freedom and reason

Glenn Greenwald, a journalist and constitutional lawyer whom I greatly admire, makes the error of treating liberalism not as a set of economic, ethical, philosophical, and political principles but as an ideological position accurately capturing the standpoint of progressive Democrats. This error occurs in a criticism of a FoxNews interview of Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney (former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s daughter) embedded in an article in The Daily Beast. I share the tweet below.

The Cheney family's primary tactic for four decades has been to brand everyone who disagrees with them as "un-American."

Liz Cheney now does it on behalf of liberal politics and the Democratic Party so it's viewed as less repugnant even though it's as vile and toxic. https://t.co/SAK2tHAy5L

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 7, 2021

Before moving to that critique, I want to stress how much I admire Greenwald and clarify that my criticism issues from a desire to strengthen the populist democratic movement against transnational corporate power and the authoritarian designs of its political establishment. I believe Greenwald has a big role to play in that movement. However, much like Thomas Frank, Jimmy Dore, Aaron Mate, and Max Blumenthal, he has yet to finish stepping over the populist threshold. Okay, on to the critique.

Greenwald gets this right in his critique of the interview (conducted by Chris Wallace): “The Cheney family’s primary tactic for four decades has been to brand everyone who disagrees with them as ‘un-American.’” I was myself smeared with this label first back in 2003 and for some years after when I exposed the reasons the United States under George Bush and Dick Cheney was invading and occupying Iraq before and after the invasion in speeches and essays (see, e.g., War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy; Christian Neo-Fundamentalism and US Foreign Policy). Greenwald is also right that Cheney’s function in all this—part of which was pressing the impeachment of President Donald Trump on bogus charges of “insurrection”—is to make the politics of the Democratic Party look other that what they truly are “vile and toxic.”

But Greenwald is wrong to include liberal politics in this tweet. (I touch on this in The Problem of the Weakly Principled. I stress that the title and the essay has to do with people other than Greenwald.) The Democratic Party does not practice liberal politics and this becomes obvious when you treat liberalism not as a party ideology but as a set of economic, ethical, philosophical, and political principles that stand for individualism and liberty.

What is liberalism? Liberalism is the politics of assembly (for all sides, not just Antifa and BLM rioters), bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty (not just for women seeking abortions), free association (not just for blacks who seek black-only spaces), free speech and expression (not just for those who change their genders), humanism, privacy, and secularism. Liberalism is also the politics of private property and limited government. When people deviate from these principles the question of their liberal bonafides may be thrown into question. It depends on how great is the deviation (and there is a contradiction between private ownership of the means of production and the realization of other liberal rights). However, when a liberal turns authoritarian, he does not bring liberalism with him. Instead, he leaves liberalism behind.

You don’t have to step back very far to see that the Democratic Party does not resemble these politics. Quite the contrary, in fact. The Democratic Party is the party of bullying, censorship and deplatforming, mandates and passports, double-standards (and doublethink), surveillance, religious zealotry, and big intrusive government. I have written numerous articles over the last several years documenting the Party’s transformation. The Party is now fully anti-humanist and illiberal. In a word, the Party is authoritarian and its rank-and-file has become reactionary. This explains why progressive Democrats and establishment Republicans like Liz Cheney have become allies in an elite war against the people: anti-democratic desire and sentiment bring them together around the imperatives of corporate state power.

What Greenwald means to say (and I apologize for attempting to speak for him, as he is so eloquent) is that progressivism (a term I believe he—like Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and others—desperately wants to reserve for those with his politics) is what is actually aligning with neoconservatism and especially neoliberalism and that these latter policy orientations are the priorities of both the Democratic Party and the corporate wing of the Republican Party, even if the latter would never speak the rhetoric of progressivism.

The alliance I am describing is not new. It became an open alliance in 1994 in the wake of the Republicans takeover of Congress (“Contract with America”) after forty years of progressive Democrat control over that branch of government. Clinton invited the alliance with his “New Democrat” politics, articulated by the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute. The alliance was reinforced during the Bush-Cheney years, as establishment Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, supported the war effort (which killed upwards of a million Iraqis in the first 3-5 years) and the construction of a vast surveillance apparatus (the PATRIOT Act). The Obama-Biden administration was a continuation of the alliance.

Mrs. Clinton was to keep things going when populist-nationalism threw a monkey wrench into the machinery named Donald Trump, who rose to power by blowing up the Establishment narrative. Thus began the long coup completed on January 20, 2021 with the installation of the decrepit former Vice-President Joe Biden in the White House, a ventriloquist dummy for the Establishment. The January 6 Commission is a concerted effort to prevent the return of Trump or one of his ilk to political power.

I understand why Greenwald is having trouble with all this. Like Thomas Frank, Naomi Wolf, Tulsi Gabbard, and others who are coming around to the realization, the politics they are instinctively drawn towards are presently represented by right-wing pundits and politicians and political organizations and parties across the trans-Atlantic space. There is a visceral reaction to the political rightwing among liberals, and so there is a degree of denial and rationalization. But the political right is where democratic populism is finding its fullest and most principled expression. I see in this an opportunity for coalition building. Wolf and Gabbard do, as well. Indeed, a growing number of liberals are appearing on the populist scene standing alongside such rightwing figures as Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro.

This has been a long time in coming. In a 2006 City Journal essay “Facing the Islamic Menace,” Christopher Hitchens notes that the character of the politics that gets the problem facing Europe, for example, religious extremism among mass immigration, is rightwing in character. In the essay, Hitchens recognizes the significance of Sam Harris’ observation in a Los Angeles Times column that ethnonationalism in Europe is at the forefront of recognizing what Hitchens calls “Fascism with an Islamic face.” This is no doubt a sticking point for Greenwald who has made his animosity towards Hitchens explicit.

I will explain Greenwald’s dilemma in a moment, but I need to elaborate Hitchens’ position so it is not unnecessarily misconstrued. What Harris writes in that essay is troubling: “The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.” Hitchens characterizes Harris’ words as “alarming” and “irresponsible.” At the same time, he grasps their significance, ending his City Journal essay by remarking “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.”

Hitchens’ remark was a call to the left to come home to democratic population and civic nationalism and defend their countries from the disorganizing force of theocratic desire. In the meantime, right-wing politics in Europe has moved away from the fascistic style towards a more libertarian populist-nationalism. No longer do racialist politics animate the European right. Indeed, populist-nationalist sentiment is, as we see also in the United States, rapidly spreading across racial groups, while progressives have constructed an elaborate racist ideology that is infecting major institutions in both public and private sectors.

Like Chris Hedges, Greenwald still clings to a politics of Muslim apologetics and the Chomsky-style rhetoric of anti-imperialism. I get it. Greenwald was politicized during this period. Chomsky fashioned his worldview. He admits it. Hitchens’ alignment with neoconservative policy under Bush and Cheney makes it difficult if not impossible for many of those who might otherwise admire Hitchens-style of populism and nationalism to avoid rejecting the corpus of Hitchens’ work for that reason. While I do not share that difficulty, I was as well very disappointed by Hitchens support for the war effort and publicly criticized him for it (while having to admit that his argument for war and occupation was the most compelling of the lot).

The difficulty Greenwald has with all this was evidenced only days ago by a reluctance to bring himself to condemn Chomsky for a truly hateful and authoritarian diatribe aimed at those who resist the COVID-19 vaccine (see Noam Chomsky is an Authoritarian). Hitchens recognized Chomsky’s growing derangement years before his death. We can only hope a man as passionate and as talented as Greenwald can also turn that corner.

This is the realization that inspired me to distance myself from the progressive Democratic establishment (as a college teacher, it surrounds me) and recheck my beliefs to make sure I was actually supporting a politics that reflected my values. My beliefs checked out.

Cheney and her ilk and the Democratic Party are the political functionaries of transnationalism. They are globalists, technocrats operating the administrative state that serves transnational corporate interests. They’re overseeing the managed decline of the American republic and, more generally, the nation-state. To their minds, no assembly could be more dangerous than that which gathered in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 to seek a redress of grievances.

When you listen to the substance of Greenwald’s arguments you can see that he is already a populist. Frank is, as well—he just needs to stop conflating populism with progressivism. These standpoints are, in fact, opposites, as the brilliant Richard Grossman pointed out so long ago. As I note above, Wolf and Gabbard are almost all the way there. Again, I understand why it’s hard to make the leap—or at least what feels like a leap given perception. People have been for so long gaslit over populism and nationalism that they have difficulty overcoming the internal resistance to the labels. That’s why Greenwald gets hung up over the label liberal. But Greenwald is a liberal. He shouldn’t let authoritarians steal the label.

The sooner those on the left and right understand their shared values the sooner they can come together and form a coalition against transnationalism. Such a coalition is necessary if we are to successfully resist the destruction of the Westphalian system and the Enlightenment values that sustain freedom and human rights. The character of populism is not fascist. It is the character that founded the American republic.

In an August 28, 2020 blog, Suicide by Cop and Victim-Precipitated Homicide, I wrote the following, “In Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25, a teenager from Illinois was attacked by several men who had assembled in Kenosha either to protest or riot the shooting of Jacob Blake (who survived his injuries). The teenager was armed and shot three of them. The following account is drawn from multiple news sources. Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, a registered sex offender for a sex crime involving a minor, chased the teenager and threw something at him. Rosenbaum was shot multiple times and died from his wounds. Anthony Huber, 26, who had a criminal history that included charges of battery and domestic abuse, chased down the teenager and was beating the teenager with a skateboard while the teenager was on the ground. Huber was fatally shot in the abdomen. Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, a member of the People’s Revolution Movement of Milwaukee, who also has a criminal record, was chasing the teenager alongside Huber. Grosskreutz was armed with a pistol, which is clearly visible in video and images. Grosskreutz was shot in the upper arm and survived. He reportedly regrets not killing the teenager. The two dead men are being portrayed as martyrs. Did they think of themselves as heroes in a situation of their own making? Were these redemptive acts?”

Because the teenager was a minor I avoided using his name in the blog (he has now reached the age of majority). The state of Wisconsin did not treat Rittenhouse as a minor. On August 26, Kyle Rittenhouse was charged as an adult with five felonies and a misdemeanor. Among the more serious charges, the state accused Rittenhouse of first-degree reckless homicide against Joseph Rosenbaum, punishable by imprisonment of up to 65 years, first-degree intentional homicide against Anthony Huber, punishable by a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole, and attempted first-degree intentional homicide against Gaige Grosskreutz, punishable by imprisonment of up to 65 years. The 2020 presidential campaign season was soon full throttle and civil unrest continued, so I moved on to other stories.

