freedom and reason

Before turning to today’s essay, a few clarifications are in order. I’m sure the reader has heard the dismissive phrase, “It’s just semantics”—as if the meaning of words doesn’t matter. But consider the glittering generality one sees in the propagandistic appeal to “democracy.” Does the speaker mean by this term direct democracy, liberal democracy, or industrial democracy? Vagueness in meaning is also a problem for the words “communism” and “socialism.”

Communism, in its anarchist and Marxist senses, conveys a classless and stateless social order in which the distribution of work and goods follows the dictum: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Socialism, by contrast, is a social system in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the workers, either at the level of the firm or through the state, the latter known as “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The standard definition of socialism is useful to keep. But there is another conception of socialism worth noting, since I describe it in this essay when I turn to the ideology of democratic socialism. That is Saint-Simon’s conception of an engineered society organized by experts. Rather than advocating the abolition of private property, Saint-Simon envisioned a system in which economic activity would be directed toward the common good through rational planning and administration. In his view, good government should shift from ruling over people to managing production. His vision of an organized, technocratic society profoundly influenced later socialist thought by emphasizing the moral obligation to use economic resources for the benefit of society as a whole through state direction. This is not ultimately managing people?

As for the popular meaning of communism, referring to those systems in which the people are under the thumb of an all-encompassing state, i.e., state socialism, this definition is more useful than the utopia imagined by anarchists and communists. After all, utopia literally means “nowhere.”

When Trump tells his audiences that the democratic socialists being elected to office around the country are communists, he’s not wrong. I use the popular meaning in this essay since it describes the experiences of those who have lived under communist rule. Communism, in this sense, points to a location somewhere, and we have enough real-world instances of this place to draw a conclusion about the adequacy of such systems to human freedom and well-being.

* * *

I grant that George Orwell, a thinker I much admire, complicates any simple divide between capitalism and socialism. He never renounced his identity as a democratic socialist, believing to his end that extreme inequalities of privilege and wealth were morally and politically corrosive.

At the same time, Orwell is arguably the twentieth century’s most penetrating critic of state socialism and totalitarianism. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War and his observations of Stalinism convinced him that concentrating economic and political power in the hands of the state corrupts movements founded upon ideals of equality and justice.

Despite being saved by an American Marxist fighter after being shot in the neck by a fascist sniper near Huesca in Northwestern Spain and attended to by anti-fascists during his convalescence, the war showed Orwell that the greatest threat to liberty did not come only from fascism, but also from authoritarian factions claiming to represent socialism—those communist organizations aligned with the Soviet Union.

Orwell’s epiphany came in May 1937, in Barcelona, the year he was shot. Instead of concentrating on defeating Francisco Franco’s far-right forces, communist-controlled security forces fought other republican factions, especially the anti-Stalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), the militia Orwell had joined. Orwell witnessed men he had fought alongside arrested, disappeared into secret prisons, and executed. He watched the reputations of his fallen comrades besmirched by wicked men.

A similar epiphany occurred to the American anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman years before. In December 1919, Berkman and Goldman were deported from the United States during the First Red Scare. They arrived in Soviet Russia in January 1920. They initially hoped the Bolshevik Revolution would realize many of the ideals they had long championed. However, as they traveled through Russia, they observed widespread shortages, strict censorship, the suppression of independent labor organizations, and the growing power of the secret police, the Cheka. They became increasingly concerned that political freedom was being sacrificed.

The decisive turning point came in March 1921 with the Kronstadt Rebellion. Sailors at Kronstadt—once celebrated by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks as heroes of the revolution—called for freer elections to the soviets, freedom of speech for anarchist and socialist groups, and an end to one-party rule. The Bolshevik government crushed the rebellion militarily, killing many and imprisoning or executing others. For Berkman and Goldman, Kronstadt was the moment they concluded that the Bolshevik government had become an authoritarian state rather than a vehicle for liberation.

What Stalinism showed Orwell requires little elaboration here. His great works of allegory, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, will tell the reader all about that. If a man hasn’t read these books, then there is a gap in his understanding of the problem of communism. Orwell brings to the reader what he (and Berkman and Goldman before him) saw for himself: the totalizing tendencies inherent in power not in the service of defending the intrinsic rights of man, but in the folly of transforming man’s nature.

* * *

The shared experience of Orwell, Berkman, Goldman, and many others makes plain Thomas Sowell’s distinction between the “constrained” and “unconstrained” conceptions of human nature, described in his 1987 A Conflict of Visions, and the peril of assuming the latter. In that book, Sowell argues that political disagreements often stem from differing assumptions about human nature rather than simply competing policy preferences. History tells us which assumptions accord with our species-being.

In Sowell’s view, the constrained vision sees human beings as inherently limited—imperfect in discernment, knowledge, and morality. Therefore, the best societies rely on institutions, markets, traditions, and the rule of law to channel self-interest and minimize harm. By contrast, the unconstrained vision holds that human problems are largely the result of flawed social arrangements rather than fixed human limitations, and that deliberate planning and expertise can significantly improve society if the right people and policies are put in place. Today, the unconstrained vision is dressed in the colors of “oppressed-oppressor” and “victim-perpetrator.”

Sowell shows how the enduring debates over economics, equality, government, and justice reflect these deeper, competing visions of what human beings are capable of becoming. In doing so, he identifies a central problem in collective control over man’s fate: Who shall govern our lives?

I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ rhetorical questions concerning the commissar during a talk he gave in Canada at the University of Toronto in 2006. Canada is notorious for restricting the speech of its citizens under the guise of “hate speech” laws. Hitchens asked his audience:

“To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor? Isn’t a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what’s fit to be passed and what is fit not to be, is the man most likely to become debauched? Did you hear any speaker in the opposition to this motion, eloquent as one of them was, to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? To whom you would give the job of deciding for you — relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone? Hands up. Do you know anyone to whom you’d give this job? Does anyone have a nominee?”

Those who know Hitchens’ biography know that he was for many years a Trotskyist. The year he uttered these words was the year he declared his independence from socialist thinking. Hitchens clarified during a town hall in 2006, in conversation with a group of fellow essayists, that “I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist.”

There was a time when I, too, considered myself a socialist. I had neglected Orwell and dismissed Berkman and Goldman. I had not yet taken Hitchens to heart. In the 1990s, I even flirted with communism. (I published in the Communist Party-USA’s newspaper, People’s World, so I can’t deny this piece of my biography.) I had become convinced that a society in which workers collectively owned and controlled the means of production represented the highest expression of economic and—I cringed as I write this—social justice.

The idea of socialism appealed to my sense of fairness. Why should those whose labor creates value by transforming nature and commodities worked up by others into wealth for the few have so little say over the enterprises they sustain? It seemed obvious that democratizing the workplace would also democratize society. And democracy is a good thing (there’s that glittering generality again).

I have not abandoned that moral intuition. I still believe there is something admirable about workers sharing ownership, decision-making, and profits. And I remain an admirer of Karl Marx. He is our Darwin in the social sciences. His materialist conception of history fundamentally shaped the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, vocations to which I have devoted more than a quarter century of my life. And the best psychology is rooted in his insights about appearance and structure. Marx was, after all, a classical liberal thinker engaged in critique and dialectic, fully embedded in the scientific worldview.

What has changed is my understanding of the relationship between ideals and political power—and history. The problem is not Marx’s analysis of the problem. The problem is his solution.

The problem goes beyond communism’s entailments. To be sure, where the totalizing scheme leads has not been good for the people who have tried it. But that’s not because they weren’t doing it right. It’s because there’s something wrong with the end itself—and thus the means deployed to achieve it. The flaw lies not with worker ownership per se but rather with making worker ownership the universal economic model through the coercive power of the state.

Substantive equality, or an equality of outcomes, in contrast to formal equality, i.e., equal treatment before the law, requires sacrificing liberty to the collective. The distribution of discipline, intelligence, talents, and virtue is not uniform across the species. We are not all the same, and achieving equality of outcomes means those who can achieve great things, to the betterment of all, are made ordinary to the detriment of all. Mediocrity is inevitable. The politics of collectivism before individualism negates the individualism that organically elevates the collective. To say that inequality is the price of progress suggests that inequality is a bad thing.

This realization owes much to my reading of economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. From the earliest days of the course Freedom and Social Control, my first teaching assignment as an assistant professor, I put his work before my students, contrasting it with Marx, hoping they would, like me, object to Hayek’s arguments. Instead, thanks to steelmanning Hayek’s position to model for students charity in discourse, and because course content focused on the problem of totalitarianism, I found myself persuaded to Hayek’s side.

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argues that comprehensive economic planning inevitably requires comprehensive political planning and social engineering. When governments decide how property must be owned, how businesses must be organized, and how economic decisions are made, they cannot avoid making choices that individuals would otherwise make for themselves, thus precluding the ingenuity that advances civilization, as well as suppressing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In this context, as disagreements over policy inevitably arise, what at first appears as voluntary cooperation gives way to compulsion. The state must increasingly decide whose preferences prevail. Too often, these preferences are not rooted in a moral ontology but in some technocratic end, and the means to such ends, unconstrained by morality, are unethical. The result is an administered world governed by authoritarians and bureaucrats. This is the folly of utilitarianism, a tyranny of the brainwashed majority, inevitably led by a vanguard of social engineers, disguised as liberalism.

Hayek’s point is often misunderstood. I am guilty of misunderstanding him myself. Careful reading of his work is necessary, and the short summary I used in class did not adequately convey his worldview. He did not argue that every government intervention leads directly to dictatorship. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek writes that there is no reason a wealthy society cannot guarantee everyone some minimum of clothing, food, and shelter. 

Hayek accepted compulsory government insurance against risks that individuals cannot reasonably insure themselves against, such as serious illness, some forms of disability, and workplace accidents. He recognized that certain public health services and responses to epidemics could be legitimate government functions because they address problems individual market transactions cannot solve effectively. He supported government provisions for basic education, bridges, roads, and other public goods where markets alone may not produce efficient outcomes. And he believed government should enforce contracts, protect property rights, prevent fraud, and maintain competition through a sound legal framework.

His argument is not that the government has no place in our lives, but rather that concentrating economic decision-making in the hands of political authorities creates pressures that steadily erode individual liberty. A society cannot centrally organize economic life without also expanding the authority necessary to enforce that organization. The problem of social engineering is intrinsic to it.

Although Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist and would go further than Hayek in social provisioning, the common ground beneath them is that both rejected the idea that protecting liberty required either an all-powerful state or a completely hands-off state. After Spain, Orwell became fiercely committed to civil liberties, competitive elections, free speech, and an independent press. For Orwell, socialism without democracy was simply another form of tyranny.

However, unlike Orwell, Hayek sees that state control over the economy to achieve what Orwell believed in principle, i.e., economic equality and public ownership, is antithetical to democracy, if by that term one means constitutional limits, free and fair elections, freedom of speech, a free press, the protection of minority rights, and universal suffrage, i.e., the liberal democratic conception, what one finds in American republicism. Both Hayek and Orwell strongly supported democratic institutions of this sort because together they form a bulwark against totalitarianism. (One reasonably wonders whether, on his deathbed, Orwell would still describe himself as a socialist.)

Hayek develops this idea further in The Constitution of Liberty. Here, he argues that freedom depends less on achieving any particular social outcome than on preserving a framework in which individuals can pursue different visions of the good life. A free society allows people to cooperate and compete, succeed and fail, and voluntarily associate in countless ways. The state’s role is to maintain impartial rules rather than dictate preferred economic arrangements.

Hayek’s clear thinking transformed my own. If a man is to be a reasonable one, he must yield his convictions to the force of logic. I had before put the left’s concept of positive liberty before negative liberty, tending to see the latter as the enemy of the former. This was the debate that framed the assignment of Marx and Hayek in Freedom and Social Control. What I did not at first see is that while what Erich Fromm and Isiah Berlin describe as substantive freedom can emerge from the conditions promoted by classical liberalism, positive liberty as a politics negates the liberal freedoms I have always held dear.

I now think that Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires a bit of reordering. But none of the needs he identifies are necessarily sacrificed in the revision. The hierarchy must rise upon a foundation of liberty as much as the requirements of the creature. We need not end inequality among men to pave the road to self-actualization. Indeed, if inequality is a sign of freedom, we should focus instead on fostering social conditions that allow human beings to transcend their lowly station—if that is what they are able and choose to do—through their own efforts.

I confess that the hardest part of accepting Hayek’s thesis is admitting that inequality is the natural order of things, that human nature is constrained. This is not to say that we must live like the other animals. But it does require recognizing that we cannot escape the laws of nature, and that, in our attempt to transcend natural history, we risk denying its results. Evolution may have no reason behind it, but there is a logic to it, and it is not a logic of man’s design. Our rights are found there, not in the designs of men.

Inequality, in Hayek’s view, is therefore not merely the unfortunate byproduct of freedom but, to a significant extent, an inevitable consequence of it. Human beings differ naturally in ambition, creativity, discipline, intelligence, interests, temperament, and willingness to assume risk. They also choose different ways of life. Some devote themselves to building businesses, others to raising families, creating art, pursuing scholarship, or serving their communities. These are not mutually exclusive vocations. Indeed, each depends on the other. A free society does not erase these differences; it allows them to flourish and integrates them. The most advanced societies recognize these truths. They are self-evident. It is why the societies that recognize them are so advanced.

As people pursue their own goals, unequal outcomes inevitably emerge. For Hayek, inequality is the mark of a free society. This is not something to regret or repair. While disparities can provoke envy, they also provide examples for others to emulate. The inventor who develops a revolutionary technology, the entrepreneur who builds a successful company, the scientist who makes a breakthrough, or the artist who creates enduring beauty all expand the horizon of what others believe is possible.

Equality of opportunity leaves room for inequality of achievement, and those achievements become models that encourage aspiration rather than conformity. Parties that organize people around resentment undermine opportunity. The democratic socialists who are taking over the Democratic Party stand against the individual’s freedom to live his life as he chooses. Really, these types have commanded the party for more than a century under the banner of progressivism, the ideological projection of corporatism. This is the operating system of Europe. Today, American socialists are more open about what they seek. And the socialism they seek is the technocratic organization of society.

This insight also reshaped the way I think about the Marxist maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” As an ethical aspiration, it possesses undeniable appeal; few people object to helping those who genuinely cannot provide for themselves. As I learned, even Hayek saw value and necessity here. The difficulty arises when the principle becomes the organizing rule of the state-administered economy.

