I want to follow up on two essays I penned in July 2023 and October 2024, Ending Patronage and Co-optation: The Death of Affirmative Action is a Start and Co-optation and Negation: Understanding Corporate Hegemonic Strategy respectively, in which I discussed the hegemonic strategy of co-optation and negation. Throughout history, rulers have faced the challenge of governing diverse populations with competing identities, interests, and loyalties. One enduring strategy for maintaining authority and suppressing dissent is elite co-optation—the deliberate selection and incorporation of representatives from various ethnic, social, and tribal groups into the ruling apparatus. While often presented as inclusive or meritocratic, this method serves a deeper strategic function: to legitimize elite rule, entrench and perpetuate the concentration of power, and neutralize opposition.
Image generated by Sora
In traditional imperial and monarchical contexts, elite co-optation involved granting prominent positions to token representatives from different groups within a realm. These individuals—chosen not for their ability to challenge power but for their willingness to align with it—were given administrative authority, court roles, privileges, and titles. Their presence in the ruling circle gave the impression of a unified, pluralistic society, even as real power remained concentrated in the hands of the king or imperial elite. This not only fostered loyalty among influential subgroups but also fragmented any unified opposition, as co-opted elites now had a vested interest in preserving the existing order.
Under colonial rule, this strategy became especially pronounced. Empires, such as the British, French, and Ottoman, leveraged colonial collaborators—educated elites, local chiefs, or religious leaders—to serve as intermediaries between the imperial center and the colonized populations. These collaborators helped administer imperial policies, collect taxes, and manage dissent, reaping personal benefits in return. They put a human face on foreign rule, while their elevation entrenched systems of inequality; their symbolic inclusion masked the exploitative nature of the imperial system, enabling empires to rule vast territories with limited direct oversight.
The legacy of elite co-optation did not disappear with the collapse of empires. In modern liberal democracies and capitalist economies, especially those with corporatist arrangements, the strategy has reemerged in subtler forms—for example in the deployment of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in corporate and state institutions. DEI programs aim to increase representation of historically marginalized groups, including along lines of ability, gender, race, and sexuality. DEI is less an instrument of justice than it is a tool of symbolic incorporation that deepens corporate state control over the populace.
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Corporations and government bodies elevate individuals from underrepresented backgrounds into highly visible positions—as consultants on institutional diversity, on executive boards, in public-facing leadership roles—to put a human face on the corporate state. These figures become the modern equivalents of colonial collaborators: symbols of inclusion whose presence can deflect criticism and pacify broader demands for structural reform. By appearing progressive, institutions maintain legitimacy and public approval without necessarily redistributing power or altering foundational systems of inequality. Indeed, this is the core function of progressivism. While DEI offers opportunities for individuals from groups that have historically been excluded or marginalized, it traps those individuals within systems that expect them to represent their group while at the same time protecting the status quo.
Equity is about fairness—ensuring individuals have access to the opportunities and resources they need to succeed based on their specific circumstances. It acknowledges that people start from different places and seeks to level the playing field through targeted support.
Equity recognizes that individuals and groups face different structural and biological realities, and thus need differential support to achieve fair opportunities—not necessarily the same outcomes.
For example, people with disabilities may require assistive technologies, flexible work arrangements, or modified environments to participate fully in education or employment.
Similarly, sex classes—biological differences between females and males—can shape different experiences, for example in athletics. Equity respects these differences by tailoring policy and support to context, rather than insisting that men and women must end up in the same activities and roles.
This depends on working from a standpoint to objectively determine law and policy. A man declaring himself a woman is insufficient groups to allow him to participate in women’s sports.
Equality of outcome, in contrast, flattens these complexities and misrepresents fairness as sameness.
Fairness lies in recognizing and responding to real differences where they matter and where they do not compromise the liberties and rights of others.
Freedom depends on allowing individuals to make something of themselves—and suffer the consequences of not striving.
Equality of outcome seeks to guarantee the same results for everyone regardless of effort, which can overlook personal agency, ambition, or talent.
Equity preserves the integrity of individual differences while addressing group differences or systemic barriers, whereas equality of outcome imposed uniformity in results at the expense of fairness and freedom.
Harrison Bergeron (AI image generated by Sora)
If you want to see what equality of outcome might look like you will find useful Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 “Harrison Bergeron.” It’s fiction, to be sure, but plausible.
I assign this essay in my class Freedom and Social Control. For those who have busy lives, I will briefly summarize the story here.
The context is a dystopian future where the US government has amended the Constitution to ensure that everyone is equal in every conceivable way—not just in opportunities or rights, but in beauty, intelligence, strength, and talent.
To achieve this, the government uses “handicaps” to suppress any advantage: intelligent people wear ear devices that disrupt their thoughts, strong people carry weights to weaken them, and beautiful people wear masks to hide their desirable features.
These arrangements are policed by the vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
The protagonist, Harrison Bergeron, is a gifted and rebellious young man who tears off his handicaps in an act of defiance, only to be executed on live television.
The story illustrates the authoritarianism that results from pursuing equality of outcome at all costs. Enforced uniformity crushes excellence, freedom, and individuality. Far from promoting justice, radical egalitarianism is tyranny.
Harrison Bergeron is not an attack on equity, but a warning: when equality of outcome replaces equality of opportunity, the result is not justice, but tyranny disguised as fairness.
Pride Month is here. I see on the news that the City of Green Bay kicked off the affair with a community-wide celebration on Sunday, featuring a Progress Pride flag-raising ceremony and a resource fair at Leicht Park in Downtown Green Bay. I have criticized the city in the past for raising the flag above City Hall, which should be reserved for the US and state flags (City of Green Bay Violates the First Amendment). I haven’t been out and about today so I don’t know whether it’s flying there now. But it is flying at Leicht Park, which is public grounds.
“As some of you might know, when I was elected, our score on the Municipal Equality Index, which is something that the Human Rights Campaign put together, was a lowly 28,” Mayor Eric Genrich told the crowd gathered in Leicht Park. “Now we are very proud to say that we have a 100. A perfect score for the City of Green Bay.” The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is the largest and one of the most influential LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations in the United States. Founded in 1980, its stated mission is to promote and protect the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people through education, litigation, lobbying, and public campaigns. Why is the mayor obsessed with getting a perfect score from an organization that has harmed so many people in the United States?
Green Bay Common Council Member Joey Prestley said at Leicht Park that it’s important to him to have a city that is supportive of the community and all its members. “The next thing I want to do, I want to see our city ban conversion therapy,” told a local reporter. “If Ryan (Spaude) and Amaad (Rivera-Wagner) can’t get it done at the state level, we’re going to do it here!” To be sure, conversion therapy is wrong with respect to gays and lesbians, since homosexuality is a natural thing; but it’s an odd demand with respect to trans-identifying individuals given that gender affirming care (GAC) is conversion therapy. Presumably Prestley was lumping gays and lesbians in with trans-identifying persons. After all, he did say all members.
Those who know me know that I have for decades supported the gay and lesbian struggle for equal rights (my whole life, in fact), even if I don’t partake in the symbology of the moment. Frankly, I’m not a fan of taking pride in immutable characteristics, though that’s separate from recognizing the legitimacy of the struggle (largely won at this point). “Black pride” is as objectionable as “white pride.” Both smack of racism. That said, I want to use the moment of Pride to underscore my support for gays and lesbians and my opposition to gender ideology. In other words, the “T” does not belong with the first three letters of the LGBT acronym.
First, on the matter of affinity, a video currently circulating on social media draws an analogy between the LGBT movement and the black civil rights movement. The comparison is apt when it comes to gay and lesbian equality. Both movements confront systems that irrationally deny equal citizenship based on immutable traits. Just as there is natural variation in phenotypic traits, same-sex attraction is a naturally occurring feature of our species—and of many other species as well. However, the push to put access to gender-specific opportunities and spaces, as well as access to medical care, under the banners of “equality” and “justice” is not analogous to the gay and lesbian civil rights struggle.
In the cases of gay rights and racial equality, the injustice lies in the enforcement of second-class status through legal and social mechanisms—such as segregation, denial of marriage rights, lack of employment protections, or social exclusion. “Separate but equal” fails in these cases because there are no countervailing group rights being infringed. Heterosexuals and white individuals are not harmed by the inclusion of gays or black Americans in public spaces or institutions. Today, the United States highly recognizes interracial and same-sex marriages acknowledging that there is no coherent moral or rational basis to treat gay and lesbian individuals as lesser citizens. Sexual orientation, like race—that is, the natural clustering of phenotypic traits—bears no rational relation to principles of group rights or equitable treatment. The pursuit of legal and social parity for homosexual individuals is a direct extension of the universalist ideals that animated the civil rights movement. Members of both groups should be treated as individuals, not as representatives of identity groups.
However, this analogy breaks down when applied to trans-identifying individuals. Unlike sexual orientation or race, gender identity is not an immutable, biologically rooted trait. Rather, it asserts a subjective sense of self that may conflict with the material realities of sexed bodies. This is a fundamental and qualitative difference. While males and females exhibit overlapping distributions across many traits—such as empathy, intelligence, and physical strength—certain sex-based differences are both statistically significant and biologically meaningful. These differences are not merely matters of degree; they reflect sexual dimorphism, which produces distinct physiological and psychological profiles between the sexes. Male and female are not simply two points on a spectrum but qualitatively distinct and exclusive biological categories. This typological distinction has important implications: in contexts where physical safety, fairness, or privacy are relevant—such as sports, prisons, or bathrooms—these differences matter.
If scientific truth is to be the basis for law and policy, this must be acknowledged. Objective criteria, not ideological or subjective self-conceptions, must guide the governance of sex-segregated spaces. Because biological sex remains relevant in various legal, medical, and social contexts, the pursuit of gender equity requires differential treatment between the sexes—not the erasure of sex altogether. Equity, in this framework, does not mean erasing gender distinctions, but rather acknowledging them to ensure fairness and safety in areas such as healthcare, privacy, and sports. Therefore, while gay and black civil rights movements rightly call for removal of irrational barriers to full inclusion, the transgender demand for the same raises distinct philosophical and policy questions that cannot be resolved by appeals to sameness. This distinction and standards derived therefrom are being elided across the United States, as seen, for example, in the encroachment of boys and men on opportunities and spaces reserved for women.
The trespass of males on female spaces is a major reason for Pride fatigue. What is Pride fatigue? The month is young, but if it feels like Pride Month 2025 is more subdued compared to previous years, your feelings are not betraying you. Broader cultural, economic, and political dynamics are influencing how Pride is celebrated and supported across the US. There is a noticeable retreat of corporate sponsorships. Major events like San Francisco Pride have experienced substantial funding losses, with companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Comcast, and Diageo withdrawing support. This trend isn’t isolated to San Francisco (though most surprising there). There is national pattern of reduced corporate backing for Pride events. Nationally, a Axios survey revealed that nearly forty percent of companies planned to scale back Pride-related engagement in 2025—with none intending to increase it. Because corporations support Pride for business reasons, the rollback of spending on the month indicates a general awareness of fatigue.
Man in dog costume says exposing kids to kinks gives them options and puts those options on a level they can understand. If that sounds like grooming, that’s because it is.
Pride fatigue is not merely a consequence of antipathy towards gays and lesbians among the general population. Really it is more the consequence of trans activists and various paraphilia normalization factions hijacking the gay and lesbian struggle to push their own agendas, agendas that works at cross-purposes with the struggle for equality in same-sex attraction, as well as the rights of women to expect gender segregation for opportunity, privacy, and safety. Many gay and lesbian individuals have voiced concern over the presence of overt kink and fetish displays at Pride events, especially when those events are promoted as family-friendly. While Pride began as a radical assertion of dignity and visibility in the face of oppression, some within the community feel that it has drifted toward exhibitionism that misrepresents the broader aims of the movement.
For the record, I first voiced concerns about this in the early 1990s. If gays and lesbians aimed to homosexuality as merely a sexual preference and not a perversion, why would they tolerate leather freaks and open sexual displays in front of children? That goes for Drag Queen Story Hour, as well. Trans activists and their allies tell us that this is a tired debate. They get angry over it the same way they get angry when you ask about Rachael Dolezal.
But the reality is that inclusion of paraphilias and sexualized displays in public celebrations reinforces harmful stereotypes about gay people as inherently deviant or hypersexual, undermining the decades-long effort to secure equal rights and social acceptance. Such imagery is incompatible with environments intended to be inclusive of families, and that it alienates potential allies—particularly those who support equal rights but are uncomfortable with the blending of adult sexual expression and child-oriented public space. It looks like grooming. This critique doesn’t deny the importance of sexual liberation in history but rather calls for context-appropriate boundaries, particularly when Pride is positioned as a civic, educational, or family-oriented event.
Finally, to return to the matter of conversion therapy, since gender is synonymous with sex, what is commonly called gender-affirming care (GAC) within the trans movement and medical establishment does not, in fact, affirm gender, but rather attempts to simulate it through medical intervention. Ranging from hormone treatments to surgeries, GAC attempts to reshape the body to conform to an internal subjective identity, making it a form of conversion therapy not an affirming practice. Trans advocates thus stand reality on its head when they label efforts to align gender identity with birth sex as conversion therapy. Genuine gender-affirming care would involve medical intervention to support an individual’s natural sexual development—such as treating a boy with insufficient androgen production to ensure typical male development—not interventions aimed at suppressing naturally occurring sex characteristics. The current practices of the medical industry with respect to gender dysphoria are
Using the opportunity of the Pride to raise awareness of the contradiction between homosexuality and gender identity and the harm the latter causes to children, women, and truth has become a necessity. The exploitation of Pride by transactivists to push for the same equality that gays and lesbians must be called out. While I do not like the rhetoric of allyship in this space, I feel compelled to advance the position many gays and lesbians have taken that “T” must be separated from the LGBT acronym in order to return to a politics of respectability, as well as prevent the harms of GAC, the actual practice of conversion therapy.
Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken about the murders of two Israeli Embassy employees, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. Shouting “Free, free Palestine,” Elias Rodriguez murdered the couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC. During his arrest, Rodriguez declared, “I did this for Gaza.” Netanyahu correctly assesses the situation in the video shared below: Rodriquez was a weapon cocked and pointed at Jews and their allies loaded by antisemitic sentiment propagated by the Free Palestine movement.
Last night in Washington something horrific happened.
