freedom and reason

“I had come across an article about families who had been trying to lodge complaints against the church for sexual abuse, and they were being silenced. Basically everything I had been raised to believe was a lie.” —Sinéad O’Connor

News and talk personality Barbara Walters is dead. The celebration of her life is deafening. But not every moment of her long career will be dwelled upon. Remember in 2013 when she accused child actor Corey Feldman of “damaging an entire industry” with pedophilia accusations? In case you don’t remember, here’s a clip:

The Sinéad O’Connor quote at the top of this blog is the artist explaining her thought process for the SNL performance that resulted in her being effectively banished from pop music. At the conclusion of her performance of Bob Marley’s “War,” she shredded a picture of Pope John Paul II (a photo she took herself and the only photo to hang on the wall of her home for years).

Feldman was shamed for coming forward. O’Connor was punished for telling the truth. Powerful cults don’t like it when people expose their paraphilias—and paraphilias appear to be common to powerful cults (and some obscure ones).

We have been hearing a lot lately about grooming and pedophilia. But the culture industry’s sexualization of children and rationalization of child molestation is not a new thing. (Nor is reputational murder, of course.) The erotic obsession with the prepubescent form of the human species—whether the boy or the girl—appears to be deep-seated in many of those who produce and participate in popular culture.

I have no reason to believe that this interest issues from the same evolved capacity that has us finding immature versions of our own (and many other animal species) cute and worthy of attention and care. There’s nothing untoward about that. Pedophilia is something dark and sinister. The desire for androgyny, for the child form stuck in a prepubescent state, is not a natural one. It’s pathological. Adults cannot serve as the guardian of childhood innocence at the same time sexualize them.

Remember the Brookes Shield’s coffee table book back in the 1970s? Remember Richard Prince’s photograph of her ten-year-old body that was widely circulated years ago, a photograph originally taken in 1975 by fashion photographer Garry Gross in 1975 for a Playboy publication titled Sugar and Spice?

In the Guardian’s words, Shield’s was photographed “oiled and glistening, naked and made-up, posing in a marble bathtub with a seductive danger that belies her years.” She has, the Guardian quotes Prince, “a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it’s got a different birthday.”

Remember the advertising campaign for Calvin Klein Jeans in the late 1970s that featured a then 15-year-old Shields? Remember her lines? “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing!”

In 1981, Shields’ mother sued Gross on the grounds that his continuing sale of the photographs was damaging to her daughter’s reputation. Gross’ lawyers argued that his photographs could not damage Shields’ reputation because she had made a profitable career “as a young vamp and a harlot, a seasoned sexual veteran, a provocative child-woman, an erotic and sensual sex symbol, the Lolita of her generation.”

The judge in that case, state Supreme Court Justice Edward Greenfield, dismissed the attempt to prevent commercial distribution of those photos. “They have no erotic appeal except to possibly perverse minds,” he opined while scolding Teri Shields for exploiting her daughter sexuality. Shields was seeking to present her daughter as “sexually provocative and exciting while attempting to preserve her innocence,” Greenfield said. “She cannot have it both ways.”

What about the child?

All these years later, the culture industry is at it again (they never stopped). In photos for fashion company Balenciaga’s gift collection campaign, young children are photographed posing with teddy bears in BDSM gear. Beside them, a stack of papers: the Supreme Court’s 2008 United States v. Williams opinion upholding a federal law prohibiting child pornography in advertising. Hardly subtle. Balenciaga’s competitor Benetton soon came under fire, as well, for “sexualizing” children in their campaign portraying prepubescent boys and girls in sexualized fashion.

Obviously I am not sharing any of these pictures. They’re easily found on the Internet. As a free speech advocate, I am not necessarily suggesting censorship of crime scene photography (we are still able to see photographs of genocide and lynching). The focus should be on those who put children in these situations—wherever the situations—and on the perverse culture that enables the paraphilias associated with the desire to consume these images.

This question occurred to me in the late-1980s sitting in an abnormal psychology class: Why does paraphilia in all its manifestations appear so common among those in positions of authority? Are sexual disorders (or perversions) associated with other predictors of success in hierarchies? Or is their concentration among the elite the result of a great deal of effort on the part of child predators to insinuate themselves into positions of trust where they find birds of a feather?

Maybe this explains why, all these months after British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on sex trafficking charges, not a single name from her elite client list has been publicly named. Or why her lover Jeffrey Epstein (they say) hung himself in prison.

Of course, the problem with paraphilia is not just about Hollywood and child actors, Catholic Priests and altar boys, or sex islands with children waiting for businessmen and politicians to arrive in lear jets. Denied or dissimulated there, it’s being mainstreamed elsewhere, the resistance smeared as bigotry. Soon it will be an identity (for some it already is). How far away are we from the time where we will be punished for refusing to refer to pedophiles as “minor attracted persons” or “MAPs”?

Most folks with don’t care about sexual fetishes. Whatever gets a person off—as long as it doesn’t hurt people. If men and women want to go to strip clubs and throw money at exaggerated personifications of gender stereotypes, whatever. It’s a free society. I’m not offended. Just leave children out of it.

I will have more to say about this topic in future blogs. I’m readying a piece on queer theory and its obsessions with child sexuality. I also have in development an essay on the sociology of sex and gender aimed at countering with science the postmodernist disruption of ordinary understanding about human nature.

Happy New Year, by the way. Thanks for reading Freedom and Reason.

Institutional or systemic racism may in fact be happening, but not against black and brown people. Ironically, if it is happening, the main victims are whites (excepting many Hispanics) and those of east Asian descent. 

Stokely Carmichael calls for “Black Power!”

Definitions are important, so I will weave them into my comments here. 

First, what is racism? In (pseudoscientific) terms, racism, a term that appears in the early twentieth century (around the same time the term “racialism” appears), refers to theories (ideology) that assume as valid the divisioning of humans into racial types that predict grouped differences in aptitude (and appetites), behavior/conduct, character (and conscience), and intelligence, and then organizes these hierarchically.

