freedom and reason

The Congressman from Florida’s 6th Congressional District, Randy Fine, an observant Jew, has triggered Islamophiles—and even some virtue signalling conservatives (Megyn Kelly, for example)—with a post defending dogs in the face of the Islamist takeover of the West. In Islam, dogs are “unclean.” There is a debate about whether this is obvious in the doctrine; however, it is a widespread belief among Muslims. Practically speaking, when Muslims run the world, the relationship between man and canine will be fundamentally altered.

If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.

— Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 15, 2026

Islamophiles are portraying Fine’s post as a call for genocide. This is an absurd characterization, which I will come to in a moment. But what allows progressives to portray his post in this way is by omitting context, which is typical of how the enemies of freedom operate, and the false belief that Muslims represent an ethnic or racial group, a falsehood suggested by the propaganda construction of “Islamophobia.”

For context, Fine is responding to a post by the pro-Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani.

Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. Like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.

— Nerdeen Kiswani (@NerdeenKiswani) February 12, 2026

Where do Muslims get this idea? According to the Hadith, particularly in the writings of Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, among other things, angels do not enter a house with a dog. The only purpose of dogs permitted in Islamic belief is herding and hunting. Even here, to keep a dog in the house is unclean. The naïve might soothe themselves by noting that Muslims are not in command of Western democracies. But New York City just elected an Islamist to be its mayor, Zohran Mandami. And Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party has been the Mayor of London since May 2016. These won’t be democracies if this trend is allowed to continue.

To return to Fine’s post, I want to illustrate by way of analogy why the congressman’s post cannot be a call for genocide. But before I get to that, what is genocide? Genocide, as originally conceived by Polish-Jewish lawyer and jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944, referred to the deliberate and coordinated destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, not only through mass killing but also through actions aimed at eliminating the group’s existence as a social and cultural entity.

Lemkin combined the Greek word genos (race or tribe) and the Latin -cide (killing) to describe a process that could include physical extermination, prevention of births, forced transfer of children, and the destruction of cultural, economic, and political institutions. His concept emphasized intent—the purposeful effort to destroy a group, in whole or in part—and influenced the legal definition later adopted by the United Nations in the 1948 Genocide Convention, which formalized genocide as an international crime.

However, Lemkin’s definition is too expansive. Lemkin’s original concept included not only mass killing but also cultural, social, and economic destruction—what he called “cultural genocide.” If genocide includes destroying identity, institutions, language, or traditions without physically killing a group, the term overlaps with assimilation and colonization, which dilutes its meaning and, furthermore, condemns nation-building as a serious human rights abuse. Under this definition, nations based on individualism and universal human rights can be falsely portrayed as oppressive projects and delegitimized or punished on that basis. The common trope on the left that the West is genocidal is the consequence of Lemkin’s expansive definition.

At the time of the legal adoption of Lemkin’s definition in international law, the United Nations intentionally narrowed genocide to specific acts committed with the intent to destroy national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups. However, even this definition is too expansive, since it arbitrarily elevates religion as a special form of ideology without any rational basis for doing so. Belief in a god or gods makes religion no different from an ideology that promotes any other potentially pernicious notion. The same is true for nationalist movements based on ideas that are destructive in practice. I hasten to emphasize that not all religions or nationalist movements are harmful. But some are, and the survival of freedom depends on our recognizing this fact.

Consider religious systems that advocate genital mutilation to mark individuals as members of a tribe. Male circumcision in the Islamic systems is widely permitted in the West. However, some Islamic cultures mutilate the genitalia of females. This is generally not permitted in the West. The tolerance of one and not the other makes no rational sense since both types of circumstances damage the genitalia and alter their function. To be sure, prohibiting either does not destroy a religious group in the UN’s narrowing of Lemkin’s definition, but a more expansive definition can argue that erasing a chief marker of a religious group erases that group in part.

This is also true for other ideologies that are not rationally different from religions that practice gender mutilation. Gender identity disorder is the obvious analogue. Here, based on the quasi-religious belief that a girl can be born in a boy’s body, the queer tribe is declared erased when the practice of genital mutilation is prohibited. Indeed, this is the language used by trans activists in defending the practice of genital mutilation, found in the rhetoric of “trans genocide.” (See Mamdani, DSA, and Child Mutilation; Trans Day of Vengeance Cancelled Due to Genocide.)

The existence of nationalist ideology that is potentially destructive in practice is also relevant here. As with the genocidal desire of Hamas to wipe the Jews from the face of the planet, National Socialism seeks the erasure of Jews from the planet, not by wishing the end of the Jewish religion (as the atheist Karl Marx did in his wish that all religion would end, which necessarily includes Judaism), but by wishing the end of Jews as an ethnicity or race. Crucially, wishing the end of Islam rationally precludes the wish to erase those who subscribe to Islam since Muslims are neither an ethnic group nor a race.

As I have argued in previous essays (see, e.g., Corporatism and Islam: The Twin Towers of Totalitarianism), Muslims are analogous to Nazis, i.e., a group of people who subscribe to an ideology. The problem of National Socialism makes Nazism a useful analogue to explore the problem I address in this essay. The world saw no problem in the denazification of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. To conceive denazification as genocide is absurd on its face. The analogy is particularly apt since Islam is doctrinally highly similar to National Socialism. Indeed, it is clerical fascism with genocidal intent. It is, for all intents and purposes, the thing itself. (See Jew-Hatred in the Arab-Muslim World: An Ancient and Persistent Hatred; Why the Israel-Gaza War Is Not Seen Like World War II—and What That Reveals About the Present Situation;  The Danger of Missing the Point: Historical Analogies and the Israel-Gaza Conflict.)

That a world without Nazism would be a better world is a common moral intuition. However, we shouldn’t avoid recognizing that the claim raises a philosophical question: Does expressing such a view amount to endorsing harm against people, or is it a legitimate moral condemnation of an ideology and a desire that the ideology should disappear from the earth, or at least be prohibited from acquiring political power? A careful argument shows that rejecting Nazism targets a system of beliefs and political practices, not the inherent worth of persons, and therefore does rise to the threshold of genocidal intent. Such an argument illustrates the inherent problem with Lemkin’s definition.

Nazism—historically institutionalized by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—was not merely a set of private opinions. It was a comprehensive political ideology that justified aggressive war, authoritarian rule, racial hierarchy, and state-sponsored persecution of ethnic groups. The ideology’s consequences were not accidental; they followed from core doctrines about political authority (anti-democratic and illiberal) and race. To judge that a world without such an ideology would be better is therefore to make a moral evaluation about the content of the ideology and its practical outcomes: fewer justifications for state violence against minorities, fewer wars of aggression, and a prohibition against ethnic and racial persecution.

