freedom and reason

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, and the other supposed patriots stuffing themselves into the far-right clown car tell us that Trump walked away from the America First movement. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If by “America First” one means the doctrine associated with the America First Committee (AFC) of 1940–41, then Trump was never an America Firster. A man cannot walk away from something he was never a part of.

The AFC was fundamentally non-interventionist/isolationist: its central purpose was to keep the United States out of World War II. American Firsters opposed Lend-Lease. Supplying Britain risked drawing the United States into war; America could best protect itself by avoiding foreign conflicts and entangling commitments.

We know how that turned out. It was a disaster. Isolationism allowed the Axis Powers to conquer more territory and entrench power. It made it more costly for America when we finally joined the war. Moreover, Pearl Harbor may have never happened if the AFC had been less persuasive. Tens of millions of lives would not have been lost had the US entered the war earlier.

At its peak, the America First Committee had more than 800,000 members. But its reputation was damaged by the antisemitic and pro-fascist rhetoric of some of its prominent figures. Sound familiar? This is what the new crowd represents. Its isolation is coupled with an antipathy towards the Jews.

However, the phrase “America First” has not always meant isolationism. Before the AFC, it conveyed nationalism, economic protection (tariffs, etc.), and American interests over international obligations. Republicans advocated this position in opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s globalism, i.e., the transnational corporate project today in ascendancy. The project’s ideology is reflected in the progressive movement. The AFC hijacked the name for its own purposes.

The original meaning describes Trump. We don’t have to infer this. Trump has put the matter explicitly. He has always maintained that he is “America First” but not isolationist.

Trump’s policies confirm it. He has not withdrawn America from the world. His administration maintains a global military presence. Trump has conducted military operations against ISIS, launched missile strikes against Syria, confronted Iran, continues to operate through NATO, and has repeatedly used American economic power to shape the world.

The Trump administration’s own description of America First emphasizes “direct, robust, and meaningful engagement with the world,” stressing that America will lead in pursuit of its interests. Trump used this phrase during his first address to a joint session of Congress on February 28, 2017.

We might describe Trump’s approach as “transactional nationalism.” The basic idea is that the United States should engage the world when it serves American interests. Alliances, international institutions, traditional diplomatic conventions, or treaties should not dictate those interests.

The President reiterated his philosophy in his January 20, 2025, America First Policy Directive, which instructs the State Department to make American citizens and interests the priority of US foreign policy.

Greene, Massie, and their associates lie to Americans when they say Trump betrayed the principle of putting America first. The far right is America First in the AFC isolationist sense, right down to the antisemitic and pro-fascist rhetoric. We see this in its support for the Islamic Republic of Iran and paranoid conspiracies about Zionist control of US foreign policy.

Those who turned their back on MAGA are the second coming of the America First Committee. The first coming opposed war with fascism because of Jew hatred. The second coming opposes war against Islamofascism for the same reason. Different generation, same stupidity, same danger.

I’m America First in the original meaning of the term. America First is the DNA of the Republican Party and, before that, was expressed by Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay.

Hamilton was fundamentally a commercial nationalist. He believed American economic development required a strong federal government and access to international commerce. He envisioned the United States as a major industrial power. The nation should not remain primarily an exporter of agricultural commodities. The United States should not be an underdeveloped periphery in the world capitalist economy. A great republic should aspire to more than playing a subservient role in the world.

Madison understood that economic independence required military strength. A commercially powerful United States needed a navy able to protect shipping.

Clay believed all this, too. His foreign policy was explicitly nationalist and expansionist. He understood that putting America first meant projecting US hegemony abroad.

What about attitudes towards the Jews? Here’s where it really gets interesting in light of the rise of antisemitism on the right. Hamilton had an unusually favorable attitude toward Jews. Most striking is a manuscript in Hamilton’s own hand, preserved by the American Jewish Historical Society. “The progress of the Jews,” he wrote, “is entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs.”

Hamilton didn’t see Jewish success as the work of conspiracy. Rather, it was the industriousness of Jews and divine providence that made the group so extraordinary. On that last point, he reasoned that Jewish survival over the millennia against great odds must have resulted from divine providence. He argued that the explanation for this is found in the Bible.

In a legal case in which Hamilton defended Jewish witnesses against an explicitly anti-Jewish argument, opposing counsel attempted to discredit the witnesses based on their being Jews. Hamilton responded by invoking Jewish biblical history and insisting that Jews were entitled to exactly the same justice as Christians. In fact, Hamilton argued that the history of Jewish persecution was itself an indictment of religious prejudice.

Hamilton had substantial personal contact with New York’s Jewish community. He represented numerous Jewish merchants and maintained close relationships with members of Shearith Israel.

Hamilton and Clay were America Firsters before the term was coined. When I say I am America First, I mean it in that sense. I reject the politics of those who now claim that name. Greene saw he way out the door. Massie was rejected by voters. In their eyes, Hamilton would be seen as a Jewish stooge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hamilton saw in the Jews what any person free of envy and paranoia sees: a people to be defended and emulated.

Greene and Massie are not really America Firsters. They are isolationists, antisemites, and Islamophiles. We know where those politics take us. In the final analysis, they are un-American. No real patriot should support them.

Women will be sexualized regardless of what they wear. First, because women are sexual beings. Second, since men are also sexual beings, the male gaze is sexualized. Nature engineered men and women that way. Even when fully clothed, men will imagine what the woman looks like naked. It’s not as if clothes make men forget they find women sexually attractive.

So, no, the burqa won’t work because some men find modest dress sexy. Are people unaware that hijab porn exists? Men seek out women in hijabs because they find it sexy. Hijab porn is a popular fetish. The presence of the hijab is not about diminishing sexual thoughts; such extreme forms of modesty are mechanisms to control women by punishing them for not wearing what men and prudish women tell them to.

Why have feminists historically criticized conservative moods that lengthen dresses and sleeves? As I heard it growing up, men and prudes imposed their patriarchal and religious ideas on women during these periods. Then a woman comes along and shows skin— and now progressive women are suddenly conservatives? Is modest dress oppressive or not? Is a sexy, half-dressed woman oppressive or what? Make up your damn minds!

Let’s be honest, Sydney Sweeney is sexy, and some women are jealous. They’re becoming Muslims out of raging jealousy. I am starting to think the Atwood women have a fetish for the Republic of Gilead style. Sorry, girls, most of you aren’t as hot as Sweeney. Get over it. Get over people with more money than you. Etc. We’re not doing the Harrison Bergeron. We’re not living by your superficial moral codes. Stop whining and improve yourself.

Do you even need to? A lot of men like obese women. There’s room for everybody, right? You know, inclusivity. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, amirite? Stop trying to make everyone see the world through your stupid fucking eyes.

And the hypocrisy. Good Lord. If sexualizing women is such a bad thing, then why the sexualizing curricula in public schools? Children are being subjected to lectures and materials that dwell on sexuality—not merely sex education from a public health standpoint, but on who the proper subjects of sexual attraction are and whether children may not be the sex that natural history tells them they are. (If progressives cannot be trusted with sex education, then sex education should not be in public schools. I hate to say that, but sex education turns out to be a Trojan horse for normalizing sexual perversion.)

Of course, Sweeney is loathed by progressives; she is a person who knows she is a woman and uses her sexuality to her benefit. Normal people don’t complain about her sexuality because they like looking at beautiful women. It is perfectly natural for human beings to find the female form interesting.

Look at the great works of art down through history—even in prehistory. We have recovered from across the globe carved Venus figurines with exaggerated breasts, buttocks, and vulvas dating back tens of thousands of years. Our species has always been interested in the female form as a sexual object. Why wouldn’t they be? Women are the source of life. And sex is an amazing experience. It’s where babies come from.

Therein lies the problem. That ancient attitude upholds and perpetuates the normative system progressives are trying to tear down—to drive down fertility and make way for sexual perversions. The project has been highly successful in both regards. It’s a vicious circle. Across the West, the population death spiral is becoming palpable.

Progressives hate normality. They decry the very concept of abnormality—except when applied to the normal. Progressivism inverts the good, projecting valorized deviance onto nondeviant behavior and thoughts. The goal is to make normality abnormal and abnormality normal. The goal is to flip instinct and perception.

Is that not obvious? Look at the way young progressives destroy their bodies. They go out of their way to present as Frankenstein monsters—monsters that, to their minds, are no longer clearly male or female. But normal people can tell the difference even when the attempt to erase it is hideous.

The left hates beauty while declaring that which has been uglified as “brave and beautiful.” The project is to redefine transcultural and transhistorical standards of beauty—and not just for people, but for art and architecture. How is brutalism in architecture a thing? Because the left loathes classical beauty.

