freedom and reason

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.

* * *

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

On Facebook yesterday, before Donald Trump’s primetime speech, I told my friends and acquaintances that Norm Eisen and Marc Elias are leading operatives for the corporate state. I asked them to keep this in mind as they navigated media framing of the intelligence showing that the 2020 election was rigged. The corporate state is in a full panic, I told them, because they know what they did.

I reminded them that the media turns to figures like Eisen and Elias to “substantiate” its claim that election rigging is “false,” “unfounded,” and “debunked.” The technique is what is known as “prebunking.” Prebunking works because repeated exposure to a statement asserted as truth makes people more likely to believe it is true, even when there is no new evidence supporting it—or even when it’s false. Cognitive scientists call the “illusory truth effect.”

The corporate media is the propaganda apparatus of the transnational elite. It weaponizes cognitive science to manipulate the public mind. Cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky, the Copernicus of linguistics, demonstrated this decades ago in his works Manufacturing Consent and Necessarily Illusions.

A professor at MIT, Chomsky broke ranks to expose the truth about how the elite lead the masses by the ring that public education pushes through the noses of our youth. As Chomsky put it, “Education is a system of imposed ignorance.” Institutional education prioritizes compliance and conformity over critical thinking, effectively conditioning students to accept the status quo rather than question it.

* * *

Trump delivered his speech last night and contained several bombshells. As expected, the media is misleading the public on what the President said and what the evidence shows. For example, Democratic Senator from Virginia Mark Warner appeared on MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) this morning to tell the audience that the voter files that China hacked, 220 million of them (far more than the number of voters currently registered to vote), was no big deal because that information is available to the public.

That is a lie. The information in voter files that the public can legally obtain does not contain all the information that’s in those files. The information beyond what is publicly obtainable includes data that can be used to hijack votes and change voter registration status. The data China hacked gave our adversary access to information neither you nor I can legally obtain, information China can use to rig elections by showing that persons have already voted or that they are not eligible to vote. This happened in several states (Georgia, most notoriously). Accused of having already voted or of not being properly registered, voters had to fill out provisional ballots that were never counted. It also allowed China to manufacture mail-in votes, which, as we all know, swayed the 2020 election.

Right now CNN has person after person claiming that China doesn't interfere in our elections.

Apparently they don't watch CNN.

2024. CNN does a segment on Chinese election interference with Tony Blinken.

This is CNN. pic.twitter.com/T89Bm9Rjxh

— MAZE (@mazemoore) July 17, 2026

What’s more, the implication that it’s no big deal that China hacked voter files downplays the threat Chinese hacking presents to the security of US elections. Why would a US Senator downplay that fact? Why does Senator Warner feel safe in appearing before the public and saying this? Whether that information is public or not, it does not change the very real national security threat of a foreign government hacking our election system. Senator Warner is effectively working with a foreign adversary to downplay the significance of election hacking. This makes Mark Warner, for all intents and purposes, a Chinese agent. He’s not the only one. It appears that several other senators knew this when the President didn’t. The Trump Administration is just now discovering what others already knew. That is a scandal.

2019. Eric Swalwell says that Russia and many other countries have the capability to change vote totals during our elections.

"The intelligence communities, they understand the risk."

From 2016 to 2020, CNN aired many segments with politicians making similar claims about the… pic.twitter.com/pzKBzLPeyQ

— MAZE (@mazemoore) July 17, 2026

When Russia was accused of hacking the US election, it was a five-alarm fire. Trump was accused of being Putin’s stooge, and Democrats claimed the 2016 election was stolen. I am not imagining this. Democrats were all over the media before and after 2016, explicitly making this accusation. Video clips of Democrats saying that Russia hacked our election and stole the 2016 election abound on social media. But China hacks our system, and it’s no big deal. Indeed, one is paranoid and spreading conspiracy theories when they talk about China’s involvement in the 2020 election. A bombshell is reframed as a dud. And tens of millions of Americans go along with this framing.

The media is downplaying a related bombshell by omitting another revelation in Donald Trump’s speech last night: that an internal chat log featuring Nikki Floris, a former high-ranking FBI official, shortly before or shortly after the 2020 election, based on the context, bragged that unelected intelligence officials were operating a “shadow government” to massage and suppress intelligence about Chinese interference. This is why Trump was in the dark about the role China played in his 2020 election loss. He was kept out of the loop so that he would not act to secure the 2020 election.

