*I’m neither “ignoring my reality” nor the “reality of my childhood,” nor am I “in denial about my childhood.” Nor am I “repressing memories about my experience.” Nor did my father abuse or molest me. Nor did my mother abuse or molest me. Nor any of the other outrageous claims made about me, all of which amount to another run-of-the-mill witch-hunt.**

Contrary to popular belief, I in fact care very deeply about the suffering of others — the suffering of children most especially, who in suffering so when their minds are wide-open and developing, and who as children have no other context and know no alternative to the world they’re directly experiencing, often sustain damage of the most serious sort. Often they carry this damage with them into adulthood. Often, also, they pass it along to their children, who in turn often pass it along to their children. This is to me among the worst of all possible tragedies — an agonizing cycle which I in my literature have in my own way sought to break or disrupt: by showing and I hope inspiring through my characters that humans aren’t fated or determined, that we are each and all the shapers of our own souls, even under the most difficult circumstances — though it’s also undoubtedly true that the more difficult the circumstance, the harder it becomes to exercise the full faculty of volition, which requires an act of will, an active effort of will, which by definition is not automatic but requires continual vigilance and work: the continual effort of attention, the continual exertion and strain of keeping the attention focused against the constant strain of inattention. This is the locus of human volition, which is also called choice, which is also called free-will.

Through my characters, I’ve sought to show that human life and human goodness are, at root, chosen. Life is chosen. Goodness is chosen. Human life isn’t doomed to despair and suffering, no matter the depth or degree of violation or force inflicted upon any human soul, even the very young human soul — because there always exist an alternative to choose from.

This is why I’ve written characters who are the victims of abuse — not because it happened to me, which it didn’t, but because in showing how my characters work to rise above inflictions they didn’t choose, I might through the example of my characters disrupt a cycle. Because whether one has suffered abuse or not, the following remains true for every one of us: the higher the goal, the more difficult the task awaiting us. This is what I’ve attempted to show through the characters I’ve created, and it’s what I’ve always wanted them to represent: humans striving to uplift themselves.

The specific obstacles are secondary. The primary is that no one’s path is determined. We always possess the faculty of choice, even if the exercising of it is made more difficult by the individual circumstances facing any given person. Even the extreme damage caused by extreme abuse can be overcome. Even then there remains in humans the power to choose between an alternative. Only when the human mind loses its power to reason, its rational faculty — e.g. from traumatic head injury or a neurodegenerative process — only then is volition expunged. Yet at no point do I pretend that overcoming abuse is a simple matter. At no point do I underestimate the task. At no point either do I pretend that any person can place parameters on another soul’s suffering. This isn’t what I suggest at all. On the contrary, no one can place parameters on another soul’s suffering — because the world is private and peculiar for each individual soul, as T.S. Eliot wrote. No one can impose parameters or limits upon another. Nor should anyone presume to. I’ve sought to say only this: no matter the individual threshold of any given person, provided we activate the choice and assume responsibility for all that it entails, we’re each to that extent the molders of our own minds, the shapers of our own psyches.

The psyche is the soul and the soul is the essential “I” inside each one of us.

To the extent that through an exertion of our own will, which is our fundamental choice — ours and ours alone — we activate our power of choice and assume responsibility for all that this entails, we’re each to that exact extent become the shapers of our own souls.

These are some of the ideas that have preoccupied me most when I’m writing fiction. It’s the reason I’ve created my characters in the way that I’ve created them: to show what might be possible to us all.

The specific obstacle or obstacles is, I say again, never the primary point. The primary point is in the principle. Abuse, which is the particular, stand-ins for any great obstacle or pain, which is the principle.

The principle which all my life, from as far back as I can remember, has in one way or another obsessed me most is the principle of aspiration: the aspiration to live the life you most want for yourself — to give physical expression to your ideas and give physical shape to your soul thereby. Thoughts and ideas are intangible. In giving your thoughts and ideas physical expression, you make real and tangible your soul’s values — which is to say: what you value. Your soul is your essential you.

Until expressed in physical terms, the values of your soul remain internal and intangible. We each of us spend the majority of our lives inside our own minds. We give our values expression and physical form when through effort — the effort of our work — we cast our values into something external.

We write. We discuss. We sculpt. We draw. We build. We dance. We sing. We play music. We run. We walk. We swim. We craft. We create. We make.

When we give physical form to our values, we add a physical structure to the universe which didn’t exist before we brought it into being, and this physical structure can live on and grow.

In fiction the most compelling conflicts are those conflicts sourced inside the characters who populate the story, the greatest struggles always the internal struggles — the struggles of the soul, the torments of the psyche, the conflicts of the mind and heart. This is the very stuff of drama and dramatic action.

Fiction is not fundamentally an autobiographical but a creative act.

The creative act is an act of imagination and reimagination.

Autobiography is not primarily creative but journalistic.

Journalism records.

Art creates.

Writers of any and every age who are just setting out on their literary adventure will often draw on their own experiences for subject-matter — writing, as the old advice goes, what they best know. There’s nothing wrong with this advice. It provides an authentic starting point, and the authentic voice is in many ways the total goal.

Yet in fiction-writing, the life and experiences of any given writer ideally serve as a springboard — a springboard from which the writer may trampoline high into the realms of pure creativity. Here the writer is limited only by imagination. She can fly or somersault in any direction she chooses. She may at first ascribe to her main character a character-trait (or traits) which she herself possesses and knows intimately: worshipping at the shrine of coffee, for example, or being of a naturally speculative cast of mind, with a tendency to brood.

But imagine this same writer sitting down the following day, picking up where she left off, and it occurs then (only then) that her main character — the fictional person she’s striving to bring to life beneath her hand — isn’t actually her but her creation. She’s a fictional product entirely of this writer’s imagination. Why then limit this or any character to only those character-traits which she herself possesses? She can think of no good reason. And so it is that she assigns to her character a character-trait which she herself doesn’t possess: a sloppy ass, for instance, or perhaps a left-eye strabismus which gives her character a slightly cock-eyed perspective, yet also an uncanny peripheral field-of-vision. Or perhaps she remembers a character she once came across in a book she read — a female character she liked, who was torn between conflicting desires — and remembering this character sparks an idea. Thus she decides to assign to her main character a divided brain, a character of two minds, let us say, especially concerning some specific subject that’s important to the storyline — a man, let us say, who loves her profoundly and whom the main character likewise profoundly loves, but also hates. Imagine that the reason this particular character-trait, from the female character in a novel she once read, and so opposite anything the writer possesses in real life, gave her pause at all is that she glimpsed the possibility of a metaphorical meaning — a dual meaning in this double-minded character-trait — a symbol which in turn sent her thinking in other directions as well. So that, opening her imagination wider still, that idea sparked others still, which in turn sparked more — ideas she’d never have conceived, were it not for her assigning to her character this one characteristic, this double-minded trait, which she herself doesn’t in reality possess., from a secondary character in a novel she read long ago.

This same basic process happens all the time, in a multitude of different ways, across every aspect of fictional creation — down to minute details and decisions of style, all the way up through grand themes and complicated scenes and everything in between: from the choice to use a certain punctuation mark here, inserting a word you rarely use there, constructing a sentence with a different syntax, changing your grammar just to see how well, if at all, you’re able to imitate a writer you like — any one of these seeming insignificancies can at any moment explode into directions and ideas you’d not yet conceived. This happens more often than not.

