Category: Uncategorized

Are any of you sharing this pic? Don’t. It’s 100 percent factually incorrect.

White skin comes from a expression of a handful of genes making their appearance in the Middle East and Caucuses as long ago as twenty-eight thousand years from present. Fair or light skin is thus a characteristic of the people of the Fertile Crescent, and that includes the Levant and civilizations in the Tigris-Euphrates River Vally, the Indus River Valley, and even the Nile. A subgroup of white skinned people migrated westward from these places into Europe and replaced darker skin populations that had lived there for thousands of years previous. White-skinned people in Anatolia who, some ten thousand years ago, sparked the Neolithic Revolution, which formed the economic and technological foundation of civilization.

Several thousand years later, in the Levant, white people collected stories about mostly white people and produced what we know today as the Bible. Noah, Abraham, Moses, and all the rest of them were white. Noah, whose legend the ancient Jews derived from Sumerian myth, the oldest involving the hero Ziusudra whose exploits are nearly identical to those attributed to Noah, would have been, if an actual person, among the earliest white people mentioned in the written records. Of course, there is no record of these folks having ever existed outside of the Bible, but given where their adventures took place and the time frame, they would have been white.

It may interest the reader to know that the earliest hominids were very likely white. The great apes are white under their fur and we are, after all, a great ape. A great naked ape. Chimps are mostly white if you shave them. Black skin is an adaptation emerging with the progressive loss of fur in the various genera associated with our species (Australopithecus, Homo, Paranthropus). White skin reemerged later on as a dominant trait (or possibly due to mutations, as it may not necessarily be the useful recovery of atavistic traits) among West Asians, North Africans, and Europeans as an adoption to large-scale agriculture and the receding of the ice sheets opening up land to the north for habitation where there is less sunlight.

One might ask themselves whether Spaniards are white. You might be inclined to say so, but not a few people are confused about this. A few years ago I noted that, at an academic institution, a professor from Spain, who is clearly white, won the annual Woman of Color award. That her white colleagues nominated her for the award is revealing of the profound ignorance about race, geography, and history shared among progressives. Why no colleagues of color spoke up is a curious thing.

What about Greeks and Italians? For the most party, they’re white. Arabs? Yes, white, for the most part. Yet here, people treat Muslims from that part of the world as non-white (see Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They Were?). Jews? The largest subpopulation of Jews, the Ashkenazi, are Germanic European. The Sephardim are Hispanic (North Africa, Portugal, and Spain), the Mizrahim (Levantines) are Arabic—all white.

These are of course nations and ethnicities, but nonetheless nations and ethnicities who majorities are historically white. That the skin tone of many of these populations is darker than a Swede’s makes no difference. Whites are no more all of one shade of color than are blacks.

Somebody shared the image of the woman with the sign on Twitter and judging from the upvotes, it was quite popular among the Twitter folk, especially those with Ukrainian flag emojis. I wondered aloud in the thread, if the Biblical characters aren’t white, then what are they? Somebody said “Middle Eastern.” That’s a region, I responded. Try again. Every answer I was provided revealed a profound ignorance of history, hominid evolution, and anthropological classification. (I have been thinking that it might be more useful to teach these subjects in our public schools than social and emotional learning and critical race and gender theory.) I find the notion of race problematic. I don’t believe it’s an intrinsic thing.

Following Richard Lewontin and other (see Lewontin’s “Confusion About Human Races”), I argue that what we understand as race is ancestry. Since offspring look like their parents, both parents and offspring are subject to the force of natural history, and human populations tend to mate with those who look like them and live in the same geographical area, a scheme can be devised to identify different subpopulations based on constellations of phenotypic traits. As history would have it, no scheme needed devising, as humans rather uniformly came to see the world in these terms, which, we later found out, enjoy empirical support. Nonetheless, since racial groups are primitive concepts that fray at the edges when confronted with more in-depth genetic analysis, the ideal would be to shift our language.

However, if people are going to make claims about race, such as that Arabs and Jews are not white, which necessarily presumes that there are people who are in fact white (and racial groups cannot define themselves since there are no elected leaders to define them nor can they demand others change their perceptions), then they should work from the prevailing framework, which divides most of the global human population into three primary racial groups: Caucasoid (white-skinned people living in Europe, North Africa, and West Asia), Mongoloid (yellow-skinned people living in East Asia), and Negroid (black-skinned people living in most of Africa).

You have heard that race is a social construction. You might have heard it for me. I have certainly said it enough times. My students are probably sick of hearing me say it. But it’s interesting that the genetic evidence is consistent with the popular understanding of racial groupings. Geographically speaking, the world breaks up into (1) most of Africa, (2) Australia; (3) East Eurasia (except for North Africa), (4) West Eurasia, and (5) North and South America (before colonization of the new world by Eurasians). Note that the genetic distances indicate evolutionary time. American Indians are the most recent human population genetically-speaking. Black Africans are the oldest.

I have in-depth writings about this in Freedom and Reason, so I am directing readers to the following blogs rather that repeat those points here: Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation and Casual Conflation of Categories. But I want to emphasis the color scheme appearing in the parentheticals does not refer to the actual neutrals and the color yellow. I am fully aware that “yellow” is offensive to many of East Asian descent, just as “red” is offensive to many American Indians, and my intent is not to offend. I don’t like this scheme. Nobody is actually black, yellow, or white (or red). The color schemes is shorthand for the constellation of superficial traits. I don’t believe in race. But clearly the woman holding the sign believes in it, since she is presuming the characters of the Bible belong to one or many—none of which are white.

All of this is well-established. But scroll up and look at the woman holding the sign again. Do you think she cares about facts? She’s woke. What else would possess a person to hold such a sign? She didn’t for a second wonder whether this claim was true or false. Facts don’t matter to her. Ideology does. So confident is she of the truth of the claim that she adds an snark at bottom suggesting that you may be too dumb to get it. What do you think? A BLM rally? I’m guessing so. The intent of the sign at an anti-racist is to express white self-loathing manifest in a desire to deny even the Judeo-Christian religion to white people, as if it were their race that produced those myths—or civilization itself. The deep error of the intent is that race and culture have nothing to do with one another and it is the racist who think they do. (See Culture and Race—Not the Same Thing; Multiracialism Versus Multiculturalism; The Myth of White Culture; Smearing Amy Wax and The Fallacy of Cultural Racism.)

I want racial thinking to go away. But it appears some people care. A lot. And they’re trying to disrupt our common-sense understanding and traditional classification of most Arabs, as well as most Hispanics, etc., as white. You don’t have to be obsessed with essentialist notions of race to wonder what that’s all about. So I will follow up in the coming weeks with analysis of why the left is reracializing selected human populations.

For the record, if he were an actual person (he may have been), Jesus would almost surely have been white. Maybe not blue eyes and blonde hair (although it’s possible), but white. Most whites don’t look like Hitler’s wet dream. But there is an effort to make it appear this way.

The President of the United States has contracted a coronavirus. Like most people who contract this virus, the President is experiencing mild systems. But he is old and frail, so there is reason for concern. Cold and flu viruses present some risk to the elderly and the infirm. One worry here is that Kamala Harris could be president. Of course she won’t actually be in charge (neither is Biden). It just means that America will be represented by an airhead.

Speaking of COVID, when are we going to have our reckoning with the public health madness that first threw billions into unfreedom and then the world economy into calamity? Some have suggested that we moved on from COVID too quickly. Have they not seen this New York Post headline: “Unvaccinated Americans up to 9 times more likely to die from COVID-19: CDC”? The fear porn has not gone away. But neither has our access to information. The buried lede tells us where to find the data that reveals the scam.

Getting past the drama of the headline, which doesn’t really convey risk despite appearing to, one finds that, of those who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and a booster dose, only 0.23 per 100,000 cases led to a COVID fatality between September and May. However, the risk of COVID fatality was only 1.60 per 100,000 among those who did not receive the vaccine. The per 100,000 calculation for the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA products is presumably similar, but those numbers don’t change the numbers of those who did not receive the vaccine, the so-called “unvaccinated” (a construction not unlike “uncircumcised,” which functions to normalize circumcision, an unnecessary medical procedure).

Working out the risk for the unvaccinated in percentages produces a fatality rate of just 0.00106 percent. The difference between the groups may be nine times, but the difference is very, very tiny. This difference is likely explained by confounding variables, such as the likelihood of those at greater risk of dying from COVID to escape vaccination, i.e., black, brown, and poor people, the later factor (i.e., poverty) associated with an increased risk of metabolic disorders, which are the conditions most associated with COVID fatalities. Since black and brown people more likely to be poor, the associations are obvious.

Returning to the case of Joe Biden, his positive test and his advanced age remind us the risk of death from COVID is not equally distributed across the population. For those fifty years and younger, the risk of death from a coronavirus is vanishingly small. The vast majority of those who died from this virus were over the age of 65 and mostly unwell. The median age of death was in the mid-80s. I have discussed this extensively on Freedom and Reason so I will refer you to my past blogs.

Moreover, all the deaths from blot clots, strokes, heart attacks, etc., from the vaccine are left out of the tolls. The Health and Human Services Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicates that, through June 2022, tens of thousands of deaths occurred within hours of injection with a COVID-19 vaccine or mRNA product. According to CDC data, there have been more than 1.3 million adverse events following COVID vaccines reported to VAERS, including 29,273 deaths and 241,910 serious injuries between December 14, 2020, and July 1, 2022 (see this article for details).

