“The more we know of history, the less shall we esteem the subjects of it; and to despise our species is the price we must too often pay for our knowledge of it.” — Colton
COLTON, CHARLES CALEB, born, 1780; an English clergyman, and writer of considerable merit, but of eccentric and discreditable habits; died by suicide, at Fontainbleau, France, 1832.
“We often judge of identity, in the strict sense, from similarity.”
— R. Whately.
WHATELY, RICHARD, (Archbishop of Dublin,) born in London, February 1, 1787; an eminent English divine, theologian, philosopher, and author; died, October 8, 1863.
“If we will rightly estimate what we call good and evil, we shall find it lies much in comparison.”
— J. Locke.
LOCKE, JOHN, born at Wrington, Somersetshire, August 29, 1632; an English philosopher, theologian, and author. He was one of the most illustrious of men, not less distinguished for his virtues and piety than for his extraordinary intellectual endowments, which he used for the improvement of mankind; died, October 28, 1704.
“Persecution and intolerance are words at which my soul recoils, words which call up the most unpleasant ideas, which make me tremble when I consider the inexpressible depravity of the human mind, and how far it has been extended and manifested among mankind.”
— C. Buck.
BUCK, CHARLES, D.D., born, 1771; an exemplary English clergyman and author; died, 1815.
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We all knew it would happen with a transgendered individual as a mass shooter. The very extreme fringe now occupied by those invested in the MAGA movement who have called themselves Republicans would jump at an opportunity to make hay of this incident. If it is only opportunistic propaganda, or actual psychologically inspired scapegoating may be hard to differentiate, or both, the potential harm to a marginalized group may be the same. Many so called “rightwing influencers,” the self description in a tweet to follow, tend to pile on, like sharks smelling blood, in amplification of a message they which to attempt to overpower social media, that is of the inherent degeneracy (their opinion only) of the transgendered community. This infuriates me, as I’m sure it does many others who tend not to be fearful, who have an open mind, appreciate equality and diversity and who are democratic in our ideology.
The Pew Research Center in 2017 estimated that the transgendered and non-binary population comprises 1.6% of the population, that is about 5.3 million of us. That equates to about 1 out of every 63 Americans.
The following from CBS News, October 2022 on transgender murder in the United States.
The number of trans people who were murdered in the U.S. nearly doubled between 2017 and 2021, according to data released Tuesday by the non-profit Everytown for Gun Safety. Of the total victims, 73% were killed with a gun.
Everytown's Transgender Homicide Tracker found that there was a 93% increase in tracked homicides of trans and gender-nonconforming people in the United States and Puerto Rico over the last four years. In 2021, 56 people were killed, compared to 29 reported deaths in 2017.
Notably, while only 13% of the transgender community is estimated to be Black, according to UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, Black trans women accounted for nearly three-quarters of the known victims.
"Bias-motivated crimes are a real, frightening problem in the United States, and LGBTQ+ people continue to be targeted because of who they are," the Everytown report said.
In 2019, the American Medical Association recognized "an epidemic of violence against the transgender community," who are over 2.5 times more likely than cisgender people — those whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were designated at birth — to experience violence, according to the Everytown report.
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Let’s travel back to the last century out of curiosity of the Jewish population prior to the holocaust. In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, comprising 1.7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million. So at this time about 1 out every 59 Europeans was Jewish.
An account of the growth of antisemitism following the 1932 German elections:
Many Germans he [interviewee] knew saw antisemitism as a sign of ignorance or lack of culture. In fact, many Germans did not take Hitler seriously and saw the Nazis as a fringe movement that would be short-lived – even when the Nazi Party won 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections, a result which made it the largest party in the German Parliament. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, many politicians still thought that they would be able to control him and form a functioning government. However, as soon as the Nazis came to power, they set out to destroy Germany’s democratic political system one step at a time. By the end of the year, Germany had become a dictatorship: Hitler had declared himself Führer (or ‘leader’) and outlawed all political parties other than the Nazi Party.
