freedom and reason

A good parent doesn’t coddle their children or excuse their bad behavior. They want their children to be conscientious, resilient, self-reliant, and responsible. Children with good character and self-discipline are more successful in life, enjoy greater emotional and psychological stability, and are less likely to violate others than those who lack good character and discipline.

Democrats are well-known for their paternalism. This goes back to the days of slavery, where Democrats treated slaves as children, most obviously in restricting their autonomy. The party still treats blacks this way. This is why they infantilize and down-talk to blacks.

Are readers familiar with the work of researchers at Princeton, Cydney Dupree and Susan Fiske, who identify what they call “competence downshift”? It’s what turned Batya Ungar-Sargon from a progressive into a liberal. Dupress and Fiske found that white progressives, when interacting with black people, tend to use simpler, less “competence-signaling” language than they used with white audiences. The researchers interpreted this as a subtle form of patronizing behavior rather than overt hostility. This is an example of Democrat paternalism.

The unfortunate reality is that, in their paternalism, Democrats are bad parents. They establish conditions that make blacks dependent on their party and then excuse the bad behavior that results from those conditions.

Long ago, psychologists identified what they call “locus of control.” This concept was introduced by Julian Rotter in the 1950s. There are two types: internal and external. A person with an internal locus of control is self-starting and prepared to take responsibility for his actions. People with an internal locus of control believe that success or failure mostly depends on behavior, choices, and effort. Taking initiative can change circumstances. People with this orientation are more successful in life.

By contrast, those with an external locus of control tend to be helpless and irresponsible. They blame others for the situation their choices put them in. People with an external locus of control tend to believe that “Things happen to me” rather than “I make things happen” or “My actions influence outcomes.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, sociologists like Peter Berger and C. Wright Mills helped validate the external locus of control orientation. Their intent was not to promote helplessness or formally defend what psychologists called an “external locus of control.” Rather, they criticized what they saw as overly individualistic explanations of human behavior. Whatever their intentions, progressive social engineers saw in the critique a justification for government intervention in the lives they sought to manage. Thus, social critics participated in a project to diminish the agency of those who face hurdles in life.

It took a while to realize that conservative and liberal critiques of progressive social policy are correct, but I get it now. Progressive policies reinforce a fatalistic worldview. Academics built around this an intellectual justification with critical race theory and pressed it into the education system. CRT feeds social justice warriors a rhetoric. Its advocates target those who believe their circumstances are not their fault. Millions of people now believe somebody else is responsible for the situation confronting blacks.

This restricts poor people’s political strategies—or, more accurately, directs political energy towards supporting policies that are not in their best interests. Rather than insist on a more robust pro-worker economic strategy and the values of hard work and striving, progressives affirm a self-fulfilling prophecy and deepen it into structural dependency. They cultivate what is known as “learned helplessness.”

There is a political strategy behind this. Democrats did this knowing that those who are dependent on government will vote for the party that puts them in that situation and makes them that way. It’s like the child who is given everything at home: there is no reason to leave what amounts to a comfortable prison. Freedom is retranslated from the experience of the rough-and-tumble to having “free” food, housing, and medicine. The spoiled child lives in the basement. He does not bite the hand that feeds (although those with spoiled children know that is not always true). It is not that there is no role for the government in helping people in need. The problem is making able-bodied citizens helpless.

Excusing behavior complicates the problem. When those whom progressive social programs made dependent on government break the law—which is an inevitable entailment of such policies, since dependency breaks down personal responsibility and undermines the family, the primary unit and source of any integral social order—Democrats, the bad parents that they are, step in and prevent accountability for the unruly. They excuse their behavior and shift the blame. It’s not their children’s fault. They have elevated bad parenting to bad government.

It certainly isn’t the parents’ fault. They’re the ones who have the children’s best interests at heart. They’re sympathetic to the plight of the poor. Their heart is in the right place. They are good and decent people, compassionate and loving. Rather, it’s the billionaire’s fault. It’s the Republicans’ fault. They insist that the situation is the result of centuries of capitalist inequality and white supremacy. It’s the conditions, they say, not the behavior and choices of the poor. We have to study the root cases, we are told, as long as progressive policies are not identified as the root cause.

The situation of blacks is not merely the creation of the welfare state. There are structural forces behind the creation of the ghetto. Structure is not entirely irrelevant in understanding problems confronting people. This historical development lies at the feet of Democrats, as well. Behind the welfare state is the destruction of the American economy by globalization.

As I have argued in numerous articles on this platform, Democrats have always sought to undermine the American System. Developed by Alexander Hamilton during the Republic’s first presidency under George Washington, the American system was designed to protect domestic industry and jobs. Democrats obviate this system to pit the American worker against foreign competition. (See History as Ideology: The Myth that the Democrats Became the Party of Lincoln; Will They Break the Peace of Westphalia or Will We Save National Sovereignty for the Sake of the People?)