If people’s needs are guaranteed regardless of effort, while the fruits of exceptional effort are continually redistributed, the incentive to strive gradually diminishes for at least some members of society, while those who continue to create, innovate, and produce find themselves surrendering an ever-greater share of what they have earned to those who have been idled or who have idled themselves.

Over time, this fosters dependence upon political institutions rather than personal initiative. Instead of working for a living, many proletarians, and especially the underclass, those made dependent on welfare, vote for a living; they vote not to open the way for those who strive, but for those who will reward sloth.

Benjamin Franklin once observed: “Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy.” Marx’s maxim blurs a distinction that every free society ought to preserve: there is a profound moral difference between someone who earnestly strives yet falls short and someone who declines to strive at all. Failure despite diligence is an honorable risk inherent in liberty and self-improvement. A life defined by the refusal to exercise one’s abilities is something altogether different.

Compassion rightly belongs to those who cannot succeed despite sincere effort; it should not require treating persistent unwillingness to contribute as morally equivalent to honest failure. Yet welfare states do precisely that. And the burden of supporting that mass of people who do not strive falls upon the shoulders of the productive members of society. It is an unjust burden because it denies human nature.

* * *

A little more than a decade ago, I gave a talk titled “The Table-Makers” at the “What is Socialism?” event held at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The evening was organized by the Critical Left, a student group. The event was well attended, with animated challenges to my position coming especially from conservatives in the audience. The core argument remains valid and sound. What is missing, however, is that I presented socialism strictly as a replacement for capitalism when it doesn’t have to be. No conservative made that critique. Nor would I expect them to.

If worker-owned firms are truly superior to other arrangements—more productive, more satisfying, and more humane in their way of thinking—then people should be free to create them. They should compete in the marketplace alongside corporations, family businesses, nonprofits, partnerships, and sole proprietorships. Nothing about free-market capitalism prohibits this. Indeed, many successful employee-owned enterprises already exist, demonstrating that democratic workplaces need not remain theoretical.

What capitalism uniquely offers is pluralism. It permits many forms of ownership simultaneously. Investors may build conventional corporations. Employees may organize cooperatives. Entrepreneurs may launch startups. Communities may establish nonprofits. Consumers and workers can choose among them. By contrast, making worker ownership mandatory requires eliminating those alternatives. If every enterprise must be collectively owned, then individuals who prefer other arrangements lose the freedom to choose them. Paradoxically, achieving universal economic democracy requires restricting economic pluralism and cancelling the freedom of contract.

This is where Hayek’s warning becomes especially persuasive. The more ambitious the social objective, the greater the governmental authority required to realize it. Noble intentions do not eliminate this reality. Furthermore, can we really count on those who lead us to have noble intentions? History answers the question for us. Stalin, Mao, and other leaders of socialist systems used their authority to establish totalitarian societies where human freedom was extinguished.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron” illustrates the same principle through satire rather than philosophy. In Vonnegut’s imagined future, substantive equality has become the supreme social value. To ensure that no one exceeds anyone else, the government handicaps beauty, intelligence, strength, and talent. The result is not justice but mediocrity enforced by coercion.

The story is deliberately absurd, yet its underlying insight remains powerful. Equal outcomes cannot simply be declared or forced into existence. Not if freedom matters. Because people naturally differ in countless ways, maintaining strict equality requires continuous intervention by political authority. The more perfect the equality sought, the more intrusive that authority becomes.

If every workplace must conform to one approved model of ownership, then someone must enforce that conformity. Entrepreneurs who wish to found a conventional company must be prohibited from doing so. Novel ideas and private initiatives are negated out of the gate. If workers voluntarily accept different arrangements, those agreements must be invalidated. Freedom yields to regulation, and regulation increasingly depends upon coercion. This is also the logic behind censorship and other affronts to liberty.

Recognizing this does not require embracing an uncritical defense of capitalism. Capitalism has undeniable flaws. It rewards exploitation of labor and nature, encourages excessive accumulation of wealth (although what qualifies as “excessive” wealth concentration needs clarity), and leaves many workers with little bargaining power. Markets do not automatically produce justice. Yet these criticisms point toward reform rather than abolition.

Laws protecting workers, encouraging competition, preventing fraud, and expanding opportunities for employee ownership can all exist within a broadly capitalist framework. Capitalist governments can remove legal obstacles to cooperatives, provide fair tax treatment for employee stock ownership plans, and enforce rules that protect workers from abuse without prescribing a single model of enterprise for everyone. Worker-owned companies do not negate capitalism. But the socialism advocated by Zohran Mamdani and his crowd inevitably negates worker-owned enterprise. Workers do not really own or control the means of production under state socialism. There is no room there for entrepreneurs.

Liberal capitalism offers something I overlooked: the freedom to build socialist institutions inside the system of private ownership. Free market capitalism is based on voluntarism. If workers wish to own factories together, they may do so. If communities wish to establish cooperatives, they may do so. If investors wish to finance employee-owned firms, they may do so. Success depends not upon political decree but upon persuading others that these institutions are desirable and sustainable. Such arrangements strike a healthier balance between liberty and justice.

What is more, liberty is itself good and therefore just. Liberty allows people to make their own choices, pursue their goals, and live according to their values without unnecessary interference. A society that respects liberty recognizes the dignity and equality of individuals by giving them the freedom to think, speak, and act responsibly. While liberty should be balanced with laws that protect others from harm, it is ultimately just because it gives everyone the same basic rights and opportunities. In this way, liberty supports fairness, personal growth, and respect for human rights. Socialism at scale takes all this away.

* * *

I still admire the aspiration that inspired my youthful socialism: giving ordinary people greater control over the economic forces that shape their lives. But I no longer believe that this aspiration justifies granting the state sweeping authority over property and enterprise. The concentration of power necessary to impose universal worker ownership poses dangers that outweigh its potential benefits. Hayek persuaded me that liberty requires preserving diverse forms of economic organization. Vonnegut showed me that even the noblest ideals can become oppressive when enforced without limit. Together, these thinkers and others like them helped me understand that freedom includes the freedom to organize cooperatively—but also the freedom not to.

Today, I believe the best society is neither one in which capitalism reigns unchecked nor one in which socialism is imposed by law. It is one in which free people can create the kinds of institutions they believe in, whether those institutions are employee-owned cooperatives, traditional corporations, nonprofits, or something entirely new. If worker ownership is truly the superior model, it should flourish through voluntary association and open competition rather than government compulsion. If it fails, then it was not the superior model. Let the better ideas win.

In reflection, I recognize that there was always a tension in my political outlook, even if I did not fully appreciate it at the time. I called myself a socialist because I was drawn to the ideal of economic justice and to the conviction that working people should have a greater voice in the institutions that shaped their lives. Yet I also called myself a liberal in the classical sense, deeply committed to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights: individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, due process, limited government, and the inherent dignity of the individual.

This is why I have always felt a certain kinship with Orwell, even if I neglected him between my first encounters with his work and revisiting them years later. Like Orwell, I am attracted to socialism’s ethical concern for the disadvantaged while remaining instinctively attached to the liberal tradition’s distrust of concentrated power. Orwell eventually recognized that socialism without liberty could degenerate into tyranny. My own journey has led me to a similar conclusion. I have not abandoned the desire for a more just economy; rather, I have come to believe that justice achieved at the expense of the freedoms guaranteed by the liberal constitutional tradition is too costly a bargain.

If forced to choose between equality enforced by the state and liberty protected by constitutional limits, I must choose liberty—not because equality is unimportant, but because without liberty, the pursuit of equality is liable to consume the very humanity it seeks to ennoble.

* * *

Hayek’s criticism of political movements that seek substantive equality at the expense of liberty is essential to understanding the struggle for autonomy and freedom. As natural as the desire for autonomy and liberty may be, the conditions necessary for their realization have not been the historical norm. This is because of the enduring presence of those who seek power over others’ lives. Every democratic socialist is, at heart, a totalitarian.

We must insist on formal equality, a situation where every individual stands equal before the law, enjoying the same legal rights, obligations, and protections regardless of occupation, race, religion, social standing, or wealth. Crucial to this principle is a system of rights, secured by constitutional limits, that places fundamental liberties beyond the arbitrary power of those who govern. To be sure, such a system still requires the exercise of power, but that power rests on a moral foundation committed to equality before the law rather than equality of outcomes.

Substantive equality, by contrast, seeks to equalize people’s economic conditions, social positions, or life outcomes, and the power required to achieve it necessarily entails an unjust exercise of coercion. This we cannot abide by. We’ve seen its fruits. And they’re rotten.

Hayek argued that these two conceptions of equality are ultimately incompatible. To preserve equal treatment under the law, governments must apply general rules impartially. To produce more equal outcomes, however, government must treat people differently—taxing some more heavily than others, distributing benefits unequally, or granting special preferences based upon need or circumstance. The pursuit of substantive equality inevitably requires departures from formal equality.

For Hayek, equality before the law was therefore not merely one value among many; it was the indispensable legal condition of a free society. Once the law ceases to treat citizens impartially in pursuit of preferred social outcomes, liberty itself begins to yield to political discretion, and the quality of discretion is also highly variable across the species. As it happens, sociopaths are often quite cunning.

In Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell depicted how revolutions undertaken in the name of the people can ultimately produce new ruling elites, censorship, surveillance, and the destruction of independent thought. Although Orwell would likely have disagreed with Hayek on the merits of capitalism, they shared an essential insight: liberty cannot survive where political power becomes sufficiently centralized to dictate not only economic life but also the boundaries of dissent and truth. Orwell serves as a reminder that genuine concern for justice must always be tempered by an equally vigorous concern for individual freedom.

Hitchens thought Marx’s method of analyzing power, class, and ideology could still be useful for understanding society. But he rejected socialism as a governing program because, in his view, every attempt to implement it at scale had tended toward authoritarianism and the suppression of individual liberty. He retained from Marx the habit of analysis—seeing politics through the lens of class power and material interests—but rejected socialism as a system of economic organization because it concentrated too much power in the state and was tyrannical in practice.

This is where I land. It has been many years since I landed here, but I felt I owed it to readers of this blog an explanation. Thanks for reading and subscribing to Freedom and Reason.

With America approaching its 250th anniversary, former President Barack Obama has drawn renewed attention—as if there weren’t already an army of woke scolds reminding the country of this history at every turn—to the fact that some of those who founded America owned slaves. In a recent interview associated with the opening of his presidential library, Obama notes that George Washington, the first president of a fledgling republic, participated in a system that the nation he fathered abolished.

Did Obama tell his slavish audience that, in his will, the humans Washington owned would be freed after the death of his wife, Martha? Did Obama even look to determine the disposition of Washington’s slaves after his death? If he had, he would have learned that the First Lady, feeling uncomfortable delaying their freedom, signed a deed that freed them on January 1, 1801, a little over a year after Washington’s death. If the first black president, the son of a white woman, knew this, he wouldn’t have told those leaning into his words.

Obama exploits his status as a (manufactured) statesman to emphasize what progressives portray as the contradiction at the heart of the nation’s origins and therefore an inherent flaw in America’s present and future: the distant past of what Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun called the “peculiar institution.” The fact that America overcame slavery must be obscured. Like an abusive spouse who continually dredges up some past grievance his wife has apologized for a thousand times, the ghost of chattel slavery must always haunt us. No redemption is possible.

At the time of this writing, it’s been 218 years and 6 months since the United States ended legal importation of enslaved people from abroad, and 160 years and 7 months since slavery was abolished in the United States. To have known a relative who was enslaved, one would have to be born around the early 1930s or earlier, a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Yet we’re supposed to believe that black Americans are presently oppressed by a system that was overthrown decades before anybody living was born.

Progressives want Americans to have slavery in mind as we turn our attention to Washington and the other white men who established the American Republic in our national moment of reflection. We’re not to see the Washington Monument in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but instead algae and cracked blue paint. “I think sometimes we get confused in thinking that these two stories are separate,” Obama said. “They’re intertwined, right? Which is why I can be a great admirer of George Washington, and also acknowledge he was a slaveholder.”

The “we” Obama imagines doesn’t exist. Nobody sees America’s founding, chattel slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade as separate from the founding of the country. We acknowledge slavery and the fact that many colonists who fought for independence from England and established the American Republic participated in it. Even if we wanted to forget it, progressives are always there to remind us. But they don’t need to; we don’t want to forget it. The question is how we are supposed to regard the entanglement, not whether we acknowledge it.

* * *

In sociology, there is a concept called “hedging.” It refers to how people soften, qualify, or partially distance themselves from a claim or identity so they avoid sounding too absolute or committed. It’s a discursive strategy—language used in social interaction to manage credibility, meaning, and social consequences.

Obama uses the strategy of hedging to implicate white people—then and now—in the oppression of black people while seeming to honor those who founded the United States. He wants you to know he’s “a great admirer of George Washington” so that he can appear patriotic—and as a sophisticated thinker who can manage nuance—while delegitimizing the American Republic. The takeaway: the “Father of His Country” was an enslaver. And that means Washington could not possibly be a man worthy of admiration. That’s all you really need to know to make a judgment on the legitimacy of the country he fathered.

At the heart of identitarianism beats this primitive belief: the child bears the sins of the father. Delegitimizing the nation is the progressive plan. If progressives believed in our country and acknowledged its progress in fulfilling its promise, they would focus on what the people have overcome, recognizing that its many achievements prove its virtue. But progressives desire a corporate state and, therefore, must, at every opportunity, run down the Republic and cast the white majority as the enemy of the people. We must forever bear our father’s sins.

It is this sin that progressives use to explain persistent inequalities in America. Readers know the narrative all too well: The white majority did not come by its status because of faith, intact families, integral communities, and a strong work ethic. They are unjustly enriched because they have, for generations, exploited and oppressed black Americans. By denying the sin, whites perpetuate the system of racial inequality that privileges them.

Whites are conditioned to believe that this system explains why black Americans as a demographic category trail whites in nearly every metric of social standing. It is not because of fatherless households, disorganized communities, and idleness, but because of white privilege. One is not supposed to consider that these pathologies are the predictable consequences of decades of progressive policies devised and implemented by Democrats—globalization, mass immigration, and the welfare state. Whites are to blame for the situation of black Americans, and thus need reminding that the Founders were enslavers.

