freedom and reason

CNN laments that colleges are canceling affinity graduations due to anti-DEI policies. “Here is how students are preserving the traditions,” it reports. But why should they?

Imagine if taxpayer money were used to fund white affinity graduations and ceremonies at colleges and universities. It would be a scandal—a national controversy. Academics, activist groups, media outlets, and public officials would line up to condemn it as an act of racial exclusion, a ritual of white supremacy dressed in institutional respectability. And they would have a point.

So why is it acceptable for those same institutions to fund black affinity graduations?

The answer, we’re told, lies in history. White affinity events risk reinforcing racial hierarchies in a society where whiteness has long been dominant. Black affinity graduations, on the other hand, are said to offer marginalized students an affirming space—a safe space—to celebrate achievement in the face of systemic exclusion. This is a radical theory of equity: race-based remedies for race-based harm.

I know this argument. I once believed it. I don’t anymore.

This is not a moral principle. It’s an ideological commitment—one that many, probably most, Americans reject (even if they’re scared of saying so because of the backlash), one that fundamentally contradicts the American Creed, which affirms the equal moral worth of every individual and the rejection of racial double standards. It replaces the universal with the tribal, and justice with selective grievance. They call it progressives. But it’s plainly regressive.

But the deeper problem isn’t just philosophical or theoretical—it’s practical and self-reinforcing. These ceremonies don’t merely reflect a view of the past; they manufacture a story about the present. Their very conduct presupposes the permanence of racial hierarchy. That is the fatal circularity of contemporary antiracism: the black affinity ceremony is justified by the claim that racial inequality persists—and yet it enacts that inequality (separate is not equal), and does so as if racism were fixed, inevitable, and undeniable.

It’s a strange alchemy. The ritual becomes its own proof. It presumes what it claims to resist. It asserts the reality of racial division by performing it. It reifies the very hierarchy it ostensibly seeks to dismantle—by treating racial identity as entitlement and experience. One doesn’t resist racial division by engaging in it. The paradox is obnoxious. What so-called antiracist really seek is cancellation of the American Creed.

Critically, those organizing black affinity celebrations assert the exclusive right to do so. If black students organize by race, it’s celebrated as resistance. If white students did the same, it would be condemned as racism. The asymmetry is not incidental. It is the entire logic.

This is bad logic. This isn’t moral clarity—it’s moral relativism. It’s the same double standard we see in language taboos: one group may use a slur as a symbol of reclamation; another may lose their career for quoting it, even in academic context. That’s not equality. That’s power exercised along racial lines. History doesn’t justify that—it’s discrimination repackaged as social justice. It flips racial power, which remains an assertion of racial power.

This framework demands permanent grievance. It cannot allow for resolution, because resolution would negate its justification. Racism, however recoded as antiracism, needs division to validate its existence. That’s not progress. It’s ideological entrenchment through ritualized racialization.

I have said this much before, but it bears repeating: If this is inclusion, it is an inclusion that requires exclusion. If it is equity, it is equity that demands unequal treatment. If it is justice, it is the justice of group identity—not individual merit, not moral consistency, but tribal entitlement. And that’s no justice at all.

We’re not building a post-racial society with affinity ceremonies; we’re entrenching race as the central organizing principle of public life. That is not a vision of shared citizenship; it’s a roadmap for perpetual division. And that’s what progressives want.

I reject the theory—and the politics—that make this acceptable. In a constitutional republic, individuals must not be treated differently based on skin color—whether that means denying them something or granting them a privilege. This is why reparations is such an immoral and un-American proposal. If black students wish to host separate ceremonies, they may do so—just not with public funding. Taxpayer-supported events must be open to all regardless of skin color.

The dismantling of DEI is not just a policy preference—it’s a moral imperative. This is about restoring the colorblind principle at the heart of the American project: that all people are to be judged by their accomplishments and character, not by the color of their skin.

Trump is doing more than dismantling DEI. He’s stabbing at the beating heart of institutional discrimination. He rightly wondered why Harvard was giving more than 30 percent of its seats to foreigners while excluding white and Asian Americans. But the President didn’t wait for an answer. He stopped Harvard from discriminating against selected demographics by importing students by revoking Harvard’s certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), effectively barring the institution from enrolling international students. 

The administration cited national security concerns and alleged insufficient transparency regarding the identities of foreign students to justify revocation. This is not cover for the real agenda. National security concerns are also part of the equation. Two birds with one stone.

Harvard responded by filing a lawsuit (of course), arguing that the revocation was retaliatory and unconstitutional, especially given the university’s opposition to certain governmental policies. What policies? Harvard accuses the Trump Administration of attempting to influence Harvard’s curriculum, governance, and the ideological perspectives of faculty and students. Harvard viewed this as an infringement on its academic independence and First Amendment rights. See how the Orwellian inversion works? Harvard uses the rhetoric of free speech to flout free speech.

Harvard is desperate to deflect attention from the very real concerns raised by the Trump Administration about institutional discrimination, campus antisemitism, and alleged coordination with the Chinese Communist Party. For it’s part, the Department of Homeland Security has accused Harvard of fostering a hostile environment and collaborating with foreign adversaries and demanded detailed records related to international students and foreign funding—reasonable inquiries in an age of cyber-espionage and ideological subversion.

More than decertification of SEVP, Harvard’s refusal to fully comply has been met with threats to revoke federal funding. I fully agree. What gives Harvard and its defenders the right to obstruct the federal government’s responsibility to protect the American people from threats to national security? If there are spies and extremists operating under the cover of academia, then Harvard isn’t just turning a blind eye—it is actively shielding those who are stealing secrets and undermining the nation from within.

Predictably, the federal district judge in the case, Allison Burroughs, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the revocation, allowing foreign students to continue their studies at Harvard while the legal proceedings unfold.

Remember when the Supreme Court told Harvard they couldn’t do the racist thing anymore? In June 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. The Court’s decision concluded that Harvard’s use of race in admissions lacked sufficiently focused and measurable objectives, unavoidably employed race in a negative manner, and involved racial stereotyping. 

Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that while universities could consider how race affected an applicant’s life experiences, they could not use race as a factor in admissions decisions per se. But even this concession undercuts the foundational American principles of equality before the law and individual merit. The idea that a person’s race—even indirectly—should influence admissions decisions stands in tension with a nation built on the ideals of equal opportunity and individualism. If race is truly irrelevant to a person’s intrinsic capability and worth, then it should play no role, overt or subtle, in how educational—or any other—opportunities are distributed. A truly fair admissions system would judge applicants solely on personal achievement, character, and potential—not their racial or ethnic background.

Still, the ruling effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, prompting institutions nationwide to reevaluate their admissions processes to comply with the new legal standards. That’s a huge win for the cause of justice. Yet, in the meantime, Harvard has been effectively discriminating against white and Asian Americans by luring foreigners to their institution and enrolling them. As with the black affinity ceremonial, that’s fine—as long as taxpayers aren’t paying for it.

I know progressives who are apoplectic over this. Why would any taxpayer support giving money to a racist institution that denied opportunities for Americans? Answer: because many progressives are anti-American, and they associate white and white-adjacent citizens with Americanism. It’s the same impulse that’s fueling the return of virulent antisemitism. Anything that is oppositional to Americanism, and broadly the West—transgressing boundaries protecting children and women, Islamofascism, whatever—is coded as social justice and any resistance to it is bigotry.

It would be one thing if anti-American anti-Enlightenment ideology was relegated to the fringes of society—Antifa, climate fanatics, BLM, trans activists, and the like—but we have major colleges and universities in the United States constructing the idea systems that mean to delegitimize the West and socializing an army of professionals whose purpose it is to take these ideas and colonize and command our sense-making and policy-making institutions.

Donald Trump is right to try to stop the runaway train of institutionalized racialization. In the 1950s and 60s, this country rightly dismantled the laws and customs that segregated people by race. But instead of moving beyond identity politics, progressives reengineered it through affirmative action, DEI, and critical race theory. So-called antiracist ideologies have entrenched race-consciousness into our culture, laws, and policies—and they have to be confronted.

The Cathedral portrays Trump’s actions as racist. But if anti-racism is to have any real meaning at all, it must mean that decision-making and segregation on the basis of race is intolerable.

I’m not saying that Andrew Doyle reads my blog (clearly people do as evidenced by the thousands of annual visitors). But the wave length here is for the most part parallel and at times almost identical to arguments I have made on Freedom and Reason.

I am not nearly as well-spoken as Doyle—or the hosts of Triggernometry. I envy those who with the ability to convey ideas through speech. So if you are interested in an enlightened discussion of liberalism, and you find my essays overlong and tedious (I readily admit that they are), then this video is for you. You will understand me better if you listen to Doyle. I’m a liberal, and what Doyle argues here captures the spirit of liberalism.

I do want to qualify one of his arguments. Perhaps liberalism does not deny human instincts for retribution and vengeance. Perhaps it does not carry the utopian assumption that human nature is essentially good—that bad behavior is learned not innate. I think there is evidence that there is an animality to man (we are, after all, a primate species) and that it comes with authoritarian potential.

At the same time, both good and bad is learned. Doyle leans a bit too much on the Hobbesian premise. If we are essentially good, we are corruptible, as experience testifies to. What liberalism does assert is that, alongside emotion, as a product of natural history, there is in the human brain rational cognitive machinery that makes reason possible—and desirable. This is the Lockean premise.

Liberals struggle for is the right of individuals to think, speak, and write as they will, to freely associate with others, not only as a natural right, but as a humane and pragmatic approach to conflict resolution and problem solving. As much as authoritarianism observably exists in history—and even in the present—so does libertarianism.

I would not, therefore, argue as Doyle does that authoritarianism is the default position, although I do recognize that it has been the way of the world for much of human existence—and it threatens us presently. Moreover, it is not just with the Enlightenment that the authoritarian tendency is marginalized. There are examples of enlightened thinking in premodern spaces and times. However, it is with the Enlightenment that authoritarianism is recognized as universally problematic and that a worldview established on the basis of reason and tolerance affords humanity with the best way forward.

This thought is based on facts in evidence, which is why Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is so powerful: the needs it posits are determinable by science. I don’t deny that there is a human nature, but rather argue that human nature is not authoritarian by default. I also believe that human nature arguments risk mystification. Science is the counter to that problem.

One other thing. I agree wholeheartedly with Konstantin Kisin that a distinction should be made between citizens and noncitizens. If no such distinction is made, then republican government is impossible. Republicanism is the best system so far devised to sustain liberalism—to resist authoritarianism.

The rule of law that defends the principles of free and open society necessarily depends on the existence of nation-states in a world where cultures exist that do not accept individualism and liberal principles. A republic cannot long survive the incorporation of populations whose worldview is antithetical to Western Enlightenment values.

If the authoritarian is a citizen, then the republic is stuck with them. The best citizens can do is criticize the authoritarian tendency and persuade the authoritarians and others to join the liberal side. But if they are not citizens, then they can be expelled. And they should be. If they don’t want to live in a free society, then why are they here? These aren’t immigrants. They’re colonizers, and what they seek is to establish their tyranny here.

