freedom and reason

From a public health standpoint, mandating masking for those who have not been vaccinated, while allowing those who have been vaccinated to choose whether to wear a mask, is irrational. Vaccination does not prevent the transmission of this virus. That’s a scientific fact. If you are vaccinated, you are just as likely to get the virus from a vaccinated person as from a person who is not vaccinated. And if you or the other person with whom you are interacting is not wearing a properly-fitted respirator, you have near-zero protection from exposure to the virus. The masks that are mandated will not protect you. Again, that’s a scientific fact.

Further adding to irrationalism of such a policy from a scientific standpoint is the fact the majority of population has had and recovered from this virus (multiply the number of documented cases by at least a factor of four and look at the number). Moreover, having the virus is better than a vaccine in every respect. Demanding that those with natural immunity who have foregone the vaccine is demanding those who are less likely to spread the virus wear a mask. It makes no sense from a public health standpoint.

Let’s be truthful about what this policy is about: stigmatizing those who have not submitted to vaccination is not because they represent any threat to others but is an authoritarian tactic intended to punish those who have not followed the commands of those in power. As with the symbol Hester Prynne was compelled to wear in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter to publicly mark her as an adulterer, the mask is wearable stigmata intended to shame those who choose not to or cannot subject their bodies to the unreasonable demands of corporations and governments. Stigmatization is a medieval practice. It’s an expression of neo-Puritanism. Neo-Puritanism, alongside censorship (for heresy) and cancelling (or excommunication), is a feature of the New Fascist attitude. It’s a sign of biofascist desire.

I have only worn a mask in public where it is required that everybody wear a mask regardless of vaccination status. I have always recognized that doing so was participating in an irrational practice, but I did so to avoid being punished. There was also a degree of solidarity in there, I must admit. That fellow-feeling kept me from fighting the matter to the extent I probably should have. So many of my comrades were willing to sign up to mandatory mask-wearing. But to punish some and not others is a matter of fundamental justice. That is a matter of discrimination. To be separated from others via the imposition of stigmata is destructive to solidarity. This we must reject.

Show your solidarity with those who are subjected to such irrational demands by writing letters of protests to their places of business. If the corporation where you work has this policy, write me and let me know. I will write a letter and encourage others to do so.

“Sanewashing” is a technique of reframing a crazy idea, movement, or persona as moderate or “sane” and “reasonable.” Remember the call to “abolish/defund” the police? Sound crazy, right? Who will be in charge of public safety if we abolish the police? Sanewashers want to save the idea come in and clean it up. “We don’t really want to abolish or defund the police,” the sanewasher says. “What we really want is to reform policing.” (It appears that concept of sanewashing was coined in reference to the defund the police movement.)

What’s wrong with reforming policing? Nothing. We’ve been reforming the police for decades (and we have been quite successful at it). That’s not the real purpose of the the sanewashed version. Sanewashers are abolitionists interested in weakening public safety who want to make sure that the audience perceives the idea as reasonable and not crazy. Sanewashers make the crazy sound normal. (In my essay Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds, I reference sanewashing throughout, I just hadn’t yet learned of the term.)

Once you know about the practice of sanewashing, you start to see it all around you. Sanewashing and similar strategies have been a general trend in our society since the 1960s, at least in a big way. The term can be expanded to include rhetoric defining down deviance (what the defund the police tendency harbors at its core) and normalizing mental illness, to take two obvious examples. We also see it in campaigns to normalize obesity, cutting, and other extreme acts of self-harm. One may expand the scope of the term because the angle of sanewashing is to accuse those who challenge a desired mode of existence of misrepresenting that desire. So the desire to pursue a diet that makes one unhealthy is redefined in such a way as to portray the norm that stigmatizes that desire as discrimination rather than a check on self-destructive behavior.

To be clear, I am not talking about efforts to destigmatize criminal or psychiatric labels or health conditions. Rehabilitation depends on reintegrating lawbreakers into society. Successful treatment of mental illness depends on reducing alienation of those who suffer from such illness. Obese people need medical attention. I am a big proponent of destigmatization and helping people get the help they need. Rather, I am talking about a strategy that denies criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and so forth are actual things or things that cause actual harm by redefining those things as normal and even laudatory. The idea that depolicing society is not harmful to public safety is a dangerous one if put into practice. Indeed, just the idea that the police should be defunded because the police are racist against black people has promoted criminal violence by demoralizing a segment of the population.

What explains sanewashing? It’s in part consequence of cultural relativism and postmodernist thought. The idea that there’s no truth or that there are multiple truths, each dependent upon one’s own subjective perspective, is corrosive to normative action. This is a manifestation of anarchy. The denial of a shared reality with objective physical, natural, material, and normative structures that exist or have evolved to protect members of society from harmful behavior presents obvious problems for freedom and reasonable expectation of safety and the preservation of the social order that guarantees liberty and rights.

