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“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” — United States Bill of Rights 1791

The concept of free speech dates to Ancient Greece in the fifth century BC and was codified in America’s founding documents with the ratification of the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791. The 45-word First Amendment prohibited Congress from “abridging freedom of speech, or of the press,” a prohibition that has incorporate all levels of government across all of the states.

James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights (the first ten constitutional amendments), initially penned a more forceful rendition of the First Amendment, one that articulated its fundamental rationale: “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”

However, a recent poll on censorship conducted by RealClear Opinion Research finds that, while most Americans express support for free speech, there are demographic and partisan differences that are very troubling to see. For example, the poll, directed by Spencer Kimball, finds that Democrats exhibit a greater inclination toward government regulation when it comes to free speech, displaying a tendency to grant more authority to the state than do Republicans. 

Kimball also found that younger generations, particularly Millennials and Gen-Z, display more openness to government censorship. Forty-two percent of individuals under thirty prioritize government protection of national security over safeguarding the right to free expression. “National security” is a well-known dog whistle for right-wing speech. The poll also found men were much more likely than women to support the right to free speech.

However, the most significant divide in perspectives on free expression remains between Democrats and Republicans. On this issue, contrary to the popular view that Republicans are more authoritarian in spirit than Democrats, Republicans are in fact much more supportive of free speech, while Democrats exhibit a worrying proclivity for government regulation.

The report frames this in terms of a change in liberalism, since Democrats have not been in the past as eager to endorse censorship. But this is the wrong albeit typical way to put this. Liberalism is a system of norms and values. The system doesn’t change over time. Liberalism doesn’t become whatever those who claim to be liberal but deviate from its principles become. Rather people and parties are either liberal or illiberal, i.e., authoritarian, in which case they falsely claim to be liberal.

The report tells us that, traditionally, those who have identified as liberal in the United States have staunchly opposed censorship, whether imposed by the government or corporations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded in 1920 to champion and defend free expression. This ideal was a core tenet of liberal thought, legal frameworks, and jurisprudence throughout much of the 20th century.

However, times have changed, and the recent RealClear Opinion Research poll reflects a gradual shift on the left regarding free expression. What they actually mean here is that Democrats have moved from liberal to progressive. While liberalism is a left-wing politics, in that seeks to emancipate the individual from state control, progressivism is a statist political philosophy and, as such, form of a rightwing politics. 

The numbers are startling. Almost three-quarters of Republicans (74 percent) believe that speech should be legal under any circumstances, while only a little more than half of Democrats (53 percent) agree. More than a third of Democratic voters (34%) believe that Americans have “too much freedom,” compared to only one our of seven Republicans (14.6 percent). Nearly half (46 percent) of Republicans feel that Americans have too little freedom, while only roughly one-fifth (22 percent) of Democrats share this sentiment. A majority of Democrats (52 percent) approve of government censoring social media content for national security purposes, while only one-third of Republicans endorse this approach. Again, among Democrats, “national security” is a dog whistle for right-wing speech. 

Poll respondents were read this statement: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Only 31 percent of Democratic voters “strongly agreed” with that sentiment, compared to 51 percent of Republicans. Democrats are notably more inclined to believe that the government should limit “hateful” social media posts (75 percent), whereas Republicans are divided (50 percent) in favor of government intervention. Democrats are more willing than Republicans to support the restriction of free speech rights for political extremists. In this, Republican views don’t vary by content. GOP voters who favor censorship do so whether the content is associated with the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, or the Communist Party.

These findings are consistent with a broader shift in so-called Democrat attitudes towards free expression, as documented in a study by Ruth Appel and Jennifer Pan of Stanford and Margaret Roberts of the University of California, San Diego. Their study, “Partisan Conflict Over Content Moderation Is More Than Disagreement about Facts,” examined Democrats’ greater willingness to embrace censorship of online content. Their research indicates thatDemocrats are increasingly willing to embrace online content censorship and that their desire to do so is often driven by partisan motives. (The RealClear Report distorts the paper by substituting the word “liberal” for Democrat.)

“Even when Republicans acknowledge that the content is false, they are half as likely as Democrats to advocate for its removal and more than twice as likely to view removal as a form of censorship,” the authors find. In essence, Democrats were more likely to apply situational ethics, excusing misinformation that benefited their side, while most Republicans did not differentiate based on the direction of the false information.

In 2017, a thorough survey conducted by the Cato Institute revealed a comparable pattern. When asked a range of questions about which speakers should be prohibited from college campuses, Democrats tended to make their decisions based on the political orientation of the speaker, often advocating for the removal of conservative voices but not liberal ones. In contrast, Republicans displayed a more cautious approach towards the idea of censorship as a whole. The Cato study also uncovered that, even in situations where one might anticipate Republicans to be more concerned, they were still less inclined than Democrats to endorse the removal of speakers.

While fluctuations in support for the First Amendment have occurred over the centuries, the current era stands out due to the fervent advocacy for, and pursuit of, censorship by mainstream media figures, including politicians and journalists who align with different ideologies. The contemporary landscape demonstrates a significant departure from historical liberal principles emphasizing free expression, and these shifts are reflected in the RealClear Opinion Research poll, which confirm the findings of other major studies.

Now you know why Democrats are so eager to portray Republicans as the censors. They portray the effort to remove pornography from public school classrooms and public libraries as “book banning.” Keeping pornography out of public schools and libraries is not book banning. Preventing the sexualization of children is not censorship. It is child safeguarding. The hypocrisy is actually on the progressive side. Who cancelled Dr. Seuss? Who desires the removal from bookshelves and the censorship of great works such as those by Mark Twain and Harper Lee? (See Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. Who Wants to See Cartoons of Muhammad Anyway?)

