Zionism emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century as a response to widespread antisemitism and persecution of Jews. The goal of the movement was to secure the Jewish homeland. This led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, following the National Socialist attempt to exterminate the Jews in Europe. But Israel existed long before then. Jewish presence in the land that the Romans later called “Palestina” goes back more than 3,000 years. Zionism is, at its core, the fight for Israel as a Jewish state. The Arabs and Muslims have dozens of states. Jews have only one—and theirs is the oldest. It is also the best in the region.
Anti-Zionism is plainly an expression of antisemitism. It seeks not only to deny Jews their homeland but to deny Jewish existence as a people. This is the mission of Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations, many of which are funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The threat is not just to Jews. The threat is to Western civilization, which is grounded in Jewish law and sensibilities. Christians, whose origins lie in the Jewish faith, whose ethical system is based on that ancient religion, must be involved in the struggle against Israel and the West. Jews and Christians must be a united front against Islamism and the reactionary politics on the left and the right. Those Christians who turn their backs on Israel turn their back on their own culture and religion.
When people tell you that they are not antisemitic but anti-Zionist, they may be speaking from ignorance. However, what guides them to this denial is an ancient antipathy towards the Jews. This antipathy is amplified by the convergence of far-right ideology and Islamophilia on the left. Islamophilia is itself an expression of antisemitism. Third Worldism at the United Nations has infected that body with this ancient hatred. The threat Jews face has been continual for millennia, and today it is reaching yet another fever pitch.
Is it ever okay to criticize the Israeli government? Of course. All governments are subject to legitimate criticism. But opposition to Israeli efforts to secure their nation and to defend it against external and internal threats is never a valid criticism unless one regards antisemitism as a moral position. Opposition to the collective self-defense by the Jewish state is therefore straightforwardly antisemitic.
In the lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Justice John Marshall Harlan articulated one of the most enduring principles in American constitutional law: the color-blind ideal. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote, “and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He continued: “The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the constitutional amendments are involved.”
In addition to Plessy, the “Great Dissenter” disagreed with the Court’s decision declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, arguing that Congress had the authority to prevent private individuals from discriminating against black citizens. In Lochner v. New York, Harlan opposed the Court’s decision to strike down state economic regulations limiting labor hours, rejecting the use of “substantive due process” to invalidate worker protections. He also dissented in Downes v. Bidwell, arguing that the Constitution and Bill of Rights should fully apply to residents of newly acquired US territories.
Where I disagree with his judgment most stridently is in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, in which Harlan wrote the majority opinion upholding a state law mandating vaccinations during a public health outbreak. He argued that individual liberty is not absolute and that states may enforce reasonable health regulations to protect public safety. This decision was used later in Buck v. Bell, which upheld compulsory sterilization laws for people labeled “unfit.” That opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and became infamous for the line, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Harlan was no longer alive when that decision was handed down, so I cannot say for sure he would have agreed. But he did establish the precedent that made the decision possible.
At any rate, in Plessy, Harlan rejected the notion that the state could impose racial classifications that divide citizens into separate legal or social categories, even under the guise of equality. Harlan got this one right. So should we; we should all reject this notion. The justice warned that such distinctions stamp one race with a “badge of inferiority” and arouse race hate by embedding racial consciousness into law. Today, Americans are rejecting racial classifications. And Southerners are leading the way.
The resistance to equality of suffrage is fierce. The resisters—the party of the Slavocracy and Jim Crow, and today the Administrative State, that is the Democratic Party—tell us that the color-blind idea is racist. Antiracism, they insist, requires subjecting the fate of individuals to racial classification. If the inversion sounds familiar, that’s because it is. We have heard such things before. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” That was the pigs’ slogan in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In his Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell suggested more: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength.”
The principle of colorblindness, rooted in the Reconstruction Amendments and the ideal of equal citizenship, provides a powerful framework for critiquing modern racial gerrymandering—particularly the deliberate creation of majority-minority voting districts. When electoral maps are drawn to ensure that a racial or ethnic group constitutes a numerical majority in a district, the state engages in precisely the sort of racial classification Harlan condemned. It sorts citizens by skin color, assigns them to political categories, and allocates opportunities for representation on that basis. Far from transcending race, such practices institutionalize it as the central feature of the electoral process.
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Harlan’s logic rests on a fundamental rejection of racial castes in civil and political life. We must pursue his logic. The Fourteenth Amendment, he argued, elevated all citizens to equal status before the law, erasing the legal relevance of prior servitude or racial origin in determining citizenship rights. Voting and fair representation are quintessential civil rights. To draw district lines so that one group is “packed” into majority-minority districts while others are dispersed is to treat voters not as individuals but as members of racial blocs whose interests are presumed to be monolithic and permanently divergent.
Such districts reinforce the very racial consciousness Harlan sought to eliminate. By implying that black voters need “black districts” to achieve effective representation, the practice suggests that cross-racial coalitions are insufficient and that political destiny is tethered to ancestry. It echoes the caste system Harlan opposed: separate political spheres for separate races. Traditional districting principles—compactness, contiguity, respect for political subdivisions, and communities of interest defined by shared economic or social concerns rather than skin color—are subordinated to racial quotas. The result is bizarrely shaped districts that prioritize race above all else, as the Supreme Court recognized in Shaw v. Reno (1993), when it subjected such plans to strict scrutiny.
Proponents of majority-minority districts argue that they remedy past discrimination and ensure minority voices are heard in a system historically dominated by majorities. Yet the color-blind principle, if integral, does not bend for remedial purposes. The Constitution, on his reading, forbids racial classifications in the allocation of civil rights regardless of the benevolent intent behind them. Moreover, we are first and foremost individuals.
Using race today to engineer outcomes risks entrenching the very thinking the Reconstruction Amendments aimed to eradicate. It tells citizens that the government views them primarily through a racial lens and that fair play requires perpetual racial balancing. This perpetuates division rather than fostering the common citizenship Harlan envisioned, in which “the humblest is the peer of the most powerful” without regard to color. But progressives want Americans to see the world through a racial lens. This is why they decry color-blindness as racist. They presume racism and then wield racism to right the wrong they presume.
Harlan did not deny the reality of historical injustice or racial prejudice. Nor do we. But like the justice, we believe that the proper constitutional response is to forbid the state from acting on race categories, not to embed them more deeply in law. A color-blind approach to redistricting prioritizes race-neutral criteria, allowing natural political coalitions to form across racial lines as individuals pursue shared interests. Representation then arises from voters choosing candidates in integrated electorates, not from government-engineered racial enclaves—or ethnic or religious enclaves, a real possibility if the indentitarian scheme established by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were generalized. I ask the reader to imagine Muslim-majority voting districts.
In an era still grappling with the legacy of race in American life, Harlan’s dissent offers a principled path forward. Southern dissent from the scheme of racial gerrymandering walks that principled path. Opposition to majority-minority districts doesn’t reflect indifference to minority participation; it reflects fidelity to the ideal of a Constitution that “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”
By treating voters as individuals rather than racial representatives, we move closer to the color-blind republic Harlan defended—one in which political rights are secured without regard to race, and government draws maps for citizens, not for racial groups. We have already missed out on sixty years of progress in this regard. To be sure, we have made progress despite such practices, but not all the progress we could have made. We are now correcting a grave error we inherited from our recent ancestors by leaning into a constitutional principle established by our forefathers.
A Threads user recently noted that Michael Jackson nicked the moonwalk—and other moves—from Bob Fosse. A commenter responded by asking whether they also criticize Elvis for “stealing black music.” My reply: “Why are you racializing this?”
This is the progressive mind in action. It racializes everything, then either condemns or mocks whites for their cultural expressions. It is identitarian to the hilt—not identity in terms of civilization or national culture, but identity in tribal terms. Black Americans are part of our national culture. We are all citizens of this republic.
Rhythm and blues is not “black music.” It comes from a place, and that place is America. Elvis came from that place. So do I. The idea of “cultural appropriation” presupposes that culture belongs exclusively to a race or ethnicity. But no culture is exclusive. Since the dawn of man, cultural transmission has been one of the primary drivers of human progress—and, at times, regression.
Human populations adopt what works for them and discard what does not. When people are forced to embrace what works against them, they are diminished. This is true both of what emerges within a culture and what comes from outside it. But none of this applies cleanly to rhythm and blues, which is a distinctly American phenomenon. Rhythm and blues is for everybody.
Who invented the guitar? Europeans. Who invented the electric guitar? Americans. Who invented the string bass? Europeans. Who invented the electric bass guitar? Americans. Who invented the fiddle? Europeans. Who invented the bass drum pedal that organized the modern drum kit? Americans. The saxophone, the trumpet, and countless other instruments emerged from European civilization.
Yet nobody I know accuses black rhythm-and-blues musicians of “cultural appropriation” for using European inventions or for building music on the 12-tone scale. These inventions exist for the world to use. If someone can take them to a higher level, all the better.