At the same time, the Nazis began to systematically persecute Jews, implementing more and more repressive laws and practices until life for Jewish people in Germany was made all but impossible. Slowly but surely, the nature of antisemitism in German society changed. Through persistent Nazi propaganda and whipping up of hatred, antisemitism was no longer seen as ‘uncultured’ or ‘ignorant’ – it became the very basis of government policy and of the organisation of social life. The Nazis entrenched antisemitism into law by passing a number of increasingly brutal anti-Jewish laws and decrees. On 1 April 1933 the Nazis organised a nationwide boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses.
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Below are some tweets receiving wide attention on Twitter relating to transgendered Americans. I have not included the “author names” of such Tweets, but I assure you theses are the usual “rightwing influencers” which come up now on the algorithm now in operation on this social media platform. Some of these Twitter statements have made national news.
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“ICYMI: Idaho’s Republican Gov. Brad Little signed Senate Bill 1100 last Thursday that bans transgender students from using school bathrooms for the opposing biological sex.”
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“The trans movement, it turns out, is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy. People who believe they’re God can’t stand to be reminded that they’re not.”
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Angle: A Trans Killer foxnews. com/video/63234955… #FoxNews
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“NEVER FORGET: Failed Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said there should be a “call to arms” for the LGBTQ+ Community after Roe v. Wade was overturned.”
“Now a radical trans activist shot up a Christian school.”
“Does Lori have blood on her hands?”
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“Anyone seeing a trend here? This many shootings by a statistically incredibly small minority group as a percentage of society???”
“Yea it’s the gun and not a mental health created and nurtured by leftist sociopaths pushing gender ideology on anyone they can.
Give me a F’en break.”
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“.@ElonMusk, there seems to be mass @Twitter censorship and punishment of users criticizing transgender extremism and violence.”
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“No one that I know of EVER had a problem with trans people... until drag shows for kids, creepy men taking advantage of it by going into women's bathrooms, Biden's hiring based on virtue signaling instead of skill... and lunatics screaming for attention with pronouns.”
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“The next time you hear about the fabled “insurrection,” ponder this. More people were killed by a transgender domestic terrorist on one day than were killed by all the Trump protesters who went into the Capitol on January 6 #NashvilleCovenantSchool”
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“So a deranged woman wasn't allowed to dress like a man at her parents' house, murders a bunch of Christian kids and school employees…”
“And "rightwing influencers" are somehow responsible?”
“Am I doing this right?”
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So I now jump back to the 20th Century and Nazi Germany. Below are some excerpts from the essay written on November 16, 1941 by Joseph Goebbels entitled The Jews are Guilty! This article, like most of Goebbels’s lead articles, was read over the radio. All Jews in Germany had recently been required to wear the yellow star in public, and the Holocaust was beginning. In this article, Goebbels made it clear that the future of the Jews in Germany was over. Anyone sympathetic to the Jews would be punished. Goebbels was Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945.
The Jews are Guilty!
by Joseph Goebbels
The historic responsibility of world Jewry for the outbreak and widening of this war has been proven so clearly that it does not need to be talked about any further.
Every Jew is our enemy in this historic struggle, regardless of whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or carries on his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or blows the trumpets of war in New York or Washington. All Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. They want its defeat and annihilation, and do all in their power to bring it about. That they can do nothing inside the Reich is hardly a sign of their loyalty, but rather of the appropriate measures we took against them.
These Jewish lackeys actually should wear the Jewish star themselves. The excuse they give for their provocative conduct is always the same: the Jews are after all human beings too. We never denied that, just as we never denied the humanity of murders, child rapists, thieves, and pimps, though we never felt the need to parade down the Kurfürstendamm with them! Every Jew is a decent Jew who has found a dumb and ignorant goy who thinks him decent! As if that were a reason to give Jews a kind of honorable escort. What nonsense.
That is an elementary principle of racial, national, and social hygiene. They will never give us rest. If they could, they would drive one nation after another into war against us. Who cares about their difficulties, they who only want to force the world to accept their bloody financial domination? The Jews are a parasitic race that feeds like a foul fungus on the cultures of healthy but ignorant peoples. There is only one effective measure: cut them out.
How stupid and thoughtless are the arguments of the backward friends of the Jews in the face of a problem that has occupied mankind for millennia! How they would gape if they could ever see their dear Jews in power! But that would be too late. That is why it is the duty of a national leadership to take all necessary measures to keep such a thing from happening. There are differences between people just as there are differences between animals. Some people are good, others bad. The same is true of animals. The fact that the Jew still lives among us is no proof that he belongs among us, just as a flea is not a household pet simply because it lives in a house…
What about Stalin the USSR communist totalitarian and of his finding scapegoats?
Stalin, in the Russian Revolution, used Leon Trotsky** as a scapegoat for a host of problems in the post-revolution USSR, even though Trotsky had been exiled long before the problems arose. To shift focus from the terrorizing effect his brutal leadership had on the Russian people, Stalin channeled his people’s fears into a hatred for Trotsky. Stalin branded and demonized his political opponent as a capitalist stooge and counter-revolutionary, as a means of redirecting blame from his own administration. But while Stalin did create a scapegoat in Trotsky, he fell just short of building a divergence between the common people and the scapegoat.
As the late French theorist of mythology René Girard argued, “the target is not chosen because it is in any way responsible for society’s woes … The scapegoat is instead chosen because it is easy to victimize without fear of retaliation.”
**Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian revolutionary, political theorist and Soviet politician. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Trotskyism. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Yanovka, Trotsky embraced Marxism after moving to Nikolayev in 1896.
And of Putin’s attempts at scapegoating the LGBQT+ Russian citizens from the Wilson Center:
In November 2022, the Russian parliament passed a new bill banning any activity that can be interpreted as the promotion of “non-traditional sexual relations and/or preferences.” In December, President Vladimir Putin signed it into law. This legislation is an expansion of the notorious 2013 bill, which prohibited so-called “gay propaganda” among minors. Nina Rozhanovskaya spoke with Dr. Alexander Sasha Kondakov about the repercussions of this discriminatory legislation, the rationale behind Russia’s crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community, and what its timing can tell us about Russian politics. The conversation was recorded on November 30, 2022.
Of question by Nina Rozhanovskaya:
Echoing that, I would say that today, when Russia is in the middle of the war, why do Russian legislators have the time and the headspace to work on legislation restricting freedoms for a minority? Why are they so keen on persecuting LGBTQ+ people in the middle of the war? You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess your answer would be: that's exactly the reason. One of the reasons they are doing that right now, because, again, 10 years later, they again need a scapegoat, a distraction as some way to prove their legitimacy. Is that correct?
Answer by Dr. Alexander Sasha Kondakov:
Exactly, exactly. And that's, again, not positive news here, of course, but something that can be taken with a little bit of hope. The very fact, the introduction of this new reformed gay propaganda law says that people are not buying it. People are in Russia generally unhappy about what's going on. They are probably against everything that the current government is doing. They are fed up. And so the government is trying to manipulate them. The law is trying to say, well, look at the gays. It's trying to distract attention and stigmatize the community. But it also means that things are not looking good for Putin currently.
The Scapegoat or Scapegoats.
The term ‘scapegoat’ has its origin in the Old Testament, more specifically, in Chapter 16 of the Book of Leviticus, according to which God instructed Moses and Aaron to sacrifice two goats every year. The first goat was to be killed and its blood sprinkled upon the Ark of the Covenant. The High Priest was then to lay his hands upon the head of the second goat and confess the sins of the people. Unlike the first goat, this lucky second goat was not to be killed but released into the wilderness together with its burden of sin, which is why it came to be known as a, or the, scapegoat.
The altar that stands in the sanctuary of every church is a symbolic remnant and reminder of this sacrificial practice, with the ultimate object of sacrifice being, of course, Jesus himself. Upon seeing Jesus for the first time, John the Baptist is said to have exclaimed, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
The sacrifice prescribed in the Book of Leviticus prefigures that of Jesus, who played the role of the first goat in his human crucifixion, and the role of the second goat, the scapegoat, in his divine resurrection.
“For scapegoating to occur, a community must agree on a target who can be blamed for anything that goes wrong. Sometimes a community just needs someone to BE wrong all the time, so they can know they are right. It really doesn’t matter if the person is actually guilty or wrong, as long as everyone agrees on it. That agreement allows the community to act against the scapegoat and feel justified. They can hate, abuse, ridicule, neglect, expel, wound or kill the scapegoat and actually experience feelings of joy and well-being afterward.”
*The website: By partnering with powerful teachers and healers, the Religion & Violence Education Network (RAVEN) aims to impact communities and individuals with God’s healing love and nonviolent theology. Unlearn violent Christianity.
From The Psychology of Scapegoating, Psychology Today.
The ego defense of displacement plays an important role in scapegoating, in which uncomfortable feelings such as anger, frustration, envy, guilt, shame, and insecurity are displaced or redirected onto another, often more vulnerable, person or group. The scapegoats—outsiders, immigrants, minorities, 'deviants'—are then persecuted, enabling the scapegoaters to discharge and distract from their negative feelings, which are replaced or overtaken by a crude but consoling sense of affirmation and self-righteous indignation.
Displacement is a defense mechanism in which a person redirects an emotional reaction from the rightful recipient onto another person or object.
For example, if a manager screams at an employee, the employee doesn't scream back—but he may yell at his spouse later that night. Displacement often involves deflected anger or aggression, but it can include other feelings and impulses as well.
The concept of defense mechanisms was originally developed by Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud; they function to unconsciously protect the ego from discomfort or distress. Although many Freudian theories have been disproven over time, defense mechanisms like displacement have endured.
Defense mechanisms crop up for everyone from time to time; displacement only interferes with mental health when it becomes habitual or interferes with daily life, such as a job or relationship.
Displacement may relieve distress or preserve self-esteem in the moment but damage well-being over time. The reaction can exacerbate personal problems or relationship conflict while failing to address the underlying problem.
In scapegoating the creation of a villain necessarily implies that of a hero, even if both are purely fictional.
Sometimes it is the villain, or villains, who are in need of an even greater villain. Especially in a time of crisis, unscrupulous leaders and politicians can cynically exploit the ancient and deep-rooted impulse to scapegoat to deflect and distract from their own inadequacies and evade, or seek to evade, their legitimate burden of blame and responsibility.
A scapegoat usually implies a person or group, but the mechanism of scapegoating can also apply to non-human entities, whether objects, animals, or demons. Conversely, human scapegoats are to varying degrees dehumanized and objectified; some, such as witches in mediæval Europe, are quite literally demonized. The dehumanization of the scapegoat makes the scapegoating both more potent and more palatable, and can even lend it a sense of pre-ordained, cosmic inevitability.
What is happening to our transgendered fellow Americans in what may be an organized effort of scapegoating, with aims of using it to erode democracy, as has been done often in the past and in the present is nothing but wrong. That Christianity is being used as a smokescreen is especially vile. It’s my opinion that a model of past successes in destroying democracy and achieving dictatorship is ongoing in this country. And the transgendered are what appears to be the weakest target which they can perhaps devise at this time to initiate the process. But one must soberly realize that wider ranging oppression will follow undoubtedly, like it has often in the past.
I will end with some wokeness, some humanity. For I have felt defiled by this subject, and must look toward the light.
“Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:
- I shall not fear anyone on Earth.
- I shall fear only God.
- I shall not bear ill will toward anyone.
- I shall not submit to injustice from anyone.
- I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.”
― Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
32nd Posting, March 29, 2023