The upshot is that the COVID hysteria was irrational and the lockdowns, vaccines, etc., harmful to human populations. There was never a need for healthy adults or children to get vaccinated. Despite claiming that the vaccines would prevent infection and transmission, the authorities knew they did neither. This ordeal will stand as the worst public health disaster in history, not because of a (lab-enhanced) virus, but because the actions of a public health system that has been entirely captured and corrupted by the corporate state.

I called bullshit from the beginning. Remember that. I was mocked. But I was right. I followed science.

“Ted Cruz says Supreme Court was ‘clearly wrong’ about 2015 same-sex marriage ruling,” is the CNN headline. Here’s why Ted Cruz is clearly wrong about the landmark 2015 Supreme Court decision.

The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1, plainly states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” 

Pay attention to this part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States….” By denying the franchise of marriage to same-sex couples, states were abridging the privileges of US citizens. Marriage is a civil right. Civil rights are not a matter for majority rule. As James Madison understood, applying the principle of majority rule to civil rights constitutes tyranny of the majority. Madison designed the Bill of Rights to prevent such a thing. (He had early sought to explicitly articulate this federal power in the Constitution itself. See The Supreme Court Affirms the Tyranny of Majorities.)

The Ninth Amendment states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Read that again. You may be unfamiliar with the Ninth Amendment. It is rarely referenced. Just because same-sex marriage—or marriage in any form—goes unmentioned in the Constitution does not mean marriage is not a right retained by the people. The Ninth Amendment very clearly states the principle here. Read it once more: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Why do conservatives rarely if ever talk about the Ninth Amendment? Now you know why: it’s the linchpin of the liberal order established by our nation’s founders. The American Republic, as Glenn Loury put it so well in 2020, is an instantiation of Enlightenment principles of individual liberty and civil rights. That’s right, the founders were liberals.

Conservatives love the Tenth Amendment, of course: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This is a statement concerning our federal system.

However, conservatives mislead their public by referring to the amendment as recognizing “states rights.” States don’t have rights. People do. States have power (and so do people). The amendment is not talking about rights. Read it again. It’s talking about powers. Marriage is a civil right. States officially recognize marriage to give it the force of law, but states do not have the power to deny civil rights to American citizens (at least states do not have the authority, i.e., legitimate power, to do so, which is the form of power manifest in law in a just civil order). You and I are first and foremost citizens of the nation, whether we are gay or straight or black or white.

Think about it. If Cruz were correct, then the Loving v Virginia ruling, which recognizes the right of interracial couples to marry, is bad law and should be overturned. Does anybody believe that governments should be allowed to decide whether a black woman marries a white man? Are you a racist?

The latest from La La Land: rationalizing exceptions to anti-abortion laws as “not an abortion” after a ten-year-old Ohioan, raped by 27-year-old illegal immigrant Gerson Fuentes, crosses state lines to obtain an abortion in Indiana.

In a House hearing on Capitol Hill last week, Catherine Foster, head of the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life, told Congressman Eric Swalwell she didn’t think terminating a pregnancy constitutes an abortion when it involves a ten-year-old rape victim.

“If a ten-year-old with her parents made the decision not to have a baby that was a result of a rape, if a ten-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape, and it was threatening her life then that’s not an abortion,” Foster told the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines abortion as a “medical intervention provided to individuals who need to end the medical condition of pregnancy.” An abortion is a medical procedure. The definition doesn’t change when a child needs one.

The specifics of the case at hand are horrifying. The young girl was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. The mother is reportedly carrying Fuentes’ baby. She appears to deny Fuentes is the rapist; however, the child identifies him as the perpetrator, Fuentes has confessed to the police, and the state of Ohio has charged Fuentes with felony rape. The mother, who maintains that the accusation against Fuentes is a lie, appears to have lied herself in telling medical staff in Indiana that the father was 17-years-old.

Ohio has banned abortion after detection of a fetal heartbeat, which occurs at about six weeks into pregnancy, a point long before quickening, which is the traditional mark of fetal life. Ohio does not provide exceptions in cases of rape or incest. The girl therefore had to travel to Indianapolis to obtain an abortion. Not satisfied with his state having provided the appropriate medical care to the little girl, Indiana’s attorney general indicated that he plans to investigate Caitlin Bernard, the doctor who helped the girl get the abortion.

Not all anti-abortion activists agree with Catherine Foster’s take. James Bopp, lead attorney for the National Right to Life Committee, told Politico that the girl should have been forced to carry the pregnancy to term, citing model legislation he authored as NRLC’s general counsel. Several states are adopting the NRLC’s model “She would have had the baby,” said Bopp, “and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child.”

In Protecting the Lives of Women: Addressing Counterarguments Concerning Reproductive Freedom, I note the plight of an Argentinian child forced by the state to give birth. In a case otherwise highly similar to the Ohio case, authorities denied an abortion to an eleven-year-old rape victim. The victim attempted suicide twice upon learning of her pregnancy and was placed in state care as a consequence where she underwent a Caesarean section in the twenty-third week of her pregnancy. The baby died a few days later. Clearly, this young girl did not understand the reason and benefit of having the child.

In Segregating Liberty by Sex and the Matter of Religious Freedom, I observe that several hundred women die each year in the United States as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications. I go on to argue that, while folks portray pregnancy as if it presents no risks to girls and women, the condition does present serious risks to the mother, including death. Moreover, pregnancy affects almost every aspect of a woman’s life. To force any woman to bear a child is unjust; to deny a ten-year-old child an abortion is horrifying.

The understanding among those whose conscience is not distorted by the pathologies of authoritarianism that this case challenges the anti-abortion argument explains Foster’s rationalization. She cannot reconcile her anti-abortion position with the real-world consequences of her activism. Her’s denial is a textbook instantiation of cognitive dissonance. Bopp’s take is a textbook manifestation of the authoritarian personality.

Let’s drill down a bit further on the hardcore anti-abortion standpoint to understand all this. I’m sure you’re familiar with this complaint from progressives: “Why do conservatives care so much about fetuses in the womb but not about babies after they’re born?” The complaint is well illustrated in Nick Anderson’s famous political cartoon shared above. However, the contradiction is only apparent. The problem with America’s brand of rightwing conservatism is not hypocrisy; it’s a deep loathing of girls and women.

The apparent contradiction evaporates as soon as one recognizes that conservatives use both cases to run down women they shame for having sex and being poor, sentiments that come with assumptions about who is seeking abortions. The conservative attitude towards either those who have pregnancies they didn’t want or those saddled with children they didn’t want is that both are just deserts for having had sex (whether they wanted it or not). A ten-year-old rape victim doesn’t fit the underlying narrative, and so many conservatives are struggling to explain themselves. Not all conservatives speak with the callousness of a James Bopp (but many do).

Don’t be fooled by rhetoric. Conservatives have written and spoken about Margaret Sanger and the classist and racist program of reducing black fertility through contraception and abortion. There are concerns to be found there. But when conservatives make the case that Planned Parenthood aborts a disproportionate number of fetuses carried by poor and black women, they don’t care that such women are disproportionately affected by family planning clinics; they mean to saddle vulnerable populations, disproportionately black, with unwanted children, keeping them mired in poverty, and then shame them for resort to public assistance. Their’s is a countermovement against the freedom of women to live autonomous, dignified, and self-directed lives.

To understand right-wing conservatism one has to understand the source of moral desire that lies at the heart of their atavistic worldview. It is one of controlling others at the most personal level based on moral understandings derived from the perversions of religious devotion—perversions independent of what scripture actually says (see Abortion is Not Murder. At Least According to the Bible. It’s Not Even Criminal).

The authoritarian and punitive sentiments undermining rightwing conservatism are not unlike those underpinning fundamentalist Islam. Indeed, cosmetics and fashion aside, today’s Christian conservatism represent something of an American version of Islamism. Like fundamentalist Islam, rightwing conservatives loathe sex-for-pleasure (at least publicly) and women generally, whom they view as inferior and subordinate to men. Women are the possession of men in both worldviews.

This loathing lies behind opposition to abortion as much as it does the cloaking of women’s bodies in public in many majority-Muslim countries. That there are conservative women in the West who embrace these controls alongside the men in their communities does not obviate the fact of them. Oppression may be deeply internalized. False consciousness is a powerful force governing the lives of those who rely on faith-belief for spiritual guidance and emotional needs.

It is not just women who suffer under fundamentalist religious traditions. The loathing of homosexuality common to religious conservatives everywhere is obvious, even if the mechanisms to achieve control over homosexual bodies differs. But for America’s strong secular culture, there would probably be very little difference between how conservative Christians in the West and Islamic activists, such as ISIS, deal with gay men. It seems like every other day, some preacher in some church somewhere in America rants about the biblical punishment for homosexuality (it’s death, for the record).

Denied his theocracy, the conservative’s call for putting same-sex marriage to a popular vote is a wish to use majorities to deny a man his right to marry the man he loves. The same is true for his call for putting abortion to a popular vote. These are both expressions of the tyranny of the majority, in this case a majority guided by primitive religious belief.

