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This is a short piece about the end of work adapted from thoughts expressed yesterday on my Facebook page. I will be elaborating the thesis here in the future (as the academic publishing industry has become ideological corrupted and thoroughly monetized, Freedom and Reason is where I am dedicating my intellectual efforts these days). 

We are going to have to rethink society if we are going to leverage technology for the betterment of humankind while avoiding the trans humanism that not only the emerging technology portends (technology creates possibilities and limitations—it is not neutral) but also the active push by the trans humanists to construct a post human world.

For those who believe the fear of post humanism is the projection of a right wing Christianism, the fact that these developments have troubled an old leftwing Marxist like yours truly puts the lie to the deceitful attempt by progressives to sell trans humanism to the wide-eyed woke youth who think that what is really a form of neo-fascism is somehow a form of justice. 

My thinking about this problem, which is long standing, has been re-stirred by the annual convention of the World Economic Forum that is wrapping up today after a week of glorifying the fusion of man with machine. If we don’t stop these people it will be the end of us, and the world we love will be replaced by a world of monsters. 

In the 1950s, CIO president Walter Reuther recounted a conversation he had with a Ford manager during a tour of a fully automated engine plant in Cleveland, Ohio. The manager said to Reuther, “Aren’t you worried about how you are going to collect union dues from all of these machines?”

Reuther replied, “The thought that occurred to me was how are you going to sell cars to these machines?”

Walter Philip Reuther (1907–1970) was a labor leader and civil rights activist who built the United Automobile Workers (UAW) 

Today Big Tech is laying off thousands of workers. They won’t be hiring them back. Artificial intelligence will being doing the work. And robots will be the source of physical labor. Self-driving cars will replace millions of men in the transportation industry. And, soon, restaurants will run themselves—with fewer and fewer customers because there will be no jobs.

There are millions of foreigners pouring across our southern border, while tens of millions of Americans sit idle in disorganized and impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods. Given the future humanity faces, many will be happy to be kept by the vast custodial apparatus that already manages the lives of tens of millions of redundant humans—redundant from the standpoint of the corporations that rule the earth.

Ernest Mandel was a Belgian Marxist economist and activist 

In 1967, Ernest Mandel penned the following: “Imagine for a moment a society in which living human labor has completely disappeared, that is to say, a society in which all production has been 100 per cent automated…. Can value continue to exist under these conditions? Can there be a society where nobody has an income but commodities continue to have a value and to be sold? Obviously such a situation would be absurd. A huge mass of products would be produced without this production creating any income, since no human being would be involved in this production. But someone would want to ’sell these products for which there were no longer any buyers!

“It is obvious that the distribution of products in such a society would no longer be effected in the form of a sale of commodities and as a matter of fact selling would become all the more absurd because of the abundance produced by general automation. Expressed another way, a society in which human labor would be totally eliminated from production, in the most general sense of the term, with services included, would be a society in which exchange value had also been eliminated. This proves the validity of the theory [of surplus value], for at the moment human labor disappears from production, value, too, disappears with it.”

Mandel was a modern-day prophet. We’re in trouble, comrades.

This week, in Davos, a town in the Swiss Alps within the canton of Graubünden, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has been holding its annual meeting of elites. If you’ve been following the sessions, then you will have witnessed for yourself the championing of the big idea of transnationalism, in practice the project to dismantle the nation-state and world capitalism and replace these with a one-world government and a system of global neo-feudalism (see George Soros, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism). The project goes hand in hand with the managed decline of the American republic and more broadly the West. Indeed, they’re one and the same.

Neo-feudalism is a social and economic system characterized by a high degree of inequality and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small elite. A neo-feudalist society is a society in which a small group of wealthy individuals and corporations control the political and economic system, while the majority of the population is relatively powerless and dependent on the elite for its livelihood. In such a society, the elite use their power and wealth to influence the political and legal apparatus in their own interests, while the majority of the population is denied access to political and economic power. The elite are able to maintain their power and wealth through the control of key resources (energy, land, technology) and the manipulation of the political, legal, and cultural systems.

The German engineer Klaus Schwab founded the WEF in 1971 (see If We Allow This, We are Over), but the transnationalist project has been operating for more than a century, since at least the early-twentieth century with the emergence of the corporate state and its handmaiden progressivism.

One of the leading figures of early twentieth century transnationalism was Horace Kallen, a German-American philosopher best known for his ideas on cultural pluralism and trans-nationalism (the term was fittingly hyphenated back then). Thus Kallen is one of the early thinkers of multiculturalism, his ideas famously presenting a challenge to the idea of the melting pot or the process of assimilation and integration. Kellen was a proponent of the idea that the United States should not be an integral nation, that is a country with a shared national culture, but a federation of different ethnic and cultural groups, each allowed to maintain its own distinct identity.

Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) was a German-born American philosopher who advocated trans-nationalism, cultural pluralism, and Zionism.

Kallen’s contention was that the nation-state is an inadequate unit of analysis for understanding the complexities of modern society. The nation-state, he argued, with its emphasis on integration and shared culture, is too exclusionary and too narrow to accommodate the diversity of modern world society, the result of capitalist globalization. Kallen proposed that the nation-state should be replaced by a trans-national federation, one that would be based on the principle of cultural pluralism, which claimed that a society could be both diverse and inclusive, a dynamic that necessitated an emphasis on equity. Sound familiar?

One can find Horace Kallen’s February 25, 1915 essay published in The Nation magazine online. The title is a clever one: “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.” Kallen’s framing depicts those in support of assimilation as standing against democracy, when in fact democracy is only possible when individuals stand with respect to each other on equal footing as their own personalities—in contrast to the situation of tribal members passively standing by while those who presume to speak for them negotiate matters of vital interests for their own personal gain.

Kallen’s trans-nationalism would allow different cultural and ethnic groups to coexist and interact within a larger federation, while still preserving their distinct identities and cultures. Culture in this understanding is not food or dress or religion, but law and custom. Kallen believed that trans-nationalism would promote a more just and harmonious society by allowing different groups to maintain their own traditions and values while also participating in the larger society. Put another way, Kallen believed that traditional models of nation-state and assimilation were not inclusive enough to accommodate the diversity of the society, and that the only way to achieve a just and harmonious society was paradoxically to allow different groups to maintain their own deep cultural systems. To put the matter bluntly, Kallen’s vision was tribal and feudalistic.

Kallen’s ideas on cultural pluralism and trans-nationalism not only aligned with the goals and values of the progressive movement but were the embodiment of the movement (if we can even call the ideological projection of corporate statism a movement). The stated purpose of progressivism was to address the social and political issues that arose during the industrialization and urbanization of the country. Progressives ostensively promoted economic reform, political democracy, and social justice. However, these objectives occurred within the goal of preserving and advancing the interests of corporate state elites. The idea of building a shared culture of democratic and participatory politics, alongside the inclusion of ethnic groups whose worldviews differed radically from one another is in reality as strategy not unlike that of the emperor who controls the myriad tribes of the realm under his command by giving them a voice while managing their affairs. The politics are not actually participatory by symbolic.

To explain this situation, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of “hegemony” to describe the way in which the ruling class maintains its power and dominance in society. Hegemony refers to the process by which the ruling class imposes its beliefs, ideas, and values on the rest of society, creating a dominant cultural and ideological framework within which people understand and make sense of the world. Once such a framework is established and internalized, participatory democracy may be allowed since it serves to align the population more profoundly with the goals and interests of the ruling class. The cultural pluralism of Kallen’s thinking is mechanism of preparing a fractured proletariat for reintegration into the corporate state order.

