Partial Transcript, at minute 30 Fr. Altman goes on a great anti-mask rant:
"Did we burn a little incense by not fighting back against the godless mask mandates forced upon us by the godless Marxists to utterly dehumanize all of us, including young impressionable children. What have we taught our children? What have we inculcated in our children? (Applause)
Dear family, you can quote me, some people do- not always in a good way- Dear family, every- quote me- Every time you see a person under the age of 30, especially children, all masked up, just remember that the words of Our Lady of Fatima are true: the Russian error, Marxism, is raging across our country and around the world. See I've been to a lot of airports lately... it's like you're in a Sci-fi movie. Everybody's masked up because Joe Biden, whos got dementia beyond belief - you ever seen that movie 'weekend at bernie's'? It's weekend at Bidens. He goes out there with that stupid mask on and I say, I want the leader of the free world to be mask free like we are; lead us, don't be a coward. (Applause)
Every time you see a person under 30 wearing a mask, ask ourselves, have we stood up against that? Have we voiced our, the truth against that? Or, have we burned a little incense by not standing firm? No matter what the cost, against the godless, diabolical masking and the jab! Orchestrated not by Almighty God, get that straight- the jab was not orchestrated by Almighty God, but by the godless. Dear family, as a simple matter of faith, ponder the truth: that if Almighty God did not want us to ever get sick and die, He never would have driven Adam and Eve out of the garden, on account of what? Their sins. And, He would gave had us born be born with masks so we'd never catch an airborne disease. Okay listen, that really sounds funny right... how do babies, how do children, learn to be human? Except by looking into the eyes and into the face of those who love them and of those they love? Little children in school? How do they learn? They look at the visual ques of the face of the teacher. I'll say it again. God damn the masking requirements that have destroyed our humanity. (Applause.)
An Australian reader explains the near-total blackout on real news Down Under - and how government-fed media propaganda has turned elections there inside out.
First: Thanks so much for all the feedback. You blew up my inbox (more correctly, I blew it up)!
Two interesting points: The vast majority of you wrote that you are happy to receive several emails a day. Obviously, there’s some potential selection bias - the most enthusiastic people may be more likely to write me. But I have to go with what I hear. So I will not hold back. (I apologize to those folks who want less. The Substack format doesn’t allow for partial lists at this time.) That said, I will try to limit the snark - that format seems to work better on Twitter.
Second: the topic that generated the LEAST interest was the origins of the virus. At first I was a bit surprised - as an investigative reporter, I think it needs to be explored deeply. But of course nothing else compares to the fight over whether we - or our kids - will be mandated to be vaccinated. And other people are doing good work on the questions of the lab leak. I’ll probably put it aside.
(A quick correction from the prior email, btw - the number of Twitter impressions I received in August was 182 million, not 210 million. If Twitter hadn’t banned me on the 28th, I would likely have reached the latter figure.)
—
Now - onto this email, from a reader in Australia. The extent of the news blackout and open propaganda is stunning. It is no exaggeration that the United States might be in the same situation if not for Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and a handful of other conservative or independent voices.
But here’s the part I hadn’t thought through. Older people tend to lean right. (As the old joke goes, a 20-year-old conservative has no heart, a 70-year-old liberal has no brain.) And they vote. Frighten even a small number of those folks into voting for the forever lockdowns and you can make a huge difference electorally.
Obviously, this is not just an issue for Australia, but for the US and Europe too - European populations are even older.
I’ll let him speak for himself, unedited. Just a few redactions of identifying information.
—
Hi Alex,
I have been reading your emails about Australia and being an Australian myself i thought i would offer you some thoughts on what is hapenning here and why nobody is standing up to all this.
I was born and grew up here and usually spend a couple of months of the year here and the rest of the year in XXX. But i came back here early in the Pandemic for the sake of my Dad is who has XXX and is in ill health generally and have not been allowed to leave since.
And can i first thank you for the Twitter feed you were running. It was one of only a handful of things keeping me sane during this period. Everybody else around me is buying into all the lies and i have felt as though i was losing my mind at times. It was so comforting to see that there were other people just as sceptical of all this as i was and have been.
I think you might be under appreciating is just how complete and comprehensive the media black out of information the government doesn't want the public to hear has been. Way worse and more comprehensive of a black out than what i see in Europe and the US. The only thing comparable to this media operation that i have seen was the Brexit campaign in the UK. Just wall to wall propaganda being blasted at the public 24/7 and all contrary information and opinion banished.
It is obvious that media coverage of Covid here is completely controlled by the government. The other day when Joe Rogan said he recovered from Covid with Ivermectin i saw the same "special report" on the 6pm news reports of all 4 main stations smearing Ivermectin.
Not only were all the key points and buzzwords identical, i.e. the horse dewormer talking point and the claims that the ICU's were full of people with life threatenning diarrhoea from taking it, but the whole script was pretty much identical. What are the odds that all 4 channels decided independently to do a special report on Ivermectin all on the same day and all with the same false talking points? There is obviously a unit in the government that is monitoring for when somebody with influence contradicts the narrative and sends out a script designed to counter it for the media to run.
Everyday on TV here the various state leaders and health ministers get on TV and tell the public that the vaccine will stop them getting Covid and/or transmitting it to other people. They use very careful language when doing it. They don't make a clear direct statement that might come back to haunt them, i.e. You can't be infected once vaccinated, but they just repeatedly imply it over and over again.
Information from other countries is not allowed to be presented unless it conforms to the narrative. There was blanket coverage of India earlier in the year. Then when deaths dropped away it has not been mentioned since. None of the events in Israel or Iceland are mentioned at all.
Coverage of vaccine adverse events is definately banned. They have admitted to like 6 deaths from blood clots from AstraZeneca. They never do anything that would humanise the person who died. No photos of the person are shown. No friends or family ever interviewed. Just a brief description of the age and gender of the person, where they are from, and then usually a caveat implying it wasn't really the vaccine the person died from added at the end (i.e. "She was known to be in poor health for some time").