I discuss these issues at length in several essays. In addition to the above, see, for example, The Threat of Compelled Speech to Free and Open Societies; Refining the Art and Science of Propaganda in an Era of Popular Doubt and Questioning; Science Politics at the University of Wisconsin—Deliberate Ignorance About the State of Cognitive Liberty and Viewpoint Diversity on College Campuses; Death of the Traditional Intellectual: The Progressive Corruption of US Colleges and Universities; The Rules of Inclusion Represent the Totalitarian Desire to Punish Heretics and Infidel; Some Notes on Free Speech, What It is, and What Constitutes Justifiable Restrictions of It; NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech; The University Cannot Punish Me for My Speech Beyond the University; My Right to My Views is Your Right to Yours.

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In free speech related news, Roger Waters, one of the co-founders of Pink Floyd and their principle lyricist, faced a ban from addressing the University of Pennsylvania campus due to accusations of anti-Semitism stemming from his attire at a Berlin concert, which featured Nazi-inspired uniforms and imagery. (I debunked that story in a June essay Authoritarianism and Genocide in Historical Comparisons.) The songwriter had been scheduled to participate in a panel discussion as part of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival on Saturday. However, upon arriving in Pennsylvania, he took to Instagram to reveal that he had been informed he would now be participating via Zoom instead.

“I was supposed to be taking part in a panel in a couple hours time this afternoon, but I’ve been told I’m not allowed into the Irving Arena because they made arrangements for me to attend the panel via Zoom,” Waters recounted. “And the fact that I came here all the way to be present, because I care deeply about the issues that are being discussed, apparently cuts no ice with campus police or whoever it is.” Water’s correctly observed, “If they can get you thinking and talking about anti-Semitism, then you won’t be thinking about the fact that Palestinians have no human rights in the occupied territories.” He then continued in third person: “This is what we should be talking about in the Daily Pennsylvanian, not whether Roger Waters is an anti-Semite or not.”

Waters is the victim of two forms of idea suppressions. First, that he is prevented from appearing in person is a form of constraining the impact of his words. Anybody who has appeared at an event via remote transmission is well aware of the difficulty it presents in conveying ideas in the give and take of debate. Second, he is the victim of poisoning the well, a rhetorical device and logical fallacy that involves discrediting an argument, claim, or person by presenting negative information about them before they have had a chance to make their case or argument. The goal is to prejudice the audience or listener against the person or argument in question before they even have the chance to present their perspective.

A big part of the failure to misidentify my politics and all the rest of it is the failure of too many individuals to understand the difference between left and right wing politics—that is, to even understand their own politics. Indeed, many people who identify as “on the left” have internalized right wing politics and put them central to their worldview, believing these are actually left wing politics. (See The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint.)

Recently I blogged about this concerning the progressive attitude towards women, which I showed is profoundly right-wing and misogynistic (Embedding Misogyny and the Progressive Mind). Let me give you another example. Over the last few years, millions of people have illegally crossed our southern border. There were 232,972 illegal border crossings last month alone—and that’s not counting the got-aways. Progressives demand that they be brought into our communities, given the right to vote generous public services, and put on a path to citizenship. Some describe themselves as “internationalists,” claiming that the goal of international socialist movement is to build a world without borders. They appeal to Karl Marx and Frederich Engels and the Internationale.

But what did Marx and Engels actually argue? They tell us in the Communist Manifesto (I wrote the preface of the Skyhorse edition of that book) that “the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle,” and, because praxis must be informed by objective theory, “[t]he proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.” Of course! It will not do to throw open the borders, allow the country to be overrun with foreigners, and turn things over the transnational corporate powers—these are fascist powers—to design a world that is even less democratic than the one we now have. On the contrary, the American socialist’s goal—if he is correct in his thinking—is to establish a popular democratic society in territory of the United States, secure the rule of law that makes that possible, democratize industrial production and extend liberties and rights to everyone on the basis of equality, and then socialize these accomplishments across the globe.

In 1870, Marx wrote Sigfrid Meme and August Vogt (who were in New York): “After studying the Irish question for many years I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.” After explaining the importance of the Irish ridding themselves of the English colonizers, thus weakening the English capitalist class, Marx noted the obvious: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.”

Indeed the Irish worker did lower the English worker’s standard of life. And that was the point! As I have shown in essays on Freedom and Reason, among other things, today, hundreds of billions of dollars are transferred from the native working class to the capitalist class by the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor—and hundreds of billions more through off-shoring, yet another method of exploiting cheap foreign labor. Moreover, the net cost of immigration is hundreds of billions to taxpayers. “This antagonism,” Marx writes concerning the English situation, “is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.” He may just as well as been writing about the America situation.

Today, the globalists are flooding the West with immigrants to burden the social welfare system. They then tell citizens that they have to give illegals work permits so they can get jobs and not burden the welfare system. Work permits for illegals displaces native born workers who then further burden the welfare system. This makes more people dependent on the parties whose electoral strategy involves enlarging the proportion of the population who vote for a living (in contrast to working for a living). Meanwhile, wages are driven even lower and the corporate firms the political establishment represents make out like bandits.

How did the so-called left in America, the progressive, come to advocate transnationalism, or globalism? How did they end up casting their lot with Horace Kallen and the other transnationalists who desire was the disorganize the modern nation state? How did Americans forget that it was the industrialists who drew tens of millions to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to impoverish the native working class and put more wealth and power in the hands of the corporate elite? How did Americans forget that, with the closing of our borders in the 1920s, that the working class set the preconditions that made possible the golden age of American prosperity and the solidarity that saw the civil rights movement and modern feminism through to substantially realize the American Creed in the actual conditions of community life? And how do we find ourselves again in a situation where corporations impoverish us with foreign labor while denying the right to those who fled their homes to stand unified against their own national bourgeoisie where the proletarian revolution would matter, weakening the power of our own national bourgeoisie?

The answer to the seeming contradictions I have cited (and there are others) is what I argued in that other essay, that what passes for the left today is not left at all. Progressivism is the projection of corporate state power and, as such, it is a rightwing politics. The home of progressivism, the Democratic Party, is the Party of the professional-managerial class, which runs the administrative state and attendant technocratic apparatus. It’s not the party of the left or the working class. Moreover, as I also noted, that the political right also believes progressivism is socialism (some even think it’s communism). Even those conservatives who define themselves as populist, and find Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Naomi Wolf compelling figures, are mistaken about the character of the system.

