The Purposeless Society

Humans are wired to think in terms of purposeful social agents and their objectives, and to tell themselves stories. In every culture, there are myths that tell its members who they are and how they relate to one another, that help to structure life and give it order. The idea that there is a crisis facing the West is by no means unique to conservatives. Classical liberals and technocrats lament the rise of populism and the loss of faith in their policy prescriptions, while progressives claim that the societies in which they live are built on foundations of violence, and must therefore be destroyed and remade.

Conservatives place the genesis of the problem further back. Where others see systems and structures that must be dismantled or that are under attack, conservatives believe that the dismantling has already occurred and that we are now suffering the consequences. The destruction of traditional social structures with their strictures and obligations divides the world into two groups. The first experience it as a liberation of the individual, and use their newfound freedom to pursue their desires. But for those who needed the guidance such structures provided to steer them into useful and fulfilled lives, it is a disaster. The idea that we do not find happiness by pursuing it may be old, but it is not always untrue. Hedonism is a poor substitute for purpose beyond the individual.

This listlessness manifests itself in an array of symptoms that speak to the absence of a narrative that can bring order to life. The phenomenon known as “deaths of despair” can just as accurately be described as deaths from lack of purpose. When life is principally about individual fulfillment and consumption, and one’s value is defined by the ability to produce and consume, there is very little reason to continue once it ceases to be pleasurable. Hedonism may be the one cause for which it makes no sense to give one’s life, but it takes its toll regardless. In the end, man can be made to serve Mammon, but never the other way round.

A healthy culture is one that is first and foremost able to sustain itself. The man who builds a cathedral does so with no hope of seeing it completed because he understands that he occupies a place within a civilisation with both a past and a future. Just as those who came before built for him, he builds for those not yet born. This altruism rests on the assumption that there will be such a continuation, that there will be people who think like him in the future to appreciate and benefit from his work, and in doing so, justify it.

Across the West, fertility rates have fallen far below replacement levels. To the extent that people are aware of this, they tend to see it as a good thing. After all, how could something bad have come from people’s freely executed choices? That those choices were made in an environment antithetical to the raising of families does not register. Nor does the pressure people feel to see economic production as their first and foremost duty, rather than building a family. Kept in an unending whirl of short-term career objectives and periods of consumption, it is easy to be lulled into a state where the future is disregarded entirely, until one day you finally look up to see that it’s arrived.

When a person is left without children through infertility or poor romantic timing, they can fall into despair at the thought that their life will end without someone to carry on their legacy. What happens to an entire culture when it finds itself staring at a future without continuity? Attempting to solve this question by replenishing populations through immigration can work only to the degree that the newcomers will buy into your way of life. What do we have to offer them that should persuade them to give up their traditions in favour of ours?

A similar lassitude comes from the belief that greatness is somehow beyond us, and that when it is not, it is undesirable or unseemly to reach for it. Whenever the idea of doing something spectacular is raised—reaching for the stars, exploring the depths of the ocean, building gleaming cities or trans-continental transport systems—the objection is the same: the money could be better spent on benefits, or healthcare, or some other form of consumption. The ideas of building a legacy, of creating things which are beautiful for the sake of it, or of inspiring a sense of something greater than oneself are left unconsidered. While poverty exists, every cathedral must be made of cinder blocks. That programmes to eliminate misery are pits into which you could shovel banknotes for millennia without even beginning to shallow their depths is quietly forgotten. Decline is a choice, and some people positively embrace it.

The dominance of utility over aesthetics is a similar indicator that something is awry. The idea that a house is nothing more than a machine in which to live is reasonable only until you think about it for the briefest moment. Reducing human concepts to their function and stripping them of their non-essential elements—building a home, a space of one’s own to take pride in and pleasure from dwelling in—is deeply counterproductive. In a society obsessed with economic facets of life, however, measurable outputs are the dominant concern. And ugly is cheap and easy.

That people still object to this—stubbornly insisting on being human rather than machines—seems to underlie the aggrieved tone of articles about selfish people enjoying meat and gardens instead of spending their lives in a pod subsisting on bugs. The idea that it is better to have a large population of miserable but barely positive utility people is a function and indeed criticism of a certain form of utilitarianism. But any society with no more to offer than hedonism might be expected to offer better than to flirt with embracing this “repugnant conclusion.”

We cannot make something of ourselves alone. We need a context against which to define ourselves, and ours offers us little meaning beyond the individual, leaving us to approach life with no more purpose than the day that is lived because it is there. We need myths that give us guidance, and we need a purpose beyond the self—spreading the gospel, living within the faith, continuing the tribe, building for the glory of the country—to give us meaning. In short, we need narratives, collectively and individually.

From this perspective, the American Left’s denial that it holds cultural power looks like an attempt to construct one. The progressive answer is that you should find purpose in politics, dedicating yourself to the great project of individual liberation in the face of the menacing edifice of the Right, joining the plucky rebel alliance, aided only by capital, academia, the arts, the press, the government bureaucracy, the White House, both houses of Congress, and a significant body of Supreme Court rulings. For the rest of the world, it is too much to hope that this project will confine itself to the United States: there is no “bright line between foreign and domestic policy,” after all.

Whether this project can succeed in providing purpose over a longer horizon is doubtful, and it still leaves us with the question of what conservatives should be doing. The diagnosis that we need a narrative—or at least an alternative to the bright-eyed fervour of America’s new progressive preachers—does not directly indicate a course of action. As the economist Albert O. Hirschman argued in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, there are two possible responses to a deteriorating organisation: withdraw from it or attempt reformation.

The first option is to become a group within a group, and cling to your own internal sense of purpose. Those looking to exit society have plenty of examples to draw upon, from pilgrim fathers and Irish monks to the modern-day practices of minority social groups and faiths. The options, briefly, are to build communities which interact minimally with the rest of the world, to leave for a country more to your liking, or to attempt to retreat into your conscience in a world increasingly opposed to it.

But none of these options will arrest the decline of the wider society, or provide certainty of success. A group within a society will be left alone only so long as there is something to restrain interference in their affairs. A man attempting to live within his conscience will eventually be compelled to comply or face sanctions. For those leaving altogether, foreign policy remains an extension of domestic concerns. Anyone who has observed the tensions building between the Visegrád Group and the broader West can be under no illusion that those countries currently amenable to the former’s views will necessarily be left alone to be so.

Action, then, is preferable both pragmatically and out of a sense of obligation for the well being of the wider world. The conservative movement must provide an alternative narrative, and one that is realistic. Too many proposals in their current form are doomed to fail, not because the march of the progressive Left is unstoppable, but because they do not offer in themselves a coherent ideology beyond a vague desire to “return” to some unspecified point in the past, without any sense of which changes can be undone. They are defined in opposition to a structure, and in their analysis and acceptance of constraints, they unconsciously retain much of that which they purport to reject.

Even if it were possible to persuade a majority of people that they should want to return to society as it was 50, 70, 100 years ago, there is no way to make it happen. Some things are too firmly established, and agricultural yields, automation, specialisation, and dense living are among them. Fortunately, what those advocating a “return” generally want in practice is the recreation of some (not all) elements of the traditional social ordering, such as the emphasis on marriage and its indissolubility, along with the dignity and stability afforded by the economic life that accompanied it. Conservatives need to make this restoration appealing enough to persuade, but it also has to provide them with a greater purpose and co-exist with the reality that technology will continue to provide challenges to be addressed.

Without faith or nation, there is no greater whole beyond the individual. We need narratives and structures that bind us together, and give us something to strive for. There has to be something more than everyday life to which people feel they are contributing. Something to daydream about, even if we don’t directly participate. Something that makes us feel like we’re playing our part in a civilisation that is going somewhere, without falling back on the old test of strength against strength, or clashing ideologies.

Individual and civilisational purposelessness, while related, are not the same. In a society dedicated to its own reproduction and maintenance, the institutions that structure lives lead naturally to the attainment of the larger goal. When they are dismantled, creating a larger ideal might give purpose to those directly involved in its achievement, but will do little for those outside it. Trying to impose purpose from the top down may prove to be an entirely futile task. The state has demonstrated the capability to destroy structures that give lives meaning and order, but outside of totalitarian societies, it has not yet proven its ability to construct them. That is not an appealing road. Absent a rediscovery of religious faith in the West, which can provide the structures at the individual level that allow society to maintain itself in aggregate, we are left to convey the idea of doing one’s duty for the future, of buying into some grander story.

We can’t rediscover the new world, but we can build new ones. Whatever project we take on has to endure, to provide new frontiers over and over again. Upon hearing Anaxarchus describe an infinite number of worlds, Alexander wept, saying, “Is it not worthy of tears that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?” Without some greater aim we are unlikely to achieve even that. Thinking of the stars overhead gives us that aim; to colonise the solar system, build for the future, create the mega-projects necessary to build to that. To build the cathedrals, or their modern equivalent, and create legacies, acting as people with a place in a culture that wants to continue. Because if we don’t, it won’t. (read more)

The Washington Post: Treat America Like a Conquered Nation

[...] The true war is an eternal war against our own inner racist. Now, we can expect a deliberate program of national disgrace imposed through official monuments, school curricula, and reparations. However, this won’t be a burden for everyone. Michele Norris, who is black, reveals her true intent when she writes:


Astonishingly, she writes that we’ve never really had a “conversation” about race. Let’s have that conversation.

America was built by whites. The fanciful notion that we are rich because of blacks is easily debunked. Others contributed and can contribute, but not by tearing down what we created. Even Abraham Lincoln noted that any wealth created by black slaves was almost entirely destroyed by the war. The Great Migration, the riots of the 1960s, and the crime wave we are living through now continue to destroy cities that whites built. The Tulsa riots do not compare to what we endure today.

Michele Norris says we don’t have conversations about race in this country because people might be “really rattled by what they might hear.” She, herself, might be rattled.

Blacks are a massive liability for this country. They commit a vastly disproportionate amount of crime and use a disproportionate amount of welfare. Much of the black middle class is an artificial creation of direct income transfers from whites to blacks via affirmative action, “diversity” programs, and subsidies from well-funded Non-Government Organizations. If whites police black citizens, we must endure constant protests; if white police back away, black neighborhoods explode in crime — and we are blamed for neglect. The driving force in American life determining where people live, work, and send their children to school is the desire to escape diversity. If diversity were a tax, its cost would be incalculable. Reparations — unjustifiable and absurd — would just be one more line item on the bill.

If we must have little monuments to the victims of American history, we shouldn’t forget Cannon Hinnant, Brittney Watts, Channon Christian, Christopher Newsom, the victims of the Zebra Killings, and the thousands of other whites whom blacks have killed. We can’t forget the whites butchered by those whom Thomas Jefferson called the “merciless Indian savages.” If we’re seriously going to discuss reparations, we should start with the millions of whites who had to flee the cities. Desegregation and black degeneracy made once-thriving American communities unlivable. (read more)

Two Black Students [Mistakenly] Won School Honors. Then Came the Calls for a Recount.

After two white families claimed a grade calculation error, a Mississippi school added their children as co-valedictorian and co-salutatorian, reviving questions about race and equity.

At first, it seemed a joyous occasion. There was an audible gasp in the room, then boisterous cheering and applause when the announcement was made: Ikeria Washington and Layla Temple had been named 2021 valedictorian and salutatorian for West Point High School.

The president of the local N.A.A.C.P. in West Point, Miss., Anner Cunningham, smiled as the two young women, both standout students, were photographed. “It was a beautiful and proud moment to witness two young, Black ladies standing side by side given such honors,” Ms. Cunningham said.

But almost immediately parents of other students near the top of the rankings raised questions about who should have been honored. Within days, and breaking with longstanding tradition, West Point High School decided to name two valedictorians and two salutatorians — with two white students, Emma Berry and Dominic Borgioli, joining the Black students who had already been named.

And in the nearly three weeks since that senior awards night, West Point, a mostly Black town in the northeastern part of the state, has been split largely along racial lines, roiled by a dispute that included threats, a potential lawsuit and allegations of racism posted on Facebook.

Officials say that race had nothing to do with the events in West Point, but instead blamed a mistake made by a school counselor resulting largely from a confusion over which of two methods for calculating final grades should have been used.

In a world in which students, and their ambitious parents, fight for the tiniest edge over their classmates, West Point is hardly the first high school to see senior class honors veer into acrimony and legal issues. A dispute over the valedictorian designation recently prompted a lawsuit in Alpine, Texas, population 6,000.

In Mississippi, where some public schools once defied federal orders to admit Black students and issues of educational equity are still raw, who gets honored and how can dredge up painful questions that are impossible to disentangle from the state’s racial history. In the past five years, Black women in Cleveland, Miss., about 150 miles away, have twice filed federal lawsuits alleging they had been cheated in their school’s selection of valedictorian and salutatorian.

Lisa M. Ross, a lawyer in Jackson, the state capital, who has handled those cases, said questions about the selection process, and whether it is fair, are not uncommon.

“Every year around graduation I get calls from parents who are concerned that their children are being cheated out of valedictorian and salutatorian,” she said, later adding, “Race is really still a big struggle in Mississippi.”

Ikeria’s mother, Angela Washington, was oblivious to any supposed miscalculation in West Point as she was leaving the auditorium after senior awards. But as she was accepting kudos and generally basking in her daughter’s glory, she said she overheard Emma pledging to challenge the decision to give the awards to Ikeria and Layla.

“She was upset. She had been crying. She thought it was going to be her night,” Ms. Washington said in an interview.

Emma’s father, Shawn Berry, was also upset, he said in an interview, because the family had kept up with his daughter’s averages and knew she was at the very top.

“We’ve been tracking this since she was in the seventh grade,” Mr. Berry said, adding that his daughter had repeatedly received awards for highest class rank over the years.

“This is why, when it all went down, we were like, ‘Wait, what?’” Mr. Berry said.

Melissa Borgioli was also confused. Her son, Dominic, had been ranked third at the end of his junior year, but had “worked his butt off this year,” she said.