This is not an argument for the status quo. Anybody who follows me know that I am a proponent of identifying problems people face and overcoming them. The social problems that concern me are too many to identify here, but a good example is my advocacy for the decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. I believe that individuals should have the right to determine what they do to their bodies. That’s the default position. But there are limits. I do not support, for example, the surgical removal of ears on the grounds that the person seeking such a procedure suffers from a pathological loathing of ears. If the person wants to remove his ears, it may be difficult to stop him. He might get a sharp knife and sneak off into the woods. But we can surely stop surgeons from harming people with psychiatric disorders by criminalizing ear removal without a legitimize medical reason. As I explain in Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds, mental illness is never a legitimate reason to mutilate a person.

In Chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels identify the various “socialist” movements of the day in order to distinguish their brand of socialism from the rest (most of which do not appear to be actually socialists).

Among the competitors is “conservative or bourgeois socialism,” a brand of socialism in name only of special significance for the contemporary observer. Marx and Engels’ description of conservative socialism bears striking resemblance to the present-day ideology of the corporate state. Marx and Engels describe this ideology as belonging to that “part of the bourgeoisie [that is] desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.” I will reproduce most of the remainder of this section from that notorious pamphlet below without further comment save for one at the end.

“To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

“The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

“A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

“Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech. Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class.”

In other words, the corporatist solution to the problems of class struggle is a fake socialism that today we call “progressivism,” known in Europe as “social democracy.”

According to PEN America, over the course of 2021, and continuing into the new year, legislatures across the United States introduced dozens of separate bills that portend the restriction of teaching of children and adults, as well as the training of administrators and teachers, in K-12 schools and higher education. Included in these bills are are restrictions on training in public institutions and state agencies. “The majority of these bills target discussions of race, racism, gender, and American history,” PEN warns, “banning a series of ‘prohibited’ or ‘divisive’ concepts for teachers and trainers operating in K-12 schools, public universities, and workplace settings. These bills appear designed to chill academic and educational discussions and impose government dictates on teaching and learning. In short: They are educational gag orders.”

It is true that some of the bills go to far. However, we have to keep in mind that efforts to impose “content- and viewpoint-based censorship,” have as counterparts efforts to impose content- and viewpoint-based ideologies on children, college students, and workers. There is indeed a potential problem in signaling “that specific ideas, arguments, theories, and opinions may not be tolerated by the government.” But this depends on what those ideas are and who is targeted to receive them. PEN contends that, while the legislation includes “language that purports to uphold free speech and academic inquiry. This language, intended to help safeguard these bills from legal and constitutional scrutiny, does little or nothing to change the essential nature of these bills as instruments of censorship.” This is a claim of which we must be skeptical. The problem lies in the deployment of the term “censorship.” It is not censorship to prevent an institution of public instruction to indoctrinate those under its charge in particular ideologies.

There are things that administrators and teachers wish to expose children to that should be age-restricted. If you don’t understand this then you don’t understand basic developmental psychology. Preventing teachers from discussing with five-years-olds the possibility that may not be the sex indicated by the chromosome and gonads should be uncontroversial. Little kids don’t get abstractions, They have vivid imaginations and are often unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. They are highly impressionable and suggestible. If you know about the satanic ritual hysteria of the 1980s and, more broadly, the problem of social contagion, then you understand why we have to be careful about what we introduce to a captive audience of children. We also have to understand that the desire to expose young children to gender ideology is a political project. Those pushing the ideology don’t deny this.

As for the things administrators and teachers wish to expose to older children, in high school and middle school, there is a difference between debating and discussing ideas about race and gender and compelling children or creating an environment in which children feel compelled to receive as true and to adopt as personal commitment particular political-ideological lines. In its totality, the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights protects freedom of conscience, speech, and association. A necessary part of that fundamental freedom is freedom from compelled thought. Indeed, one difference—perhaps the biggest difference—between a free society and an authoritarian one is the right to freely choose what one believes and says.

It is one thing to teach high school students in a social studies class about world religions. It is quite another thing to have them to repeat slogans associated with a particular religious doctrine. You can no more obligate a student to list the pillars of faith in Islam than to chant that the only path to salvation and ever-lasting life is through Jesus Christ. The same is true with partisan political ideologies. There can be no attempt to recruit students to any political party. The same is true with gender and race doctrines. Gender and race doctrines are ideological in the same way that religion is ideological. Compelling children or making children feel compelled to adopt a gender or race doctrine violates the very essence of the First Amendment. It is moreover a violation of their fundamental human rights under international law. A public school’s task is not the climb into a child’s head and either install or uninstall ideologies. Public schools are not to be reeducation camps or a series of programming/deprogramming sessions.

This problem has nothing to do with requiring students to produce the correct answer on a math or science text, use correct grammar and spelling in their essays, or even state accurately the facts of history as reached through consensus (open to revision) by professional historians. However, if you indoctrinate students in the belief that that math, science, and language rules are ideological systems, say the expression of “white supremacy,” or that historical understandings hailing from the standpoint of marginalized groups must be given epistemic privilege, then you run afoul of the First Amendment (and the norms of objectivity). If you teach children as fact that some of them live on stolen land, that some of them bear historical responsibility for the actions of their ancestors, or that some of them enjoy racial privilege at the expense of other children with a different skin color, then you run afoul of the First Amendment, not to mention the truth. You are not teaching in these instances. You are engaged in indoctrination.