Rittenhouse is now on trial, the trial is live-streamed, so it’s time to return to the matter. I have been watching the trial. As a teacher of criminal justice process, I feel obligated. But I am also very interested in this case for its ramifications. Will the jury deny Rittenhouse his human right to defend himself against death and injury? The facts presented at trial provide no reason for me to change the description of events I provided more than a year ago. That description was based on extensive photographic and video evidence. In the present blog, I recount the chain of events once more and renew my opposition to state action in this matter. I am convinced that this is an open-and-shut case of self defense. Rittenhouse should be on trial. I also suggest a motive behind this and other high profile prosecutions against individuals who defend themselves against belligerents.

The image above captures the moment witness and gunshot survivor Gaige Grosskreutz admitted under cross-examination by defense attorney Corey Chirafisi that Rittenhouse didn’t shoot him in the arm that was holding the gun until the Grosskreutz pointed the gun at Rittenhouse. That’s a prosecutor literally facepalming in the moment. The jury is just off to his right side. The prosecution then called Kenosha Police Department Detective Ben Antaramian to the stand. Here’s the exchange that led to Antaramian confirming that the shootings on Sheridan Road only occurred when Rittenhouse was attacked.

Chirafisi: You saw other people that were kind of—it wasn’t a two or three-person chase, there were multiple people kind of around Mr. Rittenhouse, some of them brandishing weapons, correct?

Antaramian: There were people—and there were people that were armed, absolutely.

Chirafisi: And those people who didn’t attack him—he didn’t fire at them, did he?

Antaramian: Correct.

Chirafisi: The only people that he fired at were people that had either kicked him, hit him with something, or pulled a gun on him when he’s running down Sheridan Road, right?

Antaramian: I would agree with that statement.

Chirafisi: And after he—initially, when he sees Gaige Grosskreutz, you’d agree when Mr. Grosskreutz’s hands are up, he doesn’t fire?

Antaramian: Correct.

Chirafisi: There is a person—to Mr. Grosskreutz’s—it would be his left—with a metal pipe. Do you remember that?

Antaramian: I don’t—earlier, you called it a wooden club—I don’t know that I’ve ever seen wooden, or—off, fairly off in the distance there’s a metal pipe, yes.

Chirafisi: So people who are armed, he doesn’t fire at any of those people, does he?

Antaramian: Correct.

Chirafisi: After the shooting, I counted—and I don’t, I’m not asking you for the specific number—but there’s multiple shots fired after Mr. Rittenhouse fires his last shout, right?

Antaramian: Correct.

Chirafisi: I counted ten, but there’s multiple, right?

Antaramian: Agreed.

Chirafisi: He never turns and fires in that direction, does he?

Antaramian: No.

Rittenhouse having exercised his right to self defense against Joseph Rosenbaum who had attacked him unprovoked in a parking lot. A mob of belligerents then chased Kyle Rittenhouse down a Kenosha, Wisconsin street. Rittenhouse was attempting to reach the police to turn himself in when the mob reached him and physically assaulted him. One man kicked Rittenhouse after Rittenhouse had fallen to the ground. Rittenhouse fired at him twice but missed both times (there is a felony charge concerning this incident). Another man, Anthony Huber, struck Rittenhouse with a skateboard while Rittenhouse was still on the ground. Rittenhouse fired once, striking Huber in the chest, killing him. Another man, Gaige Grosskreutz, pointed a handgun at Rittenhouse, and Rittenhouse, still on the ground, shot him once in the right arm, the arm attached to the firearm he was pointing at Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse was seconds away from possibly being fatally shot.

At no point was Rittenhouse an aggressor. We need to say this loudly: Rittenhouse was a victim. He was physically attacked by Rosenbaum, an unidentified assailant, Huber, and Grosskreutz. Rittenhouse was a victim of multiple assaults. In repelling his attackers, he lawfully exercised his right to use lethal force in self defense. His use of lethal force was proportional. The actions of these three men left Rittenhouse no choice but to take defensive action. The state is not only wrong but cruel for putting Kyle Rittenhouse through this. This young man is being forced to relive the trauma of having to defend himself against belligerents, some who whom were armed, all of whom represented a danger to life or limb, They intended to do him grave harm. His only purpose tat day was to defend persons and property as violent mobs where destroying the city. Rittenhouse justifiably defended himself expertly and judiciously. Given the conditions, it is frankly astonishing that that this young men, seventeen years old, had the presence of mind to so deftly execute the standards of proportional response. The video is graphic but a clinic in the rules of armed self-defense.

If the facts known from the beginning were not enough to end this travesty of justice, then yesterdays events should be. But the state had more than enough evidence to discontinue this case well before trial. Why didn’t they? They did not do so, it seems to me, because they are more concerned with appeasing the mob. They worried about more violence and property destruction in Kenosha and elsewhere, so they opted to drag an individual who followed the law through an arduous trial for the sake of the lawless. Politics is also an unavoidable influence in the case. In states across the country during the summer and fall of 2020, authorities sided with the violent mob over against the interests of law-abiding citizens. The media fueled the flames of destruction and violence while denying the character of the riots. They concealed from the public the truth that the reason for the uprising—systemic racism in the conduct of law enforcement—is a myth repeatedly debunked by science for decades. White they dwelled on Rittenhouse’s race, they usually never reported the race of his victims. For the record, Rittenhouse and his assailants are white males. The defamation of Kyle Rittenhouse was even perpetrated by the occupant of highest political office in the United States.

We have video of a man claiming to be George Floyd’s nephew, Cortez Rice, reporting that he has people on the inside in Kenosha taking pictures of the jury in order to make public their identities of they do not convict (see above). Rice is saying, “We need the same results….” presumably referring to the manner in which the jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial were intimidated. (I cover that case and verdict here: The Derek Chauvin Show Trial; The FAR Podcast: The Derek Chauvin Verdict.) We also see intimidation being used in front of what the mob think is the residence of the judge who disallowed cameras in the Daunte Wright trial. For those if you who do not know, on April 11, 2021, Brooklyn Center police officer Kimberly Potter shot Duante Wright during a traffic stop and attempted arrest for an outstanding warrants. I discuss that case here: An Avoidable Tragedy: The Accidental Shooting of Duante Wright and Another Sacrifice Upon the Altar of Antiracism. The judge in the Rittenhouse trial today informed the court that a deputy observed someone taking video of the jury as they arrived. The deputy made the person delete the video. “I’ve been assured the officers had the video that was taken deleted. New measures are being taken to make sure that does not reoccur,” the judge told the jury when they arrived in the courtroom. This is menacing, attempting to intimidate judge and jury into making decisions based not on law and reason and evidence but on fear of reprisal.

More information. https://t.co/5WeRwYu4E2

— John Curtis (@Johnmcurtis) November 7, 2021

The rule of law is being flouted for political-ideological reasons, most disturbingly around issues of race. We need to be clear about this. Rittenhouse is on trial because he is a white man, one likely holding conservative views, who lawfully defended himself against a lawless mob operating with motives approved by the Party. The Guardian described Rittenhouse a “white armed extremist.” This is a pattern. We all saw what authorities in St Louis did to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a couple who defended their property against an armed mob of three hundred that broke and entered private property, signs announcing this clearly posted. Such were the forces arrayed against them that they pled guilty to misdemeanors and had to forfeit their guns. Meanwhile, we are shamed for criticizing mob violence when it is the right color or for noting the extraordinarily high rates of crime and violence in black-majority neighborhoods.

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them; for it is to those who are childlike that the Kingdom of the Heavens belongs.” —Matthew 19:14.

I'm pretty sure Rodgers is immunized now.

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) November 6, 2021

Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., is an epidemiologist, biostatistician, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, Ph.D., is a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. Newsweek published a review of the scientific literature in a labeled op-ed, “How Fauci Fooled America.” It is an itemized list of all things I have been right about for months here on Freedom and Reason. The evidence indicates that corporate and government representatives lied about natural immunity (infection provides robust and durable immunity), misled the public about the relative dangers of SARS-CoV-2 infection (healthy people are unlikely to die from COVID-19 or even develop serious symptoms or any symptoms as all), needlessly and counterproductively closed public schools (action that carried devastating effects for childhood development), misled on the efficacy of masks (they don’t work), wasted valuable resources on contract tracing (could not stop the disease), are responsible for collateral public health damage (the list here is extensive, so definitely read the article).

There’s a reason the facts vindicate me. It’s not luck or magic. I’m no shaman. It’s my method. My default position is to not accept what pharmaceutical companies tell me (for the same reason I don’t trust the gas and oil industry) or to believe the spokespersons of the administrative state. Our regulatory agencies are captured by corporate power. The CDC is a corporate front. It’s actually funded by Big Pharma. The CDC Foundation is “an independent nonprofit and the sole entity created by Congress to mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources to support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s critical health protection work.” It is hardly news that the FDA is corporate captured. There is a constant circulation of elites between the FDA and Big Pharma. The function of these bodies (along with the USDA, EPA, and other such bodies) is to lend legitimacy to corporate products and practices. These are all part of the progressive apparatus designed by industry to prevent populist attempts to limit corporate power. Nor do I believe the corporate media or the culture industry. These constitute a propaganda apparatus serving the interests of financial and corporate power.

I understand that in the capitalist mode of production the the means of production are owned and controlled by the capitalist and professional-managerial classes, these arrangements determine authority (power) relations, and that those who control the means of production at the same time control the means of intellectual production. I know that the right questions to ask are these: Who is in a position to determine what happens in society? Who benefits from these arrangements? If you do not operate with this understanding and not asking these questions you are not properly in the game. Under less-than-totalitarian conditions, the intellectual system is somewhat open since the appearance of freedom is needed to manufacture the appearance of liberty. Here control is managed through a complex process we know as the engineering of consent. When you understand that process, you can bypass it.

My method allows me to determine which studies are industry propaganda and which are the result of independent research. It is well known among those who are familiar with the scientific literature that industry-generated science is shaped by bias serving the interests of corporate power. I knew about the efficacy of HCQ and ivermectin early on because I read the independent studies. When corporate scientists denied that efficacy, I knew what was going on. I have known for more than a a year and a half that corporate state policy was killing people. Doctors wanted to treat patients, but big medical groups, corporate pharmacies, regulatory agencies, and professional associations, all operating for profit or for the profit of others, stopped them. I knew about the problems with and dangers of the vaccines, the low level of efficacy, lack of durability, and problematic safety profile, because I read the studies. I knew masks don’t work because I read the literature and listened to industrial hygienists. I reported all this on Freedom and Reason.

