freedom and reason

The Lindsay Clancy case is much more than the particulars. In the popular reaction, it is revealing of the difference between masculine and feminine sympathetic orientations that goes to the heart of the problem of empathy.

For those who may not know, Clancy is the Massachusetts mother currently on trial for killing her three children. She strangled 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan with exercise bands in January 2023.

Defense counsel acknowledges that she killed the children but argues that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and therefore not criminally responsible. The prosecution argues that the killings were deliberate and planned.

Both things can be true—and are. Clancy is sick in the head. The question is whether the defense argument negates the state’s position. That is a question of mens rea. But the public reaction goes beyond determination of criminal responsibility.

Hundreds of women rally for Clancy outside the courthouse, and a fundraiser for her parents has reportedly surpassed $800,000, with a $2 million goal. Why would women support a woman who murders her children?

I see this through the lens of sociology. I consider a father who commits essentially the same act under comparable psychiatric circumstances, confident that I would not see hundreds of men rally or raise money for him. Would hundreds of women rally or raise money for him? No.

If women describe a mother as sick, overwhelmed, or needing help while describing a father as evil, monstrous, or dangerous, despite comparable evidence of psychosis, then this is not a situation of general sympathy for the mentally ill. The societal reaction to violent deviance is gendered.

For men, murder is wrong. When men see a father or a mother who has intentionally killed his or her children, they see a murderer, and they demand justice for the children. Men are capable of understanding the role of psychiatric illness while remaining committed to the proper attribution of blame and the correct consequences for the killer’s actions.

Of course, a mother who kills he children is sick in the head. What does that have to do with holding Clancy accountable for her wicked deeds? Men remain Smith’s impartial spectator.

This is not true for women. All women? It doesn’t have to be all women. At least some women (not a few) empathize with the child killer if she is also a woman.

This is the flaw in empathy compared to sympathy. Sympathy allows a person to understand another person’s situation while retaining the capacity to judge his actions rationally. Empathy involves putting oneself in another’s place and becoming one with the situation, losing the capacity for objective and rational discernment. Women are more prone than men to elevating empathy over sympathy.

That’s fucked up, and it has general implications. It’s why we see so many women—and feminized men—enabling the delusions of their children in the trans phenomenon. Empathy dispossesses a person of the capacity to reason and robs them of their compassion for the victims.

It’s why we see women—and feminized men—embracing foreigners, defending black men who murder and rob people, and a myriad of other pathologies.

It’s why women support allowing men in women’s sports, locker rooms, bathrooms, and prisons.

It’s why feminist professors take young female students in the Gender Studies classes to mosques to learn how to properly veil.

It’s why Queers for Palestine, as crazy as that sounds (and is), is actually a thing.

This is a very real problem. It’s a civilizational problem.

* * *

Understanding this dynamic helps explain apparent contradictions in support for women who are criminally charged.

Consider the case of Shilo Hendrix, charged with disorderly conduct for using the word “nigger” in a park. She was acquitted of the charge related to her use of the word but convicted on another charge of disorderly conduct (which she is appealing) for her encounter with Sharmake Omar, the man who videoed the confrontation.

Hendrix also had defenders who rallied and raised money for her. Whatever their political persuasion, those who wanted her punished for words were decidedly progressive.

We might explain support for Clancy as exculpatory maternalism. This is where women’s harmful behavior is interpreted through vulnerability, mental illness, trauma, coercion, or maternal pressures in ways that can mitigate perceptions of personal responsibility. Yet exculpatory maternalism was not extended to Hendrix. Why? Because her “victims” were Somali.

Clancy kills her children, and progressive women empathize. Hendrix uses a word, and progressives seek jail time.

* * *

Progressives exploit the feminine sympathetic orientation (empathy) to advance their ideological and political goals. This works at scale because of the feminization of Western culture. Progressivism and feminization are mutually reinforcing.

The feminization of the West has advanced by portraying boys and men as inherently problematic because of their masculine orientation.

For years now, we have had to put up with this notion of “toxic masculinity.” Really? It’s masculinity that’s toxic? Is that why hundreds of women rally and raise money for a child killer?

I still describe my politics as feminist. But what I mean by that term is very specific: equal rights and opportunities for women—and equal responsibilities. My feminism is liberal. I reject all other species of feminism. The reason why should be obvious. The Clancy case is illustrative.

As for the particulars of the case, whether Clancy is mentally ill or not, she should be confined. A person who murders children cannot be trusted to freely move among us. She can get all the psychiatric care she needs in prison.

This man gets it.

Young Republicans are not bluffing. They will walk.

The GOP is currently on a suicide mission. The old consultant class still thinks they can keep the base with tax cuts, judges, and “strong on the border” messaging while quietly protecting the labor supply… https://t.co/DAT1a955pK

— Gregory K Bovino (@GregoryKBovino) August 17, 2026

The man who “gets it” that Gregory Bovino is referring to is Mike Howell, president of The Oversight Project. Howell has sued DHS to share the real deportation numbers. He believes those numbers are in the thousands, not the millions we were promised. He also believes that the self-deportation numbers are suspect.

Bovino puts the matter even better than Howell in the X post shared above. Is this why our man of the moment was sent packing? He not only doubts the deportation numbers, but Bovino estimates the number of illegals in our country to be much higher than current estimates of eleven to sixteen million.

Why isn’t Trump moving more aggressively in delivering the mass deportation agenda he promised on the campaign trail?

Part of it is the inaction of the Republican Party on this issue. MAGA was supposed to end the rule over the party by the corporations that control the leadership of the Senate.

This begs the question: why is John Thune Senate Majority Leader? He drags his feet on two intertwined issues confronting the nation: mass immigration and election integrity.

The answer is that he and other RINOs are operatives of transnational corporate power. They obey the donor class that exploits cheap labor and drives down wages for native Americans.

The TNCs don’t care that tens of millions of foreigners will end the American Republic because they don’t believe in the nation-state. From their standpoint, a cesspool of green-haired dysgenics and Muslim inbreds mob-ruling Western streets is an acceptable outcome if it means more wealth and privilege for them.

The United States is being deconstructed for corporate power and profit, and the people we elected to stop them are facilitating America’s destruction through inaction, at best, and complicity at worst. Either way, Thune, McConnell, and that crowd have betrayed America.

It goes without saying that Democrats are betrayers. They have been at this for decades. The party is the principal architect of globalization. But they couldn’t have done this without the complicity of RINOs.

MAGA was supposed to change that. The movement promised to root out the neoconservatives and bring the party to its founding ideals: those of the American system. Republicans have a majority with Trump at the helm, yet mass deportations are moving at a glacial pace.

If the Republican Party leadership were America First, then we would see ICE operations in cities across the country removing Mayorkas’s illegal alien invaders from our streets and sending them packing. Instead, Bovino is sent packing. And Howell has to sue the Trump Administration.

I voted for Trump to do several things. He changed the conversation on DEI and the gender identity madness. The SLPC has been exposed. I am eternally thankful for that. He put Bobby Kennedy (who I wanted as president) in charge of HHS. Among other things, we’re seeing real progress in exposing the vaccine scam. Trump has awakened America to the reality of widespread election rigging. He imposed tariffs on our competitors and cut taxes. His foreign policy has steered the Western Hemisphere away from the cancer of socialism. He even did something I did not expect him to: he confronted the Islamic Republic occupying Iran.

But one of the big-ticket items on my list of expectations—and the list of millions of other patriotic Americans—was mass deportations. Americans want the foreigners out of their country. They want jobs and safe neighborhoods. And they want to hand down to their progeny the America they grew up in.

Is Trump waiting until after the midterms to let it rip? Preying on feminine sensibilities, the media has mounted an all-out assault on mass deportations. I get it that the optics make it hard. But if that’s the plan—to downplay deportations during the campaign—it’s a nearsighted plan. Trump needs the enthusiasm of young Americans, especially men, for November, and watching Republicans fail to deliver on a core promise of MAGA has the opposite effect.

I am beginning to suspect Trump wasn’t serious about mass deportations.

Trump must know that, if Democrats win the midterms, they will be manically obsessed with destroying his presidency. The president will be a lame duck, and Republicans won’t be there to protect him when the House impeaches him.

If Democrats retake the White House in 2028, within minutes of assuming executive power, the new president will open the borders, and that will be the end of the Republic. Trump will have squandered the opportunity to save the nation, and despite all the great things he has done, his failure to deliver on mass deportations will be his legacy.

Imagine a seventh-century illiterate (probably) schizophrenic pedophile born in Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula who hallucinates an angel that tells him that God wants him to dictate a message to someone who could put it to parchment that, among other things, the Judeo-Christian tradition, with which the pedophile is familiar, is corrupt and that he has been chosen by God to correct the Abrahamic faith and align it with the doctrine of “Islam,” which in Arabic translates to “submission” or “surrender.”

Why do I ask you to imagine a pedophile? Because the man I have in mind married a six-year-old, then raped her when she was nine years old. Her name was Aisha bint Abi Bakr.

Further, imagine the man migrates from Mecca to Medina, establishes a home base there, assembles an army, then annihilates various tribes, many of them Jewish, beheading the men, raping the women, and enslaving the survivors.

This is not an exercise in imagination. This is Muhammad’s biography. I already gave it away by identifying one of his victims by name. I asked the reader to imagine it to gain some distance from the assumption that, because something is a matter of faith, it is to be taken on faith.

One would imagine such a situation to be troubling, yet I am recounting, in a thumbnail sketch, the origins of Islam, which projected Islamic doctrine far beyond the Peninsula. Today, that doctrine is the world’s bane.One would imagine such a situation to be troubling, yet I am recounting, in a thumbnail sketch, the origins of Islam, which projected Islamic doctrine far beyond the Peninsula. Today, that doctrine is the world’s bane.

Muhammad’s dictated text is the Qur’an, the primary political and religious text of Islam and arguably the worst book ever written. Today, adherents to the faith comprise more than two million of the Earth’s human population (8.3 billion). Fifty-three of the 195 UN-recognized countries and territories are Muslim-majority.

But Islam extends well beyond these countries and territories. The doctrine is in the West and is corrupting its institutions and its people. (See The Lessons of Medina and the Rational Men of the West.)

It is important to appreciate the importance of irreligious criticism. No ideological system is immune from scrutiny, even opposition. Just because an ideology contains unfalsifiable claims—such as the existence of angels, devils, or a supreme being—is no reason for making it off-limits to critique or condemnation. If the religious system is intolerable, then it must not be tolerated.

Indeed, tolerating Islam is like tolerating Nazism. Both are intolerable ideologies. There are differences, to be sure. For example, Germans did not have hindsight when they voted members of the Nazi Party into positions of authority who prepared Germany for dictatorship under the command of Adolf Hitler. The story is different with Islam. Hindsight is plentiful.

Almost 1400 years have passed since Muhammad’s conquests in the Arabian Peninsula. The world has centuries of history from which to judge the scourge of Islamofascism.

Rational judgment should result in a condemnation of Islam, a totalitarian ideology that allows no separation between church and state. Islam is not a personal relationship with God. Islam is a political system that demands hegemony over nations.

Yet people in Western societies are voting Muslims into office. The leaders of Western countries have welcomed into the West the ideology of a warlord that freezes in place the primitive, tribal culture that produced him. The doctrine carries forward his genocidal project.

There are other differences between Nazism and Islamofascism. As bad as the Nazis were, one has to acknowledge that they liked dogs and music and celebrated women. Islam comes with all the Nazi horrors and moreover dislikes dogs, declares music as haram, and loathes women. Even publishing cartoons of the prophet puts artists’ lives at risk. Islam is a paradigm of totalitarian desire. Islam is an inherently joyless ideology.

Yet we are told that describing Islam, documenting its entailments, and warning others of its peril is a special kind of “bigotry” called “Islamophobia.” Religious liberty, we are told, is sacrosanct, and therefore Islam is to be treated no differently than any other religion.

