We can focus on the political economic dynamics that lead to change at the macro level. Indeed, we must. However, we mustn’t neglect the cultural ideological side of the struggle for power or fail to recognize to which class the sides ally.
The attitude of organic intellectual serving the interests of the corporate class—academics, entertainers, mass media—is one that privileges the exotic and the foreign. The fetishes here are Islam, queer, and race. This comes with loathing of the ordinary and the traditional.
Having been established centuries ago, the ordinary and the traditional have been modernist in orientation. Correspondingly, its intellectuals are traditionalist, not merely from settling into a new epoch, but in carrying over the importance of family and community. The desire for the exotic and the foreign is a postmodernist attitude. Its proponents hate family and culture and the liberal and republican values that define the modern age.
This schism is, of course, tied to the political economic dynamic, wreaking havoc on capitalist relations and the international system of modern nation states and raising among the ruins a transnational corporate state. The postmodern attitude is thus an expression of globalism and corporate power over against the nation, state and popular power.
The situation is at once revolutionary and counterrevolutionary—revolutionary in the sense that the corporatist system is struggling to break free of the reins of the capitalist mode of production; counterrevolutionary because it opposes the Enlightenment that stymies what lies beyond it: the reestablishment of a type of feudalist mode of production, where the proletariat is returned to serfdom, its fate determined on estates governed by lords. To be sure, the estates are high tech, and the lords are corporations, but the basic arrangement is the same—it is a condition of unfreedom. The corporatist revolution is therefore counterrevolutionary in the sense that it is atavistic and regressive.
Having recognized all this (which assumes the political economic dynamic of world historical change), we need also to study the process by which the cultural-ideological program of the corporatists is established. The strategy is slick, but once you grasp it, you have another means beyond content criticism to delegitimize it.
It’s not enough to criticize ideas—though that’s necessary—we must also expose how corporate elites and their army of intellectuals inject those ideas into the bloodstream of the body politic. For example, how did woke progressives infuse public education with gender ideology and make a disruptive and destructive praxis appear normal and necessary? Gender ideology is but one tentacle of the octopus, but it serves as a useful example. so we shall begin there.
Here’s how the process unfolds:
- First, elites colonize the governing, policymaking, and sense-making activities and institutions with progressive operatives—academic, administrative, cultural, educational, judicial, and media-based. In short, they capture the hegemonic machinery. Today, progressivism commands the machinery.
- The elites and intellectuals then spend years crafting a comprehensive ideology and a new way of speaking about reality—what we might describe as language contamination. This mirrors what George Orwell called “Newspeak” in 1984. This ideology, traceable over the past several decades, was manufactured by academics and activists. The repurposing of the concept of gender, heretofore a synonym for sex, to refer to an unfalsifiable subjective identity is the paradigm of the strategy.
- Next, they install this ideology at every level of the hegemonic machinery and normalize it—treating it as if it has always been part of our institutions or at least the result of a long social justice struggle finally won by those who stand on the right side of history. This requires, among other things, historical revisionism. A notable tactic here is the practice of rendering as false what everyone knew was true until a few decades ago, and to portray that truth as the product of an evil hegemonic system that demands deconstruction. This tactic mystifies the strategy by projecting its intent onto those who defend history and science, thus creating fake legitimacy.
- Finally, when the public pushes back, the new order labels them bigots for resisting—even questioning—what has allegedly always been normal, portray modernists as conspiracy theorists and paranoids. And, of course, bigots.
The first three steps prepare the ground for the fourth: portraying those who object to a novel and destructive ideology as narrow-minded and reactionary. It flips the burden—no longer do ideologues have to explain why gender ideology should guide our institutions. Instead, the onus falls on dissenters to justify their objections. It makes a crackpot idea appear rational while making rational people seem like crackpots.
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I’ve spent years debunking the core claims of gender ideology and exposing its harmful consequences. This is a necessary task. I knew I’d be accused of bigotry when I went public with my conclusions, but gender ideology is so destructive that silence wasn’t an option.
