Strange Bedfellows

All that I observed from 2020 onward was a puzzling phenomenon I could not make sense of until I came across a 2024 essay in Minding the Campus (MTC) entitled “DEI Hasn’t Died: The Rise of Neurodiversity and Multigenerational Diversity” written by Wenyuan Wu. Now, I do not plan to enter the debate here about whether Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs are worth saving or not—or whether “neurodiversity” is a term worth keeping or not.

What I want to argue is that the extremely controversial biomedical model of mental disorder has now been co-opted and swallowed up even more thanks to those who embody and promote CSJ-like ideologies—most likely without knowing the controversial history and contemporary issues surrounding psychiatric diagnoses, as most of the public seemingly doesn’t—as another way to buttress their identities with psychiatric labels.

I contend that this has made the biomedical model much more difficult to dislodge from its reign of supremacy as well as muddied the critical literature waters and public discourse even more. For example, a “progressive radical” in this regard, such as myself (or at least I thought I was), would say we need to reject the mental disorder model outright and consider alternatives. But now others who I thought were my ilk are giving it full-throated endorsements as they make psychiatric labels a part of their identities in very public, sometimes authoritative ways.

Enter Neurodiversity

Recall al-Gharbi contending that symbolic capitalists can be those who adopt marginalized identities (e.g., neurodivergent, disabled) as a way to position themselves as allies of disadvantaged groups in order to maintain elite status, gain moral authority, and social leverage. Fenton also reminds us that in the power and privilege wheel, disabilities and the like are on the outer reaches of the wheel, distant from the inner center comprising power and privilege.

And so, this here is where I believe a key socio-political pivot has occurred: whereas many of us have critiqued the idea of “mental disorder” itself and have gone at length to suggest we should reject it, people of the CSJ ethos have paradoxically appropriated and reclaimed psychiatric disability and mental disorder as something—another identity marker—needing to be leveraged in order to rebalance the power and privilege scales. I would argue this to also likely be the resultant of CSJ converging with “critical disability studies,” an offshoot of the “social model of disability.”

Timimi suggests that neurodiversity has become increasingly fused with identity politics and culture wars, pointedly stating:

He adds that:

Elsewhere, it has similarly been argued that the use of “white” and “BIPOC” labels contingent on questionable categories of “race” has resulted in a dichotomous balkanization of people, also a critique of CSJ and its contemporaneous “anti-racist” practices. Upon further reflection, I contend that a similar phenomenon is afoot: that of the “neurodiverse” versus the “neurotypical” false dichotomy, also contingent on questionable categories of mental disorder.

Wu continues by suggesting that “[i]nstead of the overt focus on race and gender representation, a new trend of rebranding is emerging.” She adds that:

Cromby and Johnstone, in a recent critical review of the term neurodiversity, observe:

To make matters more confusing, Timimi reminds us that ASD’s expansion:

To be sure, the aims of the neurodiversity movement are admirable as they are still (somewhat) pushing back on the medical model, instead suggesting that “many conditions described as disorders are therefore more accurately seen as neurodivergent differences with potentially positive aspects” and “neurodiversity treats forms of neurodivergence as enduring and pervasive differences in being human.” That is, a person’s “symptoms” could be better seen as characteristics that not only do not necessitate being “treated,” but can be seen simply as a clash with the culture’s norms—a view I mostly agree with.

However, to quote Cromby and Johnstone at length again, here is where I believe the forest is being missed for the trees:

And so, while recognizing the harm that the contemporary biomedical model of mental health can inflict on the people it is intending to help, this movement is essentially trying to pick up a wooden plank while standing on it, using the same medicalizing and pathologizing labels to somehow de-medicalize and de-pathologize their experiences.

Timimi asks, “If it’s a disorder it needs diagnosis and treatment. If it’s a difference it needs acceptance and inclusion (but still needs diagnosing). Is there a bit of cake and eating going on?” Relatedly, I contend that this is why we will never rid the stigma associated with distress when it’s accompanied by mental disorder labels—but only when we rid ourselves of the labels themselves.

Despite (failing at) sidestepping medical trappings of psychiatric labels, I’d argue this CSJ-neurodiversity movement is in fact subscribing to a philosophical position we can call reconstructionism—that is, the idea of “mental disorder” is worth revisiting and revising in order to keep it for particular social justice aims—as opposed to eliminativism/abolitionism—that is, any notions about “mental disorder” should be discarded/resisted/opposed.

Reconstructionism is effectively giving permission for people to engage in othering, stigmatization, pathologization, medicalization, essentializing, et cetera: aren’t these kinds of mistreatments contingent or predicated upon the existence and use of these categories? This is what is meant by trying to lift a wooden plank while standing on it: we’re being met with resistance because of the inherent historical and contemporary trappings “mental disorder” is inseparably bathed in. Instead, we should heed what Timimi suggests when he states that “taking something that is defined as a medical condition…brings along dangers when expanded rather than challenged as a notion.”

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However, as the neurodiversity movement coupled with CSJ-like ideologies continue subscribing to and promulgating reconstructionism about so-called mental disorder, psychiatric identity markers and related categories, this makeshift coalition can be seen continuing to swallow up more and more of the everyday human experience and struggles (“In the name of social justice.”) while bringing everyone else along for the ride. Of note, Haslam’s ideas about “horizontal” and “vertical” forms of concept creep expansion are illuminating in this regard, especially to help make sense of Cromby and Johnstone’s observations of how more labels and different kinds of disabilities are seemingly falling under the neurodiversity umbrella term. (See his 2016 article entitled “Concept creep: Psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology.”)

My Plea

It is the writer’s duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader’s civic duty to learn this truth.

-Vasily Grossman

What I wish this faction from this side of the aisle would be more aware of (and anyone from any political leaning, for that matter, who identifies strongly with their psychiatric labels) is how not only are they proudly identifying with extremely controversial, contested, and oppressive labels, but they are complicit in the ongoing medicalization, pathologization, and decontextualization of understandable human suffering and difficulties. As Whooley observes:

Similarly, Rosenberg has suggested the following:

The continued use of psychiatric labels and strong identification with them will paradoxically contribute to the ongoing medicalization, pathologization, and decontextualization of human distress—genuine social justice concerns and low-hanging fruit that certain left-wing activists and CSJ-like ideologies should be significantly concerned about, especially given the immense implications pertaining to power and oppression.

Elsewhere, it has been argued that social work (the discipline that makes up the largest segment of the mental health workforce in the US) professional organisations speak ad infinitum about being an anti-oppressive discipline, yet this particular biomedical model of mental health is seemingly ignored. In other words, to highlight the hypocrisy and performative nature of the field’s professional organisations.

Conclusion

Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilisation.

-Isaiah Berlin

Only time will tell if the pendulum continues to swing over the next four years. Now identifying as politically homeless, it has been a curious thing to observe how factions of the left-wing party I used to identify with have swallowed up a model that quite clearly goes against their supposed progressive and anti-oppressive social justice values they claim to take seriously. It is similar to modern-day anti-racist activists using seemingly racist tactics to achieve their anti-racist aims—as it happens, also a tactic of a faction of the left-wing party, as McWhorter argues.

Lest I and observers in my camp get tagged as right-wing extremists (again, this essay has been a narrowed-in, concentrated critique concerning a phenomenon that even people from the same side of the aisle have taken issue with, it is also helpful to point out Cromby and Johnstone reminding us how, for example:

After all, when people within the ranks of the United Nations and eventually the World Health Organization (WHO) produce a damning report pointing out not only an excessive use of psychiatric drugs but also a need to move away from the biomedical model of mental health, perhaps this is a social problem that people from all walks of life irrespective of their political leaning can take seriously without a full-throated endorsement of the controversial biomedical model of mental health.

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Arnoldo Cantú, LCSW is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist with experience in school social work, private practice, community mental health, and primary care behavioral health seeing children, adolescents, families, and adults. Cantú was born in Mexico and considers Texas home having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, though currently resides in the beautiful city of Fort Collins located in northern Colorado. He has been the lead and co-editor of several volumes in the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. He’s written critically and philosophically not only about the idea of so-called mental disorder, but also the idea of race categories. He is also critical about ideological bent and the lack of viewpoint diversity in his profession of social work.

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

-Louis Dalrymple

Introduction

In her fascinating book The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, the political psychologist and neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod walks the reader through a philosophical, socio-political, psychological, and neuroscientific understanding of ideology. She demarcates two elements of ideology: rigid doctrine and rigid identity.

She defines the former as “the evidence-resistant absolutist descriptions and prescriptions that guide the believer’s thoughts, actions, utopian hopes, and imagined catastrophes”; the latter is described as the “inventing [of] distinctive identity markers, such as flags, symbols, songs, anthems, costumes, and rituals, which signal membership and devotion. The shared and visible nature of these identity markers fosters passionate feelings of immersion and connectedness with the ideological group…Through these exclusive identity categories, nonadherents are rejected or shunned, and become the objects of hostility and prejudice.”

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With Zmigrod’s accounting in the backdrop, we must examine a pernicious and intractable ideology concerning a model within the field of mental health that, notably over the recent handful of years, has been effectively and paradoxically co-opted by a particular ideological and political segment of the population, at least here in the United States. In this two-part essay, I will argue that elements of the left-wing political party and an ideology in the form of critical social justice activism found within it has become ensnared by the biomedical model of mental health—another ideology comprising the waters in which we all swim when we refer to topics about “mental health,” “mental disorders,” “psychiatric diagnoses,” “mental illness,” et cetera.

The former will be defined later in this essay; the latter can be described as the understanding that human suffering and struggles stem primarily from biological factors residing within the individual that are, then, conceptualized as “mental disorders” or putative medical conditions. This anti-progressive and philosophically vacuous biomedical model of mental health contains unyielding critiques that have been shown to not only be arguably more harmful than helpful to the population it is purported to help—by medicalizing,1 pathologizing,2 and decontextualizing3 human suffering—but has also been appropriated by this particular left-leaning segment of the population as they work to achieve their social justice aims in ostensibly progressive ways.

It should be said at the outset that people or ideologies conservative in nature are also complicit in contributing to the problems inherent with the biomedical model of mental health—they rightfully deserve a critique of their own. For example, evidence suggests that right-wing individuals tend to not only stigmatize those suffering and labelled with a so-called mental illness by perceiving them as more unpredictable and dangerous, but they also prefer to be socially distanced from them.

Therefore, to be more precise, the subject of my critique in this essay and phenomenon I hope to illuminate will be the progressive left-wing convergence and interrelation among what has been labelled (including but not limited to) as:

• Critical social justice (CSJ): the obsession “with power, language, knowledge, and the relationship between them…This is a world view that centers social and cultural grievances and aims to make everything into a zero-sum political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality and many others”;

• the identity synthesis: a framework that prioritizes group identities (e.g., race, gender, and sexual orientation) as the preferred lenses for understanding social dynamics and structuring political action;

• social justice fundamentalism (SJF): the focus on group identities in an authoritarian way as opposed to liberal social justice, the focus on individual rights;

• social justice leftism (SJL): an ideological movement that arose predominantly in the university setting that emphasizes identity markers, rejects identity-neutral justice, utilizes the idea of “concept creep” to express grievances, and “exaggerate[s] claims of identitarian victimization” leading some to suggest that there is an “inversely proportional relationship between the intensity of SJL normative claims about identitarian oppression and the degree to which those forms of identarian oppression have been mitigated or eliminated”;

• the postmodern/critical theory (PCT) movement: “the framing of the world as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed groups” and the “landscape mov[ing] from class to identity”;

• symbolic capitalists and asymmetric multiculturalism: the tendency to adopt or advocate for identities (e.g., neurodivergent, disabled) to gain moral authority and social leverage; and when certain groups are encouraged to organize around identity while others (e.g., neurotypical, the able-bodied) are discouraged from doing so;

• and radical social justice theory: “the belief that society is divided into social identity groups defined by categories such as class, race, and gender; that any ‘unfair distribution’ of goods among these groups is oppression; and that oppression can only—and must—be removed by a coalition of ‘marginalized’ identity groups working to radically transform politics, society, and culture to eliminate privilege.”

As the various ideas and definitions illustrate, these kinds of CSJ-like ideologies not only convey a sort of authoritarianism amongst them in their declarations of what is “truth” and how we should work toward a particular kind of “social justice,” they all also have a common thread emphasized and woven throughout: identity.

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The Contemporary Landscape

I’ve considered myself to be part of a small but mighty minority across the globe working to not only spread the word about alternative views when it comes to so-called mental illness or disorder, but also contribute in developing other ways—frameworks, philosophies, practical approaches—to help those suffering make sense of their difficulties in non-medicalizing and non-pathologizing ways.

See, for example, the following: ADisorder4Everyone, Council for Evidenced-based Psychiatry, Critical Psychiatry Network, Mad in America, the Inner Compass Initiative, the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series, and the 1^st (2017), 2^nd (2018), 3^rd (2019), 4^th (2019), and 5^th (2025) Special Issues on Diagnostic Alternatives published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

When joining the mental health profession, I accepted at the outset that this kind of critical work would be a lifelong uphill battle. However, since about 2020, I began to suspect that my “camp’s” work would begin to face an even more uphill battle based on trends I was noticing in the form of offshoots—the “very liberal” who espouse CSJ ideologies listed earlier in this essay—of the left-wing political party co-opting various kinds of identity markers in their work towards achieving various forms of social justice. These markers have included, confusingly and concerningly, controversial psychiatric diagnoses and mental disorder labels.

Studies have shown increasing rates of “diagnosed mental disorders” and worsening mental health for people who identify as liberal or Democrat. Given these trends, one can assume there is a higher likelihood of someone left-leaning being diagnosed and strongly identifying with a psychiatric label. It is also important to keep in mind the phenomenon of not only “self-diagnosing” that doesn’t necessarily translate into actually seeking support, but also “diagnosis-seeking” behavior, the latter of which can be difficult to refute in a clinical encounter given the lack of objective procedures to “rule out” what someone presents with as their presenting problems and self-reported “symptoms.” And if insurance needs to be billed, current regulations, at least in the US, dictate that a codified psychiatric diagnosis has to be applied—people are “pigeon-holed” into the medical model.

Speculations abound as to possible causes for those increasing rates. On the whole, maybe left-leaning people are more open to mental health services than conservatives. Maybe psychotherapy and related support are less stigmatized for the left than it is for the right. Perhaps more pointedly, maybe left-leaning individuals prefer “a formal diagnosis as conferring a special facticity and legitimacy on their suffering” as a way “to imply that their thoughts, emotions, or behavior follow with an important degree of necessity from their faulty biology and that they lack control over themselves in important aspects of their life.”

Maybe psychiatric labels converge to bolster one’s sense of their “lived experience” to point to certain “truths” and override others—a practice that has also been subjected to criticism. Recall al-Gharbi’s take that symbolic capitalists are those who either adopt or advocate for marginalized identities (e.g., neurodivergent, disabled) to position themselves as allies of disadvantaged groups in order to maintain elite status, gain moral authority, and social leverage. Therefore, if people increasingly view themselves through a “psychiatric prism,” one can see how this appeal to medicalize one’s experiences for secondary gains can become a runaway freight train with adverse effects.

Additional reasons for this phenomenon given observations of everyday socio-political discourse may be so that psychiatric labels can provide one with comfort in a plight of “victimhood culture,” “grievance politics,” or ongoing participation in the “oppression Olympics.” Crucially and central to the argument put forth in this essay, this perceived oppression via shared identity markers and aspiration for a rebalancing of power and privilege can be illustrated via the power and privilege wheel. That is:

Others have pointed out factions of the left-leaning party’s tendency to not only be more drawn to identity politics in the name of progressivism, but also their proud embracement and encouragement to endorse these ideologies even more, resulting in a narrower, rigid view of our world and the people on it. Again, recall Drake who argues that the PCT movement attempts to conceptualize and frame the world in an overly simplistic binary way, constituting oppressor versus oppressed groups contingent on shared identities.

Similarly, Strom and Lieberman suggest these once-obscure ideologies have effectively “create[d] a permission structure for grievances that often seem to willfully subvert accountability and responsibility” in conjunction with the larger socio-political zeitgeist “gripped by a preoccupation with grievance, characterized by overwrought complaints, the weaponization of victimhood, corroded social discourse, disdain for civility and compromise, and political polarization.”

This collective assessment of CSJ-like ideologies embracing various kinds of identity markers, including psychiatric labels, resulting in a despondent socio-cultural ethos in which people are forcibly slotted into a binary (i.e., oppressed versus oppressor) coincides with Haidt’s view that the contemporary socio-political climate has effectively taught—and liberal-leaning people may be especially susceptible to given the political bent of CSJ and worsening mental health for people who identify as liberal or Democrat—reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

That is, this flavor of CBT has effectively promulgated—and people have likely internalized—various kinds of cognitive distortions en masse, such as emotional reasoning, catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, and fortune-telling. I’d add the certainty trap, coined by Redstone, to be another cognitive distortion at play: that is, “a pervasive cognitive distortion that leads individuals to treat their knowledge and beliefs as definitive and final rather than provisional, particularly regarding contentious social and political issues.”

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Connective threads between these theses can be bolstered by ideas put forth in Lukianoff and Haidt’s 2018 book entitled The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, and Lukianoff and Honeycutt’s empirical claim that the further left a young adult or college student leans, the worse mental health they experience as a result of “social justice fundamentalism.” It has also been observed how the field of psychotherapy has become increasingly politicized—most concerningly, in the consulting room à la “the personal is political” and by a predominantly politically progressive profession.

For example, Redding and Satel track the evolution and various “forces” of psychotherapy over the years and argue that we are currently living in the “fifth force” that is “Social Justice Counselling” (SJC), an extension of “Multicultural Counselling” (see here for an example of an attempt at purposefully injecting CSJ into the teaching of clinical social work). However, SJC deviates from multicultural counselling in similar ways to CSJ-like ideologies: whereas multicultural counseling personalizes support for clients predicated on their worldviews, cultural values, and the context in which they live, SJC imposes an overly simplistic binary. Redding and Satel go on to say:

Redding and Satel add that although any sensible psychotherapist will keep in mind environmental and contextual factors influencing the client’s distress, the SJC clinician “violates core tenets of sound and ethical psychotherapy when their therapy work is driven by a commitment to furthering their own political causes or grinding a political axe” through the imposition of an ideology that, again, compulsorily dichotomizes people into an “oppressor” or “oppressed” group based on identity markers, including the client sitting in front of the SJC clinician.

Identity

As foreshadowed earlier in this essay, the curious thing is how some people of this stripe within this political leaning tend to identify strongly with psychiatric labels. Not only do topics about mental health and disorders permeate everyday public discourse as well as various social media sites and apps, such as Instagram and TikTok, but some individuals of this political bent tend to speak about themselves through the lens of their mental disorder labels—and even include their psychiatric diagnoses (e.g., “AuDHD” meaning “autism” + “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]”) and disabilities (e.g., “neurodivergent”) in their bios across various platforms, typically accompanied by some sort of social justice element or emphases on other kinds of identity markers.

It is also common to view videos on YouTube or commentary articles or blog posts about political or social justice-related topics with people sharing how they identify, for example, “as someone who is ‘bipolar’,” “as someone who is neurodivergent” or “on the spectrum,” or as “someone with ‘PTSD’ or ‘depression’.” For example, I recently came across an online bio of a mental health professional who supports the transgender population identifying as an “autistic individual with dynamic disabilities and many more historically excluded disabilities.” Relatedly, I also came across the bio of an academician who identified as “white, Jewish, nonbinary, disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent (AuDHD), polyamorous, queer fat Femme” who is a “social justice activist” and whose research foci are about “disability and ableism (including neurodivergence, Mad studies and disability justice), sexuality and sexual health (including reproductive justice), and queer and trans affirming practice (in behavioral, physical and sexual health spaces).”

The authors of a recently published controversial piece of research that yielded a US Office of Civil Rights complaint identified themselves in their article as “I am a white, transgender, queer, and disabled PhD student” and “I am a proud Mexican cisgender woman. I am also able-bodied, heterosexual, spiritual, and middle class.” Another recently publicized event at a New York university centered on how a “queer polyamorous neurodivergent woman teaches workshop on ethical non-monogamy.” Or, to tie back in the idea that perhaps some individuals prefer “a formal diagnosis as conferring a special facticity and legitimacy on their suffering,” consider the Kansas City alleged teenage arsonist who, despite attempts to keep this individual in custody due to risk to public safety, was released from federal custody due to “[c]ourt records say[ing] he has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, depression and gender dysphoria, and requires daily medication and treatment” such as gender-affirming care.

These examples are clear references to people’s propensities for identifying with many, many labels infused with CSJ-like flavoring: a conglomeration of identities, providing some with a sort of protective shield to ward off any kind of criticism—“a way for some…to express negative emotions in a way that, rather than stigmatizing them, makes them feel part of a community and even unique and special.” In this vein, perhaps identity-based labels—and psychiatric ones, in particular—contribute to and make up part of Lukianoff and Haidt’s idea of vindictive protectiveness: that is, the attempt to shield people from words, subjects, topics, and ideas that may cause the person to experience offence or discomfort and simultaneously punish those who have reportedly inflicted the psychological harm.