This fact undercuts the prebunking narrative that it was not possible that 2020 was stolen because Trump was president and therefore in charge of the intelligence agencies. The reality is that he was not effectively in charge of the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence services. Intelligence agencies were working against him and effectively at the behest of the Democratic Party. The deep state was keeping from Trump intelligence vital to election integrity and national security. This proves the existence of the deep state. This is a damning revelation.

The deep state was doing a great deal more than this. For example, in 2016, they worked from two Presidential Daily Briefings, the most important report of intelligence assessments the president receives: one version showing President-Elect Trump omitting vital intelligence assessments; the other presented to President Barack Obama containing those assessments, most crucially that there was no compelling evidence that Russia hacked the 2016 election.

Moreover, in 2020, more than fifty intelligent agents and officials published an open letter, widely circulated by the media, suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” to obscure the evidence it contained that indicated Biden’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party and the corrupt government of Ukraine. Legacy and cable media networks, as well as social media platforms, censored posts and stories about the laptop. They even censored the oldest newspaper in America (founded by Alexander Hamilton), the New York Post’s reporting on the laptop. They deplatformed the War Room and other alternative media outlets that covered the story.

The prebunking operation and the subsequent omission of the admission of a shadow government operating to keep Trump in the dark are designed to deny the existence of a deep state that works independently of the presidency, and in this case, against Donald Trump. These aren’t “his intelligence services.” Any observer who knows about how the CIA and other intelligence agencies operate knows they work independently of the president unless the president specifically appoints loyalists to leadership—and even then, there are rogue elements working at the heart of these agencies. This is why there is so much concern over whether a nominee is an established intelligence asset. These services do not want outside actors leading their agencies.

If this were a Democrat president, the media would be all over the fact that some right-winger in the intelligence services, conspiring with other right-wingers, was keeping information from an incumbent president up for reelection. We would never hear the end of this if this had occurred under a Democratic president. The right would be accused of attempting to take out a president or presidential candidate. But because it’s Trump, that fact must be obscured, omitted from the reporting, and any whiff of it debunked as a “conspiracy theory.” The reaction of the media confirms what Trump is saying, and what those of us who study US intelligence services have been saying for years, that there is a permanent establishment in Washington that is working at cross-purposes with administrations they do not like, thwarting the will of the people and undermining the legitimacy of a duly elected president of the United States.

The denial of a permanent clandestine establishment in the context of a narrative that Trump is attempting to sow doubt about the integrity of the US election system goes to the greater narrative that Trump is an authoritarian who represents a unique threat to democracy. But the real threat to American democracy is a shadow government that effectively—if not directly—works with a foreign adversary to rig our elections. What is not in doubt is that the shadow government works with the Democratic Party to obtain and hold power and administrative control over the American people.

We also know that the Chinese Communist Party paid journalists to write negative stories about Trump. Remember all the hysteria of RT and other Russian news services and Americans on their payrolls? But American journalists don’t need our adversaries to bankroll their propaganda. Operation Mockingbird, a CIA propaganda construct established during the Cold War (back in 1948), has long organized the mainstream media. For those of you who do know about this, Operation Mockingbird recruited American editors and journalists to manipulate domestic news and disseminate propaganda. The existence of the program emerged from 1970s congressional investigations revealing the CIA’s extensive, covert infiltration of major media organizations. Its existence is a documented fact. The CIA used the same approach in developing the Trust and Safety regimes in the social media space. This is the conduit through which the Biden Administration worked with Twitter and other platforms to censor information and deplatform profiles disseminating information contrary to the aims of the corporate state. The deep state is not just a government entity. It also exists in the private sector.

Our democracy was hijacked by the deep state a long time ago. The media’s power to frame and manufacture information and the deep state’s control of the legacy media explain why tens of millions of Americans believe that Trump represents a unique threat to American democracy. This narrative allows the corporate state to advance the denationalization project and the managed decline of the American Republic. Considering these facts, it is astonishing that Donald Trump prevailed in the 2016 and 2024 elections. Imagine this apparatus didn’t exist. Trump would likely not only have won in landslides in 2016 and 2020, but he’d likely be the most popular president in our lifetimes. Instead, the population has been infected with a psychogenic mind virus. TDS is a result of the infection. This lies behind the repeated attempts on a president’s life. It has caused individuals to become alienated from their own family members.

