants do not contribute genes equally through male and female function to the next generation. Individual plants range from being relatively more or less male to relatively more or less female. This finding coupled with the modular and indeterminate nature of plant growth and reproduction led to the important perspective that sex expression in plants is a quantitative phenomenon, i.e. it depends on the relative proportion of reproductive units of both sexes within an individual plant.” Did I note the name of the article? Yes, “Gender in Plants.”

“From this point of view,” Borges continues (the bold lettering appears in her text), “the term plant sex denotes the various mating systems of plants such as monoecy or androdioecy [i.e., sex as action] while the term plant gender refers to the relative representation of male and female function in the entire plant [i.e., reproductive anatomy and gamete size]. The phenotypic gender of a plant then signifies the relative proportions of male and female reproductive units in terms of flowers, pollen or ovules at any given time on the plant (see Box 1). The functional gender of a plant is its relative contribution to the next generation via the male and female functions in terms of how many offspring it has sired or how many seeds it has matured.” This lines up well with the history of these two terms, with “sex” denoting action or activity and “gender” noting kind or type.

I am including Box 1 from Borges’ article so readers can see the mathematical precision with which gender can be determined. Note that the equations are adapted from a text published in 1984 by Lloyd and Bawa. This would be David Graham Lloyd, a fellow of the Royal Society in London who made landmark contributions to the field of plant reproduction, especially his work studying plant gender. Gender is a precision term used in natural science—a fact trans activists refuse to accept or admit.

As readers can see for themselves, gender is not a social construction in the sense that it is culturally or historically variable or exists as an internal subjective sense of one’s gender that may be at odds with one’s gender. Gender is an objective matter, a term denoting the reproductive anatomy and gamete size of plants and animals. This is universally true, and this truth is not changed by postmodernist deconstructionist jargon or the commercial language of so-called gender medicine.

In 2018 article in Plant Biology, Pannell and Arroyo write (and here I will bold the letters for readers), “The extent to which individuals in a hermaphroditic population deviate from the expected gender of 0.5 can be appreciated in terms of their ‘phenotypic’ quantitative gender, or in terms of their ‘functional’ gender (Lloyd 1980). A plant’s phenotypic gender describes its allocation of resources to one sexual function relative to the other, while its functional gender reflects not so much its investment strategy, but its actual success as a male versus female parent.”

“Thus,” they continue, “plants that transmit more of their genes to progeny via their pollen than their ovules will have a male‐biased functional gender (i.e., a gender < 0.5). This bias may reflect a male‐biased phenotypic gender or sex allocation, but it may also simply be the outcome of who mates with whom, i.e., because the individual happens to be a better than average sire. Similarly, a hermaphrodite may be functionally more female than male not through an adapted sex allocation strategy but simply because its seed production is less strongly pollen‐limited. Hermaphrodite individuals that vary in their floral morphology, such as those in distylous populations, may also vary in this way in their phenotypic and/or functional gender.” Note that the authors remind the reader that when they’re talking about gender they’re using it synonymously with sex in the case of phenotypic gender.

Before readers remark upon the gender fluidity of plants, a phenomenon anomalous in mammals, they should first admit that they cannot talk about hermaphroditic individuals without first acknowledging the gender binary. An individual cannot be both genders without two genders existing a priori. Moreover, before objecting to my well-known counter that the clown fish, which can change genders, is not relevant to the question of whether humans can, my point here is that gender is a scientific term native to natural history. I would no more argue that sapiens are plants than I would that they are clownfish, even though all three categories are gendered organisms.

In 2007, Thomas Meagher, in the pages of the Annals of Botany writes (here, too, I will bold some text), “Evolutionary models of gender evolution have, of necessity, posited genetic effects that are relatively simple in their impacts. Emerging insights from developmental genetics have demonstrated that the underlying reality is a more complex matrix of interacting factors. The study of gender variation in plants is poised for significant advance through the integration of these two perspectives. Bringing genomic tools to bear on population-level processes, we may finally develop a comprehensive perspective on the evolution of floral gender.”

Meagher recognizes that the use of gender in this way is an old one. “The general theme of the present review is evolutionary transitions among different gender states. One reason that the evolution of gender polymorphism has attracted so much attention is that the diversity of gender states found in flowering plants represents many independent evolutionary events. Moreover, gender variation in plants has a long history of scientific investigation. Darwin (1877) was among the first to focus attention on gender variation and its evolution in plants.”

But it’s even older than Darwin. The word “gender” entered the English language from Old French in the late fourteenth century. Originally, it was used to refer to “kind,” “sort,” or “type,” and was derived from the Latin word “genus,” meaning the same. Our species sapiens is the only extant species of the genus Homo. Our species, like all animal species, in turn contains two genotypes, female and male, which almost always present as corresponding phenotypes (derived from the Greek phaino, which means “appearance”). You may have noticed that the word genotype bears some resemblance to “gender” and “genus”—and “gene,” as well Indeed, genos is Greek for offspring or race, which indicates “kind,” “sort,” or “type.”

Thus when asking, “What gender is this animal?”, you are asking what kind, sort, or type of animal this is. Is it a dog or a cat? It’s can’t be both. (You don’t have to be a biologist to know that.) If there is a language that lumps house pets such that there is no separate word for different kinds, it doesn’t mean they are the same kind of animal. It just means that the language is constrained in such a way as to make it more difficult to differentiate between two things that look alike in some ways, or have a similar relationship to human, but aren’t alike in other ways. We expect that the answer given to this question in a culture with a language permitting accuracy and precision would be appropriate to the species or breed in question. “This is a dog.” “What kind of dog?” “A sheep dog.” “Is it a boy or a girl?” “How would I know? It can’t tell me.” “Does it have a dick?”

