On Facebook yesterday, before Donald Trump’s primetime speech, I told my friends and acquaintances that Norm Eisen and Marc Elias are leading operatives for the corporate state. I asked them to keep this in mind as they navigated media framing of the intelligence showing that the 2020 election was rigged. The corporate state is in a full panic, I told them, because they know what they did.
I reminded them that the media turns to figures like Eisen and Elias to “substantiate” its claim that election rigging is “false,” “unfounded,” and “debunked.” The technique is what is known as “prebunking.” Prebunking works because repeated exposure to a statement asserted as truth makes people more likely to believe it is true, even when there is no new evidence supporting it—or even when it’s false. Cognitive scientists call the “illusory truth effect.”
The corporate media is the propaganda apparatus of the transnational elite. It weaponizes cognitive science to manipulate the public mind. Cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky, the Copernicus of linguistics, demonstrated this decades ago in his works Manufacturing Consent and Necessarily Illusions.
A professor at MIT, Chomsky broke ranks to expose the truth about how the elite lead the masses by the ring that public education pushes through the noses of our youth. As Chomsky put it, “Education is a system of imposed ignorance.” Institutional education prioritizes compliance and conformity over critical thinking, effectively conditioning students to accept the status quo rather than question it.
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Trump speaks to the nation about election integrity (image source: NPR)
Trump delivered his speech last night and contained several bombshells. As expected, the media is misleading the public on what the President said and what the evidence shows. For example, Democratic Senator from Virginia Mark Warner appeared on MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) this morning to tell the audience that the voter files that China hacked, 220 million of them (far more than the number of voters currently registered to vote), was no big deal because that information is available to the public.
That is a lie. The information in voter files that the public can legally obtain does not contain all the information that’s in those files. The information beyond what is publicly obtainable includes data that can be used to hijack votes and change voter registration status. The data China hacked gave our adversary access to information neither you nor I can legally obtain, information China can use to rig elections by showing that persons have already voted or that they are not eligible to vote. This happened in several states (Georgia, most notoriously). Accused of having already voted or of not being properly registered, voters had to fill out provisional ballots that were never counted. It also allowed China to manufacture mail-in votes, which, as we all know, swayed the 2020 election.
Right now CNN has person after person claiming that China doesn't interfere in our elections.
Apparently they don't watch CNN.
2024. CNN does a segment on Chinese election interference with Tony Blinken.
What’s more, the implication that it’s no big deal that China hacked voter files downplays the threat Chinese hacking presents to the security of US elections. Why would a US Senator downplay that fact? Why does Senator Warner feel safe in appearing before the public and saying this? Whether that information is public or not, it does not change the very real national security threat of a foreign government hacking our election system. Senator Warner is effectively working with a foreign adversary to downplay the significance of election hacking. This makes Mark Warner, for all intents and purposes, a Chinese agent. He’s not the only one. It appears that several other senators knew this when the President didn’t. The Trump Administration is just now discovering what others already knew. That is a scandal.
2019. Eric Swalwell says that Russia and many other countries have the capability to change vote totals during our elections.
"The intelligence communities, they understand the risk."
From 2016 to 2020, CNN aired many segments with politicians making similar claims about the… pic.twitter.com/pzKBzLPeyQ
When Russia was accused of hacking the US election, it was a five-alarm fire. Trump was accused of being Putin’s stooge, and Democrats claimed the 2016 election was stolen. I am not imagining this. Democrats were all over the media before and after 2016, explicitly making this accusation. Video clips of Democrats saying that Russia hacked our election and stole the 2016 election abound on social media. But China hacks our system, and it’s no big deal. Indeed, one is paranoid and spreading conspiracy theories when they talk about China’s involvement in the 2020 election. A bombshell is reframed as a dud. And tens of millions of Americans go along with this framing.
The media is downplaying a related bombshell by omitting another revelation in Donald Trump’s speech last night: that an internal chat log featuring Nikki Floris, a former high-ranking FBI official, shortly before or shortly after the 2020 election, based on the context, bragged that unelected intelligence officials were operating a “shadow government” to massage and suppress intelligence about Chinese interference. This is why Trump was in the dark about the role China played in his 2020 election loss. He was kept out of the loop so that he would not act to secure the 2020 election.
This fact undercuts the prebunking narrative that it was not possible that 2020 was stolen because Trump was president and therefore in charge of the intelligence agencies. The reality is that he was not effectively in charge of the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence services. Intelligence agencies were working against him and effectively at the behest of the Democratic Party. The deep state was keeping from Trump intelligence vital to election integrity and national security. This proves the existence of the deep state. This is a damning revelation.
The deep state was doing a great deal more than this. For example, in 2016, they worked from two Presidential Daily Briefings, the most important report of intelligence assessments the president receives: one version showing President-Elect Trump omitting vital intelligence assessments; the other presented to President Barack Obama containing those assessments, most crucially that there was no compelling evidence that Russia hacked the 2016 election.
Moreover, in 2020, more than fifty intelligent agents and officials published an open letter, widely circulated by the media, suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” to obscure the evidence it contained that indicated Biden’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party and the corrupt government of Ukraine. Legacy and cable media networks, as well as social media platforms, censored posts and stories about the laptop. They even censored the oldest newspaper in America (founded by Alexander Hamilton), the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop. They deplatformed the War Room and other alternative media outlets that covered the story.
The prebunking operation and the subsequent omission of the admission of a shadow government operating to keep Trump in the dark are designed to deny the existence of a deep state that works independently of the presidency, and in this case, against Donald Trump. These aren’t “his intelligence services.” Any observer who knows about how the CIA and other intelligence agencies operate knows they work independently of the president unless the president specifically appoints loyalists to leadership—and even then, there are rogue elements working at the heart of these agencies. This is why there is so much concern over whether a nominee is an established intelligence asset. These services do not want outside actors leading their agencies.
If this were a Democrat president, the media would be all over the fact that some right-winger in the intelligence services, conspiring with other right-wingers, was keeping information from an incumbent president up for reelection. We would never hear the end of this if this had occurred under a Democratic president. The right would be accused of attempting to take out a president or presidential candidate. But because it’s Trump, that fact must be obscured, omitted from the reporting, and any whiff of it debunked as a “conspiracy theory.” The reaction of the media confirms what Trump is saying, and what those of us who study US intelligence services have been saying for years, that there is a permanent establishment in Washington that is working at cross-purposes with administrations they do not like, thwarting the will of the people and undermining the legitimacy of a duly elected president of the United States.
The denial of a permanent clandestine establishment in the context of a narrative that Trump is attempting to sow doubt about the integrity of the US election system goes to the greater narrative that Trump is an authoritarian who represents a unique threat to democracy. But the real threat to American democracy is a shadow government that effectively—if not directly—works with a foreign adversary to rig our elections. What is not in doubt is that the shadow government works with the Democratic Party to obtain and hold power and administrative control over the American people.
We also know that the Chinese Communist Party paid journalists to write negative stories about Trump. Remember all the hysteria of RT and other Russian news services and Americans on their payrolls? But American journalists don’t need our adversaries to bankroll their propaganda. Operation Mockingbird, a CIA propaganda construct established during the Cold War (back in 1948), has long organized the mainstream media. For those of you who do know about this, Operation Mockingbird recruited American editors and journalists to manipulate domestic news and disseminate propaganda. The existence of the program emerged from 1970s congressional investigations revealing the CIA’s extensive, covert infiltration of major media organizations. Its existence is a documented fact. The CIA used the same approach in developing the Trust and Safety regimes in the social media space. This is the conduit through which the Biden Administration worked with Twitter and other platforms to censor information and deplatform profiles disseminating information contrary to the aims of the corporate state. The deep state is not just a government entity. It also exists in the private sector.
Our democracy was hijacked by the deep state a long time ago. The media’s power to frame and manufacture information and the deep state’s control of the legacy media explain why tens of millions of Americans believe that Trump represents a unique threat to American democracy. This narrative allows the corporate state to advance the denationalization project and the managed decline of the American Republic. Considering these facts, it is astonishing that Donald Trump prevailed in the 2016 and 2024 elections. Imagine this apparatus didn’t exist. Trump would likely not only have won in landslides in 2016 and 2020, but he’d likely be the most popular president in our lifetimes. Instead, the population has been infected with a psychogenic mind virus. TDS is a result of the infection. This lies behind the repeated attempts on a president’s life. It has caused individuals to become alienated from their own family members.
My optimistic side has me warning you that we almost lost our country, and that Trump came in the nick of time, a figure not unlike Cincinnatus, who left his farm to don the senatorial toga and save the Roman Republic. Similar figures have appeared in American history. George Washington is the most obvious analogue. But the pessimistic side of me believes that the country was lost a long time ago with the establishment of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, created by the stroke of Democratic President Harry Truman’s pen in 1947. President Dwight Eisenhower was terrified of the apparatus, obliquely warning the country about the peril of concentrated power in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. This apparatus almost certainly engineered President John Kennedy’s demise. Its hand is apparent in many other events that have shaped our lives over the decades.
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I also told my Facebook audience before the speech that the establishment wasfreaking out because I understood that Trump was set to announce that Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia were illegitimately elected due to massive election fraud, following an FBI investigation into Fulton County in 2020. Now we know why the FBI was in Fulton County, I suggested. Tulsi Gabbard, former director of ODNI, was there because it appears there was foreign interference in the election. I had heard that it was China. That turned out to be true.
But Trump did not deliver the goods on Ossoff and Warnock, perhaps to make their pre-speech hysteria appear hyperbolic. Whatever the reason, if Ossoff and Warnock were fraudulently elected (and more information is coming out), then it is almost certain Trump was denied Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in 2020. Other problematic states are Arizona (+11 electoral votes), Wisconsin (+10), and Nevada (+6). Trump lost those states by 10,457, 20,682, and 33,596 votes, respectively. All those states were fraught with problems. Remember the hockey stick? If you ask AI to give you a path to victory, it will note these four states. It could pick any state, but it picks those four. Chance? No chance.
This is why David Rohde came out on MS NOW and tried to get ahead of the story with information leaked to him by somebody inside US intelligence, which now appears to have been a misdirection play. Rohde’s framed the intelligence he received as “disinformation.” But what Rohde wound up doing was confirming that US intelligence services uncovered massive fraud in the 2020 election. Was he set up? Steve Bannon put Rohde’s ravings on a loop on War Room. Meanwhile, Democrats were desperately trying to make it appear as if the intelligence services work for Donald Trump, a claim that anybody who knows anything about the deep state’s loathing of Trump is absurd on its face.
The problem is that Trump won in 2024, and now he has access to the intelligence the Biden Administration withheld during that husk of a man’s presidency (one of the most crooked men in American history). Not only is intelligence on election rigging coming out, but the Epstein files were also released, showing that Trump was not part of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. The Biden Administration sat on those files, too, because they knew they debunked the conspiracy theory. Indeed, Trump played a role in exposing Epstein. That’s why Epstein tried to keep him from winning the presidency.
Democrats fought tooth and nail to keep Trump from returning to the White House because they knew what he would find there. Biden’s cronies hid information in secret rooms full of burn bags. Trump told America about the burn bags last night. The FBI, under new leadership, turned its offices upside down and found it. Fullton County tried to keep the election records from Trump. FBI went there and retrieved it. There is probably a lot more that was destroyed, but what the FBI obtained appears damning.