As Christopher Hitchens noted several years ago, the city only falls when the barbarians are inside the gates, and the least we can expect from patriots is that they will not invite them in, will vigorously defend the gates, and if the barbarians are inside, send them back outside.

Without borders, the gates we draw around our territories, there is no way to keep out the barbarians or expel them when get in. This is why transnationalism is an existential threat to freedom. The modern nation-state and its rules of exclusion, does not therefore contradict liberalism, but is essential for its continued existence.

Just as your family’s safety depends on walls and doors that lock and the right to self-defense should strangers break in, so should the republic lock its door to strangers. We cannot always know for sure will harm us, but we have good cause to believe that at least some will. It is better not to fuck around and find out.

In case you were unclear about the seriousness of the South African refugee crisis, the South African government recently stated that Afrikaner refugees aren’t fleeing persecution but fleeing “racial justice.” The South African president Cyril Ramaphosa called them “cowards” for escaping. Does his rhetoric trouble you? No? Let me tell you why it should.

What do you think “racial justice” means in the context of the torture-murder of farmers? It means the expropriation of land and organized violence against whites. It means the systematic persecution of a racial minority. Let’s not mince words: the situation in South Africa is becoming a situation of ethnic cleansing. Genocide? Too soon to tell. But that’s the path South Africa is on. Didn’t we say “Never again”? How far down the line does the world allow the racist train to travel to a genocidal destination before the engineer pulls the handle? It is forever to America’s shame that it did not act sooner to save Jews from the Holocaust.

Are readers familiar with this history? During the 1930s-1940s, the United States failed to adequately respond to the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Despite widespread reports of the atrocities in Europe, the US maintained restrictive policies and strict immigration quotas. The refusal to loosen these limits, even in the face of mounting evidence of genocide, resulted in thousands of Jews being denied entry, with many ultimately perishing in the Holocaust. President Trump has implemented strict immigration rules to reduce illegal immigration (as he should), but he has opened the door to Afrikaners who are facing peril in South Africa.

In a meeting at the White House yesterday President Donald Trump directly challenged the South African president over the violence being visited upon white farmers there. The encounter turned tense when Trump dimmed the lights and played a dramatic video compilation. Alongside scenes of white crosses in a field, each representing murdered white farmers, the video included genocidal statements from South African political figures Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma. Malema is shown leading the crowd in a chant: “Dubul’ ibhunu,” Zulu for “Shoot the Boer” or “Kill the farmer.” Sometimes Malema chants it in English—just in case the audience beyond the mob doesn’t speak Zulu. Zuma chants “Umshini Wami,” which translates to “Bring me my machine gun.”

Who are these men leading their mobs in genocidal refrains? Malema is the founder and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a far-left South African political party. Zuma, former President of South Africa (2009–2018), now heads the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party, named after the ANC’s former armed wing. 

Dubul’ ibhunu has been the subject of several court cases aimed at determining whether it constitutes hate speech. Hate speech is not protected under South Africa’s constitution. In 2003, following a complaint from the Freedom Front, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) ruled that the song was hate speech. That ruling was upheld multiple times. But in 2022, the Johannesburg High Court ruled that the plaintiff (Afriforum, representing Afrikaners) failed to establish a causal link between the song and violence. The court also ruled the song did not incite hatred toward whites. The ban was lifted.

Regardless of what one thinks about hate speech laws (I don’t support them, for the record), the connection between Dubul’ ibhunu and anti-white violence appears clear. The white crosses are symbolic memorials meant to draw attention to the targeted killings of white farmers. These are not official graves, as Trump implied. Rather, they are public statements—acts of remembrance and protest. Those behind them want the world to know the statistics: a discernible pattern of violence against whites (more on that shortly).

Ramaphosa has distanced his administration from the figures in the video, insisting that their views do not represent government policy. He emphasized that crime in South Africa affects all races. This obfuscation is echoed by the legacy media. Yes, crime is rampant in South Africa—but the violence targeting whites is not typical street crime. The attacks on white farmers, largely by black assailants, have been ongoing for decades. 

The South African government and the American media have deliberately downplayed this reality. Trump’s intervention forced it onto the front pages. The media’s reflexive dismissal of Trump’s “unfounded claims” only reinforces his charge that the Fourth Estate is peddling fake news.

While the media desperately spins reality, Trump once again bypasses them, prompting the public to investigate for themselves. And what they’re discovering confirms that indeed white South Africans are being persecuted in their ancestral homeland of nearly 400 years. A 2017 homicide study found that 87 percent of murdered farmers were white—though whites make up only 7.3 percent of the national population. A 2024 study raised that figure to 95 percent. Of the 635 farm murders recorded from 2014 to 2024—an average of 63 per year—the vast majority were white victims.

The American legacy media has pushed anti-white sentiment for over fifteen years. They can’t afford to let that frame be challenged—not just because it risks their credibility (long gone), but because they’re advancing an agenda they cannot afford to derail.

They tell you that most victims of crime in South Africa are black, killed by other blacks. That’s true. But the same is true of the US, where more than 50 percent—and always a plurality—of murderers are black, though blacks constitute just 13 percent of the population. And since most murderers are men, that means 6 percent of the population accounts for at least half of all murders and robberies. Acknowledging this is taboo. It’s “racist.” White supremacists cite these stats—so they must be invalid? White supremacists also breathe air. 

Are progressives at all curious why this is the case? Do Black Lives Matter? That’s the deeper issue, isn’t it? Why are black people killing each other in such large numbers? They can’t explore that because it would mean progressive urban policy has been a failure—or, perhaps worse, that it’s working as intended. Are readers aware that 40 percent of black Americans live in urban centers run overwhelmingly by Democrats? That’s down from 57 percent in 1990. The exodus of more affluent black families to the suburbs has only worsened inner-city conditions.

In America, a white person is far more likely to be killed by a black person than vice versa. Per capita, a black person is 12.5 times more likely to kill a white person, and 20 times more likely to rob one. Why does the rare case of a white-on-black killing make front-page news, while black-on-white murders are met with silence—or crowdfunding for the perpetrator? The same is true of mass murder. The popular image is a white lone-wolf racist. In reality, the typical mass murderer is an inner-city gangbanger. These killings are common in Democrat-run cities, but the media doesn’t cover them. The press is run by allies of the Democratic Party. This same press does not tell you that there are no racial disparities in lethal police encounters. They led you to believe the opposite. So who are the real white supremacists? I’d argue it’s those in power who maintain urban poverty and deny black Americans access to better models for success.

If you think anti-white sentiment doesn’t motivate black-on-white crime or drive the media frame, you’re in denial. What we are witnessing is street-level reparations, stoked by academic and media rhetoric: “All whites benefit from white privilege.” “All whites are racist.” “America is a white supremacist nation.” These mantras manufacture resentment—and resentment drives action. A double-standard attempts to conceal the consequences of rhetoric. BLM burns a police station? “Mostly peaceful protests.” Rioters loot stores, destroy cities, kill people—response? “But January 6!” Meanwhile, black-on-white crime is met with silence. Whites and police are portrayed as threats to black lives, even though most whites live in the suburbs and vote Republican—the party not responsible for urban policy.

This pattern holds for antisemitic rhetoric as well. Jews are painted as oppressors of Arabs, which, predictably, results in violence. Two Israeli Embassy employees, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were murdered yesterday outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC. The shooter, Elias Rodriguez, shouted “Free, free Palestine.” Witnesses heard it. I watched the video. During his arrest, Rodriguez declared, “I did this for Gaza.”

This ideology loaded the gun. White supremacy? No—leftist antisemitism. Rodriguez, it turns out, donated to pro-Palestine campaigns and is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. This is what the left calls “propaganda of the deed”—violent acts inspired by “propaganda of the word.” The word arms the deed. Rodriguez had no prior criminal record but posted radical content: “De@th 2 Amerikkka,” “Bring the war home.” A manifesto linked to him reads: Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home.

It was not only a matter of time before this rhetoric killed Jews—it already has. October 7. Now this. “Free, free Palestine” is code for the extermination of Jews. “From the river to the sea” means a Palestine without Jews—despite their indigenous presence in the region for thousands of years.

I’m not saying we should censor antisemitic protests (though we should revoke visas for foreigners who participate in them). I’m a free speech absolutist (for citizens). I’m calling for counter-speech—challenging speech that motivates violence. The left either participates in antisemitism or fails to denounce it. History tells us where that leads. The murders of Lischinsky and Milgrim confirm the rising threat of leftwing antisemitism.

This is the nature of all propaganda of the word. Two attempts have been made on Trump’s life, inspired by rhetoric comparing him to Hitler. People believe absurdities—and some act on them. That’s how you get dead Jews and assassination attempts a leading candidate for the highest office in the world.

In his 1886 work Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” With this line, Nietzsche expressed his deep distrust of collective behavior. His goal was not merely to challenge moral systems, but to uncover the irrational and often dangerous cultural forces that uphold them—forces shaped more by instinct and emotion than by reason. This is the essence of propaganda of the word—ideas that spread not by argument, but by emotional contagion. Today, we see this dynamic in real time. There have already been two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, each motivated by rhetoric that compares him to Hitler. When people absorb dangerous absurdities as truth, some inevitably act on them. This is how antisemitic violence and political assassination attempts happen.

Thus Nietzsche’s warning about the madness of crowds remains relevant. Mass movements are rarely guided by critical thought; they run on conformity, emotion, and resentment. The individual reasons—the mob reacts. And when ideology casts certain groups as permanent oppressors—whether whites, Jews, or any other—violence is never far behind. The 2020 riots showed how quickly emotion and mythology can ignite chaos. Propaganda doesn’t just persuade; it mobilizes. And what it mobilizes is often fury.

Legacy media is complicit in all this. They compare Trump to Hitler. They equate MAGA hats with Klan hoods. Afrikaners are similarly vilified. Inferior cultures are excused by blaming their failures on more successful neighbors. Demagogues say that success comes at the expense of others. There needs to be a racial reckoning. Yes, the left has the right to say these things. And yes, we have the right to respond. Speech isn’t dangerous—people are. That’s why we challenge ideas. Bad ideas inspire bad actions. You’re supposed to doubt that anti-white and antisemitic rhetoric drives violence. But I’ll show in a forthcoming essay that it does. None of this is accidental. The left wants this outcome.

If nothing is done, South Africa will do to whites what the Arab world did to Jews: strip them of rights and drive them out. There’s been a 97 percent decline in the Jewish population of the Arab world since the 1960s—nearly a million down to about 26,600 today. Israel, the US, and other Western nations became safe havens. South Africans need similar refuge now. The US has stepped up, but Europe must follow. The situation is deteriorating fast. Afrikaners are only 7 percent of the population—and they face a campaign to eliminate them.

Trump’s administration won’t get credit for acting, but they saw this coming. The President’s instincts were right. The media called his confrontation with Ramaphosa an “ambush.” But it was necessary. The world had to know. Did Trump get a few things wrong? Yes. But he got the matter directionally right. Beyond humanitarian aid, the administration has directed agencies to halt cooperation with the upcoming G20 in South Africa. Sanctions may follow. This is now a diplomatic flashpoint.

