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Note (November 7, 2023): I was asked a provocative question this morning referencing this essay asking me to consider the question of why child pornography should be criminal and how does my response bear on the arguments presented here. “Isn’t it crime scene photography?” was the question.

When does a photograph, film, or video documenting a crime scene constitute a criminal offense itself. As a criminologist, I have seen quite a bit of crime scene photography, filmography, and videography. I wrote an essay about the matter inspired by James Allen’s 1999 Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America for The Journal of Black Studies several years ago. I compared the atrocities memorialized in those photographs to those of the Holocaust. While the photographs document crimes, collecting, distributing, and distributing them is not criminal. Indeed, it is of great importance that people have access to this material in order to grasp the significance of these crimes.

Memorializing the sexual exploitation of a child, which is a criminal act, since children can’t consent to such acts, recorded in the various media in which they fixed, is a criminal act in the same way that secretly recording women in a dressing room or the rape of a woman for personal or commercial purposes are or should be criminal offenses. To be sure, there is pornography that simulates these things; but if the women in the video consented to the acts depicted, they are not the victim of a crime. Presently, consensual sex acts conducted for the purposes of commercial pornography is legal in the United States. However, surveillance of women or raping them without their consent is not. The fruits of these crimes are also crime.

However, to relate this back to the essay, AI images are not of actual people. They are analogous to cartoons, drawings, paintings, etc., depicting ideas originating in the imagination of a man’s mind. That’s why I noted the work or R. Crumb. I won’t share his cartoons here, but you can find his work online. See, for example, his 1970 comic “Mr. Natural in ‘On the Bum Again’,” collected in Zap-Masters (2009). The story concerns a character called “Big Baby.” I won’t describe the content, but it’s explicitly pedophilic. The question one must ask in determining whether it’s criminal is whether an actual child was victimized in the production of the comic. If the answer no, then criminalizing the comic beyond that is thought crime.

In a 2017 issue of The British Journal of Criminology, in the article, Why Do Offenders Tape Their Crimes? Sveinung Sandberg and Thomas Ugelvik conclude: “New technologies are changing the way crimes are committed and the harmful consequences they have. Researchers, legislators and the victim support system need to take these changes seriously. For researchers, these developments call for an integration of insights taken from cultural, visual and narrative criminology. For legislators and the legal system, the additional harm following the recording and distribution of images of crime should be taken into account when legislating and sentencing in cases involving the use of cameras.”

* * * 

The institution of thought crime sneaks up on folks. You have to know what to look for. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British-based child safeguarding charity specializing in detecting, reporting, and minimizing child pornography, published a story a few days ago: “‘Worst nightmares’ come true as predators are able to make thousands of new AI images of real child victims.” “International collaboration vital as ‘real world’ abuses of AI escalate,” the subtitle goes. You might remember the IWF from its controversy years ago over the original album cover for the Scorpions’ Virgin Killer, which the IWF blacklisted. They dropped their blacklisting, but it was a sign of things to come. (One of many signs. Look them up.)

Those who read my blog know that I take a backseat to no one when it comes to child safeguarding. I’ve punished articles on this topic in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma and Sage’s Encyclopedia of Social Deviance, as well as several posts here at Freedom and Reason (Seeing and Admitting Grooming; Luring Children to the Edge: The Panic Over Lost Opportunities; What is Grooming?). However, if heeded, the implications of the demands of the IWF, threaten fundamental freedoms of conscience, expression, and speech. A sober examination of the problem of virtual child pornography is therefore in order.

For those who conflate the defense of free thought with being guilty of the thoughts authoritarians seek to censor, fuck off. I can’t imagine what would make a person sexually interested in children. I have the same thought about people who fantasize about rape and murder. I can’t emphasize. I can work with statistical patterns in an attempt to predict outcomes, but these are abstractions—and there’s the problem of false positives. What I care about is (a) prosecuting those individuals who actually harm concrete individuals in provable cases in courts of law, and (b) preventing the state from criminalizing art, expression, speech, and thought. Why (b) is important is because I don’t want to live in an Orwellian nightmare. Do you?

The IWF purports to reveal the disturbing extent of AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, having reportedly uncovered thousands of such images, some featuring (fictional) children under two years old. They cite their own work: How AI is being abused to create child sexual abuse imagery. “In 2023, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has been investigating its first reports of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) generated by artificial intelligence (AI).” Cue the moral panic.

CSAM stands for child sexual abuse material. Several organizations, most prominently RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), have stopped using the term “child pornography” in favor of the acronym CSAM because “it’s more accurate to call it what it is: evidence of child sexual abuse” (see “What is Child Sexual Abuse Material”). “While some of the pornography online depicts adults who have consented to be filmed, that’s never the case when the images depict children. Just as kids can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t consent to having images of their abuse recorded and distributed. Every explicit photo or video of a kid is actually evidence that the child has been a victim of sexual abuse.”

I emphasized that last sentence because this is what makes such images illegal: it is the memorialization of actual child victimization. United States law and precedent agree: “It is important to distinguish child pornography from the more conventional understanding of the term pornography.  Child pornography is a form of child sexual exploitation, and each image graphically memorializes the sexual abuse of that child.  Each child involved in the production of an image is a victim of sexual abuse.” (See Citizen’s Guide To U.S. Federal Law On Child Pornography.)

IWF warns the reader about the dark world of text-to-image technology. “In short, you type in what you want to see in online generators and the software generates the image. The technology is fast and accurate—images usually fit the text description very well. Many images can be generated at once—you are only really limited by the speed of your computer. You can then pick out your favorites; edit them; direct the technology to output exactly what you want.” The AI systems that generate virtual child porn work the same way as AI systems generating virtual adult porn. That’s because they’re the same systems. After considerable research, here’s what I understand about the process.

AI image generators work by using neural networks, particularly a class of learning models known as generative adversarial networks (GANs) or variational auto-encoders (VAEs), designed to produce images that resemble a given dataset. The key word here is resemble. The first step in the process is to gather a large dataset of images. These images are used to train the AI image generator. The quality of the generated images largely depends on the diversity and quality of the training data (as well as hyper-parameters and post-processing, but I won’t get into all that); neural networks are designed with specific architectures for image generation. 

