This occurred in the run-up to the rigged 2020 election, but an X post reminded me of something I had meant to write at the time, but, for various reasons, did not: a California law giving discretion to judges in the case of sex crimes involving minors. In the post (which I share below), a video clip of California state senator Scott Weiner is shared, where Weiner is angry because people in the gay and trans communities are overrepresented on California’s sex offender registry.
Scott Weiner: "LGBTQ people have been massively and disproportionately targeted and subjected to being slammed on the s*x offender registry."pic.twitter.com/ZE5YP401zd
Given his outspokenness on the subject, we can be certain that he’s not upset because his comrades are overrepresented in sex crimes, per se; rather, he is upset because the crimes that subject an individual to being put on the sex offender registry are more likely to involve his comrades. Does this not give the game away?
Wiener authored California Senate Bill 145, which was signed into law by Gavin Newsom in 2020. The measure amended state law to give judges discretion in deciding whether an adult convicted of certain sex crimes involving a minor must register as a sex offender, particularly in cases involving minors ages 14 to 17.
Proponents said the law was intended to eliminate discriminatory treatment of gay and trans people, claiming that the previous statute required automatic registration for some same-sex acts while allowing judicial discretion in comparable heterosexual cases. Wiener argued the disparity stemmed from remnants of California’s former anti-sodomy laws, which have since been repealed.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified a trend towards minimizing serious deviant behavior in his 1993 essay “Defining Deviancy Down,” published in the American Scholar. He argued that American society had reached a point where it was in effect redefining deviant behavior as normal or less serious to cope with an increase in social problems and the breakdown of traditional social institutions. He suggested that society had become desensitized to deviant behavior and was lowering its standards and expectations to accommodate it. If he were alive today (he died in 2003), he would no doubt recognize that the trend he identified only worsened over time. (See Deviance as Doctrine: The Post-Liberal Moral Revolution.) But there are some signs of progress, which I will come to in a moment.
At the time of California’s passage of the bill, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas accused California Democrats of believing “we need more adults having sex with children,” and Donald Trump Jr. used the bill to attack his father’s opponent in the presidential race, tweeting, “Why are Joe Biden Democrats working in California to pander to the wishes of pedophiles and child rapists?” It’s a good question.
Why are Joe Biden Democrats working in California to pander to the wishes of pedophiles and child rapists?
New California bill would lower penalties for adults who have sexual relations with a minor https://t.co/XGOmUp9cJN
The merits of the law aside, Weiner’s argument strikes me as much like the progressive complaint that state prisons are racist because 31-33 percent of prisoners are black, whereas blacks comprise only 13 percent of the population. Worse, since 93 percent of prisoners are male, that translates to around 6 percent of the US population comprising one-third of all prisoners. The problem here is that about one-third of all serious crimes are committed by black men, with roughly half of murders and nearly 60 percent of robberies committed by black men. That’s an input problem.
Rather than complain about gay and trans overrepresentation in the sex offender registry, or black overrepresentation in state prisons, progressive politicians like Weiner should ask why these groups are respectively overrepresented in sex offenses and serious crime, and solve that problem. Whatever one thinks of registries or incarceration, the laws in question are attempts to deal with the problem. But progressive judges let violent offenders off the hook for their crimes, or reduce the consequences, because they put identity over deterrence and incapacitation. Democrats give them more tools to do that by codifying the double standard. Thus, the law is an instantiation of the problem of defining deviance down.
If folks are going to argue that we shouldn’t have sex offender registries or state prisons, then a different argument should be made, an argument that works from principle, not from identitarianism. Frankly, I have difficulty imagining what that would entail. What would Weiner and his ilk have us do? Establish a two-tiered justice system in which gay or trans sex offenders are excluded from the registry while non-trans offenders continue to have their names appear? I know he would like that, and that this is what his bill intended, but in what moral universe is such a thing just? Weiner doesn’t work from morality or justice, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. However, it is almost certain that some judges will use the law to do just that.
Given Weiner’s attitude, which is shared by progressives across the country, I was surprised to learn that, on March 6, 2026, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers signed a bill into law strengthening protections for minors against sexual predators. The law makes child grooming a specific felony in Wisconsin, allowing prosecutors to charge adults who attempt to manipulate or entice minors for sexual activity before an assault occurs. That the term “grooming” was explicitly used in the legislation was unexpected. Only a short while ago, using that word could get a person censored or deplatformed across social media.
Under the new law (2025 Wisconsin Act 88) “grooming” is defined as a course of conduct, pattern of behavior, or series of acts with the intention to condition, seduce, solicit, lure, or entice a child for the purpose of (1) engaging in sexual intercourse or sexual contact or (2) producing, distributing, or possessing depictions of the child in sexually explicit conduct. Examples of conduct that could fall under this definition include verbal comments or conversations of a sexual nature directed at a child, inappropriate physical contact, or communications via text, email, social media, or other means meant to seduce, solicit, lure, or entice a child. Applying that definition consistently should problematize the public school curriculum.
The bill’s supporters argued these measures close gaps in the law and improve public safety. However, paralleling Weiner’s arguments, some Democratic lawmakers and civil rights advocates voiced concerns that aspects of the sex-offender registration policy could disproportionately impact gay and trans individuals. Still, only six Democrats voted against the legislation. Roughly 45 percent of state legislators in Wisconsin are Democrats, so this was a surprise. That signals progress in a state known for its progressive politics—or, cynically, concern over Democratic candidates’ prospects in the 2026 elections.
The new law follows an earlier law signed by Tony Evers in 2024 requiring people convicted of multiple counts of a sex offense to register as sex offenders for life—even when the counts stem from the same incident—an expansion supporters argued strengthens public safety. As with the recent bill, this bill also drew objections from some Democrats and civil rights advocates who argued the policy could disproportionately impact gay and trans people, warning that charging practices in certain cases might lead to multiple counts from a single encounter and therefore trigger a lifetime registry requirement. There were “eight” nay votes in the legislature.
In contrast to California’s approach under SB 145, which grants judges greater discretion in sex offender registration for certain cases involving minors—ostensibly to address perceived disparities but effectively softening consequences in ways that critics argue prioritize identity politics over child protection—Wisconsin’s recent action suggests a move towards reversing, or at least tamping down, the “defining deviancy down” trend Moynihan warned about decades ago. By criminalizing grooming as a distinct felony under the 2025 Wisconsin Act 88, the state has expanded tools to intervene early against predatory behavior, closing loopholes before abuse escalates.
Despite familiar objections from some Democrats and advocates about potential disproportionate impacts on gay and trans individuals, the bill passed with substantial bipartisan support, with only a handful of nay votes. This development, alongside Evers’s prior expansion of lifetime registration for repeat sex offenders, signals that even in a historically progressive state, the imperative to safeguard children can occasionally transcend partisan divides and identitarian concerns. Presuming principle was involved, it would seem that not all Democrats have lost their minds.
Ultimately, protecting minors demands focusing on the behaviors and patterns that endanger them—addressing root causes, and utilizing deterrence and incapacitation to deal with those who prey on children, rather than redefining or downplaying deviance to fit ideological preferences. The path forward lies not in creating exemptions or double standards, but in upholding uniform standards of accountability and prevention that place the safety of the vulnerable above all else. Weiner and his comrades framed the California law in these terms. But given motivation, one is right to be suspicious of that framing. Thankfully, Wisconsin has not followed California into the madness of unbridled woke progressivism. And that is progress of a kind.
California State Senator Scott Weiner in BDSM gear
To be sure, when Hitler referred to Jews as a “virus” (or “bacillus”), he was speaking metaphorically. But he used the metaphor to depict Jews as a disease. He held this ethnic group (the subject of an ancient and enduring hatred) responsible for sins he imagined had afflicted Germany for generations—and for what he believed Jews were doing in his own time through their words, their actions, and their institutions. He used the metaphor of “public health” to advance a campaign to eradicate “Jewishness” from the population.
Hitler was not speaking about Judaism as a religion, but about something he believed was essential to Jews themselves. Talarico’s standpoint, which he shares with millions of Americans, is no different. This pernicious ideology rests on the primitive notion that every individual within a group carries the essential characteristics of that group—a group to which he did not choose to belong but must belong because of those supposed characteristics. A white man can escape his whiteness no more than a man can escape his maleness. A white man may say he has rejected his whiteness, but he is who he is; he cannot reject what he is, as he wears it on his skin—what Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman called “tribal stigma.”
The ideology of white privilege holds that a white man is responsible not only for what his ancestors did but also for something of which he is by default guilty: the crime or sin of being white. He is, of course, not guilty of something he did not do (no man can be), yet the demand is still made that he atone not only for his father’s sins but also for the supposed sins he commits simply by being white.
If we take Talarico’s tweets and swap out “whites” with “Jews,” what he said may become more obvious. Imagine Talarico were a self-loathing Jew who said: “Jewishness gives me and every other Jewish American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go—through our words, our actions, our systems. We don’t have to show symptoms to be contagious. The only cure is diagnosing the virus within ourselves and taking dramatic action to contain the spread.” Or imagine a black man saying the same thing about “blackness.”
Sounds racist, doesn’t it? Yes—because it is. The Jewish American or the black American uttering such words would have internalized anti-Jewish or anti-black loathing. In the cause of whiteness, Talarico and many of his ilk weaponize that self-loathing—I suspect many who advance this argument do not truly believe it (indeed, even Talarico attempts to escape it in another tweet by resorting to special pleading)—to promote a political ideology.
We have to be direct about this: Talarico is advancing anti-white bigotry. It is not merely that his view holds all white people guilty of a crime or sin they could not all have committed; rather, all whites are guilty by default. Their crime is simply that of being white. Talarico thus subscribes to a racist ideology that blames the situation of nonwhites—while ignoring, for example, many Asian populations whose demographic averages often surpass those of the white aggregate—on all whites. Talarico explicitly says he is not talking about white hoods or Confederate flags. In his formulation, all whites are guilty of spreading the virus.
Beyond anti-white bigotry, the tweets are irrational. Talarico is not alone in this mode of thinking; the irrationality is inherent in woke progressive ideology (though this ideology, unlike race, can be escaped). Progressive ideology, corrupted by postmodernist rot, is profoundly anti-scientific. We can see this, for example, in the quasi-religious belief that a female identity can be born in a male body. The belief that all whites spread a virus is of the same quality of thought.