All the lawfare, lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the fake felony convictions, the E. Jean Carroll farce—even two assassination attempts—none of it worked to derail the Trump Train. And January 6? The police riot looks engineered to stop the challenging of state certifications. Democrats changed the Electoral Count Act in the dead of night to ensure that doesn’t happen again. Now they pivot to the conspiracy theory that the intelligence is cooked by Trump’s people.
I was mocked for saying all this in 2020. But I was right. I watched the vote counts flip in the early mornings. I understand statistical probability. I knew before the election that they were going to steal it because that loathsome snake Marc Elias told the public not to panic over the red wave. A blue wave was coming, he assured progressive media. The blue wave was the mail-in ballots. The machines and media intervention fixed the rest. That’s how Biden got 81 million votes, an absurd number on the face of it. That statistic alone told us the election was stolen. It insults my intelligence to peddle that nonsense as truth. They overshot a realistic number because Trump wound up winning ten million more votes than in 2016. They had to keep counting to overcome Trump in those four states.
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I will leave you with this note. I think you will find this interesting. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Barack Obama worked for Business International Corporation in New York City, a firm catering to multinational corporations. Congressional investigations during the 1970s revealed that BIC’s co-founder, Eldridge Haynes, worked closely with the CIA to provide cover for its agents and projects. Remember how Obama came from nowhere after an unremarkable career as a lawyer? He didn’t come from nowhere. I didn’t vote for him in either 2008 or 2012. Now you know why.
I am by nature even-keel, but these arguments about citizens committing crimes at higher rates than immigrants and, more generally, the claim that immigrants don’t contribute to the crime problem in America drive me up a wall. The loathing for our brothers and sisters in America that makes people prefer strangers over them has many people believing ridiculous things. Anti-American indoctrination in multiculturalism and the pathological humanitarianism associated with it derange our fellow citizens. We see a similar madness in European states. This is the result of transnationalist programming. Canadian psychologist Gad Saad calls this suicidal empathy. He’s right. Suicidal empathy is leading the West down a destructive path.
FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, and Washington Metropolitan Police Department officers arresting a man in August 2025 in Washington, DC.
Joblessness is one of the strongest predictors of crime. When cheap foreign labor displaces native-born workers, there is a greater likelihood that the native born will engage in crime than the foreign workers who took their jobs. This expectation brackets the cultural differences that make some groups more criminogenic than others (ceteris paribus). I will come to that problem of culture in a moment. But for now, keeping that bracket place, and intuitively grasping the association between joblessness and crime (which decades of cross-sectional and longitudinal research repeatedly confirms), how do people not see that deporting immigrants and letting the native born have their jobs back would reduce the likelihood of crime among native born Americans? The same is true with the practice of corporations exporting American jobs to the Third World. Reshoring manufacturing and returning those jobs to Americans will reduce crime.
What is more, unemployment affects marriage, which is another key variable in predicting crime over the life course. In their landmark 1993 book, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life, criminologists Robert Sampson and John Laub found that key turning points—such as stable employment and marriage —redirect even high-risk individuals away from crime by strengthening their ties to conventional society. These turning points intersect: unstable labor markets complicate long-term relationships; unstable relationships produce offspring with poor labor force attachment over the life course. Work and marriage are essential to healthy communities—and to reducing crime and violence.
When people say immigrants don’t contribute to the crime problem because they offend at lower rates than the native born, they have been conditioned to consider only whether the immigrant is engaged in crime—the significance of which they have also been conditioned to downplay (more on that in a moment). What is pushed out of the scope of possible understanding is the obvious: that the presence of immigrants changes the system in such a way that it affects the likelihood that native-born citizens will engage in crime. Thus, whatever crime the immigrant brings with his presence in America (which is considerable—and we must consider his victims), his presence increases crime and other deviant behaviors among the native born by alienating them from stable social bonds that make those behaviors less likely.
Also pushed out of the scope of possible understanding among those trained not to think holistically is the possibility that the rate of crime among children of immigrants converges over time with the crime rates of American natives. If the argument is that those who come here illegally have lower rates of crime than the native born because they bring with them a protective culture, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that, if you let them stay to have children and their children assimilate with America’s criminogenic culture, their criminal offending among their offspring will show similar rates as those of native-born Americans? Indeed, that is what we see, as the above chart clearly demonstrates.
If the argument is that more immigration leads to lower rates of crime overall because immigrants are somehow less prone to crime due to their upbringing, then are advocates of liberal immigration policy suggesting that the immigrant and his children never integrate with the host society? Promotion of multiculturalism and tolerance for the ethnic enclave suggests it.
There is, of course, no reason to suppose that immigrants overall are less crime-prone than the native born; the propensity to commit crime varies across ethnic, racial, and religious groups. There is, moreover, the situation of immigrant presence in the country; the immigrant crime rate is lower because legal immigrants comprise the group with significantly lower crime rates. The direct problem is the illegal immigrant (who has already broken the law by being here). Progressives lump these groups together to make the overall immigrant population look artificially lawful. They do not defend only legal immigrants, those with a lower propensity to commit crime (depending on the immigrant group); they defend illegal immigration, the most crime-prone immigrant type. Because of the problem of displacement identified above, both legal and illegal immigrants indirectly contributed to the native-born crime problem.
Then there is the problem of volume. Rates aside, if we add more people to a population, even if the newcomers commit crimes at a lower rate, the total number of crimes goes up. This prediction is mathematically unavoidable unless the added population commits zero crimes. For example, if citizens, let’s say 300 million people, have a crime rate of 5 per 1,000 or 1.5 million crimes, and illegal immigrants, let’s say 20 million people, have a crime rate of 2 per 1,000 or 40,000 crimes, even though immigrants commit crime at less than half the rate, they still add 40,000 crimes that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t here. Remove the 20 million, and there would be 40,000 fewer crimes. Per capita has its place, but not when it is used to deceive the public.
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The people who talk about the lower crime rates among immigrants, what are they suggesting? Is the solution to the crime problem replacing the native-born population with foreign-born populations? Moreover, it logically follows that deporting US citizens will lower the crime rate. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has suggested this argument: that if the true goal of mass deportation is purely to lower the national crime rate and make communities safer, then logically, the government should be deporting native-born US citizens instead of immigrants, since getting rid of citizens would result in a much larger drop in crime.
Uygur is obviously making a satirical point. But what if he were told that the reason why US citizens have a higher crime rate is that black Americans are so drastically overrepresented in crime statistics that criminal offending among this population alone lies behind that statistic of higher crime among native-born Americans that progressives love to cite? This is the shocking fact Uygur avoids in his rants about immigration: remove black Americans from the calculations, and the native-born per-capita crime rate is drastically reduced, and for some crime, namely, property crime, which is the most common class of crimes in America, reverses the comparison.
I am not suggesting that a progressive like Uygur would suggest we remigrate blacks back to Africa. Of course not. Progressives would never agree to this. But is it not ironic that the population that indirectly suffers the most from immigration—black Americans—is the population Cenk unintentionally leaves out of his attempt at reductio ad absurdum? If he had his druthers, he’d keep all the illegal immigrants at the expense of black Americans.
I don’t want to see black Americans deported, either. Of course not. I want to see immigrants deported and black Americans given back the jobs that were taken from them by globalization and mass immigration. I want policies of economic nationalism so black America can rebuild the family and, with the well-known benefits of work and marriage, reduce the overrepresentation of blacks in crime and violence in America. Unlike progressives, I actually care about the fate of black Americans. Cenk and his ilk don’t really care about them. They don’t really care about the native-born working class in general. Why would they shill for the party of the transnational oligarchy—the Democratic Party—if they cared about working people?
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The fact of overrepresentation of certain groups in violent crime is often met with the rationalization on the left that crime and violence are individual phenomena, and that assigning the problem to groups is racist. Ironic, given that progressives think in terms of groups and identity. The purpose of selective rationalization is to disrupt recognition that violent crime roots in cultural and subcultural differences to keep the flow of immigrants coming. The reality is that not all cultures are the same. Moreover, cultures that are out of place don’t operate the same way they do in their places of origin. They are invasive. Immigrants who do not assimilate with the host culture are more likely to transgress the host culture’s normative rules in a myriad of ways. How could it be any other way?
I have taken great pains to explain that multiracialism and multiculturalism are entirely different animals. The West has managed racial diversity fairly well. The United States record of multiracialism is especially praiseworthy. Over ninety percent of blacks in America are descendants of the original slave population, and they have enjoyed equal rights everywhere in America for more than sixty years. Moreover, many Asian populations have integrated with American society.
Multiculturalism, by contrast, is not just an abject failure; it is an ideology designed to disintegrate nations. Some cultures are incompatible with the West, chiefly Islamic fundamentalism and the attitudes prevalent among MENA and some Asian populations. This is obvious in the overrepresentation of members of these cultures in violent crime. Just answer this question: which foreign-born groups and their offspring are overrepresented in the crime of rape across Europe? The answer is so obvious that the question becomes rhetorical.
The solution to crime and violence is not found in expansive law enforcement alone. As a liberal, I would much rather see less crime and violence in part because it makes an expansive law enforcement apparatus less necessary. America annually spends hundreds of billions on its criminal justice system. Today, the number of incarcerated individuals approaches two million, with millions more on probation and parole. The number of Americans with felony convictions is compounding every year. Nor is the solution found in censoring speech or obscuring the statistics that warn the public about the demographics of crime, or in defining deviance down, as sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan so aptly puts the problem of growing tolerance for deviance. Since we all agree that it would be wrong to deport native-born groups in America, a major piece of the solution to the problem of crime is ultimately found in immigration restrictions and remigration.
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A border patrol agent at a gap in the wall
Democratic talking points about immigration reveal a deep problem with that party and the progressive left (the democratic socialist) attached to its hip. But the party is not the sole problem. The other major group that wants immigrants is those industries that exploit cheap foreign labor. They want immigrants, legal and illegal, because immigrants represent superexploitable pools of labor—across labor-intensive and capital-intensive sectors—that drive down the wages of native workers by expanding the labor supply and, moreover, disrupting worker consciousness and politics by disorganizing communities and disintegrating the nation.
Why do so many Americans still believe the Democrats represent working people when the party is working with corporations at cross-purposes with the cultural and material interests of proletarian workers? This allegiance demonstrates the power of ideology. From the perspective of ordinary working-class communities—black, brown, white, and yellow—the arguments progressives use to sell mass immigration make no sense. Mass immigration will not shore up entitlements. Immigrants include old people, single mothers, and unhealthy people. Healthy immigrants are human beings who grow old and get sick. And have babies. All this burdens public infrastructure and resources. Immigrants take jobs from the native-born and drive down their wages, transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from the working class to the corporate class annually.
The United States is suffering its sharpest rise in poverty in more than 50 years. Why on earth would any person beyond the Democrats who want votes and corporations that seek profit think it is a good idea to add more people to the poverty rolls? There are more than seven million unemployed Americans in the United States—and this only counts those who are looking for work. Working families don’t need more foreign workers competing with husbands, wives, sons, and daughters looking for work. Americans need jobs to feed their families and stabilize their neighborhoods.
The progressive left position on immigration enables the superexploitation of labor. It is harmful to the interests of working-class Americans. It is criminogenic. The media didn’t report this, but during the period when millions were flowing across our borders under Joe Biden, the country experienced a violent crime wave across urban America, exacerbated by depolicing and other progressive criminal justice policies. President Trump is reversing the trends, but if Democrats regain power in Congress, the progress his administration has made will be reversed.
