I harbor no animosity towards individuals who buck gender stereotypes—or who lean into them. Those who know me know I have never cared whether a woman wears pants and no makeup. Why would I?
My problem is with ideologues who push pseudoscience and confuse children and vulnerable people for lust and profit while bullying me and others for calling them out for it.
Trans health care is pseudoscience. The construct of “transphobia” is a propaganda term to smear those who expose the scam.
It’s the same with “Islamophobia.” I have never discriminated against Muslim students or colleagues. But Islam is bogus. Allah doesn’t exist, and if Muhammad did, he either hallucinated his meetings with Gabriel or lied to vulnerable people to manipulate them for lust and power.
I have an absolute right as a free man to criticize both—or any other ideology. More than this, as a humanist and a moral person, I have an obligation to identify the most harmful and put them on blast. And I will continue to do so.
During 2003 and 2004, before being awarded early tenure for award-winning scholarship, there were two attempts to cancel me at the university where I work. The first came in response to my opposition to the Bush regime’s pending military action against Iraq. The campaign was organized by the College Republicans, who lost their faculty sponsorship for the audacity of their stunts.
The second came in response to a paper I gave at an academic conference in New Orleans critical of the damage caused to the Fox River in Northeastern Wisconsin by the paper mills’ dumping of PCBs and their refusal to clean up the mess they made. The latter campaign was much more serious, as it involved the deployment of astroturf groups organized by polluting corporations.
In both instances, the faculty rallied around me and I weathered the storm. I was tenured and remain at my institution. I’m coming up on a quarter century of research, teaching, and service.
February 1978
It is perhaps poetic, then, that, as I approach the end of my career (a few more years left, but retirement is looming), that there would once more be an attempt to cancel me, only this time from the left (or what claims to be the left these days). Readers can find the link to the story at The College Fix: “UW-Green Bay students want professor fired for alleged racism, transphobia.”
It’s ironic that the example of my alleged racism is a piece I wrote in 2008 covering Jesse Jackson’s criticism of Barack Obama’s dog whistling about what bigoted whites see as the problems with black people. This is what would have back then been called an anti-racist take (since then, as I have shown on this blog, antiracism has come to represent anti-white sentiment).
My reflex to defend black Americans from the stereotypes Obama and others use is in part a product of my parents, who dragged me into Civil Rights activism in my diapers. My parents were activists in the movement and, later, the antiwar movement. My father, a Church of Christ preacher, was radicalized by the events of the 1960s and turned to liberation theology. We marched together. We went to black churches. We broke bread with black Americans.
When I was a toddler—this would have been in 1964—we had to flee a small-town church in West Tennessee after receiving death threats from the Klan, many of whom turned out to be congregants. Then in 1970, we were thrown out of a church in Sharpsville, Tennessee. We lived in the preacher’s house, a tiny cinderblock dwelling supplied by the congregation. I remember the night the mob came to the house with baseball bats and ax handles to drive us out.
I know what it looks like to see a principled man canceled because he stood straight and strong for social justice (which meant something very different then than now).
It is, for this reason, weirdly appropriate that the Jesse Jackson blog post was selected, which the students had to find by searching the Internet archives while my blog was down for maintenance. I imagine a conversation that went like this: “I’m offended by Professor Austin.” What offended you? “I found an article from 2008 where he quotes Jesse Jackson using the N-word.” Wait, you went searching for an example of him using an offensive word and had to go all the way back to 2008 to find him quoting somebody who used an offensive word? “Yes. And I was offended.” Could it be that you wanted to be offended?
These circumstances provide me with yet another opportunity to emphasize the things that make the American Republic so great and to identify the perils she faces in perpetuating her greatness into the future, namely threats to the constitutional rights to free conscience, press, and speech—and to remind people of points I have made over the years in my essays to this blog and in speeches at teaching and workshops:
While there is a right to engage in offensive speech, there’s no right not to be offended. If there’s a cost associated with offensive speech, then speech is not free. If I say something offensive, then you may ignore it, agree with it, or object to it. Ignoring, agreeing, or objecting to offensive speech costs nothing. If you cancel or punish offensive speech, there is a cost imposed. Then speech isn’t free. If you desire that a speaker be cancelled or punished for his utterances or writings, then you cannot claim to believe in free speech.
College students don’t need to announce their opposition to free speech. They need only seek the cancellation of the speaker. The desire speaks for itself. It is an authoritarian desire. Tragically, the illiberal impulse is rampant among our youth.