In contrast they can't wait to tell you all about anybody who died from Covid, especially if they are under 60. Photos and tearful statements from friends and family galore. They have not admitted to a single case of Guillain-Barre syndrome or myocarditis or facial paralysis. Not one. There must be loads of these side effects by now but the government and media have not admitted to a single one.
Coverage of the police violence is banned. You will not see any of the footage you have been emailing in any of the news coverage. People who rely on mainstream media will simply not know not about it. There has been zero coverage of the Identify and Disrupt bill you mentioned meaning the government can take over your email and social media accounts. Rammed through parliament in one day with no debate. Both parties voting for it. No media coverage at all. If you interviewed 50,000 Australian i would be shocked if even one person knew about it.
Anyway, i don't want to write too long of an email but i wanted to point out that one of the differences i can see between Australia and other countries and why this is being tolerated is the media blackout is beyond what you could imagine.
Most Australians think that the vaccine will stop them being infected, that you only have to have it once and thats it, that serious side effects are about as likely as wining the lottery, that the vaccine is no different to other vaccines in how it works, that if you got Covid you would probably have a 5% chance of dying. People really believe this.
Also, you need to appreciate the politics. The elderly have been totally radicalised by the fear campaign. The fear campaign was targetted at the young and it has totally failed to scare them but it has scared the shit out of the elderly.
And they have formed a formidable voting block to back the restrictions. There have been two state elections since the Pandemic and both were won in a landslide by the incumbent left wing government who ran on a platform of keeping borders shut and being complete totalitarians. The got all the elderly vote which normally votes conservative, plus the middle aged women who love the totalitarianism, plus the work from home crowd who are voting to keep this going so they don't have to go back to working at the office, plus all the people who normally vote left wing.
But the elderly vote is the big block. In a country with an ageing population and compulsory voting if all the elderly vote against you it is almost impossible to win. Especially for conservative parties because the elderly are a big part of their natural base. So they are very reluctant to stand up to any of this as the mostly left wing state governments are doing it.
“This Jewish factor is significant and has been commented on by Jewish scholars. Yet when a Gentile scholar, Dr. Kevin MacDonald, an extensively experienced psychologist from California State University (Long Beach), examined Jewish involvement in Critical Theory and other subversive movements as a survival mechanism, he was vilified as an ‘anti-Semite’ and his conclusions and sources were brought into question with the standard ad hominem and straw man arguments.”
Since at least the 1960s, a war of increasingly global significance has been waged against human ‘primary ties’: the traditional family bond, faith, homeland, culture, and ethnicity. This aggression has been waged by a confluence of hostile groups including oligarchs and financiers, dysfunctional types who both promote and excel in filth and decay, and ethnic cliques motivated by extreme racial enmity. Connecting these various groups are a host of security agencies, NGOs, and technocrats, resulting in a bewildering swirl of attack points and subterfuge. If the Western peoples and their culture are locked in conflict, we are witnessing not a straightforward duel but a hyena attack. Faced with a large opponent, these hostile groups move simultaneously to both run the West to exhaustion and to tear chunks from its vital blood vessels. It is difficult indeed to find clarity in the middle of such a storm, which features degenerate perverts like the Marquis de Sade, the Rockefeller Foundation, Jewish intellectuals, the CIA, transgenderism, George Soros, and, most recently, the ‘transhumanists.’ Drawing on classics like Spengler’s Decline of the West (recently republished by Arktos in two impressive hardback volumes), Kerry Bolton, perhaps the most prolific and controversial writer ever produced by New Zealand, has produced an admirable and exhaustive study on the perversion of normality in Western culture and society that offers some of the clearest analysis yet produced on how we came to arrive at this point of peak degeneracy. In the following review essay, I want to provide a summary of Bolton’s findings, as well as some commentary on the content, purpose, and significance of the text.
One can perhaps sum up The Perversion of Normality best by describing it as a very lengthy (over 500 pages) and comprehensive exploration of the trajectory of Cultural Marxism in the West, complete with a preamble on degenerate Leftism and Freudianism, and without some of the usual apologetics for capitalism. The tone is scholarly, and the book is extremely well-referenced. The range of historical and contemporary material under discussion is very broad, indicating a life spent in deep research. Particularly impressive is the balance struck by the author. When embracing the topics under discussion, it’s all too easy to lay undue emphasis on one factor over another, or to present a picture that isn’t entirely convincing. In recent years, for example, I’ve noticed a tendency among some within White advocacy to argue that our problems are fundamentally caused by capitalist oligarchs, or by tendencies in liberalism, or by perverted leftists, and perhaps not so much by any ethnic agenda that may underpin any of these spheres. As indicated by the quote opening this essay, the narrative tapestry woven by Bolton has a strong ring of truth, and certain facts about the situation in which we currently find ourselves, no matter how uncomfortable or controversial, are addressed here in an unflinching manner. In Bolton’s words,
The Perversion of Normality examines an array of individuals, doctrines, and movements, most claiming to serve behind the banners of science, progress, and humanity. What seem to be divergent converge by what Dr Richard Spence, a genuine scholar, calls ‘connecting the dots.’ What emerges is a movement over the course of several hundred years, pushing forward an artificial construct in the name of ‘humanity,’ but for the benefit of a self-anointed elite of oligarchs and technocrats. In hellish pandemonium normality is toppled on its head, in the name of ‘normality,’ and the absurd, sick, and destructive become the new normal.