GANs consists of two neural networks: a generator and a discriminator. The generator takes random noise as input and generates images. The discriminator is trained to distinguish between real and generated images. These networks are trained simultaneously in a competitive manner. The generator’s goal is to create images that are indistinguishable from real ones. The discriminator’ s goal is to become better at telling real from generated images. VAEs consist of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder maps input images to a lower-dimensional space, i.e., latent space, and generates a probability distribution. The decoder takes samples from this distribution and reconstructs images from them. VAEs are trained to generate images that match the training data distribution. 

During the training process, the generator learns to produce images that fool the discriminator (in the case of GANs) or reconstruct images faithfully (in the case of VAEs). The discriminator or encoder simultaneously improves its ability to distinguish between real and generated images or map input data to the latent space. GANs use a loss function that encourages the generator to produce images that the discriminator can’t distinguish from real ones. VAEs use a loss function that encourages the latent space to be structured in a way that makes it suitable for image generation. After training, the generator or decoder can take random noise or other inputs and produce images. The quality of the generated images improves as the training process progresses. AI systems are always learning.

IWF claims that the AI-generated images are made up of real images of children. But this misunderstands the process. The images generated by AI models are not copies of the source images that are used for training. Instead, these AI systems create synthetic images that are inspired by the patterns and features present in the training data. The generated images are not replicas of any specific source image but rather representations of what the model has learned about the general characteristics and structures of the training data. Put simply, the AI model learns statistical patterns and relationships from the training images and then uses this knowledge to generate entirely new images that may resemble the characteristics, content, and style of the training data. So, while the generated images may share similarities with the source images (e.g., they depict faces, poses, objects, or scenes), they are not copies or duplicates of any specific photograph; they are novel creations produced by the AI model.

In the case of images of children in sexually provocative poses or children involved in sexual activity, AI models never need to see actual photographs of children in sexual activities or situations. They have a universe of adults in sexualized scenarios, as well as a universe of children involved in various activities, to draw from. From its learning, systems re able to synthesize from these data entirely novel images that look photorealistic. The process works in much the same way that a human artist relies on his knowledge of the world to depict children in sexually provocative poses or involved in sexual activity. While we may find his work reprehensible, and would never attempt to draw such images ourselves, it is nonetheless the case that no child is sexually exploited in the process. The great cartoonist and graphic illustrator R. Crumb drew cartoons and illustrations (some photorealistic) that many observers find repulsive; however, they are just that: cartoons and illustrations. His brain generated those images from a universe of data downloaded in much the same way as an AI system does.

Should the generation and accumulation of these images be criminalized? That’s like asking whether R. Crumb is a criminal and his art contraband. Maybe you think so. I don’t. Moreover, the reaction risks assuming that all depictions of naked children are a priori instances of child sexual abuse. You might recall that Facebook and other web sites censored the cover art of Led Zeppelin’s album Houses of the Holy because it featured singer Robert Plant’s children naked on the cover. I have no doubt that there are individuals who find this album cover sexually arousing. Most others, however, find it a beautiful work of art. Whether it’s pornographic or not reflects the mind of the individual. There is nothing inherent in an image of a naked child that’s pornographic.

It is therefore rather beside the point—at least it should be—that the IWF indicates that the majority of AI-generated child sexual abuse images, as assessed by IWF analysts, now possess a level of realism that qualifies them as genuine images under UK law. The most convincing imagery is so lifelike, they claim, that even trained analysts struggle to differentiate it from actual photographs. Moreover, they warn, the use of text-to-image technology is expected to advance further, creating additional challenges for the IWF and law enforcement agencies. But this obscures the actual problem, which is the sexual exploitation of a really-existing child in the production of the image or video in question. If no actual child is depicted in the photograph, the question of whether the child was sexually exploited cannot follow, as no crime could have possibly taken place.

There is an asterisk associated with the second paragraph of the initial article cited above indicating an endnote. When we go to the endnote we find the following “AI CSAM is criminal—actionable under the same laws as real CSAM.” The laws identified are these: “The Protection of Children Act 1978 (as amended by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994). This law criminalizes the taking, distribution and possession of an ‘indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child.’” And: “The Coroners and Justice Act 2009. This law criminalizes the possession of ‘a prohibited image of a child.’ These are non-photographic—generally cartoons, drawings, animations or similar. AI CSAM is criminal—actionable under the same laws as real CSAM.” 

In guidance updated on November 21, 2019, titled “Indecent images of children: guidance for young people,” from the Home Office of the United Kingdom, referenced by IWF, while it does consider illegal “[t]aking, making, sharing and possessing indecent images and pseudo-photographs of people under 18,” that guidance was withdrawn on March 1, 2023. It is however, still instructive. Crucially, the withdrawn document defines a “pseudo-photograph” as “an image made by computer-graphics or otherwise which appears to be a photograph.” What counts as a pseudo-photograph? Photos, videos, tracings, and derivatives of a photograph, i.e., data that can be converted into a photograph. Moreover, while admitting that “‘indecent’ is not defined in legislation,” it “can include penetrative and non-penetrative sexual activity.” It defines “making” broadly as including opening, accessing, downloading, and storing pseudo-photographs. 

The withdrawn document announces that it worked with IWF to ensure every one knows the law and understand that “looking at sexual images or videos of under 18s is illegal, even if you thought they looked older” and that “these are images of real children and young people, and viewing them causes further harm.” But, in the case of pseudo-photographs generated by AI, these are not images of real children. If we return to the definition of CSAM, what lies at the heart of the issue are images that represent evidence of child sexual abuse. In the case of either human-imagined or AI-generated images, there are no sexually exploited children. There are only representations of sexually exploited children, in this case, children who do not exist. These are simulations, simulacra, and while the desire to make and consume them may offend our sensibilities, no crime has occurred except a thought crime, and at the end of that road lies totalitarianism.

People living in the UK beware. UK law does conflate images depicting child sexual abuse with images of child sexual abuse. In its guidance on Indecent and Prohibited Images of Children: “In deciding whether the image before you is a photograph/pseudo-photograph or a prohibited image apply the following test: If the image was printed would it look like a photograph (or a pseudo-photograph)? If it would then it should be prosecuted as such. For example, some high quality computer generated indecent images may be able to pass as photographs and should be prosecuted as such. The CPS has had successful prosecutions of computer-generated images as pseudo-photographs.” This is why IWF is concerned about the realistic nature of AI art.