As a matter of democratic principle, almost everything public educators do should be transparent to parents and taxpayers. This does not mean that teachers should not enjoy academic freedom or freedom of conscience, or that in the case of abusive relations at home children should not enjoy some expectation of confidence with a counselor (admittedly a tricky area, there are extraordinary cases). Rather, it means curricula and pedagogical techniques should be available for review by parents and concerned and interested citizens.

In a democracy, the people have a right to know what the institutions that serve them and their communities (and I mean here actual communities, not abstract or rhetorical ones) are doing and to criticize those policies and practices—and to reform them if they do not meet constitutional standards. Public education should not be a black box. Public education should not consist of programs to indoctrinate children in the ideologies consuming the professional-managerial class that has captured the institutions of our republic.

I am writing this today because the flood of bills coming out of the states concerning race and gender ideology are uniformly met by progressives as violative of academic freedom—a sentiment reflected in the PEN document I have shared with you. To be sure, some of the bills go too far by essentially banning discussion of ideas that may, in an age-appropriate manner, and in an even-handed and objective manner, be entertained in a classroom. But the blanket condemnation of these bills is knee-jerk. It does not reflect what is actually in many of them. Moreover, a lot of what will follow passage of these bills will work itself out in practice. There will be court challenges. There will be an emerging consensus. But something must be done to stifle the woke turn corrupting public education. Public education has become clearly ideological and in a particular direction. It shouldn’t be ideological at all. It may not be possible to get ideology out of everything, but this should be the goal.

I have heard the righteous indignation from teachers about these bills (remember, I am a college teacher). Administrators and teachers as functionaries of a public institutions really don’t have a right be get defensive over calls for transparency. When it comes to the rights of individuals before state power, then the notion that, if one has nothing to hide, then one should not remain silent, has purchase. But this principle is not true for the government and its institutions and its functionaries. Government actors who attempt to conceal the operation of public institutions deserve suspicion and are subject to review. The burden switches in these respective situations. If they’re doing nothing wrong, then there is no reason to hide curricula and pedagogy from parents and the public generally—and administrators and teachers shouldn’t be the ones deciding what’s right and wrong in a democracy. That’s for the people to decide where not limited by the inherent rights of the individual. When it comes to children, parents have a special right to know what is going on and to object if they believe it is harming their children.

What you can do as a defender of democratic and liberal freedoms is tell your legislators where these bills go too far and how they can be improved, and then help your neighbor understand the importance of transparency and public and parental oversight in curricular and pedagogical matters.

(For more about the training piece of this problem see Can I Get an “Amen” to That? No, But Here’s Some Fairy Dust; The Woke Church and the Threat to Free Speech and Religious Liberty. For more on critical race theory, see Critical Race Theory: A New Racism. I have written quite a lot on this topic, but that should give some idea of the spirit of my writing.)

From the Communist Manifesto: “Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.  10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.”

I am lecturing on the Communist Manifesto in a few days and I anticipate a question about the progressive income tax plank of that famous what-is-to-be-done list. There are also planks about free public education and central banking that might stir student curiosity. Several of these other planks have come to pass in some partial form or another. Are we a communist society? A socialist society? We’re neither, and the indication is that the realization of these planks in practice move society towards a socialist end, which is a means to communism, but do not complete the transition (the final destination is never clearly defined in Karl Marx’s work). Planks 1, 3, 6, 8, and 9 if achieved would signal a clear path to socialism. Planks 2, 4, 7, and 10 less so (obviously). Why are so many planks at least partially institutionalized in a capitalist system? Based on what I have argued on Freedom and Reason, the problem of capitalist crises and the emergence of the corporate state necessitate many of these appearances. The ultimate question in all of this concerns social class, not one of innovations from an itemized list generated more than 170 years ago.

In preparing for these questions I have been looking at recent facts and trends and found information on the question of income taxes that I want to blog about today. Also, Tax Day is not that far off and records are already arriving in the mail. The Internal Revenue Service is slower with data dumps than the Bureau of Justice Statistics, but these are fairly recent (2018 and 2019 numbers). These statistics come from the Tax Foundation. First, the United States sits atop a huge economy. Income captures only part of it. In 2019, taxpayers reported earning almost 12 trillion dollars in adjusted gross income. They paid some paid some 1.6 trillion trillion in individual income taxes. The top one percent of taxpayers paid an average individual income tax rate of 25.6 percent, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (which is 3.5 percent). The share of the federal individual income paid by the top one percent was nearly 40 percent of all revenue. The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all individual income taxes (the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent). The top one percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (at nearly 40 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (just over 29 percent).

