“In Defense of Destroying Property.” This is from the Nation, June 2020. It’s an example of how dumb seemingly smart people can be—made dumb by ideology. Or maybe it’s a instance of toxic mimicry.
Minneapolis, June 2020
Here it’s argued—by R.H. Lossin, who holds a PhD in communications from Columbia University and teachers at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research—that too many communities are over-policed. On the contrary. Too many communities are under-policed.
That’s why 57 percent of the victims of homicide last year were black people (the numbers are finally out over at the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer), members of a demographic comprising only around 13 percent of the US population, and their murderers were other black people (mostly male)—all of them living in impoverished and under-policed urban neighborhoods governed by progressive Democrats.
These are the neighborhoods where most mass shootings happen, which the media doesn’t tell you about because, you know, social justice.
It’s the left idealist bullshit spewed by elite academics like R.H. Lossin translated into urban policy by Democratic politicians subservient to corporate elites that’s responsible for mass death in black communities, and this moron with advanced degrees (which elite institutions hand out like candy) wants fewer police there so more poor black people can die.
It’s not smashing plate glass windows. It’s smashing the life dreams of people who actually create things. It’s scores of people killed by those enabled by the false rhetoric of white privilege promulgated by fake antiracists—demoralized by the conditions these fake antiracists created.
Now they’re wound up over “decolonization.” What does that look like? It looks like headless babies and burned bodies. What did they say? “Any form of Palestinian resistance is in no way equivalent to the daily violence of ‘Israeli’ settlers, the IOF, and the entire ‘Israeli’ state apparatus.” Who are they? Adhy Kim (Harvard), RH Lossin (Harvard), Eman Abdelhadi (UChicago), Sophie Lewis (Penn), Marty Cain (Cornell), Maz Do (Cornell), Addie Tsai (William & Mary), Aaron Aceves (UT), Joshua Nguyen (Tufts).
Because social justice.
NEW: A group of prominent academics have signed a letter justifying violent struggle against Israel, including: Adhy Kim (Harvard), RH Lossin (Harvard), Eman Abdelhadi (UChicago), Sophie Lewis (Penn), Marty Cain (Cornell), Maz Do (Cornell), Addie Tsai (William & Mary), Aaron… pic.twitter.com/OFdzxrdbNu
“EngSoc.” Ring a bell? That’s Newspeak for “English Socialism,” a fictional political ideology and government entity featured in British writer George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the Orwell’s dystopian world the ruling party, “The Party,” has instituted “English Socialism,” abbreviated as “EngSoc.” But is it a fictional political ideology and government? Or is it here and in the real?
In the book, The Party’s ideology is characterized by suppression of individualism, surveillance, and thought control. The key features of EngSoc: The Party exerts control over every aspect of its citizens’ lives, aiming to eliminate any dissent or opposition to its rule; The Party employs the “Thought Police” to monitor and punish any action or thought that goes against its ideology. This includes “thoughtcrime,” which is desiring or thinking something that goes against Party doctrine; The Party uses a controlled language called “Newspeak” to limit freedom of thought by eliminating words that could be used to express unorthodox thoughts, thus effectively reducing the range of thought and limiting the ability to rebel; the symbol and figurehead of The Party is “Big Brother,” who is always watching and is the embodiment of The Party’s authority; the Party uses pervasive surveillance, including telescreens that both broadcast Party propaganda and monitor citizens in their homes; citizens are expected to simultaneously accept two contradictory beliefs, a concept known as “doublethink,” which functions to ensure loyalty to The Party, as it requires people to believe whatever The Party tells them, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
I might have reported this a little while ago on social media, but it is looking pretty certain now that, under a Labor government in the UK, purposely calling someone by the “wrong” gender pronoun could lead to jail time of up to two years. The premise behind the law is that it is anti-discrimination action—that is, it is discrimination to correctly gender a person. This would bring “transphobic abuse” into line with assault and harassment motivated by hatred on the grounds of race or religion, which are currently punishable by up to two years in prison. (See Labour to jail people who use wrong gender pronouns on purpose under hate crime law.) Just like the surveillance cameras installed through the United Kingdom, everything about this proposal is in line with Orwell’s warning about the island’s future totalitarian state.