My optimistic side has me warning you that we almost lost our country, and that Trump came in the nick of time, a figure not unlike Cincinnatus, who left his farm to don the senatorial toga and save the Roman Republic. Similar figures have appeared in American history. George Washington is the most obvious analogue. But the pessimistic side of me believes that the country was lost a long time ago with the establishment of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, created by the stroke of Democratic President Harry Truman’s pen in 1947. President Dwight Eisenhower was terrified of the apparatus, obliquely warning the country about the peril of concentrated power in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. This apparatus almost certainly engineered President John Kennedy’s demise. Its hand is apparent in many other events that have shaped our lives over the decades.

* * *

I also told my Facebook audience before the speech that the establishment wasfreaking out because I understood that Trump was set to announce that Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia were illegitimately elected due to massive election fraud, following an FBI investigation into Fulton County in 2020. Now we know why the FBI was in Fulton County, I suggested. Tulsi Gabbard, former director of ODNI, was there because it appears there was foreign interference in the election. I had heard that it was China. That turned out to be true.

But Trump did not deliver the goods on Ossoff and Warnock, perhaps to make their pre-speech hysteria appear hyperbolic. Whatever the reason, if Ossoff and Warnock were fraudulently elected (and more information is coming out), then it is almost certain Trump was denied Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in 2020. Other problematic states are Arizona (+11 electoral votes), Wisconsin (+10), and Nevada (+6). Trump lost those states by 10,457, 20,682, and 33,596 votes, respectively. All those states were fraught with problems. Remember the hockey stick? If you ask AI to give you a path to victory, it will note these four states. It could pick any state, but it picks those four. Chance? No chance.

This is why David Rohde came out on MS NOW and tried to get ahead of the story with information leaked to him by somebody inside US intelligence, which now appears to have been a misdirection play. Rohde’s framed the intelligence he received as “disinformation.” But what Rohde wound up doing was confirming that US intelligence services uncovered massive fraud in the 2020 election. Was he set up? Steve Bannon put Rohde’s ravings on a loop on War Room. Meanwhile, Democrats were desperately trying to make it appear as if the intelligence services work for Donald Trump, a claim that anybody who knows anything about the deep state’s loathing of Trump is absurd on its face.

The problem is that Trump won in 2024, and now he has access to the intelligence the Biden Administration withheld during that husk of a man’s presidency (one of the most crooked men in American history). Not only is intelligence on election rigging coming out, but the Epstein files were also released, showing that Trump was not part of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. The Biden Administration sat on those files, too, because they knew they debunked the conspiracy theory. Indeed, Trump played a role in exposing Epstein. That’s why Epstein tried to keep him from winning the presidency.

Democrats fought tooth and nail to keep Trump from returning to the White House because they knew what he would find there. Biden’s cronies hid information in secret rooms full of burn bags. Trump told America about the burn bags last night. The FBI, under new leadership, turned its offices upside down and found it. Fullton County tried to keep the election records from Trump. FBI went there and retrieved it. There is probably a lot more that was destroyed, but what the FBI obtained appears damning.

All the lawfare, lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the fake felony convictions, the E. Jean Carroll farce—even two assassination attempts—none of it worked to derail the Trump Train. And January 6? The police riot looks engineered to stop the challenging of state certifications. Democrats changed the Electoral Count Act in the dead of night to ensure that doesn’t happen again. Now they pivot to the conspiracy theory that the intelligence is cooked by Trump’s people.

I was mocked for saying all this in 2020. But I was right. I watched the vote counts flip in the early mornings. I understand statistical probability. I knew before the election that they were going to steal it because that loathsome snake Marc Elias told the public not to panic over the red wave. A blue wave was coming, he assured progressive media. The blue wave was the mail-in ballots. The machines and media intervention fixed the rest. That’s how Biden got 81 million votes, an absurd number on the face of it. That statistic alone told us the election was stolen. It insults my intelligence to peddle that nonsense as truth. They overshot a realistic number because Trump wound up winning ten million more votes than in 2016. They had to keep counting to overcome Trump in those four states.

* * *

I will leave you with this note. I think you will find this interesting. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Barack Obama worked for Business International Corporation in New York City, a firm catering to multinational corporations. Congressional investigations during the 1970s revealed that BIC’s co-founder, Eldridge Haynes, worked closely with the CIA to provide cover for its agents and projects. Remember how Obama came from nowhere after an unremarkable career as a lawyer? He didn’t come from nowhere. I didn’t vote for him in either 2008 or 2012. Now you know why.