Literature of this sort flourishes most when at first it’s left completely free — when it’s permitted to move freely in any direction, most especially at the very  start of the process, before pencil ever touches paper, because at this stage nothing has solidified or set. You must never at this stage censor your mind. Permit it to range freely. Give your imagination free-rein to explore, to wander, to roam in any direction it chooses.

Because there’s one great nemesis to all mental activity, creative or otherwise, and that great nemesis is named repression.

Repression that comes from self-censorship is repression at its most stultifying. It blocks many brilliant brains from many brilliant ideas. You must trust your subconscious. You must let your mind be free to wander around and around different subjects and ideas, whether stylistic or storylines. Evaluate them. Consider them from different angles. Reconsider them with an uncensored, free-spirted, inquisitive mind. Don’t restrict yourself with artificial constraints or arbitrary rules — ten new ideas before breakfast or you’re a failure and a fraud. Instead know that your brain is capable of assessing reality, gauging it accurately, recasting it in words. The writer who doesn’t censor his mind with regard to getting ideas and exploring possibilities will unavoidably develop a fertile, creative-imaginative faculty — a creative-imaginative faculty which will rapidly accumulate more ideas than any one person could handle in a lifetime. The more possibilities the writer explores, the more ideas the writer will have at her disposal — the more also that mind becomes skilled in hunting idea.

Of course not every idea you get will be good. Many will make you wince when you reread them the following day or week. What of it? That’s precisely what your critical faculty is for. The very fact that you’re wincing shows that your critical mind has grown sharp. Keep sharpening it. Allow your mind to move freely across the landscape of ideas — knowing that your critical mind is capable of discerning good ideas from bad, and knowing also that the very process itself sharpens both your creative-imaginative edge and also your critical edge. The creative faculty and the critical faculty aren’t different faculties. They’re two components of the same one, two sides of the same penny. Yet the process of discernment should come second, or you limit yourself. You must hold it back early on and unleash it only after you’ve allowed your mind plenty of time to roam the vastness of your imagination and flush out as many ideas as you can. Later you’ll discard many of these ideas — that’s the work of your critical faculty — just as later you’ll  astonish yourself with how many good ideas you hunted down. But all of that is later. For now you’re free. Your mind is free and can move in no wrong direction.

The literature that results from this is a literature stylized and crafted by your creative imagination combined with your critical sense. So that were one to look at the earliest conceptions or versions (those in your mind when you were first thinking of your story, even before writing anything down) and somehow compare these early mental versions with the final finished version between book-covers, the ideas and the story would appear unrecognizable, the characters perhaps most of all.

The following is something I think all aspiring writers, no matter the age, should be taught —  because it will give aspiring writers much heart and help — and yet I’ve never come across it in any book I’ve read, and I’ve never heard it taught:

Whenever you read a great book and find yourself thinking something to the effect of “There’s no way I could ever write anything half this good, this complex …” know the following and take it with you all throughout your writing life, so that you’ll never feel yourself demoralized, discouraged, or overwhelmed to such an extent that you lose your aspiration desire to write:

Every great book was written and then rewritten many, many times in many, many small increments — and the greater and more complex the book, the smaller the increments in which it was written, and the more times it was rewritten.

Complexity doesn’t spring full-blown from the head of Zeus.

The final great product in your hands, which has moved you so and seems now such an impossible achievement, didn’t start out that way. It started out simple and very basic. It came together piecemeal, in small manageable layers. It moved gradually from simplicity toward complexity because complexity by definition — by virtue of what it is — doesn’t come all at once to any artist’s mind. Complexity means “consisting of many different yet interconnected components.” The more experienced writer allows for this.  She allows for plenty of room to exist in her mind so that new ideas will have space to enter as her story grows increasingly complex.

All good long stories grow one piece at a time, one idea at a time. Those ideas found in any finished product aren’t ideas conceived all at once at the very beginning of the process. They’re born out of many smaller ideas which preceded them, which are often born out of ideas that preceded them, which are not uncommonly born out of ideas that the writer had scribbled down months or even years before — often for a completely different reason.

In this way, the story becomes complex, which it wasn’t at first. At first it was a single-cellular organism, if that. Perhaps it was only a speck of dust. It doesn’t matter. It evolved in time — by means of many micro-mutations at many different steps and stages — which the writer alone, the creator, selected for, until in time this single-cellular organism or speck of dust evolved into the towering magnificent mammalian beast before you now. That is how artistic complexity emerges.

That’s how all daunting artistic tasks are accomplished: gradually, incrementally, cumulatively, painstakingly.

When you realize this, you realize two other things simultaneously: you realized that fiction isn’t autobiography, and that to craft your own literature in the same way, only two things are fundamentally required: patience and persistence.

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** The same is true of the slanderous, libelous rumors, which have also been circulating more conspicuously the past several months: namely, that in my politico-economic convictions I’m a “a pro-life conservative” of the John Birch or William Buckley sort — and more specifically that I oppose the absolute right of all pregnant women to choose abortion or not, and that everything I’ve written or spoken in the past calling for the total decriminalization, deregulation, and legalization of the practice of abortion is now no longer true, if it ever was.

As it happens, I am by a stroke of good fortune closely acquainted with the world’s foremost authority on all questions of my politico-economic convictions: me.

I’m therefore able to tell you with absolute certainty and full confidence that I’ve never in my life not supported the absolute, unalienable right of all pregnant women to choose abortion or not, and that everything I’ve written or spoken in the past calling for the total decriminalization, deregulation, and legalization of the practice of abortion — and I’ve written and spoken a great deal about this subject — is as deeply held and as passionately held a conviction as I’ve ever had.

Which is saying a lot.

I support in full and I defend in full the absolute, unalienable right of all pregnant women to choose abortion or not — as they and they alone choose — and as I’ve always supported and defended this absolute, unalienable right. I also still call as stridently as I ever have for the total decriminalization, deregulation, and legalization of the practice of abortion. There’s never been a time in my life when any of that wasn’t the case.

Also, I can’t stand religious politics — not of any kind, and that includes what is by far the most prevalent one today: statolatry — any more than I can stand partisan politics of any kind, for the exact same reason. Which is why I can’t stand William Buckley and his (waning) National Review legacy or the John Birch Society and its (waning) legacy. I espouse a strict Jeffersonian wall of separation between politics and religion — and this includes the religion of Gaia — and I always have.

I’ve defended all my life the absolute, unalienable right to choose abortion, and I’ve done so far more exhaustively than any doctor, scientist, politician, pundit, or self-described progressive-liberal democrat of whom I’m aware. I’ve defended it far more comprehensively than any of them have ever conceived of defending it, if the truth be told — or, at any rate, any one of them I’ve personally ever seen or heard — though I gladly welcome being proven wrong about this. Because there’s nothing I love more than finding likeminded souls. If, therefore, you know that person or those people, introduce me. Please introduce me to any and every person who’s defended the unalienable right of all pregnant women to choose abortion or not, as she and she alone chooses, on the grounds that choice, which is also called moral agency, is the fundamental feature of the conceptual faculty, which homo-sapiens sapiens alone among all earthen creatures possess, and that moral agency and human individuation together form the underpinnings of all legitimate rights — they form it entirely. I wish to meet this person immediately, so that I can buy him or her a drink and then propose a toast to this person and all such people, acknowledging that a high ideal has touched and sanctified my day.