Godfathers of Perversion
Bolton opens by taking aim at de Sade and Freud, identifying the latter as “one of the primary influences of the modern epoch. … Freudianism, combined with Marxism and heavily revised, has been a lethal formula for deconstructing the primary customs, ethos, traditions and faith of the West.” In fact, “the Freudo-Marxian world revolution has been more enduring and encompassing than Bolshevism, while ‘conservatives’ were worried about a ‘Moscow plot.’” In Bolton’s view, the clique responsible for bringing Freudo-Marxian thought to America is the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. This will be old news, of course, to many of our readers, and especially those familiar with the work of Kevin MacDonald, but Bolton presents an array of mainstream historical sources which freshen up what remains a very radical and momentous discovery—that a very Jewish cast of characters were responsible for developing, spreading, and implementing many of the most destructive ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the heart of these ideas is the desire to fracture the host society/mass culture. Bolton:
The focus of this Neo-Freudianism is on the individual detached from society. It is therefore a means of deconstructing and fracturing the social organism, which is why the Marxian theorists who created the Frankfurt Institute in 1923 found Freudianism to be such a useful ingredient in creating a new revolutionary synthesis. The organic bonds of family, state, faith, and ethos, disparaged as ‘primary ties’ in need of cutting, were portrayed as injurious to the individual well-being and as repressing the individual’s path to self-actualisation.
The author does an exceptional job of clarifying and explaining how the methodologies of those harboring ethnic grievances overlapped in utility with other interested parties. Bolton points out that Neo-Freudian interpretations of Man, particularly in relation to desire and gratification, were eagerly supported and adopted by capitalist elements. Bolton writes that
the social sciences provided a doctrine for the rationalisation of instant ‘ego gratification’ that is the premise for expanding consumerism, and the fad of the new. Traditional—medieval—Western societies, with their religious foundation and repudiation of avarice as sinful, prohibited mercantile competition, advertising and marketing, without which modern capitalism could not function .
Bolton’s content on these various strands of aggressors, all of whom wish to cut the “primary ties” of the Western peoples, is exceptional, and does a great deal to demonstrate how something like CIA involvement with the Frankfurt School, and therefore the involvement and funding of non-Jews, doesn’t preclude a Jewish group evolutionary strategy. The simple fact is that, by the 1950s, many interested parties were interested in destroying much of Western society, as well as engaging in social engineering and control. Even among Whites, there has clearly been a strain of nihilistic and destructive perversion, the spiritual godfather of which is surely the Marquis de Sade. De Sade’s shadow is significant in Bolton’s treatment, reminding me of a similar place afforded to de Sade in the works of E. Michael Jones. Given de Sade’s writings on homosexuality and abortion, presented verbatim by Bolton and causing my blood to boil, it’s difficult to argue against the fact this monstrous pervert is one of the founders of our current age. For Bolton he represents a kind of demonic aberration of the Western soul, anticipating the dialectical materialism of Marx, the psychoanalysis of Freud, the sexology of Alfred Kinsey, the feminist birth control and abortion of Margaret Sanger, and the Critical Theory of Marcuse, Fromm, Adorno et al.
Following this introductory look at two of the central ghouls of the epoch, there are 27 chapters concerning aspects of the origins, history, funding, and implementation of Cultural Marxism, from the time of the Frankfurt School to the present day. These 27 chapters are then followed by further sections on population control, the United Nations, George Soros, “social deconstruction through ethnic diversity,” behavior modification, transhumanism, and posthumanism.
The bulk of the book concerns Cultural Marxism and, at over 350 pages, this section almost certainly guarantees new material for even the most serious student of the subject. Bolton defines Cultural Marxism as
the ideological buttressing of anything that subverts traditional values and cultures, such as globalism; open borders; transgenderism; formlessness in arts; music; architecture; a hellish formlessness in general. The purpose is to deconstruct any vestiges of tradition in the name of ‘progress,’ the goal is to establish a nebulous mass humanity devoid of identity in regard to ethnos, land, and even gender, ironically called ‘identity politics.’ Dialectically, this push toward universal homogenisation is promoted in the name of being ‘different.’ … The Left and its globalist sponsors deconstruct in order to reconstruct.
Like Spengler, Bolton views capitalism and the Left as possessing the same essential outlook, since both see themselves as “part of the same historic process of internationalism.” In Bolton’s words,
detachment and rootlessness allow for the unhampered movement of labour, so that people become economic units, as part of a global production process. This is why the Left are useless as opponents of globalisation: when the Left attack any restrictions on immigration as ‘racism,’ ‘xenophobia,’ and ‘Fascism,’ they are following the party-line of international capitalism. … As the philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler observed nearly a century ago, leftist movements operate in the interests of money (plutocracy); so-called ‘people’s revolts’ have served oligarchic interests since the Gracchus revolt in Rome. Bolshevism was funded by oligarchs. The situation remains.
The Left-Capitalist Nexus
The advance of Cultural Marxism is therefore primarily the responsibility of hostile Jewish intellectuals with ethnic grievances against the West and its peoples, of degenerate Whites who actually seek to frolic in a sea of filth, of avaricious capitalists who wish to see the elimination of all barriers to their potential accumulation of unprecedented riches, and of power-hungry governments seeking absolute social control. The primary weapon employed by all factions is the Freudo-Marxism Synthesis, which touted social engineering as a ‘therapy’ but possessed social control as its aim. This synthesis and its early promotion was of course Jewish in origin, and Bolton makes sure to hammer this point home. He repeatedly stresses that many of these figures are Jews, and that the Frankfurt School, its funders, and many other peripheral associations involved in early Cultural Marxism were “largely Jewish.” As such, several of Bolton’s chapters concerning early Cultural Marxism compliment material found in Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique. Referring to the works of Nathan Cofnas and others, Bolton has little patience for those suggesting that Cultural Marxism is little more than an empty ‘conspiracy theory,’ pointing out that while most treatments of Cultural Marxism are well-referenced and academically sound, most denunciations of the concept bear the hallmarks of conspiracy theory themselves, and rely on blunt ad hominem condemnations of opponents as “racists” or “anti-Semites.”