As I have noted in past essays, the use of “gender” in botanical contexts can be traced back to at least the seventeenth century, and possibly even earlier. As used in plant biology today, yesterday’s botanists used it in the same way: to differentiate between male and female reproductive organs or structures in plants. Its synonym “sex” entered the English language from Old French in the fourteenth century, as well. It’s derived from the Latin word sexus, which refers to the state of being either female or male. So we are back to kinds, sorts, and types. Thus, in its earliest usage in English, “sex,” like “gender,” denoted biological differences between female and male types of animals, particularly in terms of reproductive anatomy and functions. This usage remains prevalent today, particularly in scientific and medical discourse.

Let’s return to the common objection made by those ignorant of biology and history that gender is a noun subclass. I have had individuals insist that gender as currently used by queer theorists and the medical industry was derived from there and never referred to reproductive autonomy. They never bothered to ask themselves the obvious question, What does gender as a noun subclass do in language? It is really entirely arbitrary? Why do the words “feminine” and “masculine” appear when discussing gender as a grammatical category? Do they look like they might be related to these words: “female” and “male”? Indeed. The Latin femina means “woman” The Latin masculus means “male.”

But, to make sure, let’s consult a blog called Gender World, subtitled Musings of a woman who happens to be transgender, which I take to mean that a man wrote the entry (although elsewhere the individual claims to be “gender non-conforming,” a construct that once again requires the a priori existence of the gender binary, but could go either way gender-wise). In the entry “What is Gender?” (written in 2018 or early 2019) the blogger does the typical amateur move of uncritically turning to Merriam-Webster, reporting that gender as “a subclass within a grammatical class (such as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (such as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms.”

Did you catch the word “sex” in there? The blogger also shares definition 2a, the synonym “sex” defined as “the feminine gender,” b clarifying gender in this usage as denoting “the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex” (clarifying later on that “trait” is defined as an inherited characteristic). With what sex would “the feminine gender” be associated? That’s a question that’s only difficult for those who cannot define what a woman is. There is a part c to the 2 definition, one I am not sure would have been included then, namely the term “gender identity,” inserted without definition (because it’s not an actual thing). That the blogger didn’t share this part despite its political centrality in gender ideology strongly suggest that Merriam-Webster added the term after the blog was posted.

The blogger goes on cite an article by David Haig who, in a study published by Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2004, reviewed academic articles (over 30 million!) from the years 1945-2001 to determine the occurrences of the words “sex” and “gender.” Haig found that at the beginning of the period, the usages of the word “sex” were more frequent than usages of the word “gender.” This is because in the ebb and flow of synonyms, sex had become preferred. By the end of the period, however, uses of “gender” outnumbered uses of “sex,” especially in—wait for it—the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Haig traces the shift to the introduction of the concept of “gender role” in 1955 by the notorious John Money. But it was not until feminists took up the term to distinguish the cultural and social aspects of differences between men and women from biological differences, he insists, that “gender” returned to prominence. Interestingly, he found that, “[s]ince then, the use of gender has tended to expand to encompass the biological, and a sex/gender distinction is now only fitfully observed.” As we all know, that would change with the ubiquitousness of queer theory and the appearance of gender affirming care.

In this first chart, tracking data drawn from the Science Citation Index (SCI), Haig found that, from the late 1970s, gender began a steady increase in frequency of use, partly at the expense of sex. He notes that this increase in frequency of the use prompted the FDA to adjust their guidelines in 1993 to require studies of “gender differences” in all new drug applications. Obviously, then, gender differences here would refer to genotypic and phenotypic differences between females and males; in the scientific literature, gender was understood as a synonym for sex and guidelines adjusted to include the word as used in this sense because of its growing popularity. This is an important fact to grasp, as the appearance of gender in the medical literature, when not a marketing term for gender affirming care, is often wrenched from context or assumed to mean “gender identity” all along (more on this concept in a moment).

The next two charts track data Haig gathered from the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). As you might expect, preference for the term gender rose rapidly, and it is in these disciplines that gender takes on its propagandistic meaning. This corresponds to the emergence of feminist, postmodernism, and queer politics that sought to differentiate the gender (or sex) roles that have existed in the gender binary since time immemorial (not just in human animals, but in animals across the kingdom), by reducing the roles to cultural and historical variability (which anthropologists an sociologists had never done), disconnecting them from reproductive anatomy and gamete size, and claiming that gender is purely a social construct and therefore arbitrary or mystified. It was from here that the medical-industrial complex, through the mechanisms of psychiatry and sexology, powerfully enabled by Robert Stoller’s invention of “gender identity,” picked up the ball and ran with it, substituting for scientific materialism and safeguarding vulnerable populations the pecuniary interests of the corporate state. (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy.)

On the basis of this article, Gender World concludes that, “prior to 1955, the word ‘gender’ referred to grammatical categories used in some languages to form an agreement between a noun and other aspects of language, like adjectives, articles, pronouns, etc.” But this conclusion is plainly wrong (so is Haig’s assumption, dictated by his periodization) and, moreover, misses what Haig’s content analyses reveals.

First, as I have shown in this and other essays, the conclusion is false; gender was being used to refer to reproductive anatomy and gamete size centuries before Merriam-Webster revised the definition of gender. Even hints of this fact escape the blogger. “Old English made use of grammatical gender, but mostly stopped with Middle English,” he writes. “We still have a few references to gender in Modern English, such as pronouns (he and she), and nouns associated with some animals (man/woman, stallion/mare, ram/ewe, etc).” Why would there be distinctions among animals as “man/women,” “stallion/mare,” “ram/ewe,” etc.? I already showed why in an essay dedicated to this topic, Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms, where I explain that the names for males of different species vary (man, stallion, ram, dog, tom, hog, etc.). I also note that the pronoun for males are the same regardless of the species. They are “he/him.” If you refer to a hog as a “she,” the farmer will correct you. 