Again, I do not disagree that people who are more politically conservative are not immune from identifying strongly with psychiatric labels in public ways. However, it has been difficult to find similar presentations of conservative individuals publicly describing themselves in these kinds of ways en masse—but, perhaps, the reader can correct me. As such, my claim here is that—especially when everyone was relegated to their homes during the pandemic—the internet, social media, political turmoil, omnipresent “therapy culture,” the emerging CSJ zeitgeist spilling out of the ivory tower, and everyday discourse have and continues to play a significant role in shaping how people see themselves through a psychiatric prism with mental disorder labels strongly molding their sense of identity.

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Arnoldo Cantú, LCSW is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist with experience in school social work, private practice, community mental health, and primary care behavioral health seeing children, adolescents, families, and adults. Cantú was born in Mexico and considers Texas home having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, though currently resides in the beautiful city of Fort Collins located in northern Colorado. He has been the lead and co-editor of several volumes in the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. He's written critically and philosophically not only about the idea of so-called mental disorder, but also the idea of race categories. He is also critical about ideological bent and the lack of viewpoint diversity in his profession of social work.

The Lie of “Inclusion”

“Social work is for everyone. No exceptions.”

So proudly proclaimed the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE), social work’s national accrediting body, in its 2024-2025 Annual Report. And yet, there are, in fact, several contemporary “exceptions” seemingly lambasted or dismissed by social workers, encouraged by the field’s ideological slant:

• “White dudes” in the social work classroom

• “Capitalists”

• “Conservatives”

• “Republicans”

• Social majorities

• “Whiteness”

• DEI-skeptics

• Anti-racism skeptics

• Everyone who bears the “insidious nature of Whiteness”

• Jews

There is also a near-endless list of individual “exceptions.” Because social work endlessly spins the oppressor/oppressed, group-identity wheel like a 1970s game show, we refer to self-reported group identities here, instead of individual names:

• A Sengalese pro-capitalist who rejects colonization as an explanation for Africa’s poverty.

• An Indigenous non-activist who considers the full political spectrum within the self-described Indian community.

• A Black conservative who is skeptical of the utopian, fallacious promises of social justice.

• A transgender economist who connects liberalism and freedom with societal prosperity.

• A former foster home youth who argues for the importance of a stable family life.

• A Jewish social work professor who believes in the promise of universalism and humanism.

• A Mexican-American psychotherapist who rejects the “White-BIPOC” demarcation and racial categories.

• A “double minority” nursing assistant who rejects identity-based, rights-driven progressivism without full exposure to competing ideas.

• A German-American political scientist who criticizes the dominance of identity politics.

• A British inner-city headmistress who emphasizes hard work and grit for schoolchildren.

• A Cuban-born writer who is skeptical of the creation of “Latino” and “Hispanic” identities.

• A gay, British writer who advocates for the return of political liberalism.

• A New Zealand-born philosopher who is critical of the current form of progressive feminism.

• A Black liberal professor who takes issue with identity politics and contemporary anti-racism practices.

• A Black, gay immigrant critical of race‑based and identity‑based politics for fostering a sense of victimhood.

• A Black economics professor who is critical of the Black Lives Matter movement and endorses a race-blind philosophy.

• A Russian-born immigrant who argues for preserving an open, tolerant society.

• A Hungarian sociologist who argues for the importance of conceptual and political borders.

• An Iranian-born Muslim-turned-atheist-turned-Catholic who advances the importance of spiritual meaning.

• A Zambian macroeconomist who is skeptical of the positive utility of foreign aid in Africa.

• A Brazilian libertarian who supports the importance of economic education.

• A Black philosophy student who rejects the myth of settler colonialism.

• An Italian-American DEI-critic who argues that fixing perverse economic incentives, not compassion, could ameliorate the homelessness crisis.

• A Black lesbian who rejects identity-based social division.

The strongest “exception,” by far, is anyone skeptical of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, within and outside of social work education. Instead, ignoring disagreement, the CSWE redoubled its pledge to support these ideas: the organization’s declaration that the profession includes “everyone” appeared on the same Annual Report page that described DEI as “core values” (see screenshot).

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This is effectively akin to trying to pick up a wooden plank while standing on it—superficially advocating for diversity and inclusion while hypocritically excluding certain people and ideas at the same time.

The Lie’s Professional Spillover

A week after publishing the Annual Report, the CSWE released its vision for national social work education in a 2026-2030 Strategic Plan, recommitting itself to what we see as an exclusionary, ideological set of progressive values (held coincidentally by a small group of Americans); that is, anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (ADEIB). The organization preemptively congratulated itself for upholding these ideologically tilted values: “Social work students are the future of the profession, and the workforce is ready to meet them.”

As former graduate students and current healthcare professionals, we question whether the U.S. workforce is “ready” to meet DEI-captured students whose critical thinking skills have been corroded, who prioritize consciousness-raising over the dignity and worth of the person in front of them, or who can only view the world through a simplistic, dichotomized, and disingenuous lens of power.

We also question whether the workforce is “ready” to meet students who pursue a “prochange mandate” at all costs—and are unprofessionally trained in the techniques of permanent political struggle—instead of abiding by relevant laws and policies.

Finally, we question whether the workforce is “ready” to meet students who, starting in 2022, underwent two-to-four years of “resocialization” to learn to shame themselves and one another about “White comfort” and “White supremacy”—ideas they will take with them and apply to clients with an untold number of psychological harms.

From the outside, a member of the public could be forgiven for believing that little has changed in the past five years, much as we did when we returned to school. Social work in the United States continues to be a well-regarded mental health profession, according to a 2023 public opinion survey from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). (As it stands, social work will continue to operate as a key part of the workforce, despite recent classification changes from the Department of Education.)

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From the inside, however, the CSWE and its coterie of national social work programs have taken the language of “everyone” to shift professional education into ideologically captured activist education through the discipline’s 2022 Educational and Policy Standards (EPAS). Across the country, Bachelor-level students now get to learn how social work falsely includes “everyone” as they end their programs with an average of $33,000 in loans, while Master-level students finish with an average of $40,000, according to the CSWE’s annual survey of social work programs.

Nor have these changes stopped with education. Organizations like the CSWE and the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) now “use ideologically loaded concepts to pressure practitioners into incorporating political ideologies into their work,” as Nafees Alam, a sports social worker, puts it in the Journal of The Open Therapy Institute.

This pull toward ideological conformity rather than professional neutrality, as Alam describes, comes “in ways that impinge on the equal treatment of clients, client autonomy, and respect for the diversity of clients’ values.”

In the working world, the CSWE’s transformation of professional education into an incubator for an illiberal class of activists will likely accelerate what author Naomi Schaefer Riley observed in 2024:

Certainly, we question whether social work will continue to remain the fastest growing profession in the country if the field merely “become[s] a destination for people who want to get paid to be protesters,” as Schafer Riley says. Worse still, we question how social workers will fare with unrealistic conversations about being five times more likely to suffer a serious workplace violence injury than those in other sectors.

Social work in the 2020s is indeed for everyone. For everyone with rightthink and rightspeak.

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Nathan Gallo, MSW, CNA is a recent Master of Social Work graduate and hospital nursing assistant based in Northern Colorado. He has written about the importance of cognitive liberty, tolerance and value pluralism in social work education. Gallo also led a case study article on medical aid in dying (MAID) and motor neuron disease, published in the flagship journal for this practice, The Journal of Aid-in-Dying Medicine.

Arnoldo Cantú, LCSW is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist with experience in school social work, private practice, community mental health, and primary care behavioral health seeing children, adolescents, families, and adults. Cantú was born in Mexico and considers Texas home having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, though currently resides in the beautiful city of Fort Collins located in northern Colorado. He has been the lead and co-editor of several volumes in the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. He’s written critically not only about the idea of so-called mental disorder, but also the idea of race categories.

UPDATE: As of 2/10/26, this essay has been lightly edited to include archived links after learning that several original CSWE links are now broken.

Joining the CRT Club

Christopher Rufo was onto something. In 2020, he revealed the racialized, guilt-soaked employee trainings implemented throughout the Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights, each slide steeped in what has become publicly known as “critical race theory.” Three years later, we discovered that social work’s sole accrediting body, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), demands its national programs do the same.

All by its own admission.

A 2023 lookback report by the CSWE’s Task Force to Advance Anti-Racism, one of the central drivers of social work education’s prejudicial takeover, admitted: “The consensus of [this report’s] work group was to incorporate content on anti-racism, CRT [critical race theory], and other relevant critical theories into the EPAS. Racial justice terminology must be included in a newly developed EPAS document.”

“EPAS” translates to the field’s Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards, top-down requirements that U.S. social work programs must follow to receive accreditation and stay in the professional education business. The EPAS is revised every seven years, with the latest version released in 2022.

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Infusing CRT from the Top-Down

The Task Force—the source of the report—is one piece of the puzzle involved in putting together the 2022 version of the EPAS that we, as former graduate students, took issue with (we were not alone). As we reported, the Task Force was jointly launched in 2020 by the CSWE’s President and Chair of the Board of Directors, comprised of a closed circle of individuals pre-committed to injecting far-left, so-called progressive ideology into national social work education.

After the Task Force’s creation, the report confirms that complete discretion appears to have been given to its leaders, listed here by roster. (Recall the perspicacious Kendi quote headlining the top of this document.)

The authors explain, “The co-leads and members of the [four] respective workgroups were selected by the Co-Chairs of the CSWE Task Force to Advance Anti-Racism.” Afterward, leaders handpicked those already in agreement: “Co-leads added members who actively incorporated CRT and anti-racist pedagogy approaches to social work education and social work practice.”

It is worth noting that the CSWE does not publish a visual of their organizational chart. One has been created here to illustrate the organization’s trickle-down influences of CRT on social work education and the CSWE’s biased 2022 EPAS approval process, constructed from a combination of news bulletins, timeline documents, conference presentations, policy videos, and the Task Force report.

It is also worth noting that the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), the CSWE’s “recognizing” body, provided the optimal permission structure for the Task Force in 2022 given its own top-down DEI mandates.

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The report discloses that starting in the summer of 2020, the authors conducted an analysis of the 2015 and 2022 versions of the EPAS—unclear whether the latter was Draft 1 or Draft 2—through a “critical race theory lens.” Their intent was to “expose the appearance of racism and ‘Whiteness’ in educational policies and practices through critical analysis.”

“By applying CRT,” the report explains, “social work practice can uncover its White supremacy and ensure the multiple realities of people of color/minoritized groups are centered.” Conveniently, “realities” from minority groups—and individuals—that refused to fit with the pre-built White- and racism-blaming CRT narrative didn’t count.

“To advance anti-racist social work education,” they also reasoned, “the profession must examine the White supremacy and ethnocracy that underscores social work as an applied social science that maintains information structures, paradigms, theories, and practices ensconced in academia.” (Imagine if the authors, instead, sought to examine a “Jewish ethnocracy” or “Black ethnocracy” or “Chinese ethnocracy.”)

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Clarity is not a strong suit of the report. The terms “work group,” “committee,” and “task force” are used interchangeably, making it difficult to tell who participated in the analysis. There are nine listed report authors, ten members of the official “Educational Policy and Accreditation Work Group,” and eleven “contributing members” that analyzed the EPAS.

Nevertheless, the Work Group—shorthand here for the report’s authors—combed through both EPAS Drafts over the course of a year “to examine the presence of racism or anti-racism concepts which trigger what is broadly taught in the curricula” (see screenshot below).

The Work Group clearly cast an eye towards deepening the presence of CRT within future versions of the EPAS, searching for terms like “racism” and “anti-racism” to support “this initial and future analysis.” Their analysis presumably took place early in the revision process: “White supremacy” appeared twice by the time the final EPAS version was approved in June 2022 by the CSWE’s Board of Directors, the Commission on Accreditation (COA), and the Commission on Educational Policy (COEP).

Embedding Anti-Racism (CRT) into National Curricula

The Work Group’s accusatory post-analysis conclusions, presented to leadership in Fall 2021, matched their pre-set, ideological intentions about infusing anti-racism and CRT into national social work education, arguing that the 2015 EPAS does not acknowledge “the full systemic assault of racism and White supremacy upon racialized groups.”

Deana Morrow, Chair of the COA, commended the group’s ideological influence that April: “We really want to thank the CSWE Task Force, the Anti-Racism Task Force, because their work, their rapid and in-depth work, has really been helpful in informing us in really trying to weave ADEI [anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion] across all of the 2022 EPAS.”

“Critical race theory” as a concept is nowhere to be found in the final 2022 EPAS and Interpretation Guide documents. This is likely by design. However, code words in both documents include “anti-racism,” “White supremacy,” “racial injustice,” and “systemic oppression.” From July 1, 2025 and onwards, these concepts constitute the “A” added to DEI—known collectively as “anti-racism”—that all U.S. social work programs are now required to “prioritize and maximize attention to...in the classroom or field settings.”

In January, we proposed that the IRS audit the CSWE because of other evidence we found of the organization’s ideological slant. Here, we additionally urge the federal government to audit grants that social work programs received from the Department of Education that exclusively promote CRT and ADEI. The watchdog organization, Defending Education, found, for example, 22 social work programs steeped in ADEI (and therefore, CRT) that received over $100 million in government grant funding between 2021 and 2025.

Earlier, in September 2021, a social work educator responded to a survey connected to Draft 1 of the EPAS, cautioning, “ADEI, if connected and contextualized within CRT, will be a strong area of discord and even possible litigation in the future.”

Perhaps it’s time for this litigation to federally begin.

Nathan Gallo, MSW, CNA is a recent Master of Social Work graduate and hospital nursing assistant based in Northern Colorado. He has written about the importance of cognitive liberty, tolerance and value pluralism in social work education. Gallo also led a case study article on medical aid in dying (MAID) and motor neuron disease, published in the flagship journal for this practice, the Journal of Aid-in-Dying Medicine.

Arnoldo Cantú, LCSW is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist with experience in school social work, private practice, community mental health, and primary care behavioral health seeing children, adolescents, families, and adults. Cantú was born in Mexico and considers Texas home having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, though currently resides in the beautiful city of Fort Collins located in northern Colorado. He has been the lead and co-editor of several volumes in the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. He’s written critically not only about the idea of so-called mental disorder, but also the idea of race categories.

“Comrades” at the Conference

“Independence is a myth,” charged a social work scholar at the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) 71^st Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado this last October. “It’s not about fitting disabled people into the capitalist, ableist structures,” she said, “but dismantling these collective structures of oppression so that all of us can...work towards collective liberation.” This same professor referred to her fellow panelists as “comrades” on at least three occasions.

Despite scattered applause and assuming to have the final progressive say, the overwhelming majority of the American public would sharply disagree, according to reports on hidden political tribes, shared ideals, and personal agency by More in Common—a research organization dedicated to helping the country find common ground.

In normal times, a professional educational conference does not warrant public attention. In normal times—with properly earned public trust—an education conference acts as an incubator for faculty and professionals to discuss the latest developments in their discipline. But this was a national gathering that sets the standards and educational content for money-paying, responsibility-bearing students joining the profession’s 700,000+ social work practitioners throughout the U.S.

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The Conference, as the CSWE’s website describes, is “the preeminent annual conference for social work educators, students, deans, and directors worldwide,” with nearly 3,000 people in attendance. The most recent conference theme in 2025 was “Championing Disability Justice and Disability Joy in Social Work,” a theme that on face value appears relevant and important for a large segment of the population.

As the CSWE President and CEO Dr. Halaevalu Vakalahi, who commands a salary of over $300,000 (an income higher than that of pediatricians and primary care doctors, and almost ten times more than an entry-level social worker) put it: “The 2025 Annual Conference reaffirmed our collective commitment to inclusivity and action. Disability justice and disability joy are not peripheral to our work—they are central to how we create not only a more compassionate and equitable profession, but a better world.”

Upon closer inspection, those generous assessments missed the mark by a mile.

Social work is not (or should not be), by definition, politically progressive or radical. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Social workers help people prevent and cope with problems in their everyday lives.” A definition from the National Association of Social Workers, deleted from their site sometime after September 2017, describes social work neutrally as “a profession devoted to helping people function the best they can in their environment.”

However, this year, the CSWE’s ideologically progressive mandates sat in the background of the Conference—ones that schools were forced to comply with on July 1, 2025—a development we previously reported on.

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The Conference’s Ideological Bent

Practicality, political openness, and public relevance appeared to be scarce at the conference. For example, perhaps as a microcosm of the irrelevance, a photovoice project funded by CSWE Special Projects Fund and put together by the Council on Disability and Persons With Disabilities’ project contains a photo of cheese.

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UPDATE: As of 2/10/26, this essay has been lightly edited to include archived links after learning that several original CSWE links are now broken.

A Questionable Footprint

Sometimes establishing a legacy within one’s profession leaves its institutional foundations worse, not better. In December 2022, Darla Spence Coffey left her own politicized legacy on social work education, retiring (after enjoying a hefty salary of over $300,000) as President and CEO of the non-profit Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the sole national accrediting body for one of the fastest growing professions in the United States. “In the past year,” the CSWE’s 2022 Annual Report proclaims, “[Coffey] has been laser-focused on advancing social work education that is decisively anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and decolonizing.”

We previously wrote about Coffey, her colleague Saundra Starks, and their outsized ideological impact—including a top-down decision to launch the Task Force to Advance Anti-Racism—on the direction of national social work education. Here, we continue the investigation, using publicly available documents from 2018 to 2022 to illuminate how the organization mandated anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) “approaches” into Bachelor’s, Master’s, and now practice Doctorate-level programs.

Indeed, the rollout of these ideological mandates in June 2022 has, in our view, birthed a lost generation of social work practitioners, mental health professionals, and researchers. These mandates also created an illiberal permission structure that led to a September 2025 race- and sex-based discrimination complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), where an undergraduate student in Colorado State University’s social work program confessed, “I don’t feel safe in this classroom.”

What’s more, this permission structure seemingly emboldened an instructor in that classroom (named in the same complaint) to proudly publish about disregarding and laughing at “the white dudes in class.”

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Developing the Standards

Today, the source of social work education’s waywardness throughout 900+ U.S. programs comes from revisions made to the CSWE’s Educational and Policy Accreditation Standards (EPAS), enacted by the organization every seven years. These are a set of compelled standards upon which social work programs’ accreditation statuses are predicated, as forcefully described in an October 2025 presentation by the CSWE: “2022 EPAS Assessment Essentials: Compliance as a Compass to Accreditation.”

According to a 2022 EPAS development timeline (see screenshot below), the CSWE was primed early to pivot towards what we discerned as a DEI-infused perspective “on steroids.” Between 2018 and 2019, the organization completed an environmental scan—feedback from who is unclear—and definitively prioritized “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in preparation for the next EPAS revision.

In June 2019, a Joint Committee within the CSWE—consisting of the Commission on Accreditation (COA) and Commission on Education Policy (COEP) —completed a first internal draft of the EPAS and worked on the document through mid-2020. As we reported, Coffey and Starks reacted institutionally to demands for “racial justice” by establishing the Anti-Racist Task Force in August.

In September 2020, the CSWE clarified the Task Force’s role in driving the 2022 EPAS revision process, envisioning a singular mission for new social workers entering the profession that centered on “racial equity.” Recommendations from the Task Force, a news bulletin explains, “serve as a starting point to ensure that the 47,000 social workers who enter the workforce each year are ready to champion social justice causes.”

Concurrently, social work’s current professional Code of Ethics, produced by the National Association of Social Work (NASW), indeed upholds social justice in addition to five other professional values—service, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. However, these values and a focus on professional skill-building were effectively ignored as the Task Force substituted a balanced vision of social work practice with its preferred, ideologically closed version of what scholars label as “critical social justice.”

In February 2021, another news bulletin indicated that the Task Force “continues to refine recommendations that intentionally work toward a more antiracist vision of social work education,” realized through top-down curricular changes throughout the 2022 EPAS. A first draft became available for public feedback on April 6, 2021, soliciting comments from educators by survey.

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Ignoring Feedback

Debra McPhee, Chair of the COEP, described the CSWE’s chase for importance, explaining that the priority “[has] really been to make sure that this next EPAS is relevant to a changing world and really serve programs for the remainder of the decade.” Deana Morrow, Chair of the COA, specifically praised the Task Force’s ideology:

In September 2021, the CSWE released a summary of survey feedback after receiving written responses from 564 social work educators (in addition to feedback solicited at two conferences and a town hall event). Even within the small sample size (current social work professionals total over 700,000 while faculty total an estimated 11,500), respondents raised concerns about the consequences of mandating ADEI ideas across the curricula and educational policy.

“This seems to be pandering to the left and training social workers to be radical advocates,” one commenter noted, “instead of compassionate and tenacious social work practitioners whose goal is to help everyone be the best that they can be.”

Another said:

The CSWE, citing high numerical agreement scores, disregarded critical feedback and plodded along with its ADEI plans. Unmistakably, the organization’s ears were bent towards supporters.

“We are thrilled to see the intentional presence of anti-racist practitioners woven into the EPAS,” one supporter said. Another commented, “As shared previously, we are moving to the forefront of what social work means in today’s world. The impact of covid [sic] and racially charged oppression. It helps to know we are supported in our curriculum and field designs addressing these issues through social work education.”

In October 2021, a second draft was released for another round of public feedback, which included a survey that received “74 fully complete responses.” (A summary was unavailable for review.) By June 2022, the CSWE approved and released the final version of the 2022 EPAS, formally celebrating on July 15. The Standards went fully in effect on July 1, 2025, and ADEI became the name of the social work education game.

Recently, on January 23, the CSWE continued to defend the discipline’s slanted Standards as states clamp down on DEI ideology, maintaining that ADEI consists of the “highest professional standard.” Moreover, the CSWE asks programs to sneakily purge themselves of DEI language to stay in compliance with state and federal law while simultaneously enforcing adherence to ADEI principles.

As one survey respondent foreshadowed in 2021, social work committed—and is clearly doubling down on— a “radical move toward the left,” with an unfolding, foreseeably harmful impact on a politically diverse set of clients across American society.

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Nathan Gallo, MSW, CNA is a recent Master of Social Work graduate and hospital nursing assistant based in Northern Colorado. He has written about the importance of cognitive liberty, tolerance and value pluralism in social work education. Gallo also led a case study article on medical aid in dying (MAID) and motor neuron disease, published in the flagship journal for this practice, the Journal of Aid-in-Dying Medicine.

Arnoldo Cantú, LCSW is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist with experience in school social work, private practice, community mental health, and primary care behavioral health seeing children, adolescents, families, and adults. Cantú was born in Mexico and considers Texas home having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, though currently resides in the beautiful city of Fort Collins located in northern Colorado. He has been the lead and co-editor of several volumes in the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. He’s written critically not only about the idea of so-called mental disorder, but also the idea of race categories.

A major debate has broken out in the UK about the National Health Service (NHS) clinical trial into the use of puberty blocking medication for children. Following a judicial review into the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in 2020, the controversial unit was deemed ‘inadequate’ by a government health inspection agency, the Care Quality Commission, and subsequently closed down. Hilary Cass, a leading paediatrician, was appointed to lead a wide-ranging review of gender identity services for children, and published a detailed report in 2024. Her evidence-based review found ‘remarkably weak’ evidence for the use of puberty blockers, designed to prevent the development of secondary sexual characteristics amongst children in gender distress. In fact, the use of puberty blockers, rather than giving children under 16 ‘time to think’, seemed to reinforce their wish to progress on to cross-sex hormones and later surgical intervention. The use of puberty blockers within the UK was then banned on a permanent basis in 2024. But their use is now to be sanctioned again as part of a randomised controlled trial (RCT) involving 226 children, as part of a complex research package. This move has re-ignited a fierce debate about the use of puberty blockers, with critics calling for the trial to be ended as being unnecessary and unethical.

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So, why this apparent turnaround in government health policy? In fact, Cass’ whole approach has always been to call for a robust, evidence-based approach to gender identity practice. This would be the case for any aspect of child healthcare. She called for the RCT as early as July 2022. However, a lot has happened in the meantime. The debate over so-called ‘gender identity affirming medicine’ has moved from apparently being just a niche, specialist medical topic to one of intense and growing wider public debate. Public awareness and scepticism about trans claims and entitlement seems to be growing, according to current polls (YouGov, 2025).

Risks and benefits of puberty blockers:

A major research programme to investigate the risks and benefits of prescribing puberty blockers for children under 16 seems to many to be a significant step backwards. The reasons behind setting up the trial lie partly in the poor track record of past research into gender identity issues. Puberty blockers are extremely powerful drugs, technically defined as Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone agonists (GnRHa). These have been used effectively in the past to treat precocious puberty and adult sex offending. A specialist clinic in the Netherlands pioneered their use with children seeking to undergo later medical transition. This became known as the Dutch Protocol (Delemarre-van de Waal, 2006). This model was then taken up by the Tavistock GIDS, originally as part of a limited research programme (n: 44). However, the original version of the research proposal (for what could be termed GIDS 1) was rejected by the first Research Ethics Committee (REC). This was on the grounds that the research design meant that there was no way to validate any of its findings without a control (i.e. placebo, or ‘no treatment’) group. Instead, the REC suggested “a trial which compared those who immediately started the intervention with those who had a delayed start” (Barnes, 2023: 55).

Undeterred, the GIDS simply took their proposal to another REC to gain approval. However, the eventual results were inconclusive as to the value of puberty blockers in resolving gender dysphoria (Carmichael, 2021). A third of the small sample reported improvements in positive mood, a third reported no change, and a third reported negative changes in mood (Barnes, 2023: 371). This was hardly a stunning success by any measure.

However, the research programme had very quickly developed a dual purpose. The formal research programme had started in 2011. But, within a few years, “the referring of under-16s for puberty blockers was routine clinical practice at GIDS, as, remarkably, the service had not waited for the results of the trial before rolling the treatment out” (Barnes, 2023: 118). So the research programme was conceivably more useful in providing legitimation for prescribing puberty blockers on a wider scale, well beyond the very limited numbers of children formally enrolled on the original research protocol. This factor may also apply in the future to the randomised controlled trial, which has indicated a potential interest in extending the size of its research sample above the currently agreed threshold of 226 patients (LCE REC, 2025: 2).

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GIDS 2: Pathways randomised controlled trial:

The new proposed research programme is called Pathways. In many ways, it resembles the first puberty blocker trial, to the extent that it could perhaps be more accurately construed as ‘GIDS 2’. One of the overarching aims of the research is “to determine the short/medium-term benefits and risks of GnRHa for puberty suppression” (KCL, 2025: 23). This phrasing is almost identical to that used in the original research submission made for GIDS 1 in 2011 (Barnes, 2023: 53). The research design is different, in that GIDS 1 was an observational cohort study, with no control group for comparison purposes. In fact, GIDS 2/Pathway has picked up and run with the original REC’s suggestion of a deferred treatment group for comparison purposes. This design also relates closely to the suggestion from the European Professional Association for Transgender Health (EPATH), i.e. “An alternative might be a waiting-list control group” (2025: 2). Thus GIDS 2: Pathways is a randomised controlled trial, relying on comparison between two groups receiving puberty blockers, with the second group starting puberty blockers a year after the first group. There is no placebo or ‘no treatment’ group for direct and sustained comparison. There is, therefore, no way to establish causality in a strict sense. The research will, no doubt, produce masses of data, including brain scans, but cannot, in its present format, produce definitive outcomes.

This presents major ethical problems, which critics have not been slow to point out. There is already substantial research indicating that puberty blockers entail a significant risk of harm to patients. One systematic survey has reported that “Substantial evidence from peer-reviewed scientific studies, case studies, and clinical trials suggests that puberty-blocking drugs can negatively affect the skeleton, cardiovascular system, thyroid, brain, genitals, reproductive system, digestive system, urinary tract, muscles, eyes, and immune system” (Lesbians United, 2022: 16). Furthermore, “the best available evidence suggests that GnRH agonists have a number of irreversible or possibly irreversible effects on the human body” (Lesbians United, 2022: 14).

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Risks of harm from puberty blockers:

In response, the research protocol for the GIDS 2: Pathways study acknowledges a host of possible risks to be covered in the informed consent process. These side effects are included in an eye-watering, extensive list of possible harms. They range from (in children) depression and altered mood, and (in adults) anxiety, pain, sleep disorders and weight gain (KCL, 2025: 75-6). However, the research protocol crucially fails to mention that many of these are potentially irreversible in nature, which is surely a significant consideration (Lesbians United, 2022: 14). There also seems to be resistance to fully acknowledging the extent of existing research on the proven harms of puberty blockers (i.e. irreversibility of some types of harm, cognitive impairment: Biggs, 2022) and future known risks (regret/detransition; longer term suicide risk as fully transitioned adults: Dhejne, 2011).

In narrow research terms, the case for clinical equipoise needed to justify the trial is therefore very weak. There is a clear admission by the research team regarding the risk of osteoporosis that ”studies show decreased age standardised bone mineral density with GnRHa” (KCL, 2025: 27 PJ: emphasis added). The research programme’s interest lies in “whether these changes are persistent after ceasing GnRHa and/or commencing on gender affirming hormones” (KCL, 2025: 27). This is hard to justify as a compelling argument for exposing participants to what is a known and acknowledged risk of further likely harm. Finding out whether this risk is short-term or long-term, and reversible or irreversible, is not at all an ethically sound reason for exposing vulnerable children to this grossly unacceptable degree of risk.

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Influence of gender identity ideology:

The research protocol appears to be constrained within a post-modernist, anti-scientific research paradigm. This is because it is centred on the concept of gender identity as an autonomous driver of social, medical and legal transition. Gender identity is par excellence an unfalsifiable belief, with no substantive agreed criteria or definition. Prescribing puberty blockers to children therefore amounts to providing medical treatment in order to comply with and endorse an unfalsifiable belief system held by the patient and/or parent. It is not at all equivalent to addressing a proven medical or psychiatric condition, despite the trial’s reliance on the ICD-11 diagnostic label of ‘gender incongruence’. Yet it is striking how spurious and misleading parallels are constantly made by its advocates between research into established medical conditions and research into the efficacy of puberty blockers. This is presumably as a way of establishing the legitimacy of the trial’s focus. Hence, we find comparisons of the trial to the “effort to develop and test new interventions for childhood cancers” (KCL, 2025: 26); or, similarities to contrasting the treatment effects of “chemotherapy and radiotherapy” (Cohen, 2025: 2); or parallels with the need to establish ”the short-term benefits of stimulant medication in ADHD before examining longer-term effects” (KCL, 2025: 27).

In its narrow focus on gender identity as the key driver of children’s gender distress and the potential means of its resolution, the research protocol reveals a curiously close symmetry with the ideological language of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. WPATH is a hybrid trans activist body, which has seized control of gender identity medicine in the US, via the popularisation of its Standards of Care version 8 (Jenkins, 2023a; Jenkins, 2023b). Its membership in the UK may be small, but its ideological influence over the terms of debate and discussion is remarkably resilient. Hence one of the FAQs for the research protocol refers to the participant goals of ‘body alignment with gender’ (KCL FAQs, 2025: 9). This phrase is curiously close to the stated aim of WPATH’s SOC 8 for its patients. This is “to better align their body with their gender identity” (Coleman et al, 2022: S31). There is also perhaps a further clue in the protocol’s frankly reductive and dismissive terminology used for psycho-social and psychological approaches i.e. as ‘non-endocrine intervention for CYP with gender incongruence’ (KCL, 2025: 22).

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WPATH as a politicised approach to research:

In fact, WPATH’s strongly ideological approach towards research into gender identity suggests it is a modern examplar of a ‘hyper-politicised approach to science’. In many ways this is akin to earlier approaches, i.e. “as arms of a particular political ideology” (Gordin, 2021: 30). Other examples would include the concept of ‘Aryan physics’ under the Nazi regime, Lysenkoism in genetic biology in Stalin’s USSR, and the eugenics movement during the twentieth century. Some of the major differences between a classic medico-scientific paradigm and a gender identity ideological paradigm (based on ideal-types) are briefly set out in the Table below.

Table: Comparison of Medico-scientific and Gender identity Ideological paradigms.

Probably the clearest expression of gender identity as a coherent ideology is to be found in WPATH’s Standards of Care version 8 (Coleman et al, 2022). This version of the gender identity paradigm clearly has had some influence within the shaping and priorities of the puberty blocker trial. Both WPATH and the research protocol share a strong opposition to the use of a placebo or ‘no treatment’ group. For WPATH, this is argued on largely ethical grounds, as being both coercive and a denial of autonomous access to effective treatment for those allocated randomly to the placebo group (EPATH, 2024; McNamara, 2024). WPATH has apparently blocked the publication of its own commissioned systematic reviews on the grounds of their unfavourable findings. WPATH’s stance here would support the suggestion made in the Table above that the value of its own research is crucially determined by whether or not it contributes to the achievement of its wider ideological goals, namely the growth of gender identity ideology’s power, influence and the number of its adherents (DHHS, 2025: 166-170).

Trading short term satisfaction for longer-term harm?

The other parallel is perhaps less obvious. This is the central concept of ‘harm reduction’, which is at the heart of WPATH’s approach to gender identity affirming care: “SOC-8 supports…the value of harm reduction approaches” (Coleman, 2022: S6). Harm reduction is a reputable intervention where there is a convincing evidence base for its proper use. With WPATH, harm reduction becomes simply an overriding moral imperative. It variously justifies surgical intervention for eunuchs, or the use of breast binders for gender distressed girls. WPATH decries the use of delay, gatekeeping, prolonged assessment, or withholding of treatment as likely to cause harm to potential beneficiaries of medical care, in that it is likely to “to thwart an adolescent’s expression of gender diversity or assertion of a gender identity” (Coleman, 2022: S53; PJ: emphasis added). Harm reduction in this context too often seems to consist of a trade-off between offering vulnerable patients short-term improvements in their satisfaction levels, or in their immediate sense of well-being, as against the known risks of longer-term physiological or psychological damage.

It is more than concerning, therefore, to find the persuasive motif of harm reduction employed in the service of promoting the trial. Even Hilary Cass does not seem immune to this, raising the question in Parliament as to whether “it is better that they get their medication under careful clinical supervision rather than on the dark web?” (Hansard, 2025). The trial could therefore conceivably be justified, at least in part, on the grounds that it would provide safe and supervised access to puberty blockers. Notably, the same harm reduction argument was also advanced for the original GIDS 1 trial, when the equivalent concern voiced was that patients would go abroad unless puberty blockers were provided in some format by the GIDS (Barnes, 2023: 54).

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Puberty blockers RCT and the hierarchy of evidence:

So where does the proposed trial sit within a wider hierarchy of research evidence on gender identity? Normally, randomised controlled trials sit close to the apex of such a hierarchy. However, Greenhalgh has suggested a necessary distinction needs to be made between RCTs with ‘definitive results’ and those with ‘non-definitive results’ (Greenhalgh, 1997). The proposed trial does involve random allocation to treatment groups, but without an independent placebo or ‘no treatment’ group. The trial cannot therefore establish causality on key issues, such as the reduction of bone density, or an increase in cognitive impairment, or the resolution of gender dysphoria. The following diagram suggests a possible hierarchy of research on gender identity, ranging from systematic reviews to self-report surveys.

References: 1 Cass, 2024; 2 NICE, 2020; 3 Cochrane, 2025; 4 Greenhalgh, 1997; 5 KCL, 2025; 6 de Vries, 2014; 7 Carmichael, 2020; 8 Hall, 2021; 9 Uyar, 2023; 10 Turban, 2020; 11 Cohen-Kettenis, 2011; 12 Ashley, 2019; 13, GEO, 2018; 14 James, 2016; 15 OpenMD, 2025.

According to this schematic representation, much current research into gender identity tends to cluster around the method of cohort studies, with a marked absence of classic ‘gold standard’ randomised controlled trials, capable of producing definitive results. Clearly, some important medico-scientific research can be done on the topic of gender identity. It is, after all, possible to carry out robust research into belief systems, such as politics, religion, or gender identity, without necessarily subscribing to the validity of the underpinning belief itself. While the GIDS 2: Pathways trial will inevitably produce reams of data, it is not capable of establishing causality because of the way it has been set up, i.e. without a placebo or ‘no-treatment’ group. So when the press reports that “A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said…’This trial will help provide the evidence that is lacking’”, this does seem extremely unlikely to be the case (Simpson, 2026).

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Summary:

In many ways, GIDs 2: Pathways is following closely in the footsteps of its predecessor, i.e. GIDS 1. Both have diffuse and unrealistic overarching goals of exploring the nature and extent of the risks and benefits of puberty blockers for children experiencing gender distress. While adverse side effects are identified for the purpose of obtaining informed consent, the serious risks of major longer-term harms (regret/detransition, irreversibility, enhanced adult suicide risk) appear not to be clearly underlined. The reliance on parental consent may meet minimum legal standards for medical research trials, but is fraught with difficulty in practice (this key issue is discussed in more detail in Jenkins, 2026). The research protocol shares with WPATH a core resistance to employing a placebo or ‘no treatment’ group. This design feature is essential in order to establish causality, rather than simply produce yet more inconclusive findings. Hilary Cass, a strong advocate of the GIDS 2: Pathways trial, also shows similarity to WPATH’s use of a harm reduction model as a persuasive rationale for the trial, but without recourse to detailed and convincing evidence.

Puberty blockers, a dangerous and off-label drug, were originally brought in to the NHS by the back door via GIDS 1, based on the deeply flawed Dutch Protocol. There is now a bold attempt to bring puberty blockers back into wider use, but this time via the front door of the GIDS 2: Pathway trial. The latter’s RCT trial design clearly owes more to gender identity ideology than to straightforward medico-scientific research.

Conclusion:

In political terms, the puberty blocker trial is an obvious sop to an aggrieved and vocal trans lobby. In research terms, this is an unnecessary exploration of the wider extent of harms which are already known and well-documented elsewhere, and which is set firmly within an unquestioned paradigm about gender identity and the case for medical transition. In medical terms, it is a fatal concession to the power of unbridled consumer demand for an off-label and dangerous medicine for vulnerable children, in order to buttress a belief system lacking any foundation in biological reality.

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Non-electronic references:

Barnes, H. (2023) Time to think: The inside story of the collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. Swift: London.

Gordin, M. (2021) On the fringe: Where science meets pseudoscience. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Acknowledgement: Reposted with permission of Critical Therapy Antidote.

By Peter Jenkins, counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has been a member of both the BACP Professional Conduct Committee and the UKCP Ethics Committee. He has published a number of books on legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017).

UPDATE: As of 2/10/26, this essay has been lightly edited to include archived links after learning that several original CSWE links are now broken.

The Two Pandemics

In June 2020, Saundra Starks, the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) Chair of the Board of Directors recorded a video message to the country’s graduating class of social work students. She spoke as one of two elected leaders for the CSWE, the field’s national accrediting body and overseer of professional education programs that feed into the largest group of mental health professionals across the United States:

She invoked simplistic, yet prejudicial assumptions drawn from so-called progressive values and identity politics. “This season,” she added, “the wounds are publicly exposed, revealing these disparities based on the color of skin and on anything different than the privileged: White, Christian, heterosexual, and male.”

Starks, eager to transform professional social work education into activist education, swiftly collaborated with Darla Coffey, the CSWE’s then-President and Executive Director, and by August 2020 the pair formed the Task Force to Advance Anti-Racism (the reader will note the perspicacious Kendi quote headlining the top of this document). In her June message, Starks had made a moral pledge to students, promising “changes in our curriculum, the way we teach, that can earnestly promote the dismantling of white supremacy, patriarchy, income inequities, and systems of oppression.”

This politicized pledge resulted in more than just words. In November 2025, the CSWE supported the actions of Jessica Adams, a social work professor from Indiana University (IU) who lectured, without counter-perspectives, about the “pyramid of White supremacy.” Adams was suspended—later reinstated in December—after a student raised a formal complaint under the state’s 2024 intellectual diversity law. (The ideologically slanted origin of the pyramid is from a 2005 “Tools for Liberation Packet” from the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence.)

As it turns out, the CSWE’s latest backing of politically one-sided education in the name of program “autonomy” was a long time coming. This essay and subsequent ones will mirror some parallels to what’s happened in other disciplines, including neuropsychology, counseling, and psychology, among others.

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Convening the Task Force

We reviewed publicly available documents—committee reports, news bulletins, conference presentations, policy documents—from the CSWE’s website that show how, starting in Fall 2020, Starks and Coffey’s joint decision to launch the anti-racist Task Force bent the entire U.S. social work accreditation apparatus towards a forced progressive, DEI-infused perspective on steroids.

At the time, the CSWE was three years into a five-year process of revising its national curriculum and policy standards, known within social work higher education as the Educational and Policy Accreditation Standards (EPAS). Last released in 2015, the EPAS gets revised every seven years in accordance with the CSWE’s Accreditation Policy Handbook. Both the 2015 version and 2022 version of the EPAS claim that accreditation “entitles [institutions and programs] the confidence of the educational community and the public they serve.”

Starks and Coffey, in preparation for the 2022 EPAS, assembled the Task Force with four Work Groups, directing each Group to come up with anti-racist recommendations and a corresponding action plan. Work Groups focused on four areas of social work education: curriculum development, educational policy and accreditation, faculty and student racial/ethnic equity, and conferences and faculty development.

Starks and Coffey also endowed the Task Force with an outsized influence to shape the future of professional education. The consequence, as we learned, was an intentional infusion of a racial justice- and equity-obsessed ethos throughout the country’s 900+ Bachelor’s and Master’s-level programs, a move with undoubted ripple effects on newcomers joining the profession’s 800,000+ practitioners throughout the United States.

These developments not only raise crucial questions about the concentration of unaccountable power within the social work education bureaucracy but also throw into question the credibility of an accreditation process that claims to work on behalf of a politically diverse American public, even as leaders sneakily injected a deeply unpopular and controversial ideology.

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Recommendations & the 2020 Annual Program Meeting

Later, at CSWE’s online November 2020 Annual Program Meeting, the Task Force presented preliminary recommendations to saturate social work education with anti-racist ideas. Ibram X. Kendi, famed for his shallow promotion of anti-racism, gave the plenary lecture at the Meeting, telling educators, “All we can do is ensure we are teaching and executing an antiracist curriculum.” Dexter Voisin, Professor at University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash, concurred, condemning in illustrative prose one racial group in particular: “So at times, we all falter when we need to act. We fail to do the painful but necessary work of peeling back the deep insidious layers of white supremacy that spins this web around us all from the cradle until we are laid to rest.”