Does this mean the tax structure is progressive? Not nearly as progressive as it was under Eisenhower (I am sidestepping the matter of wages versus income, earned and unearned, to keep things simple). Johnson slashed taxes in the 1960s, fulfilling Kennedy’s promise the Chambers of Commerce and the globalists and kicking off the trend towards less progressivity. Clinton raised taxes in the early 1990s (within only a few years, the nation started running budget surpluses) but then, beginning with G.W. Bush, a new wave of tax cutting was initiated. To capture these changes, I share a chart from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez from a few years ago published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Given the long throw of history covered in this blog, the article is recent enough for our purposes today, which are, admittedly, not very ambitious. The charts cover other forms of taxes, so this will allow me to make a point about progressivity overall.

As you can seem the system remains substantially progressive on the income side. The pattern has not changed much since 2004, so, as I said, this article will do (if it doesn’t, please let me know in the comment section). What was sharply reduced after 1960 were corporate taxes and estate taxes. Moreover, payroll taxes have expanded, and these impact workers the most. Thus, despite the retention of a substantially progressive income tax scheme, the overall system of taxation has become rather regressive. Deeper questions remain unexplored: what and who generates income and how do we reckon wealth in discussions of inequality? The superrich have stores of natural wealth and the social surplus that income tax statistics don’t capture. This means looking at estates, etc.. But this must be said about the taxation of income: one would expect to see the rich and well off paying most of income tax revenues given that, by definition, the rich and well off take most of the income—and most of everything else.

Yesterday, just before the fourth NTAS expired (which is today), Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas issued a National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding “the continued heightened threat environment across the United States.” The threats in question are not the continuing coercive behavioral and medical programs of the public health apparatus. Nor are they the drastic rise in criminal violence occurring in American cities. What are those threats? This is the subject of today’s blog. Here’s the spoiler: For the most part, citizens who dissent from the transnationalist program of managed decline of the American Republic constitute the “continuing heighten threat environment.”

The current NTAS reports (for much of this I am quoting from the press release as the actual document is a tedious series of bullet-points): “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM)….” You may be unfamiliar with the latter term, as it is not one usually deployed in such an open manner. Although meaning different things, the first two are often carelessly used interchangeably. So let’s clarify. The standard definition of the terms are these respectively: sincerely held but false beliefs (misinformation); purposeful dissemination of false belief (disinformation); circulation of true or false information to sow division and destabilize the status quo (mal-information). The DHS lumps these together as MDM.

Those engaged in MDM are referred to as “threat actors.” You have to grasp the consciousness of the New Fascism to fully understand to whom they are referring. We know Antifa and BLM are not among the “threat actors” who moved the Biden-Harris regime to establish (the move was announced on the first day of Biden’s presidency) the new domestic terrorism branch within DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis “dedicated to producing sound, timely intelligence needed to counter domestic terrorism-related threats”—even while those entities represented the forces of chaos throughout the nation during the summer and fall of 2020 (and one suspects those forces will return). Spokespersons for the security state apparatus will point to January 6, 2021 Capitol affair as the reason, but it’s a claim that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s much broader than those who walked through the Capitol building that day.

The bulletin identifies “foreign terrorist organizations” (which must by now include the Canadian trucker convoy). Based on the “soft targets” identified one presumes that the small number of white supremacists at the margins of US society are also on the list. But the bulletin’s rhetoric concerning what is at stake must necessarily includes another, much larger group. According to the press release, “These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.” The discord and unrest sought by foreign terrorists organization is only in the heads of jihadis. The vast majority of Americans find Islamism repugnant, and those who don’t are the last persons to concern the DHS. Likewise, the white supremacists enjoy no significant support among the American population.

It’s clear from the pattern of words spoken and actions taken of late that those who actually comprise the “threat environment” are patriotic Americans who, as did the American Revolutionaries, question government action and call for reigning in state power. The first items in the bulletin itself include “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.” Since when did concerns for election integrity and fraud and mass vaccination programs constitute domestic terrorism? “Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021,” the document claims. Was the United States subject to violent extremists attacks through the previous year? Is the bulletin referring to parents at school board meetings objecting to mask mandates and the indoctrination of their children in racist ideology? The tens of thousands who attended MAGA rallies? The tens of millions of downloads of the War Room: Pandemic?

These manifestations and more indeed represent something terrifying to elites. Consider these words from our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence: “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. —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Against the odds, the American Revolution achieved this state of affairs. It was accomplished with unity and purpose—and, as a historical fact, violence. However, with the ascendancy of the corporate state following Reconstruction, the republic became corrupted and was derailed. Progressive Democrats installed a new government—a technocracy. What governs today is the imposition of counterrevolutionary forces. In the demand to defend of life and liberty and the human desire to pursue happiness, the objective of the patriot is clear: dismantle the corporate state and its technocracy and restore and renew the republic. To the ears of oligopolists and globalists, criticisms of corporate governance and the administrative state, calls for popular action against the tyranny of the power elite and the restoration of the republic sound discordant and destabilizing. People demanding back their country is a scary sound to the elites who stole it.