Both Christian conservatism and fundamentalist Islam are profoundly illiberal in these and a myriad of others ways. As such, both are incompatible with the national culture that has guided the American Republic for centuries—however warped here and there by the factions that so worried James Madison (see The Supreme Court Affirms the Tyranny of Majorities).

The concrete reality of policing abortion reveals its totalitarian character. In the first place, whether a woman is pregnant is nobody’s business. It’s a matter between her and her doctor just as her cancer is—whether she talks about her cancer (or any other illness) openly. To prevent women from having abortions and punish doctors for performing them, the state must surveil both and dictate to them their actions concerning what ought to be a matter of choice and appropriate medical care for their situation. Not content with God’s all-seeing eye and punishment in the afterlife, the Christian conservative wishes to do the work of surveilling the intimate lives of women and punishing them for their choices himself.

As with all superficial moralists, conservatives are quintessential busybodies. Possessing a self-righteous and scolding persona, they fancy themselves moral entrepreneurs. They tell us that they want government out of our lives, but they have no problem putting the government in charge of those they loathe.

This desire to know and control women in every aspect of their lives is rooted not merely in the loathing of women as inferior, but in a loathing of sex for pleasure by others. Not far from any argument conservatives make about controlling the body of a pregnant woman is an argument that blames her circumstances on her sexual behavior, which they regard (often hypocritically) as sinful. This loathing of human sexuality also lies at the root of the loathing of homosexuality.

Conservatives want to tell women not just when they may terminate a pregnancy but whether they may prevent pregnancy at all. They want to tell poor women what foods they can buy, where they can live, with whom they may cohabitate. They want to determine who has sex with whom and who can marry whom. They want theocratic instruction in our public schools to raise up a generation who possesses the same loathings and desire to control others.

* * *

As I explain in Segregating Liberty by Sex and the Matter of Religious Freedom, that men have the right to defend life, liberty, and happiness but women do not—and women have the more profound experience since the fetus is literally inside their bodies—indicates patriarchal assumptions in opposition to abortion. Indeed, it testifies to the deep misogyny we see in the desire to shame women for their choices with respect to their reproductive capacity.

What explains these attitudes? What lies at the heart of totalitarian desire? The rightwing conservative is a primate who presents with a classic authoritarian personality: conformity to rigid and extremist ideology and destructiveness towards things that differ and dissent from that ideology. This pathology disorders cognition and conscience.

Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm identifies the characteristics to this disorder decades ago in his landmark Escape from Freedom. The key elements are conformity, narcissism, necrophilia, and sadistic destructiveness. In sum, the authoritarian is a primate who seeks to control others and punish and even destroy those he cannot control.

The narcissism Fromm operationalizes is not self-love or an over-secure sense of self, but self-loathing and intense insecurity masquerading as belligerent self-confidence. Considering that Christianity depicts man as having been betrayed by a woman and forced to live his life as a lesser being under God’s judgment—a belief terrifying in the absence of knowledge of one’s ultimate fate—, the narcissism Fromm describes is the predictable result of the ontological uncertainty generated by this faith. Uncertainty is often associated with ritual and magical thinking.

To be sure, a lot of people have insecurities, but the authoritarian is an individual who takes pride in his ignorance and has little genuine love to give others—he puts his faith in another world and gives that dimension his love. Deep down he hates himself, for he is a sinner. He is unclean. He has taken to heart that he will always fall short of the glory of God. He envies that glory and so he takes it upon himself to chastise and control others in God’s name—even if the rule he evokes is not found in scripture.

Rather than learning and accepting and striving to achieve the beloved community, the narcissist demands attention for himself, insisting on acclaim for his righteousness, since the accomplishments he boasts about are superficial and self-serving.

Rage coupled with rightwing ideology, which is based fundamentally on hatred of difference, generates aggression, a sadistic desire to punish and destroy, either literally or symbolically, those who enjoy life differently from the sadist’s narrow and rigid ideas of the normality in which he wraps his anxieties. Sadism is about more than jealousy; it’s an intense hatred of one’s own self and one’s own life, which his religion has told him is worthless. He is moreover very likely to experience a material life not too superior to those he loathes.

This situation is what the existentialists called ressentiment, a French word conveying something more than resentment or envy. The sadist seeks to dominate others, and the ability to destroy is the ultimate expression of control. These are the bullies we knew in high school who picked on those they perceived as weak or different from themselves, who delighted in practical jokes of a hurtful nature, who, often high in emotional intelligence (a characteristic of sociopathy), knew exactly how to get to push emotional buttons. The spiteful are overrepresented among the conservative persuasion. The desire to control through majorities is a projection of sadistic desire.

By necrophilia, Fromm did not mean to convey a sexual fetish for corpses. Necrophilia is not simply a love of death, but a desire to suppress and in the extreme crush sentiment that signifies passion for humanity. The necrophilic loves things that are cold and mechanical: weapons of war (guns, tanks, armor, planes), prisons (cold hard steel and concrete structures and isolation), and hierarchy. Necrophilia flows from and reinforces missing or sharply diminished empathy.

This fetish is associated with a tragic cycle in which children damaged by authoritarian family structures impose their damage on their children. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Believe as I believe. And so forth. This explains the pull of Old Testament-style “justice” or lex talionis—“An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.” The easy advocacy of the death penalty and the reflexive celebration of authority in uniform fit easily alongside the hatred and loathing of women.

It is great concern that this attitude is found not in a handful of pathological individuals, but embraced by tens of millions of people. At present, polls show that near twenty million of our fellow citizens openly profess a politics that projects this pathology. And for every one of them, there are many more who are sympathetic. And the number of fellow travelers appears to be growing.

There is indeed a great divide in our nation. It’s a struggle between those who hate and those who love. Between those who want war and those who seek peace. Between those who want to punish and those who are merciful. Between those who want to control others and those who wish to be left alone.

Conservatives need to stop rehearsing liberal rhetoric if in reality they believe in authoritarian control over the personal choices and private decisions of citizens. And, in reality, they do believe this. Libertarians on the right end of the spectrum should unhitch their political aspirations from rightwing conservatism and join freedom-lovers everywhere in a movement to reinvigorate the American republic.

The notion that we should put the locus of control over a woman’s body to a popular vote—that is, put the matter in the hands of the majority and let people who do not know her (or even those who do) determine whether her body is her’s or the state’s to command—is tyranny masquerading as democracy.

This form of tyranny has a name: majoritarianism. Majoritarianism is the political philosophy that holds that a majority of the population, often manifest as an ethnic group, political party, race, or religion, has the right to make decisions that affect everybody regardless of whether that which is affected is intimate and personal.

On this Fourth of July, as we celebrate the establishment in principle of a free society, I want to reflect on the problem of putting the liberties and rights of citizens to a popular vote and whether this notion could ever truly represent the will of the governed.

Majoritarianism is a drastic departure from the organic spirit of America. Whether you think the country should operate as a direct or popular democracy, America was precisely neither inspired nor founded as such (see The Supreme Court Affirms the Tyranny of Majorities). Those who fought a war for independence from the most powerful empire of the day sought and installed a republican form of government.

As a liberal, I am dedicated to the founding principles of the American Republic, as these root in such core Enlightenment ideas and values as humanism, individualism, rationalism, and secularism. However, I am well aware that my commitments are not shared by others. Indeed, I am surrounded by those who reject those values. The conservatives on the one side who vote to force women to have babies are matched on the other side by the progressives who demand citizens, including pregnant women and children, receive an experimental gene therapy.

In Federalist No. 10, James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, openly worries about the mob, what he calls a “faction,” which he defines as a group “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Consider that the majorities in several states whose views on abortion, many backed by religious sentiment, are adversed to the right of their fellow citizen to the bodily autonomy necessary for safe and effective family planning. Consider how violating personal liberty—in this case for an entire category of being—damages the permanet and aggregate interests of the community. In the end, do not all citizens benefit from defending the rights of persons over the enforced opinion of the faction? Same holds for mandatory vaccination. How did authoritarian attitudes become so deeply embedded on the right and the left of the American political spectrum?

The short answer (the longer answer you will find in several of the blogs on Freedom and Reason) is that conservatives are obsessed with a rightwing interpretation of Christianity, while progressives command and submit to corporate governance and the administrative state. In its erasure of individual liberty, progressivism represents a statist and technocratic worldview no less undesirable than Christianism.

What readers must understand is that today’s authoritarianism hails from two diametrically opposed standpoints; the situation we find ourselves in is thus simultaneously tyrannical and polarized. This is why it is so important in this moment that we reassert the liberal foundation of the American Republic and the utility of its governmental scheme for the protection of individual liberty and rights.

In his pamphlet, Madison warns his audience that a direct or popular democracy “can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.” So the Framers designed a constitution-based system, a representative republic, wherein officials elected by the citizens would serve the public interest in a system of checks and balances. Moreover, with a bill of rights, the Framers set core freedoms beyond the reach of the state—and the mob.

Among these freedoms are the right to be secure in one’s person—a right to privacy, implicit in the logic of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments—and a right to be free from the preachments of the various religions, a right explicit in the First Amendment, rooted in the principle of freedom of conscience. The Framers were determined to defend the individual from unwarranted and unreasonable government intrusion and from the desires of organized religion.