Second, Haig’s content analyses reveal a project across the arts and sciences to sharply increase the frequency of the word “gender” to represent both a political-ideological and medical science term, initially expanding the word to include the social and cultural aspects identified by anthropologists and sociologists decades earlier in the concept of the “gender role” (still useful and valid concepts), while gaslighting the public by claiming that “gender” was originally a system of grammatical classifications ironically used to refer to the gender (today, strictly the sex) of animals and things (as kinds and types). In other words, only very recently was “gender” repurposed by queer theorists and medical corporations to manufacture an ideological construct and commercial term for political and marketing purposes. But I am repeating myself.

This is not the only time a project has materialized to rapidly alter mass perception by manufacturing words and meanings. In a detailed content analysis of major media sources published in Tablet in 2020, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” Zach Goldberg tells us that, “[y]ears before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest.” Not just unrest. As I have shown, like queer theory, the jargon of critical race theory colonized the medical science space (see, e.g., my October 2020 essay The Problem of Critical Race Theory in Epidemiology: An Illustration.)

You can find Goldberg’s article here, and I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing, but I want to pull a few charts from the piece to make the point immediate for you. In the first two charts, the reader will see the drastic increase of reference to “racists” and “racism” occurring around 2010 and a corresponding rise in the percentage of the population who reported that racism in the United States is a problem—this after a long decline. If you ever needed to see the evidence of how the corporate media constructs and drives mass perception of social problems, Goldberg delivers it in spade (but then so did Haig).

Indicated by the next several charts, the use of terms like “racists” and “racism” were buttressed by a slew of novel or academic terms developed by progressive social scientists and historians and pushed out by the corporate media and culture industry: “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” and “institutional racism”; “racial privilege” and “white privilege”; “racial hierarchies,” “whiteness,” and “white supremacy”; “racial disparities,” “racial inequalities,” and “racial inequities.” In this way, the alleged effects of “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” etc., were identified as causing racial disparities and inequities without any demonstration of the validity of the alleged independent variables or their explanatory power. No matter, the terms comprised the assumption in force. Reinforced by race hustlers like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and through constant repetition, the abstract facts of racial disparity became their own cause, especially since even suggesting they were explicable by reference to causes outside of the antiracist narrative risked being labeled a racist.

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. ” —George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

I write in my essay Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words: “By reducing definitions to power projection, to the manipulation of reality, proponents of [the postmodernist] view … mean to delegitimize the primary purpose of words, which is to describe and convey reality with accuracy, integrity, and precision (language’s evolutionary function), and repurpose words for exclusive use as tools for fabricating reality. When words cease to be regarded as a reliable means of describing and conveying truth, those who control the means of idea production can more readily rationalize their aims and desires by blurring the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.”

I continue, “Any of you who have more recently attended college and taken any humanities and social sciences courses, which is often required by the regime of ‘general education,’ will have learned that what is and its nature (the ontological) is determined by how we think about such things (the epistemological). It is very likely that you will have been told that the former is the result of the latter and, further, that we must not allow the masses to get their hairy little paws on the machinery of meaning production.” This is hegemonic across worlds of academic and corporate science: life in the woke progressive bubble is technocratic reflex. Ideology has replaced truth.

In the German Ideology, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels describe perfectly queer theory and the postmodernist attitude:

“Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. … The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. 

“Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.”

This type of revolutionary philosopher has not disappeared from the West. Indeed, his presence is today ubiquitous—at least in the academy where I spend too much time. This type of revolutionary—and his devotees—believe that reality is reducible to words and that by denying the words or changing their meanings, he can deny and change reality.

But truth has its own integrity. The man and his followers are fools.

I was reminded today on X that there are languages that are not gendered. Of course, this is true. But that fact does not erase gender. How could propagation of the species in those cultures occur if there were no gender? Even plants have gender, I explained, and plants have no language. The flower contains a stamen (male organ) or pistil (female organ). It is as if people have literally never before heard about the birds and the bees.

One X user said he never heard anybody say they wanted to have gender with another person, as if the dual meaning of sex as description and action negates the fact that gender and sex are synonyms. If fact, if sex were only used to describe an action, then gender should become the exclusive term referring to gamete size.

Sex as action is, of course, shorthand for sexual intercourse. Since sex organs are what is engaged in this type of intercourse, it makes sense. Also, sex can be a verb, as in the farmer will sex his chickens, i.e., determine their genders. Yes, chickens have genders. The male chicken is a rooster. The female chicken is a hen. Hens lay eggs.

“Ironically, in seeking to free people from sexism, these efforts have instead reinforced it by inventing a plethora of identity labels for people who do not conform to narrow conceptions of gender roles rather than challenging those norms. This is not progress. Using my own experiences as an example, I argue instead for a return to a separation of sex and gender, and a rejection of this new gender ideology.” —Kaylee Walker.

This paragraph is from an interesting and well-written essay, “Gender Policing on the Left,” published by the Queer Majority. The first sentence is correct, as is the second; however, a problem occurs with the third sentence: the author says that she will argue for a return not to a distinction between gender (i.e., sex) and gender (or sex) role but for a separation of sex and gender. But sex is gender, and the reasonable left is always going to undermine its politics if it accedes to language falsely making a distinction between what have been synonyms for six centuries.

I have written quite a lot on this. For examples, see Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms; Sex = Gender Redux: Eschewing the Queer Linguistic Bubble; Scientific Materialism and the Necessity of Noncircular Conceptual Definitions; The Science™ and its Devotees; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy; Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module; The Queer Project and the Practice of Deceptive Mimicry; Men Do Not Have Periods; Lesbians Don’t Like Penises, So Our Definitions Must Change; There’s No Obligation to Speak Like a Queer Theorist. Doing so Misrepresents Reality; The Casual Use of Propagandistic Language Surrounding Sex and Gender; Changing the Language of Gender does not Change the Definition of Rape; The Body as Primary Commodity: The Techno-Religious Cult of Transgenderism.