No serious person argues that white people invented these things, and therefore they are “white” inventions that others should not touch. I am sure there are CRT professors somewhere making that argument, but they are not serious people.
The Poles wore plaited hair centuries ago. They were white. Ancient Egyptians wore dreadlocks. They were white (caucasian, at least). Why, then, are white people accused of “cultural appropriation” for wearing dreadlocks? Why did activists insist on laws protecting what they called “black hairstyles”?
The charge of “cultural appropriation” is ultimately a political weapon. Its purpose is to divide Americans along racial lines in pursuit of power. And it does not stop at culture. The idea that certain racial groups should have exclusive spaces—including race-based congressional districts—rests on the same logic of engineered racial division. It is time to move beyond that mentality.
People are pointing out Michael Jackson’s debt to Bob Fosse to recognize Fosse’s contributions to dance, not to diminish Jackson. And I’m sure Fosse borrowed from others as well. There is nothing wrong with that.
Not for themselves or their affluent friends, but for the rest of us, Democrats treat Americans—black and white—like second-class citizens in our own country. They do this in several ways, most obviously in the progressive projects to relegate white Americans to minority status through mass immigration and keep black Americans under the thumb of the welfare state and trapped in impoverished inner-city communities. Paternalism is inherent in progressive thinking, and they see Americans as children to be corralled and managed.
Image by Grok
Former Chairman of the RNC (from 2009-2011), Michael Steele, now co-host of The Weeknight on MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), and, embarrassingly, adopting the dialect of the black ghetto dweller appropriate to his new gig as token host, is threatening whites with the coming majority-minority America. White people will rue the day they ended racially gerrymandered districts, he more than suggested recently.
CNN’s Abby Phillip launched into a similar rant last night, declaring: “We are in the depths of Hell.” As I note in my X post, what Phillip is advocating is, at its core, racialist. I carefully say “racialist” and not “racist,” because racism requires an ideology rooted in the belief of racial superiority. If Phillip believes in black superiority, she hasn’t said so, so I will give her the benefit of the doubt. The point is that Phillip is not about voting as individuals, but as racial tribes. Blacks will lose their representatives when racial gerrymandering goes away, she claims.
What Phillip is advocating is racist. She is not talking about voting as individuals, but as racial tribes.
Blacks will lose their representatives when racial gerrymandering goes away, she claims. But removing majority-minority districts does not prevent individuals of any race…
Phillip’s argument only works if you accept the premise that voting should be organized around racial categories and not individual citizens. Removing majority-minority districts does not prevent individuals of any race from voting for the candidate of their choice. And that’s a problem for Democrats. The abolition of racial gerrymandering means that the citizens get to choose their representatives rather than the representatives choosing their citizens. This is the way it should be in a society founded on individualism and personal liberty. For Democrats, free elections threaten the Party’s hold on power. Moreover, in the long term, race-neutrality undermines the identitarianism that the Party has used for decades to isolate populations and make them dependent on welfare and racially-selective privileging.
One can see the problem of representatives choosing their constituency in the situation in West Tennessee, where racial gerrymandering has led to a white male Democrat being reelected numerous times by black constituents (see last week’s essay Democrats in Full Meltdown Over Tennessee’s Redistricting Law). Steve Cohen has held that seat for two decades. Charlotte Bergmann, a black Republican, ran against Cohen in 2024. Cohen received more than 70 percent of the vote. The arrangement Republicans just dissolved effectively prevented conservative black voters in that district from having a reasonable chance of electing a candidate reflecting their aspirations.
That’s the design of racial gerrymandering. Majority-minority districting is a strategy of control, not by the people, but by a political party that sees the world in terms of group power. This is a key feature of progressivism (not to be confused with liberalism). If progressivism were actually progressive, it would be at the forefront of eliminating racial tribalism. But progressivism is, in reality, a regressive ideology. Racial politics is atavistic. Bergmann is running again in 2026, and the new arrangement makes it more likely that she will prevail. This explains the cable news and social media meltdown: the competitiveness of race-neutral districting makes it difficult for Democrats to win. Race-neutral districts are more politically diverse, and that is not the diversity Democrats seek.
Phillip is obviously in the Democrat camp. Whatever his party affiliation is today (he claims he is still a Republican), Steele is the epitome of a RINO—that is, “Republican in name only.” RINOs are controlled opposition, loyal to the donor class and the establishment. The Republic is secondary for this class of politicians. It is thus noteworthy that Steele was defeated in his reelection as RNC chairman, not only for his public gaffes and controversial comments (for which he was notorious), but because many in the Republican Party were already moving away from the neoconservatism of the Bush era. The lack of enthusiasm for John McCain and Mitt Romney was an indication of this. The rise of the Tea Party also signalled the change. Steele was no longer useful. His reputation as a RINO and his loud criticism of Donald Trump, who took advantage of the split in Republican loyalities, made him the ideal (apparent) partisan for MSNBC, which put him on its payroll in 2025.
Michael Steele in one of his many appearances on MSNBC trashing President Donald Trump
Steele is smart enough to know that ending race-based districts is not just for the sake of the colorblind principle at the heart of our civilization, which progressivism has corrupted with tribalism, but also for reclaiming our American Republic for our children. To achieve the ends that RINOs like Steele abhor, patriots must marginalize the Democratic Party. This may be our last shot to save the country. Steele is no patriot, and so he is useful to those forces seeking to bring down Trump (Phillip has always been useful in this way). Nominal Republicans like Steele are there to make millions believe that MAGA is a racist movement (fascist, as well) and to keep some Republicans in the fold. The trick isn’t working so well these days. As Steve Bannon of the War Room puts it: “the people have had abellyful of it.”
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Who are the first-class citizens in the eyes of Democrats? Progressive elites excepted, they aren’t even citizens. They’re black and brown foreigners—set against not only whites, but established minorities. The coming majority-minority America is not accidental. Demographic change is strategic. It is intentional. At the heart of the project is what is known as “managed decline.” Elites pursue the same agenda in Europe. As I have noted in previous essays, Third Worlders are colonizing the nations of the West. But they are not the only colonizers. Transnationalists have colonized our institutions, as well. Indeed, the barbarians would not be inside the gates if it were not for the transnationalists in our midst. We’ve been betrayed by our own people.
This is why images of our blue cities look like they were taken in Third World countries. Democrats don’t wait for Third Worlders to create these neglected and rundown conditions after arrival. They create those conditions and force black and white Americans left behind by globalization—which Democrats engineered—to live in them. Progressives and social democrats across the transatlantic space have prepared the conditions that foreigners are used to living in. At their invitation, Third Worlders flock there, reorganizing American and European cities by establishing ethnic enclaves and no-go zones. The Administrative State diverts our tax dollars to these enclaves by force and fraud and weaponizes empathy to subvert the national interest. Trump is undoing all this.
This is a grand strategy organized by the Democratic Party, obvious in its development and effect. Democrats make the new arrivals dependent on the government, just as they did to the black and brown Americans they’ve impoverished for decades. They do this so that they will become loyal to the Democratic Party. They get free health care, housing, and cash transfers. This is the paternalism I noted earlier. But progressives are not responsible parents. There is no demand to behave appropriately or fix the things their children break and neglect. Those who misbehave are not held to account. Instead, their behavior is excused by appeals to “root causes,” that is, the very conditions Democratic social policy has created. Progressives have destroyed the black family and cultivated a culture of disorder and violence. Woke judges release offenders from jail to prey upon the innocent. Why? “Racism.”
I am sure readers are familiar with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, released in 1776, the same year American colonists declared their independence from the British monarchy. But seventeen years earlier, Smith wrote a lesser-known work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This book was his most important endeavor. There he writes, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” His point was that unchecked compassion for wrongdoers undermines justice and harms society. He argued that true justice sometimes requires severe punishment to prevent greater harm. He called for prioritizing comprehensive compassion for society over (misplaced) sympathy for the disordered. Why should there be mercy for the predator? What of his victim? Progressives have so demagnetized the moral compass of millions that now a large portion of the population sympathizes not with the victim, but with the victimizer.
This attitude is intrinsic to woke ideology. Progressives ally with the civilization destroyer and pit him against the creators and those whose labor makes better ideas a reality. Progressives manufacture instead docile and reactionary bodies—and import even more. The presence of such bodies is the fruit of their labors. Woke programmers disrupt the capacity of reason early on by teaching children that men can be women and that they must misgender those who demand affirmation for their delusion. They teach children to hate their nation by indoctrinating them with a revised history of America. They tell the white children under their command that they are privileged and owe non-whites an apology—and their future. Those who object are accused of bigotry and smeared with racial epithets.
Talking heads like Steele exist to manufacture the perception that level-headed Republicans agree with the warped worldview he promulgates. Steele and his ilk appeal to “moderation.” MAGA is extreme, the public is told, and good Americans reject extremism.