Economic nationalism created the most powerful nation in world history. Today, after decades of globalization, America’s greatness is diminishing. Representing the narrow interests of the corporate state, progressives pursue free trade, offshore jobs, and, in the 1960s, open the country to mass immigration. As a result, America suffers a vast surplus population of able-bodied persons, disproportionately black. The burden of administering life for those displaced by the transnationalist project has been placed on the taxpayers’ backs.

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To get a bit more technical, in criminology, we distinguish between integration and regulation. Integration aligns with the psychological concept of internal locus of control. A person who is integrated with prosocial norms controls his or her own behavior. The well-integrated follow the law. They are law-abiding strivers. Those who are less well integrated in society, on the other hand, require external control.

Here, sociologists have attempted to validate their antisocial and unruly behavior. In the late 1930s, for example, Robert Merton redefined crime and deviance as “innovation” and “retreatism” and theoretically reconceptualized these as “adaptations” to unchosen circumstances. Those who innovate (crime) and retreat from society (drugs and homelessness) are then regulated, governed by external forces. This is where law enforcement enters the picture—if progressives would allow cities to use it. The point is that big government becomes necessary to manage the innovation and retreatism. And big government inevitably manages everybody. In this way, the external locus of control is generalized.

At the core of Merton’s anomie/strain theory was the premise that social structures can pressure people toward deviance when cultural goals are emphasized but legitimate means are unequal. This spawned a school of thought that became dominant in the 1960s, exemplified by the advocacy of Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven. This idea underpinned the logic of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which engineered government dependency in black communities and expanded government, already greatly expanded by previous Democratic presidents, as seen with Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party thus actively undermines both requirements—integration and regulation—for a decent and orderly society. Their policies disorganize families and communities. The result is generations of people who are poorly integrated with prosocial norms. This produces criminogenic conditions. On top of that, Democrats weaken the regulatory function that exists to manage the societal disintegration progressive policies produce.

As a result, crime, disorder, and violence are commonplace in communities governed by Democrats. Tragically, these effects, given the progressive command of society’s sensemaking institutions (education, mass media), have become widely perceived as normal.

It’s the normality of social pathology in Democrat-controlled cities and states that leads many people to assume crime, disorder, and violence are intrinsic to the nature of blacks. History shows otherwise. Before the Great Society, black families were as stable as white families. While there was crime and deviance (there always will be some, as Émile Durkheim long ago taught us), these pathologies were nowhere near the levels they would reach during and after Johnson’s presidency. But few people study history. Instead, many assume this is just the nature of those living in those communities that progressivism has disorganized. Indeed, some conclude that it is the nature of blacks that disorganized those communities in the first place. In this way, Democrats perpetuate the racism they engineered to justify slavery and Jim Crow.

Despite representing themselves as antiracists, Democrats are responsible for creating the negative perception that many have about black Americans. Not only have they made blacks dependent on the government, and not only do their policies undermine the policing function (which imperils everybody living in and near the ghetto), but progressives have also engineered the attitude and behavior that has damaged the collective reputation of black people.

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Democrats attempt to deflect attention away from this reality by blaming the situation on “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” But the reality is that Democrats are the culprit. This tragedy is compounded by the fact that they get a lot of help from black leaders. Instead of encouraging black Americans to demand what’s right for their communities, to find a way to transcend their circumstances, progressives conditioned them to expect a life dependent on big government. Those close to the community encourage them to defend this way of life. The result is perpetual poverty and servitude, and neighborhoods rife with crime and deviance.

Progressivism, the politics of corporate statism and transnationalization, and those of the resulting administered life, drive the project of managed decline. Progressives replaced the American dream with a nightmare from which Americans need to be awakened. Indeed, we don’t need a vast state that generalizes the principle of parens patriae. We need a small, less intrusive government that promotes liberty, families, and personal responsibility. To the extent that the state gets in the way of anything, it should only get in the way of those forces that threaten the American way of life.

House Democrat Ro Khanna took to the floor to call for term limits on Supreme Court justices and to immediately expand the Court from 9 to 13 justices. Democrats seek to thwart justice by packing the Court. (They have also suggested defunding the Supreme Court.) Democrats must believe their party will win the midterm elections and replace the executive branch with a Democratic Party-led administration. They may not have realized it, but they just gave Republicans another plank for their 2026 platform.

History buffs will remember that Franklin Roosevelt attempted to pack the Court in 1937. His Judicial Procedures Reform bill failed thanks to principled Democrats in the Senate. The JPR rejected Roosevelt’s plan by a 10-to-8 vote. Roosevelt’s scheme explicitly aimed to neutralize conservative opposition to his New Deal programs, i.e., the vast project to expand the administrative state (which, unfortunately, was largely successful in institutionalizing the corporate state). The proposal was an egregious violation of the separation of powers.