One of the more interesting of Bolton’s 27 chapters on Cultural Marxism is “Funding for Social Sciences,” which documents the role of the Jewish financier Hermann Weil, and later his son Felix, in backing the Institute for Social Research. This Left-capitalist nexus drew a scathing comment from the German playwright Berthold Brecht, which could as easily be applied today to many of the vast, powerful corporations now preaching against homophobia and promoting ethnic dilution: “A rich old man dies, disturbed by the poverty of the world. In his will, he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty. Which is of course himself.” The quote very nicely sums up the fact that huge amounts of money are being pumped into causes that are presented as “good” or “just,” but are in fact entirely designed to obscure the sources of exploitation and enhance social control. Even today, among the trustees of the major social science groups, such as the Social Science Research Council and the New School for Social Research, we find large numbers of major figures from international finance, frequently Jews. Bolton writes:
Among the present directors of the Social Science Research Council is Michael Gellert [Jewish], who, as we have seen, is a trustee of the New School. Other interesting associations on the SSRC board include William H. Janeway [married to a Jew], a director of Warburg Pincus international investment firm; Peter Nager [Jewish], Principal of Skyview Ventures, a venture capitalist investment firm, and formerly a partner with the investment banking firm James D. Wolfensohn Inc., and Deutsche Bank; and José Sheinkman [Jewish], vice-president in the Financial Strategies of Goldman, Sachs & Co.
George Soros is perhaps the best example of Jewish international finance at work in contemporary society, and he receives a chapter of his own later in the book.
Bolton spends several chapters examining Cultural Marxist pseudo-scholarship and faux psychiatry. As well as a chapter looking at the concepts of social control and social engineering, there are individual treatments of behaviorism, on pathologizing morality, and the invention of psychiatric disorders to medicalize conservative political opinions or normal family relationships. The range of source material used here is impressive, and includes everything from Plato’s The Republic to actual instances of (almost exclusively Jewish) Freudo-Marxian psychobabble. Several chapters then follow that examine the overlap between the activist social scientists and the CIA, the history of which demonstrates separate streams of agitation, experimentation, and motivations. Bolton explains that “while the social scientists were often unaware of the CIA connections [and presumably the CIA was often unaware of the ethnic component of the activism of the social scientists], the extensive involvement of social scientists with Cold War projects was the result of a convergence of aims and ideologies in regard to the ‘control of human behavior.’”
Pathologizing the Normal, Targeting the Gentile
Much of this control was to be achieved by tackling what Erich Fromm called “the pathology of normalcy.” Bolton writes that the Frankfurt School advanced the idea that
the way to mental health was to cut the individual from the ‘primary ties’ and set him adrift to pursue what in the parlance of the allied field of humanistic psychology becomes self-actualisation, regardless of where that leads, as in the self-actualised examples of the Marquis de Sade, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones; all paragons of liberalism. Should the individual become unhinged, the therapeutic state would be there to offer—or impose—the direction needed to reach the nirvana of ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness.’
While Bolton doesn’t make it clear in his book, presumably because it’s been so intensively covered by Kevin MacDonald, there was an obvious double-standard at play in the studies of “authoritarianism” conducted by the Frankfurt School which casts doubt on the idea that the cutting of all individuals from their ‘primary ties’ was the overarching goal of their work. In fact, it’s absolutely essential that such a claim be qualified with the fact that the only “primary ties” attacked by the Frankfurt School were those of White gentiles. Kevin MacDonald explains in The Culture of Critique:
From the standpoint of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality, group consciousness in the majority is viewed as pathological because it tends necessarily to be opposed to Jews as a cohesive, unassimilated, and unassimilable minority group. Viewed from this perspective, the central agenda of The Authoritarian Personality is to pathologize gentile group strategies while nevertheless leaving open the possibility of Judaism as a minority group strategy. … Again, there is an implicit double standard: the complete abandonment of all in-group designations is the epitome of mental health for gentiles, whereas Jews are implicitly allowed to continue with a strong sense of in-group identity.
It goes without saying that one of the major strategies for selling this new interpretation of “mental health” among gentiles was the promotion of a hedonistic consumer society in which moral structures and inhibitions, particularly in the realm of sex, are removed. While marketed as involving unprecedented freedom and unlimited choice, what we have in fact witnessed is the emergence and expansion of what I’ve previously termed the “Culture of Sterility” in which permanence is scorned, real relationship bonds disintegrate, birth rates plummet, sex roles and identities dissolve, and in which people commodify each other as objects to be consumed and discarded in the same manner as any other contemporary product. Non-reproductive sexual behaviors, especially those of the homosexuals and gender benders, have been lauded by a corporate world only too eager to tap into their greater disposable incomes (lacking the “drain” of children) and lack of emotional attachment.
In The Perversion of Normality, Bolton points to the resurrection of de Sade by Wilhelm Reich, who added a “sexual reductionist” element to Freudo-Marxism. There are several chapters tracing the path of Reich’s ideas through to the present day, outlining in stark detail the devastating attack on the family witnessed in the West over the last 60 years. Bolton stresses at the outset of his chapter on “Deconstructing the Primary Ties” that we again see a “convergence of aims between the Left and oligarchy” which both work for the “deconstruction of race, family, and gender, all of which must become ‘fluid’ ‘social constructs’ to expand globalisation.” Much of the material will be familiar to those well-versed in the work of Kevin MacDonald (editor’s insertion: and Andrew Joyce and other writers at TOO), and Bolton gives MacDonald due credit in a section titled “Jewish Factor” found within a chapter on “Dialectics of Critical Theory.”
The Birth of “Woke”
About halfway through the book, however, beginning with a chapter on the origins of the New Left, The Perversion of Normality moves into territory that will be more novel even for seasoned students of the subject matter. The tone of the book also gains somewhat in intensity, as it leaves more historical material and nears the critical juncture of our current situation. Opening this part of the book, Bolton takes aim at Magnus Hirschfeld (who I’ve discussed on a number of occasions), sexology (the Jewish origins of which I’ve covered here), and the work of Alfred Kinsey, a latter-day godfather of perversion who worked in tandem with Reich’s “Sex-Pol” in order to satisfy his own sick proclivities. Bolton then moves onto a sequence of critical events in the deconstruction of social and moral standards in the West, beginning with the removal of homosexuality from the category of aberrancy by the American Psychiatric Association (with the board of the APA later saying they made the decision based on the testimony of the Jewish psychiatrist Robert Spitzer). Bolton points out that “the Left took a long time to find that it had a ‘gay’ agenda,” and provides some correspondence between Marx and Engels in which both parties express their disgust at homosexuals, make fun of them, and ponder the prospect that certain elements would like to normalize such behavior by converting “this smut into theory.” Bolton points out that Marx would not have been amused by transgenderism, or any other deformations of original Marxist theory, and adds that by the early 1960s, the raison d’être of Critical Theory had become “the revision of Marxism and its synthesis with a revision of Freudianism to arrive at a new revolutionary theory.”