On the terrain of truth, since gender is an objective fact about a person, it cannot be an act of misgendering a man to refer to him by the pronouns that align with his gender, but rather is an act of gendering. Misgendering occurs when, for example, a person refers a man as a woman. Sometimes men look like women, but they are still men. Misgendering is understandable in cases of ambiguity. But people almost always get it right. (And even if they get it wrong, even intentionally, how can the state punish an individual for being mistaken or obnoxious?) This is because our species is evolved to see gender. It’s a primal reflex. No one should be punished for intentionally yielding to their natural history (see Neutralizing the Gender-Detection Brain Module).
AI generated image “Misgendering”
Redefining correctly gendering a person as “misgendering” is an Orwellian move. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell identified a number of slogans that flipped the truth, e.g., “War is peace” and “Freedom is slavery.” In Orwell’s novel, truth flipping kept the people subjugated. The queer slogan “Transwomen are women” is an example of just such an Orwellian move. What Labor wants to do is force citizens of a free country to affirm the delusions and/or politics of those under the spell/advocating a queer worldview. This is just like the British government jailing people who refuse to say “Two and two is five.” The word that captures the essence of this is totalitarian.
Troubling in itself, but adding insult to injury, reflecting on this as a native America, is the fact that the United Kingdom is my mother country. For Labor to be behind such an authoritarian measure tells us how far the official political left has fallen away from the principles of Enlightenment. Some will object that this is only a possibility. Even if this doesn’t happen, that it was being floated it itself a terrible and frightening thing.
I don’t know why I was ignorant of Wesley Yang and his work, but I was and now I’m not. Recently, I started reading his X (Twitter) threads and decided to look him up. He’s an essayist and political commentator currently serving as a columnist for Tablet Magazine and a contributing editor at Esquire. He hosts a Substack blog and podcast named Year Zero.
Wesley Yang, author of the 2018 The Souls of Yellow Folk.
According to biographical information, Yang rose to prominence in 2008 when he authored an article for n+1 focusing on Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter who murdered 32 people and injured 17 others. (I am sure I read Yang then but never committed the name to memory.) What brings me to make a blog note about Yang is his concept of “successor ideology,” which he introduced in 2019. Yang coined the term to delineate an emerging ideology associated with (what I regard as a faux) left-wing movement in the United States rooted in identity politics. Yang stands in opposition to this ideology, asserting that it threatens to replace traditional liberal values. (Go here for a discussion of the concept.)
Yang’s term captures what I have been blogging about for several years now: an ideological framework prevalent in corporatist and progressive politics currently dominating the United States. This ideology revolves around principles of anti-racism, identity politics, intersectionality, and social justice—what is often referred to as “woke.” As I have been doing in those blog essays, Yang also warns that this ideology is supplanting traditional liberal values such as color blindness, freedom of speech, free inquiry, and pluralism. We see the ideology at work in cancel culture and in diversity, equity, and inclusion programming (see The Bureaucratic Tyranny of DEI; The Origins and Purpose of Racial Diversity Training Programs. It’s Not What you Think).
Ed West, writing for the UnHerd, has quoted Yang aptly characterizing successor ideology as an “authoritarian Utopianism that masquerades as liberal humanism while undermining it from within.” This attitude is why successor ideology is functional for corporate state governance, i.e., the New Fascism: it incorporates into the structure of power those who might otherwise resist neoliberalism arrangements. By appealing to the desire of progressives to signal virtue, while exploiting the deep alienation they experience in the context of late capitalism, an estrangement unpinning a profound false consciousness, corporate state elites transform potential enemies into defenders.
In a June 2020 essay in the Intelligencer, in the context of the Black Lives Matter riots, Andrew Sullivan characterizes successor ideology as a new orthodoxy rooted in what fellow journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” Sullivan writes, “Lowery told Times media columnist Ben Smith that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be).” This position conflates objectivity with neutrality and thus becomes a rationalization for propaganda. “And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity?” Sullivan rhetorically wonders. “That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, ‘the justice system—in fact, the entire American experiment—was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.’”
As I have been showing for many years now, the claim that America is systemically racist, that it’s a white supremacist project with a justice system designed to perpetuate racial inequality, is historically inaccurate. It is a revision of history made to validate tenets of critical race theory (see Truth in the Face of the 1619 Project), a fallacious teaching in legal theory in which individuals are rendered as personifications of abstract racial categories (fallacy of misplaced concreteness), and the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and of chattel slavery, the dismantling of de jure segregation, and the criminalization of institutional discrimination is theorized to function to push white supremacy so deeply into the warp and woof of western society that a species of postmodernist critical theory became necessary to detect it.
Have you heard about the Stanford teacher who made Jews stand in the corner of a classroom? This really happened and his name is Ameer Hasan Loggins. Stanford suspended him. I’m as close to a free speech absolutist as one can be, a stalwart defender of academic freedom, but telling a people based on their ethnicity to stand in a corner is unacceptable. It is not protected speech. It’s discrimination—invidious discrimination. No teacher can be allowed to single out students on account of ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexuality—whatever—and humiliate them. Let every university and college know what this man did and avoid him like the plague.
Ameer Hasan Loggins
Loggins is listed as teaching civic and liberal education at Standard. This is what he said to his students to justify his actions: “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” So that makes it okay to do it to Jews in America? No. Of course not. He’s a moral simpleton. But is this claim even true? There are approximately 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, comprising about 20 percent of the total Israeli population, and while, especially according to the rhetoric of antiracism, they face institutionalized discrimination and exclusion, they have the vote and participate in political life. How, then, is this man teaching civics and the principles of liberal education at Stanford? Was this a diversity hire?
Loggins earned a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies, a masters in African American Studies and a doctorate in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley. Here’s his page at Medium to help you get a sense of whether these degrees are serious or whether Loggins was just moved through the system (one can imagine he is difficult to deal with and maybe a little scary). The unseriousness of the man becomes plainly obvious within seconds of readying his essays, each one more absurd than the next. (Are the editors at the Guardian embarrassed that he writes for them? Are the editors over there ever embarrassed about anything?)
See in particular this piece ( “Anti-Black Police Terrorism”), where Loggins claims that he knows what he saw: George Floyd was lynched. “There was no struggle,” he writes. “No sense of danger. Chauvin appeared to be at peace with his decision to lynch George Floyd.” Did Loggins actually watch the video? Or does he not have eyes to see? There was a struggle. Floyd was a known danger (during a home invasion he shoved a gun in a pregnant woman’s stomach). There was no lynching. I’m a minor scholar of lynching and I know that is a ridiculous assertion (see Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide, published in the Journal of Black Studies). Indeed, claiming Floyd was lynched does a disservice to the memory of actual victims of lynching.
Loggins asked his students, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “Six million,” he said, “Colonizers killed more than six million. Israel is a colonizer.” After receiving Allah’s message from the archangel Gabriel in a cave, from his base in Medina, Muhammad and his army launched an invasion of Mecca. After massacring and subjugating the population there, he destroyed the temples and artifacts of other religions and forced the people to worship his god, Allah, a plagiarized version of the Jewish god Yahweh. After Muhammad’s death in the seventh century, the Islamic empire expanded through military conquests, leading to the establishment of Islamic rule over various regions in Africa, Asia, and Europe. This came with the spread of Islamic ideology and Sharia, a paradigm of clerical fascism. The Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates controlled vast territories, including parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and Central Asia. The Ottoman Empire, which lasted from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, was a powerful Muslim state that expanded its influence over much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. The Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent formed Muslim rule over a predominantly Hindu population.
Of the hundreds of millions of those whose lands were colonized by Muslims, how many millions did they kill? More than six million? A million Armenian Christians were murdered by the Ottoman Empire, so it is reasonable to suppose that the number of those killed over the fourteen hundred year history of Islam exceeds six million. Indeed, that estimate seems awfully conservative considering the brutality of Islamic colonization and its extent across the planet. And with the millions killed, many millions more were enslaved. In fact, Muslims established the modern slave trade the Europeans inherited and abolished. It was a common practice of Muslim invaders to castrate their slaves. Eunuchs have been found in different Muslim-majority regions and empires over the course of this history. George W. Bush and the neocons like to tell us that Islam means “peace.” The progressive allies of the Islamists out in the streets right now agree—even while the celebrate the massacre of Israeli civilians. Joe Biden opened our southern borders to them. In fact, the word is Arabic for “submission” or “surrender.”
For the record, Jews have lived continuously in what is now recognized under international law as nation-state of Israel for well more than three thousand years (possible as many years as four thousand)—several hundred years to a thousand years before the Arabic language appeared in its most primitive form. A people cannot colonize their homeland.
