You know the myth of the zombie. A zombie is a reanimated corpse that lacks consciousness and acts through compulsion or external control. In some tellings, a conjurer hijacks the central nervous system of the corpse and uses it to realize dark and evil aims.
The lies progressives tell are legion, but few are as harmful to American citizens as the ones told about crime and immigration control. We call these “zombie lies” because no matter how many times they’re killed by truth, they’re reanimated by progressives and sent back out to hijack the brains of the living and direct them to speak and act in ways that disrupt a necessary function of good government, namely public safety and national integrity.
The persistence of these lies betrays their political function. For numerous untoward reasons, progressives strive to keep—their proneness to involvement in crime and violence notwithstanding—foreign-born populations in America. And for those native-born populations overrepresented in crime and violence, progressives call forth the zombies to obscure the record of their social policies: the perpetuation of conditions that exacerbate the crime and violence that plague our cities, foremost among them family disintegration and joblessness.
It is therefore necessary to periodically remind Americans that the facts that debunk these lies are already out there. Concerned citizens such as yours truly have killed them many times, only to see them reanimated to stalk the countryside once more. But we remain committed zombie killers, and so we will kill them again. And again.
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It remains true that there is no “systemic racism” in lethal police-civilian encounters. The public needs periodic reminders of this truth. Black Lives Matter was founded on the zombie lie that police officers are more likely to kill black men because of racial bias. A related lie is that many of these deaths involve unarmed black men. Facts and scientific reasoning have debunked these lies.
To take the related lie first, the reality is that around 95 percent of people killed by police had a weapon. However, it must be clarified that being “unarmed” does not necessarily make a man less lethal. “Personal weapons,” i.e., hands and feet, kill more Americans every year than all rifles combined.
To address the other lie, around half of all men killed by the police are white, while less than a quarter of those killed by the police are black. Because blacks are roughly 13 percent of the population, they are around 2-3 times more likely to be killed by the police. To put this another way, blacks are overrepresented in police shootings relative to their population size. However, black men are disproportionately involved in crimes that put them in situations where police encounters are more likely.
In other words, police do not disproportionately kill black men when benchmarks and situational factors are included in modeling variance in the dependent variable. In fact, in some studies, white males are more likely to be killed by police when these variables are entered into analysis. Would we say there is systemic racism against whites in America? Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? That’s because it is.
Think about it this way: Around 95 percent of those killed by police are male. Is this because of “systemic sexism”? No. Obviously. The actual reason is that males are drastically overrepresented in situations that expose them to violent encounters with the police. Nobody has to tell you that. You already know that males engage in violence more than women. It is a fact of natural history.
The persistent beliefs that the police kill black men at a higher per capita rate than white men and that a significant number of such fatalities involve unarmed black men are zombie lies. These claims are not true.
Why do these lies persist? Because progressives lie to their audience. The corporate media assist them in the lie by not telling the public the truth. During the 2020 insurrection that killed dozens of civilians and caused billions of dollars in property damage, the media knew the claims driving the violence were false. They never debunked the zombie lies. Instead, they told the public that the mobs on our streets were “mostly peaceful.”
The Democratic Party played an essential role in pushing the false narrative. The Party lies like a psychopath. Indeed, the Party is psychopathic. It lies about everything.
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Independent databases typically record about 1,000–1,300+ deaths per year at the hands of police. This is for recent years. One compiled dataset reported 1,314 police-related fatalities in 2025. The vast majority of these fatalities are classified as “justifiable homicide.” The exact number of unjustified homicides is difficult to pin down, but we know that it is a small proportion of the total number of fatalities at the hands of police.
The best available estimate of police-civilian encounters (counting people who have at least one contact with police, not every individual verbal exchange) is approximately 50 million police-civilian contacts per year. This is according to the Bureau of Justice.
Should we stop enforcing the law because a small proportion of lethal police-civilian encounters are unjustified? Depolicing increases crime and violence, so it would not be rational to sharply restrict or abolish the police. Crime and violence in America are real problems. Secure communities demand police presence. It is a right to expect safe neighborhoods where people can go about their lives without having to fear victimization.
Police stop active shooters, rescue people from violent attacks, prevent suicides, perform emergency medical aid, and intervene in domestic violence. More generally, studies of policing find that increases in police presence are associated with reductions in crime, especially violent crime. Systematic reviews of focused deterrence strategies find meaningful reductions in serious violent crime. Research on hot-spot policing finds reductions in violent crime in targeted areas.
So why is the small number of unjustified homicides in CBP and ICE operations used as an argument for eliminating border enforcement and deportations? CBP and ICE are law enforcement agencies. Illegal aliens not only engage in crime and violence, but their very presence in our country is often a criminal act in itself. CBP and ICE exist to secure our borders and the safety of our neighborhoods.
The reason for calls to abolish ICE is not because there are fatalities at the hands of law enforcement focused on these tasks. The reason is the political-economic project to drive down wages for native workers, disorganize our communities, and change the demographic composition of the United States for electoral advantage and the denationalization project. The safety of the citizenry is sacrificed for corporate and elite needs.
Progressives don’t care about citizens. They have no problem with keeping in America a population involved in crime and violence. They are responsible for the conditions that exacerbate crime and violence in our cities—family disintegration and joblessness, among other things. They care only about power.
Not knowing that thunder is the sound of lightning is not an instance of not knowing everything. Nobody knows everything. Candice Owens knows very little. The problem in this case is not what Candice thinks but how she thinks. A person who has to be told that thunder is the sound of lightning is the last person who should attempt to opine on capital cases. Of course, blowhards blow hard, so let me put it this way: A person who has to be told that thunder is the sound of lightning is the last person you should listen to when it comes to opinions on capital cases—really opinions on anything. If they’re right about something, it is only accidental. (See Candice Owens is a Clinically Stupid Person.)
A big problem for our species is the error of mistaking our innate linguistic capacity for native intelligence. The modern scientific understanding of language is that we evolved that facility relatively independently of the range of intellectual capacity. We can talk because our brains evolved this facility. A person unable to read or make obvious connections can still stand before a group of people and hold forth. They can recite a list of talking points without notes and never lose focus. They may be polished actors who deliver compelling performances, while holding the dumbest opinions on a range of cultural or political issues.
The dumbest people can sound smart because the facility of language is not that strongly correlated with cognitive ability. Inversely, some of the smartest people have trouble communicating. Yet the stupidest people can make arguments that sound compelling—to other stupid people. This is why stupid people with confidence can appear to so many as intelligent: because those people are stupid, too. Civilizations have been degraded and destroyed because of this basic misunderstanding. And because there have always been stupid people.
Serious question @RealCandaceO: did you really not know that thunder came from lightning?
I will admit that I once thought penguins were much bigger than they are.
But did you seriously not know that thunder came from lightning?
We see this today on X with people commenting on a post by Viva Frei. Comments on the thread, Frei posted a “serious question” to Candice Owens: “Did you really not know that thunder came from lightning? I will admit that I once thought penguins were much bigger than they are. But did you seriously not know that thunder came from lightning? It’s possible this was a bit. In which case, so be it. Can you confirm?” People are in the thread defending a grown woman who didn’t know thunder was the sound of lightning until she was in her forties. Bless her heart.
The gist of the comments on the thread is that some people were not taught that the sound of lightning is thunder. People don’t have to be taught this. Thunder isn’t like penguins. Penguins don’t run around my neighborhood. Unless I go to a zoo, travel to where penguins live, study the species, or watch videos where men stand among them so I can make a comparison, I have no idea how big those birds are.
This is not a trivial matter. It’s the crux of the Owens situation. That Owens didn’t see the connection between lightning and thunder (words that are almost always paired in speech) and had to be told this explains why she can’t see the fact pattern in the Tyler Robinson case and draw the obvious conclusion. The woman’s thoughts are random happenings. That is the mark of a stupid person; in this case, a stupid person who believes that she alone can decipher the mysteries of the world—even when there is no worldly mystery.
Nobody bothers to tell kids that thunder is the sound of lightning because almost every kid figures it out on their own—so early in life, in fact, they don’t remember a time when they didn’t know it. That connection is a test of basic intelligence, namely the ability to draw an inference. It’s like knowing why your shin hurts after walking into a coffee table or what causes the tower of blocks your father spent several minutes erecting you push over with feigned astonishment (you little shit).
The ability to see cause and effect is built into most of us. It’s how we survived as a species with so little instinct. It’s why we don’t follow the serpent to our doom like alligator hatchlings who see a reptilian form and think “Momma!” This capacity can only be confused and deranged by ideology and religion—and one needs little intelligence to be confused and deranged by other stupid people. Or evil people. (At the same time, even intelligent people can be confused or deranged.)
When I brought this up at a pool the other day, the initial reaction was one of disbelief because “nobody is that stupid.” Candice Owens is. Then heads shook in amazement when I confirmed that she said it. I was at the pool with smart people. Yet millions of people hear Owens say things like this and nod their heads in agreement.
This is how you can identify the stupid people who walk among us. If a person says, “Candice is right. I didn’t know thunder was the sound of lightning until somebody told me about it,” then you know there is stupidity in your midst. After she announced her stupidity during a podcast, she asked others to tell her whether they also didn’t make the connections in the public chat. Turns out that there were a lot of stupid people in her chat.
There is no use arguing with people this stupid—except for sport. They don’t know they’re stupid because complete sentences spew from the hole where they put their food (and other things). They will never get what you’re saying. They will instead find you cruel, stupid, or part of the conspiracy. This is why I generally deploy the Schopenhauer screen. What’s that? In my essay, The Scourge of the Scold, I tell readers about German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and his approach to engaging with fools. “Logic holds little power against stubborn ignorance. Such disputes waste valuable time,” he argues. This comes with a personal cost: “debating fools diminishes one’s own standing, as true intellectual victory is unattainable when faced with irrationality and pride.” Silence here is not because the wise man has no response; it is because he knows the fool cannot admit or comprehend it. (See also Judgment, Conformity, and Epistemic Distortion.)
There is no cure for this condition. Human attributes lie along a range of variation, and natural selection for our species has been largely derailed by culture. Our Darwinian moments have, to a considerable degree (they still happen from time to time, often to our amusement), been lost to civilization. We now really only evolve with technology, with notable left-behinds. We’re stuck with stupid people, I fear. And the fools won’t stay on the hill. This is why ridicule is such a vital weapon in the arsenal of progress. We can’t reason with them, so we mock and marginalize them.
There’s nothing intrinsically racist about immigration law and enforcement or seeking limits on immigration. Nationalism is about people, not race. In the United States, the descendants of slaves are as much native Americans as the descendants of the white European colonial population (Exposing the Guilt Trip: A Nation of Immigrants?The American Creed and the True Aggressor). We need to be more strident in making these points. We need to make explicit the character of this propaganda campaign and the vital importance of national integrity. The globalists are working hard to denationalize the West. If they succeed, America is over. Without the nation-state, there is no common culture, rule of law, or self-government.
Racism—systems manifesting belief in racial hierarchy—is not intrinsic to national integrity. An immigrant is a person present in a country she wasn’t born in. She may be of any race, ethnicity, religion, etc. Immigrants in the US come from all over the world. And there are lots of them. More than a million come to the US legally every year. Before Trump, millions more were entering illegally.
We’re approaching the same proportion of foreign-born as existed in the early twentieth century, a situation that then compelled working people to demand a change in immigration law because the burden of mass immigration was acutely felt by citizens in fewer job opportunities and lower wages. Today, the problems of fewer jobs and lower wages remain, with housing shortages and the welfare burden adding to the pressures.
While people have a right under international law to leave their home country, they have no right to live in another country. They have only the right to seek asylum. They have no right to expect other countries to take them in. Asylum seekers are a small portion of the millions who seek to emigrate every year. Most migrants seek access to the educational institutions, jobs, and social welfare systems of developed economies. They have no inherent right to any of these. Native workers are being replaced by foreign workers entering the country on H-1B visas. This must stop.
The enlightened world established nation-states to represent and defend the freedoms and rights (immunities and privileges) of those who legally live in them. Globalization erodes the standard of living and compels citizens to sacrifice their way of life to foreigners. Those who live under conditions of oppression and poverty should remain in their countries and struggle to make them adequate to their needs. We understand that this is not always possible.
But many of those entering the West do not do so to make their lives better, but to make the host country like the place they left. These are not immigrants but colonizers. The American Indian did not have the capacity and organization to repel the European colonizers. But while Americans have that capacity today, they lack organization. It’s the movement to organize against immigration that elites seek to thwart by racializing the immigrant and promulgating the doctrine of multiculturalism.
It’s not that those of other races cannot be Americans. Millions of black Americans of African descent enjoy equal rights with white Americans of European descent. There are Arabs, Asians, and Hispanics who enjoy the immunities and privileges of United States citizenship. America counts among its citizens Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims. Americans can be of any race, ethnicity, or religion (or no religion at all).
All that is required to be an American—to enjoy the freedoms of conscience and speech, protection from arbitrary detention and search and seizure, and a myriad of other liberties and rights enshrined in law—is to be welcomed and assimilate with its creed and swear an oath of loyalty to the nation. It’s not like this in many parts of the world, a world marked by authoritarian cultures and political and religious oppression. Americans rarely migrate to the Third World. But many migrants mean to bring the Third World to America.
