The American corporate media is very worried about the Wi-Fi monitoring devices that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has introduced to make sure that the 2024 election is not stolen again.

In fact, they’re so concerned that every corporate news site was running the same story with the same headline around the world last week!

When did that happen?

Did a court making a ruling?

Was a new law passed in the Kentucky General Assembly?

Apparently, the local Kenton County board of elections in Kentucky “voted unanimously that poll workers will be told not to let people use the devices.”

Kenton County has four people serving on its board of elections.

This complete rubbish was amplified by America’s corrupt corporate media into statements like: “Election officials in Northern Kentucky have said that Lindell’s devices are illegal, likely a felony, and voted that poll workers will be instructed to not allow the devices.”

America’s newspapers were suddenly filled with quotes from Kenton County Clerk Gabrielle Summe, calling Lindell’s devices “particularly dangerous” because “they are small enough to sneak into the polls and could illegally identify voters.”

Do you see how this works?

The entire world was duly informed of the legal musings of Gabrielle Summe because Kentucky election officials really don’t want American citizens noticing their voting machines hooked up to the Internet illegally in 2024.

“Summe said it would be up to a Commonwealth attorney to file charges against someone for using the devices, so she's not sure what the punishment for offenders would be. But she said most crimes involving election issues are class D felonies, which are punishable by one to five years in prison."

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who has railed against "socialism," corporate "wokeness," and the Biden administration, recently spoke with FOX Business Charles Gasparino about why he is in a "particularly pissed-off mood" these days. 

"I've said this to all of my friends, anybody who would listen: if this election goes the way the last one went, this country will be a Third World country," the 94-year-old billionaire told Gasparino. 

Marcus blames the social and economic mess consuming the country on President Biden, calling the president a "dunce" and saying he's the "most divisive president we've ever seen." Labeling half the country as a 'MAGA Republican' was never a way to promote 'unity,' he continued.

The billionaire then talks about Biden's deteriorating mental state, saying, "Somebody is feeding him like a puppet." He warned against the massive spending increase and numerous policy errors that triggered high inflation and an explosion in debt. 

Marcus acknowledges some positives during the Trump administration, such as increased wages, higher employment among minorities, and low inflation. However, he expresses concerns about Trump's personality, particularly his inability to "keep his mouth shut . . . I'm afraid if he's elected, the first thing he does is go after his enemies, starting with the Republicans." 

Marcus said, "I think [Trump] has the policies if he would just follow the script and do what he has to do."

Gasparino asks the billionaire if he could build another Home Depot in today's environment. The short answer is 'no': "Regulations and all this woke crap" have made starting a public company near impossible, he said. 

He added: "I ran a business for 60 years... I would never get involved with a social issue outside of business. That was not my business."

Marcus said there was some hope for the future of the company as Americans were quickly turning on radical leftists. The example he gave was the Bud Light boycott:

"They were No. 1 . . . and they turned stupid overnight," he said. "The American people remember; their sales are going to stay down."

He concludes by saying the American people are worth saving from what he believes is a progressive apocalypse... 

In a separate interview earlier this year, Marcus told Americans to "wake up" to the reality that the economy is in "tough times" following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. 

Months before that, in December 2022, he railed against "socialism" for why nobody wants to work and warned capitalism is in dire straits. 

Marcus' warning is similar to co-founder and retired CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, who recently warned that "socialists are taking over" and 'capitalism cannot be replaced with disastrous socialism.' 

The positive takeaway is that the Bud Light boycott serves as a barometer of American sentiment, indicating widespread discontent with progressive policies across the corporate world to local, state, and federal governments.

• Users on the r/WaltDisneyWorld subreddit decry the behavior of park guests who vomit and even defecate while waiting in line
• 'Bodily fluids no longer bother me after working at Disney,' one employee wrote
• Two former cast members at Disneyland have revealed that there is even a code used in poop-related incidents

Disney World may have earned the moniker 'the happiest place on earth' - but visitors and employees alike aren't feeling the magic after witnessing people defecating and vomiting in line.

The r/WaltDisneyWorld subreddit is not just a place for fanatics to come together. It fields plenty of complaints about the park's unsanitary conditions, which are corroborated by past and current 'cast members.'

'I am in the queue for Rise of the Resistance - someone let their kid take a dump on the floor and then they just walked out and left it - WTF?' a user wrote in a thread two months ago.

An employee at the ride elaborated upon the horror, writing: 'Fun fact: this was one of 3 s**t-related incidents at Rise today. Less fun fact: I was here for all 3 of them.'

The incidents are not limited to children either.

A person claiming to have recently stayed at the Pop Century Resort in Buena Vista says they left their room one morning, only to encounter 'a massive, adult size turd on the walkway.'

The visitor continued: 'I have many questions…it wasn’t even a full turd, it was a half turd.'

There are frequent reports of other types of bodily fluids as well, including what is referred to as a Code V and illustrated by this next example.

'I was in line for Haunted Mansion at Disneyland and a little girl started puking in line. Did the parents take her somewhere more appropriate to keep puking? No no no,' a user wrote. 'People are so gross and selfish.'

'You’d be surprised how often we get called to clean a code V at a restaurant and the parents insist on staying and finishing out the meal while the poor kid that produced it looks miserable,' a cast member responded.

In another thread, a commenter denounced guests' behavior while waiting to mount the Avatar-themed Flight of Passage ride, which often has wait times of up to 40 minutes.

'Bodily fluids no longer bother me after working at Disney,' a park employee commented.

'Let's just say that the attraction I work at has what the cast ended up dubbing "the poop hall" because of the amount of times guests have gone in there and pooped. We even put up a camera and it didn't stop it.'

This triggered vivid memories in former cast members. 

'Good lord the poop hallway,' one responded, adding: 'This absolutely gives me war flashbacks.'

A thread was created just one month ago that was titled: 'Former CM’s of reddit, how often were rides shut down because a kid defecated in/on it?'

'I was a CM at Pop Century in the food court and entertainment photography in DLR. All. The Time,' one user moaned.

'It was worse in the food court, maybe once a week there, and quite often it was true accidents. Families come back for lunch exhausted from the sun and dehydrated. Add food into the mix and you could get involuntary expulsions from either end.'

And while feces and vomit are extreme enough, other park guests have found creative ways to ruin a custodian's day.

According to a former Haunted Mansion cast member, the attraction rarely shut down due to fecal matter, 'but we absolutely did shut down a handful of times for human ash/bone matter being scattered on the ride.'

Despite the sentiment, these piles of ash are 'unceremoniously vacuumed up with this giant yellow vacuum that is worn by a custodial cast member.'

Two former Disneyland custodial team workers opened up about the horrors they witnessed in a book titled 'Cleaning the Kingdom: Insider Tales of Keeping Walt’s Dream Spotless.'

In their account, Ken Pellman and Lynn Barron reveal the code name for an incident involving feces: Human Code H.

The term originally referred to 'horsecrap,' meaning a custodial worker had to clean up after one of the animals on Main Street, and the term was later modified.

The most extreme story that Pellman could recall occurred at Indiana Jones Adventure in Disneyland.

'There’s a pair of individual-use restrooms just backstage from the north unload,' the author explained.

'It was mainly for cast members, but guests could and did use it. A woman who did not know this burst into the control room for the attraction and deposited her gift right there.'

Pellman quipped: 'It must have been challenging for the ride operator to stay at their post in there before it was all cleaned up!'

So what are visitors expected to do if they really can't hold it?

Some rides with notoriously long waits, like Flight of Passage, have a restroom mid-queue.

All guests have to do is ask an employee, who will be far happier to direct you to a bathroom than have to clean up your mess. (read more)

On the eve of the barbarism, Israel was a society rent by schisms between Left and Right, secular and religious, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, pro- and anti-judicial reform. None of that is being discussed any more, neither in the press nor on the street. 

On the eve of the barbarism, many Israelis thought that co-existence with Hamas was possible, based on peace through prosperity, because Hamas seemed to be concerned with its people’s economic welfare. An illusion. 

On the eve of the barbarism, many Israelis believed in a “two-state solution.” That, too, is no longer discussed, because our eyes are open. The barbarians will use any platform they can to kill us, including, obviously, their own state.

Hamas did not just attack – it slaughtered and recorded the slaughter with joy and pride. That is a message we understand.  We understand Hamas’s intent. We also understand now that Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets that they intend to use against us. It is also clear that Iran is developing the nuclear bomb with the intent of using it against the Jews. What was unthinkable is already here. Hamas has given us that sight.

Jews outside Israel, too, have been offered this gift: Allies and friends of the Jews are, in reality, neither this nor that.  Jews were among the first to support Black Live Matter, but how does that group view Jews? Can you name any gay organization that has stood up for Israel against barbarous murder? Yet Jews are beyond doubt some of the biggest boosters for gay rights. 

And of course the universities, which Jews have attended in mass numbers to integrate into America – it’s fair to say that the universities have been, and still are, extremely unsupportive of Jews on campus or in the world. We now read of American Jews buying guns in record numbers, and a possible turn to the political Right after 100 years of voting Democrat. 

Do these Jews see now? Have they accepted the gift of sight?

For the US, the past 10 days have witnessed dozens of attacks on US troops in Syria and Iraq by radical Islamic proxies supplied and financed by Iran. 

The Iranian ambassador to the UN, in a public speech, threatens the US. Many Americans have accepted the gift of sight, but has Joe Biden? Just now the US has launched two air assaults against Iranian weapons facilities in Syria, but President Biden makes no threat or promise against Iran. Iran threatens the US, but not vice versa. Has America accepted the gift of sight?

Finally, for all those who have lived in or otherwise benefited from Western civilization, the hundreds of millions, in fact the billions of people in all inhabited continents of the globe, North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia: Do you think that the Islamicists, the fundamentalists, those who believe in the necessity of worldwide Islam, attack the Jews and no more?  

Do you feel they will leave Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists, to continue in their non-Islamic faith? Do the people of Sweden feel that they will successfully integrate more than 1,000,000 Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Africa?  

Do the people of Paris, London, or Berlin, truly believe that violent demonstrations against Israel and astounding rises in hate crimes against local Jews will leave them untouched? Will the Evangelicals of Brazil and the Catholics of Argentina support the barbarians or civilization? All of these people have benefited so much through Western civilization, but will they defend it now? 

All these groups have been offered the gift of sight.

Let them not be deluded. Let them not be confused that the barbarism has been visited solely upon a small people in an obscure corner of a tiny state in the middle of one chaotic region of the world. And let them “send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee” (John Donne, 1624).

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)

The talk of the blogosphere is the new devastating TIME magazine profile on Zelensky which paints the most grim, 1945 Führerbunker portrait of Zelensky yet. Bernhard covers it well on MoA, but I’m going to retread some of the same points to take the analysis into a slightly different direction of anticipating what comes next vis a vis the current political turmoil in the U.S.

First let’s cover the most salient revelations.

Zelensky admits that the entire world is losing interest in Ukraine, treating it as a TV re-run that’s on for the 10th time in a row:

“The scariest thing is that part of the world got used to the war in Ukraine,” he says. “Exhaustion with the war rolls along like a wave. You see it in the United States, in Europe. And we see that as soon as they start to get a little tired, it becomes like a show to them: ‘I can’t watch this rerun for the 10th time.’”

Members of Zelensky’s team say he’s lost the “sparkle” he once had, now arriving to give orders then coldly leaving without any fanfare or trivialities. He feels “betrayed” by his “allies,” he says.

But that’s where the frightening part comes in:

But his convictions haven’t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

This is the quintessential Führerbunker moment.

They go on to say that Zelensky’s stubbornness keeps them from discussing the one big taboo subject: ceasefire.

Zelensky very forthrightly admits that if he doesn’t get further aid, Ukraine will lose:

In a very revealing paragraph, they admit that not only has the counteroffensive failed and that Zelensky will have to fire the general in charge, but that things have gotten so bad units are no longer even following orders to advance or attack:

The cold will also make military advances more difficult, locking down the front lines at least until the spring. But Zelensky has refused to accept that. “Freezing the war, to me, means losing it,” he says. Before the winter sets in, his aides warned me to expect major changes in their military strategy and a major shake-up in the President’s team. At least one minister would need to be fired, along with a senior general in charge of the counteroffensive, they said, to ensure accountability for Ukraine’s slow progress at the front. “We’re not moving forward,” says one of Zelensky’s close aides. Some front-line commanders, he continues, have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the President. “They just want to sit in the trenches and hold the line,” he says. “But we can’t win a war that way.”

Expanding on this, they recount how the order was given to retake Gorlovka, which was met with frank disbelief on the frontline, urging commanders to ask: with what?!

When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”

One interesting aspect to this admission is that some may recall several months ago, around the time of the counteroffensive, I discussed possibilities for vectors here. One thing I specifically mentioned was how Russell “Texas” Bentley was loudly urging the Russian military to send reinforcements to the north Donetsk-Gorlovka area because he felt that the southern Azov direction was just a feint, and the AFU would actually attack to try to retake Donetsk-Gorlovka. It’s interesting now to see that perhaps some of his instincts were correct.

But the dreadful article goes on, confessing that the lack of manpower has become so dire for the AFU that even if all the newfangled weapons from the West were to be delivered, Ukraine may no longer even have the men to use them:

In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.” 

You recall how many videos I’ve posted recently showing frontline commanders and Ukrainian pundits specifically highlighting this? More and more voices have risen from the ranks of the AFU recently stating that they are flat out running out of men. This included the countless videos explaining how soon the entire population will have to be mobilized, man, woman, and child.

[...]

It’s something that’s been echoed over and over recently by many of the more serious and ‘aware’ pundits on the Ukrainian side, which I’ve covered here repeatedly: Ukraine was defeated by its own Western propaganda.

After the very military-strategically brilliant and gutsy move to pullback Russian forces from Kiev last year in order to shorten lines and concentrate all forces in a much smaller area, the Western pro-Ukrainian propaganda mills went into overdrive. They thought Russia was ‘on the run’ and had hoped that they could deliver a final “finishing blow” by way of propaganda, which would collapse Russian societal morale and lead to some kind of overthrow that would end the SMO.

But these people sadly knew very little about military doctrine or strategy. What Russia did was carry out an absolutely simple and pedantic textbook reorientation of forces with a clear logic. In fact, that moment should have been an extremely chilling maneuver for Ukraine. It should have signaled: “Uh oh…this means Russia is taking its gloves off.” The initial thunder-run on Kiev was merely a brazen attempt to avoid bloodshed and see if the conflict could be ended fast and early. But not having worked, Russian military planners clearly knew that now the entire operation had to be shifted into actual war footing, rather than mere enhanced special operations raid.

Everything changed from that point on. Pro-Ukrainians should have keyed in on this and realized the heavyweight was now removing his gloves. But instead, what they did was run with the propaganda that Russia is a defeated, cowardly, inept, and completely helpless paper tiger. This propaganda “worked” incredibly well, too well—but the problem is, it worked on the wrong side.

Instead of convincing Russians of it, it convinced the Ukrainians and Western public that the war had already been won, that Russia could never recover from this brutal “loss” (which was not a loss in the slightest but a strategic maneuver and concentration of forces). Since then, no one in Ukrainian society thought to take the war seriously anymore and Ukraine’s own “rear” end had dropped out, while Russia’s rear in fact throttled up into overdrive, in terms of the galvanization of society to supporting the troops and military machine top to bottom.

Now, the most aware pro-Ukrainian pundits are desperately trying to steer their flock back to rational thinking—but it’s too late.

In fact, this will be studied for generations as an example of a massive propaganda fail—a propaganda campaign which destroyed its own side by way of inadequate attenuation and nuanced micromanagement of perceptions. They instead did a bruteforce method of flooding every which way without concerning themselves with who the propaganda was actually negatively affecting.

I’ve posted videos for months where Ukrainian soldiers from the frontlines begged civilians to stop exaggerating and underestimating Russian forces. They said over and over that this is disrespectful to the AFU who are dying by the yacht-load every day to these so-called toothless “Orcs” and “homeless drunks” which Russian soldiers were characterized as being. But to no avail. One can likely blame the infantile NAFO movement as the chief culprit in this.

But the Times report goes on to underline the losses:

Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.”

The article veers into corruption with the same old stories that we all know are ever-present. The only interesting take away is that Arestovich later commented on the article, not only agreeing with the corruption bits but painting Zelensky in exactly those lone, detached dictator tones:

MoA believes Arestovich could perhaps be undergoing preparations as replacement, posting this article which discusses the various theories for why Arestovich is suddenly ‘allowed’ to so sharply criticize the ruling regime.

And why would they release such a damning TIME report now? Some believe it’s merely done to light a fire of urgency under the U.S. Congress—as if to say, “look how bad things are, we need that budget pushed through ASAP!”

It could be, though I think it’s also a desperate bid to regain global sympathy after the world’s reserve of it went to the Israeli situation the past few weeks. The TIME editors likely thought by showcasing the ultra-grim reality of the Ukrainian front, they could turn the world’s attention back onto Ukraine out of sheer guilt. In essence, a last ditch attempt to guilt trip the world into re-engaging with Ukraine.

So how does all this dovetail with the ongoing mess in U.S. Congress?

The latest from ZeroHedge still points to a complete deadlock.

Covid is so dangerous if you're old and morbid! 

We all remember Kirkland, right, at the start of the pandemic when Covid ripped through that nursing home and whacked a lot of the residents.  It was one of main fear-generating events; having a huge percentage of residents in a nursing home get seriously ill and die all of the same apparent cause tends to do that; that the median life expectancy for someone who is admitted to a nursing home is six months doesn't change that very much, even retrospectively.

The NY Coroner data should have put the Fear of God into people as it made very clear that the man in the Red Suit was chortling over anyone who was seriously fat, diabetic and/or badly hypertensive, never mind stuffed full of other pharmaceuticals -- all due to lifestyle choices.  Specifically for basically one full year the number of people 85 years of age and older who did not have one of a quite-short list of maladies yet Covid "got them" could be literally counted on your fingers.

This made quite clear that the risk factor wasn't age: The risk was caused by having chronic conditions nearly all of which are well-recognized as the result of lifestyle decisions -- that is, voluntarily acquired conditions and, in most cases, subject to elimination or serious mitigation by changing one's lifestyle.

But now comes a really ugly smoking gun in the form of this study (note the date on it too) which shows that not only does the flu shot not work very well (in fact, against pandemic H1N1 the people who got the shot were more-likely to get it (although the number of outcomes was too small to obtain statistical significance either way) but much worse other respiratory infections were potentiated by the shot, rendering you 4.4x as likely to get sick!

FOUR HUNDRED PERCENT!

And what do we demand that every older person get -- and "strongly suggest" that everyone get?

Want to know why so-called "doctors" and "nursers" are all in the back pocket of people who don't give a flying fuck about anything but money?

HERE IT IS FOLKS; the flu shot has always been known to only sort-of work but in addition we have hard evidence that in exchange for crappy performance you also are immune-damaged against other respiratory viruses and are more likely to get them -- and we've known that for a very long time.

I have taken exactly one flu shot in my life, about three decades ago at the "urging" of an employer who had a "free clinic" (of course the health insurer, I presume, "sponsored" it as part of their "wellness" thing.)

Less than a week later I got hammered with an unbelievably nasty virus that had me flat on my ass for a week with more trips to pray to the Porcelain God out both ends than I was able to count.  I might be a bit daft but nobody has gotten anywhere near me with a "respiratory virus" needle since and never will -- and if someone was stupid enough to attempt to force the issue today I would kill them instantly where they stand.  Yes, I've had the flu since, but that was all the evidence I needed that the shot was at best worthless and might have caused me to contract whatever that was.

We have receipts and its not an "anecdote" or "case study of one."

Who's going to go to prison for mass-manslaughter?

Who is going to have every single penny worth of their assets taken to pay compensation to those who got screwed over the last couple of decades as these shots clearly GENERATE more health-care spending in that they increase other disease risks!  That is, pushing them on an indiscriminate basis doesn't just make money selling the shots, it makes money selling other health services -- all of which, of course, nobody would consent to if this was honestly disclosed.

And, of course, who's going to pay for all those who got screwed when Covid came to town after we stabbed them with something we knew made other respiratory infections more dangerous, and as a direct result when said other infection showed up THEY DIED?

Nobody, of course, will have any such thing happen despite your "doctor" literally demanding you take something that we now have evidence screws you in exchange for very little if any actual protection in the first place.

You, America, deliberately let these schemes and scams continue.

The only difference between sex and rape is consent and thus until and unless you force it to stop every bit of this, including all the deaths, were and remain the result of your consent. (read more)

From Bob Moran ❤️:

“Disturbingly, out of all my artworks, this is the one most suppressed by Twitter. They really hate it. Likes and retweets are regularly removed. It can’t seem to get over 10,000 likes – even though it’s had more than 1.5 million impressions. The fact that they clearly view it as dangerous disturbs me every day. But it also gives me hope. It reminds us that we have something they not only lack, but which they fear. Genuine, meaningful love. Something worth fighting for. Right to the very end.

“This black and white ink drawing was done some time in 2017 I think. I just doodled it on a postcard to raise money for an epilepsy charity. Someone, somewhere owns the original. I just liked the idea of this elderly couple. Perhaps this is where they first met. Perhaps it’s where he asked her to marry him. That might be their house down in the valley, where they’ve raised a family. At the time, I was living in a town in Hampshire but I was about to move back to the Somerset countryside where I grew up. I was probably thinking about returning home and staying there. I nearly put their initials carved into the tree trunk but decided it would be a bit much. You can imagine them on the other side.

“When all of this nonsense reached a certain point: When stories were coming out of married couples being kept apart, parents being forced to die without their children by their side, grandparents kept from their grandchildren for months on end as the children were told they might kill them if they saw them – I just couldn’t believe that people were agreeing to it. This image came back to me and I decided to recreate it in colour. I thought it conveyed the power and significance of life-long love quite well. But also, had a sense of freedom and embracing life with all it could throw at us.

“Finally, I thought perhaps the tree could remind people of the fleeting nature of our lives. It’s probably been there since before these two were born. And it will be there after they’ve gone. Our lives are short and we have to live them. Not just survive and exist. This, of course, was when I was still very much in ‘optimistic cuddly Bob’ mode. I still felt that it could all be stopped if enough people remembered some vital truths about the human experience.

“Once it was finished I tweeted it and wrote, ‘Never surrender your right to be with the people you love.’ I hesitated because I felt that it was a statement of the obvious. But that was the whole point. People had forgotten the obvious. I realised that this had, in the space of a few months, gone from being a universal moral truth to a highly controversial statement. It certainly struck a chord with people. It’s the most popular image I have ever produced.

“As I expected, it angered a lot of idiots on the other side. “Unless being with the people you love might kill them.” They replied, clearly feeling like they had absolutely destroyed me. This total abandoning of logic and ethics really astonished me.

“I realised that these people could not see the difference between deciding, as a family, not to see each other because you are genuinely scared of a novel cold virus, and being ordered to stay apart by the government.

“What’s more, they clearly believed that this was the first time in human history when seeing your loved ones put them at some risk of a potentially fatal viral infection. What world did they think they had been living in?

“My message was deliberately absolutist and unconditional because that is how I have felt about all of this from the beginning. No circumstances, no level of threat, no risk of death can ever justify somebody in authority banning families from being with each other.

“Once we cross that line, all sorts of unethical misery ensues. As it has. The Christian sacrament of marriage states, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder!” – there is no small print that reads, “Unless there’s a nasty bug going round, in which case forget it.”

Back in August, the Wall Street Journal ran a long article on the insane spending of American public universities, with special emphasis on their proclivity for expensive building projects. This is an issue very close to my heart. I spent over a decade in American academia, at several different very wealthy institutions, and every semester of my experience was marred by major, highly disruptive, noisy and openly unnecessary building. Most of these schools have a long line of extravagant projects planned generations into the future. They routinely tear down structures thrown up mere decades ago, only to replace them with larger and newer architectural monstrosities double or triple the original size. They are constantly ripping up squares and walkways only to repave and re-landscape them with ever more elaborate modern sculptures, fountains and hedges. The last school I worked for spent 18 months “improving” the lawn in front of my office building. Among other things, they dug a massive winding trench through it, which they filled with water to make an artificial creek. Then they planted weird reeds everywhere and constructed various bridges so pedestrians could traverse their fake wetland. They turned a modest grassy area with a few simple brick walkways into a monstrous muddy outrageously expensive eyesore.

You have to ask, at some point, what all this is even for. Near the end of my time at that school, some faculty committee produced an assessment of campus facilities and how they had grown over the years. I was amazed to find that, despite hundreds of millions wasted on construction since 2000, classroom and faculty office space remained stubbornly insufficient and had not expanded for decades.

From the article at the link:

The nation’s best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. 

Then they passed the bill along to students.

The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one of America’s poorest states, paid an average $18,693 to attend in 2021-22. 

Pennsylvania State University spent so much money that it now has a budget crisis—even though it’s among the most expensive public universities in the U.S. 

The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program.  

The spending is inextricably tied to the nation’s $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges have paid for their sprees in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects.

Construction is merely the most visible extravagance modern American universities have allowed themselves. They are also spending vastly more on personnel, especially administrators. The University of Connecticut has increased its spending by 73% between 2002 and 2020, “Much of that … driven by personnel costs, with spending on benefits more than tripling.”

More:

Many university officials struggled to understand their own budgets and simply increased spending every year. Trustees demanded little accountability and often rubber-stamped what came before them. And schools inconsistently disclose what they spend, making it nearly impossible for the public to review how their tuition and tax dollars are being used. 

“These places are just devouring money,” said Holden Thorp, who was chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2008 to 2013 and is now editor in chief of Science. Offering everything to everyone all at once is unsustainable, he said. “Universities need to focus on what their true priorities are and what they were created to do,” he said.

So what’s happening?

A conventional thesis is that schools have difficulty marketing their academic programmes to students; what faculty do and teach is opaque to outsiders and difficult to showcase on campus tours. Instead, they compete on amenities and facilities, seducing prospective enrolees with shiny libraries and dining halls. There is surely something to this, but as explanations go, it’s unsatisfying. It doesn’t explain how this competitive spiral began in the first place, and it also can’t account for the truly massive build-out of the administration. Yale University, to take just one example, hired more than 1,500 new administrative staff in the sixteen years between 2003 and 2019. Many of these managers have baffling titles and either provide no obvious services or are actively annoying.

The phenomenon before us is perhaps too blunt and obvious to notice at first. Federally-backed student loans increased the amount that schools could charge, and as they raised tuition to claim this money, they had to do something with it. For the most part, that something amounted to expanding the ranks of those cadres responsible for spending money, namely the administrators and their subordinate staff, as well as those things which administrators manage, such as buildings and the building of them.

Via some mechanism, in other words, the institutional apparatus of the university itself – including its central managers and its physical manifestation in the form of the campus – has absorbed the new resources. I submit that this is a less-than-obvious outcome. The increased funding could have been an occasion for simple corruption, for example. The existing administration and the better-connected faculty could have paid themselves more and deepened their expense accounts. They did that to some extent, but not nearly as much as they could have. Alternatively, the money could have been spent on core academic functions, such as hiring more professors, increasing faculty salaries to snag the best scholars, improving research funding and facilities or building more and better classrooms. Obviously, faculty have better-appointed offices and classrooms now than they did thirty years ago, but it is almost nothing in comparison to the money pissed away on worthless buildings and worthless managers.

For our second example, we leave the benighted world of academia and betake ourselves to the universe of nonprofits. Consider this amazing Twitter thread from last year on the Wikimedia Foundation. As anybody who has ever used Wikipedia knows, the site is constantly begging for donations, frequently with obtrusive banners.

These appeals have worked: The Wikimedia Foundation has pulled in millions of dollars, even as the cost of web hosting (about $2.5 million/year) has remained constant. As it turns out, less than half of the Wikimedia budget has anything to do with running Wikipedia. With the rest of the money, the Foundation have vastly expanded their staff; the organisation now employs 400 people and by the end of 2021 they had accumulated over $230 million in assets. Because they now have vastly more money and more people than they need to run a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, they have become a grant-making institution. Many of their staff run things like the Wikimedia Alliances Fund, which “supports organisations that can contribute toward the strategic direction of the Wikimedia Movement, especially those that promote knowledge equity.”

Many Wikimedia grant recipients are absolutely atrocious. The Twitter thread highlights a few examples. Among them is something called the STEM en Route to Change (SeRCH) Foundation, which has received money from the Wikimedia Knowledge Equity Fund “to expand our repository of content highlighting the experiences, technical expertise, and traditional knowledges of STEM practitioners who have been historically excluded.” They have a YouTube channel sporting 5 videos and 177 subscribers, and an equally deserted blog that has been mostly dormant since 2022. Somewhat more serious is Borealis Philanthropy, a leftoid culture war operation that has partnered with Black Lives Matter and in 2021 had total revenue of $83.9 million. Their “Racial Equity in Journalism Fund” received $250,000 from the Wikimedia Foundation in 2021 “to support US-based journalism organizations led by and for people of color.”

Again, it helps to concentrate on what the Wikimedia Foundation have not done with the vast money Wikipedia users have given them. They have not taken the high road and poured the excessive donations into Wikipedia itself, which is surely what the their donors expected them to do. Nor have Wikimedia management simply lined their pockets with the funds, though I have no doubt they’re all compensated well in excess of their talents. Instead, we see again the ominous middle path: The institution itself has absorbed the money and expanded its managerial staff beyond all necessity.

While the Wikimedia Foundation surely hope to further their political goals with their dumb grant-making, the bewildering variety of funds, projects and initiatives they run has a much more immediate purpose, in that it gives the bloated organisation something to do. In fact a great many of these philanthropic organisations, viewed with a more cynical eye, seem to exist primarily as make-work projects for staff who pass money around among themselves. Borealis, for example, is a “philanthropic intermediary,” which uses grants from organisations like Wikimedia to make its own grants to other organisations. All of this is perverse and malicious in its own way, but it’s also profoundly stupid.

“Yes, eugyppius, that’s all well and good, but isn’t this what we’d expect? University administration and non-profits are subject to considerable scrutiny. Open corruption is hard for them. The managers can’t so easily pilfer funds, so when they have an excess of them, they simply hire more managers like themselves.”

Fair enough. For our third example, then, we’ll turn to the corporate sector. Here, surely, we would expect rising profits not to feed the managerial behemoth, but to disappear into the pockets of business owners primarily and upper management secondarily. That is, after all, the whole purpose of running a business, and while it’s true that the corporate sector has produced many wildly wealthy people, that is not the only thing it has done. In fact, the same basic dynamics are visible here as well.

For more details, I turn to a book with which I’ve long had a love-hate relationship, namely David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It (2018). After many pages pontificating about the dumb things managers get up to, Graeber finally gets around to asking what is driving this phenomenon in the first place. This is the topic of Chapter 5, which asks “Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating?” As a “parable” of corporate-sector managerialism, he presents his readers with the recent history of Elephant, a French tea company, and while his narrative is at points contentious, it abounds with suggestive details.

The story goes like this: Via various production-line improvements, Elephant increased manufacturing productivity massively through the 1990s, and profits rose accordingly. Some of these profits went to Unilever, Elephant’s parent company, but factory workers were angered when their improved efficiency did not redound to better pay for them as well. According to Graeber, there was through the 1970s a “tacit understanding … in much of the industrialized world that if productivity …. improved, a … share of the increased profits would be redistributed to the workers in the form of improved wages and benefits. Since the eighties, this is no longer the case.”

He quotes an employee, who describes where the excess money went instead. Not only did nobody’s salary increase, but Elephant also declined to expand its workforce, operations or machinery – just as American universities have failed to use easy tuition money to improve education and the Wikimedia Foundation has spent its donated millions on a great many things besides Wikipedia.

So what did they do? They started hiring more and more white-collar workers. Originally, when I started working here, there were just two of them: the boss and the HR guy. It had been like that for years. Now suddenly there were three, four, five, seven guys in suits wandering around. The company made up different fancy titles for them, but basically all of them spent their time trying to think of something to do. They’d be walking up and down the catwalks every day, staring at us, scribbling notes while we worked. Then they’d have meetings and discuss it and write reports. But they still couldn’t figure out any real excuse for their existence. Then finally, one of them hit on a solution: ‘Why don’t we just shut down the whole plant, fire the workers, and move operations to Poland?’1

Here we have, in our note-taking catwalking managers, the direct business-world equivalent of the proliferating deanlets who pollute American higher education and the Chief Talent and Culture Officers who lard the Wikimedia payroll.

Graeber argues that these pathologies amount to a kind of neo-corporate feudalism:

[A] classic feature of medieval feudalism is the creation of hierarchies of ranked nobles or officials: a European king might grant land to a baron in exchange for providing a certain number of knights to his army; the baron, in turn, would grant most of that land to some local vassal on the same basis … Such devolution would proceed … down to local lords of the manor …

As a general principle, I would propose the following: in any political-economic system based on appropriation and distribution of goods, rather than on actually making, moving, or maintaining them, and therefore, where a substantial portion of the population is engaged in funneling resources up and down the system, that portion of the population will tend to organize itself into an elaborately ranked hierarchy of multiple tiers…. As a corollary … within those hierarchies, the line between retainers and subordinates will often become blurred, since obeisance to superiors is often a key part of the job description. Most of the important players are lords and vassals at the same time. 2

Like many leftists, Graeber is particularly bothered by hierarchies, and this distracts him from the phenomenon he is trying to analyse. The problem with the managers is not their “feudal” or hierarchical arrangement. Simplifying brutally, medieval feudalism arose from the fragmentation of central government and the haphazard appropriation of its functions by the aristocracy. Feudal lords may have been violent and extractive, but they were by no means a pointless excrescence on society. They carried out, in their imperfect way, the standard pre-modern political functions of justice, taxation and war.3

The absurd managerial apparatus that the West has sprouted today is entirely different. It characterises not only state institutions and functions, but organisations in every arena of endeavour that have achieved sufficient size and complexity. Whereas key features of feudalism arose in response to the difficulty of collecting rents from remote and recalcitrant peasant farmers,4 managerialism reflects a nearly opposite phenomenon. That is to say, it is not a system that emerged to extract more money from taxpayers, customers, students or donors, but rather an institutional response to the abundance of these resources after the institution has collected them.

There is a Principle of Managerial Self-Multiplication at work here. Increased funding is used first and foremost to expand those sectors of the bureaucracy which have initial control over these funds, and secondarily to give the expanded bureaucracy something to do. The faculty at almost all universities operate with substantial independence from the administration and they are arranged in self-governing departments. Hiring more faculty would not actually keep the expanded administration very occupied, and so a great part of the funds go into classic administrative projects like construction instead. Grant-making is the direct equivalent for non-profits like Wikimedia Foundation, and the corporate sector is full of its own manifold chicanery, which Graeber documents in very entertaining detail. An important feature of all this runaway managerialism, is that almost none of it is about the core institutional mission itself. It is not about teaching students, or making tea or running an online encyclopedia. It is instead perversely recursive, addressed to the internal management of the institution. This is why so much of it seems to be, well, bullshit.

Simple corruption would be vastly preferable to this cancer. As bad as it sounds, I would rather have university administrators earning millions than university administrators spending millions to expand their Diversity, Inclusion and Equity brigades. This got me wondering, to what degree managerialism might be an unintended consequence of a cultural ethos against things like excessive profiteering, corruption and greed. I’m sure this plays a role for schools and non-profits, but as corporations suffer from the same condition, it can’t be the primary explanation. What’s really happening, must have something to do with institutional friction. As money enters a sufficiently elaborate institutional apparatus, there are endless opportunities for bureaucrats to direct the funds towards their own, internal purposes. Complexity plays a central role here; where no single person can comprehend how the institution as a whole functions, spending decisions become impossible to direct towards any rational purpose. Over time, the resources are commandeered in service of the separate, institutionally mediated goals of the managers, who strive above all to expand their own ranks.

Managerialism is an ever-advancing process of decay masquerading as an administrative system, and it has become a defining pathology of Western civilisation. Our lives are run by massive institutions in thrall to complex forces beyond all human understanding, which every day become more convoluted, unpredictable and self-serving. This parasitic, tumorous growth now commands the resources of a great part of the economy, and it uses these resources to grow itself still further. Worst of all, nobody has any idea about how to stop it, let alone reverse its terrible progress.

Last week, I participated in an online symposium convened by the American Enterprise Institute marking the thirtieth anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s seminal essay “Defining Deviancy Down.” Though it’s less well-known than Moynihan’s 1965 study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, “Defining Deviancy Down” shares with that work a prescient understanding of the social consequences of shifting norms and the perverse incentives at work when efforts to destigmatize socially adverse behavior run up against the realities of life in a large, diverse, capitalist democracy.

The event featured me, Sally Satel, Kay Hymowitz, Steven Teles, and Neil Gross presenting our reflections on the Moynihan’s essay and its continuing relevance for American society in the present day. In what follows, I present my contribution to the symposium in full, along with summaries of Sally, Kay, and Steven’s presentations and AEI Head of Domestic Policy Matthew Continetti’s opening remarks. Even at the time of its publication, “Defining Deviancy Down,” like The Negro Family, was a controversial work. It’s no less controversial in 2023 than it was in 1993, but it is every bit as necessary.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as a Democratic senator from New York between 1976 and 2000. He was born on March 16, 1927, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but after the disappearance of his father, Moynihan spent years living in poverty as a child in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, where he shined shoes and worked at his mother’s bar. Biography is not destiny, but I think we can detect in Moynihan’s formative experiences some of the themes of his later intellectual and political life: the relationship between family structure and poverty; the importance of work; the persistence of ethnicity; the need for safe, habitable, and beautiful urban environments; and yes, the need for a government safety net. Moynihan explored these subjects—and a host of others—in reports, essays, and books that he wrote as an academic, as an official in four presidential administrations, and as an elected official. Today is devoted to just one of Moynihan’s landmark publications, an essay that appeared in the summer 1993 issue of the American Scholar. His argument three decades ago was simple. He wrote:

The amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the
levels the community can “afford to recognize” … [A]ccordingly,
we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously
stigmatized, and also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where
behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.

Matthew Continetti is the head of domestic policy at AEI

Viewed from today’s perspective, one can see the problem immediately: Just as President Johnson was launching his War on Poverty, along comes a government official baldly stating that the expectations for racial equality are likely to be disappointed, not merely due to anti-black racism, but mainly because the fabric of social life among poor blacks lies in tatters. For many at the time, this kind of talk was simply unacceptable. (And for many on the left of American politics, it remains so today.) How dare a white man say these things? What will happen to reform if studies like this are issued with the imprimatur of the federal government? The author—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an assistant secretary at the US Department of Labor—had to be made an example of.

And so, he was. A firestorm of protest from journalists and civil rights activists greeted the public release of his policy document. A precedent was set thereby, the themes of which will be all-too-familiar to us today. By calling attention to the instability of family life in poor black communities, Moynihan was said to downplay the importance of racial discrimination. By ascribing this trend in part to cultural factors, he was said to be “blaming the victim.” By rehearsing the arguments of such distinguished black sociologists as W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier—arguments that chattel slavery had undermined gender relations among the slaves, with consequences that reach into the twentieth century—Moynihan was said to be a flat-out racist.

Moreover, in what we’ll recognize in retrospect as an episode of political correctness run amok, productive discussion of “the Negro family” became impossible to sustain. This was the 1960s, after all. Civil rights victories over implacable Southern opposition were fresh in everyone’s mind. Cities were burning during a series of long, hot summers. And, in tonier precincts, radical chic had become the fashion of the day. Advocacy in defense of “traditional values” was in bad odor among progressive elites. The moral authority of traditional norms about social behavior was under assault, while the moral authority of racism’s victims was virtually unquestioned.

Nothing, it was said, is inherently good about two-parent families and nothing inherently bad about single motherhood. Deviancy was defined down. Calling attention to the weakness of black family life was said to be a distraction that shifted focus from what’s wrong with America to what’s wrong with black people. Moynihan—a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrat whose principal policy recommendation in that report was to expand public employment for black men—became, for many, the personification of anti-black sentiments dressed up with a Harvard pedigree.

There was only one problem with all this. Pat Moynihan was mostly right about the Negro family in 1965, both in his diagnosis of its condition and in his forecast of the likely implications. Looking across the social landscape today, nearly sixty years after his dire warning, we can see the plain fact that conventional family relationships in the black urban ghettos have collapsed. What is more, nothing approaching social inclusion for the lower classes of the black American population has been, or soon will be, achieved. More speculative, but still entirely plausible, is the conclusion that these two undeniable facts are closely linked, with the former being a primary reason for the latter. Defining deviancy down comes at a price. And that price is being paid mainly by the deviant, not the definers.

But in 1965, and subsequently, critics were much more interested in what they supposed to be Pat Moynihan’s motives than in the acuity of his analysis. Fast and furiously came the accusations of ill will. A period ensued that lasted for decades, during which little critical assessment of black family life was undertaken, and no policy response was fashioned. The story is by now a familiar one, even to the casual student of American social policy: Any discussion of the internal cultural dynamics that might underlie black poverty in America must be left to those with racial standing to talk about such matters. Failing that, such discussion must be avoided altogether. Precious few of us with standing to address such matters elected to do so.

The fiercely negative reactions to Moynihan’s report were a brand of intellectual thuggery that would become all too familiar in due course. Smug in their certitude, the thought police in the universities, the government, the editorial pages, and the foundation boardrooms managed, in effect, to censor public discourse on crime, affirmative action, school desegregation, urban renewal, welfare policy, and much more.

The thought police were emboldened. It even became dangerous to celebrate the success of the civil-rights revolution by noticing the emergence of a new black middle class. The signature tactic was to accuse the politically incorrect of being racists. The willingness to entertain certain hypotheses—that forced busing could cause white flight, that proliferating criminal violence among blacks might retard urban development, that affirmative action compromised academic standards and stigmatized its beneficiaries, that stable families are a necessary precondition for human flourishing—came to be seen as evidence of a lack of fidelity to progressive values.

Reliance on ad hominem argument grew more commonplace: What kind of person would say such a thing? became the progressives’ first question. The list of unsavory characters lengthened. To Moynihan’s name were added those of Edward Banfield (for his reflections on urban decline), James Q. Wilson (for worrying about rising crime rates), Nathan Glazer (for noticing some downsides of racial affirmative action), James S. Coleman (for exposing the limits of school desegregation), Charles Murray (for suggesting that welfare could create dependency among long-term recipients), and Abigail Thernstrom (for questioning racial gerrymandering).

I am not saying that these writers were correct in every detail. But I am saying that, like Moynihan, all these social critics made cogent and important arguments that were rooted in astute observations, and they deserved to be taken seriously. What is more, all these critics have, in one way or another and to varying degrees, been vindicated by subsequent events.

But here’s the key point: The furiously negative reaction to Moynihan’s report, the subsequent suppression of the issue of family structure and interpersonal behaviors among the poor, the reticence to invoke norms of civility, decency, and respectability in our public discussions of the plight of the disadvantaged—all of these developments proved to be a disaster, both politically and sociologically, for the newly liberated black masses, reflecting what must be seen in retrospect as one of the great failures of the last half-century of American social policy. In my view, the black poor have paid a terrible price for this folly. Not that Moynihan was right in every detail, or that he was above criticism and without foibles and vanities. But he was right about the big questions and, contrary to his critics, his values were progressive to the core.

It must be said that Banfield, Coleman, Wilson, Thernstrom, Murray, Glazer, and others (this list could be considerably lengthened) were equally right about some of the larger themes of the late-twentieth-century American social-policy debate: about negative unintended consequences from progressive social interventions, about limits of liberal reforms to create genuine equality, about the importance of social order, and about the irreplaceable role in maintaining it of the traditional institutions of civil society. Events have consistently borne them out.

“We Shall Overcome!” That was the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. And yet, with a third of black children now living in poverty, with nearly one million black men under lock and key on a given day, with an average deficit of three years in acquired reading skills for black youngsters relative to whites by the end of adolescence, with nearly three out of every four black babies being born to unwed mothers, with hardcore ghettos in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, St. Louis, Houston, New Orleans, Baltimore, and dozens of other American cities continuing to fester in their marginality and hopelessness.

With all of this wreckage so readily at hand, it is clear that we black Americans have not yet overcome. Not by a long shot. And we never will, so long as we insist on continuing to define deviancy down.

Glenn Loury is the Merton E. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University and a Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

In his infamous 1965 report, The Negro Family, Moynihan didn’t use the term “deviant” to describe the growing population of single-mother, welfare-dependent households, but there’s no question he viewed it that way. The vast majority of Americans would probably have agreed with him. The United States had, for some time, what he called “a recognizable family system,” a normative way of forming families. He was referring to the nuclear family: a household including a mother, father, and their children. This wasn’t just a Leave It to Beaver fantasy. In 1965, three quarters of all households consisted of married couples; only 3% of white households with children were missing a husband or father. Among blacks, the number was considerably higher, though the nuclear family was, for the time being, still the norm.  

For most of history, human societies had dealt harshly with women who gave birth outside of marriage, and America at the time Moynihan was writing was no exception. Given the illegality of abortion, unmarried women who became pregnant often had little choice but to give up their babies for adoption. Nonmarital births were referred to as “illegitimate,” and the children were not uncommonly known as “bastards.” Pregnant teens were either put in homes for “wayward girls” or sent to live with a distant relative. Typically, unplanned nonmarital pregnancies ended in shotgun marriages, which can be thought of as a kinder, gentler way to keep single mother “deviance” under control.  

Twenty-eight years later, it was clear that the usual methods of social control were no longer entrenched in American life. Sixty-four percent of black children were born to unmarried mothers; among Hispanics and whites the number was 34% and 18% respectively. Moynihan’s explanation, formulated in “Defining Deviancy Down,” for why this happened was that interest groups—social workers, welfare officials, and educators—had a professional or “opportunistic” interest in normalizing single motherhood, since it meant more power and influence for them. “[T]hose who control the deviant population,” Moynihan wrote, benefit from a “transfer of resources.”  

As brilliantly prophetic as the Senator had been in 1965, when he warned about the fracturing of the black family, this explanation strikes me as wrong. It fails to take into account that the downward definition of the family was one of an interlocking group of social norms all undergoing radical rethinking. New reproductive technologies, especially the birth control pill, allowed ideas about premarital sex, cohabitation, no fault divorce, and gender roles that were once considered deviant to look far less risky and to free men and women from norms that could often seem oppressive to individual happiness and decision-making. The term “deviance” itself began to seem outdated. 

Freedom from once-settled norms also helped to usher in a redefinition of the meaning of marriage. It became an arena for self-expression and self-fulfillment rather than a social arrangement for rearing the next generation and for creating new families. We’re continuing to grapple with the unexpected consequences of those redefinitions today. 

Kay Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute

The idea of “defining deviancy down” resonated so deeply when Moynihan published his essay in 1993 because there was a wide-ranging agreement that social disorder had gotten out of hand. The upward surge in crime that started in the 1960s was nearing its peak, teen parenting had not yet started its steep multidecadal decline, and cities in general were still widely believed to be in terminal decline. Few actually read Moynihan’s essay, choosing instead to focus on the arresting title, which spoke to a belief that we needed to start pushing back against “deviancy” rather than redefining it.

The actual argument of the essay made specific claims about why deviancy might get defined down that were not reducible to a simple spread in permissiveness. Moynihan specifically argued that norms and enforcement capacity had to be in some sort of equilibrium—when there was too much deviancy to effectively punish, it was norms that would have to adjust. That argument assumed a few things. It assumed that effectively policing deviancy was a matter of whether society invested in enforcement, but it also turns out that there are some kinds of “deviant” behavior that just turn out to be difficult to figure out how to police. It also assumed that the aggregate amount of enforcement capacity was fixed, but—as Professor Loury demonstrated very early in his book on mass incarceration—that was far from true.

That said, this does not mean that something like Moynihan’s mechanism is not operative. My friend, the late Mark Kleiman, argued in When Brute Force Fails that police in particular can experience “enforcement swamping.” When crime is going up, at least before new capacity can come online, police will have to triage, directing existing capacity to more serious crimes and de-prioritizing others. As that happens, the prevalence of the less serious crimes goes up. While society as a whole might not define deviancy down, particular institutions very well might.

Steven Teles is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center

Trilateral Commission’s Henry Kissinger:
Migration And The Multi-Cultural Destruction Of The Western World
https://www.technocracy.news/kissinger-migration-and-the-multi-cultural-destruction-of-the-west/

WEF Caught Orchestrating U.S. Border Crisis From Former US Military Bases in Panama
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/wef-caught-orchestrating-migrant-surge-for-us-border-from-military-bases-in-panama/
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/wef-caught-orchestrating-u-s-border-crisis-from-military-bases-in-panama/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/some-open-border-chaos-goal

“Diversity” and “Inclusion” don’t mean what they sound like they mean. People are catching on to this all around the world, but we need to go deeper. It’s necessary not just to know something is wrong with these ideas and their implementation but also to know how and why they’re wrong. Ultimately, this means grasping the Left’s Woke Marxist mindset, namely the idea of cultural hegemony. You see, “Diverse” means “outside of the culturally hegemonic viewpoint,” and “Inclusion” means “including and protecting counter-hegemonic perspectives and the people who promote them.” Understanding that the Left always thinks in terms of the evil spirits they call “systemic power” is necessary to understand all of their terms, especially these two for practical reasons.
[...]
So, the entire diversity and inclusion thing is a scam. The point of the scam is to bring in disruptive woke Marxists from outside of the prevailing cultural hegemony. Those people are tasked with transforming your institution from within into one that spreads “critical consciousness” which is to say it uses your institutions apparatuses and resources to make people woke. That’s what it does – it’s deliberately infecting your institutions with a cultural and mental and emotional and social virus, and I remind you that they describe themselves in those terms, that they call themselves a virus that they describe this process of invading the institutions with the counter hemony as a virus. That was a literal paper they wrote in the field of women’s studies in 2016 from Arizona State University.