The philosophical distinction at stake is between condemning beliefs and condemning persons. Beliefs and ideologies are contingent; people acquire them through upbringing, persuasion, propaganda, and social conditions. All these are changeable. At least in a free society (apostasy in Islam warrants the death penalty), persons who once held extremist views may later reject them. To oppose an ideology—and this includes religion—is thus to oppose a framework of ideas, not to deny the humanity of those who hold them. Indeed, if beliefs can change, then the moral response to harmful ideologies often involves education, lawful restrictions, persuasion, and social pressure, such as ridicule and shaming, rather than violence against individuals as a first resort. Assimilation is thus a powerful tool in the arsenal against the spread of pernicious cultural and religious practices.

This distinction protects a basic moral principle: from the view of universal human rights, individuals possess moral standing independent of their political commitments. Liberal democratic traditions, in particular, hold that even those with repugnant views remain persons under the law. Denazification does not erase individuals who subscribe to National Socialism; it erases or marginalizes National Socialism. The same is true with resistance to Islamization. The Muslim as a person is not erased with the erasure of his ideological beliefs.

Punishment or restriction is justified not only when people commit crimes or incite violence, but when their ideological practices threaten the survival of a nation. Opposition to Nazism or Islam is not merely manifest because people hold objectionable opinions; rather, opposition is to these opinions in action or the potential for their manifestation in practice. Therefore, rejecting Nazism as an ideology is compatible with recognizing the rights of individuals and opposing extrajudicial harm, as well as defending a population—including those who may be conscripted in the ideology or who wish to escape it—from the possibility of the ideology becoming manifest in action. Because both Nazism and Islam are ideologies, and moreover highly similar, the same must be true with respect to Islam. To argue otherwise is to engage in the fallacy of special pleading.

We find here a practical tension. Some ideologies actively aim to dismantle the rights and freedoms of others. This is true for both Nazism and Islam. Allowing movements that seek violent domination or exclusion threatens the stability of pluralistic societies. This raises the question of how tolerant a society should be toward intolerant movements, which I have explored in previous essays (see Revisiting the Paradox of Tolerating Intolerance—The Occasion: The Election of Zohran Mamdani; Defensive Intolerance: Confronting the Existential Threat of Enlightenment’s Antithesis). I conclude in those essays that, while individuals must retain rights, societies may legitimately resist or legally constrain movements that advocate or organize violence, because tolerating such movements risks greater harm. (See Trump and the Battle for Western Civilization.)

Saying that a world without Nazis would be better need not be a call for violence against those who subscribe to National Socialism or Islam (which I oppose); it can instead express the hope that such destructive ideologies lose their appeal, fail to spread, or are replaced by more humane philosophical and political visions, and manifest that hope in assimilation and the other methods I have identified above. The ethical task is not to eliminate persons but to reduce the influence of ideas that historically have produced immense suffering. In short, condemning Nazism and Islam—the wish that these systems either did not exist or are only held by a few who are kept from power—is a moral judgment about an ideology’s consequences, not a denial of human dignity. A world without destructive political doctrines would ideally arise not through persecution, but through the gradual triumph of education, institutions, and social norms that make such doctrines unnecessary and unattractive. However, when faced with existential threats, the resort to coercion must remain on the table.

This is the point of Randy Fine’s post. Wrenched from context, and with the assumption that Muslims are analogous to an ethnic, national, or racial group, a false claim is socialized that defending the West from pernicious ideologies constitutes genocide. Nothing could be further from the truth. The condemnation of Fine’s preference for dogs over Islam is an attempt to entrench tolerance for a pernicious ideology that seeks the erasure of democracy and freedom.

Jesse Jackson died today. This essay is not a reflection on his career and legacy (I leave that to others). Instead, I want to use the occasion of Jackson’s passing to emphasize a point about free speech. This concerns an attempt to suppress my speech in the spring of 2024. At the same time, the moment does recall an attempt to derail Jackson’s criticisms of Barack Obama, who, in the context of his successful 2008 campaign for president, was appealing to the white vote by condescending to black Americans.

When the petition was circulated to get me fired (see The Snitchy Dolls Return; see also The Paradox of Petitioning Against Freedom), it was not only my gender-critical beliefs that were at issue. The petitioners also objected to my use of language regarding race, particularly an essay I published in July 2008, Jesse Jackson Criticizes Obama for “Telling Niggers How to Behave.” As busybodies tend to do, the woke scolds had to make an effort to find words that would offend them (see Samuel Johnson and the Prudes of Social Media). However, I did not use the word in question. Jesse Jackson did.

Of course, it shouldn’t have mattered if I had. There is this thing in the United States called free speech. You may have heard of it (you can brush up on it by going here: Republicanism, Free Speech, and the Illiberal Impulse). It’s part of the fundamental law of the American republic. This is how we know that progressives do not believe in the American way: they police language and seek to use the government to do the dirty work of authoritarian desire.

I work at a public university, and the petition was an attempt to persuade the administration to deprive me of my rights. The university did not act on the petition, but employees at other public institutions have been disciplined and even terminated for uttering certain words and opinions. This is the result of progressive infiltration of academia, which is, as I shown and will again show here, antithetical to the foundation of the American Republic, which rests on classical liberal principles.

Progressivism is rooted in a particular strain of liberalism called utilitarianism, which rests on the philosophical foundations of consequentialism. Consequentialism is the ethical theory that the moral rightness or wrongness of an action is determined solely by its outcomes or consequences. Such a system is necessarily preference-based, and there is no check on the means to achieve those ends apart from arbitrary statute, which requires the unjust exercise of power. (See Moral Authority Without Foundations: Progressivism, Utilitarianism, and the Eclipse of Argument.)

Utilitarians believe government action should be judged by what produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, including how policies make people feel. If a word offends people, if it makes them feel bad, and the government acts to protect them from offensive speech, because government action lacks a fixed moral ontology, whatever means it deems necessary to achieve that end may be justified. This leads to majoritarianism, which America’s Founders explicitly rejected as the tyranny of the majority. James Madison did not even like that word for this reason (see America is a Republic). Utilitarianism is at best a form of soft totalitarianism, in which those who are offended by speech may, if they acquire sufficient power, suppress those who utter it.

By contrast, the Founders subscribed to a deontological liberalism grounded in a moral ontology that defends individual rights—including the right to speak in ways others may find offensive—these found in natural law, which is discerned through reason and observation. A government founded on individual rights protects the man from the mob, permitting each person to speak and write freely without government interference. However much one may wish never to hear certain words or opinions, the authority to control speech must itself be subject to moral limits. This framework guarantees equality in the truest sense: every person possesses the same right to speak and express opinions. There is no right to not be offended. (See Epistemic Foundations, Deontological Liberalism, and the Grounding of Rights.)