One thing that the proponents of cancel culture will tell you is that getting somebody disciplined or terminated from their job isn’t cancel culture but “accountability culture.” They’re saying this about the actions taken against me in this case. Actually, accountability culture is making people answer for their misdeeds. Making arguments and expressing opinions is not wrongdoing. Therefore, there is nothing for which to be held accountable. The premise is fallacious.
What’s happening here is an instantiation of cancel culture. Cancel culture is an illiberal impulse to harm a person’s reputation or career, or to intimidate them into silence, because some individual or group doesn’t like the things he says.
Usually, those who claim to be offended or hurt by speech are actually worried that others may hear or read words that may enlighten those they believe are under their charge. They feign offense and harm to punish those whom they find disobedient or insufficiently deferential to their beliefs to make an example of them. It’s a power trip. At its core, it’s authoritarianism.
Islamic clerics and their mobs attack people for blasphemy not because they’re offended by seeing a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. They exploit the cartoon as an instrument to chill speech critical of Islam. The goal of Muslim cleric and his mob is to Islamize society. Mocking the prophet undermines that goal. Attacking those doing the mocking is the attempted negation of the undermining.
As I have shown on these pages, Islamists developed the term “Islamophobia” to smear those who criticize the doctrine. It’s the same spirit as the accusation of “transphobia.” Like Islam, transgenderism is an ideology. For the true believer, no one is allow to criticize the ideology because the zealot seeks to make it total, to make others conform to doctrine. You may recall Christopher Hitchens rhetorically asking his audience: “What are the first five letters of totalitarianism?”
Knowing this, the totalitarians make themselves out to be victims, crying that the criticisms make them “unsafe.” This is the culture of “safetyism” that college administrators have incubated and socialized.
Snitchy by Gahan Wilson, National Lampoon February 1978
These are the children of DEI. “Safety” as a euphemism for “speech I don’t like” is not something that occurs organically—certainly not everywhere at once. Safetyism is a teaching, a preachment. One implication of safetyism is that “speech is violence” (so is silence, we are told). The “safe space” is then constructed and used to suppress problematic voices.
This is the “inclusion” piece of the authoritarian project of the corporate state. Because everybody is to feel included, facts and opinions that make them feel excluded are forbidden. To be sure, not everybody is to feel included. If a point of view is disallowed, then those who express it are excluded—and reported. In this way, the cult of safetyism transforms youth into a Stasi-like apparatus, where the names of those who speak forbidden words are shared with the authorities and the media.
There are obvious features of cultural revolution at work here, as well, such as mobbing members of the older generation. Those who dwell in the adult world have been here before. These phenomena are organized by forces above young people, other adults who use them as a means to an end. Again, I have written about these things on Freedom and Reason for many years and at great length, so I won’t belabor the point.
These developments are precisely why irreligious and other heretical forms of speech are essential for preserving a free and open society. Those who would cancel others for their speech are those who desire a closed society where they get to choose what speech is uttered and thus what thoughts are thunk. No man is worthy of the job of commissar.
I might as well as have been called an “infidel” or “witch.” Neo-religions function the same way as the traditions ones, perhaps the only difference being the level of intensity; because they are younger, the new religions are eager to establish hegemony over everyone. They’re desperate for their worldview—which rests on impossible things—to be validated. This is why the constant demand for “affirmation”: it betrays their doubt and insecurities.
Snitchy by Gahan Wilson, National Lampoon February 1978
I don’t like controversy and conflict. But nobody owns me, and I am not accountable to the trans activist. I am an autonomous person with my own mind. I do what I do because, while the truth has its own integrity, without people prepared to defend it and advance it, it will become lost to consciousness.
Without truth, there is only power. In some real sense, as we used to say in the South, the devil has the power you give him (the sociologist Max Weber famously gave us the secular version in defining obedience to authority). Giving zealots power is irresponsible in light of their desire to close minds and societies. They wear cat ears to appear harmless. Cat ears are one of the insignia of the New Fascism.
Finally, we need to say this out loud: pulling one’s pants down in public is a vanity project, often a manifestation of clinical narcissism. When people have accomplished little in life, they lean on identity, as if who they are gives what they say some special significance. But few people beyond their ilk really care that they think they have superpowers. When others affirm them, know that most are acting in bad faith—and snicker behind their backs because they are ridiculous. They put up a front because they don’t want to have to deal with the temper tantrum—or the agents of DEI.
In reality, compassionate and rational people pity those who think identity matters. They think to themselves, as we say in the South, “Bless their hearts.” Me, I don’t fear the agents of DEI or their minions. I understand what this is about. And now you do, too.