Immigration is politically and socially disorganizing. It disempowers working-class Americans. It burdens public services and infrastructure. It endangers the health, safety, and well-being of children and women on both sides of the border. The only thing that recommends it is cheap labor for corporations and votes for Democrats—and neither of those things is in the interests of working-class Americans.
Call your representatives and senators and demand that they stand with American working-class families by supporting CBP and ICE. Encourage the Trump Administration to ramp up deportations. Demand that the government put its energies into strengthening our communities and our nation by investing in education, job training, and infrastructure, and reshoring industry in America that hires Americans. Tell them to put Americans first.
You know the myth of the zombie. A zombie is a reanimated corpse that lacks consciousness and acts through compulsion or external control. In some tellings, a conjurer hijacks the central nervous system of the corpse and uses it to realize dark and evil aims.
The lies progressives tell are legion, but few are as harmful to American citizens as the ones told about crime and immigration control. We call these “zombie lies” because no matter how many times they’re killed by truth, they’re reanimated by progressives and sent back out to hijack the brains of the living and direct them to speak and act in ways that disrupt a necessary function of good government, namely public safety and national integrity.
The persistence of these lies betrays their political function. For numerous untoward reasons, progressives strive to keep—their proneness to involvement in crime and violence notwithstanding—foreign-born populations in America. And for those native-born populations overrepresented in crime and violence, progressives call forth the zombies to obscure the record of their social policies: the perpetuation of conditions that exacerbate the crime and violence that plague our cities, foremost among them family disintegration and joblessness.
It is therefore necessary to periodically remind Americans that the facts that debunk these lies are already out there. Concerned citizens such as yours truly have killed them many times, only to see them reanimated to stalk the countryside once more. But we remain committed zombie killers, and so we will kill them again. And again.
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It remains true that there is no “systemic racism” in lethal police-civilian encounters. The public needs periodic reminders of this truth. Black Lives Matter was founded on the zombie lie that police officers are more likely to kill black men because of racial bias. A related lie is that many of these deaths involve unarmed black men. Facts and scientific reasoning have debunked these lies.
To take the related lie first, the reality is that around 95 percent of people killed by police had a weapon. However, it must be clarified that being “unarmed” does not necessarily make a man less lethal. “Personal weapons,” i.e., hands and feet, kill more Americans every year than all rifles combined.
To address the other lie, around half of all men killed by the police are white, while less than a quarter of those killed by the police are black. Because blacks are roughly 13 percent of the population, they are around 2-3 times more likely to be killed by the police. To put this another way, blacks are overrepresented in police shootings relative to their population size. However, black men are disproportionately involved in crimes that put them in situations where police encounters are more likely.
In other words, police do not disproportionately kill black men when benchmarks and situational factors are included in modeling variance in the dependent variable. In fact, in some studies, white males are more likely to be killed by police when these variables are entered into analysis. Would we say there is systemic racism against whites in America? Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? That’s because it is.
Think about it this way: Around 95 percent of those killed by police are male. Is this because of “systemic sexism”? No. Obviously. The actual reason is that males are drastically overrepresented in situations that expose them to violent encounters with the police. Nobody has to tell you that. You already know that males engage in violence more than women. It is a fact of natural history.
The persistent beliefs that the police kill black men at a higher per capita rate than white men and that a significant number of such fatalities involve unarmed black men are zombie lies. These claims are not true.
Why do these lies persist? Because progressives lie to their audience. The corporate media assist them in the lie by not telling the public the truth. During the 2020 insurrection that killed dozens of civilians and caused billions of dollars in property damage, the media knew the claims driving the violence were false. They never debunked the zombie lies. Instead, they told the public that the mobs on our streets were “mostly peaceful.”
The Democratic Party played an essential role in pushing the false narrative. The Party lies like a psychopath. Indeed, the Party is psychopathic. It lies about everything.
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Independent databases typically record about 1,000–1,300+ deaths per year at the hands of police. This is for recent years. One compiled dataset reported 1,314 police-related fatalities in 2025. The vast majority of these fatalities are classified as “justifiable homicide.” The exact number of unjustified homicides is difficult to pin down, but we know that it is a small proportion of the total number of fatalities at the hands of police.
The best available estimate of police-civilian encounters (counting people who have at least one contact with police, not every individual verbal exchange) is approximately 50 million police-civilian contacts per year. This is according to the Bureau of Justice.
Should we stop enforcing the law because a small proportion of lethal police-civilian encounters are unjustified? Depolicing increases crime and violence, so it would not be rational to sharply restrict or abolish the police. Crime and violence in America are real problems. Secure communities demand police presence. It is a right to expect safe neighborhoods where people can go about their lives without having to fear victimization.
Police stop active shooters, rescue people from violent attacks, prevent suicides, perform emergency medical aid, and intervene in domestic violence. More generally, studies of policing find that increases in police presence are associated with reductions in crime, especially violent crime. Systematic reviews of focused deterrence strategies find meaningful reductions in serious violent crime. Research on hot-spot policing finds reductions in violent crime in targeted areas.
So why is the small number of unjustified homicides in CBP and ICE operations used as an argument for eliminating border enforcement and deportations? CBP and ICE are law enforcement agencies. Illegal aliens not only engage in crime and violence, but their very presence in our country is often a criminal act in itself. CBP and ICE exist to secure our borders and the safety of our neighborhoods.
The reason for calls to abolish ICE is not because there are fatalities at the hands of law enforcement focused on these tasks. The reason is the political-economic project to drive down wages for native workers, disorganize our communities, and change the demographic composition of the United States for electoral advantage and the denationalization project. The safety of the citizenry is sacrificed for corporate and elite needs.
Progressives don’t care about citizens. They have no problem with keeping in America a population involved in crime and violence. They are responsible for the conditions that exacerbate crime and violence in our cities—family disintegration and joblessness, among other things. They care only about power.
Not knowing that thunder is the sound of lightning is not an instance of not knowing everything. Nobody knows everything. Candace Owens knows very little. The problem in this case is not what Candace thinks but how she thinks. A person who has to be told that thunder is the sound of lightning is the last person who should attempt to opine on capital cases. Of course, blowhards blow hard, so let me put it this way: A person who has to be told that thunder is the sound of lightning is the last person you should listen to when it comes to opinions on capital cases—really opinions on anything. If they’re right about something, it is only accidental. (See Candace Owens is a Clinically Stupid Person.)
A big problem for our species is the error of mistaking our innate linguistic capacity for native intelligence. The modern scientific understanding of language is that we evolved that facility relatively independently of the range of intellectual capacity. We can talk because our brains evolved this facility. A person unable to read or make obvious connections can still stand before a group of people and hold forth. They can recite a list of talking points without notes and never lose focus. They may be polished actors who deliver compelling performances, while holding the dumbest opinions on a range of cultural or political issues.
The dumbest people can sound smart because the facility of language is not that strongly correlated with cognitive ability. Inversely, some of the smartest people have trouble communicating. Yet the stupidest people can make arguments that sound compelling—to other stupid people. This is why stupid people with confidence can appear to so many as intelligent: because those people are stupid, too. Civilizations have been degraded and destroyed because of this basic misunderstanding. And because there have always been stupid people.
Serious question @RealCandaceO: did you really not know that thunder came from lightning?
I will admit that I once thought penguins were much bigger than they are.
But did you seriously not know that thunder came from lightning?
We see this today on X with people commenting on a post by Viva Frei. Comments on the thread, Frei posted a “serious question” to Candace Owens: “Did you really not know that thunder came from lightning? I will admit that I once thought penguins were much bigger than they are. But did you seriously not know that thunder came from lightning? It’s possible this was a bit. In which case, so be it. Can you confirm?” People are in the thread defending a grown woman who didn’t know thunder was the sound of lightning until she was in her forties. Bless her heart.
The gist of the comments on the thread is that some people were not taught that the sound of lightning is thunder. People don’t have to be taught this. Thunder isn’t like penguins. Penguins don’t run around my neighborhood. Unless I go to a zoo, travel to where penguins live, study the species, or watch videos where men stand among them so I can make a comparison, I have no idea how big those birds are.
This is not a trivial matter. It’s the crux of the Owens situation. That Owens didn’t see the connection between lightning and thunder (words that are almost always paired in speech) and had to be told this explains why she can’t see the fact pattern in the Tyler Robinson case and draw the obvious conclusion. The woman’s thoughts are random happenings. That is the mark of a stupid person; in this case, a stupid person who believes that she alone can decipher the mysteries of the world—even when there is no worldly mystery.
Nobody bothers to tell kids that thunder is the sound of lightning because almost every kid figures it out on their own—so early in life, in fact, they don’t remember a time when they didn’t know it. That connection is a test of basic intelligence, namely the ability to draw an inference. It’s like knowing why your shin hurts after walking into a coffee table or what causes the tower of blocks your father spent several minutes erecting you push over with feigned astonishment (you little shit).
The ability to see cause and effect is built into most of us. It’s how we survived as a species with so little instinct. It’s why we don’t follow the serpent to our doom like alligator hatchlings who see a reptilian form and think “Momma!” This capacity can only be confused and deranged by ideology and religion—and one needs little intelligence to be confused and deranged by other stupid people. Or evil people. (At the same time, even intelligent people can be confused or deranged.)
When I brought this up at a pool the other day, the initial reaction was one of disbelief because “nobody is that stupid.” Candace Owens is. Then heads shook in amazement when I confirmed that she said it. I was at the pool with smart people. Yet millions of people hear Owens say things like this and nod their heads in agreement.
This is how you can identify the stupid people who walk among us. If a person says, “Candace is right. I didn’t know thunder was the sound of lightning until somebody told me about it,” then you know there is stupidity in your midst. After she announced her stupidity during a podcast, she asked others to tell her whether they also didn’t make the connections in the public chat. Turns out that there were a lot of stupid people in her chat.
There is no use arguing with people this stupid—except for sport. They don’t know they’re stupid because complete sentences spew from the hole where they put their food (and other things). They will never get what you’re saying. They will instead find you cruel, stupid, or part of the conspiracy. This is why I generally deploy the Schopenhauer screen. What’s that? In my essay, The Scourge of the Scold, I tell readers about German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and his approach to engaging with fools. “Logic holds little power against stubborn ignorance. Such disputes waste valuable time,” he argues. This comes with a personal cost: “debating fools diminishes one’s own standing, as true intellectual victory is unattainable when faced with irrationality and pride.” Silence here is not because the wise man has no response; it is because he knows the fool cannot admit or comprehend it. (See also Judgment, Conformity, and Epistemic Distortion.)
There is no cure for this condition. Human attributes lie along a range of variation, and natural selection for our species has been largely derailed by culture. Our Darwinian moments have, to a considerable degree (they still happen from time to time, often to our amusement), been lost to civilization. We now really only evolve with technology, with notable left-behinds. We’re stuck with stupid people, I fear. And the fools won’t stay on the hill. This is why ridicule is such a vital weapon in the arsenal of progress. We can’t reason with them, so we mock and marginalize them.
There’s nothing intrinsically racist about immigration law and enforcement or seeking limits on immigration. Nationalism is about people, not race. In the United States, the descendants of slaves are as much native Americans as the descendants of the white European colonial population (Exposing the Guilt Trip: A Nation of Immigrants?The American Creed and the True Aggressor). We need to be more strident in making these points. We need to make explicit the character of this propaganda campaign and the vital importance of national integrity. The globalists are working hard to denationalize the West. If they succeed, America is over. Without the nation-state, there is no common culture, rule of law, or self-government.