Things are a bit different in America. Under United States law, which also prohibits CSAM, this does not include virtual child pornography or even all of what many would regard as child pornography. “Visual depictions include photographs, videos, digital or computer generated images indistinguishable from an actual minor, and images created, adapted, or modified, but appear to depict an identifiable, actual minor.” Note the emphasis on there being an actual minor involved. The meaning here is a little fuzzy. However, the Supreme Court clarified things in 2002.

In 1996, the ban on CSAM included sexually explicit material that “conveys the impression” that a child was involved in its creation, even if none was actually used. The Court ruled the “virtual pornography” law violated free speech rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy led the court majority, finding two provisions of the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act overly broad and unconstitutional. “The First Amendment requires a more precise restriction,” he wrote. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer joined him. Justice Kennedy asserted in his opinion that virtual child pornography was not directly related to child sexual abuse. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority (writing a separate opinion).

I find it despicable that a person would find children sexually arousing. I am not offended by much, but this is one of those things that shocks the conscience. But in reality, no child is sexually exploited by an individual who does not act to exploit that child. To give the state the power to punish people for their thoughts is to give up man’s most fundamental freedom: the freedom to think what he will. Ask yourself, who will be the ultimate arbiter of what shall be considered criminal thoughts? The state? Don’t make a whip for your own back. States are not to be trusted.

Imagine if one day the United Kingdom falls to Islam (it could happen). Folks there will rue the day they gave the state power over their thoughts. Unfortunately, the British have no First Amendment—and they have given the state too much power over their thoughts already. Keep in mind that they’ve already moved to make frank acknowledgment of reality in the case of gender a hate crime. Conflating art, expression, speech, and thought with actual harm caused to actual people reveals the mind of the authority. And while a person may be free to conflate these things, freedom demands that the state must not take up his conflation. Indeed, such a man is free to think this way because he lives in a democratic society that protects the right of individuals to think freely, whatever the content of those thoughts.

I watched an interesting program tonight, which I have shared at the bottom. Kaylyn Borysenko, an anarcho-capitalist I follow on X (Twitter), shared an anti-family presentation by ME O’Brien. It’s long. Borysenko makes decent points throughout, but the anti-Marxist reflex prevents a more depth analysis of O’Brien’s angle.

I studied Marxism in the 1990s in graduate school at the University of Tennessee. In fact, my PhD carries a specialization in critical political economy—heavily Marxist. My teachers were Marxists (Bill Robinson, now at UC-Santa Barbara, was one of them). What’s being passed off in the discussion as Marxism is really neo-Hegelian philosophy. Marx and Engels were materialists. And although ME O’Brien appeals to humanism at the end, and uses the rhetoric of communalism/communization throughout, O’Brien self-identifies as a Hegelian. They’re a lot of junk stuck to it so it is definitely neo.

Marx and Engels did not advocate for the abolition of the family. Their discussion of the family, in The Communist Manifesto (I wrote the intro to the Skyhorse edition, so check it out) and in Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (adapted from Marx’s notes of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family and Ancient Society), focuses on how the institution of the family is shaped by the mode of production and, in turn, reproduces the prevailing mode of production.

Marx and Engels argue for the abolition of the bourgeois family because, duh, they argue for the abolition of the bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels believed that the family is functional to the reproduction of labor and the maintenance of class divisions in a given mode of production; the bourgeoise family, characterized by patriarchal structures, private property, and inheritance, is functional to the capitalist class. Theoretically, bourgeois attributes, such as inheritance, would lose their significance with the passing of capitalism. It’s a pretty obvious sociological observation.

SOCIALISM SATURDAY: Family Abolition with ME O'Brien https://t.co/5s0JX8HH50

— Karlyn Borysenko, the modern day Yuri Bezmenov (@DrKarlynB) October 28, 2023

Update (October 28, 2023): the North American Grappling Association (NAGA) has announced that trans identifying males are banned from from competing against women. This came as multiple female competitors boycotted a competition in protest to men competing. NAGA has announced that transgender competitors must now compete in the men’s category, and only women can compete in the female category. Referring to women as “cisgender” (cisgender is a propaganda term used by queer activists to normalize the construct “transgender”) and fallacious referring to men as females, NAGA announced: “We will have divisions for only cisgender females. Transgender females will not be entered into these divisions.”

The feminist magazine Reduxx published an article today, “Women Abandon Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Tournament After Being Forced To Fight Males Men,” in which it was reported that female martial artists have come forward to reveal that male athletes have taken over the women’s categories of a major grappling association, the North American Grappling Association (NAGA), leaving the women fearing for their safety. According to the article, “One of the men, Corissa Griffith, took home four gold medals in the women’s category during a tournament in Georgia on October 21.”

I have written about the unfair practice of allow boys and men to compere against girls and women in sports (see The Rapidly Approaching Death of Sex-based Rights; No, The International Powerlifting Federation Did Not Strike a Blow for Women’s Rights; Why Are There Sex-Segregated Spaces Anyway? and The Casual Use of Propagandistic Language Surrounding Sex and Gender). What’s so bizarre about including men in women’s sports is that sex-segregated sports is, among other things, about gender equity. The goal is to give girls and women a chance to compete in organized sports in such a way as to give them a reasonable chance of succeeding. Do woke types even understand what equity actually means and entails?

Equity is a form of equality the considers fairness and justice. It’s distinguished from strict equality where everybody is treated the same without regard to significant group differences. Equity means recognizing that there are significant group differences, that these must be acknowledged, and that institutions must make adjustments in light of those differences. There is no normal and natural group difference more profound in our species than that between male and female bodies. The human, as with all mammalian species, is sexually dimorphic. In our species, as it is with the other great apes, sexual dimorphism is especially pronounced.

Compared to females, on average, males have a larger build than females; males typically have broader shoulders, narrower hips, and a more muscular physique, inducing more muscle mass and different mixes of muscle types. Females typically have a higher percentage of body fat compared to males, which can make it more difficult to perform physical activities that require endurance. Females generally have wider hips and a narrower ribcage compared to males, and a different center of gravity, which affects balance and stability. Men are on average taller than women, which gives them advantage in sports where height is an asset. These differences give males advantages in activities that require physical strength, e.g., combat sports.