For ideological purposes and pecuniary interests, queer theory and the medical-industrial complex (see Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds; Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; The Function of Gender Ideology in Rationalizing Physician Harm; Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology) take the anthropological/sociological concept of gender role, which is simultaneously (sub)culturally and historically variable and rooted in the objective reality of gender (the size of one’s gametes) and the natural division of labor along those lines, drops “role” from the concept, and repurposes the concept of gender to represent either behavioral expressions of masculinity and femininity, as if these could only arbitrarily correspond to reality, or the construct of “gender identity,” a nonfalsifiable entity either formed through trauma or akin to a soul capable of inhabiting the wrong body, an invention used to justify altering bodies physically and physiologically to realize the “authentic self.”

The reasonable left needs to return not to a separation of sex and gender, but a distinction between gender, on the one hand, and gender role on the other, while rejecting Stoller’s entity “gender identity.” There is no reason why a woman cannot express herself in culturally or historically masculine ways. Moreover, because of overlapping distributions, there are women with comparatively more masculine traits and attitudinal and behavioral proclivities. The same is true for men obviously. But there are no men with women’s brains, as Hirschfeld claimed in the early twentieth century. Like all other animals, humans are our bodies. Of course there are men who present with traits more commonly associated with women. This has always been true and is entirely normal. What is not normal is telling a tom boy that she is really a boy. That’s what queer ideology teaches girls—it teaches them to be estranged from their bodies. This estrangement is yet another feature of the alienation that marks a society in which the masses make history, but do not control the history they make, and are falsely conscious of the situation because they lack a cogent theory of the world.

A long time ago, in the 7th century CE, there lived a man named Muhammad ibn Abdullah. Muhammad was a merchant, managing caravans engaged in trade mostly in the Arabian Peninsula, including trade in slaves.

At age 40, while allegedly meditating in a cave on Mount Hira, located near Mecca, Muhammad told others that he had received a revelation from an angel named Gabriel. Gabriel commanded the merchant to “Read aloud.” Muhammad told the angel he could not, as he was illiterate.

The angel then embraced Muhammad and compelled him to recite the words of what would become the first verses of the book Quran, which means “Read aloud.” This hallucination continued over the next twenty-three years until his death. Muhammad filled his book with Gabriel’s words. People believed Muhammad, and his hallucinations became a new religion.

The book details a system of rules and values known as “sharia,” which guide all aspects of life. Muhammad called his hallucinations “Islam,” which means “submit” or “surrender.” Submit and surrender to what? To the will of an invisible entity he invented. The entity is known to the world as “Allah,” which means “god” in Arabic, but the entity has 99 names.

The book tells its adherents of a Day of Judgment, where they will be held accountable for their deeds. This is possible because each of them has an ethereal entity inside them known as the “ruh” (plural “arwah”) or soul. Paradise or hell awaits ruh based on faith and actions.

Today, Muhammad’s religion boasts of more than a billion and a half followers.

Joseph Smith Jr. was born in Vermont in 1805. He grew up in western New York during the Second Great Awakening. Smith’s family, involved in this religious fervor, was influenced by various denominations, including Baptist, Methodists, and Presbyterians.

At the age of 14, Smith claimed he had a vision in which God and Jesus Christ appeared to him. In 1823, Smith said he had an encounter with an angel named Moroni who revealed the existence of an ancient record written on golden plates buried in a nearby hill called Cumorah. According to Smith, these plates contained the religious history of ancient inhabitants of the Americas, including their interactions with God.

Smith was allowed to retrieve the golden plates in 1827. With the help of divine instruments the Urim and Thummim, he translated the writings on the plates into English. This resulted in the Book of Mormon, which he published in 1830. The book tells the story of several groups of people who migrated from the Middle East to the Americas thousands of years ago. It covers their religious teachings and eventual encounters with Jesus Christ after his resurrection.

The Book of Mormon is considered scripture by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith claimed additional revelations. Today, the LDS Church is one of the fastest-growing Christian denominations in the world, with millions of members worldwide.

L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific writer of science fiction, he developed a system that he said could address various psychological issues and improve mental well-being. He called this system “dianetics,” publishing a book by that name in 1950. This was when he was around 40 years old.

In Dianetics, Hubbard conceives of an idea he calls the “reactive mind,” which was the source of irrational fears, insecurities, and other emotions and psychological problems. He claimed that, by using his system, individuals could rid themselves of the negative influences of the reactive mind (called “engrams”) and achieve a state called “clear,” where they would be free from these mental burdens.

Hubbard pivoted from dianetics and created a church he called “Scientology.” According to the secret doctrine of the church, there exists an entity called “Xenu.” Xenu was ruler of the Galactic Confederacy, an ancient civilization that existed 75 million years ago. Xenu gathered large numbers of people from various planets, including Earth, under the guise of tax audits, and then subjected them to mass genocide by exterminating them with hydrogen bombs.

The disembodied spirits of these victims, called “thetans,” were implanted with false beliefs through a complex process, which has had lasting effects on humanity. The thetan is the individual’s true identity. According to doctrine, the state of the thetan greatly influences an individual’s personality and outlook on life. Traumas experienced in past lives are believed to affect one’s current state of mind and behavior.

One of the religion’s rituals is called “auditing.” It’s a central technique used to address spiritual trauma and improve the state of the thetan. During auditing sessions, a trained auditor guides an individual through a series of questions and exercises aimed at uncovering and resolving past traumas and negative experiences.

Scientology cannot boast of the numbers enjoyed by Islam or even Mormonism, the numbers of devotees to Hubbard’s religion may be in the millions.

In his late-30s, Robert Stoller, a psychiatrist and dabbler in dream telepathy, discovered an entity he called “gender identity,” which he said exists independent of the characteristics of physical body.

Stoller came upon the idea while working with patients experiencing body dysphoria. What these individuals told him was interpreted as persons experiencing a profound incongruence between their birth sex and the gender they really were.

