July 30, 2021
Dear New York Times:
While any attention to abuse and exploitation– whether it be pedophilia, rape, involuntary A.I. data extraction, or bio-piracy– is appreciated, your publication’s lack of an informed analysis results in propagandizing.
Your Opinion section is littered with half-analyzed insights requiring a critical analysis offered by, yes, none other than critical (race) theory. Ross Douthat’s July 24, 2021 editorial (“Can the Left Regulate Sex?”) is just one example of misguided opinion that tells half the story to the detriment of pro-child/ anti-trafficking U.S. Leftists.
To clarify against Douthat’s absurd conflations, the dominant U.S. Left tendency does not want to repeal pedophilia and statutory rape laws. We know the difference between freedom and enslavement. Even if we oppose punitive wheel-reinventing litigation for social problems, we (reluctantly, due to heavy-handed prosecutorial overreach) accept the state’s sexual restrictions to protect victims. This is not the conservative victim rights paradigm. Racist prosecution of low-level offenders is risked in the face of increased human trafficking. Thanks for the choices: we didn’t invent these seemingly contradictory conditions, so don’t hold the Left responsible for overcoming them.
A powerful, conservative, and racist-misogynistic Big Tech wing targets Leftists for our pragmatic and reasonable (self-reflexively expressed as strategic “reluctance” in critical theory) acceptance of some sexual regulations. As positive awareness about sexual choices and lifestyles increase, so will awareness of the clear difference between same sex (homosexual/ homosocial) encounters and child rape. Transgression of homosocial repressions is not the same as transgression of age boundaries. Homosocial (queer) desire is not the same as pedophilia. Queer desire and pedophilia are connected when the human imagination considers the topic of repressed and permitted sex acts. But the connection stops there.
Let me use my handy critical theory training to explain.
New technologies shaping social/sexual (socio-sexual?) tastes and behaviors (Sex Tech, broadly defined) heighten the ongoing culture war. The virtual merging of political ideologies with identitarian hyper-consumerism strengthens real world social identities. The word “circle” is used more than ever to describe new formal and informal organizations, networks, and Obama and post-Obama era militias (some who attended the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot).
Guess what? Not all U.S. Leftists adhere to the “circle” organizational form– which can foster antisocial cliques instead. We offer strong examples of an ideologically and socially diversified Leftism with zero characteristics built up by Douthat’s Straw Leftist description. We have more than one circle, so to speak, and it’s not all Electoral Epstein-ism. Donald Trump and Joe Biden would hope it were that simple!
The combination of virtual (via social media) and real (via facetime connections) dynamics set the deeply disturbing Capitol Riot in motion. In addition to surveillance state police tactics, nothing short of Big Tech’s active real world face time engineering–using pogrom-like ground force tactics to stalk, doxx, harass, rape, protest, and fight molotov cocktail style– can illuminate the January 6, 2021 event.
Terrifying Antifa street clashes with fascists anticipated the Capitol Riot. But Antifa, which opposes fascism in all its variants, including transhumanism, is a major victim in today’s racist, anti-democratic, and violent political climate. Antifa is innocent of all charges and largely (however reluctant due to prosecutorial overreach) accepts existing sexual laws against child and adult harassment, rape, trafficking, enslavement, and murder.
It was Leftists, like my California State University, Sacramento Women’s Studies students of the early 2000s, who emotionally responded to the horrific disappearances and murders of (Indigenous) women and trans folk just across the U.S.-Mexico border. When nascent globalization’s socio-economic disruptions intersected with older sexual trafficking networks, Leftists grew horrified at the heightened violence and trafficking. This is a fact that Douthat may find perturbing for his Straw Leftist caricature. (This caricature resembles the current depiction of Marxism in general.)
Today, A.I.’s disruptive Transhumanist wing (violently) embraces the recalibration of human boundaries as a major project. A.I. data extraction and robotics experimentation includes sexuality. Tech’s sexual disruption capabilities (virtualization of sex) forms the core of child porn monetization found in, for example, Pornhub’s exorbitant profits. While it is unclear how much child rape has increased as an actual practice, unbridled remote porn monetization now encourages the pedophilia aesthetic– to the desensitization of us all. There’s a sharp increase in images sexualizing children and young adults. Adult feminine beauty is still judged by its youthfulness, despite mainstream advertising’s diversification of models and locations. Some child porn videos and images are “deep fake” and some depict real victims.
That’s a “blurred line” the true Left can scarcely afford!
Just because we can’t get a federal minimum wage increase instituted doesn’t mean the Left will start raping their children on video to pay rent. Douthat ignores the peaceful vision Leftists carry in our hearts, if not in our gun holsters.
As NXIVM investigations continue and Epstein circles’ information is released by unthinkably courageous journalism, like Julie K. Brown’s Perversion of Justice, pedophilia and trafficking continue. Consider how career-ruining sex can be when recorded. A politician’s taped sexual encounter with a minor or mistress is major financial-political collateral. Now merge this fact with a more sexually permissive culture backed by Big Tech funded social circles where money is routinely exchanged for priceless values: honesty, loyalty, dignity, and integrity, for example.