I still support in full and have never wavered in this conviction that the state deregulate and decriminalize in full the practice of abortion, as I still support in full every woman’s right to exercise her faculty of choice and to exercise her rights in this arena and in every other arena of human life: her right to choose, the most basic right there is, and her right to act, her right to pursue, and that there be no legal impediments or prohibitions to the fulfillment of her choice. I’ve never not supported it. I still do support it. Let the record so reflect that.

Let the record so reflect as well the corpus of written and spoken testimony describing my stated position on this issue — my own testimony and the testimony of others — many of whom will despise me for life because of my convictions concerning the right of every woman to choose abortion or not, which I recognize as unalienable and absolute — meaning: this right cannot rightfully be taken, transferred, revoked, or made alien.

This right, like any real right, is both a moral right and also a political one. As the philosopher Herbert Spencer phrased it: “Rights are moral-politico precepts.”

[Note in particular that on the issue of abortion, the actual right is the right to choose and pursue. This is a subtle but critical distinction to make. It’s a critical distinction to make in every issue regarding rights, but it’s particularly critical in the case of abortion, because of its extremely polarizing nature.]***

Anyone claiming that my convictions on this issue are (or have ever been) anything other than what I’ve just described is witch-hunting.

The colossal error the witch-hunters make here — an error not libelous or slanderous, perhaps, and perhaps even honest — stems, I think, from the fact that I’m actually pro-choice.

By “actually pro-choice” I mean to distinguish it from “nominally pro-choice,” which is the Orwellian meaning most commonly ascribed these days to the term “pro-choice,” and which the vast majority of self-described pro-choices are: nominally pro-choice but in actuality anti-choice — depending upon the choice that’s made.

The Orwellian meaning of “pro-choice” — like its equally nonsensical counterpart “pro-life” — is a textbook example of a thought-stopper, also known as a “thought-terminating cliche” or “loaded phrase” or “loaded language” or “bumper-sticker logic” — all of which is to say: dogma.

Dogma is the deadliest thing known to the human mind.

This particular strain of dogma — that of the thought-terminating cliche strain — happens to be the most insidious. It’s within you before you’re even aware of its presence, and we’re all vulnerable to it.

Would you like to know why?

Because language is constantly evolving.

Because the technological scope and reach now, which we all have easy access to, has sped up the evolution of language at an astronomically faster rate.

Thus yesterday’s clever phrase becomes tomorrow’s thought-terminating cliche.

And yet it’s even more treacherous than this — because thought-terminating cliches are the foremost method of all propaganda machines, governmental and non-governmental alike. This is why millions if not billions of daily bots around the clock flood all headquarters of communication and the channels that lead to these headquarters: because now the work of indoctrination never sleeps.

Buzzwords, catchwords, catchphrases, new slanguage — these aren’t the only things we must be ever vigilant about, although certainly that. It’s the signs and symbols, the banners and flags. It’s mass movements and mass solidarity, the assemblage of groupthink in less than one week. I’m still trying to get my head around how fast the covid dogma took hold worldwide, it’s brand-new adherents willing to die for a cause they know nothing of — had not ever heard of until a few weeks before full indoctrination took place. It’s the swarms of people all across the globe simultaneously hanging the latest faddish flag of the latest rage, or sticking its sticker on computer or car bumper. It’s the withering of the critical sense, which is the withering of all desire to look at things inquisitively, to appraise them, evaluate and seek to know their nature, to understand them before aligning all the way. Here’s a by no means exhaustive list of examples:

“We are the 99 percent,” “Fight Privilege,” “Pro-life,” “Pro-choice,” “Resist,” “And yet she persisted,” “#BLM,” “Me Too,” “LGBBTQ,” “LGBTQIA+” “We’re all in this together,” “Embrace pronouns,” “Never Forget,” “I stand with Ukraine,” “Fuck Texas,” “I stand with Palestine,” “Fuck Trump,” “I stand with immigrants,” “Fuck Biden,” “I stand with Israel,” “COVID-19.”

It isn’t the truth or falsehood of any given thing, understand. It’s the boilerplate nature. The key is found there. Dogma can never shake its odor. It smells like boilerplate — acrid, frozen, lifeless. That will ever be your infallible clue.

Cliches, platitudes, bromides, shibboleths, slogans, thought-stoppers — you know what they actually are? They’re stock integrations. They’re canned syntheses. Like all dogma, they seek to circumvent the cognitive effort of integration — the integration of observed reality. This cognitive effort is the effort attention and focus. It’s the fundamental thing that all humans must exert in order to truly know, grasp, comprehend, understand, learn. It’s that which no one can circumvent when there’s a thirst for true knowledge and understanding. No one person or group can implant automatic knowledge and understanding into another’s mind. Learning must be undertaken by each individual person, and it requires effort. This is why dogma is the deadliest thing known to the human mind.

It’s also why I say with emphasis that I’m actually pro-choice: because I’m not pro-choice in the Orwellian sense. I actually do support in full and defend in full every woman’s right to choose to abort her fetus or not choose to abort her fetus, as she chooses. It doesn’t mean that I only defend her right to choose to abort her fetus.

Being actually pro-choice means that you actually have the nerve to defend with vehemence a woman’s absolute, unalienable right to have and keep her child or children if she chooses, just as you defend with equal vehemence her right to choose to abort her  fetus — and for precisely same reason: you believe in full freedom choice.

You’ll perhaps scoff here at my saying that I defend a woman’s unalienable right to have and keep her child or children, as if this is something ever in question, yes?

No?

You’d be wrong in so scoffing here.

The worldwide move to regulate how many children women are permitted to have, such as we’ve seen in communist China these past 70 years, has long been gathering support across the world, and it’s growing rapidly. (In fact, one of the biggest challenges facing the world fifty or so years from now — and demographers have been screaming about this for the last three decades — is under-population, and the possibility of mass starvation which will result from under-population.) If you’re a scoffer on this particular subject, you’ll then be surprised to learn how many people now — people, for instance, whom I’d not known 15 minutes previous and who know nothing about me or my mother — are outraged the moment they learn how many children my mother had.

“Totally unacceptable,” as one fellow named Michael (“Mikey”) McCallum recently expressed it to me, and added: “Irresponsible. Reprehensible.”

Until about a decade ago, I’d never in my life heard anyone say or even suggest this sort of thing — not a single time that I can recall.

Now such sanctimonious reprimands are, if not exactly common, not exactly uncommon either.

Let this serve as an example: an example of how “pro-choice” dogma has infiltrated the human psyche, the insidious way it’s crept in, with most unaware it was ever happening. So that before anyone realizes it, the right not to choose abortion, if that’s what a woman chooses, seems to people alien and non-absolute, and only the right to choose abortion seems a legitimate thing.