Instead of full integration into American society, blacks are given a quasi-religious framework perversely adapted from Christianity. Original sin casts humans as inherently sinful. Man is born sick and commanded to be well, to borrow Christopher Hitchens’ pithy formulation. In Obama’s telling, and this is a core tenet of the woke progressive faith, white people are not born morally neutral, but come into the world already inclined toward selfishness and always separated from the good. They must atone for this sin by seeking the impossible: redemption from a genetic state—a blood libel. To atone for this sin, from now until forever, those cast as the victims of whiteness must be afforded privileges that come at the expense of those whose success is explained by their inherent wickedness.

The ideological work of the woke narrative is spectacular in keeping down black Americans. One might think that successful families would serve as aspirational models. Those who sought to be like them, who emulated their attitudes and behaviors, might be expected to climb the socioeconomic ladder. Maybe they wouldn’t get to the top, but they would no longer find themselves on the bottom. At the very least, they tried. There is dignity in failure honestly come by. Instead, they are told that those whom they might emulate are the reason why they can’t get ahead in life—and why crime and welfare dependency are understandable modes of adaptation.

Instead of aspiration, blacks and other non-whites are steeped in ressentiment, a deep, lingering form of resentment among those who feel aggrieved and powerless, directed toward those they perceive as more privileged, as smarter and stronger. But rather than leaving the disaffected to wallow in their frustration, the Democratic Party organizes them into mobs and a voting bloc. Just as envy of Jewish success is rationalized by antisemites as a conspiracy to keep down the goyim, and therefore justifies hatred and violence directed at Jews and Israel, envy of the white majority is weaponized against them and the nation.

We see this today in the rabble on our streets and the electoral successes of democratic socialists across the country. The socialists assail the corporate elite. To be sure, so do populists on the right. But the left offers its followers not restoration of a nation beset by division, but administrative command and moral transgression. Their program brings technocratic control and nihilism. This is why the corporate elite do not fear democratic socialism. They know that the socialism progressives have in mind is state control over the people’s lives. The mass media is giddy over the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the success of those candidates he endorses. Indeed, corporate power fears those who pursue the Founders’ promise by making America great again.

* * *

In his July 3, 2026, America 250 address, Mayor Mamdani, a naturalized citizen and democratic socialist with king-making charisma, presented the United States as a nation defined by both remarkable ideals and enduring contradictions. Speaking from behind the desk used by George Washington at New York City Hall and surrounded by newly naturalized citizens (some wearing the flag of Islamization), Mamdani argued that patriotism should not mean ignoring the nation’s failures but working to fulfill its founding promises. He emphasized that American history includes the experiences of American Indians, enslaved Africans, immigrants, and others whose struggles have shaped the country alongside its celebrated achievements.

Mamdani described the United States as an “unfinished project” whose strength lies not primarily in its economic or military power, but in the efforts of ordinary people to expand democracy, equality, and liberty (read “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion”). He suggested that every generation inherits the responsibility to bring the nation closer to its ideals rather than assuming those ideals have already been realized. He suggests those ideals have not been realized.

But whose ideals? His or America’s? The presence of newly naturalized citizens is meant to underscore his argument that immigration remains central to the American story, props to punctuate the speech’s appeals to civic participation and democratic renewal. Of course, Republicans place symbols of their ideals around them, as well. Rhetoric and symbolism are used by politicians across place and time. But soaring words are checked by action. And symbolic choices are meaningful. We know what Mamdani means by his: color revolution, corporate statism, multiculturalism, and transnationalization.

The speech and media attention carried a clear political purpose. Delivered just hours before President Donald Trump’s own America 250 address at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Mamdani offered an alternative vision of American identity. Where Trump’s celebration was expected to emphasize historical achievement and national greatness (and that was indeed its focus), Mamdani emphasized self-criticism and the belief that patriotism is demonstrated by continually striving to make the country more inclusive and socially just.

If Obama and the democratic socialists demand we pay attention to history, then we should take up the challenge. For actual history does more than straighten the distorted frame of progressive ideology; it exposes the disuniting ambitions and racist character of the Democratic Party. Such ambition and character are indeed genetic. As I have written about before on this platform, with a few exceptions (John F. Kennedy, most notably), Democrats have always been the party of serfdom.

In reminding us about Washington and slavery, Obama invites us to remember what actually happened and how it bears on the present moment. What we find in history tells us what to expect from Mamdani and the globalists who pull his strings.

* * *

The modern Democratic Party was established in 1828. Its roots trace back to the Democratic-Republican Party, founded in 1792 by Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Both would become president—our third and fourth (two terms each). Jefferson had served as Secretary of State under Washington, and, as a Congressman, Madison was a close ally of our first president.

However, by the 1820s, the Democratic-Republican Party had fractured into competing factions as ideological and regional differences—cultural and economic— became more pronounced. The Northeast favored commerce, manufacturing, tariffs (and other protectionist measures), and a stronger national government. This is the path set by the Federalists, principal among them Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, the progenitors of the American System. These are the ideas that future great leaders Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump would champion.

By contrast, the South emphasized agriculture, free trade, and a more limited federal role (so-called states’ rights). The emphasis on free trade made the plantation owners strongly protective of the legacy institution of chattel slavery, a legacy system the colonies had inherited from those who came before them. While the Founders recognized the moral problem of slavery, the plantation owners as a class were not prepared to discard their inheritance. They prioritized profit over people.

This divide came to a head in the presidential election of 1824. Andrew Jackson ran against John Quincy Adams (the son of John Adams, America’s second president), Henry Clay, and William Crawford. Jackson won around forty percent of the popular vote and received the most electoral votes, but failed to secure an electoral majority. Under the Constitution, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, where Clay threw his support behind Adams, who was subsequently elected president. Jackson’s supporters denounced the outcome as a corrupt bargain, and the controversy fueled the formation of the modern Democratic Party. This is the origin of the modern two-party system.

As president, Adams promoted an ambitious national agenda that included federal investment in education, infrastructure (canals, roads), and scientific advancement. However, many of his proposals were blocked by Congress as Jackson’s supporters became an increasingly powerful opposition. Jackson would use Adams’ record to defeat him in 1828 and serve two terms in office. In response, Adams and Clay’s supporters formed the National Republican Party and, in the 1830s, the Whig Party, which generally favored a stronger federal role in economic development and infrastructure.

After the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s, Northern Whigs organized the Republican Party in 1854. Despite losing the 1856 election, the Republican Party became a national force and succeeded on the second try, electing Abraham Lincoln as president—just in the nick of time. Soon, the nation was at war with itself. The Democrats were not prepared to suffer nationalism, and so they chose the path of insurrection, a path they would return to again and again.

* * *

The debate over federal power and the schism of regional interests had deep roots extending back to the nation’s founding. In Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration, he included a passage condemning the transatlantic slave trade and criticizing the British Crown for perpetuating it. However, before the Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776, that passage was removed. Delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, whose economies depended heavily on slavery and the continued importation of Africans, strongly opposed the language. The Continental Congress ultimately chose unity among the colonies over retaining the anti-slave-trade passage.

The issue resurfaced during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. By then, several Northern states had begun abolishing slavery and restricting the slave trade. The Upper South, particularly Virginia and Maryland, had become less dependent on importing enslaved Africans and, in some cases, supported ending the international slave trade. The Lower South—especially Georgia and South Carolina—wanted to continue importing Africans to support the rapidly expanding cotton and other economies. Their delegates warned that they might refuse to join the Union if the Constitution immediately prohibited the trade in humans.

The resulting compromise became Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 of the Constitution. The provision prohibited Congress from banning the importation of such persons before 1808. The compromise guaranteed twenty additional years during which the international slave trade could legally continue while ensuring that Congress would have the authority to prohibit it after 1808. The compromise tells us that the problem of slavery was recognized at the beginning, and that many of our Founding Fathers had in mind the abolition of the institution. And so, with the moratorium’s end approaching, they acted.

It is important to note the timing of American and British laws abolishing the slave trade. It was remarkably close, and this was no accident. The near-simultaneous abolition of the international slave trade reflects the broader Atlantic movement against the trade. It reminds us that the United States was rooted in English culture and the spirit of individualism. However much the rise of corporate power has warped our shared values in the meantime, a sense of equality and liberty inheres in both. One might say that there’s nothing wrong with either nation that cannot be negated by what is right about them (and Britain is in dire need of remembering what is right about it).

Britain abolished its participation in the transatlantic slave trade through the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which received royal assent on March 25, 1807, and took effect on May 1, 1807. The Act ended the nation’s legal involvement in the transatlantic slave trade but did not abolish slavery itself within the British Empire. However, it was the beginning of the end of that dreadful institution. Britain was closely followed by the United States when Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves on March 2, 1807. President Jefferson signed the act into law the same day. Because of the constitutional restriction established in 1787, however, the law could not take effect until January 1, 1808, the earliest date permitted under Article I, Section 9.

Only two countries abolished trade in slaves before America and Britain. Norway banned the practice in 1803. France preceded Norway in 1794 during the French Revolution; however, the ban was reversed by Napoleon in 1802, and France would not permanently end the slave trade until the 1830s. But the fact that the world hegemon and the fledging republic that shared its culture abolished the transatlantic slave trade set the example for the civilized world.

However, rather than being taught to acknowledge that leading lights of Western Civilization led the world in abolishing the trade—America fighting a bloody civil war to end the practice of slavery—Americans are led to believe that their country is uniquely responsible for slavery. They rarely learn that slavery is an ancient institution practiced by civilizations across the globe. If they do learn about it, they will be told that slavery then was different and not as bad. Today, ignorant of the scope and truth of the ancient practice, many Americans extol the virtue of non-Western cultures that still keep the institution. Mamdani and the democratic socialists welcome those from these cultures to our shores.

* * *

The Civil War was the culmination of decades of political conflict over federal authority and the balance of power between free and slaveholding states. As the United States expanded westward, disputes over whether new territories would permit slavery repeatedly threatened the Union, leading to compromises that only delayed a reckoning, just as compromise had before.

The election of Lincoln in 1860, on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery, convinced many Southern leaders that their political influence was permanently diminished. Beginning with South Carolina, eleven Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America, asserting that states had the right to leave the Union and govern themselves. The new state put chattel slavery at the core of its way of life. Lincoln rejected secession as unconstitutional and maintained that preserving the Union was his foremost responsibility. He assumed in full the awesome powers of Article II of the Constitution. And so the nation went to war with itself.

As war unfolded, federal policy evolved from restoring the Union to also abolishing slavery, a shift marked by the Emancipation Proclamation and ultimately the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which permanently ended slavery nationwide. The Union’s victory—at the cost of as many as a million lives— preserved the United States as a single nation and greatly strengthened the authority of the federal government over the states.

However, the struggle over civil rights would continue long after the war ended, such was the recalcitrance of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was the obstacle in their path to a disunited America—then as now.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction reunited the nation while defining the legal and political status of formerly enslaved people and the former Confederate states. Congress and the presidency often clashed over how the South should be governed and readmitted to the Union, with Congressional Republicans advocating stronger federal oversight and greater protections for black Americans.

During this period, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law, while the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited denying the vote based on race. Federal troops remained in much of the South to enforce these changes, but resistance from many white Southerners—including organized political opposition and violent intimidation—undermined Reconstruction governments. One manifestation of this was the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.

The disputed presidential election of 1876 resulted in the Compromise of 1877, under which federal troops were withdrawn from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. This ushered in the era known as Redemption, during which Democratic governments regained control of Southern state governments, dismantled many Reconstruction reforms, restricted black American political participation through disenfranchisement and segregation, and inspired a reign of terror of lynching and nigger hunts. Democrats established a political order that endured until the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement.

* * *

In the aftermath of decades of upheaval, corporate power emerged as a significant threat to self-government. Soon, the gates of the nation were thrown open to cheap foreign labor. There had been a wave of immigration before then, but the second wave of mass immigration differed in character and scope. To aid in the corporate takeover that would usher in the administrative state, the Fourteenth Amendment was repurposed by the judiciary. It was out of these arrangements that Progressivism and multiculturalism emerged to advance the interests of the corporate state.

The intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was to ensure citizenship for the children of freed slaves and guarantee equal treatment with respect to the immunities and privileges of the natural-born. However, in the headnote of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), the Justices of the Supreme Court reportedly did not wish to hear argument on whether the Equal Protection Clause applied to corporations, effectively treating the matter as settled. Later courts and legal doctrine interpreted the court reporter’s summary of the case as foundational law and handed corporations the rights of men.

The second wave of mass migration was driven by a combination of push and pull factors. In many parts of southern and eastern Europe, people faced widespread poverty, land shortages, rapid population growth, political repression, and in some cases religious persecution. These pressures pushed millions to leave rural villages in search of relief. At the same time, the rapidly industrializing United States drew migrants with the promise of factory jobs, higher wages, and access to land and upward mobility. Improvements in steamship travel and expanding transportation networks made long-distance migration faster, cheaper, and more feasible than before. Chain migration and immigration networks helped newcomers to established urban enclaves.

Together, these forces produced one of the largest population movements in modern history. In 1880, the US population was just over 50 million. By the 1930 census, conducted just a few years after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson–Reed Act, which effectively closed America’s borders, the nation’s population had grown to nearly 123 million.

The Johnson–Reed Act was the initiative of the Republican Party, which controlled Congress at the time. The most influential figure behind the legislation was Representative Albert Johnson, a Republican from Washington, who chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization and became one of the leading advocates for sharply limiting immigration. In the Senate, the bill was shaped and advanced by figures such as Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania. Together, Johnson and Reed designed the system of national-origins quotas that became the core of the law.

Support for the act came from a wider coalition beyond Congress. For example, the American Federation of Labor sought limits on immigration due to competition and wage suppression. More broadly, Americans grew concerned about cultural change and demographic transformation. Transnationalists, such as Horace Kallen, argued that diversity made the nation stronger. America should abandon assimilation and embrace multiculturalism, he argued in the pages of The Nation. The people saw the folly in his transnationalist vision and demanded that America close its gates to foreign culture-bearers. And so they did.

The bill was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge had come to national prominence during the post-Progressive Era. He advanced entrepreneurship, fiscal restraint, and limited government, emphasizing balanced budgets, tax cuts, and limited federal intervention in the economy. Although he accepted some of the administrative and regulatory structures established in the early 1900s, Coolidge opposed expanding the administrative state, especially in areas like economic planning, labor regulation, and social welfare. One more, history reveals the fundamental and enduring differences between Democrats and Republicans.

* * *

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled this week that President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship violates the Fourteenth Amendment, reaffirming what is popularly believed to be the longstanding principle that nearly everyone born in the United States is a US citizen regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the Constitution does not impose a parental legal-status requirement, preserving more than a century of judicial interpretation.