The message for Americans and Europeans? Anti-white hysteria has consequences. The Democrats push it. So do the elites in Europe. They pursue mass immigration and the managed decline of Western civilization. They call resistance to these developments “racism.” But defending whites in America, England, and South Africa is not about racism. It’s about recognizing that identity politics is part of a global strategy to disorder the West. We didn’t want this fight. But we have no choice but to engage it.

I want to close with a case that has recent brought to my attention: a Danish man named Kasper Juul Eriksen detained by ICE. In April 2025, Eriksen was taken into custody by US immigration authorities during what was meant to be a routine citizenship interview in Memphis, Tennessee (this is where my wife and I had our routine citizenship interviews).

A legal resident of the United States since 2013, Eriksen was detained due to an alleged paperwork error from 2015. He is now being held in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana. With four children and no current household income, the family is seeking his release and calling for support from the community and lawmakers. The case has raised concerns about immigration enforcement practices and the impact of administrative errors on law-abiding residents. I agree that he should be released.

But something is conspicuously missing in the reporting. The controversy over the Afrikaners who sought refuge in the United States was contrasted with the refusal of the Trump administration to grant asylum to other alleged refugees. The Afrikaners were white, critics said; the others were black and brown. The implication was that Trump’s policy is racist, favoring whites and disfavoring nonwhites. But here is a Danish man, as white as can be, and ICE took him into custody—and has kept him there for a month. The fact that he was treated this way contradicts the thesis that the present policy favors whites over nonwhites.

Why aren’t we talking about Alejandro Mayorkas? Serving in senior positions under both President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, Mayorkas played a pivotal role in shaping US immigration policy in the twenty-first century—and not for the better. His approach to immigration has been praised by progressives. But in the populist world, Mayorkas is a villain, an immigrant who played a major role in advancing the managed decline of the American Republic and diminishing the quality of life of its citizens. For his efforts to deconstruct the national community, Mayorkas was impeached in 2024, making him the first cabinet secretary to be impeached in nearly 150 years. The Democrat-controlled Senate dismissed his impeachment to avoid a trial that risked shining a spotlight on Mayorkas’ anti-American agenda.

In this essay, I detail the role Mayorkas played in the project of managed decline, highlight the position of leading Democrat figures on the question of immigration, i.e., the open articulation of a desire for demographic replacement and the reordering of national life, and the populist response to what is plainly a globalist agenda.

Under President Obama, Mayorkas served first as Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In that role, which he held from 2009 to 2013, he was instrumental in the development and implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program announced in 2012 that allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to remain and work legally. Bypassing Congress through executive action, DACA became a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s immigration policy. Mayorkas is credited with managing the program’s rapid rollout and implementation.

In 2013, Mayorkas was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where he served until 2016. During this period, he supported the expansion of executive actions on immigration, including an attempted expansion of DACA and a new program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA). DAPA was ultimately blocked by the courts (as I have argued in recent essays, I don’t think courts should be involved in this, but the outcome was a good one). Mayorkas also helped coordinate enforcement priorities to focus on criminals and recent border crossers, rather than broader interior enforcement—a stance that foreshadowed the Biden administration’s policies.

Biden nominated Mayorkas to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) in December 2020, making him the first immigrant to hold the position. Mayorkas had served on the board of HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), an organization (on of many faith-based NGOs) focused on refugee protection and resettlement, resigning from the board upon his nomination. His tenure at DHS saw record levels of illegal immigration at the southern border, straining immigration courts, which were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of aliens coming before their benches.

His admirers tell us that Mayorkas tried to walk a tightrope between enforcing border laws and fulfilling the administration’s promises of what he and the President characterized as a more humane immigration system. But the premise is false. Mayorkas ended several Trump-era policies, including the Remain in Mexico program, and attempted to replace them with new asylum regulations that emphasized “fairness” and speed—that is, importing as many foreigners to America as possible. He rolled out humanitarian parole programs for nationals from countries like Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela. He engineered the end of Title 42, a public health policy that allowed for swift expulsions at the border.

Republicans accused Mayorkas of failing to maintain operational control of the border, correctly observing that his policies encouraged illegal crossings and endangered national security. In 2024, the Republican-controlled House voted to impeach Mayorkas on charges of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and breach of public trust. The articles of impeachment cited his handling of border security, use of prosecutorial discretion, and misrepresentations to Congress. This marked the first impeachment of a cabinet official since 1876.

However, the Democratic-controlled Senate dismissed the charges without proceeding to a full trial, citing the absence of constitutional grounds. One suspects that what was really at issue was the problem of discovery. A Senate trial would have requiring bring evidence otherwise bear, and Democrats did not want Americans to learn about Biden’s plan for a transformed America. Democrats argued that the impeachment was a misuse of the impeachment process to target policy disagreements rather than actual misconduct—this in the face of Mayorkas throwing open the southern border of the United States to millions of foreigners, many of whom were gang members and hardened criminals. It was a smokescreen. The corporate state media dutifully stuffed the case down the memory hole.

Mayorkas isn’t a maverick on this issue. In recent years, several high-profile Democratic leaders, including Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer, and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have increasingly framed immigration not only as a humanitarian and moral imperative but also as a strategic necessity for America’s long-term demographic and economic health. Their arguments explicitly link immigration to an aging population, declining birth rates, and labor shortages. Rather than embracing traditional natalist policies, which encourage higher native birth rates, Democrats articulate a philosophy that positions immigration as the key to what they characterize as demographic renewal and national vitality. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Mayorkas often emphasized the idea that the US immigration system should be seen as a source of strength, not disorder. In various speeches and interviews, he argued that immigrants bring cultural dynamism, energy, and innovation to the nation—attributes he sees as essential to sustaining America’s global leadership. He also highlighted the economic dimension, noting that immigrants fill critical labor gaps and contribute to industries suffering from workforce shortages, especially in agriculture, healthcare, and technology. What he didn’t highlight is the fact that labor shortages can be met by native Americans who are idled by urban social policy and drive up wages for those with strong attachment to the labor market.

Mayorkas’ rhetoric is based on the ideological assertion that the United States is at its core a “nation of immigrants,” and that embracing this identity is not only a moral stance but also a pragmatic one. As I have documented on this platform, this ideology roots in the cultural pluralist and transnationalist arguments of urban-based cosmopolitan intellectuals dating from the early twentieth century and the industrial class they served. Their arguments have played a key role in undermining the dynamic of assimilation and integration necessary for national integrity. As I have argued before, and soon will again, the notion of America is a “nation of immigrants“ is nonsensical, since the vast majority of Americans are native to the country.

Senator Chuck Schumer articulated the replacement plan explicitly in 2022, calling on Congress to “welcome immigrants” in order to “replenish our population” and counteract declining birth rates. Acknowledging the anxieties around border security, Schumer argued that America must nonetheless find a way to balance enforcement with generosity. In Schumer’s view, immigration reform is not just about fixing a broken system; it’s about securing the country’s economic future in a time of demographic contraction. This mirrors a broader shift in the Democratic establishment, where immigration is increasingly defended as an engine for population sustainability and long-term growth.

Hillary Clinton recently took this argument a step further by openly criticizing the growing natalist movement in populist circles, which calls for government support to encourage higher native birth rates. In a widely discussed speech, Clinton rejected the notion that America’s demographic crisis can—or should—be solved through such policies. She emphasized that immigration provides a more immediate, pluralistic, and realistic solution to population decline. Clinton warned that natalism, particularly when wrapped in ethno-nationalist rhetoric (her characterization), risks veering into exclusionary or reactionary politics. In contrast, she portrayed immigration as a pathway to diversity and openness, which strengthens America’s relevance on the world stage.

Clinton’s argument is bound up with the history of eugenics, a progressive program she attempts to attribute to such populist figures as Vice-President JD Vance and entrepreneur Elon Musk. In so many words, she is claiming that natalists are attempting to stem the decline in the white population by promoting child birth. But is this not plainly the goal of replacing Americans with black and brown immigrants? Moreover, it’s not only whites who are too numerous for this crowd. Democrats have ghettoized blacks, segregated them from the more affluent, idled them (replacing their labor with immigrants), made them dependent on government, and disorganized their families, especially by removing fathers from the home. And while black women still have higher fertility rates than white women, the rates are declining for blacks, as well. What Democrats don’t want to see is rising fertility rates and especially a return to the nuclear family and empowered communities among working class native Americans, black and white. The reality is that it’s the Democrats who are the eugenicists—and they’ve updated the strategy for the age of globalism and identity politics.

The birth control movement in the United States has long intersected with eugenic thinking, explicitly so in its early twentieth-century phases. Margaret Sanger, a leading figure in this movement and founder of the organization that would become Planned Parenthood, advocated for contraception not only as a means of empowering women but also as a tool for improving what she called “social health.” She embraced eugenics believing that limiting the reproduction of those deemed “unfit” would benefit society. Sanger’s involvement with the Negro Project in the 1930s has drawn criticism for reflecting a racially paternalistic approach, although it involved collaboration with black leaders who supported birth control access as a form of racial uplift.

While some have emphasized her efforts targeting black Americans, Sanger and other eugenicists were focused more broadly on reducing fertility among poor and working-class populations across racial lines. Eugenics dovetailed with broader anxieties about degeneracy, poverty, and social order. While many industrialists supported mass immigration for its economic benefits—particularly cheap labor—eugenicists were often opposed to immigration, fearing that it would dilute the genetic stock of the nation.

A convergence of interests played out in the 1924 Immigration Act that restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and prepared the way for America’s golden years. Unlike progressives who embraced technocratic solutions to social problems, the populist push for immigration restriction was driven by concerns about wages, national identity, and social cohesion. However, these combined forces pushed immigration restrictions across the line. Today, progressives have reconciled mass immigration and eugenics through a strategy that pushes down fertility rates for native Americans and replaces them with foreign workers.

It must be remembered that progressivism from its inception has been characterized by expertise, scientism (a religious-like faith in science), and social reform to improve society, i.e., to advance the technocratic project. Many progressives embraced ideas about “scientific” approaches to social problems, including education, poverty, and public health. Eugenics fit into this framework as a form of “social improvement” through controlling reproduction. Margaret Sanger identified with many progressive ideals—especially public health, social reform, and women’s rights. She believed birth control could help reduce poverty and improve social conditions. Like many progressives, she was influenced by eugenic thinking, which was widely accepted in reform circles as a legitimate science at the time. At the same time, corporations depend on cheap labor to maximize surplus value, and that means disorganizing labor to prevent an empowered working class that would agitate for higher wages.

Corporate opposition to democratic accountability fiercely targeted populism, while progressivism was seen as a more palatable, even useful, reform movement from the perspective of big business. Progressivism’s focus on expert regulation and social order meshed with corporate interests in managing capitalism’s challenges and staving off revolutionary change. Populism, which arose in the late twentieth century from the struggles of small farmers, laborers, and small business owners, was explicitly hostile to the concentration of corporate power. Populists saw large corporations—particularly railroads, banks, and monopolies—as exploitative forces that threatened the livelihoods and autonomy of ordinary people. Their political agenda called for radical reforms such as breaking up monopolies, empowering labor unions, and implementing direct democratic controls like initiatives and referendums. These demands directly challenged the power structures and profit models of big business, prompting fierce corporate resistance.