Those who advance the argument of white privilege commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. They falsely attribute the average situation—always an abstraction—of certain nonwhite groups to “white privilege,” treating every concrete white person as though he were the personification of those abstract group averages.
Under this logic, the poor white man living under a bridge possesses the same racial privilege as the wealthy white man living in a penthouse—even though millions of black Americans are better off than the man under the bridge (and tens of millions of others who share his skin color). Meanwhile, blacks as a group have enjoyed for decades literal racial privileges in the form of affirmative action and other types of preferential treatment.
The only systemic racism in America today is that promulgated and institutionalized by progressive Democrats—harming not only whites but tens of millions of blacks as well (consider the conditions of many “blue cities,” marked by rampant crime, disorder, and family disintegration). The reality is that some whites—and some blacks who have become collaborators—bear responsibility for the conditions affecting some black communities. These individuals are progressives of both races. Ideologies are not native to any racial group; such a reification is intrinsically racist.
I have previously criticized rhetoric that describes people or ideas as “viruses.” In an essay I published in December 2024 about the notion of progressive memes as “woke mind viruses” (a concept developed by Canadian psychologist Gad Saad), I wrote that “to describe such memes as ‘mind viruses,’ as we hear in the rhetoric from some on the libertarian right, is to my ears problematic.” I also criticized the claim that the social contagion of cultural memes is comparable to genetic transmission, an assumption implicit in the rhetoric of racial identitarians like Talarico.
In that essay (On the “Woke Mind Virus”), I cite Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi in A General Theory of Crime, who show that, even if we generously suppose some genetic inheritance of criminality, the variance explained—even in very large samples—is effectively zero. What little variance appears is statistical noise.
Regarding the “virus” metaphor, I argue that the problem lies in the metaphor itself. Conceptualizing memetics as a kind of germ—propagating despite fact, logic, and truth—may lead to dangerous conclusions, just as an earlier fixation on genetic inheritance led to eugenics.
Let us be charitable and suppose that Talarico is referring to implicit racial bias. This does not help his case. A key problem with the concept of implicit bias is falsifiability. A theory is falsifiable if there are clear observations that could prove it wrong. But claims about implicit bias shift to accommodate any outcome: if a person displays biased behavior, it is taken as evidence of implicit bias; if a person does not display bias, the bias is said to exist but be masked, situationally inactive, or suppressed. Bias becomes like gravity: it is everywhere, all the time, even if objects aren’t falling.
The concept of implicit racial bias is therefore infinitely rationalizable—which is precisely why it functions as an ideological tool and why it is favored by progressives. Because the bias is defined as unconscious and potentially latent, negative evidence is dismissed as not counting against the theory. Those who make this claim cannot specify the conditions under which the statement “this person has implicit racial bias” could be definitively disproven. Yet when a white man denies he is racist, he is accused of being “in denial.” This is a form of gaslighting.
Finally, returning to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: differences in group averages across demographic categories cannot be treated as prima facie evidence of systematic racism. To do so assumes that the outcome is its own cause. There are many reasons why blacks, on average, trail the average white person across certain indices.
One I have already noted: the conditions prevalent in many blue cities. This is not the result of whites as a group but of particular policies advanced by some whites and their black collaborators. Another reason is cultural. Cultural features are observable, measurable, and capable of being incorporated into predictive causal models. Yet when culture is invoked to explain group differences, progressives often conflate race with culture and declare any appeal to culture itself to be racist.
James Talarico’s rhetoric—framing “whiteness” as an inherent, contagious virus from which white people are immune yet perpetually spread—mirrors the dehumanizing logic that historical tyrants once employed against Jews and other groups, recasting collective identity as an inescapable moral contagion demanding eradication or radical self-abnegation. This is not a mere critique of privilege or systemic issues; it is a form of essentialist bigotry that assigns ineradicable guilt based on immutable traits, rendering every white individual complicit regardless of individual action, personal character, or circumstance.
Such thinking collapses under its own contradictions: it defies falsifiability, conflates statistical abstractions with individual culpability, ignores countervailing realities like affirmative action and class disparities (which are, unlike race, material), and ultimately poisons discourse by substituting moral narrative for reasoned evidence.
Talarico’s words, whether born of genuine conviction or cynical posturing, exemplify a strain of contemporary ideology that revives the worst impulses of collectivist scapegoating under the guise of “social justice.” To preserve a society grounded in individual dignity, equality before the law, and genuine inquiry, this poisonous worldview must be rigorously rejected—not debated on its own terms, but exposed for what it is and consigned to the margins where ideas that treat human beings as vectors of inherent evil belong: the dustbin of history.
“Before we go further, we need to acknowledge that our trans community needs abortion care, too.” —James Talarico, Texas Democratic candidate for Senate
Progressives drag conservative Christians continually, mocking them for their cultural traditions and religious beliefs. Progressive hatred of the common man is palpable. Conservative Christians are condemned for their resistance to progressive ideas such as abortion, gender identity doctrine, mass immigration, and racial self-loathing. Conservative Christians are portrayed as authoritarian, backwards, bigoted, and racist—even fascist. Progressives claim that conservatives have twisted the faith and that the progressive Jesus is the true Jesus. As I explained in a recent essay (A Cross of Suicidal Empathy: The Woke Emasculation of Christianity and the Road Back to Integrity), Christianity in the hands of progressives is a Christianity designed to disarm patriots and secure a monopoly over righteous violence for those who seek the erasure of Western Civilization (see Manufacturing Their Own Christs: The Violence of Progressive Christianity).
The reality is that progressives, whether professing or feigning Christianity, hold to more bizarre beliefs (if traditional Christian belief can be described in that way), such as the idea that whiteness is a “virus” or that the faith warrants arresting puberty in normally-developing children or physically altering their bodies with cross-sex hormones and mutilating surgeries. In truth, the Christianity of progressives is not really Christian at all, but the quasi-religion of woke progressivism. The woke wrap the language of Christianity around their ideology and politics because they know America is founded on Christian ethics and that a majority of Americans are Christians, and thus that the attack on American institutions—freedoms of conscience, speech, and publishing, the doctrines of individualism and voluntarism, etc.—is profoundly antithetical to the foundation of the nation.
Woke Christianity is a Trojan horse. The appeal to faith—and especially to a revisionist retelling of Christology—is a central element of a hegemonic strategy aimed at electoral success. It seeks to deceive a significant portion of the public into believing that progressivism is native to American culture, or, sidestepping the fact that America is a republic with a constitution, that democracy allows for a radically different America. It even questions whether America is a valid thing at all. By draping progressive ideology in Christian language, progressives redefine righteousness in a way that marginalizes patriots who are committed to preserving the American Republic to advance the post-national project.
The Texas politician James Talarico is the paradigm of woke in today’s electoral politics. More than a representative of wokism, having studied criminal psychology for decades, it took only a few clips of Talarico speaking to see the indicators of psychopathology—the superficial charm, the manipulative tactics, the bizarre beliefs. I sense danger in this man.
For those unfamiliar with Talarico, he is a Democratic politician who became the youngest member of the Texas House of Representatives in 2018. Before entering politics, Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, worked as a public school teacher—a chilling thought given the things he professes (which I will come to). There, he honed his persona, a dark Mister Rogers. Recently, he has appeared on various talk shows to promote his rise in American politics. Only days ago, he defeated Jasmine Crockett in the primary for the Party’s candidate for Texas Senator. In public forums, Talarico is obsessed with explaining how his Christian beliefs shape his views on education and social justice, while twisting Christianity to align with his woke ideology. Some of my acquaintances and friends don’t believe he will succeed. But they should not be so sure. He has the establishment behind him.
I confess, Talarico was not on my radar screen. The rise of his star forced him into consciousness only a few days ago. As I watched his speeches to learn more about him, memories of a distant experience percolated up from the recesses of my unconscious mind: the phenomenon of Jim Jones and the tragic events at Jonestown in Guyana.
Mass suicide at Jonestown
In 1978, I was a junior in high school. My history teacher rolled a television into the classroom and switched it on. The classroom watched in horror as helicopters hovered over hundreds of bodies strewn about a compound. Lying on the ground were the bodies of men, women, and children who, at the command of their religious leader, Jones, had drunk cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid (this is the origin of the phrase “He drank the Kool-Aid”). We learned later that some of Jones’s followers had been reluctant and forced at gunpoint to drink the concoction. Mothers squirted cyanide into the mouths of babies too young to drink the poison from paper cups.
The story of Jim Jones and the tragedy of Jonestown remains one of the most disturbing episodes in modern American religious history. As a sociologist interested in mass hysteria and moral panics, I have spent quite a bit of time studying the careers of men like Jones. However, I unconsciously avoided incorporating his tale into my lectures on the subject. Instead, I used faith healers, such as the German Pentecostal evangelical Reinhard Bonnke, who founded the ministry Christ for All Nations in 1974 and came to be known as the “Billy Graham of Africa,” as well as the 1980s Satanic panic, to draw out the implications of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism. I will have to expand my lectures on the subject to include Jones.
The lessons of Jonestown, however, appear to have been forgotten by most people. I suppose many don’t know the origins of the reference to drinking the Kool-Aid. Those who do remember associate Jim Jones solely with the 1978 event and reduce it to a mass psychogenic moment. To be sure, it was a manifestation of mass psychogenesis, but what is oftentimes lost to memory (or never learned) is that Jones was a Christian minister who built his movement within the cultural and institutional framework of an American Christianity, one rooted in liberation theology with Maoist and Third Worldist characteristics. In a word, Jim Jones was woke before the world knew what woke was. I fear that James Talarico, his preachments drenched in wokism, is here to take his place.
When asked to define woke, many people get stuck. It’s one of those you-know-when-you-see-it things. So let’s define it. Appearing in the early twentieth century, the term meant being aware of social injustice, particularly discrimination and racism against black people. In fact, it comes from black vernacular and was used in phrases like “stay woke,” which encouraged people to remain alert to systemic inequality and unfair treatment in society. The expression gained wider usage during contemporary social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, where it referred to being informed about issues like racism, police brutality, and other forms of discrimination—forms of discrimination that no longer exist, but remain rhetorically useful to movement politics. The word soon expanded to include awareness of other social issues, most notably trans rights and the normalization of queer praxis.