Hence I find myself misunderstood by both sides of the partisan divide. The progressive left, not understanding what left wing politics actually is, i.e., liberal and populist-nationalism, believing that these are rightwing politics, find my writings aligning with the right. The populist right, believing that socialism is what the progressive left is advocating, associate my identification as a man of the left with the progressive agenda. Neoconservatives and neoliberals—both projections of the corporate state—loath me because my critique is aimed at the heart of the mass deception that creates the confusion.

If you remember back in the spring of 2020, when I started blogging about the pandemic, way back in March of that year, I told you that the coronavirus is not a “novel virus,” that scientists had known about its existence at least since the 1930s and isolated it in the lab in the 1960s. By the end of that decade, scientists had identified three strains of coronavirus, and, by the 1990s, identified the alpha, beta, delta, gamma, etcetera, variants. But they sure made it sound like it was a new thing, didn’t they?

I also told you then that, prior to the identification of coronavirus, scientists had isolated several rhinovirus strains, as well as several adenovirus strains in the 1950s. When I told you that adenovirus, coronavirus, and rhinovirus are causes of the common cold, something that I never thought I would have to explain, I did so because the corporate state media was leveraging popular ignorance of virology to engineer mass hysteria. When a population is well informed, it is difficult for the social controllers to effectively carry out their agenda.

I informed those reading my blog that they have had across the life course one or more of these cold viruses. In fact, I wrote, it is very likely that they have had all three. Each helped build their immune system. Indeed, the reason why it is so important to contract these viruses in childhood or young adulthood is because they’re more dangerous to the elderly and the infirm, those who accounted for almost all deaths attributed to COVID-19, if they do not have the antibodies. The death toll, now confirmed to have been wildly exaggerated, was only remarkable because SARS-CoV-2 was weaponized, not to be more deadly (which would have interfered with maximizing the contagion), but to be more infectious. But the authorities used the death toll, leaving out information about demographics and other crucial medicating variables, to scare the living shit out of people around the world.

After everything hundreds of millions of people now know about the virus (facts that some of us knew or inferred from available information at the outset, this blog proof of that), some folks on Twitter are attempting to rekindle the engineered mass hysteria of 2020. I suspect that many of them are desperate to rationalize their initial panic over a cold virus. Being so easily manipulated feels shameful. I’ve been told by those prone to fall for moral panics willing to admit their gullibility that being fooled makes a person feel rather stupid. But most cannot admit they’re so easily duped, and so they join those who can’t think for themselves and who are entirely dependent on partisan sources for their opinions to keep peddling panic. I see people walking around my place of work and my community with masks.

Fortunately a great many more people than before aren’t rushing to take the boosters. Many parents seeing the CDC recommendation to vaccinate children 6 months and up recognize the absurdity of this in light of the fact and their own experience that the young are not only rarely harmed by the virus, but most don’t even know they have it. That the CDC is still peddling the bullshit tells you what this is substantially about: money. The fear manufactured by lockdowns, masks, and so-called vaccines was not only about preparing the masses for future social control measures; it was also about generating billions of dollars for medical-industrial complex—the same complex that killed tens of thousands of patients by denying them access to the medicines they needed to prevent their condition from worsening.

For those of you who haven’t figured all this out yet, you’re sleep walking. Wake up. Raise your head up out of the swampy interior climate. Whatever you thought it was, it’s over. Breathe a deep sigh of relief and get about your life. You don’t need a mask or an mRNA shot. You never did. Worry about something else. I see you have an Ukraine flag in your social media platform. Nuclear war, perhaps?

As readers of Freedom and Reason are aware, I have written quite a lot about gender ideology, and I’m always trying to find ways to more clearly convey my thoughts about a particular subject. Often this comes with several attempts. Writing is not just about communicating one’s ideas to others, but often about conveying one’s ideas to oneself. Writing is a process of self-listening. Other times, it comes with the discovery of a new voice. The present essay is inspired by the latter.

Recently, I watched a video clip explaining the problem of gender ideology by Amy Sousa, a psychologist who works in the area of depth psychology, a branch of psychoanalysis that investigates the realm of unconscious (or subconscious) cognition through an examination of apparently inconsequential occurrences such as dreams, serendipitous events, and verbal slips. The promise of this method is that allows for the unearthing of suppressed emotions, ideas, and thoughts and the reintegration of these into conscious awareness. This approach is powerful and Sousa’s explanation insightful. I want to share her thoughts and then add to her’s those my own.

You can watch the Sousa clip here: https://x.com/KnownHeretic/status/1704263942426796037?s=20. Sousa argues that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is ideological, perpetuating sexism and transforming the potential for critiquing cultural sexism into self-blame. Sousa contends that the medical industry is equipping children with a knife, encouraging them to alter their bodies to conform to culture’s predefined molds. It’s not bodies that are flawed, she contends; it’s the act of forcing bodies into these molds that’s wrong. The claustrophobia experienced at being coerced into these molds is a natural reaction, not a mental disorder. Children need support in debunking cultural falsehoods and embracing themselves as complete, embodied individuals.

This is good stuff, and it addresses my wonderment at how woke progressivism, which is supposedly a left-wing ideology sympathetic to feminism, would embrace right-wing stereotypes of women and use them to justify perpetrating medical atrocities against boys and girls. You would think that the last Orwellian inversion to infect the progressive mind, if it were what it thinks it is, would be seeing boys and girls uncomfortable with or who transgress gender norms as actually representing the opposite sex. Didn’t feminists argue that gender stereotypes are straitjackets limiting the emotional and social range of boys and girls? That’s my understanding. Children distressed over their bodies need is validation, not affirmation.

I’m not suggesting here that Sousa is making my argument about how progressivism is at heart a right-wing ideology. Deconstructing progressivism is my own obsession. Her analysis helps me clarify some things; I am responsible for the argument presented in this essay.

