Under any rational understanding of informed consent what happened in the account I share below constitutes sexual assault. If there is no law regulating this where this occurred, there ought to be. The victim in this case is a heterosexual man who thought he was going to have intimate relations with a woman. At no point did the man representing himself as a woman tell the man that he was actually a man. The man discovered this man’s penis during the process. What is being described here is sexual assault. The perpetrator is presenting himself as the victim. If you are tempted to rationalize this by saying it didn’t happen, you’re missing the point. The scenario is real world.
From a Reddit thread shared on Twitter by @L__G__B
However you feel about gendered presentations (as a libertarian, I don’t really care except where it is used to gain access to spaces reserved for the opposite gender or in cases like the present one), if you believe that it’s ever appropriate for a man or a woman to initiate sexual relations under false pretenses then you have become so submerged in slogans that you have lost your moral compass.
Maybe it would help to flip roles around. Imagine this is trans woman identifying as a lesbian going home with a lesbian and getting to the stage of intimacy where the lesbian discovers he has a penis. The lesbian draws back and asks if it is a penis. The trans woman pretends as if he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. This is after kissing her. This is after groping her body. This is sexual assault. It’s no different the other way around. It would be no different if a gay man went home with a trans man to discover that the trans man had a vagina or had phalloplasty. If a trans man penetrated a woman with his pseudo-penis it would be rape. You don’t get to sexually assault or rape another person because you’re trans identifying.
We need to be very clear about what’s going on here. I just lectured on criminal categories in my criminology class, which I have been teaching now for a quarter of a century, and lately, every time I go through the material, and in taking questions from students, I am reminded about how changing our language puts people at risk of criminal victimization. This is the revised definition of rape under the model statute the FBI uses to categorize these offenses: Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim. Sexual assault is sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim. This broad category includes attempted rape, fondling, or unwanted sexual touching.
From a Reddit thread shared on Twitter by @L__G__B
A lesbian does not want to be touched by a man. It matters not at all that she believes the man is a woman—or that the man believes he is a woman. A trans woman is not a woman. A trans woman is a man. Apply the principle all around. This is not about judging people by their genitals. This is about the reality of gender and sexual orientation. Reality is not mix-and-match.
The victim in this case was far too forgiving in the situation and should have reported this assault to the police. We have to force the hand of law enforcement to make sure we maintain a legal and normative culture in which it is never appropriate to deceive people into sexual relations they would not otherwise consent to given sexual preference. Clearly the man is not gay and did not intend to have sex with another man. Sexual orientation is the only objective factor in this case. As such, it is the overriding factor. Gender identity is entirely subjective. A man cannot justify raping a lesbian because he identifies as one, etc.
All the trans identifying man had to do was to tell the other man what he was so the man could make a decision about whether he wanted to go home with him. That’s it. But honesty is being destroyed because the truth is being upended by ideology. It’s not just truth that’s under assault here. The falsehood that a man is a woman because he says he is puts others at risk. Even if this case is fictional, the account is entirely possible, and moreover probable.
If this ever happens to you, please report the matter to the police. The time to prevent the dissimulation of rape and sexual assault is before the new culture being stood up robs us of our capacity to understand what is happening to us. Moreover, while some might have the courage to object, a lot of people are afraid and will allow the scene to unfold. They will leave the encounter having been sexually assaulted because they were too afraid to say no. They were too afraid to say no because they feared being condemned as a bigot.
Grindr launched in 2009 and has since grown into the largest social networking app for bi, gay, lesbian, and trans identifying people. Grindr brags about the “millions of daily users who use our location-based technology in almost every country in every corner of the planet.” However, Grindr doesn’t allow gay men and lesbians to filter for cisgender, i.e., those whose identity matches the objective reality of their gender. In doing so, Grindr leans into the fallacy that trans identifying individuals are the gender they claim they are. Is this company engaged in deceptive practices that puts personal security at risk by obscuring reality?
Here are the FAQs announcing the policy change:
Composite of three screen shots from the page Gender Filter
Grinder explains that one can choose from a list of more than fifty gender identities. The identities are culturally specific. The user can selected the gender identities of those he’d like to see appear on his grid, which can be saved to his preference. However, users cannot filter for “cis men” or “cis women,” the queer theoretical designation for the two and only genders of the human species.
“When designing gender settings on Grindr,” the service explains, “it was important to us to not further perpetuate discrimination and harm for the trans and nonbinary community. For this reason, we allow filtering based on gender—you can specify that you want to see men or women—but this will include all men or all women, because trans men are men and trans women are women.”
The reality is that trans men are women and trans women are men and acknowledging that reality is not discriminatory—truth is not discriminatory. These are objective mind-independent facts—incontrovertible, unchangeable, and eternal (at least until a molecular reassemble machine is invented that can change genotypic and phenotypic sex).
Humans are mammals and, as such, natural beings with a natural history. A man who appears as a woman, no matter how sophisticated the simulation is, is still a simulation of a woman. No simulated appearance can change the reality the appearance seeks to obscure. So when a trans identifying man claims to be a woman he is engaged in deception.
Grindr risks an environment of deception by not allowing its gay users to search for other gay users. Presumably, a man producing a simulated sexual identity would not have to tell other users the truth about what and who he is. That’s a problem. A lesbian would not being able to filter out trans women who claim to be lesbians. Etcetera.