Not all Republicans have been reliable in adhering to the party’s principles. Roberts and two other Republican appointees—Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—joined with progressives in betraying the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, they effectively scratched out a major clause of an amendment that granted citizenship to freed black slaves: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Justices Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh ignored the italicized clause to rewrite the purpose of the amendment. (It was a largely Republican-appointed Supreme Court that had affirmed corporate personhood in the aftermath of the Civil War.)

Upholding a bad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not only an insult to black Americans and to all those who died freeing their ancestors; it is an insult to all Americans, who, by the lights of the Constitution, have an inherent collective right to national self-determination. Missed was an opportunity not only to correct a historic mistake, but to prevent future developments that will likely bring about an end to the Republic. When Democrats get in power and open America’s gates to the world, they will resume the project of changing the demographic composition of the nation and achieve one-party rule. If this happens, there will not be a 300th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

* * *

The Democratic Party was the party of the slavocracy. The planter class sold primary commodities on the international market and thus sought to keep the United States in a peripheral position to the world capitalist economy. Despite the United States having overcome peripheral status to become world hegemon, Democrats seek a return to the prior arrangement. The Republican Party, by contrast, in its moments of clarity (the Bush tendency being the major exception), has sought a program of economic nationalism, enriching American citizens by establishing the United States as the world’s industrial powerhouse.

Achieving peripheral status depends on disorganizing American families and communities and pitting worker against worker. Just as Democrats used slavery and Jim Crow to divide the working class, the party used affirmative action and DEI to fracture the proletariat in the post-Civil Rights Era. The path represented by the Republican Party requires strengthening the foundation of a virtuous civilization through national unity. Via command of America’s sense-making institutions, Democrats have made nationalism a dirty word and those who oppose race-based discrimination into racists. Once history is properly ascertained, such smears lose their force.

The reality is that America overcame Jim Crow more than six decades ago with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law developed out of the broader civil rights struggle of the 1950s and early 1960s.

The legislative origins of the law are closely tied to the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose policies aligned more with nationalism than with those advanced by the globalists. During his presidency, Kennedy proposed an across-the-board income tax reduction to stimulate economic growth. He believed in using tariffs as bargaining tools, reducing them when other countries reciprocated. Focused on expanding export markets for US agriculture and manufacturing, he advocated significant federal investment in industry and infrastructure. He greatly expanded defense spending to confront the communist menace. Frustrated with entrenched bureaucratic resistance to parts of his agenda, he favored efficiency and modernization of federal agencies. He even confronted the Deep State, in particular the CIA.

Sound familiar? Indeed, I note all this because today’s Democratic Party would be an inhospitable place for Kennedy. Kennedy’s nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., currently serving as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, still holds to his uncle’s values. He left the Democratic Party to join Trump’s administration. Like his uncle, who was assassinated in 1963, the president that Bobby serves was also struck by an assassin’s bullet. Trump survived the attempt. So they tried again. Trump gave his speech to the nation last night behind a wall of bulletproof glass. By contrast, Mamdani goes to the streets of New York without concern for his safety. Both know the world they live in.

Returning to the narrative, as president, in addition to unchaining the productive machinery of American industry, Kennedy became more engaged with civil rights issues, especially after events such as the Freedom Rides, the integration crisis at the University of Mississippi, and growing nationwide protests. Over the course of his term, Kennedy increasingly framed civil rights as a national imperative.

In June 1963, after the stand-off at the University of Alabama and rising national unrest, Kennedy delivered a televised address announcing that civil rights was a “moral issue” and calling for comprehensive legislation to guarantee equal access to public accommodations, schools, and employment. He formally sent a civil rights bill to Congress shortly afterward. That proposal became the foundation of what would later become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Kennedy was assassinated before the bill could pass. After his death, as he did with Kennedy’s tax cuts, President Johnson made passage of the bill a central political priority, explicitly invoking Kennedy’s legacy as a reason for immediate action. Johnson used his experience in the Senate to build coalitions, manage negotiations, and apply pressure to secure votes. He repeatedly told congressional leaders that failing to pass the bill would dishonor Kennedy’s memory.

The bill faced its greatest obstacle in the Senate, where Democrats mounted a prolonged filibuster to prevent a vote. Opponents of the bill used the filibuster for over two months in 1964. The filibuster was ultimately broken when the Senate voted 71–29 to invoke cloture, ending debate and clearing the way for a final vote. Crucially, this could not have happened without Republican votes. Indeed, a much greater proportion of Republicans supported the law in both chambers than did Democrats.

When the Senate voted on final passage, the Civil Rights Act passed 73–27. Sixty-nine percent of Senate Democrats supported the bill. Eighty-two percent of Senate Republicans supported it. A bipartisan coalition was essential. Opposition was concentrated in the Democratic Party, which held majorities in both chambers. In the House of Representatives, 63 percent of Democrats voted in favor, while 80 percent of Republicans voted in the affirmative. As in the Senate, Republican support and Northern Democratic support together overtook opposition to the law. The result was one of the most significant civil rights laws in American history, fundamentally reshaping federal authority over segregation and discrimination in public life.

With segregation out of the way, Southerners, generally opposed to big government intrusion in their lives, gradually left the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans. Democrats retooled the racial system by establishing racial preferences that systematically disadvantaged whites, promoting anti-white bigotry to justify these systems, and implementing a vast welfare state that trapped black Americans in a cycle of dependency. They also opened the country to mass immigration, passing the Hart-Celler Act the year after the Civil Rights Act, and entrenched free trade, leading to the mass exodus of high-wage, capital-intensive jobs to the Third World. These developments proved devastating to black Americans, who have been idled, their family system undermined (three-fourths of black children are born in single-parent homes), and their communities fraught with crime and disorder.

* * *

As Independence Day celebrations approach nationwide, Obama is exploiting the moment to argue that America’s founding ideals of liberty and equality cannot be fully understood apart from the history of slavery that coexisted with them—and the entanglement we all acknowledge must be understood in the worst light possible: slavery is our original sin. We are forever a fallen nation because of an ancient and global system in which some of our ancestors participated. This move allows Democrats to distract from the reality that the present situation of black Americans is not because of slavery, but because of the progressive policies the party champions.

Obama was intent on linking Washington and the Founders with slavery to continue his project of sowing racial division. Although not his intent, he invited us to reflect on the history that shatters the woke progressive narrative. It is not just the history of slavery in America that implicates the Democratic Party in racism, but the Civil War, Redemption, the Civil Rights Era, and what followed. The facts prove devastating to the progressive project of historical revisionism. Those who abolished the slave trade, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow—as well as affirmative action and DEI—are those we associate with the Republican Party and its forerunners.

As previously explained on this platform, the parties didn’t flip. The Democratic Party remains the party of free trade and identitarianism—which they have expanded well beyond racial antagonisms to include imaginary forms of oppression (e.g., gender identity). Despite regrettable deviations at various points along the way, Republicans today champion nationalism and individualism, just as they did during Lincoln’s days (who was assassinated by a Democrat’s bullet).

In abandoning liberalism altogether, which progressivism necessarily entails, the Democrats have jettisoned any redeeming qualities they once had. The home of liberalism today is the Republican Party. It is the Republicans who uphold the values of the Enlightenment, while Democrats pursue transhumanism and the managed decline of the American Republic.

Those who voted for Obama thought they were affirming America’s promise. A black man was elected president. I caught grief for refusing to vote for the man. A colleague thought it was what I always wanted. But, as I knew it would, the nation left Obama’s two terms in office more racially divided than before. During his first term, the corporate media aggressively pushed out the academic rhetoric of systemic racism and white privilege. Black Lives Matter emerged during his second term. He fed the emerging narrative of systemic racism. By the time he left office, racial antagonisms were at a level Americans had not experienced in decades. Out of office, he continues to fuel the hostilities.

Obama always stands ready to advance the agenda of managed decline. The elite can count on him to interject racial division at key moments. His pairing of the 250th anniversary with the Founding Fathers’ participation in the legacy institution of slavery is designed to delegitimize us. Rather than celebrating the force of the American spirit in overcoming obstacles to a higher unity, however much he may feign admiration for Washington, Obama intervenes to remind us that the nation’s original sin of slavery will always taint the moral authority of our beloved Republic, a sin that white Americans must atone for eternally. And Mamdani is there by Obama’s side to punctuate the narrative.

Obama’s intervention has slavery as the albatross that history has hung about America’s neck. What he hopes to obscure is that the true albatross is the Democratic Party. Progressivism is the deadly omen. That we have survived this long with the weight of this dead bird pulling us down strongly suggests divine providence. And I say that as a nonbeliever.

Before I get to today’s essay, I must note three recent Supreme Court rulings. I will likely follow up with future essays on some or all of these, but I want to make note of them here.

Agency Independence and Executive Power. In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court significantly expanded presidential authority by ruling that the president may remove leaders of most independent federal agencies at will, overturning the 1935 precedent that had protected many regulators from dismissal without cause. The majority concluded that officials exercising executive power must remain accountable to the president, strengthening the Unitary Executive theory. However, the Court preserved the independence of the Federal Reserve, recognizing its unique constitutional and economic role. To clarify, this is not an expansion of presidential authority. I used that framing because that is the way the legacy media frames the matter. It overturns a precedent limiting executive power. This is good news.

Title IX and Transgender Bans. The Court upheld state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that prohibit males from participating on female school sports teams. It ruled that these laws do not violate Title IX because the reference to sex in statute permits classifications based on biological truth in athletics. While the justices were divided over the constitutional equal protection analysis, the decision allows states to continue enforcing similar bans and establishes an important precedent for future Title IX disputes involving transgender athletes. The vote was unanimous. This is good news.

Birthright Citizenship. Now for the very bad news. In a 5-1-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship violates the Fourteenth Amendment, reaffirming the longstanding principle that nearly everyone born in the United States is a US citizen regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Constitution does not impose a parental legal-status requirement, preserving more than a century of constitutional interpretation and rejecting the administration’s effort to narrow citizenship by executive action. 

Two conservative judges joined with progressives in betraying the Fourteenth Amendment—the Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. They rewrote the damn thing, scratching out a major clause of an amendment that plainly intended to grant citizenship to freed black slaves. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Justices Roberts and Barrett ignored the italicized clause to rewrite the purpose of the amendment.

This is not only an insult to black Americans and to all those who died freeing their ancestors. This is an insult to all Americans, who by the lights of the Constitution have an inherent collective right to national self-determination. When Democrats get in power and open the America’s gates to the world, they will change the demographic composition of the nation and achieve one-party rule. I have to be grim here: the Republic is effectively over.

Now on to today’s essay.

* * *

One must always consider the source, they say, so let’s talk about the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, established by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2021. The dictum is especially true when it comes to the UN, which has been colonized and corrupted by Third Worldism. The three-member panel of “independent experts” on the UN commission ostensibly investigates alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by all parties to the conflict. The reality is that the UN works from an anti-Western standpoint.

In November 2025, I published an essay, “Trump and the Battle for Western Civilization,” I wrote the following,

“I have lost confidence in the United Nations and the efficacy of international law to defend freedom and human rights. When the United Nations was founded, it was established on Western values of international cooperation and law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged from this framework. But not all member states endorsed it in substance, even if they formally signed onto it. Moreover, Muslim-majority nations developed their own declarations of rights—most notably the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam—which is founded on Sharia rather than the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to democratic republicanism and human rights.

As a result, the UN includes a wide array of states whose commitments to democracy and rights are not aligned with the Western standards that originally shaped the institution. These Western standards are not arbitrary; they are the product of reason in the context of European culture, made possible by the Protestant Reformation and the broader intellectual currents of Christian civilization.

If the UN or its agencies are asked to adjudicate whether Israel is responsible for genocide after the massacre of Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023, the judgment would ostensibly rest on the legal definition of genocide—a Western juridical concept. In practice, however, the judgment rendered would be heavily influenced by the political alignments and value systems of states that do not share the underlying philosophical commitments from which those legal definitions arose. Many of these states are openly hostile to Israel and to the West. Perhaps the UN won’t make this determination. But one has reason to worry it will. (And then what?)”

In its June 2026 report, which highlights that approximately 30 percent of those killed in Gaza were children, the commission has given ammunition to antisemites who frame Israel’s defensive war against Hamas terrorists as a “genocide.” While the commission is mandated to examine conduct by Israel, Palestinian armed groups, and others, its reports have consistently emphasized Israeli actions as the primary focus. This has led Israel, the United States, and several Western governments to accuse the commission of politicization and systemic bias. 

This has everything to do with who is on the commission. As of 2026, the commission is chaired by Srinivasan Muralidhar of India, a former Supreme Court and Delhi High Court judge. The other members are Florence Mumba of Zambia, a judge known for her work on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and Chris Sidoti of Australia, a human rights lawyer and former Australian Human Rights Commissioner. Sidoti in particular is well-known for his obsession with Israel, accusing Israeli authorities of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts amounting to genocide in Gaza. He has called the IDF one of the most criminal armies in the world.

The panelists are appointed by the HRC president, a position currently held by Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro of Indonesia. He is Indonesia’s Permanent Representative in Geneva. Indonesia is firmly pro-Palestinian and has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Suryodipuro is well-versed in the language of left-wing anti-colonialism. His role is framed as procedural, but he appoints members, chairs sessions, and facilitates consensus. His country’s longstanding stance shapes perceptions of the Council’s priorities, particularly its disproportionate attention to Israel under Agenda Item 7 compared to other global conflicts.

The HRC is notorious for including member states with questionable human rights records and for selective enforcement. The commission is well-known for its hostility toward Israel and for undermining the credibility of UN human rights efforts. The report’s “findings” are not worth the paper they’re written on. 

* * *

The commissions findings are wrong because all the assumptions are wrong. The claim that Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza requires the assumption that it is the intention of Israel to eliminate in whole or in part an ethic group. The claim makes no sense since the ethnic group in question, Arab Muslims, live, work, and thrive in Israel. The charge of war crimes and crimes against humanity ignore historical reality.

Take the modern paradigm of genocide: the Judeocide. Germany rounded up Jews in Germany and systematically exterminated them. This situation is the diametric opposite of the Israel-Gaza situation. Arab Muslims are citizens of, participants in, and protected by the Israeli state. Why isn’t Israel rounding up Arab Muslims internal to the state? Where is the genocide?