A brutal terrorist shot in cold blood a young beautiful couple – Yaron Lischinsky and Sara Milgrim. Yaron had just bought an engagement ring for Sarah. He was planning to give it to her in Jerusalem next week. They were… pic.twitter.com/FFdMwlacJ9
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) May 22, 2025
Rodriguez’s action was propaganda of the deed. What prepares the deed is propaganda of the word. And the word here has a long and vicious history. Eliminationist and exterminationist antisemitism are not new phenomena. A deeper history is in order to fully comprehend what the State of Israel is confronting. More than this: what confronts the West. The pro-Palestinian crowd is part of a fifth column operating in several Western states—the Red-Green Alliance–and it seeks to dismantle the Enlightenment and liberal democracy.
Today’s essay is a deep dive into the history of antisemitism and how anti-Jewish sentiment drives politics in the West. The core of this essay has a long development. I wanted to make sure of the historical narrative before publishing it. Before I turn to what I have been able to determine, I want to spend a moment emphasizing the point that criticizing Israel’s state policies falls within the bounds of legitimate political discourse. All states are subject to criticism. Indeed, everything is subject to criticism. Issues such as settlement expansion under cover of occupation, military actions, and treatment of Palestinian Arabs are subject to international debate, as well as domestically within Israel itself.
(I have in the past made some of these criticisms myself, although I admit that many of my arguments from the early 2000s were wrongheaded. I fell under the spell of the academic teachings I critique in this essay. Graduate school in the 1990s was dominated by critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and Third Worldism, and in the context of a near-total institution, I adopted many of those views and used them to criticize those who saw antisemitism lurking behind criticisms of Israel, moreover that the left’s fascination with Islam, especially the Palestinian Arab, is inspired by that ancient hatred. That ancient hatred lies at the core of Islamism.)
However, when such criticisms cross into demonization, such as suggesting something about the character of Jews apart from ideology or religion, employ double standards, or deny Israel’s right to exist (apart from the general problem of presuming such a right for any country in international law), antisemitism is manifest. Indeed, antisemitism drives demonization, double standards, and the desire to see Israel dismantled. Portraying Israel as inherently evil or uniquely genocidal, or invoking classic antisemitic tropes, e.g., global Jewish control or blood libel, transforms political critique into, or more precisely exposes it as ethnic vilification—and political critique becomes a cover for calumny.
One of the most pernicious expressions of this dynamic is the appropriation of settler-colonial language to describe Israel’s founding. The charge that Zionism is a colonial enterprise imports European academic frameworks and ignores the historical and indigenous connection of the Jewish people to the land. Jews are not foreign settlers in Israel; they are a people indigenous to the region, whose dispersion and persecution across centuries culminated in a return—sometimes from Europe, often from the Arab world—to their ancestral homeland. Jewish immigration to Israel was just that: immigration. It was not colonization. In many cases, it was an escape from systemic antisemitism.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism offers a framework for recognizing when anti-Israel sentiment becomes antisemitic. It outlines examples such as Holocaust inversion, collectively blaming Jews for Israel’s actions, or delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist—all of which are seen in various corners of Arab political and social life. I have criticized the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism in essays on this platform and in public talks, especially as it is used to form legislation addressing antisemitism; but not all of IHRA’s definition is wrong. What I regard as descriptive of antisemitism is reflected in the IHRA’s definition, so it might be helpful for readers to review that document here: Working Definition of Antisemitism.
Why do I oppose the use of IHRA’s definition in the formation of law? I want to spend a few moments explaining my position on that matter. From my standpoint states should not officially endorse historical claims or interpretations because doing so politicizes history, i.e., using history for partisan political ends, and undermines the integrity of historical scholarship. It risks historical revisionism—for the wrong reasons. History is a field that thrives on critical inquiry, evidence-based analysis, and the freedom to revise understandings as new information comes to light. When a government takes an official stance on historical events, it risks using history as a tool to promote national narratives or political agendas rather than encouraging honest reflection and debate. This can stifle academic freedom, marginalize alternative perspectives, and create a rigid, one-dimensional view of the past that serves current power structures rather than truth.
At the same time, while I believe states should not officially endorse historical interpretations, I do recognize that certain legal contexts—such as laws against genocide—require clear, codified definitions derived from interpretation of historical events. These definitions are not about shaping collective memory but about ensuring accountability, the protection of human rights, and meting out justice. In such cases, the legal recognition of events like genocide serves a necessary function within the justice system, distinguishing it from broader historical interpretation. This kind of legal clarity is essential for prosecuting crimes and upholding international law, as long as it does not preclude ongoing scholarly debate about the complexities of the events in question.
The problem I am identifying is illustrated by the attempt to delegitimize the state of Israel by portraying its actions as genocidal. Israel has faced accusations of genocide, particularly in the context of its military operations in Gaza and its broader policies toward Palestinians. These allegations have been made by various human rights groups, international figures, legal scholars, and some nation-states, especially during periods of intense conflict marked by high civilian casualties and widespread destruction (the consequence of Israel’s military superiority and determined fight for survival). The term genocide in these accusations is typically invoked to highlight what is seen as systematic violence or policies that threaten the survival of a people.
Many governments and legal experts argue that while Israel’s actions may raise serious concerns under international humanitarian law, labeling them as genocide requires meeting a very high and specific legal threshold—namely, the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnical, national, racial, or religious group (Genocide Convention). To date, no international court has officially found Israel guilty of genocide. Presumably, there would have to be evidence of genocide for an international court to make such a finding. There is no genocide taking place in Gaza. We trust that international courts will not manufacture the perception of genocide by making such a finding. But should we? Can we trust international courts?
Netanyahu has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The charges pertain to actions taken during Israel’s military operations in Gaza from October 8, 2023, the day after Palestinian Arabs massacred Jews in Israel, to at least May 20, 2024. Specifically, Netanyahu and Gallant are accused of employing starvation as a method of warfare, intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, and committing acts of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. Israel disputes the ICC’s jurisdiction, as it is not a member of the court, and has condemned the charges as politically motivated. Despite this, the arrest warrants obligate the 124 ICC member states, including many European countries, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter their territories.
Driving the action of the ICC is an assumption that Israel’s policies are racist (or more precisely ethnicist). The assertion that Zionism is racism reflects the growing influence of newly independent and decolonizing nations—the Third World—within global institutions like the United Nations during the mid-twentieth century. In 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, which declared that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. This resolution was backed by the Soviet bloc, Arab states, and many non-aligned countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America—nations that had recently emerged from colonial rule and were increasingly asserting themselves in international forums.
Many of these states viewed Zionism—the movement for the establishment and support of a Jewish state in Palestine—as a colonial or settler-colonial project that mirrored the systems of racial oppression they had themselves experienced under European imperial powers. For them, the displacement of Palestinians in the creation and expansion of Israel resembled forms of racial domination they associated with apartheid, segregation, or European conquest. In this context, the identification of Zionism with racism was as much a political statement about global power structures as it was a legal or philosophical assessment of Zionism itself.
This framing was—and remains—highly controversial. Western powers, especially the United States and European nations, condemned the resolution, arguing that Zionism was a national liberation movement for Jews, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust. Many saw the resolution as a distortion of human rights language for political purposes.
The double standard is obvious here. In the wake of World War II, the principle of national liberation emerged as a defining force in global politics, driven by a widespread rejection of colonialism and imperial domination. The war had discredited European empires, i.e., the core of world capitalism, exposed the brutality of racial hierarchies, and inspired ethnic populations to assert their right to self-determination. This principle gained legal and moral momentum through the newly formed United Nations, particularly with the adoption of the UN Charter and later resolutions that affirmed the legitimacy of anti-colonial struggles. So why were the Jews not entitled to collective self-determination and national liberation?
Across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, movements for national liberation linked their cause to broader demands for dignity, equality, and sovereignty, challenging the international community to recognize the political agency of formerly subjugated peoples. National liberation became not only a political goal but a moral imperative, reshaping the postwar international order and redefining the meaning of autonomy and freedom on a global scale. Zionism was a national liberation movement in these terms. Yet, the Jewish case was treated differently. Most paradoxically, the Jews were treated as if they were colonizers.
The map shows the region in the 9th century BCE (source: Wikipedia)
History tells a very different story. The colonization of the Jewish homeland and the forced removal of Jews from their territory spans centuries of displacement, imperial domination, and ethnic persecution. Following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the Bar Kokhba revolt c. 135 CE, large numbers of Jews were enslaved, expelled, or exterminated, beginning a long period ofdiaspora in which Jews were scattered across the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. Successive empires—including Roman, Byzantine, Islamic Caliphates, Crusader states, and later the Ottoman Empire—dominated the region historically known as Judea, later renamed Palestine.
It was following the Bar Kokhba revolt that the Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed the province of Judea to “Syria Palaestina.” This was part of a broader effort to suppress Jewish identity and connection to the land following the revolt. The name “Palestina” was derived from “Philistia,” referring to the ancient Philistines who had lived along the coastal region of the Levant centuries earlier. This renaming was intended to minimize Jewish ties to the territory and to punish the Jewish population for their rebellion against Roman rule.
However, in terms of deep historical time, this starts the story at a rather recent moment. Long before the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish people had already experienced a long and tumultuous history of conquest, exile, and foreign domination at the hands of powerful empires such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. In the eighth century BCE, the Assyrian Empire conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel, leading to the forced deportation of the ten northern tribes and the dismantling of their political and religious institutions. And in the early sixth century BCE, the Babylonian Empire under Nebuchadnezzar II invaded the southern Kingdom of Judah, destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and exiled much of the Jewish elite to Babylon, initiating a formative period of diaspora.
When the Persians, led by Cyrus the Great, conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, Cyrus issued a decree allowing Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple. Yet, while the Persian period marked a partial restoration, the Jewish homeland remained under foreign control, setting a precedent for centuries of imperial rule that shaped Jewish political, spiritual, and national consciousness long before the Roman era.
Throughout these eras, Jews remained a continuous, albeit often marginalized, presence in the land, facing discrimination and periodic violence. Over time, their ties to the land—at least in terms of legal claims—were weakened by external rule, while in many parts of the world Jews endured expulsions, forced conversions, and ghettoization. The colonization of the Jewish homeland was not only to foreign control of the territory but also to the systematic undermining of Jewish self-rule and identity in their ancestral land. This culminated in a deep historical yearning for return and national restoration. Zionism is an expression of the yearning.
Ultimately, Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991 with the end of the Cold War and, under strong pressure from Western nations, a period of renewed peace efforts began in the Middle East. Thus the equation of Zionism with racism emerged at a time when postcolonial states were reshaping global discourse at the UN, using their collective voice to challenge narratives they viewed as embedded in imperialism and racial hierarchy. This episode underscores the extent to which international law and norms are often shaped by the shifting balances of global political power. But shifting sands must not be allowed to obscure the fact that antisemitism was behind the 1975 resolution. And, despite revocation of Resolution 3379, antisemitism persists. And it is on the rise.
Antisemitism in Slavic countries, including Russia, and plainly evident in Ukraine, has deep historical roots and has manifested in various forms over centuries—cultural, political, religious, violent. While each country in the Slavic region has its own specific history, several shared patterns emerge, particularly regarding state policy, religious influence, and nationalist movements.
In Russia, antisemitism dates back to the time of the Tsars, especially after the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century, which brought large Jewish populations into the Russian Empire. Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, faced legal restrictions, and were frequently scapegoated for economic and social problems. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, violent pogroms—often tolerated or even incited by authorities—terrorized Jewish communities. The infamous fabricated text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which became a key antisemitic conspiracy theory worldwide, originated in Tsarist Russia around 1903.
In other Slavic countries, antisemitism also took hold in different ways. In Poland, long-standing religious antisemitism, tied to Catholic identity and accusations such as deicide or ritual murder, fed periodic outbreaks of violence, including the Kielce pogrom in 1946, even after the Holocaust. In Ukraine, antisemitic violence was prominent during periods of political instability, notably during the Russian Civil War and under Nazi occupation, when some nationalist militias participated in pogroms and collaboration.
The roots of antisemitism in the Arab world are multifaceted. While pre-modern Islamic societies often treated Jews as a protected minority (dhimmi), albeit this narrative is often romanticized for political advantage, European colonialism, Arab nationalism, and later the Israeli-Palestinian conflict corrupted this tradition such as it was. With the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars, many Jews in Arab countries were expelled, fled violence, or left under state pressure. Their departure left a vacuum filled by state-sanctioned narratives that portrayed Jews not merely as political enemies, but as existential threats to the world. These narratives—embedded in antisemitism—falsely cast Jews who immigrated to Israel as colonial agents.
Antisemitic sentiment in any areas of the Arab world has been influenced by a mix of cultural, historical, political, and religious factors, including colonial and post-colonial narratives. Nationalist movements sometimes portrayed Jews as aligned with Western colonial powers or as alien intruders, despite Jews’ ancient ties to the region. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has further led to a conflation of Jews with the policies of the State of Israel, fueling hostility toward Jewish people generally, with educational curricula reinforcing this conflation. Media and religious rhetoric often propagate antisemitic tropes or conspiracy theories, erasing the historical fact that Jewish immigration to Israel was often an act of survival and return, not conquest.
In several countries—including Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and the Palestinian territories—antisemitic rhetoric became commonplace in public discourse, sermons, speeches, and textbooks. Conspiracy theories, such as The Protocols, were widely circulated and became entrenched in Islamist thinking. For example, Hamas has referenced The Protocols in its ideological texts, particularly its 1988 charter, Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement. The charter includes explicit antisemitic rhetoric and cites the Protocols as if it were authentic, using it to support its allegation of a vast Jewish cabal.
Across much of the Arab world, in educational, media, and religious institutions, Jewish identity is often conflated with Zionism—a political and nationalist movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century with the goal of establishing a Jewish homeland in the historic Land of Israel. Zionism is frequently equated with racism or colonialism, a formulation that erases the indigenous nature of Jewish connection to the land and treats Jewish self-determination as an imperialist project. The result is a cultural environment where anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism have become mutually reinforcing, and where legitimate grievances are often expressed through delegitimizing and dehumanizing language.
In Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria, one finds consistently high levels of antisemitic sentiment in public rhetoric and surveys. In the Palestinian territories, particularly Gaza under Hamas, antisemitic propaganda is intertwined with resistance narratives. Lebanon, under the influence of Hezbollah, maintains a strongly anti-Israel stance with rhetoric that crosses into antisemitism.