I am by nature even-keel, but these arguments about citizens committing crimes at higher rates than immigrants and, more generally, the claim that immigrants don’t contribute to the crime problem in America drive me up a wall. The loathing for our brothers and sisters in America that makes people prefer strangers over them has many people believing ridiculous things. Anti-American indoctrination in multiculturalism and the pathological humanitarianism associated with it derange our fellow citizens. We see a similar madness in European states. This is the result of transnationalist programming. Canadian psychologist Gad Saad calls this suicidal empathy. He’s right. Suicidal empathy is leading the West down a destructive path.

Joblessness is one of the strongest predictors of crime. When cheap foreign labor displaces native-born workers, there is a greater likelihood that the native born will engage in crime than the foreign workers who took their jobs. This expectation brackets the cultural differences that make some groups more criminogenic than others (ceteris paribus). I will come to that problem of culture in a moment. But for now, keeping that bracket place, and intuitively grasping the association between joblessness and crime (which decades of cross-sectional and longitudinal research repeatedly confirms), how do people not see that deporting immigrants and letting the native born have their jobs back would reduce the likelihood of crime among native born Americans? The same is true with the practice of corporations exporting American jobs to the Third World. Reshoring manufacturing and returning those jobs to Americans will reduce crime.

What is more, unemployment affects marriage, which is another key variable in predicting crime over the life course. In their landmark 1993 book, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life, criminologists Robert Sampson and John Laub found that key turning points—such as stable employment and marriage —redirect even high-risk individuals away from crime by strengthening their ties to conventional society. These turning points intersect: unstable labor markets complicate long-term relationships; unstable relationships produce offspring with poor labor force attachment over the life course. Work and marriage are essential to healthy communities—and to reducing crime and violence.

When people say immigrants don’t contribute to the crime problem because they offend at lower rates than the native born, they have been conditioned to consider only whether the immigrant is engaged in crime—the significance of which they have also been conditioned to downplay (more on that in a moment). What is pushed out of the scope of possible understanding is the obvious: that the presence of immigrants changes the system in such a way that it affects the likelihood that native-born citizens will engage in crime. Thus, whatever crime the immigrant brings with his presence in America (which is considerable—and we must consider his victims), his presence increases crime and other deviant behaviors among the native born by alienating them from stable social bonds that make those behaviors less likely.

Also pushed out of the scope of possible understanding among those trained not to think holistically is the possibility that the rate of crime among children of immigrants converges over time with the crime rates of American natives. If the argument is that those who come here illegally have lower rates of crime than the native born because they bring with them a protective culture, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that, if you let them stay to have children and their children assimilate with America’s criminogenic culture, their criminal offending among their offspring will show similar rates as those of native-born Americans? Indeed, that is what we see, as the above chart clearly demonstrates.

If the argument is that more immigration leads to lower rates of crime overall because immigrants are somehow less prone to crime due to their upbringing, then are advocates of liberal immigration policy suggesting that the immigrant and his children never integrate with the host society? Promotion of multiculturalism and tolerance for the ethnic enclave suggests it.

There is, of course, no reason to suppose that immigrants overall are less crime-prone than the native born; the propensity to commit crime varies across ethnic, racial, and religious groups. There is, moreover, the situation of immigrant presence in the country; the immigrant crime rate is lower because legal immigrants comprise the group with significantly lower crime rates. The direct problem is the illegal immigrant (who has already broken the law by being here). Progressives lump these groups together to make the overall immigrant population look artificially lawful. They do not defend only legal immigrants, those with a lower propensity to commit crime (depending on the immigrant group); they defend illegal immigration, the most crime-prone immigrant type. Because of the problem of displacement identified above, both legal and illegal immigrants indirectly contributed to the native-born crime problem.

Then there is the problem of volume. Rates aside, if we add more people to a population, even if the newcomers commit crimes at a lower rate, the total number of crimes goes up. This prediction is mathematically unavoidable unless the added population commits zero crimes. For example, if citizens, let’s say 300 million people, have a crime rate of 5 per 1,000 or 1.5 million crimes, and illegal immigrants, let’s say 20 million people, have a crime rate of 2 per 1,000 or 40,000 crimes, even though immigrants commit crime at less than half the rate, they still add 40,000 crimes that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t here. Remove the 20 million, and there would be 40,000 fewer crimes. Per capita has its place, but not when it is used to deceive the public.