In actuality, the specific choice is totally irrelevant to all politico-legal questions here because, as I just wrote, both of them stand for precisely the same principle: the right to choose — i.e. the right to select between alternatives — and the freedom to make that choice. That’s the only politico-legal issue — not the specific choice made, but the freedom to choose. The specific choice of any given person — the selection that person makes — never enters the equation because it’s irrelevant to the principle behind it, which is the right of choice or not.

There can be no choice if there’s no alternative from which to choose.

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***The pregnant woman is an individuated, autonomous human-being. The fetus she carries is not. The pregnant woman — her living, breathing, autonomous, individuated brain and body — give life entirely to the fetus she carries and incubates within her. The right therefore belongs exclusively and entirely to this woman because the fetus she carries is entirely and exclusively dependent upon her for life. Indeed, it is a part of her. She is its host.

To subvert this in any way — by saying, for instance, that the unindividuated and fully dependent fetus, which doesn’t yet possess the faculty of choice and which therefore doesn’t possess moral agency, has “a right” over the living, breathing, individuated, independent, life-giving human who’s hosting and sustaining the fetus she carries; or to suggest even remotely that this fully formed and individuated person, who does possess full moral agency and the ability to exercise her volitional faculty and who does because of this possess in full and absolute rights — to even suggest that her rights are surrendered or subordinate to the fetus she hosts and completely sustains is to turn the concept of rights on its head. It’s to reverse the order. It’s to make rights alienable and non-absolute. It’s to render the concept of rights meaningless by turning it into an empty word — an unanchored abstraction without any actual referent or true standard that moors it to reality — a word without gauge or principle undergirding it, thereby nullifying the entire concept of rights. Because the right belongs not to the part but to the individuated whole.

Only when the fetus is individuated do rights begin. (Note that they begin here but aren’t at this point fully fledged: the parents retain control of their children as their bodies and brains mature. This is the reason that if a baby accidentally kills someone, by pulling the trigger of a loaded gun or crossbow, for example, that baby is not held responsible or liable for murder.) This is so by definition — i.e. by definition of what rights are: a formal codification of the freedoms with which each individual human-being is born.

The man who impregnated the woman does not have any rights in this matter — by which I mean: the man who impregnated her does not have any legal-moral status or claim whatsoever over what the pregnant woman ultimately chooses. She and she alone possesses the total right here. It’s her body and brain giving life entire to the fetus inside her. The fetus is for that time a part of her. As the woman retains full rights over all her constituent parts, so she retains full right over her fetus — and for identical reasons. The right is arrantly hers. Her fingers and her arms do not have rightful claim over her. She has rightful claim over them.

The man who impregnated the woman can give his opinion and try to persuade her one way or the other, but he has no legal-moral justification or jurisdiction in this matter. He has no moral-legal grounds — no rightful claim, no rightful status. He does not in this matter possess “partial rights.” There are no such things as partial rights. That’s the opposite of absolute. The right belongs exclusively to the host of the fetus — the individuated human-being giving and sustaining the fetus’s life in full.

Fetuses do not possess rights. Embryos do not possess rights. Zygotes do not possess rights. Cytoplasm does not possess rights. Protoplasm does not possess rights. There are no such things as “cytoplasmic rights” or “protoplasmic rights” or “embryonic rights” or “zygotic rights” or “fetal rights” or “ovary rights” or “spermal rights” — just as there are no such things as “cellular rights” or “bacterial rights” or “amoeba rights.” Anyone who says otherwise does not know the meaning of the term rights and where in reality it derives.

Because I vehemently, passionately, doggedly defend the mother’s choice to keep the child she named Alfie Evans does not in any way make me “anti-abortion,” which I’m not. Do you know what it does make me? It makes me pro-choice. Literally.

Because I make videos vehemently, passionately denouncing experimental genetic injections, delivered by means of lipid nanoparitcles which cross the blood-brain barrier and the placenta and which have long been known to collect in the ovaries and testes of the fetus and the fully individuated human being carrying the fetus, often damaging all reproductive capacities thereby — because I vehemently, passionately denounce these experimental genetic injections not tested a single time before being injected into billions of pregnant woman worldwide — an unthinkable horror-show which is right up to the present moment still going on, and which has never before been acted out in human history — that is, until 2020-2021 when a virus with a .01-.05 percent lethality (i.e. a bad seasonal flu, such as we saw in, for instance, 2018) came along; because I in my videos also vehemently, passionately denounce the fact that not a single one of these pregnant women was (because of the untested, experimental nature of these genetic injections) fully informed or ever could have been and so could give absolutely nothing like full and informed consent (aussi the billions of individuated human children injected and experimented upon), thus making a mockery of the principle of full and informed consent, which I also passionately support and defend — it doesn’t somehow make me anti-abortion, which I am not. Do you know what it does make me? It makes me pro-choice. Literally.

It also makes me pro full-and-informed consent — literally — which I am, and which, concerning this issue, most self-described pro-choicers I know are not.

I’m pro full-and-informed consent.

Do you know what this in turn makes me?

It makes me pro-choice. Literally.

Why?

Because you can neither give your full, informed consent nor exercise your full faculty of choice if you’re not fully informed on the issue you’ve been asked to consent to.

I’m pro full-and-informed consent. Literally.

The reason I am is that I’m also pro-choice. Literally.

They’re corollaries.

I’m not pro-choice, nominally — like the entire progressive-left world.

Consider for a moment the vast majority of self-proclaimed, self-described “pro-choicers,” rabid with sanctimony and fury at people like me for being pro-choice. Literally.

Consider their sanctimony and rage for my pointing out the hypocrisy in supporting with a full-throat this atrocity exhibition of anti-choice, anti full-and-informed consent medical tyranny, which was unleashed upon the world overnight. Consider how this tyranny and the left’s full-throated support of it obliterated in an instant the unalienable right to bodily autonomy and all the centuries of intellectual work and discipline and effort required to develop and systematize and codify this overwhelming liberating intellectual achievement: the full right to individual autonomy, body and brain alike.

Consider not just the obliteration of this intellectual achievement but also the glee and nihilistic chop-licking with which it was accompanied — chop-licking predominantly, though not exclusively, by the progressive-left majority, worldwide, who aided and abetted this worldwide genocidal act, this catastrophic act of death and destruction and state usurpation of individual human lives, the wild-eyed jeering and cheering-on of an unthinkable holocaust, the total death count of which (already well into the millions) still to be determined because the holocaust, ongoing up to this precise moment in time, has a slow-death count built into it, so that people often don’t experience adverse affects for a year or more to come, nobody really knows how long, because these experimental genetic platforms were only tested for two months and on a small number of people. That’s to say nothing of the fact that in the animal trials preceding the “warp-speed” human trials, all the animals died within 18 months — all without exception died of autoimmune disorders — nor is it to say anything of all the fatal illnesses caused which no doctor or nurse even thinks to associate with these genetic platforms, because of the length of time that’s passed since the last injection (i.e. a full year or more) nor does it say anything of cancers, turbo-cancers, and other illnesses, either long under remission or not there at all, now coming out of remission with a virulence of shocking lethality.