You don’t necessarily have to be a scientist to understand these matters. You need to know what to look for and how to read the science. You need to approach the claims of corporate and government officials from a critical standpoint. You approach these institutions the same way you approach the institutions of religion. A PhD in science helps. But these methods are available to everyone.

* * *

According to Forbes, COVID-19 associated deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Reporting System (VAERS) now exceed sixteen thousand. That’s just deaths. Injuries are far greater in number. These include heart inflammation, paralysis, and other serious damage, especially in our young people. These figures are undercounts.

You might be tempted to rationalize this large number in light of the highly publicized death tolls attributed to COVID-19. First, those are almost certainly exaggerated and inflated in contrast to vaccine deaths which are underreported. Second, and more importantly, deaths and injuries from vaccines are visited upon those who are very unlikely to die or suffer long-term harm from the virus itself—an infection from which they will acquire effective and durable immunity (your Google factcheck propaganda sidebar not withstanding).

I realize this can be both, in fact I am sure it is, but as a matter of gauging the primary causal force in all this, as you know, I have wondered whether the rush to vaccinate everybody is the result of science denialism and illiteracy or a kind of revivalist type affair, like a Great Awakening—only instead of Christianity, it’s Scientism.

Like Wokeism, we really should start capitalizing Scientism. These are the prevailing faith-based systems of the progressive left (I don’t think they are really left, to be honest, but you know what I mean). Or perhaps we might place Scientism as a doctrine under Wokeism.

* * *

I am fortune to not be part of the structures of corporate power and administrative control. I would probably be a whistleblower if I were. But I never got close to power. Not because I thought I would be coopted, rather because of my ethical sensibilities. I suppose by being an academic, I am a minor player in the system that manufactures consent. For what it’s worth, I have refused to participate to any significant degree in corporate projects, a choice that has come with considerable personal discomfort and professional limitation. My case excepted (and there are others, of course), these forces, along with the corporate media and the culture industry, explain why people who know what they are saying is a lie participate in the lie and continue peddling the lie in order to retain what legitimacy they have left. How do you come out know and say, “Look, I lied and I’m a whore” or “I didn’t care to understand science and I have no real commitment to ethics or principles”?

I want to be fair. It is not only because people lack a commitment to truth and morality. One can underestimate the power of bureaucratic organization and the subjectivity this system generate to colonize the lifeworlds of employees and compel them to participate in deception and falsehoods. But that is precisely why you do not depend on the system of hegemonic production in a capitalist society, why you set the default where I have set it. It’s tragic that so many good people on the left have so fallen for progressivism, as this is ideological projection of the administrative state and technocracy and corporate-manufactured mass culture, that they don’t even consider where the default lies for rational beings. Their role as subalterns in the extended state apparatus is a key element in the successful process of engineering consent. I invite them to return to the democratic and ethical life. I am pessimistic, though.

Part of why the left is so easily deceived is they lack a sophisticated understanding of the history and character of progressivism and social democracy, confusing it with democratic socialism or industrial democracy (see the work of Richard Grossman to acquire some degree of necessary sophistication). There is a world of difference between expanding industrial democracy, on the one hand, and expanding the corporate state, on the other. It’s the difference between socialism and fascism. We fail to grasp this as our peril. Making workers dependent on a government controlled by banks and corporations pulls workers under the control of private power beyond the constraints the workplace already imposes on the freedom of workers. Private control becomes totalitarian under these arrangements. Under these conditions workers are no longer free labor, however much that means they are exploited labor, but serfs on a network of corporate estates, a high-tech plantation supported by the custodial state. Renting one’s body isn’t complete freedom, but it’s a hell of a lot freer than one’s body being owned by an estate upheld by government. Too many folks on the left do not get the distinction. They see big government through rose colored glasses. They think that’s socialism. Ironically, so does the far right. They’re both wrong. But at least one of these groups opposes it.

* * *

We are seeing in Australia what we saw in Ireland and Vermont. The first graph is COVID-19 cases. The second graph is the vaccinated proportion of the population.

You will note that Australia had a long period of near zero cases. As the mass vaccination program proceeded, COVID-19 cases start rising. Australia is the most locked down country in the world. Indeed, it is safe to say that Australia has become a fascist state. The vast majority of those hospitalized in Australia are vaccinated. At some point people are going to have stop deluding themselves about vaccine efficacy. It looks like the surge has finally started to subside. Now the call has gone out to parent to sign up their children for vaccination. Hopefully parents will resist subjecting their children to the insanity.

* * *

Big Pharma’s desire for mega-profits know no boundaries. Billions await jabbing children with a novel drug for a disease that does not threaten them. According to the CDC, COVID-19 is associated with 0.0003 percent of deaths among children aged 5-11 years old in the United States. Taking all children into account, 0.0009 percent of deaths are associated with COVID-19. Those who died (a few hundred out of tens of millions nationally) with a COVID-19 diagnosis were morbidly obese or suffering other serious health conditions, such as leukemia. They didn’t so much die from COVID-19 (which is one of numerous cold viruses in their environment) but with COVID-19. No matter, jab healthy children with a novel drug that is injuring and killing young people. There’s a useful slogan capturing the status quo here: profits before people.

It used to be that people on the left had a different slogan. This one is aspirational: people before profits! But fascistic corporate hegemony is powerful stuff. The proof of this is everywhere, but probably no more disturbingly than woke progressive parents dutifully, eagerly lining up their children to be jabbed. “We’re doing our part!” More than patriotic corporatism, the jab is a fetish in a secular religion. The faithful have long been waiting for the clerics to bless their children. “When will my child recieve his blessing?” Corporations have played progressives masterfully—by appealing to the narcissistic personality that is widespread among the professional-managerial class. They believe by getting the jab they separate themselves from the lower primates, the mouth-breathers, the wretched antivaxers—i.e., presumed populists. Over against the deplorables, the children of progressives will become Übermensch. That is literally the campaign to get shots in the arms of those who can’t consent to being experimental subjects by stroking parents’ egos.

As I reported on Freedom and Reason, the last time the government rolled out the vaccine, just as the COVID-19 began steeply declining after coronavirus’s seasonal surge (remember, there is nothing novel about coronavirus, which sweep the planet every year), the nation experienced a resurgence of cases. I hope we don’t see a repeat of that with the new mass vaccination campaign. But there is cause for concern. Since children don’t experience symptoms or very mild symptoms from infection unless the variant is especially pathological, vaccination will allow more pathological mutations (mutation is an inherent part of the evolutionary process) to be transmitted because the vaccines have an effect on reducing symptoms.

Antibody-dependent enhancement is a real danger in populations with small probabilities of severe illness. Cases and hospitalizations have been heading back down of late after the last mass vaccination blunder, as a large proportion of those who have been vaccinated were subsequently infected and reinfected (since a lot of people with natural immunity still got the shot) thus reestablishing herd immunity against the Delta variant. But, as Kulldorff and Bhattacharya have told us, and as reported here on Freedom and Reason, the corporate state appears unconcerned with science.The vaccines don’t confer effective or durable immunity. The real-world evidence is entirely clear on this question. Our way out of this pandemic is for children to get the virus and develop natural immunity to it. We have to get out of the viruses way and let the normal evolutionary process work.

* * *

As reported by The Economist, forty percent of American workers still work from home. Do Biden’s executive order and OSHA regulations account for that? (OSHA is clearly captured now. Just wait until you see what’s next.) Why be tested every week for a virus that the vaccine doesn’t prevent when you aren’t even going to be on the job site? What would be the point beyond funneling money to the companies that manufacture, distribute, and administer testing kits (which are biased to produce false positives)? The point of this whole affair seems to be to drag everybody under the control of the state. I expect mandatory vaccinations are coming for everybody. A appeal to “equity” perhaps?

This from OSHA: “The Department of Labor and OSHA, as well as other federal agencies, are working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations. OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, or disincentivizing employers’ vaccination efforts. As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904’s recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination through May 2022. We will reevaluate the agency’s position at that time to determine the best course of action moving forward.”

So, in order to keep workers in the dark about vaccine injuries so workers will be more likely to expose themselves to vaccine injuries, OSHA is suspending the reporting of vaccine injuries as a workplace requirement. This is OSHA. I will repeat that: This is OSHA. This is literally the opposite of what OSHA was created to do. OSHA is supposed to protect workers, not keep them ignorant of potential dangers from the vaccines their employers are mandating. The agency is concealing injuries workers sustain as a work requirement. We are truly through the looking glass, comrades.

I once read about a case, it occurred back in 1983, where a manager removed the skull and cross bones from drums of toxic chemicals his workers didn’t want to work around because of health and safety concerns. One night he removed all of the warning labels and told them the next morning that he had replaced those barrels with new barrels filled with harmless chemicals. The next day a worker opened one of the drum. So toxic were the contents that the medical examiner and his assistant were poisoned when they opened him up at autopsy.

It is unethical to withhold from another human being, especially the well-being of a person for whom one has responsibility, information about potential dangers of activities required of him. A worker has the right to know anything pertaining to his health and safety so he can make an informed choice about whether he wants to proceed or whether he wants to refuse. 

* * *

How they lie to you

There are many ways of defining (or conceptualizing) power. Perhaps the most compelling definition of power is provided by the brilliant German sociologist Max Weber. Weber defines power as “the probability that one actor in a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.” Elsewhere he defines power as “the chance of a person or of a number of persons to realize their own will in a collective action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the same action.” Either definition will do. (These, along with many other sociological definitions, are found in Weber’s Economy and Society, published in 1921 shortly after his death from the Spanish Flu.)

Power presents with variable quality. For example, authority is a form of power said to be legitimate (authority = power + legitimacy). The power exercised by an authority is valid not in a logical sense but in a social one. Legitimacy is the crucial element in presenting one’s power as authority and on this basis make claims that power is validly applied. The status of legitimacy is achieved through various methods. Here’s one: Establish an arbitrary rule that only people with racial power can be racist (with the possible exception of the powerless who collaborate with the powerful). Then theorize power in such a way that your speech and action cannot be racist by definition. In other words, since discrimination = prejudice + power, pretend you’re powerless. Perceived powerlessness is a source of legitimacy. It can be used to extract benefits from others. The proof that it is pretending is that the rule and theory emanate from a position of authority. Moreover, those you accuse of being the only ones who can be racist agree that this is true. They give racial power legitimacy. It seems that there is some confusion over who has the power.