If a man seeks intimate experiences with other men simulating women (or any other being or object), then this is something no government should regulate. In a free country, men are allowed to appear as women, and other men are allowed to seek intimacy with them, etc. But such intercourse must be voluntary and consensual. If a man lures a heterosexual man or a lesbian on a date posing as a woman, this should carry criminal penalties; it is, at bare minimum, fraud; if intimate contact occurs, rape or sexual assault. Not being able to filter out people who are engaged in deception risks fraud and assault.
AI generated image “Cis Gender”
Why this isn’t obvious with rules rendered in black letter law everywhere is Exhibit A in the success of the progressive war on justice, rights, science, and truth. It’s a signal that we’re in the grip of a new religion, one that, because the government stands behind it, has become the official dogma—the state religion.
The same libertarianism that decries government regulation of consensual individual sexual conduct is the same libertarianism that finds unacceptable the union of state and religion in a secular republic that forbids such circumstances.
Corporations should be made to follow by law the logic of democratic-republican government, which is ruled by reason and dependent on evidence.
This blog post is about crime, immigration, and economy, not in the form of a systematic analysis of their association, but as a two-part blog post laying out the problem of each. Crime and the economy are of course related, and I trust the reader to put together the implications of economics development in late capitalism for the problem of crime in America. I begin with the media reporting on recent economic trends and connect this to the immigration crisis.
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Today the media is celebrating the strength of the economy, highlighting a tight labor market. To be sure, there was a recent surge in payrolls, but the market is tight because millions of people who quit their jobs over the last several years are not looking for new ones. They have dropped out of the labor market. Since the unemployment rate is determined by those seeking employment, those not looking for work will not be recorded as unemployed. This explains the low unemployment rate, not the genius of withered husk currently occupying the White House.
What would it take to bring workers back to work? Higher wages, benefits, better working conditions, and greater job security—all things necessary for an adequate and dignified life. But firms don’t want those things; those things are antithetical to their raison d’etat. So the mass media, i.e., the propaganda apparatus of the corporate state, is spinning the unemployment numbers to obscure the real reason capitalists are importing millions of foreign workers (legal and illegal): to increase competition in labor markers and put downward pressure on wages.
This is the supply and demand effect, where labor is the commodity and wages signal its price, in a market distorted by mass immigration. Instead of allowing the labor market to dictate wages high enough to draw native workers back to work, business firms use cheap foreign labor across sectors to keep the native labor on the sidelines. The corporate state wants to keep the Great Resignation going.
Haitians crossing the Rio Grande
The public needs to grasp the reality that corporations don’t care about the citizens of the country in which they operate. A corporation may fly a US flag over its headquarters, but it’s no patriot. The corporate person is a psychopath. The corporation only cares about maximizing surplus value and delivering for shareholders, which, firm by firm, is achieved by raising the rate of surplus value (the rate of exploitation) by driving down wages deploying the strategy of replacing native labor with foreign labor and displacing labor where it can through rationalization (which explains the rise in productivity over against compensation). But lowering wages via absolute production of surplus value and rationalizing production via relative production of surplus value (altering the organic composition of capital across sectors) leads to a fall in the rate of profit. Why? Constraints on realization by diminishing consumer purchasing power. In other words, rational firm-level activity produces systemic irrationality.
The Fed has been covering this by printing money. The Fed is not stupid; it knows what it’s doing. The smoke and mirrors is designed to raise debt to force austerity down the road. This is a tactic in the managed decline of a republic, while concentrating capital in fewer and fewer hands, disproportionately the pockets of transnational corporations. It’s not that there’s no central planning going on. This is not the result of anarchy. It’s that the central planning at work here has in mind something other than making life better for the citizens of this country. It has in mind the destruction of America. The working man is on the road to serfdom.
Then there is this from Newsweek: “[T]he $150.7 billion spent on illegal immigration last year is more than the total gross domestic product (GDP) of Mississippi ($146.7 billion in 2023), New Mexico ($131.5 billion), Idaho ($119.8 billion), and is more than the GDP’s Wyoming and Vermont combined, at $50.74 billion and $43.38 billion, respectively. With illegal immigration now costing $150.7 billion annually, the burden inevitably trickles down to the taxpayer. Individually, the FAIR study found that each illegal alien or their U.S.-born child costs the U.S. $8,776 annually. Of the $8,776, each American taxpayer is paying roughly $1,156 per year, FAIR found, or about $957 each after factoring in the taxes paid by illegal aliens.” As I have reported in the past, this is in addition to the half a trillion dollars transferred from the native working class to the capitalist class via the latter’s utilization of immigrant labor.
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It’s a shame I had to tell my criminology students Thursday, as we reviewed the official crime statistics, that, beyond the data on homicide (dead bodies are hard to obfuscate), I don’t trust the numbers. Why? Because they’re under the control of an administrative apparatus that systemically deceives users of its services—especially those agencies charged with keeping and monitoring domestic security. They’re lying about crime. Property crime is exploding on our streets and the Crime Data Explorer (CDE), the new dashboard system rolled out by the FBI in 2020, indicates that, with the exception of motor vehicle theft, property crime is declining under Biden. And it shows robbery in decline. That’s not possible.
Part of why the data show a decline is because many high crime areas are not merely failing to record/report numbers to the FBI—the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicates that only 45 percent of criminal victimizations are recorded by law enforcement, and fewer than 12,000 of the 18, 000 reporting authorities are reporting their numbers to the FBI—but that a lot of criminal events don’t meet the thresholds of new laws in high-crime areas that make felony theft a misdemeanor, so they don’t even make it the Index (the FBI’s system of the most serious crime); the stores that are being looted need more than a $1,000 to report a felony and many corporations are instructing their employees to let people steal with impunity. Add to this the perpetrators allowed to walk after arrest and the reality is that we’re in a major crime wave actively dissimulated by the corporate state.
You have to get into the granularity that the CDE dashboard permits to find the agencies that more accurately record and report data. I’m guessing readers probably have some idea which agencies do a better job. Not the progressive cities. The progressives cities have so politicized crime and violence that you cannot trust their numbers—except for homicide. So I guess homicide is now the proxy for crime in America. And homicide is exploding. When you see the demographic profile the CDE provides you will understand why obfuscation is needed. (See How Progressive Criminal Justice Policy Puts Black Lives at Risk; Is It Guns?)
I am hearing the objection that studies show illegal aliens commit less crime than natives. What a braindead way of looking at the problem of immigration and crime. Those who are at risk to commit crime in America are the disemployed and marginalized—made this way by globalization, a capitalist strategy marked not only by off-shoring production, but by displacing native labor through mass immigration. One would expect that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime since they’re gainfully employed.
My point is largely a theoretical one, suggesting that there is a fundamental problem in the approach of studies that compare rates and conclude that native Americans have higher rates compared to illegal immigrants. Those studies (the pro-immigrant Cato think tank is a major source of the reports used by the media) are problematic on their own grounds, since researchers use arrest rates, which underreport immigrant status (immigration status is often determined at a later stage of the criminal justice process), and, moreover, illegals may be more reluctant to report crime for fear of deportation; but accepting the research on their face, researchers ignore the indirect effects of mass immigration.
It is not controversial in criminology to state that street crime is associated with economic deprivation, poor labor force attachment, and social disorganization. To be sure, not everybody experiencing these conditions turns to crime; rather, these conditions are criminogenic, making more likely those living in these conditions will break the law. Workforce participation rates are higher for immigrants than for native workers. Black and brown Americans living in the impoverished inner-city conditions associated with street crime are displaced by immigrant labor. It follows logically that immigration is indirectly associated with crime among native Americans by exacerbating the conditions experienced by these populations. This either makes immigrants appear underrepresented in crime or mediates the much great involvement compared to native Americans.
Connecting the two parts of this blog entry, since immigrants are taking the job of natives—and preventing the development of tight labor markets that would draw the industrial reserve back into the labor force—the infusion of immigrants in the workforce is exacerbating criminogenic conditions. As I have indicated, black and brown Americans are most affected by Biden’s immigration approach. We might go so far as to suggest that the establishment’s open borders policy is a racist policy. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was followed the very next year by the opening of America’s borders. Opening entry to the US to immigrants other than Western and Northern Europeans, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 significantly altered immigration demographics in the country. You can see all around you where this change has brought us.
My advice to readers is to get a gun and get trained on how to use it. I also recommend that folks get out of the city if they can. I fear that with the millions of illegal aliens and all the native Americans displaced by them this is only going to get worse.
Here’s the text of SB 1780: “Defamation, False Light, and Unauthorized Publication of Name or Likenesses; Providing that provisions concerning journalist’s privilege do not apply to defamation claims when the defendant is a professional journalist or media entity; specifying that certain persons may not be considered public figures for purposes of certain actions; creating a presumption that a statement by an anonymous source is presumptively false for purposes of a defamation action; providing that a public figure does not need to show actual malice to prevail in a defamation action in certain circumstances, etc.” Under SB 1780, anyone in these circumstances wouldn’t have to prove actual malice, which was a standard requirement for defamation suits following the 1964 US Supreme Court case New York Times v Sullivan.
Florida Senate
The Guardian renders the matter thusly: “SB 1780, would make accusing someone of being homophobic, transphobic, racist or sexist, even if the accusation is true, equivalent to defamation, and punishable by a fine of at least $35,000. If passed, the bill would severely limit and punish constitutionally protected free speech in the state.” Maybe. In light of the concept of defamation, this is not a slam dunk free speech deal. As critical as I am of the concept of defamation, I am sympathetic to what the Florida legislature is attempting to do here: if those out to destroy the reputation of their critics by smearing them as “transphobes” were not protected speech, maybe the authoritarians and reactionaries would be less inclined to damage the reputations and livelihoods of those with whom they disagree.
Note this bit from the The Guardian rendering: “even if the accusation is true.” In addition to the fact that accusing somebody of being “transphobic” is a smear that may damage his reputation and cause him to suffer harm (such as losing his career), determining whether a person is transphobic is not something that can be shown to be true (or false). This is because “transphobia” is a word invented by reactionaries who want to intimidate and marginalize those who are critical of gender ideology and all that comes with it, for example the practice of subjecting vulnerable and mentally ill individual to radical disabling cosmetic surgery for no objective medical purpose. Branding somebody “transphobic” is the equivalent of calling those who oppose fascism “fascophobic”—in a world where such a smear wouldn’t be laughed out of the room, a distinction that ought to scare the hell out of you.
The power of the legislation is in signifying that a smear not subject to a truth test (analogous to being accused of being a witch or labeled crazy) is nonetheless designed to heap upon him disrepute and may in fact cause reputational damage—which it is clearly intended to do. We live in a world where suffering material consequences for criticizing gender ideology or antiracism is a very real possibility. If we’re going to keep around this concept of defamation, then it is reasonably applied to attempts to destroy a person’s career and good standing for criticizing irrational beliefs and harmful practices. It would be one thing if it was just name calling. But it’s not. Organizations discipline and even fire employees accused of transphobia.
And the direction is towards legal consequences for being the thing one is smeared as. In European countries, the police arrest individuals for saying “transphobic” things. Think about that. The government defines criticism of a pernicious ideology as a criminal offense, thus staking out the content of a word invented to prevent opposition to the ideology by punishing the critics. There is no recourse. You are accused of such and, if it sticks, you can lose your livelihood. That’s totalitarian. Is it really that different if a corporation punishes an employee smeared with a made-up word? Why are powerful institutions doing the bidding of an ideological movement? Doesn’t the law exist to protect individuals from institutional harm? The promise of legislation like this is to prevent our slide into totalitarianism.
Also, the bill isn’t “anti-gay.” This is not the first time the media has pulled this stunt. Remember “Don’t Say Gay”? That characterization of HB 1557 was false. SB 1780 doesn’t criminalize homosexuality, etc. The bill is seeking to protect individuals from reputational damage by the imposition of a de facto system that presently a priori reduces unfavored opinion to a form of prejudice for which there are material consequences. Words like “transphobia” and “Islamophobia” are designed to establish their own truth—as well as the witchfynders who will legitimize the smear.
Do I support the law? I’m still mulling it over. I want to see a law that forbids institutions and organizations from disciplining in any fashion any employee who criticizes any ideology. Such a law promises to obviate the need for a revised defamation law. But I do understand the motive behind the law and why progressive media outlets like The Guardian write entirely uncharitable and inaccurate stories about it. They want to empower authoritarians and reactionaries to destroy the lives of those who criticize their irrational and destructive ideologies and practices. Such a law may be necessary to disempower these fascists.
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Book Riot is reporting that “another state has entered the ranks of those introducing bills to combat the rampant book banning in public schools and libraries.” Washington now joins New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. House Bill 2331 was introduced by Representative Monica Jurado Stonier and is cosponsored by several other state representatives, including Nicole Macri, Lauren Davis, Gerry Pollet, Julia Reed, and Alex Ramel. There is a companion bill in the state Senate as well, SB 6208.
In other words, if any of the various paraphilias—autogynephilia, autopedophilia, etc.—are deemed a feature of a “legally protected class,” then communities cannot remove hyper-sexualized content from public school libraries deployed there to groom children for cult induction. Pause for a moment to reflect on the terrible truth that gender ideology is becoming for many states the official religion in a country that explicitly forbids theocracy. One more clear signal that the Republic is near over, and that the New Fascism is ascendant.
In the podcast I share below, a debate between Yascha Mounk and Christopher Rufo, moderated by Bari Weiss, Mounk presents the correct history of woke, what he calls “identity synthesis.” Woke progressivism (really all progressivism, since the ideology grows up alongside multiculturalism in the transnationalist project—see my 2019 essay The Work of Bourgeois Hegemony in the Immigration Debate), DEI, critical race theory, queer theory, post-colonial studies, etc., are not Marxist or neo-Marxist but corporatist. These reactionary ideas eschew materialist-scientific class-based analysis for the backwards idealisms of identity politics and therefore work against the objective interests of labor, interests determined by the individual’s material relationship to the means of production. Put simply, woke progressivism stands Marxism on its head. This is in addition to its illiberal character.
The intellectual origins of the woke phase of progressivism lies in its embraces of anarchism, nihilism, and poststructuralism/postmodernism (which in gender ideology incorporates the sexology project, the synthesis that has handed to the medical-industrial complex its justification for hormonally and surgically altering bodies including children). Woke is an ugly philosophy—a politics of resentment and revenges—dressed up in and deodorized with fancy academic jargon, a crackpot frame for pseudo-intellectuals to seem clever and with which to command power.
Michel Foucault, French philosopher who played a major role in the development of woke ideology.
I have been writing about this problem for several years on Freedom and Reason. I have been talking to anybody who would listen about this problem much longer than that, since the mid-1990s, actually, when physics professor Alan Sokal admitted that he submitted a hoax article to Social Text, an cultural studies journal, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” arguing that quantum gravity is a social construction. Social Text published his paper!
As I explained in my essay about Mounk in November of last year (see The Peril of Left-Wing Identitarianism), I was familiar with Mounk’s earlier work and was happy to see that his latest book about identify politics, published in September, 2023, confirmed my thesis (his argument sounds derivative of mine, to be honest). However, Mounk inadequately theorizes the big question: how the regression of woke progressivism carries any effect beyond the university. For a system of ideas to prevail, especially one that pretends to be popular and radical, there needs to be real power behind it, and in an overdeveloped capitalist society, the power that socializes big ideas emanates from the ruling class and its functionaries. It must therefore be useful to them. Indeed, woke progressivism is a formation in late capitalism, a corporatist project to disorganize the proletariat for the sake of the transnational project to establish a global neo-feudal mode of production in which workers become serfs managed on high-tech stateless estates and made stupid by tribal identities. Scroll through my blog to read the many essays I have published theorizing this development.
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For the life of me, I will never understand why those who share some version of the meme shown above don’t see that it makes the argument for securing the border, rounding up the invaders, and kicking them out—and calling out the collaborators. Democrats and establishment Republicans are in effect colonial collaborators betraying their people by welcoming the colonizes. They’re selling us out. Who are they selling us out to? Big corporate power.