To be sure, countries such as Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates have made efforts to promote interfaith dialogue and preserve Jewish heritage. Morocco, for example, incorporates Holocaust education into school curricula and has restored synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. Bahrain and the UAE, following the Abraham Accords, have made overtures toward Jewish communities and supported cultural exchange. However, even in these contexts, antisemitic attitudes persist among segments of the population. The very need for these governments to pursue such efforts is testament to how deeply rooted antisemitism remains—even where formal policy changes occur.
The modern Arab world presents a complex landscape where antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment frequently intersect—and this is because anti-Israel sentiment is driven by antisemitism. So, while it is crucial to distinguish legitimate criticism of the State of Israel from antisemitism, as I stress earlier, it is equally important to recognize that a significant portion of anti-Israel rhetoric in the Arab world is driven by or infused with antisemitic beliefs. This phenomenon is shaped by media representation and societal narratives that have developed over generations—fueled by the fallacy that Jews are colonial outsiders in their own land.
Thus, whatever anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab reflects genuine political grievances, the enemies of Israel draw on antisemitic beliefs and this is manifest in the misapplication of colonialist frameworks to Jewish history and identity. Anti-Jewish sentiment is part of a broader anti-Western antipathy, where the West alone is associated with colonialism and imperialism, this despite the fact that such practices are centuries old and global.
'That statistic should've collapsed alone under the weight of its absurdity'
Jonathan Sacerdoti says lies spread about Israel's war in Gaza are being believed by politicians and media outlets across the globe. pic.twitter.com/aucYU4lOOU
The ideological conflation of Zionism with colonialism, and Jews with foreign interlopers, is not confined to the Middle East. On university campuses in the United States and several European countries, pro-Palestinian activism has grown in visibility and intensity, especially following Hamas’ massacre of more than a thousand Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023. While some of this activism reflects sincere concern for Palestinian Arabs in occupied territories and in Gaza, it is nonetheless shaped by a worldview in which Zionism is cast as a colonial ideology and Jews as representing white settler power—despite the obvious historical incoherence of such framing.
However, the argument that this ancient hatred has migrated into Western discourse, particularly among academic and progressive political circles, is not quite correct. The Arab perspective borrows heavily from postcolonial theory and intersectional frameworks developed by Western intellectuals, in which Israel is analogized to apartheid South Africa and even to Nazi Germany—comparisons that rely on antisemitic tropes and historical revisionism. These frameworks erase or minimize Jewish indigeneity to the region, as well as the presence of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, who constitute a significant portion of Israel’s population and whose migration to Israel was largely involuntary and trauma-driven. Within this ideological structure, antisemitism is dismissed, redefined, or even justified under the guise of anti-Zionism (presuming this is a legitimate position), despite its clear resonance with classic forms of anti-Jewish hatred.
Thus, the academic and activist atmosphere has not remained merely theoretical. It has contributed to a cultural climate in which antisemitic speech and, increasingly, antisemitic violence, are tolerated, excused, or advocated. The killings in Washington, DC mark an escalation in the consequences of this radicalization. Such acts of violence underscore the degree to which certain forms of anti-Israel activism have crossed the line into racial and religious hatred. That the couple was targeted explicitly because of their Jewish identity—and not any political activity, which would not justify the assassin’s actions in any case—drives home the point that antisemitism, not critique of policy, was the motive.
The response from the US government under President Donald Trump to the rise of antisemitism has been swift. The Trump administration, citing the surge in campus antisemitism and the apparent inability—or unwillingness—of elite universities to contain it, has begun pulling federal funding from some institutions under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Most notably, Harvard University has had its certification to accept foreign students revoked. (This action was not based solely on the issue of antisemitism. It was influenced in part by longstanding concerns over foreign influence on US higher education, particularly the infiltration of Chinese Communist Party-aligned entities into American academic institutions.)
This intersection—between antisemitism cloaked as activism, ideological importation of fallacious settler-colonial narratives, and institutional failure—represents a crisis of both governance and values in Western liberal democracies. Universities, which should serve as bastions of critical thought and ethical discourse, are increasingly becoming echo chambers where nuance is unwelcome, and historical complexity is reduced to binary slogans. In this environment, Jewish students are being harassed and silenced, excluded from progressive spaces unless they renounce any identification with Israel.
What is most alarming is not that criticism of Israeli policies is taking place—that is expected and, in many cases, warranted—but that such criticism is being advanced within frameworks that require the erasure of Jewish history and legitimacy. As in the Arab world, antisemitism is not a reaction to Israeli state actions; rather it is antisemitism that shapes how those actions are interpreted and how Jews are portrayed as a people. It is precisely this inversion of history and morality that makes antisemitism so dangerous: it adapts to every ideological moment, whether nationalist or progressive, religious or secular.
1939 Palestinian
To combat this, it is not enough to issue condemnations after violent incidents or to gesture toward pluralism in abstract terms. What is required is a robust and unapologetic defense of historical truth: that Jews are not colonial interlopers in the Middle East, but indigenous people who have returned to a land from which they were violently exiled; that Israel’s existence is not a Western colonial outpost (although it is an outpost of the Enlightenment and Western values and rational, secular principles), but the political realization of Jewish self-determination; and that antisemitism—whether dressed in the garb of jihad or justice—is an ancient hatred wearing modern clothes.
The Western intellectual has played a chief role in this. While anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the Arab world have deep indigenous roots—shaped by the experience of colonialism, perceived historical grievances, and religious tradition—the postcolonial framing that casts Israel as a settler-colonial state the Arab world has adopted has been significantly influenced by Western academic and leftist thought.
It may strike readers as odd that, beginning in the mid-twentieth century and accelerating with the global spread of postcolonial theory, Arab intellectuals and political movements began to adopt the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus of Western progressivism. European Marxist and post-structuralist/structuralist thinkers reinterpreted global conflicts through a colonizer-versus-colonized lens, the oppressor-victim trope, a model that resonated with Arab narratives of dispossession but also reshaped them.
International institutions helped amplify this shift. The United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement, particularly during the Cold War, disseminated the language of anti-imperialism on a global scale. The aforementioned 1975 UN Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism a form of racism, exemplifies how Western intellectual and political frameworks were adopted to codify and internationalize a narrative that previously existed in a more nationalistic or religious register.
Thus, Western academic circles—particularly in elite universities corrupted by postmodernist thought—exported a model of decolonial rhetoric and intersectional politics. These frameworks reframe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a paradigmatic case of racialized colonial oppression. Arab discourse has not only absorbed these narratives but amplified them, finding in them both a justification for existing hostilities and a new language through which to express them—a language that appeals to Western youth radicalized in the universities (and even earlier in the educational process). Thus, while the emotional and political opposition to Israel is substantially local, the conceptual framing that dominates Arab and international discussion today is a hybrid—indigenous resentment expressed through the imported grammar of Western radicalism.
The adoption of a colonizer-versus-colonized framework by European Marxist and post-structuralist/post-modernist thinkers—and its subsequent embrace by Arab political discourse and Western academic institutions—reveals more than an analytical shift. It signals a deeper ideological realignment—the Red-Green tendency—that pits the West not simply against past imperial excesses (again, not unique in history) but against liberal modernity itself.
This interpretive model, ostensibly designed to critique power, inverts historical and moral clarity, casting liberal democracies as oppressors and authoritarian movements as agents of liberation. It smuggles in clerical fascism via the Trojan Horse of critical race theory and social justice rhetoric. The consequence is a paradoxical embrace of reactionary, even theocratic, politics under the guise of progressive struggle.
What emerges is not any real solidarity with the oppressed, but a form of Third Worldist romanticism that elevates any opposition to the West—however antisemitic, regressive, or antisemitic—as morally superior. This anti-Western stance increasingly tolerates, excuses, or sanctifies authoritarian ideologies, including jihadist movements, so long as they align against Western liberalism.
Such a worldview not only distorts history but corrodes the moral foundations of Western society. The anti-Jewish rhetoric embedded in today’s pro-Palestinian activism—rhetoric that erases Jewish history, denies the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination, and justifies terrorism—must be understood not as a fringe aberration but as a logical outcome of ideological drift and a convergence of anti-Western sentiment. As I have discussed in previous essay, what lies behind this is transnational corporate power.
When critiques of Western power abandon democratic norms and universal human rights in favor of binary moral absolutism, they do not elevate the oppressed—they empower those who would suppress freedom under the banner of resistance. The West is not perfect, to be sure, but to deny its role as a flawed but vital incubator of liberty, pluralism, and reason is to surrender the intellectual tools necessary to confront real oppression to destructive ideology. At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, the West is the moral center of the human universe. This is obvious with even a cursory glance across the world system. Why are Western youth apologists for the Chinese Communist Party, the real-world instantiation of George Orwell’s nightmare world depicted in his Nineteen Eighty-Four?
In a recent essay, I argued for counter-speech to address growing anti-Jewish, and more broadly the anti-white, sentiment associated with discriminatory policy and ethnic and racial violence. The task ahead is difficult but not impossible. It demands courage from educators, integrity from activists, and vigilance from policymakers. Most of all, it demands a renewed commitment to distinguishing criticism from calumny, and protest from prejudice. Without that distinction, the path forward will not lead to justice or peace, but to further hatred—and more graves.
Breaking the cycle of antisemitism in the Arab world requires more than diplomatic normalization with Israel. It demands grassroots education, honest historical reckoning, and public engagement that doesn’t separate Jewish identity from the political conflict but explains that the political conflict is largely caused by Jewish identity—not by Jews, but by antisemites. Raising this awareness requires challenging the false narrative that portrays Jews as colonial interlopers. Jews are not foreigners in the Middle East—they are an indigenous people with a millennia-long presence, who, like many others, have been subjected to persecution, displacement, and exile.
Debunking mythology and exposing historical revisionism is essential not only for combating hatred, but for building a future in which Arabs and Jews—whether in the Middle East or beyond—can coexist in mutual respect. An important element of the work is liberating Arabs, Persians, and others from Islam. The challenge lies not in silencing criticism, but in ensuring it does not become a vehicle for age-old prejudice masked as political analysis.
It’s funny (not really), in most critical justice and law curricula, we are rarely taught what justice means. This is not true in the courses I teach, but I am rather exceptional in that regard. The term “justice” is rich with meaning, and interpretations of the term shift depending on the context—cultural, legal, ideological, moral, philosophical, political, social. At its most basic level, justice refers to the principle of fairness: the idea that individuals should receive what they are due, whether in terms of consequences, rights, or treatment. However, this apparently simple definition confronts competing and often conflicting theories about what fairness entails, and to whom it is owed.
In legal terms, justice implies adherence to established laws and procedures. A just outcome in this sense is one that conforms to due process, treats all parties equally under the law, and dispenses punishment or protection in proportion to the facts and evidence. This concept of procedural justice, or proceduralism, is central to liberal democracies, where the legitimacy of the legal system rests on the perception that rules are applied consistently, regardless of class, race, or status. In modern, enlightened societies, the principle applies to individuals, although they may be grouped as an injured party in a class-action lawsuit. Moreover, group members may be treated differentially if they comprise an objective class, such as age, disability, or gender. Justice in this sense is not, however, applied to an imagined community, such as a race or a religion, as these are either abstractions or belief systems.
Philosophically, justice has long been debated as a moral ideal and whether that ideal may transcend existing laws. Thinkers from Plato to Rawls have proposed that justice involves more than mere legality; it encompasses the proper ordering of society, where individuals receive what is deserved not just according to law, but according to contribution, need, or virtue. Distributive justice, for instance, concerns how burdens, opportunities, and resources should be shared among members of a community. This gives rise to debates between egalitarianism, libertarianism, meritocracy, and socialism—all of which define fairness differently.
In social and political discourse, particularly today, justice often takes on a collective and historical dimension. Terms like economic justice, racial justice, and social justice suggest that fairness cannot be understood apart from historical wrongs, inherited dis/advantages, or structural inequalities. Here, justice involves rectifying systemic imbalances or addressing group-based harms, even if that requires unequal treatment to achieve equity—all of which are contested in political space. This version of justice is proclaimed as forward-looking in its goals but backward-looking in its moral claims: it calls not just for individual accountability, but for redistributive or reparative action grounded in historical grievance.
Finally, in cultural and emotional realms, justice is invoked in terms of restoration or vengeance. Victims or their communities may demand justice as a form of symbolic redress—where seeing someone condemned, held responsible, or punished offers psychological closure or social affirmation. Justice can blur into revenge, especially when it is untethered from impartial standards, becoming a vehicle for ideological, moral, or political assertion.
Each of these meanings carries different implications for how societies understand crime and punishment, equality and obligation. Tensions arise when one conception of justice—say, legal proceduralism—clashes with another—say, historical reparations. Much of our current cultural and political conflict can be traced to these underlying disagreements over what justice is, what it demands, and who has the authority to define it.
As I have explained many times before, modern enlightened systems of law explicitly reject the notions of intergenerational guilt and collective punishment because they violate foundational principles of due process, individual justice, and moral agency. Individualism is not merely a cultural preference. It is a moral and philosophical principle rooted in universalism—the recognition that all human beings share a common nature and are therefore entitled to the same fundamental rights, with equity prepared to considered objective group differences.
This idea underpins the concept of human rights: that dignity, justice, and liberty are not granted by governments or earned through group membership, but are instead inherent in each person simply by virtue of being a member of the species. It is this universalist ethos that animates the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Such rights can only be meaningfully upheld when individuals are recognized as moral agents, not subsumed into classes, collectives, or tribes. Individualism, properly understood, is the safeguard of human dignity because it affirms that no person is expendable, and no one is reducible to their ancestry, identity, or inherited guilt.
Before the term “Creator” appears, the Declaration notes the entitlements due each person—in a democratic republic each citizen—by the “Laws of Nature” and of “Nature’s God.” These concepts reflect the Enlightenment-era appeal not to a specific religious tradition, but to natural law—a rational, universal order discoverable through reason and science and accessible to all people regardless of faith—and even in the absence of it. This language signals a move away from divine-right theories or scriptural authority and toward a humanistic framework in which rights are grounded in humanity itself.
This concept of Nature’s God suggests a moral order inherent in the structure of the world and in human reason, rather than one revealed solely through theology. It aligns closely with the views of thinkers like Locke and Jefferson, for whom equality and liberty were not contingent on religious belief but derived from the shared nature of all human beings. Thus, the authority of the Declaration’s moral claims lies not in religious dogma but in a philosophical conviction that human beings possess inalienable rights by virtue of their rational, moral nature—a view that unites individualism with a universal, secular ethic, sorted only by citizenship. This view has been confirmed by science and is the material basis of human rights.