While it is true that intuitive racial groupings map over populations genetics globally, there is no evidence that these groupings either constitute genotypes or are predictive of behavior, intelligence, or personality. Differences among racially defined groups are cultural and subcultural, not biological. Culture is not race. (Science only records two genotypes in our species, i.e., sex or gender, and this is true in all mammals and most other animals—and plants as well.) So, although it is possible to talk about phenotypic differences that mark racial groups (anthropologists have offered the term “clines” to replace race), they cannot be ranked. 

Relatedly, racism is the practice of stereotyping based on constellations of socially selected phenotypic characteristics (skin color, hair texture, eye shape) and (this is crucial) subsequent action based on those stereotypes.

For example, judging all whites to be guilty of thoughts and actions perpetrated by any individual identified as white (alive or dead) is racist. White privilege is an instantiation of stereotyping. If institutional actions are taken that deny any individual identified as white opportunities on the grounds that he (presumably) enjoys a racial advantage (which is what is meant by privilege), policy often organized and carried out on the name of “social justice,” i.e., rectifying historic social disparities (blood libel and collective and intergenerational guilt and responsibility), then racism is manifest.

This brings us to these notions of “institutional” and “system” racism. Flipping the words around is useful: racist institution(s) and system(s). 

What’s an institution? An organization founded upon and ordered around an educational, legal, political, religious, or social function/purpose. Racist institutions in America—except for affirmative action and other social justice policy—were dismantled in the 1960s. Not only were those institutions abolished, it is in fact illegal in the United States to discriminate against black Americans on the basis of their race.

A lot of people don’t know this, but the term “institutional racism” appears after the dismantling of racist institutions. The term was coined by black nationalist Stokely Carmichael in his book Black Power (published in the latter 1960s). The term “systemic racism” was also invented later, pushed by critical theorists in the academy in the 1990s. Academic publishers, the culture industry, and corporate media then began pushing out these terms obsessively starting around 2010, framing the manufactured claim that racism explains fatal police encounters, which in turn contributed to a rise in crime and violence (looting and rioting as primitive rebellion or street-level reparations). 

(In fact, white men are overrepresented in the fatal police encounters. One theory for this is that despite their drastic overrepresentation in crime and violence and threat posed to the officers, the police are reluctant to shoot black men for fear of being accused of racism. More research needs to be conducted to explain why officers are more likely to shoot and kill white men, who comprise half or more of the victims of police shooting each year, but the explanation is intuitive.)

What is a system? A constellation of things, in this case institutions, working together as parts of an interconnecting network, as well as a set of principles or procedures dictating how something is done accomplished—that is, an organized framework or methodology. Since racist institutions have been abolished and discrimination against blacks based on race made illegal, what would a racist system look like? 

If you say that disparities between racialized demographic categories is what it looks like, then you will have fallaciously substituted for an explanation of disparities the mere fact of disparities. That which needs explaining cannot be its own explanation. There are many reasons blacks as-a-group trails whites as-a-group (average age, family structure, geographical locations, occupational representation, educational outcomes). The evidence that these disparities are explained by institutional or systemic racism requires institutional and systemic racism. Again, these institutions and systems (save for affirmative action and other reparations type programs) were abolished more than half a century ago. 

Scientifically speaking, group-level differences are abstractions. They tell us nothing about individuals. For example, whereas blacks are in the aggregate more likely to be poor, there are more poor whites than poor blacks. There are, moreover, black capitalists who enjoy immense wealth and power, and many more blacks who enjoy affluence as experts, managers, and professionals. At the same time, there are tens of millions of poor whites, hungry and homeless. There are white employees who work under the thumb of black managers, workers whose fate rests in the hands of the persons over them.  

Of course, it shouldn’t matter that it’s a black man telling a white man to do all day at his play of employment. That’s not the way I think about it. Nor does it matter that a white man is telling a black man what to do all day at his place of work. Yet there are a lot of people who do think that race relations in this arrangement matter.

These people commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness by treating individuals as personifications of abstract demographic categories. It’s no accident that the prevailing formulation of the fallacy works in one direction, namely that blacks can’t be racist (at least not against whites and apparently Asians).

One must assume systemic racism to make any of this work. It’s all based on circular logic. 

Hot off the press. Milwaukee has shattered its homicide record for a third year in a row. Murder there is growing exponentially. In 2019, the city reported 97 homicides. As 2022 draws to a close, the city has recorded 214 people murdered—in a single year. (The below chart reflects statistics through 2021. I do not yet have the number for nonfatal shootings.)

This phenomenon affects black families far more than any other racial group in Milwaukee (and this is true in most major US cities), with young black men comprising most perpetrators, as well as most victims. See my recent blog, America’s Crime Problem and Why Progressives are to Blame for a deep dive into the problem (based on a talk I gave in the fall at an academic conference).

The root causes of the phenomenon of inner-city gun violence are well known: the effects of globalization, i.e., loss of low-skilled labor-intensive jobs to immigration and off-shoring, exacerbating the structural inequality endemic to American capitalism, physically deteriorating and socially-disorganized neighborhoods, and a corresponding situation of idleness reinforced by progressive welfare policy, accompanied by family disintegration and a culture of violence perpetuated in gang life. All this feeds a worldview that at once dehumanizes people while compelling them to find meaning in backwards tribalism and ritualized violence.

Washington spends a trillion dollars annually on the military-industrial complex. The president invites the world to come live with us. But “Black Lives Matter.” Really? Do any lives matter to these sociopaths beyond their own self-importance?

* * *

The first draft of this blog was a Facebook post. A friend pushed back against the argument, asking if we should close the borders, only employ citizens, kick out work visa and green card holders, and nationalize. He wondered where it ends before asking “Is that what we were founded on?”

The nation was indeed founded upon economic nationalism and a fashion of geopolitics that cultivated advantageous international relations in the context of the world capitalist economy. Nation-state have borders. Every country in the world regulates travel across its borders. The more the government sides with of citizens, the tighter restrictions on immigration—and the better the social conditions. 

What is government for if not to represent the interests of its citizens? Presently, the United States has the most lax immigration rules in the West. Was I have blogged about extensively, half a trillion dollars is transferred from the native working class to the capitalist every year because of immigration. That’s not representative government. That’s government for corporations—against the people. 

So, yes, we restrict immigration as we did in the 1920s, a policy change that played a key role in producing the golden age of US economic development—with growing union power, rising wages, improving working conditions, as well as greater national unity and assimilation/integration that focused labor on class issues and powered the civil rights movement. The US made the greatest progress in its history when it most sharply restricted immigration. Growing national unity is what made the golden age possible.