In contrast, progressivism emerged in the early twentieth century among a different social base—urban middle-class professionals, reform-minded politicians, and organic intellectuals serving big government and corporate interest—who believed that social problems could be addressed through expert governance, regulation, and scientific management. Progressives generally sought to manage corporate power rather than limit it, indeed even entrench bureaucratic logic. Many in the corporate world found this technocratic approach compatible with their interests, as it aimed to contain social unrest and create a more predictable business environment without threatening the fundamental structures of industrial capitalism. This meant that while progressives pushed reforms, they worked within the existing capitalist order, sometimes even partnering with corporate leaders to implement changes that could strengthen the system overall.

Thus, progressivism represented a reform movement that sought to humanize and stabilize capitalism through expertise and regulation, whereas populism posed a more direct, grassroots challenge to corporate power and economic inequality. This is how you can see a split among progressives, such as those who supported immigration restrictions and those, such as Horace Kallen, who opposed them. When it came to immigration restrictions, the progressives were split. Populist opposition to mass immigration was much more strident and unified. Progressives have been unified in a strategy that marginalized the native-born working class via globalization, off-shoring good-paying value added jobs white replacing native workers with immigrant labor. Ghettoization of blacks, the destruction of labor unions, and open borders were accomplished during the Great Society, when progressive Democrats were the hegemonic power in the Imperial Capitol.

President Biden, who continues the progressive tradition, consistently echoes the themes of his comrades Mayorkas, Schumer, and Clinton. Running for the Democratic Party nomination to run against President Trump, Biden called for immigrants to surge to the border. His administration’s rhetoric emphasized “a secure and humane immigration system” that supports America’s economic needs. In speeches and policy rollouts, Biden has spoken about immigrants as essential contributors to the nation’s cultural fabric and workforce development. His administration promoted pathways for legal immigration and temporary labor programs—often citing demographic trends as justification.

Together, these leaders express a coherent philosophy, one already obvious in their policies and actions: that immigration is not just about compassion or inclusion (not for the sake of these things per se, of course)—it is integral to the survival and renewal of the American project in an era of shrinking birth rates and global competition, challenges progressives engineered and desire. Where others see immigration as a threat to national identity or stability, they argue it is the very means by which the United States can adapt, lead, and thrive lead in the twentieth century.

Indeed, others do see immigration as a threat. And they’re right. From a populist and nationalist standpoint, the progressive vision of immigration as a “solution” to demographic and economic decline is not a humanitarian necessity but a continuation of a globalist agenda that undermines the foundations of democratic self-determination, national cohesion, and working-class security. Mass immigration is not a neutral policy lever—it’s a force that reshapes the cultural and economic landscape of the country in ways that serve elite interests while marginalizing ordinary citizens.

Large-scale immigration, especially when rapid and poorly integrated, erodes the shared culture, language, norms, and values that bind a nation together. While the US has a long history of immigration (America is hardly alone in this), the sheer scale and pace of modern migration, coupled with an emphasis on multiculturalism rather than assimilation, is fragmenting national identity. Instead of a melting pot, mass immigration produces parallel societies within nations, ethnic enclaves and racial ghettos, culturally disorganizing the nation and undermining social trust, particularly in working-class communities where the changes wrought by mass immigration are most visible and most acutely felt.

Mass immigration functions as a downward pressure on wages and job security, especially for native-born workers without college degrees, impacting native black and brown families the most. Immigration is not an economic lifeline but a labor-market manipulation tool that benefits corporations by increasing the supply of cheap labor and weakening workers’ bargaining power. That’s what Democrats mean by global competition: pitting workers around the world in competition. That’s free trade. Wages remain stagnant because employers can tap into a constant stream of new, more vulnerable workers. There’s no compassion among Democrats here. If they were compassionate, they would think first of the American worker. Instead, in the words of Hillary Clinton, the American worker belongs in a basket of deplorables.

The populist argument dovetails with a broader critique of globalization, the coordinated project by economic and political to detach capital and labor from national obligations. Just as globalization offshores factories and hollows out industrial towns, immigration is a strategy of on-shoring labor surplus—importing low-wage workers who compete with the domestic labor force and strain public services. In both cases, the working class is asked to bear the costs of elite-driven policies, while being told these changes are inevitable, necessary, or virtuous. When American object, they are smeared as nativists, racists, and xenophobes.

The populist position emphasizes democracy accountability and national sovereignty. Mass immigration levels and policies have been imposed from above, without meaningful consent from the electorate. The political class—especially in major cities and global institutions—has become detached, or more precisely protected in the gated communities, from the real-world consequences of immigration in local communities. All this fuels resentment and distrust, not just toward the policies themselves but toward the broader system that implements them.

From this perspective, the progressive call to solve population decline with immigrants rather than by rebuilding domestic family formation is seen as a rejection of national continuity. Rather than invest in policies that help Americans start families—affordable housing, better wages, stable jobs—the corporate state prefers a demographic replacement strategy. Replacement is dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory, but, as we plainly see, replacement of the native population with foreign labor in America (and across Europe) is the explicit goal. Democrats are emboldened to say the quiet part out loud. And they paid dearly for it in 2024.

In a recent essay I asked: what meaning does citizenship, culture, or national identity really have? The same rhetorical question can be asked here. If a nation’s population can simply be swapped out to serve GDP growth, what is the meaning of citizenship, culture, or national identity? At its core, the populist-nationalist critique of immigration is not driven by hostility to outsiders but by a sense that the American working class is being systematically displaced and ignored—culturally, economically, and politically—in service of a vision that prioritizes diversity, markets, and transnational flows over cultural rootedness, national survival, popular sovereignty.

In this light, allowing Alejandro Mayorkas to quietly leaves his role as one of the major players in weakening America’s national community is part of the project to dissimulate the managed decline of the American Republic. Mayorkas was not among the several preemptively pardoned by President Biden as he left office. He’s fair game. Where are congressional Republicans on this? It is not enough that President Trump has reduced illegal border crossings to a trickle. It is not enough—if federal courts will allow it—that he deports many of the millions Mayorkas allowed to walk into our country. Those who betrayed America must be held accountable for their treason. Biden doesn’t have long to live. But Mayorkas looked healthy enough to me when he left office. Where is he now? Republicans need to establish his whereabouts and call him before the nation to answer for his deeds.

“Being sick means constructing an alternate reality, strapping it in place with sturdy mantras, surrendering to the beguiling logic of an old fairy tale.” —Katy Waldman

Anorexia is not just about striving for an idealized body image. It is an obsessive, relentless—and futile—quest to be pure, perfect, and clean.” —Cherry Jackson

Holy Anorexia, also known as Anorexia Mirabilis (“miraculous lack of appetite”), refers to a historical and religious phenomenon prevalent during the Middle Ages, in which predominantly young Christian women—often nuns or other aspirants to religious life—engaged in extreme self-starvation as a demonstration of their spiritual piety, purity, and devotion to God. Unlike the modern medical framing of anorexia nervosa as a psychiatric disorder, Anorexia Mirabilis was interpreted at the time as a form of divine grace or saintly asceticism. It’s this type of thing that stuffs my virtual filing cabinet (one of the functions of Freedom and Reason), in this case for when I return to my sociology of religion course.

The roots of Anorexia Mirabilis lie in the Christian tradition of bodily mortification and fasting, especially as practiced by anchorites (the religious recluse), ascetics (those living austere lives for God), and mystics. In an age when women had limited access to formal institutional and theological power, the control of the body through chastity, fasting, and suffering offered a spiritual and social outlet for religious agency. Refusing food was not only a way to imitate the suffering of Christ, but also a means of rejecting earthly pleasures and asserting moral superiority over the flesh.

Crucially, these practices were celebrated rather than pathologized. Women who could sustain long periods of fasting were said to be sustained by the Eucharist alone or the direct love of Christ. Here was a manifestation of the power of God. At least that was the explanation; wasted bodies were seen as evidence of their sanctity. This led to the widespread veneration of such women, many of whom became the subjects of hagiographies—i.e., religious biographies extolling their virtues—and, in some cases, were canonized as saints, for example Saint Catherine of Siena, who lived between 1347–1380.

In his influential 1985 book Holy Anorexia, historian Rudolph Bell argued that many of these women exhibited behaviors strikingly like modern anorexia nervosa, but within a radically different cultural and theological framework. Bell posits that Anorexia Mirabilis was the historical precursor to today’s eating disorders—especially among women—and served both as spiritual self-expression and a form of resistance to prescribed gender roles. However, more recent theological analyses contend that framing these women as proto-anorexics diminishes their religious agency and overlooks the sincere mystical experiences many reported (I don’t doubt their sincerity). Feminists emphasize the symbolic power of food refusal in a time when marriage and childbirth were seen as a woman’s destiny—abstaining from both sex and food became a path to autonomy and transcendence.

Religion is a powerful force, whether rationalizing or inspiring movements like Holy Anorexia. But we don’t have to travel to the Middle Ages to see this—although Anorexia Mirabilis and what it likely signifies is fascinating and relevant to the balance of this essay. Emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the rise of internet forums and online communities, there was a phenomenon associated with the “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) subculture.

While not a formalized cult in the traditional sense (the conventionally understood definition of a cult is that it is typically a structured, often religious group with a charismatic leader, rigid hierarchy, rituals, and clear boundaries), the pro-ana movement functioned with many cult-like dynamics, developing its own ideology, language, and symbology—even its own icon. The pro-ana cult (on second thought, let’s call it a cult) often centered around the glorification of extreme thinness and anorexia nervosa (a species of eating disorder, or ED) as a lifestyle choice rather than a psychiatric illness. Indeed, pro-ana became an identity, and members of the community affirmed anorexia nervosa as a legitimate way of being.

The roots of the pro-ana movement can be traced back to early internet communities such as LiveJournal, Yahoo groups, and later, Tumblr and Pinterest. Young people—mostly girls and women—who felt isolated or misunderstood in their struggles with eating disorders found camaraderie in these online spaces, as do those with Tourette syndrome and other neurological and psychiatric disorders (see Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?). These communities dismissed anorexia as a disorder, rejected recovery, and instead framed anorexia as a form of discipline, control, and even spiritual transcendence.

Out of this emerged the figure of “Anna,”or “Ana” a personification or deity-like representation of anorexia. “Anna” was sometimes treated as a guiding force, almost like a guardian spirit—a cruel but revered mistress. This anthropomorphizing of the illness helped users externalize and, paradoxically, embrace it—deepening their entrenchment in disordered behaviors. (People with bulimia also have a personification of their disorder named “Mia.” Personification of desire and phenomena is not uncommon to cultish and religious groups.)

The movement adopted strict “thinspirational” aesthetics—images of skeletal models, motivational quotes promoting starvation, sharing “tips and tricks” for extreme calorie restriction. These behaviors were often ritualized and reinforced communally, mirroring cultic social structures. Some forums developed rules, hierarchies, and even “commandments” issued in the voice of “Anna,” reinforcing the notion that to disobey was to fail a higher calling. Associated with this cult was the modern resurgence of extreme body modification practices like tight-lacing, i.e., extreme corset-wearing.

I followed this closely for a while, even delivering a lecture on the topic in the unit on patriarchy and misogyny in my Freedom and Social Control course some 15 years ago. Always changing the content of that course to keep it topical, I dropped the lecture from the unit. There was another reason why I dropped it, however—the same reason why I dropped my lectures on circumcision (including female genital mutilation) and stopped showing images of lynching and the Holocaust: thinspirational aesthetics and tight-lacing obviously disturbed students. I never came back to it and, over time, forgot about it.

I was reminded of the Anna cult yesterday morning thinking about the transgender phenomenon, where rather than treating body dysmorphia around gender identity as a mental disorder, those suffering from this disorder are instead affirmed in their delusion. It is much the same way that those suffering from anorexia were affirmed, at least in the Anna cult, the facts of which came rushing back to mind once I had reminded myself of the phenomenon. I imagined the absurdity of bariatric surgery or liposuction for girls and women who saw in the mirror obesity instead of emaciation. What psychiatrist would think to affirm girls and women suffering from this disorder in such a way?

You may not remember this cult, but media attention and increased scrutiny led to crackdowns on such content. I oppose censorship, but the response by Internet platforms was the right one for the sake of the vulnerable who get sucked into social contagion. Search engines and social platforms banned or filtered pro-ana material. However, in 2010-2015, there was a resurgence of the cult on Tumblr, where the “sad girls” aesthetic, self-harm, and mental illness fetishism overlapped with pro-ana ideas. During this time, the worship of “Anna” as a quasi-religious figure reached its more stylized and mythologized forms.

From 2015 onward, Tumblr’s adult content ban and broader mental health awareness campaigns led to a decline in centralized pro-ana communities. When I went down the rabbit hole on this subject disclaimers accompanied webpages directing those seeking this content to hotlines where they could speak to counselors. Instagram and TikTok began aggressively moderating pro-ana content. The movement fractured—some of it morphed into so-called “pro-recovery” spaces, albeit that still subtly romanticized disordered behaviors, while other remnants retreated to more encrypted platforms like Discord or Reddit. I am presently fighting the temptation to go down that rabbit hole, but there are so many and I have only so much time.

At any rate, having remembered this, I did inquire as to whether the cult still exists. While the explicit pro-ana culture has largely diminished in mainstream digital spaces due to increased regulation and public awareness, it hasn’t disappeared entirely. Instead, as noted, it has splintered and gone underground. In recent years, more nuanced discussions of “toxic recovery culture” and “eating disorder aesthetics” have emerged, pointing to the persistence of some of the same harmful ideologies in new forms. “Anna” as a deity figure is now far less common, but the spiritual or moralistic framing of anorexia—as a pure or superior way of being—still lingers in corners of the internet. Sad, but a reminder that the pathologies of internalized misogyny persist.

So, there’s good news. What once resembled a cult-like movement built around anorexia has mostly been dismantled. But there’s bad news, too, as misogyny makes sure of: the psychological and cultural underpinnings that enabled its rise are still active albeit in less overt ways. Perhaps describing something as  “less overt” is a poor way of putting the way misogyny manifests in other disorders—pathologies that may affect men, as well (not that anorexia was exclusive to girls and women). I have in mind here so-called gender affirming care.

The similarity of the pro-ana cult with the gender identity movement is striking, with an equally striking difference: whereas with anorexia there was a determined effort to arrest a social contagion and get its victims the psychiatric help they needed, gender identity disorder has been normalized and the psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and surgeons make (literally) billions of dollars by affirming gender identity with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures to manufacture simulated sexual identities. (See Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy; see also The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds; Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts). 

There is a growing body of literature—especially from the last decade—that critically examines gender identity disorder (GID), redescribed as gender dysphoria (which is not inaccurate), and the broader transgender identification phenomenon, particularly among adolescents, through the lens of social contagion, online influence, and cultural shifts (if you’re interested in the literature on the normalization of anorexia, both contemporary and historical, I summarize it at the conclusion of this essay). As you might imagine, this line of inquiry is far more contested and politically sensitive than critical analysis of the pro-ana discourse. Still, some researchers have raised concerns about the rapid increase in youth identifying as transgender and the role of peer dynamics, internet subcultures, and sociocultural narratives in shaping identity development.

One of the most prominent and controversial contributions comes from Dr. Lisa Littman, whose 2018 study introduced the concept of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). Published in PLoS ONE (later revised after peer review), Littman’s work suggested that for some adolescents, particularly natal females, gender dysphoria may emerge suddenly during puberty, potentially influenced by social factors such as friend groups and online content. The study was based on parental reports.

Unlike the work on the pro-ana phenomenon, Littman’s work has been criticized for “methodological limitations,” a standard debunking phase. The standard line, pumped out for example by Wikipedia (which feeds various AI system the consensus opinion of corporate captured sense-making institutions), is that ROGD is not recognized as a legitimate mental health diagnosis by any major professional organization. The American Psychiatric Association (APA), the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), and over sixty other medical associations have called for its removal from clinical practice, citing a lack of “credible” scientific evidence and concerns that it promotes stigma against gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Nonetheless, Littman’s work has sparked significant academic and public debate about whether gender identity can, in some cases, be shaped by social contagion mechanisms similar to those observed in eating disorders and self-harm communities.

Further exploration of this idea can be found in Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), a journalistic treatment that builds on Littman’s findings and interviews with clinicians, detransitioners, and families. Shrier’s book frames the rise in adolescent transgender identification as part of a broader cultural and ideological movement, drawing comparisons to historical phenomena such as eating disorders and multiple personality disorder (which also has a cult-like appearance). Again, critics (the medical-industrial complex and its army of organic intellectuals) argue that such comparisons risk minimizing the genuine experiences of those with longstanding or medically significant gender dysphoria. Here, those who campaign for legitimizing a mental disorder appeal to emotional blackmail to stifle criticisms of the gender identity movement.

As expected, academic counterpoints have come from gender studies, sociology, and trans-affirming clinicians, who argue that increased visibility and acceptance have simply enabled more individuals to come out safely. But isn’t this what pro-ana advocates sought to do: normalize anorexia nervosa? It appears based on the phenomenon of Anorexia Mirabilis that eating disorders have been normalized before—in the same way that a schizophrenic might assume the role of shaman in a gatherer and hunter society. I checked, and anorexia nervosa remains a recognized mental health diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), and its 2022 revision, the DSM-5-TR. It is classified under the category of “Feeding and Eating Disorders.” 

A small but growing number of clinical researchers and bioethicists—including Marcus Evans (former clinician at the UK’s Tavistock Clinic) and Stella O’Malley—have voiced concern about affirmation-only models and the potential for misdiagnosis or premature medicalization. These discussions, while still emerging compared to the well-established literature on eating disorders, mean that a contested but active field of inquiry into the sociocultural dynamics of gender identity formation in youth is gaining momentum. While the framing of transgender identification as a form of social contagion is more controversial than in the context of eating disorders, this because of politics and profits, a similar debate is unfolding. With this essay, I aim to do my part to keep the debate going. 

* * *

Again, if you don’t know about or recall the pro-ana phenomenon, there is a considerable body of scholarly literature has critically examined the emergence and development of the pro-anorexia (or “pro-ana”) movement, particularly its roots in online communities and its framing of anorexia as a lifestyle or identity. Psychological and psychiatric journals such as the American Journal of Public Health and International Journal of Eating Disorders have published influential studies, including work by Bardone-Cone and Cass (2007) and Borzekowski et al. (2010), which explore how exposure to pro-ana websites can reinforce disordered thinking and behaviors.

Norris et al. (2006) provide a comprehensive review of these websites, shining light on their structure, content, and the risks they pose to vulnerable individuals. From a qualitative standpoint, Gavin, Rodham, and Poyer (2008) analyze how online group dynamics within these communities foster a sense of belonging while deepening participants’ commitment to the disorder, often through the adoption of rituals and coded language.

Beyond clinical psychology, cultural and media studies offer additional context. Sharlene Hesse-Biber’s The Cult of Thinness (2007) presents a sociological critique of Western beauty ideals and explores how thinness functions as a quasi-religious ideal in contemporary society—paralleling the reverence of anorexia seen in pro-ana spaces. In the broader sphere of digital culture, scholars like Alice Marwick have examined how online platforms facilitate identity formation and subcultural bonding, offering frameworks that help explain the stickiness of pro-ana ideology in digital environments. Together, these sources provide a multidisciplinary lens through which to understand how a psychiatric illness became mythologized, even spiritualized, in parts of the internet—and how that mythology still resonates today in fragmented forms.

For more on Holy Anorexia and related matters in the Medieval period, see Caroline Bynum’s 1987 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women; Barbara Newman’s 1995 From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature; Amy Hollywood’s 2002 Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History; Virginia Burrus’ 2004 The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. For a handy summary of these views, see “Holy Anorexia: How Medieval Women Coped With What Was Eating At Them,” by Student Whitney May writing for A Medieval Woman’s Companion. 

* * *

I want to add to this essay my introduction of it on social media to provide a more context and the importance of avoiding revisionist history. I have been going back through my inventory of ideas and lectures and this essay is one I would have published years ago but, like a lot of things I have studied over the years, this one slipped my mind. Once a thought pushes itself into consciousness, I start remembering all sort of things about the topic—and seeing its relevance for today’s concerns.

As note above, I followed the Anna cult closely for a while, even delivering a lecture on the topic in the unit on patriarchy and misogyny in my Freedom and Social Control course some fifteen years ago—before I became aware of the current wave of the transgenderism, which became a potent force in the early 2010s and gained momentum in the mid-2010s (when I presumed along with millions of others that trans was gay adjacent). It was during this period that the rise of transgender activism heightened public awareness that I went down the rabbit hole.

One note here about history of transgenderism (this is not in my essay, but I may add it now that it occurs to me): I am well aware that what the medical industry now calls “gender affirming care” has a long history (going back to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century). The history of belief that women can think they’re men is even longer. Trans activists are quick to argue that trans is not a new thing. It’s true: female-bodied individuals living or identifying as male (and visa versa) is not a new phenomenon.

The fact that anorexics can be found in history makes it an even more powerful analog for the gender identity phenomenon. Sociologically, it shows how psychiatric disorders are rationalized in various ways in different times and places. The schizophrenic is a shaman in a gatherer-and-hunter village, etc. Some will flip this and decry the medicalization of ways of being (Gabor Maté, for example, a Canadian pediatrician whom I admire but disagree with on this matter). But this ignores science. It’s a postmodernist notion. Cultural relativism is a useful methodological technique, but to conflate epistemology and ontology is a fallacious move.

The Republican Party has long been associated with big business and corporate interests, while the Democrats have long been seen as the party of the working class. At least that’s the perception. But it’s something of a myth. Both parties are bourgeois, expected in a country as capitalist as the United States. However, it’s the Republican Party that’s the party of the working class, small business, traditional agricultural, energy, and manufacturing sectors, and forward-looking entrepreneurs and innovators. The Democrats are the party of oligarchic power and technocratic elites.

As I have documented in past essays on this platform, the Republican Party was founded with the above identified coalition at its core. The political realignment we’re seeing—where working-class voters increasingly support Republicans and corporate donors shift toward Democrats—is a return to the Republican Party as originally constituted, while the globalist ambitions of Democrats remains consistent, now explicit. The shift can be traced back at least to around 2016, apparent with Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence serving as a major inflection point. At the heart of this transformation is the return of populist-nationalism, which emphasizes democratic-republican governance and classical liberal principles.

Trump’s 2016 campaign broke with traditional Republican orthodoxy in several ways. Rather than emphasizing free trade, Trump leaned into economic nationalism, protectionism, and a populist tone that resonated with working-class voters, particularly in the industrial Midwest—not just white voters, but black and brown workers, too. Trump spoke directly to those left behind by deindustrialization and globalization (off-shoring manufacturing and mass immigration), offering a sharp contrast to the multiculturalist, technocratic, and urban-centric cosmopolitan messaging that defines the Democratic Party. Republicans have become the party of the masses, whereas Democrats have become the party of elites.

The facts are clear: corporate and high-income donors—especially from sectors like entertainment, finance, and established technology firms—found a more globalist friendly and socially progressive partner in the Democratic Party, which fully embraces climate initiatives (population control strategies), identity politics (strategies dividing the proletariat along lines of ethnicity, gender, race, and religion), and (corporate-captured) regulatory command in ways that appeal to large, urban-based multinational and transnationalist corporations and professional-managerial strata.

This shift is apparent not only in political and policy orientation, but in campaign finance trends. Where the oligarchy puts their money is a powerful indicator of political alignment. By 2020, Democrats were raising more money than Republicans from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Republicans still retain support from traditional industries—such as agriculture, fossil fuels, and manufacturing—but the bulk of individual corporate donations favor Democrats, especially from the top tiers of the finance and tech worlds.

The new alignment (if the Democrats, the party of slavery Jim Crow, and positive discrimination, ever were the party of labor) is only deepening over time. During the 2024 election cycle, Democrats received significant financial support from the finance and big corporate power—much more than did the Republicans. Democratic-aligned dark money groups spent nearly double the amount spent by their Republican counterparts. Harris’ campaign, along with affiliated Democratic entities, raised approximately 2.9 billion dollars during the 2024 election cycle, compared to the Republicans’ 1.8 billion dollars.

This financial shift mirrors changes in the party’s base of support. Polling and election data from 2024 show an alignment between the Republicans and the working class, particularly among voters without a college degree—those voters whose interests progressives have long claimed to champion. Gallup polling finds that nearly half of Republicans identify as working or lower class. Trump won 56 percent of non-college-educated voters. Working-class voters trust Republicans more on issues like economic growth, entrepreneurship, immigration, and public safety. This realignment is also evident among entrepreneurs and small business owners. In contrast, fewer Democrats self-identify working class—only around a third. This reflects the party’s appeal to college-educated, urban professionals (although, even here, college-educated white men are split in party loyalty).

Whatever it was in the past, here’s the reality of today’s America: While the populist and working-class appeal of the Republican Party have grown stronger since 2016, the Democratic Party has increasingly become the political home of the credential class and the preferred partner of transnational corporations. To be sure, the realignment isn’t absolute—there are still significant overlaps and exceptions, again expected in the most capitalist country in the world—but the broader trend has held over multiple election cycles and is deepening. The Democratic Party is the party of the oligarchy. The oligarchy embraces the Democratic Party because the Party embraces free trade.

As I noted in a recent essay on this platform, in an 1848 speech to the Democratic Association in Brussels, Karl Marx took a stance in favor of free trade—not because he supported capitalist economics, but because he believed free trade would accelerate capitalism’s internal contradictions and hasten its downfall. Marx argued that protectionism served to preserve capitalist economic structures relatively advantageous to the working class and slow the inevitable progression of capitalist contradiction. In contrast, free trade, by unleashing global competition between working classes across the planet and undermining traditional industries and social relations, deepens inequality and (if one’s eyes are open) exposes the exploitative nature of the capitalist system.

For Marx, the destructive dynamism of free trade is a necessary stage in the development of capitalism. Thus, Marx was an accelerationist, advocating for what we might call “crisis capitalism”: the more capitalism expands and destabilizes societies globally, the sooner the conditions emerge for its revolutionary overthrow. In this sense, Marx saw free trade as a catalyst for historical progress (as he understood it)—not toward a stronger market economy, but toward a post-capitalist world reorganized along communist principles.

Ironically, this is the path Democrats and big corporations and financiers who support them, have chosen. Thus, in a way, when conservatives describe Democrats as “Marxist,” while not literally true (Democrats are the party of the corporate oligarchy), are not off the mark, since the ends Democrats seek increase the possibility that something that at least looks like communism will replace capitalism: the reduction of the proletarian to serfdom, managed by a global administrative apparatus run by a technocratic elite and its army of bureaucrats.

Recently, I published an essay on my platform explaining my approach to writing (How I Write and Why). I just finished grading essays for the several classes I teach, and this caused me to reflect on that essay and my own writing. I sometimes worry that students might read essays on Freedom and Reason and wonder why, if I require them to use a requisite number of peer-reviewed scholarly sources—academic journals, university press books—do my essays contain no parenthetical citations, no works cited page (which is not always true, but for the most is)?

My first answer is simple: if I don’t teach students the rules, they won’t learn them—and if they don’t learn the rules, they can’t break them later with sophistication. Teaching academic writing is like teaching music: first comes theory and practice, then improvisation. I ask students to engage with scholarly discourse not because that’s the end goal, but because it’s the foundation. Only by internalizing the conventions—citation, evidence, structured argument—can they later transcend them if they find a space safe enough to do that (who knows if such spaces will continue to exist). I do want them to transcend these conventions. I want them to have opinions—their own opinions—and convention can, and often is, be stifling.

These days, my own work blends critical structure with topical responsiveness. I write quickly about complex, ongoing events, drawing on general knowledge, analytical habit, and a career’s worth of scholarly grounding. But I couldn’t do this—and certainly couldn’t teach others to do it—without first having acquired the discipline of academic writing. One learns the form so that, in time, he can bend it with purpose. Indeed, I cannot teach this. One only learns to do this over time. And I didn’t learn the form until graduate school. I’m giving students a big head start!

But even as I say that, I know it’s more complicated than that. One of the frustrating ironies of teaching today is that, to prepare students for success in graduate school, I must teach them to write in a style I personally find tedious and pretentious. The thicket of citations, the ritualistic referencing of theoretical frameworks, the constant nods to academic trends—these have become the currency of scholarly legitimacy.

In that same recent essay, I noted how different the writing of mid-twentieth-century sociologists feels. Their prose is direct, idea-driven, and strikingly light on citation when viewed through today’s eyes. These were serious scholars—Robert Merton, C. Wright Mills, Gresham Sykes—writing from deep knowledge with deserved confidence, not attempting to prove their intellectual bonafides with every paragraph by festooning their essays with shoutouts to their community.

The academic landscape has changed. Today, even accomplished scholars often cite the work of others more to appear academic than to advance ideas. The form of academic writing has become a kind of credential in itself. The ranking of the journal in which one’s work appears, etc. And too often, the more academic the writing appears, the less substantive it actually is. Those older works outshine the ideological and jargon-laden scholarship being produced today. One knows this because these ideas endure as the true science to the discipline, whereas the new stuff is used to rationalize ideology.

This was Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s critique offered in the preface to their 1966 Monopoly Capital (1966). In that preface, they expressed strong dissatisfaction with the state of modern academia. Conformity and ideological bias in academic institutions, especially in economics, were largely shaped by the needs and interests of capitalist societies. Rather than seeking objective truth or critically examining capitalism, academia often served to justify and sustain the status quo. The organic intellectual engaged in the suppression of critical thought by marginalizing or excluding radical ideas from mainstream academic discourse, often by only citing their side, a form of intellectual repression that stifled meaningful analysis and debate.

(Baran and Sweezy also criticized the increasing compartmentalization and specialization in the social sciences, which discourages holistic, systemic analysis of society and the economy—especially analyses that challenged capitalist structures. This echoed the critique C. Wright Mills made of “abstracted empiricism” in his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination. His criticism was directed at trends in mid-twentieth century American sociology, particularly the dominance of highly quantitative, methodologically rigid research that he believed had lost sight of the broader purpose and potential of sociological inquiry. His main target was understood to be Paul Lazarsfeld, who headed the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, where he focused on consumer behavior and public opinion, funded by corporate or government sponsors. For their part, Baran and Sweezy were especially critical of neoclassical economics, which they correctly saw as abstract, unrealistic, and ideologically committed to free-market capitalism, and thus an intellectual tool used to obscure the real dynamics of monopoly capitalism and class struggle, but I digress.)

Still, I have to teach students the rules: the citation formats, the tone, the rhetorical signaling. I have to think of those who will go on to graduate school. I want them to be prepared—to give them an edge. Graduate school is an audition before a room of the deeply indoctrinated and ironically conventional functionaries. And if my students can survive that, if they can master the constraints without being mastered by them, then maybe they’ll earn the authority to break free—to write with clarity, with conviction, and with real intellectual power.

Finally, sorry to throw shade at other academics (and this is hardly all of them), but we have to admit that part of the problem is that not everyone has good ideas or a keen analytical mind. Anyone can adopt the academic style—the citations, the jargon, the reverent name-dropping—and produce work that looks like serious scholarship. Form often disguises the absence of substance. A mediocre thinker can sound profound through mimicry. At the same time, institutions corrupted by mediocrity diminish real profundity. Given the ubiquity of progressive thought and technocratic practice in higher education, it feels like an intractable problem. And with the rise of artificial intelligence, I’m not sure that even academia can be refugee for truly breakthrough ideas.

In the context of my lectures in Freedom and Social Control (also in Social Theory) on Paul Ricoeur’s thesis of the “masters of suspicion,” Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a central position alongside Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Each of these thinkers, according to Ricoeur, embodies a hermeneutics of suspicion—a method of interpretation aimed not at understanding surface meanings, but at exposing the hidden power structures and desires that lie beneath. Nietzsche, in this triad (an unholy trinity, if you will), is the one who most rigorously dismantles the moral and metaphysical scaffolding of Christianity and its cultural inheritance in the West.

Yet Nietzsche’s influence does not end in the realm of philosophy or theology. His radical revaluation of values also helped shape the methodological and cultural sensibilities of modern sociology—most notably in the work of Max Weber. Weber’s concept of the “disenchantment of the world” and his ambivalence toward rationalization reflect a world profoundly shaped by Nietzschean suspicion, especially toward inherited metaphysical meaning. In what follows, I present Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and then return to how his influence echoes in Weber’s sociological imagination.

At the heart of Nietzsche’s critique is his distinction between “master morality” and “slave morality.” Master morality, rooted in antiquity, emerges from the affirmation of life and power. It values beauty, power, and self-assertion. Slave morality, on the other hand, is born from weakness and ressentiment—a vengeful revaluation of values by those without power (suggestive of Friedrich Engels’s conceptualization of demoralization in The Condition of the Working Class in England, used to describe the profound moral and psychological degradation experienced by the working class under industrial capitalism). According to Nietzsche, Christianity institutionalized slave morality, portraying humility, meekness, and suffering not as necessary evils, but as moral ideals.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche traces how the early Christians, oppressed by Roman rule, reshaped morality to favor their condition. In doing so, they turned traditional values upside down. What had once been seen as noble and life-affirming—ambition, pride, strength—were rebranded as sinful, while weakness and submission were reimagined as virtues. In The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s infamous proclamation—“God is dead”—strikes at the heart of Western metaphysics. This declaration is not atheistic triumphalism but a cultural diagnosis. Nietzsche recognized that modern secular societies continue to rely on the moral assumptions of Christianity even after losing faith in its theological foundations.