Where does democracy fit in all of this? In collectively controlling and directing the agency of citizens whose decisions and actions would impinge upon the rights and interests of other citizens. What I would do with my body is my business. What you would do with my body is also my business. Both are protected by the system of rights and effective democratic power. Democratic processes are therefore liberal to the extent that they give the citizen effective control over what others do that may affect him. The same principle applies in the case of the scope of state action. Those personal decisions and private matters that do not harm the rights of others are not properly subject to democratic or state control and the government exists to protect and defend those rights.

The partisan politics of all this—all this noise on legacy and social media—are beside the principle; it’s just as wrong for technocrats to govern through public health policy as it is for conservative majorities to call the state to control a woman’s body. Both sides forget who we are. I am tempted to say, who we are beyond politics, but it is via politics that we must engage and defend the American Creed.

This has been true down through history. A constitutional amendment formally recognizing the right of women to vote is appropriately subject to democratic action since it defends women against the attempt to deprive them of their proper role in determining their fate collectively and individually in a representative republic. As rational adults, women must also enjoy representation.

Crucially, the Nineteen Amendment does not give women the right to vote; it formally recognizes that right. Had it not been for laws depriving women of the vote, no amendment would be necessary—at least no amendment should have been necessary.

Perhaps now, in the wake of the overturning of Roe, we need to consider a constitutional amendment to protect the right of women to control their reproductive capacity. It is a shame that this should be necessary. This should never have been a question in light of the thousands of years of a natural right of individuals to make such decisions for their families. But since it is a question, democratic action may be necessary to explicitly recognize that natural right in the Constitution.

Appearing to understand the importance of liberty, conservatives are fond of reminding all of us that America is a republic. “This is not a democracy,” they tell us in strident terms whenever there is talk of putting some matter dear to them to a vote. Conservatives are right; America is a republic, a liberal democratic order, not a popular one. As explained above, the liberal part has to to do with the individual and his rights, which are to be protected by the state from the mob and the ballot box, not violated by the majority either in mobs in the streets or as voters at polling stations.

Yet conservatives insist that who an adult can marry should be left to the majority. That rights don’t work this way, that rights inhere in the individual, that rights are only circumscribed by the rights of others and then only when they have a legitimate grievance—all this conservatives forget when it comes to the question of homosexuality.

In Obergefell v. Hodges, the US Supreme Court held in a 5–4 decision that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states and the District of Columbia to recognize same-sex marriages across all fifty states. The Fourteenth Amendment states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Conservatives want this precedent overturned and the question of whether homosexuals have access to the franchise of marriage to be a state-determined matter. Suddenly the question should be subject to democratic action. In other words, Conservatives want majorities to have ability to take away the rights of individuals based on their sexual orientation. Now they want the tyranny of the majority.

The rights that inhere in the logic of Constitution should be explicit enough to not require an amendment guaranteeing same-sex couples their right to marry. Maybe we need an amendment for that, too.

Let me illustrate the way rights work: One has a right, codified in the First Amendment, to speak freely and to freely hear others speaking given time and place restrictions, these to prevent the interference of other free speech activities. By freely we mean talking and listening, writing and reading, without consequence. One cannot be censored, disciplined, or punished for uttering thoughts or for receiving them. Government, the First Amendment tells us, shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. The manifestation of this right means that the speaker and his audience must be protected from those who would disrupt and derail their communications. When protestors at a speech raise such a ruckus that the speaker cannot be heard by his audience, and then in their defense claim they have a right to do so because of the First Amendment, they are in fact obviating the guaranteed right and properly removed from the site of the speech to a location far enough away where they can no longer interfere with the free communication of ideas.

Imagine our right to freely exchange ideas put to the mob for a popular vote. If you say that it depends on the content of the ideas exchanged, then you have straightaway confessed your authoritarianism. Imagine putting a man’s right to pray to a referendum. You will find authoritarians here, as well, Now imagine the government telling us who we can marry or what we can do with our body. You don’t have to imagine it. Governments have done or are doing this.

In The Supreme Court Affirms the Tyranny of Majorities, I report that James Madison was so concerned about states violating the rights of individuals that he designed a constitutional mechanism to veto any such laws. His mechanism rejected in the give-and-take of deliberative committee work, he wrote the Ninth Amendment, which was accepted by a majority of states. The amendment states “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” 

The Fourteenth Amendment is the proper mechanism in conjunction with the Ninth Amendment to identify and recognize unenumerated rights and remove barriers to those already recognized. This is substantive due process. Conservatives want to do away with it. For all their talk of republicanism, they want majorities to determine the fate of individuals and minorities.

Obergefell is good law because it prevents states from violating the marriage rights of citizens on the basis of sex in the same way that Virginia v Loving (1967) prevents the states from violating the marriage rights on the basis of race. Equal protection of the law is obvious. Roe (1973), whatever is flaws, was correct in identifying a right to privacy in the Constitution (if there were no such right, then the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are arbitrary) and the role of the government in protecting that right from state majorities. How do women enjoy equal protection of the law when a freedom specific to their sex is denied while in principle is available to men? (See Segregating Liberty by Sex and the Matter of Religious Freedom.)

Again, conservatives are not the only problem here. Earlier today on Facebook, I noted that progressives not standing up for bodily autonomy with respect to vaccine mandates weakened the fight for reproductive freedom. A powerful argument from principle is available on the abortion question with which to win allies for the argument—or at least point out the hypocrisy of their opponents.

But a different message was sent out instead when progressives argued that a person can be compelled to receive experimental gene therapy for the sake of other bodies. The message was clear: it’s not your body, your choice. The government can commandeer your body for the interests of the administrative state and corporate profits.

When one side’s position is as hypocritical as their opponents, and the two sides comprise the majority of the country, and the tyranny of the majority becomes the political desire, the rational citizen finds the way forward difficult, if not impossible. Progressives will tell us that conservatives are the problem. Conservatives will tel us the inverse. The truth is that both sides are the problem. The solution to the problem to rediscover the liberal commitments that founded the American Republic.

During the pandemic, very early on in the crisis, I wrote extensively about how the Supreme Court ruling allowing forcible sterilization was based on an overly broad application of an early Court decision concerning the smallpox vaccine (see The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes; On the Ethics of Compulsory Vaccination; Social Engineering and the Jacobson Precedent). The Jacobson precedent was thus made pertinent to the question of reproductive freedom by applying it to forced sterilization of citizens and residents in America—a precedent that has never been overturned.

If the government can put a person on a table and cut her fallopian tubes, if the government can force citizens to receive experimental gene therapies in the name of public health, then why can’t the government force a woman to have babies? Does preventing abortion not save lives? In this way of thinking, it’s not your body. It’s the state and the mob’s body—whether the mob comes in the form of Christian conservatives or woke progressives.

Our only path forward is to reassert the foundational ethic of individualism that animated the actions of the Framers all those centuries ago. On this July 4th, let us rededicate our political and moral selves to the American Creed and fight to preserve these United States.

I want to clarify and reinforce key points from recent blog entries concerning abortion rights (The Supreme Court Affirms the Tyranny of Majorities; Abortion is Not Murder. At Least According to the Bible. It’s Not Even Criminal; Segregating Liberty by Sex and the Matter of Religious Freedom). This issue is far too important to not talk to death—and the death I’d like to see in all this is that of the tyrannical impulse to control women’s bodies.

At the start, however, let me say two things I haven’t said, or at least, for one of them, need to clarify. The first is that abortion is birth control. I see rhetoric differentiating contraceptive methods that prevent pregnancy from abortifacients and medical procedures that end pregnancy. There is a fuzzy area in there where methods of preventing the fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall prevents a pregnancy but still ends the life of a potential human being. We can dispense with ambiguity by noting the literal meaning of the term in use, namely birth control. Everything we’re talking about is about preventing a baby from being born. I may be warned about putting ideas in people’s heads, but preventing a woman from having an abortion is preventing her from practicing birth control and this must be said.

Secondly, I have been criticized for using the castle doctrine to justify terminating what I regard to be a human being. I steel man my argument in defense of abortion by granting the personhood of the fetus (see, for example, The Fetus is a Person. Now What?), so arguments operating on the premise that the fetus is not a person are not available to me. (The premise that denies the personhood of the fetus comes with a myriad of problems, not least among them euthanization of those government and medical authorities deem non-persons because they lack the characteristics of personhood also absent in fetuses.) Because I grant personhood, I have to identify a legal excuse for fetal homicide when this is the desired outcome. The castle doctrine is not the only legal excuse available to me. Not all killing is murder and there are several avenues open to those who kill but wish to avoid murder charges. These are: wartime killing, killing to overthrow oppression, killing in self-defense, and killing to protect those who cannot defend themselves (the latter is an extension of the former).

Any good patriotic conservative will recognize all of these types of killing as undeserving of the charge and stigma of murder. Americans have gone off to war and returned heroes. If the war was just, and soldiers followed the rules of combat, then so was their killing. The founders of the American Republic initiated a war of independence to establish a new order of things—or, more precisely, to make manifest the promise of the Enlightenment, an act that in time ended the legacy of slavery and realized the right of women to be full political actors (a right that is at present very much in jeopardy). Any good patriotic conservative recognizes the right of a man to defend himself, his family, and his home from interlopers.