So, yes, we employ citizens. We stop sending hundreds of billions to military contractors and foreign governments and invest instead in education and training and community development in our central cities, employing the millions of Americans, disproportionately black and brown, who have been idled by globalization and progressive policy.

Of course, there are foreign workers who contribute to the economy. I’m married to an immigrant who is a model naturalized citizen. I have nothing against immigrants per se. But we have tens of million of American workers who need jobs. The elite don’t want to put them to work because this drives up wages (it also empowers citizens)—and this is the reason why elites push immigration. Supply and demand. Produce a surplus of workers and drive down the price of labor. We seek the opposite: put Americans to work and drive up wages. 

You have to think is terms of the totality of relations in a capitalist economy and the profit motive to understand why elites push immigration—in this case the transnational system constructed by globalizing elites. The effect of immigration restrictions and the concomitant growth of union power sharply reduced inequality in America.

One effect of this was a fall in the rate of profit, which was why Democrats and Republican allies opened borders in the 1960s—to weaken private sector unions, put native workers at a disadvantage, and decouple compensation from productivity. It worked. As a consequence, inequality skyrocketed, structural employment increased, union density plummeted, wages stagnated.

My friend came back with “As a nation we have always welcomed others to join us if they have a valid reason and agree to follow our laws.” At one point he suggested that corporate personhood its a “conservative” idea.

Both statements are factually wrong. From the early 1920s (and really before) to the late 1960s we welcomed almost no one to come to our country. Corporate personhood is not a “conservative” idea. Modern conservatism is largely republican (note the small “r”)—and Republicans were largely populist back then. It’s not a liberal idea, either. Corporate personhood is a product of big finance and industry assuming control in the period of Redemption.

The diminishment of quo warranto in the context of the administrative state means that corporations easily skirt the demands of the sovereign (the people in a republic). The regulatory apparatus was set up to service corporate interests not public interests. And where it might have served some public interest it experiences elite capture. Corporations run the government—most easily when Democrats are in charge.

Corporatist arrangements have proved remarkably effective in preventing the development of democratic socialism. That’s the genius of the welfare state.

Progressives are the handmaidens of the corporate state and run the administrative state (and dominate our academic and cultural institutions)—the same people who push mass immigration and cultural pluralism. (See the historical work of Richard Grossman or my many blogs on this topic.)

Today’s system is evolving towards global neofeudalism. Workers are becoming serfs—and will be when the guaranteed basic income and cashless economy is rolled out. The technocracy is already in back of it. 

That’s not just my expertise in political economy talking. I watched globalization fundamentally change my state of Tennessee. Now there are beggars everywhere. I saw firsthand how mass immigration wrecked major cities in Sweden. They, too, have beggars everywhere—when they didn’t before. Crime is out of control. In some neighborhoods, women are afraid to walk down the street. They’re harassed for their dress. And for walking their dogs. 

Civilization is hard. Some cultures make it a lot harder. Some make it impossible. Yet another reason to oppose mass immigration.

Finally, as for the fear mongering over Russia and China, which was also noted in a comment, the threat Russia presents to the US is not conventional military prowess but nuclear weapons. That’s the issue. The transnationalists are for NATO expansion and a proxy war ways through Ukraine, both actions that antagonize that nuclear power. And, to be sure, China’s is a problem. That fact only strengthens my critique of globalization. China built its power on precisely the globalization progressives tout. I am writing this on a device—a very recent iMac—that was manufactured in China.

SEE UPDATE AT THE END!

The Staircase, a serial documentary by director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade about the Michael Peterson murder case, may be the best documentary I’ve ever seen. Yeah, I think it is. (Why would anybody go to the trouble to watch a dramatization of this case when de Lestrade’s documentary exists?)

I’ve finished the tenth episode and will binge watch the last three episodes tonight. Mona, my lovely wife, has watched the series from the beginning. She’s enjoying it immensely in part because she did not know about this case before starting the series. I’m familiar with the case, but did—and will keep on doing—a great job of sequestering her from the facts. (So don’t go asshole on her in the comment section.)

I want to say some things to say about the case. So, if you want Mona’s experience, then get your ass away from this blog (come back to it later, after you have watched the series).

First, the prosecution’s theory of the case fails apart completely at the end of the first trial. Once the alleged murder weapon, the blow poke, is found in the corner of the garage unused for years, thus making it an impossible murder weapon, the state’s case collapses. They insisted that the lacerations to the back of Kathleen Peterson’s head had to have come from this instrument. They drove this into the jury’s mind in graphic detail. Live by the blow poke, die by the blow poke. 

Second, and relatedly, the prosecution’s use of a blow poke identical to the one found at the Peterson’s residence in order to plant in jury’s mind the blow poke as the death instrument in a murder (premeditated no less) they never actually proved beyond a reasonable doubt looks all the world to me like prosecutorial misconduct. The DA represents the state. The state is supposed to serve justice. You don’t stay with a clearly false theory of the case. 

Third, how did the cops not find the blow poke during their searches of the house? Did they know it was there unused for years and thus fail to report its presence? 

Fourth, the SBI blood spatter analyst, Duane Deaver, was so obviously incompetent and lying that my faith in the peer jury system has been severely shaken. The cross-examination of SBI’s Duane Deaver by Peterson’s defense attorney David Rudolf is devastating. How did the jury not see through Deaver? He’s a fraud. And a sociopath.

I had not watched the trial before (I only knew the outcome). I can now say that, had I sat on this jury, there is absolutely no way I would have allowed the other eleven jurors to talk me out of this conclusion: that the prosecution not only did not meet its burden, but that the case they brought against Peterson was a grave injustice. In other words, if I could not bring them to the reality of all this, I would have hung that jury.

Of course, as a criminologist and somebody who understands criminalistics and the law (not all criminologists do, for the record), I would never be allowed to sit on a jury in a murder case. My presence would make the affair more of a bench trial, wherein an honest expert would look at this evidence and come to a superior judgment than a jury of Peterson’s peers who know jack shit about science.