Because of these facts—facts that cannot be altered—boys and men possess substantial physical advantages over girls and women such that, if boys and men are allowed into women’s sports, males will dominate, taking opportunities from women and endangering their physical safety. This means that queer advocates who push the inclusion of males in women’s sports cannot also lay claim to a commitment to equity. Indeed, they’re demanding that men who pretend to be women be granted an extraordinary privilege—to physically dominate and humiliate girls and women in public. To justify the injustice they seek, queer advocates have regressed to advocating for strict equality, something they condemn in every other walk of life.

Queer politics are a total mess intellectually—and a distinct danger in practice. The attitude is authoritarian and the arguments are irrational. At its core, it’s a misogynistic movement. The hatred the movement harbors at its heart finds its expression in the abusive behavior of trans rights activists (see Self-Castration and TERF-Punching: Trans Rights are What Sort of Rights? Antifa is Trans Activism; From Delusion to Illusion: Transitioning Disordered Personalities into Valid Identities; Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy; Embedding Misogyny and the Progressive Mind). The movement strives to deny men and women their sexuality, loathing lesbians in particular, and it demands the state and society emplace trammels on the sex-based rights of women.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who withdrew from his Democratic primary challenge to President Joe Biden earlier this month to run as an independent, has expressed support for allocating federal funds to “rebuild black infrastructure,” such as banks and businesses, and also for providing “direct redress payments or tax credits,” rather than unconditional cash giveaways. At first, he filed these policy ideas under the category “reparations.” He even discussed providing “direct redress payments or tax credits.” He has since dropped that last phrase and refiled the ideas under the label “Targeted Community Repair.” (Here’s the most recent page from his campaign website.)

The corporate media has interpreted Kennedy’s “racial healing” plan and civil rights agenda as threatening Biden’s bid for reelection by carving out a road to the left of the President. Indeed, new polls show that Kennedy’s populist campaign is drawing votes away from Biden, which put Donald Trump well in the lead for the 2024 election, a development that has the establishment leaning into the lawfare being waged against the former president. Biden also has Cornel West (who recently left the Green Party to run as an independent) to contend with.

I have publicly expressed support for Kennedy’s candidacy. I’m a populist and a fan of the man for a number of reasons, not least of which is his advocacy for victims of corporate polluters and the medical-industrial complex. However, a few days ago, in a Facebook post, I said that reparations was a red line for me. It still is—as I understand reparations: a scheme to hold collectively responsible whites and other groups for actions for which they are not nor could be responsible, since these actions happened in the past, were perpetrated by others, and have carried no benefit for the vast majority of whites, who were and continue to be exploited and impoverished by the capitalist class.

I am frustrated by the way race talk is prioritized in the United States; it obscures the most important driver of inequality in the world, namely class struggle. It’s a little known fact, but twice as many whites live below the poverty line as do blacks. They’re approximately twenty million whites who live below the poverty line, with tens of millions more struggling to get by despite working full-time and at multiple jobs. What is more, there are millions of affluent blacks—artists, athletes, capitalists, managers, and professionals. The way the media covers inequality, one would think that race is a proxy for economic inequality. This is far from reality. (See They Do You This Way.)

Of course, Kennedy is focused on the race question because he accepts the legitimacy of capitalism. I suffer under no delusions that he will fundamentally transform the economic system. My support for his candidacy was rooted instead in my desire to see the restoration of the American republic, something about which the man has spoken eloquently. For centuries, the establishment has manufactured racial division to disunite the working class, Karl Marx’s optimism that “the red sea of civil war red tide of civil war” would lead to the “reconstruction of a social world” dashed on the rocks of corporatism. Kennedy risks perpetuating this division with the rhetoric of “targeted community repair.”

From the campaign website: “Communities that were specifically targeted for destruction need to be specifically targeted for repair. During Jim Crow, Black [sic] banks, businesses, hospitals, schools, and farms were targeted for destruction. Racists knew that without these, the Black [sic] community had no chance of building wealth. We must set federal dollars aside to rebuild Black [sic] infrastructure.” Sensing the divisive character of these words—Jim Crow was abolished nearly sixty years ago—his website goes on to state: “Targeted Community Repair will be available to devastated communities across the country, not just Black [sic]. The criteria will be around need, not skin color. However, because there are so many Black [sic] communities in need, this program will channel significant resources toward the rebuilding of these most devastated of communities.”

The website eliminated this language, which has earlier been reported by The New York Post: “These programs complement direct redress payments or tax credits to the descendants of the victims of Jim Crow and other victims of persecution.” It then emphasized that “RFK Jr. will find ways to offer this redress that are legal, fair, and win the approval of Americans of all races.” This language has been replaced by the following: “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. believes that this unacceptable situation is the result of the unhealed legacy of racism in this country. We must take direct action to remedy it—not only for the sake of Black [sic] people, but for the wellbeing of the entire nation. He will appeal not to guilt and blame, but to the conscience of Americans of all races who want to repair the wounds of history.” Better, but still rooted in an abstract group-based morality rather than on the reality of class dynamics and the humanist ethic of individualism.

In the video shared above, which is from the Math Hoffa show, Kennedy voices his support for the establishment of development projects like the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which his father helped establish in 1967 alongside then-Mayor John Lindsay and then-Senator Jacob Javits. Kennedy emphasized that these initiatives are “less likely to contribute to polarization between blacks and whites because it benefits everybody. Everybody, even people who are Trumpers…everybody wants business to work and to flourish.” I don’t like the pejorative “Trumpers,” but his argument here is more sophisticated than a lot of the arguments carrying the reparations label.

This past Thursday, I lectured on police-civilian encounters in my senior-level criminal justice class and discussed the problems of ghettoization and what Harvard legal scholar Randall Kennedy called “racially selective underproduction,” which I adapted to make a case against decarceration and depolicing. In his campaign literature, Kennedy talks about both prison reform and police reform in ways that indicate a disconnect between his understanding of the pathologies wrought by the historic underdevelopment of black communities and the need for prisons and police to protect those living in urban areas. The evidence makes clear that depolicing is associated with a drastic rise in violent crime in our urban areas. Last year, 53 percent of homicides were perpetrated by blacks, most of whom were males, with 57 percent of homicide victims black civilians—and 57 percent of robberies were perpetrated by blacks. Public safety is a human right.

However, Kennedy does understand what lies at the root of these criminogenic conditions, and that’s the social disorganization and lack of collective efficacy identified by such scholars as Robert Sampson and William Julius Wilson.