The Task Force’s presentations tell their own story of ideological capture. Beneath their aspirational language “to make social work education stronger,” the four Work Groups explicitly sought to push professional education further into far-left radical territory and unmoor standards from the diversity of political values in the American populace—including within different racial groups. (The Journal of Free Black Thought, for example, opines, “Black thought varies as widely as black individuals.)

Rebecca Moore, Co-Chair of the Educational Policy and Accreditation Work Group, reviewed her Group’s set of ideologically slanted recommendations for the 2022 EPAS (see below screenshot).

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Yarneccia Dyson, Co-Chair of the Curriculum Development Work Group, explained the need to inject ideological education by force. “[We talked about] the importance of getting away from language that’s passive, like programs should do this or programs can possibly do this to mandating programs to enact change so that anti-racism [sic] goes away.”

The Task Force appeared to get what they asked for. The CSWE approved the final EPAS version in June 2022, with revised policies and standards mandating Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ADEI).

Today, the American public has little reason to believe this type of ideologically slanted education is going away. The Indiana chapter of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the field’s main professional organization, joined the CSWE in defending the suspended IU professor last November. “Not only was Ms. Adams teaching an approved curriculum as part of an accredited social work program,” the NASW reasoned, “but she was training the next generation of behavioral health professionals.” In other words, the professor’s teachings were entirely justified by the ADEI Trojan Horse the CSWE stealthily injected into social work education writ large.

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Nathan Gallo, MSW, CNA is a recent Master of Social Work graduate and hospital nursing assistant based in Northern Colorado. He has written about the importance of cognitive liberty, tolerance and value pluralism in social work education. Gallo also led a case study article on medical aid in dying (MAID) and motor neuron disease, published in the flagship journal for this practice, The Journal of Aid-in-Dying Medicine.

Arnoldo Cantú, LCSW is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist with experience in school social work, private practice, community mental health, and primary care behavioral health seeing children, adolescents, families, and adults. Cantú was born in Mexico and considers Texas home having grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, though currently resides in the beautiful city of Fort Collins located in northern Colorado. He has been the lead and co-editor of several volumes in the Ethics International Press Critical Psychology and Critical Psychiatry Series. He's written critically not only about the idea of so-called mental disorder, but also the idea of race categories.

For every bit of time there ever was, it takes just as much for it all to change.

Like molasses slowly thinning in the heat of day, then slowly thickening again in the cool of night, the reversal or dissolution of the status quo requires an equally powerful catalyst or counterpart. This is the story of the Western world’s fall from grace.

But given what these physics of time demand, who is its equal adversary? And if it is its own people paving a path to self-destruction, do they have anywhere to run?

A quick change appears to contain more power, but it only transmutes the same power of a slow change, quicker. One hard blow to the head may pose the same threat as one hundred, weaker, consecutive blows, each harmless on its own. But by chipping away at existing matter to replace it, the same can be said of understanding or dismantling ideas. They, too, have towered higher over time inside cultures and psyches. Just as it takes a lifetime for a life to be complete, history requires eternally powerful agents to crystallize or dissolve it, and eternal wisdom to understand it. Time passes as history unfolds, but what happens in between can glide under our noses before it is sniffed out.

How to know where we are, as we rub the heels of history and sculpt the formlessness of the present into the statues of tomorrow?

This oft-improvised theater of time can swell to a crescendo as quickly as it halts to pin-drop silence, and on its largest scale, it can build or destroy a civilization. But it is not always the atomic bomb that quiets the kingdom; sometimes it is the slow burn, emanating from an invisible self-combustion, stoked by the apathy and nihilism lying deep in the hearts of the asleep and the bitter, that brings it all down. This fire is, at times, accompanied by parasites that gnaw away at people’s already-hot, softened flesh from the inside out. At least a bomb is obvious—it asks people to count their blessings!

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The slow decline of the West has been documented, while it has happened, for over one hundred years. In the mid-late 1800s, blurring the line between great philosophy and fiction, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky shared the belief that “crippled religions,” i.e., political ideologies, would vie to fill a God-shaped hole in the human heart. The certainty of group-oriented totalitarianism would provide the ritual, the chaos of self-serving hedonism, the rapture.

The following, bloodiest-ever century proved them correct, thanks to such self-destructing beliefs, the idolatry of dictators fueled once more by their citizens’ projected, utopian lust for comfort and power. This didn’t only happen because of sheer, top-down brutality, but most effectively because of massive psychological coercion. Believe in certain ideas and swallow the lies whole. Violence justified by ideas made to seem more compelling than the truths about humanity, which were held as self-evident just years prior.

In 1918, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, proposing a theory of “inevitable cycles of growth and decay” that could decimate nations through decades-long culture shifts more pernicious and nebulous than war. The current conversation on Western decadence and confusion was spurred by books like Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence and, most recently, Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe. They warn of boredom, repetition, exhausted art, mass migration, and, perhaps most of all, loss of faith and tradition.

"The peoples of the West,” Barzun writes, “offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere… it has pursued characteristic purposes - that is its unity - and now these purposes, carried out to their utmost possibility, are bringing about its demise."^[

The foundation of the West was generally established by the Logos of Athens, the institutions of Rome, and the spirit of Israel. All three created a breeding ground for the conception of the divine individual— the embodied idea that the individual alone has the capacity for divine revelation, transformation, and application, to live out the Imago Dei—the image of God. Jesus Christ manifests exactly this, as God personified, asking his followers to imitate Him. With that, the belief that God made us in His image, as shepherds of the intelligible Good, capable of discerning and beckoning Heaven or Hell, forms Western civilization. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution would have been impossible without it.

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Those great, intellectual epochs were positioned among dark periods, but perhaps none darker than the 1900s. And the irony which further obscured the problem of the day was that, as the West unraveled spiritually, it burgeoned technologically. And this technological prowess created an economic cushion that, in turn, created an illusion that divinity was not necessary but accessory. The spiritual void was filled with wickedness, as weapons of warfare advanced to detach and distance us from our violent, once-prayerful hands.

As economic prosperity increases and technological safety nets abound, it is easy to relax our defenses. In terms of spiritual warfare, temptation is harder to resist when it is not identified in the present but thought to be left in the past. But the moment you relax is the moment you are vulnerable, like catching a cold after a big life event. The virus moved in after WWII. We were vigilant to attack it, though, and re-establish individual sovereignty, but nowadays that accomplishment appears somewhat forgotten.

The virus that scourged the belly of the West in the 1900s was not altogether eradicated despite the best attempts of multicultural liberalism to inoculate us against WWII’s ethnic nationalism. It has mutated and adapted. This infectious idea bears the same principle, one antithetical to the divine individual, and it has projected itself away from the ethnonationalism of World War II and onto new group identities like race and gender.

As if the caustic ‘othering’ of WWII soldiers was any different than that of social justice warriors who other themselves by grouping based on immutable characteristics. The cry of oppression based on class struggle that Marx purported is eerily similar to the one that many of today’s university students bemoan. We didn’t squash the bug. And maybe it was impossible, like the cockroach emerging from a radioactive testing site.

So, if we must live among bad ideas, then what should we do about them? Well, we can start by disarming them, identifying when and why they rear their heads in our psyches. Familiar within ourselves, we can then locate them when they appear elsewhere, manifested in the broader world. In their place, remember the ideas that formed the birthplace of the West. Remember where we came from and reidentify with the principles that built these walls. But also infuse them with the new vision you possess, the eyes that have never before seen.

The identity crisis of the West will not be solved by simply reverting to the olden days. That would be too easy. We ought to work with what we have in front of us, just as they did, to meet the needs of the day. There are everyday opportunities to treat your neighbor as yourself, as a fellow divine individual, while using novel technology to solve novel problems. Knowing how we got here and what ideas continue to shape and reshape history to the present day, however, we can point out residue from a past that was thought to be dead. History is alive.

It may take a day of the sun’s power, or a week’s worth, or a month’s, to revive what has been latent, dry out the detritus, and nourish the new. But even if it takes ten more years to reverse the last decade of decay, it will be worth it.

Editorial note: This is Jake’s 2nd essay for the Multilevel Mailer. Below is his first.

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I remember the first day of my PhD at the University of North Texas when I started to do some noticing. During that first day, we had the entire business school in one room. Of course, I only saw two white people, myself and another. I’ve gotten used to it at this point. But then it got weird. We started going around the room, and it became clear, no one in this room was from America except another student and myself. Out of a room of 40 new admits, 95% were not from the United States.

Again, this is something I’m kind of used to at this point, but this was a bit much. I mean, were there really that few American candidates that they had to import 95% of the class?

The New Corporate Horror: Insourcing

We are all familiar with outsourcing at this point. It’s the reason you call your bank, and a person in the Philippines picks up. It was a bit subtle at first. You call outside office hours, and you might get a person using their “American” name over the phone — “Hello, this is Brian,” — in an accent that makes it painfully obvious his name is not Brian.

But outsourcing at least had one mercy: distance.

The job left. The worker left. The loss was brutal, but it was geographically and psychologically removed. You could still pretend it was unavoidable. Global forces. Inevitable change. The invisible hand.

Insourcing is different.

Insourcing is what happens when the job does not leave the country, but the worker does.

This is the new corporate horror. And almost no one has named it. No one seems to be able to put this new horror into words, so I will call it right here. You are being insourced.

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What is Insourcing?

Insourcing is the practice of importing foreign labor to replace domestic workers inside the United States itself. Not to supplement. Not to fill true shortages. To replace.

It achieves the same goal as outsourcing:

• Lower wages
• Reduced bargaining power
• Greater managerial control

But it does so without moving a single office or factory overseas.

The worker comes to you.

Instead of shipping the job abroad, corporations ship in the labor. Same arbitrage. Same savings. Far fewer complications.

And unlike outsourcing, you cannot turn it off by reshoring. The replacement is already here.

No one voted for this.
No one approved this.
No one asked how this affects American families who used to take pride in their work.

But this shift wasn’t based on competence, or shortages, or the mythical “work Americans won’t do.” Of course, no one ever asked American’s if they would do it, because they didn’t want to hire American’s. They’re too expensive. Easier to hire indentured servants from India. They’re one screw up from your revoking their visa, so they’ll work as long as you want.

Indentured Labor and Wage Suppression

Indentured labor systems emerge whenever elites seek to reduce labor costs without formally abolishing free labor. The structure is consistent across history, regardless of moral framing.

Core features of indentured labor systems:

• Legal freedom paired with economic immobility
• Employment contracts that restrict exit or retaliation
• Dependency on a single sponsor or owner
• Asymmetric power between worker and employer

These features do not require ownership. They require leverage.

Historical Example: Indentured Servants in Colonial America

Indentured servants in the 17th and 18th centuries were not slaves, but they were not free laborers either.

• Contracts bound them to employers for years
• Leaving early resulted in legal penalties
• Wages were fixed or nonexistent
• Employers exercised near-total control

The economic effect was immediate and well-documented:

• Free laborers faced downward wage pressure
• Skilled trades were devalued
• Labor mobility declined
• Employers preferred bound labor over free workers

Indenture did not coexist neutrally with free labor. It displaced it.

Slave Labor as an Extreme Case

Slave labor represents the endpoint of this same mechanism.

Where slavery existed:

• Labor costs approached zero
• Free labor could not compete
• Wages for non-slave workers stagnated or fell
• Economic power consolidated among owners (Why is everything owned by corporations?! Hmmmm…)

This is why regions dependent on slave labor consistently underdeveloped diversified wage markets. The presence of coerced labor collapses the labor price floor.

Modern Parallel: Visa-Tethered Labor

Modern guest-worker and temporary visa programs replicate the same economic constraints without explicit ownership.

Examples include H-1B, L-1, H-2A/B, and OPT arrangements.

Functional similarities:

• Worker’s legal status depends on employer sponsorship
• Job loss risks deportation
• Switching employers is restricted, delayed, or impossible
• Complaints invite retaliation through visa revocation

From an economic standpoint, this creates a de facto indenture.

Wage Effects in Practice

Employers gain access to a labor pool that:

• Accepts below-market wages
• Cannot credibly threaten to quit
• Cannot unionize effectively
• Cannot litigate without existential risk

The predictable outcome:

• Wage suppression across the sector
• Displacement of domestic workers
• Increased employer leverage
• Declining job quality even for retained workers

American Companies: You’re Bad, and You Should Feel Bad

The death of shame has been so much worse than we thought it would be. I could have never predicted insourcing. I mean, I really thought we had a modicum of national pride. Unfortunately, globalism has convinced everyone that they’re part of some fake global community. Well, really only the Western, White ones.

Let me be very clear, there is no global community. You are either an American or you are against the entire world.

There is always someone in the third world who will take $14 dollars an hour in lieu of your $28.

Call it “diversity.”
Cash the bonus.
And when the quality collapses?
Blame the consumer.

It’s not “immigration.”
It’s labor arbitrage and justified as compassion.

“Strength through diversity.”
No, it’s cheapness through disloyalty.

And the message to the entire working population of this country is crystal clear:

You are optional.
Your replacement just arrived on a flight subsidized by your tax dollars.

Even the “most patriotic”, the most “military friendly bank”, has sold out. No one is safe.

The Visa Scam: H-1B as a Replacement Pipeline

If you want to understand insourcing, you have to understand the H-1B visa. The public has been sold this fantasy for decades, that the H-1B program brings in the “best and brightest” from all over the world. A high-skill talent infusion to keep America competitive.

That’s a dog faced lie.

Here’s the truth:

More than 70% of H-1B visas go to entry-level jobs requiring no advanced skill.
Most of these workers are placed into basic IT, customer service, and routine office roles.
They aren’t replacing geniuses, they’re replacing you.

The H-1B is not a “shortage” visa.
It’s a wage suppression visa.

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A few ugly facts:

• Companies are legally allowed to pay H-1B workers up to 40% less for the same job
• Those workers are indentured, tied to their employer by visa status
• The worker can’t complain, can’t leave, and can’t negotiate, ever
• If the job demands submission? They submit.

Who benefits?

The same people who gutted your town with outsourcing.

Silicon Valley billionaires, corporate lobbyists, and the political class they bought.

They discovered the perfect worker:

✔ Cheaper than an American
✔ More compliant than an American
✔ Zero leverage compared to an American

The H-1B is a citizen displacement program.

And every time an American tech worker trains their replacement, the executives celebrate another victory:

Replace the expensive worker with a desperate one.
Call it “innovation.”
Call it “global competitiveness.”
Pray no one notices who’s profiting.

Even when performance collapses, the boardroom doesn’t care. They saved 15% on labor costs. The quarterly report looks great. Meanwhile the American who built the system is standing outside the building with a severance check and a box in his hands. They now have a permanent indentured servant who they can keep under their thumb, with the threat of being sent home to keep them working.

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Why Corporate Elites Do Not Feel Loyalty

A Psychological Mechanism for National Betrayal

At first glance, it seems irrational that executives would undermine their own country’s workforce for relatively modest cost savings. This behavior appears immoral, short-sighted, and even self-destructive. But psychologically, it is neither random nor mysterious. It is the predictable outcome of a specific moral and cognitive configuration that emerges under globalized elite conditions.

The key mechanism is moral disengagement combined with elite abstraction.

Moral Disengagement at Scale

Albert Bandura described moral disengagement as the process by which individuals deactivate ethical self-regulation in order to engage in harmful behavior without experiencing guilt. Crucially, this does not require malice. It requires distance.

Corporate decision-makers do not experience themselves as firing Americans and replacing them with foreign labor. They experience themselves as:

• “Optimizing labor efficiency”
• “Maintaining shareholder value”
• “Remaining globally competitive”

The human consequences are abstracted into spreadsheets, compliance memos, and HR language. When harm is statistical rather than personal, moral intuition shuts down. The displaced worker becomes a line item, not a neighbor.

This is not sociopathy. It is bureaucratic moral anesthesia.

Elite Cosmopolitan Identity Dissolution

National loyalty depends on identity salience. You protect what you identify with.

Modern corporate elites increasingly do not identify as American in any meaningful psychological sense. They are:

• Educated in transnational institutions
• Socialized into global professional networks
• Rewarded for mobility rather than rootedness
• Insulated from the downstream costs of policy decisions

Their identity is not national. It is class-based and portable.

When identity shifts from “citizen” to “global manager,” loyalty shifts with it. The nation becomes merely a jurisdiction, interchangeable with any other that offers favorable tax codes, labor pools, or regulatory arbitrage.

In psychological terms, this is identity displacement. One cannot betray what one no longer feels part of.

Incentive-Driven Empathy Collapse

Empathy is not infinite. It is selectively deployed where incentives reward it.

Corporate systems actively punish executives who prioritize domestic labor if it raises costs. Over time, this creates empathy extinction toward out-groups defined as “legacy workers,” “high-cost labor,” or “non-competitive talent.”

What replaces empathy is instrumental reasoning:

“If they were truly valuable, the market would reward them.”

This belief is not neutral. It allows decision-makers to reinterpret displacement as a natural law rather than a moral choice.

The Dark Triad Is Not Required

It is tempting to frame this behavior as psychopathy, but that is unnecessary and inaccurate.

What is happening is more disturbing:

Ordinary people, operating inside amoral incentive systems, reliably produce anti-national outcomes without ever feeling evil.

The system selects for individuals who are:

• Highly conscientious toward metrics
• Emotionally detached from consequences
• Comfortable with abstraction
• Loyal to process over people

No pathology is required. Only alignment.

Why the Betrayal Feels Effortless

When moral disengagement, identity displacement, and incentive alignment converge, replacing citizens with compliant foreign labor feels not just acceptable, but virtuous.

Executives tell themselves they are:

• Helping immigrants
• Advancing progress
• Reducing inefficiency
• Acting rationally

Meanwhile, the nation experiences the result as dispossession.

This is why appeals to patriotism fail. Patriotism requires shared identity. That identity has already been severed at the elite level.

The Case for a Single, Unified Immigration & Labor Pathway

Today’s foreign-labor system is a sprawling jumble of visa categories, loopholes, carve-outs, and executive branch work-arounds. Each program was created for a narrow use case… and each has slowly expanded into a bypass of the traditional immigration process.

Critics want to abolish many of these programs. But ending them piecemeal won’t fix the structural chaos. The real solution is far simpler:

Put all foreign labor under one standard process, the employment-based green card system. Like it was always supposed to be.

Why? Because the green card route was originally designed to do what the labor system should do:

• Prove the job is needed

• Prove a qualified American is not available

• Ensure wages meet U.S. market standards

• Provide a stable, lawful long-term residency path

Everything else has become an ad-hoc workaround for employers who want speed, cost-savings, or loopholes.

Let’s break down why the current “insourcing” categories fail, and why consolidation benefits everyone.

H-1B Visa- A Temporary Fix That Became a Permanent Pipeline

Originally a short-term bridge for high-skilled roles, it has morphed into:

• A wholesale replacement of U.S. STEM grads

• A permission-slip for multinational outsourcing firms

• A way to circumvent the more rigorous green-card labor certification process

If a job is necessary long-term?
Put it in the green-card queue.

H-2A & H-2B- Seasonal Programs Without Seasonal Oversight

These visas were sold as temporary boosts where labor shortages existed. Instead:

• Wage suppression becomes state policy

• Labor standards become optional

• “Seasonal” workers become indispensable to year-round operations

If labor is truly seasonal, employers should prove it — and prove domestic recruitment failed — within the green-card pathway, not around it.

OPT (Optional Practical Training)- Work Authorization Without Public Consent

OPT was not created by an act of Congress.
It was created by regulatory fiat.

And its structure:

• Lets employers avoid payroll taxes when hiring foreign graduates instead of Americans

• Creates a shadow labor pool outside immigration law

• Turns student visas into covert work visas

No country should have an immigration labor system based on bureaucratic improvisation.

Foreign graduates should convert into…
you guessed it: employment-based green cards.

J-1 Cultural Exchange & TN Visas- Mission-Creep Disguised as Diplomacy

What began as goodwill programs became:

• Hospitality staffing pipelines

• Quiet expansions in professional sectors

• Legal “side doors” to avoid real vetting

Again: if it is real labor, it must go through a real labor process.

L-1 Intra-Company Transfers- The Insourcing Company’s Best Friend

This visa enables multinationals to:

• Import cheaper internal labor

• Displace Americans who trained their replacements

• Extend “temporary” stays for as long as a decade

Temporary should mean temporary.
Permanent needs permanent residency rules.

Honorable Mentions: Other Carve-Outs That Undermine a Coherent Labor System

O-1B “Extraordinary Ability” Visas
Marketed as rare and elite, but in practice adjudicated subjectively and increasingly used as a speed-lane around labor certification. If talent is truly extraordinary and needed long-term, it should qualify directly through an employment-based green card, not a discretionary temporary visa.

E-3 (Australia) and H-1B1 (Singapore/Chile)
Nationality-based professional visas that bypass the main employment queue entirely. Labor markets do not change by passport. These programs add complexity without adding protection.

TN (NAFTA/USMCA) Professionals
A trade agreement turned into a standing professional labor channel with weak oversight. No labor test, no wage protections comparable to green cards, and renewable indefinitely.

CPT and STEM OPT Extensions
Academic authorizations quietly converted into long-term work programs. These operate outside immigration law, distort entry-level hiring, and allow firms to avoid payroll taxes and wage competition.

B-1 “In Lieu Of H-1B”
A technical loophole used to import foreign labor under visitor status. No labor certification, no wage enforcement, and minimal transparency.