Stoller took this as a genuine experience and created a system that differentiated biological sex (reality) from gender identity (mythology), arguing that, while the former is determined by physical anatomy, the latter is a deeply ingrained sense of being female, male, or something else.

Stoller taught his followers that “core gender identity,” which he said was a fundamental and unchangeable sense of being male or female, develops by the age of three.

Stoller’s ideas played a key part in the development of gender affirming care, or GAC, which involves chemical and surgical intervention to make a man into a woman. Thus, in this way, bodies of believers are physically and physiologically altered to produce simulacra of the gender identity they believe is their authentic self.

All these doctrines have this in common: concepts central to the respective ideologies enjoy no empirical support. Moreover, their core concepts are conveniently nonfalsifiable. In the case of gender identity, while Stoller’s construct is not falsifiable in terms of itself, the gender of a person is empirically determinable. If a man claims to be a woman, a check of gametes will determine whether this claim is true in nearly every case. But the followers of Stoller’s religion will always fall back on the nonfalsifiability of faith belief. Like the Muslims, Mormon, and Scientologist, the authentic self is a subjective claim impervious to disconfirmation.

The philosopher of science Karl Popper used the falsifiability criteria to distinguish scientific theories from non-scientific ones. According to Popper, for a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable; that is, there must be conceivable empirical observations that could potentially refute or disprove the theory. In contrast, nonfalsifiable claims cannot be subjected to empirical testing or falsification, often because they are formulated in a way that makes them immune to disconfirmation. This characteristic can pose challenges for assessing the validity or reliability of such claims within scientific or rational discourse.

If medicine is to proceed scientifically, then it must not rely on concepts that are impervious to disconfirmation. This is why the practice of auditing is not part of medical practice (that and Hubbard’s hostility toward the profession, not to mention psychotherapy has an established presence). At least presumably. After all, gender affirming care rests on a concept impervious to disinformation and Stoller’s construct is part of medical practice. It justifies the application of powerful drugs and hormones and surgeries to transform gendered bodies into simulations of their opposites.

On April 7, Slate published this piece by Naomi Kanakia, “Wait Until You’re Older.” Kanakia, a trans activist, tells his audience, “I write books for trans teens and their parents. It’s becoming harder and harder to imagine a future for them that’s not riven with strife.” Perhaps not now that an entire industry is devoted to grooming children into falsely believing they’re not the gender they are and seeks to make them permanent medical patients (see Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; The Body as Primary Commodity: The Techno-Religious Cult of Transgenderism).

But you don’t have to imagine a past in which the lives of gender nonconforming children were not riven with strife. If they haven’t forgotten the world of only yesterday, they know that nobody from our generation (I was born in 1962) or the generations before ours, would remember one of every five of us identifying as LGBTQ. That’s not because they were hiding their identities from us. It’s because the queer contagion hadn’t yet swept up impressionable youth into the fad. There were other fads. What Kanakia and his ilk want is for us to forget this and to assume that what is novel is eternal.

“Last year, a staggering 22 states across the U.S. banned gender-affirming care for minors,” writes Kanakia. “The conservative politicians behind this wave of legislation didn’t care that it went against the near-unanimous medical consensus that parents and doctors ought to be able to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether puberty blockers, hormones, or other interventions are what’s needed for a given teen to flourish and live their life authentically. These lawmakers felt the consensus was wrong, that the government should take medical transition entirely off the table, at least until the kids grow up and can make ’informed,’ adult decisions. And in their eyes, there was a bonus: Removing the option of affirming care would surely lower the temperature in afflicted homes; it might well preserve the parent/child relationship until the threat hopefully passed—trans teens could no longer blame parents for not “allowing” them to transition. Parents were now free to say ’There’s nothing I can do. You’ll simply have to wait until you’re older.’”

Articles like Kanakia’s function to cause anybody conditioned by the eternal present to forget the world as it was only a few years ago and feel as if the travails of the trans child has always been an issue, that children have always enjoyed access to “gender affirming care,” only to suffer the oppression of fascists who, suddenly and for arbitrary political and religious reasons, are passing laws forbidding it. The motive to restrict this to those who can consent to it couldn’t possibly be from the rise of GAC and growing awareness of its horrors (see Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy). It must be because they’re bigots.

Kanakia would never consider whether suicide rates were through the roof back then. In fact, for the general population, after falling in the mid-90s for males and the mid-70s for females, suicide rates for both genders rose steadily during the period of the proliferation of gender clinics and gender ideology—as well as SEL programming and the proliferation of wellness centers in educational institutions. When the data are disaggregated, among youth aged 10-24 years, suicide surpasses homicide in 2008 and soars, while homicide remains relatively stable at less than one percent per 100,000 (and, as readers of Freedom and Reason know, is concentrated in black-majority inner city neighborhoods). As Business Insider reported in 2019, at that time, suicide among Gen Z is the second leading cause of death, and “a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age.”

It is necessary to believe instead that those denied their authentic selves always preferred death to living as the gender they were born as—to believe that there were millions whose authentic selves were being denied. It is a lie.

George Orwell warned us about organized forgetting in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the story, the Ministry of Truth is a government institution responsible for historical revisionism and the dissemination of propaganda. The Ministry of Truth manipulates information to align with the ruling Party’s ideology. Its workers constantly rewrite history to support the Party’s agenda. The memory hole is a mechanism used by the Party to eliminate inconvenient information. Documents, records, and even people are thrown into incinerators, erasing any evidence of their existence. This ensured the Party’s control over the historical narrative and suppresses dissent by eliminating opposing viewpoints.

Likewise, Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist and filmmaker, wrote about the concept of the “society of the spectacle” and the notion of the “eternal present.” In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord explores the idea that modern society has become dominated by images and representations. The spectacle is a system of alienation and social control, where authentic human experiences are replaced by mediated representations. The eternal present refers to the way in which the spectacle perpetuates a state of constant distraction and superficiality, preventing individuals from engaging with the past or the future.