This distinction has profound implications for the kind of democracy we will enjoy—or suffer. The system established by the Founders is a republican form of government, in which the will of the people operates within constraints that protect individual liberty. It is anti-totalitarian by design. The alternative, advocated by progressives—majoritarianism—contains no inherent safeguard against tyranny. If 51 percent of the population voted to enslave the remaining 49 percent, there would be no principled basis within that framework to prevent it. Only statutory law could intervene, and such a statute would itself rest on arbitrary authority rather than inviolable principle.

Therefore, freedom of conscience, speech, writing, and association are not merely beneficial to the individual wishing to exercise such freedoms, but are foundational to democratic systems that provide immunity from tyranny that would extinguish the democratic rights of every individual to affect the system. Without the right to utter contrary opinions or to freely hold objectionable thoughts, I cannot persuade others to join me in expressing a collective desire to change circumstances. I cannot share observations that might result in mutual knowledge. I cannot criticize actions that I regard as harmful.

And this is precisely why progressives police language. The main reason the petition was circulated is that I oppose the gender identity doctrine. I show that gender identity is a false construct—or in any case an unfalsifiable claim—and can therefore demonstrate why gender affirming care is an unethical practice. I can also show why preferred pronouns involve misgendering, recoded as their opposite. I can show many other things, as well. Those who want to silence me do so because their project depends on mass ignorance about the ramifications of queer doctrine, and they know I am persuasive. If the truth about gender is allowed to spread, their politics are doomed, and this they must prevent—and the free speech right is there to prevent them from successfully doing so. Ideally, they would pursue rational arguments to counter my opinion, but since there is no rational rebuttal to my position, they seek to silence me instead.

That was the point of my 2008 essay. The media sought to shame Jackson for his language because he was using the slur to criticize Obama’s anti-black propaganda, a strategy Obama put central to his campaign for president. Obama condescended to blacks to reach the white audience whose votes he needed to win office. He was convinced that the best way to garner white support was to say things he believed white people think but are afraid to say. Jackson knew what Obama was up to, so the mass media had to delegitimize Jackson to prevent the spread of mutual knowledge.

Back in the 1970s, our teachers made us memorize the Preamble to the US Constitution in high school: “We the People of the United States, to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Note the bits about “ensuring domestic tranquility” and “providing for the common defense.” The Constitution and numerous federal laws require the federal government to not only defend the country from foreign invasion, which also means protecting the borders, but also to suppress internal disorder, insurrection, and rebellion. (See Quelling the Rebellion; Our Constitution and the Federal Authority to Quash Rebellion; Concerning the Powers of The US Constitution—And Those Defying Them; The New Confederates and the Return of States’ Rights; On the Road to Civil War: The Democratic Party’s Regression into Neoconfederacy; Posse Comitatus and the Ghosts of Redemption.)

When George Washington sent troops to Eastern Pennsylvania to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, he was called a king and a tyrant. Would progressives (if there were then such a thing) have called him those things? When Abe Lincoln ordered troops to kill Southerners in the Civil War, he was called a king and a tyrant. Would progressives agree? Ulysses Grant sent troops to address racial violence in the South and confront the Ku Klux Klan. Surely progressives wouldn’t oppose that. Dwight Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock to force racial integration. John Kennedy sent troops to Alabama and Mississippi for the same reason. Were Eisenhower and Kennedy fascists?

Democrats have manufactured a subjectivity, reinforced by progressive hegemony over academia, the culture, industry, and mass media, in which the President is represented as an authoritarian. It’s a ruse: posit the President is a fascist; rebel against civil authority; when he does what past presidents did, claim he proved his fascism; then use the proof to deepen the resistance.

Democrats dwell on January 6, 2021. It was an insurrection, they say—the worst calamity since Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the Summer of 2020, truth be known. Untoward things were going on at the Capitol, but some patriots did get caught up in the moment that day. However, the difference between January 6 and the continuous left-wing rebellion is that the January 6 crowd acted to save their beloved country. The left-wing rebels, in contrast, have something more radical in mind: the destruction of a loathsome nation. To be sure, both sides want power. But what do the neoconfederates want power for? The same thing the Confederates did before them. We stopped the Confederates with violence. How, with the fascist trap set, can we stop the neoconfederates?

* * *

When it’s their president, progressives want a decisive and uncompromising leader. They don’t want a president who’s going to cave to the Republicans. They want a bold leader who’s going to pursue their agenda. Republicans will put up opposition, and they may call the other side’s man names, but since the dominant sense-making institutions are all biased towards progressivism, this doesn’t delegitimize a Democrat president. We all know that their man isn’t really Stalin. It would sound silly to call him that. We know that the Democratic Party is not really pushing socialism, even if the Democratic Socialists of America say they are (more on that in a moment).

But when a populist Republican occupies the White House and doesn’t assume the role of controlled opposition, he becomes Hitler. A liberal businessman from Queens (with a gay Treasury secretary), Trump is a stubborn man elected to pursue an agenda on behalf of the American people. He’s the type of president Democrats wish they had. But Trump is from the wrong side of the aisle. So, rather than accept that they lost the election like Republicans do when they lose, Democrats burn down the house.

Americans loved Trump when they watched him on The Apprentice because they saw a decisive leader. He was asked all the time by progressive talking heads, “When are you gonna run for president?” But the second he decided to do that, the progressives lost their composure. When they lost the election, they lost their minds.

Losing elections is normal in a democracy. Indeed, it’s a sign of democracy. The losers go back to their huts and think about how they’re going do a better job of messaging and try to win the next election. But progressives don’t work from the premise of democracy. When they lose, they don’t do what a respectable political party does; instead, they attempt to delegitimize the government and toss its elected leader.

The chaos of the last decade is due not merely to Trump, but to progressive resistance to democracy itself. Trump’s not doing anything out of the ordinary. He’s enforcing the law and representing the will of the people. The voters wanted a president who would reconfigure the world trade system. They wanted him to close the borders and deport illegal aliens. They wanted a man who would protect women’s opportunities and safe spaces.

All these facts point to a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. At least today’s Democrats. Democrats today are remarkably authoritarian. They not only want to win elections by any means necessary; they want to prevent the opposition from having any say about what happens to their democracy. They can’t accept the democratic way because they abhor it. It gets in their way. They have already promised to impeach Trump if they regain the House.

In this sense, the Democrats’ smears of fascism and Hitler represent a projection of their authoritarian tendencies and the desire to have their own charismatic leader, one who will impose his will on the American people. They see in Trump their wish. Only he’s working from the wrong side. This is why Democrats don’t want election integrity. They seek a one-party state.