H-4 EAD
Work authorization granted not for labor need, but as a patch to compensate for backlogged temporary visas. A symptom of system failure, not a solution.

EB-5 Investor Visa
Not a labor visa, but still relevant. It turns residency into a financial instrument and muddies the distinction between economic contribution and market labor need.

The Unifying Principle

Instead of regulating 8–10 separate immigration labor systems — each with their own loopholes — the U.S. should enforce a single model:

One pathway. One standard.
Proof of need → Labor-market test → Fair wages → Green card.

✔ Transparency
✔ Labor protection
✔ No displacement
✔ Integration into the American economy
✔ No more temporary-forever limbo

Conclusion: Green Cards; Can’t Justify One? Then You Don’t Need a Foreigner

The green-card system already contains the economic and ethical safeguards society expects; everything else is just a scam to get someone cheaper. They all need to go, and we need to return to Green Cards. If you can’t justify a Green Card, then why in the world do you need an overseas worker? Let’s be honest, before all of this fraud came out, no one even knew that wasn’t how it worked. America was doing way better before all this BUREAUCRATIC BULLSHIT. Outsourcing already struck a blow to America; there is no way this will be a positive, no matter how many times our tech giants simp for it. Now we do. End it all.

Your Future Depends on the Death of These Programs

Insourcing is a new level of evil. The enemies were at the gates selling your jobs to China. Now they’re selling your country to India. They hollowed out vast swathes of the Midwest, now known as the “Rust Belt”, this way. What do you think it will do to the entire country? Why would anyone want to call themselves Americans?

These middle managers are too removed from the effects of their decisions. You cannot trust that they will even think for a second about second, let alone third order effects on their own children from these betrayals. Your elite class think you are part of a global economy, the only problem being there are 2 billion Indians willing to come here to replace you. But you? Where can you go to build a better life? There is no where else to go, it is time to defend your homeland or have none. We have to end these programs, or we become a WEF Economic Zone.

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Several guest writers have provided contributions—in some case more than one—which have been well-received and further shaped the direction of the newsletter in important ways. These writers, including , , and will continue to be featured, as well as many others who have reached out to me with a desire to write for the Mailer about important issues in mental health, including gender ideology, the politicization of clinical and counseling therapies, and the connection between left-wing postmodernism and the corruption of empirical scholarship in psychological science. I have also used the Mailer to write about these issues, including posting preprint versions of academic manuscripts which have ultimately been accepted for publication.

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“I’m not afraid anymore!” repeated Kevin McCallister as he prepared to face the legendary Old Man Marley, who salted the street outside his home. But not a second later, he looked the old man in the eye and fully absorbed the subject of his fear, causing him to run back into his home screaming like the little boy he still very much was.

These days, kids don’t seem to be afraid of anything. Teachers who threaten to call home are met with a smug shrug. But no matter how sheltered, kids should be somewhat afraid of their parents because they are avatars of real-world adults. Yes, besides providing love, parents represent and thus prepare their children for the near-infinite terror of the world, which actually encourages the child to leave home one day. But first, the kids will have to overcome a pretty big hurdle and arrive at a pivotal psychological junction.

By default, a baby is egotistical, the ultimate authority over his immediate environment and every selfish wish is granted. Of course, this is because he requires help for his basic needs; this is a properly adapted mechanism for the stage. But soon this “High Chair Tyrant” has to integrate into social worlds more complex than that created by his parents; to do so, he will need to approach them with humility and learn to abide by their much less personalized rules. If this integration fails, which it does if parents and teachers are too lenient, then kids stay infantile in their self-obsession.

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This sounds cruel because it challenges our intuition that kids are inherently innocent. We want to believe that kids are a blank slate and get corrupted by the world. But do not forget that a two-year-old human is a most terribly violent creature, as per the number of times he or she bites, kicks, and steals. True, toddlers may not consciously know what they are doing, but whatever instinctual forces are operating inside of them, whatever chaos possesses them in their fits, has a history and a blueprint, old as time itself, and it doesn’t deserve praise. Obviously, it is hard to admit a cute baby is stained with original sin, or, in a nonreligious sense, bearing the mark of human nature that is inherently flawed and requires maturing to be less so. More on this later.

Nevertheless, you don’t want your kids to be afraid of everything as they step out of the home and into the world, but maybe just the stuff that is worth avoiding, like detention, suspension, and expulsion, which is like a school’s starter kit for the legal system or the objective social-moral order. Fear God if you wish. Don’t be stupid, or you might die. That’s probably a good place to start. But teachers don’t seem to bother with passing out suspensions anymore (I have not heard the word uttered at the elementary school where I work), because they hold no weight at home. If you’re a kid, fear of authority is an afterthought when the power never left your apple-saucey hands.

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Infantile Power

Before any budding lifeform matures to a higher level of functioning, it operates by a set of basic drives which mediate and strive for satiation of the appetites. “The Selfish Gene” is firing on all cylinders when a human baby cries to be fed, changed, or consoled because he was struck by another baby. This selfish mode runs on power, as in, the will to achieve one’s desired ends by any means. Hence, the prevalence of bullying among youth is higher than among adults, at least explicitly and somewhat cartoonishly. Before they develop higher-order reasoning and a sophisticated moral framework, represented through traits like generosity and delayed gratification, children rely on these power-laden instincts to survive. If I can push you down to steal your juice box, why shouldn’t I? Since kids are more susceptible to such temptations of power, adults should be wary of granting them a surplus (especially legally).

As I described in my last essay, kids test boundaries, and they ought to. The problem arises, however, when the parents and, by extension, teachers, but particularly fathers, allow the boundaries to be trampled.

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Trans demonstration against UK Supreme Court ruling in April 2025 on the biological nature of sex within the Equality Act 2010.

EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) comes at a high social cost. Promoting the voices of those claiming lived experience means silencing the views of those with apparent privilege. For the past decade, trans policy has been one of ‘No debate’ and a refusal to debate trans experience with critics. The balance of power enabling this censorship has recently shifted. In the past months, there have been two notable debates about gender identity. The first of these was held in Canada between Mia Hughes, (Genspect, Canada; The WPATH Files) versus Morgane Oger, prominent trans activist (Oger Foundation). The second was held in the UK between Helen Webberley (GenderGP) and Helen Joyce (Sex Matters; Trans). There are other examples in the UK involving Helen Webberley, with journalists Julie Bindel and Andrew Gold, which are not discussed here, but seem to broadly follow the template outlined below.

Comparing the two debates, it is striking how a trans activist and a trans ally rely on using very similar tactics in the discussion. This apparent parallel tells us something important about the resilience and global inter-connectedness of gender identity ideology. This brief analysis focuses on the specific tactics used by Morgane Oger and Helen Webberley, rather than on the main content of their arguments. It does not consider the responses by Mia Hughes and Helen Joyce, who are to be congratulated for presenting their rational counter-arguments to gender identity ideology.

The template uses three key tactics, namely using ad feminam personal attacks, discrediting non-practitioner roles as providing invalid opinion and appealing to higher authority for conclusive support.

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Making personalised ad feminam attacks:

Helen Webberly attacks Helen Joyce’s sex-based language in two instances, firstly alleging “…it’s a very dangerous thing to associate transgender women with predatory men” (7.08); and then in relation to Joyce’s description of a transgender woman as a man, which the “Crown Prosecution Service would consider that as a hate crime” (13.29). Morgane Oger makes a series of direct attacks on Mia Hughes’ veracity: “you say some things that are verifiably untrue” (37.46); “It’s not exactly truthful ... It’s a little disingenuous” (59.55); “…it’s actually not true…” (1.26.06); “…I think you are completely misrepresenting the situation” (1.54.04).

Discrediting non-medical and non-practitioner roles and opinions:

The second common tactic is seeking to discredit Mia Hughes’ and Helen Joyce’s standing in the debate, by appealing to a hierarchy of roles which are firmly linked to established systems of status and power. Hence Helen Webberley: “…you’re not a biologist. You’re not a doctor” (4.06); “I’ve never known a medical condition or a medical treatment being debated by mathematicians and statisticians saying it shouldn’t be available…” (21.24); “…we have non-medics interpreting…” (21.30); “…we’ve widened this out to non-medics to have an opinion on what a patient can have. …I can’t equate it with any other medical condition” (21.24). Morgane Oger echoes this approach, with attempts to discredit Mia Hughes, referring to “Mia and some other non-practitioner viewpoints” (1.25.53); and flatly stating: “You are not competent to show the data” (1.26.18).

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Appealing to higher medical authority:

Finally, both Morgane Oger and Helen Webberly claim justification by appealing to higher established authority, namely that of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Not only are Mia Hughes and Helen Joyce non-medics or non-practitioners, but their views are deemed invalid because they are also contradicted by an established medical source with supposedly conclusive authority. Helen Webberley describes WPATH as providing “…the global, internationally recognised standards of care, peer-reviewed by over 210 gender studies” (21.29). For Morgane Oger, WPATH “…is an organisation that includes medical practitioners who have very high reputation except in Mia and some other non-practitioner viewpoints” (1.25.53). (This jibe seems particularly ironic, given Mia Hughes’ standing as author of The WPATH Files, which has provided a devastating critique of this organisation as an advocate of trans ideology.)

Conclusion:

Putting aside the actual content of the debate, it is striking how Morgane Oger in Canada and Helen Webberley in the UK use such similar tactics in attempting to dismiss the arguments presented by their opponents. These tactics include making personalised ad feminam attacks, discrediting the relevance and standing of their opponents’ non-practitioner/non-medical roles and opinions as being invalid within this debate and appealing to supposedly conclusive higher medical authority. For a political ideology frequently lauded as being liberal, progressive and in the vanguard of social change, gender identity ideology here reveals itself as being profoundly regressive, conservative and reactionary in its nature.

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References:

Mia Hughes and Morgane Oger debate Gender Identity, Jonathon Kay as Moderator. Heterodox Academy, Wellington, Ontario, Canada. 23^rd October, 2025.

Helen Webberley, Helen Joyce, Jo Coburn: The Times Radio gender debate. Times Radio. 20^th November 2025.

By Peter Jenkins, counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has been a member of both the BACP Professional Conduct Committee and the UKCP Ethics Committee. He has published a number of books on legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017).

Peter is also a member of Thoughtful Therapists (UK). His critique of the UK Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy (MOU) was described as ‘instrumental’ in persuading the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy Board of the case for leaving the MOU in 2024.

Reposted with permission from Critical Therapy Antidote.

Once again, a conservative figure has been assassinated. And once again, the Associated Press responded by framing it as part of “a spike in political violence in the United States across all parts of the ideological spectrum.”

They did not hesitate. Before the facts were known, they rushed to dilute the meaning of what had just happened. The implication was clear. No side is innocent, so no side is to blame.

This narrative is dishonest. It ignores the lopsided pattern of political violence that has unfolded in recent years. Conservative figures continue to be attacked, threatened, and vilified with increasing frequency, while their killers are often portrayed as mentally ill or socially frustrated rather than politically motivated.

The institutions responsible for informing the public now serve as shields for a movement that refuses to acknowledge its own excesses. The press obscures intent. Universities downplay responsibility. Political leaders gesture toward unity while signaling approval through omission.

No one is held accountable because no one is allowed to speak clearly. And when clarity does appear, it is buried beneath layers of false balance and strategic vagueness.

Upside Down Land: The Criminals are the Good Guys

I just saw a scripted movie on Apple TV. The premise is that the most dangerous criminals in the world are accidentally set free. You might be tempted to watch it, but you don’t even need to. Those criminals are already on your streets.

We talk about the high-profile killings, but we ignore the real horrors. The number of people permanently injured, scared, raped, and driven to suicide. All by the false compassion that has been permeated by a corruption of the Judeo-Christian notion of compassion. This was predicted by René Girard in his Memetic Theory.

Girard called this the “satanic inversion” of the Gospel: when the concern for victims is mimetically hijacked to justify new forms of persecution.

Compassion becomes a pretext for vengeance.
Victimhood becomes a currency of power.
And mimetic rivalry rages beneath a veneer of justice.

And this is where we find ourselves. It is impossible for the liberals to recognize their actions as immoral or as the cause of these catastrophes. Similarly, the conservatives cannot admit to all of the catastrophes they caused by creating endless wars and military conflicts in the Middle East. When they couldn’t start a real war, they used special operations and CIA assets to overthrow governments, destabilizing the Middle East.

Of course, Obama continued their legacy, fulfilling none of his promises. I still remember being stationed in Guantanamo Bay, so happy he was closing it, only for him to never fulfill a single promise. So, for that reason, I do not give the Democrats much credit either.

These conflicts are the precursors to our modern illegal immigrant crisis, so I believe they are necessary to mention. We cannot have this discussion without first acknowledging this. On the same token, we can see that this is also part of the argument for tolerating importing these people. There is an assumption of guilt for the past, something modern liberals have no defense against.

However, the past is the past. We cannot wallow in self-hate based on things that happened. We live in the now, and on the home front, there is no question. The liberals had been leading a steady move to the left since the 1970s. Now it has been taken to the extreme, in recent years, all across the West. So let’s look at the facts.

How Did We Get Here?

The Overton window is so insanely out of whack that the extreme left thinks that it is in some sort of war. They live in a fantasy world where racism runs rampant and neo-confederates run through the south causing chaos. The reality is that they are hunting down any trace of the memory of the things they have already destroyed. They succeeded in getting the monuments in Richmond taken down. Monuments, no one really cared about until they started complaining. But that wasn’t enough for them. They had to travel to South America, where in Brazil, there was a group of like 1,000 people. Descendants of emigrated ex-confederate soldiers who were offered land in Brazil. They had a neat little get-together once a year, and they dressed in antebellum-style clothing. They waved a flag that has zero meaning in that country. This is not a Nazi flag that represents a specific ideology. This is a flag that holds meaning based on the context in which your mind frames it. But that can not be. Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) need an excuse to exist, and they successfully pressured the government of Brazil to declare the Confederate flag/the rebel flag a hate symbol in a country where it has no meaning.

There is no anti-hate campaign; it is an ideological extermination. Consider once again that Ms. Beirich of the SLPC studies “racism in academia”, a field so devoid of racism against anyone not white that they had to invent terms like “micro-aggression” to find anything to talk about. This, while completely ignoring the obvious racism of “anti-whiteness”. I mean, the racism is right there in the word. What in the world are you people talking about? Again, this woman is so out of touch that she had to go to BRAZIL to find something to do.

On the same token, these types of people act outraged that the Irish are proud of their red hair. They demand things like this be cancelled, because you know, not everyone has red hair. So what? There is no celebration that is too small for them to campaign against. But this is the world petty bureaucrats are trying to build. The only culture they respect is the culture of twerking, Palestinian flags, and riots. They absolutely love their riots.

Release the Hounds of Hell

In this section, I am just going to show you examples of the kind of people, all across Western society, who are being released. These are not rare cases in the US, Canada, and the UK…

If you’re thinking, “This is impossible, how could people let this happen?” Please see the quote below, and you will know exactly the type of person who allows this to happen.

And as we can see, the ignorant are a great source of pain for the actual vulnerable in our society.

To Free Our Will or Not: That is the Question

The idea of letting these people free is absolutely insane. We are given two choices when it comes to being held responsible:

1. The idea that all humans have free will and have a duty to live that out and make changes.

This is the idea of the sane. In fact, research backs this up. Belief in free will is specifically a sign of well-being, as the research shows. In addition, if you believe in free will, it means you can change. You are not fated to act the same way, regardless of circumstances.

So, if you are a criminal now, it is in the best interests of society to try to reform you, and not to lock you away forever to prevent your future criminality, as you can change.

2. The Nietzschean idea is that you are not responsible for your choices.

   “The doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt.”
   — Twilight of the Idols, “The Four Great Errors,”

This is the most common view held by most left-wing scholars. The idea comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed that we are fated and that we really have very little, or in fact no choice, in how things happen to us.

When you hold this view, it must be reasonable to conclude that people are not responsible for their actions. They were simply born that way. In fact, according to findings from a large-scale Swedish national adoption study, genetic factors play a substantial role in criminal behavior. The study showed that adoptees whose biological parents had criminal convictions were significantly more likely to engage in criminal behavior themselves, even when raised by non-criminal adoptive parents. In contrast, the influence of the adoptive parents’ criminality was much weaker. This suggests that hereditary factors may account for a majority of the variance in criminal behavior, estimated in some analyses at around 50–60%, while environmental factors such as upbringing contribute a smaller portion, roughly 20%.

However, if you have caught on by now, there is a huge problem here. If people can’t be redeemed, then why are we rehabilitating them? They won’t change; they will just kill, rob, and steal, again. If you subscribe to this view, then how can you even advocate for rehabilitation? You need to be in quarantine.

Well, somehow, the liberal-minded have pulled it off. They hold the most conflicting views to have ever been conceived. They hold that the perpetrator is not a perpetrator at all; they are a victim of genetics. Worse still, not even a genetic lottery, but a fixed game of roulette. If your number lands on the spinner wrong, you’re screwed. We can’t cure you. Yet, instead of concluding that they need to be locked away, they will never change, they now reason, “This is a victim of circumstances, we must set them free”. Set them free to terrorize again?

Now I, of course, don’t hold this incredible anti-human view. It is necessary to rehabilitate criminals. If we can save 1 out of 10, then I believe it is worth it. Even if we couldn’t, I believe in the human right to try. The conservative view, which is really just the view everyone had until 2013, is the view that does not believe in injustice for the victim, nor the perpetrator.

Now, admittedly, I had said, “They hold the most conflicting views ever conceived.” But of course, it’s important for us to realize, that isn’t true. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago:

And you could stab him only after he had stabbed you. And therefore it was quite easy to draw up a case against a citizen who had merely drawn his knife from his pocket, without even having had a chance to use it! And if he had used it, then he was all the more guilty! Because he had dared to defend himself! (And the fact that he had been attacked was not taken into account at all.)

And once again, we see the true face of this New Leftist ideological movement. Call it Socialism. Call it Satanism. Call it suicidal empathy. Call it a manifestation of a larger macrosocial explosion of Cluster B psychopathology. Whatever it is, it is a cultural malaise that needs to be cured. We cannot live like this.

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes.... That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, chapter four, The Gulag Archipelago

Would a country in East Asia, the Middle East, the entirety of Africa, or Eastern Europe ever let these people run free? I have no more words.

“Believe All Women” Means Import Rapists?

I remember when we were supposed to “Believe all women”. In fact, I remember the exact event when the push really got started. It was an incredibly famous case, because in 2006, gang rape was something almost no one had ever heard of. Now it’s just the norm throughout large swaths of Europe. Most horrifyingly in England and Sweden.

In fact, if you hear about a gang rape, you simply say “Wow, that’s horrible” and then you go about your day. This is universally true when it is done by anyone who is non-white. Unfortunately, these lacrosse players, later exonerated as the entire case was a grand work of fiction, were white.

I honestly thought back then the outrage was about the rape, the false rape, that is. Now I realize the men and women yelling really didn’t care about the rape; they cared about the race of the accused. Hopefully, you can forgive me, you see, I thought we were in a world coming to grips with racism and finally ending it. What I didn’t realize was that it was now payback time. Payback for things, people who are long dead, had done to people who were also long dead. At first, I thought this was odd, but for some reason, this spirit of spit and revenge has always been a part of Democratic, left-wing ideology.

Now they are, of course, doing this song and dance again. Once again, it is not about protecting women; it never has been. If you wanted to protect women, would you import people from hostile cultures, then suppress the voices of the people who speak out against this violence? “But it’s only a minority of them that commit these crimes.”

Even if there were only a few rapists per 100,000 imported, of course, we can see it’s many more than that, but still, how could you justify thousands of rapes that would have never happened had you not added these people to the population? That is quite literally the point of vetting immigrants. To keep out rapists, murderers, arsonists, thieves, the list goes on. In the past, one foreigner committing a rape was an atrocity. People would take to the streets. Well, now it’s so common no one even notices. Some estimates have found that over 100,000 indigenous British women, targeted because of their skin color, were groomed and raped by Muslim rape gangs.

Remember when they were made, 40-year-old Hollywood actors were dating 18-year-olds? Why don’t they care that 50-year-old Muslim immigrants are raping 14-year-old white British women? Well, I just answered my own question. But still, where is the pink pussy hat brigade? Bitching about the right to kill the babies they aren’t ever going to have. It was a death cult, not a pro-woman cult. We can forgive you for not seeing that sooner, of course.

Selective Memory

The pattern is not hard to see. There is no shortage of examples. They are simply ignored.

1. Woman executed in her own by career criminal with 40 PRIOR ARRESTS
   A woman was recently murdered by a repeat offender who had been released by a judge pushing progressive reforms. No, this is not the Ukrainian refugee woman also killed by a career criminal. This is yet ANOTHER one. This has become so common that we don’t even notice anymore. And of course, no national outcry followed

   

   

2. Attempted assassination of Donald Trump
   Last year, an individual attempted to assassinate Donald Trump. The bullet missed. A second attempt was foiled. The story vanished almost immediately.

3. Nashville school shooting by a trans-identifying shooter
   A shooter who identified as transgender attacked a Christian school. The firearms were covered in anti-Christian slogans. Officials refused to assign a motive. Of course, this comes as many of these people put on crazy hormones have committed insane crimes. Like the Minnesota school shooter, Robin Westman.

