Author: The FAR Platform

More videos and witness accounts of Alex Pretti—the man shot to death by ICE officers in Minneapolis—obstructing federal law enforcement operations in the weeks before his fatal encounter, have emerged. What they confirm is that Pretti was not only a foot soldier for the transnational corporate project to undermine immigration control, but also an instantiation of the suicidal altruism that is motivating true believers to manufacture the circumstances that potentially lead to their own deaths. (To understand the corporate state project, see The Politics of Disaster Capitalism and Revealing the Great and Powerful Oz. Alex Pretti is Toto Pulling Back the Curtain.)

America may be witnessing the emergence of a destructive phenomenon known as suicide contagion. That contagion is what the insurrectionists in rebellion against the American Republic seek is suggested by the glorification of Pretti by progressives and the corporate media, including dwelling on career in a helping profession (Pretti was an ICU nurse) and the distribution of a digitally altered photograph of Pretti making the man more attractive to an audience who fell in love with Luigi Mangione, the assassin of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson. Just as Democrats recruit emotionally dysregulated and mentally ill individuals to their cause, they valorize their acts of violence and encourage them to obstruct law enforcement operations with their bodies. (On the popular culture front, Bruce Springsteen, aping the style of Bob Dylan, released yesterday the protest song “Streets of Minneapolis.”)

Suicide contagion refers to the phenomenon whereby exposure to suicide—through personal relationships, media coverage, or community events—increases the likelihood of suicidal behavior among others, particularly vulnerable individuals. It operates through social learning and identification processes, where human primates model behavior they observe, reinterpret suicide as a viable response to distress and situations, or experience heightened emotional resonance after a highly publicized or local suicide. Contagion effects are strongest among the young and within tightly connected social networks (over-integration), and they are amplified by romanticized or sensationalist media portrayals. This is popularly known as the Werther effect, so named after Goethe’s 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

In my essay Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism, I leveraged the insights of the brilliant French sociologist Émile Durkheim and his typology of suicide to identify a growing phenomenon I identify as suicidal altruism. In that essay, my subject was Renée Good, the woman who put herself in a position to die violently by interfering with ongoing federal law enforcement operations and, then, when told by authorities to get out of her vehicle, instead pointed her SUV at a police officer and mashed the accelerator, forcing an ICE officer to use defensive lethal force resulting in her death. Instead of condemnation of her actions, progressive voices elevated her to the position of martyr by focusing on motherhood and her creative endeavors (she was a poet). In this essay, I tie the problem of suicidal altruism to the larger phenomenon that Canadian psychologist Gad Saad has identified as suicidal empathy, which I will define when I come to it.

To elaborate on the concept of suicidal altruism, Durkheim identifies in his 1897 book Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie four overlapping types of suicide: “anomic,” “egoistic,” “fatalistic,” and “altruistic.” Anomic suicide results from a breakdown of regulation, often during periods of rapid social change. Egoistic suicide occurs when individuals are insufficiently integrated into social groups, leading to isolation and weakened social bonds. Fatalistic suicide arises from excessive regulation, where individuals feel their futures are rigidly controlled and hopeless. Altruistic suicide happens when individuals are overly integrated and sacrifice themselves for the group or society, for example, in obligatory or ritual death.

While features of some of the other types of suicide may, to some degree, be inferred in the examples under discussion, altruistic suicide captures the phenomenon the world is witnessing in the insurrection against the federal government, where US citizens are killed by law enforcement taking lethal defensive action. In criminal justice studies, this is commonly known as “death by cop.” This is not the dismissive act of victim-blaming; justifiable homicide prevents victimization. In other words, understanding altruistic suicide is the proper attribution of causal force.

As I explained in that previous essay, suicide is not only the act of a person in taking his life by his own hand, for example, by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger; suicide is any death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim, which the victim knows is very likely to produce that result. When a man, interfering with ongoing law enforcement operations, attacks a federal officer, a felony punishable by up to eight years in a penitentiary, then resists arrest, and is armed, he does so with the knowledge that his actions are likely to provoke a police response that may result in his death. Therefore, one can infer from his actions that his own death was the end he sought.

"AssauIt me, motherfcker!!!" – Alex Pretti on January 13th trying to get injured by federal officers pic.twitter.com/33PBDIiJxN

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 29, 2026

When we observe a pattern of such actions, we may reasonably confirm the inference. Pretti is seen in the above video demanding that a federal officer assault him. “This is war!” Pretti shouts at the officer. “Look at you! Pepperspray me, bitch! Fucking assault me, motherfucker! Fucking do it! Fucking trash!” He spits on the officer, screaming again, “Fucking trash!” before kicking the vehicle. What the video shows is a man provoking a response from state agents duty-bound to confront aggressors that will endanger his life. Pretti is not the only example. We see in other videos the desire that armed officers exercise force upon one’s person by those who want to make themselves appear as the victims of law enforcement violence. The end they seek is martyrdom. Progressives are encouraging their followers to seek self-destructive ends. They are manufacturing a willing human sacrifice.

This footage is so damning, that you and I both know it will never leave X.

Now we know that Alex Pretti was not a kindly gentle nurse… he was a CRIMINAL!!!

An ARMED, VIOLENT, DANGEROUS, UNHINGED criminal.

HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN PRISON!!!!!!!

pic.twitter.com/Oa36olxtTe

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) January 28, 2026

In the video shared above, obtained and narrated by the BBC (the major news organization of the United Kingdom), we see Pretti spitting on officers and damaging their vehicle before officers exit the vehicle to detain him. Pretti’s holstered firearm, presumably the SIG Sauer P320 handgun recovered at the scene of the high-profile shooting that resulted in his death, is visible in the video. Pretti was with a mob of people blocking ICE vehicles (see The Rule of Law and Unlawful Protest: The Madness of Mobs and The Phenomenon of Progressive Brain-Locking and Its Role in the Madness of Crowds). As the mob encircled the officers, the officers were forced to deploy tear gas canisters and pepper balls into the crowd to deter them. Ultimately, Pretti was released, and the officers left.

The BBC notes that this is the gun that federal authorities report Pretti brandished in his fatal confrontation with law enforcement officers on January 24, 2024, in Minneapolis, but hastens to add that video evidence of the shooting contradicts this claim. However, as I explain in Deadly Force and Objective Reasonableness, whether Pretti was brandishing a firearm is immaterial to the validity of the actions law enforcement took to protect their lives and the lives of others. It was enough that an armed assailant was violently resisting arrest and that officers reasonably believed he intended to use a firearm against them.

In his 2026 book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Gad Saad argues that when societies transform victimhood into moral currency and treat accountability as cruelty, they cultivate what he terms “suicidal empathy.” In his analysis, Western societies have become dangerously skewed in their moral judgments, prioritizing symbolic compassion over evidence, order, and long-term survival.

Saad contends that a distorted form of altruism has taken hold among cultural and political elites, warping ethical priorities and encouraging policies that erode social stability, as we see with open borders and the facilitation of mass migration. This development has produced paradoxical outcomes: protecting offenders over victims, condemning self-defense (except collective action propagandistically defined as such), and privileging ideological narratives over empirical reality.

According to Saad, such trends reflect a broader inversion of moral reasoning, where social cohesion and responsibility are sacrificed to satisfy identity-based politics and virtue signaling, the subject of his 2020 book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Saad argues that these developments represent more than misguided policy choices; they indicate a deeper crisis in how societies define justice and truth. Uncritical compassion, detached from consequence and reality, becomes destructive rather than humane.

Although Gaad does not show that exposure to suicide—especially through close social ties—creates emotional and interpretive conditions that make suicide appear understandable, relatable, or even thinkable for others, this is a social psychological mechanism that works in tandem with the macrosociological phenomenon he describes. The parasitic mind disorders individuals, who then, seduced by suicidal empathy, become weaponized against freedom and reason. The social psychological dimension is therefore crucial to understanding the concrete hazard of the macrosociological development Gaad describes. Suicidal empathy is well-documented in the field of suicidology, which conceptualizes the process by which people come to emotionally identify with someone who has died by suicide and, through that identification, become vulnerable to suicidal ideation.

