Here we go folks. Jumpin’ ju-ju-bones, the first wave of producer driven inflation has just been quantified.  The economic analysts are shocked, stunned, flabbergasted and surprised, because the January single month wholesale inflation of 1.0% is double what they expected.

The “producer price index” is essentially the tracking of wholesale prices at three stages: Origination (commodity), Intermediate (processing), and then Final (to wholesale). Today, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) released January price data [Available Here] showing a dramatic 9.7% increase year-over-year in Final Demand products at the wholesale level.

Check out the single month wholesale price increases in these categories [Table 2]: Beef jumped 6.5% in January (43.9% for year). Gasoline jumped 1.9% in January, (53.9% for year).  Diesel fuel jumped 9.4% in January (56.5% for year). Cooking oil 4.7% in January (36.4% for year).  Home heating oil jumped 7.3% in January (47.4% for year).  Pasta jumped 3.0% in January (16.2% for year). Tires jumped 4.6% in January (9.0% for year). Wholesale cleaning supplies jumped 3.8% in January (34.9% for year).

Unfortunately, there is nothing upstream in the supply chain and manufacturing pipeline to suggest that higher prices at the retail level are not coming.  The price of raw materials, and the wholesale energy costs to process those materials into finished goods, are still rising.

Exactly as we suspected last month, the temporary drop in gasoline was the only reason December producer inflation was not MUCH higher.  However, that said, the BLS did revise December PPI inflation slightly higher putting it at 9.8%.  The cumulative costs of energy price increases continue to drive inflation in the entire system of goods production.

Year-over-year PPI for November (7.0%), December (7.0%) and now January (6.9%), shows the overall inflation in the wholesale supply chain is structurally here to stay.  We can expect much higher prices at retail for the foreseeable future.

Keep in mind that these figures are backward looking.  In my estimation the massive price increases the bureau has just quantified in January and the preceding months is the end of the first wave of massive inflation that CTH warned about last October.

“Do what you can do now to start preparing your weekly budget in ways you may not have thought about before.   Shop sales, use coupons, look for discounts and products that can be reformulated into multiple meals or multiple uses.   Shelf-stable food products that can be muti-purposed with proteins is a good start. Consider purchasing the raw materials for cleaning products and reformulate them yourself to avoid these massive increases in petroleum costs.” [October Warning]

The recent announcement of price increases we have discussed, from food producers specifically (Kraft-Heinz, Proctor and Gamble, etc.), in combination with massive fertilizer and farming costs for future yield, is the second wave that has yet to be quantified.  The second wave of retail inflation is only just beginning to arrive now and will extend throughout the spring/summer of 2022.

CNBC economic analyst Steve Liesman is struggling to reconcile the economic data from the last three months against his own prior claims that he could not/would not believe the economy and inflation were as bad as the BLS statistics reflect.   I do not like these elitist financial analysts who have zero connection to the Main Street economy. (read more)

If the ads on the Superbowl each year are like a Rorschach test for the nation’s mental condition, then this year’s ad-roll was a cavalcade of frantic hallucinations suggesting a near-complete detachment from reality for an audience of ADD-disabled cell phone slaves locked into a Big Tech induced consensus trance. You could barely tell what these advertisers were trying to sell in their commercials, the psychotic dazzle of half-second jump-cuts was so ferocious. One interesting note, though: people of non-color (PONCs) seem to have been magically sucked out of the universe. There, that fixed things for everybody else.

Snoop Dog’s half-time house party — Hollywood’s G-rated version of a BLM riot — heralded a real riot later on in downtown LA after the Rams’ victory. Fans lit-up a metro bus and tagged it with spray-paint. The police moved in… objects were thrown at them. I’m just sorry that Snoop didn’t bring out his friend and sometime co-star Martha Stewart to twerk for the multitudes — while, say whipping up a pumpkin mousse. That might have brought the country together after all these months of rancor. But, like I said, sorry, PONCs need not apply. Nor did Da Dawg invite onstage my favorite new pop star, Ski Mask the Slump God, composer of the hits “Faucet Failure” and “Foot Fungus.” Maybe next year… if there is a next year….

All this hearty good fellowship marks the journey of our country from a convocation of be-wigged founding fathers wielding quill pens in defense of liberty to a security-and-surveillance state of hebephrenic zombies lurching to a kind of failure that will make the fall of the Roman Empire look like a lawn sale of someone’s dead uncle’s chattels and effects. The drain-pipe beckons… but will America answer that call… or take a different turn?

The first topic is the “Russia-Ukraine crisis,” with Stephanopoulos asking Pelosi directly if she believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is about to invade Ukraine.  Nancy Pelosi’s response [Transcript Here] tells us all we need to hear:

PELOSI: “Well, I think we have to be prepared for it. And that is what the president is — yes, I do believe that he is prepared for an invasion. I also understand why the President of Ukraine wants to keep people calm and that he wants his economy not to suffer. But, on the other hand, if we were not threatening the sanctions and the rest, it would guarantee that Putin would invade. Let’s hope that diplomacy works.

It’s about diplomacy deterrence. Diplomacy deterrence. And the president’s made it very clear. There’s a big price to pay for Russia to go there. So, if Russia doesn’t invade, it’s not that he never intended to. It’s just that the sanctions worked.” … “I’m very proud of the work that the president has done.” (read more)

Can you see the domestic political scenario that has been created out of thin air?

Democrats need a win on something; anything, to shift the narrative and change the reality of their failure into an illusion of success.

First, accuse Vladimir Putin of doing something he never intends to do, a fabricated scenario.  Second, tell the world you will strongly respond to the fabricated scenario.  Third, tell the world the exact date when the fabricated scenario is supposed to happen.  Then, when the fabricated scenario never happens, it is because you are so brilliant and strong to have outmaneuvered and cowed the Russians.

Declare the absence of the Ukraine invasion event as the result of your brilliance and announce a foreign policy victory.  That, my friends, is exactly what has taken place.

Yes, this is exactly how pathetic they are.

Exactly as Predicted HERE

Not even in an election year can democrats stop themselves from abusing children. They’ve taken such glee in masking them and abusing them under the guise of protecting them when we know they’re at the mercy of the odious teacher’s unions and their political contributions. Take a moment to think about that deeply. Policies that will destroy an entire generation of children, and have far-reaching negative ramifications on society for the next three decades are made possible because of political contributions of public teacher’s unions and democrats’ desire to use fear to subdue and control their constituents. They are fine with turning children into fearful anxious maladjusted socially isolated basket cases with stunted growth, speech problems and an inability to acquire human empathy by seeing the facial reactions of other people so that teacher’s unions keep their bank accounts flush. If ever you needed an example of the abusive relationship between sociopathic public managers and the people who pay their salaries while they front run equities to enrich themselves, there exists no better in the world today than this malicious ritual of child sacrifice. The masks proved to be the warm up act to get the toxic shots approved for children. If you can psychologically manipulate their parents into believing there's an emergency, you can get them to rush their children's arms to Pfizer's needles so the corporate behemoth gains legal immunity. Toss children into a fire and hope the gods bring rain for the crops.

The Children of Pfizer sacrifices will continue indefinitely while the abuse must go on until sometime in March. Why wait until March to cease the abuse? Because if they did it any sooner that would make too much sense. And yet where is the party of opposition to do the simplest thing and counter the endless tyrannies and shape shifting science in their favor? Some valiant red state governors have been willing to block this abuse though certainly not all of them and not fast enough. Never has there been a better opportunity to look noble, win the favor of mama bear mothers across the land screaming out for someone to help them protect their cubs from the gathering vultures waiting to devour their offspring for political ends. The vultures of racist anti racism promoting school boards, who when not busy suffocating students are actively poisoning their minds.

If a photo could kill a political future in sane times this one of Stacey Abrams unmasked in a schoolroom full of masked children would do it. We do not live in sane times. The great irony of this image is that it so thoroughly inverts the real science as there is nobody more at risk of death from the former iterations of the Wuhan flu than this ineffectual heifer. Just look at the clueless expression on her dimwitted mug. We suffer tremendously when the least capable and most corrupt in society aspire to positions of power.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky told conservative website Daily Signal he's all for anti-vaccine trucker convoys to "clog up" metro areas across the U.S. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been well aware that truckers could soon embark for Washington, D.C. Still, this weekend, a more immediate threat could be a convoy headed to the Super Bowl in California. 

"I'm all for it," Paul said in the interview last Thursday. "Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition in our country, from slavery to civil rights, you name it. Peaceful protest, clog things up, make people think about the mandates."

"And some of this, we started," he added. "We put [COVID-19] mandates on truckers coming across the border from Canada, so then they put mandates on, and the truckers are annoyed. They're riding in a cab by themselves, most of them for eight, 10-hour long hauls, and they just want to do what they want to do. It's their own business."

"Freedom Convoy" demonstrations against medical tyranny have so far been peaceful across Canada for more than a week, causing congestion issues in Canada's capital, Ottawa, and blocking one of the most crucial land ports on the U.S.-Canada border crossing that connects Detroit and Windsor, two regions responsible for a sizeable chunk of output for the North American auto industry. 

Paul added, "I hope the truckers do come to America, and I hope they clog up cities."

"It'd be great, but the thing is, it wouldn't shut the city down because the government workers haven't come to work in two years anyway," Paul added. "I don't know if it'll affect D.C. It'd be a nice change. We'd actually have some traffic."

Suppose truckers are set to begin a convoy protest against medical tyranny stateside. In that case, they have a lot to learn from their brother and sisters in Canada as the actions of the governments of Ottawa and Canada were on full display of fascism (as Benito Mussolini once said, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of the state and corporate power") by taking away political fundraising from the truckers on GoFundMe. 

Censorship is growing online, but one thing that petrifies governments who follow the script of the World Economic Forum for the so-called 'Great COVID Reset' are truckers who freedom honk and congest roadways. What's even more concerning for the Davos man is that the everyday person, no matter race, religion, social class, or even political party, are banding together against overreaching governments. This was on display this weekend in Canada, France, and elsewhere. A revolution could be emerging. 

The threat of convoys clogging up metro areas in the U.S. was enough for the DHS to distribute a bulletin to law enforcement agencies last week. An agency spokesperson replied to an email request by The Epoch Times, saying: "We're tracking reports of a potential convoy that may be planning to travel to several U.S. cities." 

The bulletin highlighted how a convoy of truckers could affect Sunday's Super Bowl at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. 

"While there are currently no indications of planned violence, if hundreds of trucks converge in a major metropolitan city, the potential exists to severely disrupt transportation, federal government operations, commercial facilities, and emergency services through gridlock and potential counterprotests," the memo said.

DHS sent 500 agents to Inglewood in anticipation of trucker protests. (read more)

Back when Biden and Pelosi got the "child tax credit" turned into an advance refund I (and a number of others) warned that this was going to blow up in people's faces, potentially with disastrous consequences.

Now it is.

Generally-speaking people are not real smart when it comes to tax planning on a "routine" (every year) basis.  Oh sure, some people pay for "advice" on retirement and, especially if you have a lot of money, succession (that is, when you die) tax planning.  But few people put the noodle work in to figure out through the year how to do taxes correctly.

As a self-employed person for a long time, and with the exception of the years when Macro Computer Solutions Inc. was a "C" corporation, a necessary evil when you get big enough in certain circumstances, being a Sub-S or LLC owner for a good part of the rest of the time, I've put the noodle time in because when you have to pay estimated taxes if you get it wrong the penalties can be rather significant.  Further, I don't like giving people money that I don't get paid interest at a market rate on, and for the last 15 years or so "a market rate" hasn't been possible anyway with anything government-attached.

So if I'm in the "safe harbor" I'll pay the rest on April 15th.  But if they're going to owe me money I want it to be as small as possible.  Whatever I owe, I owe.  Tax laws are what they are; nobody likes paying taxes, but I like the prospect of audits even less, and if you try to screw them and get caught the penalties are significant and its stupid to pay penalties to the government when the reason you owe them is nothing more than arrogance and a belief that you can cheat and get away with it.

