freedom and reason

You may doubt that what I am about to tell you is real. It sounds like a hoax. It’s not. I checked. It’s real. Illinois Democrats have passed a bill (HB 4409) that changes the term “offender,” as in criminal offender, you know, murderers and carjackers, to—wait for it—“justice-impacted individual.”

Maybe you aren’t surprised. Maybe you already know that this is just the latest move by Democrats to make it harder for the proles to talk with each other about the real world. Maybe, like me, you’ve read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” or Nineteen Eighty-Four and understand the function of newspeak.

It’s a term that has been floating about for awhile, as you can see above. To give you a flavor of what’s behind the term. the Minnesota social justice organization JIIVE (Justice Impacted Individuals Voting Effectively) claims that its “dynamic system allows the social welfare organization and political action committee political power to guide, educate, register, and effectively influence campaigns to regain equity that has been stolen through the slave trade system.” This is the attitude behind the term, which a brief Internet search indicates that the term has become ubiquitous in the leftwing penology jargon.

Here is a challenge for you. What is it that a “justice-impacted individual” does to cause him to be impacted by justice? Can somebody come up with a Orwellian euphemism for this? You know, the way the impact of doctors killing patients is lessoned in the popular mind by calling such events “therapeutic misadventures”? Or the way torture is euphemized as “enhanced interrogation” (“Verschärfte Vernehmung,” in the original German, a term coined in 1937 by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller).

The newspeak dictionary overflows with examples. But we can’t have justice-impacted individual “perpetrating crimes.” We need euphemisms for “perpetrating” and “crimes.” We also need to recode “crime victims.” What term should we use there to confuse people about what’s happening?

Some members of the Illinois house have pointed out that changing the term across government documents will cost taxpayers thousands of dollars. That’s a problem. But the much greater problem is the continual downplaying by Democrats of street crime—and who is overrepresented in the perpetration of street crime.

What is the goal here? That’s obvious, isn’t it? Changing language changes thought. Confusing language confuses thought. The goal is to create a specialized language that sanitizes the harm Democrat policies cause the citizens and make it harder for the people to be able to produce mutual knowledge around the intersection of progressive urban policy and street crime.

I don’t know if you heard Joe Biden’s speech at Morehead College the other day (I report on here: The Hunt Family and the Basket of Deplorables). He told the all-male graduates of the historically-black college that black men are dying in the streets. But he didn’t tell them who is killing them. This is called lying by omission. Biden’s goal was to make the graduates believe that white civilians and police officers are killing black men in the streets. In reality, the perpetrators are soon to be described as “justice-impacted individuals.”

Did you see Michael Cohen’s op-ed in The Daily Beast, “The Antisemitic Innuendo in Harrison Butker’s College Commencement Speech.” Progressives are relentless this election season. Antisemitism is rampant on college campuses in pro-Hamas demonstrations the corporate media adores, but when Butker alerts the audience to a very real problem with the propagandistic definition of antisemitism used in new federal legislation, the Daily Beast uses that very propagandistic definition to accuse Butker of antisemitism (and once more misrepresenting his remarks concerning women and the family for good measure).

The bill in question is House Resolution 6090 (118th Congress), the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, that “provides statutory authority for the requirement that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights take into consideration the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism when reviewing or investigating complaints of discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.” Those of us who have been following the trajectory of this definition have long worried that Congress would adopt as its working definition the IHRA’s laundry list of antisemitic manifestations.

What does that list include? Everything and the kitchen sink (you can read it here), including what Butker references in his speech, the suggestion that Jews participated in killing Jesus. Alongside this example is the example of blood libel, a false accusation historically leveled against Jewish communities alleging that they kidnap and murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals, particularly for Passover. This accusation has been a recurring theme throughout history, often leading to persecution and even massacres of Jewish communities. The blood libel persists, and so we educate and advocate for religious tolerance. But the question of whether Jews participated in the killing of Jesus—assuming Jesus is a historical figure—is a historical question.

Jesus was a Jew, the Messiah according to the Christian tradition, predicted in Second Temple Judaism, and the point of the Gospel of John (who was also a Jew) was to bring everybody to worship the King of the Jews. It states in John’s gospel that somebody wrote all this down so that people might believe Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and seek salvation in that belief.

Jews don’t believe Jesus is the Messiah obviously. According to Jewish teaching, the Messiah has yet to appear. Thus Jews during the first century CE regard Jesus’ claims (or claims attributed to him) to be heresy. At trial, under Mosaic law, Jesus was convicted of a number of crimes, including practicing sorcery/witchcraft, performing exorcisms, violating the Sabbath restriction, threatening to destroy the temple, and, of course, claiming to be the Messiah (Jesus was quite the troublemaker). The adjudication of case took place in the Sanhedrin, a Jewish judicial body, with the high priest Caiaphas presiding. Up to that point, I think it is safe to say that the matter was a Jewish affair.

Because the Jewish people under Roman colonial rule did not have the authority to put a man to death, Jesus was turned over to Pontius Pilate, the governor (or prefect) of Roman-occupied Judea. There Jesus was to be tried for his claim to be the King of the Jews. The Jewish elders asked Pilate to condemn Jesus (i.e., execute him), arguing that Jesus had transgressed Roman law, as well, since by claiming to be king he had committed a treasonous act against the true emperor, who was at that time Tiberius.

There’s a lot I am going leave out, obviously. But an item that should be mentioned is when Pilate sends Jesus to appear before Herod Antipas, since Jesus was a Galilean and that was Herod’s jurisdiction. Not insignificantly, Herod was the son of Herod the Great who, while of Edomite and Nabatean descent, was raised as a Jew. Herod found Jesus to be of no threat and sent him back to Pilate. This is important because in John’s gospel, Pilate also seems to find Jesus to be no threat and, more than sit in judgment of the man, appears to advocate for him during the proceedings. John describes Pilate as very troubled by the whole affair, having the man pacing back and forth.

