freedom and reason

Advocates of racial gerrymandering argue from the assumption that white politicians cannot represent the interests of black citizens. Even though whites abolished slavery and apartheid, blacks need black politicians to advance their interests. Progressives ask you to imagine Congress with no black members, assuming that everybody shares the assumption of a racist America. The argument is thus presented as securing black power against white supremacy. But, in reality, the argument is propaganda for the ambition of progressive elites. Racially gerrymandered districts are, at their core, a political strategy for reclaiming power Democrats lost with the abolition of Jim Crow. In this essay, I expose the strategy by debunking the assumption. More than this, I show that the progressive argument is logically fallacious.

At the heart of the propaganda is the falsehood that systemic racism exists. There are two errors here. The first is the assumption that racial disparities result from racism. But any causal claim about the concrete world needs to be demonstrated with evidence. One might be able to show discrimination in individual cases, but to assume it for aggregate differences—and then base policy on it—is the work of a strange alchemy in which what requires justification becomes proof of justification. But, in the absence of de jure discrimination, the problem is much harder than this. One finds a second error is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is where an actual thing is treated as a manifestation of an abstract category. The fallacy stands in place of the evidence needed to validate the claim of systemic racism. Blacks are presumed to be the victims of white supremacy. White supremacy must be presumed to exist for this to work. Critical race theory is the ideology that manufactures the necessary illusion.

There is, ironically, a racist truth that lies behind these presumptions: Democrats find useful black politicians to lead voting blocs organized by progressive social policy. Millions of black people have been made dependent on the government and privileged in educational and occupational opportunities, benefits advanced by the Democratic Party. The present practice is thus an adaptation of an ancient strategy for achieving hegemony. In the past, members of various tribes in an area were selected to collaborate with the ruling elite to manufacture the appearance that the ruling class represented tribal interests. This was standard statecraft in kingship systems. In today’s context, the tribes are manufactured by a stratum of elites. From these contrivances, individuals are selected to perform the same function as they did in ancient times. They are regarded as useful for political ends.

Rank-and-file progressives are horrified by the projected maps in the South. They see a sea of red, which they have been conditioned to perceive as a sea of white supremacy. They believe this despite historical facts. For the rank-and-file, America is genetically racist, with whites on top and blacks on the bottom. Hence, the rhetoric of “racial justice.” They believe this in the face of history: the party associated with red today ended slavery and segregation and remains committed to equality before the law. During the days of slavery and segregation, the sea was blue. Now there are but a few blue patches. What horrifies progressive elites about those shrinking blue patches has nothing to do with racial justice but rather the loss of political power. Democrats invested trillions in engineering voting blocs whose power was maximized by rigged maps. Now those rigged maps are being dismantled, and with them, electoral power. A situation Democrats spent decades creating is crumbling around them, just as it did when Republicans abolished slavery and led the way during the Civil Rights movement in ending segregation. In both historical cases, equality before the law shattered Democratic hegemony. 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, ostensibly designed to prevent racial discrimination in voting, assumed genetic white supremacy and misplaced concreteness to convey a sense of validity where there was none. Two elements of the law stand out in this regard. Section 5 required certain states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws. Thus, the citizens of certain states were treated as second-class, deviants to be governed by the paternalistic state. Section 2 banned voting practices that weakened the political power of minority groups, as if it were “just” to privilege certain races over other races. Over time, the Supreme Court of the United States, in great measure because its composition has been changed, has limited how these provisions operate. Explicitly or not, the Court’s rulings are rooted in the recognition that neither provision is logically valid.

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down the formula used to identify which states are subject to Section 5. Section 5 technically remains in the law, but it has been rendered effectively unusable because no jurisdictions are subject to it anymore. They should never have been, since section 5 only requires the presumption of racial discrimination. That is, it assumes as given what requires evidence. Moreover, it applies the assumption to the entire body of citizens of the affected state, thus negating their democratic power. In effect, all citizens of an affected state are presumed to be racist and directed on that basis. Shelby County permits states to change voting laws without federal preapproval. That those states are predominantly red reflects the will of people unconstrained by an arbitrary designation. The badge of racism has been removed.

In the April 2026 decision, Louisiana v. Callais, the Court narrowed Section 2. Previously, plaintiffs could challenge voting maps by showing that they had the effect of diluting minority votes, even without explicit proof of discriminatory intent. The question of why diluting minority votes should be meaningful is skirted. This goes to the heart of the point I am making in this essay: one cannot presume racial disparity is the result of racism; one must prove that racism explains racial disparity. Thus, the logic used in Shelby County is extended to Section 2. That this was unexpected is rather disingenuous. Propagandists feign unexpectedness to manufacture outrage and reinforce the assumption of white supremacy. The ruling makes those challenges much harder by requiring evidence that lawmakers intentionally discriminated. By requiring positive evidence for claims of discrimination, the decision negates the strange alchemy by returning adjudication of such matters to the realm of logical reasoning. 

The Supreme Court ruling thus not only struck a blow to racial gerrymandering but also disallowed unproven claims of racial discrimination to stand as dispositive evidence, since heretofore, no evidence was needed, only assumptions based on bold conjecture derived from ideology. It moreover eschews the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The error of presuming racism is the cause of disparity rests on this fallacy. I want to elaborate on this point to show how it corrupts democracy.

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is a holdover from an ancient idea: Plato’s ontology of forms. For Plato, abstract entities are more real than the actual things themselves. Consider man’s best friend, the dog. Dogs are mammals that we have classified as such. The abstraction “dog” is the result of the common observation that some mammals can produce offspring with one another. Dogs constitute a species. Plato starts with an abstraction. The abstraction is the essence of “dogness” that dogs manifest in their concreteness. Humans have learned through selective breeding that they can manifest dogs according to an ideal type they and others have developed in their heads for whatever reason—function, aesthetics, and so forth. For Plato, the ideal type exists a priori. It is not that the breeds exist mind-independently (they are man-made); the idea of the dog does. Everything found in nature is a mind-independent form, according to Plato’s theory of forms.

In racialized thinking, racial categories represent ideal forms, and concrete individuals manifest these forms in the concrete. A black man is not merely an individual with a set of phenotypic characteristics that men identify as black, but an individual who carries in him the essence of blackness. It’s not just physical characteristics. It’s everything—the way he behaves and thinks, his aspirations and interests, and so forth. Thus, how he votes reflects his essence. This is how Joe Biden could say, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Racial thinking flattens individuals into personifications of Platonic essences: if their actions or attitudes do not align with form, then they are not the thing itself. (This is also how men can say they’re women. “Womenness”is an essence which men can embody.)

In the case of the progressive adaptation of the Voting Rights Act, blackness and whiteness are the forms that determine individual actions and attitudes. Despite individual variation, blacks and whites manifest group essences that, in the main, determine their respective voting patterns. It follows that, as a white man, I should be concerned about the race of my representative, since I come with racial interests that can only really be represented by those who look like me. The assumption at work here is essentially collectivistic.

However, I might ask whether my interests are not the same as those of any other man. What interests do I have that are exclusive to my race? Races are, after all, abstractions, and I am a concrete individual. I have interests in common with black people. If I conclude that I have no exclusive interests, then that’s a good thing; after all, I am not allowed to have interests exclusive to my race, since, if I did, that would make me a racist. Only blacks—or those who presume to speak for them—are allowed to have race-based interests and preferences.

Those who presume to speak for blacks are allowed to be racist because of the relationship between essential forms. The essence of whites is that of the oppressor/perpetrator. The essence of blacks is that of the oppressed/victim. On this theory, the sea of red and the dwindling blue patches represent racism. A neutral map cannot really be neutral since it is presumed to benefit whites. Only a map where blacks are advantaged over whites can be non-racist.

This is true for racial thinking generally. Racial gerrymandering is affirmative action’s sister. The logic of affirmative action assumes racial disparity is a valid justification for differential treatment, i.e., establishing special circumstances for some along racial lines. The absence of special circumstances for blacks is said to privilege whites, a race of people for whom privileges are presumed based on ideology. They are presumed privileged based on averages found in abstract demographic categories. But abstractions are not people. There are rich blacks and poor whites. Moreover, group differences have to be explained. One cannot simply assume they are explained by oppression.

In the progressive worldview, ideology stands in place of evidence. Affirmative action is a “just” response to the discrimination progressives presume (or at least claim) exists. By claiming that racial discrimination exists in the structure of society, progressives locate the question in the realm of abstraction. Hence, the construct of “systemic racism.” However, the only actual manifestation of racism in the case of preferential treatment is affirmative action, which by definition and in intent is positive discrimination affecting white people. That millions believe that actual racial discrimination is the solution to imagined racial discrimination is a spectacular propaganda achievement.