Ex-Marxist David Horowitz once said that, for the left, the issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution. According to Horowitz, activists on the left don’t care about the specific issue they claim to champion on any given day. The slogans are interchangeable. Anti-ICE resistance is a moment to cause chaos to confirm that a duly-elected president is an authoritarian and expand the struggle. Whatever the issue—Black Lives Matter, No Kings—these are means to an end: the destruction of national sovereignty and the overthrow of the American System.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the communists on the street are really behind this moment. They’re useful idiots for something entirely different. The mob desires revolution, to be sure, but the destination is handed down from on high. The plan is to replace national economies with a transnational corporate state.

It is naïve to believe that the elites organizing the resistance would trust the rabble to run world government. They know, like I know (you know it, too), that the mob is not up to the task of governance. But mobs can do the dirty work, and their task is to destabilize the West to open the way to the New World Order, where useful idiots become the marginal figures they were destined to be.

CNN is reporting new polling that shows that fewer than one in ten Democrats identify themselves as conservative, which, in accurate political science language, means classically liberal. CNN polling from last year shows that one-third of Democrats now identify as socialist. Among those 35 years and younger, four in ten identify as socialist. That number must be enormous now. The CNN polls vastly underestimate the degree to which the Democratic Party has become a socialist party. Richard Baris’ polling finds that nearly two-thirds of Democrats identify as socialist. He finds that the Democratic Party has, over the last several years, been on a glide path to authoritarianism. Socialism is antithetical to the American way.

But what kind of socialism? The “democratic socialist” brand is just that: an Orwellian deception deployed to disguise the actual socialism Democrats advocate. Democrats advocate the French version of socialism first delineated by Henri de Saint-Simon in the eighteenth century. Saint-Simon’s vision of socialism was world technocracy, a system in which administrators, experts, industrialists, and (industry-aligned) scientists run society. There’s another word for that: transnational corporate statism.

Those on the right who are quoting Horowitz today have it only half right. (Steve Bannon, do you have your ears on?) The issue is never the issue—that part is right. But the revolution is not communist in essence. Nor is it in form. It is the very thing progressives project onto Trump: a new and improved fascism.

The expectation is that Democrats will regain the House of Representatives. If that happens, America is in trouble. Those conservative Democrats are in the wrong political party. The Republican Party is the home of classical liberalism. It’s time for that eight percent to come home.

It’s fascinating watching progressives go into zombie mode and repeat talking points. In an essay on this platform, I describe this as “brain-locking.” (For more on brain-locking and the zombie metaphor, see The Phenomenon of Progressive Brain-Locking and Its Role in the Madness of Crowds and Zombie Politics: the Corporatist Ideology of Antiracism.)

Here’s an example I see all the time on social media and in street interviews: “Donald Trump is a trust fund baby.” The blankface dummy in supervillain garb repeats this as if it is a remarkable and essential truth. (We see this also in the constant repetition of the irrelevant fact of Trump’s felony conviction. See “Trump is a Felon!” The Squawking of Party Parrots.)

Trump inherited an estimated $177 million from his father, Fred Trump, when the family real estate empire was sold after Fred’s death in 1999. Trump received at least $413 million total over his lifetime through inheritance, gifts, trusts, and loans. When Trump entered the White House in January 2017, Forbes estimated his net worth at about $3.5 billion. As of February 2026, his net worth is estimated at roughly $6.6 billion, fluctuating mainly due to real estate holdings and stock valuations.

The talking point denies the truth: the man took the millions he inherited and made himself a multi-billionaire, not only in real estate but also in, among other ventures, producing a successful TV show that ran for several years. The Apprentice was not just a hit—it topped the ratings charts at various points, making Trump a household name. How is this the record of a “failed businessman”?

“Because he declared bankruptcy many times.”

Trump himself has never declared personal bankruptcy. Six of his companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy between 1991 and 2009, mostly involving casinos and hotels. However, this is not unusual in large-scale real estate, where developers commonly use bankruptcy strategically to restructure debt while protecting personal wealth, and many successful real estate billionaires have had multiple corporate bankruptcies during their careers. The fact that bankruptcy is a tool in successful business practice is mundane. You may not like it, but it is, and it’s not like personally declaring bankruptcy (there is no shame in that, either).

“And now he has bankrupted the Kennedy Center!”

Trump did not bankrupt the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. When he assumed the position of chairman of the board, artists, performers, and production companies—cultural elites programmed with progressive ideology—boycotted the center and canceled their engagements. Ticket sales plummeted and, as a result of organized protest, the center now faces financial and operational strain. A planned two‑year closure for renovations was exaggerated into existential concerns about the institution’s cultural standing and future stability. “He even put his name on the building!” He won’t be president forever. A future president can take it off.

“But the East Wing!”

Stop and address the question. How is Trump a “failed businessman”? Clearly, he isn’t. He is on the list of the 400 richest individuals in the United States—and he earned that status as a successful businessman. This is the diametric opposite of the zombie’s portrayal.

But there is a deeper question: why does any of this matter? So Trump inherited money from his father. So Trump’s business ventures have occasionally run into financial difficulty. So a handful of his companies declared bankruptcy. So Trump put his name on a building. Hardly unusual for a wealthy man.

Is that the problem—that he is rich? Is it class envy? Nietzschean Ressentiment—the deep, internalized resentment of the failed and self-perceived powerless towards the self-actualized and successful that shapes slave morality?

At the founding of the country, George Washington’s relative wealth in his era—landholdings, stocks, etc.—made him the undisputed richest individual in the country. Ponder that, if you will: the richest man in America became America’s first President. Moreover, Washington faced serious financial difficulties at times in his life. He managed these deftly and died a wealthy man.

Try explaining this to a zombie. It won’t work. Try explaining fascism to a zombie. Same blank stare. Rudimentary biology draws the same reaction. Zombie mode is an impenetrable state of mind. Progressives lumber about seeking brains because their own have atrophied.

This mental state is akin to the phenomenon of a programmed assassin—an individual who is the product of conditioning, ideological influence, and manipulation to kill without fully autonomous intent or moral deliberation. The programmed assassin is not a rational actor but a tool—shaped by external forces, e.g., leveraged personal grievances, psychological conditioning, or radical ideologies—that, on command, channels action toward a specific target. The culmination of layered manipulation, obsessional drives, and social pressures programs an individual to commit violence. (We see this in Islam, as well, with the suicide bomber phenomenon. See Message to the Rank-and-File Progressive; Alliance of Death Cults: The Rise of Lethal Misanthropy in the West.)