By saying that we have killed God, Nietzsche implicates modern humanity in the collapse of the metaphysical order. He warns of an impending nihilism—the absence of meaning, purpose, and objective value. This moment of crisis, however, is not the end but a challenge: can humanity create new values in the aftermath? Nietzsche believed this task required the rise of the Übermensch, one who can live creatively and affirmatively without recourse to transcendent absolutes.

For Nietzsche, Christianity was more than mistaken—it was anti-life. He argued that its teachings encourage a rejection of the body, instinct, and earthly joy in favor of spiritual purity and a promised afterlife. Likewise, Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks employs the term “animality,” particularly in the section titled “Americanism and Fordism,” to capture the historical struggle to suppress the “element of ‘animality’ in man,” referring to the natural, instinctual behaviors that industrial capitalism seeks to discipline and regulate.

Gramsci explicitly links the concept of animality to Puritanism, which functions as a cultural and moral framework used to discipline the working class in capitalist societies—particularly in the United States—by repressing the instinctual, spontaneous, and sensual aspects of human life. He observes that in the development of American industrial capitalism, especially under Taylorism and Fordism, there was a concerted effort not only to rationalize labor processes but also to morally reform the worker by cultivating habits of punctuality, sobriety, sexual restraint, and self-control. These values, deeply rooted in Puritan religious and cultural traditions, were repurposed by industrialists and reformers to create a more disciplined and efficient labor force.

Gramsci argues that this attempt to eliminate animality is not simply technical but cultural and ethical, aimed at creating a new type of human being suitable for modern industrial production. Ford’s program of moral surveillance—offering bonuses to workers who adopted “respectable” domestic lifestyles—exemplified this intervention. Gramsci interprets these measures as secularized Puritanism: a disciplinary apparatus designed to align workers’ private lives with the demands of capitalist production. Thus, he sees Puritanism as a historical and ideological tool in the struggle to suppress the natural, “animal” aspects of human life that could disrupt the rationalized order of capitalism. This repression, for Gramsci, is not simply about productivity but about constructing a hegemonic moral order that naturalizes capitalist social relations.

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche writes with unmistakable vitriol: “Christianity is a rebellion against natural instincts, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.” In Nietzsche’s view, Christian morality cultivates guilt and shame—particularly through its doctrine of original sin. Instead of empowering individuals to affirm their instincts and embrace life in all its complexity, Christianity demands submission and self-denial. This makes it, in Nietzsche’s words, a “will to nothingness.”

Despite his disdain for Christianity as a doctrine, Nietzsche admired Jesus as a figure who embodied love and inner peace without dogma or resentment. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche claims that Jesus lived and preached an aesthetic, not a moral life—a life of radical inner transformation that was later distorted by Paul and the Church into a system of judgment, doctrine, and power. “The very word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” This distinction underscores Nietzsche’s central concern: that the Church preserved not the life-affirming example of Jesus, but a perverse moralism that turned life itself into something to be ashamed of.

Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and his broader cultural diagnosis had a profound influence on Max Weber (and probably through Weber, on Gramsci), though Weber rarely acknowledged it directly. Both thinkers grappled with the consequences of secularization, but where Nietzsche feared the rise of nihilism, Weber analyzed its social forms—especially the bureaucratic rationalization of modern life. Weber’s concept of the “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung) echoes Nietzsche’s death of God. In a world increasingly dominated by scientific reason, bureaucratic efficiency, and instrumental logic, traditional sources of meaning—religion, myth, and metaphysics—lose their authority.

While Nietzsche calls for a new kind of individual to create meaning, Weber remains more ambivalent: he sees modernity as at once liberating and constraining. For Weber, the Protestant ethic—shaped by Calvinist Christianity—ironically laid the groundwork for modern capitalism and rational bureaucracy. This irony resonates with Nietzsche’s suspicion: values born in a religious, ascetic context end up fueling a secular, impersonal economic order. The “spirit” of asceticism survives, but stripped of its religious framework—a process Nietzsche would recognize as another transformation of values through history and ressentiment.

Nietzsche also stands in a tense and revealing relation to his fellow “masters of suspicion,” Freud and Marx. Like Nietzsche, Freud understood religion as a psychological projection, an illusion born of human weakness. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud describes religious belief as a collective neurosis—a system of wish-fulfillment designed to shield humanity from the harshness of reality. Nietzsche anticipates this view but goes further: rather than merely reducing religion to illusion, he exposes the value system behind it as a historically contingent moral framework rooted in weakness and ressentiment.

Before both of them, Marx framed religion as ideology and a painkiller—“the opiate of the people”—but also as a symptom of material alienation. In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx famously describes religion as “the heart of a heartless world,” not merely false consciousness but a protest against real suffering. Nietzsche shared Marx’s insight that religion is historically embedded and socially functional, yet where Marx seeks emancipation through collective material transformation, Nietzsche seeks liberation through individual revaluation.

Each of these figures, in his own way, demands that we see religion not as divine truth but as human product—deeply implicated in structures of desire, power, and social organization. By placing Nietzsche in dialogue with Paul Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion” thesis and Max Weber’s sociology, we begin to see the depth and range of his influence. Nietzsche does not merely critique Christianity; he inaugurates a deeper suspicion toward all inherited systems of meaning. His work represents both a demolition and a provocation—an insistence that values are not given but made, and that their history is often one of conflict, inversion, and power.

In Max Weber, we see the sociological legacy of this suspicion. While Nietzsche tears down the metaphysical edifice, Weber examines what arises in its place: a world where reason reigns but purpose fades, where institutions thrive but meaning dissolves. And in Freud and Marx, we find parallel expressions of Nietzsche’s impulse—one psychological, the other materialistic—each dismantling the illusions that uphold inherited and illegitimate authority. Together, they form a constellation of modern critique, united by a determination to uncover what lies beneath appearances and to demand a reckoning with the true sources of belief and value.

Nietzsche’s challenge endures: if the old gods are dead, and their shadows still haunt our morals and institutions, what shall we build in their place? His answer is not a system, but a call—to courage, to creativity, and to a life lived without illusion.

Before leaving this essay, I must record a note about Weber’s influence on Gramsci, which I earlier suggested. I believe my assumption that Weber influenced Gramsci is largely accurate, albeit with nuance. Gramsci does not appear to be directly influenced by Weber in a systematic way in the sense that he did not engage Weber’s work extensively or explicitly (not in anything I have read). However, there are converging concerns: both thinkers grapple with rationalization, the moral consequences of modernity, and the role of culture and ideology in social control. I have always been struck by the similarity between Weber and Gramsci’s critique of industrialism, both finding Americanism the paradigm of bureaucratic rationality. I must conclude, then, that, indirectly, through debates circulating in early twentieth century European Marxism, especially through interlocutors like Georg Lukács, Weber’s influence percolated into broader intellectual currents that shaped Gramsci’s thinking.

For certain, the Frankfurt School—especially thinkers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and later Jürgen Habermas—more deliberately synthesized Marx, Freud, and Weber. They credited Weber with illuminating the cultural and institutional dimensions of capitalist modernity that Marx had only partially addressed. Gramsci, although often treated as a precursor or cousin to Critical Theory, maintained an independent trajectory rooted more in Marx, Machiavelli, and Italian political thought. Still, my framing is justifiable in a pedagogical context that highlights how these traditions intersect—and how Nietzsche casts a long shadow across all of them.

Perhaps one day I will produce a podcast in which I capture the essence of my lectures on the masters of suspicion in my courses Freedom and Social Control and Social Theory. If that never happens, readers of Freedom and Reason will have this essay to know what I talk about in those courses. Some will reasonably ask what, if anything, college students gets out of such esoteric matters. I make two assumptions about that. First, I never presume that students are incapable of grasping the more high-minded ideas in social theory and moral philosophy. I do not see them as Hobbits (nor do I see Hobbits the way elites see the ordinary man). And, secondly, as one of my professors in graduate school once remarked to me, “Never hesitate to expand your students’ vocabulary.”

I woke up today to a voicemail from the telephone number (920) 918-1710: “Resign, you racist fuck.” Since this is all the message, I am uncertain to what the caller was reacting. Obviously it was in reaction to something I had written, but what? Was it my defense of Israel’s war with clerical fascism that has caught civilians in Gaza in the crossfire and my criticism of the anti-Israel protests occurring across Europe and in the United States? Was it my defense of the principle of cultural integrity in the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states organized around ethnicity, i.e., common history and shared language? I recently defended the right of the English, and by extension of Americans, Swedes, etc., to resist colonization by foreign cultures by restricting immigration and deporting illegal aliens. Or could it be my criticism of anti-white belief and practice prevailing in South Africa and my support for Trump’s policy of providing refuge for Afrikaners fleeing racial persecution?

I do know what it could not have been: any actual racism in my writing. I have on this platform carefully explained why the views I espouse are not racist (indeed they are anti-racist in any real meaning of that term). Racism, or racialism, in its strictest sense, is the belief that the human species can be divided into distinct phenotypic types that possess inherent differences in traits such as behavior, intelligence, and morality and that these differences justify the hierarchical ranking of groups as superior or inferior. On that definition, which is standard, conflating race with culture, ethnicity, nation, or religion is fallacious. Ironically, such conflation is itself an expression of racism, since it suggests that ethnicity and nation, etc., are the projection of racial differences.

Why do I say that this conflation is itself racist? Because the argument assumes that ethnic or national identities (really the same things in this argument) are fundamentally rooted in race—that is, that what defines a people or a nation is a set of inherent, biological characteristics rather than cultural, historical, or linguistic factors. By reducing ethnicity or nationality to racial essence, which one does by labeling the defense of nationalism “racist,” imports the core assumption of racism: that meaningful human groupings are defined by immutable biological traits. But opposition to the mass migration of black and brown people into Europe, for the vast majority of those seeking to preserve their cultures and nations, has nothing to do with the skin color of the new arrivals, but ethnic differences and the shared experience of stubborn refusal to assimilate with the culture of the host country.

Put another way, when so-called anti-racists label the preservation of ethnic or national identity as inherently racist, they reveal their own assumption that such identities are racial in nature. This is itself a racialist view, as it treats race as the underlying basis of culture or nationhood and erases the complex, non-biological foundations of those identities.

This is why I prefaced an October 2021 essay, Multiracialism Versus Multiculturalism, on the difference between multiracialism, which I see as the mark of a tolerant society, and multiculturalism, or cultural pluralism, which I have judged to be destructive to national integrity, with this observation: “Culture and race are not the same things. Culture refers to a social system of beliefs, ideas, norms, and values. Race refers to supposed genetic or otherwise essential variation in our species claimed to be meaningfully organized into types that exhibit concomitant variability in behavioral proclivity, cognitive capacity, and moral integrity. Culture is a real thing. Race is not.” (If I had written this today I would have said more precisely that the idea of race as constructed by racism is not real thing, since there is evidence that the large groupings humans have intuited for centuries as racial differences do have a basis in nature, but there is no evidence that race determines behavior, intelligence, or morality, or that there are superior and inferior races.)