Racism—systems manifesting belief in racial hierarchy—is not intrinsic to national integrity. An immigrant is a person present in a country she wasn’t born in. She may be of any race, ethnicity, religion, etc. Immigrants in the US come from all over the world. And there are lots of them. More than a million come to the US legally every year. Before Trump, millions more were entering illegally.
We’re approaching the same proportion of foreign-born as existed in the early twentieth century, a situation that then compelled working people to demand a change in immigration law because the burden of mass immigration was acutely felt by citizens in fewer job opportunities and lower wages. Today, the problems of fewer jobs and lower wages remain, with housing shortages and the welfare burden adding to the pressures.
While people have a right under international law to leave their home country, they have no right to live in another country. They have only the right to seek asylum. They have no right to expect other countries to take them in. Asylum seekers are a small portion of the millions who seek to emigrate every year. Most migrants seek access to the educational institutions, jobs, and social welfare systems of developed economies. They have no inherent right to any of these. Native workers are being replaced by foreign workers entering the country on H-1B visas. This must stop.
The enlightened world established nation-states to represent and defend the freedoms and rights (immunities and privileges) of those who legally live in them. Globalization erodes the standard of living and compels citizens to sacrifice their way of life to foreigners. Those who live under conditions of oppression and poverty should remain in their countries and struggle to make them adequate to their needs. We understand that this is not always possible.
But many of those entering the West do not do so to make their lives better, but to make the host country like the place they left. These are not immigrants but colonizers. The American Indian did not have the capacity and organization to repel the European colonizers. But while Americans have that capacity today, they lack organization. It’s the movement to organize against immigration that elites seek to thwart by racializing the immigrant and promulgating the doctrine of multiculturalism.
It’s not that those of other races cannot be Americans. Millions of black Americans of African descent enjoy equal rights with white Americans of European descent. There are Arabs, Asians, and Hispanics who enjoy the immunities and privileges of United States citizenship. America counts among its citizens Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims. Americans can be of any race, ethnicity, or religion (or no religion at all).
All that is required to be an American—to enjoy the freedoms of conscience and speech, protection from arbitrary detention and search and seizure, and a myriad of other liberties and rights enshrined in law—is to be welcomed and assimilate with its creed and swear an oath of loyalty to the nation. It’s not like this in many parts of the world, a world marked by authoritarian cultures and political and religious oppression. Americans rarely migrate to the Third World. But many migrants mean to bring the Third World to America.
Our representatives in government have a sacred obligation to the people they serve to scrutinize those who seek entry and residence in America, a discernment guided by what is best for the American people. Americans need jobs, decent wages, housing, lower taxes, and safe neighborhoods.
Before turning to today’s essay, I must note the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. I disagreed with Graham on Ukraine, but I have always admired his grasp of the true threat facing America: Islamism. Graham died from a sudden illness just hours after returning from an official diplomatic visit to Kyiv, Ukraine. I know that there’s nothing that unusual about a 71-year-old man dying of a heart attack, but that part of the world, you know. Just the day before, Graham appeared to be perfectly healthy as he briefed reporters about his plan to put further sanctions on Russia to bring about an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
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Two clips Steve Bannon used in his cold open on last Thursday’s early edition of War Room drew separate responses from me on Facebook. I want to combine them here and make these available to visitors of my platform (my Facebook account is set to friends and acquaintances), so I will take them in order. This essay elaborates considerably on the commentary I posted on Facebook, so those on Facebook who follow the link to this essay will not experience a repetition of those posts.
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough
The first was a clip from Morning Joe that concerned the canard that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” I published an essay on this last week that debunks the myth (see Exposing the Guilt Trip: A Nation of Immigrants? Not Really). It’s a myth progressives use to undermine national integrity. They pine to make the myth a reality. They are engineering the replacement of the original people of the United States with Third World populations.
Mika Brzezinski, daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Director of the Trilateral Commission, a globalist organization founded in 1973 by American banker David Rockefeller (a Baptist), warned that when a nation turns from its creed to its people, its moral compass has been demagnetized. As if the national creed and the nation, which is a people, are mutually exclusive. As if these people can be trusted to accurately convey the American creed.
Joe Scarborough (also a Baptist) followed his wife (a Catholic) with a rant about Jesus’s message condemning those whom we today call patriots, then known as the Zealots, and their calls for rebellion against Roman occupation, focusing instead on the Messiah’s message of grace, which we are told negates the imperative of national communities. Scarborough repurposed Scripture to chastize those Americans who are unwelcoming to foreigners and who disregard his misinterpretation of our national motto.
After decades of telling Americans that their country is not founded on Christianity, are the globalists and progressives now admitting that America is a Christian nation? No, of course not. They are exploiting the rhetoric of Christianity, selectively appealing to the teachings of Jesus to manipulate Americans, to further the managed decline of the United States and the West.
Are Christian patriots going to put up with this? Christians have as much right to participate in their government as anybody else. Since Christians are a majority in America, one would certainly hope they would. Overall, Christian voter turnout in the United States typically hovers around 55-60 percent during presidential elections. To be sure, non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic white Protestants voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, but they’re up against Hispanic Catholics and black Protestants, upon whom the Democratic Party can confidently rely. Evangelical Christians and those patriots who subscribe to Catholicism need to get energized and mobilized.
Perhaps it is needless to say that Morning Joe is obvious propaganda. Brzezinski and Scarborough lie so confidently you’d think they actually believe what they’re saying. But it is still important to show why their show, a production of MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), and shows like it (CNN, NPR, and PBS are notable examples) are organs of globalist propaganda.
Scarborough and Brzezinski (and David French, who joined them in dialogue) can’t be that ignorant of history. The talking heads know that those who founded the country were not immigrants but colonists. I tell readers what they won’t: that half of white people living in America today are descended from the colonial generation—and more than 90 percent of black people are descended from slaves brought to the United States before the country even existed. These are the original peoples of the American Republic.
The historical claim is demonstrably untrue, and those who grasp history know that Scarborough and Brzezinski are deceiving an audience the hosts of Morning Joe believe is too ignorant or indoctrinated to know they are lying. They would be insulting their audience except for the fact that the hosts’ assumption is largely correct: except for those who monitor such propaganda, those who watch Morning Joe are among the most ignorant and indoctrinated people in America.
This is why it is so crucial for readers to understand how the meanings of terms and phrases are twisted to mislead the audience. This is a major reason why I resurrected Freedom and Reason in 2018: to clarify the meanings of words. Scarborough provides a case in point; he misrepresented the motto “E pluribus unum.”
If a man did not know history, he might believe that the motto refers to a creed established at our founding that the United States is a place where those of many nations may come to America and be Americans. But the motto does not mean one nation integrating people from many nations, but rather the union of the thirteen distinct colonies that formed the Republic after throwing off the yoke of monarchy.
So, while there are immigrants in America (I happily married one), America is not a “nation of immigrants,” albeit it will become one if Americans don’t do what they did in the 1920s and shut down mass immigration for all but a select few—and more than that, establish a project of remigration.
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In another clip shared on War Room, the blonde-haired woman tangling with Scott Jennings on the CNN NewsNight panel, Caroline Sunshine, said that Iran would never attempt to assassinate Donald Trump because that would rally Americans around the flag and justify the US invading Iran.
One reads a similar sentiment on social media to the effect: “How can Trump complain upon hearing the news that the Islamic Republic of Iran means to assassinate him after he assassinates the Ayatollah and his whole family?” Drawing the proper moral parallel, I respond to the meme with this: “One would expect Germans to want to see Franklin Roosevelt assassinated if an attempt was made on Adolf Hitler’s life.” After all, the Ayatollah is to contemporary times what Hitler was to the WWII era.
Scott Jennings and Caroline Sunshine
Sunshine (the British would laugh at the aptness of the former Disney actress’s name) is oblivious to the obvious: it’s the Iranians who want war. To be sure, the Iranians want it to appear as if the US is the aggressor, so they can garner the sympathy of Muslims and their allies and delegitimize the United States and the West (which talking heads in many Western countries are doing their damndest to accomplish for them), but the reality is that they want to bring on the war they need to flush out the child Imam who went into hiding centuries earlier so they can establish an Islamic world order.
Sound far-fetched? This is why history matters. Study the Twelver Shi’a tradition. You will learn that the Twelver Shi’a belief centers on the twelve Imams descended from the Prophet Muhammad through Ali and Fatimah. Wilayat al-Faqih, developed most prominently by Ruhollah Khomeini, argues that during the occultation of the mythic Twelfth Imam, qualified Islamic jurists have authority to govern society, and the goal of the project they oversee is to steer the world towards a situation that will encourage the twelfth Imam to return and assume leadership.
The Islamic Republic is an end-times cult. Obsession over the return of the Twelfth Imam consumes them, so much so that they will wreck their own country to bring about his ascendancy. But he will never come because he isn’t real. And the experience of Persians will become even shittier than it is now.
This theory, as crazy as it sounds (and it is batshit crazy), is the theological foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran: establishing an Islamic state governed by clerical authority, viewing opposition to the religious-political leadership as illegitimate and worthy of violence suppression, and supporting “resistance” movements against foreign influence, including armed struggle. The strong emphasis on revolutionary ideology and confrontation with perceived enemies is inherent in Twelver Shi’a. The madness is a feature, not a bug. Shi’a Islam is unreformable.
The deep states of the West are engineering our common destruction. Islamism is based on the Nazi ideology.
Groups and states influenced by variants of this ideology not only include Iran’s clerical establishment but also movements such as Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon. It even influences those Sunni Muslims, such as Hamas (also a proxy of Iran), operating in the territory the Roman Empire called “Palestine,” i.e., Israel, previously Judea. There is a lot more to understanding this, which is why I provided above Triggernometry’s interview with Ed Husain, co-founder of the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam Foundation, Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Watch that interview to become aware of the peril the West is in. The question every American must ask himself is this: Who is the US, Israel, and the Middle East at war with? All one needs to do is say their names, and one knows what’s happening: the Islamic Republic and its proxies because they are at war with us. They are the aggressors. Moreover, this war has a domestic front. A Twelver Shi’a Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor of New York City, and his administration is making overtures to the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, the democratic socialists have announced their plans for a one-party state that will abolish the Constitution.
The State Department shuts down a planned meeting between Zohran Mamdani’s administration and the Iranian ambassador to the UN.
According to City Journal, the top official in the Zohran Mamdani administration’s Office for International Affairs made plans to meet with Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations. City Journal reports: “Commissioner Ana María Archila was scheduled to meet with Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations, at 2 United Nations Plaza, alongside two other senior officials in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs on July 7 at 11 a.m.—this according to screenshots of a calendar invitation reviewed by City Journal and confirmed by a source connected to the international affairs community and another familiar with Archila’s office.”
Sleepwalkers are being led by people who seek the destruction of the West and the enslavement of its people. These fools not only defend Shi’a Islam—they vote it into office in our own country. They openly call for the destruction of America. And if America falls, the West is cooked. The hour is late, comrades. You need to mark the time.
Or perhaps clinically psychotic. I’d like to say “insane” because it better captures what I have in mind, but insanity is strictly a legal term, so I will go with psychotic. However, Owen’s babbling madness is one thing—I’ve been to parties where individuals hold forth uttering the craziest and stupidest things (I’ve even encountered this at faculty meetings and professional conferences)—but observing tens of thousands of people swallowing the nonsense that falls from Owen’s mouth is another thing altogether. That is fucking scary.