In the video shared above, a participant, Mecc, responds, “I must express with all due respect that, speaking for myself and likely for many in the black community, we aren’t primarily concerned with how others feel about the idea of cash reparations. If the notion of us receiving cash reparations makes others uncomfortable, that’s more on them. Furthermore, I’m not overly interested in what’s good for everybody when we discuss reparations. Our focus should be on what’s beneficial for the black people who have consistently faced systemic disadvantages due to the existence of a system that some deny. Some would tell you there’s no systemic racism and that you should pull yourself up by your non-existent bootstraps, even after they’ve taken your boots away. Frankly, I’m not even wearing boots.”

Mecc doesn’t speak for all blacks, of course, but this is a widespread attitude in the black population, one frequently heard since the 1960s. In a October 29, 1966 speech at the University of California, Berkeley, Stokely Carmichael thundered: “And they come into our ghettos and they Head Start, Upward Lift, Bootstrap, and Upward Bound us into white society. ’Cause they don’t want to face the real problem. Which is a man is poor for one reason and one reason only: because he does not have money. Period. If you want to get rid of poverty you give people money. Period. And you ought not tell me about people who don’t work, and you can’t give people money without working, because if that were true, you’d have to start stopping Rockefeller, Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, the whole of Standard Oil, the Gulf Club [Gulf Corporation]—all of them.”

Mecc echoes Carmichael’s polemic: “I don’t want our path to financial restitution, or even more than that, to be dependent on how another group perceives it or how they might react negatively. Maybe if we confront the substantial issue that’s been overlooked and its ongoing impact, reparations wouldn’t be as painful. Perhaps they won’t be so difficult to accept if we stop attempting to rewrite history or pretending that these problems don’t exist. Denying systemic racism and telling people to work harder, or pointing to the existence of a black president as proof that things aren’t that bad, only hinders the path to reparations. Reparations wouldn’t feel like taking something away from others; it would be keeping a promise we’ve already made.”

But race-based reparation does in fact involve taking something away from others. If white people—again, more of whom are counted among the poor than any other racial group in America—are going to be enlisted in a project to repair that which they didn’t break, then any policy must include them in it. Moreover, if they are going to sacrifice the value of their time and labor to this project, they rightly expect accountability.

Mecc’s rhetoric is quintessentially black nationalist and rests on the essentialist fallacy of treating individuals as if they are personifications of abstract groups. The only real differentiations among human beings are those resting on physical and material grounds and these are three only: children, class, and sex (and class is a function of the prevailing mode of production). Beyond these objective categories, the American Republic was founded as a nation of individuals, not a nation of groups—however much the ideology of racial and cultural pluralism has confused popular consciousness. With the dismantling of de jure segregation, the continuing problem with racism is at its core the problem of identitarian thinking, and that problem isn’t solved by leaning into racism but by transcending it, that is by practicing colorblindness, i.e., race neutrality.

The man to the left of Mecc expresses sympathy for Mecc’s point, but then says, “I do understand what [RJK, Jr. is] saying about focusing on what will genuinely improve the community in the long term rather than it just feeling like a short-lived windfall followed by a return to the status quo. That’s where my understanding lies.”

And this is where all our understandings must lie. I am all for making investments in black-majority communities, as these are the very communities the Democratic Party has impoverished and disorganized with its progressive policies and identitarian politics. Disorganized communities are the source of the violent street crime that disproportionately impacts black people. However, because of this disorganization and the pathologies it has produced, cash reparations would be the worst investment possible Americans could make—indeed, it would be no investment at all. The money would be spent without any improvement in the neighborhoods. So, with all due respect to Mecc, your disregard for my opinion (my feelings don’t matter), don’t inspire confidence in the effort I would be asked to make.

Ep. 32 You’ll be shocked to learn this, but it turns out the whole George Floyd story was a lie. pic.twitter.com/4vDXBStHf5

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 20, 2023

I’m struck by this dialogue between Tucker Carlson and Vince Everett Ellison. Putting aside Ellison’s religious arguments and his confusing woke progressivism with Marxism (typical of conservatives), his analysis is spot on. In light of these points, it seems that cash reparations would be precisely the strategy one would use if the outcome was to produce more George Floyds. Such production would benefit Democrats, of course, the party of the slavocracy and now the corporatocracy, elites who want blacks to vote for a living instead of work for a living—a strategy for a type of systemic racism Stokely Carmichael internalizes in his speech, explicitly expressing the desire for blacks to be a kept race (Poor Mothers, Cash Support, and the Custodial State). But it would help neither blacks nor whites going forward, since sustaining the hegemony of Democratic Party will keep not only a large proportion of the black people trapped in crime-ridden and socially disorganized communities, but will also keep white people living in poverty and at risk for home invasion—both by the bearers of the pathologies of the neighborhoods in question and the thug forces of the federal police state.

So my enthusiasm for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been dampened but not broken. I’m hedging a little on the red line I drew in my Facebook comments. I will wait to hear more. That he walked back the crude language of the vulgar identitarian gives me reason to not walk away. But I can’t tolerate much more of this straying into woke progressivism.

“The American people are thirsty for change, they are hungry for leadership, and frankly, they know the White House cannot provide it, they know the Senate won’t lead, and they are looking for House Republicans to step up.” —Jim Jordan, October 20, 2023

Biden’s speech October 19, 2023, wasn’t as much to sell the public on war as it was to reassure K Street that the administrative state was fully on board the establishment’s strategy to marginalize the populist revolt against military spending on Ukraine in the House, a strategy that involves preventing the election of a House speaker, the position Jim Jordan is vying for.

It looks like the breakdown of the $105 billion security package includes $60 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, and $10 billion for humanitarian efforts, some of which will wind up in the hands of Hamas and Ukrainian fascists.

“Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy—completely annihilate it.” But this is not what Putin is seeking. Putin’s goal in Ukraine has been obvious from the beginning. Moscow seeks autonomy for the territories in the Donbas currently controlled by separatists, who are ethnic Russians. Ukrainian fascists are violently pressing the separatists. Putin acts to protect his fellow Russians.

The US deep state has exploited this struggle to turn Ukraine into a forward staging area for war against Russia. Last night Biden told us what this was: “And just two weeks ago, [Putin] told the world that if the United States and our allies withdraw—and if the United States withdraw, our allies will as well—military support for Ukraine, it would have, quote, ‘a week left to live.’ But we’re not withdrawing.” In other words, the regime in Washington is already at war with Russia, with the American people in tow.