In liberal democracies, responsibility for wrongdoing is thus understood to be personal and specific, tied to the actions and intentions of individuals, not to their ancestry, group identity, or historical association. The idea that one person could be held liable for the sins of their forebears or punished for the actions of others within their ethnic, racial, or social group undermines the rule of law by substituting moral retribution for individual accountability.
Enlightenment thinkers, influenced by humanism, reason, and secularism, articulated a break from primitive theocratic or tribal models of justice where bloodlines or collective identity determined guilt and obligations. Instead, they established the principle that punishment must correspond to a person’s own actions and be adjudicated through fair and impartial procedures.
This is why modern constitutions, and legal codes prohibit bills of attainder, collective reprisals (except in cases of national self-defense), and retroactive justice (except in the case where consequences follow action): such mechanisms treat people not as autonomous moral agents but as proxies for historical or group-based blame. Upholding individual responsibility preserves not only fairness but also social cohesion, by resisting the impulse to re/litigate history through the punishment of the present.
AI generated using Sora
However, tragically, devotion to humanist and rational principle is not shared to the same extent across the populations. Alongside modern, enlightened principle exists the primitive and tribal impulse, and these often take the form of collective blame, group-based moral reasoning, identity-bound loyalties, and retaliatory justice, impulses that prioritize in-group grievance over universal rights and individual accountability. Except for national integrity, necessary for the enlightened rule of law in a world with barbarians, for here is neither primitive nor tribal, it is destructive tolerate the primitive and tribal impulse for collective and intergenerational punishment. These are antithetical to the modern, enlightenment principle of individualism, an antithesis that comes with great harm precisely because it negates individualism. When individualism is negated, the rule of law devolves into the rule of the jungle.
Given the continued existence of primitive and tribal impulse in modern Western societies, there is a significant psychological and social risk when individuals are persistently told that they’re the victims of systemic injustice—particularly when this message frames the success of others as having come at their expense. Such narratives, especially when cast in zero-sum terms, can foster not only entitlement and resentment, but also a sense of moral justification for antisocial behavior. If one’s gain is perceived as another’s loss, then acts of aggression, hostility, theft, or even violence may come to be seen not as crimes, but as a righteous form of restitution—a reclamation of what was unjustly taken.
This framing becomes particularly combustible when situated within broader narratives of class and, especially, racial struggle. When marginalized individuals are told that their suffering is the result of deliberate exploitation—whether by a wealthier, more powerful class, or by a racially dominant group (whether a majority or minority)—the appeal to reparatory or revolutionary justice can override traditional moral constraints. Violence, in this context, is no longer a last resort, but a morally sanctioned tactic: a justified uprising against perceived oppressors. After all, oppressors don’t answer for their deeds or make good on their debt (that’s backed into the character of oppression), so extralegal means are in order.
Such dynamics are reflected in what German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described as primitive rebellion—a spontaneous, often unstructured eruption of violent discontent from the oppressed, whether an individual or an affinity group (or a alliance thereof), marked less by ideology (although sometimes organized by it by those who find discontent strategically useful) than by visceral rage at perceived injustice. In this light, street-level crimes—assault, looting, vandalism—are recast not as lawless acts, but as direct-action reparations or legitimate acts of resistance.
This sense of moral vindication is intensified when the rhetoric of grievance is linked not only to class but to racial identity. History tells that racial identity is enough by itself, and experience tells us that it is the more potent grievance. What begins as a cry for justice risks mutating into a license for revenge, especially when collective historical trauma is invoked to justify individual or group aggression.
Here, Engels’ notion of demoralization becomes relevant: when prolonged injustice is coupled with the failure of reform or revolution, the working (or marginalized) class may become disillusioned with ethical and legal norms altogether, leading to a kind of moral cynicism. In such a state, crime is no longer taboo, but a rational—even honorable—reaction to what is perceived is a rigged social order.
In criminology, sociologists David Matza and Gresham Sykes developed the theory of techniques of neutralization, published in 1957 in the American Sociological Review, which sheds light on how individuals justify wrongdoing. These techniques are particularly relevant here. One is the denial of the victim, wherein the offender sees the target of their harm not as an innocent person, but as someone who “deserved it.”
In the context of class- or identity-based grievance, the victim is recast as the oppressor—an abstract stand-in for centuries of perceived exploitation or systemic privilege. The perpetrator then frames their actions not as transgression, but as justice. A victim is an innocent person who did not deserve what happened to him. If the person is not innocent, then he is not a victim, but a just target for retaliation over perceived harms. A white man, by virtue of being white, and thus a member of a group believed to be the cause of a black man’s misery, is not a victim. Indeed, he is an oppressor. And victims have a right to retaliate against their oppressors.
Another technique is the denial of injury: the claim that the harm caused is minimal or inconsequential. Stealing from the wealthy—or from members of an economically or racially dominant group—is seen as harmless because “they have enough,” or because they allegedly acquired their resources through unjust means. “They didn’t earn it—they took it from me. They owe me.”
This narrative is a hallmark of grievance politics, where collective resentment is weaponized to justify individual or group-level harm, it immorality neutralized via the frame of symbolic redress or reparation. This can take the form of the warehouse worker taking “wages-in-kind” by stealing laptops at a large retail computer store. Or it could be a flash mob smash and grab, in which a sudden, coordinated group action—typically organized via social media or messaging platform—forcibly breaks into a location and quickly grabbing valuables before fleeing. If any pangs of guilt crop up, the perpetrator can remind himself that the store has insurance that covers theft.
Closely related to these techniques is the denial of responsibility, where the actor absolves himself by citing external forces. Poverty, marginalization, historical injustice—these become explanations that excuse action rather than strictly contextualize wrongdoing. Personal agency is downplayed in favor of structural determinism: “I did what I had to do. They put me in this situation.”
This attitude resonates with the phrase “Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it” an observation often attributed to Henry Thomas Buckle, a nineteenth century English historian. His pithy line succinctly captures a central idea in sociological criminology: that while individuals are responsible for their actions, broader social conditions—such as cultural narratives, inequality, marginalization, poverty—create the environment in which crime becomes more likely. There is something to this sociologically, buy the result is too often a posture of perpetual victimhood in which the lines between explanation and exoneration blur.
Additional techniques include appealing to higher loyalties—violating societal norms or laws in service of a perceived greater good, such as a collective identity, group cause, or ideology. Here, the offender does not see himself as breaking the law for selfish reasons, but as upholding a higher moral imperative that transcends ordinary rules. This can involve loyalty to a class-based movement, an ideological struggle, or a racial group, wherein acts of disruption, theft, or violence are reframed as sacrifices or duties in the service of justice.
In this framework, the law becomes an instrument of oppression, and breaking it becomes an act of liberation. The moral compass is no longer calibrated to universal principles, but to the perceived needs and grievances of one’s group. The outside becomes expendable.
This technique is frequently coupled with condemning the condemners, wherein authorities or critics are discredited as morally compromised or complicit in systemic injustice. The offender shifts focus from his own conduct to the alleged hypocrisy or illegitimacy of those who seek to hold him accountable. In politicized or racialized contexts, this can take the form of asserting moral immunity based on historical victimhood: “They can’t judge me—they’re part of the system that created this.” The result is a potent form of justification, where lawbreaking is seen not as a moral failing but as an act of resistance, and where personal responsibility is eclipsed by collective grievance.
In their article, Sykes and Matza focused on juvenile delinquency, which was a major concern in America at that time (should still be). But the argument’s frame can be applied in many ways to many things. When I teach this theory in criminology class, the obvious application that occurs to me is to the situation in Nazi Germany during WWII. There, entire populations were dehumanized and recast not as individuals, but as symbols of a threat to be neutralized—“denial of the victim” on a genocidal scale. The Nazis denied injury by claiming they were merely defending themselves and their nation from subversion and Jewish elites, who were accused of running German life. They denied responsibility by embedding individual participation in a system that was framed as inevitable or necessary.
The Nazis appealed to higher loyalties—to Volk, Führer, Fatherland—and condemned the condemners as corrupt, foreign, and weak. The horrors of that period were not carried out by monsters, but by ordinary people equipped with the same psychological tools we see in everyday delinquency—techniques of neutralization writ large. The lesson is not that all acts of deviance are equivalent, but that the moral frameworks used to justify them are alarmingly portable. When group grievance becomes moral license, and ideology replaces personal responsibility, the results can escalate from petty theft to historical atrocity.
What links these techniques is a psychological and rhetorical inversion: the oppressor is reimagined as the victim, and the victim as the oppressor. The result is a moral logic that enables and even demands retaliation—justice requires it. When identity politics intersects with this dynamic, particularly along lines of class and race, it organizes resentment as action. Individuals are no longer acting out of personal grievance alone, but as part of a larger historical reckoning. This makes the resulting behavior more dangerous, because it is perceived not merely as justified, but righteous. The perpetrator becomes virtuous, while his victim becomes deserving of whatever terrible thing is visited upon him. Street-level criminality, in this context, becomes imbued with reparatory or revolutionary meaning—primitive rebellion, and sometime highly coordinated group action, fueled by a collective sense of moral outrage.
Of course, the existence of real injustice cannot be denied. Historical and structural inequalities are facts that demand attention and reform. This is why we have legal systems to manage conflict and disputes. But how we speak about those injustices matters a lot. If we teach people that their suffering is irreparable, permanent, unjust, the direct fault of an identifiable other, we risk nurturing a worldview in which violence is seen not as tragic, but necessary. Without a constructive vision for change—one that affirms agency, mutual responsibility, reconciliation, as well as one that recognizes when responsibility and reconciliation have no relevance to the situation in question—the language of justice may become indistinguishable from the rhetoric of vengeance. In this case, social justice becomes unsanctioned restorative and retributive justice—which means they are not form of justice at all. Indeed, they constitute injustice.
The popular rhetoric surrounding critical race theory (CRT)—especially as it has filtered into mainstream discourse where it carries popular power—reinforces a binary worldview that divides society into two fixed and opposing camps—oppressors and victims—and feeds the antagonisms that risk crime, disorder, and violence. While some will argue that the academic origins of CRT are more nuanced (pealing back the overwrought jargon, it’s not really a nuanced standpoint), it nonetheless in its distilled public form essentializes identity categories and reduces complex social dynamics to a historical morality play, where guilt and innocence are predetermined by group membership. Individuals are not primarily evaluated by their actions, character, or intentions, but by their cultural or racial affiliation. The paradigm leaves little room for moral ambiguity or individual agency. One is either complicit in systemic oppression or a victim of it—there is no neutral ground.
Readers will recall that race grifter Ibram X. Kendi makes a central and often-quoted claim in his 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist that there is no such thing as being “not racist.” According to Kendi, a person is either racist or antiracist—there is no neutral or passive position. He writes, “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’” He argues that claiming to be “not racist” is a way to evade responsibility for confronting racism. In his view a racist is not merely somebody who expresses a racist idea, but who supports a racist policy through action or inaction. An antiracist is someone who opposes racist policies and ideas through deliberate action.
Kendi frames racism as not just about intent or prejudice, but about structures, policies, and power. Therefore, inaction or neutrality in the face of racial inequality is itself a form of racism, because it allows those inequalities to persist. Under Kendi’s framework, being “not racist” is an impossibility. He must actively work against racism—or else, by default, be complicit in it. Widespread acceptance of this idea explains why many white progressives did not merely fail to condemn the theft, vandalism, and violence perpetrated by blacks during the George Floyd Riots, which they saw as righteous, but rationalized it and, in some instances, celebrated it, even joining with their black allies to commit crimes themselves.
Such rhetorical framing is potent because it aligns with deeply rooted narratives of collective suffering and historical grievance. It repurposes legitimate critiques of racial inequality (explanations for which should be open and unflinching) into a form of moral absolutism. From this standpoint, there is only reason that explains racial disparities in American society: systemic racism, a reality from which whites benefit.
The danger here is that frame treats these categories as permanent and non-negotiable—and proceeds on the fallacy of reification. A white individual may be deemed an oppressor not based on any personal conduct, but purely due to alleged inherited benefit. Likewise, a person of color may be framed as a perpetual victim, regardless of actual circumstance or success. This erodes the possibility for solidarity across lines of class and identity, replacing it with a politics of categorical antagonism. This points the aggrieved weapon-like towards his perceived oppressor.
When CRT rhetoric intersects with the techniques of neutralization described earlier, it can serve to further justify antisocial or extralegal behavior. The denial of the victim becomes institutionalized: if certain groups are viewed as inherently oppressive, then the loos or suffering of individuals associated with that group is no longer morally significant. Similarly, the appeal to higher loyalties—to ancestral suffering, historical redress, or racial justice—can supersede traditional ethical norms. The individual no longer bears full responsibility for his actions, as he acts on behalf of a larger historical narrative. He is acting for the sake of justice. In this way, criminal or disruptive behavior becomes not only rationalized, but imbued with moral meaning and ethnical purpose.
This rhetoric also tends to obscure the class distinctions and internal diversity within both majority and minority groups. It flattens lived experience into ideological caricature. Poor whites, for instance, are often lumped into the oppressor category despite sharing many of the structural disadvantages associated with systemic marginalization. Wealthy elites of color, by contrast, may retain the status of “victim” by virtue of their racial identity, even if they hold substantial economic and cultural power—including over poor blacks. This inversion distorts the analysis of actual material conditions and redirects anger away from systems and structures and toward individuals or groups based solely on perceived identity.
In effect, this rhetorical framework becomes a secular form of original sin, where redemption is not achieved through personal growth, reform, or solidarity, but through permanent self-abasement. The moral logic here is not restorative (even if we agreed that such a thing were possible collectively or intergenerationally) but punitive, not reconciliatory but accusatory. As such, it encourages an emotional posture of entitlement, grievance, and suspicion, rather than constructive engagement or shared responsibility.
What this produces is a fertile ideological environment for primitive rebellion, as Marx and Engels described: unfocused, often chaotic eruptions of violence and disorder, rooted in a deep but often inarticulate sense of injustice. In a society where certain rhetoric frames material deprivation and personal frustration as the fault of a monolithic, racialized other, the moral inhibitions against acting out that frustration are weakened. Demoralization—the erosion of ethical norms under the weight of prolonged disillusionment—is accelerated when dominant cultural narratives themselves provide moral cover for transgression. When extralegal action is seen as morally courageous, and restraint as complicity, the path from grievance to violence becomes not only intelligible, but attractive.