Hence the controversy over whether John minimizes the actions of the governor while exaggerating the role of the Jewish authority. Two points are key here, and together they have to do with the problem of legitimacy that translate power into authority: (1) in law and theory, provincial governors possessed total control over their respective jurisdictions; (2) in practice, provincial governors worked closely with leaders of the provinces under their jurisdiction to secure hegemony.

To be sure, it was Pilate who ultimately ordered the execution of Jesus, obvious of course since, as noted earlier, the Jewish elites did not have the authority to carry out capital punishment. However, according to John’s account, while Pilate ordered the execution, he appears to have done so reluctantly, aggressively pushed into the deed by the Sanhedrin. To say that it is antisemitic to recall this history and apply this interpretation—and anybody who knows the story of Catholicism knows that the Gospel of John plays a central role in that story—almost feels designed to make Catholicism, especially the Latin Mass variety, appear inherently antisemitic.

For those readers who do not know the significant of John’s Gospel, it is this Gospel that emphasizes Jesus’ divinity, presenting him as the living and eternal word of God who became incarnate for the salvation of humanity. The concept of the Logos (the Word), through which all things were created, the incarnation of Jesus as the Word made flesh, and the promise of eternal life through belief in him (salvation) are unique elements in John’s Gospel. Many foundational Catholic teachings find their origin in the Gospel of John. The sacraments, especially baptism and the Eucharist, the doctrine of the Trinity, which teaches the unity of God in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—all these are found there. John’s Gospel also provides key insights into Jesus’ ministry, the miracles, his teachings on love. And then there is the passion, Jesus’ death and resurrection. Indeed, John’s Gospel provides the most detailed account of the passion. It is John’s Gospel that is centered in the Catholic liturgy, particularly during Easter.

Does Butker believe that Jews as a mass have agency and that Jesus was killed by the entire Jewish population past and present? I don’t know. I know he didn’t say that. What he said was “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.” To determine whether jail is among the consequences of the legislation readers can determine for themselves by reading the text of the bill. But was Butker accurate when he said that the matter of who killed Jesus is a biblical teaching? Yes, he was. Is he right to be concerned that Congress would pass legislation establishing any consequences for expressing opinions based on biblical teaching? For sure. The First Amendment protects religious liberty and the right to express one’s beliefs and opinions. Yet the fact that the House of Representatives legislated on the basis of IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism received minimal media attention. How many days are we out from Butker’s speech? It’s still front-page news.

The campaign to cancel Harrison Butker is one of the most extreme cases of woke progressive fury I have seen to this point. This story has dominated the news cycle for several days now, as the speech is mined for new seams of outrage. I never thought I would say this, but the progressive left is really starting to sound Christophobic. The loathing of Christendom is part and parcel of the anti-conservatism/traditionalism, anti-family, and anti-whiteness of the woke left. No doubt Butker is getting it with both barrels because the left is losing their shit over the pending return to power of Trump and the MAGA Republicans. The heightened race baiting—seen in Joe Biden’s Morehead College speech (see the coda to The Hunt Family and the Basket of Deplorables) and the resurrection of the “Hands up, don’t shoot” myth (The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter)—is yet another indicator of the panic.

Kansas City Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt’s wife, Tavia, and eldest daughter, Gracie, are talking publicly about Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College. Tavia has been married to Clark for more than three decades. She’s a homemaker. Both Tavia and Gracie has good things to say about Butker.

“I’ve always encouraged my daughters to be highly educated and chase their dreams,” she wrote on Instagram. “I want them to know that they can do whatever they want (that honors God). But I also want them to know that I believe finding a spouse who loves and honors you as or before himself and raising a family together is one of the greatest blessings this world has to offer.”

“Affirming motherhood and praising your wife, as well as highlighting the sacrifice and dedication it takes to be a mother, is not bigoted,” she continued. “It is empowering to acknowledge that a woman’s hard work in raising children is not in vain. Countless highly educated women devote their lives to nurturing and guiding their children. Someone disagreeing with you doesn’t make them hateful; it simply means they have a different opinion.”

She then encouraged people to “celebrate families, motherhood and fatherhood.” “Our society desperately needs dedicated men and women to raise up and train the next generation in the way they should go,” she wrote. “We need more dialogue (and VALUES, IMO) in this country and less hate.”

Her daughter Gracie shared her thoughts on Fox and Friends. “I’ve had the most incredible mom who had the ability to stay home and be with us as kids growing up.” She continued: “I understand that there are many women out there who can’t make that decision. But for me and my life, I know it was really formative and in shaping me and my siblings into who we are.”

Asked if she understood what Harrison was talking about in his speech (slightly condescending), Gracie responded, “For sure, and I really respect Harrison and his Christian faith and what he’s accomplished on and off the field.”

So Harrison Butker is probably not going to lose his gig—and not just because of his talent on the field. He reflects company values.

What we’re seeing in the progressive reaction to Butker’s speech is the same sentiment expressed by Hillary Clinton when she described Americans in the heartland as “a basket of deplorables.” Remember that? That was about two months out from getting beaten in the 2016 presidential election which was supposed to be her coronation.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters [tens of millions of Americans] into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” She added, “Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.”

Actually, Hillary, they are America.

The same sentiment was expressed just recently by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who called those who may see themselves as part of the populist movement just “poor souls who are looking for some answers.” “We’ve given answers to them, but they’re blocked by some of their views on guns.” Oh, so you given people the answers. Then she lifted a line from Obama: “They have the three Gs: guns, gays, God.”

Democrats are sailing towards disasters this November 5 and running down ordinary Americans is only hardening popular opinion against the party. The controversy over Butker’s speech is amplifying the elitist attitude widespread among Democrats. They can’t help themselves, though, even when it’s politically stupid to keep jerking knees.