We are close but not yet submerged in Orwell’s world, and while Debord spectacular society feels ubiquitous, the truth is still available—if you seek and speak it; and the truth is that there is no historical record of centuries of families torn apart because states prevented the administration of puberty blockers, opposite sex hormones, and surgeries to minors. The “need” for health care and compelling everybody to accept gender ideology is recent invention, manufactured by the medical-industrial complex and the crackpots of sexology and queer theory.

To believe articles like Kanakia’s have any validity is to pretend as if we haven’t been alive for decades to know that this is novel phenomenon—and for those who know a bit more to know that this is a social contagion, only this one invented and sustained by power and profit. We were the freaks in high school. We were the clique who would have known before any body about the boys and girls who thought they were the other gender but were oppressed by parents and government. Our generation and the generation before us protested a lot of things, but we never protested sexed reality because there was nothing to protest. Quite the contrary. We were busy trying to get into each other’s pants.

Imagine Christian nationalists didn’t just exist but were aggressively demanding that you affirm their doctrines and practices. Imagining being told that you had to obey the rules of their ideology. Imagine, moreover, that they had the state at their backs to make sure that you did. You would be disciplined and even terminated from employment for refusing to so do. Imagine a DEI program set up along the lines of Christian nationalist thinking. When you complain, they’d tell you that is merely a matter of being kind to Christian nationalists. What’s so hard about that? Respecting Christian nationalists takes nothing from you. What are you, a bigot?

I could have used Islam as my example. Imagine being punished at your work place for failing to obey sharia and its rules against blasphemy. I could have used Scientology, as well. Imagine being required to believe in the existence of thetans and to refrain from criticizing dianetics and the practice of auditing. There are a myriad of other ideologies that make useful examples, but I trust you get the point: A free society depends on individuals being able to believe what they will and others not being compelled to share in those beliefs. I cannot be free if I cannot choose my beliefs. The institutions of a free society must not compel belief any more than they forbid it. Censoring and compelling belief are the signs of a totalitarian society.

What many woke progressives don’t seem to understand, in addition to failing to understand why it’s wrong to compel others to obey the rules of their ideology (a thickness that results from their position in the structure of authority), is that they are, by conditioning people to accept the beliefs of others through the use of coercive tactics, making a whip for their own backs. Put another way, when—and I argue that it is a matter of when not if if this keeps up—another authoritarian ideology replaces the current one as the hegemonic system in American society, progressives are sure to squeal when their speech is censored and compelled.

This is what’s so frustrating about the very long moment of the present time. When right wing activists stand on public grounds or enter public buildings or speak at city council and school board meetings, they are condemned for their presence and speech and the police quickly mobilize to remove them from the premises. The media sparks and spreads panic about their presence and warns of the end of democracy if their presence is tolerated. Right wing voices aren’t allowed to demand election integrity; their actions are portrayed as efforts to undermine free elections. There are many other examples. Whatever the subject, the right wing activist cannot convey his point on his own terms because he doesn’t control the media frame. Progressives do. He is a priori bad and wrong and therefore his speech illegitimate.

When left wing activists do all the same things that the right activist does, indeed, much worse things, they are celebrated as standing up for the democratic values of a free society. Their violent protests are described “mostly peaceful.” Their occupation of public spaces and buildings is portrayed as an exercise of free speech, not as an insurrection. The double standard signals the character of hegemonic power. Progressives have captured our institutions—the academy, the culture, the government, the mass media, the university. People ask how we can know this. The conditions confirm it. Because they are the hegemonic power, progressives are able to frame their politics as normality and cast those who dissent as a dangerous mob.

We don’t need to flip all that by putting the right wing parallel in power. We need to instead push progressivism out of our institutions and establish the principle that our institutions are for everybody and should govern themselves in the neutral fashion that a free and open society demands.

* * *

In a recent conversation, I was accused of articulating heterodox ideas. But my ideas are heterodox only in relation to the orthodoxy of the university, captured by progressive ideology. In the light of the population at large, the same ideas become orthodox. It may be heterodox in the academy to deny that men can be women, but, if we take everybody’s beliefs into account, that assertion is exposed as campus orthodoxy. Most people don’t believe men can be women. Part of the reason they don’t is because they intuitively know that can’t be true. In the absence of a corrupting ideology, their experience with the actual world tells them that. Anybody who had spent any time on a farm knows this is true. The other part of this is that they look at the crackpot ideas of the left and call bullshit because their own bullshit beliefs inoculate them against other bullshit beliefs. We might mock this, but not all bullshit is of the same quality.

People in the academy, many of whom came straight out of high school to pursue their undergraduate college and advanced degrees, live in a bubble where they come to believe that what are bullshit ideas constitute the orthodoxy. This happens to people when they exist in a cloistered environment. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences. It probably didn’t escape readers that, in the natural and physical sciences, the crackpot “theories” of CRT and queer theory are much less pronounced. Some of these ideas aren’t even tolerated. It’s in the humanities, where imaginations run wild, and in the social sciences, disciplines that risk corruption by ideology because their finding are less sure than their hard science counterparts, that we see smart people believing stupid things.

The desire of trans activists to compel others to affirm their imagined identities is the same desire of progressive academics to demand ideological conformity in the humanities and the social sciences. They only way the junk beliefs can appear to have any truth value is if everyone suspends their disbelief and for whatever reason upholds the validity the doctrine. It’s the same logic of affirmation that trans identifying people depend on to ease their self-doubts.

I’m old school. I’m a scientific materialist. I don’t accept crackpot ideas. And I never will.

Part of the elite project known to observers as the managed decline of the American Republic—and of the West generally—is Islamization. Because of the Muslim’s faithful adherence to his irrational beliefs, Muslims are a desirable constituency for the New World Order based on the corporate state model (global neo-feudalism).