The repurposing of woke to represent a quasi-religious movement was manufactured by the progressive hegemonic apparatus in the post-Civil Rights era. In reality, it is a dissimulated corporate-engineered ideology. (I have documented this history in numerous posts on Freedom and Reason). Talarico personifies the expanded form of woke.
Because he is a rising star, and because the Overton window has shifted so far to the left that Taralico’s vision for America has become mainstream, the public needs to understand what he represents and the destructive potential of his presence in the federal government. To do that, we must recall what came before him.
Before I come to Jones, for those unfamiliar with the concept of the Overton window, it’s a political concept that describes the range of ideas, policies, or standpoints considered acceptable or mainstream within public discourse and opinion at any given time. Ideas inside the window are seen as politically viable—politicians can advocate for them without being dismissed as too extreme and still hope to enjoy broad support and win elections. Ideas outside the window are viewed as radical, unthinkable, or unacceptable to the majority.
The term originates from Joseph Overton, a policy analyst at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Originally calling it the “Window of Political Possibility,” Overton developed the idea to explain why politicians tend to stick to a limited set of options shaped by public acceptability rather than their personal beliefs. Shifting the Overton window means that ideas once viewed as extreme become mainstream. The views advanced by Jones and the People’s Temple were seen in their time as unacceptable. They have now become viable politics, as is obvious in the rise of queer praxis, manifest in gender affirming care and the postmodernist problematizing of the gender binary (see my recent essay The Party Flips the Switch: Compulsory Misgendering and the Technique of Rectification).
Jones founded a religious organization known as the Peoples Temple in the 1950s in Indianapolis. At its outset, the movement resembled a typical Pentecostal-style Christian church. Services included Bible readings, healing services, and revival-style preaching. Jones presented himself as a Christian pastor and invoked the teachings of Jesus Christ, focusing on identitarianism and social justice. In the racially segregated Midwest of the 1950s, Jones’s racially integrated congregation and his emphasis on social equality—a forerunner of the contemporary repurposing of equity—attracted attention and followers.
Jones preached against racism and promoted the idea that Christianity demanded practical concern for the poor and marginalized. These themes resonated with many Americans during the early civil rights era, so Jones has a pool of people receptive to his message. As a result, the Peoples Temple grew steadily and eventually moved its headquarters to California, first to Ukiah and later to San Francisco and Los Angeles, where it became involved in community organizing and local politics.
Over time, Jones’s theology leaned ever more determinately into social justice rhetoric, anticipating the woke theology that now animates left-wing politics in America. It is perhaps to state the obvious to note that this rhetoric has become the ideological core of the rank-and-file progressive Democrat. The virtue of these beliefs is promoted by academia, the corporate media, and the culture industry. The more progressives came to dominate the Democratic Party and America’s sense-making institutions over the last half-century, the rhetoric of social justice became normalized—the Overton window shifted.
It is no exaggeration to say that Jones’s worldview is now the worldview of millions of Americans. The ecumenism of left-wing religious teaching—the embrace not only of other Christian sects, but also of Islam, an ideology antithetical to Christianity and Western culture—smuggles into popular culture Jones’s anti-Enlightenment standpoint. This is why it is imperative to learn about the phenomenon of Jim Jones. It’s not just his early use of social justice rhetoric to manipulate his flock that one needs to pay attention to. He had in mind a political movement, and he would use his followers to show the world the future.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jones had begun criticizing the Bible as a tool that had historically been used to justify oppression. He repurposed Christian teachings to advance a collectivist ideology that stood diametrically opposed to Christian civilization and the individualism it codified. Instead of presenting himself merely as a minister, he subtly elevated his own authority within the movement, portraying himself as a prophetic, even messianic figure. His interpretation of Christianity was the true one. The example of Jesus was refracted through the prism of his Christology—woke Christianity. The religious language remained, of course, but the underlying structure of the movement shifted toward a cult of personality and ideas that lay beyond Christianity rather than adherence to orthodox Christian belief and the natural law interpretation of Enlightenment thinkers—the men who founded the American Republic.
Before postmodernism, Jones incorporated elements of socialist ideology into his preaching, especially Maoist and Third Worldist concepts and theory (I have published several essays on this platform showing how these concepts infect contemporary left-wing thinking). He described the Peoples Temple as a model of communal living that rejected capitalism and racial hierarchy. His rhetoric revolved around what would become the core of critical race theory (CRT), most directly in an attack on “whiteness.”
The frame is now familiar to those who follow CRT thinking: the “victim-perpetrator” model, where oppressed nonwhites are depicted as struggling against white capitalist power. The US was a racist, imperialist system, Jones told his followers, evil at its inception, responsible for the misery of billions of people around the world. The Temple community served as the ideal alternative. Members were encouraged to share property, devote their labor to the collective, and view the Temple as a community standing against what Jones described as the corruption and injustice of Western society.
Increasing scrutiny from journalists and defectors eventually pressured Jones to relocate the community outside the United States, where he could protect his followers from deprogramming. In the mid-1970s, he established an agricultural commune in the South American nation of Guyana. The settlement, known as Jonestown, was presented to his followers as a utopia where they could live free from imperialism and white supremacy—the imaginary forms of persecution he convinced his followers were real. He brainwashed his followers into believing they were the victims of oppression, from which his vision would liberate them.
In reality, life in Jonestown was an authoritarian nightmare. Residents lived under constant surveillance and were cut off from outsiders. Loyalty tests known as “White Nights” were conducted in which members rehearsed collective suicide as a demonstration of devotion. Jonestown is a paradigm of how mass psychogenic illness can be induced.
The situation reached its catastrophic climax in November 1978 after a visit from US Congressman Leo Ryan, who had traveled to Guyana to investigate allegations of abuse within the settlement. Family members had become concerned about what was happening to their loved ones at Jonestown. Members of Jonestown deliberately cut off contact with family and outsiders—they had gone, to use today’s grooming term, “no contact.” Going no contact was a key control mechanism used by Jones.
When Ryan and several defectors attempted to leave Jonestown, Jones’s gunmen attacked the group at a nearby airstrip, killing the congressman and several others. The killings were captured on video, although unedited footage is difficult to obtain (you can find some footage here supplied by the FBI). Later that day, Jones ordered what became known as the Jonestown Massacre, where members of the community were instructed to drink Flavor-Aid mixed with cyanide, resulting in the deaths of more than 900 people. Readers can find other footage of the tragedy by searching the Internet. I encourage readers to review these materials, but I hasten to warn you that it is a disturbing memory hole to go down.
The history of Jim Jones raises obvious problems about authority, religious rhetoric, and anti-Western ideology. Jones elevated himself as a Christian minister and used Christian language and institutions to build a destructive movement. The trajectory of the Peoples Temple demonstrates how the appeal to religion can evolve dramatically when leadership becomes organized around charismatic figures and promises of liberation. By the time of the Jonestown tragedy, the movement had departed so far from conventional Christianity (if it ever was conventional) that it functioned not as a church at all, but as an isolated ideological community centered on Jones himself. The Overton window had not yet shifted; the majority of observers could then see the destructive potential of such movements. Now the window has shifted, millions no longer see what they see or hear what they hear.
The lesson of Jonestown extends beyond small cult-like movements. We can find a paradigm of not seeing and hearing not only in the normalization of woke progressivism, but in the destructiveness of religion-as-politics in the Islamic world, which has come to the West via mass immigration and intellectuals, politicians, and pundits who promote Islam with the language of multiculturalism. Compulsory tolerance of Islamization is a central tenet in the woke progressive faith. They open the door wide for the barbarian to pass through—and condemn as bigots those who know history and grasp the peril of Jihad.
Understanding ideology and the techniques of mind control is essential to understanding Jonestown. But it is also necessary for understanding the trajectory of progressivism and social democracy in the West. As noted earlier, Jonestown was a demonstration project—it taught elites how to capture the minds of impressionable people and amass an army of zealots who can, on command, take to the streets. The wokism of today presages Jonestown at scale, an ideology cultivated by major sense-making institutions captured by progressives with the backing of transnational elites.
I have documented the rise of progressivism in previous essays, but to summarize here, at its inception, progressivism couched itself as a reformist project to put a humanitarian face on capitalism, which it portrayed as unjust in its liberal form. The goal was the normalization of the corporate person, a legal entity that clinical psychologist and expert on psychopathology Robert Hare has identified as the prototypical psychopath. Once progressivism became fully institutionalized in the administrative state and technocratic apparatus under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt (see the work of Richard Grossman), it became the core teaching of the sense-making apparatus. It was inevitable that it would move to the educational system and popular culture, raising up generations of Americans who took the ideology on faith.
The parallels between Jones and modern wokism are clear. The anti-American and anti-Western protests in major cities across the transatlantic space even echo Jones’ rhetoric about Israel and Jewish power behind US imperialism and global oppression. We see the return of this ancient hatred in the Red-Green Alliance. A ready army of true believers is mobilized against the obstacles to the transnational corporate reordering of the world.
The phenomenon of suicidal altruism, which I have documented in essays on this platform, echoes the devotion of the true believers drawn to Jones. The Jonestown tragedy did not emerge from a vacuum; the mass psychogenic event was not spontaneous; it developed out of a religious movement that wrapped itself in a recognizable form of American Christianity but was ultimately something very different. The ideas that animated the Peoples Temple have been normalized. This has shifted the Overton window.
Talarico’s tweet now has over four thousand views
In light of the preceding analysis, James Talarico stands as a quintessential embodiment of contemporary woke ideology elevated to electoral prominence—someone who has fully imbibed the Kool-Aid of progressive orthodoxy, repackaging the ideology in the language of compassionate Christianity while promoting views that a reasonable person should regard as profoundly at odds with traditional Christian doctrine and American foundational principles. His rhetoric consistently portrays racism as a pervasive “virus” inherent to whiteness, declaring in resurfaced 2020 statements that “white skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus,” positioning whites as unwitting carriers who spread it through actions, words, and systems—framing whiteness itself as a collective moral failing requiring ongoing reckoning, self-diagnosis, and dramatic containment.
We witness the moral rot in the Twin Cities in Minnesota and other cities in America. The normal person is horrified when he sees whites in supplication to Black Lives Matter, licking the boots of black militants who demand atonement for sins the bootlicker never committed. This is the perversion Talarico personifies. We hear it in his references to grappling with his “own whiteness” through warped appeals to prophetic voices like Jesus, aligning the Gospel with anti-white narratives, emphasizing blood guilt, collective punishment, white privilege, and systemic condemnation over individual character and shared humanity.
But it is more than appealing to anti-whiteness. On the matter of transgender ideology, Talarico has been similarly forthright, asserting on the Texas House floor that “God is non-binary,” describing God as “both masculine and feminine and everything in between,” insisting that “trans children are God’s children, made in God’s own image,” appealing to “our neighbors with a uterus”—positions that fuse biblical interpretation with advocacy for gender fluidity, youth transitions, and opposition to restrictions on male presence in female spaces, male participation in sports, etc. But trans children are not made in God’s image. They are made in the image of the gender identity doctrine manufactured by sexologists and transformed into simulated sexual identities by the medical-industrial complex. Talarico’s preachments demand we affirm a delusion and normalize child mutilation.
Talarico exemplifies the scaling of Jim Jones-style fusion: charismatic religious rhetoric repurposed to advance collectivist social justice, identity-based liberation theology, and anti-Western critiques under a Christian veneer. His party is the party of transnational corporate ambition. The psychopathic indicators add to the trepidation normal people feel when they hear his speeches and observe his mannerisms. Far from preserving orthodox faith, Talarico’s approach subordinates scripture to progressive priors, mirroring the Peoples Temple’s evolution from integrated revivalism to authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist communalism that, in the end, left hundreds of people and their leader dead (Jones put a bullet in his head surrounded by his dying flock).
In an era when such ideas permeate institutions, media, and politics, Talarico represents woke theology at scale—not as fringe cultism, but as a hegemonic force cloaked in moral and spiritual authority, poised to further erode the cultural and constitutional foundations he claims to champion through “love” and “neighborliness.”
As I have written in essays on this blog, beware the rhetoric of “kindness” (see my recent essay The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”). Jones’s suicidal cult following has been raised to the level of suicidal empathy, the force that is erasing Western civilization. Woke progressivism is already a very real problem in the halls of government. To be sure, many have awakened to the awokening. Yet, despite our making progress in containing it, wokism remains a destructive force in our world. What took decades to build won’t be toppled in a single election. Nonetheless, whoever wins the runoff in the Republican primary—John Cornyn or Ken Paxton—Texans need to vote for the man. Heaven help us if men like James Talarico ascend to Washington.
Since a man who believes he is a woman is indistinguishable from a man who pretends to be one, the appeal to the need of transwomen to enter women’s spaces—bathrooms, lockerrooms, prisons—sacrifices the security of women on the altar of ideology. It is moreover an expression of the misogyny that sees the needs of men (transwomen are, as an objective matter, men) as paramount. The practice comes at the expense of women, ignoring the reality that women are at particular risk of sexual violence.
The rape statistics over the last five years make it clear that, with respect to sexual violence, the perpetrators are overwhelmingly male and the victims overwhelmingly female.
FBI crime statistics on rape
I saw a clip of a comedian yesterday that spoke directly to this issue. She asked a man to imagine his worst nightmare on a first date. His answer was that he worried he might spill food on his clothes. The comedian then asked a woman the same question. The audience knew what was coming. The woman said her worst nightmare was that she might be murdered or raped. This is not to say that most men would murder and rape a woman on their first date. But it does reflect the statistical reality that, while it is highly improbable for a man to experience such an outcome, sexual violence is experienced by many women.
It is worth recalling that prisons, for example, were originally sex-segregated primarily to protect women from sexual exploitation by male inmates and staff. Placing men who believe or pretend to be women in women’s prisons presumes the truth of the lie that humans can change gender. Therefore, beyond the safety concerns, the practice is a component of an ideological project to which the vast majority of the population does not subscribe. Most transwomen are housed in male-only facilities. However, there are at least several dozen who are housed with women. One is too many.
Fiction writer and political commentator Lionel Shriver, in conversation with philosopher Peter Boghossian, framed immigration policy as a choice between societal benefit and charity. But that framing depends entirely on how “benefit” and “charity” are defined. Definitions matter because they set the boundaries of a concept and determine what conclusions follow logically. If terms are used loosely, an argument can shift meaning midstream without anyone noticing.
This is the problem of equivocation. It risks the illusion of a valid conclusion. Once the meanings are clearly distinguished, the reasoning falls apart. I like Shriver a lot, but what she said to Boghossian is a bad formulation of the dilemma (albeit one may suppose that something can be simultaneously beneficial and charitable, and there is really no dilemma here) because she is uncharacteristically careless with her words.
In this essay, I illustrate the importance of using precise definitions in making claims and arguments. At the same time, I use this opportunity to once more advance my position on immigration. My critique here does not undo the overall argument I know Shriver makes in this conversation. I know the argument she makes because I have watched several interviews with her on this topic (Triggernometry, The Winston Marshall Show, and a previous appearance on Conversations with Peter Boghossian). However, since Boghossian uses her dilemma as a clip hook, I couldn’t get past it without opening a blank page on Freedom and Reason and critiquing her use of words.
Framing immigration in terms of what “benefits society” is imprecise because society is not a single experiencing subject but a collection of individuals and groups with divergent interests. Like all capitalist societies, the United States is structured by social class and its dynamics. It may be the case that what benefits the bourgeoisie also benefits the proletariat, but their interests are intrinsically antithetical in myriad ways. Chiefly, the motive of capitalist production is to minimize the costs of variable capital (labor), which conflicts with workers’ interest in securing remunerative employment. What counts as a social benefit often consists of aggregate gains that conceal uneven distribution.
An influx of cheaper foreign labor can lower business costs and reduce consumer prices while simultaneously depressing wages or weakening the bargaining power of native-born workers. Critics might counter that workers benefit as consumers or that net social gains justify the practice. But lower prices rarely offset wage losses for low- and middle-income workers. This is why free trade can produce a downward spiral toward greater inequality, which is associated with a falling rate of profit, which ultimately destabilizes the capitalist mode of production. Framing immigration purely in terms of societal benefit implicitly prioritizes certain interests—usually those of business (even to the detriment of this class)—over others, leaving the normative question of justice unaddressed: what about the worker?
While the question of societal benefit can be debated, the matter of charity cannot. This is to be dismissed entirely. Charity is the voluntary act of an individual—or a voluntary group—giving one’s own resources to those in need without expectation of return. Voluntariness is not incidental; it defines charity. Some may argue that governments, acting democratically, can perform acts analogous to charity. Yet, even when democratically authorized, government action is coercive: citizens do not freely choose the recipient, timing, or transfer. If a man were to give up a room in his house to a homeless person, then he has performed a charitable act. But if the government were to provide housing to those without homes, however much support such a policy would enjoy from the population, it is not charity.
Put another way, moral virtue in policy—compassion, solidarity, welfare—remains distinct from charity, which requires personal choice. Appeals to “collective compassion” dissolve when translated into individual obligation: people may endorse generous immigration policies in principle, but defer responsibility to the state, as we see when pro-immigrant progressives are asked to personally house an immigrant. The reality is that few Americans would allow a stranger to live in their homes. If they are obligated to do so, it would not be voluntary and therefore constitute state coercion.
In both cases, Shriver’s dilemma—again, taking it as such, since it was framed this way—is misleading. One horn relies on a distributively opaque notion of social benefit; the other rests on a moral concept that loses its defining feature under coercion.
A clearer debate requires abandoning these imprecise categories and confronting the concrete trade-offs directly. With charity off the table, the question reduces to benefit, and with competing interests, further narrows to whose interests society prioritizes—businesses or workers. The consumer perspective is often invoked, but workers are frequently consumers themselves; without a remunerative wage, they are impoverished regardless of how cheap goods may be. Moreover, because workers pay taxes, and because those taxes disproportionately burden workers relative to their wages, workers effectively bear a heavier share of the economic costs of immigration.
As I said, the formulation of this dilemma does not negate Shriver’s overall argument. Her arguments regarding cultural and national integrity are correct ones. A nation is not merely a territory; it is a people. If the population of Japan were replaced by Nigerians, Japan would cease to exist as Japan and become Nigeria. The territory might retain the name Japan, but it would no longer be Japanese. This problem exists alongside the consequences for proletarian life chances. Social disorganization and impoverishment are reasons enough to restrict immigration.
Shriver is making appearances on various podcasts to promote her new book, A Better Life, a tale about a Brooklyn family that participates in a government program encouraging residents to host migrants in their homes. The story centers on Gloria Bonaventura, a well-meaning progressive mother who volunteers to take in a Honduran asylum seeker, Martine Salgado. Martine initially appears grateful and industrious, quickly winning over Gloria and her daughters. Gloria’s adult son, Nico—an unemployed engineering graduate still living at home—narrates much of the story and remains skeptical of both the hosting program and Martine herself. As time passes, Martine’s relationships and obligations begin to complicate the household, particularly when members of her extended network start appearing, creating tension within the family.
In this story, a government program and Bonaventura’s charity intersect. Perhaps this is why Shriver put the dilemma as she did. But in a world where consumption of social media content is constrained by time, Boghossian’s choice of clip hook was unfortunate. At any rate, it allowed me to riff about the importance of definitions and reflect once more on the problem of immigration.
The widespread adoption of compulsory, or at least strongly encouraged, use of preferred pronouns emerged prominently in the mid-to-late 2010s in the US, in academia, corporate media, and workplaces, as well as mass media and popular culture. It was not a gradual but rather a rapid cultural and institutional shift driven by evolving interpretations of anti-discrimination laws. That was the cover, in any case. The charge was that accurately sexing a person was “misgendering” them, an Orwellian inversion that, in a hegemonic context, manufactured a reality that people could actually be a different sex than they were. The science is clear on the matter: they can’t.