The whole thing is a scam to bring in people who are considered outside of the prevailing Western cultural hegemonic view and cause them to start causing disruption within, to start doing Marxist conflict theory within in order to transform an institution into one that perpetuates more woke Marxism. It’s relatively easy if if you actually look at it to tell that diversity and inclusion is a scam because every time you listen to people talk about what it’s going to deliver they’re super vague. If you ask them what it’s supposed to accomplish or how it’s supposed to work they’re vague. “Oh, we’re going to bring different minds together with different perspectives and that’s our real strength.” That didn’t say anything actually or “You know, a lot of the problems that could be solved by the same mindset have already been solved, so let’s bring in people with different mindsets we’re not talking about.”  

Well, first of all that’s not even true. The Western Mindset has solved more problems especially in fields like The Sciences than virtually any other discipline ever because it allows for open inquiry it allows for questions, it allows for advancement through success, so it actually is a problem-solving machine. Bringing in woke Marxists doesn’t actually make that better, but that’s the claim. We have to bring in these outside perspectives to solve, what kind of problems do they claim to solve? Social and cultural problems, but everywhere they go they generate more of them because it’s all a fraud and they’re vague about what it’s supposed to accomplish and how it will accomplish it because they (the useful idiots -W) don’t know it doesn’t work. It’s not real. It’s magical thinking rooted in a cult that believes if they just challenge the dominant status quo then everything can be better that the Ideal Society is contained like a seed of gold inside the existing society. If it can just be liberated so that it can expand and grow into a a new golden age and that’ll happen when enough people get caught up in the cult belief and enough people have abandoned the cultural hegemony that’s keeping us in the society that we’re in now so that we can step into a socialist society.

This is why Antonio Gramsci said that Christianity is precisely the religion that must kill Christianity. It (Cultural Marxism – W) has to rise up from within it, as a matter of fact transform it from within so that it can actually overwhelm or overcome Christianity or in fact kill it and when enough people believe in it that’s when it will work and that’s why they have to run the scam to fill your institution with people who are using your institution’s resources and reputation and power to transform more people. Like if people want to keep their job they have to go to the damned DEI training that brainwashes them into DEI or ends up getting them fired so that they can transform the institution, wasting the institution’s resources to make more people have the woke mindset.

That’s all this is about. Once you have enough people that are in the mindset they’re going to perpetuate it to do stuff like put Dylan Mulvaney on a beer can and ruin the entire business because they think that what they’re doing is noble and just and that if enough people believe it it’ll work, but this is what’s going to happen over and over and over again because it’s magical thinking. 

Now, the thing is, your average acolyte (aka useful idiot – W) in this line of thought diversity inclusion acolyte, somebody who’s been initiated into it doesn’t know enough to articulate what diversity inclusion are really about so they say this vague aspirational nonsense about, you know, bringing people from different perspectives together to bear on problems and that will allow us to solve problems better. I’m sorry, Marxism is a perspective doesn’t solve any freaking problems. It just points at things they don’t like so that they can try to change society. It doesn’t solve any problems. 

For example, bringing a Marxist into a physics lab doesn’t solve any problems in physics. They don’t have any tools. Any tools they have to do physics are a result of studying physics, not learning to complain and all the problems they solve, like I said, are sociological problems from their perspective. They start remaking the society inside the institution, the culture inside the institution, the people inside the institution. They’re just rearranging the departments in terms of who’s in them and what the policies are so that it falls in line with their (Marxist) ideology and reproducing it. Well, like I said, the average initiate or acolyte doesn’t know this but there the consultants who are bringing this crap in and the leaders who become the officers DO know. Very frequently they’re much more adept in the cult ideas and doctrines, but when they know, they lie.

The Fraud of Diversity and Inclusion (22:25)
New Discourses

They’re paranoid, don’t believe in science, many have white supremacist tendencies, and most importantly they want you to know that microchip implants are super duper scary. They’re anti-chippers, and they’ve got literally dozens more brain cells than your average anti-vaxxer. So, what’s their deal?

The coronavirus pandemic has the world’s most brilliant minds scrambling to find treatments, vaccines, and ways to improve public health going forward. One such savior is Bill Gates, the child-loving philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft. His proposal is to put a teeny tiny piece of silicone under everyone’s skin to improve lives by reducing healthcare costs and keeping track of the unhealthy.

Now what could possibly be bad about health professionals and doctors keeping Americans safe and healthy? You’d be surprised (or not).

The anti-Semitic origin of anti-chippers

When you examine the undercurrent of the anti-chipper movement, one horrid realization towers above all others: anti-Semitism is festering at the root of this evil.

Of course, not all anti-chippers are anti-Semites, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re engaging in a conspiracy theory propagated by anti-Semites who fuel fear over what “the elites” or “the globalists” would do to you. This is “coded anti-Semitic language” and dogwhistling, according to lauded civil rights organization ADL.

One of the leading voices of the anti-chipper movement is none other than Kanye “Ye” West, who said “they want to put chips inside of us” in an interview with Forbes. Take note here: Kanye said “they” want to put chips inside of us. Who is “they” in this case? West clarified that the word “they” is coded language for the Jews in a 2022 interview with radical far right extremist Tim Pool.

In the interview with Forbes, West also said that microchips are “the mark of the beast” and “they want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven.” This appeal to religion, while perhaps innocuous to the untrained ear, is truly anti-Semitic in nature when you consider who is saying it. West, like other anti-Semites, often invoke religions like Christianity or Islam as a way to exclude Jews. In other words, West is implying that Jews want to microchip Christians to keep them from going to heaven, which also implies that Jews go to hell. This is an idea shared among many anti-chippers.

West isn’t the only prominent anti-chipper. There are also figures like extreme far right ultranationalist radical Alex Jones, who has entertained dangerous anti-chipping ideas for at least a decade. For example, one article published on Infowars claims that Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu proposed “the mark of the beast” after he suggested that children should have microchips for perfectly reasonable safety reasons.

According to JPost, Netanyahu said “every person, every kid – I want it on kids first – would have a sensor that would sound an alarm when you get too close, like the ones on cars.”

Netanyahu’s proposal was completely understandable, but it was enough for Alex Jones, who happens to platform fellow anti-Semite Kanye West, to stir up anti-Semitic fearmongering about the Jewish “mark of the beast.” And it’s not a coincidence that Jones put a target on Netanyahu, who is the most prominent Jewish man in the world.

Implants are inevitable, but that’s a good thing

Whether you like it or not, chances are you will voluntarily get the microchip implants. And if you don’t, your children will get the microchip implants. Why wouldn’t they? There’s nothing nefarious about advancements in health technology. Implants will become a normal part of everyday life, and it will be overall a net positive for humanity.

Currently, microchip implants are already being developed and used to control prosthetic limbs. Microchips are also used in some patients with Parkinson’s to help detect tremors. Microchip implants will soon be used to alert doctors to impending heart attacks. According to the experts, the proliferation of this technology is “inevitable.”

Be honest with yourself. Are you callous enough to suggest that people with prosthetic limbs “can’t cross the gates of heaven” because they have a microchip?

As microchips become normalized, it also seems natural that more services, news, and entertainment will be accessible via a network on the microchip. And eventually, certain services will be only accessible via a microchip, which means that those who refuse to get a microchip will be left out of these services. It would be like not having an internet connection in 2022 and relying only on VHS tapes and a VCR.

Even putting aside the benefits of convenience, microchip implants will offer other benefits like a sharp decrease in crime. Just like pets and farm animals that are given microchips to track their movement, humans with microchip implants will be awarded the same benefit. Crime and disappearances will fade away into distant history and be viewed with disgust — as we view the medieval world now.

Admittedly, this form of crime fighting might have some systemic racism attached to it, so the future of this particular feature is uncertain. What is certain is that microchip implants will eventually be able to fight evil misinformation like racism and anti-Semitism at its very core — that is, in the brain of anti-Semites and racists. Fact-checkers and medical professionals will finally be able to interrupt blatantly evil thoughts before they can manifest into stochastic or domestic terrorism. And make no mistake: this is why anti-chippers are obnoxiously fighting tooth and nail to prevent progress.

The future holds a promise of a world without hate, poverty, or dehumanizing struggle. But it can’t happen if we don’t resist the anti-chipper dystopia. (read more)

Democrats are pushing to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections in New York City, Boston, and other municipalities, and statewide in Connecticut.

The number of migrants pouring across the southern border has hit a record high, according to data released on Oct. 21. Illegal immigrant crossings soared 21 percent over the previous month. On a yearly basis, the figure hit 2.48 million.

Democrats may feign shock and distress. Don’t be fooled. Democrats see these newcomers as their guarantee of a permanent voting majority in local elections. Not years from now, after the newcomers become citizens. Right now.

New York Mayor Eric Adams’s rhetoric is typical. He warns that the overwhelming number of migrants arriving—currently 16,000 to 17,000 a month—“will destroy New York City,” but he’s also leading the legal effort to turn migrants into voters.

Mr. Adams and other New York Democrats pushed President Joe Biden to expedite work authorizations for them. They said it’s about making migrants self-sufficient. Maybe, but Democrats have another powerful motive.

If you read the fine print of New York City’s “Our City, Our Vote” law, enacted in December 2021, it says that anyone with a work authorization who has been in the city for a mere 30 days can vote, even if they entered the country illegally.