The reality is that no rights have been taken away from black people. The Democrats are telling an absurd lie. Every adult black man and woman who is a citizen and hasn’t committed a felony can register to vote and participate in our democracy. But Democrats don’t think in terms of individuals. They’re tribalists. They always have been. The same mentality that justified racial slavery and Jim Crow rationalizes organizing the vote by race. This style of identitarian politics has no place in a nation founded on personal liberty, where each citizen is equal before the law.

The Constitution is colorblind. It privileges no class of people. Has Khanna not read Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)? He should—and learn which side of history a moral person stands on. (See Justice Harlan’s Color-Blind Constitution and the Abolition of Racial Gerrymandering.) But he does not seem to be well-read. And he and his brethren are certainly bereft of principle.

Democrats were beside themselves when the Supreme Court overturned racial segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). It took the Civil Rights Act (1964) to put an end to the apartheid Harlan found so repugnant. Ro Khanna’s party filibustered the CRA in the Senate. Remember that? One of the filibusterers, a former Klan leader, Robert Byrd, Exalted Cyclops of the West Virginian Klavern, went on to become the Senate majority leader. No evil deed goes unrewarded in the Democratic Party.

Once more, the Supreme Court had to step in and stop the Democrats from obviating the foundation of the American Republic. Just like their party ancestors, Democrats see Louisiana v. Callais as a setback. Of course they do. Unprincipled partisan power drives the logic of their politics and policies. So does the paternalism that infantilizes black Americans (which I analyze in a forthcoming essay on this platform). Racial gerrymandering is the same genus of racism as affirmative action and DEI. Those days are over—if good and decent people have anything to say about it.

Democrats can dress their racism in any clothes they like, but the threads are always imaginary, and we can see nakedness. Mutual knowledge has removed the dark shroud of the Democratic Party’s ambitions of one-party rule. One of the greatest mistakes in the history of this nation is allowing Democrats to survive Reconstruction. They deserve the same treatment that the Nazi Party received in Germany after WWII. They should be thankful for the First Amendment they seek to limit and weaponize in a myriad of ways.

Zionism emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century as a response to widespread antisemitism and persecution of Jews. The goal of the movement was to secure the Jewish homeland. This led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, following the National Socialist attempt to exterminate the Jews in Europe. But Israel existed long before then. Jewish presence in the land that the Romans later called “Palestina” goes back more than 3,000 years. Zionism is, at its core, the fight for Israel as a Jewish state. The Arabs and Muslims have dozens of states. Jews have only one—and theirs is the oldest. It is also the best in the region.

Anti-Zionism is plainly an expression of antisemitism. It seeks not only to deny Jews their homeland but to deny Jewish existence as a people. This is the mission of Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations, many of which are funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The threat is not just to Jews. The threat is to Western civilization, which is grounded in Jewish law and sensibilities. Christians, whose origins lie in the Jewish faith, whose ethical system is based on that ancient religion, must be involved in the struggle against Israel and the West. Jews and Christians must be a united front against Islamism and the reactionary politics on the left and the right. Those Christians who turn their backs on Israel turn their back on their own culture and religion.

When people tell you that they are not antisemitic but anti-Zionist, they may be speaking from ignorance. However, what guides them to this denial is an ancient antipathy towards the Jews. This antipathy is amplified by the convergence of far-right ideology and Islamophilia on the left. Islamophilia is itself an expression of antisemitism. Third Worldism at the United Nations has infected that body with this ancient hatred. The threat Jews face has been continual for millennia, and today it is reaching yet another fever pitch.

Is it ever okay to criticize the Israeli government? Of course. All governments are subject to legitimate criticism. But opposition to Israeli efforts to secure their nation and to defend it against external and internal threats is never a valid criticism unless one regards antisemitism as a moral position. Opposition to the collective self-defense by the Jewish state is therefore straightforwardly antisemitic.

In the lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Justice John Marshall Harlan articulated one of the most enduring principles in American constitutional law: the color-blind ideal. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote, “and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He continued: “The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the constitutional amendments are involved.”

Readers of this platform know that I am a fan of Harlan’s dissent in Plessy. I have written about his opinion before the recent panic over the abolition of racial gerrymandering. There, I focused on affirmative action and the doctrine of diversity, inclusion, and equity (see Colorblindness and Blindness to Color; Our Colorblind Constitution: What Justice Harlan Can Teach Justice Jackson About Equality and Fairness; The Constitution is Colorblind—So Why Do Democrats Insist that the Country is White Supremacist?). I also applied the facts of Plessy in critiquing the absurdities of transgenderism and transracialism (see The Strange Essentialisms of Identity Politics). I don’t agree with all of Harlan’s opinions, but there are a number of them I wholeheartedly agree with.