“I can’t say it without sounding like I’m bragging about my child, but he owned the awards day. Hall of fame, top this, male athlete with the highest G.P.A.,” she said. Why wasn’t Dominic in the top two, she wondered.

The parents of the just-named valedictorian and salutatorian left the ceremony, aware that Emma and her father were upset, but thinking nothing of it. Over the next day, however, the parents of Emma and Dominic did their own homework.

“We found the 2020-2021 handbook,” Mr. Berry said. “It all came down to the handbook.”

At issue was just how to calculate who the top two students were. Ikeria and Layla won based on a calculation of quality point average or Q.P.A., a system of calculating grades that gave extra weight to advanced placement and dual credit courses. But, it turned out, Dominic and Emma were the top two finishers based on unweighted grade point average.

The parents of the two white students held discussions with Burnell McDonald, the superintendent of West Point schools. They complained that based on the West Point High School Student Handbook, the school had not followed its own rules in calculating class rank.

After talking with the white parents, Mr. McDonald, who is Black, concluded that the handbook and tradition backed them up: In the school system, class rank has been calculated by unweighted grade point average, not Q.P.A., which would have made the two white students the honorees.

The evening before graduation, Mr. McDonald informed the parents of Dominic and Emma: He was adding the two white students as co-honorees — Dominic was now co-valedictorian and Emma co-salutatorian.

Mr. McDonald also permitted two missing grades — which a teacher had failed to record in the system — to be added to the final grade in one of Emma’s classes, past a deadline and after senior awards night.

Mr. Berry said the grades added for Emma did not change the outcome.

Once the decision was made, race was not the only issue that was raised.

Some cited, at least in perception, family influence as a potential factor in the naming of co-honorees. Emma Berry is a descendant of the co-founder of Bryan Foods, once West Point’s largest employer. Even though the local Bryan pork processing factory shut down in 2007, the extended Bryan family remains among the town’s most influential. Several local institutions bear the family name, including the public library.

“The family name, the Bryan name, never came into play,” Mr. Berry said.

Shortly after learning from the superintendent that her daughter would be honored as co-salutatorian, Emma’s mother posted a picture of Emma and Dominic on Facebook, announcing they were the valedictorian and salutatorian.

The next morning, as Ikeria and Layla prepared for their commencement speeches, calls started flooding the phone of Layla’s mother with news about the picture, which had been reposted all over social media. She headed to the school.

Both students and their mothers ended up in meetings at the school that day, first with the principal then with Mr. McDonald, the superintendent.

“I really wanted to cry in the office,” Ikeria said. “I held my tears and when I left the office, I just started crying.”

For the two parents, it has come down to a question of fairness — and questions not only about the switch but also about why they were kept in the dark until they saw the picture.

“They had no intention of telling us,” Lanika Temple, Layla’s mother, said. “They were just going to have us show up at graduation. If it was truly a mistake, you contact the students and the family. They didn’t have enough respect to tell us. I feel it was underhanded.”

“I didn’t even get a courtesy call,” Ms. Washington said.

Ms. Borgioli said she had heard Ikeria and Layla’s parents learned their daughters would share honors with the other students through social media. “I don’t know what is true,” she said, “but the school district handled it in the worst possible way.”

The Washington and Temple families are considering a lawsuit, and they have enlisted the advice of Ms. Ross, the lawyer from Jackson. She questions the methodology used to determine class rank in West Point — saying it makes no sense — and why weighted scores are not used.

“Anybody in education knows that a weighted G.P.A. signifies that a student has taken more rigorous courses than a student with a 4.0 G.P.A.,” Ms. Ross said.

Ms. Cunningham, the president of the local N.A.A.C.P., has raised questions about why Emma’s unrecorded grades were logged, while other students were not given that opportunity.

“If you allow such a courtesy, it needs to be offered to ALL seniors,” she wrote in an email.

She is urging the school system to reverse those grade changes, and said she will attend a school board meeting Monday night along with Ms. Washington and Ms. Temple, who plan to air their grievances.

Both white families say they have been threatened.

Ms. Borgioli said one phone caller, his voice lowered to a whisper, told her she was “going to hell” for being a racist.

“This has nothing to do with race,” Ms. Borgioli said. “And it’s been made racial and that infuriates me. This has to do with math.”

On graduation night, all four students delivered their speeches at a ceremony at Humphrey Coliseum at nearby Mississippi State University.

Despite predictions swirling on social media that the ceremony would erupt into a brawl, it concluded without disruption, just a muted dissent from Layla, who introduced herself as the “true salutatorian.”

Mr. McDonald, whose office did not respond to repeated requests for comment, opened the ceremony with a mea culpa.

“Bottom line, school board, I apologize,” Mr. McDonald told the assembly. “You charged me with doing what I really believe is right by your students despite race, color, socioeconomic, whatever. God knows when I make a decision for kids, my heart is for kids and doing the right thing. So I ask you, please, for tonight, let’s make our graduates feel special.” (read more)

MOUNTING TOLL FROM VACCINES (2021 to date)

329,021 Reports Through June 4, 2021

DEATHS 5,888
HOSPITALIZATIONS 19,597
URGENT CARE 43,891
OFFICE VISITS 58,800
ANAPHYLAXIS 1,459
BELL’S PALSY 1,737
LIFE THREATENING 5,885
HEART ATTACKS 2,190
MYOCARDITIS/PERICARDITIS 1,087
THROMBOCYTOPENIA/Low Platelet 1,564
MISCARRIAGES 652
SEVERE ALLERGIC REACTIONS 15,052
DISABLED 4,583

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

– William Casey, CIA Director, Feb. 1981

24 Black-On-White Homicides

May 2021—Another Month In The Death Of White America. (And Whites Aren’t Fighting Back, Unlike Tulsa 1921)

Last month: 29 Whites Dead: April 2021—Another Month In The Death Of White America

Our beat, interracial crime, made a rare appearance in the national Regime Media recently. But they lied about it as usual.

So did Joe Biden. He delivered an “emotional” speech in Tulsa OK June 1 decrying a “horrific” “massacre” the that took place exactly 100 year before, over 20 years before the 78 year-old Biden was born. Steve Sailer calls this “antiquarian” white guilt—see, for example: Antiquarianism: Apparently, White People Were Violent In 1918.

Herewith some more antiquarianism: One hundred years ago, the USA was engulfed in a seven-year “race war,” a series of racial conflicts between blacks and whites. The riots began in 1917 when whites responded to a black-on-white murder in East St. Louis, Missouri. Scores of blacks were killed (some say as many as 200), and an estimated 6,000 blacks were displaced; forced out of their homes and out of the city.

Other riots erupted that year in areas that included Chester, Pennsylvania; Lexington, Kentucky; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Houston, Texas.

Rioting peaked in the summer of 1919—dubbed “The Red Summer” by black author/activist James Weldon Johnson—in which rioting occurred in nearly forty “battles” pitting armed blacks and whites against each other. Hundreds lost their lives as Americans divided themselves along racial fault lines. Many more were injured and thousands—mostly blacks—were left homeless.

The race war persisted through 1923 as rioting marred the cities of Ocoee, Florida; West Frankfort, Illinois; Perry, Florida; and Rosewood, Florida. Leftist historians have chosen to emphasize the battle near Tulsa, Oklahoma where whites burned a large swath of the black Greenwood neighborhood.

That incident has been reframed as an example of untethered White Supremacy unleashed upon the America’s “Black Wall Street.”

But in reality, nearly every riot during this era was triggered by black-on-white crime. Whites responded with a vengeance—only to be vilified by Leftist historians as racist aggressors. (read more)

CIA busted in Belarus

The Kinshasa Interviews: Glenn Greenwald - the interview that breaks the internet

Glenn on broken media, the sociopathic elites, run-ins with Bolsonaro, sex with women, and being 'unpatriotic'


Why are you gay?

When I was quite young, I observed that most of the straight boys were similar to you: obnoxious, uncouth, plagued with stunted emotional development, an unwarranted sense of ego, and a sociopathic lack of empathy, all topped off with very thinly veiled fascist tendencies. I set out determined to find a way to not to be that, and settled on gay. Also, my mother was extremely beautiful and I knew early on that no woman would ever measure up. Her name was Norma Bates. Finally, have you seen pictures of my husband?

Anyway, the intent of this interview is to understand Glenn Greenwald: thinker, investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner, sex symbol.  What is at your core?  What makes you the universally-loved and admired man that you are today?  I am a strong proponent of Age Regression Therapy, and take inspiration from brilliant minds like Hippolyte Bernheim, Theodore Xenophon Barber, and Sigmund Freud, who taught us that trauma in youth will significantly impact one's character development into adulthood.  More than formative, it is central to that person.  What I am trying to figure out here is what made you a seditious little shit?  What singular moment made you hate America?  Did you get vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate on the 4th of July when you were 5 five years old?  Is this what led you to hate America?  Why don't you get on the winning team, son?  Come in for the home run.  Help us with this final drive for the touchdown, YOU PINKO FAGGOT!

I absolutely believe that our personalities shape how we interact with and perceive societal institutions and therefore our political thought. As you suggest, the genesis of that perspective, or that relationship with authority, is formed in childhood.

The formative childhood experience for me was realizing I was something which society scorned and regarded as diseased and shameful: being gay, or to use the charming vernacular of yourself and many of your readers, a “PINKO FAGGOT.” It is an obviously monumental experience to realize that the society around you has long ago decreed that something that is inside of you without your having chosen for it to be there renders you irredeemably broken, dirty, immoral and dysfunctional, and that your only survival option is to desperately hide who you really are and present a false illusion to the world to manipulate them into not discovering the truth.

There are several identifiable ways young, largely defenseless gay children might react to that realization. One strategy is to construct one’s own internal world which resides in the imagination. A more pleasing and welcoming dimension to which one can escape and which replaces the harsh reality that has rejected them, which I think is what explains why gays have excelled in the creative arts. That’s how we get David Bowie, Elton John, Alexander McQueen, James Baldwin, Gianni Versace, Freddy Mercury, Handel and Tchaikovsky.

Others set out to prove to society that they are actually exactly like them, and adopt assimilation as their primary weapon: pleading with others to stop thinking they are different. That’s how we end up Pete Buttigieg, Josh Barro and Ellen. Others still tragically internalize this baseless societal condemnation as true, and that’s why so many LGBT youth end up committing suicide or suffering mental health pathologies.

Like others, the path I chose was to declare war on the structure that viewed itself competent to impose this condemnation on me. To do that, I first had to interrogate what moral and intellectual credibility this constellation of authorities possessed that justified its self-proclaimed right to formulate and issue such judgments. I found that credibility woefully lacking, and once I did, it permanently prevented me from blindly trusting authoritative pronouncements. My pre-adolescent and adolescent strategy was to set out to prove that those who adopted this conceit of moral superiority were far dirtier, more broken, and sickly than those they had condemned (including me).

This manifested as vicious warfare on institutions of authority and, fortunately for me, the skill set with which I was endowed turned out to be well-suited for such combat. I turned the judgmental microscope back onto those who I perceived had first directed it at me, and the amount of bacteria and disease and pathology I saw when doing so was stunning. And I made no secret of the judgment I had formed about my judges.

These attacks of mine, in their early years, were sometimes a bit sloppy and imprecise: lots of collateral damage as I attacked targets that seemed at the time to possess real power but, in retrospect, were just captive servants to it. But it was still excellent training for the work I would end up doing as a lawyer, activist and journalist. And that is the central experience that shapes how I navigate the world. Human institutions are inherently and invariably fallible, and the more certainty and moral superiority they claim, the more filth and deceit they are likely trying to conceal behind that clean, lofty veneer.

The reason why I believe that you are dangerous to God and America is because you are disordered.  You watched the 1993 Richard Linklater coming-of-age movie Dazed and Confused, and you identified with the wrong character.  You could have identified with Mitch the freshman, as the story centred around him.  Or Randall "Pink" Floyd because you wanted to be like him.  Or even Wooderson, the coolest character in the entire movie, which would have let you walk around saying "alright, alright, alright' all day long.  Cool as fuck.  You could have even chosen Darla Marks because she was funny...for a woman.  Instead you chose to identify with Mike Newhouse, the annoyingly high strung guy who got punched out and only wanted to dance, because his goal in life was to become a lawyer for the ACLU.  This makes you an oddball.  By this point in your life you were already too far gone.  You chose to go on a crusade to defend the indefensible.

I didn’t see that film, rendering your drawn-out theory embarrassingly pointless.

But it’s spot on.

You and your spouse, David Miranda, run a shelter for dogs in need, most of which have been sexually abused by white women.  This is very honourable and the two of you should be commended for your volunteer work.  You love dogs, you have talked about your love for them, and have written on this subject as well.  You are also a vegetarian and have spoken out about the cruelty involved in factory farming and why we should do our best to wean ourselves off of meat.  In these two ways you resemble another animal-lover and vegetarian who went by the name of Adolf Hitler.  Are you Hitler reincarnated? Both of you have declared war on America.

I’m a vegan, not a vegetarian: one of the few differences between Hitler and myself. The more I looked, the more astonished I became at the unspeakable industrialized cruelty we now inflict on sentient, emotionally complex, and highly intelligent animals. Many people instinctively oppose veganism because they believe in the nobility and beauty of family farms. Leaving that question to the side, the way we now consume food has nothing to do with family farms: industrialized agriculture is the exact antithesis of family farming; indeed, it is destroying family farms by consuming the entire supply chain. Commercial family farms barely exist any more, thanks to the Smithfields and JBS’s of the world.

By every conceivable perspective -- moral, ethical, religious, environmental, humanitarian, public health, and just basic human decency -- the systematized torture of pigs, cows, birds, and lamb by the billions is grotesque and indefensible. The toxic waste and sludge alone dumped into communities is nauseating and dangerous. The filthy conditions make them a breeding ground for zoonotic viruses and epidemics and the excessive use of antibiotics creates a large risk of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains that can kill humans. The U.S. Government and large corporations even breed dogs for no reason other than to conduct gruesome experiments on them. Many people find that repellent because they love dogs, but there is no conceivable moral distinction between abusing dogs and abusing pigs and cows.