* * *

The people who talk about the lower crime rates among immigrants, what are they suggesting? Is the solution to the crime problem replacing the native-born population with foreign-born populations? Moreover, it logically follows that deporting US citizens will lower the crime rate. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has suggested this argument: that if the true goal of mass deportation is purely to lower the national crime rate and make communities safer, then logically, the government should be deporting native-born US citizens instead of immigrants, since getting rid of citizens would result in a much larger drop in crime.

Uygur is obviously making a satirical point. But what if he were told that the reason why US citizens have a higher crime rate is that black Americans are so drastically overrepresented in crime statistics that criminal offending among this population alone lies behind that statistic of higher crime among native-born Americans that progressives love to cite? This is the shocking fact Uygur avoids in his rants about immigration: remove black Americans from the calculations, and the native-born per-capita crime rate is drastically reduced, and for some crime, namely, property crime, which is the most common class of crimes in America, reverses the comparison.

I am not suggesting that a progressive like Uygur would suggest we remigrate blacks back to Africa. Of course not. Progressives would never agree to this. But is it not ironic that the population that indirectly suffers the most from immigration—black Americans—is the population Cenk unintentionally leaves out of his attempt at reductio ad absurdum? If he had his druthers, he’d keep all the illegal immigrants at the expense of black Americans.

I don’t want to see black Americans deported, either. Of course not. I want to see immigrants deported and black Americans given back the jobs that were taken from them by globalization and mass immigration. I want policies of economic nationalism so black America can rebuild the family and, with the well-known benefits of work and marriage, reduce the overrepresentation of blacks in crime and violence in America. Unlike progressives, I actually care about the fate of black Americans. Cenk and his ilk don’t really care about them. They don’t really care about the native-born working class in general. Why would they shill for the party of the transnational oligarchy—the Democratic Party—if they cared about working people?

* * *

The fact of overrepresentation of certain groups in violent crime is often met with the rationalization on the left that crime and violence are individual phenomena, and that assigning the problem to groups is racist. Ironic, given that progressives think in terms of groups and identity. The purpose of selective rationalization is to disrupt recognition that violent crime roots in cultural and subcultural differences to keep the flow of immigrants coming. The reality is that not all cultures are the same. Moreover, cultures that are out of place don’t operate the same way they do in their places of origin. They are invasive. Immigrants who do not assimilate with the host culture are more likely to transgress the host culture’s normative rules in a myriad of ways. How could it be any other way?

I have taken great pains to explain that multiracialism and multiculturalism are entirely different animals. The West has managed racial diversity fairly well. The United States record of multiracialism is especially praiseworthy. Over ninety percent of blacks in America are descendants of the original slave population, and they have enjoyed equal rights everywhere in America for more than sixty years. Moreover, many Asian populations have integrated with American society.

Multiculturalism, by contrast, is not just an abject failure; it is an ideology designed to disintegrate nations. Some cultures are incompatible with the West, chiefly Islamic fundamentalism and the attitudes prevalent among MENA and some Asian populations. This is obvious in the overrepresentation of members of these cultures in violent crime. Just answer this question: which foreign-born groups and their offspring are overrepresented in the crime of rape across Europe? The answer is so obvious that the question becomes rhetorical.

The solution to crime and violence is not found in expansive law enforcement alone. As a liberal, I would much rather see less crime and violence in part because it makes an expansive law enforcement apparatus less necessary. America annually spends hundreds of billions on its criminal justice system. Today, the number of incarcerated individuals approaches two million, with millions more on probation and parole. The number of Americans with felony convictions is compounding every year. Nor is the solution found in censoring speech or obscuring the statistics that warn the public about the demographics of crime, or in defining deviance down, as sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan so aptly puts the problem of growing tolerance for deviance. Since we all agree that it would be wrong to deport native-born groups in America, a major piece of the solution to the problem of crime is ultimately found in immigration restrictions and remigration.

* * *

Democratic talking points about immigration reveal a deep problem with that party and the progressive left (the democratic socialist) attached to its hip. But the party is not the sole problem. The other major group that wants immigrants is those industries that exploit cheap foreign labor. They want immigrants, legal and illegal, because immigrants represent superexploitable pools of labor—across labor-intensive and capital-intensive sectors—that drive down the wages of native workers by expanding the labor supply and, moreover, disrupting worker consciousness and politics by disorganizing communities and disintegrating the nation.