Consider the aiding and abetting of this by reducing the concept of individual autonomy into the logic of bumper stickers, by completely ignoring the principle of full-and-informed consent and then attempting to ridicule it into oblivion, and consider also what’s actually being opposed: the full, unalienable right to make an informed decision and choose what you and you alone decide to have injected into your body. In other words, they’re opposed to being pro-choice. Literally.

Because they’re pro-choice. Nominally.

What the world recently witnessed is nothing less than an overwhelming worldwide advocacy of pro-force, pro-coercion statism, under which the right to freely choose is disallowed and is punishable by force, full-and-informed consent banished, the absolute and unalienable right to choose or not choose cheered and jeered out of all recognition, full power ceded with glee to bureaucrats. And yet one of the banners these policies now exist under isn’t “tyranny,” as any sane person would likely guess, but “pro-choice.”

Yes, this is what it’s come to. You’re pro-choice if and only if you support the right to abort, as I do and always have, but not anything else.

That’s as Orwellian as anything I’ve ever seen or heard.

Consider the mockery this has made of the real freedom to choose, the damage it’s done.

Consider again that at least 90 percent of all self-proclaimed, self-described “pro-choicers” you and I both know aided and abetted the total subversion of the right to choose. Consider again how they cheered the obliteration of bodily autonomy as a right and spat venom at those who defended the right to bodily autonomy and the full freedom to choose what’s injected into one’s own muscles and veins.

Do you know why the majority of people did this?

Because they’re pro-choice in name only.

The fate of the world rests on your ability to expose thought-terminating cliches and to discern dogma.

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Because my fiction discusses as part of its plot a real-life archeological find — known as the Pedro Mountain Mummy — a carefully mummified aboriginal fetus, stillborn, which mysteriously vanished shortly after it was discovered and has never been found since, and which my friend Dr. George Gil, professor Emeritus of Anthropology and one of the world’s foremost forensic anthropologists, was the first to study, and which he discussed with me at great length, and in which mummified fetus I thought I saw a metaphor for the human potential which resides within us all — a metaphor to incorporate into my fiction — it doesn’t make me anti-abortion, which I’m not.

Because I describe an antagonist in my fiction — a man who killed the mother of my story’s protagonist, though the protagonist doesn’t yet know for certain that this man, the antagonist, who happens to be his father, killed his mother, the antagonist’s wife  — because I describe this antagonist after cleaning and dressing an elk and therefore flecked across the face and hair with fresh elk blood, both his forearms and both hands totally stained with blood, as looking to the protagonist “like an abortionist or a butcher in the firelight” — doesn’t make me anti-abortion, which I’m not. Nor does it make me anti-butcher’s rights, which I’m also not.

Nor does it mean my father or mother abused or molested me, which they did not.

Because I have in a different book a protagonist whose biological mother gives the protagonist up for adoption “because of her poverty,” as I say in the book, doesn’t make me anti-abortion, which I’m not.

Because my mother, a widow widowed with 11 children, chose to give birth to 12 children, of which I’m the youngest, and because my father had two sons, both of whom are older than me and both of whom were by his first wife, who died of a brain tumor (a death of purely natural cause, and I do assure you), making me the youngest of a combined 14 total children, doesn’t make either me or my mother or my father anti-abortion, which none of us were or are.

Because I once included screenshots of my own literature at the end of an analysis of a short poem by Robert Graves, which is about life and death and war, and because these screenshots depicted what I perceive as the great beauty of nature and young small animal life, doesn’t make me anti-abortion, which I’m not.

More than a million of my own written and published words prove my unwavering stance on and defense of the absolute and unalienable right to choose abortion, and my uncompromising advocacy to entirely deregulate, decriminalize, and fully legalize the medical practice of abortion. As do my words here.

I alone of anyone I personally know protested Mississippi’s restrictions on abortion rights, which happened almost concurrently with Texas’s equally stringent restrictions — the two states are almost identical in their legislation. Yet for well over a year, the entire progressive-leftist world knew nothing about Mississippi, and didn’t care about it, though they went absolutely apoplectic with murderous dogmatic rage directed entirely toward Texas. About Mississippi the left could not have cared less and so remained deafeningly silent on the subject of Mississippi’s nearly identical legislation, which, incidentally, is only a few weeks more stringent that Roe-v-Wade, which I alone of anyone I know pointed out publicly and in print. How does this, then, make me anti-abortion? And if that’s true, which it’s not, why was I alone among anyone I personally know speaking out against Mississippi? Where were my likeminded progressive-liberal-democrat friends all that time, my good and faithful allies who never tire of throwing me under the bus?

Where were they — and where are they still today, July 4th, 2025 — when I alone among anyone I know speaks out and points out that Roe-v-Wade does not go nearly far enough in what it codified into law, because Roe-v-Wade was only ever first-trimester?

Why have I yet to hear from a single self-described progressive-liberal-democrat that they’re even aware of this at all — that they even know this about the Roe-v-Wade ruling, upon which their sun rises and sets?

Surely the surprise on their faces when they’re told what Roe-v-Wade actually stipulates, in terms of the number of weeks of pregnancy that abortion rights are legally recognized, surely it isn’t the surprise of not actually knowing the facts about this matter — or is it?

I mean, surely it can’t be that so many enraged people are ignorant about what this landmark ruling actually codified into law — not after five full decades have passed since Roe-v-Wade became the law of the land? It’s not actually possible, is it? to have no knowledge of what Roe-v-Wade actually says, denotes, stipulates, legislates, and yet at the same time to make it the hill you die upon?

Or could we be seeing something more like this ridiculous phenomenon?

Well, I wonder.

And where were all my self-described “libertarian” allies — left and right “libertarians” alike — when I alone spoke out against Ron Paul, circa 2007 and 2008, because Ron Paul, like his son Rand Paul, is militantly anti-abortion, to say nothing of bigoted? Where were my good allies then, when I was publicly attacked with a murderous rage?

I’ll tell you where they were not: they were not anywhere to be found — even among my friends — because it wasn’t faddish or dogmatic enough, I presume. With friends like that, who needs friends?

And who stands with me in my convictions about abortion laws right now, today — my defense of the inalienable right to choose abortion or not right up to the point of human individuation? Do you know who? Me neither. But I’ll tell who doesn’t stand with me here: 85-to-95 percent of self-described, registered progressive-liberal-democrats, who for decades now, year in year and year out, right up to the present day, are consistently opposed to abortion rights after some vague unspecified time, somewhere around the second trimester, give or take, it’s hard for them to say with any certainty.

And yet these same self-described progressive-liberal-democrats who, unlike me, do not actually support the right to choose — especially after a certain vague point in time, usually never defined — will at any given time grow unhinged when I stridently, unapologetically denounce, for instance, Iceland’s sickening policy of infanticide — up to 30 days after birth and even in spite of the mother’s stated and often pleading choice. They will grow unhinged as well at my fierce opposition to the state-force imposed upon, for instance, Alfie Evans’s mother when she chose to keep her child, and the British state still said no, even after she exercised her choice, after she pleaded that her absolute right-of-choice be recognized — a right she does most definitely possess, whether recognized or not — and which, in a heinous and criminal act, an act of outright injustice committed by the British state, ignored. Where were all my pro-choice allies then, when I was defending this woman’s absolute right to choose? Why did they remain mute, unconcerned, uncaring, when the exercise of this woman’s right to choose was so shockingly, so obviously trammeled upon by the state? Was it because she made a different choice than the choice they wanted her to make? If so, doesn’t this directly imply that they never really wanted her to have a choice since if she chose opposite what they deem the only choice, there was never a choice at all?

Yes, it does. It implies precisely that.

Why?

Because they’re pro-choice. Nominally.

Whereas I’m pro-choice. Literally.

I always have been.

I am not anti-abortion. I’m anti anti-choice — which is to say: I’m anti pro-choice nominally.

I always have been.

These are some of the reasons I’ve never cared for the term — the thought-terminating cliche — known as “pro-choice.”

Consider once more the “pro-choice” groups and people around the world who supported state force over her right to choose and who made her choice, the choice to keep her already born child — and please note this as well: the Alfie Evans case was never about abortion rights but was always a question of euthanasia. They’re two separate issues.

The fate of the world rests upon your ability to descry thought-terminating cliches and to discern dogma.

Consider also the way in which doctors, politicians, and rabid activists worldwide completely ignored this woman’s choice because they did not, after all, want her to have any choice. They did not want her to have any choice — if, that is, hher choice was not to euthanize but keep her child, which she’d already birthed. The woman’s words, her repeatedly stated desire and decision, her repeated pleas, the exercise of her volitional faculty — it was all violated in the most blatant and manner possible. And I, who spoke out against this barbarous act of state tyranny and defended her right to choose, I’m the one who’s now somehow not “pro-choice” but “anti-abortion” because I spoke in defense of her right to choose among the alternatives presented in this non-abortion issue.

I’m now “anti-abortion” because I’m pro-choice. Literally.

Up is down.

Hot is cold.

Left is right.

Black is white.

The rights of a fully individuated, fully grown human being, a woman old enough to bear children and make her own decisions, and yet her choice was ignored when she chose not to euthanize her child which she’d already birthed, a totally illegal act, but was instead steamrolled by the state and activists worldwide, all of whom assumed the state had legitimate control over her right to choose, and could therefore invalidate what she and she alone wanted and what she chose. This act is many, many things, but pro-choice it most certainly among them.

Here’s some further reading on what it actually means to be pro-choice. Literally.

The Apotheosis of Ron Paul

Abortion Rights Do Not Entail Forcing People to Fund the Abortions of Others

Hobby Lobby is Absolutely in the Right

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***When a person has the right to do or pursue something, it means that in so doing or so pursuing, that person isn’t engaged in any wrongdoing. It means this person is doing nothing unlawful, illicit, illegal. It’s an instance where we glimpse the lexical-philosophical link between ethical principles (right-versus-wrong) and politico-economic principles (the right-to-do versus a wrongdoing).

Yet the most important thing to note here — the point upon which many great minds have foundered — is that the legitimate right to choose doesn’t encompass or entail the full completion or fulfillment of the thing chosen.

The right to choose abortion, which is absolute and unalienable — which is to say,  morally-politically justified and not unlawful — doesn’t mean that the full accomplishment or completion of the procedure is guaranteed, provided, fulfilled. This latter part comes about through voluntary, consensual agreement — agreement with the doctor and the staff, among many other things — which is another way of describing voluntary exchange or voluntary trade or voluntary human cooperation, all of which in this context are the same thing.

Actual rights guarantee that you are free to choose, try, and pursue, and that if you achieve your aim it is yours by right, unalienably. But actual rights do not guarantee or entail actual achievement, fulfillment, or success — they cannot guarantee it — because achievement, success, and fulfillment of the choice you’ve rightfully exercised may (and probably does) require the labor and expertise of others with whom you must come to a voluntary, consensual, mutual agreement. Rights guarantee that if you achieve what you (legally) sought, it’s your unalienably — or inalieanably (both words are still in use today, and they, too, are synonymous). Rights guarantee nothing more and nothing less than this.

Nobody has the right to the life and labor of another human being, a doctor’s life and labor included.

Voluntary, consensual, mutual agreement is an act of human cooperation freely engaged in.

You do have the right to pursue a job — i.e. to try and get one — but you don’t have the right to a job.

A job must first of all exist before you’re able to get one. The creation of a job requires many things — an idea, a product, a good, a service, capital, means of production, a lawn to mow, which presupposes property — not a single one of which you have a right to. The person who creates a job, which you’re free to pursue, is under no duty or obligation to provide you with a job, because they, like you, are also free to choose. It’s their right choose, just as it’s your right to choose. You both have that freedom equally. If you did have the right to a job, which you don’t, you’d render the concept of rights null and void because you’d be turning the concept of rights inside-out — impossible to reconcile, impossible to make sense of, and therefore impossible to enforce. “The right to a job” is an example of a so-called positive right, which in actuality doesn’t exist.

You do have a right to pursue a home, but you do not have the right to housing. “The right to housing” is an example of a so-called positive right, which in actuality doesn’t exist.

You do have the right to start a business which you hope will thrive, but you do not have the right to a thriving business.

For your business to thrive, you must gain enough customers who voluntarily choose to pay you in exchange for whatever it is you offer, so that you may then thrive in your business. You therefore cannot have the right to a thriving business since customer patronage cannot be forced or enforced. And what if customers didn’t like whatever it is you offer and yet, even so, even in spite of customer dislike or indifference, your offering was forced onto people? This is also known as socialism, which is also known as crony capitalism. “The right to a thriving business” is an example of a so-called positive right, which in actuality doesn’t exist.

You do have the right to drink alcohol, but you don’t have the right to alcohol. You must obtain alcohol by either producing it or exchanging for it.

You do have the right to try and produce alcohol, even if conservatives and liberals worldwide insist that you don’t possess this right, and even if both parties have for centuries passed laws prohibiting the exercise of this right, but you don’t have the right to alcohol. The right to try and produce alcohol isn’t “the right to alcohol.”  This  example illustrates perfectly the inseparable link between property and person. The right to property is “the right to use, dispose, and act in the most absolute manner.” The right to produce and use, which is unalienable and absolute, does not mean that you have a right to anything you didn’t produce. “The right to alcohol” is an example of a so-called positive right, which in actuality doesn’t exist. It skips over the same crucial step that the “right to a job” skips over: before anyone can have a thing, that thing must first exist. If someone else brought it into existence, you don’t have legal claim to take possession of it without the full consent of the maker. You do have a right to try and bring that thing into existence — with no guarantees you’ll succeed — and you also have a right to that thing once you’ve succeeded in bringing it into existence, but you don’t have a right to the thing itself without producing it.

You don’t have the right to an airplane. But you do have a right to try building an airplane, and if you succeed in building it, it’s yours by right.

This is the subtle but crucial point upon which many great minds have foundered.

Here’s another way of saying the exact same thing:

You do have the right to try and become a trillionaire. But you don’t have the right to a trillion dollars. If, however, you succeed in earning a trillion dollars, that money is yours by right.

Or: You don’t have the right to a billion dollars. But you do have the right to the billion dollars you earned by selling two-hundred-fifty-million items to willing customers who paid you $4.00 for each item.

Or: You don’t have a right to my money. But you do have a right to my money if you sold me something I agreed to pay you for, and you gave me the thing I agreed to pay you for even though I didn’t have the money on me at the time, and yet I promised I’d pay you in exchange for this thing of yours, which I wanted but still haven’t paid you for.

Or: I don’t have a right to your money. But I do have a right to your money if I worked for you and you agreed to pay me for my work and then you didn’t pay me.

You do have the right to eat food, but you don’t have the right to food. Food must be produced or gathered or fished for or hunted or paid for. “The right to food” is an example of a so-called positive right, which in actuality doesn’t exist.

You do have the right to learn how to drive, but you don’t have the right to a car. “The right to a car” is an example of a so-called positive right, which in actuality doesn’t exist.

You do have the right to free speech, but you don’t have the right to a daily or weekly or monthly newspaper column or a social-media profile. “The right to a newspaper column or the right to a social-media profile” are examples of so-called positive rights, which in actuality don’t exist.

You do have the right to freely associate with anyone who agrees to associate with you, but you don’t have the right not to be offended. “The right not to be offended” is a plea for a state-sanctioned privilege that would protect a people so intellectually fragile that they must have all language legally censored for fear that certain words or a combination of words might reach their ears, with, on top of that, no way to determine what any given person may take offense to. “The right not to be offended” is one of the silliest examples of a so-called positive right, which in actuality doesn’t exist. You do, however, have the right to walk away. You do have the right as well to not listen.

You do have the right to pursue happiness and you do have the right to pursue good health, but you don’t have the right to healthcare or happiness-care, both of which entail innumerable processes, procedures, consultations, tests, examinations, follow-ups, staff, and much more, not a single one of which anybody has a duty to provide you with. Why? Because they, like you, are free to choose. They, like you, have the right to choose what they wish to do with their time and whom they wish to serve, if anybody. In order to have all the things these people offer, they must voluntarily, consensually agree to exchange with you, interact with you, cooperate with you. “The right to be happy” and “the right to healthcare” are examples of so-called positive rights, which in actuality don’t exist.

Likewise the right to choose and pursue abortion, which is absolute and unalienable. In choosing abortion and pursuing it, you’re doing nothing illegal, illicit, unlawful, criminal, forbidden, wrong. But this right does not and cannot encompass, guarantee, or ensure the right to fulfillment of a successful outcome or completed procedure since fulfillment and successful outcomes and completed procedures require, for one, a fee, which someone must pay or else these clinics and practices go out of business, bankrupt, unable to sustain their practice, unable to thrive. Successful outcomes and completed procedures also require medical specialists who must train for years after they initially choose to pursue medicine, and nobody has the right to the knowledge or expertise of another human-being — just as nobody has the right to the care of they provide without paying them what they ask. No such rights exist. In this sense — the sense I’ve just explicated these last 22 paragraphs — the phrase “the right to an abortion” isn’t quite precise since it implies the right to a completed, fulfilled procedure. The right is found in the choice of abortion, and in the full freedom to pursue the procedure and its lawfulness — all of which are absolute and unalienable rights.

So-called “positive rights,” which are a figment, amount in practice to the total violation of rights — ultimately for everyone. If I have a right to job that you created but you’d rather hire someone else instead, your rights have been violated by my positive right to the job you created.

Or imagine if you and I did have the (positive) right to the labor and expertise of medical specialists, which we don’t. Where, first of all, does our right go if these specialists we rightfully have claim to move away? Where does our right go then? Is it in limbo? Does it hover in stasis while these specialists, whom we once had moral-legal claim to, are replaced? And what happens to our rights in the context of the coming replacements whom we’re about to also have moral-legal claim to, their knowledge, their time, their labor? Do our hovering rights in limbo or stasis transfer over the moments these replacements arrive?  Or do our rights-in-statis assume their former positions only after these replacements have filled out the proper paperwork and are fully trained? If so, what becomes of our right to their treatment and care — their knowledge and labor — when these replacements leave or kill themselves, as happens all the time in communist regimes and on the American Indian Reservations, which are also communistic regimes? Do our rights to their knowledge and expertise and labor go back in limbo and hover statically again after they’ve committed suicide for our legal claim to their time and work? And what if, as is inevitably happens in all communistic-Indian-Reservation regimes, no replacements ever come? What if there are no more to be had? What if no medical specialists choose to replace the medical personnel who proceeded them? What if those who chose to leave because they didn’t like working under such conditions, wherein you and I had moral-legal claim to their work and time, weren’t allowed to leave? What if no enough young people wanted to learn medicine because they didn’t want to choose for an occupation one in which you and I have moral-legal claim to their expertise and time, and so there are not enough doctors — they don’t exist — for us to have moral-legal claim to? What if no doctor wants to live and work here anymore? Should specialists then be forced at gun-point to live and work in these places?

Or rather should these specialists — these human-beings — possess, like you and I, the right to choose how they work and whom they see, so that we have claim to them no more? Should they be allowed to freely associate, as you and I are freely allowed. And what becomes of us then? Do we actually have more choices and better specialists when all humans have the full and legally protected right to choose? Do we then have to go to practitioners with whom we voluntarily, consensually cooperate and come to agreements at a fee that’s mutually agreed upon? If so, is our only right after all the right to choose — meaning: in so choosing, we’re acting freely, and this choice and freedom-of-action are entirely guaranteed by law, no crime committed by anyone, no wrongdoing, no forbidden act?

If specialists (of any kind, whether medical or otherwise) choose to work for free or at a reduced rate, or if they choose to be part of a cooperation or coalition who collects money charitably from people voluntarily contributing and if this money is then pooled to help pay for medical fees of the less fortunate, this too is an absolute, unalienable right of these people. They are free to do that — and many do, and I fully support and applaud them. They are absolutely free to choose this path and pursue all that’s necessary in joining such a co-op or coalition. And when the state is not involved in forcing “charity” (another loading of language, there) such co-ops and coalitions flourish. Do you know why? Because humans are not helpless, heartless, mindless creatures incapable of figuring out harmonious systems and systems-of-care, good-will, and humans are not dependent on the state to live and flourish.  Humans are the opposite of all this: when humans are left free — when the right to choose is fully recognized and fully protected — humans prosper and ingenuity and creative ideas explode and so does peace on earth and good-will, abundance, benevolence.

Likewise the pregnant woman who chooses abortion, which is her absolute, unalienable right, is absolutely free to choose the care of specialists working within co-ops or coalitions. And likewise these co-ops and coalitions are free to treat her or not, as they choose.

The pregnant woman doesn’t have the right to force or in any way coerce, by means of state action or otherwise, anyone into treating her, including those who choose to work for free. These for-free workers retain the right of choice. They do not cede it to the desires or demands or even the necessities of others. It’s an arrangement which must always be voluntarily agreed upon, by all parties.

There is no right to force or coerce.

There is no freedom other than the type which voluntary exchange brings about.

The only rights in the scenario I’ve just described, the only real rights, are the pregnant woman’s right to choose abortion — her freedom to choose and pursue it, without any fear of legal reprisal or punishment or or prohibition or restriction of her liberties since she’s done nothing wrong or unlawful or forbidden but is acting entirely by right: i.e. lawfully.