At the same time, in the end, the judge in this case, an official you would hope would be an honest and competent expert, needed to be beaten over the head with the obvious to make the correct ruling at the appeal that allowed Peterson to be put under house arrest (after spending nearly a decade in prison).

How that judge allowed the “evidence” of a similar accident in Germany and text messages concerning Peterson interest in male escorts and gay pornography is incredible to me. Watching the jury read those texts was difficult. How many homophobes were among them? Remember, this was the early 2000s.

(Folks have no idea how many married men are bisexual and engage in same-sex activities on the sly. The sociologists reading this post will know doubt know Laud Humphreys’ scandalous 1970 study Tearoom Trade.)

Finally, the DA, the police, the SBI—all state agencies—worked, if not in concert, in the pull of a convergence of interests they had no business pursuing in the manner in which they did, to misrepresent evidence and distort findings, even concealing exculpatory evidence and tests from the jury. It is horrifying to witness. 

But this is hardly a unique occurrence. The state works this way a great deal of the time. In fact, this was how Peterson got his retrial: some honest people stepped up and exposed Deaver and the SBI—folks who didn’t “trust the science.”

The state in the Peterson trial did all this not only in the name of “justice” but while waving the banner of science. The jury had no reason to disbelieve “the science.” After all, why would the state use the authority of science to deceive them? Why would the state put on the stand (what appeared to be) experts in their respective fields—charlatans in reality—to lock up a man, when honest and competent prosecutors (and judges) seeking justice would have to have known that the theory of the case failed utterly and, moreover, that the evidence did not support any conceivable theory of homicide? Yet the state did exactly that. 

* * *

I don’t meant to attack you personally, but this has to be said for the sake of the pursuit of the truth in science and in court: You are naive in the extreme if you believe the state isn’t doing to others what it did to people like Michael Peterson and his family. Not just in the field of the criminal law—in its warmongering (all the lies told in prosecuting the Vietnam war, in the Iraq war, in so many war, and now in the Ukrainian affair); in its suppression of political opposition (recall what was exposed at the Church Committee headings, FBI COINTELPRO efforts against the Black Panthers, and the current DHS persecution of members of the populist-nationalist movement); in the coup against a democratically-elected president (all the lies about Russian collusion, etc.).

The Church Committee

This is the work the term “conspiracy theory” is meant to do: not to enlighten you about conspiracies (a legal category) and the theories about them (matters of science), but to flip meaning on its head to keep you from recognizing that state actors are lying to you—to keep you in the dark about what they may be doing to you. It’s a thought-stopping device. 

There is a moment in an episode where Peterson wonders aloud with his legal team about conspiracy. He must feel like he’s trapped in Kafka’s Der Process (Peterson is himself a writer). There were moments when members of the Black Panthers talked about the conspiracy against them (see Kathleen Cleaver’s remarks in Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller 1990 documentary The FBI’s War on Black America). “You’re paranoid.” “You’re ego tripping.” But the FBI, CIA, DoD, state and local law enforcement—they were all in on the conspiracy.  

Remember what anonymous said long ago: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you—that they’re not watching you or interfering with your life.  

They want you to have faith in democracy. They tell you that the populists are “undermining public trust in elections,” that their criticisms “undermine faith in democracy.” (I actually know an academic who claims to be a critical thinker who nonetheless thinks free speech should be curtailed for those who question the integrity of our elections. He said this publicly to an audience nodding appreciatively.)

But democracy, justice, and science—these aren’t things in which one puts his faith. At least they shouldn’t be. These are action items, the pursuit of which must be transparent.

If you want to trust the results, don’t let other people do and think for you. Faith is for religious and quasi-religious doctrines like Critical Race Theory and other crackpot notions. The pursuit of truth requires something else entirely.

It will serve you well to keep in mind Karl Marx’s motto (borrowed from René Descartes perhaps): De Omnibus Dubitandum, Latin for “doubt everything” (sometime rendered “be suspicious of everything”). 

The Planet of the Apes (1968)

Also, remember this bit of dialogue from Planet of the Apes:

Taylor: “That’s the spirit. Keep ’em flying.”

Lucius: “What?”

Taylor: “The flags of discontent.”

* * *

(UPDATE!) I had scheduled this blog (which was based on a Facebook post) for this morning before Mona and I watched the final three episodes. Last night, we watched those episodes and it only reinforced the thoughts I expressed in my original post. Peterson taking the Alford plea was in a way tragic, of course, but it punctuated his and his attorney’s thoughts about the justice system in North Carolina, namely that it was unjust and corrupt. That they could not be sure of acquittal in a retrial given everything that was revealed over the course of those years is writ large in the growing distrust Americans express about their institutions.

I was reflecting on that this morning while listening to a discussion of the 2022 Arizona election on Steve Bannon’s War Room. At hand were the efforts by Kari Lake, the popular Republican candidate for governor of that red state, to get to the bottom of the 2022 election, a contest in which Katie Hobbs, the Democrat candidate for governor and then governor-elect and also secretary of state and therefore the chief election official, came from behind to win the election. Hobbs did not recuse herself nor did the state have any mechanisms for managing the obvious conflict of interest in this case.

Hobbs had won her position as state secretary in 2018 in a pattern highly similar to the one seen in Arizona and several states during 2020 election, where Trump won on election night only to see Biden chip away at his lead with overnight postal vote dumps. The same pattern was seen again in Hobbs’ 2022 win over Kari Lake. Lake enjoyed a consistent lead in the polling since mid-September and had pulled away several days out from election day (see below). Lake’s crowds were massive and enthusiastic. Hobbs, like Biden, ran a bunker-style campaign and refused to debate Lake. Hobbs was awkward in interviews and came across as peevish and petty—and she is obsessed with Donald Trump.

Had Hobbs been a Republican in a blue state, or were Arizona a third world country the West treated as antagonistic, accusations of a stolen election would have dominated the headlines. But, as it was, it was a Democrat victory in a blue state over a Trump-endorsed candidate. Kari Lake was clearly an “election denier,” a threat to democracy almost as great as Trump himself. This fed into the greater narrative that voters had rejected populism. How else given the conditions ripe for a red wave that the nation instead experienced a red puddle?