If you’re curious how it came to be that college students are chanting pro-terrorist slogans on the campuses of ivy-league universities, you only need to understand that they were prepared for this moment by their professors. There are interviews with students telling reporters that they’re putting into action the social justice values their professors taught them.
Over the last several years, college kids have been fed a steady diet of anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Western propaganda in the form of postcolonial, third world studies, and other ideological projects framed in the academic jargon of postmodernist critical studies.
Anti-Western mob at Columbia University last Saturday
Critical race theory, queer theory, and the rest of the fallacious mess are more than crackpot. They’ve turned young people against themselves, exploiting their lack of self confidence in the West (self-loathing betrayed by narcissism), reducing the Enlightenment to a mythology about white supremacy and a problematizing of the millennia long practice of settler colonialism (even while promoting the invasion of the West by backwards culture bearers).
In this worldview, free speech, individualism, progress, reason, and science are depicted as racist and violent. The solution, namely antiracism, is censorship and compelled speech, tribalism, indigenousness ways of being and knowing (i.e., atavisms), feeling over reason, anti-scientism—and violence.
Irrationalism and nihilism are now rampant in the West. And just in time for the 2024 US presidential election. The color revolution joins lawfare and security state intimidation in stifling the populist nationalist movement to restore democratic republican principles and the values of classical liberalism. In this way, the universities have become a key player in the corporate state transformation of free societies into tyrannies.
* * *
On a related matters… As I have shown on the pages of Freedom and Reason, gender ideology is a neo-religion, a techno-religious cult, as Jennifer Bilek calls is. Here’s another neo-religion:
In the year 2038, transhumanism has risen to become a dominant ideology, reshaping society in its wake, protected in DEI policy. Among the youth, it has become a fervent creed, promising liberation from the limitations of the flesh. Two distinct paths have emerged within this movement: individuals who identify as transspecies, referring to themselves as “otherkin” and “therianthropes,” and cyborgs, a synthesis of soft and hard machine.
An otherkin (AI generated)
Otherkin see themselves as nonhuman animals or other creatures. They undergo physical modifications to embody the characteristics of the creature with which they identify. This can involve surgically implanted features like whiskers, claws, scales, or other physical traits associated with their chosen animal identity. A person who identifies as a cat might undergo surgery to have cat-like ears and a tail implanted, while someone who identifies as a reptilian might have scale-like modifications to their skin. These modifications are a way for otherkin to express their identities and feel more aligned with their “true selves” within the framework of transhumanism.
Cyborgs are individuals who have integrated advanced technology with their bodies through neural implants and other technological enhancements. These enhancements can range from cybernetic limbs and organs to neural interfaces that allow direct communication with machines and networks. Like otherkins, cyborgs have embraced the principles of transhumanism, viewing technology to transcend the limitations of the human body and enhance their capabilities. They may undergo elective surgeries and procedures to integrate these technological enhancements seamlessly into their physiology, blurring the line between human and machine. Through their cybernetic enhancements, cyborgs may gain enhanced strength, speed, agility, and cognitive abilities. They may also have access to a vast array of information and communication tools, allowing them to interact with the digital world in ways that were previously unimaginable.
With a passion for sociology and a critical eye for societal shifts, Professor Adam Kessler was determined to unravel the complexities of this new era. He began, “Today, we apply foundational social theories to the phenomenon of youth, drawn to the allure of transformation, modifying their bodies to appear as other species or machines.” Kessler began with the historical materialism of Karl Marx, guiding his students through the concept of alienation. “In a world where connection seems elusive, where the individual feels estranged from their own body, it is no wonder they seek refuge in alteration,” he explained. Transitioning to the ideas of Max Weber, he elucidated the process of disenchantment, where the world loses its mystique and becomes mechanized. “In the pursuit of transcendence, the human spirit craves a release from the mundane, a departure from the banality of existence.” He then turned to Sigmund Freud. “In a civilization built upon consumption, where desires are manufactured and identities commodified, the individual grapples with a profound sense of disconnection.”
As the lecture unfolded, students found themselves drawn into the intricate web of theories. Beneath the academic analysis lay a dark truth, one that spoke to the insidious influence of profit and power. “The medical-industrial complex and tech conglomerates profit from the commodification of the body, perpetuating a cycle of modification fueled by consumerism.” Kessler finally came to it in the most concrete and immediate sense of the phenomenon: “The industry capitalize on the insecurities of youth, peddling promises of transcendence in exchange for a hefty price.”