People should pause and consider the significance of widespread mandatory actual misgendering, that is, referring to men using feminine pronouns and women using masculine pronouns. It was as if someone flipped a switch, and suddenly all the major sense-making institutions began referring to men with feminine pronouns—and women with masculine pronouns. A thing like that doesn’t happen by accident, and the claim that it was rooted in anti-discrimination laws is not a compelling explanation. Powerful people met in rooms and talked about something. Organizations drafted and disseminated directives and memos, instructing administrators and employees to use preferred pronouns that contradicted biological sex. Those who refused to comply with the falsehood were shamed and disciplined. Before we knew it, newspapers were referring to male serial killers as women if they identified themselves as such. Men who said they were women were sent to women’s prisons. (See Why We Must Resist Neologisms like “Cisgender”.)
This was not the first time that elites engaged in a systematic, comprehensive program to reeducate the population at the flip of a switch. The widespread adoption of “Ms.” in the 1970s closely parallels the rise of preferred pronouns. To people living through the change, it felt abrupt, yet decades of debates about marital-status titles, women in the workforce, and legal equality had quietly laid the groundwork. An even clearer example is the singular “they.” The singular they had been discouraged in formal grammar for centuries. In the 2010s, style guides began endorsing it. It changed so rapidly that, in 2019, Merriam-Webster named it “Word of the Year.” Shortly before then, I was scolded in a meeting for correcting a document that used “they” as singular. I sat there thinking: I missed the memo on this.
George Orwell captures the technique in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four with the phrase “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” In the story, the world is divided into three totalitarian superstates that are locked in a state of perpetual war: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. The ruling Party of Oceania maintains control by manipulating the truth through “doublethink,” propaganda, and surveillance. During Hate Week, a massive public rally where citizens are whipped into frenzy against the current enemy, it is reinforced that Oceania, allied with Eastasia, is officially at war with Eurasia. Mid-speech, during a fiery denunciation of Eurasia, the speaker receives a note from the Party leadership announcing a sudden switch: the war is now with Eastasia, and Eurasia is the ally. Without acknowledging the change, the speaker continues the rant, now directed at Eastasia, while the crowd cheers as if nothing has shifted.
The Party in Orwell’s nightmare retroactively alters all records, newspapers, and history itself to claim that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and never with Eurasia. Any evidence or memory to the contrary is erased or dismissed as “thoughtcrime.” This Orwellian revisionism—or “rectification” in the novel’s terms—speaks to the Party’s power to control the past, and thus to control the present and future. The people have been conditioned in doublethink, the ability to accept two contradictory realities at once (e.g., knowing the enemy changed yesterday but believing it has always been this way). Orwell is describing gaslighting on a societal scale: The regime forces the population to deny their own memories—and their common sense—and accept fabricated history, eroding independent thought. (See When Thinking Becomes Unthinkable: Motivated Reasoning and the Memory Hole; Industrial Strength Gaslighting; The Project to Gaslight the Masses is Massive and Comprehensive.)
Today, while a majority of Americans never fully accepted the lie that mammals, the class to which humans belong, can change their gender, recent surveys show that a concerning portion of those under 30 still hold related misconceptions about biology. This makes it more important than ever to declare the truth: sex is binary and immutable. It falls to all of us to help deprogram those still caught in the lie. We’re seeing the effects of this deprogramming across the Western world, as more medical institutions move away from so-called gender-affirming care. The Orwellian euphemisms are collapsing. But we must not rest on our laurels. Madness has a way of adapting to conditions. That it has to still adapt is promising.
And madness it is. The switch that flipped gender justified—and still does—altering physiology and performing irreversible surgeries in the medical-industrial complex, pushing gender-identity doctrine in public education. The scope of the gender project is astonishing. And while we’re making progress in reclaiming truth and common sense, that only means trans activists will become even more militant in demanding acceptance of their claims (the ACLU is suing the state of Kansas to restore the power of transgender individuals to falsify official documents). The reason for our progress is simple: people began speaking up despite intense pressure to conform. As soon as I recognized it was a lie, I had to speak out—I didn’t want to look back years later and regret my silence. Courage is contagious, they say. The more people speak up, the more others feel empowered to stand on the ground of truth. (The same dynamic applies to DEI and other forms of identitarianism.) Progress will be retarded if we take our foot off the gas. (See The Emperor is Naked: The Problems of Mutual Knowledge and Free Feelings; Wokism and the Naked Truth.)
Today, thankfully, woke progressivism is on the run, which is why Democrats are desperate to block election-integrity efforts. They look ever more ridiculous as they cling to their big lies. But it bears repeating: we can never underestimate their power. After all, consider what they accomplished. It will take decades to unwind the damage. I feel deep sympathy for those drawn into the vortex of this lie, now unable to undo the drastic, irreversible alterations done to their bodies. It is a crime against humanity, reminiscent of the Nazi doctors’ experiments, which is why I continue calling for a new round of Nuremberg-style trials. Stopping the madness and pretending everything is fine is not enough. Those responsible must be held accountable to ensure it never happens again. That we have not put the officials who imposed the COVID-19 pandemic controls on trial is a travesty of justice. They will pull that stunt again.
Critics will no doubt respond that all of this—the mandatory pronoun usage, the reclassification of male criminals in official records, the institutional insistence on affirming self-identified gender—is merely an expression of the simple, humane command to “be kind” (see The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”). Yet this very objection is itself a familiar tactic of rectification: by framing dissent as unkindness, the Party shifts the debate from truth to tone, from biological reality to emotional etiquette. To question the decree becomes not an appeal to evidence or reason, but an act of cruelty; to notice the contradiction is to lack compassion. (See In Exposing the Counterrevolution, Grasping Strategy is as Important to Debunking Ideas.)
In this way, the demand for kindness functions as a shield for the underlying mechanism of control, discouraging scrutiny of the rapid, top-down rewriting of language, law, and common sense. Far from being an innocent plea for courtesy, it is the latest euphemism deployed to silence those who refuse to participate in the manufacture of a new, state-sanctioned reality—one that requires us all to deny what our eyes and biology plainly show. True kindness, in the end, does not demand that we lie to one another; it demands that we tell the truth, even when the truth is uncomfortable. Even if truth-telling necessitates ridicule. (See Mocking Nonsense: A Defense of Ridicule in an Age of Bad Faith.)
A joint Israel–US attack on Iran began on Saturday, February 28, 2026 (for my initial response and context, see The Red-Green Ruse: Clerical Fascism in Post-Colonial Garb). Defenders of the operation argue it was necessary to protect allied and regional security by pre-empting a constellation of serious threats. Targeting Iran’s expanding nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities is intended to prevent Tehran from acquiring a bomb and the means to deliver it. More broadly, the strikes aim to degrade Iran’s capacity to attack US and allied interests, both directly and through regional militant Islamist groups.
Explosions on February 28 in Tehran, Iran (source)
Beyond weakening Iran’s overall military capacity and deterring future aggression, the operation is also a response to the regime’s brutal repression of its own people. In early January, widespread protests broke out across Iran amid anger at the ruling system over economic hardship and political repression. Iranian security forces, including units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other state forces, responded with aggressive crowd-control tactics, including the use of live ammunition, resulting in significant casualties and injuries. Authorities carried out mass arrests, detained activists and journalists, and imposed harsh sentences on some protesters. The crackdown was one of the most intense episodes of domestic repression in recent Iranian history.
US officials have stressed that the objective is not an open-ended war but the dismantling of specific threats, the reduction of risks to Americans and their allies, and the restoration of deterrence. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a press conference yesterday that the irrationalism of clerical fascism also played a role in the decision to strike. “Imagine a year from now or a year and a half from now, the capabilities they would have to inflict damage on us. It’s an unacceptable risk, especially in the hands of a regime that’s run by radical clerics. The ayatollah is a radical—was a radical cleric. That entire regime is led by radical clerics who don’t make geopolitical decisions; they make decisions on the basis of theology—their view of theology, which is an apocalyptic one.” Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth put it this way: “Crazy regimes like Iran, hellbent on prophetic Islamist delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons.” Indeed.
Furthermore, while this is not said explicitly, one may reasonably situate the operation within a broader strategic geopolitical framework: countering Iran’s alignment with rival great powers and limiting the expansion of Chinese influence in critical regions, which suggests another reason for recent actions in Venezuela and renewed assertion of American leadership in the Western Hemisphere (see The New World Order as Given; Monroe Doctrine 2.0; Countering China’s Influence). Beijing must be rethinking its ambitions in the face of demonstrated American military prowess and technological superiority.
In the wake of the attack, obnoxious memes from the left began flowing like corked wine. The memes depict MAGA supporting Trump in 2024 because he told them “no more wars.” In the second panel, Trump uses the military, a chip gets swapped out in the MAGA brain, and MAGA is now for endless war. If one didn’t know any better, he might think that the left had something. But the left, having departed the plane of reason, never does these days. Like everything else, the memes depend on something Trump didn’t do or a version of Trump that never existed.
Indeed, Trump frequently presented himself as strongly opposed to what he called “endless wars.” However, he never claimed he would categorically refuse to use military force to obtain critical objectives in the pursuit of peace and security. Instead, his position focused on opposing large-scale, long-term nation-building efforts, particularly the Iraq War, which he correctly criticized as costly and ineffective (see War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy), but also Afghanistan (see Sowing the Seeds of Terrorism? Capitalist Intrigue and Adventurism in Afghanistan). At the same time, Trump has consistently supported targeted military action when he believed it served American strategic interests. His approach emphasizes decisive action, deterrence, strength, and the element of surprise, while avoiding prolonged military occupations—at least so far.
It seems conveniently forgotten, but during his first term, Trump authorized several significant military operations. One of the most prominent occurred in January 2020, when the United States carried out a drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, a senior Iranian military commander, in Iraq. Soleimani was a key leader in Iran’s regional military operations. The strike brought the two countries close to open conflict. Trump defended the action as necessary to prevent future attacks against American personnel and interests, rather than as the beginning of a new war. Iran backed down.
Trump ordered missile strikes against the government of Syria in 2017 and 2018 in response to the use of chemical weapons. These strikes targeted Syrian military facilities and were designed to deter further chemical attacks. They were limited in scope and did not lead to a broader military campaign against the Syrian government. Meanwhile, US forces continued combat operations in Afghanistan throughout Trump’s presidency. Trump initially increased troop levels to pressure insurgent forces to pursue negotiations to reduce American military involvement while avoiding the disaster the world witnessed with Biden’s abrupt withdrawal of forces on August 30, 2021. Moreover, the Trump administration intensified the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS), particularly in Iraq and Syria. ISIS lost most of its remaining territorial control during Trump’s presidency. The administration relied on airpower, special operations forces, and local allied troops to defeat ISIS without committing large numbers of conventional American ground forces.
In his second term, Trump has authorized even more direct and consequential military actions. In early February 2025, Trump ordered US airstrikes against Islamic State affiliates in Somalia, targeting militants in the Golis Mountains. This marked one of the first major military actions of his second term and aimed to degrade Islamist fighters in the region. In June 2025, he ordered US airstrikes on Iran’s major nuclear facilities at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz. These strikes used advanced weapons, including bunker-busters and cruise missiles, to damage underground uranium enrichment infrastructure. The objective was to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and to reduce the threat posed by its nuclear program. On December 25, US forces carried out airstrikes against Islamist militant camps in northwest Nigeria. These were a response to jihadist violence, carried out in coordination with Nigerian authorities.
These actions were followed by Trump ordering a major military intervention in Venezuela in January 2026. US airstrikes targeted military installations in the capital city of Caracas, and American special operations forces entered the country and captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The operation involved combat with Venezuelan security forces and represented a direct US intervention in the leadership of a sovereign nation. Trump stated that the goal of the operation was to remove an authoritarian leader and oversee a political transition toward a new government. Maduro had a warrant for his arrest.
This brings us to the present moment, with Trump authorizing a broader military campaign against Iran known as Operation Epic Fury, which involved hundreds of strikes against Iranian leadership targets, missile systems, and military installations. The free and rational nations of America and Israel pounded a stake into the heart of an authoritarian theocratic vampire, while leaving the civilian leadership in place. This action separates the secular Iranians from the religious fanatics. It makes the difference between them plain, and it forces civilian leadership to think about how it survives: does it side with the people or does it double down on Islamism? If the latter, then more pounding is in order.
In addition to these major operations, Trump expanded counterterrorism and military activities in several other countries during his second term, including Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. His administration authorized airstrikes, drone attacks, and special operations missions targeting militant organizations and hostile forces. These actions reflected a continued reliance on limited, targeted military force rather than large-scale invasions or long-term military occupations. It remains to be seen whether the joint Israel-US action in Iran involves troops on the ground and an occupation similar to the one witnessed in Iraq.
My hope is that Iran does not become a quagmire. But, at this point, Trump’s record demonstrates a clear distinction between prolonged, large-scale wars and using military force aggressively and selectively when he believed it was necessary. He has not launched a full-scale invasion comparable to the Iraq War of 2003. He has instead authorized aerial assaults, drone strikes, special operations missions, and targeted campaigns against foreign governments and militant groups. His approach emphasizes precision, speed, and strategic impact, rather than long-term occupation or nation-building. Trump’s presidency illustrates how a leader can oppose extended wars while still relying heavily on military force as a central tool of foreign policy. Even if in the end the Iran affair resembles “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” it does not change the character of Trump’s past military actions.
One must keep in mind that Trump has done all this while settling several conflicts around the world, including normalization agreements between Israel and multiple Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan; the aforementioned negotiations with the Taliban to facilitate US withdrawal from Afghanistan (Biden’s blunder notwithstanding); diplomatic engagement with North Korea aimed at reducing nuclear tensions; mediation efforts between Serbia and Kosovo; and ceasefire arrangements involving Turkey and Kurdish forces in Syria.
The meme swarm on social media portraying chip swapping in MAGA brains means to plant a false premise in the public mind that Trump ran for president on a promise not to wield US military might as a means to foreign policy ends. He never promised that. His first term saw several instances of large-scale military action, and more than 11 million more people voted for him the next time around—and more than three million more in 2024. What Trump has not done is commit the United States to ground operations the way Bush and Cheney did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump’s approach is to use America’s vast intelligence apparatus and technological superiority to achieve US objectives while avoiding putting boots on the ground.
To settle the matter succinctly, the memes rest on a false premise. They mean to obscure a sensible yet muscular approach to foreign policy. Trump never said he would not use America’s military might. He said he was averse to large-scale war, and so far, he has not gotten the United States into one. In the end, he may commit ground troops to Iran. If he does, as always, I reserve the right to change my views. So far, so good.
* * *
Update (later in the day): I want to emphasize that my support for Trump’s action in Iran is not only because of national security concerns and threats to allies but also due to my antipathy towards Islam and the threat clerical fascism poses to the world. After centuries of marginalization, Islam has been on the rise for decades, sweeping across the MENA zone, driving out Christians and Jews, and now Islamizing the West. It is better to confront Islam now rather than later, and no Muslim nation represents the threat to human freedom more than Iran.
Hitler made intervention relatively easy because of his direct attacks on other European nations, which should have moved the United States to intervene earlier than it did. The attacks Iran is now making on other nations after the joint Israeli-US action might likely have occurred at some point in the future before intervention was deemed necessary—if future leaders intervened at all. But until Saturday’s action, the threat Iran posed to the world was not obvious to many. It was potential, albeit real.
The possibility of a Democratic majority in Congress and a future Democratic president, especially with a compliant Republican Party, would make the failure to act in a timely fashion even more likely, and maybe even cause the US to fail to intervene at all if objectively necessary.
As with Nazi Germany, failure to confront Iran would have allowed that Islamic state to deepen and expand its military capability, resulting in the loss of more lives in the future (I find Marco Rubio’s analysis here compelling). Loss of life is not the only peril. The future of Western civilization is at stake.
There is a parallel here that is crucial to grasp. Democrats are condemning Trump’s actions in Iran in clear view of the failure of the Roosevelt Administration to intervene earlier in the case of German aggression. As I said in the previous essay, “Never Again” should mean something lest it become an empty slogan. The rise of left-wing antisemitism has already hollowed out that slogan, which is why the historical case, while recognized, is ignored or denied as analogous. The latter signals that many observers do not grasp the threat Islamism poses to the world.
However, the failure to grasp the significance of the threat is feigned. Thus, more darkly, it signals two things. First, the persistent antipathy towards the Jews is crossing once more into eliminationist desire. The rhetoric implies the sentiment that Israel has no legitimate concerns about Islam. Consider that Hamas, which is a proxy for Iraq, is viewed by the left sympathetically. The Intifada has been globalized. Second, the apparent tolerance of Islamism is strategic: the spread of Islam, especially to the West, is a major element in the transnational corporate state project.
In sum, opposition to Trump’s actions has behind it not a failure to grasp the danger Islam poses, but a recognition of the usefulness of Islamism in advancing the ambitions of world elites who seek the dissolution of the nation-state system and the subjugation of the world population.
One last observation. Christopher Hitchens was highly critical of the Islamic Republic of Iran, seeing it as a theocratic dictatorship that oppressed its people and destabilized the region. While he distinguished between the Iranian government and its people—whom he found often cosmopolitan and relatively freedom-minded—he viewed the regime’s rhetoric, particularly its hostility toward Israel and potential pursuit of nuclear weapons, as a serious threat that could not be contained through diplomacy alone.
Unlike Iraq, where he supported US intervention (I did not), Hitchens did not advocate immediate military action against Iran. However, he argued that if the regime developed nuclear capabilities and continued to flout international norms, force might become necessary. Iran has crossed that threshold.
Hitchens’ commentary on Iran was consistent with his broader opposition to authoritarianism and theocracy, emphasizing that the problem lay with the ruling clerics rather than the Iranian populace, which is Trump’s view. It therefore seems likely, were Hitchens alive today (he would be turning 77 next month), he would support Trump’s actions—assuming that his reasoning was not, as it is for many on the left, dethroned by Trump derangement syndrome.
The critique of Christianity as a “morality of weakness” is most sharply articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), targeting the emphasis on virtues like forgiveness, humility, and “turning the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39). Such teachings, Nietzsche argues, arose from ressentiment among the powerless, transforming meekness, passivity, and self-denial into exalted “goodness” while demonizing assertiveness, prude, and strength as “evil.” This he characterized as a “slave morality” that tames the noble and life-affirming instincts of man.
Nietzsche regarded the emergence of slave morality not as a cynical invention or deliberate distortion imposed by powerful elites to subdue and pacify the masses, but as something intrinsic to the religion’s very origins. He traced its roots to the priestly class among the ancient Jews under foreign domination—unable to overcome their oppressors through strength, they instead inverted the values of the noble and powerful. What the strong had celebrated as good, the priests recast as evil, while exalting their submission as virtuous. This reactive transvaluation, born from the powerless’s need for spiritual revenge (where they had no real power), became the foundation of Christian doctrine itself, embedding a morality of weakness directly into its core rather than layering it on later as a tool of control.
For Nietzsche, the pacifying effect on life’s affirmative instincts was thus no accident of manipulation by the mighty, but the natural and inevitable consequence of the faith’s genesis among the defeated and resentful. While there may be something to this rationalization in the face of marginalization, today the slave morality is a technique of control by powerful forces to keep the masses subservient to corporate state power and eager to defend the advance of collective denationalization amid globalization. This is how we see in today’s progressive appeal to Christianity an interpretation of the Gospel, amplified in modern pacifist readings of the scriptures, that emasculates the faith by memory-holing or marginalizing its militant dimensions—while more recently elevating a militancy based on a secular ideology that presents as a quasireligious system, what we call “woke.” Such a reading, if embraced by the majority and legitimized by the corporate state apparatus, leaves Christian civilization vulnerable to erasure by barbarians from without and the machinations of elite power from within.
One can demonstrate by appealing to scripture that this is a false reading—or at least a reading narrowed by the elites and propagandists who wish to weaponize the Christian faith against Christians to achieve a transnational corporate world order. The Gospels themselves contain explicit counterpoints to pacifism, such as Jesus’ instruction in Luke 22:36 to “sell your cloak and buy a sword,” which—despite being rationalized as symbolic rather than a call to collective self-defense—acknowledges the need for force and violence amid hostility. This understanding saved Christian civilization from the barbarism of Islam in the Middle Ages, finding vivid expression in medieval military orders, such as the Knights Hospitaller (Order of St. John), who combined monastic devotion with armed resistance. Originally founded in Jerusalem in 1099 to care for pilgrims, the Hospitallers evolved into warrior-monks who fought fiercely in the Crusades, defended Rhodes against Ottoman advances for centuries, and later held Malta in the 1565 siege, playing a pivotal role in halting Islamic expansion into Europe and preserving Christian civilization through martial vigor. Christians did not then submit to the existential threat posed by Muslims. But we should be concerned that today they will not.
Far from embodying weakness, Christianity has in the past fused spiritual ideals with the sword when existential threats demanded it, challenging any one-sided portrayal as inherently emasculating or pacifist. What we see today on the progressive side is not principled pacifism, but a selective rhetoric of passivity coupled with a tolerance of the mob. The rank and file are supposed to presume the good in Muslim immigrants and in those citizens with sacral identities (these determined by woke ideology) who harm and prey upon other citizens. Unconditional positive regard for the worst of the worst. Yet, at the same time, they obstruct and even resort to violence against the Christians and patriots who rise against the alien invaders and domestic predators in their midst. Woke progressivism only feigns empathy while demanding it from its adversaries.
This Janus-faced perversion of Christian teachings exemplifies the enduring contradiction at the heart of slave morality—preaching meekness and forgiveness toward existential perils, be they invading barbarians or predatory criminals—while unleashing vitriol and even violence against those who embody the faith’s historical militancy in defense of civilization.
Progressive interpretations, amplified by emasculated elites—or at least elites preaching emasculinity, seen in the damning of so-called “toxic masculinity”—invert the Gospel’s call to both mercy and the sword, fostering a culture where the faithful are urged to “turn the other cheek” to threats that disorder their culture, disorganize their nation, and erode their heritage, while demonizing as bigots or extremists those who rise to defend and preserve it. This is how a laudable goal embedded in the phrase “Make America Great Again” is reduced to a racist slogan. Wearing a hat with the slogan can provoke punishment and even violence by those preaching empathy and inclusivity.
Concomitant with this hypocrisy is the tragic abandonment by progressive women of their traditional role as guardians of the family, redirecting their protective instincts from their children toward aliens and outlaws who undermine societal order, thus accelerating the very dissolution they purport to heal through misguided compassion—or something darker. Wokism is a powerfully disordering force in the West.
We see this, as well, in the double standard in the policing of speech. Those who condemn Islam and gender identity doctrine, who call out the violence and madness, are scolded for “demonizing” those whose beliefs they find disagreeable and obstructive. Their appeal to tolerance is obnoxious. Meanwhile, those who criticize and condemn the pernicious ideologies are called various names: bigot, fascist, Islamophobe, racist, transphobe. We saw this recently when Robert De Niro, pushing through tears, talked about “raising each other up,” and “coming together” to defend the country against the tens of millions he had just demonized as the “enemies of the nation.”
To save Christian civilization from this self-inflicted vulnerability, believers must reclaim the robust, life-affirming ethos of their forebears—the Hospitallers’ sword alongside the cross—lest the ressentiment of the weak consign the noble to oblivion. Christians need to stand with broad shoulders and face the threat to Western Civilization, and if they need me to put that call in the language of Christendom, I am more than happy to accommodate.
As many readers know, I am not a Christian, but I am eager to stand with Christians who don’t want their children to be crucified upon a cross of suicidal empathy. If Islam prevails, human freedom is lost. And it is not just the Muslims who threaten democracy. Behind them lurks the transnational corporate state. Indeed, the globalists use the Muslim as a weapon to weaken nations. Nations are an obstacle to their vision of a New World Order where proletarians become serfs in a planetary neo-feudalist structure. Christians should recognize that, from their worldview, this is not only a struggle over material stuff, but a spiritual fight for their lives.
Remember when the chief indictment of Donald Trump was that he was an isolationist? He never was. He was never a racist, either—though that charge will cling to him forever in the minds of those who need him to be one. Now he stands revealed as an interventionist. So which label sticks? The West is at war with Iran, with the opening strikes delivered by Israel and the United States. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead, along with dozens of the regime’s top elites. The Arab world has mobilized. The United Kingdom has entered the fight. Anti-war protests are already swelling in American streets; their dominant current is anti-Israeli. Yet this time something is different: pro-regime-change forces are also in the streets across the West—and inside Iran itself. The Persian lion is roaring.
I have written extensively on the Islamic Republic of Iran on this platform. (See Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?Israel and the Existential Threat of a Determined Iran; Iran, Nukes, and the Realities of Military Power: A Constitutional Perspective; US Strikes Iran’s Nuclear Facilities; Facing Down Evil.) I confess that my opinion on Iran has been troubled. On one hand, I oppose regime-change wars—they nearly always devolve into quagmires, and their moral justification is often tenuous. On the other hand, I sympathize deeply with the Iranian people, who have endured nearly half a century under theocratic authoritarianism. I have also pondered America’s failure to intervene earlier in other crises, most notoriously the rise of Nazism in Europe. When a nation possesses the power to end tyranny, should it not wield that power to liberate the oppressed? And in Iran’s case, what of its aggression against the United States and our ally Israel, the region’s bulwark of reason? At what point does that demand retaliation? How long should the United States tolerate a monstrous entity like the Islamic Republic?
Gallup poll | 2/2-2/16
In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?
As noted, much of the energy on the streets today is driven by a hatred of Israel. I recently opened the Google newsfeed to find a distressing headline from The Times of Israel: “For 1st time, Gallup poll shows Americans more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel.” Overall, 41 percent of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians, and 36 percent sided with Israel, with the rest undecided or saying they favored both or neither. Digging into the crosstabs, 65 percent of Democrats sympathized with the Palestinians and only 17 percent with Israel. Younger adults—those 18 to 34—have become especially sympathetic toward the Palestinians. The poll also found, for the first time, that middle-aged Americans, those 35 to 54, expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis—a reversal from only last year. Americans over 55 remain more sympathetic toward Israel, but that gap has narrowed as well. Meanwhile, 57 percent of US adults favor the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, even though there is no historical reason that the lumpenproletariat of the Arab world should have a country.
Pondering these numbers, I suppose a historical counterfactual: World War II ending in a ceasefire that preserved fascist rule in Europe. The Nazis were not defeated. No denazification occurred. Then I imagined that, decades later—at the same relative distance from that war as we are today from Israel’s founding—polls showed that most Americans, except those old enough to remember the conflict, were more sympathetic to fascist states than to the Jewish national cause. Such a result seems remote, but in light of Gallup’s findings, the improbable becomes possible.
The predictable objection to my counterfactual is that, given American public opinion and democratic constraints, earlier entry into what would become WWII was politically unrealistic. We were in an isolationist mood then; WWI had taken much out of us. Why should Americans lose more lives for the sake of Europeans who, at this point, were establishing a pattern of belligerence? Pearl Harbor was the decisive event that made full mobilization possible. But by then, the devastation of the war was terrible, and millions of lives were lost.
Reflecting on this a day ago on social media, I rhetorically asked whether people remembered when the world used to say, “Never again?” The Islamic Republic has ruled Iran for 47 years. Imagine putting up with Hitler for 47 years. Hitler was in power for 12 years. That was too long. I anticipated another objection: “You can’t compare the Islamic Republic to Nazi Germany!” Maybe at scale. But the Islamic Republic is authoritarian and violently repressive. It is the most fascistic state on the planet.
One need only check the inventory of fascistic traits to determine this. The Islamic state possesses the authority to veto candidates and override legislation it finds objectionable. Security forces and Islamic courts suppress political opposition and protests. Iran makes extensive use of the death penalty, carrying out large numbers of executions each year—including hundreds annually in recent years, often without due process. Ethnic and religious minorities suffer imprisonment and property confiscation. The state enforces an Islamic framework. The Guidance Patrol (or the morality police) oppresses gays and women.
At the center of the system is (or at least was) the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, an unelected authority who exercises sweeping control over a vast military and intelligence apparatus, the judiciary, key government appointments, and major national decisions involving foreign policy and war. “But doesn’t Trump also enjoy these powers?” Yes, but Trump was elected. This is why we must put up with him (even if Democrats don’t want to). But why did the West put up with Ali Khamenei for 37 years? And why did we put up with the man who came before him, Ruhollah Khomeini?
The Islamic Republic is an instantiation of clerical fascism—the worst instantiation of it in the modern period (Hamas is a lesser instance of clerical fascism). If the regime falls, Iranians will be liberated from an oppressive authoritarian nightmare. And the world will see a significant threat to freedom and safety evaporate—presuming the West finishes the job. There can be no ceasefire. “Never again” should mean something (it should have meant something in the Gaza war). Yet Democrats (not all but most) are dropping statements all over social media condemning Trump for joining with Israel to remove the Islamic regime.
What moral authority do Democrats have anymore? They watched as the Islamic Republic slaughtered tens of thousands of Iranians who rose up in the millions in more than 187 cities across all 31 provinces in December 2025, an uprising likely inspired by the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer in June of last year, in which the United States degraded Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear weapon. Democrats objected to this, too. It’s as if they have found affinity with the slogans Marg bar Amrika and Marg bar Israel, and the 1983 law forcing Iranian women to cover their hair. Indeed, Ruhollah Khomeini describes the hijab as the “flag” of the Islamic movement and the imposition of Sharia. Does this explain the left’s tolerance for Sharia in the West?
One might think that the turn against Israel in the West illustrates how historical distance can reshape public moral perception, and that this is how we might, at first blush, entertain my historical counterfactual. But historical distance cannot explain the shift we see in the polls on the question of respective sympathy. I doubt that a majority of Americans would ever come to sympathize with National Socialism over time (not consciously, in any case). Rather, the shift in sympathy is the work of propagandists who move from a deep anti-semitism fed by the myth that Jews in Israel are “white settler colonialists” who have displaced an imagined indigenous population in Palestine. The reality is that Palestinians are a disfavored group in the MENA region. Arab support for Palestinian statehood has always been more about antipathy towards the Jewish state—and finding a place where Palestinians can be kept away from the rest of the Arab world.
The charge of white settler colonialism (which has led some Jews to deny their whiteness) is a cover for antisemitism. Jews do not deserve a state in the mind of the progressive, especially in Israel, the nation established on the territory where Jews have dwelled for millennia. Indeed, it is the Jews who are indigenous to this land, and their culture and religion comprise the foundation (however perverted and devolved by the latter) of Christianity and Islam. Modern Israel is the world’s only Jewish-majority state. It exists as a small sovereign country amid a wide arc of Muslim-majority nations, including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, as well as the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (which Israel should annex). Jews have been forced into the space by widespread antisemitic sentiment in the Arab world.