Given the polling, the crowds, and way the election was conducted, there’s no way Hobbs actually won the election, so I was thrilled when a judge agreed to hear Lake’s case, even if he only agreed to hear only two of her ten grievances. I watched in its entirely the trial and, despite clear evidence that official changed ballot-printer settings during the election and substantial disruption in the chain of custody for ballots in Maricopa County, the judge rejected her case on the grounds that it failed to provide clear and convincing evidence that these problems were intentional.

The judge worked from an impossible standard that rewards fraud and rigging by making criminal actions to appear accidental or as incompetence. The standard in an election should rather be about process and outcome, namely, did the actions of election officials, whether as a result of incompetence or criminality, (a) disenfranchise voters and (b) would chance the outcome of the election? If the answer to these questions is yes, then run another election. Moreover, do a full forensic audit of every voting precinct in Arizona. Hobbs and election officials in Maricopa stood in the way of every effort to get to the bottom of the case, even when that state’s attorney general demanded answers. At trial it was revealed that officials were still trying to figure out what happened. Yet Hobbs certified her own victory.

You may feel this is a digression, but it goes to the question of institutional integrity and public trust in our judicial system, which is precisely my point concerning the Peterson case. That the state in both cases, with its immense power and resources over against those who seek justice, is able to operate in a black box and effectively flip the burden to the aggrieved (who, in the Lake case, include the people of Arizona), should push citizens to demand reforms that breathe life back into the Bill of Rights and American Democracy.

At the end of the Peterson documentary, the judge who presided over the case, Orlando Hudson, finally, in a roundabout way, admitted to the documentarians that he should have allowed in neither the Germany case nor the evidence of Peterson’s homosexuality as, had these been excluded, reasonable doubt would have been likely established and Peterson acquitted or the jury hung. And although it was this judge who created the grounds for a retrial only after the SBI scandal had come to light, he did not throw out the case on the grounds of shoddy police work, fraudulent manipulation of evidence, or prosecutorial misconduct, but forced Peterson into the Alford plea.

I learned in those last three episodes that the blow poke had in fact been found by crime scene technicians Eric Campen and Dan George. Under the direction of Thomas Dew, who worked for the prosecution, the three, along with Deaver, accompanied the Durham police department to take measurements of the Peterson home pursuant to the search warrant. They found in the boiler room the blow poke, took the instrument outside and photographed it, then put it in the garage, where it was found a year later in the state as described in this blog. Both Dew and Deaver witnessed this. All this was hidden from defense counsel at trial and skirted in testimony. In other words, there was a conspiracy to convict Michael Peterson.

I also learned in those final episodes that no DNA tests were conducted by the state in this case and evidence from the case was kept in such a manner that cross-contamination of crucial items could not be ruled out. In fact, items from another case had been thrown into the same boxes and the Peterson case. The attempt to shame defense attorney Rudolf for his handling of evidence at trial (he was not wearing gloves) seemed to be an attempt to obscure the fact that proper testing of the evidence should have occurred before the original trial. Evidence is often handled in this way at trial. Indeed, we learned that certain test that was done had been kept from the court by state investigators (and perhaps prosecution). It is my opinion that it was only the incompetence of Peterson’s then-attorney Mary Jude Darrow that allowed the DA and judge to sidestep these issues.

As Politico reported, “The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the lifting of the Trump-era Title 42 order on migration, forcing the Biden administration to leave in place the federal directive that has prevented the entry of millions of asylum seekers at the southern border” (emphasis mine).

Migrants on the US-Mexico border, Matamoros, Mexico, December 2022 (AP Photo)

Joe Biden and the Democrats want those millions. Why? Several reasons. Here are four: (1) super-exploitable foreign labor driving down wages for native workers to raise the rate of surplus value for corporate firms; (2) millions whom Democrats believe will thank them with votes for open borders (once the massive amnesty program is passed into law and even before that); (3) vast expansion of the custodial state to manage idled populations (modern serfdom); (4) weaken national integrity to prepare the masses for further integration with the global order of things (cultural pluralism and transnationalism).

What stands in the way of the ramping up of the managed decline of the American republic and the civilized West? Five conservative justices on the Supreme Court prepared to read a Trump-era policy reasonably (note that one lost his way).

* * *

Speaking of civilization and courts, a Massachusetts judge dismissed parents’ lawsuit over school gender policy yesterday because, while he found it “disconcerting,” it did not “shock the conscience.”

Parents had filed a lawsuit accusing public school officials in Massachusetts of encouraging their children to change their names and pronouns without their consent and beyond their knowledge.

Activists promoting transgender ideology in public schools (Getty Images)

Fox News reported: “U.S. District Judge Mark Mastroianni ruled Dec. 14 that the lawsuit against Ludlow Public School officials failed to meet the ‘shocks-the-conscience’ legal standard for due-process claims under the 14th Amendment, but he also scolded the school district for its policy to withhold students’ gender identities.”

The judge said that “it is disconcerting that school administrators or a school committee adopted and implemented a policy [which he deemed policy “imperfect” and “flawed”] requiring school staff to actively hide information from parents about something of importance regarding their child,” but that such an action does not “shock the conscience.”

“Shock the conscience” is an action that strikes the observer of a civilized society as “grossly unjust.” The rule has rarely been used over the last half century since the consensus is that the test permits judges to impose their own subjective views of what constitutes shocking.

Perhaps civilization would be better served by a more objective standard, such as taking into account the obvious facts that a public school is not the family unit and that parents are the primary guardians of children in civilized society (and even uncivilized ones).

This is not a totalitarian society where children are isolated from their families and molded in indoctrination camps to take up party ideology. (Or is it?) Nor are public schools religious cults where zealots separate individuals from families and brainwash them to believe in new mythologies. (Or are they?)

Of course, this is Massachusetts and the judge is an Obama appointee, so maybe “disconcerting” is the best we might expect from Mastroianni’s court. But what would shock the conscience of a reasonable observer if public schools transitioning transition children behind the backs of parents doesn’t?

No, not drag queens in fetish gear reading sexualized materials to young children in public libraries, either.

* * *

The fashion company Benetton is getting in on some Balenciaga action (see this story and then check out this story for some Balenciaga action). As we saw with Balenciaga, as soon as the child porn angle drew complaints, Benetton deleted the ads.