“Iran is in Ukraine, and it’s supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups in the region. And we’ll continue to hold them accountable, I might add.” By giving Iran billions of dollars? Biden is using Hamas Iran-funded and ordered attack on Israel, of which US intelligence had an inkling, to funnel more money to Ukraine, which is being used by weapons merchants to funnel weapons through Iran to Hamas. Preparing the public for the inevitable, Biden hedged: “If Hamas does not divert or steal this shipment—these shipments, we’re going to provide an opening for sustained delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians.” Biden is openly funding both sides in the conflict.

The signaling to arms industry and weapons merchants couldn’t be more clear: “The security package I’m sending to Congress and asking Congress to do is an unprecedented commitment to Israel’s security that will sharpen Israel’s qualitative military edge, which we’ve committed to—the qualitative military edge.” And this: “On Ukraine, I’m asking Congress to make sure we can continue to send Ukraine the weapons they need to defend themselves and their country without interruption so Ukraine can stop Putin’s brutality in Ukraine.” Ukraine isn’t asking for much, Biden reassured Americans. “All Ukraine is asking for is help—for the weapons, munitions, the capacity, the capability to push invading Russian forces off their land, and the air defense systems to shoot down Russian missiles before they destroy Ukrainian cities.”

More signaling to the military-industrial complex and to members of Congress from districts where those contractors reside: “And let me be clear about something: We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores—our own stockpiles with new equipment—equipment that that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country—in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas; and so much more.” In other words, Republicans, form a unity government with Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats. Make K Street happy.

He tried to hook all this up to history: “You know, just as in World War Two, today, patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” But it’s an entirely false association. In fact, it’s the opposite. Then, the United States was allied with Russia in a war against fascism. Today, the United States is using fascists to wage war against Russia—and using Israel as cover.

See The US is Not Provoking Russia—And Other Tall Tales; History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War; Is War With Russia Inevitable?; Will WWIII Begin in Eurasia?

“In Defense of Destroying Property.” This is from the Nation, June 2020. It’s an example of how dumb seemingly smart people can be—made dumb by ideology. Or maybe it’s a instance of toxic mimicry.

Here it’s argued—by R.H. Lossin, who holds a PhD in communications from Columbia University and teachers at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research—that too many communities are over-policed. On the contrary. Too many communities are under-policed.

That’s why 57 percent of the victims of homicide last year were black people (the numbers are finally out over at the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer), members of a demographic comprising only around 13 percent of the US population, and their murderers were other black people (mostly male)—all of them living in impoverished and under-policed urban neighborhoods governed by progressive Democrats.

These are the neighborhoods where most mass shootings happen, which the media doesn’t tell you about because, you know, social justice.

It’s the left idealist bullshit spewed by elite academics like R.H. Lossin translated into urban policy by Democratic politicians subservient to corporate elites that’s responsible for mass death in black communities, and this moron with advanced degrees (which elite institutions hand out like candy) wants fewer police there so more poor black people can die.

It’s not smashing plate glass windows. It’s smashing the life dreams of people who actually create things. It’s scores of people killed by those enabled by the false rhetoric of white privilege promulgated by fake antiracists—demoralized by the conditions these fake antiracists created.

Now they’re wound up over “decolonization.” What does that look like? It looks like headless babies and burned bodies. What did they say? “Any form of Palestinian resistance is in no way equivalent to the daily violence of ‘Israeli’ settlers, the IOF, and the entire ‘Israeli’ state apparatus.” Who are they? Adhy Kim (Harvard), RH Lossin (Harvard), Eman Abdelhadi (UChicago), Sophie Lewis (Penn), Marty Cain (Cornell), Maz Do (Cornell), Addie Tsai (William & Mary), Aaron Aceves (UT), Joshua Nguyen (Tufts).

Because social justice.

NEW: A group of prominent academics have signed a letter justifying violent struggle against Israel, including: Adhy Kim (Harvard), RH Lossin (Harvard), Eman Abdelhadi (UChicago), Sophie Lewis (Penn), Marty Cain (Cornell), Maz Do (Cornell), Addie Tsai (William & Mary), Aaron… pic.twitter.com/OFdzxrdbNu

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 19, 2023

“EngSoc.” Ring a bell? That’s Newspeak for “English Socialism,” a fictional political ideology and government entity featured in British writer George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the Orwell’s dystopian world the ruling party, “The Party,” has instituted “English Socialism,” abbreviated as “EngSoc.” But is it a fictional political ideology and government? Or is it here and in the real?

In the book, The Party’s ideology is characterized by suppression of individualism, surveillance, and thought control. The key features of EngSoc: The Party exerts control over every aspect of its citizens’ lives, aiming to eliminate any dissent or opposition to its rule; The Party employs the “Thought Police” to monitor and punish any action or thought that goes against its ideology. This includes “thoughtcrime,” which is desiring or thinking something that goes against Party doctrine; The Party uses a controlled language called “Newspeak” to limit freedom of thought by eliminating words that could be used to express unorthodox thoughts, thus effectively reducing the range of thought and limiting the ability to rebel; the symbol and figurehead of The Party is “Big Brother,” who is always watching and is the embodiment of The Party’s authority; the Party uses pervasive surveillance, including telescreens that both broadcast Party propaganda and monitor citizens in their homes; citizens are expected to simultaneously accept two contradictory beliefs, a concept known as “doublethink,” which functions to ensure loyalty to The Party, as it requires people to believe whatever The Party tells them, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

I might have reported this a little while ago on social media, but it is looking pretty certain now that, under a Labor government in the UK, purposely calling someone by the “wrong” gender pronoun could lead to jail time of up to two years. The premise behind the law is that it is anti-discrimination action—that is, it is discrimination to correctly gender a person. This would bring “transphobic abuse” into line with assault and harassment motivated by hatred on the grounds of race or religion, which are currently punishable by up to two years in prison. (See Labour to jail people who use wrong gender pronouns on purpose under hate crime law.) Just like the surveillance cameras installed through the United Kingdom, everything about this proposal is in line with Orwell’s warning about the island’s future totalitarian state.