This new revolutionary theory can be found everywhere today in the form of ubiquitous “woke” politics, all of which results in the creation of isolated White consumers without tradition, without significant or meaningful social bonds, without group influence, and without any means of countering state or corporate power. The epitome of woke ideology is found in the now-celebrated and ubiquitous transsexual, who encapsulates the idea that
You can be precisely what you want to be at any given time, or more probably what you are told you want to be by human relations ‘mediators’ and ‘facilitators,’ psychiatrists, counsellors; media, advertising, and entertainment industries. There can be no sense of permanence and duration, but rather a perpetual state of fluidity. In the name of ‘identity,’ any type of organic identity is destroyed until everyone becomes as nebulous as to slot into an amorphous mass ‘humanity’ according to the requirements of social engineering and social control.
Bolton moves on to a very interesting, and horrifying, discussion of the way in which some of Magnus Hirschfeld’s early propaganda techniques are now being used to indoctrinate children in contemporary New Zealand—through “Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE).” The details mirror similar moves in other Western countries. Bolton:
The reason why children are targeted so early is because that is when attitudes can be conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs, with rewards and punishments, at an age range that lacks developed critical faculties. Yet the RSE ‘guide’ states that children will be taught to exercise critical judgment. Nonsense. They will be told how to think. Children will not be able to critically judge the supposed ‘new evidence’ that is presented to them by RSE. … And how can the ‘evidence’ be weighed up anyway, if contrary studies are not included? Children are led along a course that conforms to liberal-globalist doctrines emanating from the UN and elsewhere, so that they are moulded into ‘world-citizens’ of the type required by globalisation.
Another useful contribution from Bolton is found in his chapter “Progressive Regression,” in which he examines the emasculation of the Western male and the role of feminism in contemporary culture and society. Bolton points out that the APA has now pathologized “traditional masculine ideology,” helping to create a general atmosphere of gender confusion that it then responds to by offering transgenderism as a supposedly healthy option to resolve. In Bolton’s words, the answer of the APA to mental health problems is “to accentuate the mobility of multiple identities, rather than encouraging a sense of permanence and rootedness in belonging to something tangible. All is in flux.”
The fifth and final section of the book is devoted to the issues of demographics and population control, and opens with a chapter on “The Myth of White Privilege.” It’s a very interesting chapter that highlights the fact that the common man of most Western nations benefitted little from Victorian colonialism or any other form of Western imperialism now trotted out by the “woke” as justification for demonizing the White race. Bolton stresses
Under capitalism there is no common bond between the White industrialists/financiers and White proletarians: there was no kinship of race or even nationality, other than when the White proletariat was needed as cannon fodder for opening up overseas industrial expansion and markets; then a common ‘patriotism’ was invoked. Yet in the fantasy of the [woke activists], Whites ‘operate as a group to maintain certain advantages and to exclude other groups.’”
The book then moves to a section on “Social Deconstruction Through Ethnic Diversity,” which is complimented with a chapter devoted to the activities of George Soros. The text then comes to a close with a brief discussion of the efforts of several tech oligarchs to develop implantable brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that, in Bolton’s view, will “enable instant mind-control, without long processes of indoctrination or brainwashing.” This opens us to “a world that no longer acknowledges humans as organic beings, so bereft of organic consciousness that children can be laboratory-manufactured, and raised without the need for the ‘restrictions’ of the parental bond.”
Concluding Remarks
Kerry Bolton’s The Perversion of Normality is a comprehensive, well-written, and well-referenced exploration of the concerted and multifaceted attack on Western social, moral, and cultural mores. In terms of breath of subject matter discussed, I can think of no significant rival text, with my only proviso being that the book represents a kind of introductory guidebook for many of the topics and will therefore require supplementary reading (e.g., the writers at TOO) for a deep grasp of any of the matters under discussion. Some of the chapters were extremely short, which increased the pace of the book and reminded me more than a little of the style and structure of Alain de Benoist’s View from the Right. That being said, this is an extremely detailed book that will hold novel revelations for everyone, and its references and bibliography are a treasure trove in their own right.
My biggest compliment for the book is simply that I admire its approach and, as someone who laments the passing or warping of such terms as “normal,” Bolton’s text is a welcome catalogue of the ideas, personalities, movements, and systems that have conspired to drag Western society into the dirt. Being a kind of narrative history, there are no solutions to our crisis offered here. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Bolton’s approach, in common with that of many of us, is to document what has happened as clearly and professionally as possible in the hope that this knowledge alone will inspire future generations to crack the puzzle of how to reverse the pattern of decline. In my opinion, Bolton accomplishes his documentary task with great success and I warmly congratulate him on this work.
Ross Welcome to Renegade Inc. With China’s increasing wealth, Western investors want some of the action. One of those investors is a bullish gentleman called George Soros. However, the Chinese are acutely aware that with Western investment comes inequality. So as Beijing begins to rethink how to do proper economic growth, we ask, will China learn from Western mistakes?
Ross Michael Hudson, always great to have you back on Renegade Inc.
Michael Hudson It’s good to be back here. Thanks for having me.
Ross Michael, we join you at a time where a lot of people think the unipolar world could have maintained its supremacy. Turns out it hasn’t. Multipolar world is here to stay. You of late have been quite vocal about George Soros, no less. Mr. Soros has been casting aspersions about various things, but one of them is talking about the Chinese economy and why Black Rock, amongst others, should be allowed to invest there, because ultimately it’s going to undo American interests. Can you unpack that for us because it seems very complicated?