Germany also rounded up Jews in the countries they occupied. Indeed, a motive in occupying countries was expanding the reach of the genocidal project. To be sure, the primary stated motive for Nazi expansion was to acquire territory (Lebensraum), destroy perceived enemies, and establish German hegemony in Europe. However, once Germany had conquered a territory, the expansion greatly facilitated the implementation and eventual radicalization of the genocidal project against Europe’s Jews.

Conquest brought millions more Jews under Nazi control. Before the war, Germany had about 500,000 Jews. The annexation of Austria, occupation of Czechoslovakia, invasion of Poland, and later the invasion of the Soviet Union placed millions of additional Jews under Nazi rule. Israel is not an expansionist state. There is no Zionist project to conquer Arab territories and exterminate Muslims. And, if the disputed territories ever become part of a greater Israel (which I think they should), Arab Muslims who integrate with the state will become Israeli citizens.

As I have written about before in numerous essays, sharing pictures of the destruction of Gaza’s buildings and dead Arabs to sustain a claim that of Israel is the aggressor must assume that the situation is analogous to that of WWII with Israel representing German belligerence. Here, again, the situation is the diametric opposite of the historical case. The Israeli government is not analogous to the Nazi regime. Zionism is not analogous to National Socialism. Hamas is. The analogue is not only analogous positionally, but also ideologically. Both the Nazis and Hamas worked from genocidal intent.

The upshot is that one cannot oppose Nazism and at the same time support Hamas. Hamas was the elected government in Gaza when its soldiers invaded Israel and massacred thousands of Jewish civilians. Hamas is the aggressor. Hamas’s goal is the elimination of Jews from the river to the sea. Israel is defending itself against an aggressor pursuing the genocide of Jews. Sovereign nation states have an inherit right to defend their peoples. The commission could not be more wrong.

Those condemning Israel and defending Hamas have stood the situation on its head. Siding with Hamas is the moral equivalent of siding with the Nazis in WWII. That the situation has been flipped in so many minds cannot be attributed to a rational disagreement about the cause of the war and its entailments. It is a rationalization. The rationalization is entirely ideological.

If Mexico invaded the United States and killed American citizens, the United States would be completely justified and raining holy hell on Mexico City. Pictures of a devastated Mexico City and dead Hispanics would not be evidence of genocide, but the consequences of Mexico’s aggression against the United States. The Mexican state brought hell to its people. They fucked around and found out. If the US invaded and occupied Mexico in this scenario, it would be entirely justified in doing so. 

There is one reason that the Israel-Gaza war is stood on its head: Jew-hatred. One must assume that Jews have no right to defend themselves from aggression, a double standard that necessarily sees Jews as a lesser or a wicked people. What Hamas did on October 7—and in many other acts of aggression over the years—is justified in the minds of the antisemite: the antisemite believes Israel is bad not merely because of what it did in retaliation; Israel is already judged bad because Jews are presumed evil. Therefore, in the antisemite’s mind, October 7 was justified. When a man takes that position, he becomes the advocate of genocide, since the Hamas project is the extermination of Jews in the region and, if it had its way, everywhere in the world. 

Jews are not only unsafe in Israel, but everywhere they reside if Muslims sharing the genocidal intent are present. And not just Muslims—the non-Muslims who ally with them. This is not Israel’s struggle alone. It’s our struggle. It is a struggle to save Western Civilization. And the source of the threat, aside from an ascendant China, is the Islamic Republic of Iran. This threat must be eliminated.

I had an exchange the other night with a person concerned that ICE was arresting illegal immigrants, especially children. The person found disturbing the images and videos of immigrants being detained and arrested, and of the detention centers. What crime had they committed?

The answer is straightforward: they committed the crime of illegally entering the United States. Other countries also have immigration laws. And the children? Children are arrested all the time in the United States for violating the criminal law (roughly half a million juvenile arrests per year, based on the latest available national data). We have a thing in America called juvenile justice. They have this thing in many other countries, too (over 190 countries have some form of juvenile justice framework).

What about family separation? Families are separated all the time in America when a family member violates the criminal law. Arrest, detention, prison—all these separate families. About 1.2 million people are incarcerated in US prisons and jails on a given day. Roughly half of them are parents of minor children, affecting an estimated 1.5–2 million children. Over the course of childhood, approximately one in 19 US children experiences parental incarceration. Millions more experience temporary separation due to arrests, pretrial detention, probation conditions, or community supervision. Children don’t go to jail or prison with their criminal parent.

What should we do with illegal immigrant children? Keep them in America when we send their parents back home? Wouldn’t that be family separation? Of course. So we keep the families together and send them all back to where they came from.

The hysteria over the regular enforcement of immigration law dispossesses people of seeing the most obvious things.

Here’s another one of those things: the claim that breaking immigration law is not a criminal offense because it is a misdemeanor. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s a felony. But what if it is only a misdemeanor? Does that make it not criminal?

To clear up any confusion, the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor is a matter of severity, not whether they are both criminal offenses. A felony is a more serious crime with harsher penalties. A misdemeanor is a less serious criminal offense. That’s really it. It is an easy exam question. My criminal justice students very rarely get the question wrong.

Felonies include crimes such as murder, robbery, and major drug trafficking. Felonies usually carry sentences of more than one year in prison and may result in substantial fines. In addition to longer sentences, felony convictions often have more significant long-term consequences, such as restrictions on certain civil rights and greater difficulties with employment, housing, and professional licensing.

Misdemeanors are typically punishable by fines, probation, community service, or up to one year in a local jail. Examples of misdemeanors include petty theft, minor assault, drug possession, and vandalism, although these can also be felonies, depending on how the statute is written.

It is a matter of degree, not difference.

Before the immigration hysteria, I think most people understood that misdemeanors are criminal offenses. The power of ideology is impressive. It makes people forget what they always knew. However, I think many people who make this argument have conveniently forgotten the difference in the pursuit of politics. They are, in effect, lying.

Another thing that one hears is that violating immigration law is only a civil offense (civil offenses are not trivial). It depends. But it is also a criminal offense.

For those interested in federal immigration-related criminal statutes, these are primarily found in Title 8 of the United States Code (Aliens and Nationality). There are some scattered throughout Title 18 (Crimes and Criminal Procedure) and other federal statutes. But searching Title 8 statutes will quickly dispel any notion one has that illegally entering the United States is not a criminal offense. There are too many statutes to list here, but reasonable people will look them up and educate themselves about the criminal law in this area.

It seems a strange argument if one ignores the ideology and politics behind it. Why would anybody want law enforcement to enforce the law except when it pertains to those who illegally enter the country? Why should non-citizens enjoy immunities and privileges that citizens do not enjoy? You really have to hate your country to think this way.

Of course, if you are an anarchist and think that there should be no law at all, then none of this matters. But then your opinion doesn’t matter because you’re a fucking idiot.

The Punisher debuted in 1974 in The Amazing Spider-Man # 129 as an antagonist to Spider-Man. In his initial appearance, Frank Castle is portrayed as a violent vigilante manipulated into targeting Spider-Man. But even from the start, he wasn’t a traditional supervillain. He was written as a brutal, morally conflicted antihero figure. He became popular enough that Marvel repositioned him to star in his own stories.

Frank Castle was created by writer Gerry Conway with artists John Romita and Ross Andru. Conway has described the character as a critique of extreme vigilantism rather than an endorsement of it. While the Punisher’s skull logo has been adopted in some military and law-and-order subcultures, Conway and other creators are generally associated with progressivism. The character was not created as a right-wing symbol, but as a morally problematic antihero meant to raise questions about justice, violence, and the limits of the legal system.

I watched the police interview a few days ago of an interrogation video in which a twisted trans killer calmly confesses to executing both of his parents, blaming it on the mom trying to thwart ongoing gender transition surgery.

Briefly, Mia Bailey slaughtered his mother, Gail, and father, Joseph, and tried to kill his brother (he and his wife escaped out of a window), inside the family home in Washington, Utah, in 2024.

The video is chilling, not just because the man murdered his parents and tried to kill his brother and his wife, but because he appeared to believe these awful deeds were completely justified. Those around him did not affirm his delusion that he is a woman, so they deserved to die.

Most of us know about the mass shootings perpetrated by trans-identifying individuals and their allies. In a high-profile event captured on video, we watched a trans ally murder social influencer Charlie Kirk in front of a large crowd.

How many acts of violence have these deranged individuals committed against their families? Most short of murder, of course. One finds it difficult to understand how parents sleep well at night with monsters like this in their house, but many don’t realize the danger they’re in. Persons with delusions this severe are inherently dangerous.

The motive in cases like this is straightforward. Once a person identifies with what he believes is an oppressed class, when he steps into oppression, he comes to believe he is excused from moral responsibility for his wicked deeds. He redefines his homicidal or violent compulsions as just deserts for those whom he believes are oppressing him. He has allies who see the world through the same twisted conception of justice. They see themselves as warriors for justice. The oppressed man becomes the Punisher.

This is a problem with what passes for the left today. They suffer from the Punisher complex. Trans-identifying individuals and their allies are motivated to perpetrate widespread violence because they’re told that trans people are being erased. One cannot erase what does not exist, but the delusion is so deep with these individuals that they actually call into existence the impossible. Those around the deluded individual affirm his delusion. They condemn others—the enemy—for refusing to do so.

This type of virtue signalling is not merely obnoxious but deadly. The man has a supportive community, which makes his violent thoughts all the more likely to manifest in actual death and destruction. In the Kirk case, an ally did the work for his lover.

I’ve personally had violent desires expressed in my direction. It’s not a good feeling to read that another man wants to punch you in the face for simply refusing to believe the impossible.

This is a mental illness. It is no different in effect from a paranoid schizophrenic murdering his neighbor because he believes in thought broadcasting—the false belief that others can hear his private thoughts—or killing couples on Lover’s Lane because a dog told him to.

I suspect some parents go along with the madness because they do realize their lives are in danger. They fear their own children. So rather than stopping their insurance from being used for so-called gender affirming care (was this what Obama and the Democrats were enabling?), they let the doctors physiologically alter or mutilate the genitalia of their children. They subject their child to what is, in reality, sex-denying harm.

Transactivists enable the violence and other forms of deviance by lovebombing disordered personalities, telling a deranged man that there’s nothing wrong with him. Instead, they tell there’s something evil in those still tethered to reality.

It’s like the parents of a meth addict affirming their son’s addiction and excusing him when he commits violence in a manic rage.

In the case of the trans-identifying individual, it’s not just friends and family that enable harm to self and others. The medical profession is also an enabler. One of their angles is to threaten suicidality on behalf of their client.

Did you know that suicidality goes up after transition medicine? This is yet another lie in the service of gender affirming care. One should never fall for emotional blackmail, but many do. This is the result of pathological empathy.

Doctors tell parents this lie because they have dollar signs in their eyes. A mutilated kid is a lifelong medical patient. They make kids forever clients for profit.

The pathology of misplaced compassion causes parents to hurt those they love. The join with the medical industry to lie about something as obvious as the immutability of gender.

A man cannot be the other gender. His gender is encoded in every cell of his body. He comes with a gender identity. It is in his chromosomes. He is what natural history made him. The moral thing to do is to teach those who suffer from body dysmorphia to learn to love their bodies as they are. A truly compassionate person does not tell a person that they can find happiness by drastically altering their physiology or mutilating their genitals.

People think they are being compassionate by affirming delusions. But, really, they’re being cruel. Love is tough. Truth is hard. A man has to be tough if he truly cares about his children. Yet, this may put his life in danger. This is why there must be a whole-of-society effort to contain the madness.

There is no real debate here. The truth has its own integrity. If we deny it, we lose our’s.

I did some banking yesterday. As I sat and waited to see my banker (joined by an elderly woman who complained to me about the modern age), the video wall told customers about the bank’s close relationship with the LGBTQ+ community. I then noticed the table across the room with the Pride Progress flag and a cup with thematic pens.

My bank’s displays are always quite something. I had, on earlier occasions, remarked upon the four-panel display behind the tellers, which included a photo, taken from the perspective of a person sitting in the backseat, of a black couple returning from snowboarding, putting a plastic sled full of snow into the back of the SUV.

Why would people put a snow-filled sled in their car? That’d be like getting in the car after a day at the beach without washing the sand off your feet. It took another second to understand why: How would I know that the couple had been snowboarding if they had shaken out the snow first?

At any rate, the Pride Progress flag displayed at the bank was notable. The flag symbolizes the inclusive acronym. But the acronym is incoherent, since it attempts to pair gay, lesbian, and bisexual pride with a range of mental and physical disorders, along with a political project, namely Queer, an offshoot of anarchism.

Most customers wouldn’t know that the Pride Progress flag is not the Pride flag. And soon, the Pride Progress flag will be the only flag any of us will know. We will believe that it alone represents Pride. It will replace the Pride flag not only because Pride is scheduled for erasure, but because, if the Pride flag is displayed, the queer community will demand to know why trans people are left out.

“I support the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community.” “Yeah? Well, what about trans people?” I have actually had this conversation.

Well, what about them?

The point of the Pride Progress flag is to make people reflexively conflate two entirely different things: homosexuality and gender identity, the first having to do with romantic attraction, the second with kinks, mental illness, and the politics of transgression.

I avoided the recent Pride celebration in Green Bay because it was festooned with Pride Progress flags. I also worried about harassment had I attended, given my reputation as a notorious transphobe. I am not imagining this, since I have been the subject of harassment by trans activists.

But more troubling than harassment is that the conflation of these things allows queer activists to frame psychological and psychiatric treatment of mental illness as “conversion therapy,” as if it’s the same as treating homosexuality as a mental illness. This not only allows the industry to valorize gender affirming care, but it also hides the fact that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgery to produce simulated sexual identities are the most obvious forms of conversion therapy in modern medicine. Gender affirming care is actually the medical practice of denying gender. It is a regression to alchemy.

While we wait for the Supreme Court to finish its term (I am especially anxious about the pending birthright citizenship decision), a ruling issued a few months ago is worth noting. The Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Chiles v. Salazar on March 31, 2026.

Following the decision, the Colorado General Assembly passed an updated, viewpoint-neutral law on May 7, 2026, to align its youth protection policies with the Court’s strict speech standards.

Before the Court’s ruling, Colorado and more than twenty other states restricted therapists from trying to change the gender identity of clients under eighteen. Colorado banned what the trans lobby terms “conversion therapy,” thereby attempting to deceive the public into believing that an intervention that treats gender dysphoria as a psychological disorder rather than affirming the concept of gender identity is similar to an intervention that attempts to change sexual orientation.