In addition to Plessy, the “Great Dissenter” disagreed with the Court’s decision declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, arguing that Congress had the authority to prevent private individuals from discriminating against black citizens. In Lochner v. New York, Harlan opposed the Court’s decision to strike down state economic regulations limiting labor hours, rejecting the use of “substantive due process” to invalidate worker protections. He also dissented in Downes v. Bidwell, arguing that the Constitution and Bill of Rights should fully apply to residents of newly acquired US territories.

Where I disagree with his judgment most stridently is in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, in which Harlan wrote the majority opinion upholding a state law mandating vaccinations during a public health outbreak. He argued that individual liberty is not absolute and that states may enforce reasonable health regulations to protect public safety. This decision was used later in Buck v. Bell, which upheld compulsory sterilization laws for people labeled “unfit.” That opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and became infamous for the line, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Harlan was no longer alive when that decision was handed down, so I cannot say for sure he would have agreed. But he did establish the precedent that made the decision possible.

At any rate, in Plessy, Harlan rejected the notion that the state could impose racial classifications that divide citizens into separate legal or social categories, even under the guise of equality. Harlan got this one right. So should we; we should all reject this notion. The justice warned that such distinctions stamp one race with a “badge of inferiority” and arouse race hate by embedding racial consciousness into law. Today, Americans are rejecting racial classifications. And Southerners are leading the way.

The resistance to equality of suffrage is fierce. The resisters—the party of the Slavocracy and Jim Crow, and today the Administrative State, that is the Democratic Party—tell us that the color-blind idea is racist. Antiracism, they insist, requires subjecting the fate of individuals to racial classification. If the inversion sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We have heard such things before. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” That was the pigs’ slogan in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In his Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell suggested more: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.”

The principle of colorblindness, rooted in the Reconstruction Amendments and the ideal of equal citizenship, provides a powerful framework for critiquing modern racial gerrymandering—particularly the deliberate creation of majority-minority voting districts. When electoral maps are drawn to ensure that a racial or ethnic group constitutes a numerical majority in a district, the state engages in precisely the sort of racial classification Harlan condemned. It sorts citizens by skin color, assigns them to political categories, and allocates opportunities for representation on that basis. Far from transcending race, such practices institutionalize it as the central feature of the electoral process.

* * *

Harlan’s logic rests on a fundamental rejection of racial castes in civil and political life. We must pursue his logic. The Fourteenth Amendment, he argued, elevated all citizens to equal status before the law, erasing the legal relevance of prior servitude or racial origin in determining citizenship rights. Voting and fair representation are quintessential civil rights. To draw district lines so that one group is “packed” into majority-minority districts while others are dispersed is to treat voters not as individuals but as members of racial blocs whose interests are presumed to be monolithic and permanently divergent.

To accomplish this, the government must first identify citizens by race and hypostatize the resulting categories—an inherently divisive enterprise (not to mention fraught with imprecision)—then engineer boundaries to achieve racially predetermined outcomes. This process transforms elections from a contest of ideas and individual preferences into racial bean-counting. But this is not merely a fallacious enterprise. The racial bean-counting is about obtaining and perpetuating partisan political power. (See Democrats in Full Meltdown Over Tennessee’s Redistricting Law; The Project to Establish Voting Rights on Rational Grounds Thwarts Progressive Power Grab; Louisiana v. Callais and the Politics of Selective Collectivism.)

Such districts reinforce the very racial consciousness Harlan sought to eliminate. By implying that black voters need “black districts” to achieve effective representation, the practice suggests that cross-racial coalitions are insufficient and that political destiny is tethered to ancestry. It echoes the caste system Harlan opposed: separate political spheres for separate races. Traditional districting principles—compactness, contiguity, respect for political subdivisions, and communities of interest defined by shared economic or social concerns rather than skin color—are subordinated to racial quotas. The result is bizarrely shaped districts that prioritize race above all else, as the Supreme Court recognized in Shaw v. Reno (1993), when it subjected such plans to strict scrutiny.

Proponents of majority-minority districts argue that they remedy past discrimination and ensure minority voices are heard in a system historically dominated by majorities. Yet the color-blind principle, if integral, does not bend for remedial purposes. The Constitution, on his reading, forbids racial classifications in the allocation of civil rights regardless of the benevolent intent behind them. Moreover, we are first and foremost individuals.

Using race today to engineer outcomes risks entrenching the very thinking the Reconstruction Amendments aimed to eradicate. It tells citizens that the government views them primarily through a racial lens and that fair play requires perpetual racial balancing. This perpetuates division rather than fostering the common citizenship Harlan envisioned, in which “the humblest is the peer of the most powerful” without regard to color. But progressives want Americans to see the world through a racial lens. This is why they decry color-blindness as racist. They presume racism and then wield racism to right the wrong they presume.