Our shelter was originally motivated by our love of dogs -- we have 27 rescue dogs of our own, plus hundreds more we fostered (I know that sounds like we’re insane hoarder people but we’re not, or maybe we are) -- but it then morphed into a fascination with the uniquely profound connection between dogs and the homeless people who care for them. Most people who have dogs also have other things -- work, family, friends, etc. -- so they love their dogs but not so single-mindedly, whereas homeless dogs and homeless people have nobody and nothing but one another which creates a bond unlike anything I’ve seen.

Our shelter, now in several locations, simultaneously employs homeless people and helps them exit the street while paying them to do what they most love: caring for abandoned animals. I realize, for judging a person’s worth, it’s not as noble or important as putting a rainbow flag or a #BLM hashtag in one’s Twitter bio, but we’re doing the best we can.

The Part of the Interview Where I Let Glenn Act Like He’s Smart So As To Play To His Out of Control Ego

These past five years have witnessed a profound collapse in trust in the American political system.  Egged on by an increasingly hyper-partisan media, conspiracy theories have taken root on both sides of the traditional aisle in US politics.  Yet where QAnon is rightly rejected as being completely detached from reality, polite company pushed the equally false Trump-Russia narrative for years, blasting it on all media day and night.  Why do you think that the mainstream elite fail to see themselves as little different from your typical QAnon when it comes to dealing with reality?  Is it a case that their power is greater, and therefore their ability to mould and shape reality makes them right in their own minds despite all evidence to the contrary?

It has always been this way. Deranged conspiracy theories are spread most aggressively, prolifically and destructively by the guardians of mainstream thought. Such conspiracy theories are scorned only when they are endorsed by the unlicensed and uncredentialled. When they are disseminated by prestigious mainstream sources, they are widely treated as Truth.

The most respected and celebrated news outlets and foreign policy analysts spent all of 2002 and the first part of 2003 telling Americans and the world that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and an active nuclear weapons program: easily the most toxic conspiracy theory of this generation. Because of their lies, by September, 2003 -- six months after the invasion of Iraq -- roughly 70% of Americans believed that Saddam personally planned the 9/11 attack. Yet other than the scapegoat Judy Miller, nobody suffered any career harm. The leading disseminators of this maniacal fiction were promoted and rewarded: Jeffrey Goldberg went from telling good liberal pseudo-intellectual New Yorker readers that Saddam was in alliance with Al Qaeda to running The Atlantic.

The most dangerous and deranged conspiracy theory of the last four years is the multi-headed Russiagate fantasy: the Kremlin has infiltrated the U.S. Government and controls it through sexual blackmail, Moscow has invaded the U.S. electricity grid and is poised to shut off heat in winter -- the craziest and most moronic shit possible. A 2018 poll found that ⅔ of Democrats — ⅔!! — believe that Hillary really won the election but Russians invaded the voting systems and switched her votes to Trump.

Yet the people who did this not only still have their media perches but now use them to posture with indignation about the conspiracies spread by MAGA boomers on Facebook and 4Chan teenagers. They don’t mind conspiracy theories at all. To the contrary, spreading them is their business. They just get angry when others -- especially the peasants -- intrude into their turf.

No 'pillar' of American democracy has collapsed more than media these past few years.  Trust is at an all-time low.  The country now has competing narratives that cancel each other out.  Gone are the days when objectivity (at least attempting it) in journalism was sacrosanct.  Advocacy journalism now rules.  Large parts of the mainstream media are little more than stenographers for the Biden regime.  One may claim that advocating on behalf of those without power is sensible and moral, but the main advocacy that we see today is done by corporate outlets that only serve to buttress the ruling elite.  Chomsky and Herman outlined this for us in their seminal work 'Manufacturing Consent', a book (and a documentary) that greatly changed my perception of the media.  Yet despite their efforts, most people continue to absorb media so long as it conforms to their preconceived notions.  Combine all of these factors and the situation is rather dangerous. No country with competing narratives can stay united.  One side will win out against the other, with or without violence.....but at what cost?

The dominant liberal sectors of the corporate media love to self-victimize, constantly complaining about the unfair loss of faith and trust by large sectors of the public in their pronouncement. Notably, they almost never seek to understand why this is beyond blaming others: we’re unfairly demonized; right-wing leaders call us Fake News; uneducated people want to hear what pleases them, not reality and the truth, etc.. It’s the playbook of Hillary Clinton after her humiliating 2016 loss: they blame virtually everyone on the planet other than themselves for their own failures.

Due to this steadfast refusal to look in the mirror -- and really, given what they would see, it’s hard to blame them -- there is no possibility for reform. The major cause of this loss of credibility is themselves. They aren’t trusted because they don’t deserve to be. But their pomposity and adamant belief that they are divinely entitled due to their superiority to control the flow of information will never permit them to acknowledge that. So they will continue doing what they’ve done, losing more and more trust and driving people away to other, often-unreliable sources of information, and that cycle will never end.

The only way out is for people to restore trust and faith in journalism by demonstrating that it can be done not to aggrandize a particular faction or ideology but by doing one’s best to find the truth given the subjective prism through which all humans see the world.

My view is that the lack of accountability in US media is what has brought us to this situation.  The neo-conservatives of the Dubya regime couldn't believe their luck when Trump began to wins primaries in 2016 because it allowed them to re-brand themselves as members of #TheResistance.  Overnight, Bill Kristol, David Frum and others who were responsible for pushing the WMD lie that laid the groundwork for the catastrophic US invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, were rehabilitated.  Regardless of that fact, they were STILL on the scene during the the interregnum between the Iraqi catastrophe and Trump's Presidency.  David Frum was hired by Woke IDF Prison Guard Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic Monthly, and Bill Kristol was a mainstay on cable TV news.  None of them were held accountable for what they did, and now they have been rewarded for attacking what was largely a scarecrow.

That is one of the many ironies of the Trump years: under the self-glorifying and unhinged banner of #Resisting fascism, American liberals marched behind and empowered war criminals, CIA and FBI goons, neocon sociopaths, the scummiest of the Bush/Cheney operatives who easily scammed them under the name “Lincoln Project,” and the long-discarded and disgraced McCarthyite script that everyone who opposes you is a Kremlin agent and a traitor. Even worse, they relied upon a union of state authority in the form of the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley monopolies, fearful of what Democrats would do when they ascended to power to systematically silence their critics and disappear them from the internet. As I’ve said before, this is the first #Resistance movement in human history that venerates secret security agencies and oligarchical power.

With trust in institutions at an all-time low, and with the political temperature set permanently to MAX, many claim that the USA is tottering and is headed towards collapse.  I take the opposite view.  My take is that the USA is shedding one skin and morphing into something else.  The elites have never been more united despite the sniping between R and D.  Time published a piece recently that detailed how the elites came together to torpedo Trump's re-election.  That in my mind shows resiliency.  Add to this the 4 year long constant drumbeat of TRUMP-RUSSIA, and attach to the increasingly loud anti-China noise from the right, and we have a situation in which half the country wants revenge against Russia, while the other half want to punish China.  This is an almost ideal situation for the military-industrial complex.  Failures at home can be channelled into foreign policy objectives that serve the interests of the elites.  And with the Biden regime re-assembling the Obama Era foreign policy team, we are well on our way to seeing what I call Turbo-America: a hyper-interventionist state that uses everything from sanctions to bombs to punish or coerce countries that fall afoul of its increasingly arbitrary rules.

In one sense, it is true that people in the U.S. are more “polarized” than ever, but it is true only in a limited sense. Take the typical self-identified leftist and stick them in a room with someone right-wing and they will viciously argue for days about race, gender, trans issues, immigration and abortion. But they will have almost no strong views one way or the other key U.S. power centers: the Pentagon, the CIA and intelligence community, Wall Street, Silicon Valley. Watch how often our discourse even mentions these things except in the most fleeting, superficial and reverential ways. To the extent that they talk about economic policy, they will likely find a huge amount of agreement on a wide range of issues without realizing it: how to treat the working class, the malevolent influence of centralized Corporatist power, the menace of monopolistic tech giants, the toxic nature of “free trade” agreements and globalist institutions.

The problem is that they’re trained — largely by media outlets, which rely on people being at each other’s throats constantly and immune to seeking common ground (see Matt Taibbi’s brilliant book Hate, Inc.) — to rush to those areas where they viciously disagree. It provides a sense of purpose and a rush of endorphins and adrenaline which becomes highly and quickly addictive. Those who benefit most from this dreary, lowly dynamic are the key power centres, who most people end up ignoring because they find agreement about those people when they think about them at all. The one thing media outlets and power centres work hardest to prevent is citizens setting aside their endless war posture against one another to realize the common interest they have against the U.S. ruling class, which is composed of the establishment wings of both parties and particularly their corporate funders.

For around a decade now I've been having debates with friends as to whether US elites actually believe what they say with regards to exporting democracy or identity politics, or whether they are a cynical move that serve underlying interests that revolve around power and money.  I imagine that the answer is somewhere between the two, but the idea that such a massive and powerful global empire contains true believers is difficult for me to digest.  I look at Biden's foreign policy statement from earlier this month

tweet

and then see Anne-Marie Slaughter's follow-up

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and I can't help but think how neo-colonialist this is.  This is the polar opposite of realpolitik; it is ideological and fanatical, akin to Lenin and Trotsky's World Revolution.  American power continues to be unrivalled, and US media has become so powerful that it is able to craft narratives totally divorced from reality that begin to impact globally based on America's unmatched power.  Are American elites becoming increasingly detached from reality?

I’ll share with you something I learned from the dark days when I was a litigator. After doing it a few years, I noticed that I invariably believed that all of my clients were the pure victims, and the people against whom we were litigating were pure villains. Rationally, I knew that was highly unlikely; the probability that the people who happened to walk through my doors to hire me to represent them were all angels, and those who they claim had wronged them were all devils was extremely remote, almost non-existent. But emotionally and instinctively, that’s how I approached each case; that I was not just advocating for them in order to be financially compensated — as a job — but I was on a righteous crusade, on the side of Good against Evil.

I realized that in order to be an effective advocate or propagandist — and there is some of both in being a lawyer — you have to get yourself to believe what you’re saying. That’s necessary not only to be effective (though it is that). It’s hard to persuade people of things if you consciously know it’s bullshit, because people will sense that on an intuitive level and that’s where most persuasion happens….but it’s also necessary to be able to believe you’re on the side of good, something which all humans other than absolute sociopaths and psychopaths want to believe. I’m sure there’s no shortage of each of those categories in elite U.S. ruling class circles, but most people operate by the same dynamic as the rest of us. So I think, yes, they do get themselves to believe what they’re saying, that it’s not consciously cynical.

I’d respect it more if it were consciously cynical. The fact that these imbecilic media cretins and career State Department and CIA functionaries actually believe themselves when they say that they’re deeply offended by the repression of Putin or the CCP or Iranian mullahs or Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro — right after they get off a call about the latest U.S. arms shipments to the Saudi monarchs or cash transfers to Egyptian despots or support for a coup against the democratically elected government in Bolivia — is frightening. How could anyone believe that the U.S. actually opposes domestic repression? That kind of self-delusion means humans can get themselves to believe literally anything. That’s more frightening to me than if they were knowingly lying for power.

All of us have watched the coalescing of the Deep State with corporate media and Silicon Valley.  Where once the internet promised freedom, we only got 24 hour surveillance.  Individual privacy is a thing of the past, but this three-headed beast is something worse.  Your work with Snowden (a certain bureaucrat from Chicago that I know insists that he is a CIA agent) and Manning blew the lid off of NSA spying, and the hope was that this would shift the battle in favour of privacy. But the opposite has happened: the security state managed to piggyback the outrage over Trump to convince people that not only are the CIA and NSA the good guys, but that the use of these surveillance tools are required to be used to punish Americans who fall outside of accepted parameters of thought.  Congress is dusting off a mammoth domestic terrorism bill that has been waiting for the right moment to be introduced (with that 'right moment' being a simple riot on Capitol Hill, far from an 'insurrection'), that creates the conditions for possibly treating large swaths of the American public as little different than members of al-Qaida.  How fucked are Americans?

Tell your Chicago bureaucrat friend he’s an absolute idiot (impolite -ed.). Also, Manning didn’t reveal NSA spying; she revealed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and systematic state corruption around the world, so maybe it’s no wonder that you two have forged such a beautiful friendship.

If you look at the political history of the U.S. over the last century, much of it is driven by fear: fear of Communism, of Muslims, of black crime, of immigrants, of the Chinese and Japanese, of white nationalists, etc. Or, at the very least, that’s been the tactic to induce the population to acquiesce to having the U.S. be in a posture of endless war, highly militarized, putting more of its population in cages than any other in the world, torture, rendition, internment, etc. Even if some of those fears had a grain of truth, they have been constantly inflated and exploited to allow the state — and particularly the undemocratic components which operate with no accountability i.e. the security state agencies — to acquire virtually unlimited power in the name of protecting Americans from what they have induced them to irrationally fear.

When you train a population for generations to be impelled primarily by fear, it is very hard to reverse. It becomes a cultural instinct. I don’t think Americans realize how aberrational, rogue and bizarre it is to just go around constantly bombing different countries, because they’ve been trained for so long to accept that as normal (one of many reasons I found anti-Trump fanatics’ obsession with returning to “normalcy” so repellent). Again, if you look at our supposedly intractable political differences, they almost never involve those agencies. As a result, they keep cruising right along with few people paying attention, which is how they like it. The one thing Americans have legitimately to fear — their domestic ruling class — is, amazingly, the one thing they seem not to fear. More often than not, they worship the ones on their team like teenagers worship their favourite girl or boy band. I don’t even want to think about how many media people have pictures of Kamala Harris, Mitt Romney or Nancy Pelosi on their walls.