The spectacular achievement notwithstanding, racial gerrymandering is coming to an end. The Court recognizes that, under the status quo, the vote of every white man and black man in a gerrymandered district is not cast on equal footing, but potentially canceled by an artificial majority constructed by rules based upon fallacious reasoning—rules established to advance party interests rather than the common interests. Elections have consequences, and although the present Court makes decisions with which I disagree, it has, so far, demonstrated a much greater depth of reason than previous Courts in recent memory. Elections have consequences. Remember that in November.

“[T]he arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race,” he observed, “is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and equality before the law established by the Constitution.” —Justice John Marshall Harlan.

You’d think, given the “antiracist” rhetoric coming from Democrats, that the end of race-based policies—affirmative action, DEI, racial gerrymandering—would be celebrated by that side. But yesterday, the three Democratic appointees on the Supreme Court voted to uphold Louisiana’s race-based map. The rank-and-file are up in arms today about the colorblind approach of the Republican Party.

In a 6–3 ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, finding that the state’s creation of a second majority-black district amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because race was used too heavily in drawing its lines. The case, Louisiana v. Callais, reshaped how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 can be applied, with the Court requiring stronger evidence of intentional discrimination rather than relying primarily on the impact of district maps on minority voters.

Predictably, Democrats in lockstep argue that the decision weakens long-standing safeguards for minority voting power and could lead to reduced representation in states with histories of discrimination. “Safeguards for minority voting power” is code for Democratic power. Stripped of rhetoric, they are telling us that they don’t believe in equality. They are telling us that they do not believe in individualism.

In his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the law that sanctioned Jim Crow, Justice John Marshall Harlan rejected the majority’s approval of racial segregation, arguing that it violated the Constitution’s core principle of equality. Harlan declared in his lone dissent that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” insisting that laws separating people by race are inherently unequal and designed to mark black Americans as inferior.

Harlan dismissed the idea that segregation can be neutral, warning that the decision would become as notorious as Dred Scott, which declared that black Americans are inferior to whites. Harlan predicted it would undermine civil rights for generations. He was right. He was right because race-based policies are incompatible with liberty.

Justice Harlan was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1877 by Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican president. This is an important fact. The difference between the parties on the question of race is a long-standing pattern in American history. The Democratic Party was the party of the Slavocracy and Jim Crow segregation.

Today, the Democrats are the party of Affirmative Action and DEI. Race-based policies and politics are embedded in the Party’s DNA. By contrast, it was the Republicans who emancipated black Americans. Republicans have been consistent in their opposition to race-based law and policy.

The public has been confused about this. Via colonization of our sense-making institutions, progressives have revised history to make it appear that Democrats are the party of civil rights and Republicans are the party of the racist dog whistle. I fell for it. I was set up from early in my life to fall for it. I had to recover the true history of the United States for myself. When I started blowing up the lies those around me were telling—many of them not knowing they were telling lies—I saw the lie machine. Once you see it, it cannot be unseen.

It’s the same thing with the political violence lie machine that I wrote about in yesterday’s essay on this platform. When you understand how these machines work, it becomes obvious that the widgets they pump out are the commodities of deceit. Public education and the Culture Industry are the machines that make primary commodities of men, preparing them to accept uncritically the lies spat out by other machines.

The corporate state runs the machines. We have to smash the machines. And we are smashing the machines. That’s why progressives are squealing like stuck pigs.

Today, Democrats are out in force, squealing about the judiciary. “Stare decisis!” they shriek. Stare decisis is the principle that courts should follow prior judicial decisions when the same points of law arise again, ensuring consistency and predictability in the legal system. Dred Scott? Plessy? Do Democrats believe in these precedents? They’re no longer useful, so they readily condemn them. Democrats don’t really believe in precedent. They believe in power. Precedents are instruments they wield to secure and reinforce power. Without race-based policies, they lose power.

Democrats don’t believe in equality because equality underpins a free society. Voters in a free society don’t want what the big intrusive government Democrats peddle. This is why, with the fall of Jim Crow, Southerners flocked to the Republican Party. To overcome this, Democrats rigged the system to overrepresent those whose loyalty they have cultivated through racial privileging and dependency on welfare. This is why they push affirmative action, DEI, racial gerrymandering, and all the rest of it.

Racial gerrymandering was never about benefiting black Americans. It was about benefiting the Democratic Party. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act knowing that Democrats would lose the South. With racial segregation out of the way, there was no reason for Southerners to stick with big government Democrats. The Republicans were the party of small government, and liberty represents the spirit of the Southern man.

As the Democrats were negotiating the civil rights movement, they spent trillions of dollars over the long term on programs that made black people dependent on the Democratic Party. Since the South was going to turn Republican, Democrats had to make extraordinary arrangements to keep their majority in Congress. Democrats are the party of racial politics. They have always been the party of racial politics. At its core, progressivism is identitarianism.

Identitarianism works from tribalism. It rejects individualism. It pursues instead selective collectivism. Identitarians separate individuals into tribes, subordinate agency to groupthink, and then weaponize groups against the people. The goal is a one-party state in which progressives reshape America towards totalitarians ends.

The congressional map Virginian Democrats devised under Governor (and former CIA operative) Abigail Spanberger reveals Democratic ambition for one-party rule. Earlier this month, while the Supreme Court of Virginia did not strike down a redistricting plan, it bought freedom-lovers time by upholding a lower-court ruling that blocked certification of a voter-approved referendum that would have allowed new congressional maps to be drawn before the next census.

Opponents have challenged the referendum as unconstitutional, claiming it amounted to partisan gerrymandering and violated Virginia’s existing redistricting framework. By leaving the block in place while litigation continues, the court effectively paused any immediate changes to the state’s electoral maps. Although the issue remains unresolved, it gives the people of Virginia a chance to stop the weaponization of their state against democracy.

The Supreme Court’s action, as well as that of the Virginia Supreme Court, is a sign that the champions of liberty are making strides in rescuing our republic from authoritarianism and collectivism. But history shows that without drastic and persistent action, authoritarianism creeps back in. If we are not vigilant, we will lose our liberty. We have already lost enough. We cannot depend on the courts to save us. Indeed, as we have seen, the judiciary can be our enemy. If Democrats win the midterms, they will resume the project of American decline. We will lose the progress we have made. Not all of it, but enough of it to make reclaiming our heritage more difficult.

We must deal with this now. Ending racial gerrymandering is a necessary step. But we also need to deconstruct the administrative state and reclaim our courts. And we must educate the public as to what a constitutional Republic founded on equality means.

This last piece requires reclaiming public education and returning curricula to the formation of patriots. We must prevent progressives from manufacturing foot soldiers for the collectivist agenda if we are to have a country. Public education was never meant to be an indoctrination program for ideological tendencies. Its purpose is to prepare the young for a self-actualized life and citizenship in a constitutional republic. Democrats want the opposite. They want docile bodies for a New World Order.

The war for democracy has many fronts.

In the wake of the attempted assassination of the President at the White House Correspondence Dinner, held at the ballroom of the Hilton in Washington, DC, on Saturday, Progressives have been out in force, citing instances of inflammatory rhetoric on the right to manufacture the perception that this is a problem on both sides of the political spectrum. “If the right wants the left to tone down the rhetoric, then the right needs to tone down its rhetoric.” That’s a false equivalency. Even if it weren’t, citing right-wing rhetoric is a deflection.

It’s ironic in light of deflection that the progressives just got caught red-handed manufacturing right-wing extremism. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the far-right to organize the “Unite the Right” rally. Heather Heyer was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of protesters at that event. Trump’s Justice Department charged Fields with hate crimes, secured a guilty plea, and sentenced him to life in federal prison.

Even without Charlottesville, the premise of the progressive argument is bogus. So what if some right-winger not on the SPLC payroll says that Barack Obama is a communist? Was such rhetoric normalized by academic institutions, the Culture Industry, mass media, and the Republican Party? No, it wasn’t. Will the Obama presidency be remembered for multiple attempts on a president’s life? No, it won’t. Desperate for equivalency, some social media users are trying to manufacture such memories. But the criteria they use only prove the point.

Anti-Trump rhetoric—he’s a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, a pedophile, a rapist, a king—is relentless and ubiquitous and has been for a decade. Comedians, social media profiles, public school teachers, pundits, and politicians openly wish for the man’s death (and the President isn’t the only target of lethal woke desire). They’re disappointed when the gunmen they arm and aim fail in their designated task. (A school teacher up here in Wisconsin was just suspended for imploring potential Trump assassins to improve their aim.)