Why do so many Americans still believe the Democrats represent working people when the party is working with corporations at cross-purposes with the cultural and material interests of proletarian workers? This allegiance demonstrates the power of ideology. From the perspective of ordinary working-class communities—black, brown, white, and yellow—the arguments progressives use to sell mass immigration make no sense. Mass immigration will not shore up entitlements. Immigrants include old people, single mothers, and unhealthy people. Healthy immigrants are human beings who grow old and get sick. And have babies. All this burdens public infrastructure and resources. Immigrants take jobs from the native-born and drive down their wages, transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from the working class to the corporate class annually.

The United States is suffering its sharpest rise in poverty in more than 50 years. Why on earth would any person beyond the Democrats who want votes and corporations that seek profit think it is a good idea to add more people to the poverty rolls? There are more than seven million unemployed Americans in the United States—and this only counts those who are looking for work. Working families don’t need more foreign workers competing with husbands, wives, sons, and daughters looking for work. Americans need jobs to feed their families and stabilize their neighborhoods.

The progressive left position on immigration enables the superexploitation of labor. It is harmful to the interests of working-class Americans. It is criminogenic. The media didn’t report this, but during the period when millions were flowing across our borders under Joe Biden, the country experienced a violent crime wave across urban America, exacerbated by depolicing and other progressive criminal justice policies. President Trump is reversing the trends, but if Democrats regain power in Congress, the progress his administration has made will be reversed.

Immigration is politically and socially disorganizing. It disempowers working-class Americans. It burdens public services and infrastructure. It endangers the health, safety, and well-being of children and women on both sides of the border. The only thing that recommends it is cheap labor for corporations and votes for Democrats—and neither of those things is in the interests of working-class Americans.

Call your representatives and senators and demand that they stand with American working-class families by supporting CBP and ICE. Encourage the Trump Administration to ramp up deportations. Demand that the government put its energies into strengthening our communities and our nation by investing in education, job training, and infrastructure, and reshoring industry in America that hires Americans. Tell them to put Americans first.

* * *

I have written numerous articles on the problem of immigration. I won’t list them all here, but here are five (stretching back several years) that seem most relevant: The Problem of Immigrant Crime and Its Apologists; The Project to Disorder America: More on the Problem of Immigrant Crime and Its Apologists; The Crime of Illegally Entering the United States; Obscuring the Crime-Immigration Connection; What is the Relationship of Immigration to Crime?

You know the myth of the zombie. A zombie is a reanimated corpse that lacks consciousness and acts through compulsion or external control. In some tellings, a conjurer hijacks the central nervous system of the corpse and uses it to realize dark and evil aims. 

The lies progressives tell are legion, but few are as harmful to American citizens as the ones told about crime and immigration control. We call these “zombie lies” because no matter how many times they’re killed by truth, they’re reanimated by progressives and sent back out to hijack the brains of the living and direct them to speak and act in ways that disrupt a necessary function of good government, namely public safety and national integrity.

The persistence of these lies betrays their political function. For numerous untoward reasons, progressives strive to keep—their proneness to involvement in crime and violence notwithstanding—foreign-born populations in America. And for those native-born populations overrepresented in crime and violence, progressives call forth the zombies to obscure the record of their social policies: the perpetuation of conditions that exacerbate the crime and violence that plague our cities, foremost among them family disintegration and joblessness. 

It is therefore necessary to periodically remind Americans that the facts that debunk these lies are already out there. Concerned citizens such as yours truly have killed them many times, only to see them reanimated to stalk the countryside once more. But we remain committed zombie killers, and so we will kill them again. And again.

* * *

It remains true that there is no “systemic racism” in lethal police-civilian encounters. The public needs periodic reminders of this truth. Black Lives Matter was founded on the zombie lie that police officers are more likely to kill black men because of racial bias. A related lie is that many of these deaths involve unarmed black men. Facts and scientific reasoning have debunked these lies.

To take the related lie first, the reality is that around 95 percent of people killed by police had a weapon. However, it must be clarified that being “unarmed” does not necessarily make a man less lethal. “Personal weapons,” i.e., hands and feet, kill more Americans every year than all rifles combined.

To address the other lie, around half of all men killed by the police are white, while less than a quarter of those killed by the police are black. Because blacks are roughly 13 percent of the population, they are around 2-3 times more likely to be killed by the police. To put this another way, blacks are overrepresented in police shootings relative to their population size. However, black men are disproportionately involved in crimes that put them in situations where police encounters are more likely.