In this climate, pedophilia functions, however misguided, as a money maker and a symbolic marker of free human behavior. Its prosecution becomes the stuff of enslavement according to Transhumanism’s twisted logic. Transhumanism wants a world dominated by competitive unregulated markets that include child porn production and disposable baby farming. We must resist the new Transhumanist sexual ethos that conveniently flouts relatively reasonable, however prosecutorial, legal prohibitions to favor immediate monetization/ gratification instead. Here, established legal protections trump any faux-Leftist freedoms gained from the idea or act of raping and killing victims. Those prosecuted for sex crimes continue to benefit from the nonelectoral Left’s prison abolitionist politics. We argue for noncarceral alternatives.
A political climate that denies past sexual debates while enshrining pedophilia as the latest repression-free sex hobby, or paying job, is a dangerous climate for today’s exploited and trafficked populations. Imagine a time when parents are said to own their children in a manner permitting an easy open market trade. Horrific, indeed, but not entirely implausible unless we extoll the anti-trafficking Left’s consistent values.
A tired old Left libertarian ethos roundly denounces pedophilia prosecutions as repressive. But this argument increasingly smacks of Charles Manson Family cult era/ CIA psych ops claptrap about “getting free” and “acting naturally.” The Transhumanist spin on this Left libertinism is the elimination of the “natural” for a wholly cultural transhuman devoid of repressive and individuated physical boundaries. (This position employs the safe liberal place where human rights notions of individual sovereignty lives: from whence the notion of “violation” is wrought.)
Some Leftist/ Antifa elements may concur with Epstein’s view of children as little creatures with sexual body parts grown in petri dishes. But not near the numbers to equate Leftism with pedophilia.
The Left ideological field is still diverse, so act now to avoid its narrowing into caricature. New clarifications are needed here. There’s a Democratic National Committee (DNC)/ Epstein Leftwing that is deeply financial and filled with white (supremacist) collar corporate crime linked to police agencies and trafficking networks. There’s a Non-Epstein Electoral Leftism that lacks funding, gets dominated by opponents, and is cop-opted by creative class cynics. Woe the third party efforts! Woe the Sandersistas! There’s a Nonelectoral Leftism (include Antifa here for convenience despite differences) that concentrates on anti-immiseration work, education efforts, and direct action planning. This group provides the vision that glues any nonviolent social sphere together. Period.
The Left that existed before Facebook, yes the one that dared to write some of the 21st century’s first critical (race) theory books, fights to stay relevant under Big Tech and national security state omnipresence. Newly active Left members, including countless young people, will get a bad impression if they equate Leftism with unbridled Tech and/ or pedophilia/ rape.
As Big Tech’s global colonization– via A.I. data extraction– continues, sexual mores encouraging nonindividuation thrive to complement the Big Tech Dystopia.
Both critical theory (via pop-Deleuzian emphasis on connectivity and flow) and pop culture contribute to the dystopian-nonindividuation (even Orwellian) drive. Pop culture’s “Blurred Lines” (Robin Thicke) and Tech-focused comedy diminish boundaries to favor microchipping and sex tech. See HBO Max’s Made for Love. Pop culture lubes the masses for Big Tech’s ongoing colonization.
Critical (race) theory identifies and analyzes exploitation and victimization. Period.
The beltway debates A.I. regulations alongside the Capitol Riot. Let’s combine these inquiries. Big Tech’s A.I/ human subject experimentation has produced new mediated political actors, requiring investigation. The Capitol Riot was the culmination of a decades-long tech colonization of the U.S. social infrastructure. Professors, publishers, intellectuals, activists, artists, scientists, tech researchers, game designers, and countless others have already suffered immense impacts from opposing Big Tech’s social media “revolution.” The poor suffer the most.
NY Times, please report on the links among social engineers and actors described here. Cover how Big Tech coordinates real harassment and hate campaigns stateside, and contribute to genocides like the North American Indigenous and Asia’s Rohingya, in detail. Cover the technological transformation of social and sexual life that deliberately uses legal topics– like statutory rape and pedophilia– for social divisions. The NSO spyware investigation should explain physical locations of Epstein (Mossad?) science and tech financing. If there are baby farms, please find them and report on them.
The field of critical (race) theory was never more relevant in the battle. However theoretically reluctant to defend an ecological humanism against its more monstrous corporate-fascist and financial-military threats, we refuse to be depicted as narrow-minded and biased instant gratification mongers.
Instead, we provide the conceptual distinctions that aid survival in this beleaguered century. This essay is merely one example of critical theory’s contributions. May there be many more.
Rest In Petals, Glen Ford.
© Michelle Renee Matisons, Ph.D. Pure Chance Productions, 2021- .
Emergency Ethics 