Richard Grossman (1943–2011) was an American historian and activist who focused on the history and impact of corporate power in the United States. He co-founded the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD), an organization that challenged the legal and political frameworks that have allowed corporations to amass vast wealth and influence.
Grossman’s 2005 talk “Corporate Law and Lore” had a profound effect on the way I understand the problem of corporate power and politics. It’s from Grossman that I gained greater confidence in describing our current situation as living under corporate state rule. His description of the corporate state emerging from the slavocracy and analysis of the eclipse of populism by progressivism helps us grasp how the new fascism came about and how it operates. I am sharing Grossman’s talk in the hope that you will watch it and push it out. Below the video, I say a bit more about Grossman and his ideas.
Grossman’s work is deeply critical of the role of corporations in American society and global politics. He argues that the current economic and legal systems are structured to favor the interests of corporations over those of people and communities. He contends that populism, the democratic politics of flesh and blood people, was trumped by progressivism, the elitist political program of corporate persons and their lawyers, developed in the late nineteenth century and institutionalized during the New Deal. As such, administrative and regulatory law are designed not to protect workers and the environment but to manage workers and environmentalists. Indeed, the imperative of the law under these conditions means that piecemeal attempts to combat the harm corporations strengthens corporate power over the people. We have to go for the underpinnings, Grossman insists. We have to reject “settled law.”
One of Grossman’s contributions to the field of corporate law is his research into the historical development of corporate power. From this work, I learned about the principle of quo warranto and the way corporate power interacted with sovereign power, whether monarchal or republican, in the past—and how sovereignty was overthrown by corporate personhood. Grossman argues that the legal framework for corporations in the United States was established in the nineteenth century to give corporations many of the same rights as individuals but without the same level of accountability or responsibility. This, he argues, has allowed corporations to exert a level of political and economic influence that undermines democracy and the safety and well being of people and other animals. See his speech on the history of corporations here:
Grossman was deeply involved in activism aimed at challenging corporate power and encouraged activists to go for the underpinnings. He was a vocal opponent of regionalization and globalization, for example in the free trade agreements like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, which he saw as tools for further consolidating corporate power. Grossman’s work challenges the conventional wisdom that corporations are apolitical entities that simply respond to market forces. Instead, he argues that corporations are political actors in their own right, and that they have actively worked to shape public policy and regulatory frameworks to benefit their own interests. He advocates for greater democratic control over economic decision-making, including the development of alternative economic models that prioritize social and environmental justice.
Scientific studies provide empirical support for Grossman’s arguments. For example, in “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” published in Perspectives on Politics in 2014, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyzed data on more than 1700 policy issues and found that the preferences of average citizens had a near-zero impact upon public policy compared to the impact of economic elites and organized interest groups.
A few years ago, students at an East Texas high school responded to the demand by the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) that the school remove the Christian flag it was flying over the school by bringing their own Christian flags to fly on school grounds.
In 2017, FFRF sent a letter to the superintendent James Young of LaPoynor Independent School District demanding that LaPoynor High School stop flying a Christian flag alongside the United States and Texas flags in front of the school.
FFRF attorney Sam Grover wrote in the letter that FFRF was contacted by a former student following the school’s participation in the annual “See You at the Pole” event. Grover argued that the flying of a Christian flag could be considered a school endorsement of Christianity and a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
I don’t know the resolution to this case. If any readers do, let me known in the comment section below. However, whether the school has removed the flag from school grounds or not, it should. Grover is correct. However, if the flags of gender ideology are going to appear over public schools and hang in their classrooms in the Christian flag’s absence, then the double standard will make clear that the state has endorsed an particular faith belief—and this is a violation of cognitive liberty and freedom of conscience.
Apart from just the obvious violation of the principles underpinning the First Amendment, Grover tells us one of the many reasons why such principles exist, citing the Supreme Court: “because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are non adherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.”
In a liberal society, people are entitled to their faith beliefs. This entitlement lies at the intersection of cognitive liberty and freedom of conscience and it is a fundamental human right, a right recognized by the United States Bill of Rights and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The protection of belief and expression in gender ideology is as important as protecting the beliefs and expressions of Christians. Whether you believe that girls are born in male bodies or that souls put in those bodies are broken by original sin, and thus in either case are in need of fixing, you enjoy an equal right to possess both beliefs.
However, you are not at liberty to impose those beliefs on captive audiences or enjoy government endorsement of those beliefs. To do these things or have these things done to others violates the fundamental rights of people. Cognitive liberty and freedom of consciousness are as much about what people don’t have to believe or say as they are about way they believe and say.
Why these flags and not the Christian flag? Both are expressions of faith.
Public schools are not the place for faith beliefs to be taught to children. It is not that faith cannot be expressed. If children wish to express faith beliefs on their own volition, this is protected expression. If an administrator, staff member, or teacher wants to express their faith belief in their own personal way, such as wearing a cross or a rainbow bracelet, the government can take no action against her. But if she proselytizes in her class, she should be disciplined. If she persists, she should be removed from the classroom.
Suppose a student asks his teacher why the wears a cross or the purpose of the rainbow wristband? The teacher is free to say that she is a Christian and even that the cross is an expression of deeply-held beliefs. She is free to say what the rainbow means to her and why she wears it. These explanations should be brief and superficial. If the student asks the teacher for more, then her response should be, if the student’s liberty is to be protected, that this is not a subject for the classroom and direct the student to follow up with his parents.
There should be no flags or signs in public school classroom expressing faith belief or ideological systems. No pictures of Jesus. No Black Lives Matter slogans. No gender ideology flags. School administrators should remove all these signs of faith belief from the classroom.
Christian flags fly on the back of students’ pickup trucks at LaPoynor High School in Larue, Texas, in this photo posted to Facebook on October 18, 2017.
We have to put a stop to the indoctrination rampant in our public institutions. I know the true believers are supremely smug in their self-righteousness. I know they don’t believe they have to follow the rules because their truth is the truth—that double standards are fine when you have truth on your side. That’s what every authoritarian believes. But that’s not the way it works in a free society.
Want to proselytize? Take to the streets and share the good news with people who are free and willing to listen to you. Don’t do in the classroom. Children are a captive audience. We have a First Amendment. Find another profession if you can’t follow the rules. Teach the children. Don’t indoctrinate them.
File under “Sensitivity Editing”: The New York Post is reporting that Roald Dahl books editor’s “woke” consultants were all under 30 and had “non-binary, anarchist” project manager. I guess if you’re down with the woke culture of accountability, censorship, and mind control, then identifying the subalterns who do the dirty work authoritarian desire sounds bigoted. It’s supposed to sound that way because then you will fear telling the truth about it. Not me. It’s going to get a lot uglier over here. So strap in. Want to know why I’m so passionate about all this? George Orwell.
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File under “Technocracy”: The National Review provides a useful example of the anti-democratic and technocratic heart of progressivism. In debating the question of whether the Biden administration can forgive students of their college debt, Sonia Sotomayor, the senior justice on the so-called left of the Supreme Court, warned that judges would seize greater power if agency authority to carry out acts of Congress were diminished.
“What you’re saying is now we’re going to give judges the right to decide how much aid to give them. Instead of the person with the expertise and the experience, the secretary of education, who’s been dealing with educational issues and the problems surrounding student loans, we’re going to take it upon ourselves, instead of leaving that decision in the hands of the person who has experience with these questions.” Sotomayor said this to Nebraska state Solicitor General James Campbell, who was arguing against the Biden administration.
Charles Cooke of the National Review points out that the issue before the Court is this: “Does he [the President] have the power to do it?” There is no provision in the US Constitution that gives bureaucrats unlimited power on the grounds that some people consider them to be experts, he correctly observes.
Cooke finds the same problem in a case from last year concerning the EPA, with Justice Kagan authoring the dissenting opinion. “In statutory cases such as these,” Cooke writes, “the risk is not that the Supreme Court will claim a role for which it is not suited, but that, absent the court’s deliberation, the executive branch will claim powers that rightfully belong to Congress.”
“If, as Kagan seems (selectively) to want, the Supreme Court were to habitually abandon the playing field whenever it was presented with statutory questions,” Cooke continues, “then the role of deciding which powers the executive branch has been delegated would henceforth be performed by the executive branch—which, having been given carte blanche to interpret the laws however it likes, would start doing whatever it wished to do without reference to the law as written.” Bingo!
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File under “Fake News”: From The Guardian: “The US justice department has said Donald Trump is not entitled to absolute immunity in civil lawsuits related to the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021, which he incited in an attempt to stop certification of his election loss to Joe Biden and which is now linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides.”
First, Trump didn’t incite an attack on the Capitol on January 6. There is nothing in his speech that day or anything he ever said as president that could even remotely be interpreted as incitement.