The feminism to which I subscribe sees men and women, both biological (or essential) categories, beyond the abilities and limitations associated with the respective biological attributes, such as the ability to have children or the inability to complete with men at elite levels of sports, as equally as capable of being journalists, musicians, nurses, physicians, poets, politicians, scholars, and scientists. All that needs to happen is for stereotypes to be dismantled and a fair playing field established. Biology determines the genotypes; beyond those parameters, individuals can pursue any career they desire and express themselves in any way.

Right-wing ideology, on the other hand, sees the gender (or sex) roles and statuses, which are historical and social, as instead god-ordained or naturally occurring—i.e., as transcultural. Based on suppositions about human nature, women are believed to have their place in society and men their’s, and these are defined in the terms of patriarchal relations. Man as warrior. Woman as helpmeet. That sort of thing. This is the essence of conservatism—not conservatism as classical liberalism (ideological labels are fuzzy in this way), but conservatism as traditionalism, as embodied in the patriarchy.

These stereotypical views of women, where they are enforced, or where there is the desire that they should be, are misogynistic. We see this, for example, in Muslim-majority societies where the imposition of the veil is characteristic of the misogynistic attitude, rationalized as obedience to their god Allah (the same god as the Judeo-Christian one). The goal of an enlightened society is to blow away these stereotypical views of women (and men) and emancipate the individual from such impositions. The reactionary resists this, insisting that masculine and the feminine characteristics are baked into the sexes. And such reactionaries exist now as much on the so-called left as they do on the right.

For the actual left wing thinker (speaking for myself), a woman can eschew makeup, cut her hair short, wear pants, be sexually attracted to women, and not be a man since there are no restrictions on women beyond those imposed by her genotypic attributes. There is no such thing as “acting like a woman” or “acting like a man” in sociocultural terms standing outside of space and time. There are only women and men as essential categories. Indeed, what is a man beyond those natural historical results is also the work of gender stereotypes. There is no principle in nature that says a man cannot wear a dress, makeup, long hair, etc., either. The only thing a man has to be is determined by his chromosomes and his gametes. He cannot change these. He will always be a man.

The right winger sees gender nonconformity as problematic because he hypostatizes the stereotypes drawn from cultural and social relations as essential and rooted in natural history. Thus right-wing ideology reduces difference to inequality through conflation of things. The core of right-wing ideology is the notion that hierarchy is baked into the species. To be sure, both the cultural/historical and the biological are realities, but they are different sorts of realities, and one of those realities can be altered or changed.

Progressives subscribe to an ideology that is the inverse—an ideology that reifies culturally and historical bounded gender roles while rejecting the reality of the animality of the species, a fallacy that results from the nihilism inhering in the postmodernist epistemic. The progressive believes that a boy who likes to wear his sister’s clothes, who likes to put on his mother’s makeup, who likes to cook, or who feels a romantic attraction to other boys, is really a girl trapped in a boy’s body. The progressive has internalized the misogynistic view that gender roles are baked in and sublimated it as secularized absolute idealism. Progressives who argue that their politics are neo-Marxist are really neo-Hegelian: they stand scientific materialism on its head.

Both right wingers and progressives are wrong for different reasons; both operate from an ideological space that either is or resembles religious consciousness. In fact, the progressive view is the more irrational and reactionary. To be sure, forcing boys and girls to conform to the stereotypical views of traditional patriarchal relations is a form of conversion therapy, but the hormonal and surgical transformation of bodies takes conversion therapy to a radically new level—all on the basis of a quasi-religious doctrine that children are born broken and need fixing. So frantic are the zealots about transforming bodies that progressives worry that children may not know they are broken, which has led to the moral project of queering public schools, medical clinics, and popular culture.

It might strike the reader as ironic that the progressive view is much like the view held, for example, in Iran, where boys “who act like girls” are given hormones and surgeries, and the state pays the bills. This is because homosexuality is an abomination and a boy “who acts like girl” must really be a girl born in the wrong body. The misogyny of their religion is such that the Islamic state cannot abide by a boy who likes girl things, i.e., whose behaves in the stereotypic feminine manner constructed and demanded by the terms of Islamic religious belief. But it is not ironic. It is embedded in the progressive worldview.

It is vital to understand this problem because, like Islam, a form of clerical fascism, misogyny is a fundamental characteristic of secular fascism, of the corporate state, the most notorious historical instantiations of which are authoritarian Italian corporatism and and German national socialism. Progressives are open about their admiration of exotic clerical fascism. We have to reveal their admiration for the secular version.

Indeed, the fascist mentality pervades corporate state arrangements, not only in the existence of a vast medical-industrial complex, the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus, but in its street-level manifestations. Consider the actions of Antifa and TRAs, the so-called antifascists and their constant attacks on women and lesbians, shutting down pro-woman events and rallies, physically assaulting women and their allies, while police officers either passively permit their actions or use the chaos to shut down the events and rallies.

What do Antifa/TRAs actions look like to you? Street-level fascism is the only honest answer. Their claim to be the opposite is an Orwellian inversion that takes very little effort to overcome. They scream “fascist!” at those who actually stand against the fascist desire to silence and terrorize women. They carry posters threatening to “Punch a TERF!” “Kill TERFS!” “Rape TERFS!” The appearance and methods of the blackshirts and brownshirts in the actions of Antifa/TRAs is unmistakable to the student of history.

Why do they act this way? Why do progressives uplift them? “Antifa is only an idea,” law enforcement rationalizes. It’s not obvious? To chill the air of debate and dissent, to sow insecurity and confusion, to spread fear and terror, to disorder civil society—all this so that the corporate state can steer society towards the inverted totalitarian ends George Orwell and Sheldon Wolin warn us about. The historical specifics are but interchangeable spatial-temporal elements of fascist politics. There is no functional difference between the concrete manifestations.

The answer to the seeming contradiction, then, is that what passes for the left today is not left at all. Progressivism is the projection of corporate state power and, as such, is a species of rightwing politics. The home of progressivism, the Democratic Party, is the party of the professional-managerial class, the class and strata that run the administrative state and attendant technocratic apparatus. It’s not the party of the left or the working class. It is the party of power and war, and that power is transnational and transgressive—not just of national but of moral borders. These are the agents of corporate power who control the culture industry and mass media system that works as a vast camera obscura to delude the masses into believing that right is left. It’s another classic Orwellian inversion, just slickly coded. “Trans-peace is Peace” has replaced the slogan “War is Peace.” “Men are Women” is too obvious.