When I decided to speak out, I asked myself a question I believe all of us are obliged to ask: could I live with my conscience if I stayed passive in the face of a campaign to disrupt ordinary, common-sense understandings of gender—and all the lies and atrocities that come with it? Puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Disfiguring surgeries. Sterilization. I thought about lobotomies and other horrors once pushed by the medical establishment. I thought about the medical experiments Nazi doctors performed on Jewish children. Brave people speaking out were essential to ending those practices (war was necessary in the case of the Nazis). Who today would defend destroying an adolescent’s frontal lobe to make the boy more compliant? The Nuremberg Code spoke loudly about the crimes of the national socialists. Somebody had to speak out. The machinery of justice had to act. Today, those whistleblowers are seen as heroes. The German doctors in the dock at Nuremberg are universally recognized as villains (but not those who escaped justice).
I thought about gay kids being manipulated into believing they’re the opposite sex—setting them on a path that would destroy their lives. I thought about the girls and women losing their spaces and opportunities to boys and men, whether deceiving or deluded (there’s no objective way to tell the difference). Had I stayed silent, knowing what I now know, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.
I know not everyone is ready to stand on the ground of truth and face the mob. The consequences for doing so can be severe. The mob is scary. But it only takes a few people to create mutual knowledge. And courage is contagious.
Still, to delegitimize gender ideology, we must do more than critique its claims. We must show how we arrived at this moment. That requires critical historical analysis and systems thinking. Gender ideology isn’t unique. The same strategy was used to re-racialize American society after the civil rights victories of the mid-twentieth century. It’s been used to delegitimize Western civilization, elevate corporate scientism over democratic science, and install technocracy in place of republican governance.
These strategies are manifest not only in gender ideology, but also in critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and other postmodern doctrines—advanced not by grassroots radicals, but by transnational elites and corporations. The so-called grassroots radical may be a true believer, a professional activist, or suffering from a Cluster-B personality disorder, but together they form the reactionary mob, trained up by the hegemonic apparatus. In a significant extent, the counterrevolution has succeeded, which makes the resistance appear counterrevolutionary.
To save Western civilization, we must root these doctrines out of our governing and sense-making institutions. To preserve freedom, reason, science, the West, our families, our way of life, the public must understand not just that these are dangerous ideas—but how they gained legitimacy. To be sure, it is a false legitimacy, but legitimacy of any sort is necessary to elevate power to authority. Our task is to expose the process to show that what masquerades as authority is class power.
One tactic has been to portray attitudes that advance the globalist project as “leftwing”—the New Left. How did a praxis advancing neoliberal and neoconservative goals become identified as left-wing politics? How did the corporate state come to embrace “left-wing” causes?
The answer, once you’ve done the critical historical and political analysis, is simple: the New Left is not a left-wing movement. It’s anti-human, anti-liberal, anti-rational, and anti-worker—all things that are antithetical to Old Left. Indeed, it’s a corporate-state strategy designed to fracture the traditional left and reincorporate its members into an alliance with globalist technocracy. To turn prior defenders of conscience and free speech into ideological authoritarians. To transform a fraction of the masses into reactionary mobs cloaked in the garb of justice.
Transnational elites and their progressive operatives—the organic intellectuals of globalization—cleverly constructed and absorbed the ideas of the postmodern New Left. They read Antonio Gramsci, too. They hijacked his cultural strategy, not to bring about communism (which is not to say that end is desirable), but to entrench corporatism.
DEI is the most obvious program that advances this alliance. At first, it may seem strange that corporations would embrace such ideas a diversity, equity, and inclusion. But with the correct approach to grasping the truth, it becomes obvious. Like gender ideology (a component of DEI), DEI programming was installed in our institutions to make corporate power and profit appear moral and just, while disorganizing the organic politics of the proletariat and the strata of entrepreneurs.