The hypocrisy I noted at the top of this post is not universal. From everything I have said, it is perfectly reasonable for an adult woman to be sexually provocative around adult men—and adult women, for that matter. They’re adults. You cannot be a free adult if you are not allowed to express your sexuality.

That’s the problem with Islam and strict modesty rules. Are women compelled to wear the hijab truly free? Of course not. That form of objectification intends to obscure the female form. It is, moreover, permission to rape when the woman is uncovered.

What is unreasonable is for adult men and women to decry sexuality while sexualizing children. The hypocrisy is therefore entirely on the side of those who complain about the sexualization of adults but insist on sexualizing children. Social media used to deplatform those who note this: progressives are groomers. There is no other conclusion. (Finally, we can say this without consequence. That’s progress of a kind. But for how long?)

A society is upside-down when it is okay to sexualize children but not okay to sexualize adults. This is the rot of queer politics, and it has taken us to a very dark place. It’s why queer praxis ultimately resolves in pedophilia. As Detrick Jensen has shown, the origin of postmodernism lies in sexual perversion. Postmodernism is an anarchist philosophy, the roots of which are found in the soil of pedophilia and other forms of sexual deviance. It’s not that no rules rule, but that postmodernist rules rule.

Remember, for postmodernists, there’s no truth except for the “truths” they construct and impose by commandeering culture and seizing institutional power. Progressives embrace postmodernism. Anarchism is a post-humanist politics. It’s all part of a chain—and anarchists will put us in chains if we let them.

That is the paradox of anarchy. It dresses tyranny in freedom rhetoric. It rebrands tyranny as liberation. But at its dark heart, it is nihilistic and misanthropic. Anarchists want us to hate ourselves. That’s why it draws the disordered and self-loathing to the project. If the misfit can’t be happy, then nobody can.

Anarchists are at war with human nature and the normative social relations that sustain it. Any decent human being rejects this. But we have to do more than reject it. We have to make war over it. It won’t go away unless we make it go away. Progressives already believe they’re at war. And they’re right. We have to exercise self-defense.

“Based on all the physical evidence, key witnesses, and what the prosecution presents, I thought it was enough proof that she knew exactly what she was doing and planned it,” Michael Desronvil said in a statement to CBS News.

Desronvil is the lone juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial voting to convict the mother accused of strangling her three children to death with exercise bands. Three cheers for Desronvil. We need men like him to uphold American virtue.

Readers may know that the judge declared a mistrial on September 4 after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict following nearly 40 hours of deliberation. As one anonymous juror characterized the proceedings, “big personalities” attempted to browbeat Desronvil into acquitting Clancy of murder—“not guilty by reason of insanity”—but he wasn’t having any of it.

“I didn’t have any doubts,” Desronvil said. “As I tried to explain different possible theories during deliberation, I kept getting cut off as if I had doubts based on the evidence presented.”

Progressives were going after Desronvil like wolverines until one of the most outspoken jurors revealed that he was a black man. After that revelation, the woke mob had to “sit with that,” as the visibly stunned CBS morning host Gayle King put it. (The oppression hierarchy isn’t always obvious.)

Clancy’s claim that command hallucinations told her to murder her children was a central issue in her trial. The issue was whether these hallucinations negated mens rea, the legal notion of the “guilty mind,” and therefore whether she was responsible for murdering her children. This was the “reasonable doubt” the “big personalities” complained to the judge about.

Clancy is not the first person to claim that a voice in her head commanded her to murder. The “Son of Sam” killer, David Berkowitz, told authorities and reporters that his neighbor, Sam Carr, owned a black Labrador retriever named Harvey. According to Berkowitz, an ancient demon possessed Harvey and, through him, commanded Berkowitz to go out and murder people.

Berkowitz later admitted he lied about Harvey. He told reporters he said that to prepare an insanity defense. Did Clancy do the same thing? How could one know for sure, since the claim of having experienced hallucinations is a subjective phenomenon? Berkowitz lied about it. Why not Clancy?

I’m not disputing that people hallucinate. But the individual claim of experiencing hallucinations is something of an unfalsifiable claim. One should be especially skeptical of the claim when the individual claiming to experience hallucinations is doing so in the context of a murder trial. The incentive to escape prison by claiming insanity seems obvious enough.

Command hallucinations are presumed auditory hallucinations in which a person experiences a voice instructing them to perform a particular action. Psychiatrists insist that command hallucinations are a well-established clinical phenomenon.

Assuming such a thing exists, psychiatrists add nuance: a hallucinatory command does not, by itself, tell us whether the person will act on the command. The problem is not whether people hear commands, but why some obey while others resist.

The appeal to hallucinatory command is a profound epistemological problem. Just as there is no way to know for sure whether a man really believes he is a woman (or that he believes he was abducted by aliens, etc.), there is no objective means of determining whether a person is lying about their hallucinations. But, for the moment, let’s explore the assumption that a person is actually experiencing command hallucinations and see what psychiatry says about the phenomenon.

Granting that hallucinations are real, researchers have found substantial variation in compliance—that is, whether an individual obeys hallucinatory commands. Rejecting the simple stimulus-response model of command hallucinations, psychiatrists insist that compliance is not automatic; if a hallucinated voice tells someone to perform a dangerous act, it does not follow that the person will do so. Those suffering from command hallucinations are more likely to comply when they recognize, regard as real, or have a delusional relationship to the voice. Another key factor is the voice’s power or authority.

In this view, the crucial question is not merely what the voice says but what it means to the person hearing it. The idea is that an affected individual who regards a voice as entitled to obedience, omniscient, powerful, or threatening experiences greater pressure to comply than someone who hears the same words but regards the voice as meaningless, powerless, or unreal.

Given the subjective nature of claims to have experienced command hallucinations, the fact that the claim is not the principal controversy remains troubling. Yet, granting such phenomena, the controversy in forensic psychiatry turns on whether such commands cause criminal behavior.

The distinction has consequences for criminal proceedings. A clinician assessing someone who reports command hallucinations cannot simply ask whether the voice has issued a dangerous instruction and then assume that the individual is likely to obey it. The question becomes: how powerful does the person believe it to be?

Note the language. How do we determine the power of belief? We know belief is powerful. Anybody who’s ever seen a faith healing knows that. We infer that the person believes there’s a god and that the healer is channeling miraculous power through his body. But the person receiving the anointing could be faking his belief. How do we know? We do know the healing is fake.

To understand why this is important, i.e., whether it matters in adjudicating criminal cases, consider the Muslim terrorist who believes that it is his obligation to perform Jihad. He believes his god commands him to perpetrate violence, and that there are rewards that come with his obedience.

Are the rest of us to regard the terrorist’s god as real, or excuse his actions on the grounds of his faith in illusion? How is a person operating on a presumed god’s dictates any different from Berkowitz obeying the commands of the demon speaking through his neighbor’s Labrador retriever? Or a voice in Clancy’s head commanding her to strangle her children to death with exercise bands?

We’ve noted that, according to psychiatry, the perceived power differential between the voice and the person determines whether the person acts on the command. However, this does not prove that perceived power explains every case; rather, it provides evidence against the idea that compliance is simply an involuntary reflex to a hallucinated instruction. Let’s grant psychiatry this much. That means the person who hallucinates a command might resist the command. Are they therefore responsible for their actions? Not if they can’t resist.

Thus, a defendant who claims that a hallucinated voice commanded them to commit a crime raises questions about whether the alleged hallucination actually existed, whether it contributed to the behavior, and what effect the person’s mental state had on their ability to understand or control their actions. That’s a lot to ascertain with any certainty.

No laboratory test can tell us with any certainty that a person actually heard a particular voice at a particular moment. Nor is there a test that determines variable compliance across individuals. How could there be? We cannot know whether a person hears voices or only claims to. It follows that there is always reasonable doubt about whether a person who appears normal is really insane. (If, as the jury foreman claimed, Desronvil said he understood the concept of reasonable doubt, was this what he was talking about?)

Forensic psychiatrists skirt the unfalsifiability problem by appealing to expertise. They examine the individual’s account alongside medical records, observed behavior, psychiatric history, collateral information, and other available evidence. The conclusion is an interpretation based on criteria the profession established—the same crowd that invented gender identity. Professional opinion substitutes for certainty.

The possibility of malingering—intentionally faking or exaggerating mental or physical illness to avoid responsibility—remains a genuine forensic concern, particularly when a defendant has an obvious incentive to portray criminal behavior as the product of psychosis. Another complication is the problem that some patients conceal or deny their command hallucinations during assessment, as might be said in the Berkowitz case (if we assume he wasn’t lying to begin with).