Civil libertarians like yourself were at the forefront of the battle against the anti-terrorism laws that grew out of the Global War on Terror.  It was a rather simple binary: the state was encroaching on rights and civil libertarians would defend these same rights from encroachment.  Easy-peasy.  Fast forward less than two decades later and we are seeing significant cracks in the edifice of civil libertarianism, even within the ACLU which has prided itself on adhering to its principles to the point of fanaticism.  There are calls to rescind accreditation from law schools that do not conform to the ever-changing rules of diversity.  There is also growing pressure applied to law firms to not take cases of 'problematic' types, with Donald Trump being the best example.  Protection from harm seems to be winning the battle against the defence of individual rights.  Is civil libertarianism dying in the USA, and if so, why?

Civil libertarianism is definitely dying in the places where it once thrived: the ACLU and various sectors (though not all) of left-wing politics. But that does not mean it is dying. The reason we’re seeing the ACLU and media organizations abandon all but the most partisan goals (with rare exceptions, largely due to the intrepid efforts of some old-school lawyers and journalists still lingering within them) is two-fold: 1) in the Trump era, they profited greatly by positioning themselves as anti-Trump #Resistance bulwarks, and are now imprisoned by their overwhelmingly liberal donor and subscriber base who will not tolerate any work or ideas that subvert their partisan beliefs and goals, and 2) the clear reality that many people of the Millennial and Gen Z generation (the former of whom are now entering mid-management and middle age) largely do not believe in values like free speech and due process, and older Gen X and Boomer managers in these institutions are petrified of them — because they can end careers (and love to do that) — and so are coerced into acquiescence.

In the past, the natural allies of civil libertarians were leftists (in opposing McCarthyism and the War on Terror, for instance) and libertarians. But now it is the right that is often singled out as targets of censorship and other forms of recrimination free of due process, so many on the right are re-discovering, or discovering for the first time, the necessity of these values. Ultimately, the only way these values will be preserved is if everyone across the spectrum defends them not just when they and their allies are persecuted, but in all instances — in fact, even more fervently when one’s political adversaries are targeted, because that is what elevates and enshrines these values as a sacrosanct principle rather than a weaponized tactic of convenience.
[...]
Deep Inside Glenn

Both of us were recently named in the top 10 list of media heroes of 2020 by RT.  Word has it that President Putin personally insisted that both you and I both be included in it.  And both you and I are members of the Substack Master Race.  Substack has launched what some are claiming to be a Silver Age of Blogging, and have secured big names like yourself, Matt Taibbi, Scott Alexander, Curtis Yarvin, and myself, and lesser lights like Matty Yglesias.  On Substack we are allowed to not only act as our own content editors, but have the ability to interact directly with our massive built-in audiences without interference from above or through middle-men. We also have removed ourselves from the environment of psychological terror that now stalks offices such as those of the New York Times, where the Red Guard is constantly on the hunt for the next sacrificial lamb.  There is an audience for honest journalism and writing, free of the ever-growing constraints of conformist elitist culture.  What I'm asking you Glenn is: how much do you love the freedom that we now have?

Everyday, I thank the supreme power of the Universe for the creation of Substack. It is the most important human invention since penicillin, and maybe even better than that (I far prefer rapidly spreading bacterial infections to censorious editors and woke millennial newsrooms). Even with the degradation the platform suffered from the arrival of Matt Yglesias and his endless carousel of banal, calculated observations delivered in the whiniest, most petulant and nerdiest manner possible, the ability of writers to find an audience without the constraints plaguing most other institutions is vital. I’m certain that the tattletale journalism brigade at CNN, NBC and the New York Times will soon be targeting Substack with their hall-monitoring censorship demands — fortunately, for now, they seem to be spending most of their time in Clubhouse waiting for someone to say a bad word so they can tell the teacher on them — but it’s only a matter of time before they train their little guns onto Substack. I believe Substack is devoted to resisting those repressive forces. (read more)

“He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once.”

— Albert Einstein

Her Name was Daisy 'Jupiter' Paulsen: 14-Year-Old White Girl Murdered (Stabbed More Than 20 Times) by a Black Male in Fargo, ND: Was He a Refugee?



The ultimate question: was the black murderer in this heinous black-on-white murder in Fargo, North Dakota, a refugee resettled in one of America’s whitest major cities?

Was this murderer of an innocent white teenager brought to our nation by a refugee resettlement agency? (read more)

[...] And an anonymous Tory MP told Politico:  'America should remember who their allies are... unfortunately he's (Biden) so senile that he probably won't remember what we tell him anyway.

'Unless an aide is listening I'm not sure he's going to remember for very long.'    

(read more)

The author, Donald Moss. M.D., a co-founder of Green Gang, a four-person collective working with climate change denial and the relation between human and the natural worlds, a faculty member of both the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a former Chair, Program Committee, American Psychoanalytic Association, has either written an elaborate joke, or is engaged in crass virtue-signaling, or is as disturbed as the homeless guy who shouted slurs at you this morning on the subway.

After a cursory examination of some of his "scientific papers," I judge him to be deeply unwell. He appears to be a self-hating Caucasian (due to unresolved 'daddy issues'?) and has deviant tendencies.

On Having Whiteness
 
Donald Moss (donaldmoss@mindspring.com)
First Published  May 27, 2021 | Research Article

Abstract

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.
(read more)

Book Review: RETHINKING PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE HOMOSEXUALITIES (ANNUAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS, VOL. XXX). Edited by Jerome A. Winer, James William Anderson, Bertram J. Cohler, and R. Dennis Shelby

Free Speech, Love Speech, Hate Speech, and Neutrality: In and Out of the Consulting Room

I and You—One Sentence Per Patient Per Session in The Time of Covid
 
Masculinity as Masquerade

Me Here, You There—Now What? Commentary on Kite, Morris, Wilson, and Kattlove

On Hating in the First Person Plural: Thinking Psychoanalytically About Racism, Homophobia, and Misogyny

On Situating Homophobia

Pussy RIOT: Commentary on Hansbury

The Insane Look of the Bewildered Half-Broken Animal

You know what, I find Mara Gay, "disturbing," and she is an (expletive deleted).

“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing … Essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this,”

“I think that as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness, this is going to continue.”

“That is the real concern. Because, you know, the Trump voters who are not going to get onboard with democracy, they’re a minority. You can marginalize them, long-term. But if we don’t take the threat seriously, then I think we’re all in really bad shape.”

— Mara Gay

Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself.

Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared.

The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation.

The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it.

And, superiority excites envy.

Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call minorities.

— Joseph Sobran, April, 1997
 (originally posted as 2021-04-16 d)

Critical Race Theory & Gender Ideology

For Both, The Chaos is the Point

Social conservatives are often asked to justify why they have decided to “target” the issue of transgender youth, as if they picked this issue because it polls well or some such nonsense. Let me make it very clear why this has “suddenly” become my concern. It is because in America, in 2007, there was one gender clinic. One. Anyone care to guess how many exist today? Three hundred.

So there are now hundreds of pediatric gender clinics in the U.S. Planned Parenthood gives out testosterone on a first visit; depending on the state, it absolutely gives testosterone to minors. Planned Parenthood in Oregon gives it to fifteen-year-olds on their own recognizance. Kaiser dispenses it. So, for today’s teens – whether they have real or typical gender dysphoria or not – testosterone is easily available. Double mastectomy known as “top surgery” is readily available. No, they do not necessarily need even parent approval, depending on the state, and they definitely don’t need a therapist’s note.

OK, so let’s talk about the Transgender Phenomenon. I’m going to start by walking you through the major issues and claims about youth and adolescent gender transition. And we’ll work our way to the big question, which is: How did we get here?  How did we get to a place in which we’re all supposed to pretend that the only way you know I’m a woman is if I give you my pronouns? How did we get to an America in which a 15 year old in Oregon can begin a course of testosterone without her parents’ permission? And a lot of the answer, of course, comes from the hard Left. But at least one part of the answer is conservative squeamishness about an issue it would rather not deal with at all.  So let’s begin by dealing with it.

What is gender dysphoria?  Gender dysphoria – the severe discomfort in one’s biological sex - is absolutely real. It’s also exceedingly rare – typically afflicting roughly .01% of the population, overwhelmingly males. And it typically began in early childhood  - ages 2-4.  Little boys saying, “No mommy, I’m not a boy, I’m a girl.” Boys who were insistent, consistent, persistent in feeling that they’re in the wrong body. It is by all accounts excruciating. I’ve talked to many transgender adults – most of them, biological males – and they describe the relentless chafe of a body that feels all wrong.

There are at least three separate issues I’m going to talk about: 

1)   There are the young kids who may have this classic presentation of gender dysphoria – some of whom, would naturally outgrow this condition; others of whom will become transgender adults.

2)   There is the social contagion currently spreading among adolescent girls – many of whom do not have typical gender dysphoria at all.

3)   There are the activists and biological men who exploit our confusion and our sympathies in order to invade women’s protective spaces and destroy women’s sports.

They are all very different.

So, the young kids.  Now, traditionally, as I said, these were overwhelmingly little boys.  And, if left alone – meaning no with no intervention either to change their name and pronouns – so called “social transition” and no medical intervention – over 70% of these kids would outgrow the gender dysphoria on their own. Most would end up as gay men. Some would not outgrow it and many of those who did not, would transition as adults, after years of therapy. And we used to call those people “transsexuals.”  These were not people who pretended they were somehow really women or always truly female. These were and are just people who felt most comfortable presenting as female. I’ve talked to a lot of transgender adults, and they’ll tell you – they know that people can tell that their biology is different, but the goal isn’t so much to fool other people as to achieve a level of comfort with themselves. For many, this involves hormonal intervention and surgeries. And I have talked to several who will say that the hormones they took and surgeries they underwent brought them a measure of peace. I can also tell you that they are generally holding down steady jobs and are leading good, productive lives.

But today, we don’t just leave kids alone, and let the chips fall – letting some kids outgrow this gender dysphoria and others to transition as adults. Today, we decide the moment a child seems not perfectly feminine or masculine, today we say—I know what this is! This is a trans kid! We take them to a therapist or doctor, nearly all of whom practice so-called “affirmative care” – that is, nearly all of whom have accepted that it is their job to immediately affirm or agree with the patient’s self-diagnosis – and to help them medically transition.

Teachers affirm young children in school – both by teaching the class that only they, the children, know their true genders and encouraging kids to reintroduce themselves to the class according to a new name and gender. Therapists affirm and encourage minors down this path. And even pediatricians do. And the typical next step for these kids – after changing their name and pronouns to their friends and classmates – is puberty blockers.

Puberty blockers shut down the part of the pituitary that directs the release of hormones catalyzing puberty. The most common of these is a drug called Lupron, originally used in the chemical castration of sex offenders. To this day, it has never been FDA-approved for use in kids to halt healthy puberty.

Now you might ask:  why would any parent or doctor do this?  Why would anyone stop the puberty in a child – even a child with genuine gender dysphoria – when that child would be highly likely to outgrow the gender dysphoria on his or her own? Some say, because it’s traumatizing to let a child go through the puberty of the sex to which they don’t want to belong.

(The problem with this, of course, is that in many cases, puberty seems to have helped children overcome their gender dysphoria).

There really is no satisfying answer to why someone would do this, given that scientists have no way of predicting which children will outgrow the dysphoria on their own and which won’t. But the argument that’s made is that these kids can’t wait. The suicide rates for transgender-identified youth and transgender adults are very high, the argument goes. And so we need to get in there and start fixing them as soon and as dramatically as possible.

But unfortunately there are no long-term studies that indicate puberty blockers cure suicidality or even that they produce better mental health outcomes. There are not even good studies that show they are safe for this population long-term, nor even that they are reversible. There’s a big debate right now in the medical community about whether and to what extent the effects of stopping healthy puberty in adolescents is reversible if these kids later stop taking them.

What we do know is that puberty blockers will block all the secondary sex characteristics, sexual maturation and development of bone density from occurring. We do know that because of the inhibition of bone density and other risks, doctors don’t like to keep a child on puberty blockers for more than two years. And we know is that once a child’s healthy puberty is arrested, placing her entirely out of step with her peers, this seems to guarantee that she will proceed to cross-sex hormones like testosterone.  In studies, nearly 100% of kids who are put on puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones.  And we know that if a child goes from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones, that child will be infertile. She may also have permanent sexual dysfunction, given that her sex organs never reached adult maturity, but she will certainly be infertile.

So the claim that puberty blockers are safe and reversible for this population is not well founded. And the claim that it’s a neutral intervention, just a “pause button,” without serious downsides is simply false. We wouldn’t accept that level of glib salesmanship in any other area of medicine.

OK, so those are the kids who actually have gender dysphoria. For the nearly hundred-year history of gender dysphoria, these little kids were what we were talking about when we talk about gender dysphoria. But in the last decade – thanks, in large part to social media – there’s been another population that claims to have gender dysphoria.  This is a population that never before had gender dysphoria in any significant numbers; in fact, before 2012, there was no extant scientific literature on their having gender dysphoria at all: teen girls.

Not only have the rates of these girls’ claiming trans identification risen dramatically in the U.S. and across the West – over 4,400% in teen girls presenting for gender treatment at the UK’s national gender clinic, for instance – but teen girls are now the leading demographic of those claiming to have gender dysphoria.

What’s going on?  The answer is social contagion.  One more instance of teen girls spreading and sharing their pain. There’s a long history of peer contagion with this demographic, of course:  we know that anorexia and bulimia are spread this way, for instance. And we know that this demographic – teen girls – is in the midst of the worst mental health crisis on record, with the highest rates of anxiety, self-harm and severe clinical depression.  We know that the population who tends to fall into social contagions is the same high-anxiety and depressive group of girls who struggle socially in adolescence and tend to hate their bodies.  Add to that a school environment where you can achieve immediate valorization and popularity by declaring a trans identity, and the delicious temptation to stick it to mom.  Add further the great many trans social media influencers who can’t wait to convince troubled teen girls that identifying as trans and starting a course of testosterone will cure all of their problems – and you have a very fast-spreading social phenomenon. I’ve spoken to families at top girls’ schools that attest that 15%, 20%, in one case 30%, of the girls in their daughter’s 7th grade class now identify as trans. When you see that, you’re witnessing social contagion in action. There’s no other reasonable explanation.

These teen girls are in a great deal of very real pain. Almost all of them have dealt at some point with eating disorders or cutting or have been diagnosed with other serious mental health co-morbidities. And now they’re being allowed to self-diagnose with gender dysphoria by a medical establishment that’s decided that its job is merely to “affirm” and agree with these girls. A medical establishment that has, with regard to trans-identified adolescents, effectively turned its doctors into life coaches.

Since my book Irreversible Damage was published in June of 2020, more evidence than I ever could have imagined has come out indicating that its thesis is correct.  You may not know the name Keira Bell  – this is a young woman in the UK, very troubled in adolescence, who was rushed to transition in her teen years and came to regret it. She underwent double mastectomy and years on testosterone, only to realize that her problem had never been gender. She sued the national gender clinic in England. And back in December, the High Court of Justice examined her case, and the claims of similarly situated plaintiffs. The Court examined the medical protocols applied to her – protocols identical to the ones we have in America – and the High Court of Justice was horrified.  It was absolutely appalled that a young girl had been allowed to consent to eliminating her future fertility and sexual function at an age when she could not have possibly have appreciated the loss. (She had begun transitioning at 15).

This was called a “landmark” case in England, by the Telegraph, the Times of London, and even the Guardian.  The ruling was seen as a clear condemnation of the effort to fast-track so many young girls to transition. And one of the things the court noted was that the clinic had been unable to show any psychological improvement in the girls it had treated with transitioning hormones.

If you didn’t read about the landmark Keira Bell case in the American legacy media, well, that’s because they largely decided to pretend it didn’t happen. Just as they continue to ignore or dismiss the stories of thousands of detransitioners --- these are young women who regret their medical transition and attempt to reverse course. So in America, the teen trans phenomenon gets treated as a ‘conservative issue’ – that is a political issue – rather than a medical one.  And so perhaps the greatest medical scandal of this decade is dismissed as a conservative preoccupation.

Finally, there’s a third group of people we talk about when we talk about the “transgender phenomenon,” and this is the group that seems to want to eradicate girls and women’s sports and protective spaces. Many or most of these proponents are not transgender themselves. But they are activist, and they are energized.  And they do seem to be winning.  They promote dangerous bills like the Equality Act now before the U.S. Senate, which would make it impossible ever to exclude a biological male from a girls’ sports team or scholarship or a woman’s protective space like locker rooms and prisons. And they would do this based entirely on a man’s self-identification. All a violent male felon needs to do is announce his new pronouns and identity and he becomes eligible to transfer into women’s prison wherever such laws are found. We have these laws now in California and Washington and as you might imagine, hundreds of biological male prisoners have applied to transfer in.

For this third group it is not enough that we create a separate, unisex bathroom, while preserving a women’s room for women. It is not enough to have an “open category” for those trans-identified athletes who do not wish to be stigmatized, while preserving the “girls team” for high school aged biological girls. And it is not enough to keep a separate safe-zone in a prison for those trans-identified biological men who may be at risk in a male prison. No, they are working to abolish all women-only spaces. They want all men to be able to self-identify their way into them, and they want to do it right now.

So these three groups are very different:  You have young children, some of whom do suffer with gender dysphoria; you have the adolescent girls, many of whom are caught in a social contagion; and you have the activists, who are using the other two groups to attack women and to advance their goal of chaos and social upheaval.

What these three have in common has nothing to do with real gender dysphoria. What they have in common is that they are all shrouded in Gender Ideology. Put another way, what they have in common is that they are all soaked in lies.

Lies are told about the risks of the treatments we administer to young children – both to play down the real dangers and to wildly exaggerate the degree to which we know medical transition to be a cure. Lies are told about the researchers and journalists who try to report on the social contagion among teen girls, in order to discredit that hypothesis or stifle its revelation. Lies are told about both the inherent dangers of eradicating women’s protective spaces and rights and the degree to which this is the only way to save a community from suicide.

The way to think about Gender Ideology is that it is the sibling of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory goes into schools to convince white kids that they bear the original sin of their skin color. Gender Ideology marches into those same schools and tells kindergartners – yes, they do this throughout the public school system of my state, California – to tell preschool children that there are a great many genders and, while someone may have guessed that they are a girl or a boy, only they know their true gender. 

Critical Race Theory postulates both that race is the most important feature of any person and that white people, existing as they do in a state of racial privilege, are not able to participate in a wide variety of discussions about our democracy. Gender Ideology tells women – which it calls “cis-women” - that they are not entitled to their fear or their sense of unfairness as biological men enter their protective spaces and claim their trophies and records and scholarships. In fact, women and girls can’t even use the English language to describe their problem, since calling a transwoman “biologically male” is an act of transphobic bigotry.

These invidious dogmas have corrupted our schools, our universities, almost all of our legacy newspapers and magazines, the medical accrediting organizations – American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, Pediatric Endocrine Society – and even our scientific journals.

Just to give you a sense of how far things have gone, I was contacted about eight months ago by a member of the National Association of Science Writers. The NASW is an association of journalists with science backgrounds tasked with explaining scientific phenomena to the public. This person sent me emails showing me that a member of the NASW online forum had been expelled for mentioning my book.  I talked to Sean Scott, who had been expelled from the NASW online forum. He hadn’t even read my book; he merely wrote that it sounded interesting to him and mentioned Lisa Littman’s research.  He was immediately banned from the forum and labeled transphobic.

And I’ve heard the same thing from endocrinologists and psychiatrists and pediatricians and scientific researchers who write around these issues. If they point out risks of transgender interventions, they struggle to get research into journals and very often their letters to the editor, pointing out flaws in the studies touting all these interventions—those letters aren’t published.  The funding goes to research that promotes gender transition and downplays risks.

There are phalanxes of young doctors – many of them in pediatrics or child psychiatry – who believe their primary job is “social justice.”  And they don’t hide this – they brag about it nonstop online.  And you’re starting to see this kind of thing put into practice. Perhaps America’s most prestigious hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, recently announced it would offer preferential care to patients based on race.  And on questions of gender, we’re seeing it with the mass celebration of transitioning treatments provided to young people by doctors who show an inexcusable  complacency about the risks of these treatments. The Washington Post recently quoted some of these young doctors, and claimed that it was a factual matter that “puberty blockers are fully reversible.” That’s not something anyone can claim to know yet – they’re certainly not psychologically reversible, and perhaps not physically either; we simply don’t have the data yet. So you’re seeing this startlingly quick corruption of medicine and science. And it is a symptom of a larger Woke corruption of American society.

Transgender Adults vs Transgender Activists

There’s something I say every time I am asked to speak, and I say this for the simple reason that it is true:  Transgender adults are some of the nicest, soberest and kindest people I have met in my work as a journalist and writer. They have good jobs, they have stable associations, and they are leading admirable, productive lives. They have absolutely no desire to harm women or to push transition en masse on children.  The activists do not represent them.

I have met adult transgender people who seem to have been helped by transition. But also, a belief in freedom absolutely requires allowing adults to make really consequential decisions for their own lives. Adulthood in a free society means you can change your religion, you can change your name, you can take a dangerous job – such as Andy Ngo and I have – and yes, you can choose to undergo sex reassignment surgery. And whenever I am in conversation with a transgender adult, I always use their chosen name and pronouns, and I believe it speaks well of conservatives who extend this courtesy.

BUT – and this is a big but – I never lie.  So I never say, and will never say – “Transwomen are women.”  That is a dangerous lie.  It’s a lie which, when promoted in public, leads to unjust and even dangerous consequences for women and girls.  When we lie in public, we usher in all kinds of consequences – the obliteration of women’s protective spaces (battered women’s shelters, locker rooms, and prisons) and the destruction of women’s and girls’ athletics. Reciting these lies is not mere courtesy, whatever the proponents say – it is the cowardly surrender of women’s welfare as sacrifice to the Woke gods.  And it’s wrong.

In the public sphere, the lie is the harm. It does damage to our ability to communicate, to comprehend each other, and makes it impossible to object in the face of unfairness and cruelty. If a “trans girl really is just a kind of girl,” after all, there is no basis for objecting to the 17 year old boy who handily beat all the girls on the track team.

I’m often asked, why Are The Trans Activists Doing This?

Why would a teacher tell her class of Kindergartners that only they know their true gender?  What could possibly be the justification for telling small boys that they might really be girls and small girls that they might really be boys?

The biggest hint I got to the answer came from the population of detransitioners – young women who underwent medical transition and regretted it.  Again and again they told me that while they were transitioning they were angry, they were sullen, and they were politically radical.

They very often cut off their families—they were coached in this by transgender influencers on line—and they rushed toward their new, “glitter families.”  You’ll often see gender-confused people among the ranks of Antifa or at Black Lives Matter rallies.  Having turned against their families of origin, they are easy prey for those who recruit revolutionaries.

Put another way:  the chaos is the point. Just as the point of Critical Race Theory is to turn the American people against one another, so the point of Gender Ideology is to stop the formation of stable families, the building blocks of American life.  Let me say again:  this is not the goal of transgender adults.  But it is the goal of the Gender Ideology and the transgender movement – namely, the creation of a new victim class, eager to join the revolution.

How do we push back on the onslaught of Gender Ideology?

First, we must oppose the indoctrination of children in Gender Ideology. There is absolutely no good reason for it and it does real harm. You can absolutely insist that all children treat each other kindly without indoctrinating an entire generation in gender confusion.

Second, in public, we must speak up, and we must speak the truth. Always, wherever we find ourselves—at work, whatever we do.  We must refuse to recite the lies.

We must clearly distinguish between, for instance, transgender Americans, many of whom are wonderful – and an ideological movement, which seeks to warp our children and wreck our families. This is a movement that would turn our children against themselves because its advocates know there is no greater horror to a parent – there is no quicker way to bring America to its knees – than by prompting our children to do irreversible harm to themselves.

The people who’ve been pushing this ideology, they got a big head start on us – perhaps by a decade. But they have awakened a sleeping giant. The success of my book, the fact that I was invited to speak to you today, the fact that state legislatures are debating these issues, testify that a cultural battle is at last being fought.  We cannot afford to lose. These are our kids and grand kids. Our future literally depends on our winning this.(read more)

Incarcerated Women Brace for Influx of Male Inmates

A reflection on my piece in the Wall Street Journal

The women with whom I spoke – currently and formerly incarcerated at “Chowchilla” prison (as the Central California Correctional Facility is colloquially known), this state’s highest security women’s prison – are watching as biological males begin to self-identify as females and transfer in. Washington state, which has a similar policy, has already allowed a rapist and serial killer of women to transfer into the women’s prison. As is true in Washington state, California requires no sex reassignment surgeries or hormones for men to become eligible for transfer to the women’s prison. Self-identification is enough. With good reason, these women are terrified.

Nearly all women who commit violent crimes, they told me, do so under the influence of a brutal man (normally a domestic partner). That does not excuse their crimes, of course. Their victims deserved justice; the women deserved incarceration. But it does provide context to their understanding of their new roommates: men, in their experience, are frequently vicious and terrifying. Now, they will be trapped in close quarters with male bodies. Being terrorized in this manner was never part of their sentence.

 Many of these women are victims of sexual abuse. Rochelle Johnson is currently serving a life sentence in Chowchilla for felony murder (she was not the killer, but participated in a robbery in which the victim was stabbed). “How are you going to force me to live with somebody when you don’t know what I went through as a child--you don’t know what I went through to make me dislike men?” she said.

Almost no one cares about these women. As convicted felons, many of them have lost their right to vote. Their social and political power is nearly non-existent. But when I sat down with them, I met women who spoke more sense about the reality of sex differences than I find almost anywhere.

And here’s why this piece is so urgent: In a matter of months, as male-bodied offenders enter the system simply as “female,” it may be impossible to write about this issue at all.

For the moment, the transfers are arriving from male prison. But under California law (and that of other states with similar laws – and presumably all states, if the Equality Act passes), male convicts will soon not need to begin their sentence at the male prison. They will simply identify as women at time of conviction and go straight into women’s prison as “female inmates.” In other words, they may soon be untraceable by journalists or feminist groups who would want to know how the women trapped in this experiment are faring.

As other new laws go into effect, for example, allowing the changing of sex on birth certificates, and as it increasingly becomes regarded as an act of impermissible discrimination to record biological sex that conflicts with ‘gender identity’ on any public document – it may be impossible to know which of the prisoners at women’s facilities are biologically male. The violence they perpetrate against the female prisoners will simply be recorded as ‘women on women’ violence. Only those at the prison will be the wiser; the rest of us will live behind an epistemological blockade. And an experiment of ghastly indifference to the lives and safety of these women, will be deemed a progressive victory. (read more)

The University as the Woke Mission Field: A Dissident Women’s Studies Ph.D. Speaks Out

I have a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies, but I’m not woke anymore. I write under a pseudonym because, if my colleagues were to find out about my criticisms of this field, I would be unable to find any employment in academia. That someone who critiques the axioms of a field of study feels compelled to write under an assumed name tells you everything you need to know about the authoritarianism underpinning this ideology. I no longer believe that the fundamental ideas of Women’s Studies, and of Critical Social Justice more generally, describe reality; they are at best partial explanations—hyperbolic ideology, not fact-based analysis. I have seen this ideology up close and seen how it consumes and even destroys people, while dehumanizing anyone who dissents.

I’m sad to say it, but I believe that Critical Social Justice ideology—if not beaten in the war of ideas—will destroy the liberal foundation of American society. By liberal I mean principles including, but not limited to, constitutional republican government, equality under the law, due process, a commitment to reason and science, individual liberty, and freedom—of speech, of the press, and of religion. Because Critical Social Justice ideology is now the dominant paradigm in American academia, it has flowed into all other major societal institutions, the media, and even corporations. Far from being counter-cultural, Critical Social Justice ideology is now the cultural mainstream. A diverse spectrum of liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and all others who, to put it bluntly, want the American constitution to continue to serve as the basis for our society have to team up to prevent this ideology from destroying our country.