The religious landscape of this region has not always been what it is today. In late antiquity and the early medieval period, many of these lands were predominantly Christian under Byzantine rule, before gradually becoming Muslim-majority in the centuries following the Arab conquests. In these times, Jews lived continuously across these societies for millennia—as minorities in cities such as Aleppo, Baghdad, and Cairo—central to commercial, cultural, and intellectual life until the upheavals of the twentieth century led most of these ancient Jewish communities to disappear.
The present map reflects not only contemporary political realities but also the outcome of profound demographic and religious transformations over time. And this would have been Europe’s fate had it not been for the Knights Hospitallers and other Christians who took up swords to drive the Muslims from the West (the subject of my next essay). But the threat of Islam remains, as we can see by the Islamization of Europe’s major cities—and even in cities in the United States. It is hoped that the toppling of the Islamic state in Iran and a US President prepared to defend Western Civilization will weaken Jihad and contain the Muslim threat to humanity. Perhaps even the people of the Muslim world will seek to throw off the yoke of clerical fascism altogether and de-Islamize their lives.
🚨 BREAKING: This Austin CBS reporter is being praised nationwide for REFUSING to follow orders from a higherup to IGNORE massive support for Trump and Israel obliterating Khamenei
If you still don’t believe that the corporate media is globalist propaganda, then you don’t have your head in the real world. Here is CBS news producers telling a reporter not to cover the rallies praising Trump and Israel for liberating the Iranian people. This is not just about avoiding reporting news favorable to the President. There’s a reason why such news must be buried or spun. Trump represents the reclaimation of the American Republic in the face of transnational elite desire. The nation-state is an obstacle to elite ambitions to establish a new world order based on corporate power. Islam is a weapon global elites wield to weaken Western nations. The fall of the Islamic regime in Iran emboldens the masses to more broadly reject Islam. It stirs the nationalist spirit. The corporate media is the propaganda arm of the project to degrade American greatness. This is the more serious threat readers of this platform need to understand. Muslim migration and Islamization are not merely organic phenomena. They are instruments of the agenda to extinguish human freedom.
“The thing I’ve been most appalled by is the sense of so many psychotherapists … that their job is to confirm their patients’ delusions rather than help them find out what really has happened. It took a long time to convince myself that’s what’s happening, but it certainly is happening. I don’t know whether it’s more likely among social workers than PhDs in psychology, or more likely among the PhDs than the psychiatrists, who have medical training.
“But I do find it astonishing that anybody in psychology should be ignorant of the most elementary precepts of skeptical scientific scrutiny. As someone who spent a lot of time reading Freud and his followers, I am also distressed by the absence of a systematic effort to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is more useful than going to your priest or rabbi.” —Carl Sagan, Psychology Today (1996)
The progressive complaint about ridicule is Janus-faced. It is, to be sure, duplicitous, but for dark objectives. Ridicule on that side inverts the proper purpose of ridicule. Progressives ridicule normal and sane people to project the source of ridiculous beliefs onto their enemies. The responsible use of ridicule, however, is to attack a belief where reason cannot reach the believer. Progressives subvert ridicule to thwart reason, since their beliefs are unreasonable. The reasonable mock the unreasonable to save reason from irrationalism.
Regarding ridicule and offense-taking: the primary target is the absurd belief—one so empirically baseless, logically incoherent, or morally grotesque that it warrants being laughed out of the room rather than endlessly debated in good-faith circles. Progressives do not argue in good faith. They’re sophists—often not even clever enough to deserve the label. As I’m fond of saying, stupid ideas make smart people stupid. Last night, I read one of the stupidest things I have ever encountered. The person is smart, yet has become profoundly stupid under the weight of irrational thoughts. I will not reveal his name, but his acquired stupidity inspires this post.
Ridicule functions like a social immune response: it tags something as unworthy of serious deference, lowering its status and making it harder for it to spread unchallenged. Beliefs, like culture, are not floating in the ether. Just as an immigrant bears the culture of his homeland, a believer bears the ridiculous beliefs of his tribe. When commitment to the belief is stubborn, ridicule becomes the only peaceful option. Absurdity resides in the heads of humans, corrupts their judgment, and guides their behavior. The human animal is tied to communities that shape identities; beliefs result from socialization—often indoctrination. It’s lodged in the deranged brain and needs to be knocked out.
When I throw sharp mockery at the stream of bad ideas, it almost inevitably splashes onto the persons holding them. “That’s absurd; how could anyone think X?” often becomes “How could you think X?”—at least to the hearer. The believer experiences it as a personal attack, even if the intent was idea-focused. But often it is directed at the person. The spillover is usually inevitable because people are emotionally invested in their worldviews. Such a person is characteristically tribal and thus often impervious to reason. He must be separated from the herd before he can be deprogrammed, and shame is thus instrumental. Progressives love to shame the clear-headed man. The man must shame them back—because he loves people.
Some ideas—e.g., denial of the gender binary and its entailments, such as factual birth certificates and driver’s licenses, and the necessity of exclusive female spaces—are so detached from reality that polite engagement only dignifies them. Ridicule signals: “This ridiculous notion doesn’t deserve oxygen.” It can jolt the believer into reevaluation when rational discourse is futile. By ridiculing him, we ridicule the tribe that deranged him. Hopefully, this provokes a genuine crisis, prompting him to wonder whether he has played the fool. We hope he leaves the herd, pursues an internal critique, and becomes a more fully autonomous, self-actualized person on the other side of madness. If he does, he will thank us later.
Christopher Hitchens argued that certain religious or ideological claims are inherently contemptible and that withholding scorn is a form of false civility. Hitchens’ razor—“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”—is a powerful heuristic for cutting through nonsense, especially online or in public discourse. Hitchens was not above ridiculing his interlocutors. Carl Sagan’s standard—“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—is also worth keeping in mind. Are we going to drag Hitchens and Sagan? If you want to drag wise men, go ahead, but know that it’s a sign of desperation.
Richard Dawkins: Do you really believe that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged-horse? pic.twitter.com/QIcNXSBMvI
Another wise man, Richard Dawkins, in an exchange with the ridiculous man, Medi Hasan, mocked the notion that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse. Hasan habitually demonstrates the type of mind that cannot be reasoned with. In the face of having to prove such a ridiculous claim, he demanded Dawkins prove Muhammad didn’t ascend to heaven on a winged horse. Hasan shifted the onus to the skeptic rather than defending his extraordinary assertion. Confronted by a mind that doesn’t understand the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof, Dawkins could only ridicule. It is obvious to any rational brain that Hasan provided a textbook instantiation of sophistry, treating the absence of disproof as positive support for his belief. Dawkins rightly laughed at the absurdity, underscoring how faith in winged horses (or thetans, or gender fluidity untethered from biology) thrives precisely because it evades rational scrutiny. When reason fails to penetrate, ridicule remains the appropriate response—polite deference only emboldens the unreasonable.
Let’s appeal to the method of wise men. Consider the claims of gender identity doctrine: that a man can be or become a woman. If gender is objective, the claim is easily falsified. Does the person have an XX karyotype? Large gametes? If not, he is a man. If gender is subjective, the substance of the doctrine of gender identity, then the claim is unfalsifiable and can be dismissed out of hand as an article of faith. A person may believe it, of course, but no one else is obligated to take it on faith—or to take it seriously. Freedom of conscience means we do not have to accept others’ faith-beliefs. Freedom of speech means we have the right, I dare say obligation, to ridicule those beliefs—and their bearers.
Some ideas are so absurd that they deserve mockery. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and its cosmology—the notion that each of us harbors an alien being called a “thetan” waiting to be discovered through “auditing”—is so extraordinary that no extraordinary evidence is required. Hubbard’s cosmology is structured as a faith-belief; no such evidence can be presented. Gender identity doctrine is of precisely the same quality. It should have been dismissed without consideration. It should be submitted to an audience with the hope that it will draw laughter. Unlike Hubbard’s, however, gender identity doctrine has institutional power behind it. The belief is fading, but it would have faded faster if ridiculed from the start. And if it isn’t relentlessly ridiculed from this moment forward, it might return at full strength and persist. If that happens, hundreds of thousands of bodies will be broken for ideology and profit.
I have proudly ridiculed Hubbard and Scientology for decades. It should be obvious to all that the notion that an alien being resides in each of us should be a ridiculous idea. But it isn’t for too many people. The Scientologist should feel embarrassed at believing Hubbard’s ham-handed attempt at religious-making. So should the followers of John Money and Robert Stoller—ridiculous people with degrees attached to their names. We must have no qualms about mocking them, because our ridicule stems from reason and protection. We are trying to save people from accepting the idea of a thetan or gender identity, only to find themselves conned out of money—and, in the case of gender identity, with mutilated bodies to boot. Reason won’t reach them. Ridicule becomes necessary. When South Park ridiculed Scientology, it liberated people trapped in its gravitational pull. Ridiculing trans ideology carries the same effect.
For progressives, however, ridicule serves a different purpose: it makes normal and sane ideas—and people—look backward and bigoted. Their complaint about being ridiculed is an attempt to claim victimhood, wrapped in the toxic rhetoric of “kindness.” But they are not kind. Progressives do not hesitate to ridicule the normal and sane, because this is their method of suppressing attention to facts and reliance on reason. This is why their brand of ridicule is cruel. Demonization is rooted in hate. We must therefore consider the relative purpose of ridicule: if it frees people from ridiculous ideas or prevents them from adopting them, then ridicule is a vital tool; if it aims to prevent normal and sane ideas from prevailing, then it is a weapon of darkness.
The sides are not the same. Equating them is like saying the status of National Socialism is no different from the beliefs of those who died to stop the Nazis. Anything wrong with ridiculing Nazis? You’d have to be a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer to object.
When crazy people appear reasonable, it is only because power makes them seem so. That is the core problem behind phenomena like National Socialism and gender identity doctrine. Sanity requires the ability to identify, describe, and resist such power. Ridicule is a necessary means to that end.
freedom and reason 