This formula works for other identity categories, as well—as long as they are imagined. By imagined I do not mean abstracted from objective social relations. For example, “proletarian” is an objective position with respect to the means of production. There are ideological elements, but they stand upon an actual thing: social class. Sex is another example. Again, there are ideological elements, but the patriarchy is erected upon the facts of biology. Men have ruled over women in part because of genotypic differences, which men in part used to command others, including other men. One sees this elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Overthrowing the systems of class and sex oppression requires the realization of legal and political practices that demand equality of individuals before the law. In the case of social class, this would require the reorganization of society. Don’t get your hopes up on that last one.

However, such categories as gender and religion are imagined. Both can be gamed in a manner similar to race, which is also imagined. Sustaining their legitimacy is the work of the formula. This is often facilitated by evoking the Greek word for “fear” as a pejorative.

In establishing authority, it is useful to act as if everybody already agrees that the rule and the theory are correct and that those who disagree admit to their correctness by demonstrating the power their identity allegedly gives them. The work selling rule and theory, where rule is arbitrary and theory has no rational or empirical support, we might call (after Erving Goffman) “impression management.” We manage other people’s perceptions of us, which depends again on power. The common word is “bluffing.” Impression management or bluffing is one of the ways moral entrepreneurs establish legitimacy for power they wish to wield on an ideological basis.

Another way of gathering legitimacy about power is to construct a false narrative that makes accessible to power-seekers the arsenal of emotional blackmail. This involves the manufacture of victimhood. The perception of powerlessness is useful here. Some might argue it’s the same thing, but there is a subtle difference. Since reason requires a victim for victimhood to exist, in the absence of an actual victim, victimhood is manufactured by exploiting the past, present, and future suffering of others, living or dead, by making their suffering appear as one’s own suffering. This presumes some essential and transcendent connection among individuals who share an imagined community, ontological linkages supposedly binding all those with socially recognized characteristics, and who also agree with the ideology promoted by the moral entrepreneur (wrong politics can make you another color), the unelected and self-appointed gatekeeper presuming to possess the authority to speak for the group that ideology has called into existence.

Weber explains how dominance is established by conceptualizing domination as a power relation marked by obedience. Here, subordinates are not forced to obey (not in any obvious way, at least), but do so voluntarily (at least apparently). Such a situation implies the power relation has become structured, according to Weber’s argument. This is another way of saying that there is an established pattern of inequality. Obedience indicates that the subject is interested in following the commands of the ordinate. Who is ordinate? Who is subordinate? How is it that the established patterns of inequality run in a direction contrary to the character of obedience? It can’t. There is no legitimacy there. This is the biggest bluff of all. Working people have to call the bluff.

We emancipate ourselves as a people from imaginary categories by negating our commitment to the ideologies that ask us to imagine them. Eliminating these does not require reorganizing society. It just requires dissolving the legitimacy of their authority over us. For this to happen, we have to stop being obedience. We have to withdraw our consent.

“As long as not everybody is vaccinated, nobody will be safe.” —Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum

I don’t like to use the word evil because of its theological implications, but I think in the case of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) it applies and must be admitted. Moreover, as you will see, the religious analog is unavoidable. Who is Klaus Schwab? Schwab is the leader of the hive-mind behind the so-called Party of Davos (the WEF holds an annual summit at Davos in Switzerland), the brain trust of the nascent New World Order (NWO). The WEF was established in 1971 and has become the hub of world planning by the transnational elite and its functionaries.

You may have wondered what’s with the slogans “Build Back Better” and the “Great Reset” and obsession with the date 2030? US president Joe Biden utters the slogans. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau utters them. UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Etcetera. Rightwing podcaster Steve Bannon is fond of saying that there are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences. Well, there are conspiracies. But the Great Reset is not one of them. Conspiracies are secret by definition—at least until they are exposed, and then they were secret. The agenda of the WEF, the origin of these slogans, has never operated in secret. Biden, Trudeau, and Johnson repeat the buzz words and push the designs in public. The leaders of the English-speaking world leaders repeat the slogans because they constitute the established political arm of the transnational project to reorder the world.

Schwab coauthored a book in the summer of 2020 carrying the title COVID-19: The Great Reset. The thesis of the book is that the virus, likely an escaped pathogen, the product of gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, provides an opportunity to reorder the world along the lines Schwab and crowd desire. That same summer Schwab published an essay on the WEF website titled “Now is the Time for a ‘Great Reset’” wherein he argued that the world must “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies.” This he calls the “Great Reset’ of capitalism.” 

Why is the COVID-19 pandemic the opportunity to carry out the radical transformation of everything? Schwab writes in that essay that “one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles. Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.” As if we were not forced to abandon these practices but rather saw the pandemic as an opportunity to do what we had long longed for: locking ourselves in our homes and cutting ourselves off from our friends and livelihoods and subjecting our children to forced isolation at a critical period in their development as humans.

When elites like Schwab use the word “we,” they do not mean us, you and me. In a now deleted web page, fortunately preserved in the form of a sponsored article in Forbes, authored by Ida Auken, member of the Danish Folketing, the WEF voiced the supposed desire of working people across the planet with an announcement from an ordinary appearing citizen: “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” In 2030, everything will be a service and every ordinary person will be a subscriber, their use of services subject to their terms. “In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.” So business will continue even if you no longer have the privacy of your own living room. With this article, those who put those words in that ordinary person’s mouth are announcing their desire to own everything and enjoy exclusive privacy from the hungry eyes of the masses whose lives will be lived openly and never more unfree. 

One may be inclined to believe that this is just the same old machinations of the capitalist class. But what is described in “Welcome to 2030” does not resemble capitalism. It doesn’t sound like socialism, either. Schwab tells us it’s neither (sometimes dropping the construct “stakeholder capitalism”). He writes, “We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems.” Based on the ideas expressed, those new foundations appear more as reclamation of the structures of Europe before capitalism, but on a different technological foundation, some sort of global neofeudalism. This is what is meant by the “new normal.” We are not going to get our old lives back (I don’t mean the lives of the ancient feudal past, but the lives we lived only a few years ago). The reason why is the COVID-19 pandemic, which can only mean that COVID-19 is a pretext for transforming the world to align with Schwab’s vision.

Now, I am not saying that COVID-19 was created in a lab and unleashed on the world with this purpose in mind (although that possibility cannot be ruled out). What I am saying is, just as the Islamist attack on New York City and Washington DC was used as a pretext for a vast expansion of the National Security State, which became normalized within a few short years, SARS-CoV-2 is being exploited to radically transform global culture, economics, and politics. In both cases, the plans and the technology were largely already developed and awaiting justification for their implementation.

As I have established on Freedom and Reason in numerous blogs, as the science makes clear, mass vaccination does not have a public health function. If you contract SARS-CoV-2, you are as infectious if you are double jabbed as you are if you are zero jabbed. Vaccinated people can contract and spread the virus and they are. This means that vaccine mandates and passports are arbitrary from a public health standpoint. Indeed, because vaccines (like masks) lend a false sense of security to the public, mandates and passports are counterproductive, which is why we see a positive correlation between mass vaccination and mask mandates and COVID-19 cases. There is no rational medical science reason for vaccines that not only do not work, but which exacerbate the problem. The same goes for masks. The fact that these were so eagerly taken up by the majority indicates how far down the road we are to unfreedom.

Therefore, in addition to generating mega-profits, COVID-19 is cover for the implementation of an extensive and global administrative state apparatus (I guess we could suppose that all the agencies and organizations pushing the vaccine mandate are stupid, but frankly that strikes me as an absurd conclusion). The WEF plays a central role in pushing the imposition of the apparatus. The endpoint is global neofeudalism, wherein you will, according to the WEF’s own propaganda, own nothing and be happy. The transnational elite will own everything. You will be subservient to them because you will owe everything to them. They will take liberties with your dwelling and your person since it is not your dwelling and you don’t even own yourself. Democratic-republican forms of government will be replaced by technocracy (they largely already are). If you want a preview of coming attractions, take a look at the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Mass vaccination works in two interlocking ways: (1) the program permits the authorities to track the movements and activities of the vaccinated and those who are officially exempted by way of passports; (2) it relegates those who are not vaccinated to official second-class status, where they are made pariah by being cast as disease vectors and scapegoated for the persistence of a virus that has already persisted since at least the 1930s when it was discovered (there variants were officially named in the 1960s and the modern variants announced in the 1990s). Vaccine passports thus form a system of segregation that functions to apply pressure on individuals to rise in status by submitting to corporate state dictates by depriving them of liberties and rights that are naturally theirs by virtue of being a human being. The system, which is self-evidently intrinsically coercive, is pitched as voluntary via the language of incentive. 

What everybody will have on the other side of freedom is what the NWO provides to them. This is what lies behind the universal basic income (UBI) scheme. If everybody is provided with an income from the government, then everybody is obligated to obey the government’s edicts, and, since the government is fully captured by transnational corporate power, everybody receiving the UBI becomes a serf on a high-tech global corporate plantation. Everybody will receive the UBI by law. This will be followed by a cashless economy, with debit cards (digital along with the passports) restricting desired purchases unauthorized by government. There will be limits on everything “for the good of the planet.” Vaccine mandates and passports, UBI, debit cards, and all the rest of it are parts of the machinery, past, present, and future, paving the road to serfdom.

The scheme works in much the same way a proselytizing religion functions when it has achieved theocracy, wherein those with different religious beliefs or no religious beliefs are coerced into converting to the dominant religion to elevate their status. Otherwise, they will remain a second-class citizen (this is the way it is in Islamic theocracies, which is why I suspect Islam is so admired by the progressive left). Of course, neither faithful nor infidel are free in a theocracy. This is an authoritarian ordering of society and it is evil. This situation can also be achieved through totalitarian government and reeducation of the population, for example the PRC. For those who can’t see how all this is possible, they are blind to the fact that it already is.

Schwab’s vision is a world that runs on “intelligent robots,” “neuro-technological brain enhancements,” and “genetic editing.” This is the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the title of another of Schwab’s books. There, he extols the wonders of the “new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital, and biological worlds.” In this new world order, the global population is fully integrated with digital networks encompassing all aspects of life. Schwab looks forwards to these new technologies “challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” This is the transhumanists wet dream. This sounds like science fiction, but it will soon be our lives. If we allow this, we are over.

As I see it, there are basically two ways a person may conduct himself in a modern political society. He may be loyal to a party, or he may be loyal to principle. This does not preclude a principled person associating with a party, either as a member or a fellow traveler. So, to clarify, I mean this in relative terms.