Compounding the confusion, the political right believes alongside many progressives that progressivism is socialism. But as an expression of corporatism, progressivism is at best a soft form of fascism, a right-wing ideology. The rank-and-file of the progressive left, not understanding what left wing politics actually is, i.e., liberal and populist-nationalism, made stupid by public instruction, believing that these are rightwing politics, falsely perceive actual left wing politics to align with the right. And so the deception is complete.

But I shouldn’t have to tell readers that socialism is the administration of things not people. Corporatism is the administration of people. As the great German sociologist Max Weber noted more than a century ago, it is the nature of corporate bureaucratic arrangements to dehumanize those they control. It is the irrationality of hyper-rationality. That’s how corporations control people: by robbing them of the rhythms of their own bodies and crushing individually different conduct—by reducing them to cogs and commodities—manufacturing charisma and celebrity.

As the old religious fades aways, an ideology emerges to take its place, born of the alienation engendered by the inhuman situation: the ideology of transhumanist desire—that is, the desire to escape the body. In an early signal of the nightmare to come, this desire was expressed at the birth of fascism in the early twentieth century (see The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint). That desire has today become totalized. Trans-genderism and trans-speciesism are subcategories of the greater transhumanist desire. As the ideology of the corporate state, progressivism can do nothing other than to deny human beings their animality. And, like the fascists before them, they mean to stamp the gospel of self-estrangement onto the bodies of the children.

Have you heard the news? US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has established of the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group responsible for handling national security matters. has appointed John Brennan (former Director of the CIA), James Clapper (former Director of National Intelligence), and Paul Kolbe (Former Operations Officer, CIA). Read the full list here: “Secretary Mayorkas Announces Establishment of Homeland Intelligence Experts Group.”

They were among those who signed the controversial letter in October 2020, “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails,” suggesting that Hunter Biden’s laptop might be Russian disinformation, despite the FBI having authenticated the laptop. Who else was among those who signed the letter These—Mike Hayden (former Director, CIA; former Director, NSA), John McLaughlin (former Acting Director, CIA; former Director of Analysis, CIA), Michael Morell (former Acting Director, CIA; former Director of Analysis, CIA), Mike Vickers (former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; Former Operations Officer, CIA)—and many other intelligence officers.

It’s evident these spooks knowingly propagated false information to influence the outcome of the 2020 US election. So why have senior intelligence officials involved in spreading disinformation to manipulate an election been appointed to a DHS Expert Group focused on national security Furthermore, it’s puzzling why they haven’t faced legal consequences for their alleged interference in the election and why they still hold security clearances. Perhaps their role isn’t really about safeguarding national security, but rather more about protecting the interests of the corporate state and the globalist project.

Ray Epps, a former Marine who became the target of a January 6, 2021, “conspiracy theory,” has been charged with a misdemeanor offense in connection with the US Capitol riot and is expected to plead guilty, according to court papers filed Tuesday. You may remember Epps from the many videos of him organizing and exhorting crowds to enter the Capitol building on that day. “We have to go into the Capitol!” he famously yelled to the throng. The night before his rhetoric was so over the top that those assembled started chanting, “Fed! Fed!” Obviously.

Epps didn’t go into the Capitol building, authorities tell us. That’s why he is only charged with a misdemeanor. Enrique Tarrio wasn’t even in Washington DC that day and he received 22 years in a federal penitentiary—and prosecutors sought a 33-year prison sentence. But Tarrio was encouraging his fellow Proud Boys to riot through encrypted messages. That’s the difference? Epps texted his nephew at 2:12 pm on January 6 to tell him, “I was in the front with a few others,” adding, “I also orchestrated it.” Epps won’t spend a day in federal prison. Nor was he held for years in a federal jail cell without bail.

We are told that the disruption in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an attempt by right wing forces to overthrow democracy. It was branded an “insurrection” with the goal of Trump supporters to take over government to keep Trump in power. The public was supposed to believe that a large and unorganized crowd of Trump supporters—farmers and proletarians—armed not even with pitchforks, but only with flags and posters and pro-USA merch, entering one government building, represented a threat to democracy.

What Trump supporters did accomplish—if they intended to accomplish anything other than venting their frustration with obvious election rigging and if we can give them the credit for disrupting anything—was undermining a process that was in fact favorable to Trump. In other words, the disturbance was used to derail a democratic process that threatened the finalization of a four-year slow-moving coup. Trump did not want them interrupting the process. He told them them to “peacefully and patriotically” march to the Capitol and let the Republican lawmakers know that the public supported the challenging of the certification of several states with obvious election irregularities—challenges that were entirely legal under federal law.

(Note: The FBI had so many paid informants at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, that the Bureau lost track of the number and had to perform a audit to determine exactly how many “confidential human sources” run by different FBI field offices were present that day, a former assistant director of the bureau has told lawmakers.)

As occurs every four years in America, a joint session of Congress was convened on January 6, 2021, to certify the electoral college results of the 2020 United States presidential election. The law guiding this process is the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA), which outlines the procedures for Congress to follow when counting and certifying electoral votes and resolving any objections raised by members of Congress. According to the ECA, a member of the House of Representatives can object to the certification of electoral votes from their state during the joint session of Congress. If both a member of the House and a member of the Senate object to a state’s electoral votes, it triggers a process where both chambers of Congress must separately debate and vote on the objection before proceeding with the certification.

There have been objections under the ECA in past elections. During the joint session of Congress to certify the electoral votes of the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, there were objections raised by some members of the Congressional Black Caucus regarding the electoral votes from Florida. Unfortunately, these objections did not result in a sustained debate and vote because they lacked the necessary support from both a House member and a Senator, as required by the Electoral Count Act. Likewise, during the certification of the electoral votes of the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, there were no sustained objections that resulted in debates and votes. And in the certification of the electoral votes of the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, objections raised by House members did not result in debates and votes because they lacked the necessary support from the corresponding Senator. All these challenges were led by Democrats.