This is a nation founded on the principle of limited government and the elevation of the rights and liberties of creative and productive individuals above the desires of mobs and the powerful minorities who inspire and direct them. This is a Constitutional Republic that, in its Bill of Rights, explicitly protects religious liberty and the rights to speech, the press, assembly, and association (First Amendment), the right to be armed (Second Amendment), the right to be secure in one’s person, papers, and effects (Fourth Amendment), as well as in the sanctuary of one’s own mind (Fifth Amendment), the right to be treated with dignity (Eight Amendment), the recognition of negative liberty (Ninth Amendment), and the right to a federal system of republic states (Tenth Amendment). The corporate state negates these liberties and rights. Republican freedom is not possible in a transnational system under corporate rule and centralized state power. Corporate state rule is established through coercion, intimidation, surveillance, and violence.

Review the bullet points towards the end of the press release. Here’s a summary for your convenience: The CP3 provides “communities” with “resources and tools” to prevent “individuals from radicalizing to violence.” DHS’s Homeland Security Grant Program now designates “domestic violent extremism” as a “National Priority Area.” Tens of millions of dollars have been allocated for “target hardening and other physical security enhancements.” And there are “increased efforts to identify and evaluate MDM, including false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories spread on social media and other online platforms.” These efforts involve “enhanced collaboration with public and private sector partners [to] increase the Nation’s cybersecurity through the Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).”

In all this, DHS wants to reassure Americans that the Department of Homeland Security “has renewed its commitment to ensure that all efforts to combat domestic violent extremism are conducted in ways consistent with privacy protections, civil rights and civil liberties, and all applicable laws.” I can hear those who know the history of the DHS and the organizations orbiting its sun laughing through the Internet. But laughter will come to an end in the coming months. “The months preceding the upcoming 2022 midterm elections,” warns the bulletin, “could provide additional opportunities for these extremists and other individuals to call for violence directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers.” It should be obvious from this and other actions that the ground is being prepared for efforts to undermine the populist movement. The see the Red Tide coming and they mean to mitigate its effects.

The press release warns the nation: “Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation.” What are the ideological beliefs and grievances to which they refer? If you are ever unclear as to what motivates the tyranny of corporate state action refer to the items enumerated in the previous paragraph. Liberty is the antithesis of totalitarianism.

I’ve been studying fascism for longer than I have studied most other things. My life-long commitment to libertarian principles periodically forces the problem of authoritarianism front-and-center in my thinking. Especially lately. It’s no fantastical worry; the objective and reactionary character of the current period should alarm all rational persons. What I have learned over these many years of study is that the core emotional and psychical preconditions for the development or manifestation of the authoritarian personality are fear, hate, and resentment. However, these do not also manifest in the same obvious ways. So, in the same way the critique of political economy must be renewed in light of changing appearances, so must the analysis of fascism. Indeed, these are inextricably linked. Fascism is a superstructure.

Fascists seek power and control—and to be controlled—because the inevitable perils of life terrify them and because they possess a deep-seated misanthropy, the latter deceptively coded as humanitarianism. They are especially fearful of those who lie outside of the the tribe with which they identity, which need not necessarily be based on race. The fascist who has climbed into their head instructs them to see their fellow human beings as threats to health and safety, especially as disease vectors, even with ideas a contagion. It is not that health and safety are rational concerns; they are highly selective in predictable ways. Violence, for example, is not objectionable from the standpoint of an ideology that seeks to limit autonomy. Indeed, in this case, it is righteous.

In a recent podcast, I discussed how Whoopi Goldberg got into trouble by suggesting that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. Of course, she was wrong. At the same time, the Holocaust wasn’t only about race. When people center the Judeocide exclusively a myopia is obtained that obscures the pathological obsession with hygiene that marks Nazi ideology. Indeed, this bears on an intrinsic piece of the deeper motivational character behind the Judeocide. Jews and Gypsies, who were white, were seen by ethic Germans and other whites as the bearers of disease, and this was translated into racial terms (this is actually why Goldberg was suspended). But don’t forget about Aktion T4, the Nazi program of involuntary euthanasia of the aged, the incurably sick, and the mentally and physically defective. Don’t forget about the persecution of religious, political, and sexual deviants and “special treatment.” Remember the medical experiments, the Nazi doctors at Nuremberg.

Nazism was in its day the apogee of the biosecurity state. With a deadly fetish for hygiene, every individual was put under the administrative control of the public health apparatus. Every individual was required to accept the terms of health from standpoint of the regime or suffer the consequences. Sometimes submission wasn’t even good enough. Jimmy Dore is incredulous that he was so hated after being injured by the Pfizer shot. There is a reason for that. Dore and the scores of other injured persons contradict the narrative. They are the worst. (See Biden’s Biofascist Regime; Fascism Becoming Under Cover of COVID-19 Hysteria.)