Michael Hudson Well, George Soros’ dream is that China would do what Yeltsin did to Russia – that it would privatise the economy, really carve it up and let US investors buy control of the most profitable heights. In that way, the foreign investors would be able to sort of get the profits of Chinese industry, Chinese labour, and it would become the darling stock market of the world, just like Russia’s stock market was the leading booming stock market of 1994-96. China would be run to benefit US investment bankers. Soros is furious that China is not following the neoliberal policy that the United States is following. It’s following a socialist policy wanting to keep its economic surplus at home to benefit its own citizens, not American financial investors. For Soros, this is a clash of civilisations. His proposed strategy is to stifle the Chinese economy by putting sanctions against it, to stop investing in it so as to force it to do to itself what Yeltsin did to Russia.
Ross Let’s hear it in his words. He says: ‘The BlackRock initiative imperils the national security interests of the US and other democracies because the money invested in China will help prop up President Xi’s regime, which is repressive at home and aggressive abroad. Congress should pass legislation empowering the Securities and Exchange Commission to limit the flow of funds to China. The effort ought to enjoy bipartisan support’. He’s not mincing his words, is he?
Michael Hudson He thinks that China actually needs American dollars to build its factories and invest. He thinks that somehow China’s balance of payments is going to fall apart without the US market, without US investors telling President Xi what to do. The Chinese government won’t have a clue as to what to invest in and how to let the ‘free market’, meaning George Soros and BlackRock and other companies, operate. So he’s living in a dream world where other people need us. It’s like a guy who doesn’t realise his girlfriend doesn’t need him anymore.
Ross There seems to me to be a distinction here that the Chinese are acutely aware of, and it’s between the classical economists and the neoclassical economists. The classical economists have understood the idea of unearned wealth, unearned income. The neoclassical economists actively chase unearned wealth, unearned income, because that is central to their playbook. Can you just expand on those two ideas? And is it the case that that’s why you talk about a clash of civilisations?
Michael Hudson Well, you put your finger on it, Ross. People think that China’s advantage is its abundant, low priced labour force, or the government building infrastructure. But what’s guiding this is an understanding of the kind of economics that goes back even beyond Marx, to Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill and the other classical economists. They realise that there’s a difference between earning income and creating wealth by employing labour to produce goods, to sell at a profit and then reinvest these profits and more capital formation, in contrast to simply buying a rent-yielding property, buying land and letting it rise in price without the landlord doing anything, buying a monopoly and just raising the price – charging monopoly prices like the US pharmaceutical companies are doing. China understands the difference between earned income and unearned income, between productive investment and unproductive investment.
In the United States, if they do recognise this difference, they realise that via unearned income you can make wealth by parasitically much quicker than you can actually create real wealth. It’s cheaper to be a parasite than a host. And so most of the financial strategy of Wall Street involves how to get something for nothing. How can we get a free lunch? Well, to do that as a major policy, we have to begin by telling people what Milton Friedman said: There is no such thing as a free lunch. But the whole of Wall Street is looking for a free lunch. They’re looking to grab Chinese assets on the cheap, like Soros has grabbed post-Soviet assets. They’re looking for monopoly rights. They’re looking for lending money and letting China do the work, to pay the interest to the Americans that are going to be providing it with money that the Federal Reserve ends up creating on its computers, or that George Soros already has saved largely by how he got the free lunch from the Bank of England betting against that and driving Sterling down.
Ross Some people call it the free world. Others call it a democracy. Others, for America, call it an advanced oligarchy. Do you think that the Chinese have looked at America and the wider West, understood that privatising all that rent has ultimately led to societal decline?
Michael Hudson They’re beginning to look at it that way. Most Chinese Marxists focused on Volume 1 of Capital, which is about employers hiring workers and putting them to work and making a profit off the mark-up. Only in the last couple of years have Volumes 2 and Volume 3 of Capital moved into central discussion in China. And it’s Volumes 2 and 3 that talk about economic rent. And so China has come to realise tha the United States is not an industrial economy. We’re not going to understand what’s happening in the United States, in England or Europe by looking only at what Marx wrote in Volume 1 of Capital, because they’re not making money industrially anymore. They’re making money by being a rentier economy, by landlordism, by monopolies and by bank credit, which Marx discussed in Volume 2 and 3.
So they’re now broadening the discussion. For the first time, you’re having, especially in the last month, China asking, “Do we want to let Chinese investors make money, financially, by buying housing, becoming absentee landlords and hoping that there is going to be a housing price inflation like you have in the United States? Or, do we want to keep housing low priced and not to bid it up by credit creation and finance?” They’re now realising that to keep China’s cost of living low, you have to keep the price of housing low. That means that you don’t want housing to become a commodity, an investment vehicle for absentee owners and landlords to make money. You want housing to be for Chinese people to live in. That means low-priced housing, not debt-leveraged housing as they’re seeing in the United States.
Ross I know somebody who works on the life boat on the Thames and they get a view each night that no one else would ever get. And they go up and down the Thames and they see all these high rises, which are oversupply of property, real estate. And there isn’t one light on in any of them. The reason, foreign investors, predominately the Chinese, have come bought them, clingfilmed the whole place, locked the door and then they chip off back to China – sit and wait, basically allow that land value to go up and cash out 10 years later. You can see what that does to local communities, schools, shops, infrastructure, services and all the rest of it – this absenteeism. Do you think that those foreign investors, the leadership in Beijing, has seen this model around the world and thought, yep, fine, we can do it over there, and yet we need to repatriate some money because of some of the liquidity issues that we’ve got over here. But we’re not having that as a central business model or a central economic model to our economies? Do you think that that light has gone on?