During the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, objections were raised by members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate to the certification of electoral votes from certain states. This triggered the process outlined in the ECA for debating and voting on those objections separately in both chambers of Congress. Objections were raised to the certification of electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. But before more objections could be raised, the so-called insurrection interrupted the process.

The timing of the riot played a significant role in derailing the process. The joint session of Congress was halted, and lawmakers evacuated. When proceedings resumed later in the evening, once the Capitol was secured (it was only a brief and mostly peaceful “occupation,” during which Trump told the protestors to peacefully leave the building and grounds and go home), Congress continued with the certification of the electoral votes and the debates on objections. The mood of the body had decisively changed, however.  

There were objections planned before the riot to the certification of electoral votes from several states, including Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The disruption and its characterization as an insurrection caused lawmakers to reconsider their objections, and they chose not to pursue them for these states. Objections to the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania were the only ones that proceeded to debate and vote and, predictably, they lost. Mission accomplished.

Epps’ misdemeanor charge? Cover for deep state orchestration of January 6? The string pullers had to do something. If you fall for this trick you don’t understand the way the world works at a fundamental level. The effect of the disturbance was to derail the process of challenging of problematic certifications, to stop a process that could have returned certificates to states with significant electoral irregularities, the sum of which was 62 electoral votes, more than enough to change the outcome of the election. Instead of looking into the problems with the certifications, which would have been the democratic course of action, Congress rubber-stamped the results to avoid appearing to stand with an insurrection that never happened.

It was the culmination of a four-year soft coup to remove a popular President and thwart the will of the People.

As I have noted before on Freedom and Reason, Islamophobia is a propaganda term that functions to portray critics of the ideological system called Islam as bigots who discriminate against Muslims based on their beliefs. I have had Muslim students in class, I have appeared at public meetings and conferences with Muslims, and I have been in the presence of Muslims at dinners and parties. I have never discriminated against a Muslim nor do I or would I support discrimination against Muslims.

I am a civil libertarian, an ethical system that defends the right of individuals to their own beliefs and conscience. My belief aligns with Thomas Jefferson’s, expressed in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Church, that government can only reach actions; opinions are the reserve of the individual. Cognitive liberty demands this right.

I am well known as a defender of the right to free speech. Free means no costs. Human beings are entitled to say what they will given restrictions that protect that same right for others. This also means human beings cannot be made to say things they find objectionable.

This freedom means that I can say without fear of discrimination that I find Islam to be an irrational ideology that is, like many other ideological systems, e.g., Bolshevism and Nazism, responsible for widespread human misery and requires as such sustained criticism and resistance to its spread throughout the institutional structure of a free nation. The right of the Muslim to his religion is at once my right to be free of his religion. His ideology cannot rule my actions.

Islam cannot therefore be allowed to corrupt our government, colonize our culture, determine the education of our children, or circumscribe our freedom. If resistance to a pernicious ideology is declared to be Islamophobic, then we have confirmation that it is what I said it is: a propaganda term designed to prevent citizens of a free nation from keeping their nation free by shaming them into silence.

The same is true for the smear of transphobia. See this thread for a concrete example of the smear of transphobia being used to dismiss the concerns of individuals regarding the misogyny of gender ideology:

This guy claims he’s not transphobic, but calls Andrea Long-Chu, Julia Serano, et al a ‘men’, which is literally textbook transphobia.

This guy has the gall to ask me and my colleagues ‘how can you teach?!’ all while actively being a bigot. Gary, do you not have trans students? https://t.co/yZRRk6OGd4

— Samuel R. Galloway 🟥 (@SamuelRGalloway) September 17, 2023

Transphobia is propaganda term that functions to portray critics of the ideological system called transgenderism—a doctrine in a larger ideological system called gender ideology or queer theory—as bigots who discriminate against trans identifying individuals based on their beliefs.

Regarding my interactions with Muslims listed above, all of this can be said with respect to trans identifying individuals. My civil libertarianism remains at strongly in place with respect to such individuals as it does with respect to those who subscribe to Islam. A trans identifying person is entitled to his or her opinion. They are not to be discriminated against based on that opinion.

As with religious belief, government can only reach those actions that may be based on ideological beliefs that affect the freedom and wellbeing of others. We do not, for example, permit men to enter spaces reserved for women, whether they are men who identify as Muslim or men who identify as women. Keeping men out of women’s spaces is not discriminatory action because it does not police such spaces on the grounds of ideology but on the basis of objective reality—that is, authorities and citizens police those spaces despite an ideology that rationalizes the presence of men in those spaces.

To be sure, Islam forbids men from using women’s toilets and observant Muslim women (as well as Orthodox Jewish women) will not use those toilets if they suspect men are or may be present. Those who subscribe to queer theory believe men should be allowed to use women’s toilets. However, this belief does not trump the enforcement of single-sex facilities. No ideology can compel women to be around men in female-only spaces. It doesn’t matter if queer theory asserts that trans identifying men are women. That is an ideological assertion that, especially in the light of the fact that trans identifying men are not women, cannot negate the right of women to single-sex facilities.

The right of the individual to subscribe to gender ideology and describe themselves either as a trans identifying person or a cisgender person is his choice, but it does not entitle that person to expect that anyone will or must accept his self-designation. Muslims have terms for themselves and for non-Muslims. I do not use them. Likewise, queer theory has terms for transgender and non-transgender people. I do not use those terms, either. I don’t not use these terms because I do not subscribe to these ideologies, which is my right as detailed above. Moreover, I oppose these ideologies because of the harmful effects they have on others in practice.

It is troubling to consider the reality that queer theory, which has corrupted our government and colonized our culture, as well as infiltrated institutions of public instruction, now enjoys in nations across the West the force of law—administrative, judicial, and legislative—to determine our speech and our actions according to its lights. The present situation is directly analogous to a situation where Islam assumes the powers of the state and the influence of a nation’s culture to compel others to behave according to the lights of Islam. This is contrary to the fundamental law of the United States of America and constitutes a state of unfreedom.