The relative degrees of loyalty to party and principle predict how the person will behave when confronted by change. With strong party loyalty, a person risks pinning his fundamental moral and political beliefs to the evolution of the party. A strongly principled person, in contrast, resists changes that affect his fundamental moral and political beliefs and, if unsuccessful in steering the party back to foundational principle (if he even bothers to try), will sever his ties to the party and end his identification with its platform.

Suppose a party that has stood firmly on the grounds of civil liberties and rights. The party has championed free speech and assembly, bodily autonomy, and so forth. The party has moreover been critical of concentrated wealth and power, instead emphasizing the interests of working-class citizens in formulating its policies and fashioning a politics. The party promoted the equality of individuals before the law and in opportunity.

Now suppose this party moves in an authoritarian direction, the commitment to individual liberty and personal rights replaced by a commitment to corporate power and an appeal to the special rights of selected minorities. Workers, once valued as autonomous and rational persons, become the targets of state surveillance and control, social coercion differentiated by identity. The change is sweeping, however gradual in development. Any objective observer can step back, look at the party’s trajectory, and admit to its changed character.

I need to clarify something before continuing with this example. Often, I hear about how liberals have changed. I am an admirer of Glenn Greenwald, but on a Rumble livestream last Friday he did just this (while at the same time professing liberal values). The proper way to put this is not that liberals believe something different now, but that, because they believe something different, they are no longer liberals. Liberalism is a rather fixed set of beliefs, even with contradictions and inconsistencies. Either one subscribes to the set and can properly call himself a liberal, or he abandons the set and becomes a former liberal. In other words, he becomes something else. He may become a fascist. Liberalism doesn’t become fascism. When a liberal becomes a fascist he ceases to be a liberal. There are those with latent or accumulating fascistic tendencies who identify as liberal and associate with liberals. So there are those who abandon liberalism and those who wear liberalism as a cloak.

The difference between the loyal party man and the man loyal to principle will over time become obvious. There may be a moment when the person’s true character is revealed (I discuss this in the second part of this blog). Many of those strongly identifying with party, desiring to remain loyal to their party identity, adjust their morals and politics to accommodate shifts in party platform. Many do not find the authoritarian drift alarming and, perhaps subconsciously seeking to remain emotionally and psychologically comfortable, rationalize criticism of the party and its platform. For those who, in contrast, base their choices firmly on principle, while admittedly less likely to be loyal to party in the first place, even the gradual trend towards authoritarianism is alarming and will cause them to leave or, if they are fellow travelers, distance themselves from the party and its platform, an action that will likely be portrayed in an unflattering light.

Let me use my own trajectory to demonstrate. My beliefs have always been strongly liberal. Liberalism promotes free speech and expression (cognitive liberty), which includes the right to remain silent, freedom from compelled speech, and the right of individuals to have access to ideas; the right to privacy; bodily autonomy; religious liberty or freedom of conscience, i.e., secularism or separation of church and state; freedom of assembly and petitioning government for redress of grievances. These are democratic-republican values. I am not completely in sync with liberalism as classically formulated in that, while I believe in the labor theory of value, indeed because I believe in this theory, I do not believe in exclusive control over the means of production. In dialectical fashion, a higher unity demands removing from the classical liberal standpoint the notion of capital as exclusive property since it constrains the ability of individuals to produce for themselves and thus be maximally free.

In light of the constraints of the US (effectively) two-party system, Democrats tended to be better in upholding civil rights than the Republican. That was my perception, anyway. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, the aggressive turn to globalization and neoliberalism (mirrored in the United Kingdom by the Third Way of Tony Blair and New Labour), was a clear signal that the Democratic Party was changing. As I grew more sophisticated in my knowledge of history and politics, I came to see that the Democratic Party and the progressive ideology it had embraced and institutionalized over the first half of the twentieth century explained that change. The point I want to make here is that, despite playing the chief role in globalizing late capitalism, including integration of the Chinese economy, the Democrats were better on liberal values than Republicans, the latter having sold their soul to the devil to fashion a coalition out of disaffected southern Democrats and evangelical Christians (mostly the same thing).

But this all changed over the course of the last two decades. The position of the Democratic Party today on the matter of civil liberties and human rights now reflects its subservience to transnational corporate power. The technocracy stood up by progressivism has become a coercive administrative arm of the oligopoly. With assistance from establishment Republicans, the Democratic Party has emerged as the house party of the oligarchy. To keep the corporate state apparatus in command, the liberal freedoms I extol, even when rehearsed in rhetoric, are sharply curtailed. The Democratic Party is the party of authoritarianism.

That the party loyalist does not find the drift towards authoritarianism alarming is explained by weak loyalty to principle. Rationalizing deviation from principle is easier for weakly principled persons. The party loyalist is differently motivated compared to the strongly principled person. The political party constitutes a society that makes the loyalist feel good about himself, providing him with a sense of belonging. Parties have banners, buttons, designs—they are brands. Politics become a personal style. It moreover feels good for weak egos to be around people who agree with them, especially when they wear the same slogans and express the same sentiments. A person feels empowered agreeing with the people he is around because it seems to him that the crowd is agreeing with him. The party loyalist’s desire to be part of the crowd is thus in part motivated by ego.

It is also motivated by laziness. The party provides ways of talking about and doing things (many of which are largely symbolic and ritualistic) that do not involve independent thought. Independent thought requires work. With a political party or movement, the individual is handed a script, repeats its points and slogans, and receives in return amens and strokes. Being one with a crowd means one does not have to act courageously while pretending to be courageous. The party loyalist can depend on the congregation to stand behind him when he confronts members of the other party or those who identify with none. It’s a church, where confronting apostates and infidels is easy with many at your back, while confronting the clerics over their hypocrisy means disloyalty and group shaming, even banishment.

Humans are prepared for congregating and herding because they are social animals. This natural history produces good and bad consequences. When it causes people to act as sheep to slaughter, following the crowd is contrary to self-interest—at least for the sheep. Absorption into the party does not bury ego. It puts ego in its service, making members feel as if their obedience to party dictates is virtuous—even while it robs them of the liberties and rights the party used to defend (at least better than the other party). Humans are naturally prepared on a psychological level to rationalize anxiety-provoking stimuli. We will die someday, so we imagine another world where we will live forever, a good place if we are good, even when some part of us recognizes that another world defies everything we know about reality (the curse of our big brains).

There are many such examples. Psychologists have identified the phenomenon that enables them as “cognitive dissonance.” If a person has a bit of principle in him, and the party loyalist is not always entirely bereft of principle, having to question the party’s evolution is anxiety-provoking. He will have to find that other form of courage, the one where a man has to speak against his comrades. There, he may have nobody standing with him. It is the rare man who does this. For most, that something that has to give is principle. Suppressing principle makes rationalizing change much easier. It is, in this way, that party loyalty is hazardous to the principled life.

In the context of party politics, cognitive dissonance is likely when a member or supporter of a party who is strongly oriented towards party loyalty and weakly oriented towards loyalty to principle is confronted by a policy or position that the party and its member have in the past opposed. The party loyalist doesn’t demand the party change back, or maybe he feebly tries with no success (and only ever so often does he find numbers sufficient to effectively raise internal opposition), but rather changes himself to accommodate his party. He may even convince himself that the party really hasn’t changed at all, that what the critic is characterizing as authoritarianism is nothing new or anything remarkable. The world has always been that way, he will tell others (and himself, since that is who he is really trying to convince). This way, despite his personal transformation, he can claim to be the same person he was along. He will be a puppet who does not think of himself as such.

If, on the other hand, he operates strongly on principle, finding the answer to his question unsatisfactory, and unable to pull the party and its members from the brink, he will quit the party and find a different party to travel with or even join. Or maybe he will abandon party politics altogether. His adherence to principle will almost invariably be portrayed as personal transformation. He was “radicalized” or some other such horrible thing. Those whose subjectivity moves with the herd do not see the herd’s changing direction because they move along with it. This is the optical illusion of positional relativity. Unlike quantum mechanics, however, space-time is not actually affected. The party left the principled man; he did not change.

Some people can easily transform themselves in tandem with the party’s evolution and these those who are weakly attached to principle. But there are those who are weakly attached to principle who also leave parties whether they are static or evolving. I have written about them on Freedom and Reason. Something should be briefly said about them here. These are the people who are drawn to parties for emotional and psychological needs. Eric Hoffer calls them “true believers.” (A Fact-Proof Screen: Black Lives Matter and Hoffer’s True Believer.) True believers are attracted to the energy of actions, movements, and slogans. Consider how easily a person who finds satisfaction in physically confronting people in street-level action floats between activist groups depending on the opportunities they provide for neural stimulation. Street-level neofascists and antifascists are indistinguishable in their organization and tactics, their ideology merely a technique of rationalization. Even their dress, if but for different colored braces, buttons, and shoelaces; they are as differentiated in costume as two NFL football teams. It’s why they keep their actions confined to an arena (a park or street corner) and never actually challenge power. They are an annoyance. The party loyalist is something much worse. He becomes a threat to the democratic-republican order when his party becomes authoritarian and illiberal in character.

* * *

The New Fascism is a Lot Like Being Dead: You Don’t Know You Are

For this section, I am going to use Michel Foucault’s notion of fascism. Despite my criticisms of Foucault’s work and politics, there are real insights in much of it, and his treatment of fascism in at least one instance is useful for understanding the subjective side of the phenomenon, the task with which we are here faced.

Foucault, in a noted analysis of Gilles Deluze and Felix Guattari’s 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, abstracted fascism from its historical concrete forms to encompass “the fascism in us all, in our heads and everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominate and exploits us.” This should remind those who are familiar with his work of Erich Fromm. This is the character of Fromm’s authoritarian personality thesis (Escape from Freedom). Like Fromm, Foucault’s solution to the problem of endemic fascism is political and social practice that emancipates the individual from “unitary and totalizing paranoia.” (See Living at the Borderline—You are Free to Repeat After Me.)

I was horrified yesterday to discover how easily people I have known for years have slipped into the authoritarian mindset. This example will serve to illustrate some of the points I made in the first section of the blog. The opportunity to reveal the fascist living in their heads came when I shared a cartoon of people worshipping a syringe (see above) with the comment: “Because it’s not the science that justifies mandates and passports.” Passports are documents citizens are required to carry (now conveniently stored on your phone, soon maybe a chip in your hand) and present to a gatekeeper (soon to be completely automated for your convenience) if they want to enter spaces open to the public. These have always been part of our world, my Facebook friends said.