You know what they say about truth being the first casualty of war. Folks were deceived into supporting the Iraq war by fake stories of babies being thrown out of incubators. There are other examples. The warmongers have ways of mobilizing us for war.
So I waited until I felt confident about this before commenting on it. But it looks like Hamas really did behead and burn babies and rape children. I will spare you the pictures. I can’t look at them anymore.
This isn’t about a land dispute. This is about a depraved and fascistic religious ideology that drives men to rape, torture, and murder anybody who doesn’t think like they do. This is consistent with the history of Islam. This way of thinking, this level of hatred cannot be negotiated with. The West—the world—needs to crush this movement. Today’s Global Day of Jihad should be answered with force.
Flames and smoke billow during Israeli attacks against Gaza on October 9, 2023
Yet progressives and social democrats in North America and Europe have welcomed this way of thinking and this hatred into their nations. They have welcomed the barbarians inside the gates. This complicates things. But not in an unsolvable way. It means that we have to throw out of power the establishment parties as a step in the project to save the West from the forces of irrationalism—external and internal. We have to fix our own houses to thwart the House of Islam. And we need to do it quickly. Islamists will make slaves or corpses of us all if we don’t.
“But the suffering in Gaza,” they say. “What about the babies there?” Not all Germans supported Hitler. But the allies bombed the fuck out of them anyway—babies and all. Were there war cries on the Allied side? Yes. But Israel is telling Gazans where to go so they are not bombed. Hamas is telling them to stay in place. Human shields.
The point is that, if you want to have a country, then being accountable for what your government does comes with the territory. You don’t get to invade a nation and behead its babies and burn alive its people and rape their children then cry when the bombs rain down on your cities. This misery you bring on yourselves.
Welcome to the system of nations. And the ethic of righteous justice.
* * *
Meanwhile, pro-Islamist forces in the West are making their voices heard. Given that the massacre of Israel civilians would cause such an expression of pro-Palestinian sentiment indicates the depth of anti-Semitism across the trans-Atlantic space. Those expressing the sentiment are either Muslim immigrants or those typically self-identifying as on the political left whose politics are informed by identitarianism and multiculturalism. Both groups are pawns of the transnational elites who state-level functionaries control the administrative apparatus of their respective governments. Their subservience to the goals of globalization is used to manufacture popular support for the strategy of mass immigration for the purposes of transforming the demographic profile of western civilization and integrating western populations into the new world corporatist order.
The Biden regime is doing its part to transform the United States in this regard. We have learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is currently overseeing 5.7 million migrants. These are recent arrivals that join the well more than ten million illegal aliens already in the country. The number of new arrivals is certainly higher. I’ve seen the videos by independent journalists of the endless stream of military age men crossing the southern border unprocessed. The New York Post is reporting today that the Biden regime indicates that it will provide free medical services, food, and housing to these aliens.
The question is not whether there are terrorists among the new arrivals but how many of terrorists have crossed over into the United States. In fiscal year 2023, Customs and Border patrol have reported more than a hundred and fifty illegals who are on terror watchlist. More than 8,000 “special interest” migrants encountered last month. There are certainly many times these numbers.
Why is this happening? I have written about this many times. These are obvious: (1) cheap super-exploitable labor; (2) depressing wages for native workers; (3) diminishing the European proportion of the US population, which will benefit the Democratic Party electorally in the long term—and obvious the elaboration and entrenchment of the new world order. There is also a theory that the establishment is raising the potential for cultural and social disorganization during the 2024 election which will benefit the Democratic Party in the short term, possibly by raising the terrorist threat and triggering marshal law. I don’t find the theory implausible. I find it hard to believe that intelligence services didn’t see the Hamas attack coming.
Helen Lewis asks rhetorically in the pages of The Atlantic, “The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?”
The woke progressive binary of a world divided by oppressor and oppressed has dispossessed those who claim to be on the left of their capacity for elementary moral reasoning. “In corners of academia and social-justice activism where the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed are never in doubt, many people failed that test.” Indeed.