President Biden’s recent action fast-tracking work authorizations for Venezuelan border crossers, who make up about 41 percent of recent arrivals in New York City, will make tens of thousands of them eligible to vote under New York City’s new law, as soon as they obtain their working papers.

That is, if New York City’s voting law is allowed to go into effect—a big “if.” The law is tied up in court.

A group of Republicans led by Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella sued, arguing the state constitution grants the right to vote to “every citizen.” A Staten Island judge bought that argument and struck down the law, but Mr. Adams’s law department is appealing that ruling in a higher court, arguing that the state constitution does not specifically prohibit noncitizens from voting.

Mr. Adams has a shot at winning. Vermont’s top court ruled in favor of allowing noncitizens to vote in municipal elections, even though the Vermont constitution restricts voting in state elections to U.S. citizens.

California and Maryland also already permit municipalities to enfranchise noncitizens.

The Boston City Council is debating allowing newcomers to vote, including migrants who recently came across the border illegally and have temporary protected status.

In Washington, D.C., Democrats rammed through a local law in November 2022 allowing noncitizens, even foreign embassy employees, to vote, as long as they’ve resided in the city for 30 days.

In Connecticut, Democrats want to amend the state’s constitution to allow noncitizens to vote in state and local elections. Amending the state’s charter is a multiyear complicated process, and it’s facing stiff opposition from the Republican minority in the Legislature. House Minority Leader Rep. Vincent Candelora called noncitizen voting “outrageous.”

For New York City, “suicidal” is more accurate.

Adding some 800,000 noncitizens to the 5 million registered voters in the city will have an effect, even if newcomers don’t always vote as a block.

Nora Moran of the United Neighborhood Houses, a New York nonprofit, predicted that noncitizen voting will make political leaders “more responsive” to the needs of newcomers and their neighborhoods.

To the extent “more responsive” means spending more, that will be a disaster.

City spending on migrants already exceeds the budgets of the fire, sanitation, and parks departments combined.

“We are past our breaking point,” Mr. Adams cautioned two months ago, adding that New Yorkers will be facing cuts in every type of city service to foot the bill.

Letting noncitizens vote will dilute the political power of all other New Yorkers, who are the real victims of President Biden’s open borders.

Tell Mr. Adams to withdraw his legal appeal and stop pushing for noncitizen voting.

Voting is a privilege reserved for citizens. Once immigrants follow the law, become naturalized, and swear loyalty to this nation and its Constitution, they should be entitled to vote. Not before. (read more)

Alvin Bragg

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was the first prosecutor to land the coveted indictment of Democrats’ Public Enemy No. 1. In April, the New York prosecutor unveiled a 34-count indictment against Trump, carrying a maximum 136-year prison sentence. The charges stem from 2016 hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels in a case prosecutors previously declined to pursue.

The Manhattan charges, however, marked the fulfillment of a campaign promise Bragg made two years ago to prosecute the former president. Prosecuting Trump was apparently the top issue of his platform in 2021.

“Bragg often reminded voters on the campaign trail that he helped sue the Trump administration ‘more than a hundred times’ as a deputy in the New York state attorney general’s office,” Reuters reported that year.

The 50-year-old prosecutor’s own supporters pointed to his ability to pursue Trump in court as a reason to back him. The New York Times reported on Bragg’s endorsement from a former U.S. attorney in July 2021.

“Preet Bharara, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who supervised Mr. Bragg and endorsed his candidacy, said Mr. Bragg had varied experience as a prosecutor, and that his work on white-collar crime and public corruption cases could come into play in the investigation into Mr. Trump,” the Times read.

Bragg was also promoted to his current office with financial support from left-wing billionaire financier George Soros. The super PAC backed by Soros, Color of Change, pledged to bankroll Bragg’s campaign with a seven-figure sum in the spring of 2021. Soon after the cash infusion, the committee pulled back $500,000 of the donation when Bragg faced allegations of sexual misconduct of his own.

Bragg’s record in New York, meanwhile, has been one of unleashed crime while prosecutors pursue politicized investigations against the most popular Republican in the country. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Soros admitted to backing candidates who promised to be soft on crime, branded as “reform prosecutors.” Bragg has held up to the pledge by prioritizing Trump instead of dangerous criminals. According to The New York Times, major crime spiked 22 percent during Bragg’s first year in office.  

Letitia James

While Bragg pursues criminal charges against the former president, New York Attorney General Letitia James has Trump in civil court on allegations of fraud. In September last year, the attorney general filed a $250 million fraud suit with the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, accusing the former president of inflating corporate assets to obtain financial benefits.

“We found that Mr. Trump, his children, and the corporation used more than 200 false asset valuations over a 10-year period,” said James at a press conference.

James, 65, won in a partial summary judgment a year later, and in October, the trial began after the judge found the Trump family, including Trump himself, liable for fraud. The judge in the case ordered the termination of Trump’s New York business license and will now examine charges by James to determine additional penalties. In October, an appeals court put a hold on the judge’s mandate to dissolve Trump’s business in the state.

The aggressive effort against the Trump family’s New York business empire marks another campaign promise fulfilled by the state attorney general. Similar to Bragg, James ran for office in 2018 on a platform to prosecute the president. When first campaigning for the statewide job five years ago, James railed against the Republican president as “illegitimate” and an “embarrassment.”

“NY Attorney General Letitia James has a long history of fighting Trump and other powerful targets,” headlined an Associated Press profile of James in September.

“Letitia James fixated on Donald Trump as she campaigned for New York attorney general, branding the then-president a ‘con man’ and ‘carnival barker’ and pledging to shine a ‘bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings,'” the AP reported. “Five years later, James is on the verge of disrupting Trump’s real estate empire.”

James was reelected last fall just more than a month after she unveiled the $250 million lawsuit against the Trump family. Now James is on the cusp of capturing Trump’s corporate exile from the Empire State.

Arthur Engoron

The state-friendly judge presiding over James’ civil lawsuit against Trump is a Democrat who held the former president in contempt last year over subpoena violations. Arthur Engoron is a judge in the New York Supreme Court’s 1st Judicial District who ran unopposed for the seat in the 2015 general election.

In September, Judge Engoron devalued the former president’s Mar-a-Lago Florida estate from between $426 million and $612 million, as estimated by the Trumps, to a mere $18 and $28 million.

The stunning devaluation stands in contrast to smaller properties at Palm Beach, which sold for far more. Rush Limbaugh’s former residence, for example, sold for $155 million despite a $51 million appraisal. Mar-a-Lago, meanwhile, is the only property at Palm Beach to face the waterfront on both the ocean and the waterway.

Last month, Engoron also implemented a gag order to prevent Trump from even speaking out against the accusations against him. Trump was fined twice over violations of the gag order for a combined $15,000.

Jack Smith

Jack Smith, 54, a veteran prosecutor with years spent at the Justice Department, was appointed last November to lead two of the federal efforts seeking Trump’s conviction. Now special counsel in a pair of cases prosecuting Democrats’ top political opponent, Smith was previously head of the DOJ public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015. Among his most notable cases was the prosecution of former Virginia Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell, whom the Supreme Court exonerated of a bribery conviction in 2016. Smith was also involved in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax scandal targeting conservative nonprofits.

Now Smith is spearheading the federal government’s criminal efforts against Trump regarding classified documents and the events related to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. In June, Trump was indicted with 37 counts of mishandling classified information, with three more charges handed down in the case about two months later. Smith indicted Trump with an additional four charges in a separate case this summer over objections to electoral certification, such as Democrats have made for decades.

Tanya Chutkan

Smith’s team at the Justice Department could not have landed a more friendly judge in the government’s Jan. 6 case against Trump than U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan. An activist judge with an obvious animus against the former president and his supporters, the Obama appointee was assigned to preside over the politically fraught Jan. 6 case after building a reputation as “a tough punisher of Capitol rioters.”

“Other judges typically have handed down sentences that are more lenient than those requested by prosecutors,” the AP reported. “Chutkan, however, has matched or exceeded prosecutors’ recommendations in 19 of her 38 sentences. In four of those cases, prosecutors weren’t seeking any jail time at all.”

When Trump complained the federal charges against him amounted to election interference by the DOJ, Chutkan shrugged off the accusations, saying, “That’s how it has to be.” Chutkan previously condemned comparisons between the Capitol turmoil and the far-left riots that characterized the summer of 2020 in other rulings of pro-Trump demonstrators. The fiery riots, she claimed, were actually “the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights.” Chutkan said comparisons between the two “ignore[] a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”

In September, Chutkan predictably denied Trump’s request to recuse herself from the Jan. 6 trial. In October, Chutkan handed down another gag order to prevent the president from speaking publicly and openly about the case. On Nov. 1, Chutkan handed down an order allowing Smith’s team to conceal evidence from Trump’s attorneys that the DOJ has identified as “classified.”

Fani Willis

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia upset a six-term incumbent when she defeated her former boss, Paul Howard, three years ago. Willis, who beat Howard in the primary runoff, carried the general election unopposed after no Republicans qualified for the November contest.

Willis’ investigation of Trump and the former president’s campaign team was one of her first acts in office and will define her legacy. In August, the DA for Fulton County, which covers most of Atlanta, charged Trump with 13 counts related to the former president’s efforts to protest aspects of the 2020 election. The Georgia prosecutor also indicted 18 Trump allies, several of whom have taken plea deals. Trump adviser Jeffrey Clark, however, filed a motion on Oct. 31 to dismiss the “massive and grotesque abuse of prosecutorial power.”

When historians review the decline of American judiciary in the 21^st century, they may have difficulty evaluating the role of one of its most important figures, Chief Justice John Roberts. His responses to a multitude of challenges have been inconsistent, and at times baffling.

In his 2010 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama broke the event’s longstanding rules of decorum by hectoring the Supreme Court, six members of which were sitting right in front of him. Obama was peeved by the Court’s recent Citizens United decision, which he alleged would “open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign corporations -- to spend without limit in our elections." Obama had a captive audience for one of his straw-man arguments, and made the most of it. It was too much for Justice Samuel Alito, who muttered sotto voce “That’s simply not true.” Sitting right in front of him was Chief Justice John Roberts, who said and did nothing.