Compare the anti-tax rallies of the Tea Party or protests surrounding the Affordable Care Act to anti-Trump hysteria. There is no comparison. An anti-tax rally is as American as apple pie. Calling for the death of an American president is madness. Progressives put conservative leaders in the crosshairs, then mock their widows. If Erika Kirk doesn’t cry, she’s not properly grieving. If she does cry, she’s a grifter. Seeing Kirk’s widow rush from the WHCD in terror delighted them.

Stochastic terrorism is not merely a matter of isolated inflammatory statements or scattered criticisms of a political figure that may theoretically inspire a lone actor. Stochastic terrorism arises from an overwhelming ubiquity of relentless, normalized rhetoric—broadcast across media, echoed by institutions, celebrities, and political leaders—that systematically dehumanizes and frames a target as an existential threat to the nation itself.

This pervasive atmosphere creates a subjective reality in which certain individuals come to believe that drastic, even violent action is not only justified but morally necessary to “save democracy” or avert catastrophe. In a country where tens of millions of citizens are conditioned to believe the messaging, it’s expected that some will take up weapons and perpetrate violence. That’s the point. Progressives know what they’re doing.

It’s naïve to believe that the alarming overrepresentation of trans-identifying individuals in lethal violence is not driven in part by the ubiquity of rhetoric around “transphobia and “transgenocide.” Such language manufactures hysteria and weaponizes mental illness for political ends.

Predictably, a population of disordered personalities conditioned to believe that questioning their delusion is an existential threat takes up rifles and enters schools and churches and murders “the enemy.” The rhetoric arms and aims them at the selected targets. That’s why you aren’t supposed to read their manifestos.

Likewise, the ubiquity of “white privilege” rhetoric motivates black actors to seek reparations on the streets of America through burglary, robbery, and theft targeting whites, or, en masse, take to the streets and topple statues, burn buildings, and assault civilians and law enforcement. Primitive rebellion is organized by manufactured resentment.

The situation requires brutal honesty. The point of anti-Trump rhetoric, just as with the rhetoric of “transgenocide” or “white privilege,” is to produce extremist attitudes and then channel them for ideological and political purposes. The left constructed the “oppressor/perpetrator vs. oppressed/victim” frame to dispossess segments of the population of their capacity to reason, to deny the rights of some individuals to life, liberty, and happiness, and increase the likelihood of violent action against them in myriad forms—assassination, mobbing, and terrorism.

Pointing to a handful of sarcastic or critical remarks from the other side misses the distinction entirely: stochastic terrorism thrives on cultural dominance and saturation, not sporadic opposition. It’s the goal of progressive forces to create a climate where stochastic terrorism is the predictable result. Targeted violence is what progressives desire. The pattern is obvious. And they say it out loud.

* * *

This is the left today. They take selected stills from the WHCD event and portray administration officials as cowards. We can plainly see Stephen Miller refusing to abandon his pregnant wife, shielding her with his own body from potential bullets as the Secret Service escorts them both to safety. In the mind of the woke progressive, Miller is using her and his unborn child as human shields.

Allusions are made to Stephen King’s Dead Zone. At a campaign rally, the politician Greg Stillson grabs a child to shield himself from the self-appointed savior of democracy, Johnny Smith. Smith foresees Stillson, future president, triggering the apocalypse. Such allusions only amplify the justification to assassinate the President. Smith is the assassin progressives aspire to be. They believe they, too, have the gift of precognition.

RFK Jr. doesn’t duck, run, or take cover. He sits calmly, observing what’s happening in the room. His soldier instincts kicked in, Pete Hegseth moved toward the danger rather than away from it. The President himself, despite stumbling, appears unfazed. He watches the room from backstage. To add to the noise, social media users recycle a scare from a few years ago in which Trump is startled by the reaction of Secret Service agents. But the clip doesn’t show a cowering president. Trump surely wasn’t cowering after having been struck by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He stood up, pumped his fist in the air, and led the crowd in a chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Some on the left and the right claim Saturday Night was a “false flag.” The astonished looks on the First Lady’s face and on the face of the event’s organizer, with Trump smirking between them, telegraph a staged assassination attempt to justify the President’s White House ballroom. Back in reality, a mentalist was on the dais performing for the First Couple. The ladies were visibly amazed by the trick. The President, familiar with the illusion, was simply enjoying his wife’s reaction—until the gunshots rang out.

They see evidence of the false flag in White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s remark to Fox News host Jimmy Failla, previewing President Trump’s speech, that there will be “shots fired.” To everyone living beyond madness, the phrase is a common idiom for verbal jabs. Those on Planet Madness are not just social media users. Major media outlets are suggesting that Leavitt had foreknowledge of what would unfold.

They saw evidence of the false flag in the many tweets about the need for a secure ballroom at the White House, as if the necessity for a secure ballroom—and the shelter beneath it—were not obvious in what just occurred. I, too, noted the obvious on social media. The Hilton is not a safe venue; it has rooms above it where bombs could potentially be planted, and once guests check in, they have free rein of the hotel.

Past presidents have wanted a ballroom at the White House. Trump is finally building one. Indeed, that’s why progressives hate Donald Trump so intensely: he is a builder. Builders are the chief enemies of destroyers. Trump confronts decay. Repairing the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial enrages those who seek the decline of the American Republic.

In the post-event press conference, Trump was asked why there have been so many assassination attempts on his life. The President stated the obvious: because he is consequential. That’s not ego-tripping; it’s an honest assessment. The left itself confirms the assessment by losing its mind over the fact that Trump occupies the White House. His reelection sent them over the edge. If he were not consequential, if he were status quo, the last several years would be rather uneventful. And Iran would have a nuclear weapon.

It’s not the first time Democrats have lost their minds over a consequential president. John Wilkes Booth and his team of conspirators lost theirs. In Lincoln’s case, the assassin succeeded, and America lost a great president. The insecurity of Ford’s Theatre made Booth’s work tragically easy. Like Cole Thomas Allen, John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat.

* * *

You’ve heard that right-wing violence is more prevalent than left-wing violence. It’s almost always the case that you hear this claim in the context of left-wing violence. Some leftist shoots up a place, or tries to assassinate the President, or murders a conservative influencer, and the media compulsively attempts to downplay it by talking about right-wing violence. This is an established pattern.

This is obviously a deflection. But it isn’t merely an attempt to downplay left-wing violence. It is an attempt to put in the minds of the audience the false notion that right-wing violence is the problem society must focus on. Moreover, right-wing violence justifies left-wing violence. From a left-wing standpoint, once a politics or a person is designated fascist, then violence is justified against that politics or person. Any opinion uttered by a fascist is not merely to be dismissed out of hand, but the person uttering the opinion is properly subject to repression.

Readers may recognize this as DARVO, an acronym standing for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s a common manipulation tactic used by abusers to evade accountability when confronted. The idea was developed by psychologist Jennifer Freyd to describe the act of denying wrongdoing, attacking the accuser, and reversing roles to portray the perpetrator as the victim. The deflection piece is thus highly revealing: it is the action of a perpetrator attempting to project his guilt onto the victim, or, more generally, those who identify with perpetrators of left-wing or other desirable violence seeking to absolve allies of their guilt.

Imagine discussing a murder case. Somebody comes along and says, “What about this other murder?” What about it? “There are other murders, too, you know.” Sure. But we’re talking about this murder. Why does this person want to talk about other murders and not this murder? One hears this type of deflection in discussions about the overrepresentation of black males in violent crime. “White males commit violent crime, too.” True. But what’s your point? We’re talking about the overrepresentation of black males in violent crime. That’s a problem. Why don’t you want to talk about it? Or, more to the point, why don’t you want me talking about it?

Such deflections signal an interest in protecting the reputations of perpetrators in the case at hand by manufacturing a false equivalency or excusing their violence. There is no equivalency, and this is the point they’re so desperate to obscure. The sides are not the same. Once the false equivalency is blown up and once the excuses are rejected, one sees that they’re effectively saying that left-wing violence is a good thing. The fact that we’re really only talking about right-wing violence when left-wing violence happens falsifies the claim that right-wing violence is worse than left-wing violence. This is what gives the game away.

Advocates of left-wing violence recognize that acknowledging their advocacy undermines their legitimacy. Thus, beyond deflection, they practice deception. For example, when people share charts showing right-wing violence to be more prevalent than left-wing violence, if you examine those charts closely, you realize there’s missing data. To see missing data, one has to be aware of left-wing violence. That’s the trick. What about BLM violence in the summer of 2020? BLM wasn’t a subtle left-wing phenomenon. It was explicitly neo-Marxist. You can’t get more left-wing than that. And it wasn’t peaceful. But the public was either told it was, or, as Chris Cuomo put it during the riots: “Who said protests were supposed to be peaceful?”