Our representatives in government have a sacred obligation to the people they serve to scrutinize those who seek entry and residence in America, a discernment guided by what is best for the American people. Americans need jobs, decent wages, housing, lower taxes, and safe neighborhoods.
Before turning to today’s essay, I must note the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. I disagreed with Graham on Ukraine, but I have always admired his grasp of the true threat facing America: Islamism. Graham died from a sudden illness just hours after returning from an official diplomatic visit to Kyiv, Ukraine. I know that there’s nothing that unusual about a 71-year-old man dying of a heart attack, but that part of the world, you know. Just the day before, Graham appeared to be perfectly healthy as he briefed reporters about his plan to put further sanctions on Russia to bring about an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
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Two clips Steve Bannon used in his cold open on last Thursday’s early edition of War Room drew separate responses from me on Facebook. I want to combine them here and make these available to visitors of my platform (my Facebook account is set to friends and acquaintances), so I will take them in order. This essay elaborates considerably on the commentary I posted on Facebook, so those on Facebook who follow the link to this essay will not experience a repetition of those posts.
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough
The first was a clip from Morning Joe that concerned the canard that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” I published an essay on this last week that debunks the myth (see Exposing the Guilt Trip: A Nation of Immigrants? Not Really). It’s a myth progressives use to undermine national integrity. They pine to make the myth a reality. They are engineering the replacement of the original people of the United States with Third World populations.
Mika Brzezinski, daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Director of the Trilateral Commission, a globalist organization founded in 1973 by American banker David Rockefeller (a Baptist), warned that when a nation turns from its creed to its people, its moral compass has been demagnetized. As if the national creed and the nation, which is a people, are mutually exclusive. As if these people can be trusted to accurately convey the American creed.
Joe Scarborough (also a Baptist) followed his wife (a Catholic) with a rant about Jesus’s message condemning those whom we today call patriots, then known as the Zealots, and their calls for rebellion against Roman occupation, focusing instead on the Messiah’s message of grace, which we are told negates the imperative of national communities. Scarborough repurposed Scripture to chastize those Americans who are unwelcoming to foreigners and who disregard his misinterpretation of our national motto.
After decades of telling Americans that their country is not founded on Christianity, are the globalists and progressives now admitting that America is a Christian nation? No, of course not. They are exploiting the rhetoric of Christianity, selectively appealing to the teachings of Jesus to manipulate Americans, to further the managed decline of the United States and the West.
Are Christian patriots going to put up with this? Christians have as much right to participate in their government as anybody else. Since Christians are a majority in America, one would certainly hope they would. Overall, Christian voter turnout in the United States typically hovers around 55-60 percent during presidential elections. To be sure, non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic white Protestants voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, but they’re up against Hispanic Catholics and black Protestants, upon whom the Democratic Party can confidently rely. Evangelical Christians and those patriots who subscribe to Catholicism need to get energized and mobilized.
Perhaps it is needless to say that Morning Joe is obvious propaganda. Brzezinski and Scarborough lie so confidently you’d think they actually believe what they’re saying. But it is still important to show why their show, a production of MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), and shows like it (CNN, NPR, and PBS are notable examples) are organs of globalist propaganda.
Scarborough and Brzezinski (and David French, who joined them in dialogue) can’t be that ignorant of history. The talking heads know that those who founded the country were not immigrants but colonists. I tell readers what they won’t: that half of white people living in America today are descended from the colonial generation—and more than 90 percent of black people are descended from slaves brought to the United States before the country even existed. These are the original peoples of the American Republic.
The historical claim is demonstrably untrue, and those who grasp history know that Scarborough and Brzezinski are deceiving an audience the hosts of Morning Joe believe is too ignorant or indoctrinated to know they are lying. They would be insulting their audience except for the fact that the hosts’ assumption is largely correct: except for those who monitor such propaganda, those who watch Morning Joe are among the most ignorant and indoctrinated people in America.
This is why it is so crucial for readers to understand how the meanings of terms and phrases are twisted to mislead the audience. This is a major reason why I resurrected Freedom and Reason in 2018: to clarify the meanings of words. Scarborough provides a case in point; he misrepresented the motto “E pluribus unum.”
If a man did not know history, he might believe that the motto refers to a creed established at our founding that the United States is a place where those of many nations may come to America and be Americans. But the motto does not mean one nation integrating people from many nations, but rather the union of the thirteen distinct colonies that formed the Republic after throwing off the yoke of monarchy.
So, while there are immigrants in America (I happily married one), America is not a “nation of immigrants,” albeit it will become one if Americans don’t do what they did in the 1920s and shut down mass immigration for all but a select few—and more than that, establish a project of remigration.
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In another clip shared on War Room, the blonde-haired woman tangling with Scott Jennings on the CNN NewsNight panel, Caroline Sunshine, said that Iran would never attempt to assassinate Donald Trump because that would rally Americans around the flag and justify the US invading Iran.
One reads a similar sentiment on social media to the effect: “How can Trump complain upon hearing the news that the Islamic Republic of Iran means to assassinate him after he assassinates the Ayatollah and his whole family?” Drawing the proper moral parallel, I respond to the meme with this: “One would expect Germans to want to see Franklin Roosevelt assassinated if an attempt was made on Adolf Hitler’s life.” After all, the Ayatollah is to contemporary times what Hitler was to the WWII era.
Scott Jennings and Caroline Sunshine
Sunshine (the British would laugh at the aptness of the former Disney actress’s name) is oblivious to the obvious: it’s the Iranians who want war. To be sure, the Iranians want it to appear as if the US is the aggressor, so they can garner the sympathy of Muslims and their allies and delegitimize the United States and the West (which talking heads in many Western countries are doing their damndest to accomplish for them), but the reality is that they want to bring on the war they need to flush out the child Imam who went into hiding centuries earlier so they can establish an Islamic world order.
Sound far-fetched? This is why history matters. Study the Twelver Shi’a tradition. You will learn that the Twelver Shi’a belief centers on the twelve Imams descended from the Prophet Muhammad through Ali and Fatimah. Wilayat al-Faqih, developed most prominently by Ruhollah Khomeini, argues that during the occultation of the mythic Twelfth Imam, qualified Islamic jurists have authority to govern society, and the goal of the project they oversee is to steer the world towards a situation that will encourage the twelfth Imam to return and assume leadership.
The Islamic Republic is an end-times cult. Obsession over the return of the Twelfth Imam consumes them, so much so that they will wreck their own country to bring about his ascendancy. But he will never come because he isn’t real. And the experience of Persians will become even shittier than it is now.
This theory, as crazy as it sounds (and it is batshit crazy), is the theological foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran: establishing an Islamic state governed by clerical authority, viewing opposition to the religious-political leadership as illegitimate and worthy of violence suppression, and supporting “resistance” movements against foreign influence, including armed struggle. The strong emphasis on revolutionary ideology and confrontation with perceived enemies is inherent in Twelver Shi’a. The madness is a feature, not a bug. Shi’a Islam is unreformable.
The deep states of the West are engineering our common destruction. Islamism is based on the Nazi ideology.
Groups and states influenced by variants of this ideology not only include Iran’s clerical establishment but also movements such as Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon. It even influences those Sunni Muslims, such as Hamas (also a proxy of Iran), operating in the territory the Roman Empire called “Palestine,” i.e., Israel, previously Judea. There is a lot more to understanding this, which is why I provided above Triggernometry’s interview with Ed Husain, co-founder of the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam Foundation, Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Watch that interview to become aware of the peril the West is in. The question every American must ask himself is this: Who is the US, Israel, and the Middle East at war with? All one needs to do is say their names, and one knows what’s happening: the Islamic Republic and its proxies because they are at war with us. They are the aggressors. Moreover, this war has a domestic front. A Twelver Shi’a Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor of New York City, and his administration is making overtures to the Islamic Republic. Meanwhile, the democratic socialists have announced their plans for a one-party state that will abolish the Constitution.
The State Department shuts down a planned meeting between Zohran Mamdani’s administration and the Iranian ambassador to the UN.
According to City Journal, the top official in the Zohran Mamdani administration’s Office for International Affairs made plans to meet with Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations. City Journal reports: “Commissioner Ana María Archila was scheduled to meet with Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations, at 2 United Nations Plaza, alongside two other senior officials in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs on July 7 at 11 a.m.—this according to screenshots of a calendar invitation reviewed by City Journal and confirmed by a source connected to the international affairs community and another familiar with Archila’s office.”
Sleepwalkers are being led by people who seek the destruction of the West and the enslavement of its people. These fools not only defend Shi’a Islam—they vote it into office in our own country. They openly call for the destruction of America. And if America falls, the West is cooked. The hour is late, comrades. You need to mark the time.
Or perhaps clinically psychotic. I’d like to say “insane” because it better captures what I have in mind, but insanity is strictly a legal term, so I will go with psychotic. However, Owen’s babbling madness is one thing—I’ve been to parties where individuals hold forth uttering the craziest and stupidest things (I’ve even encountered this at faculty meetings and professional conferences)—but observing tens of thousands of people swallowing the nonsense that falls from Owen’s mouth is another thing altogether. That is fucking scary.
I know there are low-IQ and paranoid people in the world, but seeing so many of them in one place reminds me that stupidity and psychosis are real problems for the rest of us. Intellectually, I can explain National Socialism, to take a striking example of a mass of people collectively behaving stupidly and psychotically—and destructively—but there’s a part of me that remains shocked that such a thing as Nazi Germany is possible. It is wishful thinking to want to believe that members of my species are inherently rational beings. They aren’t. Yet I reserve astonishment to preserve my moral sensibility. I try hard to avoid being a cynic and a misanthrope. I can’t just give up. Irrationality endangers me.
I have been watching Utah’s preliminary hearing in the case of Tyler Robinson, the man who assassinated Charlie Kirk. The case is so open-and-shut that I will dispense with the pro forma “allegedly.” The autopsy report, the DNA on Robinson’s grandfather’s Mauser Model 98 bolt-action rifle modified to fire .30-06 Springfield ammunition, the screwdriver used to disassemble the rifle, and the towel used to conceal it, on which biological material from Robinson’s lover Lance aka “Luna” Twiggs was also found, the etched bullet casing, the meaning of the inscriptions, and the dremel used to inscribe them, multiple videos of Robinson on the Utah Valley University campus walking up the stairs to the roof with a rifle in a pant leg (Robinson is positively identified by Twiggs) and then jumping down from the roof, the damning note left for Twiggs under Robinson’s computer keyboard, the damning text messages and Discord chats, multiple damning interviews with Twiggs, the many eyewitnesses—it’s all there. Dude is cooked. And the defense team knows it.
I have a good imagination, but I cannot come up with an alternative theory of the case. And the reason I can’t is that I am incapable of believing crazy paranoid scenarios like “Mossad did it using an exploding microphone.” Sorry, not sorry, but my mind is limited by facts and reason. This is what makes me rational. Not that Mossad couldn’t do something like this. Remember when Israel fucked up Hezbollah with exploding cellphones? That event was wild but real. I know how and why Israel did that. But Israel didn’t kill Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson did. We know how and why he did. Owens and her ilk—Ian Carroll, Jimmy Dore, etc.—are guided not by fact and logic but by motivated reasoning that assumes Jews lurk behind the scenes. This is madness.
The exploding microphone theory is one of the more bizarre elements of the grand conspiracy. The autopsy report concludes that (1) Kirk’s cause of death was homicide and (2) the manner of his death was a gunshot wound to the neck. The medical examiner even extracted bullet fragments from the man’s corpse. I have watched video footage from multiple angles of the moment Kirk is struck in the neck—the same videos that made the judge flinch in open court and sicken the curious compelled to look at it—and there is zero evidence that the wound was caused by an explosive device. Whatever the wingnuts are seeing is not something normal people can see. Normal people see this: Kirk was killed by a bullet from a gun fired by Robinson. Confidence level that Robinson murdered Kirk? One hundred percent metaphysical certitude. Doubt in this case is pathologically unreasonable.
We know why Robinson killed Kirk. Slam-dunk cases don’t require a motive. But we have a motive in this case. Robinson murdered Kirk for his lover, Twiggs, whom Robinson refers to as “my love”—and, more than this, for the trans community Twiggs is part of. The mindset, the messages, the etchings on the bullet casings, and the target tell us this. Robinson’s handwritten note that he instructed Twiggs to find under Robinson’s keyboard confesses to his intent to murder Kirk: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it. I don’t know if I will/have succeeded, but I had hoped to make it home to you.” In the text conversation that followed Twiggs’ reading the note, Robinson confessed to having murdered Kirk. “I had enough of his hatred,” he explained. “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” Millions of Americans agree with him. The two then texted back and forth as Robinson sought an opportunity to retrieve the gun he shot Kirk with. But the authorities got there first. The state has his grandfather’s rifle.