But is Benetton shame-faced? They’re sly. This is part of a strategy: progressively desensitize the public so that the next push moves even further into the mainstream with durable effects. Two steps forward. One step backwards. Repeat. (Authoritarianism works the same way.)

I’m not posting the Benetton ad campaign in question because I don’t promote the paraphilias of those who run the fashion industry (you may have noticed that they’re obsessed with prepubescent children). Nor do I share sexualized pictures of children. I saw the campaign on Twitter and even in a highly censored presentation found it troubling—let’s say even conscience-shocking.

It’s a weird thing brewing in today’s society. It’s not only fashion companies sexualizing children. Woke parents are taking their children to strip clubs, giving their little ones dollar bills to push into the G-strings of performers. Kink is being promoted to children. Appealing to higher loyalties, wrapped in the rhetoric of social justice, we are witnessing a drastic rise in cultish behavior.

One of the most worrisome aspect of this strange brew is long-standing campaign to erase age of consent rules. The idea being socialized is that consent rules are, like other norms around sexual activity and identity, oppressive structures the normality of which proves the asymmetrical power relations behind them.

This underpins Mastroianni ruling in the Massachusetts case. The children in public schools who, in collaboration with administrators and teachers, change their names and pronouns, are exercising consent as they would if they were no longer minors living with parents—as if parents were irrelevant.

War with the prevailing norms of civilization follows from the core doctrine of the new woke religion. Removing barriers to child sexual activity and expression is a campaign. You’re a heretic if you disagree. (And it’s not even your religion.)

This is mass formation psychosis. The century of the self (detailed in 2002 by Adam Curtis in his four-part documentary by that name on corporate state propaganda) have paved the road to trauma and declared it progress. The heads of generations to come are messed up and most of the public is terrified to object. Those who do object find judges whose consciences cannot be shocked by policy turning children against their parents.

I know a lot of my Christian friends see evil at work here. It looks satanic to them. However, there is a secular reason for all this. Authoritarians have long understood that, to control individuals, the authority of the family needs to be undermined and children robbed of their innocence. We won’t protect our children by explicitly defining the struggle with religious language. We have to speak in civilizational terms. Everything reasonable is at stake.

Did you read Yasmin Tayag’s essay “How Many Republican Died Because the GOP Turned Against Vaccines?” in The Atlantic? Yeah, she tells readers that “Party leaders are unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of their own supporters.”

Do readers know which demographic was more likely to die from complications from COVID-19 than white Republicans? Black Democrats. Black Democrats have been at least as likely to be vaccine hesitant as white Republicans—and are far less likely than whites overall.

On the eve of the delta variant chapter of the COVID-19 pandemic hysteria, I commented on a Twitter thread initiated by 1619 Project co-founder Nikole Hannah-Jones wherein I noted that vaccine uptake among blacks was much lower than among whites, with the implication that the draconian COVID-19 policies of progressive cities and states would disproportionately impact the freedom of black people. For some reason this was controversial, which I discuss in the blog Cognitive Autonomy and Our Freedom from Institutionalized Reflex.

Why are black Democrats vaccine hesitant? The legacy of the Tuskegee syphilis study certainly has something to with that. The Tuskegee syphilis study, wherein doctors and researchers followed disease progression in syphilitic black sharecroppers without providing them treatment, was a government organized project conducted at the height of progressive Democrat power.

But a more recent cause of vaccine hesitancy it worth noting here.

When Trump put the government behind developing a vaccine in record time, Democrats went on TV and in loud voices told their constituents that they did not trust the “Trump vaccine.”

Remember when CNN asked Kamala Harris if she would take the vaccine once it’s approved and she said, “Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump”? Remember when Joe Biden said, “Who’s going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up?” On and on these two and others went in this vein. For weeks. In the middle of a presidential campaign. “Polls say fifty per cent of American people say they will not take the vaccine if it were available today, because they don’t trust the way this federal government has politicized the process,” said New York City governor Andrew Cuomo.

Now a major progressive propaganda outlet wants to erase your memory of that and obscure the disproportionate deaths of black Americans from COVID-19 by accusing the Republican Party of murdering their constituents by—pushing out Trump’s vaccine. Is it any wonder corporate state media is suffering a crisis of legitimacy?

We should also ask about the root causes of black overrepresentation among those who suffer a complications from COVID-19. Most blacks who have suffered these complications live in the central cities run for decades now by progressives. One might ask why, if progressive Democrats are so good for black Americans, the neighborhoods in which black Americans live are so fraught with crime, crumbling infrastructure, disease, fatherlessness, idleness, mental illness, poverty, and other social problems.

Better, I guess, to blame the GOP and its basketful of deplorables than to pin the tail on the donkey.

In this blog, I present parts of a letter from David Bernstein, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, addressed to Glenn Loury (professor at Brown University) and John McWhorter (professor at Columbia University), following a discussion on The Glenn Loury show about antisemitism in the black community.

Cancel Culture Jewish Style w/ David Bernstein

Before getting to that letter and my commentary, I want to make two notes about the January 6 report, which is now being published by several imprints. This, too, is relevant to the title of this blog entry.

First, the corporate press is freaking out over Skyhorse publishing the January 6 commission report with the brilliant Darren Beattie introduction exposing the scam (see The New York Times story).

Watch Skyhorse get framed as a right-wing/white nationalist outlet—distributed by Simon & Schuster no less! But Skyhorse published the Communist Manifesto with an introduction by Yours Truly extolling the virtue of Marx and Engels thesis (get your copy today and read my words). Skyhorse is hardly an ideologically-motivated press.

You may remember when, way back in 2008, the University of Michigan Press dumped Pluto Press over books critical of US-Israel relations which removed the academic imprimatur from two chapters by Yours Truly critical of the Bush regime in Bernd Hamm’s Devastating Society: The Neo-Conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice. (I discuss the matter here.) Will I see yet another of my publications suffer a drop in prestige for the sake of preserving the globalist narrative? Will Simon and Schuster dump Skyhorse?

Second, a bit of history. In the United States, the people of their respective states do not vote directly for president but rather for a slate of electors (party insiders) who actually cast the ballot for president. Maybe that’s not what you’d like, but that’s the way it has always worked in America. The framers, being the liberals they are, built in safeguards against the specter of majoritarianism.

In the 1960 presidential election, Nixon versus Kennedy, the vote was disputed in Hawaii (among other places) and an alternate slate of electors were determined. Seems a rather important thing to remember in light of all the talk today about how Trump organized alternate slates of “fake electors” in several states, as if this were a terrible thing. 

In the Hawaii case, the governor of that state certified Nixon’s victory. Thus at the time of the safe harbor deadline for certification under the Electoral Count Act, the Republican slate had been certified. Nixon won the state, if we are to agree with the corporate state media concerning such things.

But, with the recount was still ongoing on December 19, the day US law requires the casting of votes by members of the Electoral College, the Kennedy camp determined an alternate state of (fake?) electors. When the recount showed that Kennedy had actually won the election on December 28, the alternate slate of (fake?) electors was certified—even though it was not the official slate. Hawaii rushed a letter to Congress by air mail to inform them that the election outcome had been changed. 

When Congress held the joint session on January 6, 1961, both certificates—both slates of electors—were presented. Nixon was Vice-President (he was serving under President Eisenhower who was retiring from public life). In this capacity, Nixon was the President of the Senate. It was Nixon who requested that the Republican certificate to be set aside to avoid a floor fight. But he didn’t have to that. He could have allowed a floor fight. And, of course, there was no effort to prevent a floor fight from occurring by outside forces as there was on January 6, 2020.

Whatever you think of Nixon’s move, why were neither the slate of Democrat electors nor the slate of Republican electors characterized as “fake” by the media? And why is it never pondered by the corporate state media the fact that the disruption of January 6, 2020 dispute of the electoral count, which would have sent the certification back to several states with ongoing investigation of electoral processes and outcomes, actually stopped a fight that may have benefitted Trump?

Oh, and on more thing before moving on: the buried lede. The bipartisan (unitary) 1.7 trillion dollar budget just passed by Congress contains an overhaul of the the 1887 Electoral Count Act that may have resulted in a different outcome to the 2020 presidential election. A provision in the legislation makes it harder to overturn a certified presidential election by making the Vice-President’s role completely ceremonial.

But if Trump’s attempt to change the results of the 2020 election was illegitimate, then why would the 1887 Electoral Count Act have to be altered? Put another way, changing the law means that the 1887 Electoral Count Act did allow Vice-President Mike Pence to allow for a floor fight that could have considered alternate slates of electors or send back the states the officials certificates of the electoral votes—just as the law allowed Vice-President Nixon to do exactly the same things. In the end, Pence, like Nixon, kowtowed to the establishment line—resulting in the installment of progressive politicians. But neither of them were required to do so.

Now you know why the process had to be disrupted on January 6 2021. And that is why you need to read Darren Beattie’s introduction to the January 6 report by Skyhorse.

* * *

The foregoing indicates the importance of the point of this blog entry. I am sharing Bernstein’s letter because it provides another opportunity for me to stress something I have said before, that is that the terms “liberal” and “progressive” are not synonyms but opposites. Academic, corporate, and political elite constantly conflate one with the other in order to confuse the public about this.

Why would they do this? To advance on the left the progressive agenda, which is the corporate state agenda, propagandists for the state must obscure the principles of liberalism and effectively negate those principles to usher in the new fascist state.

However, Bernstein does get some things wrong.

For one thing, he does not appear to identify progressivism itself as the problem but rather worries about “a progressivism,” namely woke ideology (emphases mine). But as I have shown in several blogs, wokeness is just the latest instantiation of progressive ideology, the logical progression of an ideology destructive to individualism.

For other thing, Bernstein implies that progressivism is not as a corporate state project designed or functioning to corrupt the left, but instead as a left-wing political tendency in-itself.

Progressivism is in substance right-wing ideology is every regard. It rejects equality in favor of “equity,” which the ideology defines as the hierarchical rearrangement of individuals on the basis of an ideological conception of justice that at every turn contradicts liberal principle, principle that demands individuals be judged on their merits and not their identity.

Indeed, the idea of “diversity” advanced by this ideology is about selecting people for occupational and societal roles on the basis of group identity—not on achievement or a natural sorting out.

And the idea of “inclusion” is not about respecting the varying standpoints of individuals, but a gloss over a coercive method for including only those viewpoints that advance the progressive agenda.

These are integrated in the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) project.

Before getting Bernstein’s letter, I want to illustrate the illiberal character of progressivism with an example, namely the notion of “trans rights.”

Many of you have heard the slogans “Trans rights are human rights” and “Trans women are women.” But what do these slogans mean? They must mean, if human rights are recognized in law, that, in law and in administrative rule, citizens of free societies are required to affirm and abide by the doctrine of Queer Theory in practice. However much one might believe—as I do—that individuals have the right to identify however they wish, compelling others to live according to the subjective identity of another person is quintessentially authoritarian.

If I do not in a free society have to affirm or live under the doctrine of Islam, which I don’t, then I do not have to affirm or live under the doctrine of Queer Theory. Indeed, my right to refuse to be controlled by religious ideology is a human right. (Queer Theory is sociologically a religion. That’s why I am from this point forward capitalizing it.)

Moreover, because of the fact of the sex binary in the human species and therefore the necessity of sex-based rights to protect girls and women, compelling girls and women to tolerate males in spaces reserved for them is violative of their human rights. In other words, the slogan “Women’s rights are human rights” is a proper matter of law and policy. As I discussed in a recent blog entry, Title IX makes no sense. (See Is Title IX Kaput? Or Was it Always Incomprehensible?)

Watch the program for an in-depth discussion of the problem:

I do want to emphasize the point Bernstein makes in his letter about the way woke ideology “neatly divides the world into oppressed and oppressor and conflates success with oppression.” (Critical Race Theory, another religion, articulates this division as “victim” and “perpetrator.”) He is precisely correct about this. I have written about this extensively.

Whether you understand postmodernist critical theory framing of social relations as an attempt by those who have in the aggregate failed at life, or a perception manufactured by grifters or the professional-managerial class, or as a strategy by the corporate state elite to sow division among the proletariat (I suggest all three), is is clearly an affront to the liberal and humanist values of liberalism.