Michael Hudson Well, they’ve been discussing this regarding Hong Kong for the last 10 years. Hong Kong is the typical example of multi, multi-billionaires in real estate. They think that a socialist economy is not one that gets rich by creating absentee landlords. There’s been a large outflow of Chinese investment to the West. You have it in New York City on the west side, all very dark apartments with no lights on at night because they’re absentee-owned. Thorstein Veblen in 1923 wrote a book, Absentee Ownership, saying that housing should really be for living, not a speculative vehicle. But in America, real estate is all about civic development. It’s about how to increase real estate prices and create a bubble for speculators to find someone to flip the property to. I’m not sure it’s going to happen much longer and in London now that Brexit has occurred. But I think that what China is trying to do is asking how to create a domestic economy where Chinese people make money productively. They can not only afford a house of their own, but if they invest, they can invest in making China richer, not in buying income-yielding, rent-yielding, assets in America, England or Europe.
Ross Do you think that the pictures that we’ve recently seen on social media of the huge tower blocks that haven’t been finished, residential, that haven’t been finished for eight years and now they’ve just put semtex under them and raised the whole thing to the ground? Do you think that’s a real world example of the scar tissue, if you like, that private debt creates and in another sense, a Minsky moment? Blowing all these things up means that you get rid of all of that oversupply, which means that that inventory isn’t in the market and isn’t their to be flipped and speculated on.
Michael Hudson These are buildings where they wanted to pre-plan for what they thought was going to be a rural exodus, but the rural exodus didn’t occur into these cities. Right now, China is focusing, I think for the first time in quite a few years, much more on rural development. China is primarily a still a rural economy, a village economy. Most people don’t realise that. When you think of China, you think of Shanghai and Shenzhen and Beijing and even Wuhan. But the fact is that much of China’s rural and there can’t really be a rural exodus to the cities because you have a kind of passport plan in China. In order to live in Beijing, you have to have a permit to live in Beijing so the city won’t become even more overcrowded than it is now. They’re having to re-focus development much more on the rural areas that have not kept pace with the heavy industrial factory areas that have occurred. So they wanted to do a lot of building, not only to employ labour and to do construction, but to think just in case they needed this housing for the rural exodus, they needed it in place. Now they realise, OK, we’re not following that particular central planning idea. Central planning really is very hard. It’s very hard to build whole small cities in advance with nobody there. It’s much easier to wait until they’re actually economic forces leading you to develop. So in that sense, China’s becoming more market oriented in its planning. But at the same time, it shapes the market, increasingly, to create domestic prosperity and earning opportunities, not unearned rent-extracting opportunities, but productive earning opportunities. This is an ongoing process of re-evaluating, restructuring, fixing up and improving the economy.
Ross Michael Hudson, welcome back. Great to have you for the second half.
Michael Hudson Thanks.
Ross Michael, we said right at the top of this programme that there is, let’s say, a tug of war between the unipolar and the multipolar. China have looked at the West and they must conclude now, the Russians also, must conclude, that the Western economic model is fatally flawed. In many ways, what you’ve got in America is an advanced oligarchy. Across Europe, you’ve got a zombie banking system. And basically the model for the last certainly 30, 40 years has been to extract as much rent as possible and pass it off as an economic miracle. To avoid all that, this fork in the road has crystallised. What do you think will be the decisions coming out of Beijing when they look at the economy in a more holistic way and they realise that they want to better the lot of the average Chinese citizen?
Michael Hudson Well, as I pointed out, their concept of the economy realises the distinction between earned income and unearned income, between rent and profits. It wants to make profits, not economic rents. And it also sees that the United States is trying to prevent it from going along this socialist road, and that’s really the new Cold War. You mentioned unipolar versus multipolar. It’s actually not so much that China, Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, along with Kazakhstan and Iran and now the other groups are pulling away. It’s the United States that’s trying to force them to follow the US neoliberal model by imposing sanctions and special penalties and military threats, not to mention ISIS terrorism. The United States is driving Europe, Asia and now Africa as well, into a unified, consolidated unit outside of itself. It’s very self-destructive. It thinks like George Soros, that if we stop investing in Asia and other countries, that will force them to knuckle under to the US. But what it’s doing is it’s driving them altogether into the Belt and Road Initiative.
What China’s doing is creating a precondition for a profitable industrial economy over a large area to benefit from. It’s participants are going to need transportation. You’re going to need ports. You’re going to need roads. You’re going to need pipelines and is focusing on the interconnections, on the infrastructure.
America doesn’t build infrastructure these days unless it’s monopolised. This is the political fight going on in the United States now. President Biden has a infrastructure plan that he’s scaled down from six and a half trillion to three and a half trillion. And essentially the bulk of the Democratic and Republican Party said if we can’t privatise infrastructure and make it a rent-extracting monopoly, we’re not going to do it, and we’re going to block the government from doing it. So in the United States, they’re going to have high priced infrastructure, high-priced health care and high-priced education while China is going to have low-priced transportation, low-cost infrastructure, free education, public health care. And you’re going to have a very high-cost United States unable to compete with the rest of the world. All it can do is make military threats or financial threats. If it tries to impose sanctions as it’s imposed on Russia, China and other countries, these are going to serve as protective tariffs for foreign countries.
When President Trump put sanctions on agricultural exports to Russia, it was a windfall for Russia. They developed their own agriculture and Russia is now the largest grain exporter in the world. Senator McCain characterised Russia as a gas station of atom bombs, but it’s a gas station with the largest farm sector in the world, and is developing an industrial integration with China and the rest of Asia. It’s a Eurasian world island as Mackinder called it a century ago, and it is becoming the economic focus of the world, leaving the United States as the high cost economy with no visible means of support, because we’re not doing our own industry anymore. We’re not competing with China. We’re letting China do all of the industry, and all of a sudden we’re dependent on it. This does not bode good for prosperity in the United States or Europe and other areas that are satellites of the US economy.
Ross What is the probability of the West going, hang on, we have taken a detour here, we need to do something differently?