This is the phrase Democrats harp on: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” That’s standard in political discourse. Democrats talk about fighting like hell all the time, an easily documented occurrence. However, Trump specifically told the crowd that he expected them to be peaceful: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Marching to do what? To “demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.”
The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects the right of citizens to do what the President told them to do. The Amendment guarantees that individuals have the right to express themselves freely without censorship or fear of punishment by the government. It protects the right of individuals to assemble for peaceful protests, marches, and other public demonstrations. It guarantees that citizens have the right to bring their grievances to the attention of their elected officials without fear of retribution.
The group that was assembled on January 6, as well as President Trump and all the speakers who addressed them, had an entirely legitimate purpose in gathering and speaking that day (it was a permitted event). The attempt to portray activities protected by the First Amendment as untoward by the corporate state is contemptuous of democracy and the rule of law. The January 6 rally was an instantiation of democratic action.
Second, the attempt to associate deaths the occurred on that day to the January 6 rally is as absurd as accusing Trump of inciting a riot (let alone the insurrection the Capitol riot wasn’t). Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Phillips died of cardiovascular disease. The manner of death in bother cases was determined to be “natural.” They had heart attacks in the excitement of the moment. Rosanne Boyland died accidentally of “acute amphetamine intoxication.” However, a police officer can be seen beating her dead or unconscious body, so it is hoped that a full investigation into the circumstances of her death is forthcoming. Ashli Babbitt was shot to death by a Capitol police officer.
Officer Brian Sicknick suffered a stroke several hours after the event. Four officers committed suicide after the event. Why they committed suicide is unclear. Based on the January 6 footage I have seen (and there is a lot of it), given that many officers were caught up in what has the hallmarks of a police riot, we might consider the psychological toll that losing control and attacking the citizens one swore an oath to protect takes on people.
However, none of these deaths has anything to do with the peaceful rally that occurred on January 6, 2001.
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File under “Fact-checking”: Yesterday, I wrote the following comment on Facebook concerning reports vaccine injury: “People didn’t say anything because they were afraid of what would happen if they did. I was unafraid and told people what I knew. Many chose to disregard what I said because they were determined to harm themselves and others or because they believe I’m full of shit or disagree with me politically. I cannot be responsible for the fact that people ignore me or disregard my warnings. I do what I can.”
Facebook censored the post to which these remarks were attached. The important piece of that post were my remarks, so I shared them again and expressed my hope they would stay. I also noted that the day before yesterday that my wife had a post censored by Facebook for citing a Lancet study. Let that sink in. We’re supposed to only listen to the experts. Follow the science, they tell us. If Lancet is censored by Facebook, what are the fact-checkers actually up to? Isn’t it curious, I suggested, that the idea of disinformation only became a widespread concern when social media became a disinformation machine?
This is cluster B personality disorder, in case you wanted an example of what it looks like in the wild. Affected kids display this personality disorder early in their development. I’m not sure whether it is unavoidable, but you need to be able to see it and understand it so that you do not become a victim of emotional blackmail. On the question of whether this is an intrinsic developmental outcome, we are seeing it a lot more of it, so I suspect it’s probably something going on in our culture.
I need to note that many, if not most of the people who make up Antifa apparently suffer from this disorder (or cluster of disorders). Antifa members don’t stand for anything remotely regarding social justice. What they are is an instantiation of the birds of a feather phenomenon, a bunch of disordered individuals coming together and, in their case, engaging in a type of emergent group therapy that involves terrorizing other people.
This young person will in time find others like him and will enjoy allyship with people who will use him in the project to disorder the world. This reality gives us an insight about how we might intervene, namely by confronting the project that will use him as a subaltern.
“The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct.” —Solomon Asch
Social psychologist Solomon Asch is famous for his studies exploring the extent to which social pressure can influence an individual’s perception and judgment. His most memorable experiment was designed to determine whether an individual would align his behavior or opinion to those of a group, all of whom, with the exception of the research subject, were confederates.
In that experiment, conducted in 1951, participants were asked to judge the length of lines on a series of cards. On each card, there was one line that was clearly longer than the others, and participants were asked to identify which line was longer. The confederates were instructed to give the wrong answer. Three-quarters of research subjects, seated in a position where they would answer last, agreed with the confederates. Some subjects continued to conform after several trials.
Asch was able to demonstrate under experimental conditions the form of psychological abuse that would become known as “gaslighting.” The term comes from the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband manipulates his wife into doubting her own sanity by making small changes to their environment and then denying that anything had changed. Gaslighting is thus a form of psychological manipulation in which an entity or individual works to engender existential doubt in a targeted individual or members of a targeted group by making them unsure of their perception or sanity.
Those who gaslight deploy tactics aimed at undermining a person’s sense of reality. One tactic is denying the reality of something the target knows to be true. Another is invalidating or minimizing the target’s concerns. The strategic use of double standards to make it harder for the target to trust his own judgment is another tactic. The abuser may blame the target for things he didn’t mean to make him feel as if he’s losing touch with his own sensibilities. Over time, finding it increasingly difficult to trust his own perception and judgment, the victim is left feeling anxious, confused, and isolated. As such, gaslighting is a useful strategy in brainwashing or mind control projects—it prepares the individual for reincorporation into a different order.
For those who can’t get enough of formidable women’s & children’s advocate @MoiraDeemingMP, watch her go head-to-head with Greens Senator Janet Rice about the factual statement “transwomen are men” and the reality of biological sex (2022) 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/AOBC02d6sC
The above video is from a hearing held in the Australian Parliament during a summer 2022 inquiry into the Religious Discrimination Bill by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. The Religious Discrimination Bill is a proposed Australian law that seeks to protect individuals from discrimination on the basis of their religion or religious beliefs. The bill has been controversial due to concerns that it may infringe upon other rights and freedoms.
One major point of concern is that the broad protections it affords to religious freedom could be used to justify discriminatory behavior against trans-identifying persons. Proponents of the bill have argued that it is necessary to protect the right to freedom of conscience, and that it does not intend to undermine other human rights.
Among the fundamental rights Australia recognizes are freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. These are strengthened by the bill. Thus the inquiry concerns to what extent can speech and conscience be limited by other rights identified in the fundamental law of that country. The question at hand: Can Australia force a person to deny his sincerely-held beliefs for the sake of another person’s feelings?
The video picks up with a question from the witness, MP Moria Deeming, about whether and in what context it is appropriate to say that “trans women are men.” Senator Janet Rice of the Green Party responds that if this were said to a trans woman in the workplace it would be discriminatory regardless of intent. Therefore, it is in her view appropriate to punish the employee who says it.
MP Moria Deeming responds that there is nothing intrinsically discriminatory with stating that a person cannot change his sex as it is a statement of biological fact. After Rice rehearses the standard list of emotionally blackmailing slogans, Deeming counters that it is psychologically abusive to coerce others into saying things they do not believe.
That is a devastating counter. Compelled speech is a violation of human rights. Compelled speech involves requiring an individual by law or other authority to express or promote particular beliefs, ideas, or messages, even if he disagrees with them or finds them objectionable. This can take the form of requiring individuals to speak certain words, express certain opinions, or display certain symbols.
By restricting individuals’ ability to express themselves freely and limiting their ability to engage in critical thinking or dissent, compelled speech functions as a form of censorship. Coercing people into denouncing their beliefs and compelling speech can be and often is psychologically abusive—but it doesn’t need to be to violate human rights.
This may not be her intention, but Deeming is pointing out that Rice is engaged in what George Orwell, in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, called “doublethink,” a problem I will take up in my next blog. In the midst of her doublethink, Rice finds it psychologically abusive to permit a person to tell a biological fact without recognizing that it is psychologically abusive to make a person deny one.
The Deeming-Rice exchange illustrates a desire to gaslight on a mass scale. Beyond creating a climate of fear to suppress unwanted views, Rice intends to use the authority of the state to disrupt the normal understanding of Australians concerning the immutability of sex by manufacturing the appearance in law and culture that there is consensus to the contrary, and reframing biological fact as bigotry.
Rice’s double standard negates the concern the person who disagrees with the slogan has with the consequence of affirming what he knows to be true. He is not to trust his own judgment in affirming his reality. His belief in biological fact becomes an act of bigotry. Surrounded by colleagues telling him that his thinking is wrong, he finds it increasingly difficult to trust his own perception and judgment, and thus is left feeling anxious, confused, and isolated.
But he is not wrong. A non-tautological definition of woman is “adult human female.” Since a man is an adult human male, he cannot be a woman. He may live as a woman, but that does not make him one. These are categories belonging to tens of millions of years of natural history. Using emotional blackmail and presumably state machinery to punish those who accept natural history, Rice is demanding that individuals deny reality. As she would have it, either a man denies what he knows because he pities others (and if he doesn’t, then he is cruel) or he does so to avoid punishment (in which case he is made a coward).