* * *

On May 19, Joe Biden gave the keynote address at the Morehouse College commencement, a historically-black all-male college in Atlanta. Biden vowed “to call out the poison of white supremacy,” and “to root out systemic racism.” That’s the bit that stood out to me. Biden elaborated: “You started college just as George Floyd was murdered and there was a reckoning on race. It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you. What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black—black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot? And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?” And Bukter’s speech was polarizing?

Here are these words again with annotations containing corrections and clarifications: “You started college just as [career criminal] George Floyd [overdosed] and there was a reckoning on race [arson, assault, intimidation, looting, murder]. It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you [given that the Democratic Party represents the interests of corporate elite with open borders and all the rest of it]. What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street [by other black men in progressive-run cities]? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises [by Democrats] still leave black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be ten times better than anyone else to get a fair shot [if we have to discriminate against whites and other races and ethnicities attempting parity]? And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it [the Democratic Party] doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

I remarked recently on my Facebook feed, “Not a fan of Mitch McConnell, but mad props for keeping Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court. The man is utterly without principle.” This was before he was found in contempt of Congress by the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees (see AG Garland Found in Contempt and MTG’s Hypothesis Confirmed). Somebody responded that he was a lot better than the Republican appointees on the Court. So I added that Garland was an authoritarian, as well. I was then asked for an example. I gave several. This essay is based on my response.

Merrick Garland’s authoritarianism and lack of principle are well documented. More than any attorney general in recent memory, Garland has not merely politicized the Department of Justice but weaponized it against the political opponents of the Democratic Party and the corporate state establishment. The evidence for this is extensive.

Garland has initiated legal actions to block the implementation of state laws, effectively pitting the federal government against elected state bodies aligned with their constituents’ preferences. These actions undermine the principle of federalism that lies at the heart of our republican system of governance. He has, moreover, pursued in a highly selective manner matters where the DOJ might have cause to act, a pattern indicative of political bias. For example, Garland has sued red states over redistricting yet left alone blue states to gerrymander. Eschewing strict adherence to evidence-based pursuit of justice for crimes falling beyond state jurisdiction, Garland’s pursuit of criminal prosecutions is typically framed in such a way as to capture mass media attention. He uses his position as propagandist for the administrative state and the Democratic Party.

Garland has employed federal investigatory powers in a coercive manner even when cases haven’t reached the courtroom. For those that have reached the courtroom, Garland’s actions have been disproportionate. Taking up the second first, his pursuit of January 6 protestors has been relentless even though only a handful of protestors were involved in violent confrontation with police officers. The vast majority of those present in and around the Capitol at best committed misdemeanors (trespassing and obstruction of official proceedings, for the most part, the latter elevated to felony obstruction), yet hundreds were kept in pretrial detention for months and some for years. When tried, prosecutors recommended prison terms of excessive length. Nearly 1300 individuals have been arrested and charged so, most of them convicted, and nearly 500 thrown into prison. 

The DOJ’s creation of a task force used to intimidate parents challenging school boards over masks and vaccine mandates, school closures, the distribution of pornographic materials, the employment of SEL, as well as gender and race indoctrination in public schools is an example of his abuse of federal power. Garland claims those persons were targeted for violent action or making threats of violence. But most incidents involved neither violence nor threats of violence. When hauled before Congress to explain this, Garland perjured himself over the memo in question and misled Congress about why he wasn’t dismantling the task force. Even senior FBI veterans sounded the alarm over Garland’s misuse of anti-terrorism tools to intimidate concerned parents. Undeterred, Garland enlarged the program to include the intimidation of citizens with FBI’s “knock and talk” tactics.

Garland has issued policy directives that circumvent congressional legislation, positioning the Justice Department not just as an enforcer but a determiner of law. Indeed, Garland’s selective application of federal statutes is notorious. No charges were brought against individuals protesting and threatening violence against individuals outside a Supreme Court justice’s home, which is against federal law, yet Garland pursued charges again Mark Houck, a Pennsylvania anti-abortion demonstrator who peacefully protested outside an abortion clinic. Thankfully, Houck was acquitted, but he and his family had to suffer the terrifying experience of a federal SWAT raid on his house. Douglass Mackey was not so lucky. The DOJ went after Douglass Mackey for satirical voting ads on Twitter and secured a prison sentence.

In the raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Logo to retrieve documents implicating the Obama Administration in an unlawful counterintelligence operation (Crossfire Hurricane) against Hillary Clinton’s political opponent, Donald Trump, Garland allowed the leak of classified information by the DOJ (remember that Edward Bernays-style frameup?) classified information manipulated by FBI agents. This is why the documents trial has been indefinitely suspended. In the resurrected zombie case in Manhattan, Garland deployed a top prosecutor in his Washington officer, Matthew Colangelo, to handle the case because Alvin Bragg wasn’t up to prosecuting a case for which there is no underlying felony. The DOJ is playing a central role in the lawfare campaign being waged against the front runner for the President of the United States. 

Having a man like this on the Supreme Court knowing that he might have an opportunity to rule on matters of the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments, etc., was so terrifying of a prospect that the Republican Party took the extraordinary step of not even allowing his nomination to proceed to a congressional vote. Thank God. Imagine had Garland not been stopped and Clinton had won the 2016 election. Given their illiberal governing philosophy, with two of three more Supreme Court justices, these authoritarians would have control over the court for a generation—a truly terrifying possibility. We dodged a huge bullet in 2016 with the election of Trump. After the 2020 steal, it only made sense that Garland would be the Attorney General of the United States. You can add to his unprincipled and authoritarian character a desire to hit back at the party that kept him off the Supreme Court.

My response is based on numerous sources. Most helpful were articles and op-eds published in the National Review over the last couple of years.