The saw this with the debate over affirmative action (DEI 1.0). Criticizing it was labeled “racist.” We were told that privileging black applicants over white ones could not be racism, because racism = prejudice + power, and only whites have power. By constructing a formula that placed critics of affirmative action out of bounds, and establishing that formula as the only truth, no real debate could be had. In an Orwellian transformation, what was racist became antiracist.
This formula hides the truth: corporations and elites hold the real power—not average white citizens. DEI and affirmation action don’t rectify injustice—they perpetuate it. The formula strengthens bureaucracy and its liberty-negating processes.
The same applies to the claim that opposing male intrusion into female spaces represents bigotry. That assumption, too, was installed through the same strategy. Many assumptions are installed in this manner. Those of us fighting to reclaim liberal freedoms and democratic institutions must therefore stop fearing labels. “Islamophobia,” “racism,” “transphobia”—these epithets are used not to describe reality but to marginalize dissent. We must stop caring what they call us. We know why they do it. Explaining why and how they do it is thus essential to defeating them.
This critical analysis isn’t mine alone. It builds on an old tradition. The German left-Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, in 1842, developed the “transformation method”—a way to invert the relationship between reality and illusion as framed by religion and ideology. Feuerbach argued that religious beliefs are not divine truths but projections of idealized human qualities—love, justice, power—externalized onto a supernatural being (God). By reabsorbing these divine traits back into humanity, Feuerbach demystified religion, exposing it as a reflection of human nature.
Karl Marx adopted, refined, and radicalized Feuerbach’s method. He agreed that religion expresses alienation—but rooted this alienation in material social relations, especially economic ones. At the core of alienation is the class struggle. Marx’s critique of ideology exposes how ruling class interests mask exploitative conditions in the language of morality and justice. He didn’t stop at analysis; he called for praxis to change the world. However, he left it to us to expose the strategy.
This was the worldview of the Old Left. Liberal. Democratic. Anti-elite. Popular. The Old Left fought to empower working people, preserve communities, and oppose exploitation. The New Left is its opposite. It aims to destroy families and communities for the benefit of the very elites the Old Left sought to overthrow. This explains why many liberals now join conservatives in the populist-nationalist movement. Even without deploying the transformation method, they see the truth: the enemies of freedom, sovereignty, and democracy are the same elites who fund and advance the New Left.
People like George Soros don’t bankroll protests to challenge corporate and financial power. They fund movements to preserve and entrench these oppressions. They install prosecutors and advocacy groups to thwart the popular will. This isn’t a Jewish conspiracy (another tactic to chill the air is to smear those who evoke the specter of Soros with antisemitism)—it’s class warfare waged from above.
Gender ideology is one part of a larger counterrevolutionary project: the return of the working class to serfdom under a New Feudalism. Once you understand the system, all the tentacles become visible. But knowledge is only potential power; the people must act to turn potential into outcomes. There are more of us than there are of them.
* * *
Remember the end of A Bug’s Life?
Hopper: “Let this be a lesson to all you ants! Ideas are very dangerous things! You are mindless, soil-shoveling losers put on this earth to serve us!”
Flik: “You’re wrong, Hopper. Ants are not meant to serve grasshoppers! I’ve seen these ants do great things! And year after year, they somehow managed to pick food for themselves and you. So who’s the weaker species? Ants don’t serve grasshoppers! It’s you who need us! We’re a lot stronger than you say we are… and you know it, don’t you?”
Earlier in the film, Hopper warned his lieutenants: “Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one. If they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life! It’s not about food—it’s about keeping those ants in line.”
Flik’s response to what Hopper told his subalterns behind closed doors? “Ants grow the food. Ants pick the food. And the grasshoppers leave!”
When I first watched A Bug’s Life, I wondered why Disney would distribute a film so critical of elite domination. It’s a story about exploited workers (ants) rebelling against parasitic rulers (grasshoppers) through collective action. That’s class consciousness—delivered with Pixar charm.