It should be clear that I am using the castle doctrine not as the crux of the legal justification for abortion (although I would throw it in the mix in judging a case), but as an instantiation of the foundational right to defend one’s life, liberty, and happiness, the inalienable rights identified in the Declaration of Independence. It is more than an analogy; such a principle must be assumed or there is no mechanism for defending inalienable rights. In other words, if a woman cannot defend life and liberty, then how can a man appeal to the castle doctrine? In both cases, killing is a means to a just end. This is why the Second Amendment is important—and why it is a collective right available to all. The question for conservatives is why they make an exception for women.

A counterargument presented to me in debate is that pregnancy, except for rape and incest (presuming the incestuous intercourse is involuntary, which makes it rape), is one hundred precent preventable. If you don’t want to be pregnant, then just don’t have sexual intercourse. Moreover, there is contraception that, when used correctly, and if the correct one is used, almost never results in pregnancy.

Previously I argued that, consistent with Nuremberg, another instantiation of the foundational rights identified above, women enjoy a right to withdraw from circumstances they may have voluntarily chose. However, even if we agreed that women aren’t allowed to change their mind after becoming pregnant by choice (and I do not agree), the reality is that sex without the intent to have children results in unwanted pregnancy all the time. Arguing with intent in the mix loses the argument in all cases where intent cannot be demonstrated—and it would be the burden of the state to demonstrate intent, an impossible task in most cases; having sex is not in itself indicative of intent to become pregnant.

Having made clear that the claim that sex and procreation are intrinsically linked is a religious perversion, let me emphasize that sex, which is for the most part intended for fun, is linked then to the right to happiness, which is among a woman’s inalienable rights (see Declaration of Independence). Not to go on about it, but sex is, for many people, one of the greatest things about being alive. It’s why humans do it so much. Unintended pregnancies are therefore inevitable. And this is why abortion has been practiced nearly everywhere for millennia—yes, even in the US at the time of our founding.

There is a related issue that is highlighted by the categorical attack on men suggesting that men should be the target of state reproductive control—vasectomies and whatever. This argument undermines the struggle for reproductive freedom by denying principle. If it is wrong for the state to regulate a woman’s reproductive capacity, then it is wrong to regulate a man’s. This extends to the man’s responsibility for the care of a child. If the women who does not intend a pregnancy or who wished not to continue with it can abort the fetus, then the man who did not intend the pregnancy or wishes it to continue can also walk away. Since having sex is not intrinsically linked to having children, the man can no more be on the hook for the fetus than the woman.

I have written that pregnancy comes with risks. When a person can, she should be allowed to voluntarily accept—or not be prevented from refusing—risks to her health and wellbeing. In this case, the risks are subject to choice. Whatever the probabilities associated with contraception, whatever the rate of failure of its various methods (and individuals should take time to learn about these), the methods of ending a pregnancy, if correctly used or performed, enjoy success rates approaching one hundred percent.

To be sure, there are risks to birth control. However, again, a person must be free to choose those risks. If one determines that having an abortion is less risky than methods of contraception available to them, then a rational choice has been made. If a person is prepared to accept the risks associated with having sex, including having an abortion, then a rational choice has been made. Of course there are risks to having sex. In a free and secular society, individuals must be free to choose those risks. They must also be allowed to have consensual sex without state-imposed consequences.

I have also criticized the defenders of abortion for the manner in which they defend the practice, especially over the language of rape and incest. Granting life of the mother (even those who resist my argument concerning the castle doctrine surely must be accept this exception), my argument goes like this: if the fetus is a person, and the person’s life must be preserved even at the cost of the mother’s desires, then why should the fetus suffer because the father is a rapist or a family member? Remember, I have granted the claim that the fetus is a person. Why should a person die for the sins of the father?

I make this point because I want those who defend abortion by appealing to the horrors and tragedies of rape and incest to reflect on the possibility that their suspect exceptions may becomes part of the regime that regulates abortion. Indeed, across Europe, and much of the United States, abortion is regulated with these exceptions in mind. But there should be no exceptions. The argument for abortion must focus on bodily autonomy and personal liberty, not on a presumption that some fetuses are more valuable than others. Birth control is not about protecting the lives of fetuses. It’s about protecting the lives of women.

I also push back against arguments that use cases where the mother forced to give birth is a minor. In some of these cases, the person is very young. It is hard to not respond in shock to the plight of a child forced by the state to give birth. Indeed, when three years ago, in Argentina, authorities denied an abortion to rape victim eleven-year-old “Lucia,” we were rightly horrified. Lucia attempted suicide twice upon learning of her pregnancy. She was placed in state care as a consequence. So the state literally forced her upon a gurney and cut her open. Lucia underwent a Caesarean section in the twenty-third week. The baby died a few days later. But why is this any less horrible if the person facing all this is an adult?

Finally, and this should be obvious in everything I write, the state must not force women to practice birth control any more than the state can force women to have babies. Observers are estimating that China’s one-child policy, a past program that included forced abortion, has resulted in the termination of 400 million pregnancies. I adamantly oppose any policy that compels women not to have the children they want or that forcibly limits family size. It is one thing to educate and persuade (and we do have an overpopulation problem). It is another to indoctrinate and coerce. America is a republic, not a tyranny. Family planning is not up to the majority or technocrats to determine. People own their bodies and control their destinies in a free and secular society.

In closing let me iterate that the United States of America was not established as a majoritarian democracy. The founders loathed popular democracy. They saw this style of government as not only destructive of individualism, but of progress and justice. We were founded as a liberal democracy—a constitutional republic with a bill of rights that specifically protects personal liberty from government overreach. The United States is explicitly organized around individual liberties and rights. Women are as entitled to those rights as men.

On average, seven hundred women die each year in the United States as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications. To be sure, some of them took on that risk voluntarily. But it was their choice. It should always be their choice.

Folks portray pregnancy as if it presents no risks to girls and women. But it does present risks—including death. Pregnancy can be dangerous. It moreover, affects almost every aspect of a woman’s life.

A fetus may sicken a woman. Women often develop serious and detrimental health conditions while pregnant. Women may be permanently disabled from pregnancy or child birth. A fetus may delay cancer treatments. A fetus imposes many costs a woman may wish not to bear. A fetus curtails her freedom. So she chooses not to bear a child.

The risks and effects associated with pregnancy mean that it must always be a voluntary decision. Even if at one point the woman wanted the pregnancy, her situation at a later point may indicate discontinuing it. She should be allowed to make that choice.

The code of Nuremberg requires that, in human subjects research, those conducting the study always allow the subject to withdraw from the study at any time. A researcher never says, “I’m sorry, Sir, but it is too late to withdraw now. You decided to involve yourself in the study. You have to see it through.” No, ethics demands that a free person may revoke his consent to participate. It is, after all, his body, his choice. The right to terminate a pregnancy is not unlike the right to withdraw from an experiment.

It is also like the right to defend one’s home. But there is a double standard in play. Why are men expected to defend their home and persons against interlopers, but women disallowed from defending their body in a similar fashion? Because the interloper is a fetus? Because the intruder in one’s home is an actual threat to safety and wellbeing?

We have already established that the fetus is a threat to safety and wellbeing. At the same time, a homeowner doesn’t know the intent of the stranger in his house. The stranger may be in the wrong house. He may wrongly believe it is his house. Mistake of fact, as they say in the law. He may not know where he is. He’s lost. He may be mentally ill and in need of help. But the homeowner doesn’t have to determine his intent. He only needs to believe that the stranger may harm him, that he is where he should not be. So he is entitled to use lethal force against him.

What right does a fetus have to be involved in a place or situation where it is not wanted or is considered not to belong? Its right to life? Why doesn’t a stranger in my house have a right to life? The answer is because my liberty is at stake—and I have a right to it. Why is liberty valued over life when it’s a man whose liberty is at stake but not a woman’s? As we have established, there are a myriad of threats the woman faces from the stranger in her womb. These are enough actual and potential threats to justify the expression of liberty in the same way a man can defend his home.

There is a principle involved here. Ideology should not negate principle. It must not be allowed to determine the law. The principle is foundational: the right to defend one’s home flows the inherent right to defend one’s self—his life and liberty. This right allows me to take a life. It is not murder. Imagine the state denying the homeowner his right to defend his sanctuary. This would be tranny.

A chief measure of liberty is the extent to which we are able to remove uninvited guest from our homes—or even invited ones when they overstay their welcome. We have to be allowed to defend ourselves from dangers, otherwise the right of personal sovereignty doesn’t exist. If we say a woman must bear a fetus in her body, then why can’t we say that the man must bear a stranger in his house? Is it his house or not? Is it her body or not? Why would we deny women the right to self-defense and bodily autonomy? What’s the point of the castle doctrine if you have to keep a stranger inside you?

Imagine the state commandeering a man’s body to sustain the life of the woman he just had sex with, arguing that he chose to have sex. Would any man stand for that? To be sure, the man may choose to have his body used in this way. But any man who is okay with the state forcing him to do so is a man who does not love liberty. A man could not be expected to serve as an incubator for the state—a vessel used to grow a fetus—but a woman can and is.

That’s a hell of a double standard. Can there be a more patriarchal assumption? Women are second-class citizens in the patriarchal double standard. This has been true for millennia.