Does this view have its roots in Marxism? The rhetoric of class antagonisms does. At the same time, class is not the same as race, since class is one’s objective position with respect to the means of production. Capitalism is an exploitative system.
What about CRT? Is this Marxist? CRT emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to the perceived limitations of traditional civil rights discourse. It was also shaped by critical legal studies (CLS) and its perceived limitations. CLS, which developed in the 1970s out of legal realism (I will leave you to study that tradition to avoid another digression), was deeply skeptical of the idea that law is a neutral or objective system, contending that legal doctrines often serve to reinforce existing power structures, especially those rooted in capitalism.
CRT scholars took up this critique but felt that CLS was insufficiently attentive to the specific role of race in legal outcomes. As a result, CRT adopted many of CLS’s methods—such as deconstructing legal texts and exposing hidden power dynamics—but reoriented them around racial rather than purely class-based or economic hierarchies. So, however CLS was derived from Marxism, CRT moved beyond understanding law as rooted in the class struggle to portray race relations in a similar vein.
CRT scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado were heavily influenced by the CLS emphasis on law as a tool of power, but critiqued CLS for being disconnected from lived experience, particularly the experiences of people of color. Where CLS tended to universalize oppression under bourgeoise legal structures, CRT insisted on the particularity of racial injustice and the ways in which it operates independently from, though often in conjunction with, class-based exploitation.
CRT introduced concepts like “intersectionality” and “interest convergence,” which were aimed at showing how racism persists even when formal legal equality is achieved, and how racial justice is often only advanced when it aligns with the interests of dominant groups. This is a crucial point, since the argument is that, even when race is no longer a factor in the administration of justice, the administration of justice perpetuates racial inequality. This is the reason why CRT rejects the doctrine of colorblindness. CRT advocates insist on seeing race everywhere.
Marxism, especially in its critical and cultural forms, plays an indirect though, some would say, foundational role in shaping CRT. Much like Marxist thought, CRT views society through the lens of conflict and domination, rather than consensus or gradual progress. CRT shares with Marxism the belief that the legal and political order is not neutral but structured to maintain existing power relations.
However, CRT critiques classical Marxism for what it sees as its economic reductionism—that is, its tendency to treat race as epiphenomenal or secondary to class (Marx understood race as a strategy for disorganizing the proletariat, and thus a feature of the superstructure). In this way, CRT represents a substantial theoretical divergence from orthodox Marxism: it centers race as the fundamental axis of power, not merely a derivative of class struggle. Nevertheless, CRT’s emphasis on structural inequality, ideological hegemony, and systemic critique reflects the imprint of Marxist analysis.
By centering race as the primary axis of oppression rather than class, critical race theory fundamentally reorients the political struggle away from the unifying potential of class solidarity. In classical Marxist analysis, the working class—regardless of race—is the universal subject of history, united by its exploitation under capitalism. But in CRT, white workers are cast not as fellow victims of economic exploitation, but as beneficiaries of “white privilege” and complicit in maintaining racial hierarchies.
This framing fractures the cross-racial unity that Marxism sees as essential for revolutionary change. By portraying white laborers as oppressors rather than comrades, CRT divides the proletariat along racial lines, undermining the very solidarity needed to confront capital. As a result, the goal shifts from dismantling class domination to confronting racial power structures—a project with different ends, enemies, and methods. Rather than seeking to unite the working class against capitalist elites, CRT can function to polarize it internally, redirecting antagonism horizontally rather than vertically. This is very useful to corporate power. This is an antagonism they can wield as a weapon against the working class.
This divergence from classical Marxism is therefore not accidental. Critical race theory emerged not from labor movements or working-class activism, but from within elite academic and legal institutions—authored and advanced primarily by members of the professional-managerial class. Its architects are not coal miners or factory workers but civil rights attorneys, diversity consultants, and tenured professors: individuals embedded in the technocratic elite. Their goal is not to dismantle capitalism, but to ascend within it—to critique systems of power in ways that position themselves as indispensable interpreters and overseers of justice.
In this way, CRT serves as a tool of upward mobility for a segment of the credentialed class, allowing them to secure roles in corporate bureaucracies, foundations, media, and universities by promoting racial consciousness over class solidarity. The material interests of this class are not aligned with the working poor—black or white—but with maintaining and managing institutional frameworks that reward credentialism, ideological orthodoxy, performative equity initiatives. Rather than calling for the abolition of capitalist structures, CRT often functions to diversify their management.
Having explained the deeper logic and source of the antiracist line (I appreciate your patience), I can now return to the problem of interracial crime and violence. Beginning around 2010, the core concepts of CRT—previously confined to academic circles and legal scholarship—began to be popularized by corporate diversity initiatives, elite educational institutions, and major media outlets. Terms such as “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white supremacy” entered the public lexicon, not just as descriptors of extremist behavior or overt prejudice, but as frameworks for understanding everyday life and social structure. (see Gender and the English Language. The first part of the essay concerns gender, as one can see by the title, but the second part pulls in the way corporate state media manufactured the myth of enduring racism in American.)
According to this rhetoric, racial disparities in education, health, incarceration, and wealth are not simply the result of historical discrimination or socioeconomic complexity, but of an ongoing, invisible system that privileges whites as a group and disadvantages blacks and other minorities (emphasis on “invisible”). Under this framework, all white individuals—regardless of background economic status, and intent—are presumed to benefit from unearned racial advantages, and are therefore implicated in the perpetuation of inequality.
This worldview provides the moral and philosophical foundation for contemporary calls for reparations. If systemic injustice is embedded in the very structure of society—and if whites continue to benefit from this structure—then restitution is framed not only as appropriate, but as necessary. Reparations, in this context, are not limited to government payments or policy changes, but are often envisioned in more expansive terms: educational preference, wealth redistribution, and in some cases, the acceptance of social blame and moral guilt. Such a model does not invite dialogue or reconciliation so much as it demands submission to a retributive moral logic: the present must continually atone for the sins of the past. This regime asserts itself as commissar, judge, and jury, and those who counterpose to it the long-standing model of modern enlightened justice, are accused of asserting the hegemony of white supremacy.
This intensifying racial consciousness is closely linked to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), which gained national prominence after a series of police shootings in the 2010s and reached a fever pitch in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. While BLM began as a protest movement aimed at highlighting perceived racial injustice in policing, it quickly evolved into a broader cultural and ideological force. Its slogans, symbols, and talking points echoed and amplified the assumptions of CRT: that American institutions are irredeemably racist, that disparities equal discrimination, and that revolutionary action—not reform—is the only path to justice. The Democratic Party, the corporate media, and the culture industry all affirmed the BLM standpoint. This gave the movement cover to pursue CRT to its logical conclusion. The result was billions of dollars in damaged buildings and stolen merchandise, as well as the intimidation and perpetration of violence against white people.
The protests that erupted in the summer of 2020 were not merely spontaneous expressions of grief or outrage; they were manifestations of a deeper ideological shift. For many participants, especially those shaped by years of CRT-inflected rhetoric, the unrest represented not just protest, but restitution—even retribution. In cities across the United States, peaceful demonstrations gave way to arson, looting, and targeted attacks on symbols of perceived white or capitalist power. These acts were often rationalized—not just by fringe voices, but by some mainstream commentators—as understandable, even justifiable, expressions of historical pain. The line between political dissent and what Marx and Engels once termed primitive rebellion became increasingly blurred: acts of destruction were no longer condemned as criminal but reimagined as morally charged responses to systemic oppression.
For the record, Marx and Engels condemned this, accurately observing that primitive rebellion was counterproductive. “The ‘dangerous class,’ [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” Indeed.
BLM was an organized uprising. But street-level reparations of an individual character occur on a continual basis in America. Street-level interracial crime, particularly when committed by those cast as historical victims against those designated as historical oppressors, illustrates the dangerous inversion of moral accountability produced by grievance ideology. While overall crime in the United States is largely intraracial, violent interracial crime—especially black-on-white incidents—occurs at disproportionately high rates relative to population sizes, a fact that is often suppressed or distorted in mainstream discourse.
When it is acknowledged, it is frequently reframed through the lens of structural injustice, implicitly or explicitly rationalizing it as the understandable backlash of an aggrieved group. In such cases, acts of assault, robbery, or even murder are not merely crimes of opportunity or pathology, but are imbued with symbolic meaning—as payback for microaggressions, redlining, segregation, slavery. The perpetrator is no longer a criminal but a vessel of historical reckoning; the victim, stripped of individuality and moral standing, is recast as a deserving stand-in for ancestral guilt.
This dynamic sets justice on its head: instead of evaluating acts based on individual agency and harm, the system (and those who manipulate it) treats some perpetrators as victims of history and some victims as embodiments of systemic guilt. This not only destabilizes public safety but corrodes the moral foundation of a liberal legal order, which requires impartiality, equal treatment, and individual culpability.
The politicization of justice through the rhetoric of grievance has profound and corrosive implications for the moral and legal fabric of society. When justice is no longer tethered to individual responsibility but instead subordinated to collective blame and historical redress, it ceases to be justice in any meaningful sense. The ideological frameworks that justify disorder, theft, and violence in the name of reparation or resistance are not paths to equity; they are vehicles for revenge, often perpetrated against individuals who have committed no wrong.
By dissolving the distinction between explanation and justification, and between victimhood and vengeance, these narratives transform lawbreaking into moral action, and moral principle into tribal score-settling. It becomes blood feud. Enlightenment values— individual agency, reason, universal rights—must remain the foundation of a just society, or else we risk regressing into a world where justice is no longer blind, but guided by grievance, identity, and ideological zealotry. The modern legal system was built to transcend such tribal logic. We dismantle it at our peril.
The Hodgetwins have been posting solid memes recently. Here’s one about the left’s penchant for elevating criminals and illegal aliens to the status of saints. We saw this with the recent attempt to recollect the energy from the Summer of Love. The attempt was a failure, but the spirit is persists, and they eagerly await the next black swan moment.
From the Hodgetwins’ Facebook feed
It’s true. Today’s left—progressives, the Democratic Party, the legacy media—makes heroes of criminals and illegal aliens and sexual deviants. At first glance, this seems irrational, even cultish. It feels like madness. And indeed, some of it is. The true believers are ridiculous people. But beneath the surface lies a deeper logic. Defining deviance down—and more than that, valorizing it—serves several ideological and strategic functions.
To those who prioritize personal responsibility and the rule of law—normal people—this behavior appears absurd. But for many on the left, elevating individuals deemed marginalized by legal or political systems is a form of resistance. By valorizing criminals and illegal aliens, progressives believe they are critiquing institutions they portray as unjust. When illegal immigrants are portrayed sympathetically, for instance, progressives believe they’re exposing a dehumanizing, racist immigration regime—thereby casting immigration enforcement advocates as racists themselves.
This perspective is rooted in a broader moral framework that privileges structural explanations—abstract, academic theories—over the concrete realities of individual behavior and common sense. Progressives often interpret criminality and illegal status not as moral or legal failures, but as products of imperialism, racism, poverty, and systemic injustice. Where a rational moral worldview excuses wrongdoing only in extreme circumstances (e.g., duress or self-defense), the progressive framework casts poverty and oppression as redeeming forces. Wrongdoers become victims—and in the moral schema of the left, victims are saints. Criminals and illegal immigrants who are caught and punished become martyrs in the woke religion.
Within this worldview, lawbreakers are reframed exclusively as victims of circumstance, then elevated as moral symbols. Punishment becomes inherently unjust, and those who enforce it are branded as cruel, authoritarian, or lacking compassion. This produces a moral inversion, where transgression is reinterpreted as virtue—because it exposes systemic injustice and challenges the legitimacy of the system itself.
In this moral universe, victimhood becomes the highest form of moral authority. Those who ally with the victims are the high priests of the highest form of moral authority. Those oppressed by institutional or state—especially if they are poor, non-white, or gender-nonconforming—are believed to possess a deeper insight into truth and justice. Their suffering doesn’t just excuse their transgressions—it ennobles them. Breaking the law, crossing borders illegally, overstaying visas—these become acts of civil disobedience. Borders and laws, in this view, are not neutral frameworks but tools of oppression.
This ethos defines much of the Democratic Party coalition and the media ecosystem that sustains it. The left builds a broad political tent that includes immigrants, urban populations, and select minority groups—communities more likely to encounter criminal justice or immigration enforcement. But rather than acknowledge patterns of behavior that make individuals more likely to subject to rule enforcement, progressives argue that the rules themselves are oppressive, designed to criminalize the marginalized.
Defending and humanizing these populations serves political ends beyond moral posturing. It energizes activism, drives fundraising, and mobilizes voters. Media portrayals of sympathetic lawbreakers attract others who feel excluded or resentful—especially those who see in these stories a validation of their own failures or grievances. Each narrative becomes a weaponized anecdote, turning tragedy into ideological ammunition.
The glorification of deviance, then, becomes a strategy of political rebellion—a way of redefining justice itself. Progressives believe that the justice system isn’t truly about fairness but about maintaining control—by their enemies: conservatives, nationalists, populists, republicans, traditionalists. They see such the system as punishing the poor, policing black and brown bodies, and protecting entrenched privilege—especially white privilege. “Law and order” becomes a dog whistle, not a principle. You have heard them say this.
If the current justice system protects a historically unjust status quo, then “real” justice must be radically reimagined. In place of punishment, there must be repair (i.e., redistribution of property and wealth); instead of guilt, context and circumstance; instead of retribution, liberation! This rhetoric dominates academia and activist circles, where transgression is viewed as revelation, and the deviant cast as prophet.
This redefinition of justice reflects a deeper philosophical shift: locating moral truth not in authority derived from the popular will, law, or tradition, but in the “lived experience” of the marginalized. Those who were historically criminalized—felons, illegal immigrants, trans sex workers—are elevated not despite their deviance, but because of it. Their nonconformity becomes a sign of moral clarity. They are fetishized as saints in a secular, postmodern religion.
Senator Chris Van Hollen (Democrat) meets with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador
We saw this dynamic in the canonization of George Floyd, and again in the sympathetic portrayal of violent offenders and gang members—some even linked to groups like MS-13. These individuals are held up as symbols, challenging traditional categories of good and evil, legal and illegal, just and unjust. This is not simply a shift in tone—it is a deliberate reorientation of the moral compass, a cultural inversion where north becomes south, right becomes wrong, and deviance becomes virtue.
The purpose of redefining justice in this way is revolutionary: to deconstruct systems perceived as built on domination and to replace them with their moral antithesis. The glorification of deviance is not an accident or a misstep—it is a blueprint for a new moral order. An order that is not moral at all.
