As I have explained on Freedom and Reason, the label “conspiracy theorist” functions as an ad hominem attack and a thought-stopping device, dismissing an individual’s arguments without addressing their claims or accessing their merits. By reducing alternative and complex viewpoints to a stigmatized stereotype, the label discourages critical thinking and exploration of evidence. It shifts focus from the substance of the claims to the perceived credibility or rationality of the person presenting them, producing and perpetuating a culture where questioning mainstream narratives is reflexively ridiculed. As such, the label—and this is its intent—undermines open dialogue, creating a binary framework where ideas are either “approved” or relegated to the realm of irrationality, often without genuine examination. The label aims to silence legitimate concern and dissent, impeding the skeptical inquiry essential to a free and informed society.
Ideology also produces a binary framework—a rigid system of “in-group” versus “out-group” beliefs that determine membership within a collective. Ideological belief, which I shorthand as “cult mentality” in this essay, contrasts with the rational approach, that is the approach rooted in facts, logic, and principles that allows for flexibility and thus adaptation to new information. Ideology serves as a shortcut for group cohesion and shared identity that comes at the expense of open inquiry and individual critical thinking. From the ideological perspective, those who do not conform to its tenets are deplorable. This framing prevents genuine engagement with ideas outside the ideology’s boundaries and fosters a tribal mindset, where the primary concern is maintaining group identity over seeking truth.
The rational person, working outside this framework, risks being misunderstood or maligned by ideologues because his motivations and conclusions do not align with the predefined ideological script. This creates a tension between open-minded rationality and the closed-system thinking that ideology enforces. Those who have attempted to raise awareness of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the role the deep state in portraying the laptop as “Russian disinformation” know very well the power of ideology, as well as the effect of dismissive labeling, in leaving people utterly incapable of entertaining the possibility that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged to replace an outsider president with one compliant to the interests of the corporate state.
“The Marco Polo Report: Overview,” by Strauch Mahoney is where folks can begin to learn about the Biden crime family—if they haven’t already studied the matter. Most haven’t, I know, in part because they don’t care to; others because they can’t find it. I provide this link so you can experience for yourself how Internet nodes aggressively censor the report. Click the embedded links and you will be timed out or told that the site isn’t available. If you use the Tor browser that sends you to IPs around the world, then you may be able to find it. But I checked, and that probably won’t work for you. You will have to do that work, however (Hint: the Internet archives). I would publish the report myself, but then Freedom and Reason might likely be censored or the its ultimate owners deplatform me.
Mahoney published the overview back in October 2022. Why didn’t I talk about it then? I did. In fact, I talked about long before then (in October 2020 in New York Post Drops a Bombshell on the Biden Campaign). Why I’m back at it is because I was recently told that the laptop was “bullshit” after I posted a story about then-president Joe Biden issuing pardons to several close family members on Inauguration Day in the final minutes of his presidency. “My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden wrote in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.” Because where there’s smoke there’s fire. He continued: “That is why I am exercising my power under the Constitution to pardon James B. Biden, Sara Jones Biden, Valerie Biden Owens, John T. Owens, and Francis W. Biden.” He then added, “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.” I checked. In Burdick v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court ruled that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance of a pardon is a confession of it.” Same goes for Biden’s son, Hunter, whom he pardoned on December of last year, the pardon exactly covering the decade of scandal.
The ignorance of those who cry “bullshit” frustrates me. I admit it. I need folks to come to terms with the existence of an establishment—a power elite, C. Wright Mills called it—that enjoys tremendous power to censor and deplatform. Before Zuckerberg’s change of policy, sharing the report would have been censored and Facebook might very well have deplatformed for telling you how to find this information. Twitter certainly would have. The laptop was heavily censored during the 2020 campaign and after. The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper (founded by Alexander Hamilton) was censored and deplatformed for reporting it. Why would the establishment do this? Because the Establishment selected the fading compliant Joe Biden to be its figurehead, and the contents of the laptop—polling shows that this would have been the case—would likely have changed the outcome of the election. This wasn’t the only way the 2020 election was rigged (that was censored, too), but it played a major role.