But gender affirming care is conversion sui generis. Conversion is defined as the process of changing or causing something to change from one form to another. In the case of gender affirming care, the process attempts to change a man into a woman, or vice versa. Conversion therapy in the case of sexual orientation is an attempt to change a gay man or a lesbian into a heterosexual. In this instance, the attempt is to modify a natural disposition with respect to sexual attraction. In the case of gender affirming care, the attempt is to modify a natural body.

Kaley Chiles, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado Springs, filed suit in 2022 over Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. The Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with Chiles, rejecting a Colorado law that prohibited mental health professionals from denying the construct of gender identity. The Supreme Court’s reasoning was that the law, as applied to talk therapy, represented an “egregious assault” on the First Amendment.

“Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the eight justices in agreement. “But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

The lone dissenter was the justice who could not tell Senator Marsha Blackburn during her confirmation hearings what a woman was. “The Constitution does not pose a barrier to reasonable regulation of harmful medical treatments just because substandard care comes via speech instead of a scalpel,” Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown argued. The decision, according to her wisdom, “risks grave harm to Americans’ health and well-being.”

Is it not incongruous for a justice who does not (strategically, to be sure) know what a woman is to pontificate on what constitutes substandard care? What’s harmful in this case is gender affirming care, not a therapist helping a confused child, one with no medical condition, feel comfortable with his body.

The person who feels they’re not what they are, that their self-image is distorted, or their identity is trapped in a body, suffers from a range of disorders, e.g., borderline disorder. One feature of this particular disorder is self-mutilation, such as cutting oneself. The sufferer does this to regulate emotional pain (which is why the underlying cause is often identified as emotional dysregulation), relieve feelings of emptiness or numbness, express distress that feels hard to put into words, or regain a sense of control or reality.

I raise the matter of borderline personality disorder because Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and gender dysphoria (GD) often appear together, with studies finding a higher prevalence of BPD traits among transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) populations, often linked to elevated gender minority stress, trauma, or identity confusion. BPD is one of the most common personality disorders found in so-called gender-diverse populations. Studies find that the prevalence of personality disorders in patients with gender dysphoria is as high as 80 percent. Indeed, some research suggests BPD-related identity disturbance overlaps with GD, that is, that GD is not a distinct condition. 

When psychiatry constructs a diagnosis, as in the case of gender identity, it calls into existence a reality. When it normalizes the reality it conjures, some will feel they have finally found a stable identity and demand that others affirm it. “I never knew what was wrong,” the thought process goes. “Now I know: I was trapped in the wrong body. I have always been trans.” The individual revises her biography in light of the revelation, blames others for not recognizing her true self all along, and then claims that this is the source of the trauma she experiences. Not only does she now know what she “really” is, but she has somebody to blame for it. And it’s the wrong person.

Typically, a teenage girl (three-quarters of borderline cases are female) who, with the help of her therapist or an online community, “discovers” that she is actually trans, blames her parents and those around them who should have known what was going on, or worse, for denying their real identity because they didn’t want a trans child. This imagined experience leads to family dissolution, the act of going “no contact,” or similar ruptures. Everything in their life is interpreted through the new frame of trans identity. She believes she has found her authentic self. But for how long?

What underpins borderline disorder and other disorders of a similar nature is an unstable identity, the feeling that one’s identity is not aligned with what she sees in the mirror or how other people respond to her. The disorder often comes with body dysmorphia, that is, a perceived distortion of the body.

One sees this in anorexia nervosa and other similar conditions. Unlike anorexia, however, which no doctor would treat using weight-loss drugs or bariatric surgery, properly reserved for those who suffer actual obesity, doctors treat a distorted gender identity using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries such as phalloplasty.

One can expect pushback when putting the matter like this. Many sociologists will paradoxically argue that treating gender identity as a disorder “medicalizes” the problem. Psychiatry agrees, which is why it dropped GID from the DSM and identified the phenomenon of GD to put in its stead, defining the problem not as misperception of one’s gender, but as the distressed experiences at the perceived incongruence between the subjective sense of gender and the actual gender of the patient.

Extending the logic of this rationalization, referencing the DSM about borderline or other Cluster B personality disorders, delusional thinking, and so forth, would constitute medicalizing, specifically psychiatrizing, the “authentic self.” This is the influence of postmodernist thinking, specifically queer theory, in which psychiatric categories concerning gender are expressions of gender oppression—as if nature itself were an oppressor.

Those who know me—and certainly students who sit through my sociology classes—know that I am a fierce critic of medicalization. One would not be wrong to identify me as anti-psychiatry. I’m a fan of Erving Goffman (Asylums), Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness, The Manufacture of Madness), Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis), and Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization). I find their arguments compelling. At the same time, I do recognize mental illness. I’ve seen too much of it to believe it’s merely a definition of a situation. This is why I oppose the administration of puberty blockers and hormones and genital surgery—we ought not be subjecting those with mental disorders to the ordeal of overly medicalized bodies.

Even the most ardent critic of psychiatry wouldn’t deny that there are conditions that have a medical basis. These conditions are not constructed by the diagnosis; rather, the diagnosis is determined by a process of abduction from the observation of symptoms. Nobody would deny that schizophrenia is an organic brain disorder, or that bipolar disorder likely has some biological basis.

Any number of other disorders could fit with this understanding. Body dysmorphia itself may result from the brain wrongly mapping the body, at first in an obscure way, then in a specific way once the experience is given a name. If these phenomena are determined to have a physiological basis, then they are properly medicalized. The question then is: what is the appropriate line of care?

The idea that a doctor would surgically alter bodies or give puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to address the process via the wrong sort of medicalization. It treats an emotional, mental, or personality disorder not only as if it has an organic basis like those other conditions, but as a medical problem that may be treated hormonally or surgically.

Such an intervention would not be ruled out in the case of a teenage boy with gynecomastia, which is the abnormal enlargement of glandular breast tissue in males caused by a hormone imbalance. Intervention in this case is actually gender affirming care, since males normally do not grow breasts. But in the case of gender identity, such interventions constitute gender denying care. They are not treating aberrations but distorting normal bodies. An endocrinologist prescribing leuprolide acetate (Lupron) to a young girl with precocious puberty is not the same as prescribing this drug to a young girl who does not want to experience a phase in the normal development process.

Instead of pursuing psychotherapy to teach an individual how to negotiate the incongruence experienced, as any ethical doctor or therapist would for a distorted body image or dissociative disorder, the doctor working from gender identity is opting for radical medical intervention.

Is trans identification always the result of a psychiatric disorder defined in this way? No. It can be other things. Much of the transgender phenomenon is explained by the problem of social contagion. It’s a fad or a fashion. For others, it’s a fetish or a kink, falling under a different psychiatric classification, namely, a paraphilia, an atypical sexual behavior, or sexual deviation. For those who are genuinely suffering from distress over their bodies, it is a delusion or distorted perception. But in all these cases, the individual is not really the other gender. What they think they are, or what they would like to be, or how they would like others to regard them, does not align with reality.

What has confused the person suffering from GD is this: a definition has been constructed by authorities and, by authority, what is defined is made to seem real. The identity is defined into existence by the words used to describe it—a thing that doesn’t exist. That is a definition of a situation. Sure, an underlying disorder may exist, but the idea of a “brain” or a “soul” trapped in the wrong body is an impossibility.

This is what is known in science as reification, that is, treating a concept or an inventory of attributes or characteristics as if it were a real thing, a thing independent of the mind. But it is ever only conceptual, at best intersubjective, and what it claims to describe does not exist apart from the mind that believes it.

A common justification for gender affirming care is that it will ameliorate symptoms and, therefore, it is an act of compassion. Whatever the individual is suffering from, he is suffering; the intervention helps him manage the suffering. If it works, then the intervention is justified.

This is the source of the language surrounding the phenomenon, that of affirmation and kindness. But affirmation here means validating something a person believes without reason, a perception without evidence. This is not kindness. It’s analogous to telling a person who has cancer that they don’t because knowing one has cancer causes distress. In every other case, that’s not an appropriate thing for a doctor to do. So why this one?

There are other reasons. The person wants to legitimize an identity they believe they are. In this case, it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the person who truly suffers from gender dysphoria and the person who wants to become the thing they desire. Either way, they want to be this thing, so they need everybody to affirm that they are this thing, and if affirmation is not forthcoming, they experience distress. They believe all their problems will be solved by transitioning, and their certainty of this precludes reason. They need affirmation because they have doubts that they really are the thing. They’re asking everybody to participate in a deception. This expectation is unkind to everyone around them—and society at large.

Another reason is that it generates billions of dollars in revenue for big corporations. The motive of doctors—we should say the medical industry, because it forces doctors to accept this. It’s not an act of compassionate care, but rather a practice that advances the financial interests of powerful medical corporations. These corporations work with psychiatrists, endocrinologists, and others to change definitions to suit their avarice. The disorder is redefined, and the new definition is upheld to advance material interests at the expense of the suffering person. That makes this an instance of institutional malpractice, and we should call it out.

When people ask me why I care about this issue so much, it’s for the same reason I care about corporate crime and medical malpractice, especially when it’s institutionalized. As a criminologist, I research and lecture on these topics all the time. It would be ideological for me to resist making this argument simply because it is politically unpopular. I’ve spent so much time on it because this is a particularly egregious example. This is the greatest medical scandal in my lifetime.

The fact that natural history has produced conscious and social animals doesn’t mean there is an ethereal realm where gender identities wander about untethered from biology. On the contrary, it should dispel such a notion. A mammal is either one or the other gender. A mammal cannot change gender, nor can it be both genders at once (unless it is a true chimera).

Here’s how those who subscribe to gender identity doctrine can know they’re wrong—or at least know that they subscribe to a neoreligion:

When a claim is made about gender, it can either be an empirical claim or an appeal to faith. If it is empirical, then testing the claim involves reference to chromosomes, gametes, and reproductive anatomy. If an article of faith, then by definition, there is no objective way to know or determine its validity. One may hold such a belief, but it’s not a scientific or true fact.

The demand for “affirmation” proves that gender identity doctrine is a neoreligion. If the claim that a man can be a woman were true, it could be demonstrated empirically. But since it cannot, those making the claim demand affirmation of the claim’s truth. “Transwomen are women. Say it! Use the pronouns!” (O’Brien to Winston, “How many fingers am I holding up?”)

The reality is that “gender affirming care” is gender denying harm, since it alters the body to represent a faith-based claim about the self that is contrary to the facts of one’s gender. Gender denying care is a type of conversion therapy. It is deceitful because it claims to make the impossible possible.

The trans body is a simulated gender identity. It can never be the thing it claims to be. True identity is what a thing really is, the thing-itself, and its truth is not determined subjectively or by affirmation or rituals, but by reference to empirical reality. Everything else is an appeal to faith. And faith here is not a stand-in for what we cannot know. A man remains an adult male human, regardless of what he believes about or does to his body.

Time Magazine reported in June 2017 that the National Park Service had to drain and clean the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after discovering that a parasite in the water killed eighty ducklings. Necropsies on the poor little things conducted by the US Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center found that a parasite growing in snails living in the pool had been killing the ducklings since May of that year. Why did President Trump allow snails to invade the reflecting pool?

The 2017 Time Magazine story has faded from the memory of the handful of people who happened across the short article at the time. I never knew about it. I stumbled upon it looking for something else (I will get to that in a moment). Now, with the 250th Anniversary of the Republic rapidly approaching, algae has become a problem at the reflecting pool, and finally, the media is paying attention.

Why Trump’s killing of ducklings at the reflecting pool was not on a continual “Breaking News” loop is the only mystery I discuss in this essay. Of course, Trump didn’t kill ducklings. The parasite is common to snails. Snails are common in water. Swimmers have long suffered itchy skin from swimming in bodies of water where the snails are present. I framed the episode at the start to bring to the fore the absurdity of the media frenzy over algae at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after Trump renovated the attraction in preparation for America’s 250th anniversary.

Algae have also been a problem at the reflecting pool. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool controversy is indeed absurd, but, sadly, predictable.

Obama’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was far more costly ($44 million in today’s dollars) and was soon plagued by algae. There were no scrolling “Breaking News” alerts about Obama’s “green reflecting pool.” I did locate a story about the algae in a Google search, but there was no hint of a scandal. Perhaps it was a slow news day. As with the death of eighty ducklings, the reporter simply noted the presence of algae in a short article.

Today, Obama’s presidential library, a work of brutalist architecture, is the toast of the town. What one may gather from the open house is that the public is supposed to pine for the good old days when Americans were sleepwalking through life. Just look at the photos of Obama’s perfect family. No scandals, we’ve been told.

That’s not what I remember. I distinctly remember Obama’s 2011 drone killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American citizen in Yemen. A year earlier, Obama joked during the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner that, if the Jonas Brothers got near his daughters, he had “two words” for them: “predator drones—you will never see it coming.” Abdulrahman never saw it coming.

Then there was the 2011 torture murder of Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi. Remember when–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reacted in her notorious cackle to the news of Gaddafi’s murder with, “We came, we saw, he died”?

The MSM cannot be bothered to report that the Obama Presidential Center was built on Jackson Park, altering historic public space, or that subcontractors are owed money (Trump is dogged for stiffing subcontractors).

I thought we would never hear the end of the temporary UFC structure on the South Lawn of the White House. Obama’s monstrosity is a glorious, permanent reminder of the days of a scandal-free presidency.

In addition to the algae, the blue paint coating the bottom of the reflecting pool is peeling. President Trump blames vandalism. The algae and peeling paint come with the chemical etching of “8647”—a sign to kill the president—on the Washington Monument grounds (West Lawn area). That nefarious forces were behind the peeling is plausible. More than plausible, actually, considering that there are vandals with tools at the pool, hauling up pieces of it. Law enforcement is investigating, there are many witnesses, and several arrests have been made.

A prebunking campaign circulated a hoax that Antifa dumped aggressive Georgia algae in the pool to sabotage the Trump Presidency. This framed Trump’s claim of vandalism.

If all this feels orchestrated, don’t be too quick to dismiss that feeling. However, sabotage by left-wing activists is hardly necessary when the corporate media stands ready to turn everything Trump does into a scandal.

I don’t recall whether the reflecting pool was green the last time I traveled to Washington, DC. That was when George W. Bush was president. There were more concerning developments at the time, like the Second Persian Gulf War and the entrenchment of the Surveillance State. I was more interested in the monuments and American history. My visits to the Pentagon and the Vietnam Memorial were remarkable. I will never forget the vigilant owl in the courtyard of the home of the War Department. Algae at the reflecting pool would not have stuck me as remarkable.