Harlan did not deny the reality of historical injustice or racial prejudice. Nor do we. But like the justice, we believe that the proper constitutional response is to forbid the state from acting on race categories, not to embed them more deeply in law. A color-blind approach to redistricting prioritizes race-neutral criteria, allowing natural political coalitions to form across racial lines as individuals pursue shared interests. Representation then arises from voters choosing candidates in integrated electorates, not from government-engineered racial enclaves—or ethnic or religious enclaves, a real possibility if the indentitarian scheme established by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were generalized. I ask the reader to imagine Muslim-majority voting districts.

In an era still grappling with the legacy of race in American life, Harlan’s dissent offers a principled path forward. Southern dissent from the scheme of racial gerrymandering walks that principled path. Opposition to majority-minority districts doesn’t reflect indifference to minority participation; it reflects fidelity to the ideal of a Constitution that “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

By treating voters as individuals rather than racial representatives, we move closer to the color-blind republic Harlan defended—one in which political rights are secured without regard to race, and government draws maps for citizens, not for racial groups. We have already missed out on sixty years of progress in this regard. To be sure, we have made progress despite such practices, but not all the progress we could have made. We are now correcting a grave error we inherited from our recent ancestors by leaning into a constitutional principle established by our forefathers.

A Threads user recently noted that Michael Jackson nicked the moonwalk—and other moves—from Bob Fosse. A commenter responded by asking whether they also criticize Elvis for “stealing black music.” My reply: “Why are you racializing this?”

This is the progressive mind in action. It racializes everything, then either condemns or mocks whites for their cultural expressions. It is identitarian to the hilt—not identity in terms of civilization or national culture, but identity in tribal terms. Black Americans are part of our national culture. We are all citizens of this republic.

Rhythm and blues is not “black music.” It comes from a place, and that place is America. Elvis came from that place. So do I. The idea of “cultural appropriation” presupposes that culture belongs exclusively to a race or ethnicity. But no culture is exclusive. Since the dawn of man, cultural transmission has been one of the primary drivers of human progress—and, at times, regression.

Human populations adopt what works for them and discard what does not. When people are forced to embrace what works against them, they are diminished. This is true both of what emerges within a culture and what comes from outside it. But none of this applies cleanly to rhythm and blues, which is a distinctly American phenomenon. Rhythm and blues is for everybody.

Who invented the guitar? Europeans. Who invented the electric guitar? Americans. Who invented the string bass? Europeans. Who invented the electric bass guitar? Americans. Who invented the fiddle? Europeans. Who invented the bass drum pedal that organized the modern drum kit? Americans. The saxophone, the trumpet, and countless other instruments emerged from European civilization.

Yet nobody I know accuses black rhythm-and-blues musicians of “cultural appropriation” for using European inventions or for building music on the 12-tone scale. These inventions exist for the world to use. If someone can take them to a higher level, all the better.

No serious person argues that white people invented these things, and therefore they are “white” inventions that others should not touch. I am sure there are CRT professors somewhere making that argument, but they are not serious people.

The Poles wore plaited hair centuries ago. They were white. Ancient Egyptians wore dreadlocks. They were white (caucasian, at least). Why, then, are white people accused of “cultural appropriation” for wearing dreadlocks? Why did activists insist on laws protecting what they called “black hairstyles”?

The charge of “cultural appropriation” is ultimately a political weapon. Its purpose is to divide Americans along racial lines in pursuit of power. And it does not stop at culture. The idea that certain racial groups should have exclusive spaces—including race-based congressional districts—rests on the same logic of engineered racial division. It is time to move beyond that mentality.

People are pointing out Michael Jackson’s debt to Bob Fosse to recognize Fosse’s contributions to dance, not to diminish Jackson. And I’m sure Fosse borrowed from others as well. There is nothing wrong with that.

Not for themselves or their affluent friends, but for the rest of us, Democrats treat Americans—black and white—like second-class citizens in our own country. They do this in several ways, most obviously in the progressive projects to relegate white Americans to minority status through mass immigration and keep black Americans under the thumb of the welfare state and trapped in impoverished inner-city communities. Paternalism is inherent in progressive thinking, and they see Americans as children to be corralled and managed.

Former Chairman of the RNC (from 2009-2011), Michael Steele, now co-host of The Weeknight on MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), and, embarrassingly, adopting the dialect of the black ghetto dweller appropriate to his new gig as token host, is threatening whites with the coming majority-minority America. White people will rue the day they ended racially gerrymandered districts, he more than suggested recently.

CNN’s Abby Phillip launched into a similar rant last night, declaring: “We are in the depths of Hell.” As I note in my X post, what Phillip is advocating is, at its core, racialist. I carefully say “racialist” and not “racist,” because racism requires an ideology rooted in the belief of racial superiority. If Phillip believes in black superiority, she hasn’t said so, so I will give her the benefit of the doubt. The point is that Phillip is not about voting as individuals, but as racial tribes. Blacks will lose their representatives when racial gerrymandering goes away, she claims.

What Phillip is advocating is racist. She is not talking about voting as individuals, but as racial tribes.

Blacks will lose their representatives when racial gerrymandering goes away, she claims. But removing majority-minority districts does not prevent individuals of any race…

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) May 9, 2026

Phillip’s argument only works if you accept the premise that voting should be organized around racial categories and not individual citizens. Removing majority-minority districts does not prevent individuals of any race from voting for the candidate of their choice. And that’s a problem for Democrats. The abolition of racial gerrymandering means that the citizens get to choose their representatives rather than the representatives choosing their citizens. This is the way it should be in a society founded on individualism and personal liberty. For Democrats, free elections threaten the Party’s hold on power. Moreover, in the long term, race-neutrality undermines the identitarianism that the Party has used for decades to isolate populations and make them dependent on welfare and racially-selective privileging.

One can see the problem of representatives choosing their constituency in the situation in West Tennessee, where racial gerrymandering has led to a white male Democrat being reelected numerous times by black constituents (see last week’s essay Democrats in Full Meltdown Over Tennessee’s Redistricting Law). Steve Cohen has held that seat for two decades. Charlotte Bergmann, a black Republican, ran against Cohen in 2024. Cohen received more than 70 percent of the vote. The arrangement Republicans just dissolved effectively prevented conservative black voters in that district from having a reasonable chance of electing a candidate reflecting their aspirations.

That’s the design of racial gerrymandering. Majority-minority districting is a strategy of control, not by the people, but by a political party that sees the world in terms of group power. This is a key feature of progressivism (not to be confused with liberalism). If progressivism were actually progressive, it would be at the forefront of eliminating racial tribalism. But progressivism is, in reality, a regressive ideology. Racial politics is atavistic. Bergmann is running again in 2026, and the new arrangement makes it more likely that she will prevail. This explains the cable news and social media meltdown: the competitiveness of race-neutral districting makes it difficult for Democrats to win. Race-neutral districts are more politically diverse, and that is not the diversity Democrats seek.

Phillip is obviously in the Democrat camp. Whatever his party affiliation is today (he claims he is still a Republican), Steele is the epitome of a RINO—that is, “Republican in name only.” RINOs are controlled opposition, loyal to the donor class and the establishment. The Republic is secondary for this class of politicians. It is thus noteworthy that Steele was defeated in his reelection as RNC chairman, not only for his public gaffes and controversial comments (for which he was notorious), but because many in the Republican Party were already moving away from the neoconservatism of the Bush era. The lack of enthusiasm for John McCain and Mitt Romney was an indication of this. The rise of the Tea Party also signalled the change. Steele was no longer useful. His reputation as a RINO and his loud criticism of Donald Trump, who took advantage of the split in Republican loyalities, made him the ideal (apparent) partisan for MSNBC, which put him on its payroll in 2025.

Steele is smart enough to know that ending race-based districts is not just for the sake of the colorblind principle at the heart of our civilization, which progressivism has corrupted with tribalism, but also for reclaiming our American Republic for our children. To achieve the ends that RINOs like Steele abhor, patriots must marginalize the Democratic Party. This may be our last shot to save the country. Steele is no patriot, and so he is useful to those forces seeking to bring down Trump (Phillip has always been useful in this way). Nominal Republicans like Steele are there to make millions believe that MAGA is a racist movement (fascist, as well) and to keep some Republicans in the fold. The trick isn’t working so well these days. As Steve Bannon of the War Room puts it: “the people have had a bellyful of it.”

* * *

Who are the first-class citizens in the eyes of Democrats? Progressive elites excepted, they aren’t even citizens. They’re black and brown foreigners—set against not only whites, but established minorities. The coming majority-minority America is not accidental. Demographic change is strategic. It is intentional. At the heart of the project is what is known as “managed decline.” Elites pursue the same agenda in Europe. As I have noted in previous essays, Third Worlders are colonizing the nations of the West. But they are not the only colonizers. Transnationalists have colonized our institutions, as well. Indeed, the barbarians would not be inside the gates if it were not for the transnationalists in our midst. We’ve been betrayed by our own people.

This is why images of our blue cities look like they were taken in Third World countries. Democrats don’t wait for Third Worlders to create these neglected and rundown conditions after arrival. They create those conditions and force black and white Americans left behind by globalization—which Democrats engineered—to live in them. Progressives and social democrats across the transatlantic space have prepared the conditions that foreigners are used to living in. At their invitation, Third Worlders flock there, reorganizing American and European cities by establishing ethnic enclaves and no-go zones. The Administrative State diverts our tax dollars to these enclaves by force and fraud and weaponizes empathy to subvert the national interest. Trump is undoing all this.

This is a grand strategy organized by the Democratic Party, obvious in its development and effect. Democrats make the new arrivals dependent on the government, just as they did to the black and brown Americans they’ve impoverished for decades. They do this so that they will become loyal to the Democratic Party. They get free health care, housing, and cash transfers. This is the paternalism I noted earlier. But progressives are not responsible parents. There is no demand to behave appropriately or fix the things their children break and neglect. Those who misbehave are not held to account. Instead, their behavior is excused by appeals to “root causes,” that is, the very conditions Democratic social policy has created. Progressives have destroyed the black family and cultivated a culture of disorder and violence. Woke judges release offenders from jail to prey upon the innocent. Why? “Racism.”

I am sure readers are familiar with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, released in 1776, the same year American colonists declared their independence from the British monarchy. But seventeen years earlier, Smith wrote a lesser-known work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This book was his most important endeavor. There he writes, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” His point was that unchecked compassion for wrongdoers undermines justice and harms society. He argued that true justice sometimes requires severe punishment to prevent greater harm. He called for prioritizing comprehensive compassion for society over (misplaced) sympathy for the disordered. Why should there be mercy for the predator? What of his victim? Progressives have so demagnetized the moral compass of millions that now a large portion of the population sympathizes not with the victim, but with the victimizer.

This attitude is intrinsic to woke ideology. Progressives ally with the civilization destroyer and pit him against the creators and those whose labor makes better ideas a reality. Progressives manufacture instead docile and reactionary bodies—and import even more. The presence of such bodies is the fruit of their labors. Woke programmers disrupt the capacity of reason early on by teaching children that men can be women and that they must misgender those who demand affirmation for their delusion. They teach children to hate their nation by indoctrinating them with a revised history of America. They tell the white children under their command that they are privileged and owe non-whites an apology—and their future. Those who object are accused of bigotry and smeared with racial epithets.

* * *

Talking heads like Steele exist to manufacture the perception that level-headed Republicans agree with the warped worldview he promulgates. Steele and his ilk appeal to “moderation.” MAGA is extreme, the public is told, and good Americans reject extremism.

Remember the Arizona Senator and libertarian fundamentalist Barry Goldwater’s famous line, delivered in his 1964 Republican National Convention acceptance speech? “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” The presidential hopeful followed that with this: “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” The corporate media used those lines to manufacture a moral panic that helped Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society scheme ascend to power. But the people now see what that was all about. The worm is turning. The people have had a bellyful of it.

Bannon put the situation brilliantly on Saturday morning on the War Room: American citizens are in steerage on their own ship. I will add to Bannon’s metaphor that the ship’s captain is a transnationalist. Such a captain does not care about his passengers. And he cares only about his crew as long as they follow commands. Pursuing this metaphor to its necessary end, it’s time for mutiny. Our ship is headed for the rocks. Those who believe in the promise of America have to assume command of the vessel and right the ship. There is no room for moderation in this struggle. Republicans in the Southern states must be ruthless in their mapmaking. If this appears extreme, it is only because the extremism of those who have tribalized us, who have walked the nation well down the path to serfdom, has made ruthlessness necessary.

Democrats are in full meltdown over Tennessee’s new congressional map. Are they fomenting Summer of Love 2026? A color revolution just in time for the midterms? (See my earlier essays on the manipulation of electoral maps for partisan political power: The Project to Establish Voting Rights on Rational Grounds Thwarts Progressive Power Grab; Louisiana v. Callais and the Politics of Selective Collectivism.)

Under the old map, the ninth congressional district in Tennessee, which covers Memphis and the surrounding area, has given Steve Cohen, an old white male Democrat, twenty years in Congress. Because of redistricting, a black female Republican may be elected to the seat Cohen has held for far too long.

The public is told that the new map is racist. That it represents the return of the Confederacy. Predictable. But the reality is that competition has come to West Tennessee. This is happening in other areas across the South. For years, Republicans have largely controlled the South, and the party is ensuring that citizens in many of those states are even freer to vote for the political party of their choice.

Nothing prevents voters in the ninth district from voting for Steve Cohen or whoever represents the Democrats in and around Memphis in the future. No black person has lost the right to vote. But, for Democrats, that’s the problem. The party wants to guarantee a Democrat win. It doesn’t matter what color the candidates are. The only thing that matters is partisan political power. This is not about race, but party.

Democrats lost the South with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Southerners like small government. They like Republicans. Once Jim Crow was abolished, Southerners switched parties (they began shifting even before this). So Democrats weaponized electoral maps to retain a toehold in the South. They just lost that strategy. And that’s why they’re losing their mind.

There’s a principle here. We don’t reserve voting districts for Democrats or for ethnic and racial groups in America. Not anymore. At least not for many Southern states. The Voting Rights Act was, in principle, a bad idea. We’re now more than sixty years on from that moment. It’s time to leave tribalism behind.

During Reconstruction, black men were elected to public office at the local, state, and federal levels. There were no majority minority districts drawn to make that happen. Reconstruction was a regime established by the Republicans in the South to protect the rights of newly freed slaves. Redemption drove the Republicans out. Now the Party of Lincoln is back—this time by choice, not by force.

The public is also hearing an old argument again. Democrats are once more harping on the overrepresentation of the South in receiving federal spending, as if they owe the rest of America subservience to identity politics. They don’t want the public to know the reason for that overrepresentation. But here’s the reality: Roughly 55-60 percent of black Americans live in the South, concentrated in states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and urban areas throughout the region. Most blacks live in Democratic-controlled cities. In these cities, blacks have been ghettoized and made dependent on welfare.

This dependency allowed the Democrats to cultivate a voting bloc of Americans whose free food, housing, and medicine depended on the Democrats’ hold on power. Democrats have for decades kept a segment of the population that votes for a living rather than works for a living. Those made redundant by Democratic economic policy now have a chance to demand jobs and a higher standard of living. Blacks now have a real chance to pursue autonomy instead of dependency.

The Great Society created the conditions that destroyed the black family and cultivated a culture of disorder. They idled black Americans by pursuing globalization. Reversing the Democrat strategy will, in the long run, help black Americans break free of the chains progressives put on them, regaining their independence and dignity. But redistricting is not just a win for blacks. Redrawing maps in Tennessee and elsewhere creates the potential for all Southerners to liberate the region from administrative rule.

In a May 2024 essay, Gender and the English Language, there is a section on the construction of a moral panic around race matters. I included this section to note that the construction of gender identity is not the only instance of a project to rapidly alter mass perception via changing words and meanings. The manipulation of mass conscience is a multipronged project. Since then, I’ve thought about isolating that section in a new essay to make it more accessible. The persistence of the left to keep racism alive for political purposes, most notably in the Southern Poverty Law Center funding the far-right actors in Charlottesville, and the recent Supreme Court decision sharply limiting the way the Voting Rights Act has been used by the Democratic Party to achieve power (see The Project to Establish Voting Rights on Rational Grounds Thwarts Progressive Power Grab; Louisiana v. Callais and the Politics of Selective Collectivism), moves me to finally pull out that piece and put it in a standalone essay.

In a detailed content analysis of major media sources published in Tablet in 2020, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” Zach Goldberg tells us that, “[y]ears before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest.” Not just unrest. The media played a key role in reinforcing the ideas that long before colonized America’s sense-making institution, most crucially, education. Moreover, as I have shown on this platform, as with queer theory, the jargon of critical race theory has colonized the medical science space.

You can find Goldberg’s article here, and I strongly encourage you to read it, but I want to pull a few charts from the piece to make the point more immediate. In the first two charts, the reader can see that, beginning around 2010, a drastic increase in references to “racists” and “racism,” and a corresponding rise in the percentage of the population who reported that racism in the United States is a problem. This rise in concern follows a period of long decline. If you ever needed to see the evidence of how the corporate media constructs and drives mass perception of social problems, Goldberg delivers it in spades.

Indicated by the next several charts, the use of terms like “racists” and “racism” were buttressed by a slew of novel or academic terms developed by progressive historians and social scientists, pushed out by the corporate media and culture industry: “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” and “institutional racism”; “racial privilege” and “white privilege”; “racial hierarchies,” “whiteness,” and “white supremacy”; “racial disparities,” “racial inequalities,” and “racial inequities.”

In this way, the alleged effects of “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” etc., were identified as causing racial disparities and inequities without any demonstration of the validity of the alleged independent variables or their explanatory power. No matter, the terms comprised an assumption in force that America remained a profoundly racist country. Reinforced by race hustlers like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and through constant repetition, the abstract facts of racial disparity became their own cause, so much so that even suggesting they were explicable by reference to causes outside of the antiracist narrative risked being labeled a racist.

I argue in Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words, that reducing definitions to mere instruments of power—treating language primarily as a way to shape or impose reality—undermines the fundamental purpose of words. Language, in its evolved function, exists to describe and communicate reality with accuracy, precision, and integrity. Repurposing language to construct reality distorts that purpose. When words are no longer trusted as reliable vehicles for truth, those who control the production and dissemination of ideas gain greater freedom to justify their aims, in part by eroding the distinction between fact and fiction. This is not a novel observation. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observes that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

Any of you who have more recently attended college and taken any humanities and social sciences courses, usually required by the regime of “general education,” will have learned that what is and its nature (the ontological) is shaped by how we think about such things (the epistemological). Of course, the usefulness of this distinction and effect depends on whether one received an education or was indoctrinated. If the latter, then the experience was with teachers who, following the Greek philosopher Antisthenes, believed that language creates categories rather than uncovering reality. There is no reality to be uncovered. What is real is power projection. If the former, where one learns to be wary of acts of construction, then he knows those concerned with truth must purge the machinery of meaning production of the corrupting force of postmodernism and its children.

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.