   

   

4. Jewish men murdered in Washington, D.C.
   In the nation’s capital, two Jewish men were gunned down by a left-wing extremist. Their names faded from the headlines within hours.

5. Republicans targeted at a congressional baseball game
   A gunman opened fire on Republican lawmakers during a baseball practice. He asked their party affiliation before shooting. The incident was quickly rebranded as a one-off.

6. Rand Paul assaulted by neighbor
   Senator Rand Paul was blindsided and beaten by a neighbor. He suffered six broken ribs and a collapsed lung. The attacker received 30 days in jail. Luckily, another judge bumped it up to 8 months.

7. Black Lives Matter riots
   During the BLM riots, federal courthouses were set on fire, police stations were overrun, and entire city blocks were vandalized or destroyed. These events were reframed as a righteous uprising.

8. The Palisades fire

   Jonathan Rinderknecht is the one who started the Palisades fire, not “climate change”. He’s charged with destruction of property by means of fire and faces up to 20 years in federal prison if convicted. He could face additional charges associated with the property damage and 12 lives lost in the Jan. 7 fire. The fact that he isn’t getting life for the 12 people killed by his fire is crazy.

   

9. Attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh

   Somehow, this person only got 8 years…

   

Each of these cases tells the same story. When the perpetrator leans left, the media downplays the ideology. When the victims lean right, the press moves on. The pattern is not only consistent. It is deliberate.

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Counter-Protests and Campus Cowardice

What the fuck even is counter-protesting, and why is it allowed? Counter-protesting has become a sanctioned form of mob suppression. What was once framed as civil disagreement is now a tool for silencing. On college campuses, especially, the tactic has evolved from free expression into intimidation. The institutions responsible for order have allowed it to spread.

We’ve all seen the scenes. A conservative speaker is invited. Students organize a protest. The protest becomes a blockade. Entrances are obstructed. Classrooms are surrounded. Faculty look the other way. No one is arrested.

This is not a spontaneous outburst. It is a coordinated method of control. It feeds off institutional weakness, and it grows with every unpunished act. But this is not new. The tactic has a history.

The Evolution of Counter-Protesting

1. Labor Movement (19th–early 20th century)
   Union strikes were often met with mobs of “loyal workers” organized by employers. These counter-protests were designed to break picket lines and protect the status quo. Police frequently took the side of the counter-protesters.

2. Civil Rights Era (1950s–1960s)
   Civil rights activists were regularly confronted by segregationist mobs. Groups like the KKK and the White Citizens’ Councils organized counter-protests to disrupt marches and block desegregation. These actions were often supported by local law enforcement and political leaders.

3. Vietnam War Period (1960s–1970s)
   As anti-war protests gained traction, “pro-troop” rallies were staged in response. These often escalated into open conflict between left-wing student groups and working-class counter-protesters. The Nixon administration used these confrontations to create political theater.

4. Culture War Flashpoints (1980s–1990s)
   Counter-protests shifted toward cultural and moral issues. Outside abortion clinics, pro-life and pro-choice activists regularly clashed. LGBTQ+ parades were met with religious protests. The tone was more personal, and the violence more sporadic, but the divisions deepened.

5. Post-9/11 and Partisan Realignment (2000s)
   After 9/11, war protests were countered by pro-military rallies. The culture hardened into two distinct political camps. Movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street existed in parallel, but rarely in direct confrontation.

6. Campus Mobs and Deplatforming (2014–present)
   This is where the tactic changed form. Counter-protests were no longer about debate. They became about removal. Conservative speakers are now shouted down, physically threatened, and forced off campuses. The goal is to prevent the event from happening at all. Universities rarely intervene. In some cases, they enable it.

7. Charlottesville and Beyond (2017–present)
   The 2017 rally in Charlottesville triggered a new era of counter-protest escalation. Antifa and similar groups began showing up in force, often with tactical gear and organized communications. Clashes became expected. One person was killed. The response from the press focused entirely on one side. Why can antifa show up with actual military gear and weapons, but the other side is the one to blame?

The Legal Illusion

In theory, all of this falls under free speech. In practice, it is mob control. Courts have ruled that disruption, harassment, and physical obstruction are not protected. But these rulings are rarely enforced. On campus, there are no consequences. In progressive cities, prosecutors decline to press charges.

A Cowardly Infrastructure

Administrators do not want trouble. So they give the mob what it wants. Speakers are disinvited. Security is reduced. Students are told to stay quiet and stay away. In this environment, there is no real freedom of speech for one side. But permission to shut down speech is granted to the other.

Counter Protests Need to Go

How do we stop this? Pretty fucking easy. John Smith is coming to speak on campus about something 50% of the student body doesn’t like. They organize the “John Smith is a Fascist” anti-protest. When John Smith comes in, multiple people throw objects at him. Everyone who throws an object is thrown off campus. It is quite literally that simple. That basic standard is not being upheld right now.

The second is, if you are forced to get a permit, so is the “counter-protest”. And, while we’re at it, on a different day. If you have to go through all that trouble, why do they get the right to ruin your activism with their group of 20 people when you have 2000? And if this group is known for acting exactly like Hitler’s Brown Shirts while claiming not to be anti-fascist, i.e., the pro-Fascism group Antifa, why would they be approved? Of course, they were finally designated a terrorist group. But remember when militias were designated terrorist groups, yet they never facilitated a single citywide riot? Odd.

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The Weaponized Narrative

When facts do not serve the narrative, the narrative is adjusted. The framing becomes the story. The public is not shown what happened. They are told how to feel about it.

After the recent assassination, Yahoo News decided to do a fact check. They showed that Charlie Kirk had called George Floyd a “scumbag”. They present this as if this is something that almost everyone hasn’t already said. He was a scumbag. He was a fentanyl addict. He wasn’t taking care of his kids. He held a gun to a pregnant woman’s stomach. What about that is not scumbag behavior?

But this approach of acting like we’re shocked and appalled at normal opinions is not new. It has become standard.

When political violence comes from the left, it is labeled as mental illness, personal grievance, or unrelated frustration. The shooter had a hard life. The attacker was confused. The riot was caused by poverty. Nothing is ever directly linked to ideology unless it supports the approved conclusion. Political violence from the left has not emerged from their ideology alone. The right does not carry out acts of violence because mental illness is not encouraged. The insanity of the left encourages cluster B personality to run rampant in their ranks.

When violence comes from the right, real or imagined, the conclusion is immediate. It is labeled as extremism. It is called terrorism. The ideology is printed in headlines before the suspect is named.

Hate crime statistics are treated as sacred until they contradict the preferred image. When a man in North Carolina murdered a white woman and said, “got that white woman,” it was not logged as a hate crime. When a church shooter covered his weapons with anti-Christian slogans, no motive was confirmed. The facts were known. The labels were withheld.

This pattern exists everywhere. Schools, media outlets, nonprofits, and federal agencies all operate under the same assumptions. Some participants are aware of what they are doing. Others believe they are simply following the data. But the data has already been filtered.

The system is not neutral. It is partisan. It does not report what happens. It decides what deserves attention and what does not.

The Final Reckoning

The facts are not hidden. They are simply ignored. It’s important to remember that socialists have no God they are loyal to. Unlike the atheist brought up in a Judeo-Christian environment, they are not anchored to truth via education either. They can, they will, they are compelled to lie.

“We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.”
— Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues” (1920)

Actions, including deception, are considered moral if they serve the revolution. We find this again and again. Abstracted onto the general ideal of the modern left, it just means they get to say whatever they want. Furthering the Leftist agenda is supreme.

We have seen the assassinations. We have seen the riots. The arson (don’t worry, it’s “mostly peaceful”). The attacks on churches and synagogues. We have seen the selective enforcement of law, the double standards in sentencing, and the silence that follows every act of violence committed by the approved side.

We are told this is all part of a larger problem. We are told the threat is broad and growing. We are told it is complex. But the people saying this are the same ones who benefit from the confusion.

But this cannot last. Every institution that refuses to correct itself eventually collapses from within. Every movement that justifies violence will one day find that violence pointed in its own direction. There will be a reckoning. The only question is, how much longer will it take?

The charts are back and forth, depending on the political party you belong to, the results seem to correlate with your side, see below:

So, in the end, there is no chart.

I wish I could make one.

But you can only find the truth through reason.

You cannot measure this by your favorite numbers.

You have to choose.

Where do you see all of the violence?

Here is what I see:

• Rapists coming into your country unvetted

• Releasing dangerous criminals as soon as possible

• Racism against whites, Asians, and Jews through policy

• Shooting people they disagree with

• Destroying programs for gifted children (Too many are White or Asian)

• Replacing the police with social workers

• Quietly enforcing ideological homogeneity in the workplace

• Importing people vocally hostile to the country they’re immigrating to

• Importing religious extremists

• “Owning the republicans” by violent riots

• Male and female genital mutilation

• 1,000 Genders and more to come

• “Mental health”

• Burning churches

• Burning down cities when mad/criminal is killed/don’t get their way

On the other side, you have:

• Patriotism

• Too much admiration for the police

• Racism against minorities through “mean” words

• Saying mean things

• Revoking visas for visitors who hate the country they’re in

• Making fun of their opponents with memes

• Importing people after careful vetting

• “Owning the libs” through success in politics

• 2 Genders

• Praying

• Complaining that their churches are being burned

• That time they stormed the capital

• The rebel flag they like to put on stuff sometimes

• Guns they don’t use to shoot their political opponents

So, let me ask you, who is the violence coming from?

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The UK is still reeling from the publication of the Cass Review in 2024, which seeks to limit provision of so-called gender-affirming medical care for children. This landmark development was followed earlier this year by the clear statement (and legal bombshell) from the UK Supreme Court that the terms male and female are rooted in biological sex when applying equality law. These changes mirror current legal and medical disputes over the status for gender identity affirming care in the US, with recent Presidential Executive Orders and the closure of leading US gender clinics. Much less media attention has been paid, however, to the prosecution of a UK surgeon for causing a double amputation of his own body, as the realisation of a long-held fetish linked to an underground London castration cult. Peter Jenkins, of Thoughtful Therapists, looks at some of the chilling background and implications of this bizarre incident.

Sometimes, reports in the media of body modification seem so bizarre that they just beggar belief. One such story was that of Neil Hopper, 49, who recently pleaded guilty in the Magistrate’s Court, in Truro, Cornwall, UK, to two counts of fraud, by making a false representation concerning his amputated legs. After deliberately packing his own legs in dry ice, in order to damage them irreparably, he required a double amputation below the knee. The obvious irony here was that Hopper was a well-known and widely respected vascular surgeon, with specialist expertise in amputation. However, he also had a powerful sexual fetish driving him to achieve the amputation of his own legs. Basking in the media spotlight as a heroic sepsis survivor, as the famed ‘bionic surgeon’, and potentially as the world’s first disabled astronaut, Hopper went on to make fraudulent insurance claims to the tune of almost half a million pounds.

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The bare facts, however bizarre, unfortunately do not really do justice to the background story and to the wider, disturbing implications of this case. Hopper was not acting on his own, but was in turn closely associated with Marius Gustavson, the leader of a secretive castration cult in London. Gustavson was given a life sentence in 2024, with a minimum term of 22 years for carrying out amateur castration operations, together with his five co-defendants, who were given similarly heavy jail sentences. Described as a cult, the group groomed and encouraged potential vulnerable victims to take a willing part in their grisly activities, which were then streamed to a ready audience of viewers, or sold as videos. In some cases, the brutal and inept removal of penis and testicles would go radically wrong, leading to catastrophic blood loss and to the need for emergency hospital care. However, perhaps surprisingly, this did not lead directly to their accidental discovery, or even to police investigation of the group’s bizarre activities.

Email links to London castration cult

Hopper liaised closely with Gustavson about how to best achieve the amputation of his own legs, sending around 1,500 emails to him at around this time. He also purchased three videos of operations from the Eunuch Maker site, leading to the additional charges brought against him of possessing extreme pornography. In court, Hopper was described as having the dual conditions of body integrity dysmorphia, and gender dysphoria. The police initially investigated Hopper through his incriminating emails exchanged with Gustavson. This email trail cast a new and very different light on the surgeon’s original claim that his amputations were due to sepsis, rather than being deliberately caused by self-inflicted damage.

In one sanitised version, this news story begins and ends just there – neatly contained, with no loose ends left over. ‘Surgeon with a paraphilic disorder contacts leader of castration cult, causes amputation of his own legs, and is found out’ – justice done, story filed and quickly forgotten.

Just safe and consensual kink?

However, there is yet more background to come out, which has only been reported, seemingly, at local level by Cornwall Live. The latter was contacted by Michael (not his real name), with significant additional background on Gustavson, the infamous Eunuch Maker.

"I went to London for a bit of kink," Michael tells us with disconcerting honesty. "I went up there for sex. I am a kinky person. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And through a friend of a friend I met up with Gustavson. The friend said he was a serious player. And it was all 'safe, sane and consensual'. Except it was none of those things."

Michael claimed he was offered £50,000 to undergo castration by Gustavson. “I was totally groomed into it. No-one would ever agree to this. It is so insane. No-one consents to being beaten up, mutilated, castrated or murdered." Michael was effectively castrated via the use of clamping of his testicles with Burdizzo clips, normally used by vets in treating cattle. Suffering severe and crippling after-effects, Michael had emergency treatment back at his local hospital in Cornwall, but his injuries were not officially reported and investigated, until his counsellor urged him to go the police in 2019. "I had to do it because of the hundreds of people being mutilated and castrated by Gustavson. It's not unique at all. There were 22,000 members registered on the Eunuch Maker."

Normalising paraphilia in the name of progress

According to Michael, the local police investigation led to Gustavson then being arrested and charged. However, he “wonders why no alarm bells rang with either the Met [PJ: London] Police or London's ambulance service when so many calls were being received to Gustavson's London address over mutilations gone wrong.” The suspicion voiced by him in his interview is that this supposedly consensual torture and violence was almost seen as being legitimate and tolerable, and that the police allegedly seemed somehow reluctant to take action in the face of perceived trans sensitivities.

Some of the wider implications of the Hopper and Gustavson cases have already been explored by key commentators, such as Malcolm Clark (the Secret Gender Files) and Mia Hughes (author of The WPATH Files, and Director of Genspect, Canada). Mia Hughes, for example, points to the crucial, but gradual process of normalising sexual deviancy, by reclassifying paraphilias simply as sexual health issues in successive editions of key psychiatric diagnostic manuals, such as DSM 5 and ICD 11.

WPATH and the Eunuch Files

There is also the overtly provocative stance of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), in strongly arguing the case that the term eunuch be accepted as a valid and legitimate gender identity, in its controversial and now heavily discredited Standards of Care. This stance has been directly challenged by Genevieve Gluck, by pointing out that the so-called research evidence for the eunuch claim included reference to an online repository of abuse, featuring graphic castration reports and fantasies about children and young people.

In fact, the Scottish National Health Service triggered a serious security alert, usually associated with a major terrorist incident, by casually posting a weblink to the eunuch abuse portal as part of its online discussion of the WPATH Standards of Care. As if yet more evidence of the normalisation of abuse to children was needed, this major data security breach was, of course, quickly brushed over in the subsequent official investigation – nothing to see here at all, so just move along…

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The case for amputation as a cure for Body Integrity Disorder?

There is a further unexpected twist to this story, with the recent publication of a case history in an academic journal, first picked up by Daniel Howard James, writing in Genspect. This academic case study seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to the apparently unique circumstances of Neil Hopper’s successful drive for amputating his own feet. Erich Kasten, who has published previously on Body Integrity Disorder (BID), has published a case study of a patient who also achieved the loss of his feet by packing his legs in dry ice. This case study, while anonymised, makes seems to make little attempt to protect the real identity of the patient from being revealed via the process of deductive identification. This is a real risk with highly unusual and distinctive cases of this kind.

Kasten states that the patient contacted him post-amputation, and completed a retrospective BID self-assessment. This showed significant relief from their troubling psychological symptoms. Kasten describes the social stigmatization and discrimination previously experienced by the patient with regard to their BID, contrasting this with the enormous relief which followed once finally rid of their offending feet.

Essentially, Kasten constructs an argument here in favour of elective amputation of body parts as a potential solution to the psychological suffering caused by Body Identity Disorder. This is on the basis of a thinly disguised and highly problematic single case example. In terms of discrimination, Kasten points to the “persecution by the police” in investigating and prosecuting the hapless patient, as if this was an illustration of enforcing criminal sanctions solely for initiating elective amputation. However, the case material described makes it very clear that police prosecution was for the patient’s possession of extreme pornography and for insurance fraud directly related to the amputation, and not for the simple fact of the amputation itself.

Elective amputation – the canary in the coalmine?

The point of Kasten’s argument becomes clearer when he laments the fact that elective surgery is now widely available for patients diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria, but apparently not for those with BID. “For decades, there have been surgical solutions for GD in many countries, often in highly specialized clinics, so that people with GD can achieve their desired gender” (Kasten, 2024: 7). This overlooks the growing trend for pre-surgical pharmacological treatments for gender dysphoria, such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, to be denied to patients under the age of majority in Western Europe, and increasingly so in the US. Surgical interventions for under 18s with gender dysphoria, such as double mastectomies, are also now restricted by law in many US states.

Kasten suggests for patients with unresolved BID that “society should consider the possibility of surgery in a hospital to avoid worse suffering” (Kasten, 2024: 7), in deference to the over-riding principle of patient autonomy. This flawed argument completely underestimates the degree of public and professional revulsion for such a step. But perhaps Kasten does appreciate this. Perhaps he is just testing the water here, feeling his way along a darkened cellar with a captive canary in a birdcage, as an early warning sign for invisible pockets of gas, seeing if anyone notices or reacts strongly to his plea in support of elective amputation?

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Conclusion

The Hopper self-amputation case and its links to the deeply disturbing Gustavson castration cult are quite bad enough in themselves, even if these are quickly erased from our awareness by the restlessly moving finger directing our intake of online social media. In terms of broader moral and ethical themes, Hopper’s motivation and behaviour speak volumes about an almost bottomless capacity for deception, of friends, family, the media and general public, as well as of himself, perhaps. Also rarely mentioned are the profound social costs of the drive to assuage his burning fetish to achieve his longed-for stumps, costs calculated not least in terms of deceptively attained medical care, fraudulent insurance claims, and the cost of later police investigation. Extreme, violent pornography is also a significant leitmotif at work here, linked to the striking, abject failure of adult safeguarding. And finally, there is something important, but very elusive and hard to pin down at work in our culture here, about the effects of normalising the abnormal, of permitting the growing acceptance of the surgical damage done to healthy bodies, of making all-too-real the eternal fantasy of physically becoming something other than what we are born with…

But the Hopper case is supposedly only about a unique, one-off bizarrerie, a never to be repeated case of the self-amputating surgeon, brought low by his overweening ambition. There’s no wider lesson at all to be discerned, explored or appreciated here about trans identity and its realisation via medical transition…

Or is there?

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Note. This is a revised and expanded version of the article first published by FAIR (Foundation for Academic Integrity and Responsibility), and republished here with their agreement. Thanks to Sue Parker Hall for additional local reporting resources.

Foundation for Academic Integrity and Responsibility

‘Hopper’ no more? The bizarre case of the self-amputating surgeon and the implications for a eunuch gender identity

Sometimes, reports in the media of body modification seem so bizarre that they just beggar belief. One such story was that of Neil Hopper, 49, who recently pleaded guilty in the Magistrate’s Court, in Truro, Cornwall, UK, to two counts of fraud, by making a false representation concerning his amputated legs. After deliberately packing his own legs in dr…

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7 months ago · 8 likes · 7 comments · Peter Jenkins

Peter Jenkins is a counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK and a member of Thoughtful Therapists.

Earlier, I posted my presentation at the conference. You can find that talk here. As described on the Centre for Heterodox Social Science website, the conference’s intellectual aims were twofold: a) to institutionalize the study of woke, arguably a dominant high-cultural ideology of our episteme; and b) to research omitted topics and perspectives, rebalancing social scientific knowledge. The conference brought together academics, journalist, and other intellectuals united by a shared view that the Social Sciences had become subverted by progressive leftist ideology that threatened the integrity of the Social Sciences in the Academy.

What a Post-Progressive Developmental Evolutionary Psychopathology Should Encompass

The growth and maturation of any scientific field will naturally evolve over the course of its history. Paradigm shifts, synthesis and cross-pollination with new fields and methodologies, and internal cultural dynamics will wax and wane at times. Nonetheless, what should remain consistent is adherence to the founding principles of the field, integrity in pursuing scientific questions, faithful and balanced interpretation of findings and dissemination of them to the lay public, and an ability to recognize when the field has lost its way and corrective action is needed. In developmental and evolutionary psychopathology (Del Giudice, 2018), such remedial action is now needed. The fields have become increasingly characterized not by the faithful pursuit of scientific truth, but rather by a radical progressive social justice activism that has polluted and corrupted them, resulting in them straying from their founding principles while also harming the mental health consumer and patient. Below I outline key elements that corrective action in the field should embrace as part of a ‘post-progressive’ developmental evolutionary psychopathology.