The story of Hunter Biden’s is a useful example of what George Orwell identified in Nineteen Eighty-Four as “memory-holing.” Memory-holing refers to the deliberate suppression or erasure of information, often to manipulate public perception or rewrite historical narratives. “memory holes” were devices used to destroy documents and records deemed inconvenient or contrary to the ruling party’s agenda. In contemporary usage, it describes attempts to obscure or erase evidence of events, statements, or facts, often in digital contexts. This can include the removal of online content and the revision of records, all to shape collective memory. The practice did not exist only in Orwell’s imagination. Memory-holing was a practice by the Soviet Union. Memory-holing marks the presence of a totalitarian situation. Had Kamala Harris been elected, the United States would have continued down the path towards a totalitarian society.
By moving to revoke the security clearances of the intelligence officials who spearheaded the disinformation campaign to portray the laptop as Russian disinformation (see The Russia Fake News Narrative), Trump is raising consciousness about the existence of a deep state and the function of the mass media as an organ of corporate governance. The Establishment was desperate to stop Trump. It’s why Trump was outspent more than 3:1 during the 2024 election (which he never less won by 77-plus million votes). It’s also why the Biden regime waged lawfare against Trump at the federal level and in multiple state. And why there were two attempts made on Trump’s life (They Tried to Kill Donald Trump Yesterday; Progressives Losing Their Shit Over the Attempt on Trump’s Life; A Second Attempt on Trump’s Life). Yes, Virginia, the deep state is real. I have known it was real since I sat in front of the television set in the 1975 and watched the Church Committee hearings. this is why ignorance frustrates me.
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For those firmly ensconced in a cult, a term that I will use here as shorthand for emersion in a belief system, an ideology, that rests on nonfalsifiable propositions, i.e., faith-belief, and that rejects facts that contradict doctrine, those who appear to leave the cult, an interpretation of the situation that rests on the presumption that they ever were in one, appear as if they have instead stepped into new one, that they have become “brainwashed,” a determination that presupposes that one is not in a cult. Ironically the act of condemning a presumed apostate is a sure sign that the condemner is in fact himself in a cult. If he weren’t, then somebody changing his mind would be the sign of a freethinker, a man not beholden to a cult. This is the essence of identity politics, which sees the world as a collection of cults. These are the people who have been running our society of late.
This interpretation of the situation is unavailable to those ensnared by cults because they have a particular cognitive style that inoculates them from reason. That’s why it’s nearly impossible—unless an unethical action such as deprogramming is pursued—for a cult member to be reasoned out of his beliefs. I have listened to quite a few people who were once in the cult of Scientology. To a man, they were not talked out of their situation. Rather, they found their way out on their own. And, to a man, once free of cult doctrine, they demonstrate the cognitive style that made that freedom possible. Listening to them, it becomes clear that they were never quite sure of doctrine or their place in the cult in the first place. Doubt left the door ajar just enough to allow their escape.
There is a lesson in this. Having doubts about what one believes is a prerequisite for escaping belief systems—and for accept beliefs on a factual and rational basis. As I have confess on Freedom and Reason, some of the positions I held in the past suggested that I was in a cult, namely the cult of woke progressivism. I used to believe things like global warming, black people are incapable of bring racist (except those who take up the views of white conservatives, you know, the proverbial “Uncle Tom”), systemic racism in the criminal justice system and, more generally society at large, transgenderism was gay-adjacent, and a few other beliefs. But I have also always moved from facts and logic. These were transient beliefs. However long I believed them (some longer than others), I remained a liberal throughout, even during graduate school (academia is something of a cult), open to disconfirmation of my ideas—seeking disconfirmation for the sake of being a reasonable person. The door was never closed for me. Once determined to open wide the door, escape was inevitable.