This is rooted in the problem of empathy, which, in my essay The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”, I show is a perversion of the concept of sympathy formulated by Adam Smith in his 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Empathy increases the likelihood of suicide contagion because it dispossesses observers of their capacity for independent, objective, and rational judgment. The individual projects himself into suicidal potential.

As I explain in that essay, empathy, which appears in educational, psychological, and sociological literature in the mid-twentieth century, emphasizing affective capacity (sharing emotions), is a translation of Einfühlung, popularized in psychology by Edward Titchener in 1909, who defines it as the ability to project oneself into another person’s experience. Thus, empathy, which rational actors are condemned of sufficiently lacking, is the weaponization of the innate human tendency to, in attempting to understand another’s situation, imaginatively put oneself in the other’s place and see the world from his emotional state (we see this elsewhere, e.g., in the socialization of gender identity doctrine). If the emotional state is a disordered one, the empathetic risk disordering themselves.

In contrast to the Werther effect, responsible reporting and narratives of irrationality, coping, and recovery, propularly know as the Papageno effect (named after Papageno, a character in Mozart’s The Magic Flute), can have protective effects. This effect captures the actions of the sympathetic to help those with suicidal ideations and tendencies by encouraging them to seek counseling and treatment. If progressives cared about the individuals drawn to their movement, they would not merely condemn the actions we see on the streets of Minneapolis; more than this, they would admit to the pathology evidenced by the actions described in this essay and urge those seeking martyrdom to instead seek help from mental health professionals.

But progressives won’t do this because they need disordered personalities to advance what resembles a fanatical religious movement surrounding the corporate state project to undermine the legitimacy of republican institutions. That this appears as a fanatical religious movement is, in part, because it’s rooted in religion itself (see Manufacturing Their Own Christs: The Violence of Progressive Christianity). This is truly a dark motive and should raise alarms about the potential for suicide contagion and, ultimately, the future of Western Civilization. (I anticipated this development in my 2019 review of Todd Phillip’s film Joker, see Joker and the Mob.)

CNN is reporting that Alex Pretti broke a rib in an altercation with federal agents a week before death. Pretti had a history of physically confronting law enforcement. Evidence is emerging indicating that Pretti was an operative in a highly organized and coordinated clandestine operation to disrupt immigration enforcement in sanctuary cities. This operation is more than domestic. There is evidence that this is a piece of the transnational project to dismantle the American Republic.

This afternoon’s essay expands on my morning essay Deadly Force and Objective Reasonableness. To understand the killing of Alex Pretti, it is necessary to step back and consider intent and context rather than reacting to a simplified narrative. Context matters when evaluating the actions of individuals, law enforcement, and the broader political environment in which such events occur.

In that essay, I asked readers to consider the case of Kyle Rittenhouse. I understand why he carried a rifle in Kenosha. At the time, looting was widespread, and law enforcement was failing to prevent property damage. Rittenhouse and others went to Kenosha for two reasons: firearms deter looting, and firearms are necessary for self-defense in chaotic situations where interpersonal violence is likely. Riots associated with the Black Lives Matter uprising in the summer of 2020 drew Rittenhouse and other patriots to Kenosha.

Rittenhouse was not targeting the police. He was performing a private, informal policing function. When police arrived, he raised his hands and attempted to surrender. When they waved him on, he returned home and later turned himself in. This behavior reflects responsibility rather than malice.

In contrast, the case of Alex Pretti raises different questions. The issue is not whether Pretti had the right to be armed—he did. The crucial question is why he was armed. Unlike Rittenhouse, Pretti was not defending property or deterring looters. Pretti was there to disrupt ICE and Border Control operations. Based on the context, he appears to have carried a firearm to defend himself against federal law enforcement officers. When confronted by police, Pretti resisted lawful orders and struggled with officers. Now we know Pretti has a history of physically confronting law enforcement.

According to available information, Pretti was not merely a protester but an operative in a coordinated effort to obstruct federal immigration enforcement, part of a broader conspiracy to foment insurrection in Wisconsin. This conspiracy allegedly involves political elites and was exposed through access to Signal chat logs organizing these activities.

FBI Director Kash Patel has announced that the Bureau is investigating encrypted Signal group chats in Minnesota that were used to monitor ICE and Border Patrol in the sanctuary city. The chats—first reported by journalist Cam Higby—shared real-time alerts, color-coded vehicle identification guides, and training invitations from state representative Brad Tabke.

The probe follows three shootings since early January, including the deaths of Pretti and Good, during federal operations targeting illegal aliens with criminal records. Patel stressed that the investigation is focused not on lawful, peaceful protest but on incitement and obstruction of law enforcement. The fact pattern indicates a conspiracy to interfere with immigration enforcement that reaches into the upper echelon of Minnesota state government.

To understand the larger context, readers should turn to fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Peter Schweizer and his new book The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon. Schweizer argues that our national debate on immigration focuses almost entirely on what happens after migrants arrive. But we’ve ignored a critical question: who is sending them, and why?

For decades, establishment elites framed mass immigration as a compassionate extension of the American Dream—a peaceful melting pot that would strengthen the nation. You have heard the rhetoric. Yet beneath the propaganda lies a troubling reality. Mass migration has become one of the most potent political tools ever turned against the United States, driven by powerful interests at home and exploited by adversaries abroad. This is the context that explains Minneapolis.

When an armed operative involved in an organized effort to obstruct federal law enforcement fights with officers, the risk of lethal outcomes increases dramatically. Yet many observers ignore this context and accept a media narrative portraying federal agents as having murdered a civilian protester. That narrative oversimplifies the situation and prevents serious analysis.

Let’s presume the ICE officer killed Pretti without justification. Should we abolish ICE? I noted in this morning’s essay that the police kill more than a thousand civilians every year. A handful of those are not justified. Should we therefore abolish the police? If we abolished the police, who would enforce the criminal law? Obviously, the call to abolish the police is effectively a call for more crime and disorder. We might leave it solely to citizens to enforce the law, but take a moment to think about what that would look like. It would be the Wild West, not the good order our constitutional government has established.

The call to abolish ICE is not a rational response to the killing of Alex Pretti—at least not from the standpoint of public safety and national security. Pretti’s killing is being exploited to abolish ICE. If immigration law goes unenforced, the tens of millions of illegal aliens won’t face deportation. Abolishing ICE effectively negates the popular will and leaves the nation vulnerable to forces domestic and foreign that seek America’s destruction—and the West more broadly.

Why isn’t this obvious? Recall George Orwell’s concept “doublethink,” a central control element used by the Party in the dystopian world he describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time and accept both as true—often without noticing the contradiction—by selectively forgetting, reinterpreting, or compartmentalizing facts.

However, it’s only doublethink for those who call for the abolition of ICE but do not also call for the abolition of the police because they sometimes kill citizens. It’s not doublethink for those who want to make immigration laws dead letters. They understand that it would take a long time to repeal the immigration laws on the books. And they’re not sure they could achieve that, since immigration control is popular (as it is in every other country on the planet). Abolishing ICE is the quickest route to neutralizing immigration law.

The circumstances of the shooting certainly matter. Video evidence shows that during the struggle, an officer disarmed Pretti. Pretti then appeared to reach for something, and officers observed an empty holster, indicating that a firearm was unaccounted for. Within seconds, someone shouted that Pretti had a gun. From the officers’ perspective, this was a reasonable inference under extreme stress, and they fired. From this perspective, the shooting was justified.

If one argues that Pretti should never have been put in that situation, the responsibility lies not with the officers enforcing federal law but with the organized effort to obstruct immigration enforcement. Federal law is the supreme law of the land, and interfering with its enforcement in pursuit of secessionist aims is what ultimately put Pretti in danger. Pretti is one of a multitude of Americans suffering from suicidal altruism (see Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism). The transnational elite have weaponized this multitude to carry out their agenda.