The BLM and similar data points are excluded or rationalized because honest recognition that the Summer of 2020 was violent—more than two dozen people were killed, structures and vehicles were set ablaze, civilians and police officers were assaulted, statutes were toppled, monuments were defaced, human beings were forced to engage in acts of self-abasement—disrupts the narrative that left-wing political action is peaceful, or that at least violent action is understandable, and that, therefore, the left commands the moral high-ground. Here, the sense-making apparatus is put in the service of legitimizing the left, with the entailment that righteousness includes violence perpetrated by that side. We saw this more recently with the anti-ICE violence.

Here’s the brutal truth: the left has no problem with political violence; some violence the left likes, and some it doesn’t, and that side wants you to focus on the violence they don’t like. They need you to believe that the violence from the left is righteous; tolerance for left-wing violence enables violence from that side. However, anybody who actually condemns violence can only claim validity for their condemnation if they work from principle. Whataboutism is unprincipled.

I have in mind a comedy skit where students in a logic and critical thinking class are offended by the unit on fallacies because they see themselves in the materials.

The skit would be funny in some measure because the likelihood that students would recognize themselves in the course materials is nil. Imagine, though, that they did. Progressive students would learn about the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and see the foundation of their worldview under assault. They’d take it personally since progressivism prepares them to take everything that way. “What do you mean it’s fallacious to say that all whites are racially privileged?” They would follow up with an ad hominem: “You’re racist!”

There are many other funny interactions possible in the skit. Confronted with the law of the excluded middle, progressive students would see the problem with the queer construct of intersex. The script might have them shriek “Transphobe!” and run and complain to the dean. The problem of circularity in what is presented as causal reasoning would provoke the outcry: “Racial disparities facially prove racism!” Etcetera.

For many years now, I have been interested not only in what people believe but also in how they form, justify, and defend their beliefs. What sparked my interest in this was an undergraduate logic and critical thinking class taught by Dr. Ron Bombardi, a professor of philosophical psychology (among other fascinating areas) at Middle Tennessee State University. This was way back in the 1980s.

I had always been fascinated by how those around me—and radio and television talking heads—routinely demonstrated fallacious reasoning, some clever enough to disguise it with sophistry. Dr. Bombardi’s class introduced me to language that allowed me to articulate what I was seeing. It also helped me identify other examples of fallacious reasoning.

I discovered during my undergraduate years that philosophy is not the only course of study that examines fallacious reasoning. In psychology, my major, the umbrella name for the study of this problem is judgment and decision-making. Intersecting fields under the umbrella examine how people evaluate evidence, make choices, and systematically depart from ideal logic.

One confronts in these studies research on cognitive bias. Cognitive bias explains the predictable ways human thinking goes off the rails—confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and similar patterns that shape how people interpret information. I have penned several essays on this problem, showing how we can understand current-day politics in psychological terms. This is not ad hominem. Rather, it is understanding a problem with the hope that we might think more clearly.

I discovered in these studies that the problem of fallacious reasoning is not, for the most part, due to an intractable deficit in clerical thinking. To be sure, human cognition is inherently subject to error because of the structure of the mind (there is, it should be noted, a range of variation error-proneness). However, there are ways to avoid these errors. This is why we study judgment and decision-making.

Cognitive error is not the only problem. Much of the work in human cognition overlaps with social psychology (which I have considerable training in at the master’s and PhD levels), especially in areas concerned with group influence, identity, and self-justification.

This is where ideas like cognitive dissonance become pertinent. Cognitive dissonance explains why people feel discomfort when confronted with conflicting beliefs and typically resolve it by rationalizing rather than revising their views. I have written many essays on this, as well.

Returning to Bombardi’s domain, the parallel field in philosophy is epistemology, which studies the nature of belief conceptually rather than experimentally. I devoted a great deal of time to epistemology in my PhD program. Unfortunately, graduate students didn’t encounter much discussion of this branch of philosophy in class (and the metaphysics of social structure was fractured by the plethora of sociological theory). I took it upon myself to interrogate epistemic matters.

The grounding of such studies in my advanced degrees is found in the sociology of knowledge (Karl Mannheim, Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann are standouts). Here, one examines the social construction of belief. After studying these ideas, all the pieces came together, and I was now qualified to assess not only arguments themselves, but also why people believed what they believed.

A key framework that bridges psychology, philosophy, and sociology is dual-process theory, which distinguishes between fast, intuitive thinking and slower, more analytical reasoning. The theory holds that both modes of thought are exhibited in the practical lives of the species. It explains how people handle routine tasks automatically while reserving mental energy for complex problems. At the same time, there is variation among individuals, indicating that some individuals are more deliberate thinkers.

In dual-process theory and human variation in cognitive style, I had an explanation for why “debates” with those around me could be so damn frustrating (I put debate in scare quotes, because what passes for debate is often not debate).

Fast, intuitive thinking is very often wrong, but audiences are impressed by it. Those who depend on this cognitive style are difficult to argue with, not because they are right, but because they can’t be wrong. Confidence and quickness of judgment are popularly seen as marks of superior intelligence.

Those who carefully craft arguments are boring, their presentation style tedious. This is especially true when one puts one’s arguments in writing and avoids debate. Who has time to read what a man with whom one disagrees thinks about things? I get it. Why is this or that writer so important that his ideas require consideration?

As a man who writes more than he debates, I have to take this in stride. I routinely encounter people who take issue with something I said because “what about this other thing?” I do talk about the other thing, and they would know that if they read my work. Once more, I get it: my work is too unimportant to invest any time in it. After all, I am already wrong. If there is any engagement at all, it is often ferreting out some line that can be decontextualized and used to smear me.

The problem of judgment and decision-making drew me to teaching. After all, my good fortune of having professors like Dr. Bombardi improved my ability to reason. Why not impart what I have learned to younger generations? The benefits of education accrue not only to students. I, too, benefit from classroom preparation. The responsibility of teaching clear thinking requires me to identify errors in my own thinking.

In his “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), Karl Marx writes, “The educator must himself be educated.” This line has stuck with me throughout my teaching. In context, Marx is criticizing the notion that people can be changed solely by external instruction or by enlightened elites. His fuller point is that circumstances are changed by people. If circumstances are to be changed in a rational direction, then those responsible for shaping impressionable minds must themselves develop their ability to reason. At the same time, Marx’s material conception of history holds that those who endeavor to shape society are themselves shaped by society. Teachers aren’t all-knowing. Thus, the good teacher is also a good student. With Marx’s insight in mind, I see myself as an eternal student.

I have been teaching a course on the foundations of social research almost every semester, and each iteration includes more material on judgment and decision-making. Every year of preparation reinforces the imperative of logical argumentation. I seek out the clear thinkers and model my own thinking after them. I find flaws and correct them. I don’t want to be wrong out of ego, but because being right is a virtue.

I want my students to benefit from this rich and fascinating domain of theory and research. Efficacy in teaching students how to think required that, over time, learning to avoid shrinking from controversial examples. My objective is to motivate engagement in self-examination, so I show students how I came to change my mind about matters that ideological commitments would have me leave alone.

In all this, I have a political goal in mind, and I am explicit about that. Understanding the problem of intuition and tightening one’s thinking facilitates Habermas’ ideal speech situation and thus advances the practice of civic dialogue. A properly functioning democracy depends on rational discourse. Since our actions affect the world around us, reason should guide our actions. We need to be more deliberate in our thinking.

Altogether, these areas and the attitude of critique—the dialectic—form a cohesive picture with a valuable lesson: humans are not just imperfect reasoners, but highly skilled at constructing justifications for what they already want to believe—a tension that would make my skit idea inherently funny, if the audience were well-versed in the language of judgment and decision-making.

That’s a big if. While the premise that those learning about fallacious reasoning would see themselves in the materials is potentially hilarious to my mind, the skit will likely not fly. Indeed, it might present yet another opportunity for an audience to take offense; as it is, when I criticize how people think, they think I am insulting them. I explore this problem in the next section of this essay.

* * * 

I want to connect the foregoing to my personal experience across areas of social life. I grew up in the buckle of the Bible Belt in Middle Tennessee. In this context, my views on religions were heretical. However, my experience growing up in a Christian culture is highly similar to my experience in academic institutions. 

Across very different social environments, a strikingly similar pattern emerges: a perceived moral consensus that is treated as both obvious and binding, coupled with explicit or implicit sanctions against dissent. The content of the consensus differs—religious orthodoxy in one case, political orthodoxy in the other—but the structure of the social dynamic remains remarkably consistent.

This section analyzes that common structure through the three lenses I identified in the first section: philosophy (especially logic and epistemology), psychology (with emphasis on cognitive biases and social cognition), and sociology of knowledge (particularly social constructionism and group boundary maintenance).