However, psychiatrists insist that the possibility of malingering or denial should not be confused with evidence that command hallucinations are inherently fictitious or unreliable. They will cite substantial clinical and research literature documenting people who experience such hallucinations, sometimes with serious consequences. The forensic problem is therefore evaluating an individual claim, not deciding whether command hallucinations as a category are “real.”

The language of free will introduces another complication. It may be tempting to describe a person who obeys a command hallucination as having lost free will, or to imagine the hallucinated voice as taking control of the person’s body. Although command hallucinations are widely recognized in psychiatry, no comparable consensus exists that hearing a command reliably predicts compliance or that compliance demonstrates the complete loss of voluntary control.

Assuming the voices are real, the free-will question thus becomes whether command hallucinations operate like a mechanical switch that bypasses the person’s entire capacity for decision-making. We’re told the forensic question is better framed in terms of the person’s mental state and its relationship to the criminal act rather than asking whether the person’s “free will” was completely overridden.

As one might imagine, forensic psychiatrists and psychologists disagree about the proper role of free-will concepts in assessing criminal responsibility. Some argue that free will is conceptually important. Others argue that forensic practitioners should avoid the concept because it is not a legal criterion. What then of actus reus, i.e., voluntary action?

Moreover, it introduces metaphysical questions that psychiatric examination cannot resolve. But is that a question for psychiatrists to answer? Is this not instead a matter for the law to determine? How deeply are we prepared to embed neoclassical criminology in criminal procedure?

As we have seen, forensic psychiatry skirts these difficult questions by treating command hallucinations as a phenomenon requiring individualized assessment rather than as a general explanation for behavior in the affected population. Thus, the field separates (1) the existence of a psychiatric phenomenon and (2) its causal significance for a particular criminal act into two separate questions. How is this science?

At any rate, that’s the forensic psychiatric view. I don’t find it convincing. Or particularly relevant. The reader will have noted my skepticism (I went to some lengths to make it obvious while also being charitable). I can put my skepticism bluntly: Even if we suppose command hallucinations are real, what must they be in any given case? Moreover, what does it matter?

After all, Clancy’s thoughts were telling her to do something bad. The voice in her head was her voice. What else could it be? Doesn’t every intentional homicide involve a brain instructing a body to kill somebody? Clancy and her defenders can claim that she was estranged from her own thoughts, but that’s yet another subjective claim.

I understand the desire to see severely mentally ill people somewhere other than prison. Frankly, I don’t care where these people go as long as it’s not among the rest of us. Clancy murdered her own children. If I believe she experienced command hallucinations in the past and that she cannot resist them, then I must assume she may experience them again—and there is no reason to believe she is capable of resisting them in the future. In other words, I must presume she is unsafe around any children for their sake.

There are two kinds of error risk in this situation: a Type I error (false positive) would be keeping Clancy institutionalized when she is no longer mentally ill or dangerous enough to justify continued confinement—an infringement on her liberty and autonomy; a Type II error (false negative) would be releasing her after clinicians or the court conclude that she is sufficiently recovered, when in fact she remains capable of causing serious harm to herself or someone else.

Massachusetts law explicitly recognizes this tension: continued involuntary commitment requires evidence that mental illness creates a likelihood of serious harm, and if that condition no longer exists, the court can order discharge. Clancy could be released into the public. Was there not sufficient evidence that her mental illness caused serious harm at trial? If we assume that she was insane, was that not what led to the deaths of three children?

Committing a Type II error can have extraordinarily severe consequences even when the probability of reoffending is relatively low. A Type I error can mean prolonged deprivation of liberty even when the person poses no longer-term danger. Given these options, risking a Type I error seems the most prudent course. If Desronvil had the same calculus in mind, then he was right to hang the jury and hope for another trial with a jury without “big personalities,” i.e., militant feminists.

The systemic problem is allowing people who commit heinous crimes to be found not guilty by reason of insanity and allowing them to potentially go free. Indeed, if a man hears voices commanding him to kill, then he arguably represents a much greater threat to public safety than the man who is in command of his own thoughts—and we would never acquit the rational man.

Even if we determine that Clancy did not commit the act voluntarily and with malice, we must assume for society’s sake that she remains a continuing threat to public safety. We can never know for sure that she is no longer a danger. I recognize that the truism that past behavior predicts future behavior is truer as a general statistical principle than when applied to an individual. But it’s true enough to risk a Type I error in extreme cases like Clancy’s.

This essay does three things. First, I summarize Eric Hoffer’s thesis in his 1951 book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, which distinguishes those who change their sympathies by falsifying their beliefs based on evidence and logic from those who do so because of psychological needs. Second, I elaborate on William James’s 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, to differentiate two cognitive styles: the “once-born” and the “twice-born.” Third, I illustrate the importance of falsification using two examples. I conclude with reflections on confronting the one-born personality in one’s own journey to enlightenment.

* * *

In 1951, Eric Hoffer published The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. This was Hoffer’s first book. In it, he was less concerned with the specific position individuals hold and more with the psychology underpinning the position. I want to briefly summarize Hoffer’s thesis because it bears on this essay’s subject: revising one’s worldview. The paradigm shift I experienced was not the rapid change Hoffer identifies in his subjects; rather, it was a progressive collapse brought about by facts and a willingness to change my mind in the face of them.

The ordinary, reflective person arrives at beliefs as conclusions: he considers arguments and evidence, reaches a position, and may later change that position if his reasoning or the evidence changes. He can move from progressivism to liberalism (or conservatism) after carefully considering these different positions. The same is true for those who abandon religious belief for other—or even embrace unbelief—because his commitment is ultimately to what he regards as reasonable and true. His beliefs are therefore, at least in principle, provisional and revisable.

The true believer, by contrast, does not primarily embrace a cause because he has reasoned his way to it; the cause satisfies a deeper psychological need—for belonging, certainty, identity, purpose, or escape from dissatisfaction with the self. In this case, the relationship between belief and reasoning is reversed: rather than reasoning leading to a commitment, the commitment organizes the person’s reasoning. The individual asks less often (if ever), “Is this true?” Rather, he asks, “How can I understand the world in terms of my cause?” This starts from the wrong position. It leads to motivated reasoning.

Hoffer was interested in people who move from one ideological extreme to another while retaining the same intensity of commitment, not in those who reason themselves in and out of worldviews. How, Hoffer wondered, can someone passionately believe one doctrine and then passionately embrace its opposite? That depends. If it is a reasoned shift, one based on facts and logic, then the man who changes did so on a rational basis. If it is rapid and without a reasoned process, then psychology becomes the proper subject of study.

Hoffer’s answer is that, for the true believer, the particular doctrine was never the deepest object of commitment. The underlying commitment was to the cause itself and to the psychological experience that the cause provided. Some individuals are predisposed to embrace causes first. Consequently, the ideology can change while the personality structure remains much the same. The person who moves from one mass movement to another has therefore not fundamentally changed; he has simply transferred his need for belonging, identity, and purpose from one cause to another.

Hoffer’s true believer should not be equated simply with a fanatic or an unintelligent person. This is not his argument, even though some true believers are fanatical and stupid. A true believer may be highly intelligent and capable of sophisticated reasoning, but he places his reasoning, such as it is, in the service of a prior commitment. Reason becomes less an instrument for discovering what is true than an instrument for defending and rationalizing what he has already committed himself to. Such a man does not use reasoning to falsify his position. He tends instead to deploy sophistry.

In this sense, Hoffer’s true believer is distinguished not by the particular ideology he holds or even by the intensity with which he holds it, but by a characteristic psychological relationship to ideology: the cause provides the self, and beliefs are organized around the cause or worldview rather than the cause or worldview being the conclusion of independent reasoning. This brings me to the subject of this essay.

* * *

A few days ago, a student working to establish a Turning Point USA chapter (the international organization Charlie Kirk founded to organize young conservatives) on campus emailed me seeking advice. He had read some of my essays and wanted a more detailed explanation. He also sought any suggestions I might have about dialoguing with those with whom he disagreed.

One particular essay, The Lakatosian Turning Point: How I Overcame Progressive Programming, prompted him to ask me how I came to abandon progressivism (which I have always been uncomfortable with), as well as my move from socialism to liberalism. Since I elaborate on my reasons in the essay, I won’t rehash all my answers here. One thing I didn’t include in the email was what might be described as soul-searching. I felt those thoughts were a bit too heady for an email. However, I do want to put them down in today’s essay.

Until I studied the claims of critical race theorists, Palestinian activists, queer advocates, communists, and others, I was sympathetic to them. My sympathies resulted from a worldview I now reject. Explaining its structure would take a lengthy essay (and I have already done that in numerous essays). The point I want to make in this essay is that most people believe the things they do because they rely on a worldview they never examine. I rejected my worldview because I suffered from its contradictions—not just belief against fact, but thoughts that ran contrary to principle. This, I found, distressing. So I sought a way out of the suffering. The more I learned, the more I understood that I wasn’t wrong about a few things; I was wrong about many things. Over time, I came to understand why: my worldview was deeply flawed. To end my suffering, I had to revise it.