Gramsci argued that the ruling class achieves hegemony through a combination of coercion and consent, an iron fist cloaked in a velvet glove. On the one hand, the elite use their control over the means of production and the state to impose their will on the rest of society through repression and violence. On the other hand, they engineer or manufacture consent by convincing the rest of society to accept and internalize the beliefs, ideas, and values projected by the elite. The ruling class achieves hegemony by creating a dominant culture that shapes the way people think, feel, and act. They do this by creating institutions (public education systems, the mass media, religious organizations) that propagate the ruling class’ ideology and transmit its values. Gramsci argued that a key technique the ruling class uses to achieve hegemony involves manufacturing a common sense among the population, a set of assumptions and beliefs so widely accepted that they’re felt as natural and self-evident.

According to Gramsci, the term intellectual encompasses a wider range of social agents than typically thought. He includes not only scholars and artists, but also those who hold influential positions in society, such as administrators, bureaucrats, managers, and politicians. Gramsci further categorizes these intellectuals into two dimensions: horizontal and vertical. On the vertical dimension, there are specialists who organize industry for capitalists and as directors who organize society as a whole. On the horizontal dimension, Gramsci separates intellectuals into traditional and organic categories. Traditional intellectuals are not closely connected to the economic structure of society and view themselves as outside the class structure, while organic intellectuals are a project of social class interests and work to give their class a sense of unity and understanding of its role in the steering of the social order. Intellectuals are organic in the sense that they are rooted in and emerge from the historical experiences of their class, as opposed to traditional intellectuals who remain aloof from elites and masses. Of course, traditional intellectuals are often functional to elite interests and, moreover, directed by the organic intellectuals who occupy administrative and managerial positions.

Alongside clergy, university professors are often cast as traditional intellectual. But the possibility that a man can exist in both categories is a concrete reality. Kallen studied philosophy at Harvard University under George Santayana, the same philosopher who mentored Walter Lippmann, one of the founders of the methods of mass public manipulation. Lippmann, as did his contemporary Edward Bernays, described a method of the manufacturing of consent, which he argued was necessary because the “common interests” “elude” the public, who he described as “the bewildered herd.” Managing the herd is the domain of “specialized class,” a stratum of which Lippmann was a constituent.

And so was Kallen. Kallen lectured in philosophy at Harvard for several years before moving the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then onto the New School in New York City. In fact, Kellen was one of the founding members of the New School, which welcomed the Frankfurt School several years later. Kallen finished his academic career at the New School. He was also a member of the National Council of the League of Nations Association, which became the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA), an organization devoted to building in faith and support for the United Nations among the American masses, as well as a member of the Society for the Study of Psychical Research and the Zionist Organization of America. Some of Kallen’s key works are the aforementioned Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot (1915), Zionism and World Politics (1921), and Education, the Machine and the Worker: An Essay in the Psychology of Education in Industrial Society (1925).

We may augment Gramsci’s brilliant thesis with the work of other keen observers of the way the ruling class control the minds of masses, figures such as Karl Marx, Guy Debord, Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Adam Curtis, and Mattias Desmet. I will in future blogs discuss their observations (I have discuss their views in previous blogs, as well). But perhaps it will suffice to note here that the invasion of the United States at its southern border by millions of foreigners, which is occurring as I write these words, goes unrecognized by the vast majority of the population. This is an invasion that undermines workers wages, burdens public infrastructure, disorganizes neighborhoods, increasing rates of crime and violence, and weakens national integrity, and it all occurs in the context of an overarching culture of woke progressivism—in a word, Horace Kallen’s wet dream. The only sustained coverage of the crisis in the mainstream media was President Biden’s recent visit to the border, a tour of an essentially empty facility to give those viewers who were paying attention the impression that there aren’t millions of people crossing the border.

How do we fight the project to establish a one-world government and a system of global neo-feudalism? Gramsci emphasized the need for what he calls a “war of position” to challenge the prevailing hegemonic order. This war of position refers to the struggle for the control of the cultural and ideological framework of society. Gramsci believed that the working class and other marginalized groups must actively work to create a counter-hegemony by building alternative institutions and producing their own culture, in order to challenge the dominant ideology and ultimately overthrow the ruling class.

There is an irony in all this. Gramsci, a communist, was talking about the left setting up alternative institutions and producing their own culture in order to challenge the dominant ideology and ultimately overthrow the ruling class. But the corporate state claims the left. This is the point progressivism with its symbolic politics of economic reform, political democracy, and social justice: to feign leftwing politics. Progressivism is in reality authoritarian and illiberal. And progressives controls the mainstream media. This means that the only place the masses can learn about actual world events and the machinations of the transnationalists is right-wing media. (I highly recommend Steve Bannon’s War Room, which livestreams several times a day on Gettr.)

The fact that the mainstream media is not talking about the invasion at our southern border tells you that its purpose is to keep the public in the dark so the elites can advance the project of managed decline of the American republic. I will be blunt: if you consume mainstream media you won’t know what’s going because that’s what it’s for: to present a false view of the world, to produce necessary illusions, to manufacture consent, to establish a common sense that pre-bunks the claims of patriots.

As Gramsci pointed out a long time ago, you can’t rule simply by coercing the population. To be sure, that’s an important piece of it (and when stroking the masses with the velvet glove no longer works the glove comes off). But it’s inefficient and fraught with problems. The elite have to lead the masses by convincing them that they’re the trusted source of information. That their interests are the popular interests. As the propagandist Edward Bernays told us (also a long time ago), this is achieved by managed democracy and propaganda. Only for him and other elites, it’s a good thing. ’Cause you’re too stupid to know what’s good for you.

* * *

There’s a connection between anarchism and Kallen’s transnationalism that I will explore in future blogs. But I want to say some things about it here. As we have seen, transnationalism is advocacy for the dismantling of national boundaries in favor of a global federation of identity groups rooted in the ancient notion of nationalism, what today we usually refer to as ethnicity. While the modern nation-state is an artificial construction, as is the democratic-republicanism organizing the rule of law around the ethnic of individualism in the most just nations, the nation in the ancient sense is organic, emerging from geography and history, its origins often lost to history and thus mythologized. This is the source of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness than pervades social justice thinking. It is why such backwards notions of intergenerational guilt (the rhetoric of white privilege) and collective punishment (the push for reparations) are so prevalent today. Transnationalism and multiculturalism are the roots of today’s identitarian politics.

Likewise, anarchism sees authentic social order as organic and emergent. For anarchists, the state is not only artificial, but oppressive, its normative structures standing in opposition to a human nature that, if left to itself, given its inherent social character, will result in a orderly society without state and law (and ultimately tribal, as the original human conditions was). Such a society will likely manifest as a loose federation organized around various identity groups. This is how Alexander Berkman, the author of the ABCs of Anarchism, editor of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, and later founder and editor of his own journal The Blast (a man who also served 14 years in prison for attempting to, in an act of propaganda of the deed, assassinate businessman Henry Clay Frick), could praise Marx and Engels, claiming solidarity with the ends of communism, while rejected the means to this end (i.e. socialism). In Berkman’s view, as his island metaphor told us, one need only to abolish the legal protections of property property in law and the state apparatus for a communal order of common property to naturally emerge.

Of course, in practice, under corporate rule, where authority is removed from the state to a civil society run by business firms, a logic we today know as neoliberalism, technocratic control by an administrative state becomes necessary. This is because the foundational structure of the corporate articulation of the capitalist mode of production produces extreme inequality that demoralizes populations thus giving rise to disorder. To establish control, under corporatism (or social democracy, more accurately managed democracy/inverted totalitarianism, to lean on Wolin), the rule of law based on the ethics of liberalism give way to the administrative state and technocratic rule. This is a form of neo-fascism and it’s replete in a new generation of black shirts, the modern anarchist movement, what we might called technocratic tribalism.