At the philosophical level, the experience can be understood as a breakdown of what might be called epistemic pluralism—the recognition that reasonable disagreement is possible among informed and rational agents. Yet, in both environments described, certain propositions, such as expressing support for a particular political figure, are judged morally unacceptable, function not as contestable claims but as hinge commitments—background assumptions that structure discourse but are themselves shielded from scrutiny.

From the standpoint of logic and critical thinking, this creates a situation in which disagreement is preemptively pathologized. Rather than engaging opposing views as arguments to be evaluated, the community treats them as evidence of moral or intellectual deficiency.

Such situations reflect a shift from argumentative rationality (evaluating reasons) to identity-protective reasoning (protecting group norms and status). There is something wrong with those who disagree because the expectation is that the moral and reasonable person agrees.

A double standard emerges. Those who are immoral and unreasonable are meant to be ridiculed, but when the moral and reasonable are ridiculed, offense is taken. I am not opposed to ridicule, which I have explained on this platform. Some ideas are absurd. But it is not necessarily because the ridiculous person is immoral or unreasonable. It is rather because the ideas he expresses are ridiculous—and because his cognitive style precludes him from abandoning or modifying those ideas.

Philosophers of deliberation often emphasize the importance of the principle of charity—interpreting opposing views in their strongest plausible form. In the environments I am describing, this principle is largely absent, if not practically excluded. Instead, dissenting positions are reduced to caricatures, making genuine dialogue practically difficult if not impossible.

Psychologically, these dynamics are well-explained by several well-documented cognitive and social biases: pluralistic ignorance, spiral of silence, in-group/out-group bias, and moralization of belief. I chose these because they suggest opportunities for improving dialogue, and thus are hopeful for advancing democratic deliberation.

Pluralistic ignorance is present when individuals privately dissent from the perceived consensus but assume (incorrectly) that they are alone, leading to self-censorship. This is a powerful force. It is why finding ways to promote mutual knowledge is so important for opening discourse. As dissent becomes less visible, the perceived consensus appears stronger, further discouraging deviation. I have written essays on this using Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the naked emperor. Pluralistic ignorance is the source of the spiral of silence, wherein the confident manufacture the false perception that their ideas are valid.

In-group/out-group bias reinforces the spiral of silence. Here, group members are evaluated more charitably, while outsiders—or perceived deviants within the group—are judged more harshly. This problem is reinforced by the moralization of belief, in which political or religious positions become tied to moral identity. Disagreement is experienced not as intellectual divergence but as ethical violation. Growing up, I fell silent in a room of Christians because I knew I was an outsider; yet, these were my family and friends, and I wanted to belong.

As an atheist growing up in Middle Tennessee, I routinely found myself in rooms full of Christians who assumed that everyone present believed in God and that God was good all the time—and that those who didn’t agree were bad people. I kept my mouth shut because of what might happen if I didn’t.

I thought things would be different in academia. However, when I came to the university, I found the same dynamic. At faculty gatherings, my colleagues—almost invariably progressive in the humanities and social sciences—not only ranted about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (whom progressives have since rehabilitated) and, more recently (and more intensely), about Donald Trump, but ridiculed those who expressed support for them. I did not vote for Bush. But I did vote for Trump. Yet I dare not say so; there are consequences for defending him.

I took my formative years in stride, since religious faith is not by definition a rational exercise. There, I was worried about social alienation and even physical retaliation. The assumption was that everybody was a Christian. But the same is true in academia. My colleagues at the university assume I belong to the progressive tribe.

It troubled me to discover this. The academic spirit is explicitly rooted in rational thought, I thought. This is the place where diversity of opinion is prized. Yet, on college campuses, support for Trump amounts to a heresy. I am expected to know better. One might think that the fact that a college professor (with advanced degrees, peer-reviewed publications, and so on) supports Trump would prompt some reflection on their assumptions about him and his supporters. If an educated person agrees with Trump’s policies, maybe some time should be devoted to understanding why. Instead, I find that the instinct runs in the opposite direction, extending even to a desire to excommunicate me. If it were not for academic freedom, I surely would have been disciplined or expelled.

My silence for many years is known as preference falsification, where individuals conceal their true beliefs to avoid professional or social consequences. Preference falsification is particularly salient in environments where reputational costs are high, such as academia. In past essays, I have described this as a species of bad faith, where hedging and silence are necessary for survival, since even the principle of academic freedom does not insulate the heretic from negative consequences for his heresy. Here, social alienation is the problem.

Crucially, these mechanisms operate largely below the level of conscious intention. Participants in such environments often perceive themselves as open-minded and rational, even as their behavior reflects strong conformity pressures.

During a period of self-examination, I recognized that preference falsification was an emotional burden. Concealing or obfuscating my opinions felt dishonest. Moreover, it compromises integrity. Certainly, it did not advance discourses necessary for advancing democratic deliberation.

It took me a long time to finally speak publicly about my support for Trump. But I still avoid talking about it around my colleagues. Freedom and Reason grew out of my frustration with this situation. I hoped that, in reading my essays, I would ease those around me into an awareness of my politics. Because my writings often come with explanations for how I landed where I did, I hoped they would, assuming charity, help others understand why I think this way. Maybe then, in my presence, others would hesitate to ridicule support for Trump, not for my sake, but for the sake of the millions of Americans who stand with the President. Things did not go as I had hoped, as I document in various essays.

From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, both of the settings I have described can be understood as systems engaged in boundary maintenance—the process by which groups define and enforce the limits of acceptable belief.

In this framework, knowledge is not merely discovered but socially constructed and stabilized through institutions, norms, and power relations. What counts as “reasonable,” “informed,” or “moral” is shaped by these social processes. As a sociologist, I understand this. But it doesn’t make practical life any easier. That would require others to understand this, as well, and the reluctance to be charitable and tolerant seems an intractable problem.

My experiences illustrate a key feature of such systems: the existence of taken-for-granted assumptions that function as markers of group membership. In religious contexts, these are doctrinal and theological; in academic contexts, they are ideological and political. In both cases, dissent is not just disagreement but deviance—a violation of group identity.

The language of “heresy” and “excommunication,” while metaphorical in secular contexts, is sociologically apt. At the level of groups, internal dissent is more objectionable than external opposition; internal dissent threatens the coherence of the group’s identity. This explains the asymmetry I am describing: as someone presumed to belong to the group, my dissent carries greater social risk than it would if I were clearly identified as an outsider. The expectation that I “should know better” reflects the enforcement of internal norms rather than the evaluation of arguments. Hence, the intractability of the problem.

One of the most striking aspects of my experience is the structural similarity between two ostensibly opposed environments. Despite differences in content (religious vs. secular, liberal vs. progressive), both exhibit implicit sanctions against dissent, limited tolerance for viewpoint diversity, and the moralization of disagreement. However, while I don’t have to belong to a religious community, my livelihood depends on belonging in higher education. Life in an institution where progressivism is hegemonic, under the pressure of its illiberal spirit, makes dissent risky.

All of these intersect to incentivize self-censorship. This phenomenon is not tied to any particular ideology but is instead a general feature of human social organization. Groups, regardless of their stated commitments to openness or truth-seeking, tend to develop mechanisms that stabilize shared beliefs and discourage deviation. This is why it is so important to talk about how people come to believe the things they do and why they are so resistant to opinions that challenge those beliefs. They take it personally because it goes to identity.

But this is even more reason to focus on these problems, and why my writing has moved so strongly in this direction. These dynamics have important implications for how individuals form and express judgments. When dissent is suppressed, groups lose access to information that could challenge or refine their beliefs.

This is the problem of epistemic distortion. Apparent consensus creates an illusion of certainty, reducing discernment and critical scrutiny. This, in turn, leads to overconfidence in one’s opinions.

The moral polarization that results from this state of affairs is a significant impediment to the interrogation of ideas. Treating disagreement as a moral failure intensifies division and reduces the possibility of dialogue. The result—self-censorship—diminishes freedom essential for democratic deliberation. Individuals refrain from expressing well-considered views, leading to a less robust intellectual environment. Without reasoned dialogue, no consensus is possible, and ideological and political polarization is entrenched.

From a decision-making perspective, this environment is suboptimal to say the least. It undermines the diversity of perspectives that is often necessary for sound judgment, particularly in complex or uncertain domains. But it’s worse than suboptimal. This sounds dramatic, I know, but it is true: the situation becomes an authoritarian one.

In a free and open society, persuasion is the central means for arriving at consensus positions that allow a people to move forward collectively with the common interests of a diverse population in mind. Robbed of or eschewing the power of persuasion, those who wish to impose their opinions on others often resort to forms of coercion, some subtle, others not so much.