There were Indians who resisted in the day. But, in the end, they lost. Many of them have failed to assimilate with power that long ago established itself as hegemonic. The truth is that America is not built on stolen lands. Nor do Americans occupy the continent. Europeans came to the New World and conquered it. These lands were won and they are ours. The time to do something about the foreign invasion of one’s land is in the moment. If you can’t resist, then you lose. The stronger side wins and their way of live prevails. In the process, the colonized depend on collaborators willing to betray their people. These are the lessons to be learned.
President Donald Trump crushed his sole remaining opponent Nikki Haley among registered Republicans in the New Hampshire Primary, beating the former governor of South Carolina among that constituency by a three-to-one margin. Yet Haley got around 43 percent of the primary vote, which the media is touting today as Haley having earned the right to “fight on,” while exposing Trump’s “November weaknesses.” How did Haley reach this unlikely number? In the open, operative Democrats manufactured an illusion.
Nikki Haley Declares Race “Far From Over” After Losing to Trump in New Hampshire
The candidacy of Nikki Haley, the favorite of the globalist donor class, is emblematic of the elite drive to make the United States more like Canada (see exiled Canadian trucker Gord Magill explain to Tucker Carlson how darkness has descended on Canada). This is how the transnationalists operate: they control the opposition by selecting candidates subservient to the neoliberal / neoconservative project and then flood the zone with dollars and voters. They manufacture the perception that the race is competitive, while forcing the Trump campaign to spend time and money on an inevitable victory, as well as bidding time for the lawfare project to do its work.
This strategy dovetails with the project to indoctrinate the youth in anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. The indoctrination program yields zealots who, by command and confluence, vote to keep “fascism at bay,” i.e., entrench the corporatist establishment. This is the army of woke progressives who no longer believe in the American Republic, young Americans who have been trained to loathe their country, the West, and the Enlightenment. (Some of them have been conditioned to loathe themselves. Their race. Their gender. Their religion.) At this point, the parallels between this development and the Cultural Revolution under Mao Tse-tung is so obvious the comparison needs no justification or elaboration.
The elite learned a lot from Antonio Gramsci’s observation that to dominate a society it is not enough to solely focus on suppressing the opposition. A social logic must be installed that brings people to pitch with the force of instinct. The ruling classes maintain their dominance not just through force or coercion but also by shaping the beliefs, norms, and values of society. Gramsci argues that to establish and maintain control, a ruling class needs to gain cultural and ideological leadership in addition to political and economic control. Achieving and sustaining power requires engineering the consent of the governed, influencing their thoughts and values to align with the interests of the ruling class. This involves establishing cultural and intellectual dominance, controlling key institutions—education and entertainment—and commanding the prevailing ideology in society.
This is Gramsci’s concept of “ideological hegemony.” It involves maintaining power not only through achieving control of the administrative apparatus and party machinery but also by influencing the way people think and perceive the world, creating a cultural framework and installing a social logic that supports the goals interests of the ruling class. The elite interests become the perceived interests of the class whose organic interests it objectively opposes. This involves revising the history of a people, replacing it with a pseudo history, and distorting the national ideals, supplanting these with an ideology extolling the virtues of the ruling class and technocratic rule.
TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) is a popular expression of fear of populist-nationalism across the trans-Atlantic space. Populist-nationalism seeks to reclaim the governing philosophy, i.e., democratic-republicanism, and the rights-based system, i.e., liberalism, that marked the period of the greatest awakening and progress of humanity in world history. The popular irrationalism opposed to this reclamation is amplified by the corporate state media and the culture industry and perpetuated by substantial establishment control over the electoral machinery and the means of intellectual production. The transnational elite understand that the United States is the last bastion of the robust expression of democratic-republican spirit in the trans-Atlantic space. They have to undermine that spirit.
Right now, our unique Constitution and Creed are sustaining us through a very dark period. But for how long? If we fall, then the West falls, and the global elite, with their barbarian hordes, finally take over. Then it’s corporate state neo-feudalism and the permanent establishment of that dark period—the New Dark Ages. That will be character of Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever.
Nikki Haley is obviously lying about her experience in the South. It’s not that she’s not very brown. She isn’t. It’s that her characterization of the South is sociologically inaccurate.
Haley was born in 1972. This was several years after the abolition of segregation with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. By the time Haley went to high school, schools had been integrated for many years and prejudice had for the most part disappeared—and discrimination was illegal.
I realize that it’s difficult for young people to grasp this given how submerged they have been in the distortions of critical race theory and its historical revisionism, but when I was in high school in the South, blacks and whites used to hang out together—and nobody would have thought of Indians and Hispanics as racialized groups.
Nikki Haley asks DeSantis’ voters to support her
Haley is assumed to be white because she is. She doesn’t have a race card to play—and before antiracism, race cards were obviously obnoxious (they still are, of course).
I recognize that Haley is aiming the pseudo-biography/history at young people who don’t know that progressives resurrected racial thinking in the new millennium, but there are enough of us who are old enough to remind everybody of what the world was like before antiracism deranged the minds of the youth.
I just spent several hours viewing my senior high school album (from the year 1980). I hadn’t see book in decades. I was not surprised at all to be reminded that all the races were together and that black students were included in the clubs, pageants, etc. There are three black cheerleaders. Most Congenial was a black male and a white female. Most Likely to Succeed, a white male and a black female. Best Looking, a black female and a white male. A black female on the Royal Court. That was the 1970s—less than an hour and a half from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty destroying MSNBC’s Joy Reid is such a beautiful moment that I watched it twice. My interest wasn’t simply in watching again the destruction of a truly loathsome person (Justice wiped the floor with Reid); I rewatched to take in Reid’s method of propagandizing her audience. Reid does not engage in argumentation; her approach is sophistry for stupid people—and for those whose sentiments align with her progressivism who don’t care how the consensus they desire is reached.
Note her form in this segment: Because removing books from bookshelves is associated with book banning, child safeguarding is a form of book banning. This is akin to arguing that, because physicians sometimes have to cut into bodies with knives, they are therefore engaged in a criminal violence, since violent criminals also cut into bodies with knives. But Justice’s campaign to remove pornographic materials from public schools isn’t campaigning to ban those books. Her argument is that books with pornographic content—cartoon characters wearing strap-on dildos, etc.—shouldn’t be accessible to children in public school libraries because these materials aren’t age-appropriate.
Reid appeals to her audience that the people who want their children to read books with pornographic content are too poor to afford these books for their children. This point moves on the same plane of idiocy as Kamala Harris’ 2021 objection on BET to “racist” voter IDs because poor people don’t have access to Xerox machines (“Kamala Harris slammed for claiming rural Americans can’t photocopy their IDs”). And Reid’s ad hominem attacks on other members of Moms for Liberty is so transparent as to need no elaboration. There is no argument in any of this. Because Reid has no shame, she powers her way through the interaction, feigning confidence in argument. The observer must be careful here; aplomb is as much an indicator of the shamelessness of the propagandist as it is of the sophistication of a master debater.
Sophistry is a widespread mode of discourse. In many of my interactions with people, some of whom quite intelligent, I routinely encounter in place of argumentation sophistry. Sophistry in the hands of those gifted with putting others on their back foot is particularly damaging to enlightened conversation. When a reasonable person is confronted with sophistry and doesn’t respond because no argument has been made, and refuses to stoop because he has integrity, and the other person continues to press the action, the audience thinks the person engaged in sophistry has won the argument.
Those who find sophistry genuinely compelling aren’t going to know what argumentation is—that, or, aligned with the politics of the speaker, the sophisticated individual would rather it appear as if his side won the argument than to have the losing argument tested. This is why we see highly intelligent people habitually engaging in sophistry while never learning the rules of argumentation. Their adroitness has made them lazy and self-assured. The rules of argument require training (logic is only partially innate to the human primate and that part needs priming and elaboration). Sophistry only requires a clever mind and the confidence of a shameless person. Indeed, with the goal of propaganda to persuade people with fallacious discourse, thus a qualification for the job of professional propagandist is the knack for sophistry.
Some of the books at the heart of there controversy
What Tiffany Justice does in this segment is systematically dismantle every attempt that Reid makes to push the extremist agenda of queer activists. In doing so, she puts on a clinic in how to expose sophistry. Reid’s work at every turn is to bring heat without light. Her goal is to obscure what is really at issue and turn everything back to her central “argument,” which is that child safeguarding is an illegitimate exercise by parents and public institutions when public health demands that responsible parents and responsive public institutions protect children from sexualization.
I have reviewed many of the books in question. To say they are not age-appropriate is an understatement. Those who want these books in public schools libraries know these materials aren’t age-appropriate. They are tools in a vast and admitted grooming project. This is what Moms for Liberty is dedicated to stopping. That they are successfully portrayed as book banners tells us how entrenched and widespread public acceptance of child sexualization has become in our society. This is no accident, as I document on the pages of Freedom and Reason. Queering spaces is about sexualizing children and changing popular culture to disarm parents and responsible citizens from meeting their obligation to protect children.
On X (Twitter) I made the following comment to the shared video clip, which I will paraphrase below the link for convenience and clarification.
Trying as hard as I can to understand, I can see no difference between this case, or the famous cases of amputating legs, and castrating a man or amputating a woman's breasts because they believed they have always been the other gender.
Trying as hard as I can to understand, I can see no difference between putting out ones eyes, or the famous cases of amputating legs (see The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts), and castrating a boy or a man or performing a mastectomy on a girl or a woman because they believed they have always been the other gender. A doctor who amputates the healthy breasts of a woman because she believes she is a man is acting no differently that a doctor who removes the healthy eyes of a woman who believes she is blind. If the latter is wrong, then so must also the former must be wrong.
I know the woman in the video clip did this to herself, but why shouldn’t a doctor safely remove her eyes? Why shouldn’t the doctor affirm her authentic self as a blind woman? That sounds absurd until we come to the matter of gender. It strikes me as some sort of bizarre internalization of loathing about sex to treat the elective castration of a boy as something different than removing his healthy arms or legs. The only difference I can see it that one body part is involved in sexual pleasure while the other is not. That and the fact that amputating a man’s limb makes an amputee while amputating a woman’s breasts don’t make her a man.
The older brother of a boy at my high school (this was in the 1970s) took LSD (or was schizophrenic—this part was always a bit unclear to me) and read the passage in Matthew that it is better to lose one part of your body than to have your whole body thrown into hell. The verbiage in that passage is dramatic, telling the faithful to cut the offending body part from his body and cast it away. And so the kid did. His mother found him with a bloody towel on his crotch and his severed penis on the desk in his room. I used to ride my bicycle past his house on my way to see my buddies at the apartment building at the end of the street. It made me sick to my stomach every time I rode past to think of about what he had done to himself because he had become deluded. I did not know then that doctors were already amputating penises in transsexual surgical procedures.
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After making this comment, an X user called Boomer wrote, “For myself, the obvious distinction is she is surrendering an ability that allows her to be independent and self sufficient. Someone modifying body parts based on gender identification, by itself doesn’t necessarily affect their ability to be full functioning and self sufficient.” I responded that I know blind people who are independent and self-sufficient and that if Boomer didn’t know about the horror stories of people who have undergone gender affirming care, then Boomer needed to study the matter before commenting. Sort of rude thing to say, I admit, but the moment irked me. Why? Because it assumes that we let a person harm herself as long as she doesn’t become dependent on others. Who makes that determination?
An X (Twitter) exchange
It’s one thing to put out your eyes, cut off your arm, etc. You’re responsible for that action. Whether I think it’s right or wrong, it might be odd to hold you accountable for self harm (if your actions were designed to become dependent on the system, it would be a fraudulent action). But I should intervene and stop you if I can. You may be suffering from a delusion, and the action you take in that moment you may regret. I certainly should regret not having helped you in your moment of need. Because it is not sane to want to put out your eyes or cut off your arm.
But it’s another thing when you harm another person. If you put out her eyes, or cut off her arm, then you are responsible for the action that maimed her. If there’s no justification for causing that harm, i.e., the eyes are not diseased, or the arm is healthy, then you have criminally maimed that person. This is especially odd for a doctor to do this; at least in principle, doctors are supposed to help people not hurt them.
During the holocaust, the Nazi doctors did all kinds of things to people in the name of advancing medical science. Moreover, they killed people for merciful reasons (see the T4 euthanasia program). From the standpoint of their ideological system, what they were doing was legal and justified. For those of us who stand outside that system, we can see it for what it was: maiming and murder. These were crimes against humanity. These were atrocities.
What Boomer is rationalizing here is crimes against humanity. Boomer is inside an ideological bubble, failing to see the reality of what is being done to deluded and vulnerable people by doctors (for profit). This is what ideology does to people: it confuses their judgment and finds them justifying atrocities. This is the function of gender ideology. It rationalizes physician harm. The harm perpetrated is a billion dollar industry.
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One of the arguments Boomer made during our back-and-forth is that a doctor may do a better job of poking out a woman’s eyes, which is the one thing the woman regrets. I have a friend who worked for many years at a psychiatric hospital. There was a delusional man there who tried several times to poke out his eyes. My friend was on the ward the day that the man successfully poked out his eyes. He was haunted by the fact that he couldn’t get to the man in time to stop him. Nobody at the hospital thought that the solution to the problem was to have a doctor remove the man’s eyes.
This is because everybody at the hospital understood that a man who wants to poke out his eyes is delusional or in crisis. In judging such things, rational observers use the rational actor standard. People are not thinking rationally when they want to poke out their eyes. They’re not thinking rationally when they want to cut off their arms and legs. It’s not normal for an animal to want to do something like that. It’s ethically wrong for a doctor to do something like that to a person. It should be criminal. And this is why “gender affirming care” should be criminalized.
These examples are not analogies; they are concrete instantiations of the thing itself. They are real, tangible representations of the same thing. Just as a person is not thinking rationally when he wants to remove his arm, he is not thinking rationally when he wants to cut off his penis. How it came to pass that amputation of arms and penises are recognized as different things might be an interesting historical social science investigation, but that they are not different things is obvious.
"Shontelle" is a white man whose racial fetishization of Black women has led to him "identifying" as a Black woman.
This is what "identifying as a woman" means: forcing the public to validate sexual fetishes, and altering the body to reflect one's preferred porn genre. pic.twitter.com/ARnDjdq5iR
We see a similar thing with the objection to transracialism among the advocates of transgenderism. The tweet I shared above is about transgender/racial man called Shontelle. As Genevieve Gluck correctly observes, Shontelle is a white man who engages in racial fetishization of black women. At least that’s one way of putting it, a gender ideologue would likely stress. I suspect that Shontelle will tell you that she identifies as a black woman. For Shontelle, trans black women are black women.
When I have raised the matter of transracialism in the past, I am told that the comparison is a bad analogy. But if gender and race are social constructions, if gender and race are essential identities, then if a man can change his gender, there is no reason a white man can’t change his race. Indeed, given the reality of genotypic sex, and in light of the absence of genotypic race, changing one’s gender is the more impossible thing. But they are analogous based not he logic of gender ideology, which raises several questions (which I asked in a 2020 essay The Strange Essentialisms of Identity Politics): Which identities may be taken up and which are forbidden? Who makes these rules? Who polices them? For what purpose? (See Adolph Reed, Jr. “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much,” Common Dreams, June 2015.)
* * *
Wait a second, I thought there were many blind people capable of being independent and self sufficient? Which is it?
I have politely discontinued my conversation with Boomer. It was going nowhere. My last response to this individual was after he threw in my face something I had earlier said, when I responded that I know blind people who are independent and self-sufficient. But it was Boomer who suggested that as a condition on whether she should be blinded. I was hoping Boomer would get back around to that. He wouldn’t stop doctors from blinding people as long as the result meets his criteria for being independent and self sufficient. I want to stop doctors from hurting people. Boomer doesn’t care if they do as long as they don’t burden others.
That some people who are born blind or blinded accidentally are independent or self-sufficient doesn’t mean all people are. Saying “I know blind people who are independent and self-sufficient” doesn’t mean I don’t also know blind people who aren’t. Just as there are some transsexuals who get on fine in life after their procedure, others who become life-long medical patients. The point is whether physicians should knowingly or purposely harm people by removing healthy appendages and organs. People who want body parts cut off from them are delusional and vulnerable. Doctors who carry out their wishes are taking advantage of them. This is wrong.
A physician taking the life of a suicidal patient is not an acceptable intervention. The goal is to save the patient. If the person is suffering from an unbearable medical condition, such a terminal cancer or ALS, then there is an ethical discussion to be had. But if it’s because they are delusional or in crisis, there’s no debate. There is nothing physically wrong with a person who says or thinks they are the other gender. They are delusional. In the case of gender, they are especially delusional because they desire something that is impossible. At least the woman who blinded herself achieved the end state.
The bottomline is that you don’t take advantage of a delusional person. It’d the same if they thought they were a lizard or a walrus. You don’t surgically alter a person’s body who believes the impossible to make them appear as a simulation of that thing. It’s contrary to the essence of medicine. It’s perverse.
* * *
ok, so she is left to her own accord to make this happen. Like she, in fact, did.
Left to her own accord generally, yes. I’d try to stop her if I were around when she attempted to blind herself. I can imagine a person in the presence of another person who is harming herself standing by and allowing it to happen, but if the person could have prevented it and didn’t, then I’d find them having failed in their duty as a human being to prevent self-harm.
On principle, we have a moral obligation to (a) refrain from acting intentionally to cause harm and (b) act to prevent harm that may occur in our presence if it is in our power to act. It is hard to imagine people intervening in an attempted suicide being scolded for not allowing the person to complete the act. It is expected that the reaction to allowing that to happen would be “What in the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you let her kill herself?” You know, “You didn’t try to stop her from pouring muriatic acid into her eyes?”
It gets tricky with self/other-harm with respect to GAC because there is legal and social approval for this type of harm, and intervening may result in a severe penalty and great social disapproval. I see somebody going to a hospital for an elective orchiectomy. What can I do about that without being hauled away by police officers? I can try to talk him out of it, but I have no legitimacy of action (as I would, say, intervening in an attempted suicide).
My argument is that we have to change the law to align social approval with correct moral action, a step towards which involves explaining why elective castration and vaginoplasty is not analogous to elective enucleation but an instantiation of the thing itself.
Francisco Javier has stated that he has no intention of changing his name or undergoing any alterations to his body. He’s fine with his masculine appearance. “I like my body, I am happy with it and I do not intend to change it,” he said. The only change he is making is altering his gender marker on legal documents. Among the woke in Spain, Javier identifies as transgender, not transsexual. Activists and journalists there stress that the law supports his right to change his gender identity without undergoing physical transformation (in saying that, they would—and do—use female pronouns).
Because Javier is a heterosexual, he identifies as a lesbian. “I [am sexually attracted to] women, but I realized some things and I felt like a woman,” Francisco explains. “For example, I’m a beautician, and I feel better talking to women than men.” So being a beautician and preferring conversation with women than men makes Francisco a woman? How does a man know what if feels like to be a woman if he isn’t one. A woman feels like a women because she is one.
(I have to note here that, as with Busty Lemieux, the Canadian shop teacher, I am suspicious of Javier’s motivation. I wonder if he is trying to make a point by saying he is a woman when he is so obviously a man to mock the notion that men can ever be women.)
A transgender soldier is threatening legal action against the Spanish army for not giving him access to women's changing rooms. Paco, who has changed his legal sex under the controversial Trans Law, identifies as a "lesbian woman". pic.twitter.com/c7kjaslEbQ
— Contra El Borrado de las Mujeres (@ContraBorrado) January 17, 2024
Ask yourself how a white women could feel like a black woman when she isn’t one. Rachel Dolezal says she feels that way. How would she know? How can anybody feel like they are something they are not? Moreover, what is the evidence that a subjective opinion of oneself can change a person’s gender or race or species (yesterday I watched a TikTok video of a young woman who identifies as an android)? We are our bodies, and an individual’s subjectivity has no power to alter the physical universe or natural history. Do these people think they’re gods? (Well, there is narcissism, isn’t there?)
People really do need to consider their position on this matter. I’m reading all the time stories, even from gender critical quarters, about how problematic it is that a man could declare that he is a woman but not make any alterations to his body, as if appearing more like the cultural stereotype of a woman, emulating her physiology, simulating her anatomy, would make him any more of a woman than making the declaration and not changing a thing (except a letter on his passport). If a man can say he is a woman and be recognized as such, then why does it matter that he alters his body?
Francisco Javier says he’s a woman
Do we really want to encourage boys and men who say or think they’re girls or women to become life-long medical patients (the medical-industrial complex does, of course, but the industry is today bereft of basic human decency and moral concern). The failure to recognize the assumption that a male has to go through a lengthy medical process in order to be recognized as a female is not benign. The demand on boys that, if they want to play on the girls team, that they need to have transitioned before puberty, is a powerful one. Why would athletic associations pressure boys to stop their puberty, take wrong sex hormones, and risk surgically altering their bodies to play on the girl’s team?
Some days, reflecting on the horror of all of this, I play with the position that, if we could save people from injuring themselves and harming their health by telling them it doesn’t matter for suspending our disbelief about the gender swapping, then by all means let’s do it. But, in the end, I could’t agree to suspend my disbelief even if it would save people from harming themselves—and I am not alone in this. I cannot dwell in the delusions of others. So here’s a better idea: let’s try to save people by socializing a consensus wherein a man cannot be woman even if he changes his body. This idea is a doubly good idea because it also happens to be the truth.
freedom and reason 