Furthermore, this argument that pregnancy should be compelled because the woman chose to have sex is straightaway absurd. Sex and pregnancy are not intrinsically linked in purpose. If this were true, sex would only occur for procreative purposes. The notion that sex is strictly for procreative purposes is a religious perversion. Only a theocracy would impose such an absurd notion.

Is it wrong to forcibly impregnate a girl or a woman? You know the answer and the reason: No. Because it is not her decision. It’s not her choice. It’s against her will. It’s not just the intercourse part she does not want. It’s being impregnated. She does not want to be pregnant. It is moreover wrong because it exposes her to risks she did not wish to take on, the myriad of risks noted above. If all that is obvious, and surely it is, then forcing her to remain pregnant is just as wrong for all the same reasons. It is just as wrong to keep a man in slavery as it is to enslave him.

Suppose she wants the intercourse, but not the pregnancy. She must be free to choose either. For the most part, we have intercourse because it’s fun, not the have children. (Perhaps some people ought to have more fun.)

Should we feel bad that the fetus loses its life when the woman exercises liberty? One is entitled to remorse. If the fetus was wanted, then its death is tragic. Nobody should ever be forced to have an abortion. What’s at issue is whether a woman’s life and liberty are more important than the continued existence of a fetus; if the woman does not want or no longer desires to carry a fetus, she has the right to terminate the pregnancy. As bad as that makes you feel, her life and liberty are more important than your feelings—or your religion.

People tell me that without life there’s no liberty. There is truth in this, of course. Why am I allowed to kill a man who threatens my life? Because I wish to continue to live in order to enjoy liberty. But the formulation has lost some spirit. It’s missing the part about no life without liberty. No life worth living, at least. Life is not just about existing. It’s about the freedom to choose.

To be used for the interests and purposes of others, to be denied one’s freedom to choose, is to be reduced to an object, robbed of agency. I have compared being forced to be a vessel in which to grow another person is an incubator. A mother once objected that she never felt like an incubator. One may never feel like an incubator, but may serve as one nonetheless—just as one may feel like a valued employee and a team member, but exist as human capital.

This is what moved Patrick Henry to declare, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” One must never be an object for the purposes of the state. There are causes which involve killing. It is why we make war, overthrow tyrannical government, and defend our homes—and bodies.

* * *

This is the season for Supreme Court rulings. Amid the Dobbs decision (The Supreme Court Affirms the Tyranny of Majorities), the Court handed down another decision concerning religious liberty. yesterday morning, the Court vindicated a Christian football coach terminated for praying on the field after games. Joseph Kennedy, an assistant football coach at Bremerton High School, Bremerton, Washington would “give thanks through prayer” at the end of each game by kneeling on the 50-yard line. Students would join him. To stop him, the school board enacted a ban on “demonstrative religious activity, readily observable to (if not intended to be observed by) students and the attending public.” 

It was just a matter of time before the Court recognized the right of Christians to their religious liberty. After all, Muslims have had a right to theirs for a long time. In the document Religious Practices of Muslim Students in Public Schools, the Islamic Networks Group (ING), “a peace-building organization providing face-to-face education and engagement opportunities that foster understanding of Muslims and other misunderstood groups to promote harmony among all people,” details all the ways Islamic faith practices exist in public schools.

Imagine none or most of what ING lists were true and the Court had just removed barriers to Muslim prayer and attire in public schools. How progressives would be cheering. Of course, there were no such barriers because progressives run the public schools and progressives are Islamophiliacs (see The Democratic Party and the Doctrine of Multiculturalism). It was never even a thought. But they aren’t so eager to Christianity expressed in our schools. This is how such an absurd notion as “Islamophobia” can be a rallying cry but complaining about “Christophobia” sounds absurd.

The counterargument is that religious expression carries subtle pressure to conform. The paradigm is the Jew in the Christian locker room. Indeed, pressure can be subtle. But Muslims have been praying in the hallways of my sons’ high school for years. Surely a Muslim teacher prays to Mecca. He must, as it is his religious duty to pray several times a day—if he is devout. Why could he not pray with the students? (What if there is sex segregation as there is in the mosque?) The influence here may be subtle; a kid with a Muslim background may not wish to pray because he wishes to be secular, to leave behind the irrational traditions of an atavistic culture. Would we for his sake stop the Muslims in the high school from praying in the hallways? (We’d be accused of bigotry, wouldn’t we?) Would we tell the Muslim teacher she couldn’t wear a hijab? (We’d be accused of bigotry) How then can a public school district tell the coach he cannot kneel at the 50 yard line and pray to his god and allow whomever among the students who share his faith to join him? 

As long as no student is punished for not participating, this sounds like religious liberty—if we are to allow Muslims their costumes and prayers. Either nobody gets to express religious sentiment or everybody gets to express religious sentiment. School authorities allow Sikh kids their ceremonial knives (see The Kirpan and the Seax) but Coach Kennedy can’t pray? Christianity is no less important to that faith community than are Islam or Sikhism to their own. As long as the public school is not instructing students in religious doctrine, or punishing them for no participating, and if we are going to allow religious scarves and knives, then I think it is difficult to deny teachers and students the exercise of their Christian faith. (Moreover, as I have argued on this blog, we must also allow hoodies and pocket knives. Otherwise, the religious are allowed privileges in the face of the demand that the state respect no such distinction. See The Injustices of Public School Dress Codes.)

Not that I personally find it compelling (after all, the Old Testament positively sanctions slavery, among other horrors, and I am an atheist), but it might interest those who follow the Abrahamic faith that the husband of a pregnant woman who loses a fetus on account of actions by others is warranted financial compensation, if this is not the outcome he desired. The fetus is his property, after all, since its mother belongs to him.

In other words, according to the God’s law, abortion is not murder. Don’t believe me? Read the Bible. Exodus 21:22 says: “When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the women’s husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on reckoning.” Versus 23-25 instruct the court, that if other damages do ensue, that is, if the woman is killed or injured, to apply lex talionis as warranted.

Are conservatives telling men what to do with their wives’ bodies over against the spirit of the Old Testament?

But, wait, there’s more. In Numbers 5:11-31, we are told that the purity test required of a wife accused of adultery will, if guilty, cause her to abort the fetus. I won’t go into the purity test because it’s a bunch of mumbo-jumbo (it reads like a Monty Python bit), but it is obvious from the text that the faithful believe the woman will miscarry if “in fact” an adulteress, a fact proven by her miscarriage.

There is a disturbing implication in this circularity. If a woman goes through the ritual and subsequently miscarries, it follows that she will have committed adultery, which in turn carries a sentence of death. So even if she did not commit adultery, the ritual will have found her guilty as such if by coincidence she miscarries. If the witch floats…

For rebelling against God, Hosea 13:16 tells us that Samaria’s people will be killed, their babies dashed to death, and their pregnant women cut open. Sounds unbelievable, I know, but here are the versus: “Samaria must bear her guilt/For she has defied God/They will fall by the sword/Their little ones shall be dashed to death/And their women with child ripped open.” (This is a common outcome for people who don’t do what God wants.)

There is a profound paradox here: if you disobey God by aborting a fetus, if aborting a fetus is indeed disobeying God, then you will be ripped open with a sword and your fetus aborted. Don’t try to figure it out. There’s no way out of religious contradiction.

What about the New Testament? All Jesus said about fetuses that I know of is this, according to Matthew (24:19): “Woe to pregnant women and those who are nursing.” Jesus was speaking about the end-times. It is not a passage about abortion. You’d think if abortion were such a terrible wrong, then Jesus would have mentioned it.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” —Declaration of Independence (1776)

In Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US Supreme Court held that abortion is not a protected right under the Constitution of the United States, thus overruling Roe v Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992) and returned the matter to the states.

Five states—Alabama, Arizona, Michigan, West Virginia and Wisconsin—have state bans on abortions already in place, which could soon and are likely in some cases to, be enforced. There are thirteen states—Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming—that have “trigger bans” that will outlaw abortions within a month. Georgia, Iowa, and South Carolina have passed bans or severe restrictions that are likely to go into effect. Florida’s recently passed ban on abortions after fifteen weeks takes effect in July. And Ohio just criminalized all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. On the horizon, Indiana, Montana and Nebraska are likely to restrict abortion.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito authored the majority opinion : “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’ It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas, joined Alito in the majority. Chief Justice Johns Roberts pitched in, upholding Mississippi’s fifteen week ban, which was the case at hand. Alito, Barrett, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Thomas are all Catholics (see Judging the Religious; Religious Liberty, Relative Theocratic Threat, and Keeping the Supreme Court Divided; Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism).

I will address the matters of abortion as a right “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” later. (I have addressed these matters in a number of past blogs. See The End of Roe and Beginning Again; The Fetus is a Person. Now What?; Abortion is Really About Freedom; Liberty is America’s raison d’être. Preserving Reproductive Freedom for the Sake of the Republic.) As the reader will learn, Alito is wrong on both counts. I want to pursue at the outset an argument—and observation really—that the understanding of the purpose of republican government represented by the Court’s majority and its grasp of the nature of rights in a liberal society, which America was founded as, is profoundly misguided and, frankly, unAmerican.