Hiding Islamofascism behind the language of civil rights is an intentional distortion of principle, designed to grant immunity from criticism and opposition to an ideology that is as bad as, if not worse than, National Socialism. In this regard, our worst enemies dwell among us. Among them are federal politicians, such as Bernie Sanders. Sanders and his ilk are useful idiots for transnational corporate power. This is what lies behind Islamization: corporate power. In that sense, Islam is the second-coming of National Socialism.

It is not that, when facing an existential threat, we must sacrifice civil liberties. This gets the problem the wrong way around. Just as criticism of National Socialism is necessary for survival, so we must criticize Islam, and for this, the right to speak freely must be protected.

But we have to do more than criticize. Legitimate constraints on liberty are already in place. The law already forbids harassment, intimidation, and threats as valid exercises of free speech. These restrictions are necessary tools for confronting those who intend to destroy our way of life. The harassment, intimidation, and threats Islam brings with it must not be legitimized with the rhetoric of free speech and religious liberty.

* * *

“But many Muslims are peaceful,” is the popular retort. “They are good neighbors who love their children. What about the peaceful Muslims?” What about them? What about them? This was also true of Nazis.

Qur’an Verse (5:60) “Say: Shall I inform you of (him who is) worse than this in retribution from Allah? (Worse is he) whom Allah has cursed and brought His wrath upon, and of whom He made apes and swine, and he who served the Shaitan; these are worse in place and more erring from the straight path.”

This passage is referring to the Jews. Shaitan is a demonic entity in Islamic theology and culture, comparable to Satan in Christianity. This verse (among others) is used to justify violence against Jews. Muslims are obsessed with Jews. The faith is intrinsically antisemitic.

We cannot exaggerate the significance of scripture. Muslims view Muhammad as God’s final prophet and believe the Qur’an is the most perfect book in the world. It is an instruction manual. Muslims have always viewed the Jews as bestial and devilish. The Qur’an told them so. They cannot doubt the scripture because it is the inerrant word of God.

The more devout the Muslim, the more dangerous the man. One must therefore always regard Islam with suspicion. Reformation might be helpful—that is, if Muslims can develop attitudes towards their religion similar to those of Jews and Christians, then they might here and there be less extreme. But given how historically recent Islam is and how mesmerized Muslims are by it, that will still leave a substantial proportion of the population adhering to an extremist ideology.

To be sure, one can find Muslims who are not extremists. Dr. Mehmet Oz, for example, born in the US to Turkish parents, is often described as a secular Muslim. His father had traditional Islamic views, while his mother and his own adult practice leaned more secular. Moreover, Oz married a Christian wife, and they have raised their children as Christians.

For this, many Muslims have criticized Oz for his alignment with the Republican Party. Thus, Oz’s secularism highlights the problem with Islam—and the Democratic Party. The threat is real. And it must be confronted.

Perhaps the most interesting—and troubling—thing about the Kirk conspiracy theories, especially the idea that the Jews were involved, is that they obscure the reality that antifa/trans violence is a serious problem in America.

It was trans activism that inspired the murder of one of the most prominent conservative leaders in our lifetime. Tyler Robinson explicitly said that Kirk’s hate could not be negotiated. So he murdered Kirk for his trans lover Lance Twiggs.

Yet, despite Robinson’s admission, Candace Owens fans twist themselves into overbaked pretzels trying to deny the only rational conclusion. They do this by denying the evidence and instead engage in the style of fantacism characteristic of paranoid schizophrenia.

Because of their antisemitic worldview, Candace Owens fans have become minions of the Queer movement. It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so dangerous.

Trans activists have to be guffawing watching faux/pseudo-conservatives divert attention away from the danger the queer movement represents to humanity (especially to children) by blaming Jews for Kirk’s murder instead.

Queers for Palestine suffer from Islamophilia, too, so they’re no doubt ecstatic about this. It’s no accident that pro-Muslim posts often appear in the various Candace Owens groups across the Internet’s social media space as frequently as Kirk conspiracy theories. Birds of a feather.

Candace Owens fans (when not actual devotees of that anti-Western combination moving undercover) are useful idiots for the Red-Green Alliance.

So it is no surprise that Hasan Piker proclaimed after Owens debated Andrew Wilson over whether alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson is the shooter see (I’m Embarrassed for Other People, and Sometimes Stating the Obvious Feels Cruel, but Here Goes), “I’m a fan now.”

Piker commended Owens for casting doubt on who is actually responsible for the killing and thus, in his words, “single-handedly” diminishing the impact that Kirk’s assassination might have had on blunting left-wing extremism.

The Owens cult is a massive betrayal of everything Charlie Kirk stood for.

* * *

Rationally judging the winner of the Andrew Wilson-Candace Owens debate requires a basic understanding of the rules of evidence and inference. Owens fans do not work from reason but from emotions and feelings. They judge those who work from reason based on those standards, not from rational standards. They are Arthur Schopenhauer’s fools.

To understand why people followed Jim Jones or history’s other myriad charismatic figures who captured the attention of the masses, we have to study intelligence and psychology. We find in our studies that the less intelligent operate on feelings. Taking them systematically through the debate and showing how Wilson destroyed Owens in every exchange will usually prove futile.

The debate reaction is thus something of an intelligence test. Reviewing reactions across several social media platforms, it becomes obvious Owens’ followers are incapable of understanding what actually transpired. They cannot see how little she knows about the case because they believe she knows everything—and they know too little to grasp that she doesn’t. Nor can they know that she doesn’t possess the capacity for rational thought. They don’t know enough to know that. And they’re not willing to try.

It doesn’t register as significant that she didn’t know about the message Twiggs sent Robinson telling him to watch for the surveillance camera footage in which he appears. That’s not an insignificant fact. Yet Owens didn’t know it. She demanded a fact-check, not recognizing it would only amplify how little she knows about the facts of the case. For Owens’ followers, the claim that Robinson’s messages were coming from a source other than Robinson doesn’t register as fantastic. They believe that DNA and other evidence are hearsay in a probable cause hearing because Owens told them they are. They know as little as she does. This is why she is their queen.