Michael Hudson I’d say maybe between one and two percent. In order to understand that you’re taking a wrong detour, you have to understand what the right path is, and why China’s doing it right. They can’t acknowledge that, because that’s called socialism. And when everyone points out that instead of having health care absorbing 18 percent of the American GDP, you could provide public health care and lower the cost of living in the United States. That’s a precondition for making labour more competitive. Well, the employers are going to argue that if you make health care public, then you’re going to lose the ability to lock-in labour to its employers. Right now in the United States, especially during the pandemic, if you work for an employer for a living, you’re afraid of being fired because you lose your health insurance and that is a threat of bankruptcy. If you complain about your job, you might be fired. That’s a danger. So having private health care paid for by the employers locks labour into dependency. They’re afraid to ask for higher wages. They’re afraid to ask for pensions. Privatized employer-based health care has become part of the class war here, and it is succeeding in impoverishing labour. Same thing with privatized education costs financed on credit at fairly high interest rates, without any bankruptcy recourse to wipe them out..
President Biden promised that he was going to wipe out student debt. If you have students paying 40 to 50 thousand dollars a year to have a college education and a college diploma is a precondition for getting a job like a union card used to be, then you’re going to have that added to the cost of living. When you have all of these privatised – education, health care, not to mention housing and other factors – when you have all these rent-extracting exploitative sectors you cannot be a competitive economy. You can only get money by conquering and exploiting other countries, by owning their own rent-extracting sectors and monopoly-profit sectors.
But there’s no one to conquer anymore. America couldn’t even conquer Afghanistan. Every economy for the last 5,000 years has two parts. There’s the real economy of producing and consuming and paying taxes and government services. And then there’s the debt and financial overhead. All economies operate on credit. The problem is that credit cost money, and creditor claims accumulate at compound interest. if you look at the compound interest for anybody’s savings – take the wealth of the One Percent and all the trillions of dollars they have – if you leave your money to accumulate compound interest, it grows exponentially. But economies don’t grow exponentially. They grow in an S-curve, and sometimes there’s an interruption. Sometimes there’s a disease like Covid. Sometimes there’s bad weather and a environmental disaster or there’s a war. And once there’s an interruption, what do you do with the fact that the finance sector grows faster?
Well, this goes way back to Babylonia. It occurred in Greece and Rome. Ultimately the tendency is for the financial sector to take over and to use the financial returns to take over real estate. And so there’s a symbiosis between real estate and finance. That’s occurred in every economy for the last 2,000 years since Greece and Rome.It certainly characterises where most money and most wealth is made today. In the universities, you take a course and they say, well, you accumulate wealth by saving up the wages and saving up the profits you made. But that’s not how the wealthy classes got money. That’s not how the One Percent have made money. They have made money either by taking property from the public domain by privatisation, or it’s made today by the central banks, lowering interest rates, flooding the market with credit, enough credit to push up real estate prices 20 percent in the United States in the last year. Housing prices have gone way up to unaffordable levels, pushing up education prices – and education is priced at whatever a bank or the government will lend you to pay with a student loan. It’s all financialization. It turns out that what people thought was industrial capitalism has turned out to be finance capitalism instead. So what China is doing is saying that it’s not going to let our industrial capitalism evolve into finance capitalism. It’s going to evolve into socialism, because they’re a socialist government.
Ross Just say the Chinese, the penny’s dropped and they’ve understood how badly wrong the West got it. What does the Chinese economy, and as importantly, society look like 10, 20 years from today?
Michael Hudson It’ll be a more balanced, less polarised economy. It will still let people make fortunes, but not gigantic fortunes large enough for an independent oligarchy to develop, to become a rival to government and try to replace government. In the West, you’ve had a financial oligarchy evolve and take over planning from elected government. So we don’t have democracy now. It means a free market where you leave everything to Wall Street as your central planner. So China is going to leave its planning spontaneously to individuals to innovate, to develop, where America is becoming, and England, are centrally planned economies planned by Wall Street, not to create prosperity, but to create rent-extracting opportunities for Wall Street stocks and bonds and absentee real estate. So you’re going to have a rentier economy – let’s call it neofeudalism – while the rest of the world goes forward into what industrial capitalism was meant to be a century ago before it was sidetracked in the West. Much of Eurasia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation will evolve into socialism, as most expected would happen in the West a century ago.
Ross You talk about Super Decadence. Is the irony lost on you that one of your politicians recently attended a 35,000 dollar gala event dressed in an expensive dress with the words ‘tax the rich’ embroidered all over the back of it?
Michael Hudson That perception of inequality has become so popular that you can almost make fun of it. There’s something called neurolinguistic programming, that says that if you have a problem, a headache or something, if you can imagine your headache or your problem being very far away and then expanding and expanding and finally, poof, it all dissolves and goes away. They think that they can say “Tax the rich” and just make it into a phrase that’s so popular, it doesn’t really mean tax the rich any more. It means that you accept inequality, but realize that it’s just become part of the system – and wouldn’t it be nice if there were a parallel universe in which we could indeed tax the rich. But of course, that’s just a nice fantasy.
Ross Michael, always entertaining. Always a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.
Michael Hudson It’s wonderful to be here, Ross. Thanks for having me on your show.
POSTSCRIPT:
Right after this interview, China did on its own just what George Soros was asking U.S. money managers to do: Stop lending money to China. So China itself made an about-face and turned down the BlackRock’s plans to buy a large Chinese real estate company, and it did not pay foreign holders of its Evergrande bonds on September 23.
Diplomatically, China had expected Wall Street firms to lobby to stop America’s anti-China policy. And indeed, many Wall Street executives did point out to the U.S. government that China offered many opportunities for America to make money, and urged not to treat it as an enemy. But the military-industrial complex (MIC) has its own agenda, along with the neocon and neoliberal advocates of unique U.S. unilateralism. I think that ever since China’s officials met in Alaska with Mr. Blinken earlier this year, they see the handwriting on the wall, as have Russia and other SCO members. The’ve accepted that the world economy is fracturing between the U.S.-centered “free world” (central planning by Wall Street and unilateral diplomacy from Washington) and the multilateralizing rest of the world.