Even when rhetoric appeals to common ground, it disguises the one-way street. Such rhetoric constitutes bad faith wrapped in weasel words. Once one sees it, the disingenuousness of it all becomes apparent. I’d be lying if I said I like being talked to that way—and by that way I mean condescension. Don’t pat me on the head. Make the argument—and try to make it using valid rules of reasoning. If not, then I am taking Schopenhauer Street.

* * *

The imagined scenario that began this essay is not merely comedic. It captures a deeper problem that has occupied my thinking for decades: not just what people believe, but how they come to believe it, how they justify it, and why they so often resist scrutiny. Drawing on insights from philosophy, psychology, and the sociology of knowledge, this essay explores both the structure of fallacious reasoning and the social conditions that sustain it. What begins as an abstract inquiry into logic and cognition ultimately converges with lived experience across very different domains of social life, revealing a common pattern—one in which dissent is pathologized, reasoning gives way to identity protection, and the possibility of genuine dialogue is quietly foreclosed.

As shown in the first section of this essay, the experiences described in the second section are not anomalies but instances of a broader pattern: the tendency of human groups to conflate shared belief with moral virtue and dissent with deviance and to avoid recognizing these problems by resort to fallacious reasoning. As a result, sophistry becomes the standard mode of discourse among intelligent people. By analyzing these dynamics through the lenses of philosophy, psychology, and sociology, we can better understand both their persistence and their costs.

Doing so, if possible, would prepare the population to engage in discourse using the rules of valid reasoning. Without such norms, even communities committed in principle to truth and inquiry risk reproducing the very forms of conformity they might otherwise criticize. I dwelled on my own frustrations because, in light of them, I am not sure it is possible. That progressives express favorable opinions about violence as a tool to suppress those with whom they disagree suggests that achieving Habermas’ ideal speech situation is impossible.

I will close on this. In prison, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, under the watchful eye of the censor, put the following sentiment in notebooks he was allowed to keep: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Why was the man imprisoned? He was arrested and confined in 1926 by Mussolini’s fascist regime. That’s one way to stop ideas from spreading (if only temporarily). With the sentiment, Gramsci meant that one should face reality with clear-eyed, unsparing analysis—recognizing the problem of constraints without illusion—while still maintaining the determination and moral resolve to act and improve things. It’s a tension between sober judgment and committed effort. The takeaway for me is that the impossibility of rational discourse is not a good reason to abandon reason.

Progressives and the far right share a mutual antisemitism. The revival of Jew-hatred has become a problem we can no longer ignore. It shapes politics in the West.

I’ve had conversations with people who condemn Israel’s just war against Hamas—a rational response to the pogroms of October 7—who admit that they are ignorant about October 7. “When did that happen?” No, how did that happen? How could you not know about October 7? I think we know the answer to that question.

For many, Israel is perceived as a white-settler colonial state that periodically bombs Gaza to advance the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land. Why do they refuse to accept that Jews are the indigenous peoples of that land and that Palestinians are a social construct? They’ve uncritically accepted a revisionist history in which Jews are aggressive and avaricious, devoid of humanity. It’s the enduring stereotype of an ancient hatred, just repackaged as “anti-Zionism.”

I see images every day on social media showing the ruins of Gaza City. I respond by sharing images of German cities after Allied bombing during WWII. (There are essays on this platform that contain those images.) This is what fascist aggressors have coming to them, I remind them. I thought you were antifascists.

“But the children!” they cry. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 350k to 500k German civilians were killed during WWII, around 50k to 100k of them children. War is terrible. But the aggressors are to blame, not those who meet aggression with necessary violence.

My counters are futile. They’re true believers. The ghost of Hitler is used to smear Trump, while his Arab allies are portrayed as “victims” of the Jews. Indeed, the world is a victim of the money-changers. And of Trump (a third attempt on his life occurred just Saturday).

How have so many people been brainwashed to see Jews as the enemy and not the Hamas death cult? Why do they not see National Socialism’s analogue in Islamism? Would they have opposed Hitler if he lived today? “We oppose Trump, don’t we?” Good Lord.

Reviving Jew-hatred has been years in the making. Postmodernist notions—critical race theory, post-colonial studies, etc.—and the embrace of Islam on the left are common in university classrooms and in online chatrooms. (Postmodernism is also the parent of queer theory, hence “Queers for Palestine.”)

Matti Friedman identifies the literature at the core of the indoctrination program as “Gazology.” Gazology refashions Israel’s just war as colonialist aggression to reinforce the portrayal of Jews as uniquely evil. The comparison of Zionism (Jewish nationalism) with Nazism is a central part of the Red-Green project, the communist-Islamist front.

A virulent mind virus has infected college students across the transatlantic space. They wear the keffiyeh, march with placards celebrating clerical fascism, chanting genocidal slogans (“From the River to the Sea.”). Far right podcasters—Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones—thrive on antisemitism. They’re natural allies to the antisemitic left.

Jew-hatred is not just a rank-and-file phenomenon. Transnational elites—super-rich financiers—bankroll street-level action pushing the Islamist narrative. The MSM treats Israel as an exceptional case, immoral for exercising the right of sovereign nations to collective self-defense. They recognize that Israel is the Oriental outpost of the Enlightenment. And they hate that.

The double standard that marks antisemitism is stark to those who see what they see. During WWII, the West didn’t secure a ceasefire with Nazi Germany. The forces of the Enlightenment ground Hitler’s monstrosity into dust and denazified the population. Yet Israel is supposed to quit its war with clerical fascism. Anybody working from clear reason knows that anything less than the total annihilation of Hamas will guarantee future pogroms against the Jews. The global elite shame Israel into passivity to give Hamas time to regroup. One could infer this from the facts, but the antisemitic network is explicit about its aims.

This is why the progressive left and the far right oppose preemptive war in Iran. The Iranian Islamic Republic bankrolls Hamas, as well as Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations, and uses the proxies to wage war against the Jews.

But it’s more than this. The Islamic Republic is part of a global network whose designs undermine the West.

A major actor in the project is the CCP. A significant percentage of China’s oil comes from Iran. China needs Iranian oil to fuel its expansionist project. Transnational elites need China for its export processing zones. China is a major destination for the jobs Americans depend on for their livelihood. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals come to America every year. They take jobs from Americans and steal American technology.

These are the sides of the global struggle for human freedom: On one side are the enemies of freedom, and tens of millions of their devotees walk amongst us. They enjoy major party representation—in America, the Democrats have been advancing the project for decades.

On the other side are conservatives and liberals who defend the liberal capitalist arrangements that liberated creativity and expression from the chains of the Ancien Régime. This is America First, and, more broadly, West First.

The latter is my choice of comrades. America First is defending Western Civilization against the barbarians who would return us to the Ancien Régime, reducing the proletariat and the middle class to serfs to be managed on high-tech estates in a neo-feudalist world order. The enemies of freedom seek a new Dark Ages.

George Orwell warned us about this development. The protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, is arrested by the totalitarian socialist state of Oceania and “re-educated” in the Ministry of Love. His interrogator, O’Brien, isn’t merely trying to extract a confession—he’s trying to completely reshape Winston’s mind so he genuinely believes whatever the Party says.

During one exchange, Winston asks about the future. O’Brien responds, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx writes, “Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge … a period of transformation by its consciousness.”

I think about this quote when people get hysterical over something Donald Trump posts or says. What they’re really objecting to is what he does. But instead of arguing about direction and policy (that would give the game away, presuming they even grasp what’s going on), they dwell on his “mean tweets.” Here, they read his posts through a false frame of incompetence or malevolence. Every new post the President makes is more evidence that the man is an authoritarian or in cognitive decline—this coming from those who deny the authoritarianism of the previous administration or the evidence that Joe Biden’s brain is scrambled.

These are people who just a few months ago condemned the Catholic Church for the practice of exorcism and its positions on homosexuality and reproductive rights. Now the Pope is the de facto leader of the Democratic Party. By contrast, Trump is the worst possible human because he criticizes a man who says that he’s Christ’s vicar on Earth.

My point, which I expressed in a recent Facebook post, is simply this: Let’s not judge prominent figures by what they say. We can see what they’re doing. Let’s judge them on that. However, I hastened to add in that post, you can’t believe what progressives say, anyway. “Trump burned food to starve hungry people.” You mean the 800-thousand-dollar worth of expired food in a Dubai warehouse? What was a small amount of spoiled items needing disposal is taken as proof of the man’s cruel nature. “Trump defunded Catholic Charities.” So now you want tax dollars to flow to religious organizations? Misrepresentations and hypocrisy mark the progressive mentality.

I concluded that post with this piece of advice: “Stop watching CNN and MSNOW and deprogram yourself.”

A question was put to me in a comment: Are cable television viewers the only people in need of programming? Lord no. Not just CNN and MSNBC, but also the “America First” or “woke right” crowd—Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Dave Smith, etc. Fox News is another outlet from which people should disengage, albeit it doesn’t quite fit the pattern I’m describing. The Murdock family pursues controlled opposition as a marketing strategy (which has proved wildly successful). CNN and MSNOW are worse. And Fox News fired Carlson.

There are many other belief systems people should get away from: Scientology; gender identity doctrine (and postmodernist ideologies more broadly, critical race theory, post-colonialism, etc.); the Red-Green Alliance; scientism; and others. Some of these weave into the progressive discourse, especially postmodernism and scientism. All of them disrupt a man’s ability to reason properly. The mentality expressed there is cult-like.

The problem that has concerned me of late is the intersection of the progressive propaganda found on cable networks and in the streets (also present in Europe) and the far-right Judeophobic crowd. While there is antisemitism present in some progressive arguments, much of what passes for left-wing ideology today originates in transnationalist ideology. This is the source of popular self-loathing in America. The “America First” crowd is more obviously driven by loathing of Jews.

However, while there are real differences (gender ideology being a key example), the convergence is troubling. It results in false equivalencies—the paradigm: rhetoric reducing preemptive war in Iran to the logic that led the US into the Second Gulf War. The conspiracy here is that Israel directs US foreign policy. That the old cabalistic theory of Jewish control finds purchase today on the left is an expression of brainwashing. That ancient history appears intrinsic to far-right tendencies.

I wrote that Facebook post out of frustration after a phone conversation the previous evening in which nearly every “fact” presented came from CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS. What frustrated me was that, when claims were challenged, the counterevidence was dismissed—even after I provided sources. This wasn’t the first time I’ve had to push back on these claims in conversations with this individual. The road we travel together is well-worn at this point.

The attitude feels cult-like, which is why I used the term “deprogram” in that post (I also use it in essays on this platform). I recognize that the term is objectionable, but it is what it is. I cannot be hampered by offense-taking.

What was particularly striking to me was how, during the conversation, the status of the pope was elevated to the point that the person argued the government should fund Catholic charities—despite having historically opposed any mixing of church and state. The shift was sudden and, frankly, irrational.

A revealing aspect of the back-and-forth was when the person became offended by my attempt to explain the phenomenon of programmed sophistry (I did not use the term “deprogramming” in that instance, but I suppose the implication was obvious enough). I pointed out that the person had earlier in the conversation described Trump voters as “crazy” and “embarrassing.” Real anger was expressed there. When I reminded the individual that I had voted for Trump, the person apologized. But I explained that the reason I even noted it was not because I was offended by the characterization. I was talking about cult-like thinking and programming. I wasn’t mounting an ad hominem attack, but providing an analysis.

Moreover, I explained that I’m not offended by ad hominem attacks even when I note them. When the petition was circulated to get me fired for “racist” and “transphobic” content on my platform, I was not concerned with being called names (I expected to be smeared), but whether the administration at my university would act on the petition. I recognize offense-taking among intelligent people as largely a rhetorical strategy.

The conversation was still on my mind when I awoke the next morning, so I penned that Facebook post sitting in the parking lot waiting for my wife to finish physical therapy. (She recently fractured her tibia and had the meniscus repaired. She is still hobbled, but recovering. It’s a slow and painful process.)

Phenomena like switch-flipping and offense-taking point to a deeper, entrenched problem. As I noted in that post, only recently, progressives were condemning the pope for the Church’s practice of exorcism and its positions on homosexuality and reproductive rights; now he’s treated as a legitimate moral authority. Similarly, many Democrats suddenly abandoned their previous positions on Iran, mass immigration, deportations, and voter integrity, among other things, when Trump became president. Remember how Democrats signaled refusal to take “Trump’s vaccine” and then scolded conservatives for refusing it out of concern for its safety?

George Orwell describes the phenomenon of switch-flipping in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the technique of rectification (see The Party Flips the Switch: Compulsory Misgendering and the Technique of Rectification). This works because of conditioning. Recall what Orwell describes as the “Two-Minute Hate” ritual organized mainly around the ominous figure of Emmanuel Goldstein (if you haven’t read the novel, you must). Such rituals train the public in irrationalism. The progressive strategy is on the nose. Trump is the Goldstein figure in the real world. Hate rituals short-circuit objectivity. 

The problem is both epistemological and ontological. The epistemic flaw with progressivism is that it operates more on what bloodsport debaters (see Andrew Wilson) call “vibes,” i.e., emotional responses, than on facts and reason. Such irrationalism is shaped by long-term ideological conditioning. Without critical reflection, people become resistant to contrary evidence, with facts subordinated to irrational sentiment and revisionism.

The ontological issue is the underlying worldview: the foundational assumptions themselves are either flawed or unsubstantiated. Here, there is a failure to interrogate presuppositional thinking. We see this in debates over ethics and rights, where the progressive operates from a consequentialist standpoint shaped by installed preferences, rather than from an objective moral position. For the far right, the appeal is to God, but they have examined the matter only superficially. They decontextualize scripture.

The consequence of all this is that people believed to be wrong are bad people, and because they are bad, they must also be wrong. Jürgen Habermas’ ideal speech situation is undermined. Opportunities for self-reflection are missed. I personally experience this as a question repeatedly put to other people (and sometimes to me directly): “What happened to Andy?”

The phenomenon explains why the charge that the SPLC has exaggerated or manufactured an image of a fundamentally racist America is not seriously considered but instead dismissed outright as a conspiracy to delegitimize the SPLC or rationalized in some nonsensical way (such as the SPLC paid informants to keep track of racists). Such thought-stopping counters the evidence that the SPLC funded leaders of white supremacist organizations that fronted the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which Biden used to launch his 2020 campaign, and that the FBI used to harass conservatives. Manufacturing hate is central to progressive strategy. It is not that the agenda is incoherent, but that the public shouldn’t understand it.

We see this also in the denial that mass immigration is a political-economic and electoral strategy to suppress wages and secure an effective one-party state. We see it in the portrayal of the Justice Department going after those who manufactured the Russia collusion and other hoaxes and waged lawfare against Trump and associates as “retribution,” where the rule of law metamorphosizes into an expression of authoritarianism. (Our man Orwell called all this.)

I first wrote about concerns with the SPLC in 2018 (see yesterday’s essay), the same year I began what I described in essays on my platform as my own process of self-deprogramming. That’s the same year I started writing about mass immigration (my trip to Europe that summer jarred me). That got me reexamining my thinking about criminal justice and gender. By the end of 2020, I was in a different place. That’s what happened to me.

I was wrong about a lot of things because I had been working from a problematic worldview, not because of CNN and legacy media and mass culture more broadly—thanks to Noam Chomsky and other critics of the corporate media, Antonio Gramsci’s critique of ideological hegemony, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s exposé on the Culture Industry, I have always understood mass media and popular culture to be propaganda—but because of socialization in graduate school, reinforced by working in the academic environment (to state the obvious, progressivism is woven into the warp and weft of higher education). I had ceased to be a fully independent thinker. It’s embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing as it would be had I never gone down the rabbit hole.

As I have explained in previous essays, I was able to escape all that because of my early grounding in liberalism and scientific reasoning. The tension between Enlightenment principles and corporatist ideology provided the exit point. Not everybody is so fortunate, which is why I lean into the deprogramming piece. Frankly, the use of that language is more for those trying to understand what’s wrong with people rather than those in need of deprogramming. I am not optimistic that anybody who needs it will seek it out. Not everybody shares my biography.

What prompted my transformation beyond the shock of the aftermath of the migrant crisis (which really isn’t over) was the Democratic Party abandoning reality and the working class, and the Republican Party (if only partially) reclaiming its roots in Lincolnesque ideas and the American System (which the RINOs are trying to derail). I was left behind. That put everything in stark relief. When only a few things I had been sure of collapsed under critical examination, my worldview fell apart. This is typical of the experience of those who have been deprogrammed.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t regret this not happening sooner. I would have been a lot happier. Progressive ideology is an emotional drag. Trying to maintain irrational beliefs is heavy lifting.

National Socialism in Germany was not socialist in any meaningful analytical sense. As Franz Neumann argued in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, the regime can be understood as a form of “totalitarian monopoly capitalism,” in which large financial and industrial interests were integrated into a coercive, authoritarian state rather than abolished. I assert Neumann’s description as definitive.

By contrast, the Soviet Union was a bureaucratically organized, state-directed economy in which private capital was formally abolished and replaced by centralized planning. Whether described as “bureaucratic collectivism,” “state capitalism,” or “state socialism” (the term I use), the common thread in these interpretations is that economic life was subordinated to a centralized state apparatus rather than liberated through markets.