Speaking of the War Department, how about some reporting on transnational corporate power and the degradation of military readiness by outsourcing industrial production to the Chinese Communist Party under previous administrations? Americans might be interested in hearing about that and other developments important to their lives.

I am confident that they would be interested in this (not unrelated matter): On her last day in office at the Office of National Intelligence, Director Tulsi Gabbard shared documentation confirming what I already knew: that COVID-19 was fabricated in the Wuhan bioweapons lab under the direction of Anthony Fauci. The Biden administration sought to conceal this by granting Fauci a preemptive pardon, framing the matter of protecting those Trump would pursue as part of his “Retribution Tour.” (Biden justified pardoning his family using this frame.)

I have only seen short news briefs or wire-service summaries about Gabbard’s revelation wrapped in muted language: “Gabbard alleges…,” “Documents purport to show…,” “No independent verification…,” etc. There is no viral narrative about the revelation, even though, alongside Trump pressuring the state of Israel to stop defending itself from Iranian proxies in south Lebanon, Gabbard’s revelation is the biggest news story of the day.

As I documented in my last essay on this platform, delegitimizing Israel is useful to the Establishment. Exposing Fauci’s involvement in producing a bioweapon that shut down the world and led to Biden being installed as president is not.

What should be breaking news occurs at the same time the legacy media and social media accounts have organized the viral media campaign about an algae bloom at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, even though algae have plagued the pool since it was completed in 1924, more than a hundred years ago. The narrative persists. It remains among the top stories in the Google news aggregator this morning.

The ODNI revelation is news. The COVID-19 pandemic affected everybody’s lives. People were told to stay in their homes, stay away from others, avoid crowds (except those rioting over the long-debunked myth of “systemic racism” in lethal civilian-police encounters), not travel (my wife could not be with her dying mother in Sweden), and wear cloth masks over their faces. They were, moreover, shamed for not submitting to an experimental mRNA shot—and worse, employees were fired. Those who objected were censored and deplatformed. Doctors lost their privileges and reputations for refusing to valorize the Pandemic narrative.

An algae bloom at the reflecting pool is not news. Photosynthetic microorganisms, such as cyanobacteria (often called blue-green algae), have existed for at least 2.5–3.5 billion years. Eukaryotic algae (the organisms most people think of as algae) have been around for at least one billion years and probably longer. Few things are as common to the experience as algae in standing pools of water.

As I noted above, there was no prominent MSM coverage of the algae bloom that followed Barack Obama’s renovation of the reflecting pool. That is because algae blooms in the reflecting pool are commonplace. It’s why I don’t remember algae when I visited Washington, DC, more than two decades ago. Here’s the point: Obama is an Establishment operative. Donald Trump isn’t.

* * *

Reporters are present at the reflecting pool covering the algae bloom, yet the vandalism commands very little of their attention. It’s not because they cannot be bothered with it. It’s because they’re there for algae and peeling paint and placing the responsibility for these developments squarely on Trump’s shoulders. I know about it because right-wing accounts on X are covering the vandalism, and there are police records of detentions and arrests. Vandals are being charged with crimes. The vandals are damned lucky they don’t live in North Korea.

Remember the burning police cars and precincts behind reporters covering the George Floyd riots described as “mostly peaceful”? Remember Lieutenant Frank Drebin standing in front of an exploding fireworks factory in the comedy Naked Gun, telling onlookers, “Nothing to see here”?

The George Floyd riots would be comical if not for the dozens of people murdered by “protestors.” As for the reports of violence that did break through, Chris Cuomo, then with CNN, demanded, “Please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.” Never mind that the First Amendment to the US Constitution protects “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” (emphasis mine).

The MSM is not news. It is Establishment propaganda. If you cannot see this, then your eyes are wide shut. The business of the MSM today—indeed for the last decade—is to delegitimize Donald Trump because Trump is not an establishment figure. He is an outsider whose policies disrupt globalization and the progressive agenda. Fauci was an operative of the Establishment. Any revelations about his involvement in the manufacture of a lethal virus that affected our lives must be marginalized.

There’s more to the Wuhan story that the MSM is not reporting. In October, 2014, the Obama White House announced a “pause” on funding for gain-of-function research. Experiments that potentially increase the transmissibility or virulence of certain pathogens were deemed too dangerous to conduct in the United States.

But the weaponization of viruses did not stop. Gain-of-function experiments were moved to China under the direction of Fauci and a network of interested parties. It was in China, at the bioweapons lab in Wuhan, overseen by the Chinese military, that COVID-19 was manufactured. It “escaped” from the lab just in time for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.

A coincidence? The hysteria over the overdose death of George Floyd, fueled by the Democratic Party and the MSM, was organized just in time for Trump’s 2020 reelection. Was that a coincidence, too? How many “coincidences” does a person need to detect a pattern?

You are not to think about any of that. If you talk about it, you risk being labeled a “conspiracy theorist.” You are to focus on an algae bloom and peeling paint at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Pay no attention to vandals. And don’t forget the ducks and their babies.

Some have suggested that chlorine might address the algae problem. But Chlorine is harmful to ducks. I can see that. Chlorine stings my eyes and makes me see halos around everything. Why do we use this chemical in our pools if it is so harmful to animals? Why do we let children swim in chlorinated pools?

In addition to algae, Chlorine also keeps ducks out of pools (but not those snails). Do we really want ducks swimming in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? Ducks are indeed cute, but there are several ponds and wetlands in Washington, DC, where ducks can safely swim and preen. The ponds are public, so if people want to see ducks, they can. Those are much better places for our web-footed friends to deposit their slippery turds. At least when I go for a walk on the trail at the river near my home, I know to step over them. It’s part of the deal. More objectionable is charging and hissing geese.

But I digress. To get back on point, to those who have not yet been awakened by the obvious, how much longer are you going to walk zombie-like through the world with your eyes wide shut?

* * *

Update: When I published this satire about Trump killing ducks at the reflecting pool in 2017, I didn’t expect that the Washington Post would actually publish a story about a couple of dead ducks amid the Great Algae Invasion of 2026. But here it is, including necropsies.

That Time Magazine was concerned enough about eighty ducklings killed by parasites to run a story on it in 2017 was weird enough. I’d expect that from a local paper in a small town. But Trump was president, so a national publication ran the story.

How many dead ducks have they found in Washington, DC, over the years? How would we know? Aside from 2017, has there been much reporting on this? Did any ducks die under Obama?

Trump should poke the media by suggesting that vandals killed the ducks. The vandals made the ducks eat the blue paint. Given everything that has transpired, it’s plausible.

I awakened this morning to find that the Islamic state has announced that it is closing the Straits of Hormuz once again. Even though Israel was not a party to the Islamabad MoU, Tehran cites continuing hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon as the reason Iran is not honoring its side of the agreement.

At the direction of Tehran, the Trump administration is pressuring Israel to quit its operations in Lebanon. Israel is a sovereign nation-state. It has the right to defend itself against foreign aggression. Ultimately, Iran is behind the aggression. Why should Israel honor an MoU that does not guarantee its security? Why is Iran dictating US foreign policy? Why has Trump made a pawn of Israel? (So much for the theory that Israel runs US foreign policy.)

Thursday afternoon on this platform, I published Trump’s Very Bad Deal With Iran and the Troubling Rise of Islamophilia Among Younger Conservatives. At first blush, the parts of that essay may strike readers as two rather distinct essays. I wish that were the case. They appear together because they describe parts of a whole.

Understanding why the Trump administration would appease Iran to the detriment of Israel, developments on the home front need attending to. The Midterms are approaching. If anger over the cost of living causes Trump to lose the Republican majority, then his second-term agenda will be ground to a halt. Gas prices are part of it. But there’s more to it than that. Trump’s base is fracturing over the Middle East.

The neocons are imperfect allies, to be sure, but on Iran, their criticism of the Islamabad MoU is essentially correct. I don’t like finding myself in agreement with a man like Robert Kagan. Kagan argues that the war outcome and subsequent diplomacy reflect a US strategic defeat and erosion of American leverage. His view is that the agreement locks in unfavorable realities rather than reversing them.

My disagreement with Trump over Iran hails from a different standpoint, but neocons are not always wrong, and they can arrive at the right conclusion even if their objectives differ from mine. In this case, the neocons are right.

The vocal rejection of Trump over the Iran war by the “Blue Hat” America First crowd—my term for right-wing isolationists inclined to challenge and constrain Donald Trump’s foreign policy—cannot have gone unnoticed by the President. Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, and their ilk and crowd were instrumental in helping Trump return to the White House. The MAGA hurricane had gathered strength amid lawfare and the disastrous Biden years. The hurricane is blowing itself out.

The Blue Hat’s highly public break with the movement’s mainstream over Iran rests on the claim that Trump has abandoned the America First principles that once defined his appeal. It must be particularly galling to Trump to hear the isolationists accuse him of aligning himself with the very neoconservatives he long denounced.

The far-right mind works from the theory of Jewish manipulation of American institutions. To obscure their antisemitism, Jews are accused of using the charge of antisemitism to silence those who expose the cabal. Readers have heard the complaint: “Jews always wrap criticisms of Israel in the charge of antisemitism. But we are criticizing Israeli behavior and Zionist racism!” But is this not itself an expression of antisemitism? It boils down to this: Jews run the world and accuse those who notice of Jew-hatred. The distillate reeks of antisemitism.

He’s doing the rationalization thing. Sad. Had high hopes for him. pic.twitter.com/GNmJAuuLEI

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) June 20, 2026

It appears this mentality has some purchase among administration officials. Vice President J.D. Vance made the distinction between criticism of Israel and antisemitism in that tortured way in a recent interview with The Blaze. But the double standard applied to Israel is a hallmark of antisemitism. Every country has the right to respond to foreign aggression. Israel is being assailed from every front. Yet they are told to behave differently from every other country. Treating Israel differently implies that Jews are the aggressors in the region. It is not opposition to a Jewish state in the Middle East that lobs missiles into Israel, but Jewish aggression in the region that demands a response. If Israel were to quit Lebanon, the conflict would end. How did that work out in Gaza?

🚨 WOW! JD Vance is DIRECTLY calling out Israeli cabinet members for their personal attacks on President Trump

"Donald J. Trump is the ONLY head of state in the ENTIRE WORLD who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time, and he happens to be the head of state… pic.twitter.com/0H9yGH8ubL

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) June 18, 2026

At a White House news conference Thursday, Vance delivered a blunt message to the Israeli government, urging it to support President Trump’s agreement with Iran. “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” he said of the Jewish nation. Israel, he continued, “needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.” This is rhetoric that isolates Israel and shirks America’s responsibility to stand with the only country in the region that shares our values—at least the values true patriots still stand by.

The Islamabad IOU has not just concerned Israel. The Gulf states are troubled, as well. Iran is their enemy, too. Why would the Trump administration make Israel’s operations in Lebanon part of the Iran MOU? Israel isn’t a party to the agreement. They’re a sovereign nation-state. Compelling Israel to quit Lebanon strengthens Hezbollah.

Then there’s that damned ceasefire in Gaza. Trump’s pressure on Israel allows Hamas time to regroup. Surely the administration knows this. They know this, too: both Hezbollah and Hamas are proxies for Iran’s war forever against Israel. Iran’s aggression imperils the entire region. Are Israel and the Gulf States not our allies?

And what about Russia? I have long been a critic of those who claim that Trump colludes with Putin to weaken the rules-based international order. Moreover, I am sympathetic to Russia’s motive for the Ukrainian action (see History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War; Pushing Through the Panic and Propaganda in a World at War). But Russia is not a friend, and the MoU benefits Russia in several ways.

The Islamabad MoU benefits Russia mainly through military cooperation and sanctions evasion. Iran supplies Russia with drones, the new face of modern warfare. Defensive cooperation fuels the Ukraine war. Both countries work to bypass Western sanctions by developing alternative trade and financial channels.

To be sure, the relationship between Iran and Russia is pragmatic rather than a formal alliance (the world beyond the West doesn’t work in exactly the same way). Nonetheless, strategically, Iran gives Russia greater leverage in the Middle East. By not merely allowing the Islamic Regime of Iran to escape annihilation but to enjoy hundreds of billions of dollars in development funds, and tying the agreement to weakening Israeli efforts to secure safety for its people, Trump has greatly strengthened Russia’s hand in the region.

Given NATO support for Ukraine, European leaders’ celebration of the MoU might seem a bit of a mystery. However, it should be noted that China also benefits from a strengthened Iran, and that’s good for the globalization project. More than a reliable energy source for China, ties with Iran expand China’s influence in the Middle East, support initiatives like the Belt and Road, and give it greater geopolitical leverage in the region. Here, again, the partnership is pragmatic rather than a formal military alliance.

I had considered that, behind the preemptive attack on Iran’s military apparatus, and possibly regime change in that country, Trump was disrupting the de facto China-Russia alliance (see Beyond Regime Change: Iran, the Rise of China, and the Trump Doctrine). The two countries cooperate closely in several areas, albeit without the binding mutual-defense commitments that define a formal alliance. The MoU strengthens that relationship. To what end?

Europeans applauded the MoU at the G7. Perhaps Europe pursues two objectives at once: containing Russia by bogging that nation down in a forever war with Ukraine (Ukraine be damned), while strengthening China by preserving its path to the Middle East. Could this be, at least in part, because it delegitimizes the Trump populist-nationalist vision of a restored Europe? (See Donald Trump’s Grand Vision: Make Western Civilization Great Again.) Has the President abandoned the doctrine? Was he ever dedicated to it?

The President is a sensitive man. Too sensitive. He likes the crowd. The loud rejection of Trump over the Iran war by the Blue Hats cannot have escaped his attention. Their dramatic exit from the movement’s mainstream hinges on their characterization of Trump as having abandoned America First. It must sting the President that the isolationists accuse him of breaking bread with the neoconservatives. The Blue Hats must be overjoyed at neocon consternation over the MoU.

In leaving MAGA, Russiophilia became prominent in the far right’s rhetoric, as I document in The Dark Heart of Antisemitism: Separating the Haters from the Critics. and The Woke Reich and the Enemy Within (although, while it struck me at the time as rhetorically clever, I am not sure “woke” is the best word to describe this tendency). But more than Russiophilia, Islamophilia has also emerged on the far right. This development is driven by antisemitism.

This development cannot please Europeans. They have a problem on their hands: nationalism. Nationalism is the biggest obstacle to globalism and its stepping stone: regionalization. Populism threatens the transnationalist project because it is a manifestation of patriotism. It appears, however, that Europeans elites are realizing that, while they cannot stop the rise of populism across the EU by branding the right as “fascist” and “racist,” they may be able to co-opt it, at least rhetorically, by throwing bones to ziophobes.