That example might seem extreme. But it’s the same dynamic that lies behind the flipping of a switch that causes thousands to take to the streets (to join the professional agitator who earns his living at it), one day chanting and waving signs with the slogan “Free Palestine!”, the next day, “No Kings!”, and the day after that, “ICE Out!”

When a zombie driver follows around ICE officers rounding up child molesters and rapists illegally present in our country, says, “I don’t care,” after an ICE officer generously explains that they are doing—that’s zombie mode. It’s the mind state that lies behind an activist mashing the accelerator pedal when an ICE officer walks in front of her car, or the “constitutional observer” bringing a firearm to an organized effort to interfere with law enforcement operations. (see Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism; also “Assault Me, Motherfucker!” Suicidal Altruism and the Politics of Suicide Contagion; “The Whole System is Guilty!”)

Have you ever seen the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoon from the 1940s, “The Mechanical Monsters”? It’s like that. The mad scientist, Dr. LeHah, controls the robots with a big console full of levers and switches. There’s a dramatic moment where he flips a switch, and the robots immediately stop what they’re doing—I think in one scene they’re raiding a bank—and switch to another task, obeying his commands instantly. LeHah has total control over mechanical soldiers responding to a single will. (I have used this analogy before, see Robots and Zombies Assemble! We Must Have War!)

Woke is an elite cult-like project that grooms and programs true believers in need of direction and meaning in life. (See “Hey, Ma. The Zombies are Marching Again.”)

https://t.co/NBmjTBhd5w

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) February 15, 2026

This is the purpose of “inclusion” in progressive circles: appealing to disordered personalities to amass an army of robots. This explains why, when most of America has awakened to the madness of gender identity doctrine, Democrats introduce legislation to recognize “trans rights,” including in the list of demands everything ordered personalities reject. It’s a signal to the zombies that Dr. LeHah is still at the controls. (Before Andrew Wilson’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, I was writing about this. In addition to the essays I have already embedded, see Deviance as Doctrine: The Post-Liberal Moral Revolution; The Politics of Disaster Capitalism.)

To take this analogy to its logical conclusion, in those Fleischer Superman cartoons, Superman isn’t just fighting generic villains; he’s defending ordinary people, society, and the foundational moral order. He stops criminals and mad scientists who threaten the safety and stability of everyday life. In later serials, protecting the public and upholding law and order evolved into the catchphrase, “Truth, justice, and the American way.” Superman is not the Nietzschean Übermensch (“Overman”). The Man of Steel is the personification of our civilization. And this is why progressives will never understand MAGA.

Progressives have turned the world into a living manifestation of a Fleischer Studios cartoon—with some DC Comics villains mixed in (see my 2019 essay Joker and the Mob).

It is striking how pro-capitalist ideologues react when capitalism is described as exploitative. They often assume that the claim is an attack on capitalism itself. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In political economy, exploitation is a descriptive, analytical concept—not a moral verdict. It refers to a structured process by which value is extracted from resources found in ecosystems, labor, land, raw materials, and social capacities within a given mode of production.

To say that labor is exploited, in this sense, is simply to describe how surplus is generated and appropriated through institutional arrangements like wage labor, property rights, markets, and the state.

The surplus is the portion of total social labor that exceeds what is necessary to reproduce the labor power of workers and the material conditions of production at a given historical level. It is the product of surplus labor time—labor performed beyond what is required to produce workers’ means of subsistence—and it appears in capitalism as surplus value, later distributed in transformed forms such as profit, interest, and rent.

The social surplus is not defined by individual firms or transactions but at the level of society as a whole, reflecting a class relation in which one class controls the conditions of production and appropriates the surplus produced by another.

How the social surplus is generated, appropriated, and allocated determines the structure, dynamics, and historical trajectory of a mode of production, making it a central analytical category rather than a moral judgment.

The term identifies a mechanism of value transfer; it does not, by itself, determine whether that mechanism is lawful, fair, or socially desirable.

This usage differs sharply from the popular meaning of exploitation, which typically implies abuse, coercion, or illegality. In everyday discourse, exploitation is often synonymous with injustice and wrongdoing. In political economy, by contrast, exploitation can be entirely legal, routine, and foundational to economic organization.

Classical political economists and Marxian theorists alike use the term to explain how profits, rents, and surplus arise under capitalism and other modes of production. Whether exploitation is seen as efficient, inevitable, or unjust is a separate question from whether it exists.

The confusion arises when descriptive and normative levels of analysis are collapsed.

Descriptively, exploitation names a relationship: one actor or class systematically extracts value produced by another through socially recognized rules. Normatively, scholars and political actors may argue that such extraction is justified, unjust, or reformable—but those judgments are not contained in the term itself.

Put another way, treating exploitation as inherently immoral imports ethical conclusions into what is, at its core, an explanatory concept.

Within political economy, exploitation functions much like terms such as accumulation, appropriation, or surplus extraction. It allows analysts to map how economies actually work before taking a position on how they ought to work.

I wrote this essay following a discussion on a Facebook thread by the Working Families Party (WFP), in which pro-capitalist ideologues attacked my observation that the WFP errs in suggesting that capitalism is uniquely problematic because of its exploitative practices. (The WFP also errs in its support for mass immigration, which is intrinsically harmful to American working families.)

The pro-capitalist ideologues misunderstood my initial post, where I argued that one cannot eliminate exploitation without overthrowing capitalism. But even this point was misread: since all economic systems are exploitative in some form, eliminating capitalism would not eliminate exploitation as such.

One finally admitted that I was right, but said that, since exploitation originally conveyed wrongdoing, I was misleading people. But the earliest meaning of the term did not originally mean wrongdoing. Its earliest meaning was neutral and economic. People misunderstand because they are uncharitable and can’t be bothered to learn. But I can be bothered to educate.

Here’s the reality: The problem of exploitation cannot be “solved.” Exploitation is inherent in humanity’s relationship with nature—including relations among humans themselves. This is true even in hunter-gatherer societies.

The question, then, is whether the system within which exploitation occurs is just. That is a moral question about capitalism as a system, not about exploitation per se. When we examine what constitutes a just system of exploitation, we have to ask whether our lives are better under one productive modality compared to another. Are we better off now than we were or could otherwise be? This question is not only about the material conditions, but also about whether we are free.

Socialism is unfreedom.

The effort to portray the SAVE Act as “Jim Crow 2.0” has backfired spectacularly. By implying that black Americans are incapable of registering to vote or obtaining valid identification, Democrats condescended to a community they claim to protect. The new angle is that millions of women will be disenfranchised because they changed their last names upon marriage and would face burdensome processes to vote. This is false.