And there’s a strategic logic, too. By turning lawbreakers into martyrs, progressives generate emotionally compelling narratives that mobilize support and delegitimize the existing system. Each viral case becomes a parable—a story of injustice meant to indict the broader society. These are not individual tragedies—they are political arguments.
But this is not the revolution of the Old Left. This is a revolution from above. What appears as bottom-up idealism is top-down destabilization—enabled and encouraged by elite institutions. When traditional norms (family, gender, law, merit, nation, religion) are dismantled, society becomes disoriented and fragmented—and thus more governable by centralized bureaucratic and technocratic authority. In this view, disorder is not a bug—it’s a feature. Progressives want disorder. They want chaos.
Under the guise of liberation, powerful interests weaken the institutions that once mediated between the individual and the state—churches, families, communities. The result is an atomized, rootless individual dependent on state systems, corporate infrastructure, and managerial oversight.
The new governing class—corporate HR departments, media conglomerates, elite bureaucrats, NGO technocrats—marries progressive values with technocratic methods. The new moral language diversity, equity, and inclusion legitimizes their tools: dependency, surveillance, speech control, algorithmic governance, regulation. This system does not require liberty or self-government. In fact, it prefers citizens who are detached from stable identities—familial, religious, national, or otherwise—because such individuals are easier to mold, monitor, and manage.
Corporations don’t champion progressive causes because they are “woke” in the way the true believer is woke. They do so because it serves their interests. Labor flexibility benefits from the breakdown of family and gender norms. A population untethered from tradition is more mobile, more dependent, more exploitable. Market expansion thrives on commodified identities—every new invented gender or oppressed subculture becomes a niche consumer audience. Reputational management is easier when progressive causes obscure monopolistic practices, labor exploitation, and global entanglements.
What we’re seeing—around crime, immigration, and especially the reengineering of sex and gender norms—is part of a larger cultural project: the systematic dismantling of civilizational boundaries. Norms are what hold civilizations together. When they are disrupted, people lose their bearings. They become more susceptible to top-down redefinition of truth, morality, and reality.
In this environment, defining deviance down—or reversing it into virtue—is a way to erase inherited proven moral frameworks and replace them with new norms, not set by rational law oe tradition, but by elite decree. These decrees don’t come from voters, but from a professional class embedded in academia, bureaucracy, and transnational institutions.
This is the trajectory of post-liberal governance. Here, classical ideals like free speech, individual liberty, and rule of law are subordinated to amorphous goals like “equity,” “inclusion,” and “safety”—defined and enforced by unelected experts. And in nearly every case, these terms are turned against their original meanings. “Inclusion” becomes the justification for men entering women’s spaces. “Equity” becomes the rationale for discriminatory practices. “Safety” becomes the excuse for censorship and control.
The administrative-managerial state doesn’t rule through force. It rules through dependence, credentialism, and the illusion of moral progress. Under this regime, transgression isn’t a moral lapse—it’s a tool of transformation. Deviance is instrumentalized to centralize control and dismantle the nation-state model, particularly in the West. Indeed, the West is the chief target of deconstruction.
In this light, the glorification of deviance is not a contradiction. It is the strategy. By sowing disorder, delegitimizing traditional norms, and destabilizing civilizational institutions, progressive ideology—backed by corporate power and technocratic ambition—clears the way for a new order. One built not on law, liberty, or responsibility, but on bureaucratic control, identity politics, and permanent social flux.
What appears as moral activism is, in fact, the cultural front of a deeper systemic power shift—one aimed not at reforming society, but reprogramming it entirely.
The Black Commencement at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 23, 2017. (Source: CNN)
Imagine if taxpayer money were used to fund white affinity graduations and ceremonies at colleges and universities. It would be a scandal—a national controversy. Academics, activist groups, media outlets, and public officials would line up to condemn it as an act of racial exclusion, a ritual of white supremacy dressed in institutional respectability. And they would have a point.
So why is it acceptable for those same institutions to fund black affinity graduations?
The answer, we’re told, lies in history. White affinity events risk reinforcing racial hierarchies in a society where whiteness has long been dominant. Black affinity graduations, on the other hand, are said to offer marginalized students an affirming space—a safe space—to celebrate achievement in the face of systemic exclusion. This is a radical theory of equity: race-based remedies for race-based harm.
I know this argument. I once believed it. I don’t anymore.
This is not a moral principle. It’s an ideological commitment—one that many, probably most, Americans reject (even if they’re scared of saying so because of the backlash), one that fundamentally contradicts the American Creed, which affirms the equal moral worth of every individual and the rejection of racial double standards. It replaces the universal with the tribal, and justice with selective grievance. They call it progressives. But it’s plainly regressive.
But the deeper problem isn’t just philosophical or theoretical—it’s practical and self-reinforcing. These ceremonies don’t merely reflect a view of the past; they manufacture a story about the present. Their very conduct presupposes the permanence of racial hierarchy. That is the fatal circularity of contemporary antiracism: the black affinity ceremony is justified by the claim that racial inequality persists—and yet it enacts that inequality (separate is not equal), and does so as if racism were fixed, inevitable, and undeniable.
It’s a strange alchemy. The ritual becomes its own proof. It presumes what it claims to resist. It asserts the reality of racial division by performing it. It reifies the very hierarchy it ostensibly seeks to dismantle—by treating racial identity as entitlement and experience. One doesn’t resist racial division by engaging in it. The paradox is obnoxious. What so-called antiracist really seek is cancellation of the American Creed.
Critically, those organizing black affinity celebrations assert the exclusive right to do so. If black students organize by race, it’s celebrated as resistance. If white students did the same, it would be condemned as racism. The asymmetry is not incidental. It is the entire logic.
This is bad logic. This isn’t moral clarity—it’s moral relativism. It’s the same double standard we see in language taboos: one group may use a slur as a symbol of reclamation; another may lose their career for quoting it, even in academic context. That’s not equality. That’s power exercised along racial lines. History doesn’t justify that—it’s discrimination repackaged as social justice. It flips racial power, which remains an assertion of racial power.
This framework demands permanent grievance. It cannot allow for resolution, because resolution would negate its justification. Racism, however recoded as antiracism, needs division to validate its existence. That’s not progress. It’s ideological entrenchment through ritualized racialization.
I have said this much before, but it bears repeating: If this is inclusion, it is an inclusion that requires exclusion. If it is equity, it is equity that demands unequal treatment. If it is justice, it is the justice of group identity—not individual merit, not moral consistency, but tribal entitlement. And that’s no justice at all.
We’re not building a post-racial society with affinity ceremonies; we’re entrenching race as the central organizing principle of public life. That is not a vision of shared citizenship; it’s a roadmap for perpetual division. And that’s what progressives want.
I reject the theory—and the politics—that make this acceptable. In a constitutional republic, individuals must not be treated differently based on skin color—whether that means denying them something or granting them a privilege. This is why reparations is such an immoral and un-American proposal. If black students wish to host separate ceremonies, they may do so—just not with public funding. Taxpayer-supported events must be open to all regardless of skin color.
The dismantling of DEI is not just a policy preference—it’s a moral imperative. This is about restoring the colorblind principle at the heart of the American project: that all people are to be judged by their accomplishments and character, not by the color of their skin.
Trump is doing more than dismantling DEI. He’s stabbing at the beating heart of institutional discrimination. He rightly wondered why Harvard was giving more than 30 percent of its seats to foreigners while excluding white and Asian Americans. But the President didn’t wait for an answer. He stopped Harvard from discriminating against selected demographics by importing students by revoking Harvard’s certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), effectively barring the institution from enrolling international students.
The administration cited national security concerns and alleged insufficient transparency regarding the identities of foreign students to justify revocation. This is not cover for the real agenda. National security concerns are also part of the equation. Two birds with one stone.
Harvard responded by filing a lawsuit (of course), arguing that the revocation was retaliatory and unconstitutional, especially given the university’s opposition to certain governmental policies. What policies? Harvard accuses the Trump Administration of attempting to influence Harvard’s curriculum, governance, and the ideological perspectives of faculty and students. Harvard viewed this as an infringement on its academic independence and First Amendment rights. See how the Orwellian inversion works? Harvard uses the rhetoric of free speech to flout free speech.
Harvard is desperate to deflect attention from the very real concerns raised by the Trump Administration about institutional discrimination, campus antisemitism, and alleged coordination with the Chinese Communist Party. For it’s part, the Department of Homeland Security has accused Harvard of fostering a hostile environment and collaborating with foreign adversaries and demanded detailed records related to international students and foreign funding—reasonable inquiries in an age of cyber-espionage and ideological subversion.
More than decertification of SEVP, Harvard’s refusal to fully comply has been met with threats to revoke federal funding. I fully agree. What gives Harvard and its defenders the right to obstruct the federal government’s responsibility to protect the American people from threats to national security? If there are spies and extremists operating under the cover of academia, then Harvard isn’t just turning a blind eye—it is actively shielding those who are stealing secrets and undermining the nation from within.
Predictably, the federal district judge in the case, Allison Burroughs, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the revocation, allowing foreign students to continue their studies at Harvard while the legal proceedings unfold.
Remember when the Supreme Court told Harvard they couldn’t do the racist thing anymore? In June 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. The Court’s decision concluded that Harvard’s use of race in admissions lacked sufficiently focused and measurable objectives, unavoidably employed race in a negative manner, and involved racial stereotyping.
Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that while universities could consider how race affected an applicant’s life experiences, they could not use race as a factor in admissions decisions per se. But even this concession undercuts the foundational American principles of equality before the law and individual merit. The idea that a person’s race—even indirectly—should influence admissions decisions stands in tension with a nation built on the ideals of equal opportunity and individualism. If race is truly irrelevant to a person’s intrinsic capability and worth, then it should play no role, overt or subtle, in how educational—or any other—opportunities are distributed. A truly fair admissions system would judge applicants solely on personal achievement, character, and potential—not their racial or ethnic background.
Still, the ruling effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, prompting institutions nationwide to reevaluate their admissions processes to comply with the new legal standards. That’s a huge win for the cause of justice. Yet, in the meantime, Harvard has been effectively discriminating against white and Asian Americans by luring foreigners to their institution and enrolling them. As with the black affinity ceremonial, that’s fine—as long as taxpayers aren’t paying for it.
I know progressives who are apoplectic over this. Why would any taxpayer support giving money to a racist institution that denied opportunities for Americans? Answer: because many progressives are anti-American, and they associate white and white-adjacent citizens with Americanism. It’s the same impulse that’s fueling the return of virulent antisemitism. Anything that is oppositional to Americanism, and broadly the West—transgressing boundaries protecting children and women, Islamofascism, whatever—is coded as social justice and any resistance to it is bigotry.
It would be one thing if anti-American anti-Enlightenment ideology was relegated to the fringes of society—Antifa, climate fanatics, BLM, trans activists, and the like—but we have major colleges and universities in the United States constructing the idea systems that mean to delegitimize the West and socializing an army of professionals whose purpose it is to take these ideas and colonize and command our sense-making and policy-making institutions.
Donald Trump is right to try to stop the runaway train of institutionalized racialization. In the 1950s and 60s, this country rightly dismantled the laws and customs that segregated people by race. But instead of moving beyond identity politics, progressives reengineered it through affirmative action, DEI, and critical race theory. So-called antiracist ideologies have entrenched race-consciousness into our culture, laws, and policies—and they have to be confronted.
The Cathedral portrays Trump’s actions as racist. But if anti-racism is to have any real meaning at all, it must mean that decision-making and segregation on the basis of race is intolerable.
I’m not saying that Andrew Doyle reads my blog (clearly people do as evidenced by the thousands of annual visitors). But the wave length here is for the most part parallel and at times almost identical to arguments I have made on Freedom and Reason.
I am not nearly as well-spoken as Doyle—or the hosts of Triggernometry. I envy those who with the ability to convey ideas through speech. So if you are interested in an enlightened discussion of liberalism, and you find my essays overlong and tedious (I readily admit that they are), then this video is for you. You will understand me better if you listen to Doyle. I’m a liberal, and what Doyle argues here captures the spirit of liberalism.
I do want to qualify one of his arguments. Perhaps liberalism does not deny human instincts for retribution and vengeance. Perhaps it does not carry the utopian assumption that human nature is essentially good—that bad behavior is learned not innate. I think there is evidence that there is an animality to man (we are, after all, a primate species) and that it comes with authoritarian potential.
At the same time, both good and bad is learned. Doyle leans a bit too much on the Hobbesian premise. If we are essentially good, we are corruptible, as experience testifies to. What liberalism does assert is that, alongside emotion, as a product of natural history, there is in the human brain rational cognitive machinery that makes reason possible—and desirable. This is the Lockean premise.
AI image generated by Sora
Liberals struggle for is the right of individuals to think, speak, and write as they will, to freely associate with others, not only as a natural right, but as a humane and pragmatic approach to conflict resolution and problem solving. As much as authoritarianism observably exists in history—and even in the present—so does libertarianism.
I would not, therefore, argue as Doyle does that authoritarianism is the default position, although I do recognize that it has been the way of the world for much of human existence—and it threatens us presently. Moreover, it is not just with the Enlightenment that the authoritarian tendency is marginalized. There are examples of enlightened thinking in premodern spaces and times. However, it is with the Enlightenment that authoritarianism is recognized as universally problematic and that a worldview established on the basis of reason and tolerance affords humanity with the best way forward.
This thought is based on facts in evidence, which is why Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is so powerful: the needs it posits are determinable by science. I don’t deny that there is a human nature, but rather argue that human nature is not authoritarian by default. I also believe that human nature arguments risk mystification. Science is the counter to that problem.
One other thing. I agree wholeheartedly with Konstantin Kisin that a distinction should be made between citizens and noncitizens. If no such distinction is made, then republican government is impossible. Republicanism is the best system so far devised to sustain liberalism—to resist authoritarianism.
The rule of law that defends the principles of free and open society necessarily depends on the existence of nation-states in a world where cultures exist that do not accept individualism and liberal principles. A republic cannot long survive the incorporation of populations whose worldview is antithetical to Western Enlightenment values.
If the authoritarian is a citizen, then the republic is stuck with them. The best citizens can do is criticize the authoritarian tendency and persuade the authoritarians and others to join the liberal side. But if they are not citizens, then they can be expelled. And they should be. If they don’t want to live in a free society, then why are they here? These aren’t immigrants. They’re colonizers, and what they seek is to establish their tyranny here.