This pathology—an instantiation of mass formation psychosis—redirects the angst and anxiety felt at the conditions of alienation, anomie, depersonalization, and disenchantment that come about as loss of control in a class-segmented society, manifest as trepidation of disease, death, and deviation, by identifying concrete manifestations of manufactured concerns by selectively targeting concrete individuals. Classes of people are invented and labeled (“unvaccinated,” “domestic terrorist”) and subjected to marginalization in order to generate popular support for state control. Rather than blame the powerful entities that actually control their lives, namely the corporation and the state and technocracy it directs, a segment of the population is instead induced to blame those who are like themselves but who have been separated from them and marked as different. The blame game prepares obedient for integration with the corporate state. (A version of this is seen in the Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a fascistic moment in what would become a corporate state.)

The authoritarian personality finds especially loathsome the unafraid, those who are calm, rational, and self-assured, because such persons represent the antithesis to the neuroticism of the fascist mind—the latter that is the actual object of their loathing (more on this in a moment). The fascist sees those outside the tribal boundaries, the bearers of disease and chaos (not their chaos, of course) as their enemy, as pariah, witches and racists, and deploy with little or no prompting the politics of personal destruction and reputational ruination. They poison the well by accusing those who expose corporate state propaganda and machinations as themselves spreading disinformation and misinformation and disorder. They accuse them of “putting lives at risk,” while at the same time rationalizing extreme impositions on freedom as necessary and trivial. The fascist personality is at once an inquisitorial mentality, always searching out those who deviate from prevailing doctrine and narrative, using persecution of others to signal virtue. This is the character of modern-day progressivism.

It is crucial to recognize that fascism is in its emotional and psychical elements, certainly among the masses, but often even among the leaders of the countermovement (fascism is always moving counter to autonomy, democracy, liberty, and personal sovereignty), ultimately an expression of self-loathing. One sees this in in the way the white progressive eagerly steps up to the altar of social justice to confess her racism and seek atonement for her sins—even as she later screams at the unmasked (and presumably unvaccinated) black man on the elevator or the poor Hispanic man at the supermarket. Fascism conveys the circumstances of a people having fallen from grace, an existential condition for which redemption is sought albeit never consistently. Redemptive desire always finds its satisfaction in an escape from freedom, as it always misspecifies the problem. It is a false consciousness. Thus the tribal identity for progressive whites involves a rhetorical subordination to the myth of black subjection, a ritual that drags into its vortex the many blacks who object to being used by elites in this manner. (See why it is so important to renew the analysis from time-to-time?)

This is why the sacred word has become the moral panic of the moment. It is no coincidence that those with Black Lives Matter yard signs are the same people who live in terror of one of the dozens of cold virus that circulate the planet every year, who see children as such a grave threat to their health that they mask them up, put them in plexiglass boxes, and beg the state to let them inject into their little bodies gene therapies for a disease that presents no reasonable threat to them—therapies that ultimately won’t protect the adults from the disease anyway. It’s no coincidence that such a countermovement would reimagine an external cultural imposition as an internal and essentialist force requiring the modifications of bodies with immature and still plastic minds. Don’t bother pointing out the contradictions. Fascism is not rational. As political scientist Michael Parenti told us years go, fascism is the rational manipulation of irrationality. 

See important update below!

Pro tip (literally): Scientists and experts disagree about stuff all the time. True consensus in science is reached very rarely and only after a lengthy period of study and replication. Even then, the consensus can unravel with a novel interpretation or in light of discovery. That’s why we don’t censor arguments and disagreements in science. Ever. Argument and disagreement are what make science work. In censoring information and corrupting knowledge, the corporate state is engaged in anti-scientific practice.

The corporate state is acting like a fundamentalist religious institution where speech contrary to doctrine is heresy and those who persist in it are punished and excommunicated. The heterodox are treated as heretics. Those who do not accept opinion handed down from on high are treated as infidels. They are marginalized and ridiculed. Instead of objectivity and reason, the corporate state resorts to authoritarianism and the politics of reputational destruction and character assassination. These attitudes and practices are the diametric opposite of science.

What the corporate state portrays as science, along with the anti-scientific attitude and practices described above, is what I call “scientism.” Scientism is ideology pitched as science. The rational person has every justification in doubting claims made by those hailing from this ideological standpoint in the same way the rational person has reason to doubt the preachments of religious clerics. Indeed, a rational person should be very suspicious of such behavior, as it strongly suggests the actor does not have the science to back up his claims. When authorities do not want you to see what they are doing or to hear challenges to their claims, that strongly indicates deception.

If the authorities want to understand vaccine hesitancy and skepticism, they should take a long hard look at their own statements and conduct.

Scientism is an ideology used to legitimize control over a population in the name of public health, a major component of the technocracy. Taken on its face, the construct “unvaccinated” is absurd, since everybody is unvaccinated in one way or another. I haven’t had the smallpox vaccine. Nor have I been vaccinated for rabies. And there are others I have not had. The term is not really about public health but is a novel category being used to create a new class of people who can be subjected to corporate state control.

I am happy to see more people speaking up about the emerging control system, but we could see this coming from a long way off and folks are a bit late to struggle. It should never have gotten this far.

* * *

Update!

The CDC is now admitting what I have been telling you for months. Natural immunity is far superior to vaccination. I have natural immunity! Yay!

According the case numbers, there have now been over 65 million people that have recovered from COVID-19 in the United States. This number is much larger in reality given that there are likely between 4-5 infections that are never recorded as cases. Some of these are reinfections. Nonetheless, it is likely that most people in the United States have had COVID-19. Many of them would never know it because they are asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms.

With the failure of mass vaccination in halting the spread of the new variant, even in those who are vaccinated, the CDC is finally acknowledging the strong protection provided from immunity after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

That’s right, the CDC is finally admitting that natural immunity is superior to immunity produced by the vaccines.

In the report, researchers analyzed COVID-19 cases in California and New York from May 30 to November 20, comparing the risk of new SARS-CoV-2 infection among several groups. They found that with the emergence of the delta variant, natural immunity was more protective against infection than vaccination.

And not by a little. By a lot. Hold on to your hats, these are gale-force numbers:

Infection rates among those with natural immunity were 29-fold lower in California and almost 15-fold lower in New York compared to the vaccinated (6-fold lower and 4.5-fold lower respectively). Crucially, hospitalization tracked infection rates. In other words, those with natural immunity were less likely to be hospitalized from infection than those who were vaccinated.

Why? For precisely the reason I told you: natural immunity is more robust and durable than the vaccine. When a person is infected with a virus, the immune system is exposed to all parts of the virus (including the spike protein). This means that the immune response is faster and more comprehensive.

Moreover, the immune system is able to respond effectively to a greater range of variants (or mutants). When the virus changes its spike, the vaccines don’t work because they were narrowly engineered to respond just to the spike—and a particular structure of spike at that (what a stupid vaccine). Natural immunity is not neutralized by mutations in the spike. It knows the genome.

Why am I right about this? Because I understand the science and I am not owned by Big Pharma. I knew this all along. It’s a matter of public records over at Freedom and Reason.

But if I knew this all along, then the experts knew this all along. Clearly I don’t know more than they do. So if they knew this all along, then why didn’t they tell you about natural immunity? Because they want you to take the vaccines. Why do they want you to take the vaccine? Power and profit.

How can they demand vaccine passports if those who have better immunity from natural infection are sqfer to be around than the vaccinated?

Please spread the “news.” Now that the CDC admits it, you can hopefully share the information without being called “antivaxxers.” Nah, who am I kidding. They’ll call you that anyway. But let them. After all, you’re already a racist. What more can they say about you than that?

That there is a major labor uprising in Canada right now that is either ignored or maligned by progressives, who tell you they stand with working people, coupled with the fact that the left (and I mean here the so-called left) is not up in arms about the way labor is being portrayed (as racists and whatnot), tells you just about everything you need to know about the authenticity of the left today. The truth of today’s left is this: it is aligned with corporate power and the administrative state.

You should find remarkable that a party calling itself the Liberal Party could be so profoundly illiberal as to mandate that truckers self-isolate upon crossing the border. The demand is damned unscientific, too. The virus is in Canada. What do these politicians think they’re keeping out? Of course, unscientific thinking is characteristically illiberal, as well. What we are witnessing is why I am so particular about language. You cannot be this illiberal and still call yourself liberal. I’m not having it.

I explained this in my recent essay The Democratic Party is Not the Party of Liberal Politics, but I want to take another whack at it (and I am almost certain this won’t be my last whack). A liberal is an strong advocate of liberalism. Here we can trust the Internet: liberalism is “relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.” (We might qualify democracy as specifically republicanism, but this is basically it. I deal with the free enterprise question in my January 2017 essay The Contradiction in Liberalism. That something is internally contradicted does not make it relative.)

A politician’s stance with respect to censorship is a useful test of authenticity. Censorship is an illiberal desire or action. It indicates authoritarianism. By definition, a liberal wouldn’t support censorship. Free speech is quintessentially liberal. You cannot have an authoritarian attitude and be authentically liberal. There are many others tests of authoritarianism like this. If you believe in vaccines mandates, then you are not a liberal. If you believe in privileging some persons over others on the basis of skin color, then you are not a liberal. Justin Trudeau is not a liberal.

As I pointed out in the November essay, some folks say that liberalism changes like any political ideology. No, liberalism doesn’t change in that way. It evolves, sure. More importantly, it colonizes a person’s lifeworld and ethnical sensibilities—if the person welcomes it in. There were slave owners who expressed liberal views. Slavery obviously stands in contradiction to liberalism. If they quit slavery because of their liberal views, then they became more liberal. Principle and values don’t change because persons and parties change. If a person who claims to be liberal advocates or tolerates slavery, then the person is not fully liberal.