In the United States, marriage and taking a husband’s last name do not affect US citizenship. Citizenship remains unchanged regardless of whether the spouse is a US citizen. No declarations, filings, or special permissions are required to maintain citizenship status. A woman who adopts her husband’s surname automatically remains a full US citizen with all associated voting rights.

Democrats have also falsely asserted that the SAVE Act requires a passport to vote, noting that millions of Americans lack one and would therefore be barred from participating. In reality, the Act does not mandate a passport for voter registration. It permits other forms of identification and documentation to verify identity and eligibility, ensuring the process remains accessible.

The SAVE Act balances voter accessibility with election integrity. It would be illogical for Republicans to enact a law that disenfranchises millions of their own voters.

Democrats’ bold misrepresentations reveal their true opposition to election integrity measures—as detailed in my recent essay on Freedom and Reason. Such blatant falsehoods expose their motives and their apparent belief that the public can be easily swayed by propaganda. (See Democrats Gaslight Americans Over Election Integrity, as well as the comments sections.)

The SAVE Act passed the House yesterday on a near-party-line vote, with only one Democrat—Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas—voting in favor. The Senate remains the primary obstacle. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has publicly stated her opposition to the bill (now often referred to as the SAVE America Act in its updated form). All Senate Democrats have also indicated they will oppose it.

With the Senate requiring 60 votes to overcome a filibuster on most legislation—and Republicans lacking that threshold—the bill cannot realistically advance without bipartisan support, unless the filibuster rule is set aside.

Tom Homan, a good and decent man, was put in a difficult—and frankly embarrassing—position when he was forced to draw down federal forces in the Twin Cities. He just held a press conference explaining the drawdown.

I liked the job Bovino was doing. Alongside “No Kings!” and the rest of it, “ICE Out!” is part of a color revolution. The mob—and the operatives who organize it—are bankrolled by NGOs funded by transnational financiers and the Chinese Communist Party. (See “The Whole System is Guilty!”)

I want Trump to nationalize the Minnesota National Guard, send federal troops into Minneapolis and Saint Paul, roll up the mob, and arrest the operatives (see Send in the Troops; The New Confederates and the Return of States’ Rights). I want the federal government to identify these funding networks and prosecute them.

We need to smash this threat to American sovereignty. Maybe there’s a master strategy here. But perceived weakness emboldens the forces seeking to knock America out of its position as world hegemon.

That’s bad for us—and bad for the world.

I noted this during Trump’s first term, and again in several recent essays: Trump appears too hesitant to do what previous presidents have done—federalize the Guard and deploy troops into cities and states where mayors and governors are in rebellion against the laws of the Union—because he doesn’t want to validate the false accusation that he’s an authoritarian.

They’re going to call him an authoritarian anyway. Worse, they’ve already branded him a fascist. So what does he have to lose by exercising his lawful federal authority to bring rebellious states and cities to heel, and to pursue the enemies of America and Western freedom? If he does this, I can almost guarantee his poll numbers will rise. They’ve already jumped five points in the most accurate poll—Rasmussen—buoyed by an expanding economy following his restoration of the American System.

I don’t understand why Trump officials don’t begin every press conference with images of violence against law enforcement officers. This would build public support for decisive executive action to quell the ongoing insurrection. There is no shortage of such images. Why are Republicans allowing progressives to win the propaganda war? The battle for men’s minds is central to the defense of any nation.

We cannot sustain this level of tolerance for sedition in the United States. There should be zero tolerance for rebellion against the Republic.

The national government is the supreme law of the land. Article VI, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution states:

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The authority of the Executive is not in dispute (see Posse Comitatus and the Ghosts of Redemption; Our Constitution and the Federal Authority to Quell Rebellion; Concerning the Powers of the US Constitution—And Those Defying Them).

There comes a point when the patience of saints becomes pathological. Didn’t Trump just release a major policy document warning of civilizational erasure? Why isn’t he acting on it? Are his words hollow? Where is the man of action we were promised?

The same applies to the toleration of the Islamization of the West. Why are we allowing Muslims to establish de facto autonomous towns and cities in the United States? Americans know about Dearborn, Michigan, and the Twin Cities in Minnesota. But when I tell them about what’s happening in Texas, they’re stunned. Trump knows. The last people on earth who should practice suicidal empathy are those charged with defending the nation.

We have to put our foot down. Sometimes boots are necessary—especially when the Republic is threatened from within. At that point, decisive action becomes an imperative.

Steve Bannon, host of War Room and a stealth advisor to the President, often places Trump in the same league as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But if Trump is to belong in their company, he must do what they did. Both used military force to confront states and cities defying the U.S. Constitution—the Whiskey Rebellion and the Civil War. It’s Trump’s turn to be a man of action. (See A Man of Action Must Act to Be Such a Man.)

Rank-and-file progressives riot whenever they’re out of power. Democrats don’t believe in democracy. They hate what America stands for. They want technocratic control guided by corporate-state ideology (see The Real Threat to Liberty Isn’t Trump—It’s Technocratic Rule).

Technocracy negates not only democracy but liberty itself. COVID-19 demonstrated this clearly. States locked down their own citizens, acting in concert with other countries across the global North. American progressives wanted vaccine passports and mandatory masking—ritualized obedience enforced by the state.

There must be consequences for tyranny. Action exposes the dystopian future Democrats have planned for America.

Trump supporters rationalize the President’s actions as four-dimensional chess. Perhaps this is meant to protect the midterm elections—or, more immediately, to secure funding for DHS. Maybe the goal is to make it safe for Senators to pass the SAVE Act. However, I remain convinced that the best way to shore up popular support for this presidency is to do what previous presidents have done: exercise federal authority with clarity and force. We shall see.

Update (2.12.26):

BREAKING: Canada media outlet uses an AI filter to make the Tumbler Ridge kiIIer look female pic.twitter.com/JFZhzrsi9U

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 12, 2026

* * *

Canadian police officials are referring to the man in a dress who shot up a school in Canada as a “gun person” and a “female in a dress.” A woman did not just murder scores of people and wound scores more. A boy did. This is not a she/her. This is a he/him. It’s not that women don’t do things like this (recall the school in Nashville). But women rarely do these types of things. There is also an indication that the boy, 17-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, aka Jessie Strang, was on psychiatric drugs. He also murdered his mother and step-brother.

You might ask yourself how the queer community has terrified the government, media, and police into referring to men as women. They’re such a small minority—how can they have that much power?

But this asks the question the wrong way. What you should ask—or, more precisely, what you should state—is this: Trans terrorism exists because the government and media enable it. The police are forced to follow suit. (Another major player is the medical-industrial complex, but I will leave that to the side for this essay.)

You will have noticed that mainstream media, progressive groups—not only in the United States but also in Canada and Europe—repeat queer propaganda as if it’s the truth. The media refer to men using feminine pronouns as a matter of “style” (just like they capitalize “black” but not “white” when referring to race). Public institutions do the same in their documents and pronouncements. Academic publications—same thing.

🚨 "If it had been a trans victim, the media would have talked non-stop about it. But they ignore it when it's the perpetrator"

Julia Hartley-Brewer and Debbie Hayton tear into the media's failure to report the sex of the suspect in the Canada school shooting.@JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/YiNDwcViCy

— Talk (@TalkTV) February 11, 2026

This doesn’t happen because a small group of people who suffer from delusions has power. It means that a small number of delusional people are being used—and to a degree are created by—the government to confuse the population and cause them to doubt one of the most basic biological truths: that sex (or gender, same thing) is binary and immutable.

If the state and its propaganda apparatus can get people to believe that, then they can get them to believe anything.

At the core of this is getting people to follow arbitrary rules. Orwell illustrated this in Nineteen Eighty-Four through Newspeak, a deliberately limited language designed to control thought by eliminating words and concepts—or changing their meanings—that could enable dissent or independent thinking. It uses language to alter the perception of reality. The fancy term for this is neuro-linguistic programming.

The COVID-19 pandemic response is another example. If you can get people to agree to state-mandated vaccinations, lockdowns, social distancing, and the wearing of ceremonial masks, then you can get them to submit to other forms of control. (The medical-industrial complex was involved here, as well.)

🚨"He is a MAN. He is a boy. It is a MALE crime. But you wouldn't know that from watching the BBC, ITV or Sky News."

Julia Hartley-Brewer's scathing message to media outlets for telling the public "lies" about the sex of the suspect of the Canadian school shooter. @JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/uHzdzIaQ9O

— Talk (@TalkTV) February 11, 2026

Issues like trans ideology, pandemics, and so on serve as demonstration projects. The test is to see who is prepared to fall in line with government demands—by governments controlled by transnational corporate power, which explains the uniformity of cognitive programming across the West—and who will resist the emerging New Fascism. This is a power play.

The real power lies with transnational corporate entities that have an agenda to disorder normal modes of thinking common to our species, or enabled by the revolution in freedom that the Enlightenment made possible. The goal is to replace native common sense with an elite-manufactured version. In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci identified this manufactured social logic as “hegemony.”

This concept is useful in understanding the present situation. According to Gramsci, hegemony is the way a dominant social group maintains power not primarily through force, but by securing the consent of subordinate groups through cultural, ideological, and moral leadership. The more you believe the prevailing institutions, the more easily you are indoctrinated in the ideology they use to disorder your thinking.

This is why it is so important to get your head out of the hegemonic mode of thought pumped out by prevailing policy- and sense-making institutions, and turn instead to alternative, more traditional sources of knowledge production—communities of sympathy and concern, Christianity (not woke), and science (uncorrupted by ideology).

Resisting the new common sense is vital to preserving your native common sense. Even when you feel alone, if you are alone with the truth, you can weather the propaganda storm and keep a clear head. That’s how one gets through this: keep a clear head and refuse to bow to power and humiliation.

Finally, I know it’s scary, but when you speak up, it lets others know they are not alone in the truth. Mutual knowledge is a major weapon against power. The emperor is naked, and people know it, but they are unsure that others know it. Doing this by private message is also effective. I appreciate those who are scared to speak out, who contact me on the sly to tell me they get it, too.

Update (2.12.26):

I tested The Democrats' "Trump knew" [about Epstein]: pic.twitter.com/aFMqfAi5W4

— Damon Imani (@damonimani) February 12, 2026

* * *

I just checked, and the Great Ape-gate hoax has fallen out of Google’s news aggregator. The only value progressives might extract from the video Trump did not share on TruthSocial at this point is to drop it and let people believe the initial big lie. Theyhave to do this, really. Had progressives continued to push the hoax, they would have drawn ever more attention to the fact that it was a hoax—and that they knew it was a hoax. It’s not as if they would ever be honest enough to admit it was.

I wonder what the next moral panic will be? Since progressives are completely making up shit these days, the possibilities are really endless. Turning Point’s alternative Halftime programming may have legs, especially as data showing how successful it keeps pouring in (I am confident advertisers are taking note). Progressives already framed the Turning Point event as an expression of backwardness and bigotry.

That’s the trick: make the response to cultural warfare the culture war itself. Open the border and flood the country with foreign culture-bearers, and then accuse those whose culture is being disordered of making it about culture.

Did you see the things going on during Bad Bunny’s performance? A man humping a woman in the back of a truck? A man humping a man in the cab? A video of Trump dancing at a party is evidence of a child predator ring, but dancers humping each other at Halftime is an all-American message of unity. If you disagree with that, you’re a racist.

Here’s how zombie-like progressive politics is: We’re supposed to believe that millions of Americans who don’t know a lick of Spanish or who have ever only passively listened to trap en español as background music while eating tacos and drinking margaritas at a Mexican restaurant were Bad Bunny fans. The performance is being touted as the best since Kendrick Lamar, right up there with Prince’s Super Bowl XLI halftime show and Michael Jackson’s Super Bowl XXVII halftime show, which turned Halftime into a high-profile event.

Social media users incorrectly identified a child actor in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime as Liam Cornejo Ramos, the five-year-old boy recently detained by ICE (after being abandoned by his father). The child was actually actor Lincoln Fox, who represented a younger version of the artist, not the detained child. Progressives say this confusion reflects racism on the right. It’s not supposed to be obvious that the point of having a child receive Bunny’s Grammy was to remind the audience about the alleged terrible injustice done to Ramos, as well as Bad Bunny’s Grammy speech in which he condemned ICE.

Progressives are conditioned to be ready for the next episode of mass programming. One day it’s “No Kings!” The next one is “ICE Out!” Then “Obamas are apes!” After that, Bad Bunny. (I am sure I am leaving out in-betweens.) They don’t have to know why they’re doing the thing. The switch is flipped, and they’re doing the thing. All they knew about Bad Bunny—if they knew anything at all—was that the man would be singing in Spanish and that he might wear a dress—and that this would piss off the MAGAts, which feels so good in Pretend Land.

I watched some of the Bad Bunny clips while reading the over-the-top coverage of the event. Did readers notice that he played to the camera and not to the crowd? Apart from a few here and there, the crowd wasn’t into it. They were forced to watch propaganda being produced. Bad Bunny was for the sheep at home. From his vantage point, it appears that Commissioner Roger Goodell realized he screwed up. The stream looked flashy. Inside Levi’s Stadium? No energy. A woman on video exclaimed, “No one is dancing. Not one person. Send help!”

Here’s how the trick works: The abolitionist Republicans were the ones who were political because they were trying to destroy a way of life—the slavocracy that underpinned the Southern aristocracy, which Democrats defended. Those who oppose compulsory preferred pronouns are the political ones. They’re the authoritarians, not those who force others to lie about gender. Those who object to a Super Bowl Halftime performance because it sucked, was in a language most Americans don’t speak, and was obvious progressive propaganda pushing multiculturalism and open borders—they’re the political ones.

It’s the MAGA neanderthals who are on the outside looking in. They want the culture war. They aren’t America. Bad Bunny is America.

* * *

In terms of mass social psychological dynamics, a humiliation ritual describes situations where groups humiliate individuals or other groups to enforce conformity or hierarchy. Is that not what the NFL’s Halftime show was? To humiliate Americans who voted for Trump and who want to keep their country, to compel them to accept multiculturalism and the demographic transformation of their nation?

Patriotic Americans are being told to learn Spanish because soon English speakers will be the minority. If one says, “Not if I can help it,” he can expect to be smeared as a nativist, racist, and xenophobe.

This is happening all over the West. Native populations are being replaced with alien culture-bearers and then humiliated when they rise to defend their culture and their people. The population targeted for replacement and humiliation? Native whites. Imagine this project working in any other part of the world and being portrayed as a progressive endeavor?

I forget who said this, but I remember somebody celebrating Bad Bunny on social media the morning after saying this was a “teachable moment.” Indeed, it is.

Readers of this platform are almost certainly hearing the propaganda that, while there is election fraud (if fraud is admitted at all), it’s insignificant, and therefore, cannot possibly determine the outcome of an election.

The propaganda bases its claim that election fraud is negligible on successfully prosecuted cases. As a criminologist, I can tell you that the ratio between crime in the United States and the number of crimes successfully prosecuted is striking. Even when considering only crimes reported to the police, a relatively small proportion result in successful prosecution.

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), in recent years, only a little more than 40 percent of violent crimes and 30 percent of property crimes have been reported to police—and that isn’t counting the crimes victims do not report to the US Census Bureau. Of those crimes reported to the police (recorded in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report), only around 15 percent result in arrest or clearance, i.e., are delivered to the next phase of the criminal justice process. Only around 10 percent lead to prosecution—and this varies dramatically by jurisdiction and offense type. Less than ten percent end in a conviction.

Obviously, one would have to be naïve in the extreme to believe that the frequency of criminal offending in America reduces the number of convicted criminals. Yet Democrats want the public to be similarly naïve about election integrity. But as we see with crime in America, just because there are a few successfully prosecuted cases of election fraud doesn’t mean that that’s all the election fraud there is.

Americans need to think about election integrity in the following way: What is the likelihood that somebody’s going to break into my house at night? Statistically small. Yet we lock our doors at night (especially after Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood). Some of us get a Ring system so we can see who’s at the door. We established organized police forces in the nineteenth century to respond to home invasions and other crimes. Many of us keep firearms to protect ourselves from home invaders. We do this because we know that, while home invasion is unlikely, it is not only possible, but happens a lot. Including burglaries, there are 1.5 million or more home invasions annually in the US. Only about 11–14 percent of burglaries reported to police result in an arrest or similar action. Of that number, a substantial portion are not prosecuted, and thus there is no possibility of conviction.

When we look at the 2020 election, we’re looking at a crime scene. This is why a judge signed the warrant the FBI used to seize 2020 ballots in Fulton County, George. Democrats fight investigations into that crime (they want those ballots back), and furthermore, seek to prevent America from locking its door to election fraud, thwarting the effective policing of election fraud. This is obvious in the Democratic Party’s vehement opposition to the SAVE Act, which would compel states to require a photo ID to vote. Democrats characterize photo IDs as “Jim Crow 2.0”—even though more than 70 percent of blacks support photo IDs.

In November 2024, Harris only won 19 of 50 states. Yet she won more popular votes than Trump did in 2020, even though Trump increased his popular vote total in 2020 over 2016 by around 11 million votes. No states shifted towards blue in 2024. They either shifted red or remained status quo. Yet Trump won less than 50 percent of the popular vote. Harris’s vote total of 75 million is artificial, just as Biden’s vote total of 81 million votes was artificial. Mainstream polling is engineered to reflect these numbers to make them appear real.

Consider that, in 2024, of the states with strict photo ID (Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin), Trump won all of them. Of those states with strict non-photo ID (Arizona, North Dakota, and Wyoming), Trump won all of them. Of those states with photo ID requirements (Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas), Trump won all but one (Rhode Island was the sole exception).

Yet Trump won only half of those states where ID was requested but photo not required (Alaska, Iowa, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia), while Harris won the rest (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Washington). Of the states where no document is required to vote in person, Trump won only two of them (Nevada and Pennsylvania). Harris won the other 14 (California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Vermont).

Democrats will argue that Trump won states with strict voter ID rules because strict voter ID rules suppress the minority vote. If this were true, then why are photo IDs required for virtually every other activity in which black Americans engage? Americans are required to show ID not only to access secure locations, but for air travel, banking and financial transactions, driving, employment verification, restricted purchases (alcohol, prescription drugs, tobacco, etc.), and public assistance (which blacks disproportionately access). Does having to show ID in those cases resemble Jim Crow laws? It is an absurd argument. We know it is absurd because there is no effort by Democrats to eliminate the requirement for a photo ID for those activities.

Democratic states are not only fighting election integrity, but are engaged in extreme gerrymandering of states to effectively lock out Republicans from the electoral system. They say they are doing this because Republicans are, even though Republicans are engaged in reapportionment in light of population change in those states. For Democrats, what should be secure is left insecure, what should be open is closed, and they lie about the reasons why.

Democrats cite the Tenth Amendment and the Constitution to claim that election rules are determined by the states. These claims are also lies. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” The Tenth Amendment cannot prevent Congress from acting under the Elections Clause, because Congress’s authority to regulate the times, places, and manner of federal elections is itself a specific constitutional grant that supersedes general state-authority claims under the Tenth Amendment.

If the SAVE Act is not passed into law, Americans will have good reason to suspect that, if Democrats prevail in the 2026 midterm elections, the popular will not have been conveyed by a democratic process. Democrats will claim, as they did in 2020, that the 2026 election was the most secure in history. But they cannot claim this if they fight the very measures that would make them secure. Democrats tell us that Republican doubts about election integrity represent a grave threat to democracy. In reality, the threat lies in failing to secure our elections. If Democrats want Americans to have confidence in our democracy, they must pass the SAVE Act. But they won’t, because their electoral success depends on insecure elections. They tell us that they must win or lose our democracy. But weakening our democracy is how Democrats win.