This is a long haul project. For example, France, in the 1970s, used Muslims and the prayer room as weapons to break industrial unions. I write in a November 2019 essay, Culture Matters: Western Exceptionalism and Socialist Possibility, “By the 1970s, for example, the government of France, under … president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, sought in Islam ‘a stabilizing force which would turn the faithful from deviance, delinquency or membership of unions or revolutionary parties,’ here quoting Paul Dijoud, minister for immigrant workers. ‘When a series of strikes hit car factories in the late 1970s,’ [Kenan] Malik writes [in Multiculturalism and its Discontents], ‘the government encouraged employers to build prayer rooms in an effort to wean immigrant workers, who formed a large proportion of the workforce, away from militant activity.’”

I conclude, “Keeping newcomers away from native-born workers is an effective strategy to disorganize the national proletariat. How effective? In the 1950s, roughly one-third of French workers belonged to a trade union. Today, less than one in ten,” noting that “[t]his mirrors the decline in organized labor in the United States during the same period.”

I have been writing about this problem for years, so I recommend you search my blog for more stories (one of my summer projects is to index my essays by topic to make it easier for visitors to search content). Others have written about this in much greater detail and for much longer than I have. I urge you to read work by Bruce Bauer, Chris Caldwell, and Douglas Murray, and, as always, speeches and talks on this subject by Christopher Hitchens. Sam Harris also has useful things to say about this matter.

In the United States, we’re now seeing students at Ivy League universities across the nation participating in Islamic prayer. Not a few of them are converting to the religion, which, as many of you know, is also a political ideology, indeed, a totalitarian one. Islam offers its followers a complete plan for life. We already have cities in the United States that are effectively Muslim enclaves governed by representatives of that religion. They’ve even sent their ideologues to Congress.

Because the West is free and open, there is always a risk that enemies of human reason and freedom will establish a fifth column in the countries they’re colonizing. Make no mistake about it, the West is being colonized by culture bearers who are bringing norms and values antithetical to the those of the enlightened West. It is vital for you to know what is at stake here. We need to speak frankly about this. You do not want you children and grandchildren to live under Islamic theocracy.

In the United States, our rights are unalienable and derive from the laws of nature or nature’s god (the creator of deism)—that means that these rights are inherent in each of us whether or not we are religious. In Islam, matters of law and governance are handed down from a particular construct of god known to the world as Allah. Allah’s rules were dictated to an ancient people by an illiterate merchant/warlord who claimed he received them from an angel in a cave. In Islam, there are no rights intrinsic to the individual—what you may or may not do is determined not by your will but by the will of Allah, determined by clerics who interpret the law, a system called sharia.

Islam literally means “submission” or “surrender.” The demand is that you submit to the authority of Allah’s earthly clerics, that you surrender your liberties and rights to their interpretation of the judgment of Allah. There is no more totalitarian ideology than Islam; it is the paradigm of clerical fascism. You should be deeply concerned about the proliferation of Muslims in your communities in light of the rejection of assimilation and the embrace of multiculturalism by the administrative state. Things have already gone badly off the rails in France, Germany, Sweden, and the UK.

There’s more to come. The war package that recently passed Congress comes with moneys designated for establishing centers in Gaza to prepare Muslims for relocation to the United States. We have to resist this. However, rather than restricting immigration from Islamic societies, which any sane and rational government would do, the Democrat Party is ramping up the importation of Muslims into your communities. This is in addition to the millions of illegal immigrants that have already crossed the border, with large numbers of Muslims among them.

We have a lot of work to do to repair the damage Democrats have wrought. That work begins at the ballot box this November, when we remove these traitors from office.

The Mayor of London is a Muslim.

The mayor of Birmingham is a Muslim.

The Mayor of Leeds is Muslim.

Mayor of Blackburn – Muslim.

The mayor of Sheffield is a Muslim.

The mayor of Oxford is a Muslim.

The mayor of Luton is a Muslim.

The mayor of Oldham is Muslim.

The mayor…

— Laurence Fox (@LozzaFox) May 4, 2024

The time is late. Lawrence Fox knows what time it is. Read his tweet posted above, but for your convenience, here it is in an easily digestible form:

“The Mayor of London is a Muslim. The mayor of Birmingham is a Muslim. The Mayor of Leeds is Muslim. Mayor of Blackburn—Muslim. The mayor of Sheffield is a Muslim. The mayor of Oxford is a Muslim. The mayor of Luton is a Muslim. The mayor of Oldham is Muslim. The mayor of Rochdale is Muslim.

“All this was achieved by only 4 million Muslims out of 66 million people in England: Today there are over 3,000 mosques in England. There are over 130 sharia courts. There are more than 50 Sharia Councils. 78 percent of Muslim women do not work, receive state support + free accommodation. 63 percent of Muslims do not work, receive state support + free housing. State-supported Muslim families with an average of 6 to 8 children receive free accommodation. Now every school in the UK is required to teach lessons about Islam.

“Has anyone ever been given an opportunity to vote for this?”

The answer to Fox’s presumably rhetorical question is no, peoples of the West were never asked whether they wanted this. Muslims colonized the West over time, establishing themselves in our communities, and using the democratic machinery to rise to power—like Adolf Hitler did before abolishing democracy.

The West has to act now and decisively if our children are to inherit the Enlightenment. Otherwise, they will toil as slaves in a New Dark Ages where women will be bagged like garbage and homosexuals hanged from cranes and thrown from towers.

I have written quite a lot about matters of immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism. Here are only a few of my contributions to understanding our situation: An Architect of Transnationalism: Horace Kallen and the Fetish for Diversity and Inclusion; Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism; The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate; Multiracialism Versus Multiculturalism.

Christopher Hitchens writes in his memoir Hitch 22, “[T]he very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as ‘white’ and ‘oppressive,’ mass illegal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon. (These people are not called nihilists for nothing.) Of all of this we were warned, and Salman was the messenger. Mutato nomine et de te fabula narrator: Change only the name and this story is about you.” 