I became “woke” around 2003, so I have nearly two decades of experience with Critical Social Justice ideology. As the oldest daughter in a working-class family with six kids, neither of my parents had a college degree, although my mom had taken some community college classes. My high school teachers emphasized the importance of going to college. While I wasn’t sure what opportunities a college education would bring, I decided that it would best to attend, given the urgency with which all the teachers and guidance counselors discussed college as a necessity. I was a good, not great, student, who scored highly very highly on the verbal component of standardized tests. I loved literature and writing, so I figured that I’d get a bachelor’s degree in English literature, then maybe find a job as an administrative assistant and write in my free time. For a seventeen year-old girl who wasn’t especially ambitious, it seemed like a decent plan. At least it was better, I thought, than continuing to work part-time as a waitress. And through a combination of scholarships and part-time work, I realized that I’d be able to complete a bachelor’s degree without incurring any debt.

When I began attending college classes in 2000, I registered for a Western civilization course and fell in love with the Greek and Roman classics, so I continued to take additional courses of this type. The twentieth-century Western civilization course was taught by a very personable and funny women’s studies professor. I don’t think it is widely understood that first-generation college students, in general, don’t know the politics behind who becomes university professors. I naively assumed that professors are among the smartest people in the country, and I had no idea that the professoriate is heavily slanted to the ideological left. I now understand that Critical Social Justice professors are evangelists for their faith and the university is their mission field. Their goal is to take young students—inexperienced, eager to succeed—unmoor them from any faith tradition they might have, even if it’s just American civics, and replace that with Critical Social Justice ideology. And, for the most part, these professors succeed. They are, on the whole, likable people—energetic, personable, and caring.

My first encounters with Critical Social Justice came during the feminism unit of this course, which included works by Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Shulamith Firestone, among others. I was interested in learning about feminism, but Firestone’s argument to eliminate the biological family alarmed me, as I hoped to have both a career and children someday. Also, I didn’t believe Firestone’s argument that motherhood is inherently oppressive. From witnessing my mom’s own experiences with having six kids, I knew that she wasn’t oppressed. It was a choice she freely made because she loved children and felt that taking care of them, in spite of the difficulties, was rewarding. In spite of my reservations about Firestone’s book, I became interested in learning more about feminism and began to check out more women’s studies books from the library. As a young university student, encountering Critical Social Justice ideas felt intoxicating, like stumbling onto a portal into a new world. I felt like a detective, with my newly developing critical consciousness understanding society for the first time—all the oppression, the sexism, racism, the evils of capitalism, and so on. It felt righteous, like I was part of a counter-cultural movement, a vanguard helping to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.

The women’s studies professor, sensing that she had an acolyte, encouraged my interest in becoming more involved in advocacy for women. Over the summer, I worked as an intern at a feminist nonprofit and met a lot of people on the radical left, including anarchists. Around this time, I attended a few protests for various causes, but after a couple of years with this ideology as my guiding framework, I grew exhausted by feeling constant anger. I became tired of focusing on all the injustices of the world, not on what I had to be grateful for. It was a miserable, resentment-based life, and I felt helpless to solve the world’s problems.

My foray into radical politics ended around the time I started a master’s program in creative writing. I focused on reading literature and my colleagues’ works, which were complex and nuanced, not ideologically motivated in the slightest degree. After finishing my master’s degree, I taught writing as a college lecturer for a couple of years, then decided to apply for Ph.D. programs in hopes that having a doctorate would increase my pay. One of the most galling forms of hypocrisy I’ve experienced is that leftist professors claim a commitment to “social justice,” yet the academic departments they run employ large numbers of underpaid adjunct instructors who are closed out of the high pay and job security of the tenured radicals.

When I began my Ph.D. program in 2013 at a highly ranked university, I began to see that something about my new colleagues was different from what I remembered about my colleagues just a few years earlier. At first, I chalked this up to the fact that I was a handful of years older than most of the students, many of whom had recently completed their undergraduate degrees. They seemed angry, self-righteous, and determined, lacking the intellectual humility that I had admired so much in the friends I’d made in my master’s program. I now realize that these students were “woke.” Having spent the past couple of years teaching writing to working-class students, I hadn’t been exposed to Critical Social Justice ideology in some time, and I was surprised to see the inroads it had made in the decade since I’d first encountered it.

I realized that Critical Social Justice was no longer a fringe intellectual field of study, but a real force that was reshaping the university. Early on in my program, I recall a panic about racism at the university, and many students issued social media demands of the administration to increase minority enrollment. While I fully support that goal, I feel that such efforts are best advanced through mentoring and guiding promising young students beginning in elementary school, not waiting until they reach adulthood and then attempting to force equal outcomes. Around this time, I became extremely disturbed when, while serving on a committee that gave writing awards, I was attacked by other committee members for judging on merit, for not taking into account skin color or gender.

Yet I don’t think I fully understand the authoritarian aspects of woke ideology until after Trump won the 2016 election. In late 2016 and early 2017, I witnessed shocking behavior from my colleagues, who began attacking Republicans, white people, conservatives, and Christians as oppressors. They attacked free speech, saying that some people did not deserve a platform because they were engaging in “hate speech.” I argued that there isn’t a clear definition of what constitutes hate speech; and that the constitution protects all speech, save for incitement to imminent lawless action. For saying this, I was attacked as stupid, a bad person, a “right-winger.” Early in Trump’s administration, one of my colleagues said that political violence was justified as a response to his “evil” policies. While I’m no fan of Trump, I oppose violence—a basic principle I thought that all Americans shared. It was in this context that I became disillusioned with the ideology in which I had been immersed for years.

I decided to seek out and try to understand other points of view, so I read books by authors to whom I had never been exposed, such as F.A. Hayek, Ronald Bork, Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Sowell, and others. I began to read and listen to conservative, classically liberal, and libertarian thinkers—people whose ideas I had never encountered in all my years of so-called “higher” education. I listened with an open mind, and I didn’t see any hatred from these thinkers. On the contrary, I discovered carefully reasoned, evidence-based arguments that had much greater explanatory abilities than anything I’d read in the Critical Social Justice literature.

I realized that Critical Social Justice ideology is not only intellectually vacuous; it is downright dangerous, and that the reason it has captivated so many minds is not because of the strength of its ideas, but because it has succeeded in silencing more reasonable and time-tested principles. If I had encountered a wider variety of ideas in my undergraduate—and especially in my graduate—education, I would have been spared years of being captive to Critical Social Justice ideology; I would likely have changed my field of study to something more practical; I would have matured more quickly in understanding the complex, and sometimes tragic, nature of human behavior; and I would have developed a more rational, sustainable understanding of how to live in the world as a decent person, outside of the narrow framework of being an activist for “social justice.” If Critical Social Justice ideology had been presented in a more intellectually diverse educational landscape, I would have been able to properly assess the strengths and weaknesses of Critical Social Justice arguments. Sadly, American universities are, for the most part, not marketplaces of ideas, but mere echo chambers.

It is an obvious fact that all civilizations must pass on their values to the young; if they do not, or if the young are taught different values, then the civilization cannot sustain itself. It is a great shame that an essential site for the transmission of civilizational values—academia—was lost decades ago. As early as 1951, William F. Buckley observed that Yale University was no longer producing graduates who had a commitment to fundamental American values. The advancement of Critical Social Justice ideology has been well documented at this point, so it is not necessary to trace that history here. Suffice it to say that our universities are so infected with Critical Social Justice ideology that they are probably not salvageable at this point.

Those who are attempting to preserve an existing system—in this case preserving the classical liberal principles of American society—have a natural disadvantage when they encounter people, even a small group, who seek, with fanatical devotion, to dismantle that system and replace it with another social order. Nassim Taleb makes this point well in his observation about minority rule: “It suffices for an intransigent minority…to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.” The good news is that it is still possible at this point that another faction of equally committed people actively resisting Critical Social Justice ideology—people who fervently defend the values upon which America was founded—can sustain the liberal social order.

However, people committed to liberal values have many significant disadvantages in this fight. They are generally older, having come of age at a time before Critical Social Justice ideology was dominant, and when strong liberal norms—specifically values of free speech and liberty—prevailed throughout society, whereas the majority of Millennials and Generation Z are heavily woke. Liberals are committed to Enlightenment values of reasoned debate, pursuit of truth, the scientific method, fact-based analysis, and treating people as individuals, not as groups. In contrast, the woke view these Enlightenment values as a white supremacist project; wokeness advances primarily through underhanded tactics: histrionic open letters that accuse ideological opponents as traumatizing and even threatening the very existence of people of color, cancel culture, flash mobs, protests that sometimes devolve into riots, and so forth. Worse, the entrenchment of Critical Social Justice ideology in academia, mass and social media companies, philanthropic foundations, corporate human resources departments, federal and state administrative bureaucracies, and Silicon Valley—combined with surveillance technology—points toward the emergence of a social credit system similar to what exists now in China. Liberals, in short, are bringing the proverbial knife to a gun fight. But we must fight. There is no other choice.

In closing, I want to offer some thoughts on how to defeat Critical Social Justice ideology. If we want to understand why this ideology is winning over the young, we have to understand its appeal. American culture is becoming increasingly secular, which means that more young people don’t have a faith tradition, and social justice ideology is, as many have discussed, filling a religious void. The woke have a messianic complex, a (if you’ll excuse the pun, millenarian) goal to remake society, and view anyone who is opposed to their project not as simply having a different worldview, but as evil. My intuition is that once Critical Social Justice becomes increasingly entrenched as the dominant cultural ideology—especially because of its totalitarian and censorious nature—young people will instinctively begin to rebel and seek out other ideas. This, in fact, seems to be happening in Generation Z already. As a result, there will be a revitalization of classical liberalism, necessitating people who are versed in it to serve as teachers and mentors, but there will be much damage done to our institutions and country in the meantime.

There is so little viewpoint diversity in academia that students don’t even realize that what they are being taught is an ideology, not factual analysis. As Niall Ferguson accurately put it, “North American academia is in the grip of a hideous mania, a cross between the early-modern witch craze and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which implacable zealots conduct grotesque show trials, innocent individuals have their reputations, careers and sanity destroyed, and everyone else cowers, terrified that they will be next to be ‘canceled.’” (Source: a blurb from Quillette’s new book, Panics and Persecutions). The American public university system—especially humanities and social sciences—is a cancer on society, as it is teaching students to hate their country and its core values. This is not to say that there shouldn’t be academic critiques of the country. On the contrary, critiques help to improve society. But we have reached a point where there are hardly any academics left to transmit the basic principles of the country.

Heterodox Academy is doing great work to highlight the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy. Their research has shown that professors who lean left outnumber conservative professors by a ratio of nine to one. (Source: “Democratic professors outnumber Republican ones by 9 to 1 ratio, according to new data” | The College Fix). As a result, leftist ideology—most commonly Critical Social Justice—dominates the intellectual culture, and hiring committees carefully select for only one type of diversity among their faculty hires (meaning only valued victim groups), in addition to those who already agree with their ideology. Unless non-woke people structure their application materials and writing samples to appear to follow the Critical Social Justice ideology, I don’t see any inroads for non-leftist scholars to find academic positions. For the few non-leftists in academia who sit on hiring committees, they need to take a stand—as Professor Dorian Abbot at the University of Chicago recently did—for only hiring the most qualified candidates, without regard to their sex, race, color, ethnicity, or any other immutable characteristic.

One of the most urgent needs is the development of a grassroots movement for intellectual diversity on campus, spearheaded by students, alumni, parents, and concerned citizens. I hope that existing conservative, centrist, or libertarian organizations can help to facilitate this movement by providing organizational and logistical support at campuses throughout the country. Everyone should take a close look at their state’s public universities’ Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiatives to see if intellectual diversity is included. If it is not, then the obvious first step is to advocate for the inclusion of intellectual diversity. Concerned taxpayers, students, parents, and alumni, working with the elected officials in those university districts, if necessary, need to ensure that universities have intellectual diversity in humanities and social sciences course offerings. If intellectual diversity is included in the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiative (in my experience, most of these initiatives include at least a brief reference to intellectual diversity), then work can be done to survey students to see if they feel that intellectual diversity is represented, particularly in their humanities and social sciences courses. Heterodox Academy has published relevant survey data on the dearth of intellectual diversity in these fields.

If America has any chance of continuing the classical liberal values upon which it was founded, then students who have a commitment to these values have to enter the teaching profession—as doctoral students in education, as administrators, and as public school teachers. Critical pedagogy, and more specifically critical race theory, are the dominant discourses controlling all levels in American schools of education, so students need to tread lightly and assent, at least outwardly, to Critical Social Justice ideology. Once in the classroom, however, teachers should reject all pressures to teach Critical Social Justice, and especially critical race theory, because it is an inherently racist ideology and because it instantiates the problem—racism—that it purports to solve. Critical race theory also needs to be resisted because it, as its own proponents assert, “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction). Teachers should take a stand for fighting racism within liberalism, not by adopting critical race theory. If there is not already a nonprofit organization devoted to assisting non-woke students to enter the teaching profession—again, at all levels, as professors of education, as administrators, and as public school teachers—then one should be organized immediately. This could also be a special project for existing right- or libertarian-leaning organizations.

Another important project should be the revival of Western civilization and Great Books courses, at all levels of education, but most critically in the universities. In 1964, 15 of the 50 premier universities in America required students to take a survey of Western civilization. All 50 offered the course, and nearly all of them (41) offered it as a way to satisfy some requirement. (Source: New York Post, by Ashley Thorne “The drive to put Western civ back in the college curriculum,” March 29, 2016). But since 1987, when Jesse Jackson led 500 students around Stanford University protesting the requirement that undergraduates take a course in Western Civilization, which they denounced as Eurocentric, white-male indoctrination, most colleges have eliminated Western civ courses for diversity or multiethnic course requirements. An excellent example of a Western civ curriculum can be found in the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, which is dedicated to “exploring enduring questions of American constitutional law and Western political thought.” Another avenue is to look into funding institutes for education in Western civilization as a new department at extant colleges and universities.