Think about it this way: Christianity is not what self-professing Christians say it is. A Christian is a defender of the faith. Those of you who are Christians know people who claim to be Christian but are not really. They wear the tag but not the commitment. This is not a perfect analogy since Christianity has different sects, doctrines, etc., whereas liberalism is a more monolithic set of principles, but I think the comparison still works to convey the point that it will not do to just say you are Christian if you reject the teachings of Jesus or the core Christian doctrine of salvation.

It’s like the BLM leaders who talked proletarian lingo and then took the money and bought a mansion. They’re fakes. To be sure, their cause was fake, too. But that is beside the point. They weren’t even true to their own ideology.

We have to recognize that what a person says about himself is not the truth. People make all sorts of claims about themselves. People lie and deceive (sometimes they lie to and deceive themselves). People are ignorant. People are wrong. The truth has its own integrity. We judge authenticity based on commitment to the truth of the thing not personal convenience or whimsy. Justin Trudeau is one or more of these things. But he is not a liberal.

It’s not the liberal who’s the authoritarian thorn in our side. It’s the progressive. It’s politicians like Trudeau. Progressivism is the ideology of corporate statism, or the administrative state of the technocracy. Progressives do not believe in individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, or free enterprise. Progressives are illiberal. Liberals have a completely different view of government and corporate power.

So here’s my ask: stop calling progressives liberals. It’s not a benign misuse of language. It perpetuates a lie about the current order of things. It participates in the campaign of confusion the elites push. If you are really a liberal, then you will oppose lockdowns, mandates, and masks. You will defend the rights associated with a free state of existence.

It’s super cold outside. The sun is blasting through my dining room window. It’s a beautiful day to tell you all some good news. This Monday I saw my doctor for my post-COVID checkup. It’s as if COVID-19, which I had late November 2021, cured my diabetes and hypertension—this despite me having put on fifteen pounds and not walking daily (not waking at all, honestly). My cholesterol and triglyceride numbers are much improved. My kidney function is outstanding. My lungs are completely clear. No more inhaler for my asthma.

I’m going to get back to diet and exercise. I don’t like being fat. Not that I’m vain. Fat doesn’t look good and it’s not healthy. But I no longer feel the urgency to starve myself and pound the pavement that I felt before when my labs were poor. That I have acquired robust natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 gives me added confidence. I have been exposed to omicron in the meantime and I had a stuffy nose for a day. Who knows what that was. Who cares? It’s time for the world to stop worrying and move on.

What was COVID-19 like? My bout was during the delta variant period and it wasn’t fun. I was sick for several days. Alongside what felt like a severe sinus infection, fatigue was the main symptom. For a few days I had what they call “COVID voice,” which means that my larynx was infected. Because of the protocol I followed (which I describe in a previous blog post), the only pharmaceutical I needed was a steroid inhaler. That was phoned in. I never entered a doctor’s office. I never missed a day of work. Sorry. Not sorry.

I know that others have had different experiences, and I feel bad for those families who lost loved ones to this disease, but my case is hardly exceptional and you need to know that. You need to hear the stories of all those who contracted this disease and survived because these are the stories of the vast majority of people and the corporate media isn’t going to tell you about them. Don’t let the exceptional cases hyped by the fear machine push you into a false reality. For most people who get COVID-19, the experience doesn’t rise to the severity of my situation, which was a really bad cold-like illness. I had a fever for maybe half a day.

I’m happy I didn’t die, mostly because being alive is fun (albeit I have no idea what it’s like being dead—or stupid). But I am also happy I didn’t die because, had I died, the mocking of my death would haunt my family. The main reason I’m even sharing my experience is to taunt the hateful progressive type who revels in the death of those who didn’t get the COVID shot. I’m still here, fucker.

I will be sixty years old this March. I have several comorbidities that put me at special risk. I was never as fearful of this virus as were so many of those around me. I did my research and knew what my chances were—I knew they were good. It is not as if I wasn’t worried about this virus. I knew masks didn’t work, so I avoided public spaces during peak periods. I didn’t want to catch it. But in the end I know I could not avoid it. My wife teaches at Head Start. My youngest son is a high school student. My odds weren’t good with respect to being exposed.

When my PCR test came back positive, and I was already sick, as was my wife, who would get her results later that day, it felt like being at the top of a rollercoaster. Sitting up in bed looking at my positive results, I told my wife, “Here we go. Now we get to find out what this is all about.” Honestly, I was relieved. I finally had it for sure and soon I would know for myself.

My message to you is simple: Don’t be scared. This is a virus among hundreds (at least). Those other viruses can kill you, too (I feel bad for all those families who have lost loved ones to influenza, etcetera). We must refuse to live in fear. As I said at the beginning of the mess, life is more than just existing. Life is about living. And living under the constant stress of panic is a very difficult thing to do.

The powers that be either grossly mishandled the situation or the COVID-19 pandemic is part of a grand agenda. Either way, the solution is obvious: we have to overthrow the status quo.