Progressives now citing corporate opposition to ICE operations as a reason why ICE should leave Minneapolis should not come as a surprise. Of course, corporations oppose mass deportations, not only to advance the transnationalist agenda, but to exploit foreign labor to drive down wages for American workers and drive up corporate profits. Nor is it surprising that Democrats—the party of the oligopoly leading the transnationalization of the global order—oppose mass deportations. They need illegal aliens for political advantage. These same economic and political imperatives protected the slavocracy in the American South. The economic motive behind chattel slavery is obvious, so I will leave that to one side to focus on the political motive.

Southern planters leveraged chattel slavery into political power in several ways. The Three-Fifths Compromise inflated Southern representation in Congress and the Electoral College by counting enslaved people for apportionment while denying them rights, giving slaveholding states disproportionate influence over federal policy and presidential elections. Wealth generated by slave labor funded political networks and enabled Democratic elites to dominate state governments, shaping laws that protected slavery. At the national level, the “Slave Power” bloc used this enhanced representation to control key committees, broker compromises, and secure federal policies—such as the Fugitive Slave Act and territorial expansion—that preserved and extended slavery.

Understanding this history sheds light on the present and the future. With the rise of transnational corporate power, world elites have put the world on the path to global neo-feudalism. I have written about this matter in several essays since 2020 (see, for example, George Soros, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Coming Era of Global Neo-Feudalism). I have relied on the work of Urban Affairs fellow at Chapman University in Orange, California, who analyzes these dynamics in his book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.

Contemporary capitalism is rapidly becoming a system that mirrors aspects of medieval feudal society—but a high-tech version that encompasses the world. In this framework, economic resources, political influence, and digital power are becoming heavily concentrated among a nexus of elites—technology companies, social planners, and ultra-wealthy individuals. Meanwhile, much of the population faces unstable work conditions and limited economic security, leading to shrinking opportunities, reduced social mobility, and weakened democratic influence.

One important feature of this development is the role of large technology platforms as modern-day “landowners.” Companies that control digital infrastructure, online marketplaces, and data ecosystems effectively set the rules for participation in the digital economy. By charging fees, collecting user data, and controlling access to markets, they extract ongoing value from individuals and smaller businesses that depend on their systems to function. This is rent-seeking on a world scale.

Open borders policies constitute a crucial factor in the global neofeudalism framework because, along with the portability of capital, they expand the supply of labor in ways that benefit large corporations and elites while increasing competition and precarity for workers. When labor (and capital) can move freely across borders without strong protections, employers gain access to a larger, more flexible workforce that can be used to drive down wages, weaken unions, and reduce job security.

This dynamic erodes the bargaining power of domestic workers and accelerates the shift toward contract, gig, and informal employment. In the neofeudalism frame, open borders reinforce a system in which capital and powerful institutions become more mobile and influential, while workers become more dependent, interchangeable, and vulnerable within a globalized economic hierarchy. Global neofeudalism is thus a description of the growing power of corporations and wealthy elites relative to governments. Transnational firms and financial institutions influence policy, shape regulations, and operate across borders in ways that exceed the authority of individual states. This dynamic weakens public oversight and reduces the ability of democratic institutions to regulate economic power effectively.

Associated with global neo-feudalism is neoserfdom, wherein workers are technically independent (indeed, atomization is beneficial to power) but practically constrained by their reliance on corporations and digital platforms. Their ability to change jobs, earn income, or improve their situation is dictated by systems they do not control, limiting their autonomy despite formal freedom. Fanatic opposition to Trump’s efforts to return to the American system and reconfigure the world economy to put nations first—the populist response to globalization—is a manifestation of elite resistance to popular attempts to reclaim democratic republicanism. If populist movements in the West can be defeated, the neoserfdom is the fate of the world population.

Here, Sheldon Wolin’s theory of inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy, detailed in his landmark 2005 Democracy, Inc., is crucial to take up (I have referenced Wolin’s work in several essays on this platform, most recently in The Real Threat to Liberty Isn’t Trump—It’s Technocratic Rule). Managed democracy is the technocratic organization of social life, which is what progressives mean when they talk about “defending democracy.” From their standpoint, reclaiming constitutional republicanism and national sovereignty, i.e., actual democracy that defends individual liberty and represents the popular will, is an assault on the technocratic arrangements they euphemize as democracy.

In global neo-feudalism, the protection of concentrated wealth and private assets centralizes power and undermines democratic forms of governance. Instead of accountable institutions and competitive markets, power becomes privatized and insulated from public influence. Global neofeudalism represents a shift away from liberal capitalism toward a system dominated by entrenched private power structures. Mass immigration must be understood in light of the emergent totalitarian system. History is only accidental to a degree. There are people with power and, as the late Michael Pareti told us, corporate elites have always wanted only one thing: everything. They’ve mobilized suicidal altruism against the open and rational institutions of the Enlightenment to realize what they have always ever wanted.

It’s striking how social media users don’t bother seeking out those who actually understand the subject before making a big deal out of the fact that Pretti had been disarmed by Border Patrol before being shot and killed by other officers, or the fact that so many shots were fired. That he was disarmed is largely irrelevant. Emptying a magazine into a body is unusual in law enforcement. What matters is the context and the reasonable person standard.

The US Supreme Court has established that police use of deadly force is governed by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures. The leading case is Tennessee v Garner (1985), which held that an officer may not use deadly force against a fleeing suspect unless there is probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others. This decision limits police use of deadly force.

The Court refined the framework outlined in Garner in Graham v. Connor (1989), ruling that claims of excessive force are evaluated under an “objective reasonableness” standard. Courts ask whether a reasonable officer in the same situation would have believed the level of force was necessary, rather than relying on the officer’s subjective fear or intent. Factors include the severity of the alleged crime, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat, and whether the suspect was resisting.

Courts also consider situational factors, such as the suspect’s behavior and the appearance of objects. The officer must reasonably believe the suspect poses a serious risk of death or bodily harm. At the same time, courts recognize that officers make split-second decisions under high stress and give deference to those judgments. This is why shootings of suspects holding ambiguous objects are often legally justified if the officer’s belief is reasonable.

Other cases clarify the standard further. Scott v Harris (2007) confirmed that deadly force can be reasonable when a suspect’s actions pose an imminent danger to others. Kingsley v Hendrickson (2015) reaffirmed that excessive-force claims for pretrial detainees are judged by objective reasonableness, without requiring proof of the officer’s subjective intent.

Taken together, these cases establish that deadly force is constitutionally permissible when a reasonable officer would perceive an imminent risk of serious harm or death, based on the totality of the circumstances. Courts evaluate this from the perspective of officers at the scene, recognizing that decisions often must be made in tense, rapidly evolving situations. Crucially, the belief must be objectively reasonable; if multiple officers act together, reasonableness is generally assumed.

When people ask why officers empty their magazines, the answer lies in psychology, situational dynamics, and training, rather than a deliberate desire to overshoot. In high-stress encounters, officers must react within fractions of a second to perceived life-threatening threats.

Adrenaline and fear may cause the first shot to miss or prompt continued firing until the threat appears neutralized. Stress triggers tunnel vision, an elevated heart rate, and reduced accuracy, often leading to instinctive, repeated firing. Studies show that even highly trained marksmen will fire multiple rounds under extreme stress.

Officers do not have the luxury of reviewing the scene from multiple angles. To illustrate this, I ask students to think of a boxing match. We often watch boxers and wonder why they don’t punch when openings appear or why they don’t avoid telegraphed blows. But that judgment is made from the armchair perspective. Imagine instead being the boxer: you’re getting hit in the face and body, the crowd is screaming, and your body is reacting from muscle memory.

Now imagine being a police officer confronting a man on an icy street in sub-zero temperatures. The armed detainee is not following commands. Multiple civilians are resisting. Bystanders are yelling, whistling, and honking. You look down and see the detainee’s holster is empty—you did not see the other officer remove the weapon. The suspect is rising. If you do not assume that there is a weapon and that the man may act belligerently, you, your fellow officers, and nearby civilians may be shot or injured. You don’t have time for a careful assessment. Officers are yelling, “Gun!” You neutralize the threat.

It’s tragic, but not uncommon. More than 1,000 civilians are killed by police officers every year. Almost none of the shootings are challenged, not because of deference to policing, but because of the reasonableness standard.

This is right. https://t.co/bDDPqAZrzN

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) January 27, 2026

Training emphasizes stopping a threat completely, because even wounded assailants can remain dangerous. If the suspect is still moving, reaching for something, or appears aggressive, officers continue firing until the threat is eliminated. Officers are trained to focus on the center mass, aiming for the torso to stop a threat efficiently. Hitting a moving target in dynamic situations is difficult, which naturally leads to multiple shots to achieve incapacitation. You don’t aim for the legs. You aim for the chest.

Pretti’s death is tragic, but it is a textbook example of a good shoot (as was the Renee Good case). Pretti could have avoided his fate had he cooperated with the officers—even better, had he not been there at all (a parent warned him about the risk he was taking). This is the message progressives should be sending to their constituents: do not interfere with federal law enforcement operations.

But Progressives make the opposite argument, and this endangers lives. Condemning law enforcement for enforcing the law and predictable actions based on confusion and training increases the likelihood that protestors will resist lawful commands in the future, thus endangering their lives and the lives of others.

It is the height of irresponsibility—if we don’t assume a darker impulse (which, frankly, for many on that side, I do)—not to explain what happened in Minneapolis over the weekend was the consequence of Prett’s actions and is entirely avoidable if he had stayed home—or, if one chooses to bring a gun to a protest action, follow the commands of law enforcement.

This last point is crucial to grasp. I’m a big proponent of firearms. But I don’t understand why Pretti would bring a gun to a protest, given his purpose that day. Who would he have to shoot other than law enforcement? He wasn’t going to shoot other protestors. He was there as a protester—ostensibly, as the evidence now suggests (I will follow up on this in this afternoon’s essay.)

The Pretti case is not at all analogous to the situation involving Kyle Rittenhouse, who brought a firearm to Kenosha in the summer of 2020 to protect himself from rioters, not from law enforcement. Rittenhouse had no intent to shoot law enforcement. When law enforcement showed up, he tried to surrender. They waved him away (he later turned himself in). Rittenhouse’s actions are exactly how an armed civilian is supposed to act when confronted by law enforcement.

Progressives condemned Rittenhouse for bringing a gun to a protest and were shocked when he was acquitted. Until a few days ago, they still condemned his actions on that day. Now they feign support for citizens carrying arms to protests. They think they have conservatives and liberals cornered for hypocrisy. But the hypocrisy is obviously on their side. Had Rittenhouse been shot by police, I guarantee you that progressives would have said that he had it coming. Had he been convicted, they would have praised the jury.

So which is it, progressives? Should protesters bring firearms to protests or not? The answer to that question depends on whether the weapon is potentially used on violent protesters or whether it’s potentially used on law enforcement.

Remember the National Guard soldiers shot by an assassin in Washington, DC? Who did progressives blame? Not the assassin. They blamed Trump for deploying the National Guard on the streets of DC. They’re blaming the violence in Minneapolis and St. Paul on Trump. This is now a reflex. Progressives blamed the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione on the dead man. They blame the assassination of conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk by Tyler Robinson on the dead man.

If the killing of National Guardsmen is justified by their presence on the streets of Washington, DC (or any other American city), then the killing of any law enforcement officer is justified by his presence. Isn’t that what they’re saying? Pretti is dead because ICE is in Minneapolis. ICE must leave to end the violence.

Progressives mean to turn America into a lawless country—as long as their comrades are the lawless ones.

The ruse worked. Progressives got their way. Trump caved. The Administration is sending Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino packing. They even appear ready to allow the state to investigate Petti’s death—this in a state whose attorney general, Keith Ellison, endorses Antifa. One need only reflect on the fate of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and his three comrades to see how justly that state treats law enforcement. Governor Tim Walz appointed Ellison as special prosecutor in the George Floyd case.

“Even if the investigation proves that the shooting was legally justified, I don’t think that even matters.” —Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara.

Can you imagine any scenario in which those supporting rebellion would not consider law enforcement quelling it excessive force?

Can you imagine any scenario in which those who support the cause of a protester shot and killed by a law enforcement officer would admit that lethal force was justified?

I can’t. We now have two cases—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—where the fact pattern curated from multiple videos clearly shows that officers acting in self-defense, yet those who make martyrs of these two deny what is plainly visible and legal precedent negating mens rea for both. (See Loretta and Richard: The Renee Good Shooting and Correct Attribution of Blame.)

We hear the opposite argument, don’t we? The act of quelling rebellion is excessive force against people protesting an oppressive regime and is, therefore, by definition, illegitimate. The very act of quelling rebellion confirms the thesis that the regime against which the rebels are rebelling is oppressive.

In their 1957 article “Techniques of Socialization,” Gresham Sykes and David Matza argued that people who violate legal and social norms neutralize guilt and social condemnation through rhetorical strategies that build in assumptions and alter perceptions, allowing them to maintain the appearance of a positive self-concept while rejecting dominant moral frameworks. When the corporate state helps them spread assumptions and alter perceptions, the criminal worldview becomes perceived as the normative one.

What the ICE Out protestors and the corporate state have prepared for America is a catch-22; their framing assumptions are tacitly accepted by most observers. To be sure, both rebels and authorities construct narratives that morally immunize their actions; each side frames itself as justified and the other as illegitimate. This is not a disagreement over facts. This is why facts don’t matter to progressives. This is about moral perception as a social process. But only one side is morally righteous.

The protestors deny responsibility for a situation in which people are dying. Consider the assumptions in place and their classification in Sykes and Matza’s system. “They forced us to rebel; the system leaves us no other choice.” Protestors have a priori negated the right of officers to defend themselves. This is a denial of injury. “One officer hurt doesn’t matter compared to systemic oppression.” The officer has no right to self-defense since he is the oppressor. This is a denial of the victim. “Police are agents of oppression; they’re not innocent victims.” This is the technique of condemnation of the condemners: “The state has no moral authority; its laws are illegitimate.” The appeal to higher loyalties is heard in the rhetoric of “marginalized communities,” “social justice,” and so on. Here, the appeal to moral obligation is shifted upward from law to ideology. Nazis do this. (See “The Whole System is Guilty!”)

Under such presumptions, no leader carrying out his duty to defend peace and tranquility escapes the tag of “oppressor.” Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump—they’re all authoritarian, fascist, racist, etc. ICE is the modern-day equivalent Brownshirts. It follows that any law enforcement action carried out at their command is illegitimate. The ethics of anarchism (which are no ethics at all but nihilism) have now become the ethics of the American Republic. The anarchists have already won the ideological battle. Now they’re moving to dismantle the state by delegitimizing its monopoly on violence.

The firearm matters—and the media is hiding it. At the Minneapolis Border Patrol shooting, the suspect was armed with a SIG Sauer P320 AXG Combat, a high-capacity 9mm pistol with a threaded barrel, extended 20–21 round magazine, and a SIG Romeo optic—a setup costing… pic.twitter.com/NECAGsjlbz

— Andrew Branca Show (@TheBrancaShow) January 24, 2026

In this inverted world, the person killed by the officer is portrayed as a “victim”—a martyr for the righteous cause. The officer’s action confirms the thesis that the government against which the protester is protesting is “oppressive,” that ICE and Border Patrol officers are “murderers.” It doesn’t matter that officers saw an empty holster where a gun just was, and must presume the worst, because if they don’t, lives may be lost, shoot the violent man who is rising from the ground. He was not following lawful commands. He was struggling with the officers. Bad intent was plain. There was a gun. None of this matters.

Americans have to recognize the catch-22 the anarchists have put us in and reject it. We cannot defend a nation or the rule of law if the ugliness of doing so means we stand by idly while the country falls into lawlessness and chaos reigns. That’s textbook suicidal empathy. What do we even have law enforcement for if it is not to do the ugly work of public safety and upholding the rule of law? Anarchists will tell you about a natural order. But it’s not an order founded upon natural law. It’s an order rooted in the law of the jungle. This is why anarchism is the perfect street-level ideology for corporate statism.

This is why I don’t really care about “radiant poet mom of three” or “outdoorsy dog-loving ICU nurse man” or any other sappy rhetoric used to describe dead anarchists. Frankly, neither do those using such emotive language. Laken Riley, raped and murdered by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who had entered the United States illegally, was a nursing student. Do the ICE Out protestors care about the dreams and aspirations of the real victims of criminal violence? I’m not interested in the progressive martyrs except for their humanity. I want them to stop putting their lives at risk for nothing—worse than that, for corporate state power.

Congress has, over generations, passed many bills regulating immigration. Presidents have signed them into law. Presidents take an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the Republic. What on earth are progressives dying for? I can answer that question. I don’t think they can. Objectively, they are dying for corporate greed and the partisan electoral advantage necessary to perpetuate that greed—elite interests that disorganize neighborhoods and diminish the quality of life for working families. Subjectively, they are dying because it is meaningful to their disordered lives. They seek transcendent meaning, and so, like the fanatically devoted woman in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, they step off the ledge at Thulsa Doom’s command. (See Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism.)

It makes sense neither from a rational standpoint nor from the proclaimed choice of comrades (the proletariat). These people have lost their minds. They hate Donald Trump because they’ve been instructed to. They hate the America Trump represents because they have been taught to. Hatred has disordered them. Now they’re biting off the fingers of law enforcement. It’s jungle law. Those capable of this level of madness are capable of running gas chambers. This is Nazi-level insanity.

I know it is frustrating for a person who believes that he is so very right about something (or everything) to be confused when his fellow citizens go in a different direction. But how it works in democracies, especially in republic form, is that, sometimes, your side loses and you have to do a better job next time of persuading fellow citizens to join your side. America chose differently on November 5, 2024. It’s their turn.

If, instead of honoring the popular will and respecting the authority of public institutions, you run out into the street and disrupt civil society, biting off fingers, blowing whistles, and whatnot, then you’re behaving not like a citizen in a constitutional republic, but instead you’re behaving like a child who didn’t get his way. You’d admit, if you were a reasonable human, that this is a very immature attitude. When this happens in a family situation, the responsible and caring parent asserts his or her authority over the child and explains to him that we cannot always get what we want—that we have to be patient and wait our turn. If the child acts out and strikes the parent, then there is an additional lesson to be learned. The same is true when a citizen lashes out at lawful authority.

Sometimes parents do a bad job of raising children with self-control. In those cases, other authorities have to take up the slack. Obviously, a lot of parents haven’t been doing a good job preparing their children for the rigors of living in a democracy by teaching them to keep their hands to themselves. Who steps into the breech if authority is perceived as illegitimate? It then becomes the exercise of naked power. That’s not the druthers of a civilized society.

Remember Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop? Did you pick up on the world-building in that movie? Verhoeven depicts late capitalism as having turned social collapse into a business model. Public disorder becomes a growth sector. Corporate actors prefer crises because crises justify the expansion of their corrupt schemes. The scenario is less about deep state psy-op, which is one’s first impression, than about disaster capitalism.

In Verhoeven’s world, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) plans to rebuild Detroit as a corporate utopia (“Delta City”). This is the Democrats’ Blue City—Detroit, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, etc. Progressives and the corporate power progressives sublimate with social justice rhetoric have turned social collapse into a business model. The expansion of their corrupt schemes depends on public disorder, crime and violence, and decadence. The Democratic Party is the organized representative of disaster capitalism. Minneapolis is their demonstration project. So is the state of Virginia, the ancestral home of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

To ordinary America, my message to you is toughen up. You have a civilization to defend (see Send in the Troops). For the disorderly American, get over yourselves. Your nothingness should dwell in basements, jails, and insane asylums. To progressives still susceptible to reason, if you have any influence over the herd, and if your conscience is still functional, tell the true believers to go home. Don’t fear being excommunicated. Do the right thing. Your politics are killing people. (See Message to the Rank-and-File Progressive.)

You’re being led by the ring in your septum to believe that ICE and Border Patrol agents are hunting civilians. This is the same lie Black Lives Matter told you about police shooting unarmed black men. None of these deaths would have occurred if civilians were not emboldened to threaten the safety of law enforcement officers.

If common decency mattered, instead of creating more martyrs for the cause, you would tell the radicals you’ve loaded, cocked, and aimed at the federal government to peacefully exercise their free speech rights and not obstruct officers in their duties. There is no First Amendment right to interfere with law enforcement operations.

But you won’t do that because you’re full-blown jihadists now. You celebrate the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, by Luigi Mangione in December 2024, outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. You even named righteous assassination after him: “Mangioning.” You mock the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You despair over the failed attempts on Donald Trump’s life. George Floyd and Renée Good are martyrs.

This explains the affinity between the Red and the Green. This explains your Islamophilia. You have made the ritual Emile Durkheim described as altruistic suicide a part of the revolution-from-above playbook. Martyrdom has now become a central element in the insurrection against the federal republic.

The transnational corporate elites who pull the strings of the marionettes they’ve manufactured—that’s you—are laughing all the way to the new world order. Everybody who supports the ICE Out rebellion has blood on their hands. You added another martyr to the growing list of human sacrifices today. Good job, y’all.

What is the word you like to yell at other people? “Shame!” That’s it. Right back at you.

This is a Color Revolution. This is Insurrection.

A “radiant poet mom” weaponizes her two-ton Honda Pilot against Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With her predictable demise, she becomes a martyr for a subversive campaign, organized by the corporate state, against the American Republic.

Three weeks later, in that same city, Border Patrol agents kill a “cheerful ICU nurse” brandishing a firearm. Predictably, the mayor accuses “masked agents” of “pummeling one of our constituents and shooting him to death.” The Minnesota governor, persisting in his defiance of the US Constitution, tells the national government to quit enforcing law and order.

Neoconfederates don’t wait for the facts. It’s all anti-American propaganda all the time. The corporate state media and anti-American forces exploit these and other instances of violence provoked by rebels to fuel a conflagration across a nation now submerged in a historic deep freeze. The incessant blowing of whistles deafening reason. “ICE Out” is yet another installment of a decade-long color revolution.

A color revolution refers to waves of mass protest movements that challenge or cripple—or even replace—elected governments through the appearance of nonviolent demonstrations and symbolic branding designed to mobilize public support against established authority, often under the banner of democracy.

These movements typically present themselves as spontaneous grassroots struggles for democracy and transparency. In reality, such uprisings are rarely organic; they are encouraged, funded, and strategically guided by transnational corporate interests, opposition parties, NGOs, intelligence services, and the broader cultural, educational, and media apparatus to reshape a country’s political system.

Thus, “color revolution” serves as shorthand for elite-backed regime change. It does not represent an authentic uprising by the masses but instead mobilizes radicalized elements of a population to thwart the popular will by destabilizing society.

In the US context, movements such as the Women’s March, March for Our Lives, Families Belong Together, Climate Justice, Trans Rights advocacy, Quiet Quitting, Black Lives Matter, Free Palestine, No Kings, and ICE Out are not isolated, spontaneous grassroots efforts. Rather, they form a series of manufactured uprisings in an ongoing revolution-from-above.

Parallel to these street-level actions, forces seeking to delegitimize and overthrow governments weaponize corporate-controlled law firms, corrupted government agencies, and partisan judicial bodies to remove—or block from power—representatives of the genuine popular will and defenders of liberal and republican ideals and institutions.

These same forces manufacture successive crises—environmental, political, public-health-related—to keep populations in a perpetual state of fear and subjection. This strategy relies on large segments of the population primed to obey elite-selected experts, self-styled saviors, and manufactured martyrs. The result is recurring waves of mass hysteria and moral panic, often characterized by mass formation psychosis or mass psychogenic illness, which spread through social contagion.

The reservoir of irrational dissent is cultivated by elite-captured cultural and educational institutions that revise history: exaggerating past injustices (while glorifying past rebellions ostensibly aimed at addressing them) and memory-holing the accomplishments and virtues of righteous movements and nations. This tactic is known as engineering a legitimation crisis.

Mass manipulation also involves enforcing a double standard, in which legitimate government actions—law enforcement, military operations, and the like—are deemed acceptable only when exercised by corporate-backed movements and parties. A police riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, is portrayed as an insurrection, while lawful enforcement action is condemned as fascism.

American citizens are now taking up arms against the federal government. They’re martyring themselves in a ritual of altruistic suicide. And Democrats want more than this. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is giving permission for illegal alien invaders to use that state’s Stand Your Ground law to fire upon federal agents. This is insurrection.

At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here. 

The officers attempted to… pic.twitter.com/5Y50mYONGH

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 24, 2026

Ultimately, what underlies this multifaceted class war on populations is transnational corporate power seeking to establish a new world order. It aims to deconstruct the interstate system emerging from the Enlightenment and replace it with a neofeudal network of elite-controlled estates, where the fractured masses are administered by cultural and technocratic managers. Donald Trump is the bulwark against the New Fascism. He must be brought to heel.

Since the summer of 2018, the resurrected Freedom and Reason platform has chronicled the elite war on America. You have a front row seat. Stay tuned. Stay frosty.

In political debates, it’s common for participants to challenge one another to define what they mean by terms like “left” and “right.” That instinct is correct: a rational argument depends on shared definitions. If two people use the same word to mean different things, they are not really debating at all—they are talking past each other. When someone clarifies meanings, they are often accused of “playing semantics.” But semantics are essential to dialectical reasoning, whose goal is to produce light rather than heat, so that individuals can make rational decisions based on their interests and principles.

The problem in the case of left and right, however, is deeper than people usually realize. Left and right are not substantive political categories. They’re not metaphysical or ontological concepts. They have no inherent content—no fixed assumptions, axioms, or principles that define them. They are merely positional labels. By contrast, terms like liberal and conservative do have real substance. They refer to identifiable political philosophies with stable core commitments.

The origin of the left–right distinction makes this clear. During the French Revolution, liberals sat on the left side of the National Assembly, while conservatives—traditionalists, monarchists, and defenders of the ancien régime—sat on the right. From this accident of seating emerged a vocabulary that has been treated ever since as though it describes deep political realities. Except for the respective philosophical systems attached to them in any given place or at any given moment in time, these positional labels have no real transhistorical meaning.

At that moment in French history, liberalism was the revolutionary force. It opposed absolutism and hereditary authority; it championed constitutional government, freedom of conscience, individual rights, and legal (or formal) equality. Liberalism was labeled “left-wing” not because left had intrinsic meaning, but because liberalism was challenging the existing power structure and its proponents sat on the left. Once liberalism succeeded, however, it became the new hegemonic order. Capitalism was legalized and normalized, constitutional government replaced absolutism, and liberal principles became the foundation of the state. Liberalism moved from being the antithesis to becoming the thesis. Where people sat shifted; what they believed didn’t.

Liberalism is the thesis of the American Republic. The Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are liberal documents. The fact that what we know as modern conservatism is, to a significant extent, substantively liberal in character doesn’t make liberalism conservative. No misuse of terms changes reality. It simply means that a synthesis has emerged that allows liberals and conservatives to forge a political coalition capable of reclaiming the American system from progressives, who have, in effect, abandoned all liberal principles. Liberals and conservatives remain distinct and have very real disagreements over matters of the role of religious faith in politics, but these disagreements do not prevent finding common cause concerning the existential threats to the American Republic.

Returning to the historic French situation, a new antithesis soon emerged: socialism. Socialists challenged liberal capitalism and liberal individualism in the name of social ownership, collective responsibility, and economic and social equality. A similar thing occurred in the United States, as well; here, it was associated with the emergence of progressivism, the ideology of corporate statism. And, to be clear, that’s what socialism was in France. The socialist vision of Frenchman Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (whom many consider the real father of sociology, not his secretary August Comte) was really corporatist-technocratic, with elite experts and industrial leaders managing society rather than democratic worker control.

With the rise of corporatism, opposition to liberal capitalism was labeled “left-wing,” and liberalism, the dominant system, was increasingly described as “right-wing” because it sat conceptually to the right of socialism. This is why one finds liberalism identified as such around the world. America is the odd case because progressives dressed themselves as liberals—Teddy Roosevelt branding corporate statism as a “New Liberalism” (also a “New Nationalism”) by which he meant a break from classical laissez-faire liberalism toward a state that actively regulated corporations, promoted social welfare, and (ostensibly) protected workers. This is the scheme that his fifth cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, institutionalized in the New Deal, vastly expanding the reach of the state into the lives of citizens, negating the liberal principle of limited government. Progressives refer to themselves as liberals to this day. Many conservatives call progressives that, too. Both are wrong.

This history reveals the core problem. “Left” and “right” do not name coherent philosophies; they describe shifting power relationships within a given hegemonic order. Under the prevailing hegemony of progressivism, whatever ideology challenges that hegemony is labeled “right,” and whatever defends or advances it is labeled “left,” regardless of their substantive philosophical content. This produces a conceptual absurdity. Liberalism can be “left-wing” when it opposes monarchy, then “right-wing” when it opposes corporate statism, even though its principles remain unchanged. Protesters advocating a form of absolutism can then march with signs declaring “No Kings!” Likewise, what is called “socialism”—more accurately corporatism or social democracy—can be labeled “left-wing” while opposing liberalism, despite being philosophically hostile to liberal individualism, which was the philosophy of those who once sat on the left. The labels float free of substance and become markers of power position rather than ideology.

This also eliminates any conceptual space for a counterrevolution if the counterrevolution is defined merely as the hegemonic position, imagined or real. Reflexively, the counterrevolution is portrayed as “far right.” This is not wordplay when political antagonisms are rendered in principled sides. In yesterday’s essay, Between Corporate Hegemony and Popular Sovereignty: Donald Trump and the Bulwark of Populism, I explain that Trump and the populist-nationalist movement represent an insurgency against the prevailing hegemony of corporate statism. The movements to return America and Europe to their liberal foundations are identified as “reactionary.” This framework allows corporate-state propagandists to portray populism and nationalism as authoritarian, even fascistic, simply because they challenge progressive or social democratic hegemony rather than because of their intrinsic philosophical content. The progressive, today in rebellion against the US Constitution, cannot be reactionary because it is “left-wing,” a label that renders even terroristic violence immune from derogatories easily smeared on liberals and conservatives.

Conceptually, the left-right framework collapses under its own contradictions. However, in the practice of propaganda, the lack of intrinsic meaning only enhances the usefulness of the respective labels for those whose political function is to manipulate the public mind. Left and right are glittering generalities; a historical pecularity is repurposed and taken up as weapons in partisan warfare. If left and right were real ontological categories, they would have stable definitions. They would be grounded in enduring principles. But they are not used that way. Instead, they are elastic labels that stretch to include mutually exclusive beliefs, thus deceiving the public when it is advantageous to hegemonic power, while fracturing meaningful and effective coalitions built upon the cogent syntheses of philosophical systems.

To be sure, there is peril in the liberal-conservative coalition. What we identify historically as right-wing is a constellation of beliefs—hierarchy, patriarchy, religious authority, and traditional social structures—that is, traditional conservatism. This was the worldview of those who sat on the right of the French National Assembly. Today, millions of Americans still identify with these ideas. Liberalism—commitment to free speech, constitutional limits, equality before the law, and individual rights—stands in contrast to traditional conservatism, even if it is now also defined as right-wing around the world. Obviously, these positions are antithetical when distilled into rigid substances; they cannot coherently belong to the same category.

To the extent that those in the contemporary conservative movement regress to the belief-constellation of traditional conservatism, the liberal-conservative coalition fractures, a schism reinforced by the perception on that side that liberals are also progressives. This confusion speaks to the vital importance of reclaiming liberalism from the progressive distortion—to expose progressivism as the negation of liberalism, and reveal to the modern conservative that he is really a liberal, even if he believes in hierarchy and traditional values, which are also familiar to liberals. After all, both sides accept the reformulation of hierarchy as emergent inequality based on competition and meritocracy. Moreover, apart from a noisy Christian nationalist minority, the desire to see Christian ethics remain at the heart of the moral system of Western Civilization persists as a shared commitment. Indeed, in the face of critical race theory, queer praxis, and Islamization, liberals have become eager to join conservatives in reasserting America’s foundational ethics.

Clarifying these matters is not pedantic. The usage of terms cannot be rationalized by noting as a trivial fact that their meanings change over time. Words either accurately and precisely refer to reality, or they become weapons of manipulation (as one sees in the repurposing of the word “gender” by those who mean to confuse the gender binary and the fact of its immutability). George Orwell warned the West at every turn—in his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in his seminal essay “Politics in the English Language”—about the consequences of repurposing language for political purposes. Liberalism has a fixed meaning. It refers to a specific philosophical tradition centered on formal equality, freedom of conscience and speech, individual liberty, limited government, property rights, and the rule of law. Those principles do not change simply because political coalitions shift. Liberalism is something. Left and right, by contrast, are not.

I have described myself as a liberal my entire adult life, and I once thought of myself as being “on the left.” In retrospect, that was a mistake. I sometimes still make this mistake out of habit—and, admittedly, out of concern that being labeled as “right-wing” delegitimizes my arguments. Indeed, this is the function of positional terms and the reductive checklists based on them: to dismiss out of hand the arguments of one’s opponent. “That’s a right-wing argument” becomes the equivalent of plugging one’s ears and rehearsing progressive or socialist talking points. What I really mean when I describe myself as a “man of the left” is that I support liberal principles, not that I belong to a coherent “left-wing” ideology. Once progressives abandoned liberalism altogether, they left me standing to their right. “What happened to you?” they asked, as if something actually had. The real question is, what happened to them? Why did they abandon the liberal principle? Why did they follow a term with no substantive meaning?

As I have endeavored to explain, liberalism has been redefined in the American spaces as progressivism. I reject that equation. And so should you for the sake of objectivity. Liberalism and progressivism are not the same thing; they are, for the most part, opposites—at least opposite enough to be incompatible. Progressivism embraces forms of administrative authority, collectivism, identity-based politics, and speech policing that liberalism explicitly rejects. When people like me (and there are many of us) say, “I used to be on the left, but the left has lost its mind,” what we mean is that liberalism has been displaced on the left as originally understood by progressivism, while still wearing the liberal label. I’m not abandoning liberalism. I’m refusing to follow words wherever they happen to wander. Indeed, I am more liberal now than I have ever been—and that is why I’ve changed my mind on some issues. To my progressive family and friends, that makes me a “right-winger.” It’s as if they never actually listened to me, but instead assumed tribal membership. In that respect, I understand their astonishment.

For these reasons, I no longer describe myself as left or right. This is not an attempt to obscure my politics by rejecting positional labels. Rather, this is a clearing out of the tangle of glittering generalities that obscure my moral and philosophical commitments. Those labels discourage reflexive thinking by encouraging tribal habituation, collapsing distinctions between incompatible ideas, and making rational debate harder, not easier. They put rings in noses (sometimes literally) and lead the herds with invisible reins. Political philosophy should be discussed in terms of what people actually believe: conservatism, liberalism, progressivism, socialism, etc. These are meaningful categories. Left and right are not. I made the mistake in the past of identifying with a side and not a set of principles. Not totally (which is what allowed me to escape), but embarrassingly enough. I will do my best to not do that anymore. I am a liberal—not because I sit on one side of a shifting political spectrum, but because I affirm a tradition with a clear, stable, and defensible philosophical core.

In his Davos address yesterday, President Donald Trump offered a sharply critical assessment of Europe, arguing that the continent is “not heading in the right direction” and that parts of it have become “not recognizable” in recent decades. He attributed Europe’s economic and social difficulties to a mix of policy choices—especially expanding government spending, green-energy priorities, and what he called “unchecked mass migration”—and contrasted this with what he described as an American economic resurgence under his leadership.

Trump framed large-scale immigration as economically and socially disruptive, contending that importing new populations had undermined growth, living standards, and social cohesion across the West, while insisting that tighter borders, cultural integrity, and a move away from transnationalism and a return to traditional economic policies were central to restoring prosperity, stability, and Western identity. This is what global elites did not want the working classes of the Western nations to hear. This is why those elites are in a panic: populist-nationalism is on the rise, and the fascistic apparatus of the corporate state has failed to contain it.

Have you ever wondered why the machinery of the corporate state—the academy, the administrative bureaucracy, the culture industry, legacy media, the judiciary, and the donor networks of both major parties—reacted with such alarm when Donald Trump rose to power? Trump was a media darling before the dramatic moment in June 2015 when he descended the gilded escalator in Trump Tower to announce his first presidential campaign. For decades, they had asked him when he was running for President. Now he was, and it was the worst fate to befall the world since the appearance of Adolf Hitler. In fact, it was exactly that. A switch was flipped, and millions of people lost their minds.

These institutions mobilized to label Trump’s policies as authoritarian and fascist, even as previous presidents, such as Barack Obama, were able to expand executive power (or, more accurately, more fully exercise the inherent powers of the office), pursue foreign interventions, and carry out mass deportations of illegal aliens, with little public fanfare or moral condemnation. The difference is not in the legality or scale of the actions themselves, but in their alignment with the corporate state. Trump’s populist agenda, backed by mass political support outside the elite consensus, threatens the carefully managed hegemony that sustains the corporate state, provoking a coordinated pushback from every institutional channel that protects it.

This essay, synthesizing analyses and arguments presented over several years on this platform, explores how the structure of the US federal government, while embedding deep corporate influence across culture, administration, and law, nonetheless preserves enough democratic mechanisms to allow such an outsider as Trump to govern—albeit precariously and under constant institutional resistance. Readers must understand that, while the Founders separated powers to establish a government resistant to fascist formation, the scheme requires a strong national leader and a movement of determined patriots who believe in the American system to fight the corruption of elite power that threatens that separation.

The contemporary United States is best understood not as a fully pluralistic democracy, but as a regime in which real governing power is exercised by what can be described as a corporate state. This corporate state is composed of large corporations and financial interests, the donor class embedded in both major political parties, legacy media institutions such as linear television and radio, the culture industry of film, music, and publishing, public education and the modern academy, the permanent administrative bureaucracy, and substantial portions of the judiciary.

These institutions need not conspire explicitly to act in concert; their unity emerges organically from shared career pathways, ideological assumptions, material incentives, and professional norms. Indeed, the situation is to a significant extent the result of a convergence of interests, as well as structural inertia. These streams form a coherent governing class whose interests and worldview dominate public life. But Leviathan is also the result of elite machinations—the transnational corporate agenda manifest in organizations like the World Economic Forum.

This arrangement is what we call corporatism, a defining structural feature of fascist systems, in which nominally private institutions are functionally integrated into state power. Political authority is exercised not primarily through elected representatives accountable to voters, but through a dense web of bureaucratic, cultural, and managerial forces and personalities that operate beyond direct democratic control.

While Europe is almost lost, America differs from the consolidating fascism of European history in a critical respect: it cannot as of yet permanently close itself off from popular participation. This is the genius of the founders’ design of the American system. Constitutional requirements such as federalism, regular elections, and separation of powers compel the regime—with strong leaders and engaged patriots who love the Republic—to preserve democratic processes, even if those processes are constrained and steered by emergent structures antithetical to a democratic republic.

Before Trump, the system could maintain the appearance of democracy while limiting the scope of popular influence. After its marginalization in the wake of the Great Depression, the Republican Party, established in the previous century to rejuvenate the American system and liberate the South from its backwardness, came to play a central role in suppressing the popular will. For most of the postwar period, it functioned as an institutional intake valve for dissent, absorbing popular frustration with elite governance and redirecting it into safe, controllable channels. Bureaucratic resistance, donor influence, and party discipline ensured that this dissent did not translate into fundamental challenges to the corporate state. Republicans so inclined are often referred to as RINOs—Republicans in name only. When RINOs control the Republican Party, the party’s role is controlled opposition.

When the Democratic Party governs, however, the system approaches de facto one-party rule with gusto. During periods of Democratic control of the executive branch, the corporate state’s major elements—academia, administrative agencies, culture, media, and much of the judiciary—align almost entirely with the governing party. Appealing to the false doctrine of agency independence, bureaucratic agencies exercise maximal autonomy, insulated from electoral accountability, while judicial interpretation increasingly reflects the progressive consensus.

Beyond the forces of campaign finance and corporate lobbying, beyond the administrative state and regulatory capture, beyond the judiciocracy, ideology plays a major role in shaping the popular sphere. Opposition voices are not merely contested but delegitimized, framed as immoral, irrational, even dangerous. They are censored, deplatformed, marginalized—even targeted by the weapons of lawfare.

Under these conditions, nearly all substantive elements of fascism are present: the fusion of corporate and state power, ideological conformity enforced through cultural authority, governance by managerial elites, and the marginalization of opposition rather than popular sovereignty. What remains absent is permanence—because elections still exist. To be sure, the efficacy of elections in conveying the popular will can be weakened by ceding sovereignty to transregional and transnational institutions and relations, as we see in the case of the European Union, and to some extent, in the American case. The republican institutions of the United States remain robust in comparison. Yet our status as one of the few democratic societies in the world is in jeopardy.

This robustness explains how somebody like Donald Trump can ascend to the White House. Trump and the populist movement represent a genuine threat to the antithesis of the corporate state. This is not because Trump opposes capitalism as such—he is himself one of the more successful entrepreneurs in history—but because he rejects elite managerial control, globalized economic priorities that subordinate national interests, cultural authority monopolized by elite institutions, and bureaucratic governance detached from voters that is the administrative state. Trump’s political power derives directly from mass democratic support rather than institutional endorsement, which makes him uniquely threatening to a system designed to manage and contain popular influence.

The aggressive reaction to Trump and populism follows logically from this threat. The culture industry and legacy media saturate the public sphere with negative framing and moral condemnation, shaping public perception and narrowing the bounds of acceptable discourse. The academy supplies intellectual justification for exclusionary practices and extraordinary measures. The administrative state delays, obstructs, or nullifies policy through procedural resistance, while the judiciary constrains executive authority through expansive and selective interpretations of law. This resistance does not require a centralized conspiracy; it is the predictable self-defense of an entrenched ruling order seeking to preserve—and reestablish—its hegemony. The desire for a New World Order is not whispered in corners. They tell us who they are and what they want

Populism can govern at all only because democratic mechanisms have not been entirely dismantled. When an outsider like Trump captures the Republican Party, which is more open to mavericks than the Democratic Party (which isn’t really open to any, as we saw with the marginalization of Bernie Sanders and Robert Kennedy, Jr.), and is backed by a broad social movement (MAGA), the Common Man can override donor influence and compel even reluctant Republicans, including establishment figures, to align with the movement to remain electorally viable. However, such governance is fragile; it operates under constant constraint from administrative, cultural, and judicial power centers that remain outside popular control. Even members of Trump’s party want to move on from him. The RINOs are desperate to get back to the status quo. This is why they resist leading Congress to codify the American First agenda.

Every American election must be understood not merely as a contest between two parties, but as a struggle between corporate state hegemony and popular sovereignty. Trump and the patriots who stand behind him represent the movement of the Common Man. This is the leader the working class has been waiting for. They watched the First Family descend that golden escalator with entirely different eyes. Yet, while the people can assert their will electorally, that will is immediately checked, constrained, and filtered by non-electoral institutions, the institutions of elites who have a different plan for America—they mean to make America go away. Democracy exists, but only as a contested space rather than a governing principle.

Put simply, permanent fascism in America is prevented not by elite restraint or glittering generalities about democracy, but by the incomplete closure of the system, buttressed by constitutional structure, and enforced by mass participation. All of this is held together by what remains of republican virtue. As we celebrate our 250 years as an independent nation, patriotism is as much of an imperative today as it was in 1776. We cannot allow Democrats to retake power on November 3. Vote like Donald Trump is on the ballot. Even if your Representative or Senator is a RINO, punch his ticket. We are the bulwark against permanent fascism.

Update (January 22) Willian Kelly, aka dawokefarmer, who filmed himself screaming at churchgoers after storming their church, has been arrested. Kelly was arrested just hours after he had a meltdown on TikTok where he called for people to rise up and “shut this country down.”

Update (January 22): According to reporting by The New York Times, two of the members of the mob that interrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota. Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Louisa Allen have been taken into custody by the FBI.

Is there a tension in contemporary Christian discourse between Jesus’s injunction, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” and the claim that Christianity constitutes a moral system? At first glance, these positions can appear incompatible, and they are often treated as such—especially within progressive Christian contexts, where moral judgment is displaced rather than abandoned. I will argue that progressive Christianity enforces standards grounded less in coherent ethical principles than in shifting criteria of affinity and power, both personal and collective. By contrast, within a classical framework of Christian ethics, no such tension exists.

Morality, by definition, involves judgments about how people ought to act, distinctions between good and bad behavior, and standards by which actions are evaluated. If these standards are to be universal, they must appeal to an objective ontology.

As I explained in essays at the end of last year (Moral Authority Without Foundations: Progressivism, Utilitarianism, and the Eclipse of Argument; Epistemic Foundations, Deontological Liberalism, and the Grounding of Rights), progressivism is relativist and utilitarian; as such, it eschews defining a moral ontology. In short, there is no moral substance to the woke church; there is only a rhetoric of virtue, one exuding indignation, self-righteousness, and egoism.

To be sure, the woke Christian invocation of “do not judge” can appear to function as a blanket prohibition on moral evaluation, but this reading mistakes a situational admonition for a universal forbiddance. In contemporary progressive discourse, moral judgment itself is often portrayed as inherently exclusionary, harmful, or oppressive. Taken at face value, however, this understanding departs sharply from the role judgment plays within the New Testament and within rational Christian theology more broadly. In its original context, the command to “judge not” does not abolish moral discernment—the capacity to recognize, reflect upon, and decide what is good or right in particular circumstances—but rather presupposes and disciplines it.

In the same discourse, Jesus calls out hypocrisy—appearing righteous outwardly while acting unjustly in practice; judging others harshly while denying one’s own fallibility; using religion for status rather than genuine devotion to God. In the light of Christian ethics, the progressive Christian is the antithesis of Christianity because he denies each of these sins in himself (see Standing King’s Dream on Its Head: The Nightmare Antithesis of the American Way).

On Sunday in St. Paul, Minnesota, a mob of around 40 members of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, the Racial Justice Network, and allied community leaders entered the sanctuary of Cities Church and disrupted the service. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a longtime Minneapolis attorney, self-proclaimed civil rights activist, and community organizer, as well as an ordained minister, led the intrusion. With her were other local figures—Monique Cullars-Doty (BLM Minnesota co-founder), Chauntyll Allen (St. Paul public school board member and activist), and Satara Strong-Allen (community leader)—and outsiders, former CNN host Don Lemon and combat veteran and social media influencer William Scott Kelly, who goes under the handle “DawokeFarmer.”

Armstrong and Lemon, in particular, reinforced by memes comparing their actions to Jesus’ purification of the temple, have claimed in interviews to represent true Christianity. Lemon was brought along to create a video record of the cleansing, so the world could see the righteousness of the mob—