This was in an Antifa hit job, as I show in my article on Freedom and Reason, Charlie Kirk’s Killer is in Custody and the Specter of Antifa. “But Antifa is an idea?”Right, and that’s the idea that motivated Robinson to kill Kirk. In that September 12 article, published just two days after the murder, I provide readers with facts central to the case and contextualize them. Nothing that has occurred since I wrote that essay contradicts my analysis (which the news site, RealClearPolitics, picked up, driving thousands of people to my platform). This was an open-and-shut case from the beginning. In that essay, I showed that Antifa terrorism and transactivism are inseparable. I knew this even before Kirk’s assassination and wrote about it (see Understanding Antifa: Eric Hoffer, the True Believer, and the Footsoldiers of the Authoritarian Left). As soon as I learned Kirk had been shot, I immediately understood what was behind it. It was not the Jews. It was an anarchist.
Leave it to Owens and her tribe of imbeciles to imagine an exploding microphone. “Why did his chain blow upwards?” she wonders aloud on Shawn Ryan’s podcast. How about air displacement, Candice? Ryan should at least have suggested this, but he had clearly not prepared for the interview. People online are wondering, “Why did his T-shirt bulge out in the back?” As if this is a mystery. A high-energy impact can cause a rapid, involuntary movement of the torso; inertia can make a loose shirt billow, lag, or flare outward. Tissue deformation and energy transfer: a bullet impact produces rapid expansion and contraction of tissue surrounding the wound path, transmitting forces through the body. Air and fabric effects, ie., displaced air under loose clothing causing a brief outward bulge—and a chain to blow upward. All of these obvious explanations could never occur to them because they already believe they know what happened.
Anybody who has ever killed an animal knows what bullets can do. A man might watch a slow-motion video of the kill and note numerous queer things about it. Yet, however many queer things may be noted, any sane person admits that the animal was shot by a rifle. How does one determine when a person has been shot? The questions are very basic and obvious. Are there entrance and possibly exit wounds? What was the bullet’s wound track through the body? What does the autopsy show? Were any bullets or bullet fragments recovered? What do ballistics and trajectory analysis show? In other words, what does the physical evidence tell us?
Candice Owens, seen here using a lavalier and two standing microphones
We have all the answers to these questions, yet the paranoid mind rationalizes what it sees with its own eyes at roughly the same velocity as the bullet that killed Kirk. One member of Owen’s band of paranoids, whose comment received numerous likes on Facebook, expressed bafflement at the observation that Kirk was wearing a microphone while speaking into another microphone. The motivated reasoning evident in his comment illustrates basic principles found in psychology and cognitive science. I am almost certain that the commenter had himself observed Owens using both a lavalier and a handheld or standing microphone simultaneously. Yet in this case, a common practice becomes extraordinary. The eyes-wide-shut phenomenon is standard among the devotees of Owens and other far-right antisemites. Jew-hatred blinds them to what any reasonably intelligent and sane person plainly sees and admits.
What is plain before a rational man’s eyes must, in the antisemite’s world, have another explanation. Motivated reasoning from that worldview must find Jews lurking behind Kirk’s murder, even if it means aiding and abetting Antifa and its terror campaign against the Republic, because Jews are behind everything. Do they really not know they are defending a movement that wants to see truth-tellers dead? If so, they don’t care. Nor do they care that they are aiding and abetting Jihadism. Antisemites are like those dimwits who believe that the world is run by reptilians disguised as people. They watch John Carpenter’s They Live and think it’s a documentary. I would like to believe that my fellow humans are rational beings. Many of them are. But a lot of them aren’t. And so we must ridicule them.
Owens’ appearance on the Shawn Ryan podcast contains many examples of paranoid delusion. Here’s another one: she claims that authorities never spoke to Twiggs. I knew that Twiggs had been interviewed shortly after Robinson turned himself in. How could Owens not know this? It was widely reported in the news that the police had spoken with Twiggs at least twice and taken pictures of the text messages and Discord chat.
Lance Twiggs wants us to believe that the biggest assassination since JFK happened in his backyard, he received a mysterious note under his keyboard plus a stunning full-fledged confession but he chose not to follow the case much and didn’t see the released FBI images until…
A video of Twiggs’ interview with the authorities was shown in court yesterday, after days of his defense team furiously trying to suppress parts of it (which they managed to do). In that video, Twiggs explains the case—the inscribing of the bullet casings and all the rest of it. Confronted with the video, Owens pivoted to the claim that Twiggs is an “obvious Fed asset.” And, since the federal government is controlled by the Jews, Twiggs must be an operative of Mossad. Right, Candice? The Zionists did it because Kirk was critical of Israeli policy. Why aren’t they murdering all the critics of Israel? Owens must be shaking in her boots.
Owens, Ian Carroll, Jimmy Dore, and the rest of this crowd, on the far left and the far right, are completely mental. I’m not engaging in an ad hominem attack when I write this. I am making an observation based on extensive knowledge of and experience in psychology and sociology. The delusion that Jews killed Kirk is akin to a schizophrenic man believing that, as he slept, the CIA planted transmitters in the fillings of his teeth to stop him from saving the world from interdimensional demons. Only here, tens of thousands of rubes believe the man. This is mass psychogenic illness. It’s the stuff of moral panic.
I’m reading posts by people resting their entire thesis of the case—that it was a Zionist conspiracy—on one section of a report that found inconclusive the identification of a bullet fragment. Hello? When fragments of the lead interior of a bullet are extracted from a corpse, ballistic experts typically can’t perform ballistic tests on them. They’re just pieces of lead. They carry no tool marks. Read the rest of the report. It’s damning. But wait a minute? Bullet fragments were retrieved from Kirk’s corpse? I thought it was a microphone bomb?
It is not unexpected that Robinson’s defense team would work such angles to generate reasonable doubt. Their job is to get their client off for murder or minimize the consequences of his actions (I’d be surprised if they didn’t seek a plea deal after what has occurred at the preliminary hearing.) Remember the way OJ Simpson’s defense team manipulated the jury in that high-profile murder case. It’s what lawyers do. If you had murdered a man, you’d likely want your attorneys to work every angle, however implausible, to help you escape justice.
The defense team is primarily pursuing two angles in this case. First, DNA analysts cannot definitively prove that biological materials identify a man or explain how a man’s DNA was deposited on a rifle or a screwdriver. Second, the bullet fragments cannot be definitely traced to the murder weapon. They know that the facts of the case condemn their client, so they intend to confuse a potential jury by dragging them into statistical minutiae, to make what is expected out to be disconfirmatory.
The defense team is doing what defense teams do: exploiting the fact that science is a probabilistic endeavor. What they have no intention of telling a jury is that the beauty of science is that it does not declare that its practitioners are absolutely certain of their conclusions. That is what differentiates science from religion—or a criminal trial. Science is humble that way. But justice not only seeks truth; justice seeks finality. It will fall to the prosecution team to explain this to the jury if this goes to trial. They have demonstrated it well enough to the judge, who will no doubt find probable cause to put this case before a jury.
Don’t be baffled by bullshit. When dealing with likelihood ratios of trillions-to-one, you can be reasonably confident of the conclusions the experts have reached. But DNA and ballistics aside, the circumstances of this case demand only one conclusion: that Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk. You’d have to be crazy to believe otherwise.
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Update!
The preliminary hearing is adjourned until September. Surely Robinson’s defense team will, in the meantime, convince their client to plead guilty to save his life. The evidence against him is incontrovertible. I knew this from the beginning, but the hearing made the truth clear to anybody prepared to accept the facts who was not yet convinced. Experts are suggesting the case may not go to trial for two years, so Robinson has plenty of time to decide his fate. That’s a ridiculous amount of time between a murder and a conviction.
The prosecution just dropped an enhanced surveillance video at the end of the hearing showing Tyler Robinson at his sniper perch on the rooftop of the building from where he assassinated Charlie Kirk. The public wasn’t allowed to see the enhanced footage, but we know what it showed because we have seen it before. The footage devastated Charlie’s wife and mother. No, it wasn’t an exploding microphone, Owen’s fans.
As for Candice Owens and her followers, truth doesn’t matter. All that matters is continuing the latest blood libel against the Jews. One reason for a more timely process is shutting up that stupid bitch and the imbeciles that hang on her every utterance. But that hopes for much. Robinson admitting his guilt or putting him before a firing squad would likely not shut Owens up. If Robinson pleads guilty, then Owens will say he’s a fall guy. If the state executes him, then he will become a martyr to her and her sycophants. This is the way of those who believe Jews run the world. All evidence is warped by the gravitational pull of their paranoid delusions.
Saturday, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The fireworks display in Washington, DC, was truly historic. Sunday morning, scrolling through social media as I often do, I saw this post on Threads. You can see my response in the image. What happened then was a full retreat by Naomi Ward. Slavery is part of our history. But it is not the master narrative of America. Emancipation is the master narrative. Liberation from bondage is our story.
From Threads
The original poster came back with something like “Yet you celebrate something that happened 250 years ago.” I responded with this: “Damn straight. It was the date of our independence from a monarchy, which created the context for the greatest free republic on the face of the planet. And it still exists! By contrast, slavery doesn’t exist anymore in the United States—or in the West. We abolished slavery in the 1860s. I celebrate something ongoing and awesome. You whine over something that’s long gone—and it’s gone because the American Republic is good and just.”
My reply was so devastating that the original poster immediately took down her post. All that remains is my response. She tried to erase the thread—and her fake grievance—from history. But the Internet is forever. She is hardly alone in throwing slavery in the face of a nation where blacks are free and equal. Much of the grievance industry is heartier than Naomi Ward. Indeed, I checked today, and it appears Ward has deplatformed herself. Her profile no longer appears on Threads.
This is how we have to respond to this nonsense. We can’t let people constantly run down the American Republic. As I said in my July 4 essay on Freedom and Reason, “Like an abusive spouse who continually dredges up some past grievance his wife has apologized for a thousand times, the ghost of chattel slavery must always haunt us.” But apparitions only torment us if we believe in them. I refuse to be haunted by ghosts. I don’t believe in them. (See As We Mark 250 Years of Independence, Let’s Not Forget the True Albatross Around America’s Neck.)
Imagine America celebrating the one-thousandth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration, and there are still those who focus instead on a legacy institution abolished in the distant past of the first free republic. This will happen only if we don’t resolutely shoot down those who guilt us with original sin. They’re the albatross, not a dead bird we threw off our necks long ago. The Democratic Party is the true albatross.
The vast majority of white men without property could not vote during the early years of the American Republic. Are we whining about that today? Are white men supposed to think less of the Declaration and the Constitution because the propertied visionaries who looked like us founded our nation? Just say thank you. Gratitude is as much for yourself as it is for those who sustain you. Don’t feel grateful? It’d be a lot better if you did.
Women couldn’t vote nationally well into the twentieth century (although some states allowed it earlier). Do we say the American Republic is illegitimate because women couldn’t vote everywhere for the first 106 years of our existence? The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was certified as law after Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify, guaranteeing that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” There was only one woman in Congress when that law was written. There were no women at the signing of the Declaration. There were no women at the signing of our Constitution or its Bill of Rights. White men wrote those documents.
There is nothing about white male minds and deeds that delegitimizes anything. This is vile identitarianism—anti-white, anti-male bigotry—mapped onto our history. It’s a primitive and regressive mindset that thinks one’s race or gender makes one either an oppressor or a victim. The Founders did not establish a free republic that affords citizens equality before the law and personal liberty because they were white and male. They established a free republic because they were just.
History attests to the righteousness of the results. White men ended the slave trade and chattel slavery. White men saved the Union in the Civil War. White men saw the Nineteenth Amendment established as the law of the land. The Supreme Court was exclusively white male when Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in public schools. White men—Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy—sent federal troops into states refusing to abide by the ruling. Long before then, a white man, Ulysses Grant, sent federal troops to the South to defend the rights of freed slaves and their descendants.
While I have you here, it may interest you to know, if you don’t already, that, in 1920, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, disbanded. Having achieved its goal, there was no reason for it to continue. Yet, instead of disbanding after same-sex marriage was recognized and gays and lesbians had achieved equal rights in opportunity, the various organizations of Pride conjured “trans rights” to keep the grievance business going.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) still exists today, despite there being no reason for it—except to keep alive the deceit that black Americans remain second-class citizens. The constant call for reparations does the same work as dwelling on the history of slavery. The War on Poverty programs alone, disproportionately spent on black Americans, have cost taxpayers over $45–60 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars since the mid-1960s, depending on which programs are included. Haven’t we spent enough? And what did we get for it? Crime, disorder, and broken families.
Let it go, people. Won and done. The nation has other problems to worry about, and we likely can’t tackle those problems unless we’re unified. Stop letting people who seek to disunite us, who seek immunities and privileges at the expense of others, get away with guilt-tripping the nation. Equal treatment is the only guarantee in a free Republic. It is the thing that lets freedom ring. Social justice is tyranny.
When people tell you that, excluding American Indians, all Americans are descendants of immigrants, they are misrepresenting the historical situation. The English who founded the United States were colonists or colonial descendants. So were the French and Spanish who colonized the Americas. They were not immigrants.
Image by Sora
Using the standard definition of immigration—moving from one sovereign country to another, residing there long-term or permanently, under a system of defined borders and citizenship laws—early European colonists in North America could not have been immigrants. The United States did not then exist and wouldn’t for well more than a century. Indeed, no countries existed in the Americas at the time Europeans were landing on their shores. There were only tribes and a few kingdoms. Although at times they strategically used the term “nation” in negotiations, the Indians were identified by their specific community, clan, or alliance network. There was no immigration law, citizenship system, or border control.
What history actually records is that the Europeans who initially settled America were moving within imperial domains (Britain, France, Spain, etc.), not into a modern nation-state. What is implied by those who say we are all immigrants is an expansive definition of the term that renders it nonsensical.
Source: Britannica
Consider this statement: “All those who permanently left Africa are immigrants.” Since humans originated in Africa, everybody outside Africa ultimately descended from somebody who left Africa.
The indigenous peoples of Europe were immigrants, if by that term we mean they descended from those who migrated to Europe roughly 45,000 years ago. It will not do to say I am descended from Europeans. One has to go back further in time than that—a lot further.
If the claim were true, then American Indians are not the indigenous peoples of the Americas but rather the descendants of immigrants, since their ancestors arrived on these lands by boat or land bridge. They were immigrants from Asia. But, then again, the Asians are the descendants of immigrants, too.
Why aren’t American Indians condemned for opposing European immigration when they were the descendants of immigrants themselves? You’ve seen the memes. If this is stolen land, who did the Indians steal it from? If one says the Indians settled unsettled patches of land, this is true of the Europeans who colonized North America, as well. The expanse of North America is vast, and there were large tracts of uninhabited land. But the truth is that Indians displaced other Indians.
The world outside of Africa has no indigenous peoples—if by “indigenous” we mean species that are native to a particular place, especially in the sense of having originated there. But that strict definition seems as strange as the expansive definition of “immigrant.”
Indigenous also refers to people who have a deep historical continuity with a land before later arrivals or colonization. Progressives may be nodding their heads at this definition, but that would make white Americans the indigenous people of North America, since they have a deep historical attachment to the land, and contemplating such a thing sets woke heads on fire.
How dare a man like me, whose family tree extends centuries into my country’s past, claim to be a native American, right? I must be the descendant of immigrants. This bakes their noodle: I am both. Not all people who look like me can say that. Nor can black Americans whose ancestors were brought here before there was a country called the United States. Many of them were brought here before the United States existed. They were not immigrants.
If one still embraces the definition of immigrant that includes all those who move from one place to another, this leaves the Africans as the only indigenous population in history. Yet, even here, one runs into problems. Which Africans?
Humans originated somewhere in Africa. The pan-African model posits that Homo sapiens developed through gene flow across the continent, principally East Africa and North Africa, perhaps also parts of Southern Africa. But that’s not all of Africa. If the broad definition is used, as one can see in the above map, most Africans are themselves immigrants, since they radiated from the species’ likely place or places of origin.
At this point, I hope the reader sees that the broad definition suffers from a logical problem that can be summed up this way: If everybody is an immigrant, then nobody is, since the term “immigrant” differentiates nothing. It is no longer a meaningful term.
Finding the one spot where the first modern human appeared won’t help clarify the matter. If you are a scripture-believing Christian, Jew, or Muslim, that indigenous one is Adam, and Adam was kicked out of Eden, along with the first woman. Adam and Eve were immigrants. There are no indigenous people in Eden. Only God and his angels.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, circa 1510
We are left with the standard definition. To be an immigrant means to leave one country and move to another. Using that definition, the claim that we are all immigrants is plainly untrue. Only some of us are immigrants or descended from immigrants. It is estimated that half or more white Americans living in the United States today are descended from “Colonial Stock,” i.e., those who arrived before 1776. More than ninety percent of black Americans living in the United States today are descended from individuals who arrived before the nation was established. So, no, we are not a nation of immigrants.
Here’s the reason for this exercise: the fact that some of us are descended from immigrants creates no burden on Americans to welcome immigrants. That’s the obligation “we’re all descendants of immigrants” sneaks into the conversation: “How can you oppose immigration when you are yourself a descendant of immigrants?” This is a fallacious argument, to be sure, but falsifying the claim, we negate a rhetorical flourish deployed to emotionally blackmail the population.
This question is not an argument. It’s a guilt trip. Don’t feel guilty. Your nativism is a legitimate sentiment, and there is nothing untoward about the politics of immigration control.
Before turning to today’s essay, a few clarifications are in order. I’m sure the reader has heard the dismissive phrase, “It’s just semantics”—as if the meaning of words doesn’t matter. But consider the glittering generality one sees in the propagandistic appeal to “democracy.” Does the speaker mean by this term direct democracy, liberal democracy, or industrial democracy? Vagueness in meaning is also a problem for the words “communism” and “socialism.”
Communism, in its anarchist and Marxist senses, conveys a classless and stateless social order in which the distribution of work and goods follows the dictum: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Socialism, by contrast, is a social system in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the workers, either at the level of the firm or through the state, the latter known as “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The standard definition of socialism is useful to keep. But there is another conception of socialism worth noting, since I describe it in this essay when I turn to the ideology of democratic socialism. That is Saint-Simon’s conception of an engineered society organized by experts. Rather than advocating the abolition of private property, Saint-Simon envisioned a system in which economic activity would be directed toward the common good through rational planning and administration. In his view, good government should shift from ruling over people to managing production. His vision of an organized, technocratic society profoundly influenced later socialist thought by emphasizing the moral obligation to use economic resources for the benefit of society as a whole through state direction. This is not ultimately managing people?
As for the popular meaning of communism, referring to those systems in which the people are under the thumb of an all-encompassing state, i.e., state socialism, this definition is more useful than the utopia imagined by anarchists and communists. After all, utopia literally means “nowhere.”
When Trump tells his audiences that the democratic socialists being elected to office around the country are communists, he’s not wrong. I use the popular meaning in this essay since it describes the experiences of those who have lived under communist rule. Communism, in this sense, points to a location somewhere, and we have enough real-world instances of this place to draw a conclusion about the adequacy of such systems to human freedom and well-being.
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I grant that George Orwell, a thinker I much admire, complicates any simple divide between capitalism and socialism. He never renounced his identity as a democratic socialist, believing to his end that extreme inequalities of privilege and wealth were morally and politically corrosive.
At the same time, Orwell is arguably the twentieth century’s most penetrating critic of state socialism and totalitarianism. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War and his observations of Stalinism convinced him that concentrating economic and political power in the hands of the state corrupts movements founded upon ideals of equality and justice.
Despite being saved by an American Marxist fighter after being shot in the neck by a fascist sniper near Huesca in Northwestern Spain and attended to by anti-fascists during his convalescence, the war showed Orwell that the greatest threat to liberty did not come only from fascism, but also from authoritarian factions claiming to represent socialism—those communist organizations aligned with the Soviet Union.
Orwell’s epiphany came in May 1937, in Barcelona, the year he was shot. Instead of concentrating on defeating Francisco Franco’s far-right forces, communist-controlled security forces fought other republican factions, especially the anti-Stalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), the militia Orwell had joined. Orwell witnessed men he had fought alongside arrested, disappeared into secret prisons, and executed. He watched the reputations of his fallen comrades besmirched by wicked men.
A similar epiphany occurred to the American anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman years before. In December 1919, Berkman and Goldman were deported from the United States during the First Red Scare. They arrived in Soviet Russia in January 1920. They initially hoped the Bolshevik Revolution would realize many of the ideals they had long championed. However, as they traveled through Russia, they observed widespread shortages, strict censorship, the suppression of independent labor organizations, and the growing power of the secret police, the Cheka. They became increasingly concerned that political freedom was being sacrificed.
The decisive turning point came in March 1921 with the Kronstadt Rebellion. Sailors at Kronstadt—once celebrated by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks as heroes of the revolution—called for freer elections to the soviets, freedom of speech for anarchist and socialist groups, and an end to one-party rule. The Bolshevik government crushed the rebellion militarily, killing many and imprisoning or executing others. For Berkman and Goldman, Kronstadt was the moment they concluded that the Bolshevik government had become an authoritarian state rather than a vehicle for liberation.
What Stalinism showed Orwell requires little elaboration here. His great works of allegory, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, will tell the reader all about that. If a man hasn’t read these books, then there is a gap in his understanding of the problem of communism. Orwell brings to the reader what he (and Berkman and Goldman before him) saw for himself: the totalizing tendencies inherent in power not in the service of defending the intrinsic rights of man, but in the folly of transforming man’s nature.
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The shared experience of Orwell, Berkman, Goldman, and many others makes plain Thomas Sowell’s distinction between the “constrained” and “unconstrained” conceptions of human nature, described in his 1987 A Conflict of Visions, and the peril of assuming the latter. In that book, Sowell argues that political disagreements often stem from differing assumptions about human nature rather than simply competing policy preferences. History tells us which assumptions accord with our species-being.
In Sowell’s view, the constrained vision sees human beings as inherently limited—imperfect in discernment, knowledge, and morality. Therefore, the best societies rely on institutions, markets, traditions, and the rule of law to channel self-interest and minimize harm. By contrast, the unconstrained vision holds that human problems are largely the result of flawed social arrangements rather than fixed human limitations, and that deliberate planning and expertise can significantly improve society if the right people and policies are put in place. Today, the unconstrained vision is dressed in the colors of “oppressed-oppressor” and “victim-perpetrator.”
Sowell shows how the enduring debates over economics, equality, government, and justice reflect these deeper, competing visions of what human beings are capable of becoming. In doing so, he identifies a central problem in collective control over man’s fate: Who shall govern our lives?
I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ rhetorical questions concerning the commissar during a talk he gave in Canada at the University of Toronto in 2006. Canada is notorious for restricting the speech of its citizens under the guise of “hate speech” laws. Hitchens asked his audience:
“To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor? Isn’t a famous old story that the man who has to read all the pornography, in order to decide what’s fit to be passed and what is fit not to be, is the man most likely to become debauched? Did you hear any speaker in the opposition to this motion, eloquent as one of them was, to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read? To whom you would give the job of deciding for you — relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone? Hands up. Do you know anyone to whom you’d give this job? Does anyone have a nominee?”
Those who know Hitchens’ biography know that he was for many years a Trotskyist. The year he uttered these words was the year he declared his independence from socialist thinking. Hitchens clarified during a town hall in 2006, in conversation with a group of fellow essayists, that “I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist.”
There was a time when I, too, considered myself a socialist. I had neglected Orwell and dismissed Berkman and Goldman. I had not yet taken Hitchens to heart. In the 1990s, I even flirted with communism. (I published in the Communist Party-USA’s newspaper, People’s World, so I can’t deny this piece of my biography.) I had become convinced that a society in which workers collectively owned and controlled the means of production represented the highest expression of economic and—I cringed as I write this—social justice.
The idea of socialism appealed to my sense of fairness. Why should those whose labor creates value by transforming nature and commodities worked up by others into wealth for the few have so little say over the enterprises they sustain? It seemed obvious that democratizing the workplace would also democratize society. And democracy is a good thing (there’s that glittering generality again).
I have not abandoned that moral intuition. I still believe there is something admirable about workers sharing ownership, decision-making, and profits. And I remain an admirer of Karl Marx. He is our Darwin in the social sciences. His materialist conception of history fundamentally shaped the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, vocations to which I have devoted more than a quarter century of my life. And the best psychology is rooted in his insights about appearance and structure. Marx was, after all, a classical liberal thinker engaged in critique and dialectic, fully embedded in the scientific worldview.
What has changed is my understanding of the relationship between ideals and political power—and history. The problem is not Marx’s analysis of the problem. The problem is his solution.
The problem goes beyond communism’s entailments. To be sure, where the totalizing scheme leads has not been good for the people who have tried it. But that’s not because they weren’t doing it right. It’s because there’s something wrong with the end itself—and thus the means deployed to achieve it. The flaw lies not with worker ownership per se but rather with making worker ownership the universal economic model through the coercive power of the state.
Substantive equality, or an equality of outcomes, in contrast to formal equality, i.e., equal treatment before the law, requires sacrificing liberty to the collective. The distribution of discipline, intelligence, talents, and virtue is not uniform across the species. We are not all the same, and achieving equality of outcomes means those who can achieve great things, to the betterment of all, are made ordinary to the detriment of all. Mediocrity is inevitable. The politics of collectivism before individualism negates the individualism that organically elevates the collective. To say that inequality is the price of progress suggests that inequality is a bad thing.
This realization owes much to my reading of economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. From the earliest days of the course Freedom and Social Control, my first teaching assignment as an assistant professor, I put his work before my students, contrasting it with Marx, hoping they would, like me, object to Hayek’s arguments. Instead, thanks to steelmanning Hayek’s position to model for students charity in discourse, and because course content focused on the problem of totalitarianism, I found myself persuaded to Hayek’s side.
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argues that comprehensive economic planning inevitably requires comprehensive political planning and social engineering. When governments decide how property must be owned, how businesses must be organized, and how economic decisions are made, they cannot avoid making choices that individuals would otherwise make for themselves, thus precluding the ingenuity that advances civilization, as well as suppressing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In this context, as disagreements over policy inevitably arise, what at first appears as voluntary cooperation gives way to compulsion. The state must increasingly decide whose preferences prevail. Too often, these preferences are not rooted in a moral ontology but in some technocratic end, and the means to such ends, unconstrained by morality, are unethical. The result is an administered world governed by authoritarians and bureaucrats. This is the folly of utilitarianism, a tyranny of the brainwashed majority, inevitably led by a vanguard of social engineers, disguised as liberalism.