I noted in that essay that extremists on both sides of the political-ideological spectrum conflate culture and race. I do not. I’m a humanist and individualist. I’m thus a universalist in that I work from a human rights standpoint in which all individuals, regardless of gender, race, religion, etc., are seen as entitled to the same regard, this because rights inhere in species-being. I am here drawing upon Marx’s concept of Gattungswesen, which captures the essential nature of human beings as conscious, creative, and social creatures who express themselves through purposeful, transformative labor and collective action more broadly. Put simple, we are all members of the same species and thus share a common nature, therefore we all have the same rights.

Unlike animals, Marx argues, humans do not merely react to their environment but actively shape it, and in doing so, realize their potential. This creative capacity is central to what it means to be human. Crucially, as social animals, humans do this through collective action. Under capitalism, Marx argues in his theory of alienation, workers become estranged from their species-being because their labor is no longer an expression of their humanity but a means of survival controlled by others. This suggests a solution: the abolition of social class and the de-alienation of species-being. But in the here and now, enlightened humans organize governments and national communities to protect the rights of all citizens with the understanding that not all collectivities share this understanding of human nature.

It’s a plain fact that not every group of humans possess a founding document that states plainly: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The American Declaration of Independence from which that statement derives also asserts that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Thus is established a republican form of government that makes possible a rule of law based on a recognition of human rights, as well as national borders that protect citizens from those who would undermine the principles for which such a government was instituted to protect and defend.

What of the Marxist project? The vision of a future world society in which people are no longer alienated from their labor and can freely develop their human capacities in cooperation with others, thus reclaiming their true nature as species-beings, may be, theoretically, a desirable thing (albeit it hasn’t worked out in practice). However, in a world where cultures and ideologies, particularly Islam, reject the basis of universal human rights, and reshape those societies to which they migrate, whether intentionally and unintentionally, such a world is unattainable for the foreseeable future. Therefore we must guard against the degradation of Western culture.

Keep in mind that, in 1990, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) as an alternative framework to the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in the aftermath of WWII. While the Cairo Declaration ostensibly affirms many human rights principles, it does so within an explicitly Islamic framework, stating that all rights and freedoms are subject to Sharia law. In other words, the position of the Muslim world is that universal human rights do not exist—until all peoples of the world are assumed by Islamic doctrine. There is a paradox here: Since Islam is a totalitarian doctrine, the moment everybody is subjected to it universal human rights are negated for everybody.

I have written extensively about this, but it might be helpful for readers if I summarize the meaning of race as constructed by racism, which is based on well-established history and scientific knowledge. The concept of race emerged prominently during European colonial expansion from the sixteenth century onward, when early pseudo-scientific theories were used to rationalize conquest, colonialism, and slavery. It was not the sole basis of rationalization, but it was a major part of it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thinkers like Carl Linnaeus and later proponents of “scientific racism” such as Arthur de Gobineau and others attempted to codify these ideas into racial taxonomies, often placing white Europeans at the top.

The terms “racism” and “racialism” did not come into common usage until the early twentieth century, even though, as history records, the ideas and practices associated with them existed much earlier. The word “racialism” appears to have been used by English speakers by the late nineteenth century, often in a somewhat neutral or descriptive sense to refer to belief in racial distinctions. Prior to these terms being coined, the same hierarchical beliefs about human differences were described using other language—such as “race science,” “racial superiority/inferiority,” or simply ideas of civilization and barbarism tied to physical traits. So while the terminology is relatively modern, the underlying ideology has a much longer and deeply entrenched history.

It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that the more charged and politically significant term “racism” gained wider currency, particularly in response to the rise of Nazi ideology and other forms of race nationalism. Race nationalism is typically misdescribed as ethnonationalism, a term complicated by redundancy, in that ethnicity and nation are synonyms, if a nation is organized by common history and shared culture and language, as integral nation-state are. National socialism does more than this: it roots ethnic differences in race pseudoscience and segregates society on this basis. This is very different that the assimilationism of free nation-states, which demand that those who wish to become part of the citizenry adopt the culture of the host country in order to preserve the basis upon which individual liberty is sustained.

Racialist praxis and the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states are in contradiction. So are the practices of colonialism, imperialism, and identity politics. History is messy, and so contradictions exist and persist. These ideologies became embedded in Western institutions and policies, influencing everything from slavery and segregation to apartheid and eugenics. Though modern genetics has discredited the biological basis of race, the legacy of this hierarchical framework continues to shape social structures and inequalities globally. However, one does not resolve the contradiction by promoting multiculturalism; instead one demands assimilation to Western Enlightenment values, which are superior, not because they emerge from white-majority European society, but because they are, in recognizing the objective fact of species-being, universal in character.

In a June 2019 essay, Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation, I wrote the following: “That populations share genes with greater or lesser frequency is explained by a mundane fact: people tend to mate with people they live around. As a result, their offspring will generally look more like them than they will the parents of unrelated or less related offspring. The further apart the families, the more dissimilar the offspring will appear.” I noted further that, “even in migration, people tend to reproduce with those who look like the people from the places they left. Because of this, the appearance of so-called racial types enjoys stability over time and space. The same is true with language and dialect. People who live around each other will tend to sound like each other. They will also carry themselves similarly. And so on. But that does not mean they are a racial type.” I wrote these words to highlight the problem of conflation: people have come to confuse national integrity with racism. They are very different things.

I reference in that piece an earlier essay, also from June 2019, Kenan Malik: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Immigration, in which I discuss Malik’s 1996 book The Meaning of Race (1996), in which the author critically examines the historical and ideological development of the concept of race, arguing that it is not a fixed biological reality but a social and political construct shaped by modernity. Malik traces in much greater detail than I do above how scientific racism and colonial expansion contributed to the formation and entrenchment of racial categories. Malik explains that ideas of race evolved alongside changing conceptions of human difference, identity, and power, particularly in Western societies.

Across his work, Malik highlights the dangers of both racism and cultural relativism. Ultimately, The Meaning of Race calls for a humanist, universalist perspective to counter racial thinking and promote genuine equality. Malik does not argue for an end to nation-states, however. Readers will benefit from his arguments, which are not identical to mind, but which support the argument I am making with respect to the history and function of racism and the problem of multiculturalism.

I raise Malik’s work in the present essay because I find the above conversation between Kenan Malik and Coleman Hughes useful for understanding the cross-currents that threaten to disorganize Western society. One of those cross-currents is multiculturalism, which, while recognizing that people bring elements of their culture with them when they migrate—language, religion, traditions, and ways of life—think of these as, if you will, fixed packages that should be preserved rather seeing individuals as adaptive, and evolving as they interact with new environments.

Malik challenges the idea that migrants are simply “culture-bearers” in the sense of carrying a pure, unchanging tradition. He argues that treating migrants this way actually limits their agency. Instead of being seen as individuals who can reshape and question their own traditions—like anyone else—they’re boxed into representing a supposedly singular cultural identity. This perspective stifles integration and reinforce stereotypes rather than promotes freedom and individualism.

Thus, the problems of immigration and multiculturalism, both of which are championed by the progressive left, promote the importation of culture-bearers who are resistant to assimilation—and more than this, often mean to change the culture to which they immigrate—and domestic political forces that insist culture-bearers not integrate with the host country, decrying the demand that they do as racist, which, as I have established, is a fallacious deployment of that concept.

The effect of this is the Balkanization of the West, a development that sees the emergence of ethnic enclaves, the ghettoization of modern society, where cultural and religious rules are asserted over the universalist practice of the rule of law in which people are treated as individuals not as groups. This is the problem of identitarianism, and while versions of it appears on the left and right, it is leftwing identitarianism that has become the far more destructive force in the West.

One of the ways leftwing identitarianism proceeds is by conflating culture and race and haranguing those who don’t with accusations of racism.

This post is inspired by Scott Adams’ May 11 Sunday live X feed “Coffee with Scott Adams.” Adams is often the voice of reason. Seems appropriate for a platform called Freedom and Reason. On this day, one of the things he talked about was the 2020 election. He’s suspicious. He repeated his skepticism on today’s “Coffee with Scott Adams.”

Coffee With Scott Adams 5/11/25 https://t.co/BKAWIn9HcM

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 11, 2025

As I was listening to Adams it reminded me that I still can’t figure out why, four years later, Joe Biden got 6,264,244 more votes than Kamala Harris. That’s a nearly 8 percentage point different. Those are significant numbers. Where did those votes go? We’re told that Biden’s astonishing vote total was driven by animus towards Trump. Why would the American electorate have less animus towards Trump in 2024 than in 2020? That’s what Scott wondered. I wondered this and more: did a significant number of those voting for Biden in 2020 switch their votes to Trump?

The total vote count for those voting for the Democratic and Republican candidates for president in 2020 and 2024 respectively were 159,633,396 and 154,925,368. So 4,708,028 fewer voters voted for either Harris or Trump, roughly a 3 percent difference. However, Trump received 3,080,204 more votes in 2024 compared to 2020, approximately a 4 percentage points improvement. Did voters realize their mistake in voting for Biden and, comparing his presidency to the previous four years under Trump, voted for Trump in 2024?

Also, I still can’t figure out how Trump won 6 of the 7 battleground states in 2016, lost all 7 in 2020, then won all 7 in 2024. Adams wondered aloud: isn’t it strange that, in the 2020 election, counties historically considered bellwethers (meaning they vote for the winning candidate) supported Donald Trump, yet Joe Biden won the election? I’ve noted before the republic’s redness. Trump won 2,564 of 3,144 counties in 2020. He won 2,633 counties in 2024. In 2016, Trump won 2,626 counties, roughly the same number he won in 2024. What explains Biden’s success in more counties compared to Clinton and Harris? The difference is considerable.

Biden received 81,283,501 votes in 2020. That is an astonishing number. I don’t believe it. I continue to hear it said that 2020 was “the most secure election in history.” But repeating something incessantly doesn’t make it true. It is furthermore suspicious that this claim would be repeated so frequently. Men who are genuinely innocent don’t typically feel the need to loudly proclaim their innocence.

Suppose the 2020 election was stolen. How would we know? Presumably the authorities would audit the election and see if there is something amiss. You would think given the widespread belief that something was amiss, an audit would help reassure everybody. But instead of an audit, the public was told that it was the most secure election in history. That’s a lot like the medical industry’s resistance to a review of vaccine safety and efficacy dismissed by claiming vaccines are safe and effective. Shouldn’t we find out? We don’t have to because vaccines are safe and effective. Remember the notorious circular argument that God is real because the Bible tells us so, and you can trust the Bible because it’s the inspired word of God? Yeah, that.

Suppose there was an audit and no significant evidence that the election was stolen was found. Could it be that the operation was so sophisticated that it could be audit-proof? That was Adams’ point. At best, at their most honest, all the establishment can do is say that they don’t know whether 2020 was “the most secure election in history.” But me and millions of other people, including Scott Adams don’t believe that. And, speaking for myself, I never will.