Others aren’t so fortunate. I have noted before on this platform before that quite a few people have wondered what happened to me. “What has happened to Andy?” Some of my Facebook friends have seen it for themselves. There are a few recent examples. One, a few months ago, involved a former student who, playing the game of “gotcha,” searched my Facebook history to find past statements he believed would trap me. When it only proved my investment in reason and the ability to change my mind, he resorted to ad hominem (I wrote a lengthy essay on this but never published it). More recently I encountered the rage of a friend I have known for decades. Freak outs are not unexpected. Whenever the political flow is disrupted, the likelihood of denouncing and shaming increases. When years ago I shifted the target of my irreligious criticism from Christianity to Islam, it upset a lot of progressives. Progressives are quite fond of Muslims, you may have noticed. Longtime Facebook friends unfriended me. When Trump was president the last time around, several of the Facebook folk caused quite a ruckus, condemning me, then unfriending me. How could I agree with Trump about anything? Some took parting shows on Messenger, essentially praying I would return to my previous positions, that I would “come home,” etc. (Only one ever apologized.)
The assumption is that the Trump column contains checkboxes that no good person would ever check. But I have never ordered my life around such columns. Those columns aren’t rationally ordered anyway. Not even close. They’re ideological and political constructions that simple-minded people, or more generously close-minded people, use to order their speech acts, a substitute for principle used to justify to themselves the act of blackening their social media profiles, or to unfollow, unfriend, block, contact your employer. There’s no reason why a liberal cannot oppose critical race theory, gender ideology, or mass immigration, or criticize the medical establishment, etc. The only things a liberal cannot oppose are those enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And I never have.
I will have to explain myself here since there are those who will counter that liberalism is itself a belief system. Perhaps. But for sure it’s not a cult. Nor is it a mental disease, as conservatives like to say (they’re talking about woke progressivism, not liberalism). Science is a system of beliefs, too. But unlike the belief systems of cults, liberalism and science are rational and based on the objective adjudication of facts. Indeed, they are systems determined by facts and logic. The notion that all belief systems—like all cultures, religions, etc.—are equal, or to be regarded as arbitrary or relative, is postmodernist (or post-truth) sensibilities. Proponents of this essentially nihilist view of the world attempt to delegitimize rational thinking by bringing it down to their level, ideas that appear to deny the possibility of facts and reason. But this genre of speaking and thinking is contradictory, since it’s inherent to the belief system that postmodernism and its various species—post colonialism, critical race theory, queer theory—are superior ways of grasping the world, which in turn leads to rejection of the Enlightenment and loathing of Western civilization, actually superior ways of grasping and living in the world.
This inherent contradiction returns us to the contest of ideas, the validity and invalidity of which are found in their relative fruits. Which ideas are better? That’s a useful question. Look around you. The answer to the question is everywhere. Liberalism and science have given us freedom and progress. Freedom is not subjective. Stealing the freedom of wolves and bears in cages by putting them in cages sickens their bodies and twists their minds (and clearly they do have minds since they act with intention and puzzle at things that escape their understanding). That I am able to convey my ideas on a computer terminal and the readers of this blog receive them validates science. One can argue about whether we should plant an American flag on Mars (I think we should). But if we do ever plant that flag (or somebody beats us to it), it will not be the result of cult mentality, but the fruit of free, and even unfree men, using reason to solve problems, working from falsifiable propositions.
Postmodernism is not the only problem when it comes to reason. What has conservatism brought the world? Where it is not a euphemism for liberalism (and these days it often is), atavisms and intolerance prevail. Both postmodernism and traditional conservatism (excluding the modern conservatism that aligns with the American constitutional principles and the spirit of the Enlightenment) have given the world backwardness and regression. Progress will always depend on freethinking or those who wield science under duress. However, freethinking alone is the unbridled spirit of open-mindedness, the ability to change one’s mind, and to pursue personal liberty based on facts and reason. This spirit is not uncompromising, to be sure. Sometimes one has to support a tendency in which there are some beliefs one would rather see excluded; compromise is part of working with other humans. This is where the liberal value of tolerance has great value. The columns with checkboxes don’t map the lay of the land. I cringe when a Republican appeals to God, even when the speech is the speech I want to hear. That was the case on Monday, January 20, 2025. As long as nobody tries to force me to worship this or that god, or make me live under the rules of this or that religion, I’m fine with it.
freedom and reason 