Most critically, there needs to be a concerted return to the classic biopsychosocial model, in theory, research, and practice. Biologically and genetically informed designs should be prioritized. Where this is practically impossible, biological or genetic proxies should be included as determinants in models which include social determinants. This should be principled, with clearly articulated theoretical and methodological reasons for the inclusion and exclusion of covariates in researcher-specific models which may prioritize hypotheses concerning the primacy of either social or biological determinants.

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Related to a dedicated return to classic biopsychosocial model, administrators in academic institutions, editors of scientific journals, and leaders in the field of developmental psychopathology, and adjacent fields that directly inform research in developmental psychopathology (e.g., behavioral and molecular genetics), should refrain from directly or indirectly restricting the sorts of questions researchers in the field of developmental and evolutionary psychopathology should be able to investigate. This is especially true regarding research the aim of which is to investigate the contributions of race and sex to mental and physical health conditions. The notion that self-identified race/ethnicity (SIRE) has no basis in genetic reality is false (see Fang et al., 2019; Kirkegaard, 2021; Nagar et al., 2020) and attempts to suggest otherwise should be met with strong rebuke. Publicly available datasets should include access to all data the law permits and not restrict access to select data, such as genetic data, because of moral or political reasons.

Renewed efforts to integrate with the broad field of sociobiology and more generally the conceptual basis of sociobiology, that social behaviors, like physical traits, are subject to natural selection and can be passed down through generations, are needed. This must be coupled with a proper contextualization and representation of figures such as E.O. Wilson and other researchers and theorists in sociobiology and adjacent fields. Uncritical moral denunciation of researchers and their work or prior statements without a critical evaluation of their actual scientific oeuvre in its entirety is unwarranted and damages the credibility of the scientific field and the scientific enterprise itself.

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A post-progressive developmental psychopathology should also dispense with social justice-oriented activist research and scholarship organized around an ideology of ‘destigmatization’ that seeks to eliminate any stigma or negative valence associated with mental health conditions (Berwick, 2020). It ignores the origins of cultural stigma (Kurzban & Leary, 2001), and the importance of cultural stigma in facilitating individual mental health (Pryor & Bos, 2015; Satel, 2007; Shellenberger, 2022), cultural hygiene, and civic order (Will, 1987). Juxtaposed with the mental health crisis and civic disorder in many American cities, this Woke, social-justice oriented activist effort in developmental psychopathology and mental health ultimately erodes public trust of research in mental health and developmental psychopathology and undermines the potential of the field to contribute to human and societal flourishing.

More specifically, an ideology of destigmatization across developmental psychopathology often takes the form of changing specific diagnostic nomenclature to less categorical and illness-specific language; (e.g., a “person with problems in living” or “a person with substance abuse problems”), and the elimination of the term ‘abnormal’ altogether in undergraduate and graduate course titles. It also encompasses softer forms, including sanitizing any notion of ‘negative value’ (negative deviance) or ‘problematic or pathological denotation’ with reference to what various psychological, psychiatric, or other mental health constructs and categorical diagnoses imply about the afflicted individual. Watering down the language in this manner to genuflect to ideological priors makes the field incoherent and undermines its legitimacy.

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A prototype example from my own area of research in developmental psychopathology involves the ‘disorganized/disoriented’ infant attachment classification in which attachment researchers seek to downplay or deny the association between parental maltreatment and the likelihood of infants being classified as ‘disorganized/disoriented’—an infant attachment classification that is associated with a host of negative behavioral outcomes (Verhage et al., 2023). I have argued that calls to remove any notion of ‘negative deviance’ from the construct of infant attachment disorganization are inaccurate, misguided, and unhelpful (J.D. Haltigan, PhD [@JDHaltigan], 2022).

Open discussion of issues with others in the field that reflect joint acknowledgment of the extant tensions in the field, the substantive issues surrounding them, and that seek to elicit public feedback with an eye towards informing optimal ways forward for the field to “renormalize” to some sense of balance and shared commitment to science and not activism should be encouraged and modeled. Alternative venues to traditional, ‘gatekept’ academic journals, such as Substack and other social media platforms have already shown promise in this regard (Haltigan & Aftab, 2024; Spier & Haltigan, 2025). More broadly, along with a return to the biopsychosocial model of psychopathology in theory, research, and clinical practice, developmental psychopathology should be informed by thinkers such as the philosophical psychologist and psychiatrist Peter Zachar whose A Metaphysics of Psychopathology (Zachar, 2014) argues for a pragmatic and pluralistic metaphysical approach to mental disorders, rejecting rigid essentialism in favor of a more flexible understanding that reflects the real but constructed nature of psychiatric concepts.

The extent to which there is faithful, principled, and heterodox engagement by developmental psychopathologists with the ideas presented above, along with the ideas espoused in works such as those by Zachar, will ultimately determine how successful a post-progressive developmental psychopathology is. Although this will be challenging to see through in the current Woke Leftist social constructivist orientation that currently predominates in the field of developmental psychopathology and allied disciplines, it is in my view essential if the field is to remain a credible—indeed a viable—scientific enterprise as it was originally conceived.

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Part 2 References.

Berwick, D. M. (2020). The moral determinants of health. Jama, 324(3), 225–226.

Del Giudice, M. (2018). Evolutionary psychopathology: A unified approach. Oxford University Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=aiRjDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Evolutionary+Psychopathology+A+Unified+Approach&ots=qyLZsW8Pfk&sig=8mEBDvnilAjg-KYc6XAwgM9slas

Fang, H., Hui, Q., Lynch, J., Honerlaw, J., Assimes, T. L., Huang, J., Vujkovic, M., Damrauer, S. M., Pyarajan, S., & Gaziano, J. M. (2019). Harmonizing genetic ancestry and self-identified race/ethnicity in genome-wide association studies. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 105(4), 763–772.

Haltigan, J. D., & Aftab, A. (2024, May 21). Psychiatry, Psychology, and Society: Multilevel Conversations at the Margins [Substack newsletter]. The Multilevel Mailer. https://jdhaltigan.substack.com/p/psychiatry-psychology-and-society

J.D. Haltigan, PhD [@JDHaltigan]. (2022, August 9). 1n/ As an attachment partisan, glad to see this work published, but one quibble that I think is reflective of the current times. It is *not* a misconception to say that infant disorganization is associated with (a consequence of) maltreatment. Https://t.co/OKiwBzA7WB [Tweet]. Twitter. https://x.com/JDHaltigan/status/1557139196627886080

Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2021). Genetic ancestry and social race are nearly interchangeable. OpenPsych. https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2021.12.22

Kurzban, R., & Leary, M. R. (2001). Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: The functions of social exclusion. Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 187.

Nagar, S. D., Conley, A. B., & Jordan, I. K. (2020). Population structure and pharmacogenomic risk stratification in the United States. BMC Biology, 18(1), 140. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-00875-4

Pryor, J. B., & Bos, A. E. (2015). 22 Stigma: Implications for Helping Behavior. The Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior, 433.

Satel, S. (2007). In praise of stigma. Addiction Treatment: Science and Policy for the Twenty-First Century, 147–151.

Shellenberger, M. (2022, October 11). Dark Side Of Destigmatization. https://www.public.news/p/dark-side-of-destigmatization

Spier, H., & Haltigan, J. D. (2025, August 27). Psychology’s Leftward Drift with Dr. J.D. Haltigan [Substack newsletter]. Psychobabble. https://hannahspier.substack.com/p/psychologys-leftward-drift-with-dr

Verhage, M. L., Tharner, A., Duschinsky, R., Bosmans, G., & Fearon, R. M. P. (2023). Editorial Perspective: On the need for clarity about attachment terminology. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 64(5), 839–843. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13675

Will, G. F. (1987, November 19). Opinion | A RIGHT TO LIVE ON THE SIDEWALK? The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/11/19/a-right-to-live-on-the-sidewalk/afe52daa-a52f-415a-8d48-087e479857e3/

Zachar, P. (2014). A metaphysics of psychopathology. the MIT press.

Earlier, I posted my presentation at the conference. You can find that talk here. As described on the Centre for Heterodox Social Science website, the conference’s intellectual aims were twofold: a) to institutionalize the study of woke, arguably a dominant high-cultural ideology of our episteme; and b) to research omitted topics and perspectives, rebalancing social scientific knowledge. The conference brought together academics, journalist, and other intellectuals united by a shared view that the Social Sciences had become subverted by progressive leftist ideology that threatened the integrity of the Social Sciences in the Academy.

In the second half of the essay, which I will post fairly soon, I outline the specifics of what exactly a post-progressive developmental evolutionary psychopathology will entail.

Although the methodology associated with the field was being used in psychiatric epidemiology and other fields (Rutter, 1988), it wasn’t until 1984, with the publication of an editorial in the journal Child Development “The Emergence of Developmental Psychopathology” (Cicchetti, 1984), and the establishment of an academic journal entitled by the same name in January 1989 (Cicchetti, 1989), in which the field of developmental psychopathology was ‘officially’ introduced as a distinct subspeciality of study in academic psychiatry and psychology. Cicchetti defined the field of developmental psychopathology as “committed to the application of developmental principles to the study of high risk and deviant populations. Inherent within this framework is a focus on the importance of applying our knowledge of normal development to the study of atypical populations and, likewise, recognition of the value in examining abnormality in order to enhance our understanding of normal development.” (Cicchetti, 1984, italics added).

Subsequent papers on the maturation of the field (Cicchetti & Toth, 2009; Sroufe, 2013) chronicled a healthy scientific development of the discipline. This healthy development was defined by a marked research generativity into the social and biological determinants, as well as their associations with one another, of developmental adaptation (i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and social adjustment) across the life course. Seminal, classic papers in the field that greatly informed our understanding of developmental adaptation across the life span included Moffitt’s seminal paper outlining a developmental taxonomy of antisocial behavior (Moffitt, 1993) and Boyce et al.’s theory of biological sensitivity to context (Boyce & Ellis, 2005; Ellis et al., 2005) outlining an evolutionary-developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity.

This otherwise healthy development of the discipline of developmental psychopathology was abruptly interrupted when the discipline was corrupted by a tsunami of Woke social justice ideology that swept across all of the Social and Medical Sciences, and especially research in clinical and developmental psychopathology, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in 2020 (see Berwick, 2020). While the saturation of research in developmental psychopathology with social justice ideology was quite immediately conspicuous to researchers who were commendably not used to injecting political activism in their work (at least to this author), it is perhaps not surprising that this ideological subversion and co-option of the field by social justice ideology occurred so rapidly during the period of national protest, social upheaval, and racial justice activism following George Floyd’s death given the biopsychosocial foundation of developmental psychopathology; A key tenant of the field as outlined in 1984 was “viewing behavior within a social context and, as such, recognizing the transactional nature of interactions” (Cicchetti, 1984).

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Research published in the field of developmental psychopathology rapidly became disproportionately focused on attributing individual psychopathology and mental health outcomes as stemming from a “sick society.” Social determinants were foregrounded as causal influences while biological and genetic influences were either ignored or not examined (more so the latter), rendering the results dubious, and the interpretation of the findings clearly social justice political statements, rather than sound empirical interpretations. Indeed, in a 2020 paper published in Women & Therapy, Buchanan and Wiklund note “Clinical science must begin to embrace the richness and nuance involved in centering social justice, intersectionality, and diversity and creating space for these topics to exist within scholars, clients, clinical work, therapy, and research” (Buchanan & Wiklund, 2020). This clear ideological capture in developmental and clinical psychopathology is still present. A symposium panel at the 2025 annual conference for the Society for Research in Psychopathology (SRP) entitled "Bringing to Light the Societal Influence on the Development and Worsening of Psychopathology” (2025 SRP Annual Meeting, 2025) for which key words included “racism” and “stigma.”

Papers in once-reputable journals focused on research in developmental and clinical psychopathology have included papers with titles including “Systemic White Supremacy: U.S. State Policy, Policing, Discrimination, and Suicidality Across Race and Sexual Identity” (English et al., 2024), “The Next Generation of Clinical-Psychological Science: Moving Toward Anti-Racism” (Rodriguez-Seijas et al., 2024), and “Personality Disorders Research and Social Decontextualization: What It Means to Be a Minoritized Human” (Rodriguez-Seijas et al., 2023) all of which both clearly communicate an social activist orientation while simultaneously belying the methodological shortcoming that (i.e., the omission of biological and/or genetic determinants) that render their findings and interpretations concerning social influences on “minoritized humans” (i.e., minority groups) severely limited at best, invalid at worst. Indeed, McNally (McNally, 2024) published a critique of the Rodriguez-Seijas et al. (2024) paper mentioned above which chronicled the epistemological poverty and lack of empirical support for the claims made in the paper.

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Moreover, the concept of “normality” (and thus abnormality) began to be directly framed in a pejorative light both from a statistical standpoint, with Scientific American referring to the “so-called” statistical normal distribution that assumes “there are default humans” and the existence of “white empiricism” in their screed against the famous sociobiologist E. O. Wilson (McLemore, 2021), and from a conceptual standpoint, with papers in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science (JPACS, formerly known as the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, but renamed as it was felt the former masthead was too stigmatizing), calling for the abandonment of the concept of normality in psychiatric nosology and mental health altogether (Mason, 2025). When one considers the totality of this rapid incursion of Woke ideological scholarship in developmental and evolutionary psychopathology, it is not difficult to appreciate the perilous and oppressive intellectual environment such ideological activism instantiates.

This Woke push in psychopathology and clinical science to abandon the concept of “normality” and move to entire dimensional systems of nosology ostensibly without some form of clinical (i.e., diagnostic) cut-points is grounded in the notion that the concept of ‘normality’ functions as a “sorting mechanism” (Mason, 2025) that oppresses minorities and those that deviate from the norm. There is, then, an obvious twisted irony in the fact that the statistical normal distribution is at the heart of frequentist statistics which are the stock-and-trade of developmental and evolutional psychopathology research and has allowed us to uncover countless insights into the nature, course, presentation, and treatment of psychopathology and mental illness.

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Additional papers in JPACS have also called for abandonment of long understood construct nomenclature in the research literature, such as the “Dark Triad” which refers to the personality trait constellation of elevated levels of narcissism, Machiavellism, and psychopathy, because it is too “stigmatizing” (Chester et al., 2025). Indeed, what any reasonable person should be able to glean from all of these developments is that the very foundation on which the field of developmental psychopathology was established—the study of normality and deviations from abnormality—is being eroded. The sensible question this leads one to ask is: if there is no normality, then what becomes of a field the very foundation of which is predicated on the [essential] existence of a quantitative description of normality? It speaks to an almost self-evident absurdity of the present moment that scientists in the field of psychopathology writ large have to pose such a question to themselves. But philosophical psychiatry in the time of Woke progressive ideology (e.g., the notion that the statistical normal distribution is an oppressive injustice from bigoted scientists) lends to rabbit holes that one has to descend at the expense of practical sanity.

In posing this question, it is instructive to understand how such internally incoherent positions are laundered by the prevailing Woke scholars in psychopathology and clinical science. Academics, especially research academics, in psychology and psychiatry understand that mental health conditions (i.e., mental health “disorders”) are continuous, dimensional constructs. That is, unlike biological medical conditions where you typically are afflicted with a disease entity (e.g., cancer cells), mental health conditions are not inherently categorical in nature. That is, one does not possess something in the sense of an essence or a disease entity (i.e., a ‘taxon’), but rather mental health conditions are empirically defined by a natural continuous distribution or spectrum on which individuals possess more or less mental illness levels (see Haslam et al., 2020, for a detailed discussion on this issue); they are not ‘natural kinds’.

Given a particular set of criteria (e.g., as reflected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; American Psychiatric Association, 2022), or a particular level of a mental health syndrome as measured by checklists, questionnaires, etc., an individual is said to have a mental health condition (i.e., be diagnosed with that condition; reflecting a ‘case’ in epidemiological nomenclature). Indeed, a key tenant of developmental psychopathology is that the approach does not assume an a priori assumption about continuity or discontinuity between normality and abnormality (Rutter, 1988), but rather, through the use of its empirical methods, seeks to directly address this grey area of what best defines ‘caseness’.

Thus, it is true in a quantitative formal sense that save for biological sex (although note the construct of gender, discussed below), one cannot 'carve nature at its joints' with respect to mental health conditions. However, radical anti-psychiatry activists and scholars then launder this empirical truth as evidence that 'categorical' systems (e.g., the DSM for mental illnesses) are always social-political constructions and therefore need abolished--that is, "liberated from" these hegemonic power structures embodied in such nosological systems as the DSM. This is why Woke researchers in the field of developmental psychopathology routinely invoke and advocate for the 'dimensional approach' to studying and communicating about psychopathology. It liberates them from having to speak in categorical terms of abnormality. Indeed, gender activists and Woke scholars within the field of developmental psychopathology have also deployed this same strategy with biological sex by conflating biological sex and the social construct of ‘gender identity’.

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While there is no doubt that I am aware of amongst scholars in developmental psychopathology that categorical systems can be improved, modified, etc., it nonetheless remains true that categorical heuristics (e.g., mental health diagnoses) are essential for a stable and civilized society. Categories that allow for efficient and necessary practical decision-making structure and stabilize a society. Without them, society would not be able to develop social health policy and mental and physical health guidelines that are necessary for civic functionality (e.g., for individuals to receive treatment, insurance claims, institutionalization for the mentally ill etc.). Moreover, the dimensional reality of mental health does not obviate the practical, quantitative descriptive reality of ‘statistical normality’ which the field is predicated upon either explicitly (research in the frequentist tradition of statistics) or implicitly (e.g., ‘Queer Theory’ [Riggs & Treharne, 2017] assumes a ‘cis’ [i.e., a population-level recognized normality] which must be reacted against and deconstructed).

For example, a course in the Department of Education at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University entitled “Queering Education” was described on a now-deleted departmental webpage in the following manner: “In many ways, the course is about the ‘hidden curriculum’ of heteronormativity and cisnormativity, or the subtle practices in schools that privilege heterosexual, gendered identities and ways of being” (Queering Education | Harvard Kennedy School, 2025). Thus, 'Queer Theory' as deployed in developmental psychopathology serves as a conceptual lens from which to avoid the practice of eventuating in categorical diagnostic entities that demarcate mental illness—indeed, to cast such practices as inherently ‘oppressive’ or otherwise malevolent. More broadly, the injection of this sort of Woke ideology into the fields of developmental and evolutionary psychopathology led to intellectual corruption of these fields and, in the case of gender identity and transgender issues, to become scientifically incoherent, with harmful consequences (e.g., see Dyer, 2024).

Part 1 References.

2025 SRP Annual Meeting. (2025). https://srp.societyconference.com/conf/#sessions/conf10005

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787

Berwick, D. M. (2020). The moral determinants of health. Jama, 324(3), 225–226.

Boyce, W. T., & Ellis, B. J. (2005). Biological sensitivity to context: I. An evolutionary–developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity. Development and Psychopathology, 17(2), 271–301.

Buchanan, N. T., & Wiklund, L. O. (2020). Why Clinical Science Must Change or Die: Integrating Intersectionality and Social Justice. Women & Therapy, 43(3–4), 309–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/02703149.2020.1729470

Chester, D. S., Lynam, D. R., & Miller, J. D. (2025). It is past time to abandon the term “dark” as a descriptor of antagonistic traits. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-29451-001

Cicchetti, D. (1984). The emergence of developmental psychopathology. Child Development, 55(1), 1–7.

Cicchetti, D. (1989). Developmental psychopathology: Some thoughts on its evolution. Development and Psychopathology, 1(1), 1–4.

Cicchetti, D., & Toth, S. L. (2009). The past achievements and future promises of developmental psychopathology: The coming of age of a discipline. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 50(1–2), 16–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.01979.x

Dyer, C. (2024). Guidelines on gender related treatment flouted standards and overlooked poor evidence, finds Cass review. British Medical Journal Publishing Group. https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q820

Ellis, B. J., Essex, M. J., & Boyce, W. T. (2005). Biological sensitivity to context: II. Empirical explorations of an evolutionary–developmental theory. Development and Psychopathology, 17(2), 303–328.

English, D., Oshin, L. A., Lopez, F. G., Smith, J. C., Busby, D. R., & Anestis, M. D. (2024). Systemic White supremacy: US state policy, policing, discrimination, and suicidality across race and sexual identity. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, 133(4), 321.

Fang, H., Hui, Q., Lynch, J., Honerlaw, J., Assimes, T. L., Huang, J., Vujkovic, M., Damrauer, S. M., Pyarajan, S., & Gaziano, J. M. (2019). Harmonizing genetic ancestry and self-identified race/ethnicity in genome-wide association studies. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 105(4), 763–772.

Haslam, N., McGrath, M. J., Viechtbauer, W., & Kuppens, P. (2020). Dimensions over categories: A meta-analysis of taxometric research. Psychological Medicine, 50(9), 1418–1432.

Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2021). Genetic ancestry and social race are nearly interchangeable. OpenPsych. https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2021.12.22

Kurzban, R., & Leary, M. R. (2001). Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: The functions of social exclusion. Psychological Bulletin, 127(2), 187.

Mason, P. H. (2025). The death of normality: Commentary on Fernandes, Gomes, and Morgado (2025). https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-40113-001

McLemore, M. R. (2021, December 29). The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/

McNally, R. J. (2024). Is Clinical Psychological Science Infected by Racism and White Supremacy? Controversial Ideas, 4(2), 0–0.

Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review, 100(4), 674–701.