To wit: rights are not given by men. As Thomas Jefferson makes clear in the Declaration of Independence, rights are a priori, inhering in human nature and universal principle—from the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” to use Jefferson’s majestic (and deistic) phrase. People, as Jefferson contends, are “entitled” to these by virtue of an authority beyond men. Moreover, governments recognize and defend these rights by identifying and removing obstacles to liberty and happiness (intelligent and fair-minded people accomplish this). Indeed, governments are stood up to secure these rights—in free societies, at least. Those who argue that men grant rights deservedly sport a bad label: statist. Conservatives will ape Jeffersonian language now and again, but in truth, they are too illiberal to be of his ilk. The spirit in back their judicial philosophy, such that we can dignify their ideology using such terms, is authoritarian.

The pressing issue here is the conservative assault on substantive due process, with Justice Thomas already asking the court to reconsider a list of rulings that rest upon that principle. Substantive due process is a constitutional law principle that empowers courts to protect from government interference fundamental rights even if those rights are unenumerated in the US Constitution (which includes the Bill of Rights) and state constitutions. The rejection of substantive due process for conservatives on the Court has at its core the fallacy of “states’ rights.” States rights was used, it will easily be recalled, to deny blacks equality with whites. Opposition to marriage equality was justified on the basis of this fallacy. Let the states decide whether to grant same-sex marriage, we were told—you know, like the question of interracial marriage. Thomas has in mind Griswold v Connecticut, Lawrence v Texas and Obergefell v Hodges. We know because he said so. He didn’t saying Loving v Virginia. But why not?

You will have noticed that conservatives like to reference the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This is “states’ rights.” But note that the amendment is about powers. A power finds its authority in common law, constitutional law, or statute. In a free society, power is in principle delegated to institutions by the citizenry to manage their affairs—to keep them safe and make them happy. Before the Tenth Amendment there is a Ninth: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Ninth is the relevant amendment in the debate over the Dobbs decision because it concerns rights, which are fundamentally different from powers. And not certain rights, but those that flow generally from the foundational ones identified in the Declaration: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Ninth Amendment is the key to the whole shebang.

Roe was one of the worst Supreme Court opinions ever written.

Abortion is not in the Constitution.

More #Verdict on YouTube: https://t.co/XPsaul8GRg pic.twitter.com/hDeC1aM2w2

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 25, 2022

Ted Cruz, whom conservatives fancy on the Supreme Court one day, is of the opinion that Roe is among the worst of the Supreme Court’s decisions. (It’s a bad decision, for sure.) He then says “Abortion is not in the Constitution.” He is correct. However, there are a lot of things that are not in the Constitution. This is why the Ninth Amendment exists. The Bill of Rights could not possibility identify all the rights, not only those known to the Founders, but those smart and just men would discover in the future. The Ninth Amendment explicitly states this understanding. This is why conservatives skip over it and head straight for the Tenth.

At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, the principle author of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, advocated for provisions that protected individual liberties and limited the power of government. Crucially, Madison sought the establishment of a national veto over state laws, and he did so explicitly to prevent the tyranny of the majority in the states. The tyranny of the majority (or tyranny of the masses) occurs in democracies where judicial protections for minorities and individuals are weak or lacking. For example, if a majority in a state can through law compel a woman to carry a pregnancy to term, that is, force the woman to serve as an incubator for the interests of the majority, then a tyranny has been obtained. If abortion is a right, on the other hand, then the primary role of government is to defend that right. If state government won’t do it, then the federal government must. This is the principle of substantive due process, and it is an essential feature of the foundation of the American Republic.

During the Constitution’s ratification, in order to secure the support of Anti-federalists (those who opposed the formation of a national government in favor of a loose network of local governments), the Federalists promised a bill of rights. Having lost his bid to limit the power of the states via the mechanism of a federal veto, Madison was skeptical of what a bill of rights could accomplish. Moreover, several states already had bills of rights. Still, the Federalists sought a list of rights to limit government power. The inherent problem of such a list, of course, is that it may be understood to be exhaustive. Madison understood that no such list could be.

After consulting with Thomas Jefferson, who very much wanted the people to have such a bill, Madison reconsidered the matter. In short order, he became a zealot for the cause. The Ninth Amendment was no afterthought, you see. In the original draft of the bill, Madison writes, “The exceptions here or elsewhere in the Constitution, made in favor of particular rights, shall not be so construed as to diminish the just importance of other rights retained by the people, or as to enlarge the powers delegated by the Constitution; but either as actual limitations of such powers, or as inserted merely for greater caution.”

Madison’s understanding that rights exist a priori and cannot be completely enumerated is foundational to Enlightenment thinking. This understanding is inseparable from the spirit that produced the Declaration of Independence. As historian Robert McDonald records, Jefferson himself claimed there were no new ideas in the Declaration of Independence, citing, among other sources, the English struggle for civil liberties, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the great philosophers of freedom, such as John Locke and Montesquieu. In other words, it is a profound expression of humanist, liberal, and secular values.

To be sure, courts may invent rights. But courts also affirm them. The right to control one’s own body is not an invented right, but among the most fundamental of rights. When the United States was founded, most states operated under the English common law right to abortion, which permitted the termination of a pregnancy before quickening (fetal movement). Laws criminalizing abortion did not appear until the late 1800s. In fact, abortion is a fundamental right stretching back millennia. So Alito’s suggestion that abortion is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” is an ignorant one.

As for whether abortion is “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” the matter is straight forward. Either you believe the state can commandeer a woman’s body and use its organs and processes for its own interests and purposes or for the interests and purposes of others or you believe that personal sovereignty and bodily autonomy demand the right to determine what one’s body is used for and who uses it where and when and for how long. The paradigm of individual liberty and self-ownership is found in reproductive freedom. Moreover, because of sex differences, girls and women bear a special burden in this domain. To demand woman serve as incubators not only violates their liberty, but it discriminates against them.

The matter can be put like this: Imagine the state commandeering your body to sustain the life of a person you had sex with. That you chose to have sex with this person does not obligate you to sustain his life. Sex and pregnancy are not intrinsically linked in purpose. If this were true, sex would only occur for procreative purposes, and that notion is an entirely religious perversion.

Rights are not matters for the majority to decide. Rights are inherent and discovered. Rights exist in the face of majority opinion and sentiment. It is the role of government to protect these rights from the majority, not subject them to the whims of the masses or powerful and well-organized elites. By leaving the determination of rights to state governments, conservative judges on the high court are advocating for the tyranny of the majority. They are proponents of majoritarianism, a standpoint antithetical to the Constitution and the liberal traditions upon which it rests.

“My rights should not be a fundraising point for the Democrats.” 💯💯💯 pic.twitter.com/6hNLQ5tZry

— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) June 26, 2022

I cannot leave this blog entry without saying something about the Democrats. Imagine Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had retired when she received her pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2009 (when she was in her late seventies) and Obama had not lost Congress in his first term. I don’t say this to merely engage in counterfactual revisionist snark. There are lessons to be learned.

Another lesson to be learned learned is the point the woman makes in the video I shared above. It looks like green screen. But I checked and this is an MSNBC reporter and there are other videos from this segment. I’m surprised this interview was aired (perhaps why it looks like green screen to me). I’m more surprised the question was asked by an MSDNC reporter. The reporter seems to go out of her way to record the response, knowing what the woman wanted to say—which was very well said! Bravo to the woman calling out Democratic Party manipulations.

Everybody is beating up on Ginsburg, so I will leave her be. With respect to Obama, the nation had a president who enjoyed Democratic control over both houses of Congress and immense popularity. Had his party pursued a national economic strategy involving a massive jobs program and saving the homes of American families across the country, instead of pushing a derivative of Romneycare through Congress, exhausting his political capital while alienating millions of Americans, we’d likely have a court more sympathetic to Roe. Folks say that elections have consequences. But let’s be sure to remember that political policy choices have consequences, as well. Obama was elected. Twice. What does the country have to show for his eight years beyond drone strikes and resurgent conservatism?

But the biggest lesson comes from realizing that the Democratic Party didn’t care about this issue in the way many progressives think they did. Fifty years of progress has been erased, progressives tell us. However, fifty years of progress might have looked more like a body of federal law protecting reproductive freedom rather than a problematic precedent. Instead, Democrats were more interested in leveraging a flawed judicial opinion as campaign strategy rather than fighting like hell to secure a federal guarantee for abortion (and this criticism applies to several states, as well).

Now that the strategy has failed, Democrats are pinning Clinton’s crushing 2016 defeat on those who refused to vote for the neoliberal and neoconservative candidate. Bill Maher used a recent monologue to chastise those of us who on principle do not vote for what Maher regards as a lesser evil. The woman’s answer to the MSNBC reporter’s question negates Maher’s attempt at shaming. The Democratic Party that has failed women. But I hasten to write that conservatives have failed America. Erasing substantive due process from constitutional law is a very grave development for the future of the American Republic.

Roe was a poor decision, but the goal of protecting this most fundamental right of women—the right to bodily autonomy—is the correct one. The struggle begins anew and we must use this struggle to not only secure the right of reproductive freedom for all women, but to reassert the American legal tradition of substantive due process and prevent the rollback of other hard-won victories in the long struggle for greater justice for our people. The movement to re-secure this right and shore up many others must proceed with new energy and determined purpose—and the best arguments. Those arguments are found in the moral logic that founded the United States of America.