I would love to see crowd-sourced funds used to construct a beautiful classical building adjacent to one of the ugliest college campuses in the country, preferably one composed entirely of postwar Brutalist buildings. I imagine that students whose spirits are continually depressed by attending classes in the midst of such hideous architecture would feel intrigued to enter such a beautiful building. Once inside, they might learn that there is, in fact, such a thing as beauty; that it matters, and that Critical Social Justice ideology can never build anything beautiful; it can never, in fact, build anything at all—it can only destroy. Once inside that building, students might become interested in registering for a course on Western civilization, a course in which all thought is permitted, in which no one is threatened with cancellation: a microcosm of what a university environment used to be. In this way, we might plant and nurture the seed of resistance to the increasing totalitarianism of Critical Social Justice.

In the long term, it is going to be necessary to create more universities devoted to classical education, not indoctrination into Critical Social Justice ideology, as well as more K-12 private and charter schools in the classical tradition because university schools of education have been training “social justice” educators for decades now, so Critical Social Justice ideology is now in the K-12 public schools. At a policy level on this problem, we need avenues for teacher certification outside of the existing teacher colleges, which are wholly committed to critical pedagogy and other failed approaches. Forcing every licensed teacher (usually for state jobs) to undergo ideological training to gain licensure is not only a problem but should be illegal. At the personal level, my advice to everyone with kids who can afford to do so is to pull your kids out of the public schools immediately and enroll them in private schools, or home school. Although home schooling has already begun to come under attack, it is still a viable option—at least for now. In the future, homeschooling will come under increased scrutiny and I believe there will be attempts to render it illegal. I realize that not everyone can afford to home school or send their kids to private schools (many of which are not safe from Critical Social Justice, either). I strongly recommend that all parents emphasize the value of vocational training programs for their children as avenues to career paths that pay well and offer a great deal of autonomy.

My hope is that new immigrants to America will increasingly speak out against Critical Social Justice ideology as an American instantiation of what is called, in other contexts, tribalism—a form of corruption that has damaged many countries. Far from being a bastion of white supremacy, America’s liberal values are what have attracted people from all countries to undergo great hardship to come here, precisely because this is one of the few places in which ordinary people can exercise their talents to achieve a standard of living that is impossible in most of the world. It is my fervent hope that more American college students—especially the “woke” who rail against their own country as evil—would be required to spend a semester abroad in a developing country in order to gain some much-needed perspective on the struggles people face who were not fortunate enough to be born into such an “oppressive” place as America.

Lastly, I have focused mostly on academia and education because this is the sector I know best, but I strongly urge everyone, from all walks of life, to embrace your sense of humor (a quality that is conspicuously absent in woke culture). Wokeness should continue to [be] relentlessly mocked and parodied through meme culture (Andrew Doyle’s Titania McGrath is a great example). Just as important: Be courageous. Stand up for the beliefs that have made America a great country. If you hear people treating others as members of groups, articulate the importance of treating people as individuals. As Jordan Peterson put it, “The smallest minority is the individual.” If you encounter people treating others badly because of their gender or skin color, say that this behavior is morally wrong. If you see people attempting to “cancel” others, articulate why this is a terrible way to treat others. If you witness attacks on freedom of speech and advocacy of censorship, or if you meet people who are in favor of “hate speech” laws, or laws to combat “misinformation” (a code word for non-leftist ideas), articulate why freedom of speech is an absolutely essential and non-negotiable value. If you hear people discussing why they think socialism is great, take a stand for free markets and the prosperity they have produced. If you hear people calling for retributive justice and political violence, push against it and discuss why violence is never acceptable. If you encounter attacks on meritocracy, make a case for why merit is essential to the advancement of individuals and societies. I think a lot of liberals, like me, generally, if not naively, assumed that the liberal values underpinning America would simply continue throughout our lives, but these values are under attack and they need to be vigorously and unapologetically defended. Our civilization is at stake and the hour is late. (read more)

Godwin's Law

Godwin's law, short for Godwin's law (or rule) of Nazi analogies,^[1][2] is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler becomes more likely.^[2][3]

Promulgated by the American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990,^[2] Godwin's law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions.^[4] He stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics.^[2] It is now applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other rhetoric^[5][6] where reductio ad Hitlerum occurs.

In 2012, "Godwin's law" became an entry in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.^[7]
(read more)

Quitting maths can affect teens' BRAINS: Adolescents who stop the subject at age 16 show a reduction in a critical chemical for neural development

• Quitting maths at age of 16 may have an adverse effect on brain development
• Teenagers who stuck with maths at A-level had higher levels of brain chemical
• Gamma-AminoButyric Acid important for memory, learning and problem-solving
• Researchers led by University of Oxford scanned brains of 87 A-level students

After years of wrestling with the complexities of algebra, fractions and mental arithmetic, some teenagers may be only too keen to dump maths at the earliest opportunity. 

But a new study suggests that quitting the subject at the age of 16 may have an adverse effect on brain development.

Researchers led by the University of Oxford found that adolescents who stuck with maths in their A-levels had higher levels of a brain chemical important for memory, learning and problem-solving.

They recruited 87 A-level students to take part in the study and, after scanning their brains, discovered that those who had continued with maths had higher levels of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in an area called the prefrontal cortex.

The study also found that the students with more GABA were better at solving brain-teasing questions when tested around 19 months later.

Scientists believe that developing new strategies to solve tricky mathematical equations strengthens this part of the brain, potentially helping people become better problem-solvers in later life.  

Roi Cohen Kadosh, senior author of the study and professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said: 'This is a good result for people who have continued studying maths, as they have engaged their brain in an activity which could benefit them in the long-term.

'But my personal view is that forcing people who don't enjoy maths to keep studying it is not the right strategy.

'Instead we should try to investigate possible alternatives, such as training in logic and reasoning, that engage the same brain area as maths.'

He added: 'While we started this line of research before Covid-19, I also wonder how the reduced access to education in general, and maths in particular (or lack of it due to the pandemic) impacts the brain and cognitive development of children and adolescents.

'While we are still unaware of the long-term influence of this interruption, our study provides an important understanding of how a lack of a single component in education, maths, can impact brain and behaviour.'

In 2019, a study claimed that millions of adults in the UK lack basic numeracy skills, with half of those of working age having the maths ability expected of a primary school child.

Two thousand adults aged 16 to 75 were asked five basic maths questions by the charity National Numeracy with no time limit and were allowed pen, paper and calculator.

Just over half got no more than two right.

The University of Oxford study is published in the journal PNAS. (read more)

The Cult Dynamics of Wokeness

Before I got involved in studying Critical Social Justice like I do now, I mostly studied the psychology of religion. I took particular interest in the more authoritarian and cultish elements that can spring up within otherwise more reasonable faith traditions. Cult indoctrinations, in particular, tend to follow very predictable stages. First, there is initiation; then there is indoctrination; and then there is reprogramming. These three phases are distinct and must be understood on their own terms.

I. Cult Initiation

One thing I learned through all that study is that most fundamentalist religious (in the colloquial, not technical sense) and cult conversions, especially in adults, occur by using doctrine to resolve some core emotional vulnerability. That is, cult doctrine, and I include extreme fundamentalist interpretations of religious doctrines as cultish, exists to resolve a particularly powerful emotional vulnerability in an unhealthy way (this adds another layer of defense for responsible faith, which does so in a healthy way to the degree that it does the same things).

The question is where that emotional vulnerability comes from because with cults it is always exploited. Sometimes, the underlying emotional vulnerability is there for personal reasons, or as a result of life events. People turn to various doctrines to explain and contextualize the major events in their lives or to understand who they are. Again, this can be healthy or unhealthy. Vulnerability is also often deliberately inflamed or manufactured for the purpose of doing a cult initiation, however, especially in unhealthy cases. Would-be indoctrinators ask manipulative questions and try to catch people on the spot in a feeling of discomfort that is usually rooted in their morality and sense of being a good or adequate person.

With religions in general obviously, many of these vulnerabilities are evoked by asking about one’s fears of death. These leave much room for manipulations by more cultish sects. With religious cults, as I’m using the term, however, they can also center directly on making their mark feel morally deficient or unacceptable. “Did you know you’re a sinner?” is an example, when a lot of emotional pressure is added about how bad that makes you as a person or in the sight of God. “Did you know you’re complicit in racist systems?” is another obvious example.

Once this vulnerability has been successfully manufactured in the mark (or identified and inflamed, if already present), cult doctrine is given as a potential resolution to the emotional distress. “Christ died for your sins, so you can be forgiven” is a Christian example, and “Be an antiracist. Help us dismantle the system and build a better world” is an “antiracist” example. One will note that this can occur in a healthy context or an unhealthy one, and that these can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from one another. The cult application will always be unhealthy in the end, and it can be known by the further manipulations it uses. It must be understood that this is merely the initiation either to a religious or moral conversion or to a cult, in which case the word “initiation” resonates more strongly.

Once the doctrine is initially accepted by the cult’s mark, the next step is to make the mark feel (morally) welcome and good. The goal is to give them resolution to the vulnerable and dissonant emotional state that was utilized previously. The mark will be made to feel like they’re now doing the right thing where they were doing the wrong thing before. This can still be done in healthy ways, and almost all genuine interventions proceed in this manner. Cults don’t diverge from religions and other moral systems at the outset, or they’d never get any marks to convert. For examples of the relevant kind of language, however, consider: “You can be one of the saved and be forgiven for your sin” and “You’re on the right side of history.”

Once the person feels morally welcome and the feeling of vulnerability gets its first hit of calming resolution through the doctrine, the cult indoctrinator will start to increase the depth of the doctrine, usually a little at a time. With a cult, this will involve beginning to teach the “quieter” parts of the cult worldview that would scare off potential new recruits. And this is where we can find the first clear sign that we’re dealing with a cult rather than something healthier, though there is still much overlap and some ambiguity. They will deepen the doctrine while informing their mark that they’ll be surrounded by temptation, especially from broader society. This gets us to the surest first sign that a cult initiation is taking place, though. It is when this warning starts being applied to friends and family who will be described as failing to understand the depth and value of the cult’s doctrine and, in fact, the mark themselves.

Another clear sign that one is dealing with a cult indoctrination rather than something healthier is making the mark live up to contradictory demands. You must understand racism and admit that you cannot understand racism. You must admit to your complicity in racism and pledge to do better knowing that it is impossible to do better. You must be an ally but accept that you will always do your allyship wrong. Impossible demands would scare off a potential cult initiate at the beginning, but once a sufficient level of commitment to the cause has taken place, the effect is the opposite. Rather than making the mark reject the cult, these impossible and paradoxical demands dramatically deepen commitment to the cult. They do this by re-invoking and massively inflaming the feeling of vulnerability at the core, making the mark burn with a desire to “do better” to resolve the emotional dissonance and white-hot feeling of inadequacy (as judged against the cult’s impossible standards). Outsiders see through this emotionally abusive tactic immediately. Cult initiates see it as a kind of ritual hazing and demand to prove the faith, very much like an abused child or spouse always trying to do better to live up to the unmet demands of their abuser.

The concept of “white fragility” in the antiracist Woke cult is exactly this sort of emotional shakedown. White fragility separates white people and their “adjacencies” into exactly two types: racists (who admit it) and racists (who are too emotionally fragile to admit it). It is obvious which side the cult doctrine favors. In fact, the cult doctrine in this case is that every white (and white adjacent) person is a racist by default, and there are only those with the moral and emotional fortitude to face that (which is good, according to doctrine) and those who lack the necessary moral fiber. Every reaction to a person accused of racism or white fragility itself is proof of this moral failure and a need to “do better” unless it is a full-on assent to the cult doctrine, including a promise to consume more of it, change yourself accordingly, do the work it demands, and to “do better” anyway. White fragility as a concept is explicitly a cult indoctrination technique into the “antiracist” cult.

Speaking more generally, this is all a process that evolves over time, and when dealing with a cult, it is a largely willful move to bring the mark further into the cult while separating them from other social, emotional, and personal ties. Depending on the degree of vulnerability generated at the outset, this process can go quite quickly, taking only weeks, though months is more common. The process is summarized as such: lead the mark to take a step further in, coach them into rationalizing why that step was good, and then repeat with a further step. Every step in means more investment in the cult and a harder path back out. Meanwhile, separating the mark from trust in outside influences becomes increasingly necessary. Those might cause the mark to doubt their new faith position while it is still shaky, which would prevent their submission to the cult ideology. At this early phase in cult indoctrination, where initiation is effectively complete but indoctrination hasn’t fully begun, the mark hasn’t devoted enough of themselves to the cause to be fully committed yet.

II. Cult Indoctrination

Thus, the next step in cult indoctrination is to get people more fully committed. This is actually rather easy, as we tend to commit to new groups fairly quickly under certain well-known conditions. Usual cult-deepening methods include public pronouncements of faith before the in-group community, which bonds the mark to them socially and emotionally. This will often involve rituals such as group prayers, singing, or outright initiation rituals, which dramatically deepen commitment to a group very quickly. There will also be requests to make costly personal sacrifices to be considered a full part of the new group.

This can also include requests for money, cutting ties with relations, making pledges, doing “the work,” and more (including, in many cults of personality, allowing the cult leader to have sex with the marks of the desired sexes). Making sacrifices and working on behalf of a group, including a cult, creates deep ties of commitment to the group, its mission, and its community, and it evokes the “sunk-cost fallacy” mechanism, which prevents people from leaving. This fallacy is a reasoning error that basically says, “I’ve invested so much already that it must be worth it, so I’ll keep going.” It keeps people committed to failing projects, failing relationships, and, as it happens, cults long after they should have abandoned them.

So we hit a particular and important point here. When people like the “critical whiteness educator” Robin DiAngelo tell us things like that “antiracism is a lifelong commitment to an ongoing process of self-reflection, self-critique, and social activism,” she is providing a mid-level cult indoctrination path. The demand is to change yourself for life in alignment with the cult’s doctrine, including how you think, how you see yourself, and how you operate in the world, and make that change a permanent part of who you are. Notice that it also demands you do the work on behalf of the cult and its objectives, which ties you more tightly to it.