In his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the pragmatist philosopher and theologian William James distinguished between the once-born and the twice-born to describe two different ways people experience life and meaning.

The once-born man’s worldview feels natural. He accepts the convictions he has been given without questioning—perhaps superficial questioning here and there—and certainly doesn’t feel a deep need to pursue radical self-transformation. This is understandable; for most people, the one-born life is uncomplicated. Why complicate the matter by interrogating it? Besides, the once-born man is tribal and aware, perhaps, for the most part, subconsciously, that his tribe may judge him harshly for questioning the tribal worldview. He may lose family and friends. He risks his career and livelihood. So he doubles down. He rationalizes the contradictions. He suffers quietly—if he feels he suffers at all.

The twice-born man, by contrast, has experienced a profound doubt or the inadequacy of ordinary life that makes his natural way of seeing the world untenable. It’s not just contradictory beliefs that haunt him, but an unhappiness that compels him to find a way out of crisis. He wants to be happy, and he is willing to pursue it despite knowing the consequences—even knowing that new sources of unhappiness await. For James, such a man undergoes a psychological or spiritual rebirth, arriving at a new outlook that incorporates the reality of suffering rather than simply denying it. In my understanding of James, that includes embracing the truth his worldview kept at bay with a tangle of rationalization.

For James, the twice-born man is not necessarily a man who has merely adopted a new set of doctrines; rather, the crucial feature is a transformation of consciousness. Unlike with Hoffer’s true believer, a different psychology is at work here. The twice-born man has moved from an initial, comprehensive way of experiencing the world, passed through crisis, and emerged on the other side with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.

Sometimes a man need not go through that. Many men are right all along, and they don’t need to study to find out why (though they may wish to). But some do. I was such a man. I think being a scientist and a teacher played a role in self-examination (see Freedom, Control, and the Lessons of Openness in Teaching: A Personal Reflection). Certainly, for me, anyway, the times called for it. The madness of the moment was outstripping my old worldview’s capacity to explain and understand it.

* * *

In this section, I use two examples illustrating the evolution of my thought and politics through falsification and show that it was less a case of simply “changing my mind” than of discovering that I had never subjected parts of my worldview to adequate empirical or historical scrutiny. A person falsifies his beliefs, in this sense, when he stops treating them as established simply because they fit within a larger interpretive framework and instead examines the evidence for them and their entailments. Once those beliefs are examined, contrary evidence can force a revision not merely of the individual belief, but of the worldview that had given the belief its meaning. I have written extensively on both examples on this platform, so I will summarize them here.

The first example is the question of lethal police–civilian encounters. I had accepted, largely uncritically, the interpretation supplied by critical race theory: that racial disparities in police use of lethal force were principally evidence of systemic racial bias in policing. That belief was sufficiently embedded in my worldview that I had not seriously examined the empirical literature that might challenge it. Roland Fryer’s 2017 research forced me to do so. More importantly, I realized that Fryer was not an isolated contemporary dissenting voice: Robert Sampson (in the 1990s) and William Wilbanks (in the 1980s) had reached findings relevant to the question years earlier. My worldview excluded them from consideration. The important realization was not simply that I had been wrong about one empirical proposition. It was that I had mistaken an interpretation for an established fact, failing to examine evidence that was available long before I encountered the argument that eventually changed my mind.

The second example involved my support for the gender identity movement. Here, the problem was not that I encountered a particularly persuasive counterargument; rather, I began a much deeper examination of the history of the concept itself—its intellectual origins, its development within medicine and psychology, and the changing assumptions underlying it—to determine whether I was on the right side of the issue. I discovered that what I had regarded as an obvious and settled understanding of human identity was actually a comparatively recent intellectual and institutional development, involving substantial conceptual changes, unresolved empirical questions, and significant entailments. That historical investigation produced the same unsettling realization as the police research: I had been treating the conclusions of a particular intellectual framework as if they were simply descriptions of reality.

The cumulative effect was consequently much larger than changing my mind about two issues. When beliefs that had functioned as load-bearing premises of a worldview failed under closer examination, other conclusions that depended upon those premises became questionable as well. I therefore began reconsidering the framework itself rather than attempting to preserve it by modifying isolated beliefs. In that sense, the change in my political standpoint was a consequence rather than the cause of the process: I did not begin by deciding to change my politics and then look for arguments to justify doing so; I examined beliefs I had previously held uncritically, found that some could not withstand the examination, and followed the implications of that discovery into a broader reconsideration of my worldview. This led to a change in my politics.

* * *

One can know how much self-transformation scares people by suffering the consequences of becoming a twice-born man. I knew that was coming. But it has been worth it. At least it was for me. For the lifelong conservative, since progressives experience him in no other way, he isn’t particularly controversial. Progressives have written him off already. He’s a known adversary from the enemy tribe. But when one is known as a leftist and walks away from the commitments of the extreme end of the spectrum, he has abandoned his tribe. He is an apostate. He has joined the enemy. From the worldview of the leftist, this means there must be something wrong with the man.

The sense of betrayal can be expressed obnoxiously: the tribe wonders what happened to their man. Some of my former students have expressed this frustration. Some think I was always somebody they didn’t really know; I kept my true thoughts well hidden (which means I was being deceptive). Part of the problem is that they saw what they wanted to see. They projected their own politics onto me. They thought they knew me and were surprised to learn they were wrong. And disappointed. But they weren’t always wrong. I changed. And change is difficult for those who see themselves in you. In their eyes, you are a betrayer. I never considered keeping the paradigm shift to myself. It seemed more important to make known what saved me: a commitment to truth. As an educator, I wanted to show others how they, too, can share this commitment.

Freedom and Reason, which began as a travel blog inspired by my trips to Jordan at the invitation of the United Nations University, has evolved into a platform concerned with many things. One of those is recounting my journey through intellectual and political life. It seems the proper place to talk about how a certain character of mind finds a man not only striving for objectivity, but also confronting the barriers that prevent him from admitting the truth that was staring him in the face all along. Doing this takes a degree of humility, even if writing it down doesn’t sound very humble. But somebody needs to say it. So I will.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Orwell quote captures the Party’s political philosophy and Orwell’s observation that control over historical memory is a form of political power. Orwell understood that the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. If you control what people believe happened in the past, you can shape what they think is possible or legitimate in the future. Orwell writes, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered,” and concludes: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Have you seen this meme?

Those who share this meme as an accurate representation of history are terribly misinformed. They fall for the Party’s historical revisionism. Who is the Party? In Orwell’s dystopia, it was Ingsoc, Newspeak for English Socialism. In contemporary America, it is the Democratic Party. Party members and those who vote for the Party suffer from motivated reasoning. They have been conditioned to resort to motivated reasoning. Their reasoning moves from a worldview they take for granted. This is why, when you challenge their understanding, they either walk away or resort to violence—when they aren’t already resorting to violence to entrench progressive ideology.

Part of the reason why Democrats are so terribly misinformed (and so fascistic) is that progressives dominate the academy and America’s sense-making institutions generally, and use their hegemony to promulgate false historical and political narratives, ones in which Democrats are portrayed as the party that did all the good things Republicans actually did—and Republicans are portrayed as the party that did all of the bad things Democrats actually did. For the most part, the meme is a camera obscura: it inverts the world. Even where it is accurate, it obscures the deeper truth of Big Government.

Like the Party in Orwell’s book, progressives understood at the start of the twentieth century that establishing the technocratic state and negating the free republic necessitated a long march through the institutions. The long march was imperative to transform popular consciousness to prepare the masses to accept their own subjection in the name of “social justice.” That progressives have been able to so thoroughly warp the historical narrative dramatically testifies to the project’s success. Democrats have enjoyed electoral success over the years because so many Americans work from a false worldview.

The truth exposes the meme as Big Brother propaganda. The Republican Party is actually the party of liberalism. As I have shown on this platform, the Party of Lincoln follows Hamiltonian nationalism in spirit. The Republican Party was a coalition of entrepreneurs and free labor that organized to oppose the slavocracy represented by the Democratic Party. The Hamiltonian paradigm is based on the principle of a strong national government capable of protecting the rights of all people regardless of the states in which they dwelled. The Democrats sought a confederacy based on states’ rights—the Articles of Confederation that the US Constitution replaced.