Remember the Arizona Senator and libertarian fundamentalist Barry Goldwater’s famous line, delivered in his 1964 Republican National Convention acceptance speech? “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” The presidential hopeful followed that with this: “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” The corporate media used those lines to manufacture a moral panic that helped Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society scheme ascend to power. But the people now see what that was all about. The worm is turning. The people have had a bellyful of it.
Bannon put the situation brilliantly on Saturday morning on the War Room: American citizens are in steerage on their own ship. I will add to Bannon’s metaphor that the ship’s captain is a transnationalist. Such a captain does not care about his passengers. And he cares only about his crew as long as they follow commands. Pursuing this metaphor to its necessary end, it’s time for mutiny. Our ship is headed for the rocks. Those who believe in the promise of America have to assume command of the vessel and right the ship. There is no room for moderation in this struggle. Republicans in the Southern states must be ruthless in their mapmaking. If this appears extreme, it is only because the extremism of those who have tribalized us, who have walked the nation well down the path to serfdom, has made ruthlessness necessary.
Under the old map, the ninth congressional district in Tennessee, which covers Memphis and the surrounding area, has given Steve Cohen, an old white male Democrat, twenty years in Congress. Because of redistricting, a black female Republican may be elected to the seat Cohen has held for far too long.
The public is told that the new map is racist. That it represents the return of the Confederacy. Predictable. But the reality is that competition has come to West Tennessee. This is happening in other areas across the South. For years, Republicans have largely controlled the South, and the party is ensuring that citizens in many of those states are even freer to vote for the political party of their choice.
Nothing prevents voters in the ninth district from voting for Steve Cohen or whoever represents the Democrats in and around Memphis in the future. No black person has lost the right to vote. But, for Democrats, that’s the problem. The party wants to guarantee a Democrat win. It doesn’t matter what color the candidates are. The only thing that matters is partisan political power. This is not about race, but party.
Democrats lost the South with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Southerners like small government. They like Republicans. Once Jim Crow was abolished, Southerners switched parties (they began shifting even before this). So Democrats weaponized electoral maps to retain a toehold in the South. They just lost that strategy. And that’s why they’re losing their mind.
There’s a principle here. We don’t reserve voting districts for Democrats or for ethnic and racial groups in America. Not anymore. At least not for many Southern states. The Voting Rights Act was, in principle, a bad idea. We’re now more than sixty years on from that moment. It’s time to leave tribalism behind.
During Reconstruction, black men were elected to public office at the local, state, and federal levels. There were no majority minority districts drawn to make that happen. Reconstruction was a regime established by the Republicans in the South to protect the rights of newly freed slaves. Redemption drove the Republicans out. Now the Party of Lincoln is back—this time by choice, not by force.
The public is also hearing an old argument again. Democrats are once more harping on the overrepresentation of the South in receiving federal spending, as if they owe the rest of America subservience to identity politics. They don’t want the public to know the reason for that overrepresentation. But here’s the reality: Roughly 55-60 percent of black Americans live in the South, concentrated in states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and urban areas throughout the region. Most blacks live in Democratic-controlled cities. In these cities, blacks have been ghettoized and made dependent on welfare.
This dependency allowed the Democrats to cultivate a voting bloc of Americans whose free food, housing, and medicine depended on the Democrats’ hold on power. Democrats have for decades kept a segment of the population that votes for a living rather than works for a living. Those made redundant by Democratic economic policy now have a chance to demand jobs and a higher standard of living. Blacks now have a real chance to pursue autonomy instead of dependency.
The Great Society created the conditions that destroyed the black family and cultivated a culture of disorder. They idled black Americans by pursuing globalization. Reversing the Democrat strategy will, in the long run, help black Americans break free of the chains progressives put on them, regaining their independence and dignity. But redistricting is not just a win for blacks. Redrawing maps in Tennessee and elsewhere creates the potential for all Southerners to liberate the region from administrative rule.
In a May 2024 essay, Gender and the English Language, there is a section on the construction of a moral panic around race matters. I included this section to note that the construction of gender identity is not the only instance of a project to rapidly alter mass perception via changing words and meanings. The manipulation of mass conscience is a multipronged project. Since then, I’ve thought about isolating that section in a new essay to make it more accessible. The persistence of the left to keep racism alive for political purposes, most notably in the Southern Poverty Law Center funding the far-right actors in Charlottesville, and the recent Supreme Court decision sharply limiting the way the Voting Rights Act has been used by the Democratic Party to achieve power (see The Project to Establish Voting Rights on Rational Grounds Thwarts Progressive Power Grab; Louisiana v. Callais and the Politics of Selective Collectivism), moves me to finally pull out that piece and put it in a standalone essay.
In a detailed content analysis of major media sources published in Tablet in 2020, “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,” Zach Goldberg tells us that, “[y]ears before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest.” Not just unrest. The media played a key role in reinforcing the ideas that long before colonized America’s sense-making institution, most crucially, education. Moreover, as I have shown on this platform, as with queer theory, the jargon of critical race theory has colonized the medical science space.
You can find Goldberg’s article here, and I strongly encourage you to read it, but I want to pull a few charts from the piece to make the point more immediate. In the first two charts, the reader can see that, beginning around 2010, a drastic increase in references to “racists” and “racism,” and a corresponding rise in the percentage of the population who reported that racism in the United States is a problem. This rise in concern follows a period of long decline. If you ever needed to see the evidence of how the corporate media constructs and drives mass perception of social problems, Goldberg delivers it in spades.
Source: Zach Goldberg, Tablet, 2020
Indicated by the next several charts, the use of terms like “racists” and “racism” were buttressed by a slew of novel or academic terms developed by progressive historians and social scientists, pushed out by the corporate media and culture industry: “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” and “institutional racism”; “racial privilege” and “white privilege”; “racial hierarchies,” “whiteness,” and “white supremacy”; “racial disparities,” “racial inequalities,” and “racial inequities.”
Source: Zach Goldberg, Tablet, 2020
In this way, the alleged effects of “whiteness,” “systemic racism,” etc., were identified as causing racial disparities and inequities without any demonstration of the validity of the alleged independent variables or their explanatory power. No matter, the terms comprised an assumption in force that America remained a profoundly racist country. Reinforced by race hustlers like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, and through constant repetition, the abstract facts of racial disparity became their own cause, so much so that even suggesting they were explicable by reference to causes outside of the antiracist narrative risked being labeled a racist.
I argue in Manipulating Reality by Manipulating Words, that reducing definitions to mere instruments of power—treating language primarily as a way to shape or impose reality—undermines the fundamental purpose of words. Language, in its evolved function, exists to describe and communicate reality with accuracy, precision, and integrity. Repurposing language to construct reality distorts that purpose. When words are no longer trusted as reliable vehicles for truth, those who control the production and dissemination of ideas gain greater freedom to justify their aims, in part by eroding the distinction between fact and fiction. This is not a novel observation. In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observes that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”
Any of you who have more recently attended college and taken any humanities and social sciences courses, usually required by the regime of “general education,” will have learned that what is and its nature (the ontological) is shaped by how we think about such things (the epistemological). Of course, the usefulness of this distinction and effect depends on whether one received an education or was indoctrinated. If the latter, then the experience was with teachers who, following the Greek philosopher Antisthenes, believed that language creates categories rather than uncovering reality. There is no reality to be uncovered. What is real is power projection. If the former, where one learns to be wary of acts of construction, then he knows those concerned with truth must purge the machinery of meaning production of the corrupting force of postmodernism and its children.
Advocates of racial gerrymandering argue from the assumption that white politicians cannot represent the interests of black citizens. Even though whites abolished slavery and apartheid, blacks need black politicians to advance their interests. Progressives ask you to imagine Congress with no black members, assuming that everybody shares the assumption of a racist America. The argument is thus presented as securing black power against white supremacy. But, in reality, the argument is propaganda for the ambition of progressive elites. Racially gerrymandered districts are, at their core, a political strategy for reclaiming power Democrats lost with the abolition of Jim Crow. In this essay, I expose the strategy by debunking the assumption. More than this, I show that the progressive argument is logically fallacious.
At the heart of the propaganda is the falsehood that systemic racism exists. There are two errors here. The first is the assumption that racial disparities result from racism. But any causal claim about the concrete world needs to be demonstrated with evidence. One might be able to show discrimination in individual cases, but to assume it for aggregate differences—and then base policy on it—is the work of a strange alchemy in which what requires justification becomes proof of justification. But, in the absence of de jure discrimination, the problem is much harder than this. One finds a second error is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is where an actual thing is treated as a manifestation of an abstract category. The fallacy stands in place of the evidence needed to validate the claim of systemic racism. Blacks are presumed to be the victims of white supremacy. White supremacy must be presumed to exist for this to work. Critical race theory is the ideology that manufactures the necessary illusion.
There is, ironically, a racist truth that lies behind these presumptions: Democrats find useful black politicians to lead voting blocs organized by progressive social policy. Millions of black people have been made dependent on the government and privileged in educational and occupational opportunities, benefits advanced by the Democratic Party. The present practice is thus an adaptation of an ancient strategy for achieving hegemony. In the past, members of various tribes in an area were selected to collaborate with the ruling elite to manufacture the appearance that the ruling class represented tribal interests. This was standard statecraft in kingship systems. In today’s context, the tribes are manufactured by a stratum of elites. From these contrivances, individuals are selected to perform the same function as they did in ancient times. They are regarded as useful for political ends.
Projected effect of the Louisiana v. Callais
Rank-and-file progressives are horrified by the projected maps in the South. They see a sea of red, which they have been conditioned to perceive as a sea of white supremacy. They believe this despite historical facts. For the rank-and-file, America is genetically racist, with whites on top and blacks on the bottom. Hence, the rhetoric of “racial justice.” They believe this in the face of history: the party associated with red today ended slavery and segregation and remains committed to equality before the law. During the days of slavery and segregation, the sea was blue. Now there are but a few blue patches. What horrifies progressive elites about those shrinking blue patches has nothing to do with racial justice but rather the loss of political power. Democrats invested trillions in engineering voting blocs whose power was maximized by rigged maps. Now those rigged maps are being dismantled, and with them, electoral power. A situation Democrats spent decades creating is crumbling around them, just as it did when Republicans abolished slavery and led the way during the Civil Rights movement in ending segregation. In both historical cases, equality before the law shattered Democratic hegemony.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, ostensibly designed to prevent racial discrimination in voting, assumed genetic white supremacy and misplaced concreteness to convey a sense of validity where there was none. Two elements of the law stand out in this regard. Section 5 required certain states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing voting laws. Thus, the citizens of certain states were treated as second-class, deviants to be governed by the paternalistic state. Section 2 banned voting practices that weakened the political power of minority groups, as if it were “just” to privilege certain races over other races. Over time, the Supreme Court of the United States, in great measure because its composition has been changed, has limited how these provisions operate. Explicitly or not, the Court’s rulings are rooted in the recognition that neither provision is logically valid.
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down the formula used to identify which states are subject to Section 5. Section 5 technically remains in the law, but it has been rendered effectively unusable because no jurisdictions are subject to it anymore. They should never have been, since section 5 only requires the presumption of racial discrimination. That is, it assumes as given what requires evidence. Moreover, it applies the assumption to the entire body of citizens of the affected state, thus negating their democratic power. In effect, all citizens of an affected state are presumed to be racist and directed on that basis. Shelby County permits states to change voting laws without federal preapproval. That those states are predominantly red reflects the will of people unconstrained by an arbitrary designation. The badge of racism has been removed.
In the April 2026 decision, Louisiana v. Callais, the Court narrowed Section 2. Previously, plaintiffs could challenge voting maps by showing that they had the effect of diluting minority votes, even without explicit proof of discriminatory intent. The question of why diluting minority votes should be meaningful is skirted. This goes to the heart of the point I am making in this essay: one cannot presume racial disparity is the result of racism; one must prove that racism explains racial disparity. Thus, the logic used in Shelby County is extended to Section 2. That this was unexpected is rather disingenuous. Propagandists feign unexpectedness to manufacture outrage and reinforce the assumption of white supremacy. The ruling makes those challenges much harder by requiring evidence that lawmakers intentionally discriminated. By requiring positive evidence for claims of discrimination, the decision negates the strange alchemy by returning adjudication of such matters to the realm of logical reasoning.
The Supreme Court ruling thus not only struck a blow to racial gerrymandering but also disallowed unproven claims of racial discrimination to stand as dispositive evidence, since heretofore, no evidence was needed, only assumptions based on bold conjecture derived from ideology. It moreover eschews the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The error of presuming racism is the cause of disparity rests on this fallacy. I want to elaborate on this point to show how it corrupts democracy.
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is a holdover from an ancient idea: Plato’s ontology of forms. For Plato, abstract entities are more real than the actual things themselves. Consider man’s best friend, the dog. Dogs are mammals that we have classified as such. The abstraction “dog” is the result of the common observation that some mammals can produce offspring with one another. Dogs constitute a species. Plato starts with an abstraction. The abstraction is the essence of “dogness” that dogs manifest in their concreteness. Humans have learned through selective breeding that they can manifest dogs according to an ideal type they and others have developed in their heads for whatever reason—function, aesthetics, and so forth. For Plato, the ideal type exists a priori. It is not that the breeds exist mind-independently (they are man-made); the idea of the dog does. Everything found in nature is a mind-independent form, according to Plato’s theory of forms.
In racialized thinking, racial categories represent ideal forms, and concrete individuals manifest these forms in the concrete. A black man is not merely an individual with a set of phenotypic characteristics that men identify as black, but an individual who carries in him the essence of blackness. It’s not just physical characteristics. It’s everything—the way he behaves and thinks, his aspirations and interests, and so forth. Thus, how he votes reflects his essence. This is how Joe Biden could say, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Racial thinking flattens individuals into personifications of Platonic essences: if their actions or attitudes do not align with form, then they are not the thing itself. (This is also how men can say they’re women. “Womenness”is an essence which men can embody.)
In the case of the progressive adaptation of the Voting Rights Act, blackness and whiteness are the forms that determine individual actions and attitudes. Despite individual variation, blacks and whites manifest group essences that, in the main, determine their respective voting patterns. It follows that, as a white man, I should be concerned about the race of my representative, since I come with racial interests that can only really be represented by those who look like me. The assumption at work here is essentially collectivistic.
However, I might ask whether my interests are not the same as those of any other man. What interests do I have that are exclusive to my race? Races are, after all, abstractions, and I am a concrete individual. I have interests in common with black people. If I conclude that I have no exclusive interests, then that’s a good thing; after all, I am not allowed to have interests exclusive to my race, since, if I did, that would make me a racist. Only blacks—or those who presume to speak for them—are allowed to have race-based interests and preferences.
Those who presume to speak for blacks are allowed to be racist because of the relationship between essential forms. The essence of whites is that of the oppressor/perpetrator. The essence of blacks is that of the oppressed/victim. On this theory, the sea of red and the dwindling blue patches represent racism. A neutral map cannot really be neutral since it is presumed to benefit whites. Only a map where blacks are advantaged over whites can be non-racist.
This is true for racial thinking generally. Racial gerrymandering is affirmative action’s sister. The logic of affirmative action assumes racial disparity is a valid justification for differential treatment, i.e., establishing special circumstances for some along racial lines. The absence of special circumstances for blacks is said to privilege whites, a race of people for whom privileges are presumed based on ideology. They are presumed privileged based on averages found in abstract demographic categories. But abstractions are not people. There are rich blacks and poor whites. Moreover, group differences have to be explained. One cannot simply assume they are explained by oppression.
In the progressive worldview, ideology stands in place of evidence. Affirmative action is a “just” response to the discrimination progressives presume (or at least claim) exists. By claiming that racial discrimination exists in the structure of society, progressives locate the question in the realm of abstraction. Hence, the construct of “systemic racism.” However, the only actual manifestation of racism in the case of preferential treatment is affirmative action, which by definition and in intent is positive discrimination affecting white people. That millions believe that actual racial discrimination is the solution to imagined racial discrimination is a spectacular propaganda achievement.
The spectacular achievement notwithstanding, racial gerrymandering is coming to an end. The Court recognizes that, under the status quo, the vote of every white man and black man in a gerrymandered district is not cast on equal footing, but potentially canceled by an artificial majority constructed by rules based upon fallacious reasoning—rules established to advance party interests rather than the common interests. Elections have consequences, and although the present Court makes decisions with which I disagree, it has, so far, demonstrated a much greater depth of reason than previous Courts in recent memory. Elections have consequences. Remember that in November.
“[T]he arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race,” he observed, “is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and equality before the law established by the Constitution.” —Justice John Marshall Harlan.
You’d think, given the “antiracist” rhetoric coming from Democrats, that the end of race-based policies—affirmative action, DEI, racial gerrymandering—would be celebrated by that side. But yesterday, the three Democratic appointees on the Supreme Court voted to uphold Louisiana’s race-based map. The rank-and-file are up in arms today about the colorblind approach of the Republican Party.
In a 6–3 ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, finding that the state’s creation of a second majority-black district amounted to an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because race was used too heavily in drawing its lines. The case, Louisiana v. Callais, reshaped how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 can be applied, with the Court requiring stronger evidence of intentional discrimination rather than relying primarily on the impact of district maps on minority voters.
A federal court found that Louisiana’s congressional map, drawn with 2020 census data, violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and ordered the creation of a second majority-black district. The Louisiana legislature passed a compliant map in January 2024. The Supreme Court just struck down the map.
Predictably, Democrats in lockstep argue that the decision weakens long-standing safeguards for minority voting power and could lead to reduced representation in states with histories of discrimination. “Safeguards for minority voting power” is code for Democratic power. Stripped of rhetoric, they are telling us that they don’t believe in equality. They are telling us that they do not believe in individualism.