Ideology makes intelligent people look crazy to those who stand outside the ideology. This is not because the outsider doesn’t understand “their truth.” It’s because ideology makes people crazy and the outsider is the objective observer watching the crazy happen in front of him.

Those who speak in tongues don’t believe speaking in tongues is crazy because an ideology has colonized their lifeworld. The ideology tells that there is an unseen spirit world populated by entities finding corporeal bodies through which to speak. That’s crazy. If one person believes this, then he’s delusional, possibly schizophrenic. If dozens or hundreds or a few thousand believe this, then it’s a cult. If several thousand or millions—or billions—then it is a religion. It is an ideology.

Examples of crazy beliefs may be found everywhere and throughout time.

Scientology’s belief in thetans is crazy. For those who are unfamiliar with Scientology, this religious system was founded in the early 1950s by pulp science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. Central to its doctrine is the idea of the thetan, a spiritual being that resides within every of is. Other beliefs include the idea of engrams which, according to Scientology, are traumatic experiences in a person’s past that negatively impact their current life. These are the source of emotional and psychological troubles. Scientology offers a therapy called auditing to help individuals identify and confront these engrams. During auditing, a person is connected to an E-meter that measures the electrical resistance of the person’s body, which is the manifestation of spiritual distress. The goal of auditing is to rid the individual of engrams and increase spiritual awareness—in essence, to get the person closer to the thetan inside the body. Spiritual progression is referred to as “The Bridge to Total Freedom,” which consists of various levels or stages of spiritual development, each requiring a series of auditing sessions and courses (which are not free).

Adherents to Scientology don’t see how crazy these beliefs are because they live according to the ideology. Enough people share the crazy to make Scientology a religion. The US government doesn’t tax the Church of Scientology because it is a religion. In France, Scientology is branded a dangerous cult. I talked about this in a criminology class in the early naughties in an early lecture describing the nature of fraud. One of the students was a Scientologist from California. After class, she yelled at me for criticizing her religion. I told that to take it up with the dean of students, that she’d get no apology from me. She dropped my class.

It’s the same with belief in gender identity, this notion that there are gender angels or gender souls—authentic selves that exist independently from the objective material self. These souls can inhabit the wrong body. Sometimes the souls have split genders and can switch from male to female. Some souls don’t have a gender at all. Some souls are both simultaneously. Sometimes the body has to be medically transformed by doctors to become a hospitable body for the authentic self, i.e., the gender angel. There are girls and women who have their breasts removed, their reproductive organs removed, their vagina’s sewn shut, and sections of the epidermis (from their arms and legs) enlarged and cut away to be formed into the shape of a phallus, which is sown onto their stomachs. Some boys and men take estrogen and grow breasts, sometimes enhancing these protruberances with implants, their testicles are sometimes removed and their penises split and inverted, stuffed into their abdominal cavity to form a permanent wound between their legs. The beliefs that cause people to do these things to their bodies represents a paradigm of crazy. Those around the afflicted are gaslighted and bullied into affirming the madness to create an inclusive space. They mean to drag all of us into the crazy. Even if we don’t mutilate our bodies, we’re are expected to be members of the congregation, conscripted into the movement, given a special designation (“cisgender”) and the function of shoring up the delusion.

That so many people believe crazy ideas and bully others into sharing on the crazy—that in the case of gender angels the lunatics have managed to commandeer the corporate state machinery to punish those who resist their lunacy—that doctors tell us that there really are gender angels and that to stop them from drugging and cutting a person’s body to affirm their delusion—none of this makes crazy ideas sane. It simply means that the crazy has captured a great many people.

This is why it is so important to get your head out of the fog of ideology. Step away from the crazy. Strive to be the objective observer. You will be criticized for it. Some will even hate you for it. But you will enjoy the dignity of not living in bad faith. And that’s a hell of a lot better than seeking ecstasy in the irrational. Delusions are emptiness because there really is nothing there.

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If this was the beginning of a movie, what would the movie be about?

🔊… 🚩🚩🚩 pic.twitter.com/P1Ce3vhiuU

— 🌈 Tess T. Eccles-Brown, PhD (@TTEcclesBrown) September 17, 2023

I will be writing an essay about this soon. Narcissism has been on the rise for years and there is an explanation. But until then, here is a paradigm of narcissism.

The narcissist is not the self-directed personality. It is not a self-actualized person confident in his beliefs, who asserts the freedom of his thoughts and his right to conscience. Narcissism is something very dark and dangerous. It is a characteristic of the cultural left.

The man in this video believes he makes a better mother because he will affirm the child in her delusion rather than validating her psychological troubles and guiding her to the truth of her body as any good mother would. His words prove he cannot be a better mother (objective reality proves he can never be a mother at all). His words prove instead that he is the star of the fantasy movie he made up in his head.

The movie is a horror movie. If he ever gets possession of a confused child, he will give her more than margarine and tea. A pedophile lurks beneath his delusion. This is a dangerous person. Gender ideology is a dangerous movement.

We’re in the middle of a crime wave the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades. We know this despite the Biden Administration failure to update the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer—the new dash-boarding system that should be giving criminal justice experts and the public as near to up-to-date crime data as possible. We know this because crime is a concrete manifestation of immorality that directly affects our lives. People experience crime and disorder in their lives. And social media has provided a means for seeing even more through other people’s eyes. We suspect the reason the FBI is not reporting the facts is because the facts will confirm what we already know: governments have utterly failed to protect the public from crime and violence.

Above the crime wave is represented at the national level by the rates of homicide and aggravated assault, both of which rose precipitously with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, what has been dubbed the “Ferguson Effect.” Because much of American is rural and suburban, and crime rates are typically much lower in these contexts compared to urban areas, the rise in these rates, as dramatic as they are, are made less so by aggregation. You may explore states and police areas by following the link with the caveat that these data have not been updated since 2021.