Obama’s verbal assault was a preview of serious problems to come. Obama would eventually go beyond rhetoric, as he and his minions deceived the nation's most secret judicial body, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Later, the Left would launch a multifaceted assault on the Supreme Court. Since both are under the supervision of the chief justice, his responses became a critical factor in combating the erosion of the judiciary.

Obama’s abuse of the FISC began during the 2016 presidential campaign when, in collusion with the Clinton campaign, he authorized “Crossfire Hurricane,” an effort to spy on Donald Trump and his staff. The Obama administration, through the FBI and intelligence agencies, submitted misleading and fraudulent information to the court, including the infamous “Steele Dossier,” to convince the court that surveillance was needed. Obama’s henchmen knew the information they were submitting was tainted. The FISC repeatedly accepted their arguments without ever even convening a hearing.

It’s important to note that the proceedings of the FISC are “ex-parte,” meaning that the government can appear before the judge without the other party being present. Those whom the government wishes to surveil aren’t even notified, much less represented. The integrity of the proceedings is the responsibility of the 11 FISC judges, all appointed and supervised by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Abuse of the FISC continued after the election and into the Trump presidency, resulting in the multi-year “Russian Collusion” hoax, the Mueller Investigation, and Trump’s impeachment.

It is a matter of record that the FISC repeatedly authorized surveillance of the Trump administration based on lies concocted by political opponents. Though the Justice Department and legacy media ignore it, no one disputes it. So egregious was the perversion of the FISC that Inspector General Michael Horowitz subtitled his April 27, 2023 House testimony “Fixing FISA: How a Law Designed to Protect Americans Has Been Weaponized Against Them.”

Horowitz’ outrage unfortunately does not appear to be shared by the Chief Justice. To date, Roberts has offered no apology or announced any sweeping changes to the personnel and procedures that failed so spectacularly. Roberts’ passivity, coincident with a somnolent Justice Department, has left the failed FISC unchanged, and all but one of its violators escaping scot-free. Former FBI agent Kevin Clinesmith was convicted of knowingly submitting false information to the court. For his deception of the nation’s “most sensitive” court, and violation of the constitutional rights of President Trump, Clinesmith received one year of probation and no prison time. The prosecutors had recommended jail time to no avail. Chief Justice Roberts had no comment.

Encouraged by their successful trashing of the FISC, the Left began applying unprecedented pressure on the Supreme Court. At an abortion rights rally in February, 2020, Sen. Chuck Schumer made a personal threat against the justices. On the steps of the Supreme Court building, he screamed: “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

This time it was too much for the Chief Justice. That same day Roberts issued a response excoriating Schumer: “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All Members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.” Roberts' reaction forced Schumer to recant on the Senate floor the very next day.

Marshal Gail Curley had been in the position for less than a year. By assigning the investigation to the Court's own Marshal, Roberts guaranteed that the entire process would be under his supervision and control. It also meant that the investigation would be conducted by the least experienced and equipped police agency that he could have chosen. The outcome was predictable, and perhaps predetermined. On January 19, 2023 the Court issued a report: alas, the assailant could not be found: “the team has to date been unable to identify a person responsible by a preponderance of evidence.”

A careful reading shows that the Marshal’s “investigation” failed to include even interviewing the nine justices themselves. Several current justices are notorious for leaks which occasionally come from their chambers, though never before of a draft opinion; but the Marshal didn’t even round up the usual suspects. So critical an omission could only have been intentional.

The Dobbs leak, an obvious attempt to intimidate justices during the Court’s final days of deliberation, emboldened abortion proponents to try more direct methods. Protesters gathered outside the homes of justices thought to support overturning Roe. The protests, though in violation of 18 U.S. Code § 1507, provoked no counteraction from the Justice Department. After a few days, some officers were dispatched, not to arrest the protesters, but to keep the unlawful protests orderly.

As the Justice Department stood by, the Biden White House cheered. Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre supported lawbreakers who hounded Justice Bret Kavanaugh out of a Washington restaurant: “Peaceful protest -- people should be allowed to be -- to be able to do that.” Even after a foiled attempt to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh, Jean-Pierre said: “We have not weighed in on where people should or should not protest.”

The Chief Justice once again called on Marshal Curley, this time to issue the Court’s objection. Curley wrote to Maryland governor Larry Hogan: “Earlier this week, for example, 75 protesters loudly picketed at one justice’s home in Maryland for 20-30 minutes in the evening, then proceeded to picket another Justice’s home for 30 minutes, where the crowd grew to 100, and finally returned to the first Justice’s home… This is exactly the kind of conduct that the Maryland and Montgomery County laws prohibit.” Tellingly, the Marshal described the protests as violations of state and local laws. No mention was made of federal law, which might have implied a criticism of the Biden administration’s inaction.

There can be no doubt that in recent years the two courts under the direct supervision of Chief Justice John Roberts have been maligned, deceived, abused, and threatened. The Chief Justice has responded with silence, inaction, and restraint, interspersed with occasional expressions of outrage. His responses are hard to understand, and history might find them harder to forgive. (read more)

On 29 October, the superstitious annual ritual known as Daylight Saving Time ended in Europe, and for my American readers it will end this coming Sunday, on 5 November. For half or more of every year, we collectively pretend that it is one hour later than it actually is, even though doing so is entirely pointless and serves merely to increase stress and confusion.

There is a charming Anglophone tradition of crediting Benjamin Franklin with the invention of everything, and DST is often laid at the feet of this poor man. The accusations are unjust. Franklin’s crime was merely penning a sarcastic takedown of Parisian nightlife in 1784, in which he suggested that the revelling citizens of that city might spare much lamp oil if only they would go to bed earlier.

The true inventor [of] DST was an entomologist named George Vernon Hudson, who wanted more daylight on summer evenings to facilitate his after-work bug collecting. In 1895, Hudson presented a paper proposing a summer-time programme of setting clocks two hours forward to the Wellington Philosophical Society, and he was justly ridiculed for his idiocy. One respondent called his idea “wholly unscientific and impracticable,” while another pointed out that “the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time.” (A certain Mr. Richardson, however, channeling Franklin, “said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.”) Hudson published his proposal in 1898, and ultimately won a British builder named William Willett to the cause of making time itself something for bureaucrats to fiddle with. Willett spent a few eccentric years campaigning to set clocks 80 minutes forward in four incremental steps every April, and then to walk back these bizarre adjustments in September. He attracted the attention of some politicians, including Winston Churchill, but he died of influenza before the scheme went any further.

DST became a reality only in 1916, when Germany and Austria-Hungary imposed the time shift as a wartime fuel-saving measure. So as not to lose any advantage, the United Kingdom imposed DST on its population weeks later, and the United States followed suit upon its late entry into the conflict in 1918. Even in those early days, there was considerable doubt that DST would have any meaningful influence on energy consumption, particularly in heavily regulated wartime economies. Evidence since then suggests that in peacetime it probably causes slight increases in electricity usage, as it involves a trade-off of less energy-intensive lighting for more energy-intensive heating and cooling.

Alas, such practical considerations have never mattered. The Great War cemented DST as an economising measure in the popular consciousness. While most countries ended the practice after 1918, basically everybody reintroduced the ritual in World War II. Germany set the clocks ahead on 1 April 1940, and did not bother setting them back again until 2 November 1942. Thereafter the National Socialists remembered to lift summer time every Fall until their defeat in 1945, when the occupiers assumed control of the clocks for them. After the Hungerwinter of 1946/7, they even imposed a “double summer time” of two hours in May, but reduced this to the traditional single hour seven weeks later. In 1949, both newly founded German states agreed to end the practice entirely, as did the rest of postwar Europe.

DST functions like a jurisdictional contagion. Anybody can introduce it for any stupid reason at all, thereby forcing all of their neighbours to swallow the chaos of misaligned clocks or follow along. It was France that brought DST back to Europe in 1976, in response to the oil crisis. Thus the twice-annual ritual of pointless clock adjustments returned to the Continent, this time not even to save energy, but simply to avoid confusion in flight times and train time tables. Switzerland was the last to succumb to the modern DST cult in 1981. Now that we are in this situation, it seems impossible to get out of it. In 2018, the European Commission opened an online survey to solicit citizens’ opinions on DST. The overwhelming majority of all respondents said they wanted to end the practice, and the European Parliament accordingly voted to abolish DST in 2019. Member states were set to decide from 2021 whether they would opt for permanent normal or permanent summer time. The deadline came and went and nothing has changed, because our politicians fear the confusion of fragmenting time on the Continent, and some believe abolishing DST would require a broader reconsideration of European time zones.

There are a lot of myths about DST. We’ve seen that it doesn’t save energy, although this has been its only official rationale. Many Americans believe the measure is supported by farmers, but they are actually among its core opponents. DST benefits primarily those on fixed schedules – that is to say, office workers – by increasing the available light after work. Schools, shops, and businesses should adjust their hours of operation individually to respond to seasonal changes in daylight, and some places may even find it advantageous to impose a permanent summer time.1 Twice-annual clock changes, however, are just egregiously stupid. They increase stress (which is why it is associated with mild spikes in heart attacks), cause widespread sleep disturbances, and a variety of other inconveniences.

You will say that DST is a small thing, and that’s probably true, but it is also a lesson in how irrational bureaucratic measures can perpetuate themselves long after everybody has learned to despise them and their only purpose for existing has been refuted. DST is insidious for its contagious properties and because it remains just below the threshold of serious annoyance required to animate opposition. It is nevertheless a noxious exercise in social engineering that nobody should have to put up with.

UPDATE: The standard defence of DST, which I also see in the comments, is that the associated schedule changes make for a more pleasant summer and that a return to normal time prevents children from going to school in the dark. I agree that these are advantages, but we have two means of achieving them: a) locally decided and enacted seasonal changes to operating hours, or b) a change to the basic hourly reference points for absolutely everybody. One of these options has little or no downside and the other of them represents an enormous bureaucratic hassle. In this as in many other cases, we have gone with the enormous bureaucratic hassle. (read more)