This process progresses over time, usually months, demanding more costly sacrifices, costly signals, and doing work for the cult and its doctrinal mission. Costly sacrifices and signals are particularly powerful displays of commitment, and when the mark rationalizes these objectively bad decisions and the cognitive dissonance that doing them causes, they nearly always rationalize themselves much further into the cult. These demands must be made fairly slowly and carefully, and they are meant to increase emotional investment and commitment. One thing the Woke cult is doing wrong is suddenly demanding too much too fast, partly because it can and partly because it’s trying to do so universally rather than in personal one-on-one settings. This push is breaking the spell for many people who would otherwise have been going along and being seduced further into the cult. This may result in its downfall.

At this point, cult indoctrination can begin in earnest, and the mark will be urged to consume more doctrine, possibly in immersive quantities. It will be expected to be consumed uncritically, looking only for areas of agreement and assent, which will be reaffirmed in the mark by other members of the cult and its leadership. With the Woke cult, the immense and widespread push to get people reading “antiracist” and other Woke literature in mass quantities right now is consistent with this step. (These include the following currently bestselling books, among many others: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be Anti-racist by Ibram X. Kendi, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.) When the mark is sufficiently committed to begin uncritically consuming massive quantities of the cult’s doctrine, they are well into the indoctrination phase.

Simultaneously, to prevent critical interpretations of the cult doctrine and to ensure full affective immersion in the cult community, marks will be urged to cut more ties with outside voices of reason and dissenting opinions. Broader society itself will be construed as bad, evil, complicit, depraved, and any number of other terrible things that the cult’s doctrine is adamantly against (systemically racist, anybody?). The mark will thus be encouraged to segregate from broader society as much as possible, even possibly becoming hostile to its potential intrusions. This will eventually include encouraging cutting ties with family and friends outside of the cult, which is fairly easy to achieve because the indoctrinated cult convert is almost insufferable to be around by that point anyway. Before long, the cultist will convince the mark that every voice that disagrees w/ the cult is somehow “demonic” and out to pull the mark away from the cult. This is relatively hard during the cult initiation phase, during which the increasing sunk cost of participation is mostly what keep marks in, but it becomes very easy once the mark is taught to “see it” (meaning the way outsiders try to get them away from the cult for “bad” reasons, as the cult defines them), at which point they lose all trust in outsiders.

Once the cultists start to turn on outsiders as though they are bad influences only trying to pull people out of the cult, it is extremely difficult to get them to change course. They’re more or less indoctrinated by that point completely and very stuck. Then the project changes completely. With indoctrination complete, the cult reprogramming phase begins in earnest. (Note: Of course, these phases have much overlap and are fuzzy, but the descriptions and progression largely hold.)

III. Cult Reprogramming

Once the mark is properly indoctrinated, the objective becomes to reprogram the mark to get them to think differently. The goal is no longer to indoctrinate on what is “rightthink” and “wrongthink.” It is to make the mark’s thinking be completely in line with the view of the world described by the cult doctrine This will let the mark see the “truth” of the doctrine for themselves everywhere in the world. That’s being “Woke.”

In the case of Woke cult programming, there is an older and more formal name for that view of the world, which is having a “critical consciousness.” Having a critical consciousness occurs when one is able to see the “problematics” in everything, where “problematics” are any deviation or potential for deviation from the cult doctrine anywhere in any aspect of society. This includes in speech, writing, institutions, thoughts, people, systems, knowledge, history, one’s past, and society itself.

I know this part gets a little heady, but it’s important. Critical consciousness is, formally, the cult mentality of Karl Marx’s conflict theory. Conflict theory, in briefest explanation, is the idea that society is broken into different groups or classes (for Marx, they were economic classes, and for the Woke, they are social group-identity classes) that are oppressive on one side, oppressed on the other, and in conflict over this. That is, conflict theory is the belief that different social groups in society are always in conflict with one another for power and dominance, and that rather than working together in complex, dynamical ways that can be mutually beneficial, they are at war. A critical consciousness means realizing this and that you are somehow personally complicit in creating the material conditions for that war and need to “do better,” either by renouncing your dominance (if dominant) or by agitating for a full-on revolution (if oppressed).

Critical consciousness is therefore a very cartoonish, us-versus-them reading of the world. This mentality, of course, tweaks various psychological and social impulses in people as described in social identity theory, for example, and dramatically increases what’s called “parochial altrusim.” This means strongly favoring the in-group (here, the cult) and forgiving it for every excess and abuse while becoming overtly hostile to the out-group (here, everyone else in society and society itself) and reading everything it does in the worst light possible. This is obviously core to the present sociological dynamic! It also dramatically increases cult commitment, adding an overtly warlike tenor to the us-against-them mentality, which in critical cults like Wokeness is us-against-the-world.

IV. The Cult Mentality

It’s very important to stress just how difficult it is to break someone free from a cult mindset once they have adopted the relevant cult consciousness. Once reprogrammed, they will think the way the cult doctrine views the world. They will have put on the cult-colored glasses of whatever cult they have joined, and they will see everything in the world through that lens. Everything will be construable as supportive of the cult’s doctrinal claims about the world, including where the cult doctrine gets things right and also where it identifies the evils in the world that would challenge its existence. People who have been reprogrammed into a cult mentality will perceive all attempts to free them from the cult as malicious attempts to drag them away from their community and, crucially, back to the Bad Emotional Place that they have come to strongly associate with that awful feeling of vulnerability that was used to initiate them into the cult in the first place. The doctrine is the opium that dulls their emotional pain, one might say with, given the context of the present discussion, a bit of tongue in one’s cheek.

In this sense, anyone trying to talk sense to a fully reprogrammed cult member or trying to pull them out of the cult will be, in a very real sense, interpreted as trying to do harm to them. This is because the cult doctrine is the proffered resolution to the pain and emotional dissonance that lives at the point of deep emotional vulnerability that led them to be indoctrinated and reprogrammed in the first place. And you must appreciate just how much that vulnerability has been inflamed by the cult initiation, indoctrination, and reprogramming process by the point that the mark has become a full-fledged cultist. They have been forced to fixate on that vulnerability under profoundly psychological abusive conditions in juxtaposition to the cult’s doctrine while making costly sacrifices to the cult and cutting most ties to the outside world. Removing them from the cult is therefore going to be perceived as an attempt to take them back to that awful vulnerability while at the same time taking them off their opium and ripping them away from the only community they have, while forcing them to face up to the embarrassment of having been indoctrinated and having sunk so many costs into something so toxic. This will not go easily. In fact, it will be met with remarkable hostility in most cases.

More than that, attempts to remove someone from a cult will also be framed in terms of “not understanding” the cult. This is actually a means of resolving the cognitive dissonance around the cult’s doctrine, and it deepens and solidifies commitment in almost every case. The problem isn’t that the doctrine is bad; it’s that you, outsider, don’t understand why it’s good. You don’t get it, and if you learned to see it the way the cultist sees it (here: with a critical consciousness), you’d understand and agree and wouldn’t threaten them with this pain. This is, of course, tautologically obvious and utterly boring: “if you saw things the way I saw them, you’d agree with them.” The cultist cannot see this, though, because the result of reprogramming is to have only the cult’s lens available for viewing everything in the world. The whole point of cult programming is to make it so one’s inner pain and pathology can only be understood in terms of the cult doctrine. The doctrine is the resolution to the vulnerability and has been very deeply established as such.

More or less all of the Critical Social Justice literature on how we know and understand the world (epistemology) and education over the last decade, including White Fragility, makes this case explicitly. Scholar after scholar makes the case that disagreement with Critical Social Justice (Woke) doctrine is only possible by having failed to engage with it properly. DiAngelo makes this case; Barbara Applebaum insists that the only legitimate disagreement with Woke doctrine is to clarify one’s understanding; Alison Bailey says all disagreement is an attempt to preserve one’s privilege. Scholars of religious fundamentalism call this way of thinking “intratextuality,” for those interested, and they consider it a defining hallmark of religious fundamentalism. In the cult’s sense, it is only being able to interpret everything, including disagreement with the cult’s doctrine, from the perspective of the cult’s doctrine. Of course, one can immediately appreciate how this makes the same demand on the cultist that indoctrinated and reprogrammed them in the first place: keep reading it and read it right; you’ll know you read it right when you agree with it entirely; if you fail, you didn’t understand because you’re not good enough in some way (smart enough, moral enough, humble enough, willing enough to do the work, etc.) and you need to “do better.”

V. Cult Deprogramming

The only ways I know of to effect a deprogramming of this are these three: (1) striking right to the heart of the point of vulnerability in a completely different and more healthy way; (2) the introduction of a severe shock (death of a family member) that creates too much dissonance against the cult doctrines to bear; and (3) finding an emotionally intolerable contradiction inside the cult doctrine.

None of this is easy. In fact, it’s all usually very difficult, as highly evolved cult doctrines have fixed these incongruities sufficiently to prevent the cultist from seeing them (that is, every objection and contradiction has a kind of “resolution” in the cult doctrine). Though best, (1) almost never works except in therapy. Usually, (2) has to induce (3), or it won’t happen.

I don’t have much to say about cult deprogramming because it is hard and usually so deeply personal and individual that general prescriptions don’t apply. One thing that can be said in general is that cult deprogramming almost always proceeds from an initial doubt that spirals out of control, getting the cultist to start questioning everything they were taught in the cult in something of an avalanche of angry skepticism. The deprogramming ex-cultist (apostate) will then usually become very angry at the cult and vent that anger at it for an extended period of time that I sometimes call “throwing rocks at the cathedral.” These will be the cult’s most vicious and ruthless critics.

Still, regarding the third case, Wokeness in specific has a few gaping holes in it in which this kind of observation sometimes occurs. One that sometimes works within Wokeness is that the abysmal treatment of women and homosexuals under fundamentalist Islam is both intolerable and absolutely defended at the same time under different, incompatible aspects of the Theory. Feminism is completely opposed to these abuses, of course, at a profound moral level, but postcolonial and critical race Theory approaches utterly prevent criticizing the moral standards of a predominantly non-white and non-Western culture. Usually, the accusations of racism and colonialism win out and prevent any criticism over the systemic and institutional abuses of women because, generally speaking, racism and colonialism are seen in Wokeness as more harmful. Nevertheless, the contradiction is there, and it sometimes crosses their eyes and gets them to start asking questions. Drawing this out for people only works on a small fraction.

This also can work by exposing ways the cult’s doctrine harms its charges in general. For example, Woke cult doctrine speaks over and for minority voices and often arranges failing systems that hurt them most. We have recently been introduced to the idea that being “racially black” and being “politically Black” are very different things, and have seen struggle sessions initiated against racially black people who are not correctly politically Black. Though people haven’t generally known this about the Woke cult, this limiting and inherently political take on identity is a central pillar of Woke cult doctrine. We have also seen devastation in communities that mostly served black and other minority races and also disabled people in the Social Justice Riots of 2020.

Still, case three can be very hard to induce. It often follows from the shock of a tragedy as described in the second case. Obviously, these events cannot be manufactured or discussed into being, though they do happen. I won’t say much about them, but I have seen them happen a few times with genuine religious cultists whose parents or children died in a sudden accident, which is very upsetting. Their thoughts rapidly shifted to “God is supposed to be everywhere, but he wasn’t there that day,” and the whole architecture unraveled quite rapidly while they grieved.

I’ll say even less about the first case, because although this sometimes happens in interpersonal interventions, it usually happens in the context of professional therapy settings and is well beyond my scope to comment upon. (It is worth mentioning, however, that the Woke cult is not this responsible. They explicitly use techniques and concepts stolen from clinical therapeutic settings in uncontrolled mass settings like classrooms, workshops, and mass broadcast, and they let amateurs, not adequately trained professionals, do them. This is consistent with the cult programming endeavor, though, because it allows an attempted evocation of the right kind of vulnerability in many people at once, and the ones who show outward signs of it can then be followed up with individually and properly indoctrinated. This happens on college campuses as a matter of officially encouraged procedure now, including in classrooms.)

VI. Leaving a Cult

If someone begins to deprogram from a cult, it is very important that they are welcomed and not shamed for their past participation in it, no matter how bad it was or how cruel they were under its programming. If you understand that they got there in the first place because of an incredibly inflamed point of vulnerability and were then psychologically abused into accepting the cult doctrine above all else, it makes sense why they would have been so hostile. In a practical sense, however, at the point where they first start to break free, they will still have very low trust for outsiders due to their reprogramming and will still see the world largely as they were programmed to see it. Hostility back at them can push them back into the cult or into a different cult that promises to manage that vulnerability for them (and thus, we have former Wokesters that go alt-right).

In general, we want to help people leave the cult and avoid radicalizing in another direction as they go. It does none of us any good to turn rabid antiracists into open white supremacists. There is a very broad, very sane middle way here that holds all the moral high ground and the keys to a properly better future in society. It’s our job to invite people to see it that way. We shouldn’t scare them off from it.

To summarize, then, Wokeness is a cult. It might even be, in its broadest functions, a proper religion at this point with a describable and fanatic cult element within it and protected by the relative reasonability of the broader faith. Antiracism, in particular, under its auspices is explicitly framed religiously and with clear patterns of cult initiation written all over it. This is what we’re up against.

Postscript: In 2018, the “whiteness educator” Robin DiAngelo published a bestselling book called White Fragility. This book is intended to teach white people about their own racism. You can learn more about how manipulative white fragility, as a concept (and book) is here, by reading this slightly modified real chapter from the book. It just turns the manipulation up a little to make it more visible. (read more)

A question to both sides of the argument: Wouldn’t segregation solve the problem? And I mean hard segregation: two nations with a big, long, fat wall between them.

All woke people in the one nation without any prejudice and privilege whatsoever: paradise on earth. And in the other nation all the deplorables, with which the woke people wouldn’t want anything to do with anyway?

Isn’t this finally something we all could agree on?

How about it?
— Ede Wolf

  “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”

— Eric Hoffer