In his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the law that sanctioned Jim Crow, Justice John Marshall Harlan rejected the majority’s approval of racial segregation, arguing that it violated the Constitution’s core principle of equality. Harlan declared in his lone dissent that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” insisting that laws separating people by race are inherently unequal and designed to mark black Americans as inferior.
Harlan dismissed the idea that segregation can be neutral, warning that the decision would become as notorious as Dred Scott, which declared that black Americans are inferior to whites. Harlan predicted it would undermine civil rights for generations. He was right. He was right because race-based policies are incompatible with liberty.
Justice Harlan was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1877 by Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican president. This is an important fact. The difference between the parties on the question of race is a long-standing pattern in American history. The Democratic Party was the party of the Slavocracy and Jim Crow segregation.
Today, the Democrats are the party of Affirmative Action and DEI. Race-based policies and politics are embedded in the Party’s DNA. By contrast, it was the Republicans who emancipated black Americans. Republicans have been consistent in their opposition to race-based law and policy.
The public has been confused about this. Via colonization of our sense-making institutions, progressives have revised history to make it appear that Democrats are the party of civil rights and Republicans are the party of the racist dog whistle. I fell for it. I was set up from early in my life to fall for it. I had to recover the true history of the United States for myself. When I started blowing up the lies those around me were telling—many of them not knowing they were telling lies—I saw the lie machine. Once you see it, it cannot be unseen.
It’s the same thing with the political violence lie machine that I wrote about in yesterday’s essay on this platform. When you understand how these machines work, it becomes obvious that the widgets they pump out are the commodities of deceit. Public education and the Culture Industry are the machines that make primary commodities of men, preparing them to accept uncritically the lies spat out by other machines.
The corporate state runs the machines. We have to smash the machines. And we are smashing the machines. That’s why progressives are squealing like stuck pigs.
Today, Democrats are out in force, squealing about the judiciary. “Stare decisis!” they shriek. Stare decisis is the principle that courts should follow prior judicial decisions when the same points of law arise again, ensuring consistency and predictability in the legal system. Dred Scott? Plessy? Do Democrats believe in these precedents? They’re no longer useful, so they readily condemn them. Democrats don’t really believe in precedent. They believe in power. Precedents are instruments they wield to secure and reinforce power. Without race-based policies, they lose power.
Democrats don’t believe in equality because equality underpins a free society. Voters in a free society don’t want what the big intrusive government Democrats peddle. This is why, with the fall of Jim Crow, Southerners flocked to the Republican Party. To overcome this, Democrats rigged the system to overrepresent those whose loyalty they have cultivated through racial privileging and dependency on welfare. This is why they push affirmative action, DEI, racial gerrymandering, and all the rest of it.
Racial gerrymandering was never about benefiting black Americans. It was about benefiting the Democratic Party. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act knowing that Democrats would lose the South. With racial segregation out of the way, there was no reason for Southerners to stick with big government Democrats. The Republicans were the party of small government, and liberty represents the spirit of the Southern man.
As the Democrats were negotiating the civil rights movement, they spent trillions of dollars over the long term on programs that made black people dependent on the Democratic Party. Since the South was going to turn Republican, Democrats had to make extraordinary arrangements to keep their majority in Congress. Democrats are the party of racial politics. They have always been the party of racial politics. At its core, progressivism is identitarianism.
Identitarianism works from tribalism. It rejects individualism. It pursues instead selective collectivism. Identitarians separate individuals into tribes, subordinate agency to groupthink, and then weaponize groups against the people. The goal is a one-party state in which progressives reshape America towards totalitarians ends.
The congressional map Virginian Democrats devised under Governor (and former CIA operative) Abigail Spanberger reveals Democratic ambition for one-party rule. Earlier this month, while the Supreme Court of Virginia did not strike down a redistricting plan, it bought freedom-lovers time by upholding a lower-court ruling that blocked certification of a voter-approved referendum that would have allowed new congressional maps to be drawn before the next census.
Opponents have challenged the referendum as unconstitutional, claiming it amounted to partisan gerrymandering and violated Virginia’s existing redistricting framework. By leaving the block in place while litigation continues, the court effectively paused any immediate changes to the state’s electoral maps. Although the issue remains unresolved, it gives the people of Virginia a chance to stop the weaponization of their state against democracy.
The Supreme Court’s action, as well as that of the Virginia Supreme Court, is a sign that the champions of liberty are making strides in rescuing our republic from authoritarianism and collectivism. But history shows that without drastic and persistent action, authoritarianism creeps back in. If we are not vigilant, we will lose our liberty. We have already lost enough. We cannot depend on the courts to save us. Indeed, as we have seen, the judiciary can be our enemy. If Democrats win the midterms, they will resume the project of American decline. We will lose the progress we have made. Not all of it, but enough of it to make reclaiming our heritage more difficult.
We must deal with this now. Ending racial gerrymandering is a necessary step. But we also need to deconstruct the administrative state and reclaim our courts. And we must educate the public as to what a constitutional Republic founded on equality means.
This last piece requires reclaiming public education and returning curricula to the formation of patriots. We must prevent progressives from manufacturing foot soldiers for the collectivist agenda if we are to have a country. Public education was never meant to be an indoctrination program for ideological tendencies. Its purpose is to prepare the young for a self-actualized life and citizenship in a constitutional republic. Democrats want the opposite. They want docile bodies for a New World Order.
In the wake of the attempted assassination of the President at the White House Correspondence Dinner, held at the ballroom of the Hilton in Washington, DC, on Saturday, Progressives have been out in force, citing instances of inflammatory rhetoric on the right to manufacture the perception that this is a problem on both sides of the political spectrum. “If the right wants the left to tone down the rhetoric, then the right needs to tone down its rhetoric.” That’s a false equivalency. Even if it weren’t, citing right-wing rhetoric is a deflection.
It’s ironic in light of deflection that the progressives just got caught red-handed manufacturing right-wing extremism. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the far-right to organize the “Unite the Right” rally. Heather Heyer was killed when James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of protesters at that event. Trump’s Justice Department charged Fields with hate crimes, secured a guilty plea, and sentenced him to life in federal prison.
Even without Charlottesville, the premise of the progressive argument is bogus. So what if some right-winger not on the SPLC payroll says that Barack Obama is a communist? Was such rhetoric normalized by academic institutions, the Culture Industry, mass media, and the Republican Party? No, it wasn’t. Will the Obama presidency be remembered for multiple attempts on a president’s life? No, it won’t. Desperate for equivalency, some social media users are trying to manufacture such memories. But the criteria they use only prove the point.
Anti-Trump rhetoric—he’s a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, a pedophile, a rapist, a king—is relentless and ubiquitous and has been for a decade. Comedians, social media profiles, public school teachers, pundits, and politicians openly wish for the man’s death (and the President isn’t the only target of lethal woke desire). They’re disappointed when the gunmen they arm and aim fail in their designated task. (A school teacher up here in Wisconsin was just suspended for imploring potential Trump assassins to improve their aim.)
Compare the anti-tax rallies of the Tea Party or protests surrounding the Affordable Care Act to anti-Trump hysteria. There is no comparison. An anti-tax rally is as American as apple pie. Calling for the death of an American president is madness. Progressives put conservative leaders in the crosshairs, then mock their widows. If Erika Kirk doesn’t cry, she’s not properly grieving. If she does cry, she’s a grifter. Seeing Kirk’s widow rush from the WHCD in terror delighted them.
Stochastic terrorism is not merely a matter of isolated inflammatory statements or scattered criticisms of a political figure that may theoretically inspire a lone actor. Stochastic terrorism arises from an overwhelming ubiquity of relentless, normalized rhetoric—broadcast across media, echoed by institutions, celebrities, and political leaders—that systematically dehumanizes and frames a target as an existential threat to the nation itself.
This pervasive atmosphere creates a subjective reality in which certain individuals come to believe that drastic, even violent action is not only justified but morally necessary to “save democracy” or avert catastrophe. In a country where tens of millions of citizens are conditioned to believe the messaging, it’s expected that some will take up weapons and perpetrate violence. That’s the point. Progressives know what they’re doing.
It’s naïve to believe that the alarming overrepresentation of trans-identifying individuals in lethal violence is not driven in part by the ubiquity of rhetoric around “transphobia and “transgenocide.” Such language manufactures hysteria and weaponizes mental illness for political ends.
Predictably, a population of disordered personalities conditioned to believe that questioning their delusion is an existential threat takes up rifles and enters schools and churches and murders “the enemy.” The rhetoric arms and aims them at the selected targets. That’s why you aren’t supposed to read their manifestos.
Likewise, the ubiquity of “white privilege” rhetoric motivates black actors to seek reparations on the streets of America through burglary, robbery, and theft targeting whites, or, en masse, take to the streets and topple statues, burn buildings, and assault civilians and law enforcement. Primitive rebellion is organized by manufactured resentment.
