“Most of the people I encountered in progressive politics, but especially in the criminal justice reform space, came from extremely privileged backgrounds”, Evan Barker writes in her memoir. Barker found that “personal wealth insulated them against the consequences of the policies they promoted.”

Simultaneously, their wealth made them self-conscious. Barker writes about one heir to the Hunt oil fortune in Texas “whose grandfather, H. L. Hunt, promoted racist policies. To me, it seemed like Leah felt immense guilt over her wealth and was using her inheritance to try to right her family’s wrongs.”

In Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, Barker writes of Chloe, “granddaughter of British Communist Party member Claud Cockburn; the daughter of Andrew Cockburn, a distinguished journalist; and the sister of Olivia Wilde, a famous actress who had two children with Jason Sudeikis.” Chloe promoted criminal justice ‘reform’ by directing donations (“incredible funding”) to progressive district attorney candidates.

“Not long after I spoke with her on the phone, several mysterious donations began coming in through ActBlue, from donors I knew were connected to Cockburn.” Donors received memos from Chloe Cockburn prompting them “to read the Atlantic article ‘The Case for Reparations’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates” and “follow Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors, transgender activist Andrea James, author Ibram Kendi, and others, including prominent ‘prison abolitionists.’”

“I remember thinking Chloe was the living embodiment of a ‘coastal elite’ ... the type of person who orbits the highest echelons of the party ecosystem.” Barker could recognize privilege because she came to politics from a very different place.

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Born to the working class, Barker struggled through childhood with “a rare, life-threatening genetic disorder called primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD)” that insurance companies would forever exclude as a pre-existing condition.

She became a health insurance reform advocate, speaking on behalf of the Affordable Care Act and supporting Barack Obama’s Democratic Party as they pushed ‘Obamacare’ through Congress and paid an enormous price in the ensuing midterm elections.

“I thought it would bind me to the Democratic Party forever”, Barker writes. According to the theoreticians of Marxist revolution, that is exactly what should have happened. Barker was supposed to become a member of the dependent classes, a reliable Democratic voter because she depended on a Democratic legislative achievement to survive.

Reading this memoir inspired nostalgia in me for the progressive movement that existed in 2009 and 2010. It is gone now, though, and this is a memoir of the going. “I was seeing the destruction of the party of the working class in real time. The Democrats were now run by people who had zero cultural connection to the people the party had long represented.” When she saw it, she could not unsee it.

Like me, she found her breaking point when she was in the room with other Democrats. I was at a networking conference, however, whereas Barker was a much higher flyer, and walked out of the 2024 Democratic National Convention when she realized that Democrats were cooked.

Barker was never a party insider. She was however an accomplished fundraiser, able to work the Chloes of the progressive movement on behalf of candidates. Her team ethos drew on Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glenn Ross: “Always be closing”. Barker chose to work with the progressive insurgent candidates and keep them on task with Call Time, the hated work of cold-calling donors.

Her campaign work ended when she took a job at Left Rising, an organization that works with Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, and other progressive nonprofits linked to the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party. But during the early 2020s, this machinery “seemed to have one, singular goal: punish all white people and demean anyone who wasn’t ‘oppressed.’”

At the same time, Barker could see the progressive youth vanguard becoming cogs within the Democratic Party machinery. Rather than a reform movement, they were a faction within the party. Barker has examples of progressive change candidates undermined by their own party. They not the juiciest morsels in the book, though.

Barker dishes on Shaun King and his Real Justice PAC, both “backed by a web of powerful people who had real money behind them.” As King embarrassed himself through social media grifting, Barker grew discontented. She ultimately canceled King, quietly.

“After one final article came out where King had been caught begging his followers to send his wife money on Cash App the same day she closed on a near-million-dollar home, I messaged my coworker who managed our website and asked her to scrub any association of Real Justice PAC from my biography.”

Then in 2020, “I met several operatives in the progressive movement who said they used ‘they’ and ‘them’ pronouns.” Her turn had come. The gender goblins had finally arrived to forcibly convert Evan Barker to the Church of Woke.

Heeding their advice, she tried to educate herself. “I remember pulling up a YouTube video to understand how to use nonstandard pronouns properly, as I was nervous about messing it up. I found it all to be confusing, but I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so I went along with it.”

It was especially bad for men. Regularly, I saw female staffers openly demonize men. One young woman wrote in an open Slack channel, Men should be bullied in school more, in response to a news article about Elon Musk buying Twitter. She thought if he had just been “bullied,” he wouldn’t have grown up with the confidence to buy it.

Normal people thought Democrats were obsessed with race, gender, and identity because, well, they were.

Normal people thought Democrats were obsessed with race, gender, and identity because, well, they were.

“Around mid-2022, my boss, Connor, began hearing from reporters that issues promoted by progressives, particularly those involving homelessness in cities and gender ideology, were off-putting to regular people.” Only too late did she understand what Corbin Trent, an AOC staffer, had meant by promising a “cultural revolution” in the party.

“Both wings captured each other’s worst impulses” and the party adopted a narrow ideology. “AOC became a loyal lapdog for the establishment, while the establishment embraced the most divisive aspects of progressive rhetoric.” The 2016, Bernie-based talk of kitchen table issues, including health care, was deprecated. “All that economic populism had to be dropped. The party would only focus on the culture wars.”

Rather than democracy, “the bowels of the Democratic Party often functioned the same way as a prison, with people aligning tribally with their respective identity-based cliques and then doing favors for their friends.” This dynamic shaped the party in ways the public cannot see.

“That’s how consultants seemed to get contracts.” Access becomes the currency of power, and ideology becomes the terms of access. “They’d also hand-pick the candidates’ campaign managers to ensure they got a spot on the campaign until the very end.”

This is entryism, a political strategy in which ideologically-aligned people join a larger organization in order to shift its policy views and take control from within. The term affinity groups is often used in progressive politics to acknowledge groups using entryism to promote their agenda.

The strategy worked because “thanks to AOC’s success, everything had changed overnight. Now major mainstream party donors like the Soroses were clamoring to help us.” A flood of Open Society Foundations funding arrived to lift progressive district attorney candidates, creating the debacles of ‘reform’ inherent in the motto defund the police.

Democrats pay a high price for pro-crime policies. Anti-police ideology arrived with the Race Class Narrative (RCN). When “I learned what it was, I realized the extent of its influence on how Democrats talked.”

RCN was a way to pivot every issue to identity. It trained politicians to think of every issue as an identity issue first and foremost. RCN was an entire intellectual framework that reduced every agenda item on the progressive wish list to racial politics.

Leftist elites were obsessed with RCN, so they pushed it on the politicians. People like me had little room to push back against high-powered donors, who ran extremely important organizations, and who were inserting their beliefs into campaign messaging.

Identity politics took over the Democratic Party through the double-whammy of ideological entryism and elite sponsorship. Barker writes that Bernie Sanders alum and frequent CNN guest Chuck Rocha, owner of Solidarity Strategies, a progressive mail firm, “was the perfect example of the quintessential progressive consultant.”

Later in my career, I heard people call Rocha the ringleader of the “Latino mafia” — a group that only promotes other Latino consultants and operatives who are friends with each other. In my opinion, he was one of the worst offenders of perpetuating anti-white sentiments behind the scenes in leftist politics. He seemed obsessed with identity politics.

A turning point for Barker was her realization that “the Democrats had given up on making healthcare for Americans better. Even when we spoke about healthcare, we had to use the language of identity politics.”

A fundraising appeal for Ady Barkan, a very public voice for health care access as a human right, raised $500,000 by using the word “LatinX”, including a “substantial donation … from Christine Pelosi.”

Everywhere she looked, “whiteness” had become the enemy. She was expected to make deprecating statements against her own race in every meeting and promote women of color who were not qualified. “The fact is, these hiring practices successfully changed the leadership class of the Democratic Party, especially among progressives.”

“The Left has been run, almost entirely, by brown and black millennial girl bosses. These numbers are nowhere near reflective of the demographics of the United States. In fact, they are completely skewed, inverted versions of reality.” A view from nowhere that does not attract the white working class.

Barker found that the new orthodoxy did not like her efficiency. “I had earned a reputation for being blunt. I had a more ‘masculine coded’ way of handling workplace misunderstandings, getting to the bottom of things, and then moving on promptly.” This style rubbed many progressive women the wrong way. Still, she did not quite understand that “everyone else in the movement had gone insane.”

Barker admits she got a “a thrill” by “taking money from wealthy Democratic donors”, which “felt like punching back.” She had grown up poor, and her own political operative career was spent hanging on to health insurance. “It felt good to make them uncomfortable, directly pressing them for donations, which I did as often as possible.”

The truth is, America’s politicians spend a lot of time taking the money of old, lonely people. These donors often aren’t technologically or politically savvy. They won’t research whether a race is winnable. They won’t investigate whether a politician has a chance of making it out of their primary.

“It’s nearly impossible to run for office without being rich or knowing lots of other rich people”, Barker discovered. “This is one reason why regular people have no representation in the American political system. If you don’t have access to dozens of billionaires and millionaires, your chances of getting elected are slim to none.” Both parties are the same way.

Democrats often pledge to turn down PAC money when they first run for office. Barker tells us “the pledge isn’t worth anything; it’s just a promise not to accept money you’re not going to be offered anyway”, as corporations will not back an unproven contender. She saw herself how coordinated ‘uncoordinated’ PAC activities really are.

The memoir is blunt in ways that reveal why the new progressive movement did not like Barker. “In my opinion, politicians are often high-functioning psychopaths, which I am sure is true across party lines. Everyone who works for a campaign is signing up for some degree of abuse. It’s part of the job.”

Her insights into candidate psychology here are valuable to the would-be campaign staffer. The reason Jasmine Crockett is so divisive on social media is that she wants to win donations that will get her out of Call Time, which she hates.

Everyone wants to be ‘grassroots’ but “unless you are a super-famous politician like Bernie Sanders, the only way to build a small-dollar donor list is by raising money first from large individual donors and then using the funds to invest in digital advertisements and list-buying.” Again, their goal is to get out of Call Time.

The apparent success of culture issues misled Democrats into doubling-down. In Missouri, Lucas Kunce “doubled down on transgender issues, hitting at his primary opponent for her views on minors changing their gender.” Kunce lost his primary race. Cori Bush, who ran for a Missouri US Senate seat, lost the support of Barker’s own working class family “once they learned of her other, more divisive social justice stances”.

Slowly, it dawned on Barker that the Democratic Party she had joined in 2008 had been replaced by 2021.

A politician reprimanded me for questioning why his website said “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women.” I told him men don’t have uteruses, and he snapped: “My brother had a baby!” Math became racist, as did three-month-old babies. Everyone suddenly had pronouns in their email taglines. White supremacy was the biggest threat to our country.

In a perfect distillation of the times, Barker realized she was on her way out of the Democratic Party when she received a reprimand, followed by silence, from a Black woman who was offended by Barker sending an email to her on the same day as the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict.

“Identity politics, boys in girls’ sports, and immigration have been huge factors in the white working class’s departure from Democrats”, Barker writes. She saw the end coming and wrestled with her realization. Then, in a horror show moment that is also a perfect distillation of our times, Barker tried to enlist the services of a psychologist.

When she explained her problem, Barker discovered that the therapeutic professions were, if anything, more captured by the new social justice religion than her political party was. They are after all the same wealthy classes of people who sponsor the most progressive politicians.

For “it’s crucial for a stable society that Trump does not go back to the White House”, the psychiatrist told her. “That concern outweighs everything else right now.” Everything, even a patient’s mental health.

Democrats “were fixated on abolishing the police, ‘free for all’ immigration policies, racialism, and gender ideology. They stole Bernie’s 2016 energy and went wild. Their priorities easily overtook the Democratic Party because the establishment stands for nothing.” The rising progressive wing also stood for nothing, and when she saw it, Barker knew she was done.

Democrats are “the bigger perpetrators” in the culture wars, she writes. The party has a distinct “privileged-college-kid problem” and donors that “are more comfortable with a focus on cultural rather than economic issues.” Barker warns that “identity experts” have built entire careers on their identity as victims of oppression and marginalization.

“They are one of the most toxic types of Democratic operatives. They can also be called ‘the Weaponizers,’ and they will fight the party tooth and nail to prevent it from becoming class-based and colorblind.” No doubt many of these will be parents of ‘trans kids’.

“No one wants to be part of a coalition where their very existence is controversial.” Women and men who know they are women and men, and who value the rights of women and men, are repelled by a party that pretends there is no difference between women and men. “Ironically, this is their biggest hurdle to winning back men.”

Evan Barker wants a political party that is focused on the real needs of real people, that meets real people where they are. “Whichever party can figure out how to get every American healthcare while protecting our borders, reshoring our industrial base, and putting America and its citizens first, will become the permanent party of the working class”, she predicts.

“Whichever party can rein in illegal immigration and expand healthcare while making life affordable for the bottom 50 percent of our country will establish a ruling coalition that lasts a generation.” That, or we can maintain the dysfunction of two parties that are each broken in their own ways.

This is an excellent memoir of the disillusioned Democrat, a feature of my own book project. While gender ideology is not the predominant force that repelled the author from the party, it was one of the demands that the new religion of the left, widely known as ‘wokeness’, made on Democrats that caused the party to shed support from the masses.

Deriding “whiteness” repels white voters. Gender-bending with children, and men in women’s sports, repel male voters. Pandering elitist virtue signals such as “LatinX” catch fire with wealthy white progressive donors while the party loses Hispanic and Latino voters. From the inside, it has its own logic. Step outside, and it looks like madness because it is.

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Abdul Rahman Toufic Ballout, a man of Lebanese descent born in Berlin, plowed a vehicle into a crowd outside a Pride event at the Tiergarten on Saturday night. Ballout exited the vehicle, a white Citröen Space Tourer, and stabbed bystanders before fleeing the scene. One woman was reported killed and 29 people injured.

After a 20-hour manhunt, a German SWAT team found and killed Ballout at a community garden complex in the Spandau district. Officers reportedly opened fire on Ballout when he ignored orders to surrender and advanced on them holding a knife.

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Ballout was born in Berlin, but he left Germany for Lebanon in May of 2025 intending to volunteer for the Islamic State. When German officials identified Ballout as an Islamist threat, they had him arrested in Lebanon and extradited to Germany on charges of plotting terrorism.

Incredibly, Ballout was convicted for terrorism offenses in May 2026, but the court put Ballout back on the streets. He was ordered to attend a “violence prevention course” that would de-radicalize him.

Instead, Ballout carried out a jihadist attack on a Pride event. Who could have predicted that a young, impulsive, radicalized man might prefer violence, even death, to such torture?

Ballout, 21, fits the profile of the westernized ISIS recruit by having a criminal record of violence, including assault and robbery convictions as a juvenile in 2022. His sentence for threatening violence against the German state was nevertheless reduced in order to release him on probation.

The prosecution was appealing that verdict when Ballout carried out his attack. According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR, Ballout was subject to wiretapping and surveillance. It was not enough to stop him.

From the instant his name was released by authorities who were looking for Ballout, there was palpable disappointment among the targets of his hate. “I had hoped that the attacker was not a foreigner, but a white Christian person”, said one LGBTQMOUSE activist at a vigil in Berlin on Sunday. Ballout is not right wing enough to make an interesting villain for the politics of Pride.

Muslims have been the totem class of western liberal coexistence politics for a decade, while immigration from majority-Muslim countries has altered the urban progressive voting demographics of Germany and the West. In London and Manchester, in New York City and Los Angeles, in Brussels and Paris, immigrant Muslims have been a fast-growing electoral demographic since 2000.

The politics of the western metropole require Germany to ‘include’ a radical Shi’a jihadi in the social fabric of the nation. He is however a poor fit with Christopher Street Day (CSD), which is named after the site of the Stonewall Inn in New York City where riots against police raids touched off the gay rights movement.

First held in West Berlin in 1979, rather than Communist East Berlin, CSD became the local Pride event — and a good example of how such a social phenomenon can only happen in the liberal West. No Pride event ever takes place in Beirut.

In 2025, Berlin organizers publicly reported a shortfall of about €200,000 in donations as corporate sponsors pulled back their support, leading to calls for increased public support. Try to imagine the governments in Tehran, Cairo, or Riyadh being asked to pay for a Pride parade.

The truth is that, no matter how many Queers For Palestine show up at western Pride events, there will never be a Gaza Pride. Islamists frequently use the left to take power (see: Iran), but they do not adopt the western lifestyle freedoms that the left values, and then Islamists are happy to liquidate leftists once they are in power themselves (see: Iran).

Gay liberation was achieved a generation ago across the western world. It is a wholly western value, however, and incompatible with Islamist values. That dissonance is eroding the hold of leftist politics on homosexuals.

According to a survey by the Romeo dating app, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has the highest support of any German political party among gay users, with the strongest plurality among the youngest voters.

In fact, the numbers exceed the AfD’s contemporaneous national polling, which is now in the high teens to the low 20s across all voting demographics. The AfD’s openly lesbian co-leader Alice Weidel belies the assumption that ‘right wing’ or ‘conservative’ is inherently homophobic.

The phenomenon has been dubbed ‘homonationalism’ or ‘homo-nativism’. It is a response to the outrages of poor immigration control and the erosion of public safety and social trust.

The cultural preservation of gay liberation is prioritized over traditional left-liberal positions, with the enforcement of national boundaries as a key concern for gay rights.

Many homosexuals are already alienated by the focus on gender ideology at Pride; they see it as a distraction from real threats to established rights that the left refuses to recognize.

German media and victim-support organizations have reported a rise in cases of immigrant men who arrange meetings with gay Germans using dating apps only to ambush, rob, assault, and humiliate them while recording their homophobic crimes.

This is all happening amid the broader decline of Pride events worldwide. Berlin CSD is hardly the only Pride event that has struggled to close funding gaps in the last two years as corporations dial back their donations to a cause that is increasingly at odds with the needs of their brands.

Islamist attacks on Pride events will have the effect of increasing the perceived risks in attending, sponsoring, or otherwise associating with Pride events. For political Islam, shutting down the decadent western sinfest is secondary to the goal of disrupting western civil society in general.

For the political left across the West, the project of importing Muslim voters is increasingly at odds with the achievements of gay liberation. The result is a growing partisan dissonance and the gradual unlocking of a small, but indicative voting demographic.

In the United States, Vice President J.D. Vance has said that “I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won, just, the normal gay guy vote, because they just wanted to be left the hell alone.” The alphabetical mafia attacked him, of course, but they were whistling past the graveyard.

‘Islamophobia’ stops being an effective word to use against political opponents once a people begins to fear the effects of mass Muslim immigration. It won’t take many more Abdul Ballouts for an actual majority of gay Germans to figure out they are only ever ‘left the hell alone’ inside of a strong, secure, western civilization.

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Jonni Skinner’s X account is here.

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Roberto Henderson-Espinoza, a PhD scholar using he/they pronouns, identifies as Mestizaje, autistic, bi-polar, non-binary, transgender, and Latinx. She is all of the things, the most intersectional identity imaginable, in order to escape the “conditional whiteness” of her mixed parentage, the original sin that she rejects in herself.

Her white father was so racist that he told Henderson-Espinoza, PhD to disclose her ancestry on official forms, so that she could benefit from racial preferences in education and hiring. Robyn seeks escape from this painful consciousness of her own race as Roberto. “Especially now in the war against Black and Brown bodies, embodying whiteness on my skin has been the hardest journey of my life”, she writes in Body Becoming: A Path To Our Liberation.

This self-hatred “is the radical difference I seek to be connected with — the center of my own difference: conditionally white.” These words resonated with James Talarico, the very white Democratic US Senate candidate for Texas. After connecting with his favorite theologian on X in 2021, Talarico appeared on Henderson-Espinoza’s podcast to complain that “whiteness and masculinity” have limited his imagination.

In the ensuing podcast appearance, Talarico confessed (there is no better word) that he harbored doubts about electoral politics as the solution for change in Texas. He was considering seminary, he said, because we are “running out of time” due to climate change. Henderson-Espinoza described the task of politics as “help[ing]” Republicans “have compassion”, to which Talarico reverently responded, “Yeah”.

Henderson-Espinoza uses the word “compassion” a lot in Body Becoming. She takes it to mean “suffering with” someone, an exercise in empathy. Her activism asks us all to identify with her, and then through her, to identify with everyone. “Existential and survival questions that in one sense arise out of our particularities (for example, being Latinx, queer, and biracial) are shown to be deeply important at the level of universality”, she writes in Activist Theology.

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Theology without Christ or God

“There is no theology without activism, and there is no activist without theology.” Her life is activism. Being queer, injecting queerness into the world, creates a theological “culture shift”, Henderson-Espinoza told Talarico in an uncanny, testosterone-affected voice. Nashville, her current home, was a place where she felt she could change things — not like Texas, her birth state, which “felt scary to me” as a “trans and queer person”.

Henderson-Espinoza’s theology is focused on liberation from “interlocking supremacies”, which we might mistake for mere intersectionalism. Body Becoming describes something more up-to-date than the Combahee River Collective of 1977: “a concept proliferating for some years now in Queer theory and other theories: assemblage.”

Critics of progressive intersectionalism call it the omnicause. “An assemblage is a collection of any number of things that may appear alike or different in their materiality that are gathered into a single new context or a singularity.” Achieving the progressive singularity requires a “diversity of tactics”, Henderson-Espinoza told Talarico. “I don’t believe in electoral politics but I still participate in them.”

Translation: Henderson-Espinoza does not endorse Antifa terrorism against law enforcement in the name of immigration justice. She merely excuses it, and continues to vote as a regular citizen. Radicalism and religion together will “dismantle and compost” the parts of the American system that offend her, such as capitalism. In Body Becoming, she writes of the “body politic” as a queered body that is “still becoming” in a perpetual state of self-revolution. Democracy should be “embodied rather than remaining an ecosystem of transactions.”

Think of it as ersatz Christian spirit, a substitute for the real thing. Henderson-Espinoza proposes to change the world-body of humanity by “transing religion … to methodologically dismantle the logic of the norm that grounds the reproduction of binarisms and theologies of complementarity.” You know: all that stuff about God making humans male and female. If we just get rid of it, the world will become a paradise where everyone loves communism.

If we just look past the plain text of scripture, the Bible becomes “trans-positive” and transgender people become “Easter icons”. In her books, Henderson-Espinoza does not have much to say about Jesus. Christ is merely noted as a radical bringing “militant peace” to an unjust world.

In Activist Theology, Henderson-Espinoza names her inspirations as Central American Jesuits Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino as well as Marxist educator Paulo Freire. She has also named Dr. Jim Rigby, a Christian anarchist at St Andrews Presbyterian Church in south Texas, as another source of inspiration. Activist Theology calls the reader to be “contemplative in action for justice”, then describes a world of justice for free-floating “bodies”.

Many critics of woke language have noted the way gender identity activism uses the words “body/bodies” to flatten the meaning and valence of biological categories. Henderson-Espinoza extends this academic abracadabra to every progressive change project: immigration, “harm reduction”, and the “deterritorializing” of the world. Land acknowledgments abound in her books. No body is illegal on stolen land; no body should be unhoused; no body is in the wrong restroom. Black and brown bodies need liberation. Call it body Marxism.

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Gender has become complicated now. Fatherhood is no longer something boys should aspire to, or be prepared to accept, because girls who have their breasts removed will do the fathering, from now on. Testosterone alone confers manhood. This new manhood does not pass between males, which makes it non-toxic masculinity.

See, look at this cartoon that The N…

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“Although the SPLC has indeed done some good work in the past and still does some good work today, it has proven, time and time again, that it cannot be trusted in the business of identifying hate …

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Originally published in 2023 at The Distance.

Josef Mengele “liked the smell of the crematoria.” To him, it was the scent of progress. In her memoir Echoes from Auschwitz, Eva Mozes Kor tells the story of her incredible survival, along with a twin sister Miriam, at the hands of the infamous camp doctor. “Even today, none of us really knows what was done to us,” Kor wrote in 1995. Her allegations include grisly experimental sex changes on children.

The older girls told of being taken to a lab where blood from some boys was transfused into their bodies and their blood was transfused into the bodies of the young boys. Some of the doctors who were working on this project told the young girls that they were going to make them into young men. One twin had his sex organs removed in an attempt to turn him into a girl.

A eugenicist, Mengele was in fact determined to “resolve the secret of the reproduction of the race,” according to Gerald L. Posner and John Ware in Mengele: The Complete Story, published in 2000. Surviving inmates understood that he “wanted to find the cause of multiple pregnancies in order to be able to repopulate Germany,” and say that Mengele “spoke of it very freely,” according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton. Conversely, Mengele was an advocate of ‘racial hygiene’ and he definitely took part in untold thousands of experimental sterilization procedures that were conducted on prisoners at Auschwitz, many of whom died afterward from complications and lack of care. Survivors were often left scarred and in pain, suffering lifelong health consequences.

In his 1986 study The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide, Lifton notes that the more bizarre reports surrounding sterilization experiments can be garbled, and it is not always clear which camp doctor did the operation. Nevertheless, after first doubting such accounts, only to spend many years hearing them from survivors and witnesses, Lifton was “not so sure” anymore. “My belief is that each of these reports stems from some form of actual abuse,” he wrote, “usually experimental, even if there was confusion in details, including the question of which Nazi doctor was involved.” Dr. Mengele “exemplified the Nazi biological revolutionary” in Lifton’s words. Based on primary sources, Mengele was clearly a pioneer of pediatric sterilizations, including possible experimental sex change surgeries.

Of course, no perfect picture of the infamous infirmaries of Auschwitz could possibly be reconstructed. Not only are the survivors mortal, but so much evidence of what happened was destroyed in the fires of German defeat. “Isn’t it a pity?” Mengele said of his own records, lost to the Red Army when it liberated the camp. Gone were his collections of eyeballs, “pinned up like butterflies,” carefully curated by color.

Human aesthetics obsessed him. Every test subject was examined in detail by a trained staff of camp nurses who took careful measurements of every physical feature (anthropometry) and remarked on every blemish. German pseudoscience had produced an entire body of theory around racial attributes and this was all supposed to be empirical data which would prove it.

As Posner and Ware explain, despite being considered handsome Mengele did not fit the preferred racial stereotypes of Nazi “hygiene,” and was very conscious of his supposed shortcomings.

Mengele’s own racial classification by the SS had put him in the Dynarisch-Ostisch category, which meant that his predominant features were of “Eastern” origin. Since childhood he had been self-conscious about his slightly tawny skin, his penetrating brown-green eyes, and his dark brown hair. At school he had endured mild taunts from his classmates about his Gypsy looks. And in Bavaria, where Mengele grew up, the word for “Gypsy” had a derogatory meaning denoting an unstable and unsettled person. His home town of Günzburg, especially, was full of folklore about Gypsies coming to kidnap children who misbehaved.

Beauty standards had always shaped the proto-science of anthropology in the German academy. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German naturalist who stamped the term “Caucasian” into our racial discourse in 1795, chose the “most beautiful” skull from his collection to be the ancestor of white Europeans. A full-blown pseudoscience in 1933, when Nazis took power in Germany, “racial hygiene” conceived of itself as a progressive movement, even an ethical one.

Mengele personified this mindset. He was clinical, dispassionate, and at the same time “on occasion he even examined and treated prisoner patients, rare for SS doctors,” according to Lifton, because it was his professional calling to do so. Mengele really believed he was making the world a better place, and his benchmark of success in “improving the human race” was a totalitarian imposition of highly-refined stereotypes. Among his most famous experiments were attempts to alter the eye color of living patients. Painful, blinding, these procedures were done without anesthetic.

Witnesses describe Mengele as “particularly cold and cynical” when he took part in the selection process, which he did as often as he could. Mengele was the rare selector who worked extra shifts in this role, which most SS officers found exhausting and demoralizing. Dr. Ella Lingens, a camp survivor, noted that unlike his peers, Mengele “performed the selections without stimulants of any kind,” except perhaps breakfast coffee. As unfortunates emptied from the cattle cars and came down the ramp, Mengele “had the air of a man who took great satisfaction in his work and was pleased with his calling,” according to one witness. He would carry a riding crop. While he examined the nude selections, Lifton records another survivor saying, he occasionally struck someone with his little horse whip, “not at all excited but … casual … just playing around as though it were a little funny.”

Stereotypical sex behaviors were another Mengele obsession. One camp doctor told Lifton he “recalled Mengele being much more concerned than the other SS doctors about lesbianism in the women’s camp as well as about homosexuality in the men’s camp.” Mengele lived his own stereotypes as well. On one occasion, he mistook a topless lesbian for a man. When she turned around to face him and answer his rebuke with disrespect, Mengele was so embarrassed that he fled the scene rather than punish her. Even his anti-Semitism had a stereotypical, and sexual, origin: a Jew had seduced his fiancée, once. He never mentioned the birth of a son to staff in 1944, so detached was his life in Auschwitz. The camp was “a paradise of delusions,” Lifton says.

Every so often, during the selections, Mengele would spot a pair of twins. “Zwillinge!” He would shout, sometimes running to them in joy: Twins! Mengele bargained with other selectors to save pairs of twins from the gas chambers for his strange research project. Lifton thinks that Mengele “probably came to Auschwitz for that purpose” of studying twins. As a student of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a professor at the University of Münster, Mengele had been trained in the use of twins for so-called genetic studies. Posner and Ware conclude that at least 200 pairs of twins were selected for Mengele’s project, which Lifton describes as “a caricature of an academic research institute.” Dr. Lengyel, a prisoner doctor, rubbished Mengele as a “charlatan.”

Yet “whatever their hubris, and whatever the elements of pseudoscience and scientism in what they actually did, they identified themselves with the science of their time,” Lifton writes in his 2019 volume Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry. The science was settled, Mengele thought, and only the great experiment to understand it completely remained.

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Death was the purpose of Auschwitz and Mengele ultimately expected the twins he selected to die. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, another prisoner-doctor who performed dissections on dead twins for Mengele, explained why Auschwitz suited Mengele so well. “Where under normal circumstances can one find twins who die at the same place and at the same time?”

For twins like everyone else are separated by life’s varying circumstances. One may die at ten, the other at fifty. In the Auschwitz camp, however, there were several hundred sets of twins and therefore as many possibilities.

Eva Mozes Kor only survived because her sister, the weaker twin, recovered from illness. Her memoir includes the harrowing details of how she procured food for Miriam, and then decades later, donated a kidney. If one twin died in Mengele’s care, so did the other. For science. Usually this was done with a bullet, but often enough it was done with chloroform injection. Mengele would have any prisoner dissected for any reason, for example over a disputed diagnosis. Surviving twins simply did not survive his experiments.

“Crude surgery and other painful tests were performed, often without anesthetics,” Posner and Ware write, reading from the Nuremberg trials.

There were needless amputations, lumbar punctures, typhus injections, and wounds deliberately infected to compare how each twin reacted. In the view of the West German indictment, all were devoid of “any recognizable knowledge being gained from them.” Scores of Mengele’s guinea pigs died at this stage, many of them from a particularly bizarre experiment in which the blood supplies of different pairs of twins were interchanged.

Twins allegedly had blood and sperm taken for injection into German women, to see if they had twins. Other “weird sexual experiments” involved forced sex of twin pairs to see if they also had twins, according to Nazi Doctors. Just as Mengele wanted to “resolve the secret of the reproduction of the race,” however, he saw his work as taking control over nature, a rejection of evolutionary progress. “Racial leadership” not only required the “cleansing” of Jews, it made killing out to be therapeutic, a way to heal humanity.

Thus “mysticism was given a biological and medical face” in Nazism, Lifton writes. One Nazi doctor told Lifton that he joined the party after hearing a speaker declare that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.” Jews and Gypsies and other undesirables were a sickness. Even Bolsheviks were a pathogen to be cured. “If you are curing sickness, anything is permissible,” Lifton observes. “Genocide itself can be understood as the purification of the world by means of eliminating a racial, ethnic, or political contaminant.”

Thus the experimental sterilizations. Altogether, historians think some 200-250,000 people were sterilized by the Nazis. It was as high a priority as war production. “Establishing widespread compulsory sterilization became a sacred mission,” Lifton says. To that end, there were attempts to industrialize the process, for example through bombardment of the gonads with X-rays. In order to determine the efficiency and efficacy of this procedure, the sex organs of the subjects could be biopsied. According to witnesses Lifton interviewed, Mengele was in the middle of it all. Emphasis added:

One survivor told me that Mengele “cut the balls” of a very young twin, and that he (this witness), in fact saw the testicles “lying on our table.” A Greek survivor, one of whose testicles had been removed, appeared in court against Schumann but held Mengele equally responsible and told of the latter’s supervising the crude method of collecting sperm from males involved in sterilization experiments.

One twin without his testicles, the other left with them intact to see what will happen, is very much like John Money’s experiment with the Reimer twins. Mengele was playing god, and in fact many camp survivors revered him as God upon their liberation, Lifton reports, for his sinister form of care offered privileges and a perceived chance of survival. Posner and Ware write of the “chocolate and special clothes” that Mengele distributed to his victims. Some survivors confessed to Lifton that their sense of receiving “genuine” affection from Mengele lingered for years afterward, that his crimes had to be “constantly described to me” before a numb acceptance could begin.

If the people who knew his crimes best could still not see his criminality, surely we cannot be certain of all specific crimes Dr. Mengele committed in Auschwitz. However, we know enough.

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Lionsgate says they will be making an all-female version of The Expendables. The proposed title, Expendabelles, is a terrific dad joke. The positives end there. Yet another gender-swapped ‘boy brand’ is being set up for failure on the wrongheaded assumption that women will t…

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Originally published in 2023 at The Distance.

Image curation was a major concern for the Soviets. Despite a vast censorship bureaucracy, however, truths still got out of the Soviet Union in the form of official photography. Truth could then appear as informed commentary on the official caption. When Robert C. Cook published the above photo in a 1949 issue of The Journal of Heredity devoted to “the genetics controversy” in the USSR, he included a tongue-in-cheek comment. “It is noteworthy that Lysenko, who has interdicted experimental controls and the use of mathematics in biological research, needs only eye-power and general impressions to ‘measure the growth of wheat,’” Cook explained. “The presence of that capitalist symbol, Santa Claus, in the center of the picture is purely coincidental.”

Contrary to popular framing, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko did not personally starve millions of people to death, nor was he personally responsible for Stalin’s purges, which included people in his own orbit. Rather, Lysenko’s impact on Soviet and Maoist agriculture was indirect. An applicable modern term might be ‘vaporware,’ for what Lysenko actually did was perform magic tricks and pretend they were science while the actual science languished; it was the Elizabeth Holmes Theranos act writ large. Joseph Stalin found value in Lysenko’s theories and ordered everyone to follow his instructions. Famines resulted from the sham pseudoscience crowding out the real, data-driven science that would have otherwise developed in Russia, much like an invasive weed taking over a fallow field. It simply failed to prevent or ameliorate famine the way real science would. Imagine that Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘Center for Antiracist Research,’ which imploded recently amid accusations of self-dealing and dysfunction, had been put in charge of the US Department of Agriculture. (Arguably, Kendi’s proposed ‘Department of Anti-racism’ would accomplish this exact goal.) Just imagine.

Reading about Lysenko today reveals clear parallels with our new moment of ideological institutional capture by ‘gender identity,’ social justice woo, and postmodern critical theory. “Scientific papers came to require extensive digressions on the significance of the topic at hand in terms of Marxism-Leninism,” William Dejong-Lambert wrote in The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair, published in 2012. “Scientists no longer criticized one another, they ‘unmasked’ and ‘exposed’ dangerous ideas.” Irascible, “Lysenko remained willfully ignorant of research outside of the Soviet Union, hated math and never passed a formal scientific examination.” In the context of Stalin’s Soviet state, though, “Lysenko’s ignorance and intolerance of dissent were assets.” When everything is political, leaving no room for anything but politics, ‘science’ is shaped by power, not evidence. It is possible to have no scientific background or education, say unscientific things such as ‘the science is settled’, and still have a serious image as a scientist — as long as you have the power to enforce respect.

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Lysenko’s power derived from his image as a ‘barefoot scientist,’ a part of the ‘peasant intelligentsia,’ but this image was not original to him. It was a familiar trope from Imperial Russia associated with Ivan Michurin, who was also uneducated and folksy and made the most of his outsider status. One approving colleague described Michurin as “so intimate with plants and has studied their life so much that one glance is enough, and he can already predict the qualities of a plant and its future fruit.” Measurements and record-keeping were elitist bougeois gatekeeping. Likewise, Lysenko judged results by eye alone. A contemporary report described him as an “extremely egotistical person, deeming himself to be the new Messiah of biological research.” He never published in the science press. His ‘theories’ were all based on unique examples, just like Michurin.

Lysenko’s conclusions derived from what would be called ‘lived experience’ or ‘other ways of knowing’ these days. “Michurin’s view was that plantsmanship was an art, incommunicable in abstractions or formulas,” Simon Ings writes in Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953. Michurin produced dubious ‘hybrid plants’ through ‘vegetative blending’ and ‘mentoring.’ Some of the more impossible ones, such as a supposed cross between a melon and squash, “attracted especially negative attention” from horticulturists. His unlikely methods meant “there was no regularity in hereditary phenomena, and no coherent science to be had from studying them.” Michurin was making it up as he went along.

Opposition only hardened Michurin’s belief in his own theories. “When scientists conducted rigorous examinations of ‘mentors’ in Michurin’s nursery, their findings were angrily rebuked,” Dejong-Lambert writes. An impoverished aristocrat himself, “Michurin fumed that their performance was ‘slipshod’ and accused them of ‘undermining faith’ in what he had done.” Russia was newly-atheist, but still haunted by the ghosts of the old religion. Michurin was a guru demanding belief without evidence. His ‘scientific philosophy’ was in fact human moralism projected on plants, so the last thing he wanted was actual data.

Anthropomorphism formed the basis for Michurin’s understanding of the natural world, and he believed all living things were endowed with an intelligent ability to adapt in the struggle for existence. This infinite plasticity implied to Michurin a challenge not to wait on the kindness of nature, but to create new varieties even nature itself could not imagine. He dismissed scientists and academics who sought to understand problems to be answered by Mendel’s statistics, calling them “caste priests of jabberology.”

Michurin did not care for Lysenko. When he died in 1935, however, Michurin’s populist legend became “a bitter myth Lysenko would latch onto,” Dejong-Lambert writes. Lysenko owed no one, for he had grown from the earth itself. When a westerner encountered Lysenko in a cafeteria in 1968, years after his star had set, he was keen to reject any debt to anyone. Asked about Nikolai Vavilov, his former champion in the scientific academy who had died in prison, Lysenko insisted that he was a self-made man.

You think I am a part of the Soviet oppressive system. But I have always been an outsider. I came from a simple peasant family, and in my professional development I soon encountered the prejudices of the upper classes. Vavilov came from a wealthy family and knew many foreign languages. When I was a boy I worked barefoot in the fields and I never had the advantage of a proper education. Most of the prominent geneticists of the 1920s were like Vavilov. They did not want to make room for a simple peasant like me. I had to fight to be recognized. My knowledge came from working in the fields. Their knowledge came from books, and was often mistaken. And, once again, I am now an outsider. Why do you think I was sitting alone here at this table when you came up? No one will sit with me. All the other scientists have ostracized me. I sympathize with the Jewish refuseniks. They are scientists who have been ostracized by the Soviet establishment because they applied to emigrate to Israel, were turned down by the Soviet authorities, and now they have no jobs and no place to turn. They are alone like me.

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In 2019, James Talarico said that “prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego. It’s a never-ending process, and it’s a painful process.” Masculinity and whiteness are sins. White men have to feel pain for their sins. That’s what Talarico and the progressive Democratic Party want for white men: pain. Democrats want the white men of Texas to cry like Jesus and beg forgiveness for voting the wrong way, all these years.

Talarico also carries his bible upside-down, fingers to page edges. A symbolic choice, perhaps. As the rainbow-draped cross from the inside of his church shows, James Talarico holds beliefs that are bigger than the Bible and larger than Jesus. I say this having no dog in the sectarian fight. Rather, Talarico’s Christianity is a recognizable bricolage, a pastiche of beliefs in which the Bible and Jesus are but one element. I have learned to recognize them. They are common.

Today, there are six colors in the progress flag rainbow. Originally, there were eight, but the hot pink stripe was removed because the color was expensive. Bunting and hanging arrangements looked better with even-numbered stripes, too, so turquoise was removed to leave six colors. While the flag of sexual freedom was never the Seven Rays of a secret Rosicrucian brotherhood, it was from the beginning a nod to the ‘New Age’ of Carlos Castaneda, sex magic, yoga, and ‘vibes’. In the cross arrangement above, the twisted white and blue fabric stripes are the suffragette colors. Talarico’s Christity is postmodern. His Jesus is a queer feminist suffering for your sins, and he wants the gun-hugging white dudes to feel the pain they/them feel.

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In the latest example of the culture trending away from the woke era of intentionally divisive discussion, “multiple high-profile actors and jury members have avoided questions about domestic and international political crises” at the Berlin Film Festival this year, Deadline reports. “That despite the best efforts of journalists to engage actors and fil…

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You can find his books on Amazon at this link.

His X account is here.

Pedro Pascal is shooting a “subversive love story” called De Noche next month, according to Variety. “The story, which echoes classic noirs like ‘Chinatown,’ charts the passionate and unexpected love affair between a cop (Pascal) and a boarding school teacher (Ramirez) in 1930s Los Angeles, when the city is overtaken by cor…

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You can get the book from Amazon here.

My review of the book will be published at Genspect on Thursday.

Jo Bartosch’s X account is here.

Robert Jessel’s X account is here.

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The Generation Indoctrination podcast is here.

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In 2016, the NBA could cancel North Carolina for a ‘bathroom bill’. In 2026, transgender advocacy can barely make it to the men’s room. The decade of cultural and political ascendancy for ‘gender …

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