In the aftermath of Professor Kessler’s lecture, a palpable tension lingered in the air. Among the students sat a group of transhuman individuals, their identities woven into the fabric of their being, their experiences colored by the very theories Kessler had dissected in the classroom. Gathering their resolve, they convened outside the dean’s office, their voices raised in solidarity against the injustice they had endured in Kessler’s class. With a collective determination, they invoked the school’s policy against misrepresenting transhumanism, demanding accountability for the harm inflicted upon their community.
Acknowledging the gravity of the situation, Dean Katherine Graves summoned Professor Kessler to her office. She informed him of the consequences of his actions, reminding him of the responsibility he bore as an educator entrusted with the minds and well-being of his students. “Professor Kessler, it has come to my attention that your recent lecture has violated our school’s commitment to inclusivity and respect for all identities. As such, you will be required to undergo professional development to ensure that such oversights do not occur in the future.”
Fearing for his reputation, Kessler acquiesced to the dean’s judgment. The students found solace in the acknowledgment of their grievances, their voices amplified by a system that, though imperfect (it had, after all, awarded tenure to a bigot like Kessler), remained committed to progress. And as they returned to their studies, a newfound sense of empowerment stirred within them. The transhumans had the state at their back.
“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” — NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher on the truth
The “might be” is rhetorical. Maher is asserting that propaganda in the service of woke progressivism is of greater value than reverence for the truth. Hiding the truth of Biden family corruption and manufacturing stories about Trump family corruption is a way of finding common ground and getting things done.
Katherine Maher, CEO of National Public Radio
Maher is not speaking for herself. This is how the woke epistemic works. In postmodernism, truth is reduced to and dissolved by discursive formations, with formations to be selected for their power in advancing movement goals, which function to obscure the truth, which has its own integrity.
For example, the truth is that gender is binary and immutable in the human species (all mammalian species, in fact). The woke take is that gender is either a sociocultural construction and performance with no connection to natural history or a transcendent spirit independent of observable reality; however, whatever the case, the individual’s subjectivity stands in place of the truth, so people are what they say they are.
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be." pic.twitter.com/Ved9mgGvJH
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 18, 2024
To be sure, the reduction of truth to individual subjectivity is selective. While a man can be a woman and a lesbian, a white person cannot be a black person. But the disappearance of truth in wokeness makes contradiction irrelevant. You will simply be told that the analogy is fallacious. Not because it is (while it is possible for a white person to be black, the analogy holds), but because the woke movement is righteous; therefore, any rule it invents is correct because it “gets things done.”
This is not a pragmatic take on truth. This is the elevation of ideology over fact and reason. This is the way Nazism worked. The Nazis reduced truth to ideology. Rule and right under Nazism were arbitrary with respect to the truth of the world. The important thing for Nazis was to get things done—according to the ideology. And the goal was the same: advance the interests of the corporate state.
Maher tweeting about the color revolution aimed at derailing the Trump re-election campaign
NPR and PBS are are part of the corporate state media machine. Their claim to be apart from the profit-generating side of that machine is an attempt to manufacture the illusion of objectivity. In this way, their existence is more objectionable than their private sector counterparts.
When thinking about who to vote for this November, consider what type of country you want to live in. Here are the two options. These options encompass our past and our present.
Option 1: A constitutional republic with a robust bill of rights, governed by citizens according to the principles of democratic republicanism, guided by the classically liberal values of free speech, conscience, assembly, association, individualism, and limited government, where the family and community are the core institutions organizing social life, who can depend on government to protect them—their neighborhoods and their livelihoods—from crime and disorder.
Option 2: A corporate state governed by bureaucrats operating via administrative rule, regulatory control, and technocratic means, guided by the progressive values of censorship, compelled thought, tribalism, collectivism, and expansive intrusive government, where corporations and state agencies organize social life at the expense of family and community. Families and communities cannot depend on the government to protect them from crime and disorder.
Shutterstock
Once you decide which country you want to live in, the next question is which political party will help you realize that country. Here we hit a snag since the hegemonic strategy of the ruling elite has been over the last several decades to put before the people two political parties that appeal to different class, cultural, and intellectual sensibilities, while perpetuating the status quo—corporate state control over the masses. This is the uniparty establishment.
Considering this, the question shifts to the history of each party and a determination of which party is reformable.
One party, the party of the caste, slavery, segregation, and woke is not reformable. It’s the party of the corporate state phoenix that rose from the ashes of the slavocracy. Its rules are exclusive, its operatives tightly controlled. It is moreover the party of those who captured the administrative apparatus—progressives. If you prefer Option 2, then this is your party.
The other party, founded as a populist antislavery party, because it is more open to popular forces in the grassroots, despite having been captured by corporate power and relegated for decades to the role of controlled opposition, is already being transformed internally by reformers who are articulating the vision described in Option 1. So, if a constitutional republic is the country you want to live in, the Republican Party, while not perfect, is the better option.
Restoring the American Republic to greatness requires returning the Republican Party to its roots by supporting populist activists and candidates. The people must do this at the same time they weaken the Democratic Party by withdrawing support for its candidates and refusing to submit to administrative rule. It’s time to return the United States to her people—the American citizen.
If trans men are men, should they go to men’s prisons? Such a practice poses serious risks to trans men given that they are females. Prison would be particularly unsafe for them. But the reverse of this, i.e., trans women in women’s prisons, poses the same problem. If trans men are not safe around male inmates because they are female, then female inmates are not safe around trans women given that trans women are male.
You can’t have it both ways can you 🤔 but apparently you can.
“Trans women are women, of that there is no debate, yet we all know we can’t put trans men in male prisons.”
This is where the logic the slogan “Trans women are women” shorthands unravels. The danger to trans men in male prisons is not because of sociocultural constructions of gender. The danger is not subjective. It’s objective. Males represent a particular threat to females. Not all males, of course, but given that most violent crime, especially violent sexual crimes, are perpetrated by males, males as a group represent a statistically significant threat to females as a group. Of the 100 thousand rapes that occurred in the United States in 2022, nearly 95 percent were perpetrated by men, with another 2 percent where the sex of the perpetrator was unknown. Around 90 percent of victims of rape were women that year. This is especially true for prisons, where sexual predators are housed in confined spaces. Of the more than 600 thousand males in US state prisons for perpetrating violent crimes (aggravated assault, murder, etc.), more than 160 thousand of them were convicted of sexual crimes.
Karen White, 52, a man, convinced authorities to place him in a women’s prison where he sexually assaulted two female inmates. Why was he sent to prison in the first place? In 2001, he sexually assaulted and committed gross indecency on a 12 year old boy in Leeds, and two years later raped a pregnant woman after spiking her soft drink with vodka.
We see the logic unravel in a similar way when we consider trans men in contact sports. Since trans men are females, and since the objective difference between males and females is vast, a trans man is at particular risk to be injured by a male player. Of course, it would be very rare for a trans man to make the team given those vast differences, so this problem is for the most part hypothetical. At the same time, however, for the very same reason that a trans man faces heightened risk playing against males in combat sports, so female athletes face heightened risk playing against males in female sports.
This is why it is important to grasp sex/gender as objective facts. When you obscure reality with thought-stopping slogans, you lose the ability to see that trans men in male prisons or male sports is the same problem as trans women in female prisons and female sports. To those who are not ideologically-impaired, this is obvious. It is very difficult to get those dispossessed of the capacity for the obvious by ideology to understand the implication of their demands that trans women be allowed in male prisons and sports. This is why we need the authorities to work from objective grounds in administering sex-segregated institutions. Unfortunately, gender ideology has colonized many of those institutions.
This is sick and disgusting and I want to know why his parents are allowing him to mock female athletes, why his coach is allowing him to cheat, and why these girls' coaches and parents aren't speaking up https://t.co/JYG8KXMU7f
Note: to help make the point clearer to those who fallaciously differentiate sex from gender, I have refrained from describing males as men and females as women in the foregoing. So, in this note, I want to reiterate the fact that a man is an adult male human and a woman is adult female human. Males and females come in two types: boys and men and girls and women. Also, the vast physical differences between men and women is not the sole reason for sex segregation in sports. Women’s sports exist as a matter of equity in that institution. It is a violation of women’s rights to compel them to compete against men.
X (Twitter) has been blowing up because Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is introducing legislation to require proof of US citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. “If an individual only asserts or simply states that they are a citizen, they don’t have to prove it, and they can register that person to vote in a federal election,” Johnson said, adding that “we only want US citizens to vote in US elections.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson andPresident Donald J. Trump during their news conference at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, Friday, April 12, 2024. (Source: The New York Times)
People are going to lie to you about this (or more likely profess their ignorance and ideology), so, for the record, as of March 2024, the District of Columbia and municipalities in three states (California, Maryland, and Vermont) allow noncitizens to vote in some or all local elections. Moreover, several states do not have clear impediments to municipalities passing their own voter qualification laws. Having a voter ID card—if one is even required—is not exclusive to citizens in America. This is a very real problem for election integrity.
We’re told not to worry about noncitizens voting in national elections because there is a federal law forbidding it. But if voters are voting in local elections, how will they be excluded from voting in federal elections if they don’t have to provide proof of citizens when registering the vote? How are noncitizens segregated from citizens when receiving their ballot if no proof of citizenship is required—or even proof of registration with a voter ID card?
Why are noncitizens allowed to vote in any election in the United States? A core pillar of constitutional republicanism is election integrity; republics are about citizens; therefore, the franchise should be exclusive to them. States should have clear impediments to noncitizen voting, and the federal government should pressure them to do so. Indeed, failing to stop noncitizens from voting appears to violate the United States Constitution.
The Constitution guarantees US citizens a constitutional republic at both federal and state levels. Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” (Note that the federal government has failed to protect the citizens of the various states from invasion and against domestic violence.)
Allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections violates the foundational principle that, in a republic, only citizens, native and naturalized, are allowed to participate via the ballot box in electing representatives. The political right of citizenship is a special kind of right, a privilege, i.e., an exclusive right, that applies to people born or naturalized in the United States. Citizenship, when not the result of jus soli (birthright), is earned in America. Those who are not citizens have not earned the right to vote in our elections at any level. Noncitizens have no right to come to America and vote in our elections.
Constitutional republics with presidential systems place a strong emphasis on citizenship as a prerequisite for voting rights because the central role of the citizen in governance is emphasized under these arrangements. This emphasis stems from key principles. In these systems, the legitimacy of the government is derived from the consent of the governed, which means the citizens. Citizens are seen as having a special connection to the state and a stake in its decisions and policies, which justifies their exclusive participation in the electoral process.
One might argue that, as a democratic principle, non-citizens have a say-so because they are also governed. However, in republics, citizenship is closely tied to the concept of national sovereignty. Citizens are considered members of a political community and are vested with certain rights and responsibilities, including the right to vote and participate in shaping the country’s future. Non-citizens are guests. They are governed by law, to be sure, but they do not have a right to determine those laws because they are not citizens. If all this sounds circular, that’s because it is; it’s axiomatic.
Democratic-republican arrangements prioritize political equality among citizens, ensuring that each citizen has an equal voice and influence in the political process (at least in principle). Granting voting rights exclusively to citizens maintains this principle by ensuring that all those who have a shared stake in the nation’s future have the power to determine that future. The legal frameworks of constitutional republics reflect these principles by explicitly defining voting rights and eligibility criteria, which typically include citizenship requirements.
Progressives are apoplectic about this, cloaking their desire to run up the popular vote by leveraging noncitizens by claiming that proof of citizenship will effectively disenfranchisement American citizens who cannot prove their citizenship. This is a variation on the opposition to voter ID. If this concern were legitimate, then progressives would be mobilizing to make sure that all eligible voters have the proper paperwork to register and vote in elections.
Am I saying that, if an individual cannot meet the burden of proving they’re a US citizen, then they don’t get a ballot? Absolutely. Think about it: if the argument is that people who cannot prove they are citizens should be allowed to vote, then the argument that noncitizens cannot vote in US election is disingenuous. It’s a ruse to allow noncitizens to influence the direction of a nation to which they do not belong.
A Pew poll found, in 2020, that there are 25 million noncitizens residing in America (remember that they wouldn’t let the Trump administration ask this question on the 2020 census). As of the first of this year, at the US southern border alone, there has been a record of more than 6 million migrant encounters at and between ports of entry since Biden took office in January 2021, according to data from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. As readers of this blog know, hundreds of thousands more have come through since then. This figure does not include the millions of getaways; it is likely that the actual number exceeds 10 million. Many of the millions encountered have been allowed to reside in the United States. (See The Mass Immigration Swindle.)
How can we trust the outcome of the 2024 election without a rule requiring proof of citizenship to vote? And after the debacle of November 2020. We can’t. But we can be sure of this: we will be gaslit when we object to the outcome.
In an X (Twitter) discussion about the innate ability of humans to detect gender, I responded in the thread that I call this the “gender-detection module” (see Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module). Think of it like the linguistic acquisition module or device, I wrote, elaborating that it works in a way analogous to factor analysis but with evolved assumptions. I then noted that the gender programmers are working aggressively to disrupt the system early in life since brain modules need priming and proper development to function correctly. Queer activists know what they’re doing. This is why the ideology has colonized our public school system and cultural programming targeting children.
It is crucial to deconstruct the discursive formations that constitute queer and corporate propaganda for those engaged in the struggle against gender ideology. Accepting the distortions of the other side undermines the efficacy of the movement for sanity and a return to scientific materialism. The fact is that anthropology and sociology used “sex role” and “gender role” interchangeably for decades until they were corrupted by woke progressivism. Biology used “sex” and “gender” interchangeably for centuries. When you live in the gender ideology bubble, when you play by their rules with their linguistic tricks, you have ceded authority to them. Queer theory and sexology are crackpot. Don’t define the world using their terms.