The situation requires brutal honesty. The point of anti-Trump rhetoric, just as with the rhetoric of “transgenocide” or “white privilege,” is to produce extremist attitudes and then channel them for ideological and political purposes. The left constructed the “oppressor/perpetrator vs. oppressed/victim” frame to dispossess segments of the population of their capacity to reason, to deny the rights of some individuals to life, liberty, and happiness, and increase the likelihood of violent action against them in myriad forms—assassination, mobbing, and terrorism.
Pointing to a handful of sarcastic or critical remarks from the other side misses the distinction entirely: stochastic terrorism thrives on cultural dominance and saturation, not sporadic opposition. It’s the goal of progressive forces to create a climate where stochastic terrorism is the predictable result. Targeted violence is what progressives desire. The pattern is obvious. And they say it out loud.
This is the left today. They take selected stills from the WHCD event and portray administration officials as cowards. We can plainly see Stephen Miller refusing to abandon his pregnant wife, shielding her with his own body from potential bullets as the Secret Service escorts them both to safety. In the mind of the woke progressive, Miller is using her and his unborn child as human shields.
Allusions are made to Stephen King’s Dead Zone. At a campaign rally, the politician Greg Stillson grabs a child to shield himself from the self-appointed savior of democracy, Johnny Smith. Smith foresees Stillson, future president, triggering the apocalypse. Such allusions only amplify the justification to assassinate the President. Smith is the assassin progressives aspire to be. They believe they, too, have the gift of precognition.
RFK Jr. doesn’t duck, run, or take cover. He sits calmly, observing what’s happening in the room. His soldier instincts kicked in, Pete Hegseth moved toward the danger rather than away from it. The President himself, despite stumbling, appears unfazed. He watches the room from backstage. To add to the noise, social media users recycle a scare from a few years ago in which Trump is startled by the reaction of Secret Service agents. But the clip doesn’t show a cowering president. Trump surely wasn’t cowering after having been struck by a would-be assassin’s bullet at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He stood up, pumped his fist in the air, and led the crowd in a chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Some on the left and the right claim Saturday Night was a “false flag.” The astonished looks on the First Lady’s face and on the face of the event’s organizer, with Trump smirking between them, telegraph a staged assassination attempt to justify the President’s White House ballroom. Back in reality, a mentalist was on the dais performing for the First Couple. The ladies were visibly amazed by the trick. The President, familiar with the illusion, was simply enjoying his wife’s reaction—until the gunshots rang out.
They see evidence of the false flag in White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s remark to Fox News host Jimmy Failla, previewing President Trump’s speech, that there will be “shots fired.” To everyone living beyond madness, the phrase is a common idiom for verbal jabs. Those on Planet Madness are not just social media users. Major media outlets are suggesting that Leavitt had foreknowledge of what would unfold.
They saw evidence of the false flag in the many tweets about the need for a secure ballroom at the White House, as if the necessity for a secure ballroom—and the shelter beneath it—were not obvious in what just occurred. I, too, noted the obvious on social media. The Hilton is not a safe venue; it has rooms above it where bombs could potentially be planted, and once guests check in, they have free rein of the hotel.
Past presidents have wanted a ballroom at the White House. Trump is finally building one. Indeed, that’s why progressives hate Donald Trump so intensely: he is a builder. Builders are the chief enemies of destroyers. Trump confronts decay. Repairing the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial enrages those who seek the decline of the American Republic.
In the post-event press conference, Trump was asked why there have been so many assassination attempts on his life. The President stated the obvious: because he is consequential. That’s not ego-tripping; it’s an honest assessment. The left itself confirms the assessment by losing its mind over the fact that Trump occupies the White House. His reelection sent them over the edge. If he were not consequential, if he were status quo, the last several years would be rather uneventful. And Iran would have a nuclear weapon.
It’s not the first time Democrats have lost their minds over a consequential president. John Wilkes Booth and his team of conspirators lost theirs. In Lincoln’s case, the assassin succeeded, and America lost a great president. The insecurity of Ford’s Theatre made Booth’s work tragically easy. Like Cole Thomas Allen, John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat.
You’ve heard that right-wing violence is more prevalent than left-wing violence. It’s almost always the case that you hear this claim in the context of left-wing violence. Some leftist shoots up a place, or tries to assassinate the President, or murders a conservative influencer, and the media compulsively attempts to downplay it by talking about right-wing violence. This is an established pattern.
This is obviously a deflection. But it isn’t merely an attempt to downplay left-wing violence. It is an attempt to put in the minds of the audience the false notion that right-wing violence is the problem society must focus on. Moreover, right-wing violence justifies left-wing violence. From a left-wing standpoint, once a politics or a person is designated fascist, then violence is justified against that politics or person. Any opinion uttered by a fascist is not merely to be dismissed out of hand, but the person uttering the opinion is properly subject to repression.
Readers may recognize this as DARVO, an acronym standing for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It’s a common manipulation tactic used by abusers to evade accountability when confronted. The idea was developed by psychologist Jennifer Freyd to describe the act of denying wrongdoing, attacking the accuser, and reversing roles to portray the perpetrator as the victim. The deflection piece is thus highly revealing: it is the action of a perpetrator attempting to project his guilt onto the victim, or, more generally, those who identify with perpetrators of left-wing or other desirable violence seeking to absolve allies of their guilt.
Imagine discussing a murder case. Somebody comes along and says, “What about this other murder?” What about it? “There are other murders, too, you know.” Sure. But we’re talking about this murder. Why does this person want to talk about other murders and not this murder? One hears this type of deflection in discussions about the overrepresentation of black males in violent crime. “White males commit violent crime, too.” True. But what’s your point? We’re talking about the overrepresentation of black males in violent crime. That’s a problem. Why don’t you want to talk about it? Or, more to the point, why don’t you want me talking about it?
Such deflections signal an interest in protecting the reputations of perpetrators in the case at hand by manufacturing a false equivalency or excusing their violence. There is no equivalency, and this is the point they’re so desperate to obscure. The sides are not the same. Once the false equivalency is blown up and once the excuses are rejected, one sees that they’re effectively saying that left-wing violence is a good thing. The fact that we’re really only talking about right-wing violence when left-wing violence happens falsifies the claim that right-wing violence is worse than left-wing violence. This is what gives the game away.
Advocates of left-wing violence recognize that acknowledging their advocacy undermines their legitimacy. Thus, beyond deflection, they practice deception. For example, when people share charts showing right-wing violence to be more prevalent than left-wing violence, if you examine those charts closely, you realize there’s missing data. To see missing data, one has to be aware of left-wing violence. That’s the trick. What about BLM violence in the summer of 2020? BLM wasn’t a subtle left-wing phenomenon. It was explicitly neo-Marxist. You can’t get more left-wing than that. And it wasn’t peaceful. But the public was either told it was, or, as Chris Cuomo put it during the riots: “Who said protests were supposed to be peaceful?”
The BLM and similar data points are excluded or rationalized because honest recognition that the Summer of 2020 was violent—more than two dozen people were killed, structures and vehicles were set ablaze, civilians and police officers were assaulted, statutes were toppled, monuments were defaced, human beings were forced to engage in acts of self-abasement—disrupts the narrative that left-wing political action is peaceful, or that at least violent action is understandable, and that, therefore, the left commands the moral high-ground. Here, the sense-making apparatus is put in the service of legitimizing the left, with the entailment that righteousness includes violence perpetrated by that side. We saw this more recently with the anti-ICE violence.
Here’s the brutal truth: the left has no problem with political violence; some violence the left likes, and some it doesn’t, and that side wants you to focus on the violence they don’t like. They need you to believe that the violence from the left is righteous; tolerance for left-wing violence enables violence from that side. However, anybody who actually condemns violence can only claim validity for their condemnation if they work from principle. Whataboutism is unprincipled.
I have in mind a comedy skit where woke progressive students in a logic and critical thinking class are offended by the unit on fallacies because they see themselves in the materials.
The skit would be funny in some measure because the likelihood that the students would recognize themselves in the course materials is nil. Imagine, though, that they did. Progressive students would learn about the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and see the foundation of their worldview under assault. They’d take it personally since progressivism prepares them to take everything that way. “What do you mean it’s fallacious to say that all whites are racially privileged?” They would follow up with an ad hominem: “You’re racist!”
There are many other funny interactions possible in the skit. Confronted with the law of the excluded middle, progressive students would see the problem with the queer construct of intersex. The script might have them shriek “Transphobe!” and run and complain to the dean. The problem of circularity in what is presented as causal reasoning would provoke the outcry: “Racial disparities facially prove racism!” (Not that they would put it like that.) Etcetera.
For many years now, I have been interested not only in what people believe but also in how they form, justify, and defend their beliefs. What sparked my interest in this was an undergraduate logic and critical thinking class taught by Dr. Ron Bombardi, a professor of philosophical psychology (among other fascinating areas) at Middle Tennessee State University. This was way back in the 1980s.
I had always been fascinated by how those around me—and radio and television talking heads—routinely demonstrated fallacious reasoning, some clever enough to disguise it with sophistry. Dr. Bombardi’s class introduced me to language that allowed me to articulate what I was seeing. It also helped me identify other examples of fallacious reasoning.
I discovered during my undergraduate years that philosophy is not the only course of study that examines fallacious reasoning. In psychology, my major, the umbrella name for the study of this problem is judgment and decision-making. Intersecting fields under the umbrella examine how people evaluate evidence, make choices, and systematically depart from ideal logic.
One confronts in these studies research on cognitive bias. Cognitive bias explains the predictable ways human thinking goes off the rails—confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and similar patterns that shape how people interpret information. I have penned several essays on this problem, showing how we can understand current-day politics in psychological terms. This is not ad hominem. Rather, it is understanding a problem with the hope that we might think more clearly.
I discovered in these studies that the problem of fallacious reasoning is not, for the most part, due to an intractable deficit in clear thinking. To be sure, human cognition is inherently subject to error because of the structure of the mind (there is, it should be noted, a range of variation error-proneness). However, there are ways to avoid these errors. This is why we study judgment and decision-making.
Cognitive error is not the only problem. Much of the work in human cognition overlaps with social psychology (I had training in this area at the master’s and PhD levels), especially in areas concerned with group influence, identity, and self-justification.
This is where ideas like cognitive dissonance become pertinent. Cognitive dissonance explains why people feel discomfort when confronted with conflicting beliefs and typically resolve it by rationalizing rather than revising their views. I have written many essays on this, as well.
Returning to Bombardi’s domain, the parallel field in philosophy is epistemology, which studies the nature of belief conceptually rather than experimentally. I devoted a great deal of time to epistemology in my PhD program. Unfortunately, graduate students didn’t encounter much discussion of this branch of philosophy in class (and the metaphysics of social structure was fractured by the plethora of sociological theory). I took it upon myself to interrogate epistemic matters.
The grounding of such studies in my advanced degrees is found in the sociology of knowledge (Karl Mannheim, Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann are standouts). Here, one examines the social construction of belief. After studying these ideas, all the pieces came together, and I was now qualified to assess not only arguments themselves, but also why people believed what they believed.
A key framework that bridges psychology, philosophy, and sociology is dual-process theory, which distinguishes between fast, intuitive thinking and slower, more analytical reasoning. The theory holds that both modes of thought are exhibited in the practical lives of the species. It explains how people handle routine tasks automatically while reserving mental energy for complex problems. At the same time, there is variation among individuals, indicating that some individuals are more deliberate thinkers.
In dual-process theory and human variation in cognitive style, I had an explanation for why “debates” with those around me could be so damn frustrating (I put debate in scare quotes, because what passes for debate is often not debate).
Fast, intuitive thinking is very often wrong, but audiences are impressed by it. Those who depend on this cognitive style are difficult to argue with, not because they are right, but because they can’t be wrong. Confidence and quickness of judgment are popularly seen as marks of superior intelligence.
Those who carefully craft arguments are boring, their presentation style tedious. This is especially true when one puts one’s arguments in writing and avoids debate. Who has time to read what a man with whom one disagrees thinks about things? I get it. Why is this or that writer so important that his ideas require consideration?
As a man who writes more than he debates, I have to take this in stride. I routinely encounter people who take issue with something I said because “what about this other thing?” I do talk about the other thing, and they would know that if they read my work. Once more, I get it: my work is too unimportant to invest any time in it. After all, I am already wrong.
The problem of judgment and decision-making drew me to teaching. After all, my good fortune of having professors like Dr. Bombardi improved my ability to reason. Why not impart what I have learned to younger generations? The benefits of education accrue not only to students. I, too, benefit from classroom preparation. The responsibility of teaching clear thinking requires the isolation of one’s own errors of thinking.
In his “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), Karl Marx writes, “The educator must himself be educated.” This line has stuck with me throughout my teaching. In context, Marx is criticizing the notion that people can be changed solely by external instruction or by enlightened elites. His fuller point is that circumstances are changed by people. If circumstances are to be changed in a rational direction, then those responsible for shaping impressionable minds must themselves develop their ability to reason. At the same time, Marx’s material conception of history holds that those who endeavor to shape society are themselves shaped by society. Teachers aren’t all-knowing. Thus, the good teacher is also a good student. With Marx’s insight in mind, I see myself as an eternal student.
I have been teaching a course on the foundations of social research almost every semester, and each iteration includes more material on judgment and decision-making. Every year of preparation reinforces the imperative of logical argumentation. I seek out the clear thinkers and model my own thinking after them. I find flaws and correct them. I don’t want to be wrong out of ego, but because being right is a virtue.
Efficacy in teaching students how to think requires learning to avoid shrinking from controversial examples. My objective is to motivate engagement in self-examination, so I show students how I came to change my mind about matters that ideological commitments would have me leave alone.
In all this, I have a political goal in mind, and I am explicit about that. Understanding the problem of intuition and tightening one’s thinking facilitates Habermas’ ideal speech situation and thus advances the practice of civic dialogue. A properly functioning democracy depends on rational discourse. Since our actions affect the world around us, reason should guide our actions. We need to be more deliberate in our thinking.
Altogether, these areas and the attitude of critique—the dialectic—form a cohesive picture with a valuable lesson: humans are not just imperfect reasoners, but highly skilled at constructing justifications for what they already want to believe—a tension that would make my skit idea inherently funny, if the audience were well-versed in the language of judgment and decision-making.
That’s a big if. While the premise that those learning about fallacious reasoning would see themselves in the materials is potentially hilarious to my mind, the skit will likely not fly. Indeed, it might present yet another opportunity for an audience to take offense; as it is, when I criticize how people think, they think I am insulting them. I explore this problem in the next section of this essay.
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Image by Sora
I want to connect the foregoing to my personal experience across areas of social life. I grew up in the buckle of the Bible Belt in Middle Tennessee. In this context, my views on religions were heretical. However, my experience growing up in a Christian culture is highly similar to my experience in academic institutions.
Across very different social environments, a strikingly similar pattern emerges: a perceived moral consensus that is treated as both obvious and binding, coupled with explicit or implicit sanctions against dissent. The content of the consensus differs—religious orthodoxy in one case, political orthodoxy in the other—but the structure of the social dynamic remains remarkably consistent.
This section analyzes that common structure through the three lenses I identified in the first section: philosophy (especially logic and epistemology), psychology (with emphasis on cognitive biases and social cognition), and sociology of knowledge (particularly social constructionism and group boundary maintenance).
At the philosophical level, the experience can be understood as a breakdown of what might be called epistemic pluralism—the recognition that reasonable disagreement is possible among informed and rational agents. Yet, in both environments described, certain propositions, such as expressing support for a particular political figure, are judged morally unacceptable, function not as contestable claims but as hinge commitments—background assumptions that structure discourse but are themselves shielded from scrutiny.
From the standpoint of logic and critical thinking, this creates a situation in which disagreement is preemptively pathologized. Rather than engaging opposing views as arguments to be evaluated, the community treats them as evidence of moral or intellectual deficiency.
Such situations reflect a shift from argumentative rationality (evaluating reasons) to identity-protective reasoning (protecting group norms and status). There is something wrong with those who disagree because the expectation is that the moral and reasonable person agrees.
A double standard emerges. Those who are immoral and unreasonable are meant to be ridiculed, but when the moral and reasonable are ridiculed, offense is taken. I am not opposed to ridicule, which I have explained on this platform. Some ideas are absurd. But it is not necessarily because the ridiculous person is immoral or unreasonable. It is rather because the ideas he expresses are ridiculous—and because his cognitive style precludes him from abandoning or modifying those ideas.
Philosophers of deliberation often emphasize the importance of the principle of charity—interpreting opposing views in their strongest plausible form. In the environments I am describing, this principle is largely absent, if not practically excluded. Instead, dissenting positions are reduced to caricatures, making genuine dialogue practically difficult if not impossible.
Psychologically, these dynamics are well-explained by several well-documented cognitive and social biases: pluralistic ignorance, spiral of silence, in-group/out-group bias, and moralization of belief. I chose these because they suggest opportunities for improving dialogue, and thus are hopeful for advancing democratic deliberation.
Pluralistic ignorance is present when individuals privately dissent from the perceived consensus but assume (incorrectly) that they are alone, leading to self-censorship. This is a powerful force. It is why finding ways to promote mutual knowledge is so important for opening discourse. As dissent becomes less visible, the perceived consensus appears stronger, further discouraging deviation. I have written essays on this using Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the naked emperor. Pluralistic ignorance is the source of the spiral of silence, wherein the confident manufacture the false perception that their ideas are valid.
In-group/out-group bias reinforces the spiral of silence. Here, group members are evaluated more charitably, while outsiders—or perceived deviants within the group—are judged more harshly. This problem is reinforced by the moralization of belief, in which political or religious positions become tied to moral identity. Disagreement is experienced not as intellectual divergence but as ethical violation. Growing up, I fell silent in a room of Christians because I knew I was an outsider; yet, these were my family and friends, and I wanted to belong.
As an atheist growing up in Middle Tennessee, I routinely found myself in rooms full of Christians who assumed that everyone present believed in God and that God was good all the time—and that those who didn’t agree were bad people. I kept my mouth shut because of what might happen if I didn’t.
I thought things would be different in academia. However, when I came to the university, I found the same dynamic. At faculty gatherings, my colleagues—almost invariably progressive in the humanities and social sciences—not only ranted about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (whom progressives have since rehabilitated) and, more recently (and more intensely), about Donald Trump, but ridiculed those who expressed support for them. I did not vote for Bush. But I did vote for Trump. Yet I dare not say so; there are consequences for defending him.
I took my formative years in stride, since religious faith is not by definition a rational exercise. There, I was worried about social alienation and even physical retaliation. The assumption was that everybody was a Christian. But the same is true in academia. My colleagues at the university assume I belong to the progressive tribe.
It troubled me to discover this. The academic spirit is explicitly rooted in rational thought, I thought. This is the place where diversity of opinion is prized. Yet, on college campuses, support for Trump amounts to a heresy. I am expected to know better. One might think that the fact that a college professor (with advanced degrees, peer-reviewed publications, and so on) supports Trump would prompt some reflection on their assumptions about him and his supporters. If an educated person agrees with Trump’s policies, maybe some time should be devoted to understanding why. Instead, I find that the instinct runs in the opposite direction, extending even to a desire to excommunicate me. If it were not for academic freedom, I surely would have been disciplined or expelled.
My silence for many years is known as preference falsification, where individuals conceal their true beliefs to avoid professional or social consequences. Preference falsification is particularly salient in environments where reputational costs are high, such as academia. In past essays, I have described this as a species of bad faith, where hedging and silence are necessary for survival, since even the principle of academic freedom does not insulate the heretic from negative consequences for his heresy. Here, social alienation is the problem.
Crucially, these mechanisms operate largely below the level of conscious intention. Participants in such environments often perceive themselves as open-minded and rational, even as their behavior reflects strong conformity pressures.
During a period of self-examination, I recognized that preference falsification was an emotional burden. Concealing or obfuscating my opinions felt dishonest. Moreover, it compromises integrity. Certainly, it did not advance discourses necessary for advancing democratic deliberation.
It took me a long time to finally speak publicly about my support for Trump. But I still avoid talking about it around my colleagues. Freedom and Reason grew out of my frustration with this situation. I hoped that, in reading my essays, I would ease those around me into an awareness of my politics. Because my writings often come with explanations for how I landed where I did, I hoped they would, assuming charity, help others understand why I think this way. Maybe then, in my presence, others would hesitate to ridicule support for Trump, not for my sake, but for the sake of the millions of Americans who stand with the President. Things did not go as I had hoped, as I document in various essays.
From the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, both of the settings I have described can be understood as systems engaged in boundary maintenance—the process by which groups define and enforce the limits of acceptable belief.
In this framework, knowledge is not merely discovered but socially constructed and stabilized through institutions, norms, and power relations. What counts as “reasonable,” “informed,” or “moral” is shaped by these social processes. As a sociologist, I understand this. But it doesn’t make practical life any easier. That would require others to understand this, as well, and the reluctance to be charitable and tolerant seems an intractable problem.
My experiences illustrate a key feature of such systems: the existence of taken-for-granted assumptions that function as markers of group membership. In religious contexts, these are doctrinal and theological; in academic contexts, they are ideological and political. In both cases, dissent is not just disagreement but deviance—a violation of group identity.
The language of “heresy” and “excommunication,” while metaphorical in secular contexts, is sociologically apt. At the level of groups, internal dissent is more objectionable than external opposition; internal dissent threatens the coherence of the group’s identity. This explains the asymmetry I am describing: as someone presumed to belong to the group, my dissent carries greater social risk than it would if I were clearly identified as an outsider. The expectation that I “should know better” reflects the enforcement of internal norms rather than the evaluation of arguments. Hence, the intractability of the problem.
One of the most striking aspects of my experience is the structural similarity between two ostensibly opposed environments. Despite differences in content (religious vs. secular, liberal vs. progressive), both exhibit implicit sanctions against dissent, limited tolerance for viewpoint diversity, and the moralization of disagreement. However, while I don’t have to belong to a religious community, my livelihood depends on belonging in higher education. Life in an institution where progressivism is hegemonic, under the pressure of its illiberal spirit, makes dissent risky.
All of these intersect to incentivize self-censorship. This phenomenon is not tied to any particular ideology but is instead a general feature of human social organization. Groups, regardless of their stated commitments to openness or truth-seeking, tend to develop mechanisms that stabilize shared beliefs and discourage deviation. This is why it is so important to talk about how people come to believe the things they do and why they are so resistant to opinions that challenge those beliefs. They take it personally because it goes to identity.
But this is even more reason to focus on these problems, and why my writing has moved so strongly in this direction. These dynamics have important implications for how individuals form and express judgments. When dissent is suppressed, groups lose access to information that could challenge or refine their beliefs.
This is the problem of epistemic distortion. Apparent consensus creates an illusion of certainty, reducing discernment and critical scrutiny. This, in turn, leads to overconfidence in one’s opinions.
The moral polarization that results from this state of affairs is a significant impediment to the interrogation of ideas. Treating disagreement as a moral failure intensifies division and reduces the possibility of dialogue. The result—self-censorship—diminishes freedom essential for democratic deliberation. Individuals refrain from expressing well-considered views, leading to a less robust intellectual environment. Without reasoned dialogue, no consensus is possible, and ideological and political polarization is entrenched.
From a decision-making perspective, this environment is suboptimal to say the least. It undermines the diversity of perspectives that is often necessary for sound judgment, particularly in complex or uncertain domains. But it’s worse than suboptimal. This sounds dramatic, I know, but it is true: the situation becomes an authoritarian one.
In a free and open society, persuasion is the central means for arriving at consensus positions that allow a people to move forward collectively with the common interests of a diverse population in mind. Robbed of or eschewing the power of persuasion, those who wish to impose their opinions on others often resort to forms of coercion, some subtle, others not so much.
Even when rhetoric appeals to common ground, it disguises the one-way street. Such rhetoric constitutes bad faith wrapped in weasel words. Once one sees it, the disingenuousness of it all becomes apparent. I’d be lying if I said I like being talked to that way—and by that way I mean condescension. Don’t pat me on the head. Make the argument—and try to make it using valid rules of reasoning. If not, then I am taking Schopenhauer Street.
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The imagined scenario that began this essay is not merely comedic. It captures a deeper problem that has occupied my thinking for decades: not just what people believe, but how they come to believe it, how they justify it, and why they so often resist scrutiny. Drawing on insights from philosophy, psychology, and the sociology of knowledge, this essay explores both the structure of fallacious reasoning and the social conditions that sustain it. What begins as an abstract inquiry into logic and cognition ultimately converges with lived experience across very different domains of social life, revealing a common pattern—one in which dissent is pathologized, reasoning gives way to identity protection, and the possibility of genuine dialogue is quietly foreclosed.
As shown in the first section of this essay, the experiences described in the second section are not anomalies but instances of a broader pattern: the tendency of human groups to conflate shared belief with moral virtue and dissent with deviance and to avoid recognizing these problems by resort to fallacious reasoning. As a result, sophistry becomes the standard mode of discourse among intelligent people. By analyzing these dynamics through the lenses of philosophy, psychology, and sociology, we can better understand both their persistence and their costs.
Doing so, if possible, would prepare the population to engage in discourse using the rules of valid reasoning. Without such norms, even communities committed in principle to truth and inquiry risk reproducing the very forms of conformity they might otherwise criticize. I dwelled on my own frustrations because, in light of them, I am not sure it is possible. That progressives express favorable opinions about violence as a tool to suppress those with whom they disagree suggests that achieving Habermas’ ideal speech situation is impossible.
I will close on this. In prison, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, under the watchful eye of the censor, put the following sentiment in notebooks he was allowed to keep: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Why was the man imprisoned? He was arrested and confined in 1926 by Mussolini’s fascist regime. That’s one way to stop ideas from spreading (if only temporarily). With the sentiment, Gramsci meant that one should face reality with clear-eyed, unsparing analysis—recognizing the problem of constraints without illusion—while still maintaining the determination and moral resolve to act and improve things. It’s a tension between sober judgment and committed effort. The takeaway for me is that the impossibility of rational discourse is not a good reason to abandon reason.
freedom and reason 