Owens didn’t even know until recently that thunder is the sound of lightning. She wasn’t even aware that admitting this revealed her incapacity for drawing the simplest of inferences. This incapacity is tied to the intelligence quotient. It explains why she can’t pronounce rather basic words. (See Candace Owens is a Clinically Stupid Person)

I wish it were not true that there are dumb people in the world, but it is, and it is very difficult to get dumb people to understand that they’re dumb.

Charisma is not an indicator of general intelligence. Emotional intelligence and general intellectual ability are distinct phenomena. High emotional intelligence tricks dumb people. Owens has high emotional intelligence. She knows how to manipulate people. She is very good at it. (See Mistaking Our Species Innate Linguistic Capacity for Native Intelligence.)

Owens is the charismatic leader of a cult. She plays her audience like a fiddle because she makes them feel a certain way. She valorizes their shallow thinking by mirroring it. This is why her confidence impresses them—they see themselves in her. Her followers believe she won the debate for the same reason they’re pulled into her universe. If they were critical thinkers to begin with, then they wouldn’t be Owens followers.

The problem of charisma is a perennial problem across human societies. There will always be a proportion in any population that succumbs to the pull of charismatic persons who prey on dumb people. This can lead the rest of us to very dangerous places.

It’s not that Wilson should not have debated Owens. He did a useful thing. Some of those who thought Owens was on to something now see what a fraud she is. And they learned something about how logic works. But those whose eyes were opened are few. Wilson is working the margins. The reaction to the debate is more useful for researching the cult phenomenon. The Owens cult is public in a way that many other cults aren’t. This allowed Wilson to expose a cult leader before millions of people. That made the exercise worthwhile.

Karoline Leavitt is resigning from her post as White House Press Secretary. She says it is to spend more time with her family. TDS sufferers say it is because Trump exposed her to an Iranian assassination plot.

Maggie Haberman and White House spokespeople have stated that Karoline Leavitt was not on the decoy flight out of Turkey. Supposing she was, that would not explain her resignation.

Why haven’t other White House officials on the decoy flight resigned? Marco Rubio (Secretary of State), Scott Bessent (Secretary of the Treasury), Stephen Miller (Deputy Chief of Staff), and several White House staff members were on that flight. Yet they remain loyal to the President.

President Donald Trump was accompanied on the Air Force C-32A flight by Deputy White House Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, Executive Assistant Natalie Harp, Director of Oval Office Operations Walt Nauta, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Does it occur to TDS sufferers that, based on a credible threat that Iran intended to assassinate the President, putting the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of Defense on the same plane would involve a monumental lack of judgment by those governing our nation?

The President’s life must be safeguarded above all others. Moreover, since the President was the target of the plot, his presence on board would have exposed others to greater danger. Hegseth is another prime target, so naturally he went with Trump.

This isn’t hard. Leave it to TDS sufferers to see a prudent move as something untoward.

On Saturday, I published an article on the apparent suicide of Jason Arday using Émile Durkheim’s concept of anomie as an explanatory concept. Anomic suicide occurs when an individual is subjected to extreme or disrupted forms of regulation. As I was penning that essay, I became aware that the mass media, consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), launched an attack on President Trump by exploiting sailors attempting suicide on the USS Lincoln, currently deployed in the Middle East.

I am sympathetic to the situation of sailors on the Lincoln; however, the media is not telling their audience that sailors attempting suicide is common in naval history. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell is blaming the media for what he called “a false narrative.” Parnell is right; the media is disseminating a false narrative. Before I explain the deeper reasons why, I want to say a bit more about Durkheim’s suicide typology to help the reader see why the media narrative should be understood as false on its face.

One might consider Durkheim’s concept of anomie to explain this, as I did in the Arday article. But Durkheim’s concept of egoistic suicide is more apt in the Lincoln case. In egoistic suicide, the individual is insufficiently integrated into collective life. During a long naval deployment, a sailor may feel detached and isolated, with no meaningful connection to the crew. The longer the deployment, the more detached and isolated the sailor becomes, and suicide is a risk. There are approximately 5,000 service members stationed aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln. Predictably, a handful of sailors will be insufficiently integrated with their crew.

The media is reframing a common phenomenon and making it appear as the result of an extraordinary situation. But there is nothing extraordinary about long deployments during times of war. Sailors may not be fully aware of what they signed up for, but they did sign up for military service. The solution is not to bring the Lincoln to port, but to understand the problem of egoistic suicide and confront it in those terms. Given that the problem of suicide among service members is a chronic one, the Navy has ways of addressing it. This would likely not be news but for the fact that Trump is president.

Supposing that the story originated with popular concern originating in family complaints, rather than explaining this to the public in the terms I just outlined, the media is taking a personal tragedy with known sociological causes and using it to attack the Commander-in-Chief. Media elites are weaponizing egoistic suicide to undermine the command structure of the US military. Why would they do this? This is the more important question.

* * *

One cannot address the question without understanding the aims of transnational corporate power and the anti-West project. We must therefore move beyond Durkheimian functionalism to conflict theory. The conflict is at scale, so we turn to macrosociology and political economy to orient our observations. Here, the picture becomes clear: China and Iran are strategic partners with significant economic and security cooperation. China is essential to the designs of the globalists who are effectively denationalizing the world order. Trump’s intervention in Iran is, from the globalist standpoint, interference with the transnationalist agenda.

How else would one explain why the transnational corporate order integrated the largest totalitarian communist state in world history into the global economic system? Such a relatively rapid world-changing event doesn’t happen by accident. Indeed, we know who did it. In the United States, the Democratic Party spearheaded the project to fuse the American and Chinese economies. As Senator, Joe Biden played a principal role in this development. It is one of his many betrayals—among others, the opening of America’s southern border and the invasion of tens of millions of illegal alien invaders during the man’s illegitimate presidency.

For what purpose would Biden and the Democrats do such a thing? Is it not obvious? They have deindustrialized the United States by moving manufacturing to China to take advantage of cheap, subjected labor, crash the standard of living for ordinary Americans, demoralize the population, and undermine popular political power. And there is more to it than that. Elites seek to establish a comprehensive control apparatus. China is the paradigm surveillance state of the New World Order. Transnational corporate elites intend to entrench a new mass control apparatus based on surveillance and simulation.

The crisis of late capitalism requires a new model to manage an increasingly disaffected population for the sake of elite power and privilege, concentrated in the hands of a small number of firms and wealthy individuals. The new model is global neofeudalism, where the world proletariat becomes serfs managed on high-tech estates. There will be no democracy or liberty in the future. What may appear as popular participation and individual freedom in the next epoch will be simulacra only—and most observers will be unable to tell the difference. Simulacra are everywhere today, and they are shared by people who believe they are authentic.

How does Iran fit in with this plan? Islam has proven to be an effective weapon in the deconstruction of liberal democracy. Islamized populations are subservient to religious delusions ultimately managed by economic elites. Islam is essentially the fascist design (corporations and financial institutions were behind fascist states like Nazi Germany), but superior to fascism in that Islam explicitly seeks an end to nationalism, which is the greatest threat to globalism. Like communism, Islam envisions a world without nations. However, Islam has proven more effective in colonizing the lifeworlds of Western populations. Tragically, susceptibility to religious delusions is a common disposition, however variable. For every person who resists the siren song of religions promising solutions to man’s problems, there is one or more ready to wreck the ship of society upon the rocks of mythology.

So far in this essay, I have focused on the United States. But we can see the unfolding of the plan in Europe and the regionalization project, i.e., the European Union and the Schengen Area. The United Kingdom, to take the obvious case, has been deindustrialized. The quasi-religion of environmentalism plays a major role in hollowing out the core. At the same time, Europe has been flooded with Muslims. Englishmen now find themselves the minority in their own cities. These developments are driving the nations of Europe to the brink of financial collapse. Out of Europe’s ashes the New World Order will arise like the phoenix.

Those who deny this is happening are of two sorts. The first are those leading the deconstruction project. They control the mass media that confuses popular understanding. The USS Lincoln is a case in point. There are many others. The second sort are the indoctrinated whom the first brainwashed and now mobilize to resist the nationalist reclamation of the West and liberalism. TDS is a sign of the power of brainwashing. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Red-Green Alliance are others. The purpose of mass psychogenic illness is to demoralize and pacify the general population—to render them inert in the greatest conflict of our time.

* * *

It is no exaggeration to say that the free people of the West find themselves in existential crisis. The only way out is through nationalism. The difficulty is that the political party chosen by the moment—the Republican Party—is itself partly captured by transnational corporate power. And with the possibility that Democrats will retake Congress in 2027, the number of captured Republicans will likely grow as the party is forced into a compromise position.

This would already have happened had Trump not prevailed in 2024. That is how close America is to the Republic’s end. Trump is a glimmer of hope. There are glimmers in Europe, as well. Alternative for Germany (AfD) is one of them. But glimmers are not enough. Following the lead of the six US Senators who called on soldiers to disobey Trump’s orders, Germany’s police union has called on officers to defy any “unconstitutional” orders if the AfD takes power.

Defiance of populist governments is part of the elite transatlantic plan. What is needed to counter the plan is mass action by patriots across the Western space and the election of leaders prepared to punish the enemies of freedom. This is no time for compromise. Deconstruct the transnational order.

It appears that disgraced academic Jason Arday has committed suicide. He was found at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon. His family is blaming those behind Arday’s termination. “The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.” Should the campaigners have affirmed his identity as a university professor? Of course not. Doing the right thing can cause emotional torment. Doing the right thing takes precedent. The right thing is the most important thing, and one’s feelings have to come to terms with this.

French sociologist Émile Durkheim would likely have described Arday’s death as a case of anomie. For Durkheim, anomie occurs when the norms and expectations that ordinarily regulate people’s lives become disrupted. Anomie is thus a state of normlessness in which the person is disconnected from his moral foundation and alienated from his survival instinct. (See Accounting for Disordered Personalities in Altruistic Suicide: A Note On Durkheim’s Typology.)

In The Sacred Canopy (1967), which builds directly upon the sociology of knowledge that he and fellow sociologist Thomas Luckmann developed in their foundational text The Social Construction of Reality (1966), Peter Berger takes Durkheim’s concept of anomie and develops it phenomenologically. Berger’s elaboration may help the reader understand the situation Arday was in.

Berger argues that society provides individuals with a nomos—a taken-for-granted world of identity, meaning, and order. People ordinarily do not experience nomos as something society has constructed; it simply feels like reality. When that nomos collapses, the result isn’t merely confusion. The ultimate danger is meaninglessness—what Berger characterizes as the “nightmare par excellence,” in which identity and reality themselves are distorted and terrifying. Anomie, Berger contends, can become unbearable to the point that an individual may seek death in preference to it.

Think about it. A person has a socially defined identity of great reputational import—Arday was a professor, scholar, respected member of an institution—and understands what’s expected of him. If that identity suddenly collapses, as it did in Arday’s case, his relationship to the social order can become profoundly destabilized. Death is preferable to the emotional torment of social rupture.

Arday’s case has all the ingredients of such a rupture. He went from being celebrated as a Cambridge professor and academic marvel (and allegedly marvelous at other things, such as athletics and fundraising) to having his scholarly credentials publicly scrutinized, his biography questioned, and resigning his position—all in a compressed period of time. Arday was a star, so his fall was predictably far. The revelations about his biography and career weren’t edge cases. It appears that he invented a fictitious person: Jason Arday.

One might say that Arday’s situation was something like that of the manufactured pop group Milli Vanilli. For those who missed this epic scandal, Milli Vanilli were a German duo exposed for faking their hit record and live performance. It was a dramatic fall from stardom I shan’t recount here. However, it is relevant that one of the pair, Robert Pilatus, appears to have committed suicide on the eve of the promotional tour for the album—which was never released—on which he and Fab Morvan actually perform their vocal parts. The point is that, when the constructed self has been destroyed, and it is that person’s core identity, self-annihilation becomes an escape route.

There is an important lesson to be learned in cases like this. If a person you know suffers such a degree of social destabilization, it is important to watch them, even sit with them and encourage them to seek help. You may think they are the last person in the world to commit suicide, but that misunderstands the nature of suicide. I have heard too many people say, “But he wasn’t suicidal.” No, not when everything was in place. But Arday was out of place. And he felt he had nowhere to go. For somebody whose identity is everything, losing it is a kind of death itself.

The reality is that surveys find that a large plurality of next-of-kin have no idea that a family member was suicidal. An even larger plurality of those who eventually commit suicide did not admit to suicidal thoughts when examined by health care professionals. Arday was probably not suicidal—until he was found out and resigned (same for Pilatus, having to prove he was something he wasn’t). That is when a man needs those around him the most. Despite what Arday did, he was a human being. Somebody should have regarded him on those terms.

It would be stating the obvious to say that Andrew Wilson destroyed Candace Owens today during the Great Debate, moderated by Patrick Bet-David. One was able to predict the outcome with one hundred percent metaphysical certitude. Owens may be able to talk rapidly and in complete sentences (her constant mispronunciation of basic words notwithstanding); however, she is not smart in the sense of having an analytical mind. She is high in emotional intelligence, for sure, like other manipulative people. But not a rational thinker. Like everybody else, narcissists and psychopaths are on a sliding scale of different qualities of intelligence (see Mistaking Our Species Innate Linguistic Capacity for Native Intelligence). Owens had no answer to Wilson’s steel-trap approach.

Wilson embarrassed Owens throughout the conversation, but a standout moment was when she demanded that Wilson name just one of the charges against Tyler Robinson. So he did: murder. Owens responded by saying that aggravated murder is “literally not murder.” She literally said this. Aggravated murder is literally murder. Aggravated murder is murder with aggravating factors, for example, planning the crime out over time or lying in wait. It is known in other jurisdictions as first-degree murder, marked by malice aforethought. Imagine somebody telling you that first-degree murder is not murder. That Robinson planned the crime out over time doesn’t make his murderous action “literally not murder.” You would laugh in the man’s face, wondering how on Earth he came to believe that aggravated murder is not murder. After all, the word “murder” is in the frickin’ name!

Owens doesn’t have the first clue about criminal law. Nor does Owens army of zombies. But she and her army wouldn’t have to know much at all about the subject to get this one right. One could know next to nothing about criminal law and still know that aggravated murder is murder. Can they not see the word in the name? To her credit, she did pronounce the word correctly rather than saying something like “agoravatized.”

Candace Owens MISPRONOUNCING 40 words straight. pic.twitter.com/5KQi8OGgfC

— Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV) (@TheMilkBarTV) August 12, 2026

What did Wilson hope to accomplish with this conversation? It isn’t like he believed that he could change her or her followers’ minds. He knows who they are: they’re Arthur Schopenhauer’s fools. The Candace Owen follower is the paradigm. “Whoever writes for fools always finds a large public,” Schopenhauer once observed. Sensationalism, shallow thinking, and low-substance work attract mass popularity because they require no mental effort to consume. Such content draws those incapable of consuming high-substance work and operating on higher-order thinking. They’re flies on a shit show, to update a hackneyed phrase. Facts and logic hurt their ganglia. Wilson, on the other hand, has a keen analytical mind. And the patience of a saint.

Candace Owens was made for shallow people in search of the sensational. The Church of Owens is a charismatic one. Confronted with her claim that Israel killed Charlie Kirk, she explicitly said that she had no positive evidence for the claim (or any of her claims, for that matter) but that it “feels” that way to her. She actually said this—and defended her entitlement to it! In other words, vibes. No evidence. No reasonable inferences. Just vibes. Wilson can’t reach people who think like that, however patient he is. Owens may seem smart (to gullible people) because she can Gish gallop, but experience tells us that stupid people are capable of blizzard mouth. Polls asking the public who won the debate serve as proxies measuring the extent of gullibility in the population.

“She didn't have a single solid piece of evidence. She had no positive evidence that Israel's involved in anything, no positive evidence that France is involved in anything, no positive evidence TPUSA is involved in anything, no positive evidence that Erika Kirk is involved in… pic.twitter.com/Nvz2jZKtc7

— Steven Crowder (@scrowder) August 14, 2026

Schopenhauer suggested that the best way to deal with fools is to have nothing to do with them (see The Scourge of the Scold). He argued that trying to reason with a fool is useless because logic has no power over stupidity (see Judgment, Conformity, and Epistemic Distortion). However, the target of debate is not really one’s opponent but the audience. Yet, the stupidity of Owens’ audience makes them unreachable. They find her attractive not because she’s intelligent. (How would they know anyway?) They follow her because she has a charisma they find appealing. Why would anybody follow Jim Jones, Benny Hinn, or L. Rob Hubbard? Charisma. Charisma works on everybody to a degree, so smart people are on guard.

Her followers also find validation in Owens’ refusal to use facts and logic when making the case. They don’t use facts and logic, either! Owens gives them permission to affirm their lazy cognitive style. “Candace is like that, so I can be, too!” They’re too stupid to know how stupid that makes them. They won’t listen to me (or Wilson)—that’s for sure. Not having to use facts and logic makes life easy in a society that tolerates stupid people. So my hat is off to Wilson for not tolerating stupid people. I struggle with it. I feel embarrassed for them. I worry I might sound cruel. I don’t easily suffer fools.

The opportunity Owens’ followers saw was to dogpile Wilson. They’re really good at that—ad hominem, logical fallacies, and non sequiturs. These come naturally to shallow minds. “Why is Wilson’s foot shaking?” (Because he’s a nicotine fiend experiencing withdrawal live and on screen, perhaps. What is that relevant?) “He said he was in the army and didn’t serve!” (What does that have to do with the ass-kicking we just watched?) “Wilson should cancel his podcast immediately!” (Their girl canceled her podcast Wednesday when Robinson’s defense pleading was dropped because it essentially admits he murdered Kirk.)

You remember these people from high school. Think back. They sat at the mean girls’ table in the cafeteria. Their heads were full of designer brands, changing hairstyles, and the names of cute boys they plan to use for clout. They moved like schools of fish down hallways and at malls. They sighed and rolled their eyes a lot.

A clarification is in order. Wilson kept demanding positive evidence, which Owens found threatening. What does Wilson mean? Circumstantial evidence requires plain facts that suggest other facts—and that requires rational inference. DNA, Fingerprints, the murder weapon, a screwdriver, or shoe prints left at a location are circumstantial. The prosecution has all that and more in copious amounts. Running away from a scene or hiding items. Check. Buying tools needed for a job right before it happens. Borrowing a Dremel from a roommate to inscribing the bullets used in the murder with ideological messages. Check. Check.

“So the case is circumstantial!” Most cases are. So what about direct evidence? By contrast, direct evidence proves itself. Wilson has a lot of that, too. So does the prosecution. The text messages to Twiggs in which he confesses to the crime. The video of Robinson at the scene with a rifle down his pant leg. Those are damning facts. All Owens has is conjecture and speculation. And that is no evidence at all.

This is a slam dunk case. Kirk’s alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, should negotiate a plea deal. I hope his attorneys are advising their client to take that route. Surely, they are. Luigi Mangione (who also killed for ideological reasons) stepped into a Manhattan federal courtroom today and pled guilty to federal charges. “On the morning of December 4, 2024, I shot Mr Thompson in Manhattan, and he died,” he said. “I knew what I was doing was illegal.” Robinson should follow suit.

https://t.co/3ZoUW6imGA

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) August 14, 2026

Remember when Kamala Harris and Tim Walz rolled out the campaign theme of “joy”? Harris presented herself as the “joyful warrior.” Her hyena laugh was not cringeworthy (even though people cringed) but “joyful.” When she said crazy things (which was routine), it was just Harris being silly—which is why she giggled her way through the constant stream of nonsensical ramblings. Readers might be interested in the essay I wrote about this before the 2024 election, A Fool’s Paradise: Democrats Rehash the Fake “Politics of Joy”.

The Republicans? Not joyful at all, Democrats implied. They dismissed Trump’s natural comedic talent (forgetting his appearances on SNL and all other shows and events). They would have Americans ignore the scenes of the conservative family on the lake, their backyard barbecues, hunting and fishing trips, laughing and joking around. There’s no celebration of life on the right side. For Democrats, working-class culture is reduced to signs to be used to manufacture fake affinity with the common man. “Look at me in the hunting outfit my campaign just bought, shooting the gun I borrowed. I’m just like you.” Sure, Elmer.

They do the same thing when appealing to black voters. During an April 2016 interview on The Breakfast Club, Clinton told her black brothers and sisters that she always carries a bottle of hot sauce in her bag. On the same program, during the 2020 election, hidden away in his basement, Biden remarked to the host Charlamagne, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Charlamagne responded, “It don’t have nothing to do with Trump. It has to do with the fact, I want something for my community.” Biden shot back: “Take a look at my record, man!” In reality, neither side of that exchange had anything to offer working families—or black Americans—that would allow them to rise.

At the same time, the 2024 campaign branded Republicans as “weird.” Despite their patriotism, belief in equality and fair play, advocacy of the nuclear family and traditional norms, and appreciation of basic biology, Republicans were the odd ones. Communication advisers instructed Democrats to reframe political disagreement into everyday, relatable terms rather than heavy ideological warnings. It would do no good to disagree with orthodoxy; instead, reduce them to a single word. Otherwise, the country sees plainly that Democrats subvert equality with DEI, replace the nuclear family with the village, transgress child protective boundaries, and reject basic biology. To be sure, from their point of view, these aren’t weird. But Democratic operatives know others will see them that way because they are. So Republicans are weird.

Psychologists call this projection. Yet they attend Pride parades where men on estrogen (attempt to) swing their shrunken genitals in the faces of children while wearing leather gimp and puppy masks. They turn the obvious question around and put it to normal people: “Why are you so obsessed with genitals?” That’s strategic projection.

Francesca Hong, who was just defeated in the Wisconsin primary by David Crowley, is a paradigm of joylessness in the Democratic Party. She’s weird, too. You’ve probably already heard that a while ago she tweeted that Thanksgiving should be abolished. She took that back recently, but in the lead-up to feigned regret, she also expressed her dislike of Halloween and Valentine’s Day. Too much love and kindness—and joy. Asked why she didn’t like Halloween, she responded, “I’m just not a fun person.” No shit, Sherlock. None of them are. They’re a bunch of woke scolds. It’s why their conservative family members avoid Indigenous Peoples’ Day. They don’t want to sit through rants about how awful Trump and those who voted for him are. They don’t want to see another “In this House” yard sign. That’s not going “no contact.” It’s avoiding another Maoist struggle session.

Democrats suck the joy out of life. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Valentine’s Day roll around, and progressives grumble about white supremacy, the capitalist cash-grab, or some other terrible thing those holidays represent. They see edgy comedians and smear them as “racists” and “transphobes.” Their own idea of comedy is some activist making unclever politically correct “jokes” to clapter, finger-snapping, or jazz hands (so as not to trigger those with sensory issues). The media transfigured Trump’s joyful rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024, into a “Nazi rally.” Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe horrified them. But there’s nothing weird about “Drag Queen Story Hour.”

As I explain in the essay cited at the top of today’s piece, the substance of the projection is familiar to history. Through the state-run “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude or KdF) program, the Nazi regime explicitly projected a politics of joy. To eyes wide open, the Nazis were covering a dark and grim project for world reordering with propaganda disguised as entertainment. Likewise, the Soviet Union ran an extensive, highly organized network of state-sponsored culture designed to showcase the “joyful” achievements of communism. Some went through the motions because that was the only party in town. But it is always sad to see, because Nazism and Communism are sad ways of living. Joy under totalitarianism is contrived because totalitarian regimes are joyless.

That a party or a state feels compelled to manufacture the appearance of joy distinguishes totalitarian design from the organic joy that naturally emerges from the people who live freely. The administered world of progressivism is inherently joyless because it compels people to live according to institution-sanctioned activities. It sucks joy out of people to tell them how to respond appropriately—and what that will be is determined by organizational doctrine. Humans find jokes about this or that group of people funny. They are scolded for “punching down.” Those who laugh at their fellow humans should feel shame—or be shamed—for laughing. The totalitarian will tell you who to laugh at.

For the totalitarian mindset, humans finding joy in life in ways the state disapproves of is dangerous. It’s a metric for too much freedom. Better that they hate people and things—and to know who and what that is, listen to the totalitarian. It’s as true for humor as it is for any other human expression. Movies set in eighteenth-century Denmark must cast black people, so those who can’t suspend their disbelief in the face of farce can be identified as dissenters (see Helen of Troy and the Falsification of History; The Deceit of AfroTurfing: Resisting the Siren Call of Nolan’s Monster Movie). To cover for how weird and awful that is, the party or state manufactures officially approved joy, which, as it is in any totalitarian situation, is the opposite of what it claims to be.

https://t.co/MRLByan0xc

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) August 14, 2026

I noted earlier that Hong lost her bid to be the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor. After her loss, House Democrat Ro Khanna explained to his followers that he and “Fran” were close. You could tell they are close because he called her “Fran,” as if they were family. As I read Khanna’s tweet, my mind drifted to that scene from Elia Kazan’s Waterfront. In the back of a cab, Charley remarked to his brother Terry, “Look, kid, I—how much you weigh, Slick? When you weighed one hundred and sixty-eight pounds you were beautiful. You coulda been another Billy Conn, and that skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast.” Terry responded, “It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you. Remember that night in the Garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night.’”

I did my part to get Hong into the general. Not just to make it easier for the Republican candidate Tom Tiffany (who won his primary in a landslide), but so the nation could have a good illustration of the lunacy of the Democratic Socialists of America, the totalitarian tendency colonizing the Democratic Party. I wasn’t counting on the establishment to pull out a Crowley win. The polling did not look good for him, as you can see from the polling the day before shared below. Now Tiffany has a fight, and the number illustrative of lunatics diminished. Not by much given the depth of the madness, but Hong was special. She brought a childlike quality to the mix. She doubled the AOC vibe, who recently admitted that “Woke 1 was crazy.” Cortez’s admission was designed to obscure the reality that Woke 2 is crazier.

Looking at the polling, and considering the “human error” in Milwaukee, it is hard to believe that Crowley legitimately won the Wisconsin primary. So why did Hong concede? In reflecting on this, I imagined the following conversation:

“Fran.”

“Yes?”

“We’re going to need you to concede. Crowley will win the election.”

“How do you know that? I am way ahead in the polls. Where are all these Crowley votes coming from?”

“Fran, this has to happen because Democrats must win the midterms. Republicans are killing us on the Democratic Socialism thing. You can’t win against Tiffany. But it’s worse than that. Republicans are going to use Wisconsin to portray Democrats as socialists and zero in on all the rest of the things we want.”

“How do you know that I can’t beat Tiffany? I am very popular.”

“Yes, you are. But we’ve looked at this closely and have determined that the people are not there yet. Tiffany will win if you are the candidate. We know you are way ahead in the polls. But everything is at stake here. We can’t risk the midterms.”

“Are you sure?”

“Look, you do want Trump impeached and his agenda thwarted, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You do want to continue the project of demographic transformation, right? Our plans depend on it.”

“Yes.”

“We knew you’d understand. After we’ve transformed the country, Democratic Socialism can reemerge. We’re not yet in a position to abolish the American Republic. As I said, the people just aren’t there right now. You’re young and your time will come. You do understand, right?”

“I understand.”

“Will you concede?”

“I will concede.”

“Good girl. The counterrevolution appreciates your service. We won’t forget about you.”

🔥🚨 AWKWARD — NBC ended its live coverage of the Wisconsin Democratic primary as Milwaukee County officials announced a “tabulation error" in the election data.

Five of nine USB sticks with the absentee ballot results contained only audit logs rather than the actual vote… pic.twitter.com/cWjh3uTYSG

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) August 12, 2026

Have you seen this meme yet? It is often framed with a question that goes something like this: “Is Elon Musk a robot?” No, Musk is a sympathetic human. He’s right; empathy is a fundamental weakness of Western civilization. Indeed, the concept (like “cultural relativism” and other like concepts) was invented to weaken Western civilization. I have written several essays on this, but The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind” is the most comprehensive. I will follow the meme with a brief treatment here, since I did not discuss Hannah Arendt in previous essays.

The meme is misleading. Hannah Arendt rejected empathy as a guide for political or critical thinking, viewing it instead as an illusion that erases the necessary distance between human beings. Where did she get this idea? In his Moral Sentiments argument (which you can download here for free), Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith argued that morality is rooted in imagination, sympathy, and the impartial spectator. 

For Smith, sympathy is the ability to imaginatively understand others’ feelings by placing ourselves in their situations. However, one does not accept the moral frame of the person with whom one is imaginatively swapping places. He does this to gain an appreciation of the man’s situation so he can better understand him. Indeed, unless he is a psychopath, he cannot help but do this. Smith explores the subject to establish the foundations of ethical behavior and to show how self-interest serves society’s broader good. What may seem paradoxical is resolved by grasping human nature and bringing out the best in it.

Empathy, on the other hand, is a recent invention that invites people to assume the perspective of the other person (the drug addict, the alien, the pedophile), and not only imaginatively swap places but judge right and wrong from his perspective. Empathy is associated with the pathology of people identifying with the alien and the criminal. We see it in the demand that society affirm the false gender identity of a delusional man. Empathy negates the impartial spectator and robs a man of discernment. Divorced from rational discernment, a man is unable to judge individuals and right from wrong. He thus, perhaps unwittingly, puts his life, his family, and society in jeopardy.

Arendt makes the same argument as Smith, even down to the observations of imagination and place-taking. For the record, this is the foundation of sociology’s looking-glass self (Charles Horton Cooley’s formulation) and, more broadly, pragmatic ethics. Arendt was well educated in sociology and pragmatic ethics.

In the final analysis, sympathy is a destructive demand. That’s what Musk is talking about. Gad Saad wrote about it this May, in a book appropriately titled Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind. Folks should read Smith and Saad’s work instead of ignorantly posting memes that distort what people think and say.