Multiculturalism is not a well meaning practice of cultural tolerance. It’s a strategy to lower our defenses so the colonization of the West can proceed unabated. The Democratic Party is the party enabling the colonization (see The Mass Immigration Swindle; “It’s Not Going to Stop.” The Managed Decline of the American Republic; Democrats, Immigration, and Neoliberalism; The Democratic Party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism; The Progressive Politics of Mass Immigration). If you love freedom, vote against those who betray your nation.

I know how I will be voting, but I’m not optimistic about the outcome either way, though. Christopher Hitchens warned us many years ago in the bluntest of language, as you can see below. That would have been the time to head off the coming crisis at the pass. But we didn’t heed his warning. So Lawrence Fox can write a terrifying tweet that feels more like a postmortem than a plan of action.

It’s ironic to see gender ideologues swimming at the bottom of the postmodernist morass at the same time appealing to ideological and industry captured experts and science, the ruse of peer review (i.e., gate keeping), etc.—along with their circle jerk professional associations—to justify the greatest medical scandal in world history, namely so-called “gender affirming care.” (See The Body as Primary Commodity: The Techno-Religious Cult of Transgenderism; Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy.)

It’s ironic, as well, given that the only useful thing about postmodernism—to be sure, noting the problem of discursive formation as power projection is not original to the claptrap—is that it warns “folx” about taking as truth knowledge production by government institutions and business firms. (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; The Corporate Character of Scientism; Eugenics 2.0; COVID-19 and the Corporate State; Science Versus Scientism: How to Spot the Difference.)

It’s as if none on the self-declared left have read postmodernist philosopher Sandra Harding’s landmark 1992 essay “After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and ‘Strong Objectivity’” (published in Social Research), where, after quoting historian Robert Proctor, who writes—

“It is certainly true that, in one important sense, the Nazis sought to politicize the sciences…. Yet in an important sense the Nazis might indeed be said to have ‘depoliticized’ science (and many other areas of culture). The Nazis depoliticized science by de- stroying the possibility of political debate and controversy. Authoritarian science based on the ‘Führer principle’ replaced what had been, in the Weimar period, a vigorous spirit of politicized debate in and around the sciences. The Nazis ‘depoliticized’ problems of vital human interest by reducing these to scientific or medical problems, conceived in the narrow, reductionist sense of these terms. The Nazis depoliticized questions of crime, poverty, and sexual or political deviance by casting them in surgical or otherwise medical (and seemingly apolitical) terms…. Politics pursued in the name of science or health provided a powerful weapon in the Nazi ideological arsenal.” 

—Harding adds: “The institutionalized, normalized politics of male supremacy, class exploitation, racism, and imperialism, while only occasionally initiated through the kind of violent politics practiced by the Nazis, similarly ‘depoliticize’ Western scientific institutions and practices, thereby shaping our images of the natural and social worlds and legitimating past and future exploitative public policies.” 

On the other side from postmodernism, Immanuel Wallerstein, in his 1997 American Journal of Sociology paper, “Social Science and the Quest for a Just Society,” mocked the early hopes of positivists who thought “they could be modern philosopher-kings,” the same ilk pushing the technocracy woke progressives adore so much (another irony in the light of their attempt at revolutionary posturing, in full and embarrassing display on today’s college campuses). In the light of history, Wallerstein tells us, their self-aggrandizement proved “totally vain” and they became the “handmaidens of governmental reformism” (not to mention corporate profit).

“When they did this openly, they called it ‘applied social science,’” Wallerstein writes. “But for the most part they did this abashedly, asserting that their role was merely to do the research, and that it was up to others—the political persons—to draw from this research the conclusions that seemed to derive from this research. In short, the neutrality of the scholar became the fig leaf of their shame in having eaten the apple of knowledge.” 

Indeed. Neutrality is ideology. Objectivity is what we strive for in science. Tragically, in the epoch of the corporate state, with its administrative rule and technocratic control, the enterprise has become thoroughly corrupted. Of the sciences that feign objectivity, medical science is the worst. Even the captured FDA has to recall thousands of pharmaceuticals, devices, and procedures annually to make the appearance of legitimacy.

Sometimes I think that if the views of flat earthers generated mega-profits, or there was no therapeutic competitor to Scientology, the corporatists would find a way to shoehorn those species of hokum into the academic literature, too.

If you change the environment and make it harder for capitalists to (super)exploit foreign labor, native-born working class families will enjoy a rising standard of living because their wages will increase. Supply and demand. But there’s more to it than that.

As I explained back in the last decade, restricting immigration in the 1920s allowed for the integration of foreigners into a unified working class that strengthened worker solidarity and led to the rise of unions. The restricted labor pool, combined with union power raised, the standards of living for American families by raising wages and benefits. It moreover improved working conditions.

It was the opening of the borders in the mid-1960s that played a major role in decoupling wages and benefits from productivity, which was associated with a relative decline in real wages, the destruction of private sector unions, and the rise in public employee unions representing functionaries of the permanent administrative class.

This was a purposeful strategy by the corporate state: to disorganize the civil society of native born workers and drive down their wages by introducing foreign workers into the national economy, as well as offshoring work to the third world, further decimating the American working class. Globalization is the problem. Immigration is integral to globalization.

The only way to restore the economic golden years of the mid-20th century is to sharply restrict immigration and re-shore manufacturing. We have to rebuild the private sector union to recouple productivity with wages and compensation, and the only way to do that is rebuild a unified working class.

We can’t do what we need to do with millions of culture bearers pouring into our country who do not share the values that created the broad and well compensated working class of previous generations. We need time to assimilate all these foreigners. And this time it will be even more difficult; the last time they were mostly Europeans who had experienced the Enlightenment and had a grasp of the classical liberal values and principles of democratic-republicanism. Today’s newcomers in contrast are anti-West. We need closed borders and mass deportations to put the country back on the path to peace and prosperity.