Democrats did not emancipate the slaves. Republicans did that. Why would Republicans be offended by something they accomplished? It is an absurd framing. True history records that the Democrats were the party of the slavocracy. They rebelled against the Union in a bid to keep their slaves. Republicans defeated them militarily and released all their slaves from bondage. Democrats neither granted black people citizenship nor the right of black men to vote. They vehemently opposed citizenship and enfranchisement for blacks. Republicans were the ones who granted blacks citizenship and the right of black men to vote. The Republican Party drafted and passed the Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth.

Democrats did not grant women the right to vote. For the most part, Democrats opposed universal suffrage. Republicans made this an issue in the 1918 election, winning control of both the House and the Senate. Republicans championed the Nineteenth Amendment and secured for women the right to vote at the national level. President Woodrow Wilson was initially reticent. However, after the National Women’s Party picketed the White House, and coming to believe it was important to the war effort, Wilson supported the amendment. Why would Republicans be offended by championing women’s suffrage? They should be offended that Democrats are credited with the good deed.

Republicans also led the way against segregation. Democrats were the party of racial segregation. Democrats filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the Senate. A much larger percentage of Republicans voted for the legislation in both Houses of Congress. Why don’t you know this? The same is true with the Voting Rights Act. Far more Republicans (94 percent, to be exact) than Democrats supported voting rights.

Related to the struggle over civil rights, although this item is not on the list, Democrats opposed anti-lynching legislation. They filibustered anti-lynching legislation when it came through the Senate. In fact, Democrats successfully prevented any anti-lynching legislation from ever becoming law. Is this common knowledge? No, it’s not. I didn’t know this myself until I researched the matter in my mid-thirties in graduate school. I might never have known this fact if the dissertation I was writing had not necessitated clarifying the politics about lynching.

Democrats indeed pushed through a raft of social programs. Some of these programs have benefited Americans, especially elderly citizens. However, an ulterior motive lurked behind the New Deal and the Great Society: a scheme to enlarge the administrative state, establish technocratic control over the population, and entrench progressive ideology. We saw this in the ghettoization of black Americans and the destruction of the black family, which made black women dependent on the government instead of husbands, who were idled by capital migration and white flight and, later, globalization. Progressive Democrats engineered de facto segeregation.

This is why, after Republicans became the party of choice among Southerners (because Southerners desired limited government, and with the dismantling of segregation there was no need to align with Democrats any longer), hardcore Democratic families persisted in the South (especially in Tennessee). Many Southerners who lived through the Great Depression appreciated progressive intervention, such as rural electrification. This was how Democrats maintained the coalition between progressives and segregationists—until the 1964 Civil Rights Act removed the race question and Southerners were free to join the Republican Party en masse.

This is why racial segregation is so much more intense in the North and in urban areas run by progressives than it is in the rural South. Southern whites have always lived around blacks. Segregationist sentiment in the South quickly dissipated after the 1960s. Those of my generation (coming of age in the 1970s) will remember that our high schools were fully racially integrated. In blue cities, blacks are corralled in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods where they are managed by the government. This led black comedian Dick Gregory to quip in the early 1960s, “In the North, they don’t mind how big I get, as long as I don’t get too close.”

The meme’s trick is to distort popular consciousness by confusing labels. True history is very different. The Republican Party is the liberal party (except during the Bush dynasty, in which globalism and neoconservatism aligned with Democratic goals). The Democrats are historically the party of conservatism and progressivism, both of which are illiberal in spirit. Here we must distinguish between old-style conservatism (the feudalist mentality) and modern conservatism, which is really liberalism with traditional Christianity and pro-family sentiment more openly pronounced. Moreover, as I have shown on this platform, progressivism and liberalism are opposites. Progressives oppose the liberal principles of religious liberty, freedom of speech and publishing, and so forth. Modern conservatives embrace these principles.

Do you see the trick? By not telling you that Republicans did all the things that liberals did, the meme manufactures an assumption that liberals are Democrats and Republicans are conservatives. This is a false assumption.

They do this to make you forget or never know that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a Republican. Democrats want to claim Douglass as their own. Douglass was staunchly anti-Democratic Party (I documented this in a recent essay on Freedom and Reason). During the struggle against lynching, W.E.B. Du Bois was a Republican. His comrade, Ida B. Wells, was a Republican. Together they founded the NAACP. Democrats will claim all of these activists. At the time, Democrats might well have lynched them if they could have gotten their hand on them.

Black intellectuals have become Democrats because of a principle of colonial collaboration. This is where tribal elites benefit from aligning with the colonizers’ interests in controlling the subjugated population. This is the essence of identity politics. In black America, this involves making blacks dependent on progressives and keeping them confused about history. As a result, blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, even though voting that way undermines their organic interests in having good jobs, good housing, and integral families. The situation has so corrupted black culture that black men are murdering one another at an astonishing rate.

Lawrence O’Donnell’s dialogue substitutes the word liberal for progressive. O’Donnell is not a liberal. He is a demagogue for the Party seeking to regain the reins of the federal government in November. If the Party succeeds, it will fully resume the project of historical revisionism. If allowed enough time, future generations will find it difficult to recover the truth about the American Republic, even if they know to be curious about it. They won’t remember a time when America was a free country. They may even think that slavery is freedom. And those who return to Plato’s cave to tell them about the reality of the world beyond it—their shapes and voices will be distorted into monstrous forms the prisoners must never believe.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” George Orwell writes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “It was their final, most essential command.” That’s the situation of totalitarian rule. However, the Party can achieve something approximating this rule by portraying the institutions they govern as neutral and objective. This is where we’re at presently in the United States (and the West more broadly). Many of our fellow citizens have fallen for the trick, even though no Ministry of Love tortures them into loving Big Brother. At least not yet.

This situation is what Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci described in his Prison Notebooks as ideological hegemony. Those in power write history from their standpoint and act as if the narrative they socialize is the only or truthful one. They do the same with science. How is it that so many people came to believe that men could be women? How can the progressive prole appeal to academic journals to support such an absurd claim? Because progressives colonized science and corrupted its publications. Queen theory is anti-science. Yet it is portrayed as though it’s science. Doctors perpetrate medical atrocities on its basis. This occurs because elites substitute pseudoscience for science. What has replaced science is scientism (see The Corporate Character of Scientism and embedded links).

You can see the trick when a new power comes around. The new party may reset the dial to truth. Those who lost power depict the reset as ideological. The cry goes up: “The Republican Party is assaulting the truth!” Republicans are the ones revising history—by moving the date of America’s founding from 1619 to 1776 and declaring that gender is binary and immutable. Here, the change is the opposite of revisionism: it is the restoration of truth that comes with taking from those who have controlled the institutions the power they used to radically revise history and corrupt science.

A case in point is Trump’s changes at the Smithsonian. What the panic obscures is that the Smithsonian under progressive rule was never neutral or objective. The Smithsonian has been ideological for a very long time. It has promoted, among other things, critical race theory, portraying the Protestant work ethic as white supremacist design. Progressives redesigned the Smithsonian to advance Party power, attempting to manufacture a new common sense. To a large extent, they have succeeded. America is already so far down the road to Ingsoc that millions of proles think that it’s Trump who’s the historical revisionist. Bobby Kennedy Jr. is the anti-science guy.

The left across the West used Gramsci’s insights to embark on the long march through the institutions. In the United States, even though most Americans reject progressive ideas, these ideas nonetheless shape the national understanding because progressives command the sense-making and policy-making institutions. Progressives chill the air and marginalize opposition by portraying the common man as a heathen who just doesn’t understand. The progressive worldview is assumed as orthodoxy. That is ideological hegemony.

The Smithsonian’s corruption proves the reality of the long march through the institutions the left began decades ago. One sees it in public education and elsewhere—everywhere, in fact. One sees it in Americans having soured on their country. It is manifest in the rabble in the streets. Hoffer’s “true believer” has been mobilized. The corruption of Western sensibilities is what lies behind the reemergence of virulent antisemitism, which is infecting both the left and the far-right. Hating America and the West is by design. It is a plan to weaken conventional society by disordering the mind with distorted knowledge. It puts the common man on the defensive by making him appear as the problem. He becomes “bigoted,” “racist,” etc., because he loves his country.

We see this on the other side of the Atlantic, where the rise of the right-wing AfD in Germany has European elites in a full panic. They’re terrified of losing their grip on power to ordinary Germans, whom they see as hobbits who should play no role in the affairs of Middle-Earth. Elites bemoan the rise of the extremism they say they defeated in WWII. But how can the AfD be extreme if 44 percent of those in Saxony-Anhalt voted for them—and the next runner-up only got 17 percent of the vote? That’s not extreme. That’s mainstream. That’s the orthodoxy. And that’s what terrifies elites. The Hobbits are carrying the ring to the furnace of Mount Doom. They’ve eluded the Great Eye’s gaze. Barad-dûr is shaking. (See The Lord of the Rings as a Meditation on the Clash of Civilizations and Peril of Technocracy.)