What explains the crime wave? “If crime is a product of poverty and discrimination as they say endlessly, why was there so much less of it when poverty and discrimination were much worse than today?” Thomas Sowell once said. “If massive [social] programs are the only hope to reduce violence in the ghetto, why was there so much less violence long before anyone ever thought of these programs?”

The implication of Sowell’s observations is correct: poverty doesn’t cause crime. The cause of crime is multifactorial. Structural inequality and material deprivation associated with poverty must be accompanied by family disintegration, demoralization, and the emergence and nurturance of a subculture that delegitimizes normative structures conducive to the development of a law abiding character. To be sure, without a system of determined wealth redistribution the capitalist mode of production produces inequality and material deprivation, but it’s the custodial state that progressives built over the twentieth century that demoralizes populations under their control and undermines their moral integrity, and these pieces are necessary for the emergence and persistence of a criminogenic culture.

The lull in crime between the early 1990s and the current rise in crime over the last decade was achieved by a massive expansion of the criminal control apparatus—more police on the street, greater technological prowess, better organization of command-and-control structure, aggressive policing and prosecution, tougher laws and sentencing, and a drastic increase in the incarceration of serious offenders. This effort was mounted at all levels of government—local, state, and federal. After decades of rising crime and violence beginning in the late 1960s, crime plateaued in the early 1990s and then began declining, this occurring in the face of rising inequality and poverty caused by globalization, i.e., offshoring of production and mass immigration.

Since then, a comprehensive political project, involving both propaganda of the word, seen in the rhetoric of antiracism and critical race theory, blaming the plight of poor disproportionately black and brown people on the western way of life, and propaganda of the deed, has delegitimized American institutions, especially the criminal justice system. The project has targeted the police with respect to its interactions with those subpopulations drastically overrepresented in crime, primarily black males, with the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” accompanied by the systemic depolicing of vulnerable communities under the banner of “Defunding the Police,” the politicization of prosecutors’ offices by transnational financiers, the widespread practice of cashless bail, and a myriad of other “reforms.”

This massive stand down of the criminal justice apparatus has unleashed those socialized in the criminogenic environments created by progressive policymakers and managed by Democratic Party members to prey on each other and those living near them. The millions flowing across the southern border fuel the fire. The effort to tamp down popular recognition of these facts is marked by accusations of bigotry and racism. But the public is becoming desensitized to the smears of woke progressivism. Situations often carry their own radicalizing effects. The people want law and order. They demand their human right to public safety. The violence of the present moment has shaken loose the memory of our disorderly past. We’ve been here before. And we don’t like it.

What happened in California on September 11, 2023 is startling, I know. It doesn’t even sound real. But this really happened. We have arrived at the point where a crackpot ideology will soon have the force of state behind it. Governor Gavin Newsom (the likely 2024 Democratic nominee for President of the Untied States) is sure to sign this monstrosity into law. It will mean that the state can commandeer children and destroy families if parents do not affirm the delusion that humans can change their gender and try to stop the genital mutilation of their children.

Here are the details (I relying on coverage of this story by Tristan Justice writing for the Federalist): On Friday, the California legislature approved Assembly Bill 957, that could potentially lead to parents losing custody of their children if they express reservations about their child’s desire to undergo hormone treatments or surgeries to transition to the opposite sex. Originally, the bill was introduced to require courts to consider whether parents were supportive of their child’s identification as transgender during custody disputes. However, in June, as if the original intent of the bill weren’t bad enough, lawmakers amended it to include provisions that could hold parents accountable for child abuse if they were not considered adequately “affirming” of their child’s gender identity.

Republican state Senator Scott Wilk strongly criticized the bill, advising parents to consider leaving the state to protect their children. “In the past when we’ve had these discussions and I’ve seen parental rights atrophy, I’ve encouraged people to keep fighting,” Wilk said in June. “I’ve changed my mind on that,” Wilk added. “If you love your children, you need to flee California. You need to flee.”

The legislation is part of a broader trend of government actions in California that have sparked concerns about parental rights. In another recent development, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued a school district over rules compelling teachers to notify parents about changes related to their child’s gender identity. A local judge temporarily suspended this policy, pending further litigation. Last fall, Governor Newsom signed a bill stripping out-of-state parents of their ability to protect children seeking transgender medical procedures in California. This law mandates that doctors withhold medical information related to “gender identity” from parents.

Proponents of such laws argue that they protect transgender and gender-nonconforming students, citing studies that purportedly suggest that easing access to medical interventions for adolescents pursuing gender transitions may increase the risk of mental health issues, including suicide, which, as I discussed in yesterdays blog entry, is a form of emotional blackmail used by the queer lobby to bully parents into supporting “gender affirming care.” However, there are no studies supporting the claim that denying access to puberty blocked, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries increases risk of suicide among adolescents.

* * *

Holy sh*t

The Secretary of State in Illinois came to speak out against “book bans” at school

Senator John Kennedy then reads directly from the books he is defending for kids

His reaction: "Those words are disturbing coming from your mouth."

pic.twitter.com/SEbha1qrGj

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 12, 2023

The Secretary of State in Illinois Alexi Giannoulias came to the United States Senate to speak out against “book bans” at public schools and libraries. Senator John Kennedy read directly from the books the Secretary is defending. It’s straight up pornography. All Boys aren’t Blue and Gender Queer are the books excerpted. These are just two of many books sexualizing and pushing the queer agenda on children. The Secretary’s reaction? “Those words are disturbing coming from your mouth.” Indeed. Are they not also disturbing coming from a teacher or a drag queen?

In this video clip, it is admitted that pornographic materials and materials intended for sexual grooming are being framed in the language diversity, inclusion, and equity to blunt efforts at child safeguarding. Keeping these materials away from children is decried as “book banning.” Those who argue for protecting children are smeared as bigots. The project to normalize paraphilia and sexualize children finds libraries as one of the most important sites to colonize since the appeal can be made that these are taxpayer funded institutions that must remain open to all—including to children who can be lured into a sexualized world where norms are problematized and sexual boundaries transgressed. None of this is happening by accident. It’s all part of a piece.

* * *

Unsure of the source, but this meme is essentially correct: