As Politico reported, “The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the lifting of the Trump-era Title 42 order on migration, forcing the Biden administration to leave in place the federal directive that has prevented the entry of millions of asylum seekers at the southern border” (emphasis mine).
Migrants on the US-Mexico border, Matamoros, Mexico, December 2022 (AP Photo)
Joe Biden and the Democrats want those millions. Why? Several reasons. Here are four: (1) super-exploitable foreign labor driving down wages for native workers to raise the rate of surplus value for corporate firms; (2) millions whom Democrats believe will thank them with votes for open borders (once the massive amnesty program is passed into law and even before that); (3) vast expansion of the custodial state to manage idled populations (modern serfdom); (4) weaken national integrity to prepare the masses for further integration with the global order of things (cultural pluralism and transnationalism).
What stands in the way of the ramping up of the managed decline of the American republic and the civilized West? Five conservative justices on the Supreme Court prepared to read a Trump-era policy reasonably (note that one lost his way).
* * *
Speaking of civilization and courts, a Massachusetts judge dismissed parents’ lawsuit over school gender policy yesterday because, while he found it “disconcerting,” it did not “shock the conscience.”
Parents had filed a lawsuit accusing public school officials in Massachusetts of encouraging their children to change their names and pronouns without their consent and beyond their knowledge.
Activists promoting transgender ideology in public schools (Getty Images)
Fox News reported: “U.S. District Judge Mark Mastroianni ruled Dec. 14 that the lawsuit against Ludlow Public School officials failed to meet the ‘shocks-the-conscience’ legal standard for due-process claims under the 14th Amendment, but he also scolded the school district for its policy to withhold students’ gender identities.”
The judge said that “it is disconcerting that school administrators or a school committee adopted and implemented a policy [which he deemed policy “imperfect” and “flawed”] requiring school staff to actively hide information from parents about something of importance regarding their child,” but that such an action does not “shock the conscience.”
“Shock the conscience” is an action that strikes the observer of a civilized society as “grossly unjust.” The rule has rarely been used over the last half century since the consensus is that the test permits judges to impose their own subjective views of what constitutes shocking.
Perhaps civilization would be better served by a more objective standard, such as taking into account the obvious facts that a public school is not the family unit and that parents are the primary guardians of children in civilized society (and even uncivilized ones).
This is not a totalitarian society where children are isolated from their families and molded in indoctrination camps to take up party ideology. (Or is it?) Nor are public schools religious cults where zealots separate individuals from families and brainwash them to believe in new mythologies. (Or are they?)
Of course, this is Massachusetts and the judge is an Obama appointee, so maybe “disconcerting” is the best we might expect from Mastroianni’s court. But what would shock the conscience of a reasonable observer if public schools transitioning transition children behind the backs of parents doesn’t?
No, not drag queens in fetish gear reading sexualized materials to young children in public libraries, either.
* * *
The fashion company Benetton is getting in on some Balenciaga action (see this story and then check out this story for some Balenciaga action). As we saw with Balenciaga, as soon as the child porn angle drew complaints, Benetton deleted the ads.
But is Benetton shame-faced? They’re sly. This is part of a strategy: progressively desensitize the public so that the next push moves even further into the mainstream with durable effects. Two steps forward. One step backwards. Repeat. (Authoritarianism works the same way.)
I’m not posting the Benetton ad campaign in question because I don’t promote the paraphilias of those who run the fashion industry (you may have noticed that they’re obsessed with prepubescent children). Nor do I share sexualized pictures of children. I saw the campaign on Twitter and even in a highly censored presentation found it troubling—let’s say even conscience-shocking.
It’s a weird thing brewing in today’s society. It’s not only fashion companies sexualizing children. Woke parents are taking their children to strip clubs, giving their little ones dollar bills to push into the G-strings of performers. Kink is being promoted to children. Appealing to higher loyalties, wrapped in the rhetoric of social justice, we are witnessing a drastic rise in cultish behavior.
One of the most worrisome aspect of this strange brew is long-standing campaign to erase age of consent rules. The idea being socialized is that consent rules are, like other norms around sexual activity and identity, oppressive structures the normality of which proves the asymmetrical power relations behind them.
This underpins Mastroianni ruling in the Massachusetts case. The children in public schools who, in collaboration with administrators and teachers, change their names and pronouns, are exercising consent as they would if they were no longer minors living with parents—as if parents were irrelevant.
War with the prevailing norms of civilization follows from the core doctrine of the new woke religion. Removing barriers to child sexual activity and expression is a campaign. You’re a heretic if you disagree. (And it’s not even your religion.)
This is mass formation psychosis. The century of the self (detailed in 2002 by Adam Curtis in his four-part documentary by that name on corporate state propaganda) have paved the road to trauma and declared it progress. The heads of generations to come are messed up and most of the public is terrified to object. Those who do object find judges whose consciences cannot be shocked by policy turning children against their parents.
I know a lot of my Christian friends see evil at work here. It looks satanic to them. However, there is a secular reason for all this. Authoritarians have long understood that, to control individuals, the authority of the family needs to be undermined and children robbed of their innocence. We won’t protect our children by explicitly defining the struggle with religious language. We have to speak in civilizational terms. Everything reasonable is at stake.
Do readers know which demographic was more likely to die from complications from COVID-19 than white Republicans? Black Democrats. Black Democrats have been at least as likely to be vaccine hesitant as white Republicans—and are far less likely than whites overall.
On the eve of the delta variant chapter of the COVID-19 pandemic hysteria, I commented on a Twitter thread initiated by 1619 Project co-founder Nikole Hannah-Jones wherein I noted that vaccine uptake among blacks was much lower than among whites, with the implication that the draconian COVID-19 policies of progressive cities and states would disproportionately impact the freedom of black people. For some reason this was controversial, which I discuss in the blog Cognitive Autonomy and Our Freedom from Institutionalized Reflex.
Why are black Democrats vaccine hesitant? The legacy of the Tuskegee syphilis study certainly has something to with that. The Tuskegee syphilis study, wherein doctors and researchers followed disease progression in syphilitic black sharecroppers without providing them treatment, was a government organized project conducted at the height of progressive Democrat power.
But a more recent cause of vaccine hesitancy it worth noting here.
When Trump put the government behind developing a vaccine in record time, Democrats went on TV and in loud voices told their constituents that they did not trust the “Trump vaccine.”
Remember when CNN asked Kamala Harris if she would take the vaccine once it’s approved and she said, “Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump”? Remember when Joe Biden said, “Who’s going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up?” On and on these two and others went in this vein. For weeks. In the middle of a presidential campaign. “Polls say fifty per cent of American people say they will not take the vaccine if it were available today, because they don’t trust the way this federal government has politicized the process,” said New York City governor Andrew Cuomo.
Now a major progressive propaganda outlet wants to erase your memory of that and obscure the disproportionate deaths of black Americans from COVID-19 by accusing the Republican Party of murdering their constituents by—pushing out Trump’s vaccine. Is it any wonder corporate state media is suffering a crisis of legitimacy?
We should also ask about the root causes of black overrepresentation among those who suffer a complications from COVID-19. Most blacks who have suffered these complications live in the central cities run for decades now by progressives. One might ask why, if progressive Democrats are so good for black Americans, the neighborhoods in which black Americans live are so fraught with crime, crumbling infrastructure, disease, fatherlessness, idleness, mental illness, poverty, and other social problems.
Better, I guess, to blame the GOP and its basketful of deplorables than to pin the tail on the donkey.
In this blog, I present parts of a letter from David Bernstein, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, addressed to Glenn Loury (professor at Brown University) and John McWhorter (professor at Columbia University), following a discussion on The Glenn Loury show about antisemitism in the black community.
Before getting to that letter and my commentary, I want to make two notes about the January 6 report, which is now being published by several imprints. This, too, is relevant to the title of this blog entry.
First, the corporate press is freaking out over Skyhorse publishing the January 6 commission report with the brilliant Darren Beattie introduction exposing the scam (see The New York Timesstory).
Watch Skyhorse get framed as a right-wing/white nationalist outlet—distributed by Simon & Schuster no less! But Skyhorse published the Communist Manifesto with an introduction by Yours Truly extolling the virtue of Marx and Engels thesis (get your copy today and read my words). Skyhorse is hardly an ideologically-motivated press.
You may remember when, way back in 2008, the University of Michigan Press dumped Pluto Press over books critical of US-Israel relations which removed the academic imprimatur from two chapters by Yours Truly critical of the Bush regime in Bernd Hamm’s Devastating Society: The Neo-Conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice. (I discuss the matter here.) Will I see yet another of my publications suffer a drop in prestige for the sake of preserving the globalist narrative? Will Simon and Schuster dump Skyhorse?
Kennedy and Nixon in 1961
Second, a bit of history. In the United States, the people of their respective states do not vote directly for president but rather for a slate of electors (party insiders) who actually cast the ballot for president. Maybe that’s not what you’d like, but that’s the way it has always worked in America. The framers, being the liberals they are, built in safeguards against the specter of majoritarianism.
In the 1960 presidential election, Nixon versus Kennedy, the vote was disputed in Hawaii (among other places) and an alternate slate of electors were determined. Seems a rather important thing to remember in light of all the talk today about how Trump organized alternate slates of “fake electors” in several states, as if this were a terrible thing.
In the Hawaii case, the governor of that state certified Nixon’s victory. Thus at the time of the safe harbor deadline for certification under the Electoral Count Act, the Republican slate had been certified. Nixon won the state, if we are to agree with the corporate state media concerning such things.
But, with the recount was still ongoing on December 19, the day US law requires the casting of votes by members of the Electoral College, the Kennedy camp determined an alternate state of (fake?) electors. When the recount showed that Kennedy had actually won the election on December 28, the alternate slate of (fake?) electors was certified—even though it was not the official slate. Hawaii rushed a letter to Congress by air mail to inform them that the election outcome had been changed.
When Congress held the joint session on January 6, 1961, both certificates—both slates of electors—were presented. Nixon was Vice-President (he was serving under President Eisenhower who was retiring from public life). In this capacity, Nixon was the President of the Senate. It was Nixon who requested that the Republican certificate to be set aside to avoid a floor fight. But he didn’t have to that. He could have allowed a floor fight. And, of course, there was no effort to prevent a floor fight from occurring by outside forces as there was on January 6, 2020.
Whatever you think of Nixon’s move, why were neither the slate of Democrat electors nor the slate of Republican electors characterized as “fake” by the media? And why is it never pondered by the corporate state media the fact that the disruption of January 6, 2020 dispute of the electoral count, which would have sent the certification back to several states with ongoing investigation of electoral processes and outcomes, actually stopped a fight that may have benefitted Trump?
Oh, and on more thing before moving on: the buried lede. The bipartisan (unitary) 1.7 trillion dollar budget just passed by Congress contains an overhaul of the the 1887 Electoral Count Act that may have resulted in a different outcome to the 2020 presidential election. A provision in the legislation makes it harder to overturn a certified presidential election by making the Vice-President’s role completely ceremonial.
But if Trump’s attempt to change the results of the 2020 election was illegitimate, then why would the 1887 Electoral Count Act have to be altered? Put another way, changing the law means that the 1887 Electoral Count Act did allow Vice-President Mike Pence to allow for a floor fight that could have considered alternate slates of electors or send back the states the officials certificates of the electoral votes—just as the law allowed Vice-President Nixon to do exactly the same things. In the end, Pence, like Nixon, kowtowed to the establishment line—resulting in the installment of progressive politicians. But neither of them were required to do so.
Now you know why the process had to be disrupted on January 6 2021. And that is why you need to read Darren Beattie’s introduction to the January 6 report by Skyhorse.
* * *
The foregoing indicates the importance of the point of this blog entry. I am sharing Bernstein’s letter because it provides another opportunity for me to stress something I have said before, that is that the terms “liberal” and “progressive” are not synonyms but opposites. Academic, corporate, and political elite constantly conflate one with the other in order to confuse the public about this.
Why would they do this? To advance on the left the progressive agenda, which is the corporate state agenda, propagandists for the state must obscure the principles of liberalism and effectively negate those principles to usher in the new fascist state.
However, Bernstein does get some things wrong.
For one thing, he does not appear to identify progressivism itself as the problem but rather worries about “a progressivism,” namely woke ideology (emphases mine). But as I have shown in several blogs, wokeness is just the latest instantiation of progressive ideology, the logical progression of an ideology destructive to individualism.
For other thing, Bernstein implies that progressivism is not as a corporate state project designed or functioning to corrupt the left, but instead as a left-wing political tendency in-itself.
Progressivism is in substance right-wing ideology is every regard. It rejects equality in favor of “equity,” which the ideology defines as the hierarchical rearrangement of individuals on the basis of an ideological conception of justice that at every turn contradicts liberal principle, principle that demands individuals be judged on their merits and not their identity.
Indeed, the idea of “diversity” advanced by this ideology is about selecting people for occupational and societal roles on the basis of group identity—not on achievement or a natural sorting out.
And the idea of “inclusion” is not about respecting the varying standpoints of individuals, but a gloss over a coercive method for including only those viewpoints that advance the progressive agenda.
These are integrated in the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) project.
Before getting Bernstein’s letter, I want to illustrate the illiberal character of progressivism with an example, namely the notion of “trans rights.”
Many of you have heard the slogans “Trans rights are human rights” and “Trans women are women.” But what do these slogans mean? They must mean, if human rights are recognized in law, that, in law and in administrative rule, citizens of free societies are required to affirm and abide by the doctrine of Queer Theory in practice. However much one might believe—as I do—that individuals have the right to identify however they wish, compelling others to live according to the subjective identity of another person is quintessentially authoritarian.
If I do not in a free society have to affirm or live under the doctrine of Islam, which I don’t, then I do not have to affirm or live under the doctrine of Queer Theory. Indeed, my right to refuse to be controlled by religious ideology is a human right. (Queer Theory is sociologically a religion. That’s why I am from this point forward capitalizing it.)
Moreover, because of the fact of the sex binary in the human species and therefore the necessity of sex-based rights to protect girls and women, compelling girls and women to tolerate males in spaces reserved for them is violative of their human rights. In other words, the slogan “Women’s rights are human rights” is a proper matter of law and policy. As I discussed in a recent blog entry, Title IX makes no sense. (See Is Title IX Kaput? Or Was it Always Incomprehensible?)
Watch the program for an in-depth discussion of the problem:
Maya Dillard Smith, a legal scholar who left her position as head of the ACLU of Georgia over President Obama’s directive for public schools to let transgender students use the bathroom of their choice.
I do want to emphasize the point Bernstein makes in his letter about the way woke ideology “neatly divides the world into oppressed and oppressor and conflates success with oppression.” (Critical Race Theory, another religion, articulates this division as “victim” and “perpetrator.”) He is precisely correct about this. I have written about this extensively.
Whether you understand postmodernist critical theory framing of social relations as an attempt by those who have in the aggregate failed at life, or a perception manufactured by grifters or the professional-managerial class, or as a strategy by the corporate state elite to sow division among the proletariat (I suggest all three), is is clearly an affront to the liberal and humanist values of liberalism.
Here is Bernstein’s letter:
Glenn and John,
Thank you for your recent discussion on antisemitism on The Glenn Show. I am a long time Jewish professional leader and the immediate past CEO of the umbrella organization overseeing mainstream Jewish advocacy organizations across the country. I left nearly two years ago amid the growth of woke ideology in mainstream Jewish life and started a new organization called the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values devoted to viewpoint diversity in the Jewish world. I’m also the author of the recently released Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews.
I thought John gave a perfectly well-reasoned critique of the overblown response to Kanye’s cartoonish behavior. I do think John got it wrong, however, when he suggested that Jewish sensitivity to antisemitism is primarily animated by the trepidation that “it could happen here.” I happen to agree that it’s very unlikely that growing antisemitism in America will culminate in another Holocaust. But there are many dystopian scenarios well short of genocide.
The white nationalist variant of antisemitism has already resulted in distortions to Jewish life. Jews can no longer safely go to synagogue without an elaborate set of security arrangements. This threat has added tens of millions of dollars annually to Jewish organizational budgets (causing already financially stretched Jewish organizations to go belly up) and is further exacerbated by the threat emanating from radical Muslims against American Jewish institutions (Jewish organizations get regular briefings from the FBI and Homeland Security about threats of terrorism emanating from the Middle East). Imagine if the number of domestic shootings triples in the next few years. Such an outcome would render Jewish life unlivable for many Jews.
When you combine the threat from the white nationalist right with the growing ideological antisemitism on the left, it’s understandable why many Jews—even the less hysterical among us—are beginning to feel besieged. Woke ideology is the perfect accelerant of antisemitism on the left, as it neatly divides the world into oppressed and oppressor and conflates success with oppression. The concern about the left is less about violence against Jews than it is political disenfranchisement.
…
Take a look at this report about rising antisemitism at the University of Toronto medical school. I spoke to a progressive Jewish law professor at the same university last week who feels he now works in a hostile environment. This may not be happening everywhere to the same degree, but it is happening in more places, more often. It could be a precursor of things to come in growing swaths of the US.
Another result of wokeness is declining American support for Israel (see our recent poll). Granted, deteriorating fealty to the Jewish State does not by itself constitute antisemitism. But the corrosion of support for Israel certainly impacts the sense of place of many liberal Zionist Jews in the Democratic Party and, by extension, in the broader society. Along with this diminution in support comes growing anti-Zionism and grotesque characterizations of Israel as a “settler-colonialist state.” I agree with Glenn that anti-Zionism is not ipso facto antisemitism, but it often does come packaged with demonization of Jews and the Jewish state. While I don’t think that the Democratic Party is on the precipice of “Corbynization” (becoming like Jeremy Corbyn’s hostile Labour Party in the UK), who knows what another ten years of this untamed ideology might bring?
Last but not least, the biggest fear of Jews and others ought to be the undermining of liberalism and the sense-making institutions in American life coming from both ends of the ideological spectrum, further polarizing our already polarized society. I can imagine it getting much worse. Such a dystopia would affect everyone, but surely Jews will feel it earlier and more acutely than most, and who knows what atrocities might come about in the chaos?
As we approach the end of the 2022, I wanted to check to see how the Freedom and Reason blog is doing and found that views (and visitors) are down sharply after steady growth in viewership. Freedom and Reason when from almost 10,000 views in 2021 to around 7,500 in 2022. The year is not over, but the trend is clear. The blog cannot make up the number of views it needs to approximate the last two years. Here are the stats provided by WordPress:
I began to suspect something was wrong when searching my past blog entries over the last year in Google (the overwhelming choice of the world public for search engine). There I found that my blogs on the pandemic, deep state machinations with respect to the 2020 election and its aftermath, the color revolution, etc., were not returned (whereas DuckDuckGo was returning them). Even using the advanced search function in Google did not return information on blogs that in fact exist.
When I search Google for information critical of these matters independent of my site url using terms specifically intended to generate criticism of the dominant political and scientistic narrative the search engine returns pages upon pages of sources toeing the line obviously desired by elites. Again, even using Goggle’s advanced search function does not return information and opinion critical of the corporate state line. I have to go directly to websites I know provide that content to find it.
Here’s the problem: there remain many more critical websites I don’t know about because the Google algorithm shadow bans them. If this is true for those other sites, then it must be true for mine, as well. Potential readers across the world will never know that Freedom and Reason exists because Google’s search engine will never provide the url to them. It appears Google got on to me sometimes last year and found my commentary too contrary to the corporate state narrative.
As you may know, Google is the parent company of YouTube. I reported recently that YouTube removed a podcast from Freedom and Reason that concerned the FBI-Twitter cabal that censored Hunter Biden’s laptop and de-platformed users reporting on it. Although this was not the first time YouTube censored my content, in the latest case the content said nothing about the subject matter that YouTube claimed it was censoring the podcast. Even after my appeal was heard staff or algorithm used the same justification. I reposted the podcast on Rumble. However, searching Google for that content does not return the link.
If YouTube is removing content critical of powerful corporate and state actors, then it seems certain that Google is shadow banning websites critical of those forces.
There is an attempt to make those who suspect being stealth banned out to be paranoid. Elaine Moore of the Financial Times writes that “social media influencers are at the mercy of algorithms. This makes them perfect fodder for conspiracy theories. It also makes sense that influencers would be baffled by any sudden decrease in engagement and spooked by changes that might jeopardise the brand deals they sign. Instead of believing that their own popularity is waning, some cling to the idea that shadowbans are a disciplinary measure that is used against creators who do not warrant an outright ban from a platform.”
But media gaslighting and the use of thought-stopping devices like “conspiracy theory” does not explain patterns that become obvious when examining the type of content that is not return by Google’s search engine. It’s obvious that Google’s algorithm is designed to restrict information critical of corporate state agendas.
So do me a favor. If you are familiar with Freedom and Reason or stumble upon this entry, push out my content.
Workers tell pollsters that higher wages and better and more flexible working conditions will bring them back to work. Progressives have a better idea: throw open the borders and declare amnesty for those illegally here. The Democrat leader in the Senate blames working people for not having enough babies, while progressive politicians keep their constituents idled in ghettos where they vote for a living.
I know it confuses a lot of people to see Democrats advocating these policies. Aren’t progressives pro-working class? Don’t they care about marginalized populations? Bad assumptions (failure of objectivity). Progressives are neoliberals. They don’t believe in nation-states. They’re trans-nationalists. This has always been true. They try to disguise it with the rhetoric of cultural pluralism and social justice (presumed noble standpoint). But deceit only works on those devoted to ideology and narrative. The problem is that there are a lot of gullible people—and the elite-controlled communications, cultural, and education systems are making more of them everyday. Big Tech and Big Pharma own our youth.
Meanwhile, the Fed will continue raising interest rates to throw more workers out of work. As Fortune reported Thursday, “stock markets buckled on the growing realization that the Fed is willing to let the economy slide into recession to drive inflation down to its 2 percent annual target.” The Fed forecasts ratcheting up the key rate by an additional three-quarters of a point (from 5 percent to 5.25 percent) and keep it there through next year. Fortune tells its readers that “the higher rates will mean costlier borrowing costs for consumers and companies, ranging from mortgages to auto and business loans.” But it will also mean higher unemployment—and this is the core purpose of the move: to throw workers out of work in order to depress wages and restore rates of surplus value. Few Democrats have come forward to criticize the Fed’s actions.
On a more general note (and this will be the subject of a forthcoming blog), the American republic was essentially over when progressives won the debate with populism at the turn of the last century. Not that they won the debate in any democratic sense. Courts made corporations persons and turned the reins of government over to them. We now live in a corporate state. The direction of the corporate state is towards global neo-feudalism, towards a high-tech serfdom. The Chinese model. The Great Reset. Perhaps it’s not too late to turn things around. But it soon will be.
But it is clearly not a Marxist maneuver. Douglas Murray is so wrong about this—as is Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, and all the other right-wingers who advance this ridiculous claim that postmodernist-style critical theory is based on the logic of Marxism.
Think about it for only a few moments and you will see why this is a garbage argument. If the point is to divide the majority and disrupt their individualism by defining them in essentialist terms—black, Muslim, gay, gender identity, whatever (while denying sex and obscuring class)—and demanding they pursue the “interests” of group identity rather than their material interests (which is what Murray is arguing in this clip), then how on earth could it be Marxist when the point of Marxism is precisely the opposite!?
The point of Marxism is to break down the identitarian and ideological divisions that disrupt the development of proletarian (majority) consciousness for the sake of a class politics that can effectively challenge bourgeoise power—the actual force engineering the divisive politics of identity. How is the contradiction in Murray’s argument not immediately obvious?
Remember when both the political right and “leftwing” progressives were both—as was BLM itself—characterizing Black Lives Matter as a Marxist thing when in fact it was based on race essentialism and queer theory and bankrolled by corporate power? BLM (and Antifa) is about as far apart from Marxism as a thing can possible be yet self-described leftists just gushed over co-founder Patrisse Cullors describing the nucleus of the organization as “trained Marxists”—right before they took the money and bought big houses and signed exclusive deals with corporations in the culture industry.
Murray spoils a potentially useful point by attributing the effect to the wrong cause. And Murray is a super smart dude. Shit like this just wants to make me give up. I swear.
Transgender athletes in Connecticut and their advocates secured a victory yesterday when an appeals court ruled that the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) can advance its plan to allow males who identify as transgender girls to compete on female sports teams. (See Transgender athletes score legal victory in Connecticut case.)
Bloomfield High School athletes Terry Miller, second from left, and Andraya Yearwood, far left, compete in the 55-meter dash at the Connecticut girls Class S indoor track meet in New Haven, February 2019. (AP Photo)
A three-judge panel of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that discrimination against transgender students violates Title IX. Passed in 1972, Title IX prohibits educational institutions receiving federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex.
“Today’s ruling is a critical victory for fairness, equality, and inclusion,” said Joshua Block, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who represented the CIAC, five Connecticut school boards, and two former athletes in the case. “This critical victory strikes at the heart of political attacks against transgender youth while helping ensure every young person has the right to play.”
How is this not it for Title IX? If the court interprets the law to mean that it prevents educational institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating based on sex, and therefore males can compete in female sports, then how have we allowed sex-segregated sports all these years? How does this ruling not renders the law incomprehensible? Or effectively nullify it?
Surely this is not what the framers of title IX intended. Wasn’t the law designed to protect girls and women’s rights as girls and women’s right were understood when the law was written, i.e., the rights of human females? Sports are not segregated on the basis of gender identity (a new and problematic construct) but on the basis of genotype, which enjoys the confidence of biological reality.
So let’s reconsider. Title IX bans sex discrimination in higher education. The law states that colleges cannot exclude females from any school activity, including sports. Schools that only offer male teams are therefore out of compliance. So let’s eliminate male-only teams and try out everybody regardless of sex. Those who make the team make the team. Those who don’t don’t. That way, everybody is treated equally and only the best athletes participate.
Let’s make it about the individual. Like we do with race. We don’t have white-only sports teams (anymore). That would be racist. So why do we have male-only teams? Why didn’t Title IX address the obvious problem that sex-exclusive sports teams discriminates on the basis of sex when the law was drafted? Why isn’t that sexism? As civil rights law did on the basis of race, let’s require all sports teams to try out females.
It seems there’s a hidden assumption in all of this. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Sex is only a social construct, right? But I’m not a biologist.
Facebook’s vaccine center, which you are asked to consult every time you look at one of my Facebook posts about vaccines (and there’s a lot of them), now says that the bug that causes COVID-19, coronavirus, is not new at all, and, in fact, this is how scientists were able to develop a vaccine for it so quickly (failing to mention that they engineered this particular one).
This is an interesting admission in light of the fact that we were all told when the powers-that-be rolled out the pandemic that coronavirus was a novel virus. At least that’s what they led us to believe by repeating ad nauseam the phrase “novel coronavirus.” Novel means new and not resembling something formerly known. The phrase is misleading. The media obscured the history of our knowledge about the virus—and casts doubts on the origins of the particular strain.
If you remember back in the spring of 2020, when I started blogging about the pandemic, I told you that the coronavirus is not novel, that scientists had known about its existence at least since the 1930s, and had, in fact, isolated it in the lab in the 1960s. By the end of that decade, scientists had identified three strains of coronavirus, and, by the 1990s, identified the alpha, beta, delta, gamma, etcetera, variants. I also told you that, prior to the identification of coronavirus, scientists had isolated several rhinovirus strains, as well as several adenovirus strains—all this in the 1950s.
Coronavirus, adenovirus, and rhinovirus are causes of the common cold. You and I have had across the life course one or more of these cold viruses (very likely all three). They helped build our immune systems. Indeed, we needed to contract these viruses as kids because they are more dangerous to adults, especially the elderly. The lockdowns interfered with the acquisition of natural immunity. The obvious reason respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has “returned with a vengeance” is because the lockdowns deprived children of exposure to the virus, leaving their immune systems collectively ill-prepared for a return to normality (such as that is).
If knowing about these viruses for all this time allows the development of vaccines, and if we knew about rhinoviruses and adenoviruses a decade before coronaviruses were isolated, then where is the rhinovirus vaccine or the adenovirus vaccine? Shouldn’t we have had it already? Remember when we joked as kids about finding a cure for the common cold? That the scientist who discovered that would be set for life?
Of course, the truth is that there is no vaccine for any cold virus. There is an mRNA gene therapy that trains cells to produce a dangerous protein called spike (S protein) that causes systematic inflammation in the human body. The mRNA jab does not stop the transmission of coronavirus. It does not keep you from getting sick. In fact, it can make you sick. It does not keep you out of the hospital. In fact, it can put you in the hospital. It does not prevent you from dying from the virus. In fact, it can kill you.
The mRNA technology is now being developed for other viruses. The FDA recently approved the Moderna mRNA RSV vaccine mRNA-1345 for single-dose administration to adults over 60. Stockholders are now directed towards Moderna’s “mRNA vaccine portfolio.” The company’s revenue is expected to top $100 billion in 2022—more than double the pre-pandemic level. Pfizer will also soon have an mRNA RSV vaccine. It is expected these will find their way onto the vaccine schedule for children. Of course they will.
Gullibility and naiveté is a huge problem in the West. It should be obvious that Big Pharma operates the same way other industries do. To be sure, Big Energy generates products that can be helpful. People want to have a warm home in the winter. People want to drive their cars to work. At the same time, the productions of Big Energy are harmful to people. This is true with the chemical industry generally. Chemicals marketed as beneficial for this or that purpose are also carcinogenic and so on. Big Pharma produces a lot of commodities: some are beneficial (but also harmful); some are harmful (and not particularly beneficial).
Big Pharma produces these commodities to generate large and sustainable profits for the shareholders who have buy into their companies. Corporations are legally required (it is the fiduciary responsibility) to put the interests of their shareholders over the interests of the stakeholders, i.e., the public. To legitimize their activities, while appearing to protect the public from dangerous actions and products, regulatory agencies (CDC, FDA, USDA, EPA, etc.) are stood up by governments to stamp commodities as safe and effective. Big Pharma even funds and staffs the agencies charged with regulating them. What corporations don’t control at the outset, they capture later.
Big Pharma depends on professional organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the America Academy of Pediatrics, and governmental agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, to construct diseases and disorders and the diagnostic criteria that marks them to align with the products marketed by Big Pharma and the Medical-Industrial Complex. These organizations, the regulatory bodies, and the companies comprise the corporate state, what Antonio Gramsci called the “integral state” (some call it the “extended state”).
In the process of establishing hegemony, Gramsci argues, the integral state depends on popular support to secure broader legitimacy. As Max Weber told us before Gramsci, power requires legitimacy to become authority—and domination depends on consent from the dominated. Domination is not a one-way street: authority needs the subaltern to conform to the rules it establishes to secure its interests over against the interests of the subaltern. It requires compliance, and that is most easily secured by making people ignorant and afraid. It needs the masses to not grasp the actual nature of the system (indeed, to be functionally unable to) but rather to put their faith in the system as power defines it, to treat the claims of the corporate state as doctrine to affirm by repeating its prescriptions.
In the post-Fourteenth Amendment world, with the rise of corporate personhood, the government does not exist to protect the public from corporations; the government exists to protect corporations from the public.
Progressivism is the apparent movement ideology legitimizing corporate governance. I say apparent because it is not actually a movement but instead a political-ideology articulated by the professional-managerial strata (the new middle class) established to thwart social movements from challenging corporate power be coopting grievances and neutralizing them.
Jürgen Habermas has pointed out that the nonappearance of democratic socialism (not be confused with social democracy, i.e., corporatism or managed democracy) is the result of the pacification of class conflict by the welfare state that emerged in the post-WWII West. Reformist tendencies, pushed by the middle class, rooted in Keynesian economics, pulling even organized labor into the integral state, replaced radical class-based politics. The rhetoric of the middle class subsumes into that sphere of interests those of the working class. In fact, these classes are directly antagonistic; as the managers of corporate affairs, the interests of middle class are diametrically opposed to those of the proletariat.
Ensconced in the academy, the culture industry, the media, and even the major religious institutions of the West, the new middle class has become something of a priesthood, with progressivism representing something of a religious faith. Hence the appearance of “Woke.” This explains why, if you don’t affirm the importance of vaccinating your children, then you are “antivaxxer” (the secular equivalent of a heretic) or a “science denier” (the secular equivalent of an apostate).
In this context, science becomes scientism, that which the corporate state presents as the only true science, the science it uses to generate patented commodities. Other corporations, especially the legacy and social media, who depends on the advertising dollars of Moderna and Pfizer, dutifully label as disinformation (heresy) the facts that contradict the doctrine and censor and throttle those facts—and restrict and cancel those who deliver those facts to people.
For example, see the case of Twitter and Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, “They Wanted an ‘Illusion of Consensus.’” Governments manufactured a consensus around the “science” of lockdowns and vaccines by working with social media companies to silence scientists and censor science. Expertise didn’t matter. Look at Bhattacharya’s credentials. They censored those who knew what was going on. Just like I told you they were. “Following the science” means actually following the science—not believing what corporate and government and progressive voices tell you is the science.
This is the real reason why Facebook uses the posts on my time-line to push out the propaganda of the pharmaceutical companies that pay its bills.
‘20 mill lives saved from covid vaccines ? This is a modelling study – it’s science fiction, not scientific fact
Times headlined with mild covid linked to heart attacks.The actual research revealed the opposite.
“Now, because of a recent Supreme Court ruling, many of these remaining regulations are in danger of being dismantled. As bad as America’s gun-violence problem is, it could be about to get much worse,” writes Ryan Busse, author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America, in his Atlantic piece “One Nation Under Guns.” (Busse serves as a senior policy adviser to the gun-safety advocacy groupGiffords)
The argument raises two questions that need answering: (1) does gun regulation prevent gun violence? (2) Does gun deregulation cause gun violence?
The provocative image accompanying Busse’s Atlantic essay.
Taking (2) first, there is no intrinsic connection between deregulation and gun violence. A change in regulation cannot reasonably be supposed to produce in a person a desire to pick up a gun and shoot another person. Indeed, the construct “gun violence” is problematic for this reason. Gun violence is really people acting violently with guns. It’s the same with knife violence or personal violence, i.e., personal weapons, e.g., fists and feet. Guns, knifes, and fists do not themselves cause violence. They are means to end. Yes, even those physically attached to persons (which cannot be reasonably regulated).
As to (1), what is the evidence that regulations of guns prevents (or reduces) violence? It is reasonable to suppose that restricting access to certain means with which to commit violence may reduce to some extent resort to those mean, and, even more, reduce death and injury from violence using these means. However, we need evidence to make a judgment about this. Even then, whether that should affect policy is not a given.
Modern gun control laws came about in my lifetime. As gun control spread city-to-city, state-to-state, over a period of several decades, violent crime rose alongside it, and would continue to rise until the mid-1990s, when states put more cops on the street and judges locked up more violent offenders. The reduction of violent crime, including so-called gun violence, continued until 2014, when it began rising again. This is when the rhetoric of “systemic racism” become widely socialized in American society and criticisms of policing began to change both criminal justice policy and the attitudes and behaviors of police officers (we call this the “Ferguson effect.”
In other words, the rise in violent crime, which will necessarily be accompanied by a rise in the use of guns to commit violent crimes whether guns are regulated or not, began well before the Supreme Court decision about which the author of this essay is concerned.
The focus on guns–like the focus on race–is a distraction in the debate about violence in America. Independent of means, violence in America is the consequence of multiple factors: structural inequality, idled populations, neighborhood conditions, and father-absence. Regulating guns as a solution to criminal violence in America, even if it resulted in some reduction in “gun violence,” cannot be a substitute for tackling the root causes of violence in America. To do this requires reducing inequality, providing jobs, fixing communities, and putting fathers back in the home–and an effective public safety strategy that allows the gains made in these areas to persist over time.
I was finally provided a link to appeal YouTube’s decision to ban my podcast “Twitter and the Deep State.” Soon after submitting my appeal, YouTube got back to me this this:
So they will not restore my content. One must ask, then, was the FBI also meeting weekly with YouTube to prep its team for censoring stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop? Because that’s what my podcast was about. And YouTube has censored it.
The actions of YouTube and other social media platforms are rationalized with the phrase “the control of misinformation,” something with which the Executive Branch and the network of corporations it represents have become obsessed. This phrase is the label for an Orwellian-named strategy to suppress information that contradicts the preferred narrative and undermines mass opinion engineered by the corporate state in support of that narrative. This is the way totalitarian states operate.
I suspect that YouTube also does not want you to know that the FBI colluded with former employee James Baker, a lawyer who had been with Twitter since 2020 until owner Elon Musk fired him over the Hunter Biden laptop coverup, to carry out the objectives of the administration state. Baker served as general council for the FBI from 2014-2018, working alongside Peter Strzok and Lisa Page (I encourage readers to look into doings of these two). Baker has also served as an analyst for CNN.
Baker was a key figure in the FBI’s probe into the allegation that Trump was a Russian asset during the 2016 presidential election. In other words, Baker has been exposed as a deep state actor who worked inside Twitter to arrange for FBI visits to Twitter headquarters to prep Twitter’s “legal, policy, and trust team” to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. Musk is now indicating that, before leaving, Baker may have gone through the Twitter files to cover up his own role in Hunter Biden laptop affair.
It is almost certainly guaranteed that if I did a podcast on Baker and his role in the coverup and uploaded it to YouTube, the company would remove my content again and I would receive that strike they’re warning me about. This is a dilemma for me: since I use YouTube to host my lectures for my online courses, I cannot risk losing that resource. So I will now be uploading my political content to Rumble in the future: The FAR Podcast.
More revelations are sure to come out concerning the Hunter Biden laptop story, but we know now without any doubt that the administrative state and the national security apparatus work with legacy and social media to label information critical of progressivism and corporate power “misinformation.”
This fact is profound. To posit a separation between the public and the private spheres, between the political and civil societies of American life, is today untenable. The interlinkages between the administrative state and the corporate structure of late capitalism constitute the webbing of the corporate state. The corporate state, if we suppose at the moment is some form of an integral state, only means that we stand on the brink of an open totalitarian situation. For, if the hegemony engineered by the administrative state-corporate power nexus break down, then the only choice for the ruling class is to shift to open totalitarian rule.
As I have said before, following Sheldon Wolin’s thesis, as it stands now, we already live in a situation of inverted totalitarianism (and of course managed democracy). But it could be worse. We could see the end of the alternative networks of information sharing that I have been compelled to utilize.
The reader must grasp the direness of the situation. The liberal arrangements upon which the American republic was founded have been abrogated. The republic as a liberal-democratic constitution-based system is increasingly a fiction. The effect of all this is the end of democracy and personal liberty.
We see the end of liberal democracy not only in the cabal to engineer elections and with the administrative state weaponized in COINTELPRO fashion against conservative groups and other dissidents, but in the case of, for example, pharmaceutical interests, targeting for discrediting those scientists and doctors whose findings potentially hurt corporate profits. The integral state is desperate to shore up the hegemony it constructed decades ago to avoid the totalitarian shift they know risks provoking a popular uprising against the corporate state.
This reality has been made concrete to me. My own reporting on the FBI-Twitter machinations around Hunter Biden’s laptop have been censored by YouTube and they are threatening me with cancellation. In the past, both YouTube and Facebook have censored my podcasts on the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a pattern that tells me what I never needed a smoking gun to confirm: that powerful interests are suppressing information disruptive to corporate state hegemony.
I’m just a small fry (in part because my accounts have been throttled for years). If corporations micromanage the political expressions of their other customers in the same way (and they do), then it is obvious that the suppression of my work and marginalization of my person is an organized function of the apparatus. How much longer will those who claim to love liberty deny the existence of that apparatus?
freedom and reason 