I know there are low-IQ and paranoid people in the world, but seeing so many of them in one place reminds me that stupidity and psychosis are real problems for the rest of us. Intellectually, I can explain National Socialism, to take a striking example of a mass of people collectively behaving stupidly and psychotically—and destructively—but there’s a part of me that remains shocked that such a thing as Nazi Germany is possible. It is wishful thinking to want to believe that members of my species are inherently rational beings. They aren’t. Yet I reserve astonishment to preserve my moral sensibility. I try hard to avoid being a cynic and a misanthrope. I can’t just give up. Irrationality endangers me.
I have been watching Utah’s preliminary hearing in the case of Tyler Robinson, the man who assassinated Charlie Kirk. The case is so open-and-shut that I will dispense with the pro forma “allegedly.” The autopsy report, the DNA on Robinson’s grandfather’s Mauser Model 98 bolt-action rifle modified to fire .30-06 Springfield ammunition, the screwdriver used to disassemble the rifle, and the towel used to conceal it, on which biological material from Robinson’s lover Lance aka “Luna” Twiggs was also found, the etched bullet casing, the meaning of the inscriptions, and the dremel used to inscribe them, multiple videos of Robinson on the Utah Valley University campus walking up the stairs to the roof with a rifle in a pant leg (Robinson is positively identified by Twiggs) and then jumping down from the roof, the damning note left for Twiggs under Robinson’s computer keyboard, the damning text messages and Discord chats, multiple damning interviews with Twiggs, the many eyewitnesses—it’s all there. Dude is cooked. And the defense team knows it.
I have a good imagination, but I cannot come up with an alternative theory of the case. And the reason I can’t is that I am incapable of believing crazy paranoid scenarios like “Mossad did it using an exploding microphone.” Sorry, not sorry, but my mind is limited by facts and reason. This is what makes me rational. Not that Mossad couldn’t do something like this. Remember when Israel fucked up Hezbollah with exploding cellphones? That event was wild but real. I know how and why Israel did that. But Israel didn’t kill Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson did. We know how and why he did. Owens and her ilk—Ian Carroll, Jimmy Dore, etc.—are guided not by fact and logic but by motivated reasoning that assumes Jews lurk behind the scenes. This is madness.
The exploding microphone theory is one of the more bizarre elements of the grand conspiracy. The autopsy report concludes that (1) Kirk’s cause of death was homicide and (2) the manner of his death was a gunshot wound to the neck. The medical examiner even extracted bullet fragments from the man’s corpse. I have watched video footage from multiple angles of the moment Kirk is struck in the neck—the same videos that made the judge flinch in open court and sicken the curious compelled to look at it—and there is zero evidence that the wound was caused by an explosive device. Whatever the wingnuts are seeing is not something normal people can see. Normal people see this: Kirk was killed by a bullet from a gun fired by Robinson. Confidence level that Robinson murdered Kirk? One hundred percent metaphysical certitude. Doubt in this case is pathologically unreasonable.
We know why Robinson killed Kirk. Slam-dunk cases don’t require a motive. But we have a motive in this case. Robinson murdered Kirk for his lover, Twiggs, whom Robinson refers to as “my love”—and, more than this, for the trans community Twiggs is part of. The mindset, the messages, the etchings on the bullet casings, and the target tell us this. Robinson’s handwritten note that he instructed Twiggs to find under Robinson’s keyboard confesses to his intent to murder Kirk: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it. I don’t know if I will/have succeeded, but I had hoped to make it home to you.” In the text conversation that followed Twiggs’ reading the note, Robinson confessed to having murdered Kirk. “I had enough of his hatred,” he explained. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Millions of Americans agree with him. The two then texted back and forth as Robinson sought an opportunity to retrieve the gun he shot Kirk with. But the authorities got there first. The state has his grandfather’s rifle.
This was in an Antifa hit job, as I show in my article on Freedom and Reason, Charlie Kirk’s Killer is in Custody and the Specter of Antifa. “But Antifa is an idea?”Right, and that’s the idea that motivated Robinson to kill Kirk. In that September 12 article, published just two days after the murder, I provide readers with facts central to the case and contextualize them. Nothing that has occurred since I wrote that essay contradicts my analysis (which the news site, RealClearPolitics, picked up, driving thousands of people to my platform). This was an open-and-shut case from the beginning. In that essay, I showed that Antifa terrorism and transactivism are inseparable. I knew this even before Kirk’s assassination and wrote about it (see Understanding Antifa: Eric Hoffer, the True Believer, and the Footsoldiers of the Authoritarian Left). As soon as I learned Kirk had been shot, I immediately understood what was behind it. It was not the Jews. It was an anarchist.
Leave it to Owens and her tribe of imbeciles to imagine an exploding microphone. “Why did his chain blow upwards?” she wonders aloud on Shawn Ryan’s podcast. How about air displacement, Candace? Ryan should at least have suggested this, but he had clearly not prepared for the interview. People online are wondering, “Why did his T-shirt bulge out in the back?” As if this is a mystery. A high-energy impact can cause a rapid, involuntary movement of the torso; inertia can make a loose shirt billow, lag, or flare outward. Tissue deformation and energy transfer: a bullet impact produces rapid expansion and contraction of tissue surrounding the wound path, transmitting forces through the body. Air and fabric effects, ie., displaced air under loose clothing causing a brief outward bulge—and a chain to blow upward. All of these obvious explanations could never occur to them because they already believe they know what happened.
Anybody who has ever killed an animal knows what bullets can do. A man might watch a slow-motion video of the kill and note numerous queer things about it. Yet, however many queer things may be noted, any sane person admits that the animal was shot by a rifle. How does one determine when a person has been shot? The questions are very basic and obvious. Are there entrance and possibly exit wounds? What was the bullet’s wound track through the body? What does the autopsy show? Were any bullets or bullet fragments recovered? What do ballistics and trajectory analysis show? In other words, what does the physical evidence tell us?
Candace Owens, seen here using a lavalier and two standing microphones
We have all the answers to these questions, yet the paranoid mind rationalizes what it sees with its own eyes at roughly the same velocity as the bullet that killed Kirk. One member of Owen’s band of paranoids, whose comment received numerous likes on Facebook, expressed bafflement at the observation that Kirk was wearing a microphone while speaking into another microphone. The motivated reasoning evident in his comment illustrates basic principles found in psychology and cognitive science. I am almost certain that the commenter had himself observed Owens using both a lavalier and a handheld or standing microphone simultaneously. Yet in this case, a common practice becomes extraordinary. The eyes-wide-shut phenomenon is standard among the devotees of Owens and other far-right antisemites. Jew-hatred blinds them to what any reasonably intelligent and sane person plainly sees and admits.
What is plain before a rational man’s eyes must, in the antisemite’s world, have another explanation. Motivated reasoning from that worldview must find Jews lurking behind Kirk’s murder, even if it means aiding and abetting Antifa and its terror campaign against the Republic, because Jews are behind everything. Do they really not know they are defending a movement that wants to see truth-tellers dead? If so, they don’t care. Nor do they care that they are aiding and abetting Jihadism. Antisemites are like those dimwits who believe that the world is run by reptilians disguised as people. They watch John Carpenter’s They Live and think it’s a documentary. I would like to believe that my fellow humans are rational beings. Many of them are. But a lot of them aren’t. And so we must ridicule them.
Owens’ appearance on the Shawn Ryan podcast contains many examples of paranoid delusion. Here’s another one: she claims that authorities never spoke to Twiggs. I knew that Twiggs had been interviewed shortly after Robinson turned himself in. How could Owens not know this? It was widely reported in the news that the police had spoken with Twiggs at least twice and taken pictures of the text messages and Discord chat.
Lance Twiggs wants us to believe that the biggest assassination since JFK happened in his backyard, he received a mysterious note under his keyboard plus a stunning full-fledged confession but he chose not to follow the case much and didn’t see the released FBI images until…
A video of Twiggs’ interview with the authorities was shown in court yesterday, after days of his defense team furiously trying to suppress parts of it (which they managed to do). In that video, Twiggs explains the case—the inscribing of the bullet casings and all the rest of it. Confronted with the video, Owens pivoted to the claim that Twiggs is an “obvious Fed asset.” And, since the federal government is controlled by the Jews, Twiggs must be an operative of Mossad. Right, Candace? The Zionists did it because Kirk was critical of Israeli policy. Why aren’t they murdering all the critics of Israel? Owens must be shaking in her boots.
Owens, Ian Carroll, Jimmy Dore, and the rest of this crowd, on the far left and the far right, are completely mental. I’m not engaging in an ad hominem attack when I write this. I am making an observation based on extensive knowledge of and experience in psychology and sociology. The delusion that Jews killed Kirk is akin to a schizophrenic man believing that, as he slept, the CIA planted transmitters in the fillings of his teeth to stop him from saving the world from interdimensional demons. Only here, tens of thousands of rubes believe the man. This is mass psychogenic illness. It’s the stuff of moral panic.
I’m reading posts by people resting their entire thesis of the case—that it was a Zionist conspiracy—on one section of a report that found inconclusive the identification of a bullet fragment. Hello? When fragments of the lead interior of a bullet are extracted from a corpse, ballistic experts typically can’t perform ballistic tests on them. They’re just pieces of lead. They carry no tool marks. Read the rest of the report. It’s damning. But wait a minute? Bullet fragments were retrieved from Kirk’s corpse? I thought it was a microphone bomb?
It is not unexpected that Robinson’s defense team would work such angles to generate reasonable doubt. Their job is to get their client off for murder or minimize the consequences of his actions (I’d be surprised if they didn’t seek a plea deal after what has occurred at the preliminary hearing.) Remember the way OJ Simpson’s defense team manipulated the jury in that high-profile murder case. It’s what lawyers do. If you had murdered a man, you’d likely want your attorneys to work every angle, however implausible, to help you escape justice.
The defense team is primarily pursuing two angles in this case. First, DNA analysts cannot definitively prove that biological materials identify a man or explain how a man’s DNA was deposited on a rifle or a screwdriver. Second, the bullet fragments cannot be definitely traced to the murder weapon. They know that the facts of the case condemn their client, so they intend to confuse a potential jury by dragging them into statistical minutiae, to make what is expected out to be disconfirmatory.
The defense team is doing what defense teams do: exploiting the fact that science is a probabilistic endeavor. What they have no intention of telling a jury is that the beauty of science is that it does not declare that its practitioners are absolutely certain of their conclusions. That is what differentiates science from religion—or a criminal trial. Science is humble that way. But justice not only seeks truth; justice seeks finality. It will fall to the prosecution team to explain this to the jury if this goes to trial. They have demonstrated it well enough to the judge, who will no doubt find probable cause to put this case before a jury.
Don’t be baffled by bullshit. When dealing with likelihood ratios of trillions-to-one, you can be reasonably confident of the conclusions the experts have reached. But DNA and ballistics aside, the circumstances of this case demand only one conclusion: that Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk. You’d have to be crazy to believe otherwise.
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Update!
The preliminary hearing is adjourned until September. Surely Robinson’s defense team will, in the meantime, convince their client to plead guilty to save his life. The evidence against him is incontrovertible. I knew this from the beginning, but the hearing made the truth clear to anybody prepared to accept the facts who was not yet convinced. Experts are suggesting the case may not go to trial for two years, so Robinson has plenty of time to decide his fate. That’s a ridiculous amount of time between a murder and a conviction.
The prosecution just dropped an enhanced surveillance video at the end of the hearing showing Tyler Robinson at his sniper perch on the rooftop of the building from where he assassinated Charlie Kirk. The public wasn’t allowed to see the enhanced footage, but we know what it showed because we have seen it before. The footage devastated Charlie’s wife and mother. No, it wasn’t an exploding microphone, Owen’s fans.
As for Candace Owens and her followers, truth doesn’t matter. All that matters is continuing the latest blood libel against the Jews. One reason for a more timely process is shutting up that stupid bitch and the imbeciles that hang on her every utterance. But that hopes for much. Robinson admitting his guilt or putting him before a firing squad would likely not shut Owens up. If Robinson pleads guilty, then Owens will say he’s a fall guy. If the state executes him, then he will become a martyr to her and her sycophants. This is the way of those who believe Jews run the world. All evidence is warped by the gravitational pull of their paranoid delusions.
Saturday, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The fireworks display in Washington, DC, was truly historic. Sunday morning, scrolling through social media as I often do, I saw this post on Threads. You can see my response in the image. What happened then was a full retreat by Naomi Ward. Slavery is part of our history. But it is not the master narrative of America. Emancipation is the master narrative. Liberation from bondage is our story.
From Threads
The original poster came back with something like “Yet you celebrate something that happened 250 years ago.” I responded with this: “Damn straight. It was the date of our independence from a monarchy, which created the context for the greatest free republic on the face of the planet. And it still exists! By contrast, slavery doesn’t exist anymore in the United States—or in the West. We abolished slavery in the 1860s. I celebrate something ongoing and awesome. You whine over something that’s long gone—and it’s gone because the American Republic is good and just.”
My reply was so devastating that the original poster immediately took down her post. All that remains is my response. She tried to erase the thread—and her fake grievance—from history. But the Internet is forever. She is hardly alone in throwing slavery in the face of a nation where blacks are free and equal. Much of the grievance industry is heartier than Naomi Ward. Indeed, I checked today, and it appears Ward has deplatformed herself. Her profile no longer appears on Threads.
This is how we have to respond to this nonsense. We can’t let people constantly run down the American Republic. As I said in my July 4 essay on Freedom and Reason, “Like an abusive spouse who continually dredges up some past grievance his wife has apologized for a thousand times, the ghost of chattel slavery must always haunt us.” But apparitions only torment us if we believe in them. I refuse to be haunted by ghosts. I don’t believe in them. (See As We Mark 250 Years of Independence, Let’s Not Forget the True Albatross Around America’s Neck.)
Imagine America celebrating the one-thousandth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, and there are still those who focus instead on a legacy institution abolished in the distant past of the first free republic. This will happen only if we don’t resolutely shoot down those who guilt us with original sin. They’re the albatross, not a dead bird we threw off our necks long ago. The Democratic Party is the true albatross.
The vast majority of white men without property could not vote during the early years of the American Republic. Are we whining about that today? Are white men supposed to think less of the Declaration and the Constitution because the propertied visionaries who looked like us founded our nation? Just say thank you. Gratitude is as much for yourself as it is for those who sustain you. Don’t feel grateful? It’d be a lot better if you did.
Women couldn’t vote nationally well into the twentieth century (although some states allowed it earlier). Do we say the American Republic is illegitimate because women couldn’t vote everywhere for the first 106 years of our existence? The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was certified as law after Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify, guaranteeing that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” There was only one woman in Congress when that law was written. There were no women at the signing of the Declaration. There were no women at the signing of our Constitution or its Bill of Rights. White men wrote those documents.
There is nothing about white male minds and deeds that delegitimizes anything. This is vile identitarianism—anti-white, anti-male bigotry—mapped onto our history. It’s a primitive and regressive mindset that thinks one’s race or gender makes one either an oppressor or a victim. The Founders did not establish a free republic that affords citizens equality before the law and personal liberty because they were white and male. They established a free republic because they were just.
History attests to the righteousness of the results. White men ended the slave trade and chattel slavery. White men saved the Union in the Civil War. White men saw the Nineteenth Amendment established as the law of the land. The Supreme Court was exclusively white male when Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in public schools. White men—Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy—sent federal troops into states refusing to abide by the ruling. Long before then, a white man, Ulysses Grant, sent federal troops to the South to defend the rights of freed slaves and their descendants.
While I have you here, it may interest you to know, if you don’t already, that, in 1920, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, disbanded. Having achieved its goal, there was no reason for it to continue. Yet, instead of disbanding after same-sex marriage was recognized and gays and lesbians had achieved equal rights in opportunity, the various organizations of Pride conjured “trans rights” to keep the grievance business going.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) still exists today, despite there being no reason for it—except to keep alive the deceit that black Americans remain second-class citizens. The constant call for reparations does the same work as dwelling on the history of slavery. The War on Poverty programs alone, disproportionately spent on black Americans, have cost taxpayers over $45–60 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars since the mid-1960s, depending on which programs are included. Haven’t we spent enough? And what did we get for it? Crime, disorder, and broken families.
Let it go, people. Won and done. The nation has other problems to worry about, and we likely can’t tackle those problems unless we’re unified. Stop letting people who seek to disunite us, who seek immunities and privileges at the expense of others, get away with guilt-tripping the nation. Equal treatment is the only guarantee in a free Republic. It is the thing that lets freedom ring. Social justice is tyranny.
When people tell you that, excluding American Indians, all Americans are descendants of immigrants, they are misrepresenting the historical situation. The English who founded the United States were colonists or colonial descendants. So were the French and Spanish who colonized the Americas. They were not immigrants.
Image by Sora
Using the standard definition of immigration—moving from one sovereign country to another, residing there long-term or permanently, under a system of defined borders and citizenship laws—early European colonists in North America could not have been immigrants. The United States did not then exist and wouldn’t for well more than a century. Indeed, no countries existed in the Americas at the time Europeans were landing on their shores. There were only tribes and a few kingdoms. Although at times they strategically used the term “nation” in negotiations, the Indians were identified by their specific community, clan, or alliance network. There was no immigration law, citizenship system, or border control.
What history actually records is that the Europeans who initially settled America were moving within imperial domains (Britain, France, Spain, etc.), not into a modern nation-state. What is implied by those who say we are all immigrants is an expansive definition of the term that renders it nonsensical.
Source: Britannica
Consider this statement: “All those who permanently left Africa are immigrants.” Since humans originated in Africa, everybody outside Africa ultimately descended from somebody who left Africa.
The indigenous peoples of Europe were immigrants, if by that term we mean they descended from those who migrated to Europe roughly 45,000 years ago. It will not do to say I am descended from Europeans. One has to go back further in time than that—a lot further.
If the claim were true, then American Indians are not the indigenous peoples of the Americas but rather the descendants of immigrants, since their ancestors arrived on these lands by boat or land bridge. They were immigrants from Asia. But, then again, the Asians are the descendants of immigrants, too.
Why aren’t American Indians condemned for opposing European immigration when they were the descendants of immigrants themselves? You’ve seen the memes. If this is stolen land, who did the Indians steal it from? If one says the Indians settled unsettled patches of land, this is true of the Europeans who colonized North America, as well. The expanse of North America is vast, and there were large tracts of uninhabited land. But the truth is that Indians displaced other Indians.
The world outside of Africa has no indigenous peoples—if by “indigenous” we mean species that are native to a particular place, especially in the sense of having originated there. But that strict definition seems as strange as the expansive definition of “immigrant.”
Indigenous also refers to people who have a deep historical continuity with a land before later arrivals or colonization. Progressives may be nodding their heads at this definition, but that would make white Americans the indigenous people of North America, since they have a deep historical attachment to the land, and contemplating such a thing sets woke heads on fire.
How dare a man like me, whose family tree extends centuries into my country’s past, claim to be a native American, right? I must be the descendant of immigrants. This bakes their noodle: I am both. Not all people who look like me can say that. Nor can black Americans whose ancestors were brought here before there was a country called the United States. Many of them were brought here before the United States existed. They were not immigrants.
If one still embraces the definition of immigrant that includes all those who move from one place to another, this leaves the Africans as the only indigenous population in history. Yet, even here, one runs into problems. Which Africans?
Humans originated somewhere in Africa. The pan-African model posits that Homo sapiens developed through gene flow across the continent, principally East Africa and North Africa, perhaps also parts of Southern Africa. But that’s not all of Africa. If the broad definition is used, as one can see in the above map, most Africans are themselves immigrants, since they radiated from the species’ likely place or places of origin.
At this point, I hope the reader sees that the broad definition suffers from a logical problem that can be summed up this way: If everybody is an immigrant, then nobody is, since the term “immigrant” differentiates nothing. It is no longer a meaningful term.
Finding the one spot where the first modern human appeared won’t help clarify the matter. If you are a scripture-believing Christian, Jew, or Muslim, that indigenous one is Adam, and Adam was kicked out of Eden, along with the first woman. Adam and Eve were immigrants. There are no indigenous people in Eden. Only God and his angels.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, circa 1510
We are left with the standard definition. To be an immigrant means to leave one country and move to another. Using that definition, the claim that we are all immigrants is plainly untrue. Only some of us are immigrants or descended from immigrants. It is estimated that half or more white Americans living in the United States today are descended from “Colonial Stock,” i.e., those who arrived before 1776. More than ninety percent of black Americans living in the United States today are descended from individuals who arrived before the nation was established. So, no, we are not a nation of immigrants.
Here’s the reason for this exercise: the fact that some of us are descended from immigrants creates no burden on Americans to welcome immigrants. That’s the obligation “we’re all descendants of immigrants” sneaks into the conversation: “How can you oppose immigration when you are yourself a descendant of immigrants?” This is a fallacious argument, to be sure, but falsifying the claim, we negate a rhetorical flourish deployed to emotionally blackmail the population.
This question is not an argument. It’s a guilt trip. Don’t feel guilty. Your nativism is a legitimate sentiment, and there is nothing untoward about the politics of immigration control.
Before turning to today’s essay, a few clarifications are in order. I’m sure the reader has heard the dismissive phrase, “It’s just semantics”—as if the meaning of words doesn’t matter. But consider the glittering generality one sees in the propagandistic appeal to “democracy.” Does the speaker mean by this term direct democracy, liberal democracy, or industrial democracy? Vagueness in meaning is also a problem for the words “communism” and “socialism.”
Communism, in its anarchist and Marxist senses, conveys a classless and stateless social order in which the distribution of work and goods follows the dictum: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Socialism, by contrast, is a social system in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the workers, either at the level of the firm or through the state, the latter known as “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The standard definition of socialism is useful to keep. But there is another conception of socialism worth noting, since I describe it in this essay when I turn to the ideology of democratic socialism. That is Saint-Simon’s conception of an engineered society organized by experts. Rather than advocating the abolition of private property, Saint-Simon envisioned a system in which economic activity would be directed toward the common good through rational planning and administration. In his view, good government should shift from ruling over people to managing production. His vision of an organized, technocratic society profoundly influenced later socialist thought by emphasizing the moral obligation to use economic resources for the benefit of society as a whole through state direction. This is not ultimately managing people?
As for the popular meaning of communism, referring to those systems in which the people are under the thumb of an all-encompassing state, i.e., state socialism, this definition is more useful than the utopia imagined by anarchists and communists. After all, utopia literally means “nowhere.”
When Trump tells his audiences that the democratic socialists being elected to office around the country are communists, he’s not wrong. I use the popular meaning in this essay since it describes the experiences of those who have lived under communist rule. Communism, in this sense, points to a location somewhere, and we have enough real-world instances of this place to draw a conclusion about the adequacy of such systems to human freedom and well-being.
* * *
I grant that George Orwell, a thinker I much admire, complicates any simple divide between capitalism and socialism. He never renounced his identity as a democratic socialist, believing to his end that extreme inequalities of privilege and wealth were morally and politically corrosive.
At the same time, Orwell is arguably the twentieth century’s most penetrating critic of state socialism and totalitarianism. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War and his observations of Stalinism convinced him that concentrating economic and political power in the hands of the state corrupts movements founded upon ideals of equality and justice.
Despite being saved by an American Marxist fighter after being shot in the neck by a fascist sniper near Huesca in Northwestern Spain and attended to by anti-fascists during his convalescence, the war showed Orwell that the greatest threat to liberty did not come only from fascism, but also from authoritarian factions claiming to represent socialism—those communist organizations aligned with the Soviet Union.
Orwell’s epiphany came in May 1937, in Barcelona, the year he was shot. Instead of concentrating on defeating Francisco Franco’s far-right forces, communist-controlled security forces fought other republican factions, especially the anti-Stalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), the militia Orwell had joined. Orwell witnessed men he had fought alongside arrested, disappeared into secret prisons, and executed. He watched the reputations of his fallen comrades besmirched by wicked men.
A similar epiphany occurred to the American anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman years before. In December 1919, Berkman and Goldman were deported from the United States during the First Red Scare. They arrived in Soviet Russia in January 1920. They initially hoped the Bolshevik Revolution would realize many of the ideals they had long championed. However, as they traveled through Russia, they observed widespread shortages, strict censorship, the suppression of independent labor organizations, and the growing power of the secret police, the Cheka. They became increasingly concerned that political freedom was being sacrificed.
The decisive turning point came in March 1921 with the Kronstadt Rebellion. Sailors at Kronstadt—once celebrated by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks as heroes of the revolution—called for freer elections to the soviets, freedom of speech for anarchist and socialist groups, and an end to one-party rule. The Bolshevik government crushed the rebellion militarily, killing many and imprisoning or executing others. For Berkman and Goldman, Kronstadt was the moment they concluded that the Bolshevik government had become an authoritarian state rather than a vehicle for liberation.
What Stalinism showed Orwell requires little elaboration here. His great works of allegory, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, will tell the reader all about that. If a man hasn’t read these books, then there is a gap in his understanding of the problem of communism. Orwell brings to the reader what he (and Berkman and Goldman before him) saw for himself: the totalizing tendencies inherent in power not in the service of defending the intrinsic rights of man, but in the folly of transforming man’s nature.
* * *
The shared experience of Orwell, Berkman, Goldman, and many others makes plain Thomas Sowell’s distinction between the “constrained” and “unconstrained” conceptions of human nature, described in his 1987 A Conflict of Visions, and the peril of assuming the latter. In that book, Sowell argues that political disagreements often stem from differing assumptions about human nature rather than simply competing policy preferences. History tells us which assumptions accord with our species-being.
In Sowell’s view, the constrained vision sees human beings as inherently limited—imperfect in discernment, knowledge, and morality. Therefore, the best societies rely on institutions, markets, traditions, and the rule of law to channel self-interest and minimize harm. By contrast, the unconstrained vision holds that human problems are largely the result of flawed social arrangements rather than fixed human limitations, and that deliberate planning and expertise can significantly improve society if the right people and policies are put in place. Today, the unconstrained vision is dressed in the colors of “oppressed-oppressor” and “victim-perpetrator.”
Sowell shows how the enduring debates over economics, equality, government, and justice reflect these deeper, competing visions of what human beings are capable of becoming. In doing so, he identifies a central problem in collective control over man’s fate: Who shall govern our lives?
I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ rhetorical questions concerning the commissar during a talk he gave in Canada at the University of Toronto in 2006. Canada is notorious for restricting the speech of its citizens under the guise of “hate speech” laws. Hitchens asked his audience:
“To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor? Isn’t a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what’s fit to be passed and what is fit not to be, is the man most likely to become debauched? Did you hear any speaker in the opposition to this motion, eloquent as one of them was, to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? To whom you would give the job of deciding for you — relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone? Hands up. Do you know anyone to whom you’d give this job? Does anyone have a nominee?”
Those who know Hitchens’ biography know that he was for many years a Trotskyist. The year he uttered these words was the year he declared his independence from socialist thinking. Hitchens clarified during a town hall in 2006, in conversation with a group of fellow essayists, that “I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist.”
There was a time when I, too, considered myself a socialist. I had neglected Orwell and dismissed Berkman and Goldman. I had not yet taken Hitchens to heart. In the 1990s, I even flirted with communism. (I published in the Communist Party-USA’s newspaper, People’s World, so I can’t deny this piece of my biography.) I had become convinced that a society in which workers collectively owned and controlled the means of production represented the highest expression of economic and—I cringed as I write this—social justice.
The idea of socialism appealed to my sense of fairness. Why should those whose labor creates value by transforming nature and commodities worked up by others into wealth for the few have so little say over the enterprises they sustain? It seemed obvious that democratizing the workplace would also democratize society. And democracy is a good thing (there’s that glittering generality again).
I have not abandoned that moral intuition. I still believe there is something admirable about workers sharing ownership, decision-making, and profits. And I remain an admirer of Karl Marx. He is our Darwin in the social sciences. His materialist conception of history fundamentally shaped the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, vocations to which I have devoted more than a quarter century of my life. And the best psychology is rooted in his insights about appearance and structure. Marx was, after all, a classical liberal thinker engaged in critique and dialectic, fully embedded in the scientific worldview.
What has changed is my understanding of the relationship between ideals and political power—and history. The problem is not Marx’s analysis of the problem. The problem is his solution.
The problem goes beyond communism’s entailments. To be sure, where the totalizing scheme leads has not been good for the people who have tried it. But that’s not because they weren’t doing it right. It’s because there’s something wrong with the end itself—and thus the means deployed to achieve it. The flaw lies not with worker ownership per se but rather with making worker ownership the universal economic model through the coercive power of the state.
Substantive equality, or an equality of outcomes, in contrast to formal equality, i.e., equal treatment before the law, requires sacrificing liberty to the collective. The distribution of discipline, intelligence, talents, and virtue is not uniform across the species. We are not all the same, and achieving equality of outcomes means those who can achieve great things, to the betterment of all, are made ordinary to the detriment of all. Mediocrity is inevitable. The politics of collectivism before individualism negates the individualism that organically elevates the collective. To say that inequality is the price of progress suggests that inequality is a bad thing.
This realization owes much to my reading of economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. From the earliest days of the course Freedom and Social Control, my first teaching assignment as an assistant professor, I put his work before my students, contrasting it with Marx, hoping they would, like me, object to Hayek’s arguments. Instead, thanks to steelmanning Hayek’s position to model for students charity in discourse, and because course content focused on the problem of totalitarianism, I found myself persuaded to Hayek’s side.
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argues that comprehensive economic planning inevitably requires comprehensive political planning and social engineering. When governments decide how property must be owned, how businesses must be organized, and how economic decisions are made, they cannot avoid making choices that individuals would otherwise make for themselves, thus precluding the ingenuity that advances civilization, as well as suppressing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In this context, as disagreements over policy inevitably arise, what at first appears as voluntary cooperation gives way to compulsion. The state must increasingly decide whose preferences prevail. Too often, these preferences are not rooted in a moral ontology but in some technocratic end, and the means to such ends, unconstrained by morality, are unethical. The result is an administered world governed by authoritarians and bureaucrats. This is the folly of utilitarianism, a tyranny of the brainwashed majority, inevitably led by a vanguard of social engineers, disguised as liberalism.
Hayek’s point is often misunderstood. I am guilty of misunderstanding him myself. Careful reading of his work is necessary, and the short summary I used in class did not adequately convey his worldview. He did not argue that every government intervention leads directly to dictatorship. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek writes that there is no reason a wealthy society cannot guarantee everyone some minimum of clothing, food, and shelter.
Hayek accepted compulsory government insurance against risks that individuals cannot reasonably insure themselves against, such as serious illness, some forms of disability, and workplace accidents. He recognized that certain public health services and responses to epidemics could be legitimate government functions because they address problems individual market transactions cannot solve effectively. He supported government provisions for basic education, bridges, roads, and other public goods where markets alone may not produce efficient outcomes. And he believed government should enforce contracts, protect property rights, prevent fraud, and maintain competition through a sound legal framework.
His argument is not that the government has no place in our lives, but rather that concentrating economic decision-making in the hands of political authorities creates pressures that steadily erode individual liberty. A society cannot centrally organize economic life without also expanding the authority necessary to enforce that organization. The problem of social engineering is intrinsic to it.
Although Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist and would go further than Hayek in social provisioning, the common ground beneath them is that both rejected the idea that protecting liberty required either an all-powerful state or a completely hands-off state. After Spain, Orwell became fiercely committed to civil liberties, competitive elections, free speech, and an independent press. For Orwell, socialism without democracy was simply another form of tyranny.
However, unlike Orwell, Hayek sees that state control over the economy to achieve what Orwell believed in principle, i.e., economic equality and public ownership, is antithetical to democracy, if by that term one means constitutional limits, free and fair elections, freedom of speech, a free press, the protection of minority rights, and universal suffrage, i.e., the liberal democratic conception, what one finds in American republicism. Both Hayek and Orwell strongly supported democratic institutions of this sort because together they form a bulwark against totalitarianism. (One reasonably wonders whether, on his deathbed, Orwell would still describe himself as a socialist.)
Hayek develops this idea further in The Constitution of Liberty. Here, he argues that freedom depends less on achieving any particular social outcome than on preserving a framework in which individuals can pursue different visions of the good life. A free society allows people to cooperate and compete, succeed and fail, and voluntarily associate in countless ways. The state’s role is to maintain impartial rules rather than dictate preferred economic arrangements.
Hayek’s clear thinking transformed my own. If a man is to be a reasonable one, he must yield his convictions to the force of logic. I had before put the left’s concept of positive liberty before negative liberty, tending to see the latter as the enemy of the former. This was the debate that framed the assignment of Marx and Hayek in Freedom and Social Control. What I did not at first see is that while what Erich Fromm and Isiah Berlin describe as substantive freedom can emerge from the conditions promoted by classical liberalism, positive liberty as a politics negates the liberal freedoms I have always held dear.
I now think that Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires a bit of reordering. But none of the needs he identifies are necessarily sacrificed in the revision. The hierarchy must rise upon a foundation of liberty as much as the requirements of the creature. We need not end inequality among men to pave the road to self-actualization. Indeed, if inequality is a sign of freedom, we should focus instead on fostering social conditions that allow human beings to transcend their lowly station—if that is what they are able and choose to do—through their own efforts.
I confess that the hardest part of accepting Hayek’s thesis is admitting that inequality is the natural order of things, that human nature is constrained. This is not to say that we must live like the other animals. But it does require recognizing that we cannot escape the laws of nature, and that, in our attempt to transcend natural history, we risk denying its results. Evolution may have no reason behind it, but there is a logic to it, and it is not a logic of man’s design. Our rights are found there, not in the designs of men.
Inequality, in Hayek’s view, is therefore not merely the unfortunate byproduct of freedom but, to a significant extent, an inevitable consequence of it. Human beings differ naturally in ambition, creativity, discipline, intelligence, interests, temperament, and willingness to assume risk. They also choose different ways of life. Some devote themselves to building businesses, others to raising families, creating art, pursuing scholarship, or serving their communities. These are not mutually exclusive vocations. Indeed, each depends on the other. A free society does not erase these differences; it allows them to flourish and integrates them. The most advanced societies recognize these truths. They are self-evident. It is why the societies that recognize them are so advanced.
As people pursue their own goals, unequal outcomes inevitably emerge. For Hayek, inequality is the mark of a free society. This is not something to regret or repair. While disparities can provoke envy, they also provide examples for others to emulate. The inventor who develops a revolutionary technology, the entrepreneur who builds a successful company, the scientist who makes a breakthrough, or the artist who creates enduring beauty all expand the horizon of what others believe is possible.
Equality of opportunity leaves room for inequality of achievement, and those achievements become models that encourage aspiration rather than conformity. Parties that organize people around resentment undermine opportunity. The democratic socialists who are taking over the Democratic Party stand against the individual’s freedom to live his life as he chooses. Really, these types have commanded the party for more than a century under the banner of progressivism, the ideological projection of corporatism. This is the operating system of Europe. Today, American socialists are more open about what they seek. And the socialism they seek is the technocratic organization of society.
This insight also reshaped the way I think about the Marxist maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” As an ethical aspiration, it possesses undeniable appeal; few people object to helping those who genuinely cannot provide for themselves. As I learned, even Hayek saw value and necessity here. The difficulty arises when the principle becomes the organizing rule of the state-administered economy.
If people’s needs are guaranteed regardless of effort, while the fruits of exceptional effort are continually redistributed, the incentive to strive gradually diminishes for at least some members of society, while those who continue to create, innovate, and produce find themselves surrendering an ever-greater share of what they have earned to those who have been idled or who have idled themselves.
Over time, this fosters dependence upon political institutions rather than personal initiative. Instead of working for a living, many proletarians, and especially the underclass, those made dependent on welfare, vote for a living; they vote not to open the way for those who strive, but for those who will reward sloth.
Benjamin Franklin once observed: “Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy.” Marx’s maxim blurs a distinction that every free society ought to preserve: there is a profound moral difference between someone who earnestly strives yet falls short and someone who declines to strive at all. Failure despite diligence is an honorable risk inherent in liberty and self-improvement. A life defined by the refusal to exercise one’s abilities is something altogether different.
Compassion rightly belongs to those who cannot succeed despite sincere effort; it should not require treating persistent unwillingness to contribute as morally equivalent to honest failure. Yet welfare states do precisely that. And the burden of supporting that mass of people who do not strive falls upon the shoulders of the productive members of society. It is an unjust burden because it denies human nature.
* * *
A little more than a decade ago, I gave a talk titled “The Table-Makers” at the “What is Socialism?” event held at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The evening was organized by the Critical Left, a student group. The event was well attended, with animated challenges to my position coming especially from conservatives in the audience. The core argument remains valid and sound. What is missing, however, is that I presented socialism strictly as a replacement for capitalism when it doesn’t have to be. No conservative made that critique. Nor would I expect them to.
If worker-owned firms are truly superior to other arrangements—more productive, more satisfying, and more humane in their way of thinking—then people should be free to create them. They should compete in the marketplace alongside corporations, family businesses, nonprofits, partnerships, and sole proprietorships. Nothing about free-market capitalism prohibits this. Indeed, many successful employee-owned enterprises already exist, demonstrating that democratic workplaces need not remain theoretical.
What capitalism uniquely offers is pluralism. It permits many forms of ownership simultaneously. Investors may build conventional corporations. Employees may organize cooperatives. Entrepreneurs may launch startups. Communities may establish nonprofits. Consumers and workers can choose among them. By contrast, making worker ownership mandatory requires eliminating those alternatives. If every enterprise must be collectively owned, then individuals who prefer other arrangements lose the freedom to choose them. Paradoxically, achieving universal economic democracy requires restricting economic pluralism and cancelling the freedom of contract.
This is where Hayek’s warning becomes especially persuasive. The more ambitious the social objective, the greater the governmental authority required to realize it. Noble intentions do not eliminate this reality. Furthermore, can we really count on those who lead us to have noble intentions? History answers the question for us. Stalin, Mao, and other leaders of socialist systems used their authority to establish totalitarian societies where human freedom was extinguished.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron” illustrates the same principle through satire rather than philosophy. In Vonnegut’s imagined future, substantive equality has become the supreme social value. To ensure that no one exceeds anyone else, the government handicaps beauty, intelligence, strength, and talent. The result is not justice but mediocrity enforced by coercion.
The story is deliberately absurd, yet its underlying insight remains powerful. Equal outcomes cannot simply be declared or forced into existence. Not if freedom matters. Because people naturally differ in countless ways, maintaining strict equality requires continuous intervention by political authority. The more perfect the equality sought, the more intrusive that authority becomes.
If every workplace must conform to one approved model of ownership, then someone must enforce that conformity. Entrepreneurs who wish to found a conventional company must be prohibited from doing so. Novel ideas and private initiatives are negated out of the gate. If workers voluntarily accept different arrangements, those agreements must be invalidated. Freedom yields to regulation, and regulation increasingly depends upon coercion. This is also the logic behind censorship and other affronts to liberty.
Recognizing this does not require embracing an uncritical defense of capitalism. Capitalism has undeniable flaws. It rewards exploitation of labor and nature, encourages excessive accumulation of wealth (although what qualifies as “excessive” wealth concentration needs clarity), and leaves many workers with little bargaining power. Markets do not automatically produce justice. Yet these criticisms point toward reform rather than abolition.
Laws protecting workers, encouraging competition, preventing fraud, and expanding opportunities for employee ownership can all exist within a broadly capitalist framework. Capitalist governments can remove legal obstacles to cooperatives, provide fair tax treatment for employee stock ownership plans, and enforce rules that protect workers from abuse without prescribing a single model of enterprise for everyone. Worker-owned companies do not negate capitalism. But the socialism advocated by Zohran Mamdani and his crowd inevitably negates worker-owned enterprise. Workers do not really own or control the means of production under state socialism. There is no room there for entrepreneurs.
Liberal capitalism offers something I overlooked: the freedom to build socialist institutions inside the system of private ownership. Free market capitalism is based on voluntarism. If workers wish to own factories together, they may do so. If communities wish to establish cooperatives, they may do so. If investors wish to finance employee-owned firms, they may do so. Success depends not upon political decree but upon persuading others that these institutions are desirable and sustainable. Such arrangements strike a healthier balance between liberty and justice.
What is more, liberty is itself good and therefore just. Liberty allows people to make their own choices, pursue their goals, and live according to their values without unnecessary interference. A society that respects liberty recognizes the dignity and equality of individuals by giving them the freedom to think, speak, and act responsibly. While liberty should be balanced with laws that protect others from harm, it is ultimately just because it gives everyone the same basic rights and opportunities. In this way, liberty supports fairness, personal growth, and respect for human rights. Socialism at scale takes all this away.
* * *
I still admire the aspiration that inspired my youthful socialism: giving ordinary people greater control over the economic forces that shape their lives. But I no longer believe that this aspiration justifies granting the state sweeping authority over property and enterprise. The concentration of power necessary to impose universal worker ownership poses dangers that outweigh its potential benefits. Hayek persuaded me that liberty requires preserving diverse forms of economic organization. Vonnegut showed me that even the noblest ideals can become oppressive when enforced without limit. Together, these thinkers and others like them helped me understand that freedom includes the freedom to organize cooperatively—but also the freedom not to.
Today, I believe the best society is neither one in which capitalism reigns unchecked nor one in which socialism is imposed by law. It is one in which free people can create the kinds of institutions they believe in, whether those institutions are employee-owned cooperatives, traditional corporations, nonprofits, or something entirely new. If worker ownership is truly the superior model, it should flourish through voluntary association and open competition rather than government compulsion. If it fails, then it was not the superior model. Let the better ideas win.
In reflection, I recognize that there was always a tension in my political outlook, even if I did not fully appreciate it at the time. I called myself a socialist because I was drawn to the ideal of economic justice and to the conviction that working people should have a greater voice in the institutions that shaped their lives. Yet I also called myself a liberal in the classical sense, deeply committed to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights: individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, due process, limited government, and the inherent dignity of the individual.
This is why I have always felt a certain kinship with Orwell, even if I neglected him between my first encounters with his work and revisiting them years later. Like Orwell, I am attracted to socialism’s ethical concern for the disadvantaged while remaining instinctively attached to the liberal tradition’s distrust of concentrated power. Orwell eventually recognized that socialism without liberty could degenerate into tyranny. My own journey has led me to a similar conclusion. I have not abandoned the desire for a more just economy; rather, I have come to believe that justice achieved at the expense of the freedoms guaranteed by the liberal constitutional tradition is too costly a bargain.
If forced to choose between equality enforced by the state and liberty protected by constitutional limits, I must choose liberty—not because equality is unimportant, but because without liberty, the pursuit of equality is liable to consume the very humanity it seeks to ennoble.
* * *
Hayek’s criticism of political movements that seek substantive equality at the expense of liberty is essential to understanding the struggle for autonomy and freedom. As natural as the desire for autonomy and liberty may be, the conditions necessary for their realization have not been the historical norm. This is because of the enduring presence of those who seek power over others’ lives. Every democratic socialist is, at heart, a totalitarian.
We must insist on formal equality, a situation where every individual stands equal before the law, enjoying the same legal rights, obligations, and protections regardless of occupation, race, religion, social standing, or wealth. Crucial to this principle is a system of rights, secured by constitutional limits, that places fundamental liberties beyond the arbitrary power of those who govern. To be sure, such a system still requires the exercise of power, but that power rests on a moral foundation committed to equality before the law rather than equality of outcomes.
Substantive equality, by contrast, seeks to equalize people’s economic conditions, social positions, or life outcomes, and the power required to achieve it necessarily entails an unjust exercise of coercion. This we cannot abide by. We’ve seen its fruits. And they’re rotten.
Hayek argued that these two conceptions of equality are ultimately incompatible. To preserve equal treatment under the law, governments must apply general rules impartially. To produce more equal outcomes, however, government must treat people differently—taxing some more heavily than others, distributing benefits unequally, or granting special preferences based upon need or circumstance. The pursuit of substantive equality inevitably requires departures from formal equality.
For Hayek, equality before the law was therefore not merely one value among many; it was the indispensable legal condition of a free society. Once the law ceases to treat citizens impartially in pursuit of preferred social outcomes, liberty itself begins to yield to political discretion, and the quality of discretion is also highly variable across the species. As it happens, sociopaths are often quite cunning.
In Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell depicted how revolutions undertaken in the name of the people can ultimately produce new ruling elites, censorship, surveillance, and the destruction of independent thought. Although Orwell would likely have disagreed with Hayek on the merits of capitalism, they shared an essential insight: liberty cannot survive where political power becomes sufficiently centralized to dictate not only economic life but also the boundaries of dissent and truth. Orwell serves as a reminder that genuine concern for justice must always be tempered by an equally vigorous concern for individual freedom.
Hitchens thought Marx’s method of analyzing power, class, and ideology could still be useful for understanding society. But he rejected socialism as a governing program because, in his view, every attempt to implement it at scale had tended toward authoritarianism and the suppression of individual liberty. He retained from Marx the habit of analysis—seeing politics through the lens of class power and material interests—but rejected socialism as a system of economic organization because it concentrated too much power in the state and was tyrannical in practice.
This is where I land. It has been many years since I landed here, but I felt I owed it to readers of this blog an explanation. Thanks for reading and subscribing to Freedom and Reason.
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