In other words, police do not disproportionately kill black men when benchmarks and situational factors are included in modeling variance in the dependent variable. In fact, in some studies, white males are more likely to be killed by police when these variables are entered into analysis. Would we say there is systemic racism against whites in America? Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? That’s because it is.

Think about it this way: Around 95 percent of those killed by police are male. Is this because of “systemic sexism”? No. Obviously. The actual reason is that males are drastically overrepresented in situations that expose them to violent encounters with the police. Nobody has to tell you that. You already know that males engage in violence more than women. It is a fact of natural history.

The persistent beliefs that the police kill black men at a higher per capita rate than white men and that a significant number of such fatalities involve unarmed black men are zombie lies. These claims are not true.

Why do these lies persist? Because progressives lie to their audience. The corporate media assist them in the lie by not telling the public the truth. During the 2020 insurrection that killed dozens of civilians and caused billions of dollars in property damage, the media knew the claims driving the violence were false. They never debunked the zombie lies. Instead, they told the public that the mobs on our streets were “mostly peaceful.”

The Democratic Party played an essential role in pushing the false narrative. The Party lies like a psychopath. Indeed, the Party is psychopathic. It lies about everything.

* * *

Independent databases typically record about 1,000–1,300+ deaths per year at the hands of police. This is for recent years. One compiled dataset reported 1,314 police-related fatalities in 2025. The vast majority of these fatalities are classified as “justifiable homicide.” The exact number of unjustified homicides is difficult to pin down, but we know that it is a small proportion of the total number of fatalities at the hands of police.

The best available estimate of police-civilian encounters (counting people who have at least one contact with police, not every individual verbal exchange) is approximately 50 million police-civilian contacts per year. This is according to the Bureau of Justice.

Should we stop enforcing the law because a small proportion of lethal police-civilian encounters are unjustified? Depolicing increases crime and violence, so it would not be rational to sharply restrict or abolish the police. Crime and violence in America are real problems. Secure communities demand police presence. It is a right to expect safe neighborhoods where people can go about their lives without having to fear victimization.

Police stop active shooters, rescue people from violent attacks, prevent suicides, perform emergency medical aid, and intervene in domestic violence. More generally, studies of policing find that increases in police presence are associated with reductions in crime, especially violent crime. Systematic reviews of focused deterrence strategies find meaningful reductions in serious violent crime. Research on hot-spot policing finds reductions in violent crime in targeted areas.

So why is the small number of unjustified homicides in CBP and ICE operations used as an argument for eliminating border enforcement and deportations? CBP and ICE are law enforcement agencies. Illegal aliens not only engage in crime and violence, but their very presence in our country is often a criminal act in itself. CBP and ICE exist to secure our borders and the safety of our neighborhoods.

The reason for calls to abolish ICE is not because there are fatalities at the hands of law enforcement focused on these tasks. The reason is the political-economic project to drive down wages for native workers, disorganize our communities, and change the demographic composition of the United States for electoral advantage and the denationalization project. The safety of the citizenry is sacrificed for corporate and elite needs.

Progressives don’t care about citizens. They have no problem with keeping in America a population involved in crime and violence. They are responsible for the conditions that exacerbate crime and violence in our cities—family disintegration and joblessness, among other things. They care only about power.

Not knowing that thunder is the sound of lightning is not an instance of not knowing everything. Nobody knows everything. Candace Owens knows very little. The problem in this case is not what Candace thinks but how she thinks. A person who has to be told that thunder is the sound of lightning is the last person who should attempt to opine on capital cases. Of course, blowhards blow hard, so let me put it this way: A person who has to be told that thunder is the sound of lightning is the last person you should listen to when it comes to opinions on capital cases—really opinions on anything. If they’re right about something, it is only accidental. (See Candace Owens is a Clinically Stupid Person.)

A big problem for our species is the error of mistaking our innate linguistic capacity for native intelligence. The modern scientific understanding of language is that we evolved that facility relatively independently of the range of intellectual capacity. We can talk because our brains evolved this facility. A person unable to read or make obvious connections can still stand before a group of people and hold forth. They can recite a list of talking points without notes and never lose focus. They may be polished actors who deliver compelling performances, while holding the dumbest opinions on a range of cultural or political issues.