Most people don't think this way.  They overpay intentionally because its the "standard" take-out from their check and they don't want to do the work to make it otherwise.  Further, many people see that refund as more-or-less a "forced savings account" that goes cha-ching every year.  That's dumb, by the way, but it is what it is.

Not this year.

Biden and Pelosi's change to the child tax credit, if you have kids, making it a thing paid out over the year, means that instead of reconciling it after the end of the year and getting it back in a big chunk you got it in payments over the course of the year.  Biden and Pelosi thought this would help families meet their expenses.

Maybe it did, but what it also did was for many people erase the refund, and for those who were somewhat on the wrong side now they owe money come April 15th, and maybe a lot of it. 

Even worse is that for many wage-earners, even without kids, the "standard" withholding is very close to zero, not set to generate a large refund.  I'm seeing this among friends already; they go through all the arm-waving and motions and.... owe $30.  Last year?  $800+ refunds.  Biden claimed that his tax changes wouldn't increase taxes on people making less than $400,000.  I knew that was crap when I read it originally and now, well.... it is crap.

What's worse is that if you owe money this time for last year you may be in a situation where you must make estimated payments (or adjust your withholding with your job) or next year you will get penalized and owe both penalties and interest.  The "Safe Harbor" rule is that you must have paid 90% of what you owe in a given tax year or 100% of the taxes owed the previous year, or have less than $1,000 owed for the previous year beyond what you paid, or you're subject to penalties and interest.

When you're doing a lot of independent work and your income is all over the place you frequently end up in a "year on, year off" situation where you must make estimated payments one year to stay in the "safe harbor" (since you can't predict what the next year will be), then if that year was soft you don't have to do the following year because you wildly overpaid to be within the safe harbor, and then back to it again.  That's life when you are doing independent work and have no idea what your earnings will look like in a given year, and pre-Obamacare where I actually put in effort to make money (and thus paid taxes) this was the world I lived in post-MCSNet.

Obamacare destroyed my willingness to engage in such work or start a new business because from about $20,000 to $40,000 an utterly enormous percentage of it gets recaptured in the form of losing the Obamacare subsidy.  There are zero circumstances under which I will effort to earn money when my effective tax rate on that piece of my earnings is 70, 80, 90 or even 100%.  Nope, especially since my health-care spending for the last 20 years that would be covered by said "insurance" has been zero.  I'm forced to pay for something I get no value out of with the only possibility of it working out is if something really awful happens.  Yes, I know, once you "punch through that" it goes away but there's never a guarantee you'll succeed at that in a given year as an entrepreneur, and if you don't pull massively away from it (north of $100k or more) the effective tax rate on your actual earnings as an independent is ridiculous.  In short you either have to know you can make materially into six figures in a given year or the only wise decision is to stop earing around $25,000 which is where the phase-out starts for a single person who is not working a W2 job.

For most wage-earners with kids this will be the first time they get hit over the head like this and it doesn't end this year if the amount is over $1,000.  If it is, and for many people it will be, now you have to make the estimated payments or adjust your withholding -- or you risk getting hammered next year.

Plenty of people thought this was going to be a bonanza for those who quite-reliably vote Democrat when Biden and Pelosi made this change, and I suspect that was exactly their thinking too; oh look, we gave you more money, vote for us!

Uh..... how's that looking now, Nancy and Joe, considering that there's an election coming up and, for most of the people in your base, from their point of view they got screwed.

No, they didn't really get screwed; the actual change was a timing change rather than an amount.

But perception is reality when it comes to politics, and the perception is that you hosed your constituents.

Good luck. (read more)

Consider a handful of examples of this new genre:

• Is Wokeness Almost Over? (Scott McConnell, The American Conservative)

• The fightback against wokeness has begun (Frank Furedi, Spiked)

• Why Wokeness Will Fail (Bret Stephens, New York Times)

• The end of woke is nigh (Peter Franklin, UnHerd)

• Emerging Cracks In The Woke Elite (Andrew Sullivan, Substack)

• Dave Chappelle May Help Tame Wokeness [as part of a “Thermidorian reaction”] (Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal)

• Inflation Might Spell Doom for Wokeness (Lewis M. Andrews, The American Conservative)

• Is this the end of progressive America? (Joel Kotkin, UnHerd)

While a few of those examples are from earlier in 2021, this theme seems to have really emerged and begun to solidify into a consensus among more centrist types soon after the beginning of November 2021. That was when some conservative American politicians won or almost won a few special elections, in part by riding a popular backlash to Critical Race Theory in schools, and a number of local ballot measures to defund police departments failed around the country. Republicans, feeling especially good about their chances against a flailing Biden, started drooling over a “Red Wave” expected to sweep them back to power in the 2022 midterm elections. And now that private equity executive turned Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin has personally won the culture war’s Battle of Midway, the tide has turned and, aside from the occasional messy beachhead here or there, inevitable victory is now in sight, or something.

One would think that by now all these anti-woke conservatives and moderate liberals would have learned at least some of the bitter lessons from the last decade about how political power and cultural change actually work, but I guess not. They could have taken note of all the fundamental factors driving this ideological belief system, all of which had to be painstakingly uncovered, layer by layer, even as it swept through every institution. But they have not. (Like, do they even read the pages and pages of erudite Substack anthropology on the topic? No?) They could have recognized by now that this is not a simple political issue with a political solution, but they have not.

Look, honestly I really didn’t want to have to do this. Come the New Year I had resolved to focus on the positives and all that crap. But I haven’t seen anyone else do it, so guess I have no choice and the duty falls to me to deliver the pessimistic news: no, the Revolution is far from over.

So, in what might also serve as a handy tour guide to the vast depths of the ideological abyss, catalogued at length here – in convenient listicle format! – are twenty reasons to get woke and despair.

1. One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs. What is called “Wokeness” – or the “Successor Ideology,” or the “New Faith,” or what have you (note the foe hasn’t even been successfully named yet, let alone routed) – rests on a series of what are ultimately metaphysical beliefs. The fact that their holders would laugh at the suggestion they have anything called metaphysical beliefs is irrelevant – they hold them nonetheless. Such as:

The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil); language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” – thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed; this has created power hierarchies enforced by the creation of false boundaries and authorities; no oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal; the stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy; all disparities visible today are de facto proof of the influence of hierarchical oppression (discrimination); to redeem the world from sin, i.e. to end oppression and achieve Social Justice (to return to the kingdom of heaven on earth), all false authorities and boundaries must be torn down (deconstructed), and power redistributed from the oppressors to the oppressed; all injustice anywhere is interlinked (intersectional), so the battle against injustice is necessarily total; ultimate victory is cosmically ordained by history, though the arc of progress may be long; moral virtue and true right to rule is determined by collective status within the oppression-oppressed dialectic; morally neutral political liberalism is a lie constructed by the powerful to maintain status quo structures of oppression; the first step to liberation can be achieved through acquisition of the hidden knowledge of the truth of this dialectic; a select awoken vanguard must therefore guide a revolution in popular consciousness; all imposed limits on the individual can ultimately be transcended by virtue of a will to power…

I could go on, but the real point is that these are faith-beliefs, and ones capable of wielding an iron grip on the individual and collective mind. And they have a strong civilizational resonance, because they are in fact not arbitrary but deeply rooted in a metaphysical struggle that effectively stretches to the very beginning of Western theological and philosophical thought. In other words, “Wokeness” is much more than just a political program. And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon, because…

2. The void of meaning still hasn’t been filled. I mean, did the gaping hole of meaning in people’s lives created by the uprooting forces of secular liquid modernity get resolved in some alternative way while we weren’t looking? You know, the spiritual void that this creepy chimeric faith-ideology and its romantic political crusades rushed to fill in the first place? Has there been some kind of genuine, organized religious revival? Has decadent nihilism stopped being the defining sentiment of the age? Did the young even become hyper-nationalists or revolutionary Marxist class-warriors instead? Have they found an alternative passionate heroic narrative to act out in some new Davos slide deck? No. And in fact, meanwhile, it also seems that…

3. Social atomization hasn’t reversed. It sure seems like the kind of robust communities, civic associations, and “little platoons” which once served to fortify society against the revolutionary (per Burke) and totalitarian (per Arendt) forces that thrive on atomization haven’t suddenly been rebuilt from the ground up. In fact even the most basic such unit, family formation, appears to be continuing to decline precipitously. And that may be because…

4. Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity. That is: liberalism made the autonomy of the individual its highest good. To maximize individual autonomy, the state therefore found itself obliged (being unable to resist claims that it must enforce an expanding array of rights) to exercise its power to help progressively liberate the individual from all limits and constraints, including from tradition, religion, geography, community, family, and nature itself. (This is certainly deserving of more argument than I have space to recap here; see “Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution” for a bit more.) Liberalism has thus acted as a centrifugal force, severing all the centripetal counter-forces that once kept individuals connected to recognizably human communities and launching them outward towards solitary orbits where they can drift cold and alone in their pods.

From this perspective it is more obvious why the amorphous ideology referred to as “Wokeness” so often seems mixed up and chaotically self-contradictory: it is the confused response to two opposite instincts. On the one hand it is actually a kind of anti-liberal reactionary movement, a blind, emotional scramble to grasp desperately for collectivism in the most basic, tribal sort of community seemingly still available: in identity groups, and in fixed racial identity in particular. But, on the other hand, it simultaneously attempts to continue embracing the boundless autonomy of individual choice as its most sacred principle, celebrating an individual’s right to self-define everything about themselves without limit, up to and including their own concept of material reality. (This cognitive dissonance has never been much more than an ideological speedbump, however – don’t get your hopes up.) And this hyper-individualism has now collided head first with the technological revolution, which increasingly positions itself as offering hope for the boundless potential necessary to escape from any natural limits whatsoever, including by fracturing any solid definition of what we once thought it meant to be human. And, speaking of technology and fracturing, meanwhile…

5. The information revolution is still reverberating. Ultimately, what’s more important in driving societal change: ideas, individuals, material conditions, or technological forces? That’s a fascinating question to debate, but for now all that matters is that it’s become manifestly clear that the ongoing revolution in information technology, most notably the internet and social media, has been a tremendous driver of cultural and political change. In fact a growing number of thinkers tend to attribute nearly the entire phenomenon of Wokeness to technological factors. Social scientist Jonathan Haidt, for example, traces it directly to the 2009-2012 period, when Twitter added the retweet button and Facebook added the share button. The resulting acceleration of memetic virality revolutionized the whole dynamic of how people interact with each other on the internet and suddenly made concentrated ideological coercion via distributed online mob a common occurrence. And whatever the precise influence of technological change in driving the Revolution, it certainly hasn’t ended. When the invention of the Gutenberg printing press launched an information revolution in the 15th century, the full consequences took well over a century to play out – a century of theological chaos, bitter division, and bloodshed. The mass media revolution of radio then helped do the same in the 20th century. We should hardly expect the consequences of the internet to be any less dramatic or long lasting. In part, we’ve already seen how its disintegrative effect has helped ensure that…

6. There is no authority. Who or what institution today is now able to establish any kind of common metaphysical framework, common moral narrative, common vision of a properly ordered life, common norms, or even a common reality that most of society will respect, trust, follow, and collectively defend? CNN? Ted Cruz? Yeah no, we can move on. But how then can this ideological upheaval quickly be put to rest, exactly? Considering this, and all of the above, it really shouldn’t be a surprise to discover that actually…

7. Political parties can’t choose their policies. Political strategists have been pointing out for some time now that woke ideas like Critical Race Theory and defunding the police are not politically popular and are hamstringing the Democratic Party’s electoral chances. So theoretically they would just drop these things, stop talking about them, change course, and talk about popular things. But of course it’s not that simple. All they can actually do is ride the chaos of the Zeitgeist, because some small portion of their base (maybe some 8% of Americans) are true believers gripped by a religious fervor that transcends political calculation. And this minority is steering the ship, because…