Did you miss it? Or did you see the coverage that put the “newsworthy” exchanges in the wrong order? The House Oversight Committee Congress (as did House Judiciary) found US Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for withholding an audio recording bearing on the question of whether Joe Biden is fit to be president and therefore should be criminally prosecuted for stealing top secret documents when he was vice-president or whether, on the other hand, he is unfit to be president and therefore incompetent to stand trial for his actions which put the nation’s security at risk. The Biden regime exerted executive privilege at the last minute because the audio of him disclosing to a ghostwriter state secrets he illegally obtained while vice-president has him on the horns of a dilemma.

We all know about the corrupt and compromised man in the White House. Today, I want to sort out for you the chaos occurring during debate and deliberation that overshadowed the vote itself. Like ozone in the atmosphere, you could feel the storm coming. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R)) was sensing that Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D) and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) were seething. One giveaway was Crockett’s response to Greene query to the committee whether any Democrat present had employed the services of party operative Loren Merchan, the daughter of Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing the zombie case against Trump in Manhattan.

Greene’s query, while rhetorical, was not unsolicited. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) wanted to ensure that members of his party were not taking any actions on the Oversight Committee in order to solicit campaign contributions. This was in response to the usual clown show by Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D), who insulted the chair, Kentucky Rep. James Comer (R) without objection. Greene wanted to make it transparent that at least once member of the party on the committee, New York Rep. Daniel Goldman (D), had in fact retained the services of the judge’s daughter. Greene also knew Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez are easily triggered and, when drawn into a cat fight, resort to embarrassing themselves by trash talking. Both Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez are well spoken, but when triggered channel (or revert to) the argot of the street. So Greene tested her hypothesis by casually commenting on Crockett’s false eyelashes.

Greene (recognized by the chair for five minutes): “I’d like to know if any of the Democrats on this committee are employing Judge Merchan’s daughter.”

Crockett: “Please tell me what that has to do with Merrick Garland.”

Raskin: “Is she a porn star?”

Greene: “Oh, Goldman that’s right.”

Crockett: “Do you know what you are here for?”

Greene: “I don’t think you know what you’re here for. I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

Crockett: “Ain’t nuthin—”

And the cat fight was on. Hypothesis confirmed. After Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch (D) called into question Comer’s ethics. Ocasio-Cortez made a point of order to take down Greene’s words. “That is absolutely unacceptable! How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person.”

Greene: “Aww, are your feelings hurt?”

Ocasio-Cortez: “Oh girl, baby girl—”

Green: “Oh really?

Ocasio-Cortez: “Don’t even play.”

Greene: “Baby girl? I don’t think so.”

The motion to strike Greene’s words was seconded, and Greene sat triumphally while the parliamentarians got busy trying to sort it all out. Ocasio-Cortez persisted in waxing indignant, continually repeating “Not today,” while rapping her fingernails on her desk (the woke progressive version of Nikita Khrushchev’s shoe on the table). At one point, Ocasio-Cortez said to those seated around her, “She’s not used to people talking back to her. She don’t want to say sorry to nobody for nothing. She’s going to learn.” When the committee reconvened, Greene agreed to strike her words. This wasn’t enough for Ocasio-Cortez, who demanded an apology, as well. Greene refused to apologize and then challenged Ocasio-Cortez to a debate.

Greene: “Why don’t you debate me.”

Ocasio-Cortez: “I think it’s pretty self-evident.”

Greene: “Yeah, you don’t have enough intelligence.”

More chaos ensued, with Democrats moving to strike those words, too. Channeling her inner Frank Zappa, Greene responded sardonically, “Oh, they cannot take the words.”

What followed was a discussion of parliamentary rules about ad hominem attacks and a demand by Raskin to repeat Greene’s words that she agreed to strike. Raskin attempted to repeat the words himself, something about Crockett taking off her fake eyelashes, to which Comer looked at him and said, “Really? I mean….” (Translation: You have got to be kidding me. That’s what triggered all this?”) Comer then asked the clerk to report the words. They suspended while the clerk reviewed the audio to determine the words. During the pause, Greene quipped, “Release the audio.” (There was also a call to have the media leave the well of the chamber until somebody pointed out that nobody called for the removal of the Netflix crew who accompanied Hunter Biden during his brief appearance in that chamber.

Eventually Comer got around to ruling that, while indecorous, the words did not rise to the level of ad hominem. Comer asked everybody to agree to treat each other with comity, including in his list Moskowitz (he had not forgotten Moskowitz’s snide remark). Raskin appealed the ruling. There was a motion by Republicans to table the appeal. The appeal was tabled. Comer recognized Greene to speak (you will recall that it had been her turn to speak since the beginning of the chaos).

At that point, rather than moving on, Crocket raised a point of order with a sideways insult aimed at Greene. “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

“A what now?” Comer replied. “I have no idea what you just said.”

Amid the crosstalk and calls for Crockett to calm down, Crockett could be heard to say, “’Cause this is what y’all do. Don’t tell me to calm down ’cause y’all talk noise and then you can’t take it. If I come and talk shit about her, y’all gonna have a problem.”

Ocasio-Cortez made a second motion to take down Greene’s words about Ocasio-Cortez’s intelligence and after debate over the rules and a brief recess, the committee finally got back to business and Rep. Green was allowed to complete her opening statement. Her speech was important. She condemned the lawfare against Trump and his associates and called on the committee to find Garland in contempt. But perhaps more important than her speech was her successful goading of the opposition into exposing its performative attempt at political discourse.

Big corporate power and progressives in government legalized private-sector unions, incorporated them (corporatism), and then crushed them with out-sourcing, off-shoring, and mass immigration. They did this while pressing a cosmopolitan worldview onto the proletariat, smearing cultural and national integrity as backwards and bigoted. Unions shifted to cover the public-sector bureaucrats, the very corporate functionaries pushing multiculturalism and transnationalism, adapting its organization to become the mouthpiece for the credential professional-managerial class. We now live in an administrative state living administered lives with unionized bureaucrats administering them.