On the terrain of truth, since gender is an objective fact about a person, it cannot be an act of misgendering a man to refer to him by the pronouns that align with his gender, but rather is an act of gendering. Misgendering occurs when, for example, a person refers a man as a woman. Sometimes men look like women, but they are still men. Misgendering is understandable in cases of ambiguity. But people almost always get it right. (And even if they get it wrong, even intentionally, how can the state punish an individual for being mistaken or obnoxious?) This is because our species is evolved to see gender. It’s a primal reflex. No one should be punished for intentionally yielding to their natural history (see Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module).

Redefining correctly gendering a person as “misgendering” is an Orwellian move. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell identified a number of slogans that flipped the truth, e.g., “War is peace” and “Freedom is slavery.” In Orwell’s novel, truth flipping kept the people subjugated. The queer slogan “Transwomen are women” is an example of just such an Orwellian move. What Labor wants to do is force citizens of a free country to affirm the delusions and/or politics of those under the spell/advocating a queer worldview. This is just like the British government jailing people who refuse to say “Two and two is five.” The word that captures the essence of this is totalitarian.

Troubling in itself, but adding insult to injury, reflecting on this as a native America, is the fact that the United Kingdom is my mother country. For Labor to be behind such an authoritarian measure tells us how far the official political left has fallen away from the principles of Enlightenment. Some will object that this is only a possibility. Even if this doesn’t happen, that it was being floated it itself a terrible and frightening thing.

I don’t know why I was ignorant of Wesley Yang and his work, but I was and now I’m not. Recently, I started reading his X (Twitter) threads and decided to look him up. He’s an essayist and political commentator currently serving as a columnist for Tablet Magazine and a contributing editor at Esquire. He hosts a Substack blog and podcast named Year Zero.

According to biographical information, Yang rose to prominence in 2008 when he authored an article for n+1 focusing on Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter who murdered 32 people and injured 17 others. (I am sure I read Yang then but never committed the name to memory.) What brings me to make a blog note about Yang is his concept of “successor ideology,” which he introduced in 2019. Yang coined the term to delineate an emerging ideology associated with (what I regard as a faux) left-wing movement in the United States rooted in identity politics. Yang stands in opposition to this ideology, asserting that it threatens to replace traditional liberal values. (Go here for a discussion of the concept.)

Yang’s term captures what I have been blogging about for several years now: an ideological framework prevalent in corporatist and progressive politics currently dominating the United States. This ideology revolves around principles of anti-racism, identity politics, intersectionality, and social justice—what is often referred to as “woke.” As I have been doing in those blog essays, Yang also warns that this ideology is supplanting traditional liberal values such as color blindness, freedom of speech, free inquiry, and pluralism. We see the ideology at work in cancel culture and in diversity, equity, and inclusion programming (see The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI; The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think).

Ed West, writing for the UnHerd, has quoted Yang aptly characterizing successor ideology as an “authoritarian Utopianism that masquerades as liberal humanism while undermining it from within.” This attitude is why successor ideology is functional for corporate state governance, i.e., the New Fascism: it incorporates into the structure of power those who might otherwise resist neoliberalism arrangements. By appealing to the desire of progressives to signal virtue, while exploiting the deep alienation they experience in the context of late capitalism, an estrangement unpinning a profound false consciousness, corporate state elites transform potential enemies into defenders.

In a June 2020 essay in the Intelligencer, in the context of the Black Lives Matter riots, Andrew Sullivan characterizes successor ideology as a new orthodoxy rooted in what fellow journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” Sullivan writes, “Lowery told Times media columnist Ben Smith that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be).” This position conflates objectivity with neutrality and thus becomes a rationalization for propaganda. “And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity?” Sullivan rhetorically wonders. “That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, ‘the justice system—in fact, the entire American experiment—was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.’”

As I have been showing for many years now, the claim that America is systemically racist, that it’s a white supremacist project with a justice system designed to perpetuate racial inequality, is historically inaccurate. It is a revision of history made to validate tenets of critical race theory (see Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project), a fallacious teaching in legal theory in which individuals are rendered as personifications of abstract racial categories (fallacy of misplaced concreteness), and the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and of chattel slavery, the dismantling of de jure segregation, and the criminalization of institutional discrimination is theorized to function to push white supremacy so deeply into the warp and woof of western society that a species of postmodernist critical theory became necessary to detect it.

(See also The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones; Committing the Crime it Condemns; Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening: Unreasonableness and Quasi-religious Standards; What Critical Race Theory Is and Isn’t. Spoiler Alert: It’s Racist and Not Marxist; Not All White People Are Racist.)

Have you heard about the Stanford teacher who made Jews stand in the corner of a classroom? This really happened and his name is Ameer Hasan Loggins. Stanford suspended him. I’m as close to a free speech absolutist as one can be, a stalwart defender of academic freedom, but telling a people based on their ethnicity to stand in a corner is unacceptable. It is not protected speech. It’s discrimination—invidious discrimination. No teacher can be allowed to single out students on account of ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexuality—whatever—and humiliate them. Let every university and college know what this man did and avoid him like the plague.

Loggins is listed as teaching civic and liberal education at Standard. This is what he said to his students to justify his actions: “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” So that makes it okay to do it to Jews in America? No. Of course not. He’s a moral simpleton. But is this claim even true? There are approximately 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, comprising about 20 percent of the total Israeli population, and while, especially according to the rhetoric of antiracism, they face institutionalized discrimination and exclusion, they have the vote and participate in political life. How, then, is this man teaching civics and the principles of liberal education at Stanford? Was this a diversity hire?

Loggins earned a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies, a masters in African American Studies and a doctorate in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley. Here’s his page at Medium to help you get a sense of whether these degrees are serious or whether Loggins was just moved through the system (one can imagine he is difficult to deal with and maybe a little scary). The unseriousness of the man becomes plainly obvious within seconds of readying his essays, each one more absurd than the next. (Are the editors at the Guardian embarrassed that he writes for them? Are the editors over there ever embarrassed about anything?)

See in particular this piece ( “Anti-Black Police Terrorism”), where Loggins claims that he knows what he saw: George Floyd was lynched. “There was no struggle,” he writes. “No sense of danger. Chauvin appeared to be at peace with his decision to lynch George Floyd.” Did Loggins actually watch the video? Or does he not have eyes to see? There was a struggle. Floyd was a known danger (during a home invasion he shoved a gun in a pregnant woman’s stomach). There was no lynching. I’m a minor scholar of lynching and I know that is a ridiculous assertion (see Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide, published in the Journal of Black Studies). Indeed, claiming Floyd was lynched does a disservice to the memory of actual victims of lynching.