From the Iranian Journal of Public Health, in their 2022 note “Sex Reassignment Surgery in Iran, Re-Birth or Human Rights Violations against Transgender People?” Bihan Pirnia and Kambiz Pirnia reference a 2005 Guardian article (A fatwa for freedom) in which the following appears: “Today, the Islamic Republic of Iran occupies the unlikely role of global leader for sex change.” The author of the Guardian article, Robert Tait, begins with “Maryam Molkara was a woman trapped in a man’s body,” a case that could only be approximately true in an extreme sexual anomaly case, which this case is not.
Pirnia and Pirnia lament that the Guardian article “did not distinguish between SRS and conversion therapy.” They clarify: “What is common in Iran is SRS [sex reassignment surgery], not conversion therapy or reparative therapies. SRS has a guideline and is designed and approved by the World Professional Association for Transgender People (WPATH). It is a professional organization that has published the health care standards for transsexual, transgender and gender nonconforming people in the latest version (version 7). Psychologically, SRS is in line with the adaptation of physical body to sexual identity and reduces the gap caused by the incompatibility of these two dimensions, allows gender expression and contributes to the mental health of these people.”
Despite the fact that Iran is is the only Muslim-majority country that provides SRS (“the Imam Committee provides interest-free loans to some people eligible for gender reassignment surgery, which is in line with the recommendations of the WHO”), the authors lament that the treatment process in Iran does not comply with international medical and psychiatric standards. “Our suggestion is to change the culture of the society towards Trans genders, to improve the quality of surgeries, to create a culture of dealing with these people, and finally to pass laws that will make life easier for them than before.” At the same time, the authors criticize the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), and the construct of gender dysphoria in which, in the authors’ words, “distress is caused by gender mismatch, which is an inappropriate and harmful diagnostic method.” They stress that “the International Classification of Diseases Code (ICD)–11, the Health Organization has suggested that relevant diagnoses be transferred to a new sexual health-related chapter.”
Ayatollah Khomeini
The reader may be surprised that the Islam state in Iran provides SRS for Irans (as well as people from other countries). However, Pirnia and Pirnia explain why this is the case: “Classical Islamic discourse divides gender as one of two categories, male or female, but has accepted the possibility that in the case of hermaphrodites [intersex conditions] it is difficult and sometimes impossible to determine the body.” So far, except for the suggestion that it is ever impossible to determine one’s sex, the discourse aligns with science. But Islam is a religion and sooner or later it will depart from reason. “Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, once in 1964 in his book Tahrir al-Wasila and once after the Islamic Revolution in 1982, issued a fatwa on the act of reassignment and confirmation gender only for people whose faces are inconsistent with their gender and considered it legitimate and this issue became one of the emerging issues of Shia Islamic jurisprudence.” There’s the inevitable departure from the planet into the real of the supernatural.
What does it mean to say “faces inconsistent with gender”? It means that a boy who is attracted to other boys or who appears to possess attitudes and habits associated with girls is really a girl trapped in a boy’s body. His gender, the role assigned to people by the Islamic faith, does not match his natural body. In Islam, one’s role in society is determined not by social, material, and physical things, but by the soul. “According to the jurists,” the authors report, “since it is not possible to change the soul, but at the same time medical advances have made it possible to change the body, the act of gender reassignment is permissible.”
So, by the lights of woke progressivism, Shia Islam is a progressive religious faith. Women trapped in male bodies are with the sharp edge of the surgeon’s scalpel able to release their authentic selves. Genital mutilation sets them free to suffer the imposition of Islamic gender stereotypes. This is the core doctrine of queer theory. To make it work, science must be abandoned, or at least in this case excluded, and a religious or religious-like ideology must stand in its place. Is it any wonder that the woke faux-left is so enamored with Islamism?
Meanwhile, the Guardian is reporting today that FGM ban in the Gambia under threat as calls grow to repeal law. “Women’s rights campaigners denounce ‘hugely regressive’ proposals from political and religious leaders to decriminalize [the] practice.” The author, Sarah Johnson, reports “Members of the country’s national assembly have backed a proposal for the 2015 law to be scrapped while the Supreme Islamic Council has issued a fatwa condemning anyone who denounces the practice and calling for the government to reconsider the legislation.”
More than a quarter of a million illegal immigrants cross our southern border monthly. Those are just the illegals Border Control has apprehended and processed. Millions have poured across the border during the course of the Biden regime. The number of illegals is likely around 10-12 million. They Joni tens of millions of illegal immigrants who are already in America. Hundreds of those crossing today are known terrorists from the third world. Hundreds more cross every year undetected. Thousands of terrorists from the third world are now in the United States. What are they planning?