These are the same big corporations—enabled by the same administrative state, with its regulatory apparatus and technocratic corp—that pump forever chemicals into the earth and atmosphere and mine the human population for forever patients. This is the same ruling elite who push climate apocalypticism and use mass hysteria to rationalize globalization and restrictions on efficient food and energy production. It’s the same ruling elite that demand we agree to overthrowing the most basic truths of the world, such as the gender binary and its immutability.

The Democratic Party is the party of the elite. See what you see. Academic institutions, the culture industry, the mainstream media—these unelected de facto governing bodies push the party line. They are in cahoots, and folks on that side should admit it and lean into their post-truth world. But the folx deny it, and even more than this, tell you that they are the real voice of the common man. They think you’re too dumb to see it for what it is. Maybe some of you have been asleep. I confess, I was drowsy for a spell. But we’re not dumb. And we’re waking up.

Who are the true defenders or free labor and conservationism? I grew up with them. I have come home to them. They’re the rural conservative individualist who uses the earth for survival but does so in a way that preserves the environment he knows he and his wife—and their children and their children—have to conserve to pass down to the next generation of virtuous republican citizens—not an inheritance of grievances, but an inheritance of republic virtue and good stewardship of the earth. They’re the small entrepreneurs who build their business to benefit the members of their community—the organic solidarity of the people, built on the traditional family system, ensuring their loyalty to their customers and employees, thus conserving the social ecology. Today, men and women with this spirit are rising and they’re making the Republican Party their means to return America to its populist roots.

If you ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up, many of the boys will tell you that they want to be police officers and firefighters, sometimes soldiers. Who are these men they want to grow up to be? They are the men who protect the community from danger and help people in need. The corruption of the medical profession aside, helping people is what doctors and nurses do, too, so one finds children wanting to be these things, as well. Yet, by the time they finish their education, the curriculum and pedagogical technique, now fully captured by progressives administrators, staff, and teachers, dispossess many of them of their natural instincts to defend country, protect community, and help the needy—replacing those instincts with a massive state bureaucracy that is not merely remote to their local concerns and needs but antagonistic towards the people and the culture naturally inclined to address those concerns and needs. Progressives seek to dethrone family and community and put big government in their stead. To be sure, policing and the military still find men who lean into their vocation, and there are many men around with broad shoulders who make a path to self-actualization; rural and small town America still exist; but that America is under assault, and the fact pattern attests to it.

Our children are groomed and recruited to be functionaries for the antagonistic force assaulting the republican ideal. Social and emotional learning (SEL) teaches them to focus inward, to dwell on their anxieties, insecurities, and vulnerabilities, while diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) selects the personnel that hones and implements the strategy of cultivating faux esteem and self-loathing. SEL conditions children to think not of how through service to others they may build courage and resiliency, but rather how the world has done them dirty, their ancestors either oppressed or oppressor, manufacturing the trauma of the victim (increasingly a sought status, with people inventing and stepping into novel categories of the oppressed), while at the same time instilling the shame of the oppressor, demoralizing the majority, teaching them to hate the very communities they are naturally inclined to defend and perpetuate—teaching them to hate themselves.

This is what explains the spectacle of campus unrest—and the summer of 2020 and so on. This is the pathological expression of hateful retribution for fictional and impossible harms and deep-seated self loathing learned from socialization in the inverted totalitarian arrangements of managed democracy with an agenda of managed decline. The modern nation-state, and its inherent principles of freedom and reason, are being dismantled by a power elite who seek the establishment of a global neofeudalism rooted in corporate statism where the proletariat of the earth will serve as serfs on high-tech estate. We can see the New Dark Ages approaching. Your comrades are the men and women who are bringing the light.

“Over the years, upside-down flags have been displayed by both the right and the left as an outcry over a range of issues, including the Vietnam War, gun violence, the Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion and, in particular, election results. In 2012, Tea Party followers inverted flags at their homes to signal disgust at the re-election of President Barack Obama. Four years later, some liberals advised doing the same after Mr. Trump was elected.” —Jodi Kantor, The New York Times

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. had an upside-down US flag waving over his house following the 2020 election. The flag in this position signals distress. It has been rebranded by The New York Times as a “Stop the Steal” symbol. Alito said that it was his wife, not him, who raised the distress symbol. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in an emailed statement to the NYTimes. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Progressives are countering that even if Alito didn’t raise it, he kept it flying. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia (to get a sense of her politics, here’s Frost’s profile page at the university). This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard,” she said, “which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases.”

So are progressives really saying that Alito—a man sworn to defend the Constitution—should censor his wife’s speech? Are these the same progressives who lost their minds over Harrison Butker’s graduation address at Benedictine, a private catholic college in Atchison, Kansas? This is a serious question: are feminists now good with husbands censoring the speech of their wives? Speaking as a feminist myself, I’m not good with that at all. Mrs. Alito has a right to fly any flag she wishes over her house.

* * *

Speaking of Harrison Butker, the Kansas City Chiefs kicker, I listened to his speech yesterday. I got curious because the speech was being described as demeaning towards women and the LGBTQ+ community and inappropriate for a graduation. Inappropriate at a Catholic university? A petition for Butker’s dismissal from the Chiefs has nearly reached its goal of 150,000 signatures. Here is a video of his speech if you’re interested in listening to it:

After listening to the whole thing, I am at a loss to understand what is so objectionable? I don’t agree with some of his opinions, but none are outrageous. They are consistent with his religious teachings—which he has a right to—and mild compared to the preachments of Islamic clerics. There are things he said that I do agree with. The things he said about the rile of fathers, for example (Kansas City residents should take those sentiments to heart). He impressed me; he is an accomplished public speaker and, what is more, I learned a lot about a worldview that is different from mine, namely the Latin Mass. I appreciate men rising and expressing their opinions in an honest and direct way.

It did not surprise anyone, I think, when the NFL condemned the speech. “Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity. His views are not those of the NFL as an organization,” said Senior Vice President Jonathan Beane, the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. (Nice, they assigned their DEI man to articulate the criticism.) “The NFL is steadfast in our commitment to inclusion, which only makes our league stronger.” Why does the NFL articulate positions on such matters? The NFL is an impersonal corporation. Shouldn’t it be an apolitical organization?

However, it did surprise many when Whoopi Goldberg came to his defense. Speaking on her show, The View, she said, “I like when people say what they need to say—he’s at a Catholic College, he’s a staunch Catholic, these are his beliefs, and he’s welcome to them. I don’t have to believe them, right? I don’t have to accept them. The ladies that were sitting in that audience do not have to accept them.” (Apparently the ladies in the audience liked them just fine, if the enthusiastic applause throughout the speech was any indication.) “I have the right to say what I say, he has the right to say what he says.” Goldberg continued. “When you say to somebody, ‘I don’t like what you said and I’m going to get your job taken away because you disagree with me,’ for me, that is an issue.” Of course, she had to twist the thing into a rant about how Trump is all about taking away the rights of everybody and we don’t want to be that way. Of course we don’t. Neither does Trump.

She ran into another issue when she compared the situation to Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49er who sat during the national anthem to protest what he described as oppression against black people. Goldberg said “The same way we want respect when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee, we want to give respect to people whose ideas are different from ours.” Kaepernick was on the job when he did this. Butker was giving a speech at a private university. While I think free speech rights should be upheld everywhere, the current interpretation of the First Amendment permits private corporations to censor speech and discipline those who speech the corporation finds objectionable. But that’s beside the point, some will argue. Kaepernick was let go not because of his protests but because he was no longer a competitive player in the NFL.

“Dr. Charnock had only one observation to make on Mr. Harris’s paper. The latter made a distinction between plants and the genus homo, that in the former both sexes are sometimes found in the same plant. Now, it had never been proved that the human spermatozoon was any gender, and the gender of the ovum depended upon the time fecundation; i. e., upon chance. Dr. Charnock spoke on the authority of Pouchet, Hofaeker, Lucas, Huber, and others.” —J. McGrigor Allan, “On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London (1869)

In an essay I published earlier this week (Gender and the English Language), I documented the use of the word “gender” to denote reproductive anatomy in the natural science literature over the course of several centuries. As the reader can see in the above quote, anthropologists used “gender” in the same way. Indeed, in the passage, the subject is reproductive anatomy. The same is true for sociology. The concept of “gender role” appears later on, but as a concept it was available long before its appearance; the concept of the “sex role” appears in the anthropological and sociological literature well before John Money’s alleged coining of the term “gender role.” Since I have established that gender and sex are synonyms, either construction is appropriate for denoting the societal roles organized around gender and the expectations and values that attach to those roles.

By way of example, in a 1942 issue of the American Sociological Review, “The Adjustment of the Individual to his Age and Sex Roles,” Leonard Correll, Jr. writes, “By way of further clarification it is necessary to call attention to the distinction between the use of the term role to refer to a modal system of responses which constitutes the culturally expected behavior and the particular system of responses with which a specific individual operates. Thus, when we speak of the individual’s ability to perform in his sex role, we refer to the relation which his behavior, in situations in which sex classification is relevant, bears to some modal pattern expected in a given cultural or subcultural group.” The concept of role is as basic to sociology as the concept of status.

The sociologist most famously associated with the concept of “sex roles” is Talcott Parsons. In his work, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, Parsons discussed the division of labor based on gender within the family and society. Parsons introduces his concept of “sex roles” in his book The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937. Parsons argued that in traditional societies, there is a clear division of labor between men (instrumental roles) and women (expressive roles), and this division is functional to the stability of the family and the reproduction of society as a whole. His ideas were highly influential in shaping discussions around gender roles and social expectations.

The historical materialists understood this long before Parsons. Friedrich Engels, building on Lewis Henry Morgan’s work in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877), as well as his collaboration with Karl Marx, argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), that in primitive societies, there existed a form of social organization he and Marx called “primitive communism,” what today’s anthropologists call “hunter-gatherer,” characterized by communal ownership of property, egalitarian social relations, and a natural gendered division of labor. Engels theorizes the transition from primitive communism to class-based societies, particularly focusing on the emergence of private property and the patriarchal family structure.

Engels posits that, in early human history, societies were organized around maternal kinship and inheritance, with descent traced through the mother’s line (matrilineage). He argues that the development of agriculture led to the accumulation of surplus resources and the rise of private property, which, in turn, gave rise to class divisions and the oppression of one group by another. With the development of private property, men sought to ensure the paternity of their offspring to pass down property and thus instituted patriarchal family structures. This shift, according to Engels, involved the overthrow or subjugation of matriarchal systems by patriarchal ones, leading to the rise of male dominance in family and societal affairs. Thus we see the existence of gender roles in primitive societies and the transformation of those roles over time. Gender is not a social construct but an objective matter of natural history around which humans have always organized social roles.

Engels writes in the preface to the first edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.”

He continues: “The lower the development of labor and the more limited the amount of its products, and consequently, the more limited also the wealth of the society, the more the social order is found to be dominated by kinship groups. However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval. In the collision of the newly-developed social classes, the old society founded on kinship groups is broken up; in its place appears a new society, with its control centered in the state, the subordinate units of which are no longer kinship associations, but local associations; a society in which the system of the family is completely dominated by the system of property, and in which there now freely develop those class antagonisms and class struggles that have hitherto formed the content of all written history.”