Here is Bernstein’s letter:

As we approach the end of the 2022, I wanted to check to see how the Freedom and Reason blog is doing and found that views (and visitors) are down sharply after steady growth in viewership. Freedom and Reason when from almost 10,000 views in 2021 to around 7,500 in 2022. The year is not over, but the trend is clear. The blog cannot make up the number of views it needs to approximate the last two years. Here are the stats provided by WordPress:

I began to suspect something was wrong when searching my past blog entries over the last year in Google (the overwhelming choice of the world public for search engine). There I found that my blogs on the pandemic, deep state machinations with respect to the 2020 election and its aftermath, the color revolution, etc., were not returned (whereas DuckDuckGo was returning them). Even using the advanced search function in Google did not return information on blogs that in fact exist.

When I search Google for information critical of these matters independent of my site url using terms specifically intended to generate criticism of the dominant political and scientistic narrative the search engine returns pages upon pages of sources toeing the line obviously desired by elites. Again, even using Goggle’s advanced search function does not return information and opinion critical of the corporate state line. I have to go directly to websites I know provide that content to find it.

Here’s the problem: there remain many more critical websites I don’t know about because the Google algorithm shadow bans them. If this is true for those other sites, then it must be true for mine, as well. Potential readers across the world will never know that Freedom and Reason exists because Google’s search engine will never provide the url to them. It appears Google got on to me sometimes last year and found my commentary too contrary to the corporate state narrative.

As you may know, Google is the parent company of YouTube. I reported recently that YouTube removed a podcast from Freedom and Reason that concerned the FBI-Twitter cabal that censored Hunter Biden’s laptop and de-platformed users reporting on it. Although this was not the first time YouTube censored my content, in the latest case the content said nothing about the subject matter that YouTube claimed it was censoring the podcast. Even after my appeal was heard staff or algorithm used the same justification. I reposted the podcast on Rumble. However, searching Google for that content does not return the link.

If YouTube is removing content critical of powerful corporate and state actors, then it seems certain that Google is shadow banning websites critical of those forces.

There is an attempt to make those who suspect being stealth banned out to be paranoid. Elaine Moore of the Financial Times writes that “social media influencers are at the mercy of algorithms. This makes them perfect fodder for conspiracy theories. It also makes sense that influencers would be baffled by any sudden decrease in engagement and spooked by changes that might jeopardise the brand deals they sign. Instead of believing that their own popularity is waning, some cling to the idea that shadowbans are a disciplinary measure that is used against creators who do not warrant an outright ban from a platform.”

But media gaslighting and the use of thought-stopping devices like “conspiracy theory” does not explain patterns that become obvious when examining the type of content that is not return by Google’s search engine. It’s obvious that Google’s algorithm is designed to restrict information critical of corporate state agendas.

So do me a favor. If you are familiar with Freedom and Reason or stumble upon this entry, push out my content.

Workers tell pollsters that higher wages and better and more flexible working conditions will bring them back to work. Progressives have a better idea: throw open the borders and declare amnesty for those illegally here. The Democrat leader in the Senate blames working people for not having enough babies, while progressive politicians keep their constituents idled in ghettos where they vote for a living.

I know it confuses a lot of people to see Democrats advocating these policies. Aren’t progressives pro-working class? Don’t they care about marginalized populations? Bad assumptions (failure of objectivity). Progressives are neoliberals. They don’t believe in nation-states. They’re trans-nationalists. This has always been true. They try to disguise it with the rhetoric of cultural pluralism and social justice (presumed noble standpoint). But deceit only works on those devoted to ideology and narrative. The problem is that there are a lot of gullible people—and the elite-controlled communications, cultural, and education systems are making more of them everyday. Big Tech and Big Pharma own our youth.

Meanwhile, the Fed will continue raising interest rates to throw more workers out of work. As Fortune reported Thursday, “stock markets buckled on the growing realization that the Fed is willing to let the economy slide into recession to drive inflation down to its 2 percent annual target.” The Fed forecasts ratcheting up the key rate by an additional three-quarters of a point (from 5 percent to 5.25 percent) and keep it there through next year. Fortune tells its readers that “the higher rates will mean costlier borrowing costs for consumers and companies, ranging from mortgages to auto and business loans.” But it will also mean higher unemployment—and this is the core purpose of the move: to throw workers out of work in order to depress wages and restore rates of surplus value. Few Democrats have come forward to criticize the Fed’s actions.

On a more general note (and this will be the subject of a forthcoming blog), the American republic was essentially over when progressives won the debate with populism at the turn of the last century. Not that they won the debate in any democratic sense. Courts made corporations persons and turned the reins of government over to them. We now live in a corporate state. The direction of the corporate state is towards global neo-feudalism, towards a high-tech serfdom. The Chinese model. The Great Reset. Perhaps it’s not too late to turn things around. But it soon will be.

But it is clearly not a Marxist maneuver. Douglas Murray is so wrong about this—as is Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay, and all the other right-wingers who advance this ridiculous claim that postmodernist-style critical theory is based on the logic of Marxism.

Think about it for only a few moments and you will see why this is a garbage argument. If the point is to divide the majority and disrupt their individualism by defining them in essentialist terms—black, Muslim, gay, gender identity, whatever (while denying sex and obscuring class)—and demanding they pursue the “interests” of group identity rather than their material interests (which is what Murray is arguing in this clip), then how on earth could it be Marxist when the point of Marxism is precisely the opposite!?

The point of Marxism is to break down the identitarian and ideological divisions that disrupt the development of proletarian (majority) consciousness for the sake of a class politics that can effectively challenge bourgeoise power—the actual force engineering the divisive politics of identity. How is the contradiction in Murray’s argument not immediately obvious?

Remember when both the political right and “leftwing” progressives were both—as was BLM itself—characterizing Black Lives Matter as a Marxist thing when in fact it was based on race essentialism and queer theory and bankrolled by corporate power? BLM (and Antifa) is about as far apart from Marxism as a thing can possible be yet self-described leftists just gushed over co-founder Patrisse Cullors describing the nucleus of the organization as “trained Marxists”—right before they took the money and bought big houses and signed exclusive deals with corporations in the culture industry.

Murray spoils a potentially useful point by attributing the effect to the wrong cause. And Murray is a super smart dude. Shit like this just wants to make me give up. I swear.