The construct “authentic self,” currently circulating on social media as Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina’s 1st District announces her resistance to the transgressive praxis of the gender project, is a paradigm of what George Orwell warned about in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party turns words into their opposites to chill the air and manipulate the populace. What is identified as the “authentic self” in gender ideology is in reality a simulated sexual identity. Its desired function is not only to dissimulate misogyny—demanding that men be permitted to invade women’s spaces and assume opportunities reserved for that sex class for purposes of genuine equity—but to disorder organic common sense by disrupting the human being’s evolved capacity to see the real.
The simulation is never the reality, yet the populace and its representative are expected to engage in doublethink, at least flawlessly appearing to accept the simulation as real. Doublethink is the ability Orwell identified of the indoctrinated ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept both as true. If transwomen were women, then the prefix means nothing. At the same time, in its actual meaning, “across from” or on the “other side of,” in this case literally the “opposite of,” all men are transwomen in the sense that they stand opposite of women. As slogan, the construct is a form of cognitive dissonance institutionalized by a totalitarian regime to control thought and suppress dissent. The term is thus an instantiation of the process by which individuals reconcile conflicting realities to align with the Party’s official narrative.
The folx work from the blindness of doublethink. The “folx” are the woke progressives who failed to deceive the majority of Americans on November 5, 2024. There is a lot of be excited about the fact that Donald Trump and his “Team of Rivals” won the popular vote, winning the largest number of votes than any GOP candidate in history (closing in on 77 million votes, more than two and half million more votes than the major opponent). Trump won 58 percent of electoral votes—the majority of states—including every swing state. Republicans retook the Senate and retained control the House. Republicans now control 37 of 50 governor’s mansions. The political realignment is deep and profound, with eighty percent of counties across the United States trending red in the voting. It’s clear that a majority of Americans want to uproot the woke progressive sensibilities that are upending their lives. In the face of deep and profound corporate state hegemony, the will of the reality-based citizen prevailed. Common sense is still alive and kicking.
But the woke progressive ideologue still controls the apparatus—the Academic-Industrial Complex, the Cathedral, the Culture Industry, the Medical-Industrial Complex. Identity politics, DEI, and the rest of it still pervade our institutions, channeling the resentment of the proles the Party has sacrificed on the alter of corporate profit and cultural decadence. The apparatus must be deconstructed and the people liberated. And we don’t have a lot of time to get this done. The United Kingdom under the thumb of Labour has become Airstrip One. This is the fate that awaits the United States if Democrats regain power. House elections are less than two years away. November 5 should be the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare. But to be this, the moment needs seizing. Tomorrow’s historical question of whether America awakened in time will be determined by citizen actions today.
A big part of that struggle is to reclaim language from the Ministry of Truth. The problem of gender ideology is central to this struggle. But so is the language we use to describe our political standpoints. This is why I am so tenacious when it comes to grasping the meaning of the word “liberal” and insisting that we use this word with reference to its actual meaning. We therefore must also clarify the meaning of “conservative” and “progressive.”
Perhaps the main difference between the conservative, as originally understood, and a liberal person is that the latter openly embraces modernity. I see a lot of criticism of modernity from self-identified conservatives. But what is modernity? Modernity is the shift away from agrarian, feudal, and traditional relations towards industrialization, secularism, and urbanization, those developments associated with the rise of rationality, science, and technology. Modernity is the concrete embodiment of Enlightenment ideals: individualism and personal autonomy, progress (not progressivism, another inversion that conceals regressive tribal desire), humanism, reason and science, and skepticism of authority. Modernity is aligned politically with the development of capitalism, the modern nation-state, and republicanism. Modernity is the state that takes man away from the primitive and tribal politics of identity and pushes him towards rational individualism and nationalism.
If one takes a moment to reflect on this, he will see that most modern conservatives are substantially liberal. The conservative of old—the monarchist and traditionalist of the Ancien Régime—is a reactionary, out of place in the modern world. What the modern conservative—the man who lacks self-awareness of his liberal sensibilities—is really reacting to is postmodernity and the project to abandon modernity for totalitarianism and transhumanism, a desire rooted in anarchist and nihilistic sensibles, i.e., authoritarian desires organizing and organized by the corporate state. Liberals reject all that, as all that is inherently destructive to the Enlightenment values liberals and modern conservatives embrace. As such, one cannot be both liberal and progressive. When people identify as both, they are admitting they’re either purveyors or victims of doublethink.
A few days ago on Facebook, I used the movie franchise Star Wars as a metaphor to remind progressives who saw in that series of what is happening in the actual world. I wanted to remind them of this to help them find the liberal that may still be lurking in their bosom—to join the fight to restore the Old Republic. In the first installment of the franchise, the Rebel Alliance prevailed. Speaking metaphorically, 2016 repented the destruction of the Death Star. But the Empire remains and persists and always coming after the Rebel Alliance. The Empire struck back in 2020. And they’re not done after the Return of Jedi. The Empire hates the American Creed—federalism, civil liberties, and popular sovereignty—because the Creed stands in the way of the Agenda. The Agenda: the Empire wants to make America something other than what it is meant to be. Progressives cheered on the Alliance in theaters. And when Disney infused the franchise with woke progressivism, many progressives resisted. We need to help the progressive now grasp the spirit of those sympathies, to find their inner liberalism—their authentic self. That’s the spirit of the American Revolution.
freedom and reason 