Nagar, S. D., Conley, A. B., & Jordan, I. K. (2020). Population structure and pharmacogenomic risk stratification in the United States. BMC Biology, 18(1), 140. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-00875-4

Queering Education | Harvard Kennedy School. (2025, May 12). https://web.archive.org/web/20250512093238/https://www.hks.harvard.edu/courses/queering-education

Riggs, D. W., & Treharne, G. J. (2017). Queer theory. In The Palgrave handbook of critical social psychology (pp. 101–121). Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51018-1_6

Rodriguez-Seijas, C., McClendon, J., Wendt, D. C., Novacek, D. M., Ebalu, T., Hallion, L. S., Hassan, N. Y., Huson, K., Spielmans, G. I., Folk, J. B., Khazem, L. R., Neblett, E. W., Cunningham, T. J., Hampton-Anderson, J., Steinman, S. A., Hamilton, J. L., & Mekawi, Y. (2024). The Next Generation of Clinical-Psychological Science: Moving Toward Anti-Racism. Clinical Psychological Science, 12(3), 526–546. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026231156545

Rodriguez-Seijas, C., Rogers, B. G., & Asadi, S. (2023). Personality disorders research and social decontextualization: What it means to be a minoritized human. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 14(1), 29.

Rutter, M. (1988). Epidemiological approaches to developmental psychopathology. Archives of General Psychiatry, 45(5), 486–495.

Sroufe, L. A. (2013). The promise of developmental psychopathology: Past and present. Development and Psychopathology, 25(4pt2), 1215–1224.

And this summarizes the reality that is modern feminism. It’s run by hatred, anger, and fear of the truly destructive cluster B women positioned at the top. Oh, and ironically, men.

There are countless examples of this across modern society. We have bent over backwards to the requests of women because we mistakenly believe the past was unjust to women. Manipulative cluster B women have used this anger to manipulate other women to their pet causes. Even worse, these cluster B types also use false causes to sabotage other women’s mating potential. In fact, this is a common mating tactic among less attractive women to reduce the competition from their more attractive competition. And it works.

Just as bad, men have used it to make women more available for sex, more willing to be one of many partners, and to fulfill whatever perverse fetish they may have. The idea that this isn’t happening is rooted in the idea of female agency. For women, at the root of most of their decisions, there was a man pulling the strings. We can see this in the endless hordes of immigrants that white, college-brainwashed women vote to bring into their countries. When we do buy into the unlimited and pathological empathy of the feminine, they end up importing the very people who will victimize them. We have seen this for 25 years with mass immigration. Somehow, these statistics are not good enough for them to show compassion for their fellow women. Of course, that assumes women like other women.

Unfortunately, women just don’t like each other that much. Every week, we have to read another article about how women don’t get along because of men. Wow, really showing your agency there. This trend is particularly pathological. Women are now branding each other “pick me’s” for wanting attention from men. “The 'pick me' I know brags about receiving attention from men…”. That screams manipulative female, trying to limit her competition. I mean, really, that is some sick and twisted manipulation. But women fall for this. They genuinely believe they should eschew male attention, while still wanting to be with a man. It’s no wonder 25% of women will never get married in the West. Keep listening to the Queen Bees who make these rules for you. Go for it. And then it just gets worse. These women get grouped en masse under the guise of feminism. Instead of being empowered, this simply opens up the floodgates to the cluster B females and the psychopathic males, who want to manipulate them.

To further illustrate the lack of ability of large groups of women to fend off these manipulative types, we can see that the ability to speak out among groupthink is specifically tied to testosterone. If you expect a room full of Beckys from HR to raise concerns about anything that might actually be harming the group instead of helping, you clearly haven’t worked in corporate. The only thing feminism has done for women is possibly help women organize during suffrage. You won, like 100 years ago; you have nothing left to gain from these leeches but pain and misery. All they do now is screech like craven witches in the dark about imaginary problems.

A great example of these operations to undermine their competition can be found in the cobwebbed halls of the former newspaper turned home-for-the-histrionic, The New York Times. I remember back in 2016, how these histrionic types would use instrumental manipulation to attack targets. First, they would find three tweets that back up their fake outrage, publish an article that the entire world is offended, and get people kicked off Twitter. Below, we can see their more modern attempts at fabrication. This is the perfect example of a problem histrionic cluster B personas invent to sabotage other women.

The New York Times, which has a gift for taking the private neuroses of its most unstable contributors and marketing them as social movements, gives us a masterclass in fabricating a social movement. The latest is “heterofatalism,” a term so contrived it begs to be used as public discourse. Supposedly, it’s the dawning realization among women that men are so irredeemably awful that heterosexual relationships are doomed. In reality, it’s a columnist refabbing her own dating failures into a fake trend, hoping other bitter women will adopt the label and join her in the warm bath of mutual resentment. Women, this is your recruitment flyer.

Their only real tools are manufacturing anger and imagining the world as one vast conspiracy against them. In science, evolutionary biologists get mocked as “just storytellers”. Well, if that’s true, then these women are the greatest fiction writers in literature and science, attempting to make their personal grudges into contrived social movements.

This works only because there’s an audience of women eager to be told that their personal dysfunction is a political awakening. They learned no moral lessons as a child. No religion. No ethics classes. Nothing. Empty vessels looking for some easy pathology to latch onto.

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The WNBA, a Hotbed of Mean Girl Pathology

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the WNBA, a league that has become the perfect petri dish for grievance culture.

Every so often, its players pop up in the news with the same tired demand: “Pay us what we’re worth.” Currently, you’re worth less than nothing. The league has never been profitable, not once in its history. It loses money each year. Without NBA welfare it would not exist. This is the perfect example of loud women complaining when there is nothing to complain about. You are getting paid to do what you love. The average salaries are around $102,249, on par with European league pay for professional rugby and other sports, except those leagues turn a profit.

And yet, in a league with so little genuine public interest, one player has managed to break through the apathy. Caitlin Clark has become the league’s reluctant poster child, a gifted athlete who can draw crowds in a sport that normally struggles to make anyone care. Some say her cold reception from teammates is about race, seems somewhat obvious. You would think they would be happy someone is watching, but that doesn’t match up with female in-group dynamics. In male sports, a rookie who plays at an elite level is often celebrated, even by rivals, because excellence raises the game for everyone. In female sports and group dynamics in general, the instinct is usually the opposite: close ranks and shun the outlier.

“Female participants were more likely than men to think that competing with same gender coworkers was undesirable and unacceptable, that it was simply ‘not right’.”

In fact, women don’t even like being close to each other after a competition. This is all indicative of the longhouse effect, a leveling impulse where anyone who rises too far above the group threatens the harmony and must be cut down to size. Not surprisingly after all, women are brutal cyberbullies as the research shows. Bullying the successful is just female interpersonal psychopathology. The truly pathological females are so bad you can’t even trust them to give you a haircut without trying to sabotage your mating success.

And after all this well-known research, somehow with their witch magic, this behavior gets blamed on a fictitious patriarchy, a construct that has never existed. This only distracts from the real problem: we have no mechanism to deal with female psychopathology at this scale. In fact, we outright deny its existence. Male psychopathology gets confronted through mentorship, initiation rituals, corporal punishment, public shame, honor cultures, religious morality, community surveillance, and even psychological intervention, sometimes involuntary. With women, we just encourage it.

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The Ghost of Lena Dunham Strikes Another Blow to Women

The Guardian wrote a piece on Lena Dunham’s new show. You may remember her a the weird girl who made a show about depressed women.

In reality, we all thought Lena Dunham died. Not in the literal sense, of course. Just that she would not haunt our screens anymore. When she first wrote a show about how depressing it is to live in Manhattan (Been there, done that, would not recommend) and how terrible the people who live there are, we were all glad to see it end. But, alas, her exile is thus ended, for she has arisen once again from the grave, like yet another unwanted Walking Dead spinoff, to teach a new generation of women how to be insufferable to any man that hasn’t been castrated.

Well, God is once again challenging his strongest soldiers. And BREAKING NEWS, women are not loud enough. I am shocked. Who would believe something like that? That’s the entire premise of this show. I won’t go in deeper because there’s nothing to mine. To be clear, I feel bad for her. She is clearly mentally unwell. She insists on telling gross stories, including a weird one about her little sister I have no interest in telling you about, but you can follow the link if you dare. In reference to the story, some people said she abused her sister. It just seems like some awkward things that some kids probably do. The weird thing is feeling the need to tell people about it. And this underscores the entire problem of feminism from its inception. We are expected to listen to these gross stories and be extremely hyped to hear them. Like how they absolutely can’t survive until they use red for tampon commercials. No one wants to see your bloody tampons you loons.

We thrust these strange stories to the height of human experience, as if they are something to aspire to. Like everyone wants to sit around and talk about weird shit. No, we want to watch normal movies that show humanity at its best. But all of our culture has been taken over by miserable liberals who want to tell you the gross stories that they should probably just tell their therapist instead. Maybe spare her too, for humanity’s sake. Makes you wonder why no one wants to see movies anymore, and people scroll their phones when they have a TV show on.

Well, even after all that nonsense, here is Lena again to make us dislike modern feminists even more. A real statistic that should worry women is that 30% of women aged 30-35 have never had children. It’s one of those “We say we’re happy not having children,” but you can see it in their eyes that it’s a lie. Or that rape rates rise dramatically with illegal immigration and bail reform. But absolutely not, this show cannot talk about real problems women have. The real problem is (checks notes) MEN!

Now, every failed journalist turns a bad Tinder date into a column, every TikTok girl performatively cries in her car to garner attention at the latest trend, every podcast whining about “my truth” are all Lena’s bastard kids. Her legacy is a permission slip for women to vomit their dysfunction onto the rest of us and demand we clap while choking it down.

The Gender Pay Gap was Debunked Two Years Ago, by a Woman

Just wanted to add this in real quick. I’m not going to discuss it at length because it’s already been debunked. I’m just spreading awareness at this point. After all, feminists are still complaining about a 46-year-old statistic from the 1979 U.S. Current Population Survey saying they purportedly made 77 cents to a man’s 1 dollar. They have used that same study for 50 years. Not just to be wrong, but also annoying. Of course, it was a misinterpretation of the math, but don’t let that stop you from a false narrative. Go off queen.

Female Dating Value is Tied to Attractiveness

When a guy gets rejected, it sucks, but we take it as feedback. Maybe it was looks, maybe it was confidence, maybe we were just off that night. Men know we can change the variables. Hit the gym, sharpen the banter, make more money. Rejection stings, but it’s also data. You regroup, you improve, you try again. That’s the male ego: we take a beating, and then we do it again and again until we figure it out.

For women, their entire dating value is tied up in something they can only change marginally: how hot they are. Sure, they can hit the gym and learn to contour, but there's a ceiling. Sure, they can have a great personality, but again, it only goes so far. So when a woman actually works up the courage to make a bigger move than giving a look across the bar, and gets up and talks to a guy, it’s a big deal. If she gets rejected, she’s really only got two choices. She wasn't attractive enough or he is a flawed human being in some way.

He's gay. He's intimidated by successful women. He's obviously got mommy issues. He's probably a creep anyway, look how he was talking to that waitress. The hamster wheel starts spinning, and suddenly his polite "not interested" becomes evidence of deep psychological problems. He didn’t reject me; it’s that he's fundamentally broken as a human being.

This is why male rejection hits differently than female rejection. When we turn women down, we're threatening their entire sense of self-worth. And since that's unbearable, they have to make us the villain in the story. The ego must be preserved at all costs, even if it means torching the guy's reputation on the way out. And they love doing that. It’s pretty funny that the UVA college rape hoax, a hoax that blamed a fraternity for a rape that never happened, kicked off the #MeToo nonsense. Seems fitting, a fake story starting a contrived movement. Real rape victims will suffer because of this selfishness. And these men had their lives destroyed because of it. Luckily, the victims are going to get their just deserts.

Rolling Stone magazine and a journalist have been found guilty of defamation over a false article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia.

All of this, to protect ego.

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Marrying the Maid

High-earning men don’t just happen to marry women who stay home. The numbers are clear: at the very top, almost half of these men’s wives earn less than five percent of household income. Among the top one percent, the majority of wives aren’t working at all. That isn’t random chance. Men who make serious money know that financial inversion poisons a relationship. When the man provides, the order feels natural. Flip it, and no matter how many slogans get thrown around about empowerment, the house fills with resentment.

Sociologists have found this for decades. Alexandra Killewald’s work shows that men who don’t fulfill the breadwinner role face higher odds of divorce, not because of poverty but because the dynamic feels wrong to both sides. Amazingly, Time, another formerly respected news organization, calls these facts “stereotypical”, even though they’re universal and are not likely to change in any significant way. And of course, we haven’t even covered the fact that women don’t want to date down anyway. Is that sexism on the part of women? Pretty sure it’s just reality.

And for this reason, high-status men avoid the trap altogether. They don’t marry their peers; they marry women who are free to focus on the home. Meanwhile, highly educated women complain about the shortage of “suitable” men because they refuse to marry down. The data leaves little mystery: men who climb to the top don’t want competition across the dinner table, and women who climb to the top don’t want to bankroll their boyfriends. Pretty obvious stuff here, but it’s 2025 and people don’t read, so you need to spoon-feed them.

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The Great Workforce Lie

Another banger, we keep hearing this fairy tale that women marching into the workforce “doubled household wealth.” Bullshit. It didn’t double anything except prices (That and printing money). When one income could buy you a house, raise a few kids, and maybe even stash something for retirement, families were stable. Now? Two adults grind forty, fifty hours a week just to keep the lights on and food in the fridge. Of course, two incomes would raise the price of everything by double. Have you read a single economics textbook?

And then our salary asks were too high. So they outsourced the labor. Now that we’re finally demanding more money, they’re just replacing us again, but in our own country. Enter the H1B visas. Right now, they’re telling us it’s not happening and we’re overreacting, which means it is happening exactly as we think it is, but it hasn’t reached a point where they have to admit it. All of this just to realize that now childcare without a woman to care for the children is as expensive as having a second job in the first place. Again, of course, this happened.

And what’s the trade-off? Lowering their IQ’s by bottle feeding. Outsourcing infant years to iPads. Teachers and administrators fresh out of universities, looking to found New Jonestown with your children. They see your kid as a blank canvas for their half-baked politics. Forcing women into the workforce through feminism has been great. Luckily, women are getting over the “empowerment” lie.

And of course, every woman reading this from her oak office in the new faculty lounge is spitting out her coffee at the gall of this man. And every woman behind the counter at Dollar General is thinking the opposite. Thinking that every woman gets to have your exciting job is of course, a luxury belief. But they don’t care anyway, after all, they have an au pair.

And that’s the grift: Working “liberated” women, who got cool jobs, and forced the rest of the women to work shit jobs. They can keep working because and so we can hand our children off to people who have gone through the factory farm of academia to create low-IQ-mystery-meat teachers. The home stopped being the center of life and was ceded to the state, dressed up in “education” branding. And the result is obvious. Parents come home exhausted, kids come home radicalized, and every family wonders why it has zero cohesion.

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Feminism has always been a pathology that feeds on the fresh blood of unsuspecting young women. Every time it eats one problem, it’s invents a problem to replace the previous. Like the climate change wack-a-mole game we’ve been playing since the 1970s, it’s a perpetual motion machine of misery, fueled by resentment. No one is saying women shouldn’t be this or that. We’re saying this fake bullshit narrative that women have to be in charge of 50% of everything is fundamentally flawed and backed up by research.

The proof’s everywhere. From Lena Dunham turning her diary into a hazmat spill, to WNBA players demanding paychecks from a league that can’t pay the rent, all the way to columnists coining fake trends to mask their own anti-social flaws. The reward system runs on victimhood, and the most unhinged voices always rise to the top.

This is the generation that inherited the strongest country in the world, with the best institutions, the highest trust, and the clearest sense of direction. They took it all and sold it. They used to believe in something. Then they got rich. Then they said, screw it, I’ve got mine.

They used to say family was everything, then they divorced everyone and chased yoga retreats and second marriages. They told their kids not to talk about politics or religion, and now they don’t understand why no one knows how to stand for anything. They handed the universities over to corporations and foreign markets. When students of the home country decried the universities for being too expensive, they simply sold them to the world. They opened up the floodgates to pay their bills. They had to. They couldn’t, and still can’t, stop their decline.

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But they can’t help it. The civil rights movement broke their minds. They took a specific struggle and abstracted it into a worldview. Suddenly, every non-white face on Earth was a victim. They imported the world and gave it privileges their own grandchildren don’t have. Then they told us there were too many of us. They told us we weren’t having enough kids. They locked us out of the housing market and told us we were lazy. They told us we couldn’t travel like they did because it damages the planet. They used coal, oil, and nuclear energy. Now they demand that we live without any of it. They had it all, and now they sit in judgment, dripping with resentment for the people they raised.

They have love for the stranger and contempt for the neighbor. They’ll sponsor a child halfway across the globe, but ignore the one struggling next door. They started a charity for every country, but their own. They walk through cities filled with crime, needles, and poverty, and smile because it’s not happening to them.

They hoard every position of prestige and refuse to leave. They cling to power until death. They love the sound of their own voices. They wrote the rules, broke the rules, then rewrote them so no one else could win. They despise the very people they were. They look to immigrants to replace their own sons to atone for their imagined sins, embedded into their cultural milieu by countless hours of MSNBC. Their eternal symbol of evil is the white man.

Who are they? They’re all the liberal professors at your university. They are the ones who sent all the real jobs overseas. They’re replacing your laptop job with an H-1B Visa. They are politicians with a $200,000 salary and a $0.5 billion bank account. They are bailing their business out with printed money to protect their reputation, and mocking you for buying your $5 daily coffee. After all, they had more discipline than you, back in their day.

Eternal addicts. Addicted to praise, addicted to control, addicted to being right. Their fathers fought and died in World War II. Men bled out on beaches so their sons could turn their country into a shopping mall with a diversity quota. And now, in whispers, some people say maybe the wrong side won in 1945. Not because they love Nazis, but because they’ve seen what came after. The ultimate betrayal by the entitled son. Shame is their legacy.

And Kier Starmer is the final form. The final boss. A name so cursed not a single Brit dares to give it to their son. A name only a globalist could love. The last gasp of an ideology that refuses to die, even as it drags everyone else down with it. They won’t quit. They won’t step aside. They can’t. Because letting go would mean admitting what they’ve done. And they will never, ever do that.

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“Conservative ideology was associated with a positive view of Trump.” Wow, you don’t say? “Conservatives are malevolent and psychopaths.” Oh, and look at this! They found that liberals have a benevolent disposition, in stark contrast to those mean old conservatives!

Equally as devoid of a real hypothesis is the opening abstract. Like, how fucking stupid is that "we studied conservatives and found they are more likely to be right-wing (authoritarians) than liberals"? Like, no fucking shit? You don't say. You studied conservatives and liberals, and found that conservatives are more conservative than liberals? It's in the fucking name. You may be thinking, “Well, what did liberals score on left-wing authoritarianism?” Oh, they don’t think that exists. Laughable.

OK, so what do we know from the literature? What is actually true of conservatives is that conservatives are more prone to tradition, social stability, the importance of established hierarchies, and preserving institutions.

However, most research, while accurate in its trait identification, is often overshadowed by how incredibly biased the authors are. Listen to this absolute drivel written by “academics” on Britannica, a formerly respected encyclopedia:

A common way of distinguishing conservatism from both liberalism and radicalism is to say that conservatives reject the optimistic view that human beings can be morally improved through political and social change.

Saying that the view of social change is inherently an optimistic position is the first tell that the authors have a clear bias. Most social change throughout history has been bad; it ends in disaster, and the plan is scrapped. That is, after millions of people die. Just in the 1900’s we had revolutionary change in Russia (approx. 20 million dead), Germany (approx. 15 million dead), and China (approx. 65 million dead), to name the worst. So in that sense, conservatism is prudent, not unoptimistic.

Of course, we can’t say all change is bad; we need social change to explore new ideas. So in a perfect world, conservatives critique the new ideas, and liberals invent and try to implement the ideas. The best ideas can win or lose before resulting in disaster. Well, no actually. According to the authors, those conservatives have the baseless opinion that a planned economy doesn’t work.

“Attempts by philosophers and revolutionaries to plan society in advance… are misguided and likely to end in disaster, conservatives say.”

Successful “philosophers and revolutionaries” have never tried to plan a perfect society “in advance”. There is a modern conception that revolutionaries in the past had everything planned out before they did it. This is completely untrue. For Example, the American Constitution was written 11 years after the Declaration of Independence.

Have they ever read a history book? Of course not, not their “field of study”. Again, keep in mind this is supposed to be an explanation of conservatism, not a criticism. But they really can’t help themselves, as we will see.

“…many authorities on conservatism have been led to deny that it is a genuine ideology, regarding it instead as a relatively inarticulate state of mind. Whatever the merits of this view, it remains true that the best insights of conservatism seldom have been developed into sustained theoretical works comparable to those of liberalism and radicalism.”

Yes, conservatives have never developed theoretical works. Oh wow, all the beautiful works of the liberals! What a dumb statement, I mean really. As if all the great works of history were written by liberals. The ego is absolutely astounding. But who am I to criticize? Liberals have the beautiful works of Marx, the loser poet who got millions killed.

So why does modern liberalism so often prioritize novelty, reform, and upheaval, even when previous reforms are still left unfinished or worse, in complete disarray?

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