Note: I revised the blog from this morning to add the tweet with the MSNBC video clip and weave it into the commentary. The video so nicely punctuated the point I made—indeed, making the point better than I did!—that I had to revisit the essay.

However useful for electoral strategies and mind control the construct “people of color” (“POC”) is sociologically absurd. As John McWhorter wondered on a recent episode of the Glenn Show, how does the experience of a black American put him in the same category as that of the Bangladeshi immigrant? Moreover, how is his experience like that of an American Indian? For that matter, how is his experience the same as another black American—or all other black Americans? The newer construct “black and indigenous people of color” (“BIPOC”) is not much better. At least it doesn’t try to suck every nonwhite majority and minority into a fantastic abstract mass. But it still lumps people of disparate backgrounds in a way in an invalid way.

Consider a black CEO of a major corporation. How does his experience compare to that of a black man living in a ghetto? The most important social fact of all, namely social class (defined as relative position with respect to the means of production), means their life chances and trajectories are highly dissimilar. The CEO lives in a gated community. He is unlikely to be the victim of a drive-by or a home invasion. If he gets sick, he can afford a doctor. If he runs afoul of the law, he can afford an attorney—and the time and resources the attorney needs to properly represent him. The CEO enjoys a better diet. And so on. Reckoned in material terms, everything about his life is better, and that generally translates to better emotional, psychological, and relational quality of life.

If your response is to say both the black CEO in his gated neighborhood and the poor black man are more likely to be pulled over by the cops on their way to work, if we accept this claim as true, is the same true for the Bangladeshi immigrant? Or a Chinese man? They’re “people of color.” Is the greater likelihood of a black man being stopped by the cops compared to a Chinese man the fact that erases all other facts so as to make a homogeneous group out of the more than forty million Americans? What happens to “people of color” as a meaningful category if the Chinese man does not share the black experience? All they have in common is that they are not white. And if a Chinese man is more likely to be assaulted by a black man than a white man, what does this say about the common oppressor? (See The Rise in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes. Trump-inspired? Not Quite.)

Even if we admit that, out of racial bias, cops are more likely to pull over a black man compared to other racial groups, how does that fact sustain the broader claim that white supremacy is the common experience that validly groups blacks? If white supremacy were such a problem, how did that black man become a CEO? His social class may not matter to a cop, but it matters to just about everybody and everything else. And, as I have shown, the claim that the criminal justice is racist is mythical (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; The Myth of Racist Criminal Justice Persists—at the Denial of Human Agency (and Logic); Debunking Mythologies Surrounding the American Criminal Justice System; Again, The Myth of the Racist Criminal Justice System).

How are black bankers, business owners, doctors, executives, lawyers, managers, professors, and so on even possible if we live in Ibram X Kendi’s world? Kendi’s world, he told a fawning crew at CBS News, is one where not teaching children about white supremacy guarantees that they will be absorbed into and perpetuate it. This is why, he argues, we must raise up a generation of “antiracist kids.” According to Brookings Institution, in February 2020 more than 60 percent of black families were middle class. To be sure, the middle class is reckoned here not in Marxist terms, but as incomes between $22,000 and $125,000. However, speaking in Marxist terms, how does one find in a society where white supremacy permeates everything a black capitalist exploiting the labor of a white worker?

Folks need to see the work these constructs are doing. The function of “POC,” if not its intent, is to lump everybody who is not white (or not European or East Asian, in the case of BIPOC) and treat the majority of people on the planet as the collective victims of the white oppressor. Europe, North America, and South American hold less than a quarter of the world’s population, and these are the most diverse regions on the planet; if Hispanics are excluded, the proportion of the world’s population comprised by white people is maybe around fifteen percent. Of course, Chinese and other Asian groups are increasingly identified as “white adjacent.” Indeed, one suspects “BIPOC”is a way to exclude successful minorities from the POC category to save the argument that inequality is the work of racism (and not classism). Nonetheless, white people, as defined by progressives, remain a distinct minority of the world’s population. Touting the victimhood of an abstract mass composed of those who are not white is a contrived act of majoritarianism with political intent.

I want to note before moving on that, according to the standard racial theory, Arabs are white. According to its guidelines, those of Middle Eastern and North African descent are to enter the US Census as white. Some Arabs are rejecting their whiteness and there is a discussion about elaborating the racial and ethnic categories of the census. Central and most South Asians are also considered white. (See my essay Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation.) I raise this issue because those behind the construct “people of color” do not see Arabs, Central, and South Asians as white (it is unclear whether they see Jews as white, but there is some chatter to that effect). You can understand why. If Asian Indians are white, the narrative becomes complicated: one white population (Great Britain) colonized another white population (Indians). This is as problematic as black Africans owning and selling as slaves other black Africans. Also, if Arabs and Indians are white there are lot of white people in the world and most of them do not live in the West.

(There is an interesting history here with respect to Asian Indians. Briefly, in US v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court ruled that Asian Indians were ineligible for citizenship because federal law specified that only free whites could become naturalized citizens. Following the anthropology of the day, which held Asian Indians and white Europeans to be the same race, Asian Indians were declared caucasian, but significant subracial differences prevented them from being legally recognized as white. In other words, according to the Supreme Court not all caucasians are white. In 1946, Congress passed a law that allowed Indians to become naturalized citizens, but I trust you get my point. Race is malleable. Racial designations change to sustain the antiracist doctrine.)

However conceptualized, centering race polarizes the world in a false way. Peddling lies, antiracism substitutes itself for class struggle; it negates class struggle by obscuring the capitalist imperative and the material relations it necessitates (see The Ruling Ideas and the Faux-Left). By blaming systemic social facts on a mythological etiology, namely that the West operates on the logic of white supremacy, antiracism serves as an ideological obscurantism that defies sound explanations for inequality (see They Do You This Way; What Explains—and Doesn’t Explain—Inequality and Explaining Demographic Disparities Requires a Multifactorial Approach). Antiracism divides the world between whites and their fellow travelers, on one side, and everybody else on the other. On one side is the oppressor—the white man. On the other, the oppressed (see Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; The Wages of Victimism: Leftwing Trauma Production for Political Ends; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones).

As progressives would have it, it’s not a world dividing up into capitalist versus proletariat as Marx and Engels describe in the Communist Manifesto, but a world founded upon the division between whites (and white adjacent) and people of color. The increasingly shrill James Lindsey decries critical race theory as “race Marxism,” but by centering race the politics of woke progressive are anti-Marxist. (The title of Lindsay’s book tells you that its premise is absurd. Marxism is a materialist praxis. If anything, critical race theory is neo-Hegelian—it makes people out of abstractions. CRT, like gender theory, is a form of idealism.) Whites are not a monolithic group any more than any other racial group. There are white CEOs and there are whites homeless on the streets, with a vast working class between these extremes—the same as it is for blacks. Indeed, the working class is multiracial. Their common experience is a proletarian one, not a racial one.

“People of color” is a construct that appears designed to disrupt class consciousness and disorganize the proletarian movement (see The Elite Obsession with Race Reveals a Project to Divide the Working Class and Dismantle the American Republic). It is advanced by the corporate state, its operatives exploiting the work Third Worldists performed in undermining the socialist struggle for economic justice by substituting race for class (see The Mao Zedong Thought Shift from the Class-Analytical to Race-Ideological). This is preparing those living in the periphery for incorporation into the transnational capitalist system.

“POC” is not a valid concept; it commits the fallacy of reification, i.e., it misplaces concreteness by treating abstractions as actual persons, as well as commits the ecological fallacy (see Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment; Critical Race Theory: A New Racism; What Critical Race Theory Is and Isn’t. Spoiler Alert: It’s Racist and Not Marxist; Committing the Crime it Condemns; God is Everywhere—On the Ontology of Systemic Racism and the Faith-Belief of the Progressive). If one operates from the standpoint of scientific socialism, then these constructs are understood to be a counterproductive absurdity. “People of color” is an ideology of class paralysis. And this is why it has become part of the normative language of corporate governance.

https://twitter.com/funkeiro888/status/1536911562560110592?s=20&t=lQTkVAwbPlVxhRW-RsRBTQ

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Horrified by the shooting of school children in Texas, a person asked me why people kill people they don’t know and who never wronged them. I answered that humans do this all the time in war. The wartime mentality escapes the confines of the battlefield. At least the battlefield as traditionally defined. A lot of these mass killers—armed with guns or driving trucks—are at war. They have causes. They have grievances. These are not “senseless” acts (as politicians mindlessly say right before asking for prayers for the victims). They are the actions of profoundly alienated individuals swimming in social currents that have dehumanized populations.

In a world that personifies abstractions, any child can stand in for the one a young man believed bullied him when he was a kid. Any and every white person has privilege and is an oppressor (see Against White Privilege: Clarifying the Critique of a Problematic Term). And so on. When any individual of this or that imaginary community becomes a stand-in for any other “member” of the community imagined, those with grievances feel licensed to take out those grievances against strangers. They can even rationalize that, with their actions, they’re doing justice for others. Social justice. This is the consequence of identitarian thinking. It’s one of the reasons why what I have written in this blog matters.