It’s not just the United States that’s experiencing waves of barbarian hordes and the consequences of allowing this to happen. Over the last decade, millions have invaded Europe. Crime and violence is now rampant in formerly safe countries like France and Sweden. Across the West, Islamists are out in the streets celebrating the slaughter and kidnapping of Jews. If you’ve been watching the situation in Israel, the invasion of that nation by Hamas, you have plain before you the consequence of losing track of terrorists and inattention to terrorist activities—and of open borders.
Emergency personnel work to extinguish the fire after rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip, Ashkelon, Israel October 7, 2023.
Terrorists attack when defenses are down. The barbarians are especially enabled when they are allowed inside the gates. The chief responsibility of the government of a republic is to preserve the law and order and secure the borders of the nation its officials are sworn to defend. Looking at the situation, it’s hard to judge Biden as a failure; it appears that this is by design. Same for the European situation. Anybody with a brain knows what will happen when you flood the civilized world with culture bearers who tenaciously cling to a culture that is incapable with the culture of individual liberty, democratic politics, and human rights. Mass immigration and multiculturalism are destroying the West. This is no accident.
The Biden regime has engineered the perfect storm. How could it be any other way? How could Biden have stumbled his way into this situation? This isn’t the work of senility but something with a rational goal in mind. This isn’t accidental but the results of an elite plan that is entirely contrary to the interests of the common man.
The United States is sending hundreds of billions to Ukraine to prosecute a proxy war against Russia. Ukraine was established in its current state as a puppet by the CIA and neofascist operatives in 2014 for this purpose: to draw Russia into a conflict via terrorist operations against ethnic Russians in the east of the country. The United States just quit Afghanistan, a situation that began as a proxy war against Russia. Then, under the Carter regime, the CIA worked with Islamic terrorists to destabilize the democratic government in Kabul in order to draw the Soviet Union into conflict by honoring a mutual defense pact.
Weapons in Afghanistan and Ukraine are now finding their way into the hands of terrorists in the Middle East and North Africa. Billions in weapons of war were abandoned in Afghanistan. Only a portion of the weapons the US is supplying to Ukraine make it to the front line. Biden just gave Iran six billion dollars in exchange for hostages. Iran is a major supporter of terrorism in the region. Iran and China are allies. China is presently engaged in military preparation to invade Taiwan. Biden is feeding the war machine that is arrayed against the nation he took an oath to protect.
“If you leave those billions of dollars of weapons behind I promise they're going to be used against your grandchild and mine some day" – Joe Biden
Should we disbelieve the billions Biden gave the Iranians is being used to arm Hamas? Remember when Bush perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair, a scheme in which regime operatives gave weapons to Iran—in exchange for hostages? Those weapons found their way into hands of Islamic terrorists. Today, the United States gives weapons and cash to Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Putin, while abandoning weapons in Afghanistan. Ukraine and Afghanistan sell weapons to arms dealers in Iran, flush with US cash, then Iran gives the weapons to Hamas. Hamas attacks Israel, Israel defends itself with arms bought with billions from the United States, and the arms industry fucking loves it all the way to the bank.
These are instantiations of deep state action in shaping history. For whom is history so being shaped? For the transnational elite whose hubris causes them to believe they can control the Frankenstein’s monster they have assembled and are jolting to life. They can’t. But more importantly, they shouldn’t. They should not be the one’s in charge of our fate. We have to take it back.
The distinction between “gender” and “sex,” with the latter strictly reduced to biology, is an invention of sexologists in the 1950s-60s. Queer theorists picked it up and pressed it into academic jargon. Activists picked it up from there. Doctors have used it to justify an industry. But the fact is that both words entered the English language centuries ago and were used for centuries to refer to the same thing. (See Sex and Gender are Interchangeable Terms.)
Gender is binary.
The earliest know use of the word gender refers to female and male humans. Botanists referred to the gender of plants. Darwin used gender and sex interchangeably. Yes, word was also used to describe feminine and masculine in language (grammatical subclass), and “sex” became the primary term to convey gender in science, including social science, but that doesn’t change the history of the primary meanings and uses of the words.