Hayek’s point is often misunderstood. I am guilty of misunderstanding him myself. Careful reading of his work is necessary, and the short summary I used in class did not adequately convey his worldview. He did not argue that every government intervention leads directly to dictatorship. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek writes that there is no reason a wealthy society cannot guarantee everyone some minimum of clothing, food, and shelter.
Hayek accepted compulsory government insurance against risks that individuals cannot reasonably insure themselves against, such as serious illness, some forms of disability, and workplace accidents. He recognized that certain public health services and responses to epidemics could be legitimate government functions because they address problems individual market transactions cannot solve effectively. He supported government provisions for basic education, bridges, roads, and other public goods where markets alone may not produce efficient outcomes. And he believed government should enforce contracts, protect property rights, prevent fraud, and maintain competition through a sound legal framework.
His argument is not that the government has no place in our lives, but rather that concentrating economic decision-making in the hands of political authorities creates pressures that steadily erode individual liberty. A society cannot centrally organize economic life without also expanding the authority necessary to enforce that organization. The problem of social engineering is intrinsic to it.
Although Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist and would go further than Hayek in social provisioning, the common ground beneath them is that both rejected the idea that protecting liberty required either an all-powerful state or a completely hands-off state. After Spain, Orwell became fiercely committed to civil liberties, competitive elections, free speech, and an independent press. For Orwell, socialism without democracy was simply another form of tyranny.
However, unlike Orwell, Hayek sees that state control over the economy to achieve what Orwell believed in principle, i.e., economic equality and public ownership, is antithetical to democracy, if by that term one means constitutional limits, free and fair elections, freedom of speech, a free press, the protection of minority rights, and universal suffrage, i.e., the liberal democratic conception, what one finds in American republicism. Both Hayek and Orwell strongly supported democratic institutions of this sort because together they form a bulwark against totalitarianism. (One reasonably wonders whether, on his deathbed, Orwell would still describe himself as a socialist.)
Hayek develops this idea further in The Constitution of Liberty. Here, he argues that freedom depends less on achieving any particular social outcome than on preserving a framework in which individuals can pursue different visions of the good life. A free society allows people to cooperate and compete, succeed and fail, and voluntarily associate in countless ways. The state’s role is to maintain impartial rules rather than dictate preferred economic arrangements.
Hayek’s clear thinking transformed my own. If a man is to be a reasonable one, he must yield his convictions to the force of logic. I had before put the left’s concept of positive liberty before negative liberty, tending to see the latter as the enemy of the former. This was the debate that framed the assignment of Marx and Hayek in Freedom and Social Control. What I did not at first see is that while what Erich Fromm and Isiah Berlin describe as substantive freedom can emerge from the conditions promoted by classical liberalism, positive liberty as a politics negates the liberal freedoms I have always held dear.
I now think that Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires a bit of reordering. But none of the needs he identifies are necessarily sacrificed in the revision. The hierarchy must rise upon a foundation of liberty as much as the requirements of the creature. We need not end inequality among men to pave the road to self-actualization. Indeed, if inequality is a sign of freedom, we should focus instead on fostering social conditions that allow human beings to transcend their lowly station—if that is what they are able and choose to do—through their own efforts.
I confess that the hardest part of accepting Hayek’s thesis is admitting that inequality is the natural order of things, that human nature is constrained. This is not to say that we must live like the other animals. But it does require recognizing that we cannot escape the laws of nature, and that, in our attempt to transcend natural history, we risk denying its results. Evolution may have no reason behind it, but there is a logic to it, and it is not a logic of man’s design. Our rights are found there, not in the designs of men.
Inequality, in Hayek’s view, is therefore not merely the unfortunate byproduct of freedom but, to a significant extent, an inevitable consequence of it. Human beings differ naturally in ambition, creativity, discipline, intelligence, interests, temperament, and willingness to assume risk. They also choose different ways of life. Some devote themselves to building businesses, others to raising families, creating art, pursuing scholarship, or serving their communities. These are not mutually exclusive vocations. Indeed, each depends on the other. A free society does not erase these differences; it allows them to flourish and integrates them. The most advanced societies recognize these truths. They are self-evident. It is why the societies that recognize them are so advanced.
As people pursue their own goals, unequal outcomes inevitably emerge. For Hayek, inequality is the mark of a free society. This is not something to regret or repair. While disparities can provoke envy, they also provide examples for others to emulate. The inventor who develops a revolutionary technology, the entrepreneur who builds a successful company, the scientist who makes a breakthrough, or the artist who creates enduring beauty all expand the horizon of what others believe is possible.
Equality of opportunity leaves room for inequality of achievement, and those achievements become models that encourage aspiration rather than conformity. Parties that organize people around resentment undermine opportunity. The democratic socialists who are taking over the Democratic Party stand against the individual’s freedom to live his life as he chooses. Really, these types have commanded the party for more than a century under the banner of progressivism, the ideological projection of corporatism. This is the operating system of Europe. Today, American socialists are more open about what they seek. And the socialism they seek is the technocratic organization of society.
This insight also reshaped the way I think about the Marxist maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” As an ethical aspiration, it possesses undeniable appeal; few people object to helping those who genuinely cannot provide for themselves. As I learned, even Hayek saw value and necessity here. The difficulty arises when the principle becomes the organizing rule of the state-administered economy.
If people’s needs are guaranteed regardless of effort, while the fruits of exceptional effort are continually redistributed, the incentive to strive gradually diminishes for at least some members of society, while those who continue to create, innovate, and produce find themselves surrendering an ever-greater share of what they have earned to those who have been idled or who have idled themselves.
Over time, this fosters dependence upon political institutions rather than personal initiative. Instead of working for a living, many proletarians, and especially the underclass, those made dependent on welfare, vote for a living; they vote not to open the way for those who strive, but for those who will reward sloth.
Benjamin Franklin once observed: “Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy.” Marx’s maxim blurs a distinction that every free society ought to preserve: there is a profound moral difference between someone who earnestly strives yet falls short and someone who declines to strive at all. Failure despite diligence is an honorable risk inherent in liberty and self-improvement. A life defined by the refusal to exercise one’s abilities is something altogether different.
Compassion rightly belongs to those who cannot succeed despite sincere effort; it should not require treating persistent unwillingness to contribute as morally equivalent to honest failure. Yet welfare states do precisely that. And the burden of supporting that mass of people who do not strive falls upon the shoulders of the productive members of society. It is an unjust burden because it denies human nature.
* * *
A little more than a decade ago, I gave a talk titled “The Table-Makers” at the “What is Socialism?” event held at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. The evening was organized by the Critical Left, a student group. The event was well attended, with animated challenges to my position coming especially from conservatives in the audience. The core argument remains valid and sound. What is missing, however, is that I presented socialism strictly as a replacement for capitalism when it doesn’t have to be. No conservative made that critique. Nor would I expect them to.
If worker-owned firms are truly superior to other arrangements—more productive, more satisfying, and more humane in their way of thinking—then people should be free to create them. They should compete in the marketplace alongside corporations, family businesses, nonprofits, partnerships, and sole proprietorships. Nothing about free-market capitalism prohibits this. Indeed, many successful employee-owned enterprises already exist, demonstrating that democratic workplaces need not remain theoretical.
What capitalism uniquely offers is pluralism. It permits many forms of ownership simultaneously. Investors may build conventional corporations. Employees may organize cooperatives. Entrepreneurs may launch startups. Communities may establish nonprofits. Consumers and workers can choose among them. By contrast, making worker ownership mandatory requires eliminating those alternatives. If every enterprise must be collectively owned, then individuals who prefer other arrangements lose the freedom to choose them. Paradoxically, achieving universal economic democracy requires restricting economic pluralism and cancelling the freedom of contract.
This is where Hayek’s warning becomes especially persuasive. The more ambitious the social objective, the greater the governmental authority required to realize it. Noble intentions do not eliminate this reality. Furthermore, can we really count on those who lead us to have noble intentions? History answers the question for us. Stalin, Mao, and other leaders of socialist systems used their authority to establish totalitarian societies where human freedom was extinguished.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron” illustrates the same principle through satire rather than philosophy. In Vonnegut’s imagined future, substantive equality has become the supreme social value. To ensure that no one exceeds anyone else, the government handicaps beauty, intelligence, strength, and talent. The result is not justice but mediocrity enforced by coercion.
The story is deliberately absurd, yet its underlying insight remains powerful. Equal outcomes cannot simply be declared or forced into existence. Not if freedom matters. Because people naturally differ in countless ways, maintaining strict equality requires continuous intervention by political authority. The more perfect the equality sought, the more intrusive that authority becomes.
If every workplace must conform to one approved model of ownership, then someone must enforce that conformity. Entrepreneurs who wish to found a conventional company must be prohibited from doing so. Novel ideas and private initiatives are negated out of the gate. If workers voluntarily accept different arrangements, those agreements must be invalidated. Freedom yields to regulation, and regulation increasingly depends upon coercion. This is also the logic behind censorship and other affronts to liberty.
Recognizing this does not require embracing an uncritical defense of capitalism. Capitalism has undeniable flaws. It rewards exploitation of labor and nature, encourages excessive accumulation of wealth (although what qualifies as “excessive” wealth concentration needs clarity), and leaves many workers with little bargaining power. Markets do not automatically produce justice. Yet these criticisms point toward reform rather than abolition.
Laws protecting workers, encouraging competition, preventing fraud, and expanding opportunities for employee ownership can all exist within a broadly capitalist framework. Capitalist governments can remove legal obstacles to cooperatives, provide fair tax treatment for employee stock ownership plans, and enforce rules that protect workers from abuse without prescribing a single model of enterprise for everyone. Worker-owned companies do not negate capitalism. But the socialism advocated by Zohran Mamdani and his crowd inevitably negates worker-owned enterprise. Workers do not really own or control the means of production under state socialism. There is no room there for entrepreneurs.
Liberal capitalism offers something I overlooked: the freedom to build socialist institutions inside the system of private ownership. Free market capitalism is based on voluntarism. If workers wish to own factories together, they may do so. If communities wish to establish cooperatives, they may do so. If investors wish to finance employee-owned firms, they may do so. Success depends not upon political decree but upon persuading others that these institutions are desirable and sustainable. Such arrangements strike a healthier balance between liberty and justice.
What is more, liberty is itself good and therefore just. Liberty allows people to make their own choices, pursue their goals, and live according to their values without unnecessary interference. A society that respects liberty recognizes the dignity and equality of individuals by giving them the freedom to think, speak, and act responsibly. While liberty should be balanced with laws that protect others from harm, it is ultimately just because it gives everyone the same basic rights and opportunities. In this way, liberty supports fairness, personal growth, and respect for human rights. Socialism at scale takes all this away.
* * *
I still admire the aspiration that inspired my youthful socialism: giving ordinary people greater control over the economic forces that shape their lives. But I no longer believe that this aspiration justifies granting the state sweeping authority over property and enterprise. The concentration of power necessary to impose universal worker ownership poses dangers that outweigh its potential benefits. Hayek persuaded me that liberty requires preserving diverse forms of economic organization. Vonnegut showed me that even the noblest ideals can become oppressive when enforced without limit. Together, these thinkers and others like them helped me understand that freedom includes the freedom to organize cooperatively—but also the freedom not to.
Today, I believe the best society is neither one in which capitalism reigns unchecked nor one in which socialism is imposed by law. It is one in which free people can create the kinds of institutions they believe in, whether those institutions are employee-owned cooperatives, traditional corporations, nonprofits, or something entirely new. If worker ownership is truly the superior model, it should flourish through voluntary association and open competition rather than government compulsion. If it fails, then it was not the superior model. Let the better ideas win.
In reflection, I recognize that there was always a tension in my political outlook, even if I did not fully appreciate it at the time. I called myself a socialist because I was drawn to the ideal of economic justice and to the conviction that working people should have a greater voice in the institutions that shaped their lives. Yet I also called myself a liberal in the classical sense, deeply committed to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights: individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, due process, limited government, and the inherent dignity of the individual.
This is why I have always felt a certain kinship with Orwell, even if I neglected him between my first encounters with his work and revisiting them years later. Like Orwell, I am attracted to socialism’s ethical concern for the disadvantaged while remaining instinctively attached to the liberal tradition’s distrust of concentrated power. Orwell eventually recognized that socialism without liberty could degenerate into tyranny. My own journey has led me to a similar conclusion. I have not abandoned the desire for a more just economy; rather, I have come to believe that justice achieved at the expense of the freedoms guaranteed by the liberal constitutional tradition is too costly a bargain.
If forced to choose between equality enforced by the state and liberty protected by constitutional limits, I must choose liberty—not because equality is unimportant, but because without liberty, the pursuit of equality is liable to consume the very humanity it seeks to ennoble.
* * *
Hayek’s criticism of political movements that seek substantive equality at the expense of liberty is essential to understanding the struggle for autonomy and freedom. As natural as the desire for autonomy and liberty may be, the conditions necessary for their realization have not been the historical norm. This is because of the enduring presence of those who seek power over others’ lives. Every democratic socialist is, at heart, a totalitarian.
We must insist on formal equality, a situation where every individual stands equal before the law, enjoying the same legal rights, obligations, and protections regardless of occupation, race, religion, social standing, or wealth. Crucial to this principle is a system of rights, secured by constitutional limits, that places fundamental liberties beyond the arbitrary power of those who govern. To be sure, such a system still requires the exercise of power, but that power rests on a moral foundation committed to equality before the law rather than equality of outcomes.
Substantive equality, by contrast, seeks to equalize people’s economic conditions, social positions, or life outcomes, and the power required to achieve it necessarily entails an unjust exercise of coercion. This we cannot abide by. We’ve seen its fruits. And they’re rotten.
Hayek argued that these two conceptions of equality are ultimately incompatible. To preserve equal treatment under the law, governments must apply general rules impartially. To produce more equal outcomes, however, government must treat people differently—taxing some more heavily than others, distributing benefits unequally, or granting special preferences based upon need or circumstance. The pursuit of substantive equality inevitably requires departures from formal equality.
For Hayek, equality before the law was therefore not merely one value among many; it was the indispensable legal condition of a free society. Once the law ceases to treat citizens impartially in pursuit of preferred social outcomes, liberty itself begins to yield to political discretion, and the quality of discretion is also highly variable across the species. As it happens, sociopaths are often quite cunning.
In Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell depicted how revolutions undertaken in the name of the people can ultimately produce new ruling elites, censorship, surveillance, and the destruction of independent thought. Although Orwell would likely have disagreed with Hayek on the merits of capitalism, they shared an essential insight: liberty cannot survive where political power becomes sufficiently centralized to dictate not only economic life but also the boundaries of dissent and truth. Orwell serves as a reminder that genuine concern for justice must always be tempered by an equally vigorous concern for individual freedom.
Hitchens thought Marx’s method of analyzing power, class, and ideology could still be useful for understanding society. But he rejected socialism as a governing program because, in his view, every attempt to implement it at scale had tended toward authoritarianism and the suppression of individual liberty. He retained from Marx the habit of analysis—seeing politics through the lens of class power and material interests—but rejected socialism as a system of economic organization because it concentrated too much power in the state and was tyrannical in practice.
This is where I land. It has been many years since I landed here, but I felt I owed it to readers of this blog an explanation. Thanks for reading and subscribing to Freedom and Reason.
With America approaching its 250th anniversary, former President Barack Obama has drawn renewed attention—as if there weren’t already an army of woke scolds reminding the country of this history at every turn—to the fact that some of those who founded America owned slaves. In a recent interview associated with the opening of his presidential library, Obama notes that George Washington, the first president of a fledgling republic, participated in a system that the nation he fathered abolished.
Did Obama tell his slavish audience that, in his will, the humans Washington owned would be freed after the death of his wife, Martha? Did Obama even look to determine the disposition of Washington’s slaves after his death? If he had, he would have learned that the First Lady, feeling uncomfortable delaying their freedom, signed a deed that freed them on January 1, 1801, a little over a year after Washington’s death. If the first black president, the son of a white woman, knew this, he wouldn’t have told those leaning into his words.
Obama exploits his status as a (manufactured) statesman to emphasize what progressives portray as the contradiction at the heart of the nation’s origins and therefore an inherent flaw in America’s present and future: the distant past of what Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun called the “peculiar institution.” The fact that America overcame slavery must be obscured. Like an abusive spouse who continually dredges up some past grievance his wife has apologized for a thousand times, the ghost of chattel slavery must always haunt us. No redemption is possible.
Obama made the comments at the opening of his presidential library, a paradigm of brutalist architecture
At the time of this writing, it’s been 218 years and 6 months since the United States ended legal importation of enslaved people from abroad, and 160 years and 7 months since slavery was abolished in the United States. To have known a relative who was enslaved, one would have to be born around the early 1930s or earlier, a vanishingly small percentage of the population. Yet we’re supposed to believe that black Americans are presently oppressed by a system that was overthrown decades before anybody living was born.
Progressives want Americans to have slavery in mind as we turn our attention to Washington and the other white men who established the American Republic in our national moment of reflection. We’re not to see the Washington Monument in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but instead algae and cracked blue paint. “I think sometimes we get confused in thinking that these two stories are separate,” Obama said. “They’re intertwined, right? Which is why I can be a great admirer of George Washington, and also acknowledge he was a slaveholder.”
The “we” Obama imagines doesn’t exist. Nobody sees America’s founding, chattel slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade as separate from the founding of the country. We acknowledge slavery and the fact that many colonists who fought for independence from England and established the American Republic participated in it. Even if we wanted to forget it, progressives are always there to remind us. But they don’t need to; we don’t want to forget it. The question is how we are supposed to regard the entanglement, not whether we acknowledge it.
* * *
In sociology, there is a concept called “hedging.” It refers to how people soften, qualify, or partially distance themselves from a claim or identity so they avoid sounding too absolute or committed. It’s a discursive strategy—language used in social interaction to manage credibility, meaning, and social consequences.
Obama uses the strategy of hedging to implicate white people—then and now—in the oppression of black people while seeming to honor those who founded the United States. He wants you to know he’s “a great admirer of George Washington” so that he can appear patriotic—and as a sophisticated thinker who can manage nuance—while delegitimizing the American Republic. The takeaway: the “Father of His Country” was an enslaver. And that means Washington could not possibly be a man worthy of admiration. That’s all you really need to know to make a judgment on the legitimacy of the country he fathered.
At the heart of identitarianism beats this primitive belief: the child bears the sins of the father. Delegitimizing the nation is the progressive plan. If progressives believed in our country and acknowledged its progress in fulfilling its promise, they would focus on what the people have overcome, recognizing that its many achievements prove its virtue. But progressives desire a corporate state and, therefore, must, at every opportunity, run down the Republic and cast the white majority as the enemy of the people. We must forever bear our father’s sins.
It is this sin that progressives use to explain persistent inequalities in America. Readers know the narrative all too well: The white majority did not come by its status because of faith, intact families, integral communities, and a strong work ethic. They are unjustly enriched because they have, for generations, exploited and oppressed black Americans. By denying the sin, whites perpetuate the system of racial inequality that privileges them.
Whites are conditioned to believe that this system explains why black Americans as a demographic category trail whites in nearly every metric of social standing. It is not because of fatherless households, disorganized communities, and idleness, but because of white privilege. One is not supposed to consider that these pathologies are the predictable consequences of decades of progressive policies devised and implemented by Democrats—globalization, mass immigration, and the welfare state. Whites are to blame for the situation of black Americans, and thus need reminding that the Founders were enslavers.
Instead of full integration into American society, blacks are given a quasi-religious framework perversely adapted from Christianity. Original sin casts humans as inherently sinful. Man is born sick and commanded to be well, to borrow Christopher Hitchens’ pithy formulation. In Obama’s telling, and this is a core tenet of the woke progressive faith, white people are not born morally neutral, but come into the world already inclined toward selfishness and always separated from the good. They must atone for this sin by seeking the impossible: redemption from a genetic state—a blood libel. To atone for this sin, from now until forever, those cast as the victims of whiteness must be afforded privileges that come at the expense of those whose success is explained by their inherent wickedness.
The ideological work of the woke narrative is spectacular in keeping down black Americans. One might think that successful families would serve as aspirational models. Those who sought to be like them, who emulated their attitudes and behaviors, might be expected to climb the socioeconomic ladder. Maybe they wouldn’t get to the top, but they would no longer find themselves on the bottom. At the very least, they tried. There is dignity in failure honestly come by. Instead, they are told that those whom they might emulate are the reason why they can’t get ahead in life—and why crime and welfare dependency are understandable modes of adaptation.
Instead of aspiration, blacks and other non-whites are steeped in ressentiment, a deep, lingering form of resentment among those who feel aggrieved and powerless, directed toward those they perceive as more privileged, as smarter and stronger. But rather than leaving the disaffected to wallow in their frustration, the Democratic Party organizes them into mobs and a voting bloc. Just as envy of Jewish success is rationalized by antisemites as a conspiracy to keep down the goyim, and therefore justifies hatred and violence directed at Jews and Israel, envy of the white majority is weaponized against them and the nation.
We see this today in the rabble on our streets and the electoral successes of democratic socialists across the country. The socialists assail the corporate elite. To be sure, so do populists on the right. But the left offers its followers not restoration of a nation beset by division, but administrative command and moral transgression. Their program brings technocratic control and nihilism. This is why the corporate elite do not fear democratic socialism. They know that the socialism progressives have in mind is state control over the people’s lives. The mass media is giddy over the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the success of those candidates he endorses. Indeed, corporate power fears those who pursue the Founders’ promise by making America great again.
* * *
In his July 3, 2026, America 250 address, Mayor Mamdani, a naturalized citizen and democratic socialist with king-making charisma, presented the United States as a nation defined by both remarkable ideals and enduring contradictions. Speaking from behind the desk used by George Washington at New York City Hall and surrounded by newly naturalized citizens (some wearing the flag of Islamization), Mamdani argued that patriotism should not mean ignoring the nation’s failures but working to fulfill its founding promises. He emphasized that American history includes the experiences of American Indians, enslaved Africans, immigrants, and others whose struggles have shaped the country alongside its celebrated achievements.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdai’s televised address on the morning of July 3
Mamdani described the United States as an “unfinished project” whose strength lies not primarily in its economic or military power, but in the efforts of ordinary people to expand democracy, equality, and liberty (read “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion”). He suggested that every generation inherits the responsibility to bring the nation closer to its ideals rather than assuming those ideals have already been realized. He suggests those ideals have not been realized.
But whose ideals? His or America’s? The presence of newly naturalized citizens is meant to underscore his argument that immigration remains central to the American story, props to punctuate the speech’s appeals to civic participation and democratic renewal. Of course, Republicans place symbols of their ideals around them, as well. Rhetoric and symbolism are used by politicians across place and time. But soaring words are checked by action. And symbolic choices are meaningful. We know what Mamdani means by his: color revolution, corporate statism, multiculturalism, and transnationalization.
The speech and media attention carried a clear political purpose. Delivered just hours before President Donald Trump’s own America 250 address at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Mamdani offered an alternative vision of American identity. Where Trump’s celebration was expected to emphasize historical achievement and national greatness (and that was indeed its focus), Mamdani emphasized self-criticism and the belief that patriotism is demonstrated by continually striving to make the country more inclusive and socially just.
If Obama and the democratic socialists demand we pay attention to history, then we should take up the challenge. For actual history does more than straighten the distorted frame of progressive ideology; it exposes the disuniting ambitions and racist character of the Democratic Party. Such ambition and character are indeed genetic. As I have written about before on this platform, with a few exceptions (John F. Kennedy, most notably), Democrats have always been the party of serfdom.
In reminding us about Washington and slavery, Obama invites us to remember what actually happened and how it bears on the present moment. What we find in history tells us what to expect from Mamdani and the globalists who pull his strings.
* * *
The modern Democratic Party was established in 1828. Its roots trace back to the Democratic-Republican Party, founded in 1792 by Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Both would become president—our third and fourth (two terms each). Jefferson had served as Secretary of State under Washington, and, as a Congressman, Madison was a close ally of our first president.
However, by the 1820s, the Democratic-Republican Party had fractured into competing factions as ideological and regional differences—cultural and economic— became more pronounced. The Northeast favored commerce, manufacturing, tariffs (and other protectionist measures), and a stronger national government. This is the path set by the Federalists, principal among them Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, the progenitors of the American System. These are the ideas that future great leaders Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump would champion.
By contrast, the South emphasized agriculture, free trade, and a more limited federal role (so-called states’ rights). The emphasis on free trade made the plantation owners strongly protective of the legacy institution of chattel slavery, a legacy system the colonies had inherited from those who came before them. While the Founders recognized the moral problem of slavery, the plantation owners as a class were not prepared to discard their inheritance. They prioritized profit over people.
This divide came to a head in the presidential election of 1824. Andrew Jackson ran against John Quincy Adams (the son of John Adams, America’s second president), Henry Clay, and William Crawford. Jackson won around forty percent of the popular vote and received the most electoral votes, but failed to secure an electoral majority. Under the Constitution, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, where Clay threw his support behind Adams, who was subsequently elected president. Jackson’s supporters denounced the outcome as a corrupt bargain, and the controversy fueled the formation of the modern Democratic Party. This is the origin of the modern two-party system.
As president, Adams promoted an ambitious national agenda that included federal investment in education, infrastructure (canals, roads), and scientific advancement. However, many of his proposals were blocked by Congress as Jackson’s supporters became an increasingly powerful opposition. Jackson would use Adams’ record to defeat him in 1828 and serve two terms in office. In response, Adams and Clay’s supporters formed the National Republican Party and, in the 1830s, the Whig Party, which generally favored a stronger federal role in economic development and infrastructure.
After the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s, Northern Whigs organized the Republican Party in 1854. Despite losing the 1856 election, the Republican Party became a national force and succeeded on the second try, electing Abraham Lincoln as president—just in the nick of time. Soon, the nation was at war with itself. The Democrats were not prepared to suffer nationalism, and so they chose the path of insurrection, a path they would return to again and again.
* * *
The debate over federal power and the schism of regional interests had deep roots extending back to the nation’s founding. In Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration, he included a passage condemning the transatlantic slave trade and criticizing the British Crown for perpetuating it. However, before the Declaration was adopted on July 4, 1776, that passage was removed. Delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, whose economies depended heavily on slavery and the continued importation of Africans, strongly opposed the language. The Continental Congress ultimately chose unity among the colonies over retaining the anti-slave-trade passage.
The issue resurfaced during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. By then, several Northern states had begun abolishing slavery and restricting the slave trade. The Upper South, particularly Virginia and Maryland, had become less dependent on importing enslaved Africans and, in some cases, supported ending the international slave trade. The Lower South—especially Georgia and South Carolina—wanted to continue importing Africans to support the rapidly expanding cotton and other economies. Their delegates warned that they might refuse to join the Union if the Constitution immediately prohibited the trade in humans.
The resulting compromise became Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 of the Constitution. The provision prohibited Congress from banning the importation of such persons before 1808. The compromise guaranteed twenty additional years during which the international slave trade could legally continue while ensuring that Congress would have the authority to prohibit it after 1808. The compromise tells us that the problem of slavery was recognized at the beginning, and that many of our Founding Fathers had in mind the abolition of the institution. And so, with the moratorium’s end approaching, they acted.
It is important to note the timing of American and British laws abolishing the slave trade. It was remarkably close, and this was no accident. The near-simultaneous abolition of the international slave trade reflects the broader Atlantic movement against the trade. It reminds us that the United States was rooted in English culture and the spirit of individualism. However much the rise of corporate power has warped our shared values in the meantime, a sense of equality and liberty inheres in both. One might say that there’s nothing wrong with either nation that cannot be negated by what is right about them (and Britain is in dire need of remembering what is right about it).
Britain abolished its participation in the transatlantic slave trade through the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which received royal assent on March 25, 1807, and took effect on May 1, 1807. The Act ended the nation’s legal involvement in the transatlantic slave trade but did not abolish slavery itself within the British Empire. However, it was the beginning of the end of that dreadful institution. Britain was closely followed by the United States when Congress passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves on March 2, 1807. President Jefferson signed the act into law the same day. Because of the constitutional restriction established in 1787, however, the law could not take effect until January 1, 1808, the earliest date permitted under Article I, Section 9.
Only two countries abolished trade in slaves before America and Britain. Norway banned the practice in 1803. France preceded Norway in 1794 during the French Revolution; however, the ban was reversed by Napoleon in 1802, and France would not permanently end the slave trade until the 1830s. But the fact that the world hegemon and the fledging republic that shared its culture abolished the transatlantic slave trade set the example for the civilized world.
However, rather than being taught to acknowledge that leading lights of Western Civilization led the world in abolishing the trade—America fighting a bloody civil war to end the practice of slavery—Americans are led to believe that their country is uniquely responsible for slavery. They rarely learn that slavery is an ancient institution practiced by civilizations across the globe. If they do learn about it, they will be told that slavery then was different and not as bad. Today, ignorant of the scope and truth of the ancient practice, many Americans extol the virtue of non-Western cultures that still keep the institution. Mamdani and the democratic socialists welcome those from these cultures to our shores.
* * *
The American Civil War
The Civil War was the culmination of decades of political conflict over federal authority and the balance of power between free and slaveholding states. As the United States expanded westward, disputes over whether new territories would permit slavery repeatedly threatened the Union, leading to compromises that only delayed a reckoning, just as compromise had before.
The election of Lincoln in 1860, on a platform opposing the expansion of slavery, convinced many Southern leaders that their political influence was permanently diminished. Beginning with South Carolina, eleven Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America, asserting that states had the right to leave the Union and govern themselves. The new state put chattel slavery at the core of its way of life. Lincoln rejected secession as unconstitutional and maintained that preserving the Union was his foremost responsibility. He assumed in full the awesome powers of Article II of the Constitution. And so the nation went to war with itself.
As war unfolded, federal policy evolved from restoring the Union to also abolishing slavery, a shift marked by the Emancipation Proclamation and ultimately the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which permanently ended slavery nationwide. The Union’s victory—at the cost of as many as a million lives— preserved the United States as a single nation and greatly strengthened the authority of the federal government over the states.
However, the struggle over civil rights would continue long after the war ended, such was the recalcitrance of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party was the obstacle in their path to a disunited America—then as now.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction reunited the nation while defining the legal and political status of formerly enslaved people and the former Confederate states. Congress and the presidency often clashed over how the South should be governed and readmitted to the Union, with Congressional Republicans advocating stronger federal oversight and greater protections for black Americans.
During this period, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law, while the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited denying the vote based on race. Federal troops remained in much of the South to enforce these changes, but resistance from many white Southerners—including organized political opposition and violent intimidation—undermined Reconstruction governments. One manifestation of this was the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.
The disputed presidential election of 1876 resulted in the Compromise of 1877, under which federal troops were withdrawn from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. This ushered in the era known as Redemption, during which Democratic governments regained control of Southern state governments, dismantled many Reconstruction reforms, restricted black American political participation through disenfranchisement and segregation, and inspired a reign of terror of lynching and nigger hunts. Democrats established a political order that endured until the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement.
* * *
In the aftermath of decades of upheaval, corporate power emerged as a significant threat to self-government. Soon, the gates of the nation were thrown open to cheap foreign labor. There had been a wave of immigration before then, but the second wave of mass immigration differed in character and scope. To aid in the corporate takeover that would usher in the administrative state, the Fourteenth Amendment was repurposed by the judiciary. It was out of these arrangements that Progressivism and multiculturalism emerged to advance the interests of the corporate state.
The intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was to ensure citizenship for the children of freed slaves and guarantee equal treatment with respect to the immunities and privileges of the natural-born. However, in the headnote of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), the Justices of the Supreme Court reportedly did not wish to hear argument on whether the Equal Protection Clause applied to corporations, effectively treating the matter as settled. Later courts and legal doctrine interpreted the court reporter’s summary of the case as foundational law and handed corporations the rights of men.
Immigrants on the SS Patricia In New York Harbor En Route To Ellis Island 1906
The second wave of mass migration was driven by a combination of push and pull factors. In many parts of southern and eastern Europe, people faced widespread poverty, land shortages, rapid population growth, political repression, and in some cases religious persecution. These pressures pushed millions to leave rural villages in search of relief. At the same time, the rapidly industrializing United States drew migrants with the promise of factory jobs, higher wages, and access to land and upward mobility. Improvements in steamship travel and expanding transportation networks made long-distance migration faster, cheaper, and more feasible than before. Chain migration and immigration networks helped newcomers to established urban enclaves.
Together, these forces produced one of the largest population movements in modern history. In 1880, the US population was just over 50 million. By the 1930 census, conducted just a few years after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson–Reed Act, which effectively closed America’s borders, the nation’s population had grown to nearly 123 million.
The Johnson–Reed Act was the initiative of the Republican Party, which controlled Congress at the time. The most influential figure behind the legislation was Representative Albert Johnson, a Republican from Washington, who chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization and became one of the leading advocates for sharply limiting immigration. In the Senate, the bill was shaped and advanced by figures such as Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania. Together, Johnson and Reed designed the system of national-origins quotas that became the core of the law.
Support for the act came from a wider coalition beyond Congress. For example, the American Federation of Labor sought limits on immigration due to competition and wage suppression. More broadly, Americans grew concerned about cultural change and demographic transformation. Transnationalists, such as Horace Kallen, argued that diversity made the nation stronger. America should abandon assimilation and embrace multiculturalism, he argued in the pages of The Nation. The people saw the folly in his transnationalist vision and demanded that America close its gates to foreign culture-bearers. And so they did.
The bill was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge had come to national prominence during the post-Progressive Era. He advanced entrepreneurship, fiscal restraint, and limited government, emphasizing balanced budgets, tax cuts, and limited federal intervention in the economy. Although he accepted some of the administrative and regulatory structures established in the early 1900s, Coolidge opposed expanding the administrative state, especially in areas like economic planning, labor regulation, and social welfare. One more, history reveals the fundamental and enduring differences between Democrats and Republicans.
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In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled this week that President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship violates the Fourteenth Amendment, reaffirming what is popularly believed to be the longstanding principle that nearly everyone born in the United States is a US citizen regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the Constitution does not impose a parental legal-status requirement, preserving more than a century of judicial interpretation.
Not all Republicans have been reliable in adhering to the party’s principles. Roberts and two other Republican appointees—Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—joined with progressives in betraying the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, they effectively scratched out a major clause of an amendment that granted citizenship to freed black slaves: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Justices Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh ignored the italicized clause to rewrite the purpose of the amendment. (It was a largely Republican-appointed Supreme Court that had affirmed corporate personhood in the aftermath of the Civil War.)
Upholding a bad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not only an insult to black Americans and to all those who died freeing their ancestors; it is an insult to all Americans, who, by the lights of the Constitution, have an inherent collective right to national self-determination. Missed was an opportunity not only to correct a historic mistake, but to prevent future developments that will likely bring about an end to the Republic. When Democrats get in power and open America’s gates to the world, they will resume the project of changing the demographic composition of the nation and achieve one-party rule. If this happens, there will not be a 300th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
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The Democratic Party was the party of the slavocracy. The planter class sold primary commodities on the international market and thus sought to keep the United States in a peripheral position to the world capitalist economy. Despite the United States having overcome peripheral status to become world hegemon, Democrats seek a return to the prior arrangement. The Republican Party, by contrast, in its moments of clarity (the Bush tendency being the major exception), has sought a program of economic nationalism, enriching American citizens by establishing the United States as the world’s industrial powerhouse.
Achieving peripheral status depends on disorganizing American families and communities and pitting worker against worker. Just as Democrats used slavery and Jim Crow to divide the working class, the party used affirmative action and DEI to fracture the proletariat in the post-Civil Rights Era. The path represented by the Republican Party requires strengthening the foundation of a virtuous civilization through national unity. Via command of America’s sense-making institutions, Democrats have made nationalism a dirty word and those who oppose race-based discrimination into racists. Once history is properly ascertained, such smears lose their force.
The reality is that America overcame Jim Crow more than six decades ago with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law developed out of the broader civil rights struggle of the 1950s and early 1960s.
The legislative origins of the law are closely tied to the presidency of John F. Kennedy, whose policies aligned more with nationalism than with those advanced by the globalists. During his presidency, Kennedy proposed an across-the-board income tax reduction to stimulate economic growth. He believed in using tariffs as bargaining tools, reducing them when other countries reciprocated. Focused on expanding export markets for US agriculture and manufacturing, he advocated significant federal investment in industry and infrastructure. He greatly expanded defense spending to confront the communist menace. Frustrated with entrenched bureaucratic resistance to parts of his agenda, he favored efficiency and modernization of federal agencies. He even confronted the Deep State, in particular the CIA.
Sound familiar? Indeed, I note all this because today’s Democratic Party would be an inhospitable place for Kennedy. Kennedy’s nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., currently serving as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, still holds to his uncle’s values. He left the Democratic Party to join Trump’s administration. Like his uncle, who was assassinated in 1963, the president that Bobby serves was also struck by an assassin’s bullet. Trump survived the attempt. So they tried again. Trump gave his speech to the nation last night behind a wall of bulletproof glass. By contrast, Mamdani goes to the streets of New York without concern for his safety. Both know the world they live in.
Returning to the narrative, as president, in addition to unchaining the productive machinery of American industry, Kennedy became more engaged with civil rights issues, especially after events such as the Freedom Rides, the integration crisis at the University of Mississippi, and growing nationwide protests. Over the course of his term, Kennedy increasingly framed civil rights as a national imperative.
In June 1963, after the stand-off at the University of Alabama and rising national unrest, Kennedy delivered a televised address announcing that civil rights was a “moral issue” and calling for comprehensive legislation to guarantee equal access to public accommodations, schools, and employment. He formally sent a civil rights bill to Congress shortly afterward. That proposal became the foundation of what would later become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Kennedy was assassinated before the bill could pass. After his death, as he did with Kennedy’s tax cuts, President Johnson made passage of the bill a central political priority, explicitly invoking Kennedy’s legacy as a reason for immediate action. Johnson used his experience in the Senate to build coalitions, manage negotiations, and apply pressure to secure votes. He repeatedly told congressional leaders that failing to pass the bill would dishonor Kennedy’s memory.
The bill faced its greatest obstacle in the Senate, where Democrats mounted a prolonged filibuster to prevent a vote. Opponents of the bill used the filibuster for over two months in 1964. The filibuster was ultimately broken when the Senate voted 71–29 to invoke cloture, ending debate and clearing the way for a final vote. Crucially, this could not have happened without Republican votes. Indeed, a much greater proportion of Republicans supported the law in both chambers than did Democrats.
When the Senate voted on final passage, the Civil Rights Act passed 73–27. Sixty-nine percent of Senate Democrats supported the bill. Eighty-two percent of Senate Republicans supported it. A bipartisan coalition was essential. Opposition was concentrated in the Democratic Party, which held majorities in both chambers. In the House of Representatives, 63 percent of Democrats voted in favor, while 80 percent of Republicans voted in the affirmative. As in the Senate, Republican support and Northern Democratic support together overtook opposition to the law. The result was one of the most significant civil rights laws in American history, fundamentally reshaping federal authority over segregation and discrimination in public life.
With segregation out of the way, Southerners, generally opposed to big government intrusion in their lives, gradually left the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans. Democrats retooled the racial system by establishing racial preferences that systematically disadvantaged whites, promoting anti-white bigotry to justify these systems, and implementing a vast welfare state that trapped black Americans in a cycle of dependency. They also opened the country to mass immigration, passing the Hart-Celler Act the year after the Civil Rights Act, and entrenched free trade, leading to the mass exodus of high-wage, capital-intensive jobs to the Third World. These developments proved devastating to black Americans, who have been idled, their family system undermined (three-fourths of black children are born in single-parent homes), and their communities fraught with crime and disorder.
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President Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hill of South Dakota
As Independence Day celebrations approach nationwide, Obama is exploiting the moment to argue that America’s founding ideals of liberty and equality cannot be fully understood apart from the history of slavery that coexisted with them—and the entanglement we all acknowledge must be understood in the worst light possible: slavery is our original sin. We are forever a fallen nation because of an ancient and global system in which some of our ancestors participated. This move allows Democrats to distract from the reality that the present situation of black Americans is not because of slavery, but because of the progressive policies the party champions.
Obama was intent on linking Washington and the Founders with slavery to continue his project of sowing racial division. Although not his intent, he invited us to reflect on the history that shatters the woke progressive narrative. It is not just the history of slavery in America that implicates the Democratic Party in racism, but the Civil War, Redemption, the Civil Rights Era, and what followed. The facts prove devastating to the progressive project of historical revisionism. Those who abolished the slave trade, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow—as well as affirmative action and DEI—are those we associate with the Republican Party and its forerunners.
As previously explained on this platform, the parties didn’t flip. The Democratic Party remains the party of free trade and identitarianism—which they have expanded well beyond racial antagonisms to include imaginary forms of oppression (e.g., gender identity). Despite regrettable deviations at various points along the way, Republicans today champion nationalism and individualism, just as they did during Lincoln’s days (who was assassinated by a Democrat’s bullet).
In abandoning liberalism altogether, which progressivism necessarily entails, the Democrats have jettisoned any redeeming qualities they once had. The home of liberalism today is the Republican Party. It is the Republicans who uphold the values of the Enlightenment, while Democrats pursue transhumanism and the managed decline of the American Republic.
Those who voted for Obama thought they were affirming America’s promise. A black man was elected president. I caught grief for refusing to vote for the man. A colleague thought it was what I always wanted. But, as I knew it would, the nation left Obama’s two terms in office more racially divided than before. During his first term, the corporate media aggressively pushed out the academic rhetoric of systemic racism and white privilege. Black Lives Matter emerged during his second term. He fed the emerging narrative of systemic racism. By the time he left office, racial antagonisms were at a level Americans had not experienced in decades. Out of office, he continues to fuel the hostilities.
Obama always stands ready to advance the agenda of managed decline. The elite can count on him to interject racial division at key moments. His pairing of the 250th anniversary with the Founding Fathers’ participation in the legacy institution of slavery is designed to delegitimize us. Rather than celebrating the force of the American spirit in overcoming obstacles to a higher unity, however much he may feign admiration for Washington, Obama intervenes to remind us that the nation’s original sin of slavery will always taint the moral authority of our beloved Republic, a sin that white Americans must atone for eternally. And Mamdani is there by Obama’s side to punctuate the narrative.
Obama’s intervention has slavery as the albatross that history has hung about America’s neck. What he hopes to obscure is that the true albatross is the Democratic Party. Progressivism is the deadly omen. That we have survived this long with the weight of this dead bird pulling us down strongly suggests divine providence. And I say that as a nonbeliever.
Before I get to today’s essay, I must note three recent Supreme Court rulings. I will likely follow up with future essays on some or all of these, but I want to make note of them here.
Agency Independence and Executive Power. In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court significantly expanded presidential authority by ruling that the president may remove leaders of most independent federal agencies at will, overturning the 1935 precedent that had protected many regulators from dismissal without cause. The majority concluded that officials exercising executive power must remain accountable to the president, strengthening the Unitary Executive theory. However, the Court preserved the independence of the Federal Reserve, recognizing its unique constitutional and economic role. To clarify, this is not an expansion of presidential authority. I used that framing because that is the way the legacy media frames the matter. It overturns a precedent limiting executive power. This is good news.
Title IX and Transgender Bans. The Court upheld state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that prohibit males from participating on female school sports teams. It ruled that these laws do not violate Title IX because the reference to sex in statute permits classifications based on biological truth in athletics. While the justices were divided over the constitutional equal protection analysis, the decision allows states to continue enforcing similar bans and establishes an important precedent for future Title IX disputes involving transgender athletes. The vote was unanimous. This is good news.
Birthright Citizenship. Now for the very bad news. In a 5-1-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship violates the Fourteenth Amendment, reaffirming the longstanding principle that nearly everyone born in the United States is a US citizen regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Constitution does not impose a parental legal-status requirement, preserving more than a century of constitutional interpretation and rejecting the administration’s effort to narrow citizenship by executive action.
Two conservative judges joined with progressives in betraying the Fourteenth Amendment—the Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. They rewrote the damn thing, scratching out a major clause of an amendment that plainly intended to grant citizenship to freed black slaves. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” Justices Roberts and Barrett ignored the italicized clause to rewrite the purpose of the amendment.
This is not only an insult to black Americans and to all those who died freeing their ancestors. This is an insult to all Americans, who by the lights of the Constitution have an inherent collective right to national self-determination. When Democrats get in power and open the America’s gates to the world, they will change the demographic composition of the nation and achieve one-party rule. I have to be grim here: the Republic is effectively over.
Now on to today’s essay.
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One must always consider the source, they say, so let’s talk about the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, established by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2021. The dictum is especially true when it comes to the UN, which has been colonized and corrupted by Third Worldism. The three-member panel of “independent experts” on the UN commission ostensibly investigates alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by all parties to the conflict. The reality is that the UN works from an anti-Western standpoint.
United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, established by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2021
“I have lost confidence in the United Nations and the efficacy of international law to defend freedom and human rights. When the United Nations was founded, it was established on Western values of international cooperation and law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged from this framework. But not all member states endorsed it in substance, even if they formally signed onto it. Moreover, Muslim-majority nations developed their own declarations of rights—most notably the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam—which is founded on Sharia rather than the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to democratic republicanism and human rights.
As a result, the UN includes a wide array of states whose commitments to democracy and rights are not aligned with the Western standards that originally shaped the institution. These Western standards are not arbitrary; they are the product of reason in the context of European culture, made possible by the Protestant Reformation and the broader intellectual currents of Christian civilization.
If the UN or its agencies are asked to adjudicate whether Israel is responsible for genocide after the massacre of Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023, the judgment would ostensibly rest on the legal definition of genocide—a Western juridical concept. In practice, however, the judgment rendered would be heavily influenced by the political alignments and value systems of states that do not share the underlying philosophical commitments from which those legal definitions arose. Many of these states are openly hostile to Israel and to the West. Perhaps the UN won’t make this determination. But one has reason to worry it will. (And then what?)”
In its June 2026 report, which highlights that approximately 30 percent of those killed in Gaza were children, the commission has given ammunition to antisemites who frame Israel’s defensive war against Hamas terrorists as a “genocide.” While the commission is mandated to examine conduct by Israel, Palestinian armed groups, and others, its reports have consistently emphasized Israeli actions as the primary focus. This has led Israel, the United States, and several Western governments to accuse the commission of politicization and systemic bias.
This has everything to do with who is on the commission. As of 2026, the commission is chaired by Srinivasan Muralidhar of India, a former Supreme Court and Delhi High Court judge. The other members are Florence Mumba of Zambia, a judge known for her work on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and Chris Sidoti of Australia, a human rights lawyer and former Australian Human Rights Commissioner. Sidoti in particular is well-known for his obsession with Israel, accusing Israeli authorities of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts amounting to genocide in Gaza. He has called the IDF one of the most criminal armies in the world.
HRC Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro of Indonesia
The panelists are appointed by the HRC president, a position currently held by Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro of Indonesia. He is Indonesia’s Permanent Representative in Geneva. Indonesia is firmly pro-Palestinian and has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Suryodipuro is well-versed in the language of left-wing anti-colonialism. His role is framed as procedural, but he appoints members, chairs sessions, and facilitates consensus. His country’s longstanding stance shapes perceptions of the Council’s priorities, particularly its disproportionate attention to Israel under Agenda Item 7 compared to other global conflicts.
The HRC is notorious for including member states with questionable human rights records and for selective enforcement. The commission is well-known for its hostility toward Israel and for undermining the credibility of UN human rights efforts. The report’s “findings” are not worth the paper they’re written on.
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The commissions findings are wrong because all the assumptions are wrong. The claim that Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza requires the assumption that it is the intention of Israel to eliminate in whole or in part an ethic group. The claim makes no sense since the ethnic group in question, Arab Muslims, live, work, and thrive in Israel. The charge of war crimes and crimes against humanity ignore historical reality.
Take the modern paradigm of genocide: the Judeocide. Germany rounded up Jews in Germany and systematically exterminated them. This situation is the diametric opposite of the Israel-Gaza situation. Arab Muslims are citizens of, participants in, and protected by the Israeli state. Why isn’t Israel rounding up Arab Muslims internal to the state? Where is the genocide?
Germany also rounded up Jews in the countries they occupied. Indeed, a motive in occupying countries was expanding the reach of the genocidal project. To be sure, the primary stated motive for Nazi expansion was to acquire territory (Lebensraum), destroy perceived enemies, and establish German hegemony in Europe. However, once Germany had conquered a territory, the expansion greatly facilitated the implementation and eventual radicalization of the genocidal project against Europe’s Jews.
Conquest brought millions more Jews under Nazi control. Before the war, Germany had about 500,000 Jews. The annexation of Austria, occupation of Czechoslovakia, invasion of Poland, and later the invasion of the Soviet Union placed millions of additional Jews under Nazi rule. Israel is not an expansionist state. There is no Zionist project to conquer Arab territories and exterminate Muslims. And, if the disputed territories ever become part of a greater Israel (which I think they should), Arab Muslims who integrate with the state will become Israeli citizens.
As I have written about before in numerous essays, sharing pictures of the destruction of Gaza’s buildings and dead Arabs to sustain a claim that of Israel is the aggressor must assume that the situation is analogous to that of WWII with Israel representing German belligerence. Here, again, the situation is the diametric opposite of the historical case. The Israeli government is not analogous to the Nazi regime. Zionism is not analogous to National Socialism. Hamas is. The analogue is not only analogous positionally, but also ideologically. Both the Nazis and Hamas worked from genocidal intent.
The upshot is that one cannot oppose Nazism and at the same time support Hamas. Hamas was the elected government in Gaza when its soldiers invaded Israel and massacred thousands of Jewish civilians. Hamas is the aggressor. Hamas’s goal is the elimination of Jews from the river to the sea. Israel is defending itself against an aggressor pursuing the genocide of Jews. Sovereign nation states have an inherit right to defend their peoples. The commission could not be more wrong.
Those condemning Israel and defending Hamas have stood the situation on its head. Siding with Hamas is the moral equivalent of siding with the Nazis in WWII. That the situation has been flipped in so many minds cannot be attributed to a rational disagreement about the cause of the war and its entailments. It is a rationalization. The rationalization is entirely ideological.
If Mexico invaded the United States and killed American citizens, the United States would be completely justified and raining holy hell on Mexico City. Pictures of a devastated Mexico City and dead Hispanics would not be evidence of genocide, but the consequences of Mexico’s aggression against the United States. The Mexican state brought hell to its people. They fucked around and found out. If the US invaded and occupied Mexico in this scenario, it would be entirely justified in doing so.
There is one reason that the Israel-Gaza war is stood on its head: Jew-hatred. One must assume that Jews have no right to defend themselves from aggression, a double standard that necessarily sees Jews as a lesser or a wicked people. What Hamas did on October 7—and in many other acts of aggression over the years—is justified in the minds of the antisemite: the antisemite believes Israel is bad not merely because of what it did in retaliation; Israel is already judged bad because Jews are presumed evil. Therefore, in the antisemite’s mind, October 7 was justified. When a man takes that position, he becomes the advocate of genocide, since the Hamas project is the extermination of Jews in the region and, if it had its way, everywhere in the world.
Jews are not only unsafe in Israel, but everywhere they reside if Muslims sharing the genocidal intent are present. And not just Muslims—the non-Muslims who ally with them. This is not Israel’s struggle alone. It’s our struggle. It is a struggle to save Western Civilization. And the source of the threat, aside from an ascendant China, is the Islamic Republic of Iran. This threat must be eliminated.
freedom and reason 