8. Majorities don’t matter. Unfortunately for those dreaming of harnessing a majority anti-woke popular will, the truth is that, as statistician and philosopher Nassim Taleb has explained in detail, it’s typically not the majority that sets new societal rules, but the most intolerant minority. If the vast majority generally prefers to eat Food A instead of Food B, but a small minority is absolutely insistent on eating Food B and is willing to start chopping the heads off of anyone who disagrees and serves Food A – and the majority doesn’t care enough to get all bloody dying on this particular culinary hill – all restaurants will soon be serving only Food B, the new national cuisine. This is especially true if the intolerant minority already holds a disproportionate position of influence within the system, given that…

9. Personnel is policy. Let’s imagine, for example, that some lawmakers officially ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their state’s schools or universities. Will this be the end of the matter? Will all the woke teachers and administrators who consider “consciousness raising” through “critical pedagogy” – or in general what Marxists call “praxis,” the constant need for the transformation of theory into practice – to be practically a religious commandment just stop doing so? No of course not. As one consultant/cleric recently advised teachers, “Don’t say critical race theory, just teach its precepts… You’re going to see how classroom teachers apply some of these pedagogical models in ways where they don’t even mention the words critical race theory but are doing anti-racist work.” Yes, the work of spreading the new good news shall not be stopped! After all, who is going to stop them? Will they be fired by the woke human resources department, or the woke principal? Abandoned by the woke teachers’ union? Reported to the state by their un-woke peers, all of whom have already been systematically purged from the collective for their heresy? If concerned parents do manage to get them fired, who will hire their replacements? Why… the woke HR department! The people who actually set the effective policy of any institution are inevitably the personnel located in the power centers closest to implementation. Or as a Chinese saying goes: “for every measure that comes down from on high, a countermeasure arises from below” (上有政策, 下有對策). That principle works equally well for a revolutionary professional managerial class as it does for beleaguered counter-revolutionary peasants. And in this case the reality is that…

10. All the institutional high ground is still occupied. Have the top universities already been retaken from the woke, or replaced? (No, one still imaginary university in Austin doesn’t count.) What about the elite finishing schools? The accreditation companies? Most mainstream news media? The social media companies? The publishing houses? Hollywood? The major foundations? The non-profits and the think tanks? The consulting and accounting companies? The investment banks? The NASDAQ? The digital service providers? The HR departments of the Fortune 500, and most of their boards? The law schools? The Bar Association? The permanent federal bureaucratic state? Heck, even Halliburton? No, at such a ludicrous suggestion the Cathedral merely echoes with the mocking laughter of the new woke high clerisy. They know from experience that…

11. Long marches are long. When Herbert Marcuse and the rest of the Neo-Marxists and critical theorists of the Frankfurt School finally took to heart Antonio Gramsci’s directive to seize “cultural hegemony” and first conceived of launching Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions,” it was only the start of the 1970s. It was not until almost fifty years later that their dream was realized. However much the last several years may have seemed like an avalanche of shockingly rapid ideological coup d'états to those who saw power abruptly change hands in their institutions, one after another, this suddenness was an illusion. Coups only succeed if the backers necessary to support them are already in place. And it took literally a generation of young intellectuals and activists simultaneously inspired and disillusioned by the left-radicalism of the 60s entering into and seeding the institutions, rising into positions of power, and cultivating another generation of trained foot soldiers for their influence to fully flower.

Now, much as Marcuse was lamenting in 1971 that “the fact that the radical Left has no equal access to the great chains of information and indoctrination is largely responsible for its isolation,” the Right and its moderate liberal fellow travelers today find themselves isolated and impotent in turn. And yet, in response, they appear to have no patience whatsoever for executing their own counter-march through the institutions, instead mostly trying to either force the institutions to behave differently through political power (mostly pointless), or fleeing from the institutions entirely in a bid to create new ones from the ground up (a longshot, if more promising). Either way, they seem to hope everything achieved by the left can be reversed in the matter of only a few years, which is naïve on multiple levels because…

12. Culture wars are generational wars, and the young are woke as hell. In his book Bowling Alone, the legendary political scientist Robert Putnam explained that sweeping social changes typically only occur “generation to generation,” or through what he called “cohort change.” For most people, the formative experiences of coming to age are truly formative – afterwards their fundamental values will typically barely change for the rest of their lives. For this reason, as Tanner Greer adeptly elaborates, it is necessarily the case that “culture wars are long wars,” because “cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort.” Instead the “real target of [their] ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren.” The process of “instilling new ideas and overthrowing existing orthodoxies takes time—usually two to three generations of time,” so for the generational cohort at the height of its power any change will seem to only be happening very gradually. But eventually a transition point is reached, and “the end falls swift: the older cohorts suddenly find themselves outnumbered and outgunned, swept up in a flood they had assumed was a mere trickle.” They are shocked and confused, but only because “the revolution occurring below did not echo in their souls” like it did for the youth, whose views they neglected or ignored. Only once it is far too late do they realize their mistake.

Hence even if the anti-woke were prepared to launch their own long march through the institutions, the cohort from which they would currently need to recruit their talent is the same one that’s been busy tearing things down and chanting “the Revolution will not uphold the Constitution!” Of Generation Z Americans (those born after 1996) 51% report that America is “inextricably linked to white supremacy,” 52% support racial reparations, 60% believe systemic racism is “widespread” in general society, and 64% say “rioting and looting is justified to some degree” by the need to address systemic racism “by whatever means necessary.” 51% believe the “gender binary” is “outdated,” and up to 40% self-identify as LGBTQ+ (although Gallup separately finds only about 16% do, compared to 2% of Baby Boomers). 59% support expanding non-binary gender options. 41% support censorship of “hate speech,” 66% support shouting down speakers they consider offensive, and 23% support using violence to silence such speakers. 61% have positive views of socialism, and 70% think “government should do more to solve problems.”

Sorry conservatives, but that’s the 67 million-strong cohort who will fill the pipeline of employees, leaders, educators, and voters for the next two decades or so, even if Gen Alpha (those born after 2010) were all to become rampant little reactionaries tomorrow. But why are the youth so woke, anyway? Well maybe, for one thing at least…

13. The youth are still coddled and mentally broken. Back in 2015, when most people still thought of what is now referred to as Wokeness only as a bizarre and vaguely amusing phenomenon that was isolated to college campuses, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published an essay titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” in The Atlantic (later to become a book of the same name) as an early hypothesis of what was happening. They advanced an essentially psychological explanation for why so many college students were suddenly acting simultaneously like fragile snowflakes and rabid authoritarians: thanks to the embrace of the “self-esteem” movement and “helicopter-parenting” by their Boomer parents, along with liability risk-aversion by institutions, young people had grown up physically and psychologically “coddled” and therefore emotionally fragile. By this the authors specifically meant that they had adopted a number of beliefs totally inverse to the Stoic-derived principles considered best practice by modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. These unhealthy beliefs included: always trusting your feelings, assuming disagreement is always a personal attack, and believing hurtful words lead to real harm, including permanent trauma. Normalization of these beliefs led to a “cult of safety” on campuses, with hyper-attention devoted to the prevention of offense (because it was now actual “violence”). Hence the emergence of such innovations as “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.”

I must admit that I’ve grown a bit skeptical of this explanation by now. As things have progressed, it’s become increasingly clear to me that these claims to offense are often used as cunningly deliberate weapons against empathetic liberals, and are probably frequently evidence less of psychological fragility than of psychopathy. But, it does seem true that Gen Z sadly does indeed suffer from much higher rates of mental illness than older generations (though the millennials are very close). Even before the pandemic, the rate of anxiety and depression recorded in their age group nearly doubled between 2007 and 2018, as they came of age. The suicide rate rose 57%. From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%. Only 45% reported their mental health was good overall in 2018. One-third reported having a mental health or substance abuse problem. They are also far and away the loneliest generation. Meanwhile, our whole culture seems to have grown significantly more possessed by emotivism in general, to the point that the decline of rational language and the rise of emotional reasoning can even be tracked quantitatively…

But I digress. If we assume any of this may be causally related to the Revolution, the real question for us here is: has any of this gotten better? Of course not! The pandemic has had a devastating impact on Gen Z’s already fragile mental health. Up to seven in ten now report feeling depressed. Rates of severe depression rose to around 25%. Hospitalization for suicide attempts by girls in particular rose 51% from 2019 to 2021. Meanwhile, far from pulling back at all on the “cult of safety,” colleges have now expanded it to absolutely insane levels. So no, the situation has not improved. And from what we know about how totalitarian cults target and more easily exploit the lonely and vulnerable, we can probably safely assume the Revolutionaries will only have more material to work with moving forward, not less, as college graduates remain fragile and/or “entitled” for the foreseeable future. And speaking of anxious, entitled young people…

14. Elite overproduction is still in overdrive. In what is rapidly becoming one of my preferred explanations for the Revolution, the evolutionary anthropologist/mathematician/prophet of doom Peter Turchin has identified “elite overproduction” as having been one of the top drivers of revolution and civil conflict throughout history. He points to the tendency for decadent societies to produce far more overeducated elites than there are elite-level jobs, leading to large numbers of underemployed, resentful elite-class intellectuals of the type who tend pine after the position and status they “deserve” and eventually start spending their free time starting revolutionary cells. Or as James Lindsay has put it, all the children of the upper-middle class bourgeoisie “fake elites,” who find they will likely never be part of the truly wealthy elite (e.g. Bezos) that they aspire to be, have quickly become “a breeding ground for ressentiment in society” instead.

But, scrabbling desperately with one another for status, and horrified at the idea of ever falling into the ranks of the mere working class, the overproduced elites have found another solution: they’ve set themselves up, not as the nobility, but as the First Estate, the new clergy, where they can labor diligently to produce basically nothing but the “right” opinions to police our collective moral rules. And now they’ve succeeded in creating their own job market (e.g. critical theorists, diversity consultants) out of thin air. Or as Mary Harrington recently put it succinctly: “Once you start seeing the calls for moral re-evaluation of everything as a mass job application on behalf of an ever-expanding surplus of arts graduates it’s difficult to unsee.” And in this crowded, hyper-competitive world of the bourgeoisie, the surest way to move up is to take someone else down – hence “cancel culture” and the vast, elaborate, ever-changing, mandatory “correct” vocabulary that functions as a way to help weed out any of the competition (or dirty proles) who can’t keep up. Thus Wokeness.

Have young people stopped trying desperately to make it into Harvard or Yale and join the smaller and smaller share of the population that represents the elite? No way. It’s just that, thanks to the latest expansion of a huge, growing industry of administrators and consultants, the professional managerial class has an array of profitable new fallback options after investment banker. Now instead of having to labor through something difficult, like medical school, in order to achieve a respectable, well-paid career, one can always become a Chief Diversity Officer (average annual salary in Northern California in 2021: $231,500 to $329,500). Fortunately the government is there to help make sure this will remain an option in perpetuity, because…

15. “Wokeness” is still required by law. Why are America’s university presidents and CEOs so terrified of their Gen Z students and employees, capitulating immediately to their every demand? Is it because Twitter has become basically their entire world? Do they, as Theodore Roosevelt once said of William McKinley, just have “the backbone of a chocolate eclair”? Probably a bit of both. But likely much more important is that they are terrified of the law.

The scope of U.S. federal antidiscrimination statutes that grew out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have already made the core facts of what people think of as “Wokeness” the law of the land. This includes the concept that all disparities are due to discrimination (“disparate impact”), the requirement that employers relentlessly police private speech that could be in any way offensive to any “protected class” (to prevent a “hostile work environment”), and “affirmative action” in hiring. Moreover, the law as written is so deliberately vague in its language that any new claims to rights raised by any protected identity group can be seamlessly slipped into the body of harms that any company or organization must legally prevent. So, for example, if any employee refuses for whatever reason to refer to another employee by their chosen gender pronouns, the entire company is in real danger of being held liable for violation of Title IX and Title VII by permitting discrimination on the basis of sex (as affirmed by the Supreme Court in its Bostock decision). Or at least so the company must assume, because the potential financial penalties are far too high to risk it. The nonconforming employee is getting the boot – unless they themselves are of a protected class that could conceivably sue for being fired due to their identity…

The safest path through this regulatory mess is simply to hire a very large HR department staffed with “experts” in all these rules and let them handle it, including by subjecting employees to a vast numbers of “training sessions” run by DEI consultants, all of which can if necessary then be pointed to in court as evidence that the company was definitely doing everything it could to prevent any discrimination from occurring. Hence why while fewer than 30% of organizations had an HR office in 1955, that number had grown to 70% by 1985, and today it is close to 100% of all firms of any significant size. So, as Christopher Caldwell has painstakingly explained, the unintended legacy of the original “emergency measures” of 1964 was to create an entire permanent apparatus of “surveillance by volunteers, litigation by lawyers, and enforcement by bureaucrats.” Then “the fear of litigation privatized the suppression of disagreement, or even of speculation,” and so the phenomenon of “political correctness” emerged as simply “the cultural effect of the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law.” But because enforcement gradually expanded through new case law and executive orders, and therefore “there was no statutory ‘smoking gun’ behind it, this new system of censorship was easily mistaken for a change in the public mood.” Or, as Richard Hanania has put it simply, the fact that we now have uniformly “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law.”

Practically speaking, this means any claim by conservative politicians that they will put an end to Wokeness if elected to office is pure theater. Without addressing the structure of the law, none of the forces at play in the workplace will reverse on their own (in fact they will get much worse. Have I mentioned how very woke law students are?) But unless these politicians are willing to take on the politically suicidal task of reforming the Civil Rights Act (practically holy writ in American society due to having tackled a genuinely great moral wrong), nothing they do will have any significant impact on the concrete incentives at play. So it’s a safe bet that they will just posture rhetorically and pass another tax cut instead. And speaking of incentives…

16. Money is still power. Those who live outside places like Washington D.C. or San Francisco might hear the word “philanthropy” and think it means feeding the hungry, or something naïve and low-brow like that. But “philanthropy” is really a word for how the concentrated power latent in oligarchic money is transformed into applied political and cultural power. In this process, money from concentrations of wealth (today mostly from the tech industry) flows (tax free!) into very special institutions called foundations, where it is laundered of any appearance of corrupt influence or nefarious motive, and then handed out to the vast constellation of non-profit NGOs, activist organizations, think tanks, and academic programs that subsist almost entirely on such money, where it can find a way to “inspire change.” A large proportion of the elite in places like Washington are engaged in helping facilitate this process as their full-time labor. (How to spot a budding young elite aspiring to join this trade: simply scan their job applications for polite requests to be given some power, pretty please, such as a stated desire to “make an impact” or “change the world.”)

This means the foundations have truly tremendous influence over public policy, because every nominally independent think tank, for example, automatically tailors its projects to attract the blessing of their funding. Government officials, being lazy, and chummy with the non-profit “experts” and executives (who are often former or future colleagues), simply copy their ideas almost directly into the rules they implement. Alternatively, those in the government with an agenda can hand over trial policy ideas in the other direction to be validated “independently” by the other side of the blob. This Wealth-Foundation-NGO-Government Complex thus works in unison to pour huge amounts of money-power into causes that are essentially by definition progressive ones (being to affect rapid change). Today this means there are massive tides of woke capital hard at work changing the world. How much money? Well as Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times about just one cause du jour:

Before [George] Floyd’s death, Candid found that philanthropies provided “$3.3 billion in racial equity funding” for the nine years from 2011 to 2019. Since then, Candid calculations revealed much higher totals for both 2020 and 2021: “50,887 grants valued at $12.7 billion” and “177 pledges valued at $11.6 billion.”

Among the top funders, according to Candid’s calculations, are the Ford Foundation, at $3 billion; Mackenzie Scott, at $2.9 billion; JPMorgan Chase & Co. Contributions Program, at $2.1 billion; W.K. Kellogg Foundation, $1.2 billion; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $1.1 billion; Silicon Valley Community Foundation, $1 billion; Walton Family Foundation, $689 million; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, $438 million; and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, $350.5 million.

With this much money spent, the priorities of the non-profit sector have already been firmly set for at least the next few years, as budgeted projects are implemented. Hundreds of new institutions will have been set up to get in on the feeding frenzy. And all of these now have an incentive to justify their existence in perpetuity by hyping whatever problem they purportedly exist to solve. The inertia is now immense. In time, their specific priorities may change as the foundations’ priorities change, but one thing you can be sure of is that those priorities will stay woke – because if you begin to dig into what, say, the Ford Foundation has gotten up to in its lifetime, the deeper you go the more and more horrifying it gets – until you learn they were the ones who essentially invented modern left-wing identity politics in the United States in the first place. (The Ford Foundation is also a great example of how the foundations often run riot well beyond even the intentions of their donors. Henry Ford II went to his grave lamenting the family had ever set theirs up in the first place, describing it as “a fiasco from my point of view from day one,” having “got out of control” because, “I didn’t have enough confidence in myself at that stage to push and scream and yell and tell them to go fuck themselves, you know, which I should have done… we can get thrown out or we can go broke; but those people, they’ve got nobody to answer to.”)

But even the foundations, despite their zeal and close relationship with government, may ultimately wield only a shadow of the influence exerted more quietly by titans of finance like the “Big Three” asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. With a collective $22 trillion in assets under management, and owning an average of 22% of the typical S&P 500 company, these three firms have the power to dictate corporate policy across the world, both by acting as voting proxies for their index fund investors, and through the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) standards they choose to set as requirements for investment. And because these firms’ leaders are now woke (or at least see advantage in acting woke), there is now, as Vivek Ramaswamy has explained in detail in Woke, Inc., constant pressure on companies to get woke too, or face losing critical access to capital.

In any case, whether it’s the influence of foundations or asset managers, what should be obvious is how unprepared the average politician is to stop any of this. Not only is the American political class’ power over moneyed interests held back by legal limits, but they also have significant political and personal incentives not to upset the same elite coastal donor and investor class that funds their campaigns and employs them after they retire. Despite their collective anger about Wokeness, America’s conservatives, in particular, still seem to have no real consensus or even understanding of how to begin to tackle such a problem, given their traditional worship of capital. Which is a big problem, given that…

17. The opposition is still only political. Given all of the above, it should be clear by now that political opposition to the Revolution is rather unlikely to be sufficient – not without resistance on the cultural, educational, economic, technological, and media fronts as well, at a minimum. Yet what else has emerged so far? As outlined in detail above, the woke left is unloading huge amounts of cash to advance the social causes that matter to them. On what social causes has the right matched this level of funding, or even enthusiasm? Does the right even have social causes? If people standing up to the woke are being fired for their ideals and losing their employer-provided health insurance, for example, does the right have a concrete plan to make sure they have an alternative? How many people other than Oren Cass have started seriously considering a new, conservative wave of unionization by now? And if this is a “culture war,” is there a conservative foundation for the arts? No, it doesn’t seem like it. At least the dissident right has some great memes and a lot of people who can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about cryptocurrencies, I guess. So even if Red Tribe does sweep the elections in November, or 2024, what is likely to be the result? Probably the same as their last period in the majority: at lot of populist huffing, puffing, and flailing about trying not to drown as the Revolution continues to advance. And speaking of politics in such a scenario…

18. Partisanship is still getting worse, and Wokelash 2.0 is entirely possible. Donald Trump may not have been the cause of the Revolution, but his presidency certainly helped send it into overdrive. Worked into frothing-at-the-mouth levels of outrage, the ranks of the #Resistance were easily converted to Wokeness on the purely tribal need to be for whatever Trump was against, traditional liberal principles be damned. America’s partisan political rancor has hardly improved in the year since Trump left the White House – if anything it is somehow even worse. So let me make a prediction: if Trump wins again in 2024, be prepared for the inevitable outbreak of the Second Woke Crusade to extirpate all the Racist Forces of Evil from the nation once and for all (some might argue this has already begun). Meanwhile, even if anti-woke Republicans were to seize back the White House (with or without Trump), they would soon learn that, in the end…

19. None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands. At the risk of sounding like one of them conspiracy theorists: who really controls the power centers in the United States? The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on. Are all these run by elected representatives accountable to the people, including an elected president and his appointees, who then set a policy direction which is faithfully executed? It may be worth considering that this is simply not the case. That, instead, these power centers are run by a certain interchangeable class of people who already staff them permanently and run them as they think best and only cooperate if they so please. And who all happen to have went to the same schools (let’s go Hoyas!), and received the same prestigious fellowships from the same foundations, and share overlapping networks, and marry each other, and hang out at the same parties, even though secretly they actually all mostly loathe one another. And who hire each other as they cycle seamlessly between the public and private sectors. And who all consume the same media, and like to send each other the same latest “must-read piece” in The Atlantic, or whatever. And who somehow all use exactly the same identical phraseology when they humble-brag on LinkedIn as when they issue a State Department press release. What if this is the real body-politic?

It may then be the case that this class prefers to believe that they have a certain right to rule as they do – a certain nobility of superior virtue, merit, and knowledge that justifies their permanent hold on power and the material gains that happen to come from it. It may then be that if any entity intrudes into this body-politic from outside, it naturally gets all inflamed and ideologically feverish in an attempt to purge the infection by whatever means necessary – both to reassert control and so its members can assure themselves that they are in fact still the good guys, the ones who retain the Mandate of History, as it were. And it might be that this class, which is of course the most diverse, inclusive, and enlightened ever assembled by said history, has recently come to realize they aren’t much liked by the masses, out there – those people whose wild and unpredictable behavior, driven by dark irrational impulses, is impossible to understand, even after a safari! In that case they may have determined that it is necessary to form a united front – transcending any specific past political demarcations – to make sure none of those dangerous barbarians ever gets anywhere close to the levers of power in our democracy, where they risk derailing the train of progress and disrupting the natural order of wise technocratic rule.

If all this were the case, there might be a need to build a big, beautiful metaphorical wall, to separate the inner from the outer, allies from enemies, the good people from the bad people. In this effort, a strict moral ideology – like a state religion, but with none of that unscientific stuff – would be an essential tool to distinguish between us and them, and to help keep dangerous dissenters from polluting the united front with class treason. And then, once this firewall was in place, if any wrong-thinking elements with the incorrect ideological encryption key were to be mistakenly elected by misinforming the people, they could be instantly identified, isolated, contained, and suppressed before they could do any harm to the system. It might be worth considering this theory, just in case what’s happened is that…

20. Leviathan has a’woken. In the end, it may be that “revolution” isn’t quite the right word for Wokeness after all. Real revolutions characteristically replace one elite with another, redistributing their wealth and power. True, this is happening at the individual level, with many a white male manager finding himself suddenly replaced by someone younger and “more diverse.” But at the broader level this is a “revolution” that has been embraced wholeheartedly by the leadership of the elite, who show little fear that they will ever be replaced as a class. Indeed they seem to have adopted woke ideology as a wonderfully useful tool for reinforcing their position while punishing their inter- and intra-class rivals.

In this way the woke revolution strikes me as similar to the Chinese Cultural Revolution – and not just because of a similar ideological emphasis on the destruction of the Four Olds (Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Customs), as many have now pointed out already. Rather because, at root, the Cultural Revolution was started by Mao as a way to leverage the blind ideological zealotry of the young to wage an intra-elite war on his political rivals within the Chinese Communist Party. Seeing many of his peers as encroaching on his authority and threatening the continued centralization of power, he stirred up an internal revolution to destroy them while reenergizing the Party base. Just like then, things may not turn out quite how today’s woke-riding elite hope, of course; the Cultural Revolution became an uncontrollable inferno that consumed many who thought themselves safe, or even to be its leaders.

But it seems to me that the woke revolution, as co-opted by the elite, is being tailored to point not towards dissolution and lawless chaos forever, but towards a re-ordering that brings with it a great centralization and unification of power. In this revolution the liberation and safety of the individual by the state becomes the greatest good. Each individual comes under the tender, empathetic care of the state alone, which ensures their “liberty” through safety. The state contains only autonomous individuals, whose general will is represented by the state. Hobbes’ Leviathan wakes.

In 2019, America’s most celebrated high priest of Wokeness, Ibram X. Kendi, was invited by Politico magazine to offer his take on “how to fix American politics.” He proposed an “an anti-racist constitutional amendment” that would make unconstitutional “racial inequity” and “racist ideas by public officials,” and “establish and permanently fund [a] Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.” The DOA would be “responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.”

Most would of course argue that the chance of such an amendment ever being passed in today’s United States is basically zero. But Kendi’s idea of establishing a permanent totalitarian super-structure overarching the state, through which unelected and unaccountable “trained experts” would tirelessly ensure democracy can no longer be misled by unacceptable people or ideas… is this not a sight of awful beauty? For here is Leviathan emerging from the deep, momentarily visible as it crests above the waves. Here is Kendi revealing the whole telos, the whole intended final destiny of the woke Revolution, as it and the shared destiny of the technocratic state rush to merge into one point of singularity, where all shall be consumed: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

As I said in the beginning, I hope I am wrong. But I think it is perhaps too soon to scoff at Kendi’s plan, to trust that this is not where we are headed in the end, eventually, if a firm stand is not taken. Not if the terrible truth is that Wokeness is Leviathan, and Leviathan is woke.

Some of these many explanations above for what continues to drive Wokeness may seem contradictory. And perhaps some are. But they also aren’t necessarily exclusive. And in fact there are certainly likely to be many more factors than this list contains. Like a hydra, today’s Revolution is a complex beast with many heads; its causes and its consequences may be multitudinous.

Also like a hydra, it is likely to prove very difficult to kill. If there is a wave of conservative political victories in U.S. elections this November, expect the “Wokeness is dead” takes to come fast and heavy. But hopefully now you won’t be fooled, and will know: the Revolution isn’t over. (read more)

The US Foreign Policy establishment is not happy about these developments. They don’t want Germany to become more dependent on Russian gas because commerce builds trust and trust leads to the expansion of trade. As relations grow warmer, more trade barriers are lifted, regulations are eased, travel and tourism increase, and a new security architecture evolves. In a world where Germany and Russia are friends and trading partners, there is no need for US military bases, no need for expensive US-made weapons and missile systems, and no need for NATO. There’s also no need to transact energy deals in US Dollars or to stockpile US Treasuries to balance accounts. Transactions between business partners can be conducted in their own currencies which is bound to precipitate a sharp decline in the value of the dollar and a dramatic shift in economic power. This is why the Biden administration opposes Nord Stream. It’s not just a pipeline, it’s a window into the future; a future in which Europe and Asia are drawn closer together into a massive free trade zone that increases their mutual power and prosperity while leaving the US on the outside looking in. Warmer relations between Germany and Russia signal an end to the “unipolar” world order the US has overseen for the last 75 years. A German-Russo alliance threatens to hasten the decline of the Superpower that is presently inching closer to the abyss. This is why Washington is determined to do everything it can to sabotage Nord Stream and keep Germany within its orbit. It’s a matter of survival.

That’s where Ukraine comes into the picture. Ukraine is Washington’s ‘weapon of choice’ for torpedoing Nord Stream and putting a wedge between Germany and Russia. The strategy is taken from page one of the US Foreign Policy Handbook under the rubric: Divide and Rule. Washington needs to create the perception that Russia poses a security threat to Europe. That’s the goal. They need to show that Putin is a bloodthirsty aggressor with a hair-trigger temper who cannot be trusted. To that end, the media has been given the assignment of reiterating over and over again, “Russia is planning to invade Ukraine.” What’s left unsaid is that Russia has not invaded any country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and that the US has invaded or toppled regimes in more than 50 countries in the same period of time, and that the US maintains over 800 military bases in countries around the world. None of this is reported by the media, instead the focus is on “evil Putin” who has amassed an estimated 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border threatening to plunge all of Europe into another bloody war.

All of the hysterical war propaganda is created with the intention of manufacturing a crisis that can be used to isolate, demonize and, ultimately, splinter Russia into smaller units. The real target, however, is not Russia, but Germany. Check out this excerpt from an article by Michael Hudson at The Unz Review:

“The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” (“America’s Real Adversaries Are Its European and Other Allies”, The Unz Review)

There it is in black and white. The Biden team wants to “goad Russia into a military response” in order to sabotage NordStream. That implies there will be some kind of provocation designed to induce Putin to send his troops across the border to defend the ethnic Russians in the eastern part of the country. If Putin takes the bait, the response would be swift and harsh. The media will excoriate the action as a threat to all of Europe while leaders around the world will denounce Putin as the “new Hitler”. This is Washington’s strategy in a nutshell, and the whole production is being orchestrated with one goal in mind; to make it politically impossible for the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to wave NordStream through the final approval process.

Given what we know about Washington’s opposition to Nord Stream, readers may wonder why earlier in the year the Biden administration lobbied Congress NOT to impose more sanctions on the project. The answer to that question is simple: Domestic politics. Germany is currently decommissioning its nuclear power plants and needs natural gas to make up for the energy shortfall. Also, the threat of economic sanctions is a “turn-off” for Germans who see them as a sign of foreign meddling. “Why is the United States interfering in our energy decisions,” asks the average German. “Washington should mind its own business and stay out of ours.” This is precisely the response one would expect from any reasonable person.

Then, there’s this from Al Jazeera:

“Germans in the majority support the project, it is only parts of the elite and media who are against the pipeline…

“The more the US talks about sanctioning or criticizes the project, the more it becomes popular in German society,” said Stefan Meister, a Russia and eastern Europe expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations.” (“Nord Stream 2: Why Russia’s pipeline to Europe divides the West”, AlJazeera)

So, public opinion is solidly behind Nord Stream which helps to explain why Washington settled on a new approach. Sanctions are not going to work, so Uncle Sam has flipped to Plan B: Create a big enough external threat that Germany will be forced to block the opening of the pipeline. Frankly, the strategy smacks of desperation, but you have to be impressed by Washington’s perseverance. They might be down by 5 runs in the bottom of the 9th, but they haven’t thrown in the towel just yet. They’re going to give it one last shot and see if they can make some headway.

On Monday, President Biden held his first joint-press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the White House. The ballyhoo surrounding the event was simply unprecedented. Everything was orchestrated to manufacture a “crisis atmosphere” that Biden used to pressure the chancellor in the direction of US policy. Earlier in the week, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki repeatedly said that a “Russian invasion was imminent.” Her comments were followed by State Department flak Nick Price opining that the Intel agencies had provided him with details of an alleged Russian-backed “false flag” operation they expected to take place in the near future in east Ukraine. Price’s warning was followed on Sunday morning by national security advisor Jake Sullivan claiming that a Russian invasion could happen at any time maybe “even tomorrow.” This was just days after Bloomberg News agency had published its sensational and utterly-false headline that “Russia Invades Ukraine”.

Can you see the pattern here? Can you see how these baseless claims were all used to apply pressure to the unsuspecting German chancellor who seemed oblivious to the campaign that was aimed at him?

As one might expect, the final blow was delivered by the American president himself. During the press conference Biden stated emphatically that,

“If Russia invades … there will no longer [be] a Nord Stream 2.. We will bring an end to it.”

So, now Washington sets policy for Germany???

What insufferable arrogance!

The German chancellor was taken aback by Biden’s comments which clearly were not part of the original script. Even so, Scholz never agreed to cancel Nord Stream and refused to even mention the pipeline by name. If Biden thought he could sandbag the leader of the world’s third biggest economy by cornering him in a public forum, he guessed wrong. Germany remains committed to launching Nord Stream regardless of potential flare-ups in far-flung Ukraine. But that could change at any time. After all, who knows what incitements Washington might be planning in the near future? Who knows how many lives they are prepared to sacrifice in order to put a wedge between Germany and Russia? Who knows what risks Biden is willing to take to slow America’s decline and prevent a new “polycentric” world order from emerging? Anything could happen in the weeks ahead. Anything.

For now, Germany is in the catbird seat. It’s up to Scholz to decide how the matter will be settled. Will he implement the policy that best serves the interests of the German people or will he cave in to Biden’s relentless arm twisting? Will he chart a new course that strengthens new alliances in the bustling Eurasian corridor or will he throw his support behind Washington’s crazed geopolitical ambitions? Will he accept Germany’s pivotal role in a new world order— in which many emerging centers of power share equally in global governance and where the leadership remains unflinchingly committed to multilateralism, peaceful development and security for all– or will he try to prop up the tattered post-War system that has clearly outlived its shelf-life?

One thing is certain; whatever Germany decides is bound to affect us all. (read more)

The categories of erotica available include: “boy to girl,” “guy to girl,” or “men to women.” Examples of stories listed under “boy to girl” are: A Temporary Schoolgirl, I Never Wanted to be a Girl, Mind-Altering Feminizing Tapes, Becoming a High School Girl, Boy to Real Bitch, and Lipstick Discipline.

Most of the stories about fictional children involve what is called "petticoat discipline," a genre of transgender erotica that describes a mother figure or older sister punishing a misbehaving young boy by forcing him to wear makeup, feminine underwear, and dresses. These stories are targeted at adult men who are aroused by imagining the scenario, and audio of each is provided in the form of an AI text-to-speech program designed to sound like a child’s voice. The effect of the generated, robotic child’s voice is chilling, especially when describing graphic sexual activities.

As Girly As It Gets follows the story of a 13 year-old boy who is mocked in school and elected as homecoming queen. The boy, called Mark, is forcibly "feminized" by his mother and older sister, who remove all of his body hair and coerce him into donning lingerie, a dress, and fake breasts for the homecoming ceremony. That evening, when they return home, his mother has him sign a consent form for breast implants: “not only had my mom signed for me to be a part of this, but my implants also couldn’t be bigger than she was. Mom has double D cups, just so you know.” As he is about to undergo surgery, it becomes clear that he is not a willing participant. “It was too late by the time I realized where [the nurse] was going with all the questions. She showed me the implants she intended to use and the fake vagina she would suction and seal between my legs.” This is a clear example of the "forced feminization" genre of transgender pornography being projected onto a child, onto the idea of a little boy being "feminized" against his will through surgeries.

Another example of the sexualization of minors is found in the app’s story Girly Changes, which describes a ten year-old boy named Ryan who is found to have a rare genetic disorder referred to as TSS, or "transsexual syndrome." "Ryan internally, biologically and genetically, is a girl. Other characteristics had started to appear like the growth of breasts and the retreating of the scrotum to create a natural-looking vagina." As is typical for the genre, the boy in the imagined situation is unhappy with the changes, but nevertheless relents to appease his mother.

The category Lipstick Discipline contains 22 chapters accompanied by cartoonish drawings of a young boy in lingerie and women’s clothing and makeup. The series begins when the boy character is just 4 years old, and continues on into his early teen years, detailing how his mother punishes him by forcibly applying lipstick, nail polish, and girls’ clothing and undergarments. All of these stories are labelled as rated “R”; there are vivid descriptions of the young boy character in a highly sexualized context, and all of the stories involving children fall under the transgender pornography genre called "forced feminization," where men and boys are "transformed" into women and girls, usually by a domineering mother figure, through the process of being punished in sexually objectifying and degrading ways.

There is also erotica in the app involving minors that includes graphic sexual activities, as the child ostensibly begins to enjoy being punished and humiliated in this manner. A story titled A Boy With Long Curly Hair, rated X, details how two older men convince a young boy to crossdress and eventually perform fellatio on them, coached along by his mother. “Michael, dear, you’d make a lovely girl,” she says. “Why not take the next step? You can go back to being a boy anytime you want. You only have a few months left to experience how it feels to be a girl. Once in high school, that’ll be the end of the opportunity… Imagine Will and Jeff, how they would behave if you looked more like a girl.” The adult male characters, Will and Jeff, are aroused by the boy’s feminine transformation and groom him for sexual abuse. The rhetoric provided by the mother figure parallels the insistence by transactivists that drugs referred to as "puberty blockers" are reversible and that they ought to be given to children at a young age in order to provide them with an opportunity to try the transsexual experience for themselves.

In I Never Wanted to Be a Girl, a 15 year-old boy named Sam suffers an accident that damages his Achilles tendons. In order to learn how to walk again, he is given high heels. He is groomed by his friend named Tia, who is described as his female “look-alike” and “the best looking 15 year-old in town,” who dresses him in her clothing. Once in public, the children are immediately propositioned by men offering them money for sex. Sam begins going by Samantha, and begins to enjoy the attention from Tia and from other boys his age who make him feel “hot” like a “bimbo.” The story eventually culminates in a trip to the endocrinologist:

“‘I don’t want to become a girl, at least not where it counts. That I’m sure of.’ The endocrinologist took over. ‘Samantha, it is possible, by changing your hormone balance, to keep you from ever maturing as a male… It may be possible for you to develop small, feminine breasts and change your fat distribution so you have a more defined waist, and larger thighs, hips, and bottom. If you were ever to decide to change back, the fat would re-distribute itself naturally.’ Tia whispered in my ear, ‘Think about my doing to you what I like so much when you do to me.’”

This story in particular mirrors a real-life incident involving one of the pioneers of the "gender identity" theory, New Zealand’s sexologist John Money, who attempted to raise a boy as a girl after a botched circumcision permanently damaged his male genitalia. A best-selling book by journalist John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, explores how John Money attempted to convince David Reimer that he was born a girl named Brenda. Money would force David to imitate sexual intercourse with his twin brother, beginning from the age of six, in what Money called “sexual rehearsal play,” and he would photograph the boys in these poses. Money believed that showing pornography to children was an efficient method for helping them develop their "gender schemas," or gender identities. “Explicit sexual pictures,” he wrote in his book Sexual Signatures, “can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education.” Such pictures, he said, “reinforce his or her own gender identity/role.” Both David Reimer and his brother Brian committed suicide in adulthood.

In most cases, photographs of children are used alongside each story. For the story titled A Temporary Schoolgirl, the app’s developer chose a photo of 14 year-old UK girl Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing self-harm posts on Instagram. Photographs of Molly appeared in media publications in 2019, as her grieving father, Ian Russell, spoke with the BBC calling for greater accountability on behalf of social media firms for the content that they platform. In response to Russell’s case, UK politician Jackie Doyle-Price, who was at that time the Secretary of State for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, said that harmful suicide and self-harm content online can have “the effect of grooming people to take their own lives.”

There is a disturbing irony in Molly Russell’s photo being featured in an app which eroticizes the grooming of children into transsexualism: as Russell was groomed into self-harm and taking her own life, children and teenagers are also being groomed, via social media, into gender identity ideology, and often alongside a narrative that promotes suicidal ideation.

Images of children celebrities and social media influencers are also used alongside the erotica, including: Coco Quinn, a young woman who rose to fame at 12 years old; Berta Castañé, a Spanish actress who similarly landed her first role at the age of 12; Jack Bennett, a child "influencer" specializing in makeup tutorials; and Corey Maison, a famous "transgender youth" who aspires to become a Victoria’s Secret model.

One of the photos used in the app is of an unidentified teenage boy wearing makeup and a wig. A reverse image search leads to a YouTube video of this boy applying makeup, a wig, and a dress. It was uploaded by a user named “Spokane Sissy” who has used an AI-generated, robotic feminine voice to add commentary, saying,

“For a shorter time in my life, I identified as a transgender woman. I now know I am a sissy. I choose to crossdress, and I have a singular reason for doing so: to present myself to real men as a sexually attractive and available f*cktoy. I would have never come to accept myself as a f*cktoy without the insight I garnered from my time on YouTube. My journey to this understanding of myself began with this video.”

One of Spokane Sissy’s most popular uploads is a video titled, “Unconditional Love: Older Man Convinces Young Man to Crossdress.” The top comment is from another crossdresser account and reads, “The only thing that could make this perfect for me would be an older woman making me her lesbian lover.”

In the “man to woman” category, After Wife’s Death tells the story of a man named Gary, who is married to a beautiful woman named Sarah. Gary, who runs a “home-based computer software business” begins dressing up in Sarah’s clothing while she is away at work. Sarah refuses Gary’s advances to engage in sexual intercourse while he is wearing her clothing but allows him to continue indulging his fetish whenever she is at work. While away on a business trip, Gary visits a women’s clothing shop and pretends to be his wife, telling the saleswoman who works there that his name is Sarah, and is so aroused by the experience that he immediately pleasures himself when he gets home.

Sarah is written out of the story in a single sentence, and Gary begins taking her oral contraceptives, “which made his skin smoother and his beard less vigorous. He believed he was Sarah, and to the casual observer, was the image of her. He increasingly thought of making the transition to Sarah more permanent.” He begins a friendship with the saleswoman, Steph, who helps him begin dating men "as a woman." Gary is now committed to using his dead wife’s identity full-time.

There are several real-life examples of men who claim a transgender status, unabashedly stealing the identity of a woman they know or have been involved with, usually in a romantic capacity. One high-profile incident involved "Jessica" Yaniv, a Canadian trans-identified male whose lawsuits against women refusing to provide him with a bikini wax made headlines in 2019.

Yaniv took the name "Jessica" from a girl he targeted online and groomed for sexual abuse when she was between the ages of 14 and 15. In 2020 it was reported that 62 year-old Larawest Baglien of the United States began identifying as a two-spirit trans woman: “She is not Indigenous but her wife of 31 years is a member of Fort William First Nation.” There is also some anecdotal evidence which has been gathered by Trans Widows Voices, an organization which campaigns for the rights of women who have been abused by men claiming a female identity. As one woman described it,

“He was feigning this whole coquettish, girlish thing, that looked like a parody of me. It felt like he was trying to be me, like he was mocking me, taking what was mine. He even affected my mannerisms, my laugh, the way I walk.”

Another application on Google Play is Crossdresser - Transform from Male to Female, which gives tips on how to present as a woman, is available for free, and is rated for ages three and up. Described as “a complete guide to cross dressing for LGBT community - towards womanhood” it gives instructions on how to tuck and dress to resemble an objectified woman. A section titled “Private Parts” features advice on lingerie and how to create the appearance of breasts, along with a diagram of a nude woman in high heels labelled “Ideal Proportion - Female.”

In a section titled “To Be a Real Woman,” the app’s creator writes:

“One of the toughest jobs a transgendered person has to learn is to be accepted as a real female while out in public. Cross dressing means much more than wearing female clothing. It also involves acquiring or imitating feminine attributes and behaviors - including movements, mannerisms, and mental states. The purpose of this guide is to help you to pass as a genetic female, to increase the possibility of you being accepted as a real woman in public.”

Suggestions also include internalizing the objectified female form: “Genetic women often take off their clothes and look at themselves in the mirror. Do the same. Look at your naked body in the mirror and imagine yourself as female.”

Adult men are using the app’s comment section to request sexual hook-ups. Commenters ask for and provide the names of areas where they live on some occasions, and others ask for “naughty selfies.” A few netizens request a woman to “sissify” them. Some refer to themselves as “CD,” an abbreviation for crossdresser, and state that they want to make their “transition” permanent. According to the app’s developer,

“Transwomen can come from the whole of the male-to-female side of the transgender spectrum, from transsexuals to crossdressers… Men wear female clothes for a number of reasons… some men dress for a sexual thrill, a turn-on.”

Professor Roy F. Baumeister is a social psychologist who is known for his work on the self, social rejection, belonging, sexuality and sex differences, self-control, and free will. His 1989 book Masochism and the Self explains the phenomena of sexual masochism as a means of releasing the individual from the burden of self-awareness. According to Baumeister:

“Gender switching is exclusively associated with male masochism. Male masochists show clear behavioral signs of being feminized... The fact that our culture’s ideals of femininity resemble the goals of masochism should not be disregarded… But the resemblance between masochistic and feminine models tells us more about our culture than about the essential nature of womanhood.

Male masochists seem to like to be reduced to beings of lesser status… Many males reported being feminized, which also entails loss of status insofar as men generally have higher status than women. Presumably, status is a central issue in male identity, and the desire for loss of status is a central feature of male masochism.”

There are countless forums online dedicated to the eroticization of forcing boys to dress in women’s clothing; there are self-published erotica books on Amazon and personal blogs; there are captioned images on Pinterest image boards and across social media; and there is the "femboy" pornography genre, in addition to the broader category of "forced feminization." As evidenced by the application Transgender & Crossdressing Stories, as well as an abundance of “sissy captions” which also use photos of actual children, adult men are fetishizing the forcible transitioning of children.

Gender ideology uses children as a cover for adult male sexual practices centered around BDSM. Historically, the group of people associated with transsexualism were adult men, though this demographic has shifted as the adult male sexual practice of crossdressing has become normalized through the proliferation of gender ideology.

Rather than expanding the definition of women, the definition of transsexualism has been broadened to include women and children. By removing "sex" from transsexualism and replacing it with the word "gender," the fetishistic element, though still present, has been obscured. The narrative of the transgender child appears to be at least in part constructed in an attempt for adult men with paraphilias to save face, and to believe childhood transition would have made them a more attractive version of an adult "woman." (read more)

Between your third and fourth (and final) sessions with my daughter you and I had a one-on-one conversation wherein I believe you recognized that this mother and this family were not going to easily or willingly surrender this child to whatever gender transition services you were prepared to refer her for after just three forty-five-minute meetings.

I asked what it was specifically about my daughter that convinced you that medical transition would be the right course of action to relieve her distress. You said, “He has Gender Dysphoria.” I said, “She has an eating disorder, body dysmorphia, and ADHD, all of which seem to have some overlapping features with Gender Dysphoria. Why wouldn’t you assess for and treat those before triggering any kind of medical intervention?”

I asked you what happens if my daughter, upon taking T and going through the changes you described, is not relieved of her dysphoria. What if her feelings and symptoms of self-loathing, dissociation, anxiety, depression, and self harm become exacerbated? You visibly cringed at my questions and responded that most people who transition are satisfied with their results and don’t regret their decision. I asked where I might find peer-reviewed longitudinal studies that suggest that affirming and facilitating social and medical gender transition produce happy, well-adjusted teens and young adults. You said you would gladly send me links to those studies. The links never came.

I was clear, perhaps brutally so, that affirmation of male gender identity would not be the focus of your subsequent sessions and that you would instead help her explore her discomfort with her now almost fully developed, curvy female body. You would talk with her about her anxiety, her depression, her giftedness, her sense of alienation from her peers at a highly competitive suburban high school, and the impact of the pandemic at such a pivotal point in her life. In other words, you would work to slow the transition train way down.

Thinking back to that conversation I feel a delayed sense of dread as that was before I knew that major medical and mental health associations, the law, and key players in our state and federal government had also adopted a gender identity affirming stance, albeit for their own personal and political purposes. At the time I was unaware that in some instances parents had been reported to Child Protective Services just for refusing to address a child with his or her chosen name and preferred pronouns. In a way, though, I’m glad for my ignorance because I believe my forceful early pushback saved my child’s life. I would not take any of it back.

With an abundance of unconditional love, real psychotherapy, solid psychiatric care, and some long-overdue changes in her personal and social life, my daughter is coming into her own as a quirky, witty, gender non-conforming young adult. She is grieving as she sheds her preoccupation with chemically and surgically transforming her body into something that would never result in her being male. She will not have to live out her life in a Frankenbody. No dry and shriveling vagina. No beard or male-pattern baldness. No irreversibly thickened vocal chords. And no enlarged and exposed clitoris. You called it a phallus, but she would never pee or ejaculate from her clitoris. It is anatomically impossible.

A critically important thing that we learned along the way is that my daughter, as many other young people who declare transgender identity in adolescence, is on the autism spectrum. She was diagnosed by an experienced child and adolescent psychiatrist and is now coming to understand how certain aspects of her autism resulted in collapsing and narrowing her focus into gender identity as a way of explaining and coping with what made life so difficult for her during her middle and high school years. She is learning to reconcile with being socially awkward and having idiosyncratic interests and will be better for it as she inhabits her full adult self sometime in her late 20’s. She is a brilliant and beautiful human being whose entire future came so close to being stolen from her by the gender transition industry. It is alarming that an entire generation of gifted children who may be on the autism spectrum is being sterilized in what amounts to a eugenics experiment with the participation of big-name medical and professional institutions, and to the benefit of a novel category of mental health practitioners: gender therapists like you.

Had my daughter continued on the path she was on when you were her therapist, she would be well into a regimen of weekly testosterone injections and eventual surgeries that would not have resolved her Gender Dysphoria, a diagnostic category that was included in the DSM-5 (APA, 2013) as a way of validating the experiences of a very small percentage of the population who suffer with lifelong feelings of discomfort and disconnection with their biological sex, all while creating billable codes for gender clinics and mental health professionals (see Drescher, 2013: “…it is difficult to find reconciling language that removes the stigma of having a mental disorder diagnosis while maintaining access to medical care”). I know this because one of the experts on the DSM-5 workforce on Gender Dysphoria is a long-time friend who is, himself, appalled at what has come from this diagnostic category that he, no doubt with the most compassionate of intentions, helped forge. It is disappointing that he is hesitant to come out on the side of best and safe practice and to publicly state that gender exploratory therapy is NOT conversion therapy; that, in fact, putting so many young LGB people on a fast-moving conveyer belt to medical transition is the latest iteration of gay conversion practices.

Our daughter was not “assigned female at birth”. She was born with the full complement of normal female sex organs and all the eggs that her ovaries will release over the course of her fertile years, regardless of whether or not she ever chooses to become a mother. We expected as much because prenatal DNA testing let us know unequivocally at ten weeks’ gestation that we were having a baby with XX sex chromosomes in every cell of her body. And no, she isn’t “intersex”. Her phenotypical features reflect her Southwest Asian genetic heritage and she is fine and healthy just as she is. Nothing about her body is or has ever been out of place. If the gender transition industry is anything it is profoundly racist and disturbingly sexist.

I believe that the medical fast tracking of trans-self-identifying children and young adults is a contemporary twist on American individualism taken to its point of absurdity. We are now in a situation where corporate wolves are passing effortlessly as progressive sheep. Even Planned Parenthood, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall that was confirmed with the recent Texas abortion ruling, may be hedging its bets by offering “Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy”. Institutions’ needs for staying relevant and projecting themselves into the future trump any fidelity to stated guiding principles. And a parent’s need to protect her child’s mind and body trumps any and all political affiliations. Our wallets and our votes will speak for us.

*   *   *

It is now September and my daughter and and I have been living in a city in the former Soviet Union as of mid August. She is connecting to her roots, her land, and her cultural heritage; to rich and lasting sources of identity that synthetic hormones and manufactured gender ideology were threatening to undermine and replace. She recognizes that going down the path of medical transition would have made her into a lifelong patient as well as holding her back from so much joy and freedom that she now has access to. She is coming to terms with the inevitable losses that growing up brings and discovering facets of herself that she never would have if we had taken your advice and initiated medicalization. Gender ideology would have had to become the central focus of her intellect and creativity for the rest of her life.

It helps that the local language, which my daughter is quickly absorbing and starting to speak, is devoid of gendered grammatical markers. I think she is relieved to not have to ask or answer questions about “preferred pronouns” and such. Here, no one is compelled to participate in a mass delusion that requires thought control and speech policing. They had more than enough of that during seven long decades under Soviet rule. Simply put, people have more pressing daily challenges and live highly interconnected social lives as a result. When you fall passers-by stop to help you up and dust you off. As other young people my daughter feels confident walking around the city on her own at all hours. She increasingly feels safe and at home in this city and in her body. And I grow more hopeful every day that removing her from a culture that would pathologize normal developmental struggles and push costly and irreversible medical treatments, will enable and reinforce long-term remission of gender dysphoria and trans ideation from her life.

I took the unpopular risk of holding my child’s ambivalence and keeping it alive rather than surrendering her to a process that would make her the docile object of bogus “affirmation” and “celebration”. And while I became the target of so much hatred and rage for many exhausting months (affirming and facilitating social and medical transition, by far the less conflictual path for parents who have the financial means, would have gained me temporary status as the heroic mother), she never lost sight of the fact that her father and I were the ones who truly had her back; that social-media groomers’, glitter families’, and gender clinicians’ approval could never be a replacement for her own self esteem and her family’s unwavering love.

Let me close by saying that things are changing in parts of Europe and in the UK. In the US a growing movement of parents and ethical clinicians, most of whom are lifelong progressives and active supporters of LGBTQ people and causes, are organizing and becoming vocal with their outrage and rejection of gender ideology and the unsupported diagnostic claims and harmful treatment practices it has given rise to. When the lawsuits start coming this will be exposed as one of the biggest medical scandals in history.

It is only a matter of time. (read more)

Parent stories are beginning to be heard in places like the PITT substack. The general public should be beginning to see by now that, very slowly, things are beginning to change. In 2021, we had the Washington Post piece and the BBC exposé. Already this year we have had the New York Times, of all newspapers, start to question pediatric transition. Again, I’m not a fool: I know it’s only the tip of the iceberg. But it’s something. This evolution of the conversation is happening slowly, and it's nowhere near enough. But it's beginning to happen. And it needs to happen openly, carefully, and publicly. And that is why it needs to happen strategically.

We are a voice for parents with gender questioning kids. That's what this debate is about. We are being told that we can't use the words “transgender” or the word “gender”, at all. If that is your position, do you believe that changing our slogan to “A voice for parents with deluded, mentally ill children” will enable us to continue our back channel conversations, and get us the media contacts that we need? If so, please show me. Try it yourself. Other organizations exist, and they have used more direct language. They have not gotten into the media. We have. We have put parents’ faces on two national TV networks, telling the world what’s really going on (www.genspect.org/media/). There’s no way this would have happened if the producers had seen words like “deluded” or “mentally ill” on the banner of our website.

People are welcome to take other approaches, but our approach is working. We have had stories placed in other parts of the mainstream media, like the BBC, Telegraph and Times. Please show me how your approach and your language can achieve this.

We are working with countless parents behind the scenes as part of our advocacy project. This has resulted in stopping actual kids from being socially transitioned, in actual schools, which have changed their actual policies on pronouns, bathrooms and changing rooms. If you think that you can get schools to listen and stop socially transitioning kids using your language, please show me how successful you have been. There are children today who have been prevented from socially transitioning at school and have desisted from a trans identity crisis because we have intervened with the school and stopped it. If it weren’t for the obvious need for privacy, I could name the kids we have rescued from social transition.

We successfully got a British detransitioner on national television. If you think that language like “mutilated” will get a detransitioned person on television to explain to the public that transition regret is real and that young people are being harmed, please show me an example of how you did that. Please name the producers at center and left of center news outlets (which are the ones we want to reach) who would still talk to us.

If you think that you can replace the Gender Unicorn with resources that are compliant with regulations but don't mention the word “gender”, please show me. We have teachers emailing us, asking for resources which mention gender but don't teach gender identity theory. Our Gender Giraffe is a tool that teachers are using to discuss this issue, one that kids are hearing about from the media and the internet, in a factual way that confirms that we all have a personality, but sex is dimorphic. There are states that require teachers to teach about gender. The law in many states (e.g. California, Oregon, Washington) and provinces (e.g. British Columbia) literally compels teachers to mention “gender”, by name. If you think you can satisfy this requirement in some way, without using the word, please show me.

We have a trans person on our advisory board. What that means is that centrist and left of center journalists, politicians, producers, and activists face an immediate obstacle when they try to shut us down by labeling us as transphobic. If you believe that you can make the headway that we have made without making that same decision as we did, please show me. Many organizations have tried, have made different choices, and we respect them for that. But they have not succeeded in the same way that we have.

Other organizations have changed their approach over time, because they have realized that they weren't getting anywhere. Our strategy is not accidental. The mothers I work with are intelligent, professional, strategic, and desperate. They have spent a year, or two, three, four or five years thinking about how to get through to the media, the schools, the therapists, and the politicians. When you have had as many sleepless nights as I have, wondering where your child is and whether someday a surgeon will dissect her arm, cut her genitals apart, and scar her for life, please come talk to me. We are doing what we can because we believe it has the best chance of success. As feminists, I hope you would agree that professional and intelligent women who have spent years in this battle might be capable of formulating a strategy with a particular goal in mind. I hope you will also recognize that this has destroyed my family, and nothing I do comes from ignorance of any of the issues here. None of that is to say that other approaches don’t have their own merits: they do. But they won’t, and don’t, achieve the specific goals we have set ourselves.

We are literally at war for our children. War is about strategy. It's about winning battles, and the stakes here could not possibly be higher. Imagine that you are in Nazi occupied France. You're in the resistance, and you need to blow up the railway lines, in order to stop the enemy from advancing. If you don't have a German speaking diplomat on your team, you don't know which railway lines to bomb. We can't afford to be purists here. We have a common enemy, and it would be preferable to focus on the actual battle, and not on which people are allowed to fight it. We need different people, taking different approaches.

Difference does not have to mean disagreement. Every approach is needed and valuable. I'm not telling anyone that what they are doing is wrong. Ideally, we could have complementary approaches with common goals. The goal of parents, and I am one, is to stop our kids from medically transitioning.

It's true that there are many other issues in this debate. The erasure of women, the erosion of single sex spaces, the capture of women's sports, men in women's prisons, and the demolition of lesbian community are all real and important issues. But at the end of the day, children being led into a lifetime of medical harm is truly outrageous. We are witnessing the greatest medical scandal of all time, and we are currently not allowed to talk about it. As a parent, and a woman, I care about all of these issues. But the safeguarding of children must take precedence, because children, of all people, deserve our protection. Children are unable to advocate for themselves. And parents currently are unable to advocate for them. Please give us a voice, and join us. (read more)

Before she decided to strip him of all custody over his son, Drew*—before determining that he would have no say in whether Drew began medical gender transition—California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto asked Ted Hudacko this: “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”

“Of course I would,” the senior software engineer at Apple replied, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”

“I understand that qualifier,” Judge Hiramoto replied. “But if it were—if you were told by [Drew’s] psychiatrist, psychologist that [Drew] was very fragile and that confronting him—or, I’m sorry, confronting them with the idea that they are not the Queen of England is very harmful to their mental health, could you go along and say, ‘OK, [Drew], you are the Queen of England and I love you; you are my child and I want you to do great and please continue to see your psychologist.’ Could you do that?”

“Yes,” Hudacko said. “That sounds like part of a process that might take some time, sure.”

“What process?” Judge Hiramoto said. “What is the thing that might take some time? Accepting the idea that [Drew] occupies an identity that you believe is not true?”