The word “gender” entered the English language from Old French in the late fourteenth century. Originally, it was used to refer to “kind” or “sort” and was derived from the Latin word “genus,” which meant “kind” or “type.” The usage of “gender” in botanical contexts can be traced back to at least the seventeenth century, and possibly even earlier. Botanists used it to differentiate between male and female reproductive organs or structures in plants. The botanical usage predated the broader biological usage that emerged in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing both plants and animals. In modern times, discussions around “gender” have expanded to include social and cultural aspects, such as in the “gender role.” Along side all this, “gender” was also a system of grammatical classifications used to refer to the sex of animals and (oddly) things. Only very recently was “gender” repurposed by queer theorists and sexologists to manufacture an ideological construct for political and corporate purposes.
The word “sex” also entered the English language from Old French in the fourteenth century, derived from the Latin word “sexus,” which referred to the state of being either male or female. In its earliest usage in English, “sex” primarily denoted biological differences between male and female organisms, particularly in terms of reproductive anatomy and functions. Throughout history, “sex” has been used in various contexts, including biology, medicine, and law, to refer to the biological characteristics that differentiate males and females of a species. This usage remains prevalent today, particularly in scientific and medical discourse. In addition to its biological sense, “sex” has also been used to refer to sexual activity or intercourse, a meaning that also emerged in the late fourteenth century. This usage became more prominent over time, especially in colloquial and informal language. In modern times, discussions around “sex” have expanded to include social and cultural aspects, such as in the “sex role” and “sexual orientation.”
In sociology, the concept of “sex role” gained prominence in the twentieth century, particularly within the framework of structural functionalism. Sociologists like Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton explored how societies assign different roles and responsibilities to individuals based on their sex. Parsons, for example, described the complementary roles of men (instrumental role) and women (expressive role) within the family structure. Anthropologists began to explore the concept of sex or gender roles in the twentieth century, as part of broader studies on kinship and social organization. Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict conducted ethnographic research that highlighted the variability of gender roles across different cultures. Mead’s work, in particular, challenged Western notions of fixed gender roles by demonstrating the diversity of gender norms and behaviors across societies. Over time, the term “gender role” gradually supplanted “sex role” in academic discourse. This transition coincided with the rise of queer and feminist scholarship, as well a sexology, and the redefinition of gender as a multidimensional construct shaped by culture, power, and socialization. Today, many people use gender as a shorthand for gender or sex role.
A different person in the thread attacked me for being yet another man talking down to women, to which I responded that my claim is easy to confirm. Even Wikipedia recognizes the fact, I wrote, quoting the entry: “Though sex and gender have been used interchangeably at least as early as the fourteenth century, this usage was not common by the late 1900s. Sexologist John Money pioneered the concept of a distinction between biological sex and gender identity in 1955.” In other words, a crackpot manufactured a distinction and many in the gender critical movement have uncritically accepted it. I was criticized for quoting Wikipedia, of course, since it proved my point. But I used a popular source to avoid appealing to my own expertise on the matter, sharing essays from this blog, or posting a lengthy reply with the above content. I also used the Wikipedia quote because the Google result just above it (the first result returned) was Gemini correcting the assumption in my question and instructing me to accept queer and corporate propaganda. I found it amusing that the seriously woke Wikipedia could provide a more truthful answer to my question than a chatbot.
To reiterate in concluding, it is important to critically analyze the ways in which queer and corporate messaging are constructed for those involved in challenging gender ideology. Embracing opposing distortions undermines the effectiveness of efforts for clarity and a return to scientific principles. By conforming to the language and tactics of the gender ideology narrative, individuals inadvertently yield authority to it. Queer theory and sexology are to be viewed skeptically. It is therefore advisable not to adopt their terminology when framing our understandings of the world.
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. — William Issac and Dorothy Swain Thomas (1928)
Is it at least possible that the Wellness Center at the college you or your children attend presumes illness? “If you build it, they will come.” This phrase is appropriated from a line spoken by Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, in the film Field of Dreams (1989). Some hasten to note that the line is misquoted; however, it preserves the essential meaning: people often don’t know what they seek until you tell them. What you tell them doesn’t necessarily have to be real or necessary; it just needs find them anxious and vulnerable, a condition that may be manufactured by those who are expert at disordering personalities. Those experts are tied to a vast corporate enterprise racking in hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The global mental health industry, showing a compound growth rate of 3.8% annually, is forecasted to grow to more than $532 billion by 2030. It’s truly a field of dreams.