As Christopher Hitchens noted several years ago, the city only falls when the barbarians are inside the gates, and the least we can expect from patriots is that they will not invite them in, will vigorously defend the gates, and if the barbarians are inside, send them back outside.
Without borders, the gates we draw around our territories, there is no way to keep out the barbarians or expel them when get in. This is why transnationalism is an existential threat to freedom. The modern nation-state and its rules of exclusion, does not therefore contradict liberalism, but is essential for its continued existence.
Just as your family’s safety depends on walls and doors that lock and the right to self-defense should strangers break in, so should the republic lock its door to strangers. We cannot always know for sure will harm us, but we have good cause to believe that at least some will. It is better not to fuck around and find out.
In case you were unclear about the seriousness of the South African refugee crisis, the South African government recently stated that Afrikaner refugees aren’t fleeing persecution but fleeing “racial justice.” The South African president Cyril Ramaphosa called them “cowards” for escaping. Does his rhetoric trouble you? No? Let me tell you why it should.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers his remarks at the plenary session during the August 2023 BRICS summit held in Johannesburg, South Africa. He accused Israel of committing genocide. South Africa’s legislature voted to suspend diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv and shut the embassy.
What do you think “racial justice” means in the context of the torture-murder of farmers? It means the expropriation of land and organized violence against whites. It means the systematic persecution of a racial minority. Let’s not mince words: the situation in South Africa is becoming a situation of ethnic cleansing. Genocide? Too soon to tell. But that’s the path South Africa is on. Didn’t we say “Never again”? How far down the line does the world allow the racist train to travel to a genocidal destination before the engineer pulls the handle? It is forever to America’s shame that it did not act sooner to save Jews from the Holocaust.
Are readers familiar with this history? During the 1930s-1940s, the United States failed to adequately respond to the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Despite widespread reports of the atrocities in Europe, the US maintained restrictive policies and strict immigration quotas. The refusal to loosen these limits, even in the face of mounting evidence of genocide, resulted in thousands of Jews being denied entry, with many ultimately perishing in the Holocaust. President Trump has implemented strict immigration rules to reduce illegal immigration (as he should), but he has opened the door to Afrikaners who are facing peril in South Africa.
In a meeting at the White House yesterday President Donald Trump directly challenged the South African president over the violence being visited upon white farmers there. The encounter turned tense when Trump dimmed the lights and played a dramatic video compilation. Alongside scenes of white crosses in a field, each representing murdered white farmers, the video included genocidal statements from South African political figures Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma. Malema is shown leading the crowd in a chant: “Dubul’ ibhunu,” Zulu for “Shoot the Boer” or “Kill the farmer.” Sometimes Malema chants it in English—just in case the audience beyond the mob doesn’t speak Zulu. Zuma chants “Umshini Wami,” which translates to “Bring me my machine gun.”
Who are these men leading their mobs in genocidal refrains? Malema is the founder and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a far-left South African political party. Zuma, former President of South Africa (2009–2018), now heads the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party, named after the ANC’s former armed wing.
Dubul’ ibhunu has been the subject of several court cases aimed at determining whether it constitutes hate speech. Hate speech is not protected under South Africa’s constitution. In 2003, following a complaint from the Freedom Front, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) ruled that the song was hate speech. That ruling was upheld multiple times. But in 2022, the Johannesburg High Court ruled that the plaintiff (Afriforum, representing Afrikaners) failed to establish a causal link between the song and violence. The court also ruled the song did not incite hatred toward whites. The ban was lifted.
Regardless of what one thinks about hate speech laws (I don’t support them, for the record), the connection between Dubul’ ibhunu and anti-white violence appears clear. The white crosses are symbolic memorials meant to draw attention to the targeted killings of white farmers. These are not official graves, as Trump implied. Rather, they are public statements—acts of remembrance and protest. Those behind them want the world to know the statistics: a discernible pattern of violence against whites (more on that shortly).
Ramaphosa has distanced his administration from the figures in the video, insisting that their views do not represent government policy. He emphasized that crime in South Africa affects all races. This obfuscation is echoed by the legacy media. Yes, crime is rampant in South Africa—but the violence targeting whites is not typical street crime. The attacks on white farmers, largely by black assailants, have been ongoing for decades.
The South African government and the American media have deliberately downplayed this reality. Trump’s intervention forced it onto the front pages. The media’s reflexive dismissal of Trump’s “unfounded claims” only reinforces his charge that the Fourth Estate is peddling fake news.
While the media desperately spins reality, Trump once again bypasses them, prompting the public to investigate for themselves. And what they’re discovering confirms that indeed white South Africans are being persecuted in their ancestral homeland of nearly 400 years. A 2017 homicide study found that 87 percent of murdered farmers were white—though whites make up only 7.3 percent of the national population. A 2024 study raised that figure to 95 percent. Of the 635 farm murders recorded from 2014 to 2024—an average of 63 per year—the vast majority were white victims.
The American legacy media has pushed anti-white sentiment for over fifteen years. They can’t afford to let that frame be challenged—not just because it risks their credibility (long gone), but because they’re advancing an agenda they cannot afford to derail.
They tell you that most victims of crime in South Africa are black, killed by other blacks. That’s true. But the same is true of the US, where more than 50 percent—and always a plurality—of murderers are black, though blacks constitute just 13 percent of the population. And since most murderers are men, that means 6 percent of the population accounts for at least half of all murders and robberies. Acknowledging this is taboo. It’s “racist.” White supremacists cite these stats—so they must be invalid? White supremacists also breathe air.
Are progressives at all curious why this is the case? Do Black Lives Matter? That’s the deeper issue, isn’t it? Why are black people killing each other in such large numbers? They can’t explore that because it would mean progressive urban policy has been a failure—or, perhaps worse, that it’s working as intended. Are readers aware that 40 percent of black Americans live in urban centers run overwhelmingly by Democrats? That’s down from 57 percent in 1990. The exodus of more affluent black families to the suburbs has only worsened inner-city conditions.
In America, a white person is far more likely to be killed by a black person than vice versa. Per capita, a black person is 12.5 times more likely to kill a white person, and 20 times more likely to rob one. Why does the rare case of a white-on-black killing make front-page news, while black-on-white murders are met with silence—or crowdfunding for the perpetrator? The same is true of mass murder. The popular image is a white lone-wolf racist. In reality, the typical mass murderer is an inner-city gangbanger. These killings are common in Democrat-run cities, but the media doesn’t cover them. The press is run by allies of the Democratic Party. This same press does not tell you that there are no racial disparities in lethal police encounters. They led you to believe the opposite. So who are the real white supremacists? I’d argue it’s those in power who maintain urban poverty and deny black Americans access to better models for success.
If you think anti-white sentiment doesn’t motivate black-on-white crime or drive the media frame, you’re in denial. What we are witnessing is street-level reparations, stoked by academic and media rhetoric: “All whites benefit from white privilege.” “All whites are racist.” “America is a white supremacist nation.” These mantras manufacture resentment—and resentment drives action. A double-standard attempts to conceal the consequences of rhetoric. BLM burns a police station? “Mostly peaceful protests.” Rioters loot stores, destroy cities, kill people—response? “But January 6!” Meanwhile, black-on-white crime is met with silence. Whites and police are portrayed as threats to black lives, even though most whites live in the suburbs and vote Republican—the party not responsible for urban policy.
This pattern holds for antisemitic rhetoric as well. Jews are painted as oppressors of Arabs, which, predictably, results in violence. Two Israeli Embassy employees, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, were murdered yesterday outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC. The shooter, Elias Rodriguez, shouted “Free, free Palestine.” Witnesses heard it. I watched the video. During his arrest, Rodriguez declared, “I did this for Gaza.”
This ideology loaded the gun. White supremacy? No—leftist antisemitism. Rodriguez, it turns out, donated to pro-Palestine campaigns and is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. This is what the left calls “propaganda of the deed”—violent acts inspired by “propaganda of the word.” The word arms the deed. Rodriguez had no prior criminal record but posted radical content: “De@th 2 Amerikkka,” “Bring the war home.” A manifesto linked to him reads: Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home.
It was not only a matter of time before this rhetoric killed Jews—it already has. October 7. Now this. “Free, free Palestine” is code for the extermination of Jews. “From the river to the sea” means a Palestine without Jews—despite their indigenous presence in the region for thousands of years.
I’m not saying we should censor antisemitic protests (though we should revoke visas for foreigners who participate in them). I’m a free speech absolutist (for citizens). I’m calling for counter-speech—challenging speech that motivates violence. The left either participates in antisemitism or fails to denounce it. History tells us where that leads. The murders of Lischinsky and Milgrim confirm the rising threat of leftwing antisemitism.
This is the nature of all propaganda of the word. Two attempts have been made on Trump’s life, inspired by rhetoric comparing him to Hitler. People believe absurdities—and some act on them. That’s how you get dead Jews and assassination attempts a leading candidate for the highest office in the world.
In his 1886 work Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” With this line, Nietzsche expressed his deep distrust of collective behavior. His goal was not merely to challenge moral systems, but to uncover the irrational and often dangerous cultural forces that uphold them—forces shaped more by instinct and emotion than by reason. This is the essence of propaganda of the word—ideas that spread not by argument, but by emotional contagion. Today, we see this dynamic in real time. There have already been two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, each motivated by rhetoric that compares him to Hitler. When people absorb dangerous absurdities as truth, some inevitably act on them. This is how antisemitic violence and political assassination attempts happen.
Thus Nietzsche’s warning about the madness of crowds remains relevant. Mass movements are rarely guided by critical thought; they run on conformity, emotion, and resentment. The individual reasons—the mob reacts. And when ideology casts certain groups as permanent oppressors—whether whites, Jews, or any other—violence is never far behind. The 2020 riots showed how quickly emotion and mythology can ignite chaos. Propaganda doesn’t just persuade; it mobilizes. And what it mobilizes is often fury.
Legacy media is complicit in all this. They compare Trump to Hitler. They equate MAGA hats with Klan hoods. Afrikaners are similarly vilified. Inferior cultures are excused by blaming their failures on more successful neighbors. Demagogues say that success comes at the expense of others. There needs to be a racial reckoning. Yes, the left has the right to say these things. And yes, we have the right to respond. Speech isn’t dangerous—people are. That’s why we challenge ideas. Bad ideas inspire bad actions. You’re supposed to doubt that anti-white and antisemitic rhetoric drives violence. But I’ll show in a forthcoming essay that it does. None of this is accidental. The left wants this outcome.
If nothing is done, South Africa will do to whites what the Arab world did to Jews: strip them of rights and drive them out. There’s been a 97 percent decline in the Jewish population of the Arab world since the 1960s—nearly a million down to about 26,600 today. Israel, the US, and other Western nations became safe havens. South Africans need similar refuge now. The US has stepped up, but Europe must follow. The situation is deteriorating fast. Afrikaners are only 7 percent of the population—and they face a campaign to eliminate them.
Trump’s administration won’t get credit for acting, but they saw this coming. The President’s instincts were right. The media called his confrontation with Ramaphosa an “ambush.” But it was necessary. The world had to know. Did Trump get a few things wrong? Yes. But he got the matter directionally right. Beyond humanitarian aid, the administration has directed agencies to halt cooperation with the upcoming G20 in South Africa. Sanctions may follow. This is now a diplomatic flashpoint.
The message for Americans and Europeans? Anti-white hysteria has consequences. The Democrats push it. So do the elites in Europe. They pursue mass immigration and the managed decline of Western civilization. They call resistance to these developments “racism.” But defending whites in America, England, and South Africa is not about racism. It’s about recognizing that identity politics is part of a global strategy to disorder the West. We didn’t want this fight. But we have no choice but to engage it.
Kasper Juul Eriksen, his wife Savannah, and their four children (Source of image)
I want to close with a case that has recent brought to my attention: a Danish man named Kasper Juul Eriksen detained by ICE. In April 2025, Eriksen was taken into custody by US immigration authorities during what was meant to be a routine citizenship interview in Memphis, Tennessee (this is where my wife and I had our routine citizenship interviews).
A legal resident of the United States since 2013, Eriksen was detained due to an alleged paperwork error from 2015. He is now being held in an immigration detention facility in Louisiana. With four children and no current household income, the family is seeking his release and calling for support from the community and lawmakers. The case has raised concerns about immigration enforcement practices and the impact of administrative errors on law-abiding residents. I agree that he should be released.
But something is conspicuously missing in the reporting. The controversy over the Afrikaners who sought refuge in the United States was contrasted with the refusal of the Trump administration to grant asylum to other alleged refugees. The Afrikaners were white, critics said; the others were black and brown. The implication was that Trump’s policy is racist, favoring whites and disfavoring nonwhites. But here is a Danish man, as white as can be, and ICE took him into custody—and has kept him there for a month. The fact that he was treated this way contradicts the thesis that the present policy favors whites over nonwhites.
Why aren’t we talking about Alejandro Mayorkas? Serving in senior positions under both President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, Mayorkas played a pivotal role in shaping US immigration policy in the twenty-first century—and not for the better. His approach to immigration has been praised by progressives. But in the populist world, Mayorkas is a villain, an immigrant who played a major role in advancing the managed decline of the American Republic and diminishing the quality of life of its citizens. For his efforts to deconstruct the national community, Mayorkas was impeached in 2024, making him the first cabinet secretary to be impeached in nearly 150 years. The Democrat-controlled Senate dismissed his impeachment to avoid a trial that risked shining a spotlight on Mayorkas’ anti-American agenda.
In this essay, I detail the role Mayorkas played in the project of managed decline, highlight the position of leading Democrat figures on the question of immigration, i.e., the open articulation of a desire for demographic replacement and the reordering of national life, and the populist response to what is plainly a globalist agenda.
Alejandro Mayorkas (AI generated image by Sora)
Under President Obama, Mayorkas served first as Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In that role, which he held from 2009 to 2013, he was instrumental in the development and implementation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program announced in 2012 that allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to remain and work legally. Bypassing Congress through executive action, DACA became a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s immigration policy. Mayorkas is credited with managing the program’s rapid rollout and implementation.
In 2013, Mayorkas was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where he served until 2016. During this period, he supported the expansion of executive actions on immigration, including an attempted expansion of DACA and a new program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA). DAPA was ultimately blocked by the courts (as I have argued in recent essays, I don’t think courts should be involved in this, but the outcome was a good one). Mayorkas also helped coordinate enforcement priorities to focus on criminals and recent border crossers, rather than broader interior enforcement—a stance that foreshadowed the Biden administration’s policies.