The dumbest people can sound smart because the facility of language is not that strongly correlated with cognitive ability. Inversely, some of the smartest people have trouble communicating. Yet the stupidest people can make arguments that sound compelling—to other stupid people. This is why stupid people with confidence can appear to so many as intelligent: because those people are stupid, too. Civilizations have been degraded and destroyed because of this basic misunderstanding. And because there have always been stupid people.

Serious question @RealCandaceO: did you really not know that thunder came from lightning?

I will admit that I once thought penguins were much bigger than they are.

But did you seriously not know that thunder came from lightning?

It’s possible this was a bit. In which case, so… pic.twitter.com/cvjf0VooyZ

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) July 13, 2026

We see this today on X with people commenting on a post by Viva Frei. Comments on the thread, Frei posted a “serious question” to Candace Owens: “Did you really not know that thunder came from lightning? I will admit that I once thought penguins were much bigger than they are. But did you seriously not know that thunder came from lightning? It’s possible this was a bit. In which case, so be it. Can you confirm?” People are in the thread defending a grown woman who didn’t know thunder was the sound of lightning until she was in her forties. Bless her heart.

The gist of the comments on the thread is that some people were not taught that the sound of lightning is thunder. People don’t have to be taught this. Thunder isn’t like penguins. Penguins don’t run around my neighborhood. Unless I go to a zoo, travel to where penguins live, study the species, or watch videos where men stand among them so I can make a comparison, I have no idea how big those birds are.

This is not a trivial matter. It’s the crux of the Owens situation. That Owens didn’t see the connection between lightning and thunder (words that are almost always paired in speech) and had to be told this explains why she can’t see the fact pattern in the Tyler Robinson case and draw the obvious conclusion. The woman’s thoughts are random happenings. That is the mark of a stupid person; in this case, a stupid person who believes that she alone can decipher the mysteries of the world—even when there is no worldly mystery.

Dan Bongino destroys Candice Owens. https://t.co/meTfU1uwIM

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) July 14, 2026

Nobody bothers to tell kids that thunder is the sound of lightning because almost every kid figures it out on their own—so early in life, in fact, they don’t remember a time when they didn’t know it. That connection is a test of basic intelligence, namely the ability to draw an inference. It’s like knowing why your shin hurts after walking into a coffee table or what causes the tower of blocks your father spent several minutes erecting you push over with feigned astonishment (you little shit).

The ability to see cause and effect is built into most of us. It’s how we survived as a species with so little instinct. It’s why we don’t follow the serpent to our doom like alligator hatchlings who see a reptilian form and think “Momma!” This capacity can only be confused and deranged by ideology and religion—and one needs little intelligence to be confused and deranged by other stupid people. Or evil people. (At the same time, even intelligent people can be confused or deranged.)

When I brought this up at a pool the other day, the initial reaction was one of disbelief because “nobody is that stupid.” Candace Owens is. Then heads shook in amazement when I confirmed that she said it. I was at the pool with smart people. Yet millions of people hear Owens say things like this and nod their heads in agreement.

This is how you can identify the stupid people who walk among us. If a person says, “Candace is right. I didn’t know thunder was the sound of lightning until somebody told me about it,” then you know there is stupidity in your midst. After she announced her stupidity during a podcast, she asked others to tell her whether they also didn’t make the connections in the public chat. Turns out that there were a lot of stupid people in her chat.

There is no use arguing with people this stupid—except for sport. They don’t know they’re stupid because complete sentences spew from the hole where they put their food (and other things). They will never get what you’re saying. They will instead find you cruel, stupid, or part of the conspiracy. This is why I generally deploy the Schopenhauer screen. What’s that? In my essay, The Scourge of the Scold, I tell readers about German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and his approach to engaging with fools. “Logic holds little power against stubborn ignorance. Such disputes waste valuable time,” he argues. This comes with a personal cost: “debating fools diminishes one’s own standing, as true intellectual victory is unattainable when faced with irrationality and pride.” Silence here is not because the wise man has no response; it is because he knows the fool cannot admit or comprehend it. (See also Judgment, Conformity, and Epistemic Distortion.)

There is no cure for this condition. Human attributes lie along a range of variation, and natural selection for our species has been largely derailed by culture. Our Darwinian moments have, to a considerable degree (they still happen from time to time, often to our amusement), been lost to civilization. We now really only evolve with technology, with notable left-behinds. We’re stuck with stupid people, I fear. And the fools won’t stay on the hill. This is why ridicule is such a vital weapon in the arsenal of progress. We can’t reason with them, so we mock and marginalize them.