“The identity you just mentioned to me was the Queen of England,” Ted began. “I can tell him and I can affirm that to him, to reassuring him situationally; but objectively, he is not the Queen of England and that won’t change, and even the therapist in that case would know that.”

The then-54-year-old father of two teenage minor sons (Drew is the elder) felt that he was walking into a trap. For Ted, precision is not merely a requirement for his job but almost a constitutional necessity. His recall of every fact, date, and filing of the complicated court proceedings involving him and his ex-wife is astoundingly accurate—the sort of feat you might expect from a brilliant lawyer, not a distraught father battling the legal system alone for his son.

But at this point in the child-custody hearings, Ted couldn’t understand what the judge wanted from him. His soon-to-be-ex-wife, Christine, then an executive at the investment firm BlackRock, had already agreed to shared custody of their younger son; no one—not even this judge—seemed to believe that he was anything like an unfit father.

Ted isn’t a particularly devout Episcopalian, and he describes his politics as libertarian. He’s athletic, health-conscious, and takes a keen interest in his sons’ talents. He coached their baseball teams and researched conservatory programs for Drew, already an accomplished pianist. Just one year earlier, Ted had been one-half of a Bay Area power couple with high-status careers and precocious kids. Now, he was one-half of a contentious divorce, presided over by a judge who was referring to Drew as “they” and pressing Ted to accept that his 16-year-old son was actually a girl.

“And do you think that being transgender is a sin?” Judge Hiramoto asked, according to the transcript.

“No, of course I don’t think it’s a sin.”

“So you don’t think that it’s a sin. But you probably think that [Drew], if they are truly transgender, you would prefer that [Drew] not be transgender because in our society transgender people are the subject of a lot of discrimination. Would you agree with that?”

“I agree that transgender people suffer some discrimination and prejudice. I agree with that,” he said.

“I’m sort of going off the parallel experiences that I’ve read about or heard in family court or in family law classes for judges where gay children come out to their parents,” the judge said. “And sometimes it is difficult for the parents because they believe that the identity of being gay or lesbian, in their religion, is a sin. And then some people don’t feel that it’s a sin, but they say—they take a different angle, and they say, I just would prefer my child not to be gay or lesbian because they suffer so much discrimination in our society.

“So I’m sort of asking these parallel questions to see what is your—what I see in the papers is that you think that [Drew] is not truly transgender and that they are merely confused and—”

“He might be transgender,” Ted said. “He might be.”

“Okay. So if [Drew] might be transgender, it’s just to say they might.”

Ted realized his error and corrected himself: he had used the “he” pronoun because he remained deeply skeptical that the boy he’d coached in little league—the son he’d once seen crushing on a cute girl in his fifth-grade class—was actually a young woman.

“They might be,” Ted said. “[Drew]—they might be. Might be. We don’t know.”

While trying to keep an open mind about Drew’s gender, Ted was adamant to the judge that he did not want Drew to begin medical transition. In the 312 days since he had last seen his boy, Ted had done a lot of research on medical transition and gender dysphoria. He begged the court to consider research that suggested puberty blockers could impair cognition and diminish bone density. He knew that Drew, if administered puberty blockers along with estrogen, would be at high risk of permanent infertility. He wasn’t even sure that his son had gender dysphoria. He wanted to see his son—and he wanted this bullet train to slow down.

“It sounds to me that you would prefer that [Drew], when all is said and done, is just going through a phase. Is that a fair assessment?”

Ted evaded the question. Did he prefer that his son avoid a medically risky regimen that would render him permanently infertile and make him a lifetime medical patient? Wouldn’t anyone?

In the three years I’ve spent writing about families with transgender-identifying minors, the story of Ted Hudacko stood out as a case study of how gender ideology has infiltrated family law. It also frames the unintended consequences of medical professionals’ fudging science, rewriting medical definitions, and tolerating shoddy research to placate activists. At each stage, doctors may have thought: Where was the harm? And so, as a consequence, judges now decide the fate of children and their families based on phony, medically unsubstantiated metaphysics, as if it were factual that all adolescents have an immutable, ineffable “gender identity,” knowable only to the adolescents themselves.

Judge Hiramoto never disclosed that she has a transgendered child, and that she has expressed sympathy for trans activism online. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing. This poor man, Ted Hudacko, was dragged through a Kafkaesque legal system that was utterly against him, and so pro-trans that it beggars the imagination. Seriously, Shrier has the details here. There was never any consideration by anyone representing the court in this matter that Hudacko might have a point, and that transition for Drew might not be the best option.

You should understand that judges are drawn from a social class in which embracing and affirming transgenderism is the expected thing. People who question the trans narrative are monstered by this class. Ted Hudacko and his son never had a chance. Now this teenage boy is going to be permanently mutilated.

Reading Shrier’s story was like reading an account of the show trials in the Stalinist world. The actual guilt or innocence of the defendant was irrelevant. The political verdict was decided before things got underway. What we are seeing here is not just a totalitarian court proceeding, but totalitarianism that comes from the elite social class forcing its highly controversial views on the rest of us, as if they were holy writ. You don’t think it’s a class issue? Here’s how Shrier’s piece ends:

In January 2021, Judge Hiramoto transferred from Family Court of Contra Costa to the Criminal Division. For a year, Judge Wendy Coats presided over the Hudackos’ ongoing proceedings. Last Friday, Ted and Christine appeared before their new judge, Benjamin Reyes II. At issue: the temporary restraining order against Ted.

According to several witnesses, Judge Reyes commenced proceedings by stating his pronouns.

These people, these elites, they hate normality, and they hate people like us. You need to get it clear in your head right now that you too could be Ted Hudacko. You think you’ll be safe if you move from California to Texas? Ask Jeff Younger how that worked out for him in Dallas County, where a judge took his nine-year-old son away from him last year and awarded full custody to the boy’s mother, who is transitioning him to female.

In November 1996, First Things magazine published an extremely controversial symposium on the topic of “the judicial usurpation of politics.” It began like this:

Articles on “judicial arrogance” and the “judicial usurpation of power” are not new. The following symposium addresses those questions, often in fresh ways, but also moves beyond them. The symposium is, in part, an extension of the argument set forth in our May 1996 editorial, “The Ninth Circuit’s Fatal Overreach.” The Federal District Court’s decision favoring doctor-assisted suicide, we said, could be fatal not only to many people who are old, sick, or disabled, but also to popular support for our present system of government.

This symposium addresses many similarly troubling judicial actions that add up to an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics. The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.

Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have. The American tradition abhors the notion of the rulers and the ruled. We do not live under a government, never mind under a regime; we are the government. The traditions of democratic self-governance are powerful in our civics textbooks and in popular consciousness. This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word “regime” we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.

We are at a new moment in which this topic must be taken up again. We are dealing not only with the judicial usurpation of politics, but with the judicial usurpation of family, and the biological destiny of children. It is hard to find words strong enough to describe the hideousness of what these judges are doing. These judges are not outliers, but key actors in an evil system — a regime — that is fast losing its legitimacy, in my view. Why are we sitting back letting this happen? Why do our elected representatives not care? Why don’t we make them care? Look at what they are doing to fathers like Ted Hudacko and James Younger, and to their minor children!

As you know, I am now back in Hungary, where abominations like this do not happen, because most people here are morally sane. And yet, many in the United States look at Hungary as some sort of semi-fascist state. Hungary is a country where the courts will not take children away from parents and permit them to be jacked up on cross-sex hormones. God bless Hungary! The day may come when carers request political asylum here to escape the gender “gulag” into which American judges sentence their children.

This has to be fought politically, and fought hard. What are we waiting for? The First Things symposium, if memory serves, ended with Richard John Neuhaus concluding that as long as we still had the democratic opportunity to fight the courts politically, we could not in good conscience withdraw consent from the regime. What about now?

You, father, and you, mother, are potentially an enemy of the state, simply because you do not wish to have your children mutilated and chemically transformed into a facsimile of the opposite sex. Think about that. None of us are safe from what happened to Hudsacko and Younger, and their sons. All it takes is an angry, divorcing spouse, and a child who thinks they have gender dysphoria, having been propagandized relentlessly by pop culture and the schools.

Here is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short 1974 essay “Live Not By Lies,” from which I took the title of my book about building resistance to this new form of totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn says that not everybody has to be a hero, but there are things that all of us must be prepared to do, right now, to refuse to accept the lies of the system. This is the conclusion:

It will not be an easy path, perhaps, but it is the easiest among those that lie before us. Not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul. No, not an easy path, but then we already have among us people, dozens even, who have for years abided by all these rules, who live by the truth.

And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!

But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.

And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin asks with scorn:

Why offer herds their liberation? 

[For them are shears or slaughter-stall]
Their heritage each generation
The yoke with jingles, and the whip.

He’s saying that we can be like the dumb cows of the herd, or we can be men and women. Are we Americans going to allow the state to do this to us and our children? Are we just going to cower, and leave poor souls like Ted Hudacko and James Younger to be destroyed in trying to protect their children?

The times are very dark. Be a light. Be a damn blowtorch.

UPDATE: It was a joke when Monty Python did it. But this is happening at a real university in the UK:

Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments”. The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.”

Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline”. The word nyan is Japanese for “meow”.

The shocking revelation comes after documents were acquired through a Freedom of Information request filed with the Bureau of Prisons by Amanda Stulman, the Director of the USA branch of Keep Prisons Single Sex. Stulman obtained the documents on December 14, 2021 – several weeks after submitting the request.

The breakdown of trans-identified criminals was sectioned into two categories – one for male-to-female transgenders and one for female-to-male.  According to the document, 48.47% of biological male inmates identifying as women are in federal custody for sex offences, compared to just 4.71% of biological females identifying as men, and 11.2% of the non-transgender male population of federal inmates in general.

Stulman says she's not surprised by the data, but was pleased the information had at least been tracked.

"A challenge in making decision-makers and the public aware of the problems in housing male inmates in women's prisons and jails is the difficulty in obtaining precise data." Stulman says, noting that state-level correctional facilities often don't keep accurate statistics due to coding based on gender identity markers on legal documents rather than actual biological sex.

Stulman points to a recent case where a biological male convicted of sexually abusing two toddlers was coded as a female in the in Bureau of Prisons system. Jakob Neives, also known as Dakota, had been a trans activist publicly advocating for male access to women's spaces based on gender self-identification prior to his incarceration.

In June of last year, Neives was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for sexually abusing two toddlers, as well as one count of distributing child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography. In the Department of Justice release on his sentencing as well as media reports, he was uniformly referred to as a "woman" and by "she/her" pronouns.

Neives is currently housed at an institution which has separate units for male and female inmates, but Stulman says the Bureau of Prisons has not disclosed which unit he is located on.

Another dangerous male inmate currently in federal custody and coded as female by the Bureau of Prisons is Cristian Noel Iglesias, who was convicted of launching an anthrax terror attack on the British Foreign Office in 2002 while in prison for similar terror-related offences. Iglesias was recently transferred to a women's institution with the help of the ACLU.

"It's maddening that so much effort has to be expended in finding and producing data to show that men who identify as 'trans' have criminal patterns similar to other men." Stulman says, "The vast majority have male genitalia, are sexually attracted to women, and have gone through male puberty so they are, on average, bigger, taller, and stronger than women."

Stulman goes on to state the male inmates seeking to move to women's institutions are often in for more serious offences than their female counterparts, so have less to lose for engaging in misconduct while incarcerated.

"The mere presence of these men is disruptive to [female inmates] wellbeing. That we are allowing any men to opt into women's prisons is a monstrous societal failure."

Keep Prisons Single Sex is an activist organization dedicated to campaigning for the rights of incarcerated women. Started in the U.K in 2020, a U.S branch was quickly established to compliment it. The U.S site notes some of their current goals include ensuring the most recent iteration of the Equality Act does not pass the Senate, and pursuing amendments to the Prison Rape Elimination Act "so as to address current regulations which permit cross-sex housing in prisons." (read more)