Directed by John Lasseter and co-directed by Andrew Stanton (who later directed WALL·E, another radical allegory), the film was inspired by Aesop’s fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper. But its subtext—about labor, class, and resistance—is unmistakable. Whether intended or not, the film critiques the very system that produced it.
Perhaps corporations allow—even socialize—radical messages because they’re so supremely confident in their control over the populace. The anti-capitalist band Rage Against the Machine signed with a major label, after all. This is how the culture industry works: it manufactures a pretense of justice to co-opt and contain opposition.
I have many disagreements with critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, but he put in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man that captures the spirit of my critique:
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.”
Rolling Stone recently framed Tom Morello’s politics like this: “Like many of his comrades in music, the artist despairs at the bizarre, daily antics from the Trump administration. Trade wars, cosying[sic]-up with the enemy, picking fights with allies. Every day, another pie thrown from the MAGA circus.”
“You can only imagine what it’s like here with the impending shadow of American fascism,” Morello told the magazine. “The almost ethnic cleansing of discourse is a very significant warning sign, where anybody who wants to apply for a grant, or if you used words like ‘inclusion,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘African-American,’ you’ll be red-flagged.”
That’s corporate framing. Morello opposes “trade wars” (neoliberal rhetoric) and repeats neoconservative talking points about Russia. All of this aligns with the goals of the corporate state. Rejecting that frame, we see that Trump policies seek to re-shore high-wage value added manufacturing to the United States, as well as rapprochement with Russia for the sake of world peace and to marginalize China. Trump and the populist movement do not represent the “shadow of fascism.” On the contrary, the peoples of Europe and North America stand in the shadow of a New Fascism.
Indeed, Trump and the populist movement is resistance to the New Fascism. This is the real threat, what Barrington Moore, Jr. called a “revolution from above.” As noted earlier, the revolution-from-above in our time represents a counterrevolution against the Enlightenment. If the globalist project succeeds, we won’t just lose our liberties. We’ll lose the Enlightenment itself—and enter a New Dark Age.
* * *
One of the most common objections I encounter when raising concerns about elite coordination in shaping the global order: the supposed lack of direct evidence—the demand for the proverbial “smoking gun.” Detractors ask: Where is the document? Where is the confession?
But this standard of proof, while emotionally satisfying, an effective is sophistry is allowed, is intellectually naïve. Power, especially at the highest levels, rarely broadcasts its intentions. The nature of elite influence is opaque, strategic, and subtle. Elite machinations take place behind closed doors, across private conferences, and through networks inside institutions, not press releases.
Yet we are not without means to understand what is happening. Just as in a criminal trial, one does not need a confession to reach a conviction. A murderer is not obligated to explain himself under our system; he enjoys a constitutional protection against self-incrimination. Rather judge and jury infer intention and guilt from evidence—corpus delicti (the body of the crime), patterns of behavior, access, motive, and opportunity. The prosecutor builds his case from context, evidence, and the logic of the act itself. What explains the outcome? Can it be explained another way? Is there reasonable doubt?
So too with global economics and politics. We don’t need elite actors to publish their plans for hegemony, resource control, or ideological engineering. We observe policies coordinated across actors, financial systems that perpetuate inequality, wars whose beneficiaries are always the same, and technologies that centralize control. These are not accidents. There is no reasonable doubt to be had here. The consistency of outcomes and the mechanisms by which they are produced point to rational actors with converging interests. Conspiracies are real. And rational people have theories about them.
To demand a confession from the architects of global power is to misunderstand both the nature of power and the means by which we come to know anything complex and concealed. Like any good detective—or any good historian—one must work from the evidence available (and there’s plenty of it), grasp the patterns, and be willing to follow reason and facts where they leads, even if the path runs behind closed doors.
Remember what Groucho Marx said to his wife when caught in bed with another woman: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
freedom and reason 