The EU has, moreover, moved to tighten immigration controls. On March 26, 2026, the European Parliament voted on a major part of the EU’s migration reform known as the Return Regulation, which is part of the broader Migration and Asylum Pact. The vote speeds up deportations of people without a legal right to stay in the EU, allows longer detention periods in some cases, creates or permits so-called “return hubs” or detention/processing centers outside the EU, and expands cooperation with non-EU countries for returns and removals.

These are fallback positions. The positions of the European elite are not really a mystery. Such developments require elites to finesse the situation. If anti-Israel sentiment animates the opposition, then give the ziophobes a false sense of affinity while decrying antisemitism. “We hear you, comrades.”

For elites, antisemitism is strategic. For antisemites, it is heartfelt. Co-optation won’t work. Ziophobia is core to far-right ideology. A visible elite is not nearly as attractive as a cabalistic one. Epstein’s Island was a Jewish plot. 9-11 was a Jewish plot. AIPAC commands our elections. And so on. It’s a mindset. And a reflex. Antisemitism lies at the core of MAGA exit.

For the balance of this essay, I want to focus on developments on the domestic side, since these function to strengthen the transnationalist project. It seems a paradox. But the problem here is not intent, but effect. The Blue Hats are not eager agents of globalization. Antisemitism functions as a means to this end, nonetheless.

As much as I would like to believe that the Blue Hats are a fringe phenomenon, they are a problem that nationalists cannot ignore. These are not our allies. They are useful idiots working at cross-purposes with the project to restore nationalism. The rise of Russiophilia and Islamophilia on the American right, if it sways Trump, weakens his doctrine and strengthens the globalization project.

* * *

On June 2, Glenn Beck published “The Russian influence operations targeting Candace Owens and you,” an analysis penned by Ryan Mauro, a counter-extremist and national security expert. Beck followed this the next day with his own commentary on the matter.

I do not follow Beck’s content, but these pieces caught my attention because, the day before Mauro’s analysis appeared, I published an essay about the problem Mauro identifies, introducing readers to the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin and his Fourth Political Theory (see The Left-Far Right Convergence and Notes on the Fourth Political Theory). Mauro’s article deepens our understanding of the movement Dugin represents. I am not the only one who has seen the peril of the Fourth Political Theory. Readers need to see it, too.

Candace Owens taking a "suspicious trip to Russia" is NOT the real story. It's only proof that Russia and Alexander Dugin's massive propaganda operation is working.

Dugin is right about what is happening to the West. It is evil. But that's the trap. His "solution" would destroy… pic.twitter.com/1s9wE3ooeg

— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) June 4, 2026

Read Mauro’s analysis, by all means. But I’ll summarize it here. Mauro argues that Russia is executing what may be one of the most effective foreign malign influence operations in modern history, blending rebranded Tsarist Orthodox Christianity, Russian nationalism, and conspiracy narratives to undermine the West, particularly the United States and Christianity itself. The problem was never Trump’s subservience to Putin. Yet, today, he is backing into Russian machinations to destabilize the West.

The effort is rooted in Soviet-era strategies to revive communism by fusing it with Orthodox theology and nationalism. I leave that history to Mauro and others. What is important for the moment is understanding that the nexus of the Russian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate, state-backed outlets like the Strategic Culture Foundation, and ideologues such as Alexander Dugin. Those who once identified themselves as Trump’s strongest allies domestically are a principal target of the nexus.

The operation promotes a messianic vision of Russia as a “holy” defender of traditional values, framing the West as satanic and positioning Moscow’s influence as a spiritual imperative. This has attracted the far right in America, especially those subscribing to right-wing sides of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. We hear it not only in ziophobia but in anti-Protestant rhetoric (see What Jesus Told the Pharisees and the Jewish Roots of Christianity).

The ideology Mauro is describing mirrors Islamism in key ways: a drive for civilizational unification (the “Russian World” is akin to the Ummah), justification of “holy war,” promises of spiritual redemption for fighters, blasphemy protections, and strategic alliances with Islamist actors against shared Western enemies. It is not merely a mirror image but a de facto alliance. These tendencies have converged to produce a geopolitical force. Increasingly, it is more cross-fertilization than convergence.

According to Mauro, Dugin, and others, work to reconcile Christian and Islamic eschatologies to sustain this partnership through an envisioned apocalyptic battle. The practical strategy, drawn from the Russian philosopher’s writings, focuses on exploiting Western divisions—isolationism, moral decay, racial and social conflicts, and separatism—to weaken the US from within, laundering narratives through non-Russian voices and influencers. Protestantism is the root of the Enlightenment and liberalism; the Reformation is condemned. This is where Candice Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentez, and others come in.

For Maduro and Beck, Candace Owens’ undisclosed activities and appearance at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum serve as a concrete example of how this influence reaches American audiences. Her engagements align with networks tied to Russian intelligence, propaganda figures, and the Russian Orthodox ecosystem, amid a pattern of amplification by state media like RT and earlier cultivation by Russia-linked operatives.

Mauro frames this not as an isolated incident but as evidence of a broader cognitive warfare campaign that uses anti-Western rhetoric, conspiracy themes, and the rhetoric of “family values” to draw conservatives and Christians toward a false choice: prioritizing a declining and immoral West or embracing an authoritarian, Moscow-centered “rescue” of faith and tradition. The desire for Christian theism aligns with the Islamic project of a global order founded on Sharia.

To be sure, the West is in decline. Its moral fabric is tattered and torn. But Protestantism, the Enlightenment, and liberalism are not the culprits. What lies behind the decline are globalization and progressivism. These are the forces denationalizing the West. The Blue Hats are working for these forces.

I’m not suggesting that Russiophilia is in the service of globalization by delegitimizing the Trump presidency. The Blue Hats are committed ideologues. They seek to undermine Trump for their own perverse reasons. Nonetheless, the tendency effectively weakens MAGA and derails the very project those who have abandoned Trump ostensibly support: strengthening the nation-state against the transnational project.

The Blue Hats may simply be stupid (that they still think after everything that has transpired that Jews run the world indeed suggests stupidity). It is, moreover, obvious that they are social influencers cultivating an audience. However, stupidity and grifting are not mutually exclusive. That the influencers are affecting things is obvious. They are not a fringe element. And it appears they’re getting to Trump.

Action confirms sentiment. If the Blue Hats weren’t antisemites, they would have thrown their support behind a preemptive war in Iran and used their influence to encourage their followers to see higher gas prices as a necessary burden in achieving a safer future for the West and freedom for Persians, a noble people who deserve the civilization of their ancestors.

The Blue Hats would have had to suffer the neoconservatives, but standing shoulder to shoulder with the perpetrators of the Second Gulf War entails no permanent alliance. One can still oppose PNAC’s invasion of Iraq while supporting preemptive war—and even regime change—in Iran. Iraq and Iran are not analogues. The Ba’athist regime in Iraq posed no existential threat to Israel and the West. Iran is an entirely different story, especially since the Islamic Republic comes with strategic alliances with Russia and China.

But the blue hats are disordered by Jew-hatred. It is that ancient hatred that aligns them with Islam and ultimately the transnationalist project. They will never grasp the reality that they betray their own cause of national restoration. They cannot because, deep down, they oppose the Protestant foundations of the American Republic. They derive their ethics not from Nature’s God, but rather from a desire for the divine command of a patriarchal God, a deity manifest in the hierarchical structuring of life that leaves little room for individual liberty.

Ironically, the churches they attend mimic the highly ritualized and priest-dictated religious experience that marks the old monarchal Judaism, an atavistic system Jews long ago transcended. At the same time, they reject the practical culture characteristic of Jews that Protestantism elevates. They mean to come not only for Jews, but for Protestants, as well, and that entails coming after the very constitutional order upon which the American Republic rests.

The Blue Hats are fascists. They didn’t have to be. But it is what they have become. To the extent that this crowd holds any sway over Trump, they taint his presidency. To the extent that Trump allows them to shape his policies, he undermines himself—and the nation.

* * *

Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. erred in allowing affirmative action for diversity goals in the landmark 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. I recognize that he compromised to get that decision (his was the controlling decision). But given that diversity adds no value, it should not have been allowed. The Court has since remedied the Bakke error in several ways, but in the meantime, the nation suffered for far too long. Powell’s decision sanctioned the rise of DEI, which remains determined to shape the future of millions—Supreme Court rulings notwithstanding. Bakke shaped the environment that corrupted higher education.

Powell got this part right, however: a university can neither use racial preferences to remedy societal discrimination (presuming this is a meaningful concept) nor provide compensation for historical wrongs. Privileging groups viewed as victims of societal discrimination, he argued, does not justify disadvantaging individuals who were not responsible for those harms. Seems obvious enough, but at the time, discriminating against whites in the present was deemed an appropriate remedy for past discrimination.

The importance of abolishing such a controlling principle cannot be exaggerated. To tell a white kid that he has to meet a higher standard than a black kid, or that he has to give up his place in line for a black kid who is not as accomplished or talented as he is, punishes the white kid for something someone else did. Affirmative action is like arresting a random black man for homicide because a black man somewhere murdered somebody. That is race-based discrimination, a practice antithetical to the colorblind principle at the heart of the Constitution.

As I have explained in several essays (see, e.g., Justice Harlan’s Color-Blind Constitution and the Abolition of Racial Gerrymandering; Our Colorblind Constitution: What Justice Harlan Can Teach Justice Jackson About Equality and Fairness; The Constitution is Colorblind—So Why Do Democrats Insist that the Country is White Supremacist?), equal treatment and individual justice are foundational to a free society. Treating individuals as if they are personifications of an abstract group is regressive (isn’t it weird that people calling themselves progressives advance regressive law, policy, and process).

Collective punishment is tribal. Modernity transcends such primitive thinking—at the very least, it shouldn’t codify it into law and policy. Affirmative Action should never have happened. Racial gerrymandering should never have been allowed. These practices are un-American. The Executive should compel all institutions to end all diversity programming based on suspect categories today. The only justification for treating individuals in terms of groups should be reserved for natural categories, such as age, gender, or disability, since treating individuals differentiated by biology or accident creates inequality. On grounds of class, ethnicity, or race, it is inherently discriminatory and unjust.

Despite doing something, Powell did not do enough. Perhaps in the moment, this was all he could do. But this is always the problem with compromising principles for expediency: it leads to half-measures that often compound problems in need of solving. Powell gave the tribalists time to institutionalize the doctrine of identitarianism to the detriment of millions of deserving Americans over time. And now we have to blast it out of our institutions, while facing accusations of racism for doing the right thing.

True, the 300 billion dollars in the US-Iran memorandum of understanding is not coming from US taxpayers. Democrats and the media are lying through their teeth about that. But, ultimately, it’s a distinction without a difference. The problem is the 300 billion itself. Iran will use the 300 billion to restart their nuclear weapons program. The Islamic Republic is evil. It cannot be trusted.

Trump’s deal is a bad one. It doesn’t help that he signed the Iran MOU at the Palace of Versailles, where, on June 28, 1919, German representatives signed the treaty with the Allied powers formally ending World War I.

The Islamic Republic should get nothing. It’s bad enough that Trump is leaving the regime in place. For forty-seven years, we’ve put up with clerical fascism in Iran. I wanted my sons to live in a post-Islamic Republic world. It should not fall to Israel to confront Iran and its proxies—Hamas and Hezbollah. We had an opportunity to change the course of history. Trump walked away from it.

I like Trump, but he has made a monumental mistake. If the MOU were a stable ceasefire that opened the Straits of Hormuz to get Republicans past the Midterms, that would be one thing, but wrapping negotiations in a Security Council guarantee that handcuffs the US in future action tells me that it isn’t merely an electoral strategy. I am disappointed in the President.

The stock market is booming. The price of oil is dropping. Every county in northeast Wisconsin is back under $3.95 per gallon on average. Prices in Green Bay are down around 67 cents a gallon from a month ago. I’d much rather have higher gas prices than see the Islamic Republic of Iran survive.

Trump is too sensitive to criticism. Doing the right thing sometimes comes with hardship. I don’t accept his rationalization about heading off depression and all the rest of it.

I am also disappointed in my fellow Americans. So many of them wanted Trump to end hostilities with the Islamic Republic. What happened to the patriotism that saw us through WWII? Can we not count on the younger generations to fight for our Republic? It’s their Republic, too.

* * *

Much of the sentiment against preemptive war in Iran is driven by a shift in attitudes towards Israel among younger conservatives, who are increasingly questioning the decades-old status quo of the US-Israel relationship, arguing that unconditional support for Israel (a false premise) contradicts America First foreign policy principles. 

Recent surveys, including data from Pew Research and the IMEU Policy Project, indicate that as much as 57 percent of young Republicans hold an unfavorable view of Israel.

Younger conservatives sound like progressive leftists. https://t.co/vLWIK02ZDB

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) June 17, 2026

As I have shown in several articles on this platform, changing attitudes towards Israel among younger conservatives are not so much about America First (any true America First paradigm would mind international threats) but are much more rooted in a resurgent antisemitism, the same ancient hatred animating the progressive left.

Rampant ziophobia comes with growing support for Islamism. Increasingly, younger conservatives are seeing an alliance between Christians and Muslims against the Jews. Bizarrely, they resort to progressive left arguments that Muslims are flocking to the West because the West is assaulting the Middle East.

That’s not why the Muslims are invading the West. They’re invading the West to make it Islamic. Younger conservatives are increasingly adopting the postmodernist standpoint of postcolonial theory, and they appear unaware of it. Moreover, they are oblivious to the fact that the transnational corporate elite is behind it. The Red-Green Alliance and its backers are enjoying the rise of a third column in America.

It’s truly frightening that younger conservatives would shift to Islamophilia. Antisemitism famously brought the Muslims and the Nazis together. The growing affinity between younger conservatives today and Islamization is a bad sign. It signals that the far right in America is developing fascist sympathies. These sympathies are already present in the Red-Green Alliance. Will the right become what they are already accused of being?

Jew-hatred is the glue that holds this monstrosity together. The idea that the Jews are a greater threat to the West than Muslims reveals a profound idiocy among younger conservatives that they cannot dismiss by asking why Boomers support Israel.

Boomers support Israel because they grasp the danger Islam poses to the world. Boomers have the wisdom of awareness and experience. Forty-seven years is a long time.