The struggle over the Smithsonian isn’t over truth versus ideology, but over competing worldviews. But it is more than this. Trump’s intervention is an attempt to reclaim the Smithsonian from progressive ideology. For the left, knowledge is less about truth than it is about power; losing the Smithsonian to truth means losing control to those who seek it. The Hobbits aren’t supposed to have the integral truth; from integral truth derives a different kind of power—authentic legitimacy that makes power authority. Across space and time, elites have always trembled at what the proles might do with authority.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s political ideology was secular Arab nationalism. He was not an Islamist. Yet, when globalist Islam attacked the United States twenty-five years ago today, George W. Bush went around insisting that Islam isn’t the problem; rather, Saddam Hussein was. He then bombed and invaded Iraq, predictably emboldening the Islamists.

The Bush wing of the Republican Party has been a disaster for America. George H. W. Bush worked with Democrats to advance globalization and bring China into the world economy. His son, while masquerading as a conservative and enjoying Democratic support, carried the agenda forward. Barack Obama continued the project. And Hillary Clinton would have, too.

At the same time, the Islamic Republic of Iran was allowed to gather strength, build and entrench its network of proxy armies across the Middle East and North Africa. Trump is finally doing something about it. However, unlike the First and Second Persian Gulf Wars, the corporate media is assailing him for it. Quite the flip of the switch. The media was Bush’s chief propaganda unit in taking the nation into war with Saddam. Today they tell us that everybody thought Saddam had WMD. No, the media wanted it to seem like everybody thought that.

The neoconservatives were not so stupid as to believe the WMD narrative. They knew what they were doing. They manufactured the narrative. And this is why they’re hopping mad about Trump’s intervention in Iran. His entire existence as a patriotic American disrupts the globalist project. This is also the reason so many people have turned against Israel, currently governed by staunch nationalists prepared to defend their country.

Being the sneaky bastards that they are, the elite took the general bad feelings Americans developed towards the Second Persian Gulf War over time, made sure the public knew it was neoconservatism, and then pinned that foreign policy direction on Trump. But neoconservatism is not what lies behind the Iran intervention. Trump did not bomb Iran to advance the transnationalist agenda. Trump’s program is meant to shift momentum away from globalist restructuring towards internationalism, i.e., a restoration of the Westphalian system of sovereign states operating on nationalist interests instead of globalist logic.

The Trump doctrine has been obvious—if not explicit—all along. Dismantling the Islamic Republic weakens China and strengthens the Western Hemisphere, which in turn enables nationalism in Europe and the popular project to dismantle regionalism (the EU, etc.). The toleration of the Islamic Republic for nearly half a century has been part of the transnational agenda to dismantle the international system that patriots are now rising to defend.

Iran used to be a secular society aligned with the West. The Red-Green Alliance produced a totalitarian and terrorist state and turned it against our greatest ally in the region, Israel. Israel is governed by staunch nationalists who grasp the threat of Islamism, and this drives the globalists up a wall. Why is Israel portrayed as an aggressor and genocidal state when it is engaged in self-defense? This is not difficult to understand once you grasp the logic of globalism and Iran’s role in that. Hamas is a proxy for the Islamic Republic.

People don’t see this because nobody explains it to them. They lack sufficient knowledge to resist the media narrative. They also can’t see how this goes well beyond the Middle East. The Red-Green Alliance in the West is turning Westerners (especially the youth) against their own nations. The left, historically populist and anti-globalist, is today aligned with the transnationalist corporate agenda.

The jet fuel driving anti-Israeli sentiment is antisemitism. Jew-hatred is what holds together the far right, the progressive/socialist left, and the Islamization project. The upshot is that the brain-dead on the right are unwittingly serving the interests of those who will reduce them to neo-serfdom.

The convergence of the Red-Green Alliance and the far-right is the enemy of free and sovereign people. This monstrosity is organized by global elites to derail populist nationalism—that is, patriotic resistance to globalization. The idiots bashing Israel and Trump are either too stupid to see, or they are effectively (if not knowingly) operatives for transnationalism.

We’re constantly being told that Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. This is untrue. No court has found that Israel is committing or has committed genocide in Gaza. True, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel came to this conclusion, but as I explain in Are You Antisemitic? It Depends on Your Choice of Comrades in the Israel-Gaza Conflict, their findings are untrustworthy because of anti-Israel bias.

Whether a crime has occurred or is occurring depends on a legal definition. Absent a precisely defined statute, no crime has occurred. This is the Roman legal maxim nullum crimen sine lege. The maxim is basic to the rule of law. Genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention is not simply mass killing or even war crimes. Genocide requires specific intent (in legal parlance, dolus specialis) to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such.

A court can infer intent from a pattern of conduct and statements. However, in the case of genocide, courts have required that destruction of the group be the aim of aggression. Defeating an enemy or dispersing a population is insufficient grounds to apply the definition of genocide; these are the typical entailments of total war. Total war is not inherently genocidal, and it is absurd to suggest otherwise.

War is a hideous thing, but it is rarely genocidal. At least not in the modern epoch. At least not among modern peoples. The National Socialist project of eradicating the Jews was exceptional. But it is not the only one. Hamas’s goal of driving Jews into the sea is genocidal. Yet it is Israel that is accused of genocide.

The reality of the situation is that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute an act of self-defense after being attacked. Even when not accused of genocide, Israel is condemned for bringing death and destruction to Gaza when Hamas is to blame. As with any other war, it is not possible to hold Hamas accountable without collateral damage. But the premise is wrong. It’s not as if Hamas is a terrorist organization acting independently of the will of Gazans. Hamas is the Gazan government. Hamas represents the Gazan people, just as the Nazi regime represented the German people in World War II.

This is an historic analogy to the Israeli-Gaza situation: Germany attacked its neighbors, triggering a world war. It would be incorrect to say that because one in ten Germans was a Nazi, the Allies should not have addressed the German people with total war. Moreover, many more Germans supported the Nazi Party than were official party members.

Likewise, Hamas enjoys the support of a majority of Gaza’s residents. Support for the terrorist government extends beyond Gaza. If Hamas were allowed to run for elections in the West Bank, polls show that a majority of Arab Muslims living there would put them in office. October 7 was an act of the whole Gazan population. The grim truth is that the majority of Arab Muslims want to see Israel wiped off the Middle East map.

It follows that the death and rubble left in the wake of Israel’s retaliation against Gazans after October 7 are analogous to the death and rubble in Germany following Allied bombing and the ground invasion. It would be absurd to accuse the Allies of genocide because hundreds of thousands of Germans were killed, maimed, and displaced during combat (another 1.5 to 3 million died as a result of the war). It is likewise absurd to accuse the Israelis of genocide because tens of thousands of Gazans were killed and even more were displaced during combat. Again, this is the nature of total war.

There is a high-intensity urban war with large Gazan casualties after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. But it is not a genocide. Frankly, even if a court found Israel guilty of the crime of genocide, it would be a bad verdict, driven by Jew hatred. One need not wait for authority to tell us what is happening in Gaza. We know why Israel is treated differently than other countries.

The lesson is this: When your government pursues aggressive war, you suffer the consequences. War crimes aside (which must be proved in court by impartial judges), the death and destruction of your fellows are your responsibility.

What did Gazans expect? There is no rational nation that will—or should—allow a foreign army to invade and kill its citizens and take hostages without retaliation. Poke Israel, and Israel strikes back. It must retaliate for its citizens’ sake.

The death and destruction that follow aggressive war are attributable to your government and therefore to you if your government takes you to war. If you do not wish to be on the receiving end of the right to self-defense, then don’t vote Nazis or Islamists into power. It’s that basic.

When progressives attack American traditions, they are attacking Western culture. The conflict between progressives and patriots is often framed as liberals versus conservatives. To clarify, American traditions include practices and values that range from liberal to conservative. Moreover, Christianity is central to Western traditions, and Jesus’ preachings are shared among liberals and conservatives. The United States is a product of Christian civilization. Christian ethics are foundational to our culture and law. The conflict is between those who defend the West and those who stand against it.

Acknowledging Christianity’s role in American history is crucial. Some assume Christian doctrine and ethics are conservative, but Christianity is fundamental to liberalism and its values of individualism and moral autonomy from the state. The Founders of the American Republic were classical liberals who put the rights of man beyond government. The Declaration of Independence makes clear that government doesn’t give rights to man; our rights derive from natural law. Furthermore, the Enlightenment largely grew out of the Protestant Reformation, which shattered the hegemony of singular religious authority and opened the door to secularism. Thus, liberalism is core to the American tradition. The founders of the American Republic enshrined the Enlightenment values of freedom of conscience, speech, and writing in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

By contrast, progressives oppose Christian ethics and liberal secular culture. Progressives have repurposed religious liberty as a Trojan horse to expel Christianity from the public square. In restricting speech and writing, progressives don’t even try to disguise their authoritarianism. Indeed, progressivism is an Orwellian euphemism for regressivism, which is why the term regressive left is an apt one, especially when one acknowledges that liberalism is politically left.

The regressive left is moreover reactionary. Progressives, especially young progressives, are far more likely than conservatives and liberals to agree that violence is the appropriate response to speech with which they disagree. We also see regression in the belief that racial discrimination is an appropriate tool to address unequal outcomes in the various laws and policies imposing diversity, inclusion, and a redefined equity, especially around race relations.

Wokism is a more regressive form that progressivism takes over time. It was inevitable that progressive praxis would devolve into tribal identitarianism. In the general abandonment of principle, the utilitarian path winds towards totalitarianism. Indeed, progressivism was deliberately conflated with liberalism to disguise the truth that progressivism is intrinsically illiberal.

Progressivism is anti-Christian as well, despite the surface appeal to ecumenism (the appeal is strategic). However, it is not anti-theist. The progressive embrace of Islam and the quasi-religion of gender identity doctrine, two ideologies antithetical to Christianity (and liberalism), is proof of its theistic character.

Consider that, at the same time that progressives attack Western culture, they decry criticism of foreign and indigenous traditions. When a liberal or conservative criticizes backwards and primitive cultures, such as Islam, for its misogyny and homophobia, or pre-modern indigenous practices (caste, collective and intergenerational punishment, witchcraft, and other primitivisms), he is accused of bigotry. Why aren’t progressives bigots for criticizing and restricting Christianity?

The double standard on the progressive side is obnoxious. When it comes to Islam, progressives appeal to religious liberty to defend the establishment of Muslim enclaves and the movement toward alternative legal systems, such as Shari’a (Islamic custom and law). Indigenous and primitive cultural practices are treated as sacred and, therefore, limiting them under the rule of law and the principle of individual liberty is treated by progressives as oppressive and imperialist.

To clear up any confusion, those who worry about the spread of Islam are not operating from a double standard. Allowing indigenous and primitive cultures to have a say in modern societies—that is, to shape our way of life— is objectively corrosive to liberal values and Christian traditions and thus destructive to modernity. Opposition to Islam or to practices granting autonomy from the rule of law is not a betrayal of religious liberty but a defense of it. Islam rejects religious liberty. Indigenous traditions reject the rule of law as a liberal innovation that stands contrary to their customs.

That’s why progressives defend Islam—because it is destructive to Western civilization. The progressive appeal to principle is strategic; it is deceptive because his progressive ideology rejects principle. We know this because the progressive rejects the universalism of other values enshrined in the First Amendment; so how could his appeal to religious liberty be principled? He claims personal and civil liberties for himself and his allies, yet denies them to others. He does so while promoting ideologies and practices destructive to free speech and civil liberties. Put simply, the progressive appeals to liberty and principle to cancel liberty and negate principle.

The destruction of Western civilization is the ulterior motive behind the values the public is urged to embrace and that the Culture Industry and the education system embed in the minds of our children—cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and the transnational project. By marginalizing and negating traditional Western culture and liberal principles, progressives advance the march towards a post-liberal social order. Islam, queer, and all the rest of it are weapons used against freedom and democratic republicanism. They are not genuine expressions of tolerance.

We see this in the outrage over Christians expressing their beliefs in the public square by those who embrace the Islamization of Western society. Christians are accused of imposing their faith on the populace with public displays of religious devotion. Yet mosques are allowed to blast the call to prayer throughout the day, starting in the early morning hours. When there is resistance to the imposition of Islam on the public, the resistance is smeared as an expression of “Islamophobia.”

We see this in the outrage over Christians expressing their beliefs in the public square by those who embrace the Islamization of Western society. Christians are accused of imposing their faith on the populace with public displays of religious devotion. Yet mosques are allowed to blast the call to prayer throughout the day, starting in the early morning hours. When there is resistance to the imposition of Islam on the public, the resistance is smeared as an expression of

We see this among proponents of gender-identity doctrine, as well. When Americans attempt to remove queer propaganda from public schools, they are accused of “transphobia.” The charge of hypocrisy goes up. “But what about Christian texts?” This propaganda tactic assumes and socializes a double standard that does not exist. Christian texts are foundational to Western civilization. The Old and New Testaments are native to modernity. It’s not as if the flag of Christian Nationalism hangs in the halls of public schools. Queer theory is neither foundational nor native to the West, yet many classrooms are festooned with Pride Progress flags. Queer beliefs are alien to Western culture, and they are an attack upon it.

The claim that a man can become a woman is not about individual autonomy but about undermining common sense and natural historical understandings of gender (which aligns with science). The queer demand that we misgender others is a demand that we violate our conscience. The queer movement is not really about allowing individuals to choose to identify however they wish. If that were true, then those defending individual expression would agree with liberals that a man can wear a dress and makeup and leave it at that. But queer activists don’t leave it there. They attempt to compel all of society to jettison the traditional and scientific understanding of gender. That’s not demanding tolerance but seeking revolution. Queer is intolerant of traditional culture surrounding gender. This intolerance has a purpose: disrupting the ordinary gender relations that make a healthy society and reproduce the species over time.

Progressivism gives rise to postmodernism. Postmodernism, in turn, informs progressivism. If you understand postmodernism, then you can see what progressives are up to. At the core of postmodernism is the deconstruction of truth and the disruption of Western culture and social norms. Queer theory, post-colonialism, critical race theory—these are different manifestations of the postmodernist project. They are, at their core, not merely forms of science denialism, but weapons used to delegitimize the traditional cultural values that make up Western civilization—Christianity, liberalism, and modern conservatism—and thus undermine their authority.

Postmodernism’s goal is explicit in the name. Postmodernists envision a society after modernity. All the values and practices that comprise Western civilization are scheduled for the dustbin of history. Postmodernism intentionally situates itself as the antithesis of modernism. But it does so not as a dialectic seeking a synthesis. In postmodernist logic, the antithesis negates the thesis. All the good things about modernity—equality, liberty, and so forth—are scheduled for cancellation.

By colonizing the West’s sense-making institutions with these ideas, progressives use the state and the law against themselves—and thus against all of us.

Nathan Cofnas, an American philosopher and self-described “race realist,” currently holding a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University, whose investigation brought the Jason Arday plagiarism controversy to public attention (see Jason Arday Found Dead After Fall From Grace), has been making the podcast rounds to take questions about the Arday affair, as well as his views on group differences in intelligence.

In these appearances, Cofnas presents himself less as an advocate of racial hierarchy than as someone willing to examine empirical claims about differences among human populations that he believes are too often treated as beyond legitimate inquiry. Predictably, his arguments have generated considerable controversy, particularly because questions about race and intelligence sit at the intersection of contested science, racial stereotypes, and contemporary debates over academic freedom and discrimination.

Before turning to Cofnas’s argument, I think it is useful to briefly consider the logic of affirmative action, since positive discrimination (which I clarify in a moment) is among his chief political and ethical concerns.

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At its core, affirmative action rests on the proposition (an assumption, really) that outcome disparities among groups cannot necessarily be attributed to differences in individual merit or ability, especially in the case of race, since individual differences aggregate along those lines—and it is “racist” to presume racial groups vary on average in significant traits, such as intelligence. After all, the powerful have constructed race as a tool to obtain and keep power. There really is no such thing as race, so no differences can be attributed to it. Therefore, if historical discrimination or unjust structural forces explain disparities between groups, then treating individuals identically in the present may not be sufficient to eliminate their effects.

Readers should not miss the problem that what requires evidence is assumed to be true (for ideological reasons). But let’s put that problem aside for the moment. Another problem we cannot put off is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, a species of reification in which concrete individuals are assumed to be the statistical average of the abstract demographic category classifying them. Such persons do not actually exist. Therein lies the problem with affirmative action.

Affirmative action attempts, in various ways, to compensate for or counteract presumed inequalities by considering membership in groups conceptualized as social constructions. This logic becomes particularly important when considering claims about group differences in intelligence, because such claims raise a fundamental question: to what extent can disparities in educational, occupational, or other outcomes be attributed to discrimination and unequal opportunity, and to what extent might they reflect differences in characteristics that are relevant to those outcomes? The latter question is decried as racism. In the case of race, progressives deny the objectivity of the categories they use to promote selective group advantage.