The Internet will tell you that Money introduced the term in 1955 as if the history of the concept begins there. In reality, Money, a psychiatrist by training, lifted the concept from anthropology and sociology, substituted for “sex” the synonym “gender,” and passed himself off as the originator of an insight that already basic to social science. Another trick played is the reification of Robert Stoller’s invention of “gender identity,” which the psychiatrist used to denote an individual’s internal and individual experience of gender. In Stoller’s formulation, “gender identity” is a subjective thing to the person who “experiences” it—a sense of being a man, a woman, both, neither, or anywhere along the spectrum said to comprise gender (in fact, gender is binary and you can be neither both nor neither)—that others are told they must treat as if it is real. That’s a trick in itself; however, between 1968 and today, the words “role” and “identity” were dropped, and the word “gender” elevated to a socially constructed and subjective category of being.

Knowing these linguistic tricks allows the rational among us to expose the agenda at work here. There is nothing complex about any of this; it only requires we use the English language accurately and precisely. When somebody tells you that sex refers to reproductive anatomy and gender refers to cultural values and societal norms, they are simply saying that there are social roles associated with gender. It has always been true that gender in our species, and in many others species, as well, has been socially organized. Another way of saying this is that there is sex (reproductive anatomy) and sex roles (the cultural values and societal norms). It is important in conversation that you make that clear for everyone participating. Don’t accept the propaganda purpose of these terms; instead, insist on the important of using scientific terms to convey reality not ideology.

As for the identity piece of this, it is enough to observe that the gender of the organism, whether it is female or male, is the identity of the organism. Identity is the fact of being who or what a person or thing is—not who or what a person says he is. In the preface to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx writes, “Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.” I use this quote to emphasize the importance of grounding knowledge in scientific materialism and realism. We don’t judge an individual by what he thinks about himself because what he thinks of himself may be the product of delusion or indoctrination. We judge the individual on the basis of what he is—that is, his identity—in the same way we judge historical epochs in terms of themselves, not by the distorted ways in which those epochs are represented by ideology (religion, etc.).

If an individual genuinely believes that his gender is what it isn’t, then he is either delusional or indoctrinated (he is possessed of an illusion, as Sigmund Freud put it). Those who affirm his subjectivity are either themselves delusional or indoctrinated, or they are exploiting the man. If he is mentally ill, which is possible, then the treatment for his delusion is to be found in psychotherapy. But this is not the approach of gender affirming care. Delusional individuals or those possessed of an illusion are referred to the gender clinic. Without mystifying gender, feminism sought to escape the constraints of the social roles and stereotypes that attach to gender in a given cultural space and historical period. By untethering gender from gender role, trans activists and the medical industry mystify gender to suppose individuals can escape the constraints of biology, which in turn justifies the use of chemicals and surgeries to produce simulated gender identities—and compel others to act in bad faith by affirming the validity of all this.

The constructs “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria” play vital roles in this, as well. With gender identity, shorthanded to simply “gender,” the mystification is totalized; gender is now not a cultural or social thing, i.e., an observable thing conceptualized by social science rooted in natural science, but an essential thing without any empirical indicators—that is, something like a soul or thetan. Gender dysphoria, which indicates a psychiatric disorder where a man or a woman is confused about his or her identity, again, a thing that is objectively determinable, is then reduced to the distress felt by a person when their subjective experience is at odds with reality, albeit the same thing but with different treatment options, options that generates large and sustainable profits for corporate firms and their stockholders.

In my blog on gender and the English language, I cited an article by David Haig who reviewed more than thirty million academic articles from the years 1945-2001 to determine the occurrences of the words “sex” and “gender.” Haig found that, at the beginning of the period, the usages of the word “sex” were more frequent than usages of the word “gender,” but flipped with the emergence of feminism. This shift is reflected in my discipline of sociology, which is to say that the sociology of today is quite different fro the sociology of yesteryear.

Testifying to the sorry state of contemporary sociology is this op-ed by Finn Mackay in a January 2024 issue of The Guardian. Mackay is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England in Bristol. “Gender ideology is real,” she writes, “but it wasn’t invented by trans men or trans women, and it doesn’t just apply to trans or transgender people. The real gender ideology is the binary sex and gender system that requires all of us to be either male-masculine-heterosexual or female-feminine-heterosexual; and which attaches harsh penalties to those who deviate from this script. Almost all of us will have been socialised on to pink or blue paths from birth, if not by our immediate family, then by the books, TV, toys, clothes and adverts that surrounded us in wider society. This socially prescribed gender informs our gender identity.”

“Trans people didn’t create ‘gender ideology’,” she writes, “and should not be blamed for somehow making gender visible. Rather than pathologising a stigmatised minority, we need to focus instead on the gendered majority. Gender criticism should start at home.” 

Make it make sense, the reader may be asking at this point. I can do that. Gender ideology does not rest on the fact of the gender binary; quite the contrary. What is strictly true is not ideological (although ideology may conceal or obscure truths nonetheless embedded in it). The gender system, by which Mackay means gender roles, at least not in enlightened Western society, carries no harsh penalties for deviation from stereotypes associated with those roles. For the most part and without consequence, girls and women wear pants and eschew makeup, and many of them cut short their hair. It is not true that almost all of us were put on paths of blue and pink (ironically the colors that comprise the trans flag). Boys have appetites for things that trans ideologues identify as blue (an arbitrary designation) because it is the nature of boys to have such appetites. The gender role is rooted in gender, which is the result of natural history. Whatever the concrete expressions of masculinity over space and time, and whatever the variable frequency of masculine and feminine traits in the overlaying distributions of the gender binary, boys and girls today are more like the boys and girls that came before them than they are different, and this will be true in the future presuming that the project to confuse children about gender fails in its totalitarian desire.

As we see, she doesn’t quite pull it off, but Mackay is performing the postmodernist trick of treating the eternal one of many possible narratives, this one prevailing because of the power arrayed against the trans identifying individual. The natural is recast as a form of social oppression, liberation from which requires consciousness raising that comes about by turning schools into indoctrination centers where children are gaslighted over gender and their gender-detection modules disrupted. Mackay writes that “in its guidance, the Department for Education states that gender identity is a contested belief, and that many people don’t consider themselves to have one at all. They define gender identity as a person’s sense of their own gender, which may or may not be linked to their biological sex. In the document’s explanation of pupils’ ‘social transition,’ this is described as using different names, pronouns, clothing or facilities from those provided for their biological sex.” This is indeed the queer project formula.