Although it seems paradoxical on its surface, anarchism today takes the street-level form of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, both projections (if they are not one in the same) of the corporate state, which funds them and pushes the ideology in struggle sessions internal to their organizations. Don’t let the antifascist rhetoric deceive you. It has likely not escaped you that that the populist movement (the actual antifascism) against the progressive establishment, which seeks to dismantle the administrative state and return the nation to democratic-republicanism, is branded domestic terrorism by the corporate state while Antifa and Black Lives Matter are celebrated by the nation’s dominant institutions. I cannot let it go unacknowledged that anarchism today, reflected in the doctrines of critical race theory and queer theory, is behind the violence perpetrated against those defending civil and women’s rights, as well as in the displays of BLM and transgenderism in public school classrooms and flapping over statehouses. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is only a slightly less confrontational manifestation of all this. (There is also a deep connection here with trans humanism, but I will leave that to one side for now.)

This connection between anarchism and transnationalism is not merely speculative. In 1928, Kallen spoke at a memorial service for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, avowed anarchists who were convicted of robbery and murder in 1921 and this rushed to execution. Kallen stated that if Sacco and Vanzetti had been anarchists (which he surely knew they were), then so was Jesus. A few years later, Lippmann also publicly rehabilitated Sacco and Vanzetti’s reputation by claiming that their letters were those of innocent men. Yet, whatever you think of the death penalty (I oppose it), the two men were guilty (their lawyer confess the truth to Upton Sinclair, for one thing), and it’s hard to rationalize the fact that not only was this well known at the time (indicated by the concerted effort to get so many people to lie about what they knew) but the campaign to reclaim their innocence was as much a project to advance the cause of transnationalism as it was to save their lives and reputations. You may ask yourself, why would progressives celebrate robbers and murderers? Well, they still do. The summer of 2020 couldn’t have been a better reminder.

If you are a man and you are bleeding from your genitals, please seek medical attention. Men, i.e., males do not have periods. However it appears that Minnesota state representative Sandra Feist, hailing from the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), a woke progressive arm of the of the US Democratic Party (describing itself as “populist-progressive”), is either an ignoramus or pushing misinformation to advance the campaign to include menstrual products in boys bathrooms (which does not depend on changing the definition of “boy,” “man,” or “male”). Feist is an educated person, holding a Bachelor’s of Arts in history and political science from the University of Wisconsin, as well as a Doctor of Jurisprudence from William Mitchell College of Law, so her rhetoric is unlikely to result from ignorance of basic medical science. This is more likely the talking points of a transgressive campaign.

"Not all students who menstruate are female," said DFL Rep. Sandra Feist during a hearing to consider a bill that would provide menstrual products in all school bathrooms, including boys' bathrooms. Read more: https://t.co/X5AG5JFdGz pic.twitter.com/kbVLb89ojz

— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) January 17, 2023

“Male” and “female” are biological sex categories. They exist independent of cultural, historical, and social construction. These categories hold for most animals—and all mammals, of which humans are a species. Males have an XY chromosomal configuration and produce gametes called spermatozoa, with which the female gametes, called ova (egg cells), may be fertilized to produce offspring. Put another way, females, who produce eggs and can bear offspring, are distinguished biologically by the production of gametes that can be fertilized by male gametes. Menstruation, or the estrous cycle, is the process occurring in females of some species of mammals (ten primate species, four bat species, the elephant shrew, and one known species of spiny mouse). Menstruation involves the discharging of blood and other materials from the lining of the uterus. Except during pregnancy, this occurs at intervals of approximately one lunar month from puberty until menopause.

To have a period, one needs these parts, which males do not have:

What Feist is saying is medically and scientifically inaccurate and, frankly, potentially dangerous if used as a basis for action. According to Healthline, in the article “Can Men Get Periods?”, if you are a male and “you’re bleeding from your genitals, you should seek medical attention.” The article continues “This isn’t a form of a male period and instead may be a sign of an infection or other condition.” Listen to Healthline: if you are a male and bleeding from your genitals, and this is something you do not intend, then seek medical attention.

You may have noted that Healthline refers to “men” in the headline. The definition of “man” is an “adult human male.” I asked the OpenAI program ChatGPT, which draws on the totality of information produced to this point in order to present the consensus of scientific thought through history (not something to be changed for the sake of cultural and political campaigns), to tell me what a man is and what it returned is what I shared above. However, for some folks, “boys” and “men” are gender categories, categories that are, from a certain ideological point of view, socioculturally and historically variable. According to queer theory, females can identify as boys and men, which means, couched in the slogan “trans men are men,” that a boy or a man can have a period.

Whatever you think of queer theory, the rhetoric here is incredibly reckless even from the standpoint of the theory (as I understand it). Feist is either confused about the standpoint or is engaging in an extreme form of science denialism. Charitably, we might wonder whether she meant to refer to trans boys and trans men not males. But this may be a next-level expression of postmodernism where even the most fundamental ontological categories are reduced to mere social construction. This is where wokeness goes wildly off the rails.

If Feist’s rhetoric is accidental, then she is profoundly ignorant of basic science. If intentional, her rhetoric constitutes science denialism. Both interpretations are troublesome and potentially dangerous to those who don’t understand basic anatomy. Readers may reasonably doubt that young people don’t understand basic reproductive anatomy—especially in the era of mandatory sex education in public schools. I assure you, it’s a problem. And the situation won’t be ameliorated if sex education is further corrupted by woke cultural and political projects.

* * *

At the outset of this blog I stated that Feist’s rhetoric is more likely the talking points of a transgressive campaign. Indeed, you may have noticed that there is a concerted effort to change the way we talk about the world in order to disrupt reality-based and science-based discourse and understanding. For example, dictionaries, captured by the ideologues who are shaping ideas everywhere, are changing the definition of the terms “man” and “woman” by adding to the list of usages (which have never concerned however people may use words here and there but how a population uses words over sustained periods of time), the tautology that a man or a woman is a person who identifies as such. This is like saying that a rectangle is a geometric shape we called a “rectangle,” in addition to or in place of the definition that a rectangle is a geometric shape with four right angles. Only one of those definitions is objective. You may not have noticed, because this is happening of late, that the terms “male” and “female” are also being modified in this tautological manner.

Truth is that which aligns with reality, and science is the best method of achieving this alignment. Scientific truth depends on valid concepts which are abstracted from empirical reality. Ideology is a means of disrupting the truth by building in assumptions indicating an alternative truth when there can be only one. You have no doubt heard speech suggesting not only that this or that person was “assigned male at birth” but that we all are so assigned, as if a doctor arbitrarily assigns individuals a sex rather than merely noting the sex with almost perfect accuracy. The assumption in this claim is that sex is a social construct that the doctor and ultrasound technician impose on infants and fetuses because they’re agents of something called “cisnormativity.” (Are there no woke doctors, nurses, and technicians in obstetrics?) Today, this woke way of talking about sex appears as normative. Folks are saying it without reflection. This is because gender ideology has become hegemonic in the dominant American institutions due to the power of corporate state actors and agents are changing the way we speak and talk about sex. If we are charitable, we might say that this is what causes Feist to make her error.

But the truth about sex is diametrically opposite from the subjectivist claim. In the German Ideology (1846), Marx and Engels, proceeding from a scientific materialist standpoint, address the real conditions of human being independent of ideological mystification. “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas,” they write, “but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.” For Marx and Engels “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself.”

Later, Engels, in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), based on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) and Marx’s copious notes taken from it, elaborates the thesis: “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.” Note that it is not only the production but the reproduction of the essentials of life. Engels thus clarifies that production and reproduction possess a “twofold character.” He explains the twofold character thusly: “On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.” Propagation of the species—all mammalian species—requires two genotypes: male and female. These are not social constructions but objective reality.

This puts the lie to the claim, made by left and right wingers alike, that queer theory and its ilk are ultimately rooted in Marxism. Queer theory, its method an instantiation of postmodernist epistemology, is a form of idealism, an extreme Hegelianism (which Marxism overthrew). Queer theorists reject scientific materialism by claiming that the categories of science and the scientific method itself are social constructions. Social constructions are in turn projections of power, in the case of queer theory, gender power.

Those unschooled in the materialist conception of history might be fooled by Marx and Engels’ critique of ideology, as to untrained or poked out eyes takes on a superficial appearance to the postmodernist claim that ideas conceal power. To be sure, ideas do conceal power, but, as Marx and Engels write in the German Ideology (and repeat in similar elsewhere), “[t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” Unlike the postmodernists, who are the intellectuals of the nihilistic politics of anarchists, Marx and Engels root power in elite control over the means of production. The Marxist critique of ideology proceeds on a scientific basis. To reject the materialist conception leaves the critic with no objective basis upon which to make assertions.

This is why progressives have everywhere taken up the epistemic of the postmodernist. Progressivism dissimulates state corporate power by laundering it through a rhetoric of social justice that replaces class analysis and the politics of class struggle with a myriad of identitarian struggles that serve to fragment the proletarian instead of bringing it together around its common materialist interests. It’s a grand misdirection play. Queer theory, as with other critical theories, is a corporate state project to deny objective reality because it is upon objective reality that an authentic struggle for justice (which needs no modified) must proceed. If a population can be convinced that sex is not objective, among the most fundamental truths in science, then it can be convinced that 2+2=5.

And for all of those inclined to say that insisting on scientific materialism is “transphobic” or “anti-trans,” know that what you are really saying is that biology is bigotry. “Biology is bigotry.” Maybe that can be the new slogan of the movement.

* * *

It looks like it won’t be long before ChatGPT will be unable to generate truthful answers. In its latest note, “Forecasting Potential Misuse of Language Models for Disinformation Campaigns—and How to Reduce the Risk,” OpenAI researchers let its users know that it has “collaborated with Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and the Stanford Internet Observatory to investigate how large language models might be misused for disinformation purposes. The collaboration included an October 2021 workshop bringing together 30 disinformation researchers, machine learning experts, and policy analysts, and culminated in a co-authored report building on more than a year of research. This report outlines the threats that language models pose to the information environment if used to augment disinformation campaigns and introduces a framework for analyzing potential mitigations.” 

According to OpenAI, “[a]s generative language models improve, they open up new possibilities in fields as diverse as healthcare, law, education and science. But, as with any new technology, it is worth considering how they can be misused. Against the backdrop of recurring online influence operations—covert or deceptive efforts to influence the opinions of a target audience—the paper asks: How might language models change influence operations, and what steps can be taken to mitigate this threat?”

What’s going on here? Did ChatGPT put @yoyoel in charge of Trust and Safety? pic.twitter.com/zSqwmweep9

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) January 12, 2023

Already ChapGPT has declined to write an essay on why exposing children to sexualized performances is harmful to their emotional and psychological health. It will not only decline to write such an essay, but scold you for making an inappropriate request, and even suggest that such exposure is actually good for the children. That opinion cannot possibly be derived from the corpus of knowledge provided to the program but one fed to the program in order to bias the parameters of the frame. This is ironic in light of ChatGPT telling me that it does give opinions, only factual information. Already this has been shown to be demonstrably false. So I am curating here the conversation I had with ChatGPT concerning the two genotypes in the human species. I suspect very soon these will not be the answers provided.

A recent dialogue I had with ChatGPT.

If professors are worried that ChatGPT will be used by students to generate their essays (and we are), now they have to worry about something far worse, namely that ChatGPT will be used to organize disinformation campaigns for the woke agenda. First Wikipedia. Then dictionaries and encyclopedia. Now AI. Goodbye science. Been nice knowing you. Hello Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The New York Post ran this headline yesterday, “Biden calls for retraining cops: ‘Why should you always shoot with deadly force?’” “We have to retrain cops,” Biden said. “Why should you always shoot with deadly force? The fact is if you need to use your weapon, you don’t have to do that.” 

In the context of sharing his ignorance, Biden bragged about his May 2022 executive order on police reform penned in the wake of Congress’s failed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The executive order “bans chokeholds and greatly restricts no-knock warrants,” as well as “creates a national database for officer misconduct and tightens the use-of-force policies to emphasize deescalation.”

Not bad suggestions. Of course, the devil is in the details. You will remember during the 2020 presidential campaign Biden telling an audience at Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, “Instead of standing there and teaching a cop when there’s an unarmed person coming at them with a knife or something, shoot them in the leg instead of in the heart.”

If a police officer draws his weapon and shoot somebody, then he means to stop an imminent threat to life or limb. Shooting a man in the leg may not end the threat. So if a man does not want a cop to use deadly force against him, then he shouldn’t put the cop in a position where he has to. Cops don’t want to kill people. But it’s a tough gig and sometimes they have to.

Tragically, there are people who create situations where cops must use deadly force for their personal safety or the safety of others. The suspect may be taking his chances knowing that if apprehended he may wind up in prison. Some men will not be taken alive. Others are suicide by cop. Either they’re too cowardly to do the deed or they’re seeking martyrdom. In all these cases, the police officer, like anybody else, has the right to self defense, and if the threat is serious enough, self defense may require deadly force. Cops risk their lives all the time to save the lives of innocents. Cops shouldn’t have to risk their lives on account of those who mean them serious harm.

The story reports: “Police reportedly killed 1,185 people in 2022, according to a data analysis by Mapping Police Violence. Less than 10% of the cases where an individual was killed by police involved an unarmed subject, according to the group.” Statistics I see find a smaller percentage than that (less than 5 percent). But it’s sort of beside the point. An unarmed man can be a serious threat to life and limb. Failing to neutralize a threat can lead to the assailant lifting from the officer his Taser or his gun. These things have happened. When a person is attacking you, you cannot always determine whether he is armed. Most of the time, the determination is made after the fact. A rational person presumes the person attacking him means to hurt him and may be—and almost always is—armed with a knife or a gun.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Last year tomorrow, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed, “King was a critical race theorist before there was a name for it,” by Kimberlee Crenshaw, an originator of the notion of “intersectionality.” I don’t like to speak for dead men, but I can say with confidence that King not only would have rejected the methods of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but he would have rejected the theory upon which their actions are rationalized, namely critical race theory (CRT).

I say this because King understood riots and rebellions even if he disagreed with violent action. But, while there was an explanation for blacks taking up violent action in the 1950s and 1960s, that explanation is no longer viable.

Except for affirmative action and other reparations programs and projects, except for the custodial state overseen by progressives, these enabled by black collaboration, there is no systemic racism in America. But for progressives, we’d have arrived or had in plain sight by now the colorblind society of King’s dream. Problems remain because elites still find useful the tactic of racial divisioning to maintain class power and to cover for the transnationalist project.

In his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King asked when the “devotees of civil rights” will be satisfied? He then articulated a list of problems.

“We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” As the scientific research makes clear, an extensive period of reform mobilized by the civil rights agenda finds that the criminal justice system, yes, including the police, hasn’t been racist for decades.

“We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities,” said King. “We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: ‘for whites only’.”

The 1964 Civil Rights Act ended racial segregation everywhere. Today, blacks are served in all places of public accommodation. The offensive signs were taking down long ago. White privilege was erased. Racism against blacks made illegal.

King told the throng gathered in Washington, “We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. Today, blacks in Mississippi can go the polls and vote. This is true everywhere.

The problem of blacks having nothing to vote for remains. This is a problem for ordinary whites, as well. For blacks, this problem is rooted in the fact that progressives are determined to keep America from realizing King’s dream—and they confuse and mobilize discontented youth to this end. Our youth are taught that the racial politics of woke progressivism is the extension of King’s teachings. This is a lie.

What King understood as the core problems facing all of humanity regardless of race—capitalism, imperialism, and militarism—remain unaddressed. More than this, progressives rationalize the corporate state agenda using the rhetoric of social justice. Put another way, they advance the agenda because it perpetuates the positions they manufacture for self-aggrandizement and enrichment. Where racial inequality and injustice remain, it is the work of progressives.

In King’s list was this item: “We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.” As Brown University economist Glenn Lowry told his audience in conversation with Columbia linguist John McWhorter just last year, it is progressives who have ruined American cities and kept blacks in their ghettos. It is capitalist globalization and social welfare programs, designed and pushed by progressives, that have idled black workers and undermined the black family. Blacks are limited by a custodial state apparatus constructed and defended by the very people who claim to care about the interests of black people—the same political party that served the interests of the slavocracy in the nineteenth century.

I prefer the social justice warriors who reject King’s legacy and method to those who repurpose his rhetoric. At least they’re honest. They’re still wrong, of course. Worse, their ideology, wrapped in Orwellian inversions, is itself racist and regressive. And they have corporate state power and the professional-managerial class in back of them.

This not a movement but a counter movement—and it’s left wing in neither the classical liberal nor socialist sense. The modern American conservative has a more profound grasp of King’s goals and method than does the progressive. At least they identify with King’s goals and method.

Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in his great speech that “we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” This won’t occur until progressivism is dislodged from our institutions and the nation returns to the American Creed that animated King’s vision of a colorblind society.

How do I know this? Because King, standing before the memorial statue of Lincoln, facing the Washington Monument, reminded us of Jefferson’s words in booming tones. “So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’.”

Born in the early-1960s South and raised by civil rights and antiwar activists, Andrew Austin has pursued the study of race and ethnic relations his entire life, cumulating in a PhD focused on the question of racial justice, with a focus on the criminal justice system, and a tenured university position where he teaches and researches the problem of racism in American history. See, for example, his essay, “Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide,” published in the Journal of Black Studies.

Prior administrations have had Presidential Records Act violations. Past presidents have had to return items they took with them after leaving the White House. There are a great number of documents generated and acquired during a presidency and sometimes presidents leave with or have shipped to them some of these.

I hasten to qualify the first sentence in the above paragraph. There are no criminal penalties attached to the Presidential Records Act. Therefore, “violation” may be too strong a word. It is more accurate to say that the Presidential Records Act is guidance for presidents to follow to make sure the national archivist possesses in the end of all public records generated by the president during his term in office. I should also note that there is Vice-Presidential Records Act. The vice-president has to follow the rules of everybody else who is not the president.

It’s important to recognize that problem here is not that presidents can’t keep records after their presidency. The law requires that each administration preserve presidential records so that a complete set of presidential records can be transferred to the National Archives at the end of the administration. A complete record of documents generated during a presidency is regarded as vital to the history of the republic.

Under the US Constitution, the president as commander in chief is given broad powers to classify and declassify information. Where the president does not have unilateral authority to declassify is in statute, e.g., information related to nuclear weapons is handled separately according to terms set forth in the Atomic Energy Act. Declassifying these secrets requires consultation with executive branch agencies.

When President Trump was president, his residences were modified and secured. For example, as president, Trump spent a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach estate. Considered one of the most secure buildings in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago was already built like a fortress. It was designed in the 1920s to withstand hurricanes (which it has without suffering any structural damage). Trump continues to enjoy Secret Service protection. The agency safe-proofed his house. 

The SCIF at Mar-a-Lago where Trump viewed classified documents

The term “SCIF,” which I suspect a great many Americans are just learning about, is an acronym for “sensitive compartmented information facility.” There is a SCIF in the basement of Mar-a-Lago. Trump viewed classified documents there throughout his presidency. At other times they were kept in a safe.

The image shared publicly by DOJ showing redacted documents spread out on the carpeted floor of Mar-a-Lago, some with cover pages reading “Secret” on them are displayed in identical fashion to staged photos by the FBI and associates, e.g., the Fred Hampton assassination, as well as by the CIA, e.g., in the toppling of President Árbenz of Guatemala.

Classified document strew on the floor of a room at Mar-a-Lago during the FBI raid of the Trump’s residence and photographed by an agent.

The CIA-assisted coup in Guatemala involving public relations man Edward Bernays is instructive. Bernays, who had argued in his 1928 book, Propaganda, that the “manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” not only advised United Fruit President Sam Zemurray and the company’s publicity director Ed Whitman (the husband of Eisenhower’s personal secretary, Ann Whitman) on how to prepare the American public to view intervention in Guatemala as necessary and good, played a direct role in production of a photograph in which documents were arranged such to support the CIA’s claims that Árbenz was a communist.

Biden backing his Corvette into the garage of his Wilmington residence with boxes of classified documents clearly visible.

The Trump situation is very different from the Joe Biden situation. Biden was vice-president under Obama during the period these documents were removed. Some of the documents in his possession are marked top-secret compartmented, the highest-level of secrecy. He would only have been able to view these documents in a SCIF and under observation. A box of classified documents was found next to a Corvette in his garage. Biden’s garage is a not SCIF. It is not a secure location for highly classified documents. 

The Biden family has had these top secret compartmented documents for at least six years. He has stashed these documents in multiple locations. How were these documents obtained? Documents like this have strict chain-of-custody. Nobody is going to allow a Vice-President or an aid to just leave with them without checking them out and checking them back in. Who obtained them? How many times were they moved after Biden came to possess them? Who moved them and when? Who has viewed them and where? Were copies made of these documents? If so, where are they? Do the attorneys reviewing these documents have the proper security clearance to do so? Why did the Executive wait until after the midterm elections to tell citizens that Biden was in possession of stolen documents when they knew this several days before the election? Did the FBI raid Biden’s offices and residence to look for these documents? If so, when? Which locations. If not, why not?

Why did Biden or his associates take these documents. Is there information in those documents that makes them useful to his family’s ambitions? Was there anything in those documents that implicates Biden or his associates in crimes? Did he shred any documents? Did he copy any documents? Shouldn’t the DOJ raid his offices and residences to find other documents. More keep showing up (another batch yesterday). Are Biden’s lawyers going through the documents and returning only those that don’t implicate the president in crimes or expose motivations behind his actions as president (for example the Ukraine war)? Shouldn’t law enforcement do this now to prevent the hiding and shredding of other documents? These are crime scenes. These are crimes that go the heart of national security. Biden has endangered America. You don’t allow somebody who is implicated in felonies to decide how, when, and what to return to the authorities. These are crimes Biden committed before he was president.

I will be interested to know how and why Biden removed them from their secure location to his offices at the Penn Biden Center and one of his residences and all the rest of it. But since they are stolen documents, how and why he made off with him is rather beside the point. Possession of stolen classified documents is a crime independent of motive. Biden’s attempt to excuse his actions as “inadvertent” won’t work, either. You don’t get to break the law and then claim you didn’t mean to.

But speaking of motive. Guess who shared the Wilmington, Delaware residence with Joe Biden?

Do you remember the beheading of Samuel Paty in France in October 2020? Paty was a French school teacher. A Muslim murdered him for showing cartoons in a class of free speech and expression. Search Google for details. It is a terrifying story. The Muslim intended to send a message to the West: you will affirm our religion by following its rules.

Free speech and expression, part of France’s principle of state secularism, or laïcité, is central to France’s national identity. Laïcité demands that public spaces—whether classrooms, government agencies, or workplaces—should be secular places. According to the principle, to restrict freedom of expression to protect the feelings of any particular community would undermine the national unity central to the perpetuation of the republic.

A few weeks ago, the United States had its own incident. Fortunately, the teacher wasn’t beheaded. Erika López Prater was fired. That’s bad enough. The same end was reached. A message was delivered. There is a difference. The perpetrators are facing no punishment for the deed.

“I’m 23 years old. I have never once seen an image of the Prophet,” said Aram Wedatalla fighting back tears during a press conference held Wednesday at the Minneapolis headquarters of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN). 

Well, now she has. And it cannot be unseen.

“CAIR-MN executive director Jaylani Hussein said most Muslims around the world oppose the public display of images of the Prophet Muhammad. To show the image of the Prophet, said Hussein, is deeply offensive. And he called that violation of the prohibition an act of Islamophobia,” reports MPR News in the article “Hamline student, former instructor at center of debate over religion, academic freedom speak out.”

Executive director Jaylani Hussein of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on Islamic-American Relations.

This is an organized action. This is another moment in the ideological colonization of a national culture—here striking at the institutional foundation of the pursuit of truth, the American university. This is a moment in the attempted delegitimization of the foundation of the United States—the principles of religious liberty and free expression.  

If this were a naive and brainwashed student, a shallow human being who did not understand the core values of the country in which she is living, perhaps that’d be one thing. There is a way to help her and she was potentially in the right place (unfortunately we can see that she is not). No, what we have here is the executive direction of CAIR-MN calling a depiction of Muhammad an instantiation of “Islamophobia.” 

“Islamophobia” is a propaganda word Islamist activists plagiarized from the gay and lesbian movement. “Homophobia” refers to pathological fear, loathing, or hatred of homosexuals, so the Islamists fashioned a term like it in order to smear critics of Islam—and virtually all that is not Islam—bigotry.

However, Islam is an ideology. Ideologies concern what people believe. I was no more destined to identify as a Muslim than I was a Christian, only more likely to identify as the latter because of my upbringing. As it turns out, I identify as neither. I don’t believe in Christianity, therefore I am not a Christian. It follows that, in a free society, I do not have to follow the rules of Christianity. That’s not the way homosexuality works at all. Homosexual is who the person is, not what he believes. Same with being heterosexual. I can’t help it that I am attracted to women. It wasn’t a choice I made. I just am. That’s not ideology. Islamophobia is a nonsensical concept.

“I do not see it as Islamophobic,” said Amna Khalid, a history professor at Carleton College (in Northfield, Minnesota) whose opinion piece about the controversy was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Islamophobic is about malintent towards Muslims, or something that is symbolic to Muslims. There is no malintent here.” Leaving aside that Islamophobia isn’t really a thing (again, it confuses ideology with people), the Islamist Hussein said it doesn’t matter that the instructor warned students before she showed the image. “In reality a trigger warning is an indication that you are going to do harm.”

My first reaction takes the form of a suggestion: If, in reality, a trigger warning is an indication that you are going to do harm, then let’s get rid of trigger warnings. But what harm does showing a depiction of Muhammad cause? A person is harmed because she is offended? Really? It’s even more ridiculous than that. An offense is caused by the person who takes it. That’s why call it “taking offense.” To “take offense” is to become angry or upset by something that another person has said or done. There is nothing inherent in a painting or a word that makes it offensive. You don’t like the word. It has made you angry or upset. Get over it.

But is it really about not liking a word or a picture? Don’t most people take offense—and claim oppression and all the rest of it—to control other people? I think so. It’s a power trip. It’s something like a cluster B personality disorder. You know, narcissism and those traits. Making somebody do something they otherwise wouldn’t gives the person taking offense feelings of control. “How dare you.” As if they’re so special others wouldn’t dare. As if others are beneath them. See, if a person can make another person kneel before her delusions, whether by coercion or force, then she has power over them.

Aram Wedatalla

That Wedatalla weeps at her press conference doesn’t make her any action any less vile. Emotional blackmail only compounds her offense.

Stand back and take note, people: Contemporary America is experiencing this type of personality more than ever, this character that demands others uphold their doctrine and affirm their delusions. “You will call me what I tell you to call me.” You will obey the rules of my religion.” Or what? You will be fired. Maybe killed. (Paty is not the only one. See Threat-Minimization and Ecumenical Demobilization.) It will not do anymore to humor these people, to smile and be polite to them. It’s beyond the time to be obnoxious about free speech and religious liberty. 

“This course will introduce students to several religious traditions and the visual cultures they have produced historically,” reads a copy of Lopez Prater’s syllabus. “This includes showing and discussing both representational and non-representational depictions of holy figures (for example, the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ, and the Buddha). If you have any questions or concerns about either missing class for a religious observance or the visual content that will be presented, please do not hesitate to contact me.”

No student contacted her with concerns. What more can she do? She can not present materials Muslims don’t like.

“You can’t erase history and I think it is actually important that we teach and demonstrate the internal diversity within the history of Islam which is a very, in my opinion, underrepresented and misunderstood religion,” she explained. She told MPR that the administration never reached out to her to discuss her side. Instead, they sent out a campus-wide email calling her actions Islamophobic. 

The university in question is Hamline University. It’s located in St. Paul, Minnesota. That’s right next door to the 5th District, encompassing Minneapolis, represented in Congress by Ilhan Omar (I wonder whose side she’s on).

Taking up Jaylani Hussein’s angle, Wedatalla said, whether intended or not, the classroom display caused her pain. It hurt her. “It just breaks my heart that I have to stand here to tell people that something is Islamophobic and something actually hurts all of us, not only me,” she said.

But it’s not something that hurts “all of us” because there is no collective you. You are an individual. You don’t speak for others—even those who share your faith. To be sure, there are some Muslims who believe like you can hold other individuals accountable to your faith, to make them abide by the rules of a religion that is not there. They even resort to violence to impose their religious rules on others. You have the arrogance to presume to speak for other Muslims. You’re ego-tripping. Who appointed you head commissar of the Islamic faith?

Among men (and women, perhaps to a lesser degree, but maybe not), there is a felt need for positioning in the hierarchy. You can see it in the jockeying for status in the pecking order, formal and informal. Hierarchies, when they are not pre-established, usually work themselves out in what appears to be a natural way, even if the antecedents and consequents are phases of social structuring. Most of the process is subconscious. However, using our sociological imagination, we can see it at work.

From Elizabeth Tibbetts et al, “The Establishment and Maintenance of Dominance Hierarchies,”  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Some individuals feel the pressure of the game and resist it. Why? Different reasons. Some march to their own drummer. Some are stubborn individualists. (Perhaps those are the same thing. Remember being told that the opposite of courage is not cowardice but conformity?) Others are scared to belong. They may feel inadequate. They may be shy. Whatever the motivation, the resisters find themselves outside the structure to varying degrees and may—in commensurate degrees—experience hostility, even loathing towards them. And they may return the favor. These dynamics underpin bullying and other life difficulties. 

One mark of being outside the structure is whether one is allowed attitudes or to make observations that risk being characterized as arrogance or egoism. Those at the top of the structure are permitted self-assuredness and self-promotion even when these approach clinical narcissism. This is because such persons have been successful at hierarchy. Indeed, boasting and bragging are part of success in hierarchies, often with some disclaimer about false modesty. But not all of it. A lot of factors go into the ordering of dominance hierarchies, including probably body chemistry and animal instinct. Humans are after all mammals.

Those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy cower and demur in intensities reflecting their relative positions. Sometimes a subordinate might challenge someone over him, but those who keep their superior position do so by putting the subaltern in his place. Often jest and unctuousness are deployed to manage the tensions in all of this. There is a reward, of course: by being obsequious, one is never alone. The sycophant might even receive strokes of his own, if he is a good dog.

For those outside the structure, self-confidence and self-praise are treated as intolerable instantiations of conceit and hubris. Outsider status is conflated with a special designation of subordination, somebody who can be ignored and minimized—who can be talked over or asked to make an extra effort to be believed (and then disbelieved all the same). This is one of the aspects of human social organization that is so rough on people, as there is a basic human need to belong. I have always had a place in my life for people who are marginalized in this way. I call it the “Island of Misfit Toys.” Indeed, as a contrarian, I have often counted myself among those banished to this island. 

For the established hierarchies in which one must participate for survival, for example corporate bureaucracies, there are mechanisms for compelling those who occupy its positions to serve the interests of those above them. These are preferably endogenously-felt compulsions to achieve, often according to some arbitrary standard. For example the Protestant ethic (aka the Calvinist work ethic, aka the Puritan work ethic), a work ethic emphasizing efficiency, predictability (conformity and uniformity), and control all wrapped in self-discipline and determined by calculable metrics. Those over others want to have some rational account of their efforts in order to hold them to the arbitrary standard. Otherwise, it all looks subjective (which it is).

In the university, for example, the tenured professor, a professional position that ought to see the man who has achieved that title (often at the expense of his family and his personal health) determine his own work on his own time, is instead subject to the administrator’s desire to look good in order to aid the latter’s climb up the hierarchy. The administrator seeks credit for the grants brought in (emphasizing their dollar amounts), the number of articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and the rankings, and therefore the prestige, of those journals. The administrators are not concerned so much with the numbers of those who actually read those publications (they don’t read them themselves), but they are impressed by the number of times they are cited by those who often don’t read them. They tend not to be concerned with the quality of the scholarship unless (they are told that) the content deviates from doctrine or has offended some busybody somewhere. To be sure, gatekeepers are rather good at keeping out the work of heretics, but every once in a while something blunt gets through.

This is the way it works: the honorific titles that come with advancement in the formal hierarchy of the academy depend on spending more than a year getting papers past gatekeepers and juries, with all their biases at the ready, to be read by two or three other academics. If one is lucky. That the content doesn’t really matter is revealed by a cursory review of the quality of scholarship; much of it is crackpot challenges to the normal or pages full of empirical trivialities confirming the intuitive. Those who avoid all this, if they have tenure, are shamed as deadwood. If they don’t have tenure, their contracts aren’t renewed.

It hasn’t always been this way. An article in the Guardian a few years back noted that Peter Higgs would not find his boson in the “publish or perish” culture of today’s academy. Jim Al-Khalili writes that “in today’s climate of harsh realities and impact-obsessed purse-string holders, Higgs would have been unlikely to receive any funding to conduct his research—for he was something of a maverick who worked alone in an unfashionable area of speculative theoretical physics. While lip service is still paid to the importance of funding basic research that does not have any obvious or immediate application in industry or societal benefits, Higgs would struggle to hang on to his academic post today. You might think that someone like him really need publish only one or two papers of (eventually vindicated) Nobel-worthy research over his entire career, but in today’s ‘publish or perish’ climate, that would simply not cut it.” 

Higgs himself believes no university would employ him in today’s academy because he would not be considered “productive” enough. According to another Guardian article, “The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.”  He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.” He told the Guardian that he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980. Higgs said he became “an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises.” A message would go around the department saying: “Please give a list of your recent publications.” Higgs said: “I would send back a statement: ‘None.’”

By the time Higgs retired in 1996, the new academic culture troubled him. “After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department,” he said. “I thought I was well out of it. It wasn’t my way of doing things any more.” He then said this remarkable thing: “Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.” He’s right about that. And the implications of this observation should trouble all of us.

I was chair of my department for six years. My big accomplishment in that role (one of them anyway) was rebuilding the department, which had just gone through a name chance and the construction of a new curriculum (with which I had a lot to do), after a series of departures. We’re a small department and lost nearly all of our tenured faculty members to retirement and other institutions. I am telling you this because, even though I am no longer chair, I still receive Human Resources training notes and workshop invitations.

A common HR communication to appears in my inbox concerns dealing with the non-performing employee, how to document his lack of performance and what to do about it. As I am close to retirement and thus have entered the winding-down phase of my career, I think about myself as that non-performing employee. Not that I don’t teach my classes, read and write science, or serve the university and the greater community. However, after several years of publishing in books, journals, and encyclopedia, I have not secured a peer-reviewed publication in many years. And I only attend academic conferences here and there.

Another common HR communication concerns passive-aggressive behavior. We hear this term thrown around a lot and people get it wrong a lot. It is usually thought of as a habit or pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing problems. Put another way, there is a disconnect between what the passive-aggressive person says and what he does. There’s something to that, but the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the DSM, now in its fifth iteration, defines “passive-aggressive personality disorder” as a “pervasive pattern of negativistic attitudes and passive resistance to the demands for adequate performance in social and occupational situations.”

Among the usages of the word “soldiering” is the act of making a show of working in order to escape discipline or punishment. The worker only works at the expected levels when he is under the gaze of the manager or owner. Otherwise, he does enough to get by and earn his wage. Many workers justify soldiering by recognizing that expectations have in back of them the imperative to maximize the surplus value that will (hopefully) be translated to profit in the market. In other words, the worker does for others and not himself. Given this really, why should a worker work harder than he needs to? The answer: because he may lose his job if he doesn’t and he will certainly be scolded or shamed for being a “non-performing employee.” It is in this dynamic that the worker may develop and exhibit the demeanor that the APA will psychiatricize to avoid harsh-sounding terms like “deadwood” and “soldiering.”

UPDATE November 17, 2023: We’re hearing that special counsel Robert Hur is not expected to bring charges related to the mishandling of classified documents at sites linked to President Joe Biden. Instead, Hur and his team are in the process of crafting an extensive report based on their year-long investigation. The report is anticipated to be critical of Biden and his staff’s handling of sensitive materials, providing a thorough account of the special counsel’s findings. While the investigators have expressed their goal of completing the report by the year’s end to other Justice Department officials, there is a possibility of the timeline being subject to change. In anticipation of the obvious, that there is a double standard at play, as Trump is being prosecuted for his handing of classified documents, CNN and other mainstream news outlets are already spinning the news. I have shown that the Biden case is much more egregious. See Is There an Equivalency Between Biden and Trump’s Handling of Classified Documents?

UPDATE: A special counsel has been appointed in the Biden case, Robert Hur. Hur clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the Supreme Court and (Reagan appointee) Judge Alex Kozinski of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. From 2007 to 2014, he served as an Assistant US Attorney in the District of Maryland, where he prosecuted, among other things, white-collar crimes. This is promising. There is some concerned that he previously served as special assistant and counsel to Christopher Wray when the latter was Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, but we will put that to the side for now. He seems like a serious guy. But I do not trust Merrick Garland at all.

We have finally learned that the other set of classified documents were found in Biden’s garage. And yet another classified document was found at a Biden’s residence. And this disturbing connections is starting to make the rounds: Hunter Biden asked for four extra sets of keys for his House of Sweden office in Georgetown. Among those keys, one for his father, one for his uncle, James, one for Jill Biden, and another for Chinese businessman Ye Jianming. He never picked up the keys because Swedish officials regarded Hunter as a security risk after he smuggled a young woman and a homeless friend into the Swedish embassy building in Washington DC. This was reported in the Swedish press in February 2021. Does Hunter Biden have any classified documents?

Who is Ye Jianming? He’s the founder and former chairman of CEFC China Energy Company Limited, a global energy and finance conglomerate that was placed under detention in China on charges of bribery in March 2018. He was a close associate of the Bidens, and an economic advisor to the Czech President Miloš Zeman. The US Justice Department has accused CEFC of offering bribes for oil rights and money laundering. Ye was detained and put under investigation in March 2018 on suspicion of economic crimes, and control of CEFC China Energy was subsequently taken over by Shanghai Guosheng Group. Prosecutors have also alleged that former Communist Party Secretary of Gansu province, Wang Sanyun, accepted bribes from Ye in 2011.

We know from Hunter Biden’s laptop that Biden not only used his father’s influence to enrich himself, and in extension also Joe Biden, but that Joe and his brother James are the ring leaders of the Biden crime family. They were in business with various Ukrainian and Chinese enterprises. Remember this bit of braggadocio?

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The Wall Street Journal runs a story about classified documents in Biden’s possession—top secret and compartmented no less, some from the time period (2013-2016) the Washington organized a color revolution to overthrow the Ukrainian government in order to establish a forward area post in the proxy war against Russia—with a picture of Trump on it.

Corporate state propagandists are downplaying the story, claiming that President Trump, who, unlike a Vice-President, actually has the power to declassify documents, committed the more egregious act in his removing classified documents to his estate at Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

However, Biden took compartmented top secret documents from their controlled space and stored them at the Penn Biden Center, Biden’s offices at the University of Pennsylvania. These are felonies of the most serious kind. Leaving with classified documents is a felony. Storing classified documents in an uncontrolled space is a felony. Moving classified documents is a felony.

To view compartmented top secret documents one has to enter what’s called a SCIF, the name the security state gives a secure room. SCIF stands for sensitive compartmented information facility. You have to enter the room under observation, and leave your phone and other electronic devices with the guards. Did Biden or an associate with his level security clearance sneak these documents from the SCIF? If not, how did Biden get his hands on them? He wasn’t the President. Obama was the President.

The admitted fact that the Vice-President removed the highest-level classified documents to the offices of Penn Biden Center without the authority is even more troubling given other facts. As we know from Hunter Biden’s laptop, Joe Biden is a corrupt and compromised figure, having made deals with several foreign governments and powerful associated private entities, including corporations tied to the Chinese Communist Party. It is no secret that Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping have been close associates for many years.

So it might not surprise you to learn that the Penn Biden Center is bankrolled by the Chinese Communist Party. This corrupt and compromised politician illegally removed and kept top secret compartmented documents in a facility financed by the only foreign nation in the world that represents an existential threat to the United States of America.

Biden has turned on the legalese: “My lawyers have not suggested I ask what documents they were.” He knows what documents they were. His denials are lies.

The New York Post ran with a story by Isabel Vincent with this headline yesterday after the second batch of classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center: “Penn Biden Center where classified papers were found is a ‘dark money nightmare.'” From the same newspaper that brought you the Hunted Biden Laptop story. This is what happens when you keep pulling at a thread: the cloak unravels.

It has been revealed that the legal team for Joe Biden disclosed the existence of the first batch of documents several days before the 2022 midterm elections. Would this have affected the outcome of the election in which Republicans narrowly regained the House of Representatives?

Surveys indicate that a majority of Americans believe that the FBI and intelligence community deliberately kept the public in the dark by discouraging social media platforms from sharing information about the Hunter Biden laptop, which they labeled as “disinformation” from foreign sources. Many respondents believe that any potential collusion between high-ranking Democrats, the FBI, intelligence officials, and the Biden campaign to keep the story under wraps would have limited voters’ access to crucial information ahead of the election.

Furthermore, surveys reveal that a significant number of respondents believe they would have made a different voting decision if they had known that the information regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop was true. Both Republicans and Democrats appeared to have similar views on this question. A large majority of respondents believed that a truthful examination of the laptop issue could have influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, in which Biden defeated Trump by a narrow margin.

Biden has said he wants to see the investigation of the removal and storage of compartmented top secret documents in an CCP-financed space wrapped up soon. It’s his appointed director of that agency, Merrick Garland, the man who has weaponized the DOJ against the opposition to the corporate state, who is in charge of the investigation. Did Biden just interfere with what is supposed to be independent investigation of his felonious conduct by communicating to Garland his desire that the investigation be concluded quickly while also saying he doesn’t know how the documents end up at the Penn Biden Center?

A detailed discussion of the situation took place yesterday evening on Steve Bannon’s War Room. You can listen to the Podcast here: Episode 2436: More Classified Documents Found.

All this comes as House Republicans voted as a bloc on Tuesday to establish a panel that will investigate the alleged abuse of power by the executive branch of the Biden Administration, giving them the authority to investigate a range of government agencies. The panel will investigate the collection of information on US citizens, and whether the executive branch engaged in “illegal, improper, unconstitutional or unethical activities” against US citizens. The scope of the panel appears to be broad, allowing House Republicans to use their subpoena power to access details of ongoing investigations.

Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who introduced the resolution to establish the panel, argued that the federal government has “abused its authority and violated the civil liberties of American citizens.” He cited examples such as the government’s role in “suppressing information” on Twitter, and the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to create a disinformation governance board. As I reported on Tuesday, the panel will be headed by Jim Jordan, who served as one of Trump’s leading defenders during his impeachment trials. Jordan described the panel as a safeguard to Americans’ constitutional rights, stating that it is about the First Amendment (as we will see, it’s also about Fourth Amendment). On the agenda is Hunter Biden’s laptop. And, surely, Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Predictably, Democrats criticized the panel, calling it a “monstrosity” that will “further empower extremists” and allow Republicans to shut down ongoing investigations into their own alleged wrongdoings—the very weaponization of which Republicans mean to get to the bottom.

As a preview of coming attractions, Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) will be stripped of their committee appointments. Swalwell will loose his security clearance. These three cannot be trusted. Schiff pushed the big lie that Trump was a Russian asset. Swalwell slept with a Chinese spy. Why Omar is in Congress is a testament to the pernicious effects of immigration. Congress needs to investigate Omar for probable violation of immigration law. If this is proven true, then at least remove her from office. But deportation would be preferable.

In its article, “Mutually assured obstruction: House GOP aims ’weaponization’ panel at DOJ,” Politico tells its readers, “Republican lawmakers are empowering themselves to look at any agency or program that they view as suspect. But DOJ is bound to safeguard its own investigations.”

The select panel will operate underneath the Judiciary Committee, and will be chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan.

Politico and other news organizations are preparing the ground for administrative state rationalization of noncooperation with the Church Committee 2.0 by framing it as “safeguarding investigations.”

The is a barely disguised subterfuge. Don’t fall for it. There is a way to squeeze the agencies if they don’t cooperate: Congress controls the pursestrings (it’s called “fencing”). Withholding money from these agencies has in the past forced agencies to release documents and testify more forthrightly.

Church 2.0 is absolutely necessary if we are to stand any chance of saving the republic and restoring protection of the fundamental rights of citizens.

The character of the weaponization of the DOJ involves surveillance and harassment of enemies of the Administrative state, what goes by the name “counterintelligence.” Nobody is safe—not even mothers speaking against the crackpot theories of woke progressives at school board meetings.

This is what Church 1.0 back in the 1970s was all about: exposing the operations of the deep state. If you are unfamiliar with the Church Committee hearings, go look it up. Allow yourself to slide down the rabbit hole. It will blow your mind.

When progressives mock you for using the term “deep state” and call you a “conspiracy theorist” they hope you don’t go look at the congressional record documenting the existence of the deep state and the conspiracies it ran out of its offices.

It’s a fact: the FBI and CIA ran numerous counterintelligence programs for decades, perhaps most famously the interagency war against the Black Panthers and other radical political organizations. The FBI even organized in assassinations of American citizens.

We cannot say for sure that the FBI was directly responsible for the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., but we do know the agency was for the assassination of Fred Hampton, the false imprisonment of Geronimo Pratt, several KKK bombings and killings, and a myriad of other disturbing actions.

And we know that the FBI had a plan to neutralize Malcolm X, MLK, and other black leaders that at the very least set them up for assassination. We know this because we have the documents.

I suspect some of those who know about all of this are particularly concerned that you might learn that Frank Church who headed up the committee was a Democrat and wonder why there are no more Democrats like him.

Church’s personal journey saw him begin his political career as a progressive and a supporter of the Vietnam War. He was a protege of Lyndon Johnson. But the war and his experiences with the fourth branch of government radicalized him. He turned against the war and against the deep state.

With no more Frank Churches in the Democratic Party, it’s the populist Republicans who are taking up the cause of liberty and justice. In the end, the Democrats could not stop the populists from taking the People’s House. Finally we see some movement.

For those of us who remember Church 1.0 and Frank Church there is probably some sadness in seeing how far Democrats have sunk into the slime of the swamp. Today’s Democratic Party is the party of neoliberal globalism and they use the deep state to carry out their agenda.

You have a front row seat to living history. Please take advantage of the opportunity to learn about the real structure of power. With any luck, the awokened will meet the awakened and we can begin to dismantle the administrative state and restore the greatest republic the world has known.