In Executive Order 10925, issued in March of 1961, President John Kennedy directed federal contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure that applicants and employees are treated without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin. It was essentially a proactive equal opportunity requirement. The EO did not establish a system wherein whites were subject to racial discrimination. Nor did Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act establish racial preferences. Affirmative action became anti-white discrimination in 1965 with President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, and when the Labor Department began requiring contractors to develop programs with numerical goals and timetables for increasing minority representation.

The hijacking of affirmative action is sometimes sold as positive discrimination. Negative discrimination involves differential treatment that disadvantages an individual or group. By contrast, positive discrimination involves differential treatment intended to advantage a group or individual. The qualifiers here are similar to those Isiah Berlin uses in his distinction between “negative” and “positive” liberty. Berlin does not claim that positive liberty (freedom to exercise agency or achieve something) was always good or without dangers, but rather identifies a different conception of liberty, with negative liberty denoting freedom from interference or constraint.

But is this a distinction without a difference? If a man faces no constraints on his freedom, then is he not therefore free to exercise agency or achieve something he has in mind? The same applies to the distinction between positive and negative discrimination. If a group is given an advantage in college admissions or on an employment application, is not another group disadvantaged in its own pursuit of the same? This seems necessarily so. There is no real difference in the distinction.

In the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the justices examined this dilemma. The University of California at Davis medical school had reserved 16 of 100 seats for applicants from certain disadvantaged racial minority groups. Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was rejected twice despite having higher admission scores than some applicants admitted through the special program. Bakke sued, arguing that the quota violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled for Bakke.

However, while rejecting racial quotas, the Court held that race could be considered as one factor among many in admissions. I recently published an analysis of the Court’s ruling (see The Bakke Error: Compounding Problems in Need of Definitive Solving). I argue there that Powell’s decision sanctioned the rise of DEI, which, despite the 2023 case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. UNC, in which the Court ruled that, in using race in undergraduate admissions, Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Constitution (UNC), as well as federal civil-rights law in the case of Harvard, remains determined to shape the future of millions aspiring high school graduates. Because the Bakke decision effectively rationalized discrimination, Powell’s compromise shaped the environment that has corrupted higher education.

The language of positive and negative discrimination is not value-neutral. Both types of discrimination, even if we suppose a difference between them, if allowed, concretely harm individuals who, in principle, have an inherent right to equal treatment. Moreover, as noted earlier, justifying this harm presupposes that the disadvantages individuals bring to college admissions or employment applications result from historical discrimination or unjust structural forces. As a consequence, affluent blacks are given advantages over working-class whites based on abstract demographic classifications.

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The media dwells on Arday’s fate, framing Cofnas’s intervention as precipitating Arday’s demise. In making this about Cofnas’s actions in a specific case, the media sidesteps Cofnas’s broader argument, which is that, essentially, the Arday case is evidence of a broader problem in academia: DEI and racial preferences cause institutions to elevate people based on their racial identity rather than whether they meet ordinary standards of academic merit, and the entailment that those institutions then have an incentive to protect their hires from scrutiny because their success serves an ideological and representational purpose.

Before the Arday affair, Cofnas had already noted that, under strict meritocratic selection, the proportion of black academics, accepting average racial differences in cognitive ability, would be far lower than it is in elite universities. If Harvard’s admissions and hiring standards were strictly colorblind, for example, black student representation would be much lower than their representation in the general population. This would be true also of Harvard professors.

Cofnas sees Arday as a particularly revealing case: Cambridge celebrated him as a historic black professor even while serious questions about his scholarship and biography were being raised before Cofnas’s intervention. Cofnas’s argument is not merely that Arday committed plagiarism; it is that the institutional conditions surrounding DEI made Arday’s elevation and subsequent protection possible, and that the episode therefore illustrates what Cofnas regards as the corrosive effects of racial preferences on academic standards. This is the point that the media skirts.

Cofnas’s “race realist” argument is that racial groups are not merely socially constructed categories but correspond, at least to some extent, to populations with different inherited ancestral characteristics (the phylogenetic tree from population genetics data shared above indeed finds that phenotypic traits cluster along the lines of historically intuitive conceptions of race, here using the older anthropological language for these caregories), and that these differences may help explain persistent average disparities in outcomes—particularly cognitive-test and educational outcomes. Cofnas argues that the conventional explanation, which attributes such disparities primarily to discrimination, socioeconomic conditions, or institutional structures, is therefore incomplete.

His preferred principle is individual meritocracy: people should be judged as individuals, not according to racial quotas or demographic representation. His Harvard example is meant to illustrate the implications: a Harvard study associated with the Students for Fair Admissions litigation found that if undergraduate admissions were based solely on grades and test scores, the black share of the entering class would have been about 0.7%, rather than its actual share; Cofnas argues that because faculty are selected from an increasingly academically selective population, the black share of Harvard faculty under a strictly meritocratic, colorblind system would consequently be even lower. 

The crucial further step in Cofnas’s argument is that he does not regard unequal racial representation as necessarily evidence of racism or institutional failure. If the underlying group differences are partly inherited, then equal treatment of individuals can legitimately produce unequal group outcomes independent of historical circumstances or social structuring. He nevertheless acknowledges a political problem: a multiracial society might not tolerate a system in which some groups become almost absent from prestigious institutions, and he has therefore suggested that society may have to balance meritocracy against social and political stability. 

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We have two competing explanations for group-level disparate outcomes. One explanation emphasizes group-level differences and argues that, if admissions and hiring were strictly colorblind, the representation of black students and professors at elite institutions would be lower. This connects to the broader argument that people and groups tend to sort into different fields and occupations, much as men and women have historically exhibited different patterns of occupational choice. Indeed, the more open the society, the greater the differences between men and women.

The competing explanation attributes such disparities to the legacy and continuing effects of systemic racism. (It frames gender differences using the same logic, despite the absurdity of suggesting that sex differences don’t matter in the distribution of attributes and interests.) From this perspective, present equal treatment may not be sufficient to eliminate disparities produced by historical and institutional inequalities, which is part of the rationale offered for affirmative action and DEI initiatives. Again, this assumes what remains to be demonstrated: that decades after de jure segregation was abolished, de facto segregation remains.

The debate should concern assessing the competing explanations. However, universities promote one explanation while marginalizing, even effectively forbidding, the other. Universities treat particular lines of inquiry as illegitimate when they conflict with prevailing institutional assumptions. But why is a university taking an arbitrary institutional position in favor of one explanation over the other? Is that not unbecoming for an institution whose primary mission is to seek the truth through open inquiry? And what of academic freedom, the right professors and students enjoy that permits them to pursue such inquiry without fear of consequence?

I have experienced this bias firsthand, albeit not on the question of race realism. There have been consequences for my views concerning issues associated with critical race theory and gender identity doctrine. When I presented Roland Fryer’s findings that systemic racism does not explain disparities in lethal police-civilian encounters, but rather neighborhood conditions and situational factors do, with blacks overrepresented in the serious crimes that bring them more frequently into confrontations with the police, I was called to the dean’s office for an explanation. Perhaps I should have refused, but I was too damn curious to hear what the dean had to say. When I debunked the queer claim that men can become women, a group of students circulated a petition to get me fired.

Consider this hypothetical: a university assumes, as an institutional stance, that racial differences are real. One expects that researchers would not be punished for investigating evidence that might support such differences. By the same logic, it would be inappropriate to punish a researcher for conducting research intended to disprove the claim that there are racial differences and that these differences matter. The reader will note that I simply flipped the current situation on its head.

Compare debates over racial identity with debates over gender identity. Both involve claims about characteristics that are sometimes treated as immutable; institutional opposition to certain views about transgender identity can function similarly to institutional opposition to challenges to prevailing assumptions about race. Whether a university takes an official stance for or against the gender binary and its immutability, its professors should have the freedom to explore the question either way. Failing to defend academic freedom marks the institution not as a place of open inquiry, but as an ideology factory. The academic becomes a line worker whose work is determined not by his interests but by his manager’s demands.

This is the most troubling aspect of the Cofnas controversy. Universities should remain agnostic or neutral regarding genuinely disputed scientific questions rather than treating one position as institutionally acceptable and the opposing position as beyond the bounds of legitimate inquiry. Inquiry into racial differences is not analogous to flat-eartherism, the geocentric conception of the solar system, or intelligent design. Then again, the biology professor interested in intelligent design should not be forbidden to investigate the theory that a greater intelligence designed the universe and all the things in it.

Darwinian evolutionary theory is paradigmatic in the university not because its administrators declared it to be, but because free inquiry established it as such. This is the only way to avoid what happened to Galileo (albeit the Church could not, in the end, resist the momentum of Copernicus’s 1543 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium).