In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx writes, “Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge … a period of transformation by its consciousness.”
I think about this quote when people get hysterical over something Donald Trump posts or says. What they’re really objecting to is what he does. But instead of arguing about direction and policy (that would give the game away, presuming they even grasp what’s going on), they dwell on his “mean tweets.” Here, they read his posts through a false frame of incompetence or malevolence. Every new post the President makes is more evidence that the man is an authoritarian or in cognitive decline—this coming from those who deny the authoritarianism of the previous administration or the evidence that Joe Biden’s brain is scrambled.
These are people who just a few months ago condemned the Catholic Church for the practice of exorcism and its positions on homosexuality and reproductive rights. Now the Pope is the de facto leader of the Democratic Party. By contrast, Trump is the worst possible human because he criticizes a man who says that he’s Christ’s vicar on Earth.
My point, which I expressed in a recent Facebook post, is simply this: Let’s not judge prominent figures by what they say. We can see what they’re doing. Let’s judge them on that. However, I hastened to add in that post, you can’t believe what progressives say, anyway. “Trump burned food to starve hungry people.” You mean the 800-thousand-dollar worth of expired food in a Dubai warehouse? What was a small amount of spoiled items needing disposal is taken as proof of the man’s cruel nature. “Trump defunded Catholic Charities.” So now you want tax dollars to flow to religious organizations? Misrepresentations and hypocrisy mark the progressive mentality.
I concluded that post with this piece of advice: “Stop watching CNN and MSNOW and deprogram yourself.”
A question was put to me in a comment: Are cable television viewers the only people in need of programming? Lord no. Not just CNN and MSNBC, but also the “America First” or “woke right” crowd—Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Dave Smith, etc. Fox News is another outlet from which people should disengage, albeit it doesn’t quite fit the pattern I’m describing. The Murdock family pursues controlled opposition as a marketing strategy (which has proved wildly successful). CNN and MSNOW are worse. And Fox News fired Carlson.
There are many other belief systems people should get away from: Scientology; gender identity doctrine (and postmodernist ideologies more broadly, critical race theory, post-colonialism, etc.); the Red-Green Alliance; scientism; and others. Some of these weave into the progressive discourse, especially postmodernism and scientism. All of them disrupt a man’s ability to reason properly. The mentality expressed there is cult-like.
The problem that has concerned me of late is the intersection of the progressive propaganda found on cable networks and in the streets (also present in Europe) and the far-right Judeophobic crowd. While there is antisemitism present in some progressive arguments, much of what passes for left-wing ideology today originates in transnationalist ideology. This is the source of popular self-loathing in America. The “America First” crowd is more obviously driven by loathing of Jews.
However, while there are real differences (gender ideology being a key example), the convergence is troubling. It results in false equivalencies—the paradigm: rhetoric reducing preemptive war in Iran to the logic that led the US into the Second Gulf War. The conspiracy here is that Israel directs US foreign policy. That the old cabalistic theory of Jewish control finds purchase today on the left is an expression of brainwashing. That ancient history appears intrinsic to far-right tendencies.
I wrote that Facebook post out of frustration after a phone conversation the previous evening in which nearly every “fact” presented came from CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS. What frustrated me was that, when claims were challenged, the counterevidence was dismissed—even after I provided sources. This wasn’t the first time I’ve had to push back on these claims in conversations with this individual. The road we travel together is well-worn at this point.
The attitude feels cult-like, which is why I used the term “deprogram” in that post (I also use it in essays on this platform). I recognize that the term is objectionable, but it is what it is. I cannot be hampered by offense-taking.
What was particularly striking to me was how, during the conversation, the status of the pope was elevated to the point that the person argued the government should fund Catholic charities—despite having historically opposed any mixing of church and state. The shift was sudden and, frankly, irrational.
A revealing aspect of the back-and-forth was when the person became offended by my attempt to explain the phenomenon of programmed sophistry (I did not use the term “deprogramming” in that instance, but I suppose the implication was obvious enough). I pointed out that the person had earlier in the conversation described Trump voters as “crazy” and “embarrassing.” Real anger was expressed there. When I reminded the individual that I had voted for Trump, the person apologized. But I explained that the reason I even noted it was not because I was offended by the characterization. I was talking about cult-like thinking and programming. I wasn’t mounting an ad hominem attack, but providing an analysis.
Moreover, I explained that I’m not offended by ad hominem attacks even when I note them. When the petition was circulated to get me fired for “racist” and “transphobic” content on my platform, I was not concerned with being called names (I expected to be smeared), but whether the administration at my university would act on the petition. I recognize offense-taking among intelligent people as largely a rhetorical strategy.
The conversation was still on my mind when I awoke the next morning, so I penned that Facebook post sitting in the parking lot waiting for my wife to finish physical therapy. (She recently fractured her tibia and had the meniscus repaired. She is still hobbled, but recovering. It’s a slow and painful process.)
Phenomena like switch-flipping and offense-taking point to a deeper, entrenched problem. As I noted in that post, only recently, progressives were condemning the pope for the Church’s practice of exorcism and its positions on homosexuality and reproductive rights; now he’s treated as a legitimate moral authority. Similarly, many Democrats suddenly abandoned their previous positions on Iran, mass immigration, deportations, and voter integrity, among other things, when Trump became president. Remember how Democrats signaled refusal to take “Trump’s vaccine” and then scolded conservatives for refusing it out of concern for its safety?
George Orwell describes the phenomenon of switch-flipping in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the technique of rectification (see The Party Flips the Switch: Compulsory Misgendering and the Technique of Rectification). This works because of conditioning. Recall what Orwell describes as the “Two-Minute Hate” ritual organized mainly around the ominous figure of Emmanuel Goldstein (if you haven’t read the novel, you must). Such rituals train the public in irrationalism. The progressive strategy is on the nose. Trump is the Goldstein figure in the real world. Hate rituals short-circuit objectivity.
The problem is both epistemological and ontological. The epistemic flaw with progressivism is that it operates more on what bloodsport debaters (see Andrew Wilson) call “vibes,” i.e., emotional responses, than on facts and reason. Such irrationalism is shaped by long-term ideological conditioning. Without critical reflection, people become resistant to contrary evidence, with facts subordinated to irrational sentiment and revisionism.
The ontological issue is the underlying worldview: the foundational assumptions themselves are either flawed or unsubstantiated. Here, there is a failure to interrogate presuppositional thinking. We see this in debates over ethics and rights, where the progressive operates from a consequentialist standpoint shaped by installed preferences, rather than from an objective moral position. For the far right, the appeal is to God, but they have examined the matter only superficially. They decontextualize scripture.
The consequence of all this is that people believed to be wrong are bad people, and because they are bad, they must also be wrong. Jürgen Habermas’ ideal speech situation is undermined. Opportunities for self-reflection are missed. I personally experience this as a question repeatedly put to other people (and sometimes to me directly): “What happened to Andy?”
The phenomenon explains why the charge that the SPLC has exaggerated or manufactured an image of a fundamentally racist America is not seriously considered but instead dismissed outright as a conspiracy to delegitimize the SPLC or rationalized in some nonsensical way (such as the SPLC paid informants to keep track of racists). Such thought-stopping counters the evidence that the SPLC funded leaders of white supremacist organizations that fronted the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which Biden used to launch his 2020 campaign, and that the FBI used to harass conservatives. Manufacturing hate is central to progressive strategy. It is not that the agenda is incoherent, but that the public shouldn’t understand it.
We see this also in the denial that mass immigration is a political-economic and electoral strategy to suppress wages and secure an effective one-party state. We see it in the portrayal of the Justice Department going after those who manufactured the Russia collusion and other hoaxes and waged lawfare against Trump and associates as “retribution,” where the rule of law metamorphosizes into an expression of authoritarianism. (Our man Orwell called all this.)
I first wrote about concerns with the SPLC in 2018 (see yesterday’s essay), the same year I began what I described in essays on my platform as my own process of self-deprogramming. That’s the same year I started writing about mass immigration (my trip to Europe that summer jarred me). That got me reexamining my thinking about criminal justice and gender. By the end of 2020, I was in a different place. That’s what happened to me.
I was wrong about a lot of things because I had been working from a problematic worldview, not because of CNN and legacy media and mass culture more broadly—thanks to Noam Chomsky and other critics of the corporate media, Antonio Gramsci’s critique of ideological hegemony, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s exposé on the Culture Industry, I have always understood mass media and popular culture to be propaganda—but because of socialization in graduate school, reinforced by working in the academic environment (to state the obvious, progressivism is woven into the warp and weft of higher education). I had ceased to be a fully independent thinker. It’s embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing as it would be had I never gone down the rabbit hole.
As I have explained in previous essays, I was able to escape all that because of my early grounding in liberalism and scientific reasoning. The tension between Enlightenment principles and corporatist ideology provided the exit point. Not everybody is so fortunate, which is why I lean into the deprogramming piece. Frankly, the use of that language is more for those trying to understand what’s wrong with people rather than those in need of deprogramming. I am not optimistic that anybody who needs it will seek it out. Not everybody shares my biography.
What prompted my transformation beyond the shock of the aftermath of the migrant crisis (which really isn’t over) was the Democratic Party abandoning reality and the working class, and the Republican Party (if only partially) reclaiming its roots in Lincolnesque ideas and the American System (which the RINOs are trying to derail). I was left behind. That put everything in stark relief. When only a few things I had been sure of collapsed under critical examination, my worldview fell apart. This is typical of the experience of those who have been deprogrammed.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t regret this not happening sooner. I would have been a lot happier. Progressive ideology is an emotional drag. Trying to maintain irrational beliefs is heavy lifting.
freedom and reason 