freedom and reason

The big complaint on the far right today—the rogue America First crowd—is that Trump has morphed into a neoconservative. In 2004, I penned two chapters in Bernd Hamm’s Devastating Society: The Neo-Conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice. One of those chapters (you can read the article version War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy on this platform) was a deep dive into neoconservatism and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and their plans to instigate a “democratic tsunami” across the MENA space. I know a bit about this ideology.

Trump is no ideologue. He’s a pragmatist. It’s an error to group him with the PNAC crowd of warmongers whose grand vision is rooted in American imperialism and globalism. When Trump said “no new wars,” he was explicitly separating himself from the war hawks; he was not saying that America would never go to war (see Trump Never Promised to Eschew Military Power to Confront Tyranny). Such a stance is suicidal. It allows evil to gather strength. The America Firster who thinks like this is the same America Firster who delayed America’s entry into World War II. Isolation bolsters our enemies’ ambitions. Millions died needlessly because America sat on its hands while Nazi Germany gathered strength. It took the attack on Pearl Harbor to finally move the United States to action.

The term “neoconservative” is used in popular speech as a synonym for “hawkish” policy or looking favorably upon military action, but historically it referred to a much broader strategic doctrine. The neoconservatives associated with the George W. Bush administration—figures such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and others—influenced a vision that extended well beyond removing specific threats.

Crucially, neoconservativism was a rebranding of Cold War progressivism. The ideology was hatched and raised by the Democratic Party and then migrated to the Republican Party when conservatism fully returned from the wilderness following the Great Depression. Neoconservatism corrupted the party. The Bush family was their political vehicle. It then returned to the Democratic Party with Barack Obama’s election. Hillary Clinton was meant to carry the torch for transnationalism. However, there are Republicans in power who remain committed to neoconservative ambition. They loathe Donald Trump.

Even before 9/11, the neoconservatives argued that authoritarianism in the Middle East bred terrorism and that the United States should actively reshape the region by overthrowing hostile regimes and fostering democratic governments. This is not altogether untrue. The question is how America and the West should address the problem. For neoconservatives, the invasion of Iraq was presented not merely as eliminating Saddam Hussein or addressing alleged weapons of mass destruction (which Hussein did not possess), but as the first step in a “democratic domino effect” that would transform Iraq into a model for political liberalization throughout the Middle East. This ambitious project was often described as the “Freedom Agenda.”

Trump’s approach, by contrast, has generally not been framed in those transformational terms. Although he authorized significant military actions—including the 2020 strike that killed Qasem Soleimani and later strikes against Iranian-linked targets—his rhetoric has consistently emphasized deterrence, retaliation, and protecting American interests rather than remaking the political order of the Middle East. Even when using force, Trump has repeatedly stated that he does not seek long-term nation-building or regime-change occupations. His foreign policy has tended to combine military assertiveness with skepticism toward prolonged interventions, reflecting a transactional worldview rather than the ideological internationalism that characterized neoconservatism.

This does not mean there is no overlap, as alluded to above. Islam is an existential threat to the world. Both Trump and the neoconservatives have at times endorsed the use of overwhelming military power, maintained close strategic ties with Israel, and viewed Iran as a principal regional adversary. These are views to which any rational actor may—must—subscribe. Those similarities explain why some observers perceive continuity. However, the underlying strategic logic differs considerably. For the Bush-era neoconservatives, military force was often a means of transforming political systems and spreading liberal democracy, i.e., corporate transnationalism. For Trump, military force has generally been presented as a tool to punish adversaries, deter attacks, or eliminate perceived threats without assuming responsibility for rebuilding societies or exporting democratic institutions.

Describing Trump as a neoconservative solely because he ordered military action against Iran conflates tactical decisions with grand strategy. The defining characteristic of neoconservatism is not simply a willingness to use force but a belief that American military power could and should be used to reshape international politics by promoting a simulation of democratic governance. Unless one sees Trump’s actions as part of a broader commitment to regional political transformation, the comparison is faulty. The evidence that Trump is committed to regional political transformation just isn’t there. A more precise characterization is that Trump has at times adopted policies resembling neoconservative tactics while rejecting the larger ideological project that made neoconservatism distinctive.

As for neoconservatism, it will not escape the reader who reads my chapter in Hamm’s book that, at the time I penned those words, I was not a supporter of intervention in the MENA space. I have softened my view on military intervention after consideration of the threat Islam poses to the world. More than twenty years have passed between then and now, and the advance of a barbaric ideology has made considerable strides in capturing the West. This does not make me a neoconservative, but rather it aligns me with, as I put it in the April 2026 essay, Donald Trump’s Grand Vision: Make Western Civilization Great Again. It’s not as if Trump didn’t explain it to his MAGA followers. Where was panic then? Did they not read Trump’s National Security Strategy and the Case for Democratic Nationalism? In truth, Trump’s vision is America First without the isolationism that corrupted the first iteration. Trump is a pragmatic nationalist.

There is nothing in Trump’s actions on Iran that contradicts his long-held position on war. Indeed, it is very clear that he did not want to have to deal with Iran and that he is trying to find a way to bring the Islamic Republic to the table and negotiate a resolution to the problem of Iranian belligerence and the desire to acquire nuclear weapons. However, the events of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas, an Iranian proxy, invaded Israel and massacred civilians in the most horrific ways imaginable, changed the situation. Iran is the chief sponsor of international terrorism. Its goal is the destruction of Israel and the West. (See Israel and the Existential Threat of a Determined Iran.)

October 7 was a wake-up call. The West has been sitting on its hands while genocidal Islam has gathered strength. The pragmatist reassesses circumstances and responds appropriately (see Securing the Occidental Realm: Why US Action in Iran Serves Western Civilization, Not Just Israel). If any criticism is to be made of Trump, it is that he is not aggressive enough (see Trump’s Very Bad Deal With Iran; Tehran Scuttles the Islamabad MoU).

There is nothing intrinsically wrong about regime change when that regime seeks world conquest and nuclear weapons (see US Strikes Iran’s Nuclear Facilities). The West, with America leading the charge, changed regimes in Germany and Japan during World War II. Regime change in Iran is a perfectly reasonable objective. At the very least, the Islamic Republic needs to be defanged and put on a tight leash. If we want a safer world, the West must confront Iran and Shi’a Islam—not just abroad, but at home. Europe should join the fight (see Not a Modest Proposal: Repurposing NATO for the War on Islamofascism).

In the wake of the Islamic terrorist attack on a Pride gathering in Berlin, perpetrated by a 21-year-old Lebanese man named Abdul Ballout, subsequently shot dead by the SEK, I posted commentary from a German queer who said: “If I go to Palestine, I’m not afraid of Hamas. I’m afraid of Israel.” A friend commented, “I do not understand the LGBTQ point on Palestine. It makes zero fucking sense.” No and yes. In this essay, I explain why “Queers for Palestine” does and doesn’t make sense.

“Queers for Palestine” makes sense from a particular worldview. The logic follows from the “oppressor-oppressed” or “perpetrator-victim” framework. Queer politics portrays the West as oppressive. Those outside the West—and obviously marginalized groups within the West—are its victims. Islam is outside the West. Therefore, Muslims are victims of Western oppression. Their victim status makes them natural allies with other groups victimized by and in the West. Warped by the postmodernist gaze, the queer sees himself in the Muslim. 

The oppressor-oppressed framework has been in operation for a long time. This frame explains why the left allied with the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the 1970s. The Iranian left believed that both itself and Islam were fighting Western imperialism, which it took to be all bad. Leftists outside Iran also adopted this view. This was most famously articulated by the West’s most cited philosopher, the postmodernist Michel Foucault. Widely regarded as the “godfather of queer theory,” Foucault is a central figure in the perversion of critical theory.

Foucault traveled to Iran twice in 1978 as a journalist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and wrote a series of essays expressing fascination with the revolutionary movement. He did not simply praise Ayatollah Khomeini personally; rather, he believed he was witnessing a new form of political resistance that challenged Western liberalism. He admired what he conceptualized as “political spirituality,” a fusion of religion and political action.

Today’s red-green alliance is moved by the same spirit as the alliance between leftists and Islamists in Iran in the 1970s. These are examples of common cause convergence (which leads to more dark places—see The Left-Far Right Convergence and Notes on the Fourth Political Theory). The historical case provides a valuable lesson about the peril of such a convergence; to wit, when the Muslims took command of Iran, leftists found themselves dwelling on a hellish landscape. The Islamic Republic forces women under the veil and hangs homosexuals from cranes. Yet, the inevitable consequence of establishing an Islamic state is lost on the contemporary left. The oppressor-oppressed frame has made them stupid and self-destructive, turning them against the very liberal values that liberated women and homosexuals.  

A similar thing occurred in Germany with the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s. The aspirations of the Nazi Party were bolstered by a vigorous socialist wing. The socialist wing drew disaffected workers into the party, marshaling popular support for fascism and undercutting the left. It advocated policies such as nationalizing industries, breaking up large department stores, curbing the power of finance capital, and presenting the party as a revolutionary movement for workers as well as the middle class.

I trust that the reader hears the echoes of the Nazi platform in the declared positions of today’s democratic socialists, who are increasingly commanding the Democratic Party. It might be one thing if the democratic socialists stood in opposition to the Democratic Party (albeit that would raise a different problem). But they are allied with it. Like the socialists in the Nazi Party, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party ultimately serves the purposes of the corporatocracy. The Democratic Party tolerates socialism because it undercuts the working class. Today’s socialists are not the socialists of yesteryear; they have jettisoned organized class politics in favor of the nihilism of political spirituality.

Hitler tolerated the socialists because they broadened the party’s appeal. But his priorities were always racial and corporatist rather than class-based. As soon as he had secured power, the socialists were eliminated. Horrifically, during the Night of the Long Knives (June–July 1934), leaders of the socialist wing and the SA—dominant paramilitary force within the Nazi Party—were murdered, and left-wing parties outlawed. This is not a closed chapter in the book of possibility. Khomeini’s rise paralleled Hitler’s rise to and subsequent consolidation of power. We find ourselves once more in this terrible situation.