Wellness centers are part of the Garden Grove district’s “Choose Wellness” campaign, launched in 2019 to expand “mental health awareness.” As of a year ago, the district employees 60 school psychologists, 22 school social workers, 30 mental health specialists and 44 mental health interns on staff (source: Orange County Registrar)
I have covered this matter in depth on Freedom and Reason (See, e.g., Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex; Feeding the Medical-Industrial Complex; Thomas Szasz, Medical Freedom, and the Tyranny of Gender Ideology; Disordering Bodies for Disordered Minds). Yesterday, I listened to The Brendan O’Neill Show from March 7. He interviewed Abigail Shrier, former opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In 2020, she published Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. O’Neill and Shrier engaged in a conversation about her latest book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. They explore such topics as the prevalent over-diagnosis of mental-health conditions, the detrimental impact therapists can have on children and parental authority, and the innate resilience inherent in human beings. Here’s the conversation on Apple Podcasts.
Among the many forces at work, Shrier notes the emergence of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), an educational framework ostensibly focused on nurturing students’ abilities to understand and manage their emotions, set and achieve positive life goals through responsible decision making, feel and show empathy for others, and establish and maintain positive relationships. SEL advocates claim the goal is to foster students’ social and emotional skills, which are essential for success in school and work, and life in general. However, by framing discussions around emotional well-being in educational contexts, teachers (perhaps for many inadvertently) often reinforce the belief that students have been traumatized or vulnerable.
At the top, I quoted what has come to be known as the Thomas theorem. But even when things are real, they can be made more traumatic by defining them as such. Many of us have had the experience of watching babies made to cry upon bumping their head solely on the reaction of those around them. Indeed, you can make babies believe they have bumped their heads even when they haven’t by acting as if they have.
Consider the Dartmouth Scar Experiment. Participants thought they were being interviewed for jobs with fake scars on their faces applied by a makeup artist. During final touch up, no longer being able to see themselves in a mirror, the scar was removed without their knowledge. Those participants who believed that they had a visible scar reported experiencing increased level of discrimination. They reported feelings of powerlessness and self-pity. They were also more like to blame others for their feelings.
Encouraging students to explore feelings and experiences in-depth, there’s a risk of inadvertently amplifying or even manufacturing perceptions of trauma. In other words, the process of introspection and discussion lead some students to interpret normal life challenges or experiences as traumatic events, potentially exaggerating their negative impact. Moreover, they learn that trauma is debilitating, thus steering the child into the sick or victim role. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, where students come to view themselves primarily through the lens of trauma, potentially limiting their perceptions of their own agency and resilience.
It should be obvious that excessive focus on exploring trauma and negative emotions in educational settings compromises important aspects of students’ development, such as fostering resilience, promoting positive coping strategies, and building strengths-based approaches to negotiating the life-course. Educators, while crucial in supporting students’ emotional and social development, usually don’t have the professional training or expertise to serve as therapists or counselors. Many only have a bachelor’s degree, and the quality of education programs is widely variable. Moreover, the vocation has become target and instrument of woke progressive programming.
Engaging in deep emotional exploration without proper training is associated with boundary issues. As I have noted, this can be a form of grooming. However, as Shrier points out, counselors and therapists are often as bad, and they are a conduit into the medical-industrial complex, thus representing another form of grooming. This is evidenced by the fact that all of the worsening mental health outcomes for kids widely reported by the media, and confirmed by research—as well as young people declining to engage in life and thrive at it (see tweet below)—have coincided with a generation of parents obsessed with the mental health and well-being of their children.
The young arent driving, fucking, and drinking because high energy activity is fundamentally incompatible with modern ethics. If you're always told to be harmless (but also guilty!) then your innate will to power withers. You vegetate. Man, the greatest animal, turned to plant pic.twitter.com/RrjQlFBdfY
This phenomenon has been well-explored in my field of sociology. In his various books (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of mental Patients and Other Inmates, and Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity), for example, Erving Goffman directly or in effect elaborate the concept of the “sick role.” The sick role refers to a set of social behaviors and expectations associated with individuals who are perceived or depicted as disabled or ill. Goffman described the sick role as a socially sanctioned deviant status that individuals assume when they are treated as ill. This status comes with exemptions from normal responsibilities and obligations to seek help and cooperate with treatment. The later requires reifying the mental illness, which often involves securing an official diagnosis. In this view, illness is not necessarily am objective phenomenon, but a socially constructed experience shaped by cultural norms and expectations, and social interaction.
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