No, they have not always been part of our world. This is rhetoric designed to normalize the pathological. This is not normal. Never before in the history of America have citizens been forced as a general rule to present proof of vaccination to enter spaces open to the public. I have never had anybody ever ask me for my vaccination record to enter my child’s school, to dine in a restaurant, to attend a concert—to go anywhere. Even when I have been obviously sick, coughing and blowing my nose, nobody has ever questioned me about it or restricted my movements on account of it. Not a single time. I am fifty-nine years old. I won’t let people normalize fascism by acting as if what’s happening is not an extraordinary development in the history of our country.

(I am sure somebody reading this will identify my white privilege here. Maybe white people never had to present proof of a legitimate reason for being out and about, I hear a woke voice say, but this was a common experience of black people for centuries. Yes it was. And it was wrong. It is wrong to treat people this way. You’re making my argument for me.)

What makes mandates and passports so extraordinary is that the United States is based on the premise that a free and open society where the civil rights of the individual are paramount is essential for a good life. Mandates and passports are elements in totalitarian societies, not free and open ones. The power elite are using COVID-19 pandemic as cover to establish a totalitarian administrative state apparatus. What we are witnessing in real time is nothing less than a paradigm shift in the character of the United States.

The fascists-in-training shrug their shoulders as if it’s no big deal. Their acquiescence to authoritarian control exposes the fascist that lives in their heads. And they are utterly unprepared and ego-bound to confront their emerging authoritarian personalities. The brute force of clear and present reason has no effect on them. Not mature enough to deal with confronting error, they have an ego to defend. The greatest disaster for a weak ego is the collapse of worldview. I think it is too late for them.

There was some confusing on the particular thread I am referencing and the matter of international travel was raised. There we find passports. Yes, we do, and so we should. But let’s take a look at that, because it makes my point all the more. I have been to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Jordan—multiple times. I have been through France and the Netherlands. I never needed to be vaccinated to travel to any of these places. Nobody ever asked me about my medical history. Yet even here we’re seeing an extraordinary development. While the rank-and-file authoritarians live in a dreamworld constructed for them by the culture industry, the trans-Atlantic community is being transformed into a grand totalitarian administrative apparatus. 

These two Facebook friends are hardly alone. Hundreds of millions across the trans-Atlantic community are walking zombies for corporate state totalitarianism. The success of the power elite in incorporating young Americans into the social logic of corporate capitalism is spectacular. There’s no reaching them. They’re foot soldiers for the technocratic order, prepared to take up any cause deftly wrapped in the rhetoric of social justice.

As I have documented on Freedom and Reason, the power elite are using the rhetoric of public health and the religion of scientism to effectuate a new fascist order (Biden’s Biofascist Regime; see also A Dark and Authoritarian Path is Paved by Pathologizing Humanity). It’s obvious from the standpoint of any theory of power. But it is just as obvious from the standpoint of common sense. By definition, rule by the departments of public health constitutes technocratic government. Technocracy is diametrically opposed to democratic-republican values and libertarian norms. Mandates and passports are clear markers of the fascistic reorganization of western society. And all that flies by the rank and file authoritarians, because they have allowed a fascist to live in their heads—and cognitive dissonance has produced in them a false belief that all this is normal and necessary. But it is on the contrary objectively abnormal and scientifically unnecessary and we must resist it.

Fascism works by creating a subjectivity that seduces those weakly devoted to reason and principle into taking up authoritarianism.

* * *

Spreading the Mind Virus that Causes the Fascist Disease

Things were going fairly well until the Irish population reached a high level of vaccination. But once most people were vaccinated, COVID-19 cases started rising. Well over 90 percent of the Irish population is now vaccinated. See the below graph. Look familiar?

Why do we see an association between case frequency and high rates of vaccination? Because these vaccines do not confer immunity and by reducing symptoms allows the infected to spread the virus more successfully. Instead of being at home in bed with cold and flu-like symptoms, they are out interacting with other people. Moreover, passports allow infected people who have been vaccinated greater access to spaces exclusive of those not vaccinated.

If you fear COVID-19, you should be told that being around vaccinated people represents a significant risk to being exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and that, even if you are vaccinated, you may contract and develop the disease. Not only are you not being told this, but you are being led to believe the opposite. None other than the president of the United States told an audience recently, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” This is false. When the authorities admit this, they tell you that the vaccine prevents severe illness. But once infected, you can still get sick, you can still wind up in the hospital, and you can even die. But mostly, you will just spread it to others.

I explained this weeks ago on Freedom and Reason. But I am painfully aware that facts don’t matter to people who peddle the vaccine. They are motivated not by science but by a desire for force people to submit to technocratic rule (and profits, of course). Authoritarianism is, after all, the desire to control other people, and it often comes with sadism. Support for mass vaccination has become the chief indicator of the extent of fascist subjectivity among the general population in western societies. And fuck is it extensive.

We might think of fascist desire as a mind virus, one that is much more dangerous than SARS-CoV-2. The mind virus causes people to do things that are especially damaging to children. Masking children is early training in obedience to arbitrary rules, the intervention occurring during the crucial years of personality development. And now they are going to jab them for a virus that will give them a cold, if they have any symptoms at all. And still make them wear a mask. And still quarantine them.

It’s as obvious as anything can be that the virus that causes COVID-19 is being used to spread the virus that causes the disease of fascism and the population has been so deranged that they’re welcoming totalitarian rule with open arms. This is because people are weakly principled.

Remember in the documentary The Corporation when MIT linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky said people can be anything depending on the circumstance—even a gas chamber attendant? Here’s what he said: “It’s a fair assumption that every human being, real human beings, flesh and blood ones, not corporations, but every flesh and blood human being is a moral person. You know, we’ve got the same genes, we’re more or less the same, but our nature, the nature of humans, allows all kinds of behaviour. I mean, every one of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint.”

The quote implies that exterminating humans is a moral endeavor. In other words, morality has no universal form and content. It is whatever the circumstances define as moral. It is then our nature to follow the norm. I try to remember in every class where I show that documentary to make sure students know that Chomsky’s claim pulls too many people into the orbit of banal evil. It is not the species that can be made into vaccine mandate/passport loving authoritarians given circumstance. It’s some people can be turned into vaccine mandate/passport loving authoritarians given circumstance. What circumstance reveals is not the infinite moral plasticity of man but who those men really were all along: authoritarians waiting for the right circumstance.

In other words, we now know Chomsky was describing himself.

Last night I took some time listen to Max Blumenthal’s analysis of Noam Chomsky’s politics presented on The Jimmy Dore Show. Spot on.

I was aware of Chomsky’s past involvement with the military-industrial complex, but I had long believed the horrors of the Vietnam War changed him. He was usually good, if sometimes prone to hyperbole, on the question of American imperialism. I have quoted the man’s insights on Freedom and Reason (We Have Become Eisenhower’s Worst Fears; The Self-Pacifying Political Stratum of the Modern Corporate State). I show substantial portions of the film Manufacturing Consent to my students in Freedom and Social Control. They learn about his “propaganda model.” I present the comparative/content analysis section on Cambodia and East Timor as paradigmatic of this type of work in Research Methods. I still intend to do so. This is important stuff. My Chomsky library takes up an entire shelf of my vast library.

But Chomsky has changed. Or did he really ever change? Blumenthal talks about how Chomsky’s technocratic training never really left his soul. His entire career was at MIT, a linguistic informing the development of weapons systems directly or indirectly. Chomsky finds himself at home in the technocracy, Blumenthal suggests. A company man, Chomsky now delivers the talking points of the authoritarian progressive establishment. (How much do you wager that his position on the question of Black Lives Matters is the standard progressive social justice formula?)

Blumenthal notes importantly that during the Manufacturing Consent period of Chomsky’s career, in his “Political Economy of Human Rights” phase (where one of his books was so controversial the publisher folded the company to prevent the book’s release after he couldn’t back out of the contract), the man did not work alone. His collaborator was Edward Herman. It seems more obvious that before that Herman shaped Chomsky’s thinking during that period. Sadly, Herman is no longer with us (Herman died in 2017).

Blumenthal appeals to the work of Michael Parenti as the superior go at media criticism. Those who know me well, know I think very highly of that man. Parenti is a Yale educated political scientist. I teach his material in a class I sometimes offer for the present moment called Power and Change in America. Parenti’s early 1990s books Inventing Reality and Make-Believe Media are important if a bit dated. The man’s catalog is much larger than that, though. His textbook Democracy for the Few, in its several editions, is a must read. He is prolific. And great with words.

Moreover, Parenti is a terrific speaker. Dore and Blumenthal talk about Parenti’s lecture “Conspiracy and Class Power.” It’s the speech that made me stop worrying about people calling me a “conspiracy theorist.” Parenti explains that things don’t happen by accident. People in positions of power make things happen. The rich have always wanted one thing, he says: everything. He then asks the audience to consider whether those with that mentality will do anything to keep privilege and power. Of course, is the answer. Even if it means killing people. They do it all the time. (Want evidence? Read William Blum’s Killing Hope. But you can also take a look at the record of the medical-industrial complex. The reality of medical science is horrific. I fear it is about to get even more so.)

A bit more stridently Marxist than Mills, Parenti works in the tradition of C. Wright Mills and the “Power Elite” model of explaining history, developed over a series of books by Mills in the 1950s. Mills was influenced not only by the work of Karl Marx, but also that of Max Weber. In the early 1950s Mills wrote a book with Hans Gerth called Character and Social Structure. Let that title sink in a bit. (We won’t go down that rabbit hole here, but you might anticipate a forthcoming blog on the matter. In the meantime, here is a short piece I wrote on Mills: C. Wright Mills and the New Fascism.)

Blumenthal does us a real service in helping those of us who remember Chomsky in the 80s-90s, the man we admired, work through the distress of seeing him in this state. Our trauma isn’t new. Chomsky shocked me when he showed up a few years ago up comparing Trump to Hitler, a comparison so ridiculous that it makes Chomsky’s past insights feel accidental. His aggressive “lesser of two evils” campaigns every four years long ago indicated that he was losing critical power power and sliding back into his past technocratic socialization. Blumenthal helps bring it all together for me.

I am worried about sounding too harsh. The fact that Chomsky is 92 years old isn’t lost on me. Blumenthal may have repurposed the term when he refers to the current intellectual landscape as a “gerontocracy.” Dore believes Chomsky is in mental decline. It’s obvious from the clips that Chomsky’s reasoning is unusually faulty and his mood is petulant.