A 2014 BBC article helps us understand the affinity between trans ideology and Shi’a Islam. It seems unlikely such an article would appear today, but the Internet is forever, so we have a window into a time when Big Media was concerned with the plight of homosexuals in Iran. It was shown how, in Muslims country where consensual same-sex sexual activity can be punished by death, gender reassignment is recognized by the state under a religious ruling issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. Although the government does not officially force gay people to undergo gender reassignment, many experience intense familial, medical, religious, and social pressure to do so. Iranian clerics and doctors conflate homosexuality with gender identity, telling gay patients they are “sick” and steering them toward hormone therapy and surgery rather than accepting them as homosexual. Individuals, lacking access to accurate information about sexual orientation and gender identity, consent to irreversible medical procedures they do not truly want.

The affinity with Islam and National Socialism on the question of transition surgery is clear. Erwin Gohrbandt was involved in some of the earliest “gender-affirming” surgeries performed in collaboration with Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Science. Gohrbandt participated in surgical procedures for transgender patients in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including some of the pioneering vaginoplasty work of that era. With the rise of Hiterlism, Gohrbandt joined the SS, became a consulting surgeon, and conducted or supervised medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. These experiments have been widely condemned as unethical and criminal. (I have written extensively on this subject. See Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy; The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care; Medical Atrocities Then and Now: The Dark Continuity of Gender Affirming Care.)

After the war, Gohrbandt was investigated but, unlike some Nazi physicians, was never convicted of war crimes and continued his medical career in West Germany to great acclaim. It is not only Shi’a clerics and doctors who affirm the practice of altering human bodies to manufacture simulated sexual identities. The doctrine was embraced by Nazi doctors who escaped punishment after the fall of National Socialism. Gender identity doctrine is a license for crimes against humanity. While the medical community has shifted lately under pressure from those who grasp the peril of the doctrine, the medical atrocities continue in the West. Without the shift in mass consciousness, they would have expanded these practices. So the moral and rational among us must keep up the pressure.

This is why the queer stance on Islam is lunacy. Queer activists, and today’s left more broadly, do not grasp the reality that, if Islam were to prevail, homosexuality would be severely suppressed by the regime. So, yes, in that sense, my Facebook friend is right: it makes zero fucking sense. But to a mind corrupted by the oppressor-oppressed frame, it does make sense. The oppressor-oppressed frame represents a set of tragic failures in reasoning, historical knowledge, and basic grasp of ideology. Yet the left today believes irrationalism and ignorance are sources of truth. They are true because reason and knowledge are false. Reason and knowledge are false because they are Western social constructions.

“Queers for Palestine” is a species of slogan George Orwell identified in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Ignorance is Strength,” “Freedom is Slavery”—these are the slogans of a totalitarian socialist state.

The left no longer operates in the real world. Once it abandoned historical and scientific materialism for political spirituality, substituting perversion for moral truth, it switched from mobilizing for a more just world (however that works out in the end) to a praxis intent on transgressing Western norms. Islam transgresses Western norms, too, and that makes Muslims natural allies to a lunatic mind.

Both the left today and Islam eternally are illiberal. Both deny the truth of the world. The left today believes the most ridiculous things. We see this most obviously in the denial of the gender binary and its immutability. But we also see this in the adoption of a worldview in which Jews are suspected of having engineered the world queers find so objectionable. Antisemitism reinforces the queer alliance with Islam. The paradox that queers are tolerated in Israel and murdered in Iran escapes the left. Islam has the left right where it wants it. And the left is incapable of embarassment.

So, I agree, “Queers for Palestine” is lunacy. But this is because I live in the real world, know history, and understand the ideology at work. Unfortunately, not everybody lives in the real world but rather in a world that lives in their heads—and the madness compels us to fight its externalization.

It is also unfortunate that reasoning with people becomes impossible when they check out of reality. Those pulled into a mass psychogenic illness become immune to facts and logic. And they become unreasonable and violent as a result. The only strategies left to those who remain grounded in reality are to ridicule and marginalize the lunatic and ensure he never obtains power.

The problem with queer politics is not just what it does to confused youth (that’s bad enough), but what it will do to all of us if it gets its paws on the levers of the state.

“I hold that, in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.” —John C. Calhoun, 1837 Senate speech

Students of history know about Democratic politician John C. Calhoun and the doctrine he played an important role in developing and socializing, namely nullification, the idea that an individual state can declare a federal law unconstitutional and prevent its enforcement within that state. This doctrine is rooted in the notion “states’ rights.” If the federal government passes a law that Democrats believe exceeds its constitutional powers, the nullification doctrine holds that a state can declare the law “null and void” within its borders and resist its enforcement.

Sound familiar? It should. This doctrine is being deployed in California, Minnesota, Oregon, and other blue states, especially in the blue cities. We have all seen cities like Minneapolis and Portland thwarting the enforcement of federal immigration law. They couch nullification as “resistance” to what they contend is federal government overreach and encourage their populations to confront law enforcement officers in the streets. These cities provide sanctuary to those who violate our nation’s laws. We see this with election integrity, as well. Federal law forbids Illegal aliens from registering and voting in federal elections. Rogue states register illegal aliens and allow them to vote in federal elections. If the law is not enforced, then its in effect a dead letter.

We’re told that the Democrats are a different party today than the party Calhoun represented, but this is obviously false. Today’s Democrats are behaving as they did in Calhoun’s day. Do I really need to tell readers that this is not a good thing? The nullification crisis was a key element in the run-up to the calamity of the Civil War. This is where we’re headed today: towards disunion. Indeed, the US is already significantly disunited. Central to the Democrats’ nullification project is delegitimizing the American Republic. They reject the spirit of the Constitution even as they selectively enforce its rules to achieve sought ends. More and more, we hear the language of revolution. But, in truth, it is the rhetoric of counterrevolution (see The American Counterrevolution is Reactionary and Regressive).

The populist president Andrew Jackson rejected the nullification doctrine. He could see what members of his party were up to: they sought to preserve the aristocracy. In his Proclamation Regarding Nullification (1832), Jackson argued that the Union was created by the people, not merely by the states; that the Constitution created a government superior to the states in its legitimate sphere (the Supremacy Clause); and that a state could not unilaterally invalidate federal law. In April 1830, Jackson famously toasted: “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved.” The task of defending the Republic turned to the Republicans during the Civil War.

Democrats centralize power in the federal government when they are in command, not in the sense of principled recognition of the awesome powers of Article II ala Jackson (these are constitutional), but rather in preserving aristocratic control of the levers of government. This is the beating heart of progressivism and the purpose of the administrative state. Democrats represent big, intrusive government. When they are out of power, they pursue disunion by nullifying federal law. Don’t let differential strategy confuse you. Strategy is contingent. Both strategies are elements of the same anti-republican politics. Anti-individualism lies at the core of neo/confederate thinking.

During the slaveocracy, Democrats demanded that federal policy uphold the aristocratic class and pursue free trade. They sought to keep the US as a periphery in the world capitalist system because it fed their wealth and preserved not only chattel slavery but wage slavery, as well. They demand the same thing today with the administrative state and transnationalism—at the behest of corporate power. Nullification is designed to weaken the Republic and elevate the corporatocracy.

Democrats are at war with populist nationalism (Europe is also a front in the war) because it threatens the corporate state. Trump is objectionable because he is a modern-day Jackson or Lincoln. Corporate media propaganda advances the war by disorganizing mass consciousness. Why do so many people hear populist nationalism as “fascism”? Because they have been brainwashed to oppose the spirit of the American Republic.

In fact, the return of the nullification project represents modern-day fascism. The Democrats represent an existential threat to the Republic. Ask yourself: who wants to expand the administrative state and enlarge the sphere of technocratic control? Who censors and compels speech? Who revises history to meet ideological ends? Who disorders truth? Who encourages Antifa to perpetrate violence in our streets? That would be the progressives.

* * *

On Facebook yesterday, I asked family and friends to imagine if the far right controlled the major institutions of society, using them to impose its ideology on the population. Government agencies, universities, schools, corporations, and media organizations suppress dissenting viewpoints, censor speech deemed unacceptable, and compel ideological conformity through official policies and social pressure.

Imagine further, I wrote, that, at the street level, right-wing authorities encourage or tolerate far-right-wing activists who intimidate political opponents, harass civilians, and engage in violence against perceived enemies, including assaults on assemblies and attacks on government officials—while law enforcement and prosecutors respond selectively or leniently toward those aligned with the prevailing ideology.

Would we not recognize that as a fascist situation? Of course we would. Would the left speak up? Of course it would. I would expect them to do more than that. So why is the right in America so passive in the face of the far left that is doing exactly that? Why is it okay for the far left to impose their worldview on the rest of society, but not for the rest of society to resist them? Because the far left is in control of our sense-making institutions.

I will use my own situation to illustrate. Many of you already know what I am going to say. In 2024, a group of far-left students circulated a petition demanding that the university that employs me terminate my employment. Rather than condemn the students who were campaigning to deprive me of my rights to free conscience and speech by terminating me for my convictions and opinions, I was made to feel by my institution as if I had done something wrong.

Even among those who support me, some asked me whether it was a good idea to be so outspoken. My response was that I was doing what the left would do if the shoe were on the other foot. I reminded them that when conservative students pursued a similar action against me in the early 2000s, the university came to my defense and condemned them, defending the principles of liberty and academic freedom. Why is it different when the other side attacks? Because administrators and faculty are on the left. They don’t work from principle. They work from ideology and use the levers of power to impose their ideology on others.

This is why we must be outspoken and call out those who attempt to undermine our freedom. Courage is contagious. If we are going to hunker down in the face of extremism, we risk losing everything. The far left is redefining all the categories of life. They are telling us that liberalism is oppressive, that anti-white bigotry is antiracism, that criminal conduct is laudable as long as its tribes are the criminals, that men who say they are women are women, that they should have access to exclusive female activities and spaces, that children are fair game for radicalization in critical race theory and queer doctrine, that demographic transformation is a good thing, that assimilation and integration is racist, and that borders are a bad thing. The time to resist this is before mass consciousness is completely transformed.

The same thing applies to a far-right takeover of our society. If it were the right-wing fascists who were doing these things, I would speak out, even at great personal and professional risk. But I would do it nonetheless because I am principled. Thankfully, far-right fascism is not ascendant. But far-left fascism is. And we have to call it out. The right, center, and sane left must resist what is happening in Portland, San Francisco, New York City, Minneapolis, and Madison. We cannot allow America to become an authoritarian country. We have to cancel the nullification project.

“In times long gone by, there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.” —Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume I, Chapter Twenty-Six: “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation”

Before I begin today’s essay, I suggest to readers my essays, The Problem is Not Worker Ownership but Socialism at Scale, and Let It Go, People—Won and Done, published last week. The arguments I make there bear on the thesis presented here, in particular my analysis of Karl Marx’s work in light of Frederich Hayek’s defense of liberty, with respect to the first, and the master narrative of slavery as original sin, with respect to the second. Today’s essay assumes points and references I made there. Whether the reader chooses to read those essays or not, I will proceed as if he has so that I may avoid repeating myself.

* * *

It would be entirely uncontroversial to note, in traveling the world, or even the United States, that culture plays a significant role in shaping the lives of people, and that people, through their speech and action, reproduce that culture over time. How people organize their societies, the worldview that shapes their attitudes and behaviors, the technologies they develop and deploy—these are the stuff of what anthropologists know as ideational and material culture. It is cultural variation that determines whether a people are advanced or primitive, rich or poor. Those without a written language produce no great works of literature, and so on. The only symphonies one hears in primitive cultures are crickets chirping in the dark.

“If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street without a cover and the cats come and eat it…

Whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?

The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have… pic.twitter.com/8yRNCeyz1g

— SaltyGoat (@SaltyGoat17) July 8, 2026

A recent post on X (posted above) usefully illustrates the force of culture in explaining individual conduct and appropriate societal reaction to it. Sheikh Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly justifies rape using the following analogy. “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street without a cover and the cats come and eat it [w]hose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat?” As one might expect, here’s the answer: “The uncovered meat is the problem. If [a rape victim is] in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.” The Australian religious leader denied that he was condoning rape and was suspended from his duties at the mosque for a couple of months. Yet the sheikh’s analogy is a common one in Islamic societies. Almost no imams are disciplined for such pronouncements. The sheikh was “disciplined” for optics.

This sheikh’s argument is not entirely alien to Western culture. Some readers have no doubt heard before the argument that if a rape victim had not been dressed provocatively, then she would not have been victimized. This is a paradigm of victim-blaming. Today in the West, such an argument is made by only a small number of people who have not yet been educated about the matter of where responsibility rightfully rests for the crime of rape. It is not the expression of the dominant culture, but of subcultural backwardness. In Islam, the backwardness of such an argument to Western eyes is an expression of Muslim culture. The sheikh was disciplined only because he was in Australia, and his comments were understood by the Muslim community as a public relations problem in a Western nation that Muslims have not fully Islamized.

Here’s another example:

Popular Islamic scholar with millions of followers, Zakir Naik, says that abusing girls who don’t comply with Islamic dress code is allowed by Allah, and that if a girl is raped and murdered, it’s her own fault.

This is another level of disgusting and evil. pic.twitter.com/IRoHsuKyMu

— Dr. Maalouf ‏ (@realMaalouf) July 15, 2026

Instrumental music is haram in many Islamic societies because Muhammad didn’t like it. According to various Hadiths, he saw music as a sinful distraction that leads to immorality. So, crickets.

* * *

Western observers are rightfully horrified by the sheikh’s analogy (and by Muhammad’s dislike for musical instruments). Some among us will tell us that such attitudes do not represent the view of all Muslims; however, most of us know that this is a ready example of Islamic thinking (we have heard similar analogies before), and, furthermore, that we are at liberty to say so without widespread condemnation. However, when it comes to explaining the pathologies of black America, such cultural explanations for the extraordinary homicide and robbery rates in black neighborhoods—to take two striking facts—are off limits, especially if the observer is a white man.

A white man risks being smeared as a racist for commenting on the attitudes and behaviors associated with crime and violence, poverty, single-family households, and the general social disorganization clearly evident in black neighborhoods. His motive to see that black residents of these neighborhoods are protected and have opportunities to rise above such pathologies is disparaged. He is not supposed to actually care about black people. Progressives are the ones who actually care. They show it by perpetuating the conditions that disorganized black America—conditions they established during the New Deal and Great Society.

At the same time, no one hesitates to cite culture in explaining why whites think and behave as they do, even when such explanations strain credulity (implicit race bias, systemic racism, and the rest of it), except if it’s an explanation for why whites—and white-adjacent populations—lead the nation in every significant metric of human thriving. Citing white culture is only allowed when used to advance the myth of white supremacy; if used to explain white success, it is cataloged as evidence for the myth. And those who make such explanations are condemned as white supremacists.

Indeed, what is particularly striking about black subculture is how its associated lifeways are rationalized by blaming white America for them. Self-professed white progressive allies amplify these grievances and are, as noted, largely responsible for them, both in how grievances are framed, for example, in the rhetoric of “white privilege,” and in policies that reproduce the aggrieved conditions. As for the ordinary white family living in America’s heartland, those most likely governed by the mainstream culture that has proven its efficacy in producing affluence and the good life (when followed), those who, at the expense of no one, have profited from their alignment with it—what did they have to do with the state of black America? Who runs the blue and chocolate cities? Not the salt of the Earth. There is no plague of murder and robbery in red states beyond the blue cities they contain.

Even many of those blacks who have integrated with mainstream culture and traveled entrepreneurial and professional paths—businessman, doctor, and lawyer—often rehearse the grievances of those who are held back by such beliefs and their enablers. Even with the advantages afforded blacks by affirmative action and DEI, and the tens of trillions of dollars redistributed downward, signs of a nation bending so far over backwards that its citizens downgrade their own aspirations and make room in their budgets for the taxes they must pay, the blame still falls on white people for the circumstances confronting black Americans. A black man is successful despite the obstacles that white people allegedly throw in his way; a white man is successful because he stands on the bodies of the black men. Such is the power of the black subculture and the oppressor-victim frame that extends up through the class structure.

* * *

While the white man must hold his tongue, a black man, at least in the past, could shame those who made poor choices in life—the spendthrift of Marx’s parable (quoted at the top of this essay), offered in the last chapter of Capital as a clever criticism of Adam Smith and other organic intellectuals of the bourgeoisie who explained inequality in this way. Cab Calloway’s 1931 song “Minnie the Moocher,” to take an obvious instance, makes Smith’s moral argument. The “Ho-Dee-Ho” song is often taken as a fun call-and-response about a woman who dreamed of being kept by the King of Sweden. But there’s a dark message there Calloway would have us pay attention to. Nobody who has looked into Calloway’s celebrated song should remain ignorant of its point.

A “moocher” is someone who lives off others, begging for support rather than making something of herself. The fictional Minnie is based on a real person named Minnie Gayton, a woman who lived by begging rather than supporting herself independently. That Minnie, a black woman, never made anything of herself and died from exposure in Indiana in 1951. The only items Minnie possessed for decades were a baby carriage and a brick she carried in it. Her sympathizers hoped she was not alive to see somebody steal her only possessions as she lay exposed to the elements. The thief’s identity remains unknown to this day. Behind the toe-tapping standard is a sad story.

Not long after Minnie’s passing, the state became the father of future generations of Minnies. The taxpayer is the King of Sweden. The generalized Minnie has become associated with the controversy surrounding Ronald Reagan’s reference to the “welfare queen.” However, unlike Calloway, Reagan was a racist for suggesting the reason why such persons exist in America. The opinions of the fortieth president were illegitimate because he was white, and those he characterized as mooches were understood by everybody to be black.

There is a clarification to be made here that will become relevant in a moment. Like Calloway’s Minnie, Reagan’s inspiration was also an actual person, Linda Taylor, a woman from the Chicago area who was convicted of welfare fraud in the 1970s. Taylor used multiple aliases to collect benefits fraudulently and committed numerous other crimes. Obliquely, Reagan described a woman in Chicago with dozens of aliases, multiple addresses, and lavish benefits to illustrate what he argued were abuses in the welfare system. The original Minnie was a sympathetic figure, the sociological categorization of which I will come to shortly. Taylor was not. She falls into another category that I will, in time, note. However, both are deviants. Moreover, both are moochers.

The analytical difference is academic, but the substance is important. But for those leveling charges of racism against Reagan, any difference is immaterial; no suggestion of deviant behavior is permissible when the subject is the conduct among black Americans. After Reagan, any person of any race came to understand that he must steer clear of identifying among blacks the problem of sloth—the failure to do what is required to live an upright life, care for others, or nurture one’s own potential—as the culprit in determining the fate of many Minnies. They must avoid suggesting that Taylor’s action had anything to do with black culture. They suggest that Taylor, like the Somalian migrant engaged in fraud in Minneapolis, is at best only a small minority of their respective communities.

There are exceptions. Barack Obama, the charmed son of a white woman, was allowed to shame black parents who bought sugary sodas for their children with food stamps. But, as a general rule, nobody should explain these behaviors, which are, in point of fact, ordinary, in any other way but by ascribing them to the fevered imagination of white supremacists.

* * *

Marx sets up his “anecdote of the past” by characterizing the interpretation as performing “about the same part as original sin in theology.” I am certain readers know that original sin is a Christian doctrine that teaches that all human beings inherit a fallen condition because of the first sin committed by the first humans, Adam and Eve, their story told in the Book of Genesis. But perhaps some might not know what that original sin entails. According to myth, they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that grew in Eden. Thus, they committed the first act of disobedience and introduced sin into the world.*

Marx makes the point plain by summarizing Genesis in a short sentence: “Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race.” Here he means to belittle explanations that suggest human agency has a role in determining a person’s fate by mocking Christian theology, which he had been wont to do since early in his publishing career (see his 1843 essay “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”). Such an explanation is, according to him, “insipid childishness.”

Today, the Marxist frame finds a black man offering such an explanation dismissed as an “Uncle Tom” (Thomas Sowell comes to mind, but he is one of many blacks who have become the targets of scorn). For Calloway, Minnie’s story symbolizes the precarious allure of life on society’s margins. This, perhaps, explains the attraction of gold chains as a conspicuous appearance of wealth when one’s underlying situation is actually one of poverty. Another manifestation may be found in the practice of leaving price tags on one’s clothing, visible signs communicating to others that an item was expensive or newly purchased. And we mustn’t forget Taylor, the welfare queen who devoted considerable effort to enriching herself with ill-gotten gains.

Such practices may strike those outside the subculture as odd. Why would a woman want to be dependent on people she doesn’t know? Why would one hang a gold chain around his neck when he might invest his money in endeavors that generate wealth over the life course, not only for himself but for a family that may be proud of him? Why would an individual wish to convey wealth while making little effort to actually achieve a higher station in life and the dignity that comes from hard work? Here’s why: Taylor and her ilk believe society owes them something because society is to blame for their situation. In particular, white people. Minnie dreamt of a benefactor who would accept her sloth and gift her gold chains and expensive-looking clothes. Taylor went to extraordinary lengths to avoid honest work. They both lived on the generosity of white people.

For those who deny that such choices have anything to do with culture, they find refuge in Marx’s explanation that “insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defense of property” and embrace the Old Moor’s “real” explanation: “In actual history, it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder—briefly force—play the great part.” Those who earn what they have are really those who enjoy ill-gotten gains. Taylor stands accused of taking back what is rightfully hers. Her “crime” was reparations-in-kind. Minnie’s fantasy replaced the effort to achieve a station higher than the lowly one she occupied. Marx replaces the behavioral explanation with a structural one rooted in the “secret history of primitive accumulation.” (Read the text for yourself. Follow the URLs at the bottom for the following chapters.)

* * *

It should not escape the reader that Marx provides the frame for the argument that Minnie’s situation is ultimately rooted in the legacy of slavery, which Sunny Hostin blames for the relative absence of cars and driver’s licenses in black America. This explanation is known as the appeal to “root causes,” which, in social science and progressive ideology, precludes references to attitudes and behaviors in explaining the fate of black people in the aggregate. (However, Hostin did not shy away from appealing to her high status and her son’s virtue when the police rolled him up.)

For the left, structure erases agency. But only selectively. The argument that black people have, on average, rejected true ambition and the norms that make success possible is ruled out of order. More accurately, then, those the “root causes” crowd identifies as “the oppressed” are portrayed as puppets dancing on the ends of strings operated by the powerful few. Today’s democratic socialists promise to replace the puppetmaster with themselves.

My discipline of sociology bridged Marx and the root causes paradigm in stages. Marx’s argument challenged the legitimacy of capitalism as a moral system (albeit he avoided putting it that way, since all morality could be reduced to ideology), so progressives had to be crafty in smuggling Marx into academia and popular discourse. Anti-communism complicated matters. There was a time when liberals and conservatives alike could dismiss explanations that condemned capitalism without being accused of being Nazis. (Today, anti-communism marks a fascist.)

The prevailing school of thought, namely functionalism, also complicated matters. Although Marx viewed society as an evolving, interconnected system, he did not share the functionalist assumption that social institutions exist primarily because they contribute to the stability and maintenance of society for the good of all. Functionalism, especially in the work of later sociologists such as Émile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons (a professor at Harvard, where Merton pursued his graduate studies), emphasized the ways institutions work together to preserve cohesion. Marx instead argued that history is emergent and organic, meaning societies develop through dynamic processes shaped by contradictions, conflict, and material conditions. He saw social change as driven largely by class struggle and tensions within economic systems rather than by a natural tendency toward balance. In his view, morality is an ideology concealing exploitative social relations.

This distinction was important in bringing Marx into mainstream sociology because it positioned conflict theory as a major alternative to functionalism, expanding sociology’s focus from social stability to power, inequality, and historical transformation, and thus threatening what sociologists viewed as the paradigm: structural-functionalism. The trick was how to work Marx into the discipline without invoking the man’s name. That would come later.

In his 1938 article in the American Sociological Review, “Anomie and Social Structure,” Robert Merton helped advance the project of erasing human agency by labeling Minnie as a “retreatist.” The retreatist is a category of people who withdraw from the norms and values that form the basis of the legitimate society. This class suffers not from a disjuncture between cultural goals and societal institutions—the pursuit of the “American Dream” divorced from the means to achieve it—but from the realistic rejection of both, even if Minnie dreamt of a life by the side of a Swedish king.

Retreatism, for Merton, is one of several “modes of adaptation.” Another mode of adaptation is “innovation.” This category captures the Taylors of the world. Here, the desire to acquire things is estranged from the legitimate means to achieve them. Innovation is a clever way of describing the criminal offender. If a man cannot obtain his gold chain through exchange, he will obtain it through force or fraud. If Somalis can’t run childcare facilities and health clinics, they will claim they can, and Democrats in Minneapolis will give them money for their schemes.

In Merton’s scheme, both adaptive modalities deviate from the cultural norms. Rather than root personal conduct in human nature—his account of such explanations is pitched as a strawman—Merton locates social pathology instead in the “definite pressure” of “social structures,” albeit permitting culture to play a role, what he calls the “socio-cultural sources” of deviant behavior, to frame the behavioral entailments.

“There persists a notable tendency in sociological theory to attribute the malfunctioning of social structure primarily to those of man’s imperious biological drives which are not adequately restrained by social control. In this view, the social order is solely a device for ‘impulse management’ and the ‘social processing’ of tensions. These impulses which break through social control, be it noted, are held to be biologically derived. Nonconformity is assumed to be rooted in original nature. Conformity is by implication the result of a utilitarian calculus or unreasoned conditioning. This point of view, whatever its other deficiences [sic], clearly begs one question. It provides no basis for determining the nonbiological conditions which induce deviations from prescribed patterns of conduct.

“In this paper, it will be suggested that certain phases of social structure generate the circumstances in which infringement of social codes constitutes a ‘normal’ response. The conceptual scheme to be outlined is designed to provide a coherent, systematic approach to the study of socio-cultural sources of deviate behavior. Our primary aim lies in discovering how some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconformist rather than conformist conduct. The many ramifications of the scheme cannot all be discussed; the problems mentioned outnumber those explicitly treated.”

The question still concerns the source of deviant behavior, but Merton prepares future sociology to sharply constrain the range of possible answers. It’s not that social structure explains nothing, but that it must explain everything, lest we be Hobbseans. Though Merton is prepared to acknowledge culture in this narrow frame, those who came after Merton—Richard Cloward and other progressives—adapted Merton’s thesis, removing the behavioral attributes and vanquishing culture as an explanation. Their ideas shaped the policies of the Great Society. All along, the Marxian element in Merton’s 1938 essay was recognizable, even if Merton was not explicit about having smuggled in the man. Merton was careful to couch his theory in the language of Durkheimian functionalism and American sociology, rather than class conflict or historical materialism. He left it to Cloward and others to be more transparent in their sympathies.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who himself played a big role in policy formation in the 1960s, eventually came to the realization, which he expressed in his 1993 essay “Defining Deviance Down,” that American society had become so accustomed to rising levels of crime, family instability, mental illness, and other forms of social disorder that it increasingly reclassified these behaviors as normal rather than confronting them as problems. (He also changed his mind about the pathologies of the “Negro family,” but that’s a subject for another essay.)

Moynihan’s contention was that when the volume of deviant behavior exceeds society’s capacity to control it, those in authority lower their standards of what counts as unacceptable, effectively defining deviance down, and then transmit the lowered standards to the population at large. He identifies several ways this happens, including humanitarian motives (such as deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill), political or social expediency, and gradual normalization through repeated exposure. Moynihan warns that this process weakens shared social norms, reduces public willingness to address serious social problems, and leaves communities increasingly tolerant of behaviors that earlier generations would have considered alarming or unacceptable. 

Moynihan writes in that sociological style, which makes his argument elusive to some readers. The takeaway is that defining deviance down has several harmful consequences. It erodes shared social norms by lowering the threshold for what society considers unacceptable behavior. It reduces public recognition of serious social problems because behaviors once viewed as alarming come to be seen as ordinary or inevitable. It weakens the motivation to address those problems through policy, law enforcement, or community action.

Moreover, it can undermine public confidence in social institutions if people perceive that authorities are simply redefining problems rather than solving them—or worse: some see what others define as social problems as expressions of personal liberty. A question occurs to the libertine mind: Why shouldn’t a man defecate in the street or masturbate in public? Such a man is free from the coercive force of culture imposed by oppressors. That’s a good thing, no? All norms are oppressive (except those the progressive wishes to impose.) It is not that such voices fail to seek anarchism creeping in, but rather extol the virtue of anarchism itself. They are nihilists. This is where defining deviance down takes a society. Moynihan didn’t say as much himself, but it’s where his argument goes.

* * *

To explicitly link the foregoing to the essay at hand, rather than confronting the pathologies of black America, academics and policymakers, with the prevailing sense-making institutions in tow, make the problem worse by excusing it—and condemning those who don’t. They justify excusing deviance—even to the detriment of the deviant—by appealing to root causes, which necessarily implicate white people. And they impose a monopoly on explanation by smearing those who point to the role of agency in shaping outcomes. By racializing the problem, the accusation that academics and policymakers are blaming capitalism for inequality (as if inequality is among the myriad social formations of history exclusive to capitalism) can be avoided.

Obviously, there is less concern about the accusation today; among democratic socialists, appealing to Marxian class rhetoric to explain poverty has become common. What accounts for this is that the democratic socialist is not really going after capitalism, or more precisely, the corporatocracy; transnational corporate power lies behind the electoral success of a relatively small stratum of elites and their handpicked candidates. They use Marx’s anecdote as a means to whip up popular support for the destruction of America and the West more broadly and move the masses further down the road to serfdom. Eat the rich has replaced anti-communism as the prevailing justification for obscene levels of wealth accumulation.

For the lay observer whose moral compass still points true north (where West is on the left), Minnie’s adventures teach us that chasing illusion and living a life of indulgence lead to isolation and ruin rather than fulfillment and success, making Minnie a universal metaphor of the consequences of living outside conventional social norms. But the masses are not to consider that Minnie would have been better off integrating with mainstream culture and its values of achievement, hard work, and punctuality.

Today, achievement culture is framed as white, and appealing to it is beyond the pale. The way of dependency, learned helplessness, and short time horizons is not the work of agency, but structure (where no progressive can be responsible for it), and it mustn’t be framed in the terms I use to describe it. Many blacks reject achievement culture and instead embrace a culture of poverty, where their choices guarantee failure. This is the pathology of sloth. To admit this makes one a bad person. Truth requires no caring about whether progressives think we are bad people. The truth can be brutal, but it is not cruel.

* * *

Oh, what they would think of a Calloway today. Calloway was a black man who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. As black America was becoming ascendent, the strivers in the community could see the problem of mooching. So they mocked it. They made Minnie the poster girl of urban pathology. The “New Negro” had progress on the mind. He could not be held back by the past, and he certainly wasn’t going to leave his fate to Minnie and her ilk.

It took Democrats little time by history’s clock to check the New Negro and normalize Minnie with the Great Society. They had sociological theory behind them. Now there are tens of millions of Minnies thanks to the tens of trillions of dollars spent on welfare programs of various sorts—to manage a population that globalists relegated to their status. That is the structure we need to talk about. We must also talk about how agency is at work, too, since the denationalization project is the plan of men who know what they are doing. Social structure is an abstraction. Transnational corporate power is concretely real.

As anti-white bigotry—the globalist strategy to set nations against themselves—has been increasingly challenged by those affected by it, the politics organized by corporate power have become more open in their intent, blaming the rich for the situation of the poor, which is then used to expand government. An extension of corporate power, the administrative state ultimately replaces the invisible hand of the free market with the visible hand of corporatism. Republicanism gives way to authoritarianism, and all the liberal freedoms of the Enlightenment are reduced in scope and quality by technocratic control.

* * *

Marx called the liberal-capitalist origin story “Robinsonade,” referencing the literary genre of castaway and survival fiction, the prototype of which one finds in Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. Marx debunks the origin story. He argues that, in reality, capitalism did not emerge because some people simply worked harder or saved more. Instead, it required a historical process he calls “primitive accumulation”: the forcible separation of producers from their means of production. Thus, inequality is not the result of natural differences among individuals but of historical expropriation and class formation. Capitalism begins with an unequal distribution of property produced through political and economic coercion, not merely through market exchange. Thereafter, the capitalist system reproduces and expands that inequality because capitalists appropriate the surplus value created by workers.

Marx must ignore in his historical account the fact that inequality is also a sign of liberty, in which men plainly rise and fall on ambition, discipline, and relative talents. Never mind that! He had a revolution to foment!

Curiously, in that same chapter, Marx notes that even though Crusoe is alone on his island, at least apart from his kind, he does not begin from a completely natural or pre-social state. Crusoe brings with him the categories of thought, habits, know-how, and skills acquired in English bourgeois society. Crusoe knows how to make tools, organize work, and calculate his labor time because he has already been shaped by a particular historical society. Marx even notes that Crusoe keeps books, reflecting the mindset of a practical Englishman. This is part of Marx’s broader argument that individuals are always products of historical and social conditions. What could he be referring to other than culture?

To be sure, Marx’s historical account is not untrue. Peasants were dispossessed of common lands through enclosures, artisans lost control of their tools, and colonial conquest, slavery, state violence, and legal changes concentrated property in the hands of a relatively small class. Don’t forget about Crusoe’s Man Friday, whom he rescues from a group of cannibals who are about to kill and eat him. Rescued from the savages, Friday becomes Crusoe’s faithful and obedient servant. Once workers no longer owned land or productive assets, they had little choice but to sell their labor power to capitalists. But, as noted above, missing from the account is the development of liberal freedom, where one sees the emergence of private property and the possibility of upward mobility.

We must, in accepting Marx’s account, ignore that class remains distinct from caste in that one can change stations in a class system. The world that social class replaced was largely one of caste, including the coercive category of race. America has neither king nor peasant. The artisan still exists. But the colonial subject and the slave don’t. Black people are no longer limited by de jure segregation. However, they are limited by their own attitudes and behaviors—and the party they vote for in large numbers.

Marx believes classical economists such as Smith take existing property relations for granted and use them to explain how capitalism functions. Rejecting their narrative, he shows how those property relations themselves came into existence and are used to exploit man and nature. Marx thus credits himself with having discovered the secret history of primitive accumulation. By contrast, his nemesis, Smith, presents inequality as emerging from voluntary economic activity. Wrong, says Marx; it originates in a history of coercion, dispossession, and the creation of a propertyless working class. Were the feudalist relations superior? And what about what comes after capitalism?

There must indeed be a class that sells its labor. This is necessary for capitalism to work. But this, too, is a functionalist argument. And it is true of most large-scale societies. However, the question is not whether abstract man is fated to be a proletarian worker, for he is not in a class-based society. That question has already been answered. The question is whether this is the station he is content to occupy. He may very well be. After all, there is no shame in working. Man has had to do that since he was expelled from Eden. There is shame in mooching, though. So the matter resolves to the sort of moral question that Marx abhorred.

Marx cannot escape morality. One might even say that Marx’s account is itself am attribution of original sin, since it roots the world’s misery in the emergence of capitalist relations, a sin that can only potentially be absolved by eliminating capitalism and establishing a classless and stateless social order—a return to the original conditions of the species before. Therein, for Marx, lies justice. Here, Marx is not original. There were those before him who also rationalized sloth in this way. Before the great communist put pen to paper and ranted at the podium, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), argued that inequality arose with private property. Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen were others who said much the same.

Nor can we say that Smith and his ilk imported a theological account into their explanation of inequality. It seemed self-evident to them that under the free arrangements of capitalism, the poor were largely the authors of their own fate. Smith admitted to concentration of wealth, but he also believed competitive markets create general prosperity. However, those who seek affluence must strive to achieve it. That was only fair.

Smith’s observations seem self-evident today. But for globalization, which in his notorious speech on free trade Marx advocated precisely to impoverish the proletariat and thus accelerate the conditions necessary for communist revolution (or common ruin of all competing social classes), the system remains, in the main, a free and open one. I came from poverty and now live a comfortable life, achieved by hard work. Anecdotal? I’m hardly the only one who can tell the same basic story.

Those who find themselves ensnared in the ghetto life are not powerless. They are not only free to try and make it, but they also free to organize collectively to demand that the government pursue economic nationalist policies that will make jobs readily available. Why don’t they? Where are the mass protests against mass immigration and offshoring? Where is the demand for work? Why do they organize instead for free food, housing, and medicine? Have you ever wondered? Because of the pathology of sloth.

* * *

An Endnote

Recall when I wrote that, according to myth, Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that grew in Eden, thus committing the first act of disobedience and introducing sin into the world. I must add that this is the case at least on man’s part. In the war in heaven, in which Michael and his angels cast out Satan and those allied with him who were in rebellion against God, Satan is reasonably charged with the first act of disobedience. Many Christians hold that this occurred before Satan in serpentine form seduced Eve, who then seduced Adam. Thus, God remains aloof from the seduction of Eve.

As for inequality, the Bible presents a balanced view. It recognizes that many people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control, such as famine or misfortune, and repeatedly commands God’s people to care for them with compassion and generosity. This is the duty of those who are sympathetic to others’ plight. At the same time, Scripture condemns sloth, teaching that those who can work should do so diligently and responsibly. Books such as Proverbs warn that idleness can lead to poverty. The New Testament encourages believers to work honestly and provide for themselves and others. The biblical view distinguishes between poverty caused by unjust circumstances, which calls for mercy and justice, and poverty resulting from persistent laziness, which calls for personal responsibility. And so should we.

I do not reference the Bible to justify the argument I make in this essay, but rather to point out that the problem of sloth is an old one, and that mankind has long known that the solutions to the problem of laziness are found not in coercive social arrangements that have strivers supporting those who seek freedom from work, but rather in the demand that those who can work provide for themselves—and the recognition that, if the conditions are such that this proves too difficult, should be met with collective action demanding not mediocrity but an opportunity to provide for oneselves and his family.

However, I do want to dwell in Eden for just a bit longer to make a point about freedom. I hope Christians will pardon me for this observation, but it seems to me that this garden of delights that the first couple found themselves in is akin to the welfare state, albeit one of abundance, harmony, and innocence. Adam did not have to work to make a life for Eve. Everything they could want they had within their grasp—except for what the two trees God planted there could give them: conscience and eternal life. But there is a third matter: freedom.

God specifically forbade the first humans from partaking of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He told them that doing so would bring death. And, as things turned out, this was true in time. He did not tell about the Tree of Life and how its fruit would make them immortal beyond Eden, which, in their fallen condition, would prove unbearable. So God placed cherubim and a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree in case they learned of its existence (after all, God spared the serpent’s life).

In expelling Adam from paradise, God told him this: “Because of what you’ve done, the ground itself is now working against you. From this point on, getting what you need to survive will take hard work and constant effort. The earth won’t easily provide for you—it will grow weeds, thorns, and obstacles along with the food you need. You’ll have to work tirelessly just to earn your daily bread, and you’ll keep doing so for the rest of your life. In the end, you’ll return to the earth from which you came, because you were formed from dust, and one day your body will become dust again.”

Sounds unbearable. But wasn’t everlasting life in Eden itself also an unbearable condition? To be sure, Adam and his wife enjoyed all the creature comforts imaginable. They did not know they could become like gods, and they were only deceived by the serpent into losing their place in paradise. But paradise, despite its bounty, was, at the same time, something of a prison with no work program. No effort was required from them, but they were also not at liberty to make history or improve themselves.

Erich Fromm famously repurposed the story of the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the birth of human freedom rather than simply the origin of sin. In his view, Adam and Eve’s act of eating from the forbidden tree marks humanity’s break from an instinctive, harmonious unity with nature and the beginning of genuine self-awareness and independence. By disobeying God’s command—man’s first act of disobedience—they become conscious of themselves as separate individuals, capable of making choices and bearing responsibility for them. This newfound freedom came at a cost, of course: they experienced fear, isolation, shame, and uncertainty after being expelled from Eden. But it came with something else: autonomy. As hard as freedom was, it meant that man was able to choose for himself, reap the rewards of his industry, and suffer the consequences for wrongful action. Only after being expelled from paradise did man become a moral agent who knew good from bad.

For Fromm, this tension lies at the heart of the human condition. He used the story as a warning. Freedom is not merely liberation from external constraints and the beginning of history, but also a burden that can produce anxiety, leading people to seek security by submitting to authority. What sort of authority people submit to is a terribly important question. Shall it be the authority of duty and ethics? Or shall it be the authority of communist and fascist states? Or the welfare state? The Eden story therefore illustrates both the achievement and the challenge of human freedom—the irreversible transition from innocent dependence to autonomous existence. Man became free to choose and was shouldered with the burden of choosing wisely.

* * *

One last note, while it is on my mind. It is striking how similar the story of Eden and the fall of man is to the Zoroastrian account of how evil entered the world, which dates to roughly 3,000 years ago. In this tale, in the beginning, Ahura Mazda, a primordial spirit, creates a perfect world. The world is good and pure: the sky, the waters, the earth, plants, animals, and finally the first human, Gayomard. Everything was created without death, disease, or corruption. The other primordial spirit, Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman, perceived the radiant creation of Ahura Mazda, but instead of admiring it, he became consumed with envy and hatred. When Ahriman invaded the material creation, he brought with him death, disease, decay, drought, poisonous creatures, lies, violence, and demonic beings called daevas.

The first man, Gayomard, died from Ahriman’s assault. Yet from his seed eventually came the first human couple, Mashya and Mashyana, through whom humanity continued. The point is that evil entered the world not because Ahura Mazda created it, but because Ahriman freely chose to corrupt what was good.

Monday, I critiqued modern-day democratic socialism. With the rise of the Democratic Socialists in America, the public must consider whether liberalism and socialism are compatible. The coexistence of liberalism—freedoms of conscience, speech, publishing, and all the rest of it—and socialism depends on a worker-owned and controlled society in which the population is willing and able to defend liberal values. It was George Orwell’s desire to see such an arrangement. However, that its preconditions could exist is highly unlikely, to put it mildly. More likely is that such an arrangment is impossible.

First, as we can plainly see for ourselves, many people on the left today do not believe in liberal values. They don’t want individuals to have freedom of conscience, speech, and the like. They openly demand the imposition of ideology and speech rules. People with this attitude cannot be trusted with power. And there are too many of those types. As Erich Fromm told us in Escape from Freedom, the problem of authoritarianism is a perennial one. Even presuming that such persons are lawfully elected to these positions, the problem of the tyranny of the majority looms. The majority may be of the sort that rejects liberal freedoms, and it will vote into office authoritarians who will oppress the individual and minorities.

Second, and this follows from the problem identified above, socialism requires not merely a population willing to preserve liberal freedoms but institutions able to defend liberty. This is almost certainly an inherent problem in socialist arrangements. History certainly attests to it. Administering a collectively owned economy requires extensive bureaucratic authority over consumption, distribution, and production. Such authority inevitably concentrates power. When the same institutions that govern political life also exercise broad control over economic life, they acquire the means to reward conformity and penalize dissent.

Liberal rights depend not only on good intentions but on limiting the concentration of power itself. Government control over consumption, distribution, and production is a necessary entailment of socialist arrangements. I trust you see the problem. After all, the goal of socialist arrangements is substantive equality, not just formal equality. This is at least the ostensible reason individuals advocate for socialism. Let’s be charitable and take them at their word. This is the problem: since discipline, effort, and talents are unequally distributed across the human population, facts personal liberty affirms, those who are more industrious must meet the needs of those who are not, and this necessarily intrudes into the personal liberty space.

It is no secret that I used to advocate for socialism. Socialism tugged at my sense of fairness. Inequality seemed to me an injustice. But after considering history and turning to reason, it became obvious to me that socialism inevitably restricts individual liberty and personal autonomy. My capacity to rationalize the experience of those who suffered under Soviet communism was limited by my devotion to personal autonomy. One chooses not for himself under socialism, but others choose for him, and those who make the choices do not always have his best interests in mind. In fact, they usually don’t. More often, they have their interest in mind, which socialism allows them to lord over the formerly free man.

As I argued recently, we might say that inequality is the price we pay for freedom. However, this makes inequality sound as if it is always a bad thing. If inequality is the result of freedom, and that result comes with progress and more opportunities for individuals to rise and self-actualize, then inequality is rather an entailment of liberty. At the same time, it serves as liberty’s metric. Given the unequal distribution of ambition, discipline, and talents, equality of outcome cannot be expected in a free society. Yet ambition can be inspired, discipline can be learned, and talents can be developed. Those who rise serve as models for others who also may wish to rise. By contrast, those who promote dependency on others model attitudes and behavior that the ambitious know to avoid. The more freedom, the more inequality, because freedom allows competition in which there are winners and losers, the result of variation in ambition, discipline, and talents. 

To illustrate this, I recommend Kurt Vonnegut, Jr’s 1961 “Harrison Bergeron.” In this very short story, Vonnegut has the reader imagining a utopian society in which those who are faster, smarter, etc., are forced to wear weights on their legs, helmets that disrupt their thinking, etc., so that they’re equal with those who can’t run as fast or who aren’t as smart. To make this work, there’s a bureaucratic office called the Handicapper General, headed by a commissar who determines who needs to be limited, how, and to what degree. I don’t know if this is the case, but “Harrison Bergeron” appears to have been inspired by Frederick Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, published the year before, in which the argument is made that inequality is a measure of the degree of freedom in a society assuming human variation in the traits identified above. I used to not like Hayek’s argument because I was a socialist. Hayek persuaded me. Now I am no longer a socialist. (See The Problem is Not Worker Ownership but Socialism at Scale.)

I was assisted in my escape from socialist sympathy by George Orwell. Even though Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, he condemned state socialist societies that sought, if only ostensibly, substantive equality. In Animal Farm, Orwell renders the initial revolutionary slogan as “All animals are equal.” But the pigs later changed it to “Some animals are more equal than others.” And they unleashed the dogs on those who dissented from the new arrangement.

Those who lived under Soviet rule were much more substantively equal than those living in the West. I used to use this fact to praise the Society Union. I did the deep dive on this in a 2003 article in Nature, Society, and Thought. Soviet citizens had universal housing, access to food and healthcare, etc. This is true. But it is rather beside the point. The Soviet Union was not a free society. That’s the point. The government picked where you lived, what you ate, where you worked, etc. The capitalist class was replaced by an administrative state that managed the proles. Ashamedly, I even downplayed the oppression of the peasantry and the proletariat. I cannot deny this because it is a matter of public record. But I can publicly renounce previous opinions. I am free to do that.

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek explicitly defines liberty as the absence of coercion by other people. He puts the situation of liberty as such: “The state in which a man is not subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another or others.” Coercion occurs when one person forces another to serve the first person’s purposes by threatening harm or leaving him with no reasonable alternative. That last situation is why Hayek supported public support for the aged, the disabled, etc. But not for able-bodied individuals. In Hayek’s view, liberty exists when individuals are generally free to pursue their own plans according to their own knowledge and values. Socialism negates liberty. It takes us down the road to serfdom, as Hayek argued in his 1945 book by the same name.

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MAGA is not so much redefining the Republican Party as it is taking the party back to its roots, which are themselves rooted in the founding principle of the Republic and the American System. The Republican Party lost its way under the neoconservative and neoliberal tendencies that emerged under Bush. Even before then, Nixon was compelled to compromise with the progressive Democrats who controlled Congress and the administrative state. This is why liberals and conservatives in MAGA consider that crowd RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” the donor class embodied today by Thune, Cornyn, McConnell, and their ilk. MAGA aims to return the party to the spirit of Lincoln, deconstruct the unelected administrative state, an unconstitutional fourth branch of government established by progressives and entrenched by the welfare state, and restore the full powers to the Executive, those outlined in Article II of the Constitution.

Democratic socialism, by contrast, represents a radical departure from the Democratic Party in its approach to governance. Even during secession, the Confederate States of America established a government structure that closely resembled the United States under the original Constitution (the chief differences being increased power to the states and preservation of the institution of chattel slavery). Democratic socialists are proposing fundamental changes to the Republic by ending federalism and overthrowing the constitutional system of democratic representation, thereby concentrating power in a centralized state. In short, the democratic socialists are proposing that we abandon the American Republic. 

This would constitute a paradigm shift, in a word, revolution, but not a socialist one in the Orwellian sense. Indeed, as I explained in Monday’s essay, the social democrats are counterrevolutionaries. The democratic socialists, like the party they steer, are backed by transnational corporate power. The globalists seek the end of nation-states and the interstate system, replacing the present world order with a new one governed by transnational corporate entities. The system would constitute a neo-feudalist planetary system where populations are managed by a techocratic system of corporate-run estates administered by a bureaucratic elite. It is in this way that progressives embody the counterrevolutionary spirit.

Stripped of its rhetorical clothing, the globalist vision is more in line with the Stalinist vision of governance (this was Orwell’s concern), only with corporate power behind it. In that sense, it intersects with the ambition of the National Socialists but with the racial hierarchy inverted (see Communism and Fascism—A Distinction Without a Difference?). Something like Communist China is the model the globalists have in mind. This model is necessary to protect the wealth of the corporate elite, which is threatened by historical developments it has brought about, for example, the entailments of artificial intelligence, which will render the majority of the world’s working class redundant, finishing the job started by bureaucratic efficiency, automation, and robotization. This was predicted in the 1960s by the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel. In such a world, he proved, value disappears. The elite need a new system to preserve their privilege.

The pigs changed the slogan because the inequality brought about by the socialist situation was the result of coercion. The pigs did not have more than the other animals because they earned it in an open and competitive system, but because they controlled the political apparatus and awarded themselves privileges, which the dogs secured by force when the new slogans were insufficient to keep the other animals in line. The slogan “Some animals are more equal than others” was designed to rationalize the coercive system that allowed the pigs to claim unearned advantages. Through their control of the political apparatus, they instituted a system not unlike DEI. Socialism became what it condemned: a system of unequal power, where the other animals toiled in the dirt of mediocracy—all for the sake of pigs.

In its report, The Islamic Republic of Iran: A Dangerous Regime, published in December 2020, the US State Department prefaced its analysis with this assessment:

The Islamic Republic of Iran, also known as Iran and previously known as Persia, is a paradox in the Middle East. It is home to a proud and ancient culture whose ideals of freedom and democracy under Cyrus the Great helped form some of the foundations of the U.S. Constitution, while Iran itself has struggled to reach democracy. The Iranian people have been fighting to reach toward freedom throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The Iranian people are largely pro-Western but are brutally subjugated by an anti-Western religious theocracy. Iran is an anomaly in the Middle East as the Iranian people do not speak Arabic, but rather Persian or “Farsi.” While there is diversity in Iran, the majority of the Iranian people are culturally, ethnically, and religiously unique from their surrounding neighbors.

I suggested in 1999, in my first published analytical article (I was in graduate school), that the repurposing of NATO, its original purpose having been rendered moribund by the fall of the Soviet Union eight years earlier, was driven by globalization and the need for transnational corporations to have unfettered access to the resources (including labor) in Eastern Europe. (See The US and NATO in the Balkans. See also History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War.)

I was right about all that. But today I am suggesting that NATO, if it cannot be dissolved, should be repurposed once more, this time for overthrowing the Islamic Republic in Iran and joining Israel and Lebanon in their efforts to root out Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as defending the region by confronting the Houtis and other Islamist terrorist organizations. Our adversaries are not merely waging kinetic war against the West and its allies but also pursuing an economic war, which we experience as higher commodity prices (gas is once again over four dollars a gallon at the US pump).

Alongside this repurposing, Europe must repatriate millions of Muslims from its territories back to their countries of origin (America must do this also). To be sure, European elites want Muslim immigrants to denationalize their countries—and immigrants generally to undermine the proletariat)—but some are, I am certain, fearful of what would happen domestically if Islamism is confronted in the MENA and Central Asian spaces, namely a rise in Islamic terrorism on their shores.

This is a rational concern, since Islamic terrorism is already a problem in Europe, and tackling the Islamist problem in MENA and Central Asia will result in more terrorist attacks. However, if Europe re-migrates Muslims simultaneously with attacking Islamism abroad, it will disrupt domestic terrorist networks by removing the threat. The idea here is to put Islamism on its back foot. It does not have the military capability to effectively counterpunch for long—if the forces of NATO, the United States, and the Gulf States unify. And, yes, this requires ground forces. The scale I have in mind is on the order of magnitude of the Allied attack on Nazi Germany.

One big problem in mounting a unified attack on Islamofascism is the Western left, which is all in with Islamism. The Red-Green Alliance is capturing our sense-making institutions (academia, the culture industry, mass media) and even the Democratic Party. What must therefore accompany the project to contain Islamism—analogous to the communist threat during the Cold War—is an internal effort to disorganize the Western left. Central to this task is bolstering the populist-nationalist wing of the liberal revolution, not only to replace globalist elites currently in power, but to galvanize European populations to defend Western Civilization.

One of the tactics the globalists use to demoralize the Western citizenry is to dwell on US casualties in war. The mass media is already blaming US military casualties on an unnecessary war. I hate when soldiers are killed and maimed. I don’t like war. I never have. But sometimes war is necessary, and the tragic entailment of that necessity is the death and wounding of our sons and daughters. This is what soldiers sign up for. The military is right to offer the range of benefits soldiers receive when signing up. But the military is not a jobs or welfare program. Its purpose is to invade countries, break things, and kill people.

Soldiers are warriors who are sometimes called to war. This is one of those times. Either we pay now, or we pay later—and paying later will be much less desirable. Indeed, if we wait, we risk losing everything. Americans need to summon the spirit of the Greatest Generation. The Islamic Republic has been in power now for nearly half a century. The free world has put up with this menace for far too long. It’s time to relegate Islamofascism to the dustbin of history.

Just because a man believes something does not make it true. A man may very well believe he is a woman (only a few deep down, given the degree of delusion required to believe such an obvious fiction). But whether he is a woman is the domain of fact and logic. It follows from the objective definition of “woman,” i.e., an “adult female human,” that if the man is not an adult female human, then he is not a woman.

In symbolic logic, one writes it like this: ¬(B(x, P) ⊢ P). Belief in P does not entail (or make true) P. Put another way, it is not the case that x’s belief in P logically entails (or proves) that P is true.

This is a fundamental point in logic and epistemology: belief is not a truth-preserving operator. “x believes P” is a psychological or subjective “fact” about x; it says nothing about the actual truth value of P. This rejects any implicit rule of the form B(x, P) → P as invalid. The truth value of P is instead in the domain of fact and logic, that is, objective correspondence to reality, including biological definitions and the law of identity: A is A. Determining P requires checking whether the individual satisfies the predicate “adult female human,” not whether they hold the belief B(x, P).

The beauty of logic is that there is no appeal to authority, emotion, or the majority. Stating a truth is a straightforward application of: (1) semantic clarity/definitional reasoning by fixing the meaning of the term “woman” analytically; (2) the law of non-contradiction, which it is held that one cannot both be and not be an adult female human in the same respect, regardless of belief; and (3) rejection of subjectivism/relativism about truth in this domain, i.e., truth here is not indexed to individual belief—it is not the case that P is true for x simply because x believes it.

The claim that a man can be a woman is not an unfalsifiable proposition. Claiming that an individual is a woman is not the same species as the claim that, for example, a man has a soul. I cannot prove that a man does not have such a thing as a soul because, by its very nature, the soul is unprovable. It is not an empirical category but a subjective one. But gender is not like a soul. Gender is an empirical (biological) category against which observable evidence may be posed. The evidence encompasses chromosomes, gametes, and reproductive anatomy.

I have noted before that on many lawns in my neighborhood, often accompanied by the flags of transgender allyship, there is a yard sign that reads: “In this house we believe in science.” Those displaying the sign do not appear to understand that a declared belief in science (and one presumes logic) and a Pride Progress flag are mutually exclusive. One must either believe that a man is a woman because he says he is and, therefore, vacate the meaning of “woman” by reducing it to a tautological definition (like a square is a thing we call a square), or he must believe in science, where definitions mean something and are used to accurately and precisely define the thing under examination.

In an attempt to get around this, the queer movement and the academics and professionals they’ve organized perform a linguistic trick: gender and sex are different things. This deception has many beyond queer circles fumbling. What the truth-defenders must recognize is that what the movement means by gender is the recent construct “gender identity,” which in propaganda reduces to “gender” for rhetorical purposes. This move is designed to transform gender into an unfalsifiable category comparable to a soul. Gender identity doctrine is thus a religious-like belief system. Gender identity is a faith-based belief. As such, it escapes the demands of science. Gender identity is to reproductive physiology/biology what intelligent design is to evolutionary biology.

* * *

If gender is classified as a thing akin to the soul, and therefore the doctrine is a quasi-religious one, there is no rational justification for requiring anybody to accept any claim that assumes gender as such or its entailments if accepted as true. Compelling somebody to use preferred pronouns, or an institution or organization to permit males to participate in female-only activities or enter female-only spaces, is no different from compelling a person, institution, or organization to follow the blasphemy or dietary rules of Islam. Compelling such a thing clearly violates a man’s freedom of conscience and is therefore unconstitutional.

If a man wishes to misgender another man by referring to him as a woman, then he is free to do so. But neither the government nor any public institution may compel a man to follow suit. Any government or public institution that disciplines or terminates the employment of a person who refuses to follow the rules of gender identity doctrine breaks foundational law. Moreover, the government or a public institution that permits men in female-exclusive spaces while women are present in those spaces violates the rights of women. It forces a faith-based belief on all women, whether they believe the thing or not.

While the state cannot compel individuals to act in ways that violate their conscience with respect to beliefs, the state can prevent men from entering female-exclusive spaces because men, as an objective matter, are not women. They have to if women’s rights matter. The state can moreover keep sexual deviants away from children by canceling queer programming and taking down the flags of a transgressive cultural and political project. Indeed, it can abolish the rest of the anti-humanist project—curricula that condition white kids to believe that they are responsible for the crimes of their ancestors, and black kids to believe that white kids are their oppressors, and all the rest of it. For the sake of truth and justice, all of it must go.

President Donald Trump often qualifies his criticisms of progressives by noting that he avoids using the word “progressive” to describe the political left because he considers it an inherently “nice word,” one that implies positive forward movement, instead preferring terms like “communist,” “liberal,” “radical left,” or “socialist” to characterize their ideology. As readers would expect, I disagree with him on the liberal label, but his point has merit; it’s a shame that such a nice word is associated with reactionary and regressive politics.

* * *

Liberalism emerged from the Age of Reason to challenge the cultural, legal, and political systems that had grown up around feudalism. Conservatism was the reactionary movement defending the ancien régime. It is in this period that notions of left-wing and right-wing first appeared. The left sat to the left of the presiding officer. They supported greater political equality, the abolition or limitation of the monarchy, and expanded rights and popular sovereignty. The right sat to the right. They supported the monarchy, the established social order, and the privileges of the Church and the nobility. The left were the revolutionaries. The right, the reactionaries.

Over time, the success of the bourgeois revolution and the institution of republican politics changed sensibilities on the right. The old conservatives died off. The newcomers had to admit that the liberal order was better than the old one. Over time, conservatives incorporated core elements of liberalism into their worldview. The new conservatism emphasizes free-market capitalism and limited government alongside Christian ethics (which liberals had already integrated into their secular worldview). Conservatives and liberals formed a unified front against the communists and socialists, who threatened the liberal order of individualism and private property with their notion of replacing equal treatment with substantive equality and liberty with statism. 

With the rise of corporate personhood and the new aristocracy in the wake of slavocracy’s demise, elites elaborated an administrative state, replacing liberal capitalism with a hierarchical bureaucratic-technocratic order of administrative controls. Elites called this “progressivism” to obscure a counter-revolutionary force defending the new and regressive order of things. The liberation of the people that the Republican Party intended by freeing the slaves and deconstructing the racial separation between black and white workers—to realize the promise of a government of, by, and for the people—was thwarted by the establishment of the corporate state. To be sure, demonstrating its robustness, the bourgeois revolution continued and has been mounting a comeback of late. The new conservative represents today’s revolutionary; he carries forward the founding intent of the American Republic. 

In what may at first blush seem paradoxical, progressives are the present-day manifestation of the old conservatives. The monarchal attitude projected onto the revolutionary by the mob is intended to deceive the masses into obedience to elite command and subjection to unelected authority; the corporation, once subordinate to the king under the monarchy, has replaced the sovereign; the worker has become the subject once more. The socialists, once opposed to this system of concentrated economic power, having sought to replace it with their own, but thwarted many times, joined the progressives in the hope of finding a conduit to power. This is today’s democratic socialist. Today, they steer the Democratic Party.

Having obtained control over the West’s sense-making institutions after the long march through them, progressives and social democrats portray their praxis as a righteous movement representing the least among the people, various oppressed and vulnerable groups past and present—the colonized, poor, the black and brown—, as well as those who step into oppression for status and style (queer people). But the truth is the inverse of this framing. Progressives exploit historically oppressed groups and manufacture new ones to advance the corporate state. The rising that the revolution made possible has an obstacle thrown before it.

Consider the choice of comrades in my righteous arguments to right the image. I advocate for workers having good jobs with good pay, the integrity of the nuclear family and parental rights, protecting the innocence of children by keeping them safe from sexualization, preserving the activites, opportunities, and spaces exclusive to women, nurturing and safe neighborhoods for citizens by maintaing a robust measure of public safety, and defending a shared culture and language where the inheritances of the free nation are enjoyed by its offspring.

The progressive agenda opposes all this. Progressives call for open borders and the presence of illegal aliens in our communities, the practice of multiculturalism and the establishment of identitarian hierarchies, dismantling public safety, substituting government for fathers, idleness and welfare dependency, transgressing child-safeguard boundaries, granting men engaged in sex-deception access to female-only spaces, activities, and opportunities. Progressives endorse the transnational project of managed decline. They even endorse the Islamist project, which seeks to put children, Christians, Jews, and women under the thumb of Sharia.

In their project to return the world to tribalism by undermining the common national culture and deconstructing the individual, progressives pursue a regressive politics—an atavistic reaction to the Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolution it nurtured. The pleasant branding of their worldview is a deception, an Orwellian illusion. The real scene of progress is the liberal conservatism that desires to keep America and the West going. What made the West the leader in human rights and shared prosperity is Enlightenment principles, the two-parent family, and private property. This is where actual forward thinking and action live.

How can a liberal like me be characterized as somebody who doesn’t care about the least among us? I want to see black children born to intact and stable families where the father works and receives a wage that allows him to provide for his wife and children, a masculine role model that raises upright men. I want to see children grow up in nurturing and safe environments wth emotionally available parents, protected from those who seek to sexualize them. I want to see women afforded the opportunities and spaces in which they may develop their capacities and take advantage of what autonomy makes possible. I want to see a strong republic where the liberties and rights of citizens are protected from the ambition of a backwards and totalitarian religion that seeks to fracture Western culture and force Westerners to live under Sharia.

The contrast could not be clearer. The sides today are these: On the one side are the liberals and conservatives who defend the bourgeois revolution. On the other side, the progressives and socialists, counterrevolutionaries who seek an end to the Enlightenment and its entailments: free conscience, thought, speech, and publishing; nuclear families; the institution of private property; and equality before the law (i.e., equal and equitable treatment). Progressivism is reactionary. We see the violence on Western streets—the assassinations, the riots, the intimidation. What is Antifa? The paramilitary arm of progressivism.

A big part of the counterrevolution is portraying the revolutionaries as backwards and regressive. They do this by commanding the nation’s sense-making institutions and deploying the weapon of language contamination. Don’t look at what they say. Look at what they do and have done. They expose children to sexual perversion. They impose male presence on women when and where women are at their most vulnerable, in bathrooms, locker rooms, and domestic abuse shelters. They replace native-born workers with foreign labor. They manage black and brown Americans by making them dependent on public assistance. They raise an administrative-technocratic apparatus above the people, sharply curtailing individual freedom. The debank, deplatform, and censor. They lord their elitism over the working and rural man, mocking the Salt of the Earth. They make a plumber appear as a fool.

Karl Marx told us long ago that, just as you cannot judge a man by what he says but rather judge him by what he does, you cannot judge a historical system by the claims its organic intellectuals make for it (to borrow Antonio Gramsci’s apt concept). One must instead judge historical systems as one could any other system: via objective analysis. I should add to this methodology the vital importance of discernment. As I have emphasized in past essays, it is imperative to work from a moral ontology that puts such judgment beyond the political-ideological frame that reduces everything to elite preference. This is what the Declaration of Independence had in mind when it recognized the unalienable rights of man.

Although I derive my moral ontology from natural law, the ethical epistemology that results from it lands in the same place as that which derives its path from divine command of a special sort. This is Christian ethics, the principled system that guided the men who founded our republic. Philosophers have identified this as deontological liberalism, which is distinct from the utilitarianism reflected in progressive thought and action. In utilitarianism, the means to reach preferred ends—whatever the apparent majority seeks— are not governed by morality. What is more, some ends must never be sought because they are immoral in themselves. Deontological liberalism does not rule out preferences, but rather steers political action towards ends that are objectively beneficial to the people and align with ethical principles. 

We see this in the struggle over election integrity. For progressives, because election integrity threatens their power and thus derails the ends they seek, namely corporate power, population control, and the transgression of protective norms, ends objectively harmful to people, especially the most vulnerable among them, a safe and secure voting system is an affront to the manufactured and pretentious ethics of “social justice.” Progressives do not work from principle because utilitarianism has none. It is a totalitarian praxis that dresses itself in a rhetoric of “fairness,” “kindness,” and “justice.”

This isn’t Orwell’s democratic socialism. It’s the modern-day substantiation of fascism. Left and right have been inverted. Popular confusion reigns.

I posted this on Facebook’s Candace Owens News page yesterday, and the crazies there are—well, you know—going crazy. I confess: I did it to provoke them. It proves my point about the infection among Owens’ supporters that deranges them (see Candace Owens is a Clinically Stupid  Person; Mistaking Our Species Innate Linguistic Capacity for Native  Intelligence). The more they frenzy, the more obvious it is that they’re in the grip of a mass psychogenic illness. I don’t expect to change their minds. My goal is to help the fence-sitters who visit the page find their way out of madness.

The truth of September 10, 2025, is that Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk using a high-powered rifle. The bullet, which fragmented in Kirk’s body, the fragments recovered by the medical examiner at autopsy, entered his neck area and struck a major artery and likely severed his spinal cord based on the amount of blood pouring from his body and his body’s reaction. But for some, this is not what happened. They think Kirk was killed by an exploding microphone. Moreover, they think the Jews were behind it. Now they think I am a shill for Mossad. Perfect.

The facts are so obvious that denying them is highly revealing of the character of mind that lies behind a lot of the problems confronting America today. That I would have to explain that a microphone with sufficient explosive materials to cause a fatal injury would leave severe burn marks, singe hair, tear clothing, and deposit chemical residue is troubling. If this is what had occurred, then we would be able to see it on video, shot from multiple angles, capturing the moment. We do not see this. What we see is consistent with a bullet from a high-powered rifle entering a human body.

The “exploding microphone” theory not only contradicts the autopsy report and the circumstantial, ballistic, and DNA evidence, as well as eyewitness testimony, but also defies basic physical reality. There is no thermal or blast evidence. Forensic analysis and objective review of the event footage show a clear, clean gap between the lethal wound and the collar of the man’s undamaged T-shirt. His shirt was not torn or blackened by an explosive material. Explosive materials leave a distinct chemical trace—sulfur or nitrates. They also leave behind all the things I described in the previous paragraph.

Moreover, the sound of a rifle being fired is clearly audible on cellphone recordings. Moreover, hundreds of witnesses testify to hearing it. Video from multiple cameras captures Robinson on the roof from where the rifle was fired. The rifle was recovered and identified as Robinson’s grandfather’s rifle, which was in Robinson’s possession. Robinson confesses to having shot Kirk. His lover testifies to his confession. Robinson’s own family admits Tyler killed Kirk.

The “rigged mic” narrative relies on slow-motion footage of Kirk’s shirt rippling from the acoustic shockwave associated with a projectile fired from a rifle. Head to the woods, put a T-shirt on a plasticine torso, and fire a bullet into it with a high-powered rifle. Video it. Slow down the video. Then admit to what you see. Explosives don’t work that way. Bullets do. Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk using a high-powered rifle. Metaphysical certitude of this conclusion: 100 percent. Denying the reality of this event is a sign of madness.

That so many people believe a narrative so obviously false is indeed troubling. This does not come without generalized effects. Any good and decent society depends on people willing to accept what is obviously true. If it were one or two cranks who thought Kirk was killed by an exploding microphone, then I would not be so troubled. Those who believe the Earth is flat may be stubborn, even obnoxious, but they are few in number. But it appears that the number of people who believe the rigged mic theory is much greater than a few. The number should be zero.

This is where we are, dear reader. On one side of the political continuum, there is a large group of people who believe that humans can change genders. On the other side, we have a large group of people who believe Jews killed Charlie Kirk using an exploding microphone. The rational center that the good and decent people occupy is encircled by delusional people to their left and right. That’s what’s so troubling. I don’t know what to do about it, but admitting the problem is an important step in figuring out the solution