Loggins asked his students, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “Six million,” he said, “Colonizers killed more than six million. Israel is a colonizer.” After receiving Allah’s message from the archangel Gabriel in a cave, from his base in Medina, Muhammad and his army launched an invasion of Mecca. After massacring and subjugating the population there, he destroyed the temples and artifacts of other religions and forced the people to worship his god, Allah, a plagiarized version of the Jewish god Yahweh. After Muhammad’s death in the seventh century, the Islamic empire expanded through military conquests, leading to the establishment of Islamic rule over various regions in Africa, Asia, and Europe. This came with the spread of Islamic ideology and Sharia, a paradigm of clerical fascism. The Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates controlled vast territories, including parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and Central Asia. The Ottoman Empire, which lasted from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, was a powerful Muslim state that expanded its influence over much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. The Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent formed Muslim rule over a predominantly Hindu population.

Of the hundreds of millions of those whose lands were colonized by Muslims, how many millions did they kill? More than six million? A million Armenian Christians were murdered by the Ottoman Empire, so it is reasonable to suppose that the number of those killed over the fourteen hundred year history of Islam exceeds six million. Indeed, that estimate seems awfully conservative considering the brutality of Islamic colonization and its extent across the planet. And with the millions killed, many millions more were enslaved. In fact, Muslims established the modern slave trade the Europeans inherited and abolished. It was a common practice of Muslim invaders to castrate their slaves. Eunuchs have been found in different Muslim-majority regions and empires over the course of this history. George W. Bush and the neocons like to tell us that Islam means “peace.” The progressive allies of the Islamists out in the streets right now agree—even while the celebrate the massacre of Israeli civilians. Joe Biden opened our southern borders to them. In fact, the word is Arabic for “submission” or “surrender.”

For the record, Jews have lived continuously in what is now recognized under international law as nation-state of Israel for well more than three thousand years (possible as many years as four thousand)—several hundred years to a thousand years before the Arabic language appeared in its most primitive form. A people cannot colonize their homeland.

(For further reading, see Threat Minimization and Ecumenical Demobilization; Assert Your Right to Tell the Truth; Assert Your Right to Tell the Truth; Verse 4:34 of the Qur’an.)

You know what they say about truth being the first casualty of war. Folks were deceived into supporting the Iraq war by fake stories of babies being thrown out of incubators. There are other examples. The warmongers have ways of mobilizing us for war.

So I waited until I felt confident about this before commenting on it. But it looks like Hamas really did behead and burn babies and rape children. I will spare you the pictures. I can’t look at them anymore.

This isn’t about a land dispute. This is about a depraved and fascistic religious ideology that drives men to rape, torture, and murder anybody who doesn’t think like they do. This is consistent with the history of Islam. This way of thinking, this level of hatred cannot be negotiated with. The West—the world—needs to crush this movement. Today’s Global Day of Jihad should be answered with force.

Yet progressives and social democrats in North America and Europe have welcomed this way of thinking and this hatred into their nations. They have welcomed the barbarians inside the gates. This complicates things. But not in an unsolvable way. It means that we have to throw out of power the establishment parties as a step in the project to save the West from the forces of irrationalism—external and internal. We have to fix our own houses to thwart the House of Islam. And we need to do it quickly. Islamists will make slaves or corpses of us all if we don’t.

“But the suffering in Gaza,” they say. “What about the babies there?” Not all Germans supported Hitler. But the allies bombed the fuck out of them anyway—babies and all. Were there war cries on the Allied side? Yes. But Israel is telling Gazans where to go so they are not bombed. Hamas is telling them to stay in place. Human shields.

The point is that, if you want to have a country, then being accountable for what your government does comes with the territory. You don’t get to invade a nation and behead its babies and burn alive its people and rape their children then cry when the bombs rain down on your cities. This misery you bring on yourselves.

Welcome to the system of nations. And the ethic of righteous justice.

* * *

Meanwhile, pro-Islamist forces in the West are making their voices heard. Given that the massacre of Israel civilians would cause such an expression of pro-Palestinian sentiment indicates the depth of anti-Semitism across the trans-Atlantic space. Those expressing the sentiment are either Muslim immigrants or those typically self-identifying as on the political left whose politics are informed by identitarianism and multiculturalism. Both groups are pawns of the transnational elites who state-level functionaries control the administrative apparatus of their respective governments. Their subservience to the goals of globalization is used to manufacture popular support for the strategy of mass immigration for the purposes of transforming the demographic profile of western civilization and integrating western populations into the new world corporatist order.

The Biden regime is doing its part to transform the United States in this regard. We have learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is currently overseeing 5.7 million migrants. These are recent arrivals that join the well more than ten million illegal aliens already in the country. The number of new arrivals is certainly higher. I’ve seen the videos by independent journalists of the endless stream of military age men crossing the southern border unprocessed. The New York Post is reporting today that the Biden regime indicates that it will provide free medical services, food, and housing to these aliens.

The question is not whether there are terrorists among the new arrivals but how many of terrorists have crossed over into the United States. In fiscal year 2023, Customs and Border patrol have reported more than a hundred and fifty illegals who are on terror watchlist. More than 8,000 “special interest” migrants encountered last month. There are certainly many times these numbers.

Why is this happening? I have written about this many times. These are obvious: (1) cheap super-exploitable labor; (2) depressing wages for native workers; (3) diminishing the European proportion of the US population, which will benefit the Democratic Party electorally in the long term—and obvious the elaboration and entrenchment of the new world order. There is also a theory that the establishment is raising the potential for cultural and social disorganization during the 2024 election which will benefit the Democratic Party in the short term, possibly by raising the terrorist threat and triggering marshal law. I don’t find the theory implausible. I find it hard to believe that intelligence services didn’t see the Hamas attack coming.

(For a recent essay on the immigration issue, see “It’s Not Going to Stop.” The Managed Decline of the American Republic. See also The Progressive Politics of Mass Immigration; Protecting the Fatherland—Mayorkas and His Spooks.)

* * *

Helen Lewis asks rhetorically in the pages of The Atlantic, “The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?”

The woke progressive binary of a world divided by oppressor and oppressed has dispossessed those who claim to be on the left of their capacity for elementary moral reasoning. “In corners of academia and social-justice activism where the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed are never in doubt, many people failed that test.” Indeed.