Biden nominated Mayorkas to serve as Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) in December 2020, making him the first immigrant to hold the position. Mayorkas had served on the board of HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), an organization (on of many faith-based NGOs) focused on refugee protection and resettlement, resigning from the board upon his nomination. His tenure at DHS saw record levels of illegal immigration at the southern border, straining immigration courts, which were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of aliens coming before their benches.
His admirers tell us that Mayorkas tried to walk a tightrope between enforcing border laws and fulfilling the administration’s promises of what he and the President characterized as a more humane immigration system. But the premise is false. Mayorkas ended several Trump-era policies, including the Remain in Mexico program, and attempted to replace them with new asylum regulations that emphasized “fairness” and speed—that is, importing as many foreigners to America as possible. He rolled out humanitarian parole programs for nationals from countries like Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela. He engineered the end of Title 42, a public health policy that allowed for swift expulsions at the border.
Republicans accused Mayorkas of failing to maintain operational control of the border, correctly observing that his policies encouraged illegal crossings and endangered national security. In 2024, the Republican-controlled House voted to impeach Mayorkas on charges of “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and breach of public trust. The articles of impeachment cited his handling of border security, use of prosecutorial discretion, and misrepresentations to Congress. This marked the first impeachment of a cabinet official since 1876.
However, the Democratic-controlled Senate dismissed the charges without proceeding to a full trial, citing the absence of constitutional grounds. One suspects that what was really at issue was the problem of discovery. A Senate trial would have requiring bring evidence otherwise bear, and Democrats did not want Americans to learn about Biden’s plan for a transformed America. Democrats argued that the impeachment was a misuse of the impeachment process to target policy disagreements rather than actual misconduct—this in the face of Mayorkas throwing open the southern border of the United States to millions of foreigners, many of whom were gang members and hardened criminals. It was a smokescreen. The corporate state media dutifully stuffed the case down the memory hole.
Mayorkas isn’t a maverick on this issue. In recent years, several high-profile Democratic leaders, including Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer, and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have increasingly framed immigration not only as a humanitarian and moral imperative but also as a strategic necessity for America’s long-term demographic and economic health. Their arguments explicitly link immigration to an aging population, declining birth rates, and labor shortages. Rather than embracing traditional natalist policies, which encourage higher native birth rates, Democrats articulate a philosophy that positions immigration as the key to what they characterize as demographic renewal and national vitality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Mayorkas often emphasized the idea that the US immigration system should be seen as a source of strength, not disorder. In various speeches and interviews, he argued that immigrants bring cultural dynamism, energy, and innovation to the nation—attributes he sees as essential to sustaining America’s global leadership. He also highlighted the economic dimension, noting that immigrants fill critical labor gaps and contribute to industries suffering from workforce shortages, especially in agriculture, healthcare, and technology. What he didn’t highlight is the fact that labor shortages can be met by native Americans who are idled by urban social policy and drive up wages for those with strong attachment to the labor market.
Mayorkas’ rhetoric is based on the ideological assertion that the United States is at its core a “nation of immigrants,” and that embracing this identity is not only a moral stance but also a pragmatic one. As I have documented on this platform, this ideology roots in the cultural pluralist and transnationalist arguments of urban-based cosmopolitan intellectuals dating from the early twentieth century and the industrial class they served. Their arguments have played a key role in undermining the dynamic of assimilation and integration necessary for national integrity. As I have argued before, and soon will again, the notion of America is a “nation of immigrants“ is nonsensical, since the vast majority of Americans are native to the country.
Senator Chuck Schumer articulated the replacement plan explicitly in 2022, calling on Congress to “welcome immigrants” in order to “replenish our population” and counteract declining birth rates. Acknowledging the anxieties around border security, Schumer argued that America must nonetheless find a way to balance enforcement with generosity. In Schumer’s view, immigration reform is not just about fixing a broken system; it’s about securing the country’s economic future in a time of demographic contraction. This mirrors a broader shift in the Democratic establishment, where immigration is increasingly defended as an engine for population sustainability and long-term growth.
Hillary Clinton recently took this argument a step further by openly criticizing the growing natalist movement in populist circles, which calls for government support to encourage higher native birth rates. In a widely discussed speech, Clinton rejected the notion that America’s demographic crisis can—or should—be solved through such policies. She emphasized that immigration provides a more immediate, pluralistic, and realistic solution to population decline. Clinton warned that natalism, particularly when wrapped in ethno-nationalist rhetoric (her characterization), risks veering into exclusionary or reactionary politics. In contrast, she portrayed immigration as a pathway to diversity and openness, which strengthens America’s relevance on the world stage.
Clinton’s argument is bound up with the history of eugenics, a progressive program she attempts to attribute to such populist figures as Vice-President JD Vance and entrepreneur Elon Musk. In so many words, she is claiming that natalists are attempting to stem the decline in the white population by promoting child birth. But is this not plainly the goal of replacing Americans with black and brown immigrants? Moreover, it’s not only whites who are too numerous for this crowd. Democrats have ghettoized blacks, segregated them from the more affluent, idled them (replacing their labor with immigrants), made them dependent on government, and disorganized their families, especially by removing fathers from the home. And while black women still have higher fertility rates than white women, the rates are declining for blacks, as well. What Democrats don’t want to see is rising fertility rates and especially a return to the nuclear family and empowered communities among working class native Americans, black and white. The reality is that it’s the Democrats who are the eugenicists—and they’ve updated the strategy for the age of globalism and identity politics.
The birth control movement in the United States has long intersected with eugenic thinking, explicitly so in its early twentieth-century phases. Margaret Sanger, a leading figure in this movement and founder of the organization that would become Planned Parenthood, advocated for contraception not only as a means of empowering women but also as a tool for improving what she called “social health.” She embraced eugenics believing that limiting the reproduction of those deemed “unfit” would benefit society. Sanger’s involvement with the Negro Project in the 1930s has drawn criticism for reflecting a racially paternalistic approach, although it involved collaboration with black leaders who supported birth control access as a form of racial uplift.
While some have emphasized her efforts targeting black Americans, Sanger and other eugenicists were focused more broadly on reducing fertility among poor and working-class populations across racial lines. Eugenics dovetailed with broader anxieties about degeneracy, poverty, and social order. While many industrialists supported mass immigration for its economic benefits—particularly cheap labor—eugenicists were often opposed to immigration, fearing that it would dilute the genetic stock of the nation.
A convergence of interests played out in the 1924 Immigration Act that restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and prepared the way for America’s golden years. Unlike progressives who embraced technocratic solutions to social problems, the populist push for immigration restriction was driven by concerns about wages, national identity, and social cohesion. However, these combined forces pushed immigration restrictions across the line. Today, progressives have reconciled mass immigration and eugenics through a strategy that pushes down fertility rates for native Americans and replaces them with foreign workers.
It must be remembered that progressivism from its inception has been characterized by expertise, scientism (a religious-like faith in science), and social reform to improve society, i.e., to advance the technocratic project. Many progressives embraced ideas about “scientific” approaches to social problems, including education, poverty, and public health. Eugenics fit into this framework as a form of “social improvement” through controlling reproduction. Margaret Sanger identified with many progressive ideals—especially public health, social reform, and women’s rights. She believed birth control could help reduce poverty and improve social conditions. Like many progressives, she was influenced by eugenic thinking, which was widely accepted in reform circles as a legitimate science at the time. At the same time, corporations depend on cheap labor to maximize surplus value, and that means disorganizing labor to prevent an empowered working class that would agitate for higher wages.
Corporate opposition to democratic accountability fiercely targeted populism, while progressivism was seen as a more palatable, even useful, reform movement from the perspective of big business. Progressivism’s focus on expert regulation and social order meshed with corporate interests in managing capitalism’s challenges and staving off revolutionary change. Populism, which arose in the late twentieth century from the struggles of small farmers, laborers, and small business owners, was explicitly hostile to the concentration of corporate power. Populists saw large corporations—particularly railroads, banks, and monopolies—as exploitative forces that threatened the livelihoods and autonomy of ordinary people. Their political agenda called for radical reforms such as breaking up monopolies, empowering labor unions, and implementing direct democratic controls like initiatives and referendums. These demands directly challenged the power structures and profit models of big business, prompting fierce corporate resistance.
In contrast, progressivism emerged in the early twentieth century among a different social base—urban middle-class professionals, reform-minded politicians, and organic intellectuals serving big government and corporate interest—who believed that social problems could be addressed through expert governance, regulation, and scientific management. Progressives generally sought to manage corporate power rather than limit it, indeed even entrench bureaucratic logic. Many in the corporate world found this technocratic approach compatible with their interests, as it aimed to contain social unrest and create a more predictable business environment without threatening the fundamental structures of industrial capitalism. This meant that while progressives pushed reforms, they worked within the existing capitalist order, sometimes even partnering with corporate leaders to implement changes that could strengthen the system overall.
Thus, progressivism represented a reform movement that sought to humanize and stabilize capitalism through expertise and regulation, whereas populism posed a more direct, grassroots challenge to corporate power and economic inequality. This is how you can see a split among progressives, such as those who supported immigration restrictions and those, such as Horace Kallen, who opposed them. When it came to immigration restrictions, the progressives were split. Populist opposition to mass immigration was much more strident and unified. Progressives have been unified in a strategy that marginalized the native-born working class via globalization, off-shoring good-paying value added jobs white replacing native workers with immigrant labor. Ghettoization of blacks, the destruction of labor unions, and open borders were accomplished during the Great Society, when progressive Democrats were the hegemonic power in the Imperial Capitol.
President Biden, who continues the progressive tradition, consistently echoes the themes of his comrades Mayorkas, Schumer, and Clinton. Running for the Democratic Party nomination to run against President Trump, Biden called for immigrants to surge to the border. His administration’s rhetoric emphasized “a secure and humane immigration system” that supports America’s economic needs. In speeches and policy rollouts, Biden has spoken about immigrants as essential contributors to the nation’s cultural fabric and workforce development. His administration promoted pathways for legal immigration and temporary labor programs—often citing demographic trends as justification.
Together, these leaders express a coherent philosophy, one already obvious in their policies and actions: that immigration is not just about compassion or inclusion (not for the sake of these things per se, of course)—it is integral to the survival and renewal of the American project in an era of shrinking birth rates and global competition, challenges progressives engineered and desire. Where others see immigration as a threat to national identity or stability, they argue it is the very means by which the United States can adapt, lead, and thrive lead in the twentieth century.
Indeed, others do see immigration as a threat. And they’re right. From a populist and nationalist standpoint, the progressive vision of immigration as a “solution” to demographic and economic decline is not a humanitarian necessity but a continuation of a globalist agenda that undermines the foundations of democratic self-determination, national cohesion, and working-class security. Mass immigration is not a neutral policy lever—it’s a force that reshapes the cultural and economic landscape of the country in ways that serve elite interests while marginalizing ordinary citizens.
Large-scale immigration, especially when rapid and poorly integrated, erodes the shared culture, language, norms, and values that bind a nation together. While the US has a long history of immigration (America is hardly alone in this), the sheer scale and pace of modern migration, coupled with an emphasis on multiculturalism rather than assimilation, is fragmenting national identity. Instead of a melting pot, mass immigration produces parallel societies within nations, ethnic enclaves and racial ghettos, culturally disorganizing the nation and undermining social trust, particularly in working-class communities where the changes wrought by mass immigration are most visible and most acutely felt.
Mass immigration functions as a downward pressure on wages and job security, especially for native-born workers without college degrees, impacting native black and brown families the most. Immigration is not an economic lifeline but a labor-market manipulation tool that benefits corporations by increasing the supply of cheap labor and weakening workers’ bargaining power. That’s what Democrats mean by global competition: pitting workers around the world in competition. That’s free trade. Wages remain stagnant because employers can tap into a constant stream of new, more vulnerable workers. There’s no compassion among Democrats here. If they were compassionate, they would think first of the American worker. Instead, in the words of Hillary Clinton, the American worker belongs in a basket of deplorables.
The populist argument dovetails with a broader critique of globalization, the coordinated project by economic and political to detach capital and labor from national obligations. Just as globalization offshores factories and hollows out industrial towns, immigration is a strategy of on-shoring labor surplus—importing low-wage workers who compete with the domestic labor force and strain public services. In both cases, the working class is asked to bear the costs of elite-driven policies, while being told these changes are inevitable, necessary, or virtuous. When American object, they are smeared as nativists, racists, and xenophobes.
The populist position emphasizes democracy accountability and national sovereignty. Mass immigration levels and policies have been imposed from above, without meaningful consent from the electorate. The political class—especially in major cities and global institutions—has become detached, or more precisely protected in the gated communities, from the real-world consequences of immigration in local communities. All this fuels resentment and distrust, not just toward the policies themselves but toward the broader system that implements them.
From this perspective, the progressive call to solve population decline with immigrants rather than by rebuilding domestic family formation is seen as a rejection of national continuity. Rather than invest in policies that help Americans start families—affordable housing, better wages, stable jobs—the corporate state prefers a demographic replacement strategy. Replacement is dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory, but, as we plainly see, replacement of the native population with foreign labor in America (and across Europe) is the explicit goal. Democrats are emboldened to say the quiet part out loud. And they paid dearly for it in 2024.
In a recent essay I asked: what meaning does citizenship, culture, or national identity really have? The same rhetorical question can be asked here. If a nation’s population can simply be swapped out to serve GDP growth, what is the meaning of citizenship, culture, or national identity? At its core, the populist-nationalist critique of immigration is not driven by hostility to outsiders but by a sense that the American working class is being systematically displaced and ignored—culturally, economically, and politically—in service of a vision that prioritizes diversity, markets, and transnational flows over cultural rootedness, national survival, popular sovereignty.
In this light, allowing Alejandro Mayorkas to quietly leaves his role as one of the major players in weakening America’s national community is part of the project to dissimulate the managed decline of the American Republic. Mayorkas was not among the several preemptively pardoned by President Biden as he left office. He’s fair game. Where are congressional Republicans on this? It is not enough that President Trump has reduced illegal border crossings to a trickle. It is not enough—if federal courts will allow it—that he deports many of the millions Mayorkas allowed to walk into our country. Those who betrayed America must be held accountable for their treason. Biden doesn’t have long to live. But Mayorkas looked healthy enough to me when he left office. Where is he now? Republicans need to establish his whereabouts and call him before the nation to answer for his deeds.
freedom and reason 