The persistent confusion—especially among conservatives—that National Socialism was socialist stems less from its name or a theory describing its character than from intuition. At the level of lived experience, workers in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union both confronted systems that eliminated independent class organization, subordinated labor to centralized authority, and sharply constrained autonomy.

From below, the everyday experience of discipline, surveillance, and political powerlessness could appear comparable, even though the underlying relations of production and ideological foundations were fundamentally different. So, in a way, conservatives are right. They can easily imagine what life would be like in these totalitarian systems. They aren’t wrong.

The chief difference between a liberal democracy and an authoritarian state, whether totalitarian monopoly capitalism or state socialism, is the pendulum swing to coercion and away from persuasion. Persuasion is the method of control in free and open societies. To be sure, capitalism is associated with inequality. But the average citizen is free to fail. In a liberal capitalist society, the worker is not dependent on the state. He is not a kept man.

George Orwell has been criticized for dwelling on the Soviet Union and downplaying the problem of National Socialism and fascism generally. Orwell did focus very strongly on criticizing the Soviet Union, especially Stalinist authoritarianism, most famously in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which led some critics—particularly on the political left—to argue that he emphasized Soviet communism more than other forms of oppression. But it’s not accurate to say the man ignored fascism. Orwell actively opposed fascism, including fighting against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War and writing journalism that criticized European fascist movements in the 1930s.

Orwell’s broader concern was authoritarianism in general rather than any single ideology. Since Western academics downplayed the problems of Soviet-style communism (many were sympathetic to socialism), he felt a need to shine light on that form of authoritarianism. The perception among antifascists that Orwell focused too much on the Soviet Union was amplified by the Cold War, when his books were read primarily as anti-communist texts.

But for Orwell, it’s not a matter of choosing between authoritarianisms. There’s no dilemma. Another way is possible. This explains the continuing popularity of his work. The man teaches us what to look for. And why we need to look for it.

A private grocer stocks shelves according to customer demand. He pays taxes and offers both premium and generic products to keep customers satisfied and returning. Both consumer desire and state coffers benefit.

A government grocer, by contrast, stocks shelves according to bureaucrats’ whims while consuming tax dollars. No revenue is generated, only consumed. Generic products dominate to reduce costs. Customer satisfaction is secondary; shoppers make do with what is available.

In the first case, customer needs are met, and revenue is generated. In the second, customers accept what the government decides is best, while public resources are diverted elsewhere, or public debt grows. As private grocers disappear, revenues decline, and the specter of austerity looms. To the extent that they survive, a two-tiered system of choice and quality prevails.

Risk shifts from the private sector to the public, placing the burden of failure on taxpayers. Grocers no longer compete to offer a variety of breads; instead, customers line up for whatever the government provides, carrying it back to cramped apartments, both purchased with modest state support. The wide selection of alcoholic drinks is replaced with something like Victory Gin. It dulls the senses well enough, but the government will not pay for it.

Imagine such a world: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four made real. There, the proles accept what Big Brother allows them to have. They love Big Brother—or at least, they must. What choice do they have?

Remember when Joe Biden said he decided to run for president because of the “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia? Apparently, there were “very fine people, on both sides” in Charlotteville—at least from the perspective of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Yesterday, FBI Director Kash Patel and the Department of Justice announced an eleven-count federal indictment against the SPLC, alleging that the organization secretly paid over 3 million dollars to individuals connected to extremist or hate groups between 2014 and 2023. The SPLC used shell companies or disguised entities to route those payments, and failed to fully disclose the activities to donors or financial institutions. The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Patel characterized the conduct as the SPLC “not dismantling extremist groups, but manufacturing extremism,” and accused it of misleading donors about how their contributions were being used.

I have written about the SPLC previously. In 2018, I published The Irony of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Authoritarian Desire, in which I criticize the organization’s double standard, especially its failure to treat black nationalism and Islam as extremist movements. More recently, in 2023, I published Southern Poverty Law Center Defames Parents Invested in Safeguarding Children, which defends the parents’ rights group Moms for Liberty against the SPLC’s attempt to designate that organization as a hate group. The SPLC manufactures hate groups to maintain the perception on the left that conservative Christianity and white supremacy remain significant threats to ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.

In a twist that would make even the most jaded satirist blush, the very organization that once lectured the nation about spotting “hate” now stands accused of secretly funneling millions to the very extremists it claimed to be fighting. While the SPLC busied itself branding half the country as bigots and elevating Charlottesville into a sacred parable of American wickedness, it was apparently writing checks—through layers of shell companies—to the very dragons it professed to slay. The irony is almost poetic: the self-appointed guardians of tolerance didn’t just fail to dismantle extremism—they allegedly helped bankroll it, all while harvesting donations from those who trusted them to do the opposite.

In the Maddax song “Bitch,” from the 1987 Speed Demon, I do not sing that all women are bitches. I sing, “Some women are bitches.” The lyric goes, “Some women are bitches / telling me their lies / Best not fool with bitches / ’cause I ain’t got the time.” (Readers can hear the song here.)

This observation has implications not merely for personal relationships but also for the workplace and society more broadly.

As occupations are feminized, some women decide who’s hired, promoted, disciplined, or terminated, and how the organization functions, based on a worldview in which men are portrayed as oppressors, with women portrayed as victims deserving of special treatment for recompense. The feminized organization sees through a particular gaze and organizes work and its public face accordingly.

Men and women are different. They think and act differently. This is natural history. A feminized organization will accentuate traits common to women. And while such traits work in many areas of human endeavor (women are essential), this is not always true. And that’s okay. But since men are dismissed as oppressors, in whatever beneficial ways men may think or act, their thoughts and actions are, by definition, bad.

Hence, “toxic masculinity” and the need to feminize boys, or at least make them manageable with discipline or drugs. Masculinity is redefined as a “disorder.” Men should be more like women.

The knock-on effect is the presence of feminized men demanding to enter women’s spaces. In some places, they are allowed to, even if women object or are afraid to speak up out of fear of what will happen to them if they do. Most men are also afraid to speak up for the same reason. Many of them have also been feminized. Moreover, who wants to be a bigot? Who wants to be disciplined or dismissed?

Why are feminized men allowed to invade women’s spaces? “Kindness.” Society’s values have become feminized.

Cross-cultural psychological studies find that women score higher on measures of compassion, empathy, and prosocial behavior. They are higher on the personality dimension of “agreeableness.” Girls and women are more sociable. They are more collectivist in orientation. Men, by contrast, are more individualistic. The two orientations can only coexist if society is free and open.

To be sure, not all women are agreeable. Some women are bitches. They sit together at the mean-girls table. Their coffee mugs get shit done. Bitches use agreeableness to manipulate others. It’s an instrument of control. They demand compassion, empathy, and prosocial behavior from others to gain compliance. They wield these as weapons in a feminized context.

Another knock-on effect is a sharp decline in fertility. Nations can’t reproduce themselves. Borders are thrown open to foreigners to replenish the nation’s numbers. Why are the borders open? “Kindness.” Why the opposition to deportation? “Kindness.”

The maternal instinct to care for the future of the nation becomes transferred to the infantilized foreigner and the inner-city menace. Criminals are memorialized. Their victims’ murals are powerwashed from buildings.

Nor can the men in a feminized social order defend the nation from threats foreign and domestic. Men object to just war. Standards in the military (and policing) are lowered. Male aggression increasingly takes the form of primitive rebellion, which is channeled by globalists into societal disruption.

Are men not a danger to women? Some men are. On average, men are more likely to rape than women. Much more likely. Rapists are almost exclusively male, in fact. And that is why we don’t let them into women’s spaces.

Not all of us rape. Most of us don’t. We understand some do, and that’s why men established women-only spaces. Men know that the desire of some men to enter women’s spaces is because either they want access to women at their most vulnerable or they aren’t right in the head, in which case we don’t trust them around women (or children). Men are not as kind as women. Nature prepares men for danger.

The problem isn’t that women aren’t rational; it’s that men are. Some men are not afraid to say all this. We need more men to be unafraid.

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— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) April 18, 2026

(Note: This post is inspired by observations made by Helen Andrews. Readers can find her work here. I am also inspired by two others. Lionel Shriver and Andrew Wilson. Readers can find Shriver’s work in numerous outlets. Wilson’s work can be found here. I do not agree with everything Wilson says, but entertaining his arguments is worth one’s while. Part of pulling one’s head out of the progressive space is waking up to how progressivism, which in part views the world through the feminist gaze, distorts normal human relations. This is one of the chief elements of woke.)