Swapping “sex” for “gender” in “sex role,” the standard term used by anthropology and sociology to convey the sociocultural features of sex, and then reducing sex to biology, saying gender is something else, that it is a “social construction,” is an ideological move. Manufacturing a new meaning for “gender” allows for the rhetoric of incongruity. The invention “gender identity” soon follows. The social construction is then reified, hypostatized, and essentialized and bodies modified to physically manifest gender identity in simulation. (See Simulated Sexual Identities: Trans as Bad Copy.)
This is how authoritarians work. They grasp that thinking uses words, and that, by changing the meanings of words for ideological and political purposes, they can change the way people think and more readily manipulate them, using them for various projects. (See Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words.)
There are a lot of ideologies that cause significant psychological distress. Indeed, the history of religious experience is at once been ecstasy and torment—and alienation.
The angst Christians feel at having doubted the Holy Spirit is very real and terrifying. I saw it all…
There are a lot of ideologies that cause significant psychological distress. Indeed, the history of religious experience has at once been ecstasy and torment—and alienation. The angst Christians feel at having doubted the Holy Spirit is very real and terrifying. I saw it all around me growing up in the Bible Belt. I saw people getting baptized more than once because they’d had doubts. I saw terror in the face of a young Scientologist whose beliefs I blew up in class (criminology), exposing them as fraudulent, unaware that an L Ron Hubbard devotee was among my students (a highly unlikely occurrence in Northeast Wisconsin). Muslims will behead a man for challenging Islamic doctrine. Fact. That they don’t hesitate to do such a wicked thing tells us how damaged they are.
Gender Alienation (AI generated)
I have no doubt about the pain of those who don’t fit in and the terrible consequences of having been handed an explanation for their existential terror. Religion and religious-like belief causes people to sacrifice humans on an altar of lies. Queer theory is no different in kind. But it is different in excess. The consequences of queer theory are far worse than most religious belief; a horror show surpassed only by the antics of ancient Aztecs. Queer theory has broken more bodies than most religions we (righty and) routinely condemn.
It is not an “ideology”. Having gender incongruity causes significant psychological distress. Gender dysphoria is a very real and impactful aspect of many trans people’s lives. Why do you believe it so harmful that we want to live free from that distress?
Alongside queer theory stands Islam, its clerics and doctors subjecting gay boys to wrong-sex hormones and debilitating and disfiguring surgeries because Allah loathes homosexuality with such exceptional passion. Make the gay boy an artificial woman—a simulacrum—good enough for the Shi’ite. No wonder Foucault loved Islam as much as he loved boys. Maybe a little less (although he has his defenders).
Trans folx have been around forever. In the Talmud, rabbis wrote laws for men who had periods. They had to leave the community for ritual cleansing, but once done, they resumed living as men. It was done thousands of years ago, so nothing new under the sun.
“Trans folx have been around forever,” an X (Twitter) user said to me. “In the Talmud, rabbis wrote laws for men who had periods. They had to leave the community for ritual cleansing, but once done, they resumed living as men. It was done thousands of years ago, so nothing new under the sun.” Folx. That’s a sign. Of course, men don’t have periods because men can’t have periods. The Talmud must be wrong. Who’d have expected that?
Awesome. You’re rooting your truth in ancient religion.
Imagine a world wherein Muslim students don’t want to take a class from an atheist who is critical of Islam. Islam is an identity and criticisms of it are offensive to those who identify as such. The teacher is an Islamophobe. He makes Muslims feel unsafe. The university needs to train faculty to affirm Islamic beliefs. Students should not be required to take a class from an Islamophobe. The teacher should only teach non-required classes.
“St. Sebastian,” 15th-century painted terra cotta sculpture by Matteo Civitali at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Now imagine that a fundamentalist Christian student learns his teacher is a Darwinist. The teacher believes men and women are evolved creatures. He doesn’t subscribe to creationist ideology—to intelligent design. He’s a Christophobe. He makes the student feel unsafe. How can the university allow a man who believe in natural historical explanations teach required classes? Students should not be required to take a class from a Christophobe. The teacher should only teach non-required classes.
The second example is difficult to imagine given the anti-Christian bias in today’s academy. Indeed, it sounds like a ridiculous example. But the first example is not that hard to imagine. In fact, it has already happened.
There are other examples like the first one that could be made that are even easier to imagine. You’ve already thought of one of them.
freedom and reason 