However, the most disturbing piece of it is his authoritarianism and this doesn’t seem to be the work of senility. Chomsky’s opinions are marked by a profound loathing of the working class that betrays his elitism. He has always gotten to his head. Dore notes the air of fear that surrounds Chomsky’s manner and tone. You don’t need to note it for the audience. He is scared. He doesn’t want to die. His pathological fear makes him pathologically hateful. He sees the unvaccinated as killers because they spread the virus. Of course, the vaccinated spread the virus, as we all now know (even if many are too ashamed to admit it), and so Chomsky’s arguments make no sense. But I have written extensively on the reality of this virus on Freedom and Reason, so I will refer you to my past blogs.

It is not accidental that a man who compares Trump to Hitler will see those who are not vaccinated as killers. Chomsky believes, as do his irrational progressive peers, that those who do not get the vaccine are Trump supporters (he appears to be unaware that vaccine hesitancy is highest among black Americans). If Trump is Hitler, then what does that makes Trump’s supporters? It makes them Nazis. That’s right: the people Hillary Clinton labeled the “deplorables” are Nazis. And Nazis are killers.

This way of thinking is delusional and paranoid. More than this, it demonstrates a profoundly superficial understanding of politics and power. I cannot exaggerate how shallow this understanding is. It’s third grade. Trump is a liberal, a nationalist, and a populist, hardly remarkably things to a clear head. Yes, he’s a flamboyant New York City real estate tycoon prone to braggadocio. Yes, he tweets mean things. He also loves his country and was part of the 1990s populist movement that harassed the New Democrats and warned us about NAFTA and mass immigration and globalism.

No, today’s fascism comes in the form of corporate statism, the functionaries of which are drawn from the legacy media, the university, the culture industry, and the administrative state bearing the political face of the Democratic Party, especially its progressive wing, with establishment Republicans collaborating. (See Totalitarian Monopoly Capitalism: Fascism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow; Fascism Becoming Under Cover of COVID-19 Hysteria; Biden’s Biofascist Regime.)

Chomsky, a man who described himself for decades as a “libertarian socialist” and an “anarchist” is actually on the authoritarian capitalist side of politics. And not in a subtle way. Chomsky is deranged. It’s sad. But it’s also dangerous. A lot of people hang on his every word with eyes wide shut.

It use to be that you had to beg to take experimental medicine. Now you’re begging not to be forced to.

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) October 26, 2021

Remember when I told you that young males are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems after being jabbed than be hospitalized from coronavirus? That’s still true. Over 90 percent of those males whose hearts are injured by the vaccine are hospitalized.

Knowing this, why would the US government, which is supposed to protect people, seek to inject young males with this vaccine? Why would any parent inject their teenage boys with this vaccine?

Pfizer and Moderna are making tens of billions from vaccine sales.

Myocarditis isn’t the only injury young people are suffering from this vaccine. Guillain-Barré syndrome, Grave’s disease, and Bell’s palsy are three other injuries caused by this vaccine. These are often devastating conditions that can last a lifetime. The numbers of those injured in the United States are much greater than those reported as the reporting system VAERS vastly undercounts cases.

The health systems in Scandinavia, which do a much better job at this, are so concerned about vaccine injuries that they have stopped the vaccines for those under 30 years of age. So Scandinavia is protecting children while the Biden regime and the technocracy are gearing up to vaccinate tens of millions of children with a vaccine we know will injure them for a virus that may produce in some of them common cold symptoms and for most of the rest of them no symptoms at all.

This is not collective insanity. This is sinister.

Here’s something else that’s true I bet most of you don’t know (and many of you won’t care) about: half of all those who are listed as hospitalized with COVID-19 are actually admitted for reasons other than COVID-19 and only test positive for SARS-CoV-2 once in the hospital.

According to the CDC, more than 90 percent of those who are listed as having died from COVID-19 died from other causes—half of them from influenza and pneumonia.

That last fact is especially odd since we’re told by the CDC that flu activity is the lowest on record. It must be one hell of a flu if at almost undetectable levels it kills nearly half of all those whose death certificates also list COVID-19.

Why is there so little flu activity? They aren’t testing for it. Just like they were testing for coronavirus two years ago.

* * *

As more and more people are vaccinated, the probability that an unvaccinated persons will be the source of your SARS-CoV-2 infection approaches zero. Put another way, in a society where 100 percent of the population is vaccinated, 100 percent of COVID-19 cases will be among vaccinated people.

If the number of COVID-19 cases were reduced by say 99 percent upon mass vaccination, and vaccination could be shown to be the reason for that, that would recommend the vaccine (not compel it). If, on the other hand, controlling for various factors, the number of COVID-19 cases is not reduced or case numbers go up with vaccination, then the mass vaccination program has failed.

Of course, it depends on what end the program is seeking. If the end is public health centered, then, clearly, the program is a failure. But if the end is to impose upon the general population totalitarian corporate-state arrangements, then the program is well down the road of success.

Mandates and passports flip the essential burden of a free society from the state to the individual. The state no longer has to prove I am guilty of something or that I represent a danger to restrict my movements in free spaces or fire me from my job. The state presumes I am guilty and dangerous until I present official documents showing otherwise. The original formula, with the state shouldering the burden, is liberty. The new formulation is tyranny.

* * *

James Heathers, writing for The Atlantic, in the story The Real Scandal About Ivermectin, tells us what the real problem is: “not all science is worth following.” Here comes the pivot. When the establishment can no longer deny the science on Ivermectin, they tell us that not all science should be followed. Which science should we follow, James? The science the establishment tells you to follow.

* * *

Finally, in other science news, Sabrina Imbler, writing for The New York Times, Can Skeletons Have a Racial Identity? reports that “[a] growing number of forensic researchers are questioning how the field interprets the geographic ancestry of human remains.” To summarize the article, forensic anthropologists are questioning the use of ancestry in making determinations of race. Why? Because race is not really a thing. Readers of Freedom and Reason will already know this.

But there’s a problem in changing the way experts think about this, Imbler laments. “Today in the US, the field of forensic anthropology is 87 percent white.” How can this be a problem if race is not really a thing?

Racism is not something a human being is born with. To be sure, a young child will see human difference. But how that young child responds to human difference is learned. Depending on what the child is taught, he may consider a difference or set of differences as incidental or significant. Racial thinking is the result of teaching children that human difference in terms of skin color and other phenotypic features, the result of ancestry, determines a person’s fate in the world. Racial thinking very easily crosses over into racism.

I will define racism later on. But before I get to that, I want to say more about the raising of children. How we raise children determines whether they operate on the basis of cognitive styles regarding and shaping interaction with individuals with or without respect to race. If you teach a child that those who share phenotypic characteristics because of ancestry are collectively bad or good and so forth, then the child will likely to grow up believing that. If you teach a child that the color of a person’s skin does not matter, then they will grow up believing that.

For example, if you teach a child that those with light skin and European facial features are “white,” and that people who are white enjoy a race privilege, this in a country where race privilege was abolished more than half a century ago and discrimination based on race in institutional life made illegal, then you will plant in that child’s mind a fiction that will shape future behavior. Some false beliefs fade over time. Few children grow up to be adults believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. At the time time, most children grow up to be adults who believe in other imaginary things, such things as angels and demons. Not all childhood beliefs fade easily away.

This is why it became widely recognized during the civil rights movement that parents, for example members of the Ku Klux Klan, who taught their children to think in terms of white supremacy, were practicing bad parenting. To counter the bad parenting that was widespread during America’s periods of institutional racism, those who opposed race prejudice taught their children, and encouraged other parents to teach their children, and sought to have teachers teach children, that thinking of others in essentialist racial terms is wrong. This principle was embodied in the preachments of Martin Luther King, Jr., who told the nation of his dream of an America where children are taught to judge each other not by the color of their skin, but on the content of their character.

A black child who is taught to believe that the world is made up of different races and that membership in these groups determines one’s life chances may believe that, no matter what he does, he will never be able to get ahead because he does not possess the race privilege he imagines the white person enjoys. This may cause the child to grow up falsely believing that he is disadvantaged because of his race. This belief may cause him to feel resentful and make him conflict-seeking. It may cause him to be fearful and limit his freedom of movement. The belief may cause him to interact with others in a way that sabotages his chances to make something of himself in a nation founded on individual liberty—the very value that caused men to abolish all forms of institutional racism over the course of its short and spectacular history.

The person who thinks this way may become bitter, not in the face of reality, but because of the fruit of his own self-defeating behavior—a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by the planting of false notions in his head during childhood.

Another person, on account of merely having white skin and European features, may on the basis of such teachings feel guilty for something he did not do or for something other people did. He may falsely believe the situation of those he believes aren’t like him are not because of a self-defeating cognitive style but because he enjoys a privilege he most likely does not enjoy because he is a working man. The false belief will cause him to be ignorant of the fact, for example, that most people who are disadvantaged in America share his skin color and European facial features. For this reason, it will be difficult for him to see that his disadvantage is the result of an economic system inadequate to his needs independent of his racial classification. This false consciousness will likely, like with his black brother, motivate self-defeating conduct.

No good comes from teaching children that ancestry shapes destiny. We have now an extensive decades-long history of collectively participating in a comprehensive, intergenerational real-world experiment. The first phase of the experiment involved teaching children to think and act in racial terms. The second phase taught children that thinking and acting in racial terms was wrong. In this phase, children were instructed to think of themselves as individuals first, for this was the creed of their nation, the ethic of a free and democratic republic. The third phase involves a return to instruction in racial thinking and practice. We are in the throes of the experiment’s third phase. It’s time to call off the experiment. The results are unambiguous. We continue to the detriment of the experimental subject: ourselves.

A society based on reason and evidence does not ignore the findings of such a definitive conclusion. Such a society, if it is true to its rational character, will abandon the antiracist teachings of critical race thinking and demand a return to traditional civil rights thinking and practice—and parents across the nation are indeed making this demand. Rational people recognize that critical race theory is a return to a cognitive style and practice deleterious to the optimal growth and development of human beings. CRT is a form of neoracism, one that teaches people that ancestry defined in racial terms shapes their life-chances. It teaches white children that they are members of an oppressor race, while teaching black children that they are the oppressed race. In its intention or its effect, this teaching obscures the common experience of all children in a class-based social system wherein a few enjoy lives of actual privilege, while the many are exposed to preachments dividing children in essentialist terms in order to raise falsely conscious adults.

Now I come to the definition of racism, although it hardly feels necessary anymore. Racism is not merely the belief that there is human variation and that group differences are the result of ancestry. As I said at the outset, physical differences are real. That offspring in time come to resemble their parents is true throughout the natural world. It is a biological truth (which it seems progressives would have us deny). The differences across a species can be made important or unimportant depending on how they are conceptualized and on the emphasis placed on things. But the individuals of a species are more alike than they are different. This is what we mean when we say race is “socially constructed.” The ideology of racism thus requires more than merely observing human variation; it holds that our species can be subdivided into essential race types and that these types tell us about what goes on inside a person’s head, how he acts in life, and what he deserves.

