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Update (Thursday, April 20, 2023): You’ve probably heard about Klint Ludwig throwing his grandpa Andrew Lester under the bus. Thought you might want to put your eyes on Klint and see whether you’re surprised. Ludwig, a Democratic Party shill, seized the opportunity to feed CNN propaganda points, with race-baiting anchor Don Lemon stuffing his face with the robust meal of progressive talking point. Other of Lester’s relatives dispute the claims Ludwig makes. Lester was not a racist. He was a scared old man.

Meanwhile, police are on the hunt for Robert Louis Singletary. Singletary fired on a family living in his neighborhood in Gaston County, Norther Carolina. Six-year-old Kinsley White was hit by shrapnel after retrieving her basketball from a location near Singletary’s residence. Singletary also wounded White’s mother and father. Shielding his wife and child from the shooter, the father, William, took the brunt of the attack. He remains in the hospital in critical condition.

Although the story is being covered by major media, this almost certainly the result of the barrage of criticism concerning the double standard by the media when it comes to the reality of racial violence in America, the reporting does not discuss the possibility that the interracial character of the crime suggests a “racial component.” The failure to suggest this stands in stark contrast the reflex to imply racism whenever the interracial angle is in reverse.

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Yesterday, in Kansas City, Missouri, an 84-year-old white man named Andrew Lester was charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action for allegedly shooting a 16-year-old black kid named Ralph Yarl. Yarl had misunderstood the directions he was given and wound up at the wrong address. Yarl was struck twice. He is now at home recovering. I hope he makes a full recovery.

The media is reporting that Clay County Prosecutor’s Office said the crime had a “racial component.” While there is no mention of this in the charging document, the case does indeed have a racial component. Young black men like Yarl are daily put in harm’s way by crime control policies developed and implemented by urban elites.

The progressive approach to public safety puts black people at risk in a myriad of ways. That most murder victims in America are black males—dying at the hands of other black males—is only the outstanding fact (albeit a fact largely ignored by the corporate state media). The case of Yarl indicates another risk: the racialization of threat perception shaped by high rates of criminal violence.

Routinely in the top ten deadliest cities in America, Kansas City is among the worst in the country for criminal violence. The state as a whole is only second to Mississippi when it comes to the rate of gun homicides. Missouri’s other large city, St. Louis, has the second highest homicide rate in the country after New Orleans. In some some years, St. Louis surpasses New Orleans in gun homicides.

Gun violence by blacks drives the murder rate in Missouri. At 11.8 percent, the black population in Missouri is less than the national average (13.6 percent); yet, compared to whites, blacks are nearly twice as likely to commit murder and nearly two and a half times more likely to be murdered. Blacks commit 60 percent of murders in Missouri. They are 69 percent of murder victims. The vast majority of perpetrators and victims of gun homicide are males. Males are half the population in the United States. That means that less than six percent of the population in Missouri commit most of the murders in that state.

Blacks are overrepresented in other violent crimes, as well. Sixty-five percent of robberies are committed by blacks. However, fifty-four percent of robbery victims are white. All violent crime accounted for, half are committed by blacks, while fifty-five percent of victims of violent crimes are white.

One of the consequences of not controlling crime is that public fear of crime grows. We are told that it is biased media coverage that raises the fear level. To be sure, the media distorts perception. But in the case of law and order issues, the bias runs in the opposite direction progressives claim. The role blacks play in serious crime is downplayed by the media. Rather it is the clear overrepresentation of certain groups in homicide and other violent crimes that changes mass perception. The fear is therefore not entirely irrational. Under these conditions, what used to be a mistaken address becomes a potential home invasion, a risk statistically more likely amid the failure to control crime.

There is no shortage of videos on the Internet of trusting people being victimized in their own homes by intruders who were not regarded with the degree of caution one exercises to be safe in a dangerous city. The Internet allows people to get around the corporate state filter. Seeing this, the citizen gets a gun to protect himself from very real threats. He is determined to not to be another victim; if the police aren’t going to protect him, then he will protect himself. By heightening the threat of interpersonal crime, bad public policy makes it more likely a citizen will use that gun in an ambiguous situation. People become less cautious in their actions when they are under siege. Is that a lion in the bush? Or just the wind? It’s how we are hardwired.

According to sources, Lester told police that he had just gone to bed when the doorbell rang. He picked up his handgun and opened the interior door of his house. There he found a black male pulling on the exterior door. He thought the male was trying to break into the house. He told police that he was “scared to death” at the size of the male. He feared that at his advanced age he would be unable to defend himself against an intruder, so he twice discharged his weapon.

Crime is rampant in Kansas City, as it is throughout urban America, and it’s growing worse. As you can see from the above graph, the murder rate in Missouri is higher now that it has been at any time since before 1985—even higher than the previous peak year, in 1993, when the nation as a whole was experiencing historically high violent crime rates. Moreover, the murder rate for Missouri has in most years exceeded the national rate of homicide. The increase in homicide since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the shift in criminal justice policy towards ever greater leniency is especially startling. Homicide in Missouri is now nearly twice the rate of the national average.

The racialization of threat perception is an awful tax laid upon innocent blacks by the failure of governments to control urban crime. This failure rests at the feet of progressive urban policy, which the work of the Democratic Party. It is no accident that, of the thirty most violent cities in America, twenty-seven of them are run by progressives. Is it therefore surprising that the mayor of Kansas City, Quinton Lucas, is a Democrat? Would it surprise you if I told you that the mayor of St. Louis, Tishaura Jones, is a Democrat? It’s predictable.

Doug and I are praying for Ralph Yarl and his family as he fights for his life.

Let's be clear: No child should ever live in fear of being shot for ringing the wrong doorbell.

Every child deserves to be safe. That’s the America we are fighting for.

— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) April 17, 2023

“Let’s be clear: No child should ever live in fear of being shot for ringing the wrong doorbell,” Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted. “Every child deserves to be safe.” Indeed. But they won’t be as long as Harris’ party runs our nation’s cites.

Did you know that in the late 1990s, Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary in Scotland, performed leg amputations on two perfectly healthy men? Horrifying, no? Unthinkable, right? It happened.

Both men suffered from a form of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) known as apotemnophilia. This condition causes patients to believe that they will only be normal if they have a limb removed. In each case, the men had their leg amputated above the knee.

Smith performed the surgeries after the men had been turned away by other doctors. Before the surgeries, both patients underwent counseling by psychiatrists and a psychologist, and they were assessed by medical professionals. The procedures were discussed with Smith’s defense body and the ethics committee of the General Medical Council. The hospital charged £3,000 ($4,800) per leg amputation.

The chairman and board members of Forth Valley Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which manages the hospital, were unaware of the surgeries at the time. They only became aware of them in the summer of 1999, when Mr Smith informed the trust’s new chief executive, Jim Currie, that he was evaluating a third patient, an American. The trust announced a ban on further amputations after a report from its ethics subcommittee.

Smith said that there were two groups of patients who wished to have limbs amputated. The larger group found the idea sexually arousing, while both of his patients were part of a small subgroup that sought amputation because they felt incomplete with four limbs but would feel complete with three. (It was later revealed that one of the two men did in fact have a fetish for amputees.)

According to Smith, people with this condition frequently harm themselves, such as shooting their leg off or lying on train tracks. One of the men was close to suicide, according to Smith. This necessitated affirming the identities as amputees. He stated that the patients’ lives had been greatly improved by the surgeries, and they were pleased with their new state. They received artificial limbs, but did not always wear them. Lucky for them they have no regrets, since their transition to the status of amputee is irreversible.

Smith told a press conference at the hospital, “At the end of the day, I have no doubt that what I was doing was the correct thing for those patients.” The trust’s chairman, Ian Mullen, stated at the time that such surgeries were not excluded in the future, but a strict protocol would have to be followed. Since then, the practice has been banned.

However, the problem of apotemnophilia hasn’t gone away. In 2017, Mirror covered the story of Nick, from Edinburgh. Nick says “I want it to be amputated. I perceive that to be my end goal. It is really the only way that I can see a future where I am happy and comfortable with myself.”

Mirror journalists explain that “Nick suffers from a rare, debilitating condition known as body integrity identity disorder, which stops sufferers from recognizing body parts as their own.”

Body integrity identity disorder (BIID), which includes apotemnophilia, is related to BDD, a condition where people have a distorted view of their physical appearance, leading them to obsess about perceived flaws in their body, which can include their limbs. (For more on the phenomenon, see Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds.)

There is a condition called xenomelia, for example, in which individuals experience a strong feeling of discomfort or mismatch with one or more of their limbs, feeling that they do not belong to their body.

There is also a condition called blindness identity disorder (BID), also known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder, blindness subtype. Individuals with this condition have a strong desire to become blind. Some may even attempt to harm themselves in order to cause visual impairment.

As for Nick, binding his leg and imagining he has a stump relieves his dysphoria. But he can only maintain the strap for a few hours at a time. “I have no association with my right leg. It feels like it shouldn’t be there,” he says. “It’s similar to if you had a weird growth on your arm. It would revolt you and you’d want to get it taken off as quickly as possible. That’s how I feel about my leg but, obviously, I can’t get it removed.” Of course, Nick’s leg is not a weird growth on his arm. It is a limb he was born with.

Not all people with body dysmorphia have a desire to amputate a limb or be blinded. Should those who do be able to find a doctor who will surgically remove an arm or a leg—and charge them an arm and a leg to do it? I’m sorry for the sarcasm, but this is a money making operation. That the fees charged in the Smith case was returned to the National Health Service (NHS) is a function of state-run health care. The amputations occurred privately. The United States healthcare is largely private and for-profit. Should eyes be surgically removed for those who wish to be sighted? Is this desire be attributed to a new type of Oedipal complex? (See Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex.)

The Atlantic covered the phenomenon in 2000 in the article “A New Way to Be Mad.” Carl Elliott writes, “The phenomenon is not as rare as one might think: healthy people deliberately setting out to rid themselves of one or more of their limbs, with or without a surgeon’s help. Why do pathologies sometimes arise as if from nowhere? Can the mere description of a condition make it contagious?”

These are questions that need answering. The second more so than the first. Maybe we will never explain why a person with no deformities feels his body is in some way deformed. In genuine cases, it seems mostly likely a defect in the brain’s capacity to properly map the body. But how could one tell an authentic case from a delusion? And why would it matter? Would that justify mutilating a person’s body?

As for the second question, we know from our experience with anorexia nervosa, cutting, and Tourette syndrome that among the risk factors there is the problem of social contagion. (See Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?)

Anorexia nervosa is a serious psychiatric disorder characterized by a distorted body image and an intense fear of gaining weight. Individuals with anorexia often restrict their food intake, leading to significant weight loss and, in severe cases, malnutrition. The disorder typically begins in adolescence or early adulthood and is more common in women than in men.

Anorexia nervosa can have serious physical and psychological consequences. The physical consequences may include amenorrhea (absence of menstruation), cardiovascular complications, gastrointestinal problems, and osteoporosis. The psychological consequences may include depression, anxiety, social withdrawal, and suicidal thoughts or behaviors.

The exact causes of anorexia nervosa are not fully understood, but it is thought to be a complex interplay of environmental and psychological factors. Some of the risk factors for anorexia include a family history of eating disorders, certain personality traits such as perfectionism or neuroticism, and cultural pressures to be thin.

Cutting behavior, also known as self-harm or non-suicidal self-injury, is a psychiatric disorder that involves deliberately harming oneself without the intention of causing death. Cutting behavior can take many forms, including cutting, burning, scratching, hitting oneself, or other types of self-injury.

Cutting behavior is often associated with underlying mental health conditions, such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and borderline personality disorder (BPD), which is a cluster B type personality disorder I have discuss before on Freedom and Reason. Cutting may be a way for individuals to cope with intense emotions, feelings of worthlessness, or a sense of alienation from self and others.

As with anorexia, cutting is more common among adolescents and young adults, particularly those who have experienced trauma or abuse. And like anorexia, cutting behavior can have serious physical consequences, including infection, scarring, and nerve damage.

With regard to anorexia, research has found that individuals who have friends or family members with an eating disorder are more likely to develop an eating disorder themselves. Exposure to media images of thin models and celebrities has been shown to contribute to the development of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviors in some individuals.

Perhaps you have heard about the phenomenon of “Anna,” is a personified way of being used to convey a pro-anorexia, or “pro-ana,” subculture that has over the last several years emerged online. For the “pro-ana” community, anorexia is viewed as a lifestyle choice rather than a serious mental health disorder. Within this community, individuals who struggle with anorexia are often referred to as “Anna,” and the disorder is often romanticized and portrayed in a positive light.

Some individuals who participate in the “Anna” community view anorexia as a way to achieve a certain aesthetic or idealized body type, while others view it as a means of gaining control over their lives or coping with emotional distress. The community often promotes extreme weight loss methods and encourages individuals to engage in disordered eating behaviors.

With regard to cutting behavior, the practice can spread among groups of adolescents and young adults, particularly in peer group and social settings. As with the pro-anorexia community, this is in part due to the behavior being viewed as a way to cope with emotional distress or to gain attention or social acceptance. There is also evidence to suggest that exposure to media coverage of self-harm may contribute to the normalization and spread of the behavior.

So the second question has a well-known answer. Social contagion is a very real phenomenon. If limb removal were ever normalized and enjoyed in back of it an opportunity for individuals to be part of something bigger than oneself, an opportunity to belong to a community, an explanation for why one feels uneasy with the world, then we might have a rash of cases of people wanting to remove body parts. The “new way to be mad” would become, at least among some circles, a new identity. It might be identified as an ideology, something like “Transableism.” (See Sanewashing—It’s More Widespread Than You Might Think. Also, this 2014 article in Psychology Today, “Out on a Limb.”)

In the Scottish case, Smith continued practicing “medicine.” The government never investigated him. Should Smith have been allowed to continue his work? How about prison? To be sure, voluntary amputation was banned in the end (was it criminalized?), and as a general rule ex post facto consequences are problematic. But what sociopath thinks it’s okay to remove the healthy body parts of individuals suffering from psychiatric disorders?

The Smith case is reminiscent of the Nazi medical experiments. Should there be a Nuremberg 2.0? What other analogous medical experiments are being performed today? Medicalizing atrocities doesn’t make them any less atrocious.

* * *

Source for the historical case: “Surgeon Amputated Healthy Legs.” British Medical Journal. February 5, 2000: 320(7231): 332.

What is religion? Religion is a set of beliefs, practices, and values that are focused on the worship of one or more deities and a domain of supernatural things. One finds in religion transcendent entities, such things as angels, demons, and souls. These are things of such a nature that they resist falsification using scientific methods. Their truth depends instead on authority, charisma, and faith.

Religion finds people seeking ecstasy and euphoria, often in contrast to the state of their current lives, where they experience despair and dysphoria. As a philosopher suggested long ago, religion is a painkiller. But religion is not only rapture and opiate. The content of religion includes ethical codes and moral principles, as well as rituals and ceremonies that guide and shape the way individuals live their lives and mark transitions across statuses. Religion also creates the statuses.

Religion can be found in different forms, including organized faiths with established institutions and structures, cults with religious-like characteristics, and individualized and personal spiritual practices. Religion provides a framework not only for understanding the meaning and purpose of life, as well as providing guidance for personal and societal morality, but establishes meaning and purpose. We are told that religion causes people to do great things. Religion also causes people to do horrible things.

Scientology is a religion founded in the 1950s by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. Its beliefs and practices are based on Hubbard’s book Dianetics, which theorizes that negative experiences called “engrams” are stored in the mind but can be removed through a process called “auditing,” allowing the subject to achieve personal; freedom and spiritual enlightenment. Scientology teaches that individuals have in them an entity known as “thetans,” which is their true identity. By relieving the emotional and psychological stress caused by engrams, the person may realize his authentic self.

The organization has faced controversy over the years, with former members alleging abusive practices and financial exploitation. The church has also been accused of engaging in aggressive legal and extra-legal tactics to silence its critics. The church is also known for recruiting celebrities and using them to push the faith. Despite the controversies, there are tens of thousands of adherents of Scientology found throughout the world.

Imagine you and your seven-year-old meet with his second-grade teacher for a parent-teacher conference. You enter the room and notice flags and placards with symbols on them. Also, the teacher is wearing a button with one of the symbols. And a necklace with a pendant. You ask her what the symbols are, and she tells you that they are symbols representing Scientology. She tells you that she wishes to create an inclusive and safe space for children who are drawn to the ideas Hubbard presents in Dianetics. An increasing number of students express interest in these ideas, she tells you. She shows you a picture book in the classroom based on Dianetics.

It’s not that you don’t know what Scientology is. But you did not know its symbols. You are surprised to see a religious system being promoted in this way in your child’s school. You don’t want to fly off the handle until you know more. So, when you get home, you open Google and do some research.

You soon learn that one of the two major parties that governs your country, the Democratic Party, has taken up Scientology and is aggressively institutionalizing the religion across the administrative state. You learn that bureaucrats in the technocratic apparatus are required to undergo mandatory training in the doctrine, its jargon, and the practices of dianetics. You knew already that members of this religion were in the entertainment business, especially Hollywood. Given the relationship between Hollywood and the Democratic Party, the advocacy of Scientology among Party members makes sense, you guess. But you had no idea of the depth of the association. 

You keep digging and find that, over the last several decades, Scientology has been taught in American colleges and universities. Graduates of institutions of higher learning leave with at least an appreciation of the religion, if not feeling drawn to it, some converting. You learn that graduate students are trained in dianetics and carry it into their professional careers. You also learn that the health care industry has taken up the theory of engrams and has been engaged in auditing children with the goal of removing the engrams so that the children can achieve personal freedom and spiritual enlightenment.

You learn from your second grader that the school has been inviting members of Scientology to come to the library and read books about Scientology and encourage the children to explore the religion by having them engage in exercises. Some parents, you learn, take their kids to fun events hosted by Scientologists. There is one coming up, in fact. There is a flier in his backpack. Your child asks you if he can go. Definitely not. He tells you he hates you and runs to his room and slams the door.

The world you thought you knew now feels very strange. How did this happen? Doesn’t the United States have a rule that separates church and state and prevents public school teachers from using the classroom to teach students about Scientology?

Is Dianetics in the middle school and high school libraries? Is so, how did it get there? You ask your older daughter about it, and she tells you that Hubbard’s book has always been there. You can tell that she wonders what’s wrong with the book. What about it, she asks. Everybody is talking about the ideas in that book, she tells you. She tells you that she discusses the ideas with her friends in chat rooms on social media. You think to yourself: What’s going on here?

She asks if you are a “suppressive person.” What is that? That’s the term used by Scientologists to describe a person who is considered an enemy of the religion and its goals. According to doctrine, a suppressive person is someone who actively seeks to impede or undermine Scientology’s progress, as well as the progress of its individual members. She tells you that Scientology views suppressive persons as a negative influence on society and encourages its members to avoid contact with them. They are also encouraged to harass and ostracize those who are critical of Scientology.

You go back on Google and learn there are indeed reports from former members of the religion that they were encouraged or even required to go no contact with family members deemed antagonistic towards the faith. You learn about how Scientologists harass and ostracize people they see as enemies. It’s all very scary and you think about your son sulking in his room and the way your daughter looked at you when you asked these questions. You start to feel threatened.

You start talking to others about it and they look at you like you’re a space alien. You didn’t know about this? No. You were cause unaware. Why would you think something like this could happen? You trusted your institutions to protect you and your children.

Then you make the mistake of arguing that it is improper for public schools and the government to push a religion. This is a theocratic arrangement, you argue, and we live in a secular society. Is this even a religion, they wonder. Isn’t this sound science? Aren’t these valid categories? Aren’t thetans real? Doctors are auditing children, are they not? Why would the health care industry do anything to hurt children? The Democrats are progressives. How could they harm children? This is the same party trying to take guns off the street. The Democrats care about people.

You compound your mistake by pointing out how absurd Hubbard’s thesis is and how many young people will be harmed by being pulled into a system known to engage in abusive practices and financial exploitation. You’re informed that you’re out of step, that you’re either ignorant or bigoted. Literally everybody disagrees with you. They tell you that, far from being abusive and exploitative, auditing has saved many young people from the engrams that kept them from realizing their true selves and living authentic lives.

On Thursday, March 30, more than a thousand activists gathered at Tennessee’s state capitol to demand restrictive gun laws. The House of Representatives’ legislative business was brought to a halt when three elected Democratic Party representatives, barking commands through a bullhorn, led the activists into the capitol building. There were no arrests.

Protestors began assembling inside and outside the state capitol in the morning. They confronted lawmakers as they arrived for legislative sessions. Later, a crowd gathered at War Memorial Plaza, where various speakers spoke about gun control following The Covenant School shooting on March 27, where a trans man murdered six Christians, including three children.

While the House of Representatives debated an education bill, the three Democrats violated the chamber’s rules by approaching the podium without being recognized to speak. The three were Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, Rep. Justin Pearson, D-Memphis, and Rep. Gloria Johnson, D-Knoxville.

Section 12 of the Tennessee Constitution reads: “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member, but not a second time for the same offense; and shall have all other powers necessary for a branch of the Legislature of a free state.”

If leading a mob into the Tennessee state capitol building with bull horns and shutting down the democratic process such that it necessitated police intervention is not the disorderly behavior Section 12 is referring to, then to what on earth could those who authored that passage have been referring? Indeed, it looked an awful lot like what Democrats call an “insurrection.” Even more so, in fact; in this case, party members actually incited the mob to occupy the capitol.

Before getting to the expulsion and Nashville’s shameful vote to reinstate one of the Democrats, readers need to recognize that, contradicting these comparisons of these actions of the “Tennessee Three” to the civil rights activists of yesteryear, these protests were not intended to expand a civil right but rather to diminish one. They were seeking to abridge the fundamental right to self-defense.

This was not a violation of a house rule to throw rules and laws into question for the sake of enlarging the scope of rights to which citizens are entitled, such as the right of the people to keep arms to defend their homes and persons from rampant crime and violence on the streets of Memphis and Nashville, two of the most unsafe cities in America. This was a demand to restrict that right by attention-seeking personalities in violation of democratic rules—a demand to make it more difficult for their imperiled brothers and sisters to effect their human right to self-defense.

It was therefore all the more disturbing to listen to a man with no understanding of democratic norms or practices or American history exploit an opportunity to engage at length in an obnoxious exercise of anti-white bigotry using an affected voice in the preacher’s cadence ostensible to diminish the rights of those most subjected to the failure of progressive government to protect themselves.

In place of an orderly demand for enhancing public safety was disorderly action by disordered persons driven by inflated ego and an obnoxious sense of entitlement. Knowing that there were people watching the speech with tears in their eyes and muttering “Amen” just made the spectacle all the more troubling.

Despite the body of that chamber having spoken in accord with the state constitution concerning the fate of Justin Jones and his comrades, the Nashville Metropolitan Council voted Monday to return Justin Jones to the state legislature. The thirty-six council members at the meeting unanimously supported reinstating Jones, even suspending its rules to allow an immediate vote instead of holding a month-long nomination period.

I learned Monday night, that Jones was involved in assaulting a legislator at the capitol in 2019. Jones, attending a protest to remove from the capitol a statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, assaulted Republican Glen Casada. Jones was charged with two counts of misdemeanor assault and one count of disorderly conduct. Lawmakers attempted to ban him from the capitol then, since he represented a danger to legislators and others there on legitimate business. A judge blocked the ban.

That’s not all. Jones has been removed from and arrested during other protests, including a 2020 protest in the wake of the George Floyd’s death. That he was arrested indicates that he was not involved in peaceful protests.

I want to be clear: being arrested for civil disobedience is not necessarily wrongful conduct in a moral sense. But, unlike the protests against Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s, the riots of 2020 lacked the moral imperative. The protest against alleged racially disproportionate killing by police was a contrived matter.

A year later, Jones faced additional charges for allegedly throwing a traffic cone at a car during the protest.

The greatest predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Jones is sure to pull another stunt like he did on March 30. But this doesn’t matter to the politicians in Nashville. Preventing the process that would find a replacement for Jones, one who didn’t assault a legislator or lead an insurrection at the capitol just so the progressives running Nashville into the ground can stick a thumb in the eye of the state of Tennessee—this is what democracy look like?

Of course, we are dealing with a different definition of democracy. Progressives are not confused about what democracy is. When progressives use the word they mean two things: (a) rule by the corporate state through the technocratic apparatus; (b) action taken by their side beyond democratic norms and processes. In this context, (a) sees armed citizens of a certain ilk as a threat to its continued existence; (b) uses the occasion of mass murder by a disordered person to push (a)’s agenda.

Rinse, repeat.

You will note that progressives want to take away rifles of a certain sort, firearms they brand “weapons of war,” i.e., semi-automatic rifles. They seek to ban or restrict these weapons despite the fact that most gun homicides are perpetrated with handguns. In fact, more homicides are perpetrated with knives, and even fists and feet (personal weapons), than are perpetrated with “weapons of war.”

Why are progressives obsessed with these weapons? Because these are the weapons that would prove most effective against the agents of an administrative state when the final abolition of democratic-republican government arrives. Democrats are thinking in terms of war (abroad and at home).

This is why, for progressives, populism, i.e., the actual maximal democratic norms and processes, is declared “fascism.” Just as progressives redefine democracy to fit illiberal desire, they redefine opposition to corporate state authoritarianism as its opposite.

Like the Orwellian slogans, “Ignorance is strength,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “War is peace,” the desire here is to produce in the public mind a confusion that renders the slogan “Fascism is democracy.”

The reflex of progressivism is projection: conservatives and liberals are accused of what progressives are. This requires doublethink, a technique of control I have written about in the past and will again in greater depth in the near future.

This is why it is so important to read—or reread—Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. You must understand how the corporate state uses language to disrupt normal consciousness. The public is being conditioned to believe, depending on what is convenient for the corporate state, that the most sure things in the world are not sure at all or that a thing is the opposite of what we have always known it to be.

All eyes are on now on Shelby County to see what happens with Justin Pearson, the Memphis Democrat who was also expelled for his participation in the insurrection at the capitol.

I describe myself as an atheist. But, really, why does someone who is not religious need a label? Religion is a thing. Its absence is nothing. It is no thing.

To be sure, the word means “absent god.” But that’s not what most people think when they hear that word. For them, the atheist is something. He is some thing.

Moreover, to be absent some thing conveys some thing is missing, some thing one should have—that one is supposed to have.

But not having god in one’s life is not like missing a leg. Being godless is different from being legless. I am not godless because of accident, war, disease, or deformity. I am godless because I do not believe in God. And I don’t have to in a free society.

The labels “atheism,” “heathen,” “infidel,” “pagan” have long been used to persecute people for not being some thing. But the atheist is not someone who chooses to step into oppression. The label creates the status that oppresses him. He is being othered for no good reason. He is not othering himself.

The atheist is a man who would rather not be forced to believe that which he does not. Is he to be responsible for his oppression because he rejects the beliefs of others? Why must he be included in their belief system? Why must he be burdened by the labels of believers?

The term “atheism” is lot like the term “uncircumcised.” The woman tells her girlfriends at diner, “He is uncircumcised.” “I’ve never been with an uncircumcised man,” a girlfriend says. “That’s gross.” It creates an assumption. It makes the women wonder why he’s not. Not everywhere, of course; where circumcision is the norm, being uncircumcised means the man is on the outside, even if only a little. He may feel a need to explain himself.

Do we say that women who have not had mastectomies are “unmastectomized”? No? Then why “uncircumcised”? Is it because circumcision is a religious thing? Then imagine a cult or a religion where girls are mastectomized to indicate their membership in the tribe, to show their commitment to the doctrine, to express belonging to the group. I suppose we might then have unmastectomized women.

How about that term “cisgender”? The term, appearing at the end of the twentieth century, denotes a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex registered for them at birth. Simply put, to be cisgender is to be not transgender.

Why is there a word for not transgender? “I am not transgender.” “Most people aren’t. Why are you telling me this? Why is this relevant?” “Because I am a thing. I am ‘cisgendered.’ I was ‘assigned’ male at birth and identify as a man. I thought you should know.” “I don’t care.”

If I reject the cisgender label then for many I am a bigot—and the label will be imposed anyway.

Why should those who don’t believe in supernatural things or who don’t alter their bodies get labels? Do those without tattoos have a label? They have no tattoos. Most people don’t. More and more people do. But, like religion, circumcision, and many other things, people aren’t born with tattoos. What are these people called?

Those who don’t get tattoos are not doing some thing. They are being the way they are. But if tattooing ever becomes the norm… What if those with tattoos wish to label those who don’t with a special word? Let’s make up a label and apply it. When people resist their new designation, we shall call them as bigots. They are, after all, tatouazophobes.

Let’s put on our sociology caps and answer the general question raised by the pattern. There is a explanation for why things work this way. It’s a method of “othering,” of making stubborn and wayward individuals live within the scope of an ideology and marginalizing them for refusing to accept the doctrine or participate in the rituals of those who do.

That those who are not included get a label tells the rational observer that there is a power relation and indicates those who control that relation. Those who control the relation may be the majority. They may be a minority. They may be a constellation of minorities. We are interested in the source of power.

Whatever the source of power, it is a truism that those who have the power to define words and label things have the power to control minds. By controlling thought, they control people. One of the most powerful way to control thought is by establishing the assumptions that steer those thought away from some thing towards another.

Why aren’t your pronouns in your profile and signature line? Because I am not religious. I can’t control what the believers call me. That is for sure. Can I control what I call myself? That’s less certain.

Update (April 17): I did not know about this case until yesterday. This occurred in Australia. Evie Amati, a trans woman (his parents named him Karl), seriously wounded a man and a woman at a 7-Eleven in Sydney in January 2017. Security footage showed Amati approaching his first victim, Ben Rimmer, as he waited to buy a meat pie. After a brief conversation, he struck Mr Rimmer in the face, knocking him to the ground with a severe facial wound and facial fractures. He then attacked his second victim, Sharon Hacker, near the door, fracturing her skull. Amati turned on a third customer, Shane Redwood, but he shielded himself using his backpack. Amati was arrested shortly afterwards. When the BBC initially reported this story, it left out the fact that Amati is trans gender. It finally clarified the story two years later. I am sharing the video below.

In 2017, transgendered person Evie Amati had a bad tinder date, triggering gender dysphoria and took it out on strangers at a 7-11. Now serving 14 years in prison for attempted murder. The court ruled that the original sentence was “manifestly inadequate.” https://t.co/ufZx2TiB68

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 21, 2022

Update (April 12): Another murder by a trans identifying individual.

#Portland media & police still refuse to mention the suspect accused of brutally murdering a cab driver on Easter Sunday is #trans. I first broke that report & spoke with @IngrahamAngle about the latest updates in the murder of Reese McDowell Lawhon. The suspect was arrested days… pic.twitter.com/QGE3yuX6yB

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) April 12, 2023

* * *

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”—George Orwell, Animal Farm

“In conclusion, then, we may say that the difference between delusion and illusion lies in the impact that belief has on the individual holding it. Delusion is a system of ideas that is not shared by other people, and that is of such a nature as to make its possessor unhappy or a menace to society. Illusion, on the other hand, is a false belief that is not susceptible to correction by outside evidence, but that serves the needs of the individual’s emotional life.”—Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

I begin today’s blog with clear evidence of corporate state disinformation and official state suppression of critics concerning the rise of militant trans activism represented by a single case: the government harassment of Mitchell Watley, an illustrator of children’s books, and the corporate cancelling of his career.

Watley will have a preliminary hearing April 11 in Juneau, Alaska, on a single count of “terroristic threatening” for allegedly placing notes in businesses that included an assault rifle superimposed over the trans gender flag with accompanying text reading: “Feeling Cute Might Shoot Some Children.”

The New York Post frames the story this way: “An Alaskan children’s book illustrator was dropped by his publisher after he was arrested for posting menacing, transphobic notes targeting children at local businesses. Mitchell Thomas Watley, 47, is accused of putting the threatening notices in public places throughout the capital city of Juneau beginning on Friday—the International Day of Transgender Visibility.”

The official complaint against Watley reads in part: “Officers spoke to Mitchell, who said (in essence) that he was in fear of the recent transgender school shooter and took it upon himself to print out and distribute these leaflets.” Rexene Finley, the assistant district attorney, told the judge in court that Watley “targeted our most vulnerable populations.”

The image in question is not Watley’s invention. You can see in the above image, as well as in the image below, members of Antifa, a street-level manifestation of the New Fascism, wearing a patch with an AR-15 superimposed onto a trans flag with the slogan “DEFEND EQUALITY.” Go here to find for purchase numerous banners, buttons, patches, and posters with the image and the slogan. Next time you are reviewing photos of Antifa, pay attention to the uniform. See any patches from the Etsy catalog?

Obviously, the image doesn’t mean what the assistant district attorney and the media suggest it does. The reality is that the image signals something very different, something the corporate state does not want the public to know, namely that this is a patch worn by trans activists to signal to opponents of gender ideology that violent trans action, including gun violence, is now part of the movement’s growing militancy, justified by growing resistance to the ideology.

You’re supposed to be upset over the Tennessee legislature removing members from its body for commandeering the house floor and inciting mob violence at the state capitol. Demagogues took to the house floor to distract you from thinking about the actual problem. It wasn’t guns that killed the six people at a Nashville Christian school. It was a person with thoughts in her head. But progressives want you to make a fetish of guns so they can advance a project to disarm the population of weapons that allow them to effectively counter state oppression.

They are now distracting you with rhetoric about “racism” and “white supremacy.” The two men removed from the Tennessee legislature were black so therefore racism and white supremacy. But there are several members in the Tennessee legislature who are black. Most of them are still in the legislature. Why? They didn’t commandeer the floor of that body with bullhorns and lead a mob in disrupting the democratic process. Expelling two members from the Tennessee legislature wasn’t about race. It was about making sure those elected to serve the people don’t use the cover of the electoral process to instead thwart the democratic process they were sworn to uphold. It was the act of egregiously violating the rules of the House and the principles of a free society that caused that body to expel these men.

Nor does Watley’s text mean what the assistant district attorney and the media suggest it does. When you know what the image is actually about, the meaning of the text associated with the image become obviously a sarcastic warning about the rise in violence by trans activists and a reference to the Nashville children murdered by a trans man. It’s not Watley threatening to kill children. It is Watley telling people that trans identifying people are killing children. And they are.

Audrey Hale, the Nashville shooter who murdered six people, including three children, isn’t the first mass murderer identifying as trans gendered. Last year, Anderson Lee Aldrich (seen in the photo above surrendering to police) killed five people at a nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Aldrich identifies as nonbinary. Alec McKinney, who identifies as a trans man, teamed up with Devon Erickson in 2019 to shoot several students as a Denver-area school. They killed one person and wounded several others. A 2018 shooting at a Maryland warehouse that left five dead was perpetrated by a trans woman named Snochia Moseley.

According to a local news source, police just disrupted the plans of a fifth trans identifying person in Colorado Springs, Colorado. William Whitworth, a male who now goes by the name “Lilly,” has been charged with two counts of criminal attempt to commit murder in the first degree, criminal mischief, menacing and interference with staff, faculty, or students of educational institutions. Lilly was planning to “shoot up” multiple schools in Colorado Springs.

Look at what this cult has done to our youth. @Riley_Gaines_ was barricaded in a room at San Francisco State University Thursday night after she was assaulted following a speech to students about saving women's sports.pic.twitter.com/sFWLc65Ull

— Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) April 7, 2023

My last blog covered the assault of Riley Gaines by trans activists at San Francisco State University during the Turning Point USA event. The university’s administration, without mentioning the assault on Gaines, praised the trans activists who perpetrated the assault.

Breaking🚨📰: San Francisco State University has just released a statement to students after @Riley_Gaines_ was assaulted and held hostage by them.

The University VP commended the trans activists for their “tremendous bravery’’ and described them as behaving “peacefully”.… pic.twitter.com/GJWRAxgSQe

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 9, 2023

Here is a video of the trans activist mobbing of Kellie Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, in Aukland, New Zealand. Keen has just been assaulted along with several other women. (See also here.) What you are seeing very clearly in the crowd, alongside the true believers driven to mob violence by ideology, the convergence in the movement by individuals with mood and personality disorders.

What you are seeing very clearly in the crowd, alongside the rabid true believers driven to violence by gender ideology, are individuals with disordered personalities who have found in this movement a way to transition their mental illness into what progressives tell them is a positive expression of social justice. We saw this in San Francisco in the mobbing of Riley Gaines, who was assaulted and kidnapped for more than three hours while the hostage takers demanded money for her release. A sickness was clearly apparent in the actions and on the faces of members of the mob—and San Francisco State University then praised the mob and offered them counseling without mentioning the victim of misogynistic violence.

We are told that the rise in violence committed by trans identifying people is a myth. My Google news aggregator is teaming with stories claiming to debunk the myth. There is also the return of the sentiment, often heard during the period in which another violent extremist movement, Islamic terrorism, that one cannot blame an entire group because a member of that group commits an act of violence. Obviously those making this claim are hypocrites given how easily they accuse the entire white race of enjoying skin-color privilege and for harboring at the very least implicit bias and unconscious prejudice for black people—and white isn’t an ideology or a religion operating on doctrine. Contrast being white with the act of preaching a gospel of vengeance, and portraying the adherents to the doctrine that underpins that gospel as a persecuted minority morally privileged to use any means necessary to defend itself. As with islamism, gender ideology attracts and transitions disordered people into agents of harassment, intimidation, and violence.

* * *

The cultivation of an antagonistic social movement is bearing fruit. The construct “gender identity” as it exists in gender ideology/queer theory constitutes for many of those so identified a re-coding of their personality disorders (PDs), including cluster B type disorders, as a positive thing. (The intersection of gender identity disorder/gender dysphoria and personality disorders is demonstrated in the research literature. For examples, see here, here, and here. There are more, and I encourage readers to explore the matter further.)

Cluster B type are a group of PDs characterized by dramatic or erratic behavior, emotional dysregulation, and impulsivity. One can see an overrepresentation of this class of disorders among trans activists, who are involved in acts of intimidation and terrorism across the globe. This is an important matter to address, especially in light of the normalizing and mainstreaming—and amplifying—of these personality types.

The four disorders in this cluster are antisocial (ASPD), borderline (BPD), histrionic (HPD), and narcissistic (NPD). ASPD is characterized by a disregard for the rights of others, a lack of empathy or remorse, and a tendency to engage in deviant or impulsive behavior. BPD is characterized by instability in mood, self-image, and relationships, and a tendency to engage in impulsive and self-destructive behaviors. HPD is characterized by excessive attention-seeking behavior, emotional instability, and a tendency to engage in dramatic or exaggerated expressions of emotion. NPD is characterized by a grandiose sense of self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, and a strong need for admiration and attention. You can see from these descriptions the likelihood of compounding disorders.

Historically, treatment for PDs has typically involved a combination of medication and psychotherapy, as well as support from family and friends (although in providing this support one must be careful not to be drawn into an abusive or exploitative relationship). One might think it is still important for individuals with these disorders to seek professional help from qualified mental health professionals But in the current environment this poses a risk; what was heretofore treated as a mental illness is now affirmed as an identity. Young people with PDs are redirected to gender clinics where they are put on a path to gender transitioning, first social, next medical, the latter now a billion dollar industry where they will become life-long patients.

Gender identity is an ideological construct that, by redefining PDs and giving them a cultural and social purpose, not only disguises and obfuscates these disorders, as well as frequently associated emotional and mood disorders, but turns those in need of psychiatric help into subalterns for the corporate state project to dismantle the American republic.

One need not to sign on the theory I have been advancing about the corporate state project on Freedom and Reason to see the obfuscation and to know that this development is not benign. Whatever the motives behind the transitioning of personality disorders to gender identities, the results have been a rise in harassment and violence against members of society who do not subscribe to this ideology. Those who advocate the ideology are responsible for its consequences whether or not they are working consciously to advance the transnational and transhumanist agenda.

Gender ideologues tell society that if the majority is skeptical of or resists the claim that a person can change her or his sex, that gender is either a soul-like entity that inhabits bodies (including wrong bodies) or so disconnected from sex that it can be whatever individuals wants it to be, then the majority is plotting and perpetrating a genocide against those who have proclaimed gender ideology as their faith. They can, therefore, expect the “trans community” to fight back. That is, having asked the public to deny reality and affirm delusional beliefs that advance an illusion of gender so constructed in all its quasi-religious character, public rejection of the doctrine justifies extreme action on the part of the believers.

If this ideology reaches a person with an antisocial personality disorder, a person who is gathering weapons in preparation for killing those people this person believes wronged her, it teaches her that her disordered thinking is a valid identity, that she is really is a man trapped in a female body, that her imagined grievances are real, obviously real because others won’t affirm her delusions (forcing her to undergo puberty, etcetera), and her impulse is therefore also valid. She comes to believe that she has the right to and must defend herself against a genocide—to martyr herself for the cause.

The explanation obviates the need for mental health treatment, at least treatment that would take up the actual problem, and the disorder is not helped but valorized. Gender ideology transitions the personality disorder from a limitation on living a normal life into a force promising an extraordinary one, a transcendent identity, a real thing to be recognized and embraced, a source of legitimate political action, legitimizing the use of violence against her oppressors. It takes the pathological desire to violently lash out at others and empowers it by giving it a justification—the affected becomes an instrument of agency in solidarity with a group of believers. The affected becomes a suicide death machine.

We are waiting Audrey Hale’s manifesto. But based on the totality of the circumstances, it almost certain that Hale was a zealot moved to murder Christians because she believed they had wronged her. In fact, it seems so certain that if the manifesto does no contain a clear motive, or suggests one that doesn’t fit the circumstances, an objective observer might suspect official manipulation. The observer might consider whether the document is being censored and modified to hide the motive that would make this a hate crime or an instantiation of domestic terrorism.

The ideology provides the actor with the targets of her valid wrath. It constructs and defines her oppressors. The ideology points the mentally disordered person in a direction. It puts the gun in her hand. It instructs her to pull the trigger. Like all extremist ideologies, by manufacturing the identity, the ideology creates a worldview and peoples it with good and evil entities. It instills and heightens the paranoia and resentment necessary to motivate committed action. To paraphrase Buckle’s truism: gender ideology prepares the crime; the trans person commits it.

Violent and suppressive acts short of homicide abound. The many videos of trans activists (TRAs) harassing feminists and lesbians and shouting down and physically assaulting participants at women’s rights rallies illustrates the unhinged nature of many of those in this movement. Read aloud the slogans on their placards. Hear how they sound. Listen to the terms TRAs use to describe their enemies. Review the images of armed TRAs standing before the trans flag making terroristic threats (some of which I am sharing in this blog).

TRAs are openly using the language of war. Conservative Christians are portrayed as the principle enemy, described as “Nazis” and “fascists,” and of course “transphobes.” But even allies are being threatened (see video at the end of this blog). The enemy is portrayed as representing a mass desire to erase the existence of the trans people. What follows from an imagined existential threat taken as real? Should not those who are about to be genocided take up arms and defend themselves against the genociders? To be sure, not all trans identifying persons will go there. But the reality is that a lot are going there, and all it takes are as many who are to endanger the public.

Why do we condemn fascism? Why do we condemn Christian and Islamic extremism? Why do we condemn extremist ideologies? Not just because they are wrong, but also because they can result in terrorism and violence. To be sure, TRAs enjoy the First Amendment right to convey their paranoid delusions and gather in groups—they have the same right to speech and expression, assembly and association as we all do. That means that we also have the right to tell the truth about this dangerous and harmful ideology. And we have the right to gather together and organize against it, to seek through legislation rules that protect all of us, including trans identified people.

That’s what all this language about Nazis and fascists is about in the rhetoric of the trans activists. This worldview plagiarizes both the real and the mythical dynamics of good and evil in reality and stories of the distant and recent past. Indeed, stepping into oppression, gender ideology is the work of future-past. Parents, politicians, teachers—anybody who fails to affirm and celebrate the delusional is portrayed as “fascist” and “collaborator.” The steps of genocide are recited. The delusions of the paranoid are fed. The bomb was fused years ago. It’s a short fuse.

Just as in Islamism, where the critics of a form of religious extremism are portrayed as “Islamophobic,” so in gender ideology are the critics of this form of quasi-religious extremism portrayed as “transphobic.” In this ideology, the trans gender person becomes the moral equivalent of the Jew and those who do not accept his worldview become the Nazis (see below video). The illusion that ideology creates resonates with the delusions of mentally disordered individuals. The delusions are given definite form and certain content. The desire to carry out aggressive violence is rationalized as defensive action.

Imagine comparing yourself to six million murdered Jews simply because people don’t view you as a woman. What a complete whack job. pic.twitter.com/Zck1OiIuCV

— CAMILLE PAGLIA STAN✨ (@AgingWhiteGay) April 4, 2023

This is analogous to the Islamic extremist who shoots up a school blaming his actions, motivated by his beliefs, perpetrated on those who deny or criticize his beliefs, on the victims of his actions. Islam is the only true way to think about the world, so to his mind he is justified. That Allah is the only god and that law and policy and everything else flows from him is obvious. That Muhammad is his messenger must be true. This ideology must be defended—even with violence.

New bill in Canada would prosecute anyone that misgendered, criticised or protested against Transgenderism.

Anyone deemed “transphobic, homophobic or offensive” would face prosecution and a $25,000 fine. 🇨🇦

pic.twitter.com/aRli8ZKQJe

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 5, 2023

The demand that others respect preferred pronouns is indicative of theocratic desire. The admonition to avoid “dead-naming” the trans person is a prime indicator of the depth of faith-belief; the person believes they have killed their former self and are reborn in a differently gendered body that is what they say it is. Gender ideology seeks a theocratic order where its doctrines are effectively if not formally the state-sanctioned religion, punishing those who deny it are to be punished. Until that order is established, if the state won’t listen, then activists believe they must take matters into their own hands.

This is jihad and it moved a disordered person to enter a school and murder children, as well as moved the purveyors of this ideology to blame the victims. That Hale sought suicide by cop just cements the analogy. Hale was a suicide bomber.  There are more to come.

Just curious, at what stage of genocide does the “victimized” party start shooting up schools? pic.twitter.com/vNkGdyM2Hj

— Right Side of History™️ (@xxclusionary) March 29, 2023

We are told that there is no rise in mass shootings perpetrated by trans identifying people. That is not merely a myth, but that it is “anti-trans” to say otherwise. William Whitworth would have been the fifth trans identifying individual in only a handful of years to murder people had the police not intervened. Moreover, not all violence committed by trans identifying people and their allies involves murder. Indeed, murder constitutes only a small portion of the violent acts perpetrated by this movement—violence accompanying patterns of harassment and intimidation.

You will remember that we were told to ignore the terroristic actions of Islamists, that their beliefs and their choice of targets had nothing to do with their religion. We were told that most Muslims are peaceful, that Islam is a “religion of peace,” and that to suggest that the political-ideological motivations of the perpetrators of violence constituted “Islamophobia.” 

We are in the phase of awakening that involves the defenders of an antagonistic social movement trying to prevent objective observers from rationally grasping what is happening by intimidation and shaming. The downplaying of danger from groups the corporate state pushes is as predictable as the exaggeration of danger from groups the corporate state fears. We are told that white supremacists lurk everywhere and that Christian nationalism is on the move, while we are at the same time told to disbelieve that which we can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears and know with our own minds. But for how much longer?

It is imperative to ask yourself why things happen in the way they do. Why is the corporate state pushing political-ideological agendas that not only have no benefit for the ordinary working class people who make up the vast majority of the country but that also disrupt the consciousness of their children. What are the ends that the corporate state seeks by turning children against their parents—indeed, by turning children against their own bodies?  

To more fully understand the religious character of trans gender movement, grasp that the genocide trans activists are warning about does not involve actually killing trans identifying people. The genocide is a symbolic one. It is the rational act of denying that a man can actually be a woman. The genocide occurs not in the material world but on the spiritual plane that constitutes the cosmology of the new religion. Because the belief that a man can be a woman depends on substituting for reality a slogan, it is vital that everybody believe that slogan.

I will leave you with this dialogue from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. O’Brien is torturing Winston in the Ministry of Love. “We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.” He then says, “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”

When Winston challenges O’Brien’s claim that the earth is as old humans by asking him about fossils, O’Brien asks, “Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.” When Winston tried to remember the word for such fallacious thinking, O’Brien reminded him “that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing.”

This reminds me of Sigmund Freud’s point in The Future of an Illusion where he distinguishes between “delusion” and “illusion.” Here are several passages that speak to the situation we face today with the quasi-religious system of gender ideology.

“We shall not be far wrong if we define a delusion as a system of ideas that is not shared by other people, and is of such a nature as to make its possessor unhappy or a menace to society. It is an obvious disadvantage if an individual has to admit to himself the full share of his own meanness, vileness, and shoddiness. In such circumstances, he will be sure to try and dispose of them in the minds of other people as intolerable qualities belonging to them. This he can do only by projecting them and by setting himself up in opposition to them as a paragon of virtue, a hero, or a saint.

“An illusion, on the other hand, is a false belief, a product of wish-fulfillment, which is not susceptible to correction by outside evidence. The difference between an illusion and a delusion is not a difference in the objective truth or falsity of the belief in question, but rather in the impact that belief has on the individual holding it. An illusion is a form of happiness that is available to everyone, and is thus not incompatible with social life.”

“The source of religious energies lies in the individual’s own emotional nature, and it is only through an illusion that this source can be rendered accessible to the conscious personality. To be sure, there are many forms of illusion, and it is not always easy to distinguish them from each other. But we shall not be far wrong if we define an illusion as a belief that is founded on a wishful fantasy, and that is maintained in the face of evidence to the contrary. An illusion is a false belief that is not amenable to correction by evidence, and that serves the needs of the individual’s emotional life.”

“An illusion is essentially a product of the imagination, and it is only through the imagination that we can overcome the limitations of reality. The imagination allows us to transform reality into a more satisfying form, and it is only through this transformation that we can find meaning and purpose in our lives. The function of religion is to provide individuals with a set of illusions that can help them to cope with the harsh realities of existence.”

The delusion that a disordered man possesses in which he believes he is a woman comes with the wish that he actually were. He suspects he really isn’t so he needs others to affirm him. Something as untrue as a man being a woman requires affirmation from everybody. When universal affirmation is not forthcoming, the man becomes mean and vile. If his delusion becomes an illusion, if his delusion is sustained by many millions affirming his disordered thinking, then he finds a ready vehicle for wish fulfillment. He is given a purpose alongside others who are also disordered in this way.

The threat to society becomes ever greater as disordered people come to the calling. Something happens when a thing nobody would wish on anybody else becomes a thing people want more than anything else: they are prepared to hurt other people to obtain it. A proselytizing religion spreads its denial of reality. And, like all such religions, those who resist the doctrine become despised and demonized, justifiably subjected to the vengeance of the righteous. No disbelievers makes the fiction finally real. Any person who declines to affirm the delusion—to celebrate the illusion—becomes an enemy of God. And so we have a terrorist movement.

There is a serious problem in America today. This movement is already extremely dangerous. When children are massacred for the sake of an ideology, we must at the very least call out the ideology that animates the monster. We have a moral obligation to condemn terrorism. I have a long history of calling out Christian nationalist violence, white supremacy, Islamic terrorism, etcetera—this history documented on this blog.

Progressives defend trans activism the way they defended Islamic terrorism. They believe that the victims of these terrorisms had it coming to them. Those with whom they disagree are unworthy victims—undeserving of sympathy. Remember how gleeful progressives were when a critic of mRNA gene therapy died of COVID-19?This attitude pervades the rank-and-file devotees of this ideology. Never being wrong combined with political extremism makes an individual so righteous in his beliefs that he can justify any level of immoral action. We see the glee of the psychopath in these actions. These are the traits of disordered persons.

"To be clear, the heckler’s veto is not free speech." https://t.co/rvm6YGt1v1

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) April 7, 2023

This movement has become dangerous. We can talk about the mass shootings by armed trans identifying people (four so far, with a fifth event thwarted by the police). But far more common are acts of harassment, intimidation, and physical violence short of murder. Ask Kellie-Jay Keen about it. Or ask twelve-time All-American swimming champion Riley Gaines, who was attacked by trans activists after giving a speech on saving women’s sports at San Francisco State.

“Yeah you fucking transphobic bitch—I fucking see you!” a deranged activist screamed as Gaines as she escaped the mob down a hallway to a safe room, protected by security and university staff. “Bye bitch! Fuck you,” the activists shouted. Holding “Trans Lives Matter” signs, they chanted “Trans rights are human rights” and “Trans women are women.” Gaines was barricaded in the room for several hours. The San Francisco Police Department had to be called in to manage the situation.

What justifies the harassment, intimidation, and violence we see from this movement is a false doctrine popularly known as “the weapons of the weak” (a phrase taken from James Scott’s book by the same title). This doctrine holds that a minority can exert control over the majority by deploying such terroristic tactics as deploying or threatening violence to prevent people from speaking and receiving information, or restricting the free movement of people.

Terrorism is a form of political violence that aims to create fear, panic, and terror among the population or some group to achieve an ideological, political, or religious objective. Terrorism takes many forms (bombings, hostage taking, shootings). Terrorism is typically carried out by non-state actors, such as members of extremist groups or radicalized individuals, rather than by governments. However, some terrorism is developed and effectively used by government actors.

Transgender activists holding @Riley_Gaines_ hostage demanded money in exchange for her safe passage off of the San Francisco State University.
pic.twitter.com/4APxWLdVvO

— @amuse (@amuse) April 7, 2023

The goal of terrorism depends on the ideology that animates it. In the present case, the ideology puts central to its praxis the transgression of norms concerning sex and gender, for example erasing age of consent laws. This is a movement founded in anarchism in its most nihilistic tendency, fueled by postmodernism, and dressed in the clothing of critical theory (queer theory). It’s the same cloth that covers today’s anti-white bigotry (anti-racism, critical race theory). All this is smuggled into corporate board rooms and public institutions as DEI and progressive education. At universities, these programs draw those in society’s disordered pockets and incubates the subaltern forces—organized as “SFSU’s Queer and Trans Resource Center”—who show up at Turning Point USA events and mob the attendees.

Terroristic tactics are popular among those who believe their cause is so righteous that they can run roughshod over the civil and human rights of others. We see this in members of a neo-nazi cell who are so convinced of their racist beliefs they believe they’re justified in disrupting a meeting of liberals discussing the threat neo-nazism represents to the community. Less hypothetically, we see this in members of Islamist cells so convinced of their religious beliefs that they feel justified in shooting cartoonists who mock the prophet. Whatever means are deployed, the end is the same: to suppress the fundamental rights of people.

The “heckler’s veto” is not an exercise in speech. It is a violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The weapons of the weak is free speech and association. What you see in the video above are the weapons of the authoritarian.

White privilege refers to the set of cultural, economic, political, and social advantages that are granted to people who are perceived as white, simply because of their skin color. White privilege is often described as an invisible set of advantages that white people enjoy, which are not available to people of color.

Examples of white privilege include access to better education, job opportunities, and healthcare, as well as better treatment by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. White privilege can also manifest in more subtle ways, such as not having to worry about being discriminated against or stereotyped because of one’s race, or not having to constantly navigate and combat the effects of systemic racism.

Why do I say on my blog that the white privilege rhetoric is anti-white prejudice and racism? (Not “reverse racism” but racism.)

Consider the fact that black males as a group are overrepresented in serious crime, especially homicide and robbery, in which more than half of these crime types are committed by black males, a statistic disturbing in light of the fact that black males comprise only around six percent of the United States population.

Suppose I argue that, because of this overrepresentation of black males in serious crime, that every black male you encounter is a criminal who represents a danger to you and your family. Wouldn’t we all agree that I am misusing abstraction and statistics to make every black male appear to be problematic and that this move represents a type of ani-black prejudice? Isn’t it racist to say all blacks are criminals?

The problem is a confusion over things. Aggregate statistics concerning demography and criminality are abstractions. These are averages and rates. Not every black male has committed murder or robbery (in fact, most haven’t). It is an error to assign to each man the average characteristic of the demographic group to which he is assigned.

One always commits this error when he portrays or treats a concrete individual as the personification of or some aspect of the abstract group to which he has been assigned. To treat an individual as representative of a statistical average or rate commits the the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

This is not to say that we don’t need to worry about the statistics concerning the overrepresentation of blacks in serious crime. This is of vital importance. But we are told not to talk about them because the statistics are themselves racist in that they cast a bad light on black males.

They’re not racist, of course. Those who cite the statistics are falsely smeared with the accusation or suggestion of racism because the elite who mismanage the cities in which homicide and robbery are rampant want to silence critics of their politics and policies.

Now consider the fact that whites as a group are more likely than blacks to have jobs, jobs with higher pay, homes that possess more value, better education and health outcomes, etc. These are the facts that are provided in specifying white privilege.

Suppose I argue that, because of this overrepresentation of whites in these statistics, every white person one encounters enjoys a racial privilege and is thus in some way implicated in the inferior position of blacks, that is the means for this demographic.

This is an assumption that must be made if reparations are to be in order. This assumption must also be at work in justifying the practice of selecting a black person over a white person in employment and other opportunities on the grounds that the black person comes from a historically disadvantaged group, disadvantaged because of the legacy of racism.

How could a white man be responsible for the historic debt owed black people on the basis of his skin color? Shouldn’t he be held responsible for his actions as an individual? How can his skin color be used to disadvantage him on the grounds that there other whites who have higher incomes, etc., than him?

There is no difference between the cases. They both commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But, unlike in the case of black crime, I don’t think that we would all agree that it is wrong to use abstraction and statistics to make every white male appear to be problematic, that this indeed represents a type of anti-white prejudice.

Both cases are wrong because they involve treating abstract statistical trends as if they were a concrete reality that applies to every individual within a particular demographic category. Both involve reducing an individual’s unique characteristics, experiences, and perspectives to a simplistic and generalized stereotype based on demographic identity. Both of these examples highlight the importance of recognizing the complexity and diversity of individuals and the groups to which they are assigned.

We are told that white privilege is not about individual guilt or blame, but rather about recognizing the historical and ongoing inequalities that exist in society based on race, and working to dismantle these systems of oppression. This is a disingenuous claim.

White privilege is about individual guilt and blame because all whites are included in the group that is blamed for historical and ongoing inequalities that exist in society allegedly based on systemic racism. All whites are presumed responsible for dismantling this system of oppression. Either one is an anti-racist or a racist. The term therefore represents anti-white prejudice. It is racist.

The negative response to safeguarding children that assumes content available to adults should also be available to children—and that it is therefore wrongful censorship to deny children access to that content—already has in mind and conduct the negation of age of consent rules.

Because those rules have been so effectively negated, reasserting them feels to those who have erased the boundaries in their minds and conduct as if something is being taken away. Feelings aside, the norm is being clarified and reinforced. Folks need to take a look at themselves and ask themselves why this feels like wrongful censorship. Also folks needs to ask themselves why the safeguarding of children is portrayed as the stuff of right-wing culture war—that is, who is doing the politicizing?

It is commonplace in history that when a norm has significantly eroded by sociocultural dynamics or concerted efforts to disrupt it, the norm is encoded in law to remind society of its vital importance. Societal reaction that negates exploitation feels like oppression to the exploiter. One feels bad for exploiters because they have successfully portrayed their thoughts and actions as acceptable or preferred. Those who decry the law need to ask themselves how they came to regard exploitation as acceptable or preferred.

Part of the process of restablishing the norm is asking reasonable people to research why we established age of consent rules to begin with. To begin your journey of enlightenment start by reviewing the harm caused to children by adults sexualizing them. But you can also use common sense. Ask yourself, why would an adult be so eager to have children thinking about sexual matters? Why the obsession with sex and gender? Why the desire to get children into that obsession? Are there terms for this way of thinking and acting in the literature on child sexual abuse and child sexualization? How about the term social media is censoring and suspending over? How about grooming?

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Entertainment Weekly ran a story about Sasha Colby wanting “Tennessee frat boys arrested for appropriating drag on Halloween.” The magazine frames Colby’s demand as a response to the state passing “anti-drag and anti-trans legislation.” Tennessee hasn’t banned drag. No state has banned or is planning to ban drag. The law bars “adult cabaret performances,” also known as burlesque, overtly sexualized performances, on public property or in places where they might be within view of children. The law resemble laws already on the books concerning strip clubs and other venues of adult entertainment.

In this context, the law bans “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest.” What does “prurient” mean? It literally means “having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters.” It’s not drag per se the law targets, but drag for that purpose, namely to cause or encourage children to have an excessive interest in sexual matters. That’s the explicit purpose of the drag queen story hour and all-age drag queen shows. This isn’t Mrs. Doubtfire reading a book to children or Dustin Hoffman dressed as Tootsie talking about his role in the comedy by that name. This is a propaganda push by a gender cult backed by corporate state power.

Republican-controlled states are restricting the current practice of using drag as a vehicle for the sexualization of children because proponents of this legislation understand the effects the sexualization of children has on childhood development. Child sexualization, which refers to the portrayal or treatment of children as sexual beings, carries devastating and long-lasting effects on a child’s physical and mental health, as well as their relationships and future prospects in life.

Child sexualization is emotionally and psychologically harmful, associated with anxiety, depress, and trauma. Children experience confusion, guilt, and shame when compelled to obsess over sex and gender. This can affect their self-esteem and developing self-image and detrimentally affect their relationships with others. We have seen a marked rise in mental health problems in our youth. What’s driving the deteriorating in the emotional and psychological well being of our children? The rise of social media and the gender questioning project lie at the heart of this development.

Sexualization involves objectification where a person is treated as an objects for some one rather than a free person on her way to becoming an autonomous individual with thoughts and feelings of her own. In this way, objectification leads to a loss of the child’s developing autonomy, an inability to make decisions about her own life, and a loss of control over her own body—the opposite of what we are told by those pushing the agenda of early childhood sexualization and gender questioning. This is not about ferreting out those suffering from gender confusion to help them. This is about creating gender confusion in order to exploit them.

Sexualization of children perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes and encourages children to conform to destructive, reductive, unrealistic, and culture industry constructed standards of beauty, behavior, and sexuality. Consider what children are being exposed to when drag queens, who in these contexts typically present as hyper-sexualized and objectified women, are represented as desirable personifications of girls and women—as representative of proper gender norms.

The reality is that the sexualization of children normalizes sexually predatory behavior, which is associated with an increase in sexual exploitation and the abuse of children, including by those who say they are there to help the children with the emotional and psychological maladies they played a role in manufacturing.

We all know what’s going on with this. The goal of having children think about sex and gender at a young age is to prepare them for a life of reducing themselves to only one thing about themselves—and to have them question that one thing constantly to cause them to seek out experiences to validate themselves. It expands the universe of paraphiliacs—and provides the raw materials for the multibillion dollar industry that markets its business as “gender affirming care.”

We are told that drag queen story hour and all-age drag shows are to build tolerance for sex and gender diversity, to support an alleged marginalized community. Why is that even necessary? The trans community is the most celebrated minority in the United States maybe ever. The movement’s flags are everywhere. The agenda is promoted in classrooms and cultural industry programming. Tolerance for the community is part of DEI training in corporate and public institutions.

Here’s the real point of building tolerance about the minority (the members of which are literally stepping into oppression): asking children to tolerant, to in fact celebrate a group that defines itself on the basis of disrupting normal understandings of sex and gender requires an explanation about what children are being ask to celebrate. The tolerance and acceptance rhetoric is a cover for getting to children so that the members of the movement can then tell them about the wonders of the movement. Children come out of these experiences questioning their gender, and wanting to be like the person who is confusing them.

Again, we don’t have to speculate about this. The organizers of these events are telling us that the goal of presenting drag is to children to sexualize them to encourage them to obsess over gender. Dressing it up in the Trojan horse of tolerance for marginalized groups is a deception that gets them around children to expose children to ways of acting, being, and thinking that the organizers want to socialize. But these ways of acting, being, and thinking are not for children.

This is a social contagion, one that is intentionally spread by the actors pushing the agenda, which, as we can see, involves corporate and government actors. In the latest issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Suzanne Diaz and J. Michael Bailey, report on nearly two thousand cases of rapid onset gender dysphoria reported by parents. They write, “During the past decade there has been a dramatic increase in adolescents and young adults (AYA) complaining of gender dysphoria. One influential if controversial explanation is that the increase reflects a socially contagious syndrome: Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD).”

I encourage you to read the article, but this passage stands out: “Pre-existing mental health issues were common, and youths with these issues were more likely than those without them to have socially and medically transitioned. Parents reported that they had often felt pressured by clinicians to affirm their AYA child’s new gender and support their transition. According to the parents, AYA children’s mental health deteriorated considerably after social transition.”

See how it works? It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Get children to question their gender. When a boy suggests he is a girl trapped in a boy’s body, change his pronouns and begin social transitioning. The resulting deterioration in his emotional and psychological health will not be treated as the consequence of the path he is on but as clear evidence of the need to push him further down the path—into medical transitioning. Hormones and surgeries will break him in so many ways and he will be under a doctor’s care for life. Sterile. Unable to achieve an orgasm. In other words, the process is the manufacture of raw materials for the medical-industrial complex (see Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex).

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You might wonder why corporations are all in on woke. It’s because woke is neoliberal. Where did you think these crackpot ideas come from? Working people? No, corporate elites and the professional-managerial strata that carry out their bidding. Aside from mega-profits, the idea of woke is to keep folks the hell away from democratic-republican populism and make corporate governance appear to be the politics of the people. People are told to obsess over gender and race and they will be celebrated figures in the bureaucracy. There they will enjoy a symbolic politics over a real class-based politics. Progressivism is the ideological projection of these arrangements. See Brendan O’Neill’s latest in Spiked: “Why capitalism loves transgenderism.”

What you are watching here is Maoism in action.

Trans-Activists, who are
young, inexperienced, and steeped in ideology, present a “list of demands” to every school in the nation, which also apply to “everyone in the community”

One of their goals: Removing sexed bathrooms pic.twitter.com/1G9WNgVkUn

— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) April 1, 2023

The line about mandated LGBTQ etcetera specific diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training? That’s straight out of the Maoist Cultural Revolution playbook. DEI training thus has another name: “struggle session.” The way the sessions were framed during the Cultural Revolution was as a form of public reconciliation over class oppression. Today, the struggle session is pitched as a form of reconciliation over the myriad of intersecting oppressions. The oppressor is the straight white man and woman, presumed Christian.

The struggle session is designed to do several things:

First, struggle sessions are recruiting operations involving captured subjects. In cult induction and grooming, these are known as “targets.” Embedded in the corporate bureaucracy, workers are captive in much the same way workers were captive under conditions of bureaucratic collectivism. Corporate governance arrangements are very different from liberal capitalist relations and resemble more those of People’s Republic of China (PRC) than the American republic prior to the institutionalization of progressivism.

Second, struggle sessions are designed to detect disallowed or disfavored attitudes and opinions and to identify enemies of the Revolution. Resistance to both participating in the session and during the ensuing struggle mark you as a subversive. Suppose you work at a university and you do not believe trans women are women, or that one cannot change sex, or that males should not compete in women’s sports. These positions are not inclusive and therefore they do not support the goals of the DEI university. What does the institution do with your heresy? What will it do if its demands are met?

Third, struggle sessions are designed to intimidate resisters by presenting the ideology of the revolution as the institution’s official position, thus giving the doctrine the force of normal authority. Many of those who are of the opinion that, for example, one cannot change his sex, will not voice that opinion because they are fearful of what the institution might do with their heresy. This is the chilling effect. The chilling effect may not need high-profile examples. The process itself chills the air.

Fourth, struggle sessions are designed to reeducate resisters and break the recalcitrant by having them rehearse the slogans of the revolution, or at the very least appear not criticize the doctrine. The latter is usually viewed as passive resistance, however, and one may not escape having to finally rehearse the slogan. He may be reprimanded for his half-hearted commitment to it. This violates the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom of speech and conscience mean that I cannot be forced to hold the opinions of others or punished for the opinions I hold or don’t hold. 

Fifth, struggle sessions are designed to train subalterns to police and correct the thoughts of not only those in the session, but those who lie beyond the reach of the mandated training. In other words, mandatory trainings are designed to disseminate the idea to the general population. This is the proselytizing character of Cultural Revolution.

It is crucial to realize that the Chinese youth carrying out the cultural revolution did not spontaneously take up these ideas, nor did they design the struggle session. This was the work of the administrative state and technocratic apparatus, and the functionaries and organic intellectuals embedded in those structures, all controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The American youth carrying out the cultural revolution in Biden’s “Build Back Better” is no more clever than those Chinese youth. Like their counterparts, they are directed by the administrative state and technocratic apparatus and the functionalities of organic intellectuals embedded in these structures, all controlled by the corporate state. (See The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological.)