Likewise all medical specialists who practice abortion practice it by right and are therefore involved in no wrongdoing. They are practicing lawfully and are subject to no legal reprisal whatsoever since in the choice and exercise of this practice these specialists are acting entirely by right, not by privilege, which is a permission granted or not.

These practitioners are acting by right under an enumeration and specification of rights, which are fully ratified and recognized by a legally-binding document, often called a Constitution, any breach of which constitutes a crime, an injustice, an act of wrongdoing.

These specialists work freely — by right  (not for free, unless they choose) — but freely by right in their practice, which means, among other things, that they work free from the anxiety that looms over places and precincts which practice acts that the state deems forbidden, illegal, unlawful, or illicit, its practitioners part of a criminal underworld whose markets are black.

When practitioners and producers operate not by permission or black-market but by right, it means that they act and practice with the full ratification and recognition of their inalienable freedom to do so — the state has fully recognized and sanctioned their liberty to practice thus — so that in their work and practice they remain forever secure and at liberty: free from that dog authority slavering ever at the throat, no fear of no fucking po-po no mo, no badges, no warrants, no longer el puerca secreto, neither the SS nor the KGB nor the FBI nor the CIA nor the BMF nor the Gestapo nor any other long arm of any other law-enforcement, which is also known as the state, which is the apparatus that holds an exclusive monopoly on the exercise of force with impunity. No longer need any practitioner fear the police state again under such a system as I’ve described, because these medical practitioners are acting and practicing lawfully, which means without any wrongdoing, which means that they are acting and practicing entirely by right, as they are at full liberty to do — and so is the woman who chooses abortion, which I support in full.

The pregnant woman’s procedure isn’t, however, paid or performed by right. That’s an example of a “positive right,” which in actuality doesn’t exist. The choice she exercised is by right. The fulfillment of it is not by right.  It comes about through voluntary, consensual human action and interaction. That is the subtle but crucial distinction — the point upon which many great minds have foundered — which we must all take special care to specify and not neglect in our contemplation of rights. Neglecting and not specifying this distinction is what, in every instance, leads to every positive-rights claims: the inanities that seem too far-fetched to believe: i.e. because a woman has the right to choose abortion (which she does), she has the right to the complete fulfillment of the abortion (which she does not), and so she has a right to have an abortion provided for her at the expense of others, as she also has the right to the expertise and labor of doctors who practice this procedure, and one MD in particular, who’s regarded as the best and who therefore has waiting list, she, who does indeed have the absolute right to choose abortion, likewise, it is now often thought, has a right to the best MD’s care — without herself have to pay the fee and even though he’s located many miles from where she lives– and she also has the right to transportation to and from the clinic (or else how could she get there and have her choice fulfilled?) And if she can’t get there, she doesn’t, after all, have the right to choose abortion — or so it is argued. Thus in exercising her legitimate right to choose abortion, a taxpayer-funded uber to and from the clinic is entailed, the medical fee also taxpayer funded, and a whole host of other things besides — otherwise she doesn’t possess the absolute, unalienable right to choose abortion.

That is the very argument from which positive-rights claims derive. It is false. It is an argument riddled with incompatible rights-claims.

It’s’ also exactly what we’re living with right now, all across the world, in countless spheres of day-to-day life.

It is, I say again, the direct result of the chronic non-specification of what a right actually is: i.e. that which can be exercised without another person’s permission, consent, agreement, or say-so.

The scenario I’ve just put forth, so commonplace in one way or another in every daily newspaper, comes about by conflating negative rights — i.e. real rights — with positive rights, which don’t actually exist.

Neglecting this distinction and not carefully specifying it has toppled the principle and practice of rights in, for example, the United States of America, where the concept of rights has been unspecified and neglected for over two centuries. The destruction and human suffering wrought by this neglect — this neglect and non-specification of a subtle but critical distinction — is approximately incalculable.

When the “right to choose a thing and pursue it” becomes through non-specificity “the right to that thing in its complete fulfillment,” it becomes the precise point at which real rights (i.e. negative rights) turn into government-granted privileges, which are permissions granted. These permissions are in legal terms known as  “positive rights,” which in order to provide require massive amounts of funding, which in turn requires the continual application of expropriation and innumerable other acts of force. This is why socialism in and all of its endless variations is by definition a politico-economic system of force.

Negative rights refer to the fact that your rights, my rights, and everyone else’s rights impose no duty or responsibility on anyone else except that of a negative kind: i.e. we must refrain from violating the equal rights of others.

Positive rights definitionally entail a moral-legal claim over everyone and everything required in order to bring about its fulfillment. In its full expression, positive rights claims are the bedrock of all forms of socialism.

Politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and lawyers are experts at manipulating language — in confusing the vocabulary and exposing the vulnerable points of any given language-system, most especially those areas of non-specificity and ambiguity, which are open to interpretation or reinterpretation. Such experts fill these vulnerable areas with their own bias or those of their clients — often resulting in huge sums of money for these language manipulators — and in so doing create new definitions in place of old, long-neglected, or forgotten meanings. Or by changing definitions entirely by means of lexical hair-splitting to the point of absurdity. In brief, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and lawyers are experts in exploiting linguistic deficiencies in order to further their aims, which are often political, religious, or otherwise ideological and always involve enormous sums of money.

This is why the fate of the world rests on your vigilance in descrying dogma and thought-terminating cliches and discerning dogma — because the willingness to subvert rights by means of language manipulation crouches always at the ready, nearby, and will leap out at the first sign of lapsed vigilance.

The subtleties and nuances of meaning concerning the issue of rights, which is the bedrock upon which all freedom and justice are built, have always been and will always be complex — philosophical to such a degree that it’s left the principle of rights unexamined by most and therefore always vulnerable. For this reason, rights have for over two centuries stood wide-open to attack from all sides, whether secular or non, because so few have taught it or taken up the cause in understanding the complexity and the complexities underpinning it. So that what I’ve written here sounds radical and even outlandish, infuriating. But that’s not a testament to the principle. It’s a testament to language manipulation and the power of entrenchment that this brings.

When equivocation is cleared away and issues are made explicit, rational inquiry and discussion encouraged, it’s the side with the most precise and accurate definitions that wins. Defining is an act of identifying. Identifying means stating the nature of a thing. It means to name that thing by answering the question What is it? 

Of what stuff does it consist?

Answering that is an act of identifying. It is a process of identification. Identification is a process of reduction. Reduction is a process of distilling, boiling, reducing down to its essential characteristics the nature — the identity — of a thing.

Everything is simple once it’s reduced — even the most complicated of things. It’s the reducing that’s the difficult part. Here, then, are three of many possible reductions of the concept of rights:

All rights are elaboration of the only right there is: the right to your own life. Every other right — the right to use, dispose, and act in the most absolute manner, which is also called property, and the freedom to choose, which is the right to decide your own path and the liberty to pursue the path you’ve chosen — are nothing more or less than elaboration on the right to your own existence. Property, which includes money, is an extension of person.

If you remember that and if you remember that your rights and my rights and every other person’s rights stop where another’s begin, you’ll forever have an infallible gauge by means of which to determine a right.

A right is anything you can practice without another’s consent, agreement, approval, or say-so.

A right is that which you are at liberty to exercise without another’s permission.