But our thoughts and our conduct are products of socialization and enculturation that ultimately have nothing to do with our physical appearance. This is why we can say that some forms of socialization and some cultural formations are inadequate for the proper raising of children and the treatment of individuals. This is why cultures that teach and practice racism, sexism, etc., are not up to the task of producing individuals who can develop to their full potential—they do not provide the tools necessary for self-actualization.

In the presence of an institutional system that mandates the differential treatment of individuals on the basis of skin color and other phenotypic features, it is wrong to teach children that such a system is good and appropriate. Because of our creed, Americans understood that and rebelled against this system and, in the end, abolished it. It is just as wrong to teach children that such a system still exists but as an abstraction accessible only through a specialized language. It’s wrong for a different reason, of course. It’s wrong because it is immoral to deceive children in this way to establish of a new system of racial division and conflict.

We see in the lie—an ideology dressed in social studies clothing telling children and young Americans untruths about America’s past and present—the desire to re-segregate social spaces on the basis of race. It is dishonest to resurrect and refashion the old antagonisms that favored the power elite using the rhetoric of justice. To be sure, the scheme of favored and disfavored races is flipped, but the inversion hardly disguises the racism inherent in such style and practice. The doctrine of critical race theory, that racism is about the direction of power, itself exposes the scheme as racist. This is why CRT pushers don’t want parents to know what they’re teaching their children. It’s even why the deny they’re even teaching it.

It is time we speak frankly about the state of affairs. The doctrine teaching untruths to our children is critical race theory. The CRT pushers tell us it’s not being taught to children. In the same breath, they tell us that those who seek to remove it from public school curricula are racist. Their doublespeak is noise designed to obscure the signal. Our purpose here, as in most times and places, is to improve the signal:noise ratio in order to live in light and truth. Removing neoracism from our schools is not about free speech and academic freedom. The appeal to free speech and academic freedom is noise because it is a false appeal. Our republican institutions have been captured and corrupted by a technocratic elite who serve corporate power. When the illiberal appeal to liberal freedoms, the cynicism is palpable. There is no freedom to indoctrinate children in ideology. It’s why the Founding Fathers separated Church and State.

Our struggle is nothing less than saving the American republic. We must return to our children a curriculum based on civil rights and the ethic of individualism—which are the same things. This will require legislative and popular action.

One last thing. There are voices who will tell you that it’s more complicated than this, that I am oversimplifying things. They will try to pull you back into orbit around a world they have constructed with jargon and slogans. I’m a professional sociologist who has studied racism and social history for more than a quarter century. I’m well-acquainted with the formulas of critical theory. I have also studied religion. Like any system of religious scripture, critical race theory is designed to obscure truth and it meant only for the clerics to translate. Our role is to join the congregation, receive the wisdom of the priest, take up the rituals, affirm the commandments, and sit and stand on direction. Yes, there are details here and there, but at its core it’s really not more complicated than that. Nor is it mysterious and novel. You’re already familiar with the way this sort of thing works. It’s an old story. We have already written a new one.

A hallmark of fascism is pathological fear of disease.

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) October 23, 2021

The state has become parens patriae. That’s Latin for “father of the people.” Of course, the state must look out for children, the disabled, and the elderly if others cannot. But under the cover of COVID-19 hysteria, the principle is being extended to cover everybody but those in the Inner Party and selected functionaries. You will lose “privileges” (a euphemism for liberties and rights) if you do not do as you are told. Your “privileges” are contingent upon obeying the father. You may have received this form of punishment as a child. It’s the way convicts are treated. We call it “reform” or “rehabilitation” in the criminal justice system. When it’s applied to the general population it bears another name: fascism.

Fascism comes with numerous markers. But you have to know what to look for. “It’s a pandemic of the unvaccinated!” goes out the slogan. But the hospitals are filling with fully vaccinated people with COVID-19, you point out (because you care to be informed and not appear gullible). So the powers-that-be change the definition of fully vaccinated. You need three shots to be fully vaccinated. Next you will need four shots. And then five shots. And so on. In other words, there are no fully vaccinated people really. There never really were. There are only people who keep getting in line for shots and those who resent being scammed, many of latter whom feel they have no other choice but to go alone. That’s not really a choice, of course. Mandates force people to do what the father tells them.

First, the Ministry of Truth changes the definitions of “immunity” and “vaccine.” Now Minitrue is changing the definition of “fully vaccinated.” Tomorrow Minitrue will tell us the term has always been defined this way. Most of the proles of Airstrip One will take it in stride thanks to doublethink. Empty shelves at the supermarket? The national economy is healthy. And so on. It’s doubleplusgood! “We’re doing our part.” How did Bill Maher put it? “I’m taking one for the team.” (You’re still on the wrong team, Bill.)

Control over information is vital in the establishment of the Ministry of Truth. In a free society, when somebody is saying something that others think is wrong, somebody will usually object and a discussion will ensue and people will learn things. With fact-checking, when somebody is saying something that the powers-that-be think is wrong, somebody in authority will label the post “false” or “partially-false” and there will be no discussion. Those who were likely to discuss matters will instead stand on either side of a claim and watch the powers-that-be determine the fate of whatever the claim may be. Fact-checking dumbs down and limits interaction. It treats social media users like elementary school students who need to be corrected by the teacher. And the teacher only has a bachelors degree and a lesson plan with no depth or detail. And an agenda she learned in professional development camp.

Massive, powerful display of protest against vaccine passports in Bern, Switzerland. The protesters wear yokes to symbolize the desire of the ruling class to treat workers like livestock that they can drug at will.pic.twitter.com/qq9z5gVxef

— Michael P Senger (@michaelpsenger) October 23, 2021

Because the establishment media won’t show you the protests occurring throughout the world in resistance to the fascist vaccine mandates, I will (see above). Letting people know they are not alone is about manifesting what we call in science “mutual knowledge.” Mutual knowledge is essential for building power among those upon whom illegitimate power is being imposed. When people don’t know that others think like they do, when they believe they are all alone in the world, they start to feel as if they are in the wrong. They can even start feeling like they are losing their sanity. That’s the point of marginalization and ridicule when it’s aimed downwards (power is by definition unequal, so you have no ethical responsibility to resist marginalizing and ridiculing the powerful).

https://t.co/9SMk9lIJa9

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) October 24, 2021

For those of you who recognize what’s happening for what it is—it is fascism—know that you are not losing your mind. The power elite, their attack dogs working the institutions and the irregulars working the popular front, are trying to gaslight you by keeping you in the dark and making you feel alone and wrong. This is a standard strategy of power, characteristic of totalitarian governments who control what you see and hear because they know they increase the likelihood of either controlling what you think or cowing you with this method. Unfortunately, the method is very powerful and it has gotten to quite a lot of our comrades.

You hear and see the gaslighting in memes about “conspiracy theory.” I’m sure you have seen the images of people wearing tinfoil hats and so forth. People who share these memes, while they may seem quite intelligent and compassionate otherwise, are shallow sadists who push corporate state propaganda. You can know them by their works. Consider this article from NBC News by Brandy Zadrozny: “‘Carol’s Journey’: What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users.” It sports an image of a rabbit in a hole surrounded by a steel trap and emoticons strewn about.

The story is damned condescending. Here’s the premise: you’re a bunch of proles who can’t think for yourselves—for sure you can’t be trusted to think the right thoughts. I’ve had this trick tried on me—I’ve been “radicalized” because people are just now discovering that I don’t operate according to checked boxes and approved slogans. What are the right thoughts? You can know by what they think the “radicalized” thoughts are. You’ll find there (and them) what Antonio Gramsci conceptualized as “hegemony.” Hegemony comes with both a velvet glove and an iron fist. Just ask yourself, “Who do they platform, promote, stroke, and privilege?” Alternatively, you can ask yourself, “Who do they marginalize, censor, discipline, and punish?”

NBC News is handing readers a template for action. A big part of the reason people will run with this, will become part of the fascist order of things, is because they possess an authoritarian personality. They enjoy lording power over others, and since they have no real power themselves, they stand with the manifestation of power they believe is most efficacious, which in the current period is corporate state power. They are just like those who, in early periods and in other cultures, theocratic ones, stand with the religious clerics in persecuting the disbelievers. They enjoy burning witches. Those who are smeared as “conspiracy theorists” are the disbelievers, the freethinkers. They do not accept the line of the power elite. As it should be in a free world. Be a freethinker. You are not alone.

Freedom is what we are told to run from. “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID,” former vice-president Joe Biden mockingly told a CNN town hall filled with plants. “Experts say vaccines mandates for COVID-19 infringe on individual freedoms, but may be necessary to protect public health,” writes Zaheena Rasheed for Aljazeera, in an article pushed out by the establishment news aggregators. Zaheena reflects the establishment admission that the mandates indeed infringe on individual liberty, which is where freedom lives. But mandates can’t possibly be necessary if (1) the coronavirus does not present a threat to the general population (it does not); (2) the vaccine does not confer significant immunity (it does not); (3) the risk : benefit ratio is to the detriment of children and young adults (it is). The facts make this obvious: there is no public health reason warranting mandates. COVID-19 mandates and passports are profoundly unethical and their advocacy from a public health standpoint is irrational. There has to be an ulterior motive. And it can only be sinister.

We got a dose of the sinister this morning when The New York Post reported that the former vice-president signed a memo blaming COVID-19 for postponement of the scheduled release of the assassination records of President John Fr. Kennedy, who was gunned down in Dallas, Texas in 1963, likely the result of a conspiracy according to conclusions reached by the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1979. In 1992, Congress ruled that “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy . . . should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.” Does it need to be pointed out that 1992 was a long time ago? Friday’s White House memo tells us that “continued postponement is necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

COVID-19 hysteria has become a master justification for a vast range of corporate state actions that work at cross-purposes with the fundamental tenets of a democratic society. We are seeing the socialization of totalitarian methods of mass social control. Fear and sadism are essential for its successful implementation.

* * *

The CDC is telling you that a COVID-19 vaccine is a magic talisman that protects you from everything. I refuse to live in the land of the absurd. I’m not kidding. Maggie Fox of CNN reports, People vaccinated against Covid-19 less likely to die from any cause, study finds.

Do you know why the vaccinated have better outcomes? They are healthier than those who do not get vaccinated to begin with.