However, Mackay sabotages her own magic trick by finding in this “the bizarre claim that things like this have a biological sex in the first place. How can names, the fabric of clothes, or the porcelain of toilets possibly have a biological sex?” By her own lights, she regards these matters as gender not sex. Much of the essay is disjointed in this way. However, this immediately follows: “The fact is that all children should be ‘gender questioning’ and this is the natural state of children—it is something to be encouraged. If only adults could unlearn the lessons of gender ourselves, rather than subjecting our children to it.” Here is the agenda. This is grooming.

For Mackay, the queer project is not just another narrative, but the true view of the world, a world in which gender is learned along blue and pink paths constructed by the gender tyrants. It is not queer theory that’s ideological. The ideology is found in the practice of gender roles. The natural state of children, she supposes, is to question their gender. In this view, conservative ideas of gender roles suppress the natural proclivities of children. But for gender role socialization, children could have no predictable response that would align with gender as it is now constructed by the patriarchal heteronormative, cisgendered oppressors. This is John Money’s argument. The boy Money used to prove his case committed suicide. He is not the only won in the meantime. (See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy.)

* * *

In looking up a fact about Money, I ran across a story concerning Janet Frame, an author who attended some of Money’s classes at the University of Otago. Money was, like a lot of psychopaths, a charming man, and Frame found herself drawn to him and was eager to please him. In October 1945, following an essay in which Frame mentioned her thoughts of suicide, Money persuaded her to admit herself to the psychiatric ward at Dunedin Public Hospital, where she was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. She spend eight years in psychiatric institutions, undergoing electroshock and insulin shock therapy. She narrowly escaped a lobotomy. See An Angel at My Table. The man was a monster.

Have you seen this story? “Howard University cancels graduation mid-ceremony after furious family members pound on doors, smash window.” Not good. It’s a pattern.

“Because of the size of the room and because our relatives sometimes do not know how to act, the fire department is now here to shut us down,” Dr. Gina S. Brown, dean of the College of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences, said to boos.

Booing is a symptom of the pathology. Brown is right. There’s a cultural problem here. To be sure, as Brown assumes in formulating her statement, not everybody associated with a particular cultural variation acts like this—but when, in culturally relative terms, a significant proportion of individuals do, it’s time to take an honest look at the norms and values of that culture.

The collective irrational disruption of public events (and I emphasize irrational), the internecine tribal warfare associated with gangland conditions, the smash and grab robbery tactics forcing stores to close and businesses to leave—all these result from a dysfunctional culture.

We have been told that to speak about this is racist because of differential demographic profiles across cultural varieties. It’s a double standard. White culture is said to have the criticisms directed at it coming; black culture, on the other hand, is sacrosanct. But to observe that cultures differ from one another, and that some cultures are, at least in certain of their norms and values, superior, is not a racist observation but a rational one.

To say that the culture associated with a race is inferior is not to say that the race is inferior. Race is not culture. Race is an observation of the existence of constellations of phenotypic characteristics. Culture has a historical development. Indeed, to root culture in race is the original meaning of racism.

Listen to Dom Lucre:

I have written a lot about how progressive policy affects the life chances of black Americans (see, e.g., America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame). Lucre is not wrong. Do you know who did this to the black community? Progressives. When I say there is no systemic racism, I mean that it is not those who are blamed for the situation of blacks who perpetuate that situation. White conservatives don’t run blue cities. Democrats do. Joblessness, fatherlessness, poverty, demoralization, nihilism, crime, despair—these are miseries the Democratic Party brings. What they’ve done to black people, they will do to the rest of the working class. The Democratic Party is the party of the managed decline of the American Republic and everything dear to Western Civilization.

Hi. I’m back to make sure you don’t get caught up in the pandemic hysteria again.

Have you heard? Globally, from January 2003 to March 2024, 888 cases of human infection with avian influenza A(H5N1) virus were reported from twenty-three countries. Of those 888 cases, 463 were fatal. That is a case fatality rate, or CFR, of 52 percent.

Scary sounding, I know. But, first, note the time frame. Worldwide, out of billions of people, only 463 individuals died from H5N1 in a span of more than two decades. That is a very, very small number.

Second, and this is going to sound a lot like my debunking of the COVID19 hysteria, but note that the figure given is the CFR not the infection fatality rate (IFR). If H5N1 is more widespread than the World Health Organization (WHO) would like you to believe, then it is less lethal than they tell you it is.

The WHO only reports cases that include individuals with symptoms severe enough to necessitate hospitalization and laboratory testing. In fact, to appear in the WHO statistics, a person must have an acute illness and fever within a week and test positive for exposure to the H5 protein that gives the virus part of its name.

To say that reporting on a handful of individuals already at higher risk of death is misleading is an understatement. It is propaganda in the service of a political goal (look into the global pandemic treaty).

There could be—and almost certainly this is true—a significantly greater number of individuals who have contracted the virus but remain asymptomatic or experience mild symptoms insufficient to prompt medical attention, which in turn leads to an underestimation of the virus’ prevalence and an exaggerated perception of its lethality.

Suppose the number of infections is just one hundred times the number indicated by the CFR, but the same number of deaths. Based on the numbers given at the outset, that would be 88,800 infections, which is not a very large number given the vastness of the planet’s population. The IFR would be 0.000052027, or 0.0052% percent, roughly one death in almost 20,000 infections. Based on patterns already in evidence, these would overwhelmingly be people of advanced age or with comorbidities, such as cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory diseases, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.

We’ve seen this playbook before.