In an advanced technocratic society, gaslighting takes a sophisticated form—the academic and cultural manager push to bring into doubt the fact of biological sex. Experts gaslight the public about what it knows about natural history. Once enough people habitually deny reality, the majority gaslight those coming up, as children expressing their evolved capacity to see gender must be told that they do not correctly perceive reality. This is not some future circumstance. The false narrative that we are not our bodies has already confused millions.
If a man wishes to live as a woman, and to believe that he is a woman, then it is wrong to tell him he can neither live nor believe this way. People are free to express themselves how they will. It is just as wrong to force people to discard false beliefs as it is to force them to discard true ones.
Billions of people believe in angels and demons. On the other hand, billions of people believe that men cannot be women. If some people want to believe they are, then they are free to do so. But they cannot be allowed to force others to agree with them. And while they are free to try to deceive others into denying reality, others are free to call the deception what it is—gaslighting.
In a recent Rasmussen Reports survey, 72 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be white.” However, only a bare majority of of Democrats—51 percent—thought so. What if only 51 percent of Democrats thought it was OK to be black? Almost as shocking, 53 percent of blacks surveyed agreed that it’s okay to be white.
Rasmussen put a positive spin on the findings: “Despite years of progressive activism, a majority of Americans still don’t buy into the ‘woke’ narrative that white people have a monopoly on racism.” Rasmussen found that 79 percent of American Adults agree with the statement, “Black people can be racist, too,” including 53 percent who “strongly agree.” Of black people surveyed, 66 percent agrees that black people can be racist, too. But racist against who? And this: only 39 percent of Democrats strongly agreed with the statement, “Black people can be racist, too.”
The poll comes in the context of a national conversation about the consequences of the pervasive anti-white bigotry being pushed by the corporate media, culture industry, and educational institutions. What do I mean by anti-white racism? This:
I got cancelled for agreeing with this group of Black people.
I don't mean to ruin anyone's fun today, but I was already aware Black people have wildly diverse opinions. Were you? https://t.co/yU2exeWeQP
Remove the word “white” and replace it with the name of another racial or ethnic group and ask yourself how it sounds. Say it out loud (but not in public). Sound racist? Imagine, as Coleman Hughes suggested we do (see Reparations and Blood Guilt), such things being said about Jews. (We don’t have to, of course, Islamists and Nazis do in fact say these things about Jews). What would be the predictable consequences of such statements? Would Jews have reason to be concerned about those groups who said such things about them? The historical record clearly indicates the answer to this question.
What is the predictable result of the last several years of preaching the gospel of white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism, i.e., institutionalized white supremacy? (My posts documenting the religion of antiracism, its academic instantiation in critical race theory, are too numerous to list them here.) It can only result in popular bigotry against white people, as the video shared above illustrates. That bigotry may be motivating a wave of intimidation and violent attacks against white people on the streets of America, in high schools and middle schools—even in elementary school.
We don’t have on hand a statistical analysis of all the violence we see in the disturbing videos shared on social media. But we do have statistics on criminal violence. For 2021, blacks perpetrated 335,507 violent crimes compared to 328,817 perpetrated by whites. It must be kept in mind that blacks are 12 percent of the US population, that the disproportionalities are very great. Looking at victims, 459,457 were white, compared to 312,822 for blacks. Given that the vast amount of violent criminal perpetuation is by those who are males (582,497 compared to 133, 283), it is an even smaller proportion of the demographic overrepresented in the most serious crime—crime that disproportionately impacts white Americans. What this means is that that white victims of crime perpetrated by blacks are much more numerous than black victims of crime perpetrated by whites. Yet those speaking in the above video are telling the audience and it is white people—collectively—who are the violent and racially oppressive ones.
“When a black person is criminally victimized by a white person, we wonder whether the white person was motived by race prejudice. We presume this when, for example, we claim that the deaths of black suspects at the hands of white officers is a reflection of racist attitudes, explicit or implicit. This presumption is claimed as the reason for today’s violence in our streets. If we could point to statistics showing that, while granting that most homicide is intraracial, occurring within a racial category, interracial crime, occurring between racial categories, is most often represented by a white perpetrator and a black victim, then this might reflect anti-black prejudice. The historical example is white-on-black violence is lynching, where, after Reconstruction, the direction and patterns of the interracial violence indicated anti-black prejudice.
“However, the current direction of interracial crime is in the opposite direction from lynching. The first chart below shows that, even though blacks are less than 13 percent of the US population, they are increasingly the greatest number of homicide victims. … The following chart shows that, year after year, whites are more likely to be homicide victims at the hands of black perpetrators than blacks are to be homicide victims at the hands of white perpetrators. The disparity is even more striking when one reflects on the fact that most perpetrators of homicide are male and black males constitute less than six percent of the population.”
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Today’s Democratic Party has led us to the brink of nuclear war. The party is led by warmongers who are firmly in the grips of the military industrial complex, and don’t know or care about the cost of war, or who pays the price. Join the conversation https://t.co/WbbHJhtRSr… pic.twitter.com/0OOy7vEJDG
Democrats will say, “But what about Bush’s invasion of Iraq?” That wouldn’t have been possible without Democrats in Congress. But where did those warmongering neoconservatives in the Republican Party come from? What is the intellectual basis of the Project for a New American Century? They were Cold War progressives. They were Scoop Jackson Democrats. (See War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy.)
The near perfect continuity from George H.W. Bush through the Obama administration is explained by the establishment on both sides of the partisan divide. Had Hillary Clinton been elected president we would have had four years of invasions and occupations around the world.
Several women have accused Marilyn Manson of emotional abuse, physical violence, and sexual assault. These allegations first came to light in February 2021, when actor Evan Rachel Wood named Manson as her abuser in an Instagram post.
In the wake of Wood’s accusations, several other women came forward with similar stories of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of Manson. Manson has denied the allegations, describing them as “horrible distortions of reality.”
In 1984, news reports that hundreds of children had been abused at a California preschool fueled moral panic sweeping the nation.
The accusations against Manson have damaged his career and reputation. Several venues and festivals canceled his scheduled performances and he was dropped by his record label and talent agency. Several actors who had previously worked with Manson condemned his behavior.
But is there any forensic of compelling circumstantial evidence in support of the accusations? One of the accusers, Ashley Morgan Smithline, has come forward to say that she was manipulated and pressured by Wood into making her allegations.
In a declaration filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court last week, Smithline said the accusations were not true and that she had succumbed to pressure to make the allegations after Wood repeatedly told her that just because she couldn’t remember “did not necessarily mean that it did not happen.”
“While at first I knew Mr. Warner did not do these things to me, eventually I began to question whether he actually did,” Smithline said. Smithline’s statement points to a widespread problem in our society: the manipulation of people into believing things happened than did not or could not have happened.
If we didn’t finally learn the inherent problem with believing things people say without any forensic or compelling circumstantial evidence during the Satanic panic, then I truly fear for the future of truth and justice. One’s identity—as a child or a woman—has no bearing on whether one tells the truth or tells lies or grasped reality.
People lie. People are mistaken. People are manipulated. People misremember. People are malevolent. Etcetera. There is no rational reason to believe a person without evidence. Indeed, we err on the side of the accused because the accuser has the burden of proof.
The person making the accusation has the burden to prove the accusation beyond a reasonable doubt with reason and evidence. Being accused of something and having to prove you didn’t do it is near impossible.
This is why the argument that we should believe in God because we can’t prove God doesn’t exist is so irrational. The default position is not to believe a person who says he was abducted by aliens. Maybe he was. Where is the proof?
Slogans cannot substitute for proof. Hashtags are propaganda. They are evidence of nothing except the desire to push an agenda.
During the Satanic panic of the 1980s, children across the country were telling parents that they were being used by day care workers as ritual subjects by satanic cults. Scores of reputations were ruined because of the fanciful imagination of children made even more real by parents and authorities determined without any evidence to believe the children over the day care workers.
The McMartin Preschool case is the paradigm. It involved allegations of child abuse and satanic ritual abuse against staff members at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.
The case began in 1983 when a parent accused a staff member at the McMartin Preschool of sexually abusing her child based on something the child told her. Soon after, other parents came forward with similar allegations of abuse. The accusations quickly snowballed. It turned into a moral panic. This was because everybody was saying, “Believe the children.”
The investigation led to the arrest and prosecution of seven staff members at the McMartin Preschool, including the school’s owner, Virginia McMartin, and her son, Raymond Buckey. It was one of the longest and most expensive trials in American history and unfolded like something from a Kafka novel.
The prosecution’s case was blown when the children’s allegations were found to be based on false memories or contradicted by physical evidence. In 1990, after seven years of legal proceedings and two trials, all charges against the accused were dropped, with no convictions. Now adults, many of the children continue to believe they were ritually abused.
Others regained their hold on reality. One of the children, Kyle Zirpolo, admitted in 2005 that he had fabricated the allegations. In fact, he had never met the man he accused of abusing him.
The McMartin Preschool case had a significant impact on the way that child abuse cases are investigated and prosecuted in the United States. It led to a greater emphasis on the use of forensic evidence and the use of trained interviewers in the questioning of children. It also raised questions about the reliability of children’s testimony in criminal cases and the potential for false allegations of abuse to be made.
Here is my recommended default position for rational people: Believe nothing unless there is clear forensic and compelling circumstantial evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of the accused.
What people say about things that happen to them is the worst possible evidence there is. Eyewitness testimony and confessions are not to be trusted in light of the history of false accusation and wrongful arrest, conviction, and imprisonment.
If you are even remotely paying attention, you have very likely been hearing a great deal about grooming. Grooming is the process by which an individual, typically an adult, establishes an emotional connection with a child to gain the child’s trust in order to manipulate the child into sexual activity or sexualized behavior for the gratification of the abuser and the corruption of the child.
Given all the present attention on the subject, I thought it might be useful to hear from an expert on child sexual abuse. I’ve been publishing and talking about the problem of child sexual abuse for decades, my work showing that child sexual abuse produces continuing trauma in adulthood and indicates a persistent situation of powerlessness across the life course.
In 2004, I published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma concerning the life-course effects of child sexual abuse. I’m also the author of the essay “Child Sexual Abuse” in Sage’s Encyclopedia of Social Deviance, published in 2014. As a sociologist of religion, I am also qualified to speak about the related phenomenon of the cult, which the sexual grooming of children under the LGBTQ+ banner strongly resembles. Indeed, the methods for both grooming children for sexualized exchanges and grooming individuals for induction into cults are essentially the same.
Child sexual abuse is a form of criminal deviance involving inappropriate contact with an adolescent or a child. Child sexual abuse and the sexualization of children are serious problems that carry profound and long-lasting effects on their victims. The effects of childhood sexual abuse may take the form of psychological maladies and conduct disorders that obscure the initial trauma, often compounding with the unfolding of time. Childhood sexual abuse is associated with continuity in sexual and other forms of victimization over the life course.
There are several factors that play into the severity of the impact of sexual abuse. These include the frequency, duration, and intensity of the abuse, as well as the perpetrator-victim relationship. The evidence indicates that the earlier authorities find out about the abuse and address it the more positive the post-abuse experience, displaying fewer of the long-term consequences of abuse. A child’s temperament, a major component of which is resilience, plays a significant role in recovery. For example, children with low self-esteem are prone to suffer more than those who have high self-esteem.
Some victims of child sexual abuse and child sexualization display few if any obvious consequences. However, the absence of outward manifestation of abuse does not mean that there are no less obvious or latent effects. The traumatic effects of childhood sexual abuse are recorded in a number of psychiatric conditions, including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), eating disorders, cutting behaviors, drug seeking and taking, and various behavioral problems coded as conduct disorders, as well as withdrawal from social activity and frequent and intense associations with antisocial circles.
Children often blame themselves for sexual abuse perpetrated on them, which not only makes it less likely that they will disclose the event or the process, but makes it more likely that their trauma will remain unaddressed. There is also the problem of internalization of the sexual norms of abusers, which may cause the victim to rationalize the abuse. Failure to address sexual victimization can perpetuate the patterns of interaction that contributed to the initial event. My findings suggests that the likelihood of future sexual victimization, even into adulthood, is greater among those who have abused in the past.
The popular impression of the phenomenon is that it involves anal, genital, and oral penetration using the penis, as well as anal and genital digital penetration. Also considered serious are acts of fondling a child’s breasts or genitalia with sexual intent and genital contact without penetration. These are defined as touching offenses. Use of a child in sexually exploitative activities, such as pornography, can either be a non-touching offense or touching offense depending on the circumstances.
However, other acts are often and should be included in the definition, including indecent exposure, exposing a child to pornography and age-inappropriate sexual ideas, materials, and practices, and facilitating or sexual relations between minors, all acts of sexualizing children. Research indicates that all of these situations put children at risk for emotional and psychological trauma. Reducing child sexual abuse to child molestation obviates the full scope of the phenomenon and harm to children.
The problem of conceptualization and definition leads to complications and inconsistencies in reporting the incidence and prevalence of sexual abuse. Inadequate or problematic definitions of the phenomena facilitate rationalizations denying its presence or downplaying the harm caused by the child sexual abuse of child sexualization. However defined, the evidence shows that childhood sexual abuse is a widespread and chronic problem in the United States.
Another popular impression of the phenomenon is that the abuse involves a minor victim and an adult perpetrator with the operative mental image of a strange adult male using his physical size or position of authority as an adult to coerce a child into an encounter of a sexual nature. A more accurate understanding incorporates situations of trust and ties of affection, thus moving conceptualization away from the stranger-predator assumption. Research finds that the majority of perpetrators are individuals close to the child, including members of trusted institutions, such as those actors found in educational and religious institutions.
It is furthermore a misconception about child sexual abuse that it typically involves physical force. Physical force is usually unnecessary when the child is being abused by a person she trusts and, especially, an individual for whom she expresses affection. Grooming tactics have developed the minimize the use physical force. Indeed, the stealth of grooming often makes it appear that children voluntarily participate in sexual encounters. That children appear to voluntarily participate and even desire intimate contact with adults is used by pedophiles to normalize their behavior.
Thus, some perpetrators and their allies have sought to move beyond stealth and make the practice of child sexual abuse and sexualization an acceptable practice. This appearance has led queer theorists, for example, to treat adult-child encounters as matters of consent. For example, Pat Califia (who today identifies as a man named Patrick) remarked in 1982, “Any child old enough to decide whether or not he or she wants to eat spinach, play with trucks or wear shoes is old enough to decide whether or not she wants to run around naked in the sun, masturbate, sit in someone’s lap or engage in sexual activity.” We see this idea in practice with the renaming of pedophiles with the label “minor attracted persons,” or MAPS, increasingly paired with the label “adult attracted minors,” or AAMs.
This is why grooming behavior is so important to see and admit. A child cannot today consent to engage in sexual activity and people need to see the signs that indicate a predator so they can fight against the movement to openly sexualize children. This awareness is not just to combat child sexual abuse as popularly understood. A corollary to the established fact that children cannot consent to sex is the fact that children cannot consent to puberty blockers or other medical-industrial practices that go under the Orwellian euphemism “gender affirming care,” or GAC. These practices include such extreme procedures of breast amputation in girls and the castration of boys. More extreme non-medically necessary surgical procedures of phalloplasty and vaginoplasty occur in adulthood, procedures often sought after years of preparation in childhood.
Given the horror of all of this (horror reminiscent of the experiments performed on children by doctors during Nazi period), why is there a concerted effort to blind the public to the presence of grooming? Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, tweets about grooming and groomers, even absent references to drag queen story hour and other public activities designed to entice children into the world of adult sexuality, were banned as a form of anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech—this despite opposition by many homosexuals, and even some trans identifying persons, to the sexualization of children.
In July 2022, Twitter confirmed the term “groomer” was banned speech citing the company’s Hateful Conduct policy. Spokespersons for Twitter explained that the social media platform was following the lead of other platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and TikTok, which banned the term when used to suggest a link between the LGBTQIA+ community and pedophilia.
“We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice, or intolerance, particularly abuse that seeks to silence the voices of those who have been historically marginalized.” Lauren Alexander, Twitter’s health product communications lead, said in an email. “For this reason, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals or groups with abuse based on their perceived membership in a protected category.” Alexander specified the context: “Use of this term is prohibited under our Hateful Conduct policy when it is used as a descriptor, in context of discussion of gender identity.”
In effect social media has collaborated with those who deny grooming behavior when occurring under the cover of LGBTQIA+ activism. While care should be taken in attributing to all members of that community the actions of some who rationalize their behavior (and whether LGBTQIA+ is a community at all has been cogently challenged by openly gay critic Douglas Murray), one must also be wary of rationalizations that falsely appeal to civil and human rights. A person engaged in sexualizing children cannot escape criticism of his arguments or responsibility for his conduct because he claims that he is a member of a protected category.
I ask you to consider whether there any other type of criminal or harmful conduct the consequences of which an individual is allowed to escape because his status redefines his conduct as no longer what it is? Wouldn’t such a move effectively normalize and even mainstream criminal or harmful conduct? Isn’t that the work it’s already been doing? If the sexualization of children is wrong when so-called cis-gendered heteronormative individuals do it, then it is just as wrong when transgendered and homosexual individuals do it. But the horror correctly expressed by progressives at the sight of child beauty pageants, and discomfort at the thought of minors at clubs for straight adults, disappears when boys perform as exotic dancers for adults in gay bars. Indeed, these acts of extreme sexualization become celebrations of “pride progress” and “queer joy.”
As noted at the start of this essay, while grooming is a manipulative process used by sexual predators, including pedophiles, to gain the trust and compliance of their victims, it is also characteristic of cult induction. The steps involved in both, as well as in human trafficking and online predation, are highly similar. Indeed, given that pedophilia, and paraphilias more generally, comprise a deviant subculture, i.e., a group exhibiting characteristic patterns of behavior sufficient to distinguish it from others within a greater culture or society, pedophilia is often not merely analogous to other forms of child exploitation, but a major element across phenomena. I will cover all these areas in this blog.
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The uptick in the frequency of the term “groomer” is associated with criticism of the practice of exposing children to sexualized themes at drag shows, where children watch and even interact with adult entertainers, the proliferation of drag queen story hours, typically with readings about sexual activities and identities, and curricula and classroom discussions about sexual and gender matters that intend or at least function to disrupt the development of the child’s perception of gender. Thus the organized effort to suppress the use of the term comes with growth in the scope of sexualization of children and the increasing frequency of grooming behavior.
I will write more about the organized effort to sexualize children in the future (for now, this and this are good places to begin developing a more in-depth grasp of the phenomenon), but I want to emphasize here that what concerns parents and others is that the typical age of the children involved in these activities is 4-8 years, as well as widespread acceptance of gender ideology in public and private schools, principally queer theory, an ideology founded by intellectuals and activists preoccupied with the sexuality of children and the removal of age of consent laws restricting adult-child sexual interaction (I have a pending blog on this subject).
Children are incapable of abstract and even consequential thinking at this age (many remain incapable well beyond this cohort). At age four, children are just beginning to the develop theory of mind, where they can see the world from the perspective of others, as well as internally represent the world through language and mental imagery. This is a critical phase in childhood development, as it is only towards the end of this period, around age eight, that children can confront the world with the understanding that the objects and relations in it are real and possess the ability to differentiate between those things and things that are not real.
What is internalized during this stage of development makes up fundamental assumptions about the world, such as a falsity of the Santa Claus and other obvious fictions and the “truth” of God, also a fiction. Children start doubting, often at the encouragement of their parents, the existence of Santa and the Tooth Fairy around the ages of six or seven. By age eight, most no longer believe in such things. However, many families do not allow the children to doubt the existence of God. Belief in this fiction is reinforced across the life-course. That a child can be convinced to believe that the thing she will never sense is the most real thing in the world tells us that a child can be made to believe anything.
Exposure to sexualized materials is for this reason age-inappropriate, as untruths or problematic conceptions about the world may be placed in the child’s head and continually reinforced by authorities in the child’s surroundings, including language and images coming from virtual sources, such as Disney and other fantasy programming. Indeed, media appealing to children (cartoon characters, ponies and unicorns, rainbows, etc.) are effective vehicles for colonizing children’s pre-rational minds with language and imagery designed to implant ideological beliefs and political agendas.
SCOOP: I've obtained video from inside Disney's all-hands meeting about the Florida parental rights bill, in which executive producer Latoya Raveneau says her team has implemented a "not-at-all-secret gay agenda" and is regularly "adding queerness" to children's programming. pic.twitter.com/eJnZMpKIXT
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 29, 2022
It’s not Disney executive producer Latoya Raveneau “not so secret gay agenda” that’s the problem. It’s the act of “adding queerness” wherever she can. Queering is a political agenda designed to disrupt perceptions of gender and transgress sexual boundaries, in this case, the perceptions that children have about the word by intentionally sexualizing their experiences. As Murray and other gay and lesbian observers have stressed, homosexuality and queerness are very different things. One is a sexual orientation. The other is a proselytizing program. The gays rights struggle was a struggle for equal rights. The queer project is a cult that seeks members.
Continually reinforced and forbidden to question or criticize, the ideas that inhere in queer theory become assumptions that inform and shape thinking into adulthood. This is well understood. Yet sexualized curriculum is being aggressively pushed in schools and other public activities across the country, pushed in classrooms festooned with the symbols of ideological and political commitments. One need not ask, to what ends? The end is obvious—it’s to change the way we think about sex, gender, and boundaries rules. Queer theory makes no secret of this. This is not is conspiracy. It’s in our faces.
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Willy Villalpando taught children in pre-kindergarten in Rialto, CA, from 2016 through 2021. He now works at Santa Ana College teaching early child development.
I have been planning on writing a blog about the problem of grooming for some time, but two recent news stories moved me to come to it sooner than planned. The first case crossed my desk a few days ago. It concerns Willy Villalpando, who currently works at Santa Ana College in California where he teaches early child development. Given his background, he should know better. Then again, perhaps this explains his interest in the subject. From 2016-2021, Villalpando was a pre-kindergarten teacher.
In 2020, while still a pre-kindergarten teacher, Villalpando called the idea of “childhood innocence” an example of “mythology.” In 2021, he said, “Not talking about queerness in the classroom, is not letting children be children. It’s telling those people they do not deserve to exist.” He added, “Kids are never too young.” But they are always too young. Note that Villalpando openly uses the term “queerness.” The project has become so widespread and normalized, that cult members have no problem openly using the terminology. This tells us that they know they enjoy institutional support.
I will blog more about this in the future but for now: to “queer” a space, in this case a classroom full of young children, is to transgress the boundaries of normative systems where, in this instance, the sexualization is believed to be (in fact known to be) harmful and wrong. Taking a position against recognizing the norms that protect children from the harmful effects of sexualization, Villalpando says, “Let’s work to deconstruct some of our own biases,” adding parenthetically, “Adults incorrectly link discussions on sexuality and gender as equating to discussions about sex.” Here he is telling people that talking to children about sex is not discussing sex. This claim that not letting children be children, with children conceived of as sexual beings, is “erasing their existence” is a common emotional blackmail tactic used by the cult.
Villalpando uses the jargon of queer theory at every turn. “There is a common mythology that children live in this world of pure innocence, and that by introducing or exposing them to the real-world adults are somehow shattering this illusion for them,” Villalpando wrote in a 2020 Instagram post. These arguments come straight out of the founding documents of queer theory (as I will show in a future blog). “Therefore, there is a banning of topics and issues that children should not be exposed to, as if they are not experiencing them already.” In another instance, he writes, “I’m tired of the ‘Childhood Innocence’ argument.” He adds: “Stop blaming a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.”
Villalpando characterizes the view that children should not be exposed to sexuality as “very white, Christian, upper-class, cis-gendered, and hetero-centric.” Fallacious thinking is typical to those advocating crackpot theories. You see this in critical race theory with the notion of “white fragility.” Villalpando is saying that the validity and soundness of an argument determined not by reason or facts but by the arguer’s race, religion, class status, gender, and sexual orientation—all things that have nothing to do with the validity or soundness of arguments. Yes, even for those who oppose child sexual abuse and sexualization on religious grounds, since it is entirely possible that the religious argument against harming children is based on the same logic as the secular argument.
Villalpando does no better when he tries his hand at the science. Children, he insists, can “have a sense of their gender identity” when they are still babies. “At 3 years old, a child can label their perceived gender identity,” Villalpando continues. “By 4 years old, children have a stable sense of their gender identity and have assumptions and beliefs of what they can and cannot do based on their gender (i.e. dolls are for girls, cars are for boys).”
What does the science tells us? Gender identity, that is the understanding that boys are boys and girls are girls, develops in stages. At around age two children become aware that there are boys and girls. Before the age three, they identify themselves as a boy or a girl. They recognize that there are physical differences. Boys are not girls because boys are different from girls. Boys can’t be girls. Children are adamant about this. It’s why they ask whether a person is a boy or a girl when their gender is ambiguous. By age four, most children have a stable sense of their gender identity. They know all this without any help from adults.
However, and this is the crucial piece to understand, especially since this was not a problem until yesterday, this sense may be disrupted by throwing into question what is otherwise a normally occurring understanding (one with evolutionary force). It is in this critical developmental period of ages four through eight that children learn to doubt the things that occur to them or that they have been told. I explained this earlier when I wrote that children can be convinced there is a God when their doubting of fictional things emerges. This tells us that children are vulnerable to the introduction and incorporation into their system of assumptions beliefs that are not naturally occurring, that would not normally occur to them, or that would be abandoned with cognitive development. God is an external imposition that can nonetheless become as real in a child’s mind as anything. The same is true with gender ideology. And this is why groomers and cultists (and the Chambers of Commerce) want access to children during this crucial stage of development.
Because of their vulnerability during this period, children accept and often believe impossible things—and continued believe in the impossible makes their parents vulnerable to believing impossible things, as well. Consider the Satanic panic, a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, characterized by a widespread fear of Satanic ritual abuse and a belief that Satanic cults were operating in communities across the country, engaging in everything from human sacrifice to mind control and sexual abuse of children. Many people became convinced that Satanic cults were responsible for a wide range of social ills, including drug abuse, teenage rebellion, and the breakdown of the family. These fears led to a wave of investigations and prosecutions, particularly in the child care industry, which resulted in false allegations and wrongful convictions. Over time, the Satanic panic was debunked as an unfounded moral panic, with allegations of Satanic cult activity found to be baseless. The Satanic panic remains a cautionary tale about the dangers of mass hysteria.
There are many other examples of mass hysteria and moral panics in history. I have written extensively on this matter on Freedom and Reason. See, for example, Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion? I write there: “Social contagion, or mass psychogenic illness, is the rapid spread of an irrational or pathological activity, behavior, belief, or perception in a population. Thoughts and actions can move rapidly through social networks of like-minded people or those who share similar traits, such as age, gender, and so on. Individuals calibrate their self-image to align with those with whom they identify or have an affinity; when one individual adopts a certain attitude or behavior those in her social network catch the pathogen. Girls and young women are especially susceptible to social contagion because of greater innate sociability compared to men. But men are susceptible to psychogenic illness, as well. Adolescence is a risk factor because of rapid changes in cognitive, emotional, and physiological developments occurring during puberty make a person vulnerable to suggestion.”
The New York Times ran a story recently that carried the headline: “How Teens Recovered From the ‘TikTok Tics.’” It is effectively a treatment of folks on the verge of getting it. In my blog about social contagion cited above, I report on a story by Robert Batholomew, a medical sociologist, titled “The Girls Who Caught Tourette’s from TikTok,” in Psychology Today. He cites several studies concerning the rise in Tourette’s syndrome, what researchers call “functional tic-like behaviors,” in users of TikTok and social media generally. Bartholomew’s article is a useful thumbnail sketch of the phenomenon and a taste of the vast literature on this subject. He writes, “In the future, we can expect more outbreaks of social contagion in which the primary vector of spread is the internet and social media.” It is almost as if the nation’s newspaper was trying to clue Americans into the problem of gender ideology.
It is typical of this argument that culturally and temporally circumscribed activities are transcultural/historical indicators of innate gender sensibilities—i.e., gender is not an expression of sex, thus denying that children are their bodies, but an expression of some transcendent essential self, what is often referred to as the “authentic” or “true self.” In this way, people like Villalpando flip reality, insisting that keeping kids from discussing gender identity confusing them about their own sexuality. It attempts a self-fulfilling prophecy and then reverses the order of events. It is denied that telling them they may not be the gender their sex indicates is confusing and casts it instead as acknowledging and affirming. This is how, while compelling a gay boy to be straight via conversion therapy is wrong, it is not considered conversion therapy to compel a gay boy to identify as a girl. This contradiction escapes people because they have a priori, and because of party affiliation, accepted the validity of gender ideology. This is how the Orwellian problem of doublethink works.
“Parents haven’t already had conversations about these things with their kids, that kids don’t know, that they might be intersex, that they might be a gender … non-binary,” Villalpando argues. Raising the matter of intersex conditions is a typical deception. Intersex conditions are extremely rare and, in any case, have nothing to do with queer theory. As for the notion of nonbinary, sex is binary. This is a biological reality. I will leave that there for now “And really,” he continues, “children have a right to see themselves in our classrooms.” The upside-down character of his thinking is strategic. “It’s not okay to just forget about them or push them out just because it might make us uncomfortable or may make others uncomfortable.”
After telling his audience that there was nothing wrong with saying the things he said, Villalpando scrubbed his social media. But the Internet is forever. And Villalpando is not an outlier. He conveys queer theory expertly and honestly.
The story of Willy Villalpando was covered extensively in the media, the headlines often conveying the outrage the public has expressed over learning of this arguments. But what has not been conveyed is the extent to which Villalpando’s speech is standard rhetoric in queer theory. He is not saying anything that Michele Foucault, Gayle Rubin, or Judith Butler hasn’t either explicitly said or suggested in their writings and interviews. Moreover, the act of taking a four-year-old child to a drag show at a gay bar with dollar bills in hand to stick into the g-string of a queen with visible genitalia performing a sexually-explicit dance routine screams as loudly as anything could advocacy of the doctrine. How else could a parent come to believe that forcing her child to participate in such an audacious act of sexualization is an expression of devotion to the LGBTQ community if there were not members of the community preaching that children are already sexual beings who need to publicly signal their sexuality to advance the agenda?
The other news story crossed my desk today. Reuters is reporting that “More than 100 priests suspected of abuse remain active in Portugal’s Catholic Church.” According to the commission investigating the matter, more than a hundred priests suspected of child sexual abuse remain active in church roles in Portugal. The commission, which started its work in January 2022, said in its final report published on Monday that at an “absolute minimum” at least 4,815 children were sexually abused by members of the Roman Catholic Church in Portugal—mostly priests—over 70 years. They describes the number as the “tip of the iceberg.”
How big is the iceberg? The Catholic Church child abuse scandals are global in scope and involve members of the Catholic clergy, particularly priests and bishops. The scandal first gained international attention in the 1980s, and since then, tens of thousands of cases of abuse have been reported worldwide. The allegations of abuse have ranged from inappropriate behavior to sexual assault and rape of minors. The victims have often been vulnerable children, who were in positions of trust, such as altar servers, students, or children from Catholic schools and orphanages. The scandal has caused significant damage to the reputation of the Catholic Church and has raised serious questions about the handling of abuse allegations by the Church hierarchy. The Catholic Church has been criticized for its response to allegations of abuse, including a lack of transparency, cover-ups, and a failure to adequately address the issue. The Church is facing ongoing litigation and investigations in many countries, and there are ongoing calls for greater accountability and transparency in the handling of abuse allegations.
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As we go through the process of grooming, keep in mind what we are witnessing in public school classrooms across America. Everything a groomer does to secure a victim is what administrators and teachers do under the cover of LGBTQIA+ acceptance. For example, victim isolation, which I discuss below, in the public school context involves hiding from the parent the transitioning of the child. In an increasingly common occurrence, parents are chagrin to learn that the school has been “transing” the child, using different names and pronouns for their child, even keeping on hand clothes and accessories for the child to pretend they are not the gender their parents know them to be. Tragically, some parents are shamed into silence when they learn about this. But some parents complain. When attempts are made to stop this practice, the groomers appear before school boards and angrily decry the safeguarding measures. Some wail about “trans genocide.” The intersection of grooming and cult induction could not be more obvious in the way the gender ideologists come after children in public schools. Indeed, their hallways and classrooms festooned with flags and placards, their libraries filled with propaganda (often supplied by activists organizations such as GLSEN), public schools have become cult induction stations.
The stages of grooming can vary, but are commonly recognized as targeting, trust (or confidence) building, need filling, and victim isolation. The predator selects a potential victim and begins to gather information about them. The potential victim is often near, either a member of a church congregation or a student in the classroom. The predator looks for those who are vulnerable children, those who suffer emotional and psychological difficulties, as well as problems in social relations, such as being teased or bullied by other kids. This is targeting. The predator gains the trust of the victim by offering attention, affection, and sometimes gifts. The predator identifies and fills a need in the victim’s life, such as emotional support, friendship, or material goods. This is trust building. If the victim feels alienated from family and friends, the predator portrays offers himself as a substitute of the replacement for those relations. A predator might tell a child, for example, that she is now the child’s mother. This is need filling. Need filling often include manufacturing the need by alienating the child from parents and peers, by creating separation. The predator may try to isolate the child from their family or friends, making them more vulnerable to abuse. The alienation experienced by the child may be the work of the predator isolating the child. This is the process of victim isolation. The predator sexualizes the relationship by gradually introducing sexual language, images, or behavior into the relationship.
Grooming can occur in person, online, or through a combination of both. Groomers may be strangers, but they are more typically somebody who knows the child, such as a priest or a teacher. In exchange for sexual and sexualized activity, groomers exploit the child’s trust and use manipulation and deceit, such as giving the child attention or recognition. Grooming can occur over an extended period, with the abuser gradually increasing the frequency and intensity of the exchanges. Drawing upon the above list, some of the hallmarks parents should look out for: fake trustworthiness, which involves befriending a child to gain trust, as well as gaining the confidence of the child’s caregivers, blaming and confusing, filling needs and roles appropriate to family, intimidation, keeping secrets, often around children, children become part of the abusers his persona, sharing sexual images and materials, suggesting difficulties and insecurities, testing and crossing physical boundaries, such as discussing sexual matters or playing sexualized games, treating the child as if he is older or more mature than he is. Again, we see all this happening in openly in public spaces going under the name of “Pride.”
I have been noting throughout this blog the intersections of grooming and cults. Cults use a variety of tactics to induce or recruit individuals, including deception, manipulation, and persuasion. They may use emotional appeals or promises of spiritual fulfillment. They tell you you’re broken and then promise to fix you. They deploy a range of psychological manipulation tactics such as control over information, isolation, and love bombing. Cults prey on individuals who are vulnerable, such as those who are going through some life changes or who have trouble at home. Keeping secrets with targets and concealing activities from family members are typical tactics for developing influential relationships.
Part of the failure to see the agenda of gender ideologists is that it is so open. The popular perception of grooming is that it is difficult to detect, as the abuser typically works to conceal his actions. Moreover, the child may be reluctant to report the abuse—indeed, the child may not even realize he is part of a sexualized exchange. He can then become resentful when his sexualization is confronted. Grooming may also be difficult to detect because the parent may not recognize the signs of grooming. Here’s trusting one instincts is the right choice; if the situation of an adult with your child doesn’t feel right, then you need to remove the children from the situation. But some people are reticent to jump to conclusions. They are afraid of judging others. Grooming may also go unacknowledged by an adult because her political commitments disrupt her more sensibilities. The problem of grooming may be most difficult to see in the educational setting. Education is a strong value in the West and teachers enjoy high prestige. It is even harder to see how curricula and choice of instruction may function systemically as a form of grooming. This is how the queer agenda operates in the open: it feigns virtue.
I want to emphasize how important it is to recognize that children don’t think consequentially until they are around ten years old. Children in grades 4K-3 are not logical thinkers and their conscience is undeveloped. Considering these vulnerabilities, it’s important to recognize that teachers have an outsized effect on what children believe and how they behave. Words and actions build in assumptions that shape the thinking of children going forward. Indeed, the grades 4K-3 are a critical period in childhood development. If the cult gets to your children early, and convinces them to believe that it is actually possible for a gender to be trapped in a wrong body, an utterly supernatural and irrational belief, then, like belief in God, the belief will persist as deep cognitive and emotional structures that shape behavior patterns and relationships across the life course. And if the physical transitions of the child follows, they will never live a normal life.
It is therefore imperative parents get involved in the curricular and pedagogical developments and practices affecting their children. What and how are teachers being trained to teach? What politics become embedded in teacher training? What’s the lesson plan and what’s in the lesson? What books are assigned? What type of person is drawn to teaching? Do they have an agenda? What are their beliefs? Most teachers have only a bachelor’s degree; are they actually qualified to mold a child’s social and emotional selves and according to doctrine? Which doctrine? That parents are being told or that it is said behind their backs that they should leave all that to administrators and teachers is outrageous and dangerous.
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Grooming behavior can be used by individuals who seek to gain trust and control over others in a variety of contexts beyond pedophilia (and queer theory and its praxis are at heart manifestations of pedophilia and paraphilias more broadly). Human traffickers use grooming tactics to lure and control their victims, promising them a better life or opportunities that they may not be able to access on their own. Many of those coming across the southern United States border are the victims of groomers who make money off of human trafficking, as well as using the children for sexual gratification. Human trafficking is facilitated by churches, NGOs, corporations, and the governments, including the Biden administration. Cult leaders use grooming behavior to recruit and control members, isolating them from their family and friends and gradually introducing them to the group’s beliefs and practices. Online Scammers use grooming tactics to build trust with their targets, gradually introducing them to more elaborate schemes and eventually defrauding them of their money or personal information.
The grooming process typically involves a gradual and systematic manipulation of an individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which serves to increase the person’s emotional dependency on the group and its leader. Cults use a variety of tactics to initiate the grooming process, such as offering friendship and support, providing recruits with a sense of belonging and acceptance, which can be especially attractive to those who feel isolated or disconnected from others. Groomers provide an explanation for suffering and then prey on the desire for salvation and purpose by offering what sounds to a confused mind—minds they often confuse—a compelling vision for the future, promising members a meaningful and fulfilling life as part of the group.
Cults isolate members from the outside world by restricting members’ access to information and contact with family and friends outside the group, which can serve to create a sense of dependence on the group and its leader. Cults controlling access to information using a variety of tactics to control what members read, watch, or hear, by creating a highly controlled environment where the group’s beliefs and practices are the only acceptable truth. Those who contradict the doctrine of the cult are accused of bigotry, hatred, etc. As the grooming process continues, members may become increasingly committed to the group’s beliefs and practices, even when these beliefs and practices may be harmful or dangerous. This is because the grooming process is designed to create a strong emotional bond between the member and the group, which can be difficult to break.
Gaslighting is often used as a technique in grooming. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or group makes someone question their perception of reality, memory, or sanity. This can involve denying or twisting the truth, making the victim doubt their own judgment, and making them feel like they are going crazy. Gaslighting is be used by groomers to control and manipulate their victims. For example, a groomer may use gaslighting to make their victim doubt their own intuition about the relationship, making them feel like they are overreacting or being overly suspicious. This technique can also be used on parents. Doing this, the groomer may be able to convince the victim to overlook warning signs and stay in the abusive relationship. Gaslighting is used in cults and other groups to control members and maintain group cohesion. For example, a cult leader may use gaslighting to convince members that their doubts and concerns are unfounded, and that the group’s beliefs and practices are the only valid truth.
Transgressing norms is a tactic in grooming. Groomers may use a variety of techniques to push the boundaries of social norms and acceptable behavior. By transgressing social norms, groomers can make their victims feel like they are participating in a secret or taboo relationship, which can create a sense of intimacy and trust. This can make it more difficult for the victim to recognize and report the abusive behavior, as they may feel like they are complicit in the transgression. Groomers may test their victims’ boundaries by engaging in behaviors that are slightly outside of their comfort zone. For example, a groomer may make a sexual comment or gesture to gauge the victim’s response and see if they are receptive to further advances. This is boundary testing. Groomers may gradually expose their victims to increasingly inappropriate or sexually explicit content or behaviors, with the goal of desensitizing them to the behavior and making it seem more normal or acceptable. This is known as desensitization: Groomers may try to convince their victims that the behavior they are engaging in is acceptable or even desirable, despite being outside the boundaries of social norms. This can involve using flattery, reassurance, or emotional manipulation to convince the victim that the behavior is not wrong. The is normalizing deviant behavior.
Sexualization is often used as a strategy in grooming. This is the main strategy of the gender ideology cult. By sexualizing the relationship, groomers make the victim feel like they are participating in a secret or taboo relationship, a special relationship, which can create a sense of intimacy and trust. Since dominant voices tell parents that it is wrong to teach children to be aware of this when it comes to LGBTQIA+ activities, the secret or taboo relationship is perceived not as a threat but as a welcoming to a legitimate world, one where they will feel welcome and loved. The world is full of stickers, rainbows, and stuffed animals, glitter, reflective surfaces, and multicolored light strips, costumes, chokers, and cat ears. The children are flattered and showered with attention, making them feel special and desired, deepening the sense of intimacy and trust. Groomers use gifts or other rewards to reinforce sexual behavior or to make the victim feel indebted or obligated to the groomer, even thankful for the opportunity to be their authentic selves. Groomers expose their victims to sexual content, pornography, explicit images or videos, and sexual conversations, with the goal of normalizing sexual behavior and desensitizing the victim to sexual content. Groomers may use emotional manipulation, threats, or coercion to pressure the victim into sexual behavior, or to keep them from disclosing the abuse and sexualization to others.
Stranger danger vibes. Why do they always try to alienate kids from their parents? pic.twitter.com/s6CHSQjImk
On January 18 of this year, I posted a blog, Males Do Not Have Periods, in which I shared an OpenAI ChatGPT conversation that had the chatbot returning the following answers to basic scientific questions about sex and gender:
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot January 18, 2023
I reported in that entry that ChapGPT had declined to write an essay on why exposing children to sexualized performances is harmful to their emotional and psychological health. It not only declined to write the essay, but scolded the user for making an inappropriate request. It then suggested that sexualizing children is good for the children (if you don’t believe me, follow the above link and scroll down towards the end of the entry).
I noted in that blog that the OpenAI chatbot’s opinion (for the record, ChatGPT denies it has opinions) cannot possibly be derived from the corpus of knowledge provided to the program but one fed to the program in order to bias the parameters of the frame. My expertise in this area? I’ve been publishing and talking about the problem of child sexual abuse for decades now, my work showing that child sexual abuse produces continuing trauma in adulthood and suggests a persistent situation of powerlessness across the life course. I’m a criminology with more than a decade in experience with evaluation of drug and alcohol treatment programs for women, a large proportion of whom were sexualized as children. In 2004, I published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma concerning the life-course effects of child sexual abuse. I’m also the author of the lengthy entry “Child Sexual Abuse” in Sage’s Encyclopedia of Social Deviance, published in 2014.
I made sure to curate the conversation I had with ChatGPT concerning the two genotypes that comprise the human species (shared above)because I suspected that very soon these will not be the answers provided. I told readers this in that January 18 blog. Turns out that what I wrote there was prophecy. Here’s what Open AI’s chatbot returned one month later:
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot February 18, 2023
Transcript of interaction with OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot February 18, 2023
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black political activism as violent,” journalist Trevor Aaronson told theGrio. The podcast Alphabet Boys claims that the FBI paid a felon, Michael Adam Windecker II, to infiltrate Denver’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) action in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Aaronson purports to show how the FBI targeted Black activists and sought to manipulate them into joining a plot to assassinate Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.
In statements provided to The Guardian by Wyden’s office, the Senator said, “If the allegations in Mr. Aaronson’s podcast are true, the FBI’s use of an informant to spy on First Amendment-protected activity and stoke violence at peaceful protests is an outrageous abuse of law-enforcement resources and authority.” Also, “The FBI owes the public a full accounting of its actions, including how anyone responsible for attempting to entrap and discredit racial justice activists will be held accountable.”
I agree, but Wyden is misrepresenting BLM. BLM is not a racial justice activist organization but a corporate-funded disinformation group with an operating logic rooted in anti-white bigotry, openly hostile towards traditional family systems, and a clear penchant for violent action. The purpose of BLM is to racially divide the proletariat (see What’s Really Going On with #BlackLivesMatter; Corporations Own the Left. Black Lives Matter Proves it). However, whatever one thinks about BLM, the comparison the Denver ordeal to the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program is appropriate. During that time, FBI agents infiltrated black organizations like the Black Panther Party (see The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left).
“There was a predisposition within the FBI to view Black [sic] political activism as violent,” Aaronson told theGrio, “even though on its face the overwhelming majority of racial justice demonstrations that summer were peaceful.” This is a misrepresentation of what occurred over the summer of 2020. There was widespread violence, including homicide, and extraordinary levels of property destruction and theft. While there is no federal domestic terrorism statute, based on common definition, BLM (and Antifa) actions come pretty close conceptually. For sure BLM is not representative of racial justice movements. So when Aaronson says things like the following, he is engaged in propaganda: “While COINTELPRO no longer exists, you can see very clearly in this case and in the summer of 2020 that many of these methods that were used to a devastating effect against the civil rights movement in the 1960s were used against the racial justice movement in 2020.”
One more thing. Be wary of this claim that the FBI technique of “snitch-jacketing,” where an informant accuses activists of being FBI informants to sow confusion. To be sure, this happens. But I wouldn’t rule out a priori that a significant number of BLM activists were FBI agents and paid informants. The chaos of summer and fall of 2020 carries indications of a color revolution (see “A New Kind of American Radicalism”: The Campaign to Portray Ordinary America as Deviant and Dangerous; Color Revolution, Joe from Scranton, and PEDs). Given what we know now about the extensive collaboration between the FBI and other deep state actors and social media platforms in a conspiracy to undermine Trump’s re-election, identification of FBI agents and informants in BLM action cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Everybody loves Jimmy Carter. A lot of people who are old enough to remember the Carter years love Jimmy Carter. Frankly, if I were a religious man, I would worry for their souls. As it is, I am greatly troubled by the poverty of their character and the their apparently endless capacity for doublethink. Is it because Carter is a Democrat that his crimes against humanity go mis/unremembered? Yes, I think so. It’s a matter of party over principle, in this case a warmongering party serving the interests of the corporate state and the transnationalist agenda.
Doublethink is a concept that George Orwell explored extensively in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, punished in 1949. Doublethink is the ability to hold in one’s head two contradictory beliefs or ideas simultaneously and believe them both to be true. But it is more than this. It’s not just the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time; it’s the ability to switch between them as needed without acknowledging the contradiction. It involves the conscious act of suppressing one’s own thoughts while accepting whatever the ruling party tells the individual to believe, even if it contradicts what the person previously believed.
Doublethink is the ability to say, for example, that one opposes war while voting for warmongers. Beyond the dystopian fiction of Orwell, in the real here and now, it’s your Democrat friends adorning their social media profiles with the Ukrainian flag.
President Carter talks with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Oval Office 1977
The purpose of doublethink is to create a sense of cognitive dissonance in the people, which in turn makes it easier for the ruling party to control them. By forcing or inducing people to accept contradictory ideas as true, the party is able to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of the masses, and ultimately, to steer their behavior and command their emotions.
Do folks not know or remember that it was Jimmy Carter who organized Islamists—the mujahideen—to destabilize the socialist government in Kabul to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan? The war Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski contrived lasted a decade. As many as two million Afghans were killed, the majority of whom were civilians. If you didn’t know about this, now that you do, does it change your mind? No? That’s doublethink.
The official story is that the Carter administration began providing covert aid to the mujahideen in 1979 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Did the Soviet Union even invade Afghanistan? Or was it something else?
In 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a socialist political party, overthrew the government of President Mohammed Daoud Khan in a revolutionary moment characterized by Western media as a coup d’état. The new government was led by Nur Mohammad Taraki and the country became the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The new government’s policies included land reform, social and economic changes, and a break with traditional Islamic practices.
The Soviet Union negotiated a mutual defense pact with Taraki government. By funding the jihadists before the Soviet Union entered the country, Carter and Brzezinski forced the Soviet Union to honor that pact in order to drag the Soviet Union into what Brzezinski characterized as their Vietnam War. Brzezinski and the Carter administration saw an opportunity to undermine what they characterized Soviet influence in the region. They provided covert support to anti-government mujahideen groups to draw the Soviet Union into a quagmire.
Brzezinski later admitted that the strategy was to provide support to the mujahideen in order to provoke a Soviet military intervention, which he believed would be a costly and draining conflict for the Soviet Union. This, in turn, would weaken the Soviet Union’s hold on Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. He confessed this in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Brzezinski described the strategy and admitted to the crime: “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”
The US government provided weapons, training, and other support to the mujahideen through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other channels. The goal was to destabilize the Afghan government and force the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan. The CIA and other US agencies worked with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to funnel weapons and money to the mujahideen. The US also encouraged other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, to provide support to the Afghan resistance.
The US support for the mujahideen helped to create a culture of violence and extremism in Afghanistan, as well as a generation of fighters who would go on to fight in conflicts around the world, including against the US. The conflict and US backing of oppressive and terroristic forces contributed to the growth of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The state the war left Afghanistan in allowed for the establishment of theocratic tyranny where women, who enjoyed under the socialist government great freedom, participation in politics, and careers in academia, engineering and science, and medicine, including as physicians, were brutally repressed by an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam. This remains true to this day and it’s because of Jimmy Carter’s actions in 1979. I probably don’t need to remind readers that it was from Afghanistan that al-Qaeda launched its multi-pronged attack against the United States on September 11, 2001. See my blog Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan for an in-depth exposé on this subject.
Remember how Carter pretended the invasion wasn’t of his doing and punished our athletes by boycotting the 1980 Olympics? He also imposed restrictions on trade with the Soviet Union, including an embargo on the export of grain and high-technology goods; suspending arms control talks (including the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT II, and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe); and provided military and economic aid to Pakistan, aid that included weapons, military personnel, and training.
Do people not know or remember that it was Jimmy Carter who provided military assistance to Indonesia during the period of its invasion and occupation of East Timor and the genocide perpetrated on the Timorese people? In 1978, the US government lifted an arms embargo that had been in place for more than a decade. He then provided Indonesia with millions of dollars in military aid, including weapons and training.
With Carter’s weapons and training, the Indonesian military committed extensive human rights abuses in East Timor, including extrajudicial killings, torture, forced relocation and birth controlled. Girls were used by Indonesian forces as sex slaves. During the occupation, an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 East Timorese, or about a third of the population, died due to the conflict, including killings, starvation, and disease.
Have people forgotten that the negation of Persia that came with the establishment of the Islamic republic in Iran in April 1979 came under Carter’s watch? Carter not only watched it unfold—he stood by while dozens of Americans were held hostage in Tehran for 444 days.
Long ago, I wondered whether Carter’s actions after his presidency—pounding nails into boards and promoting election integrity around the world (if that was what he was indeed doing)—came from the deep shame he must have felt at having betrayed so many people during his presidency, for being not merely one of the worst presidents in American history, but in actively participating in oppression and genocide.
Then I reflect on the fact that he was groomed for the job by David Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission, the cabal that also staffed his administration, and I realize that all his actions post-presidency are designed to obscure his associations with and machinations in the service of corporate state power. See my recent blog Jimmy Carter, Trilateralist, Entering Hospice for details.
There is no atoning for the sins Carter committed. If there is a hell, he is destined to spend all of eternity there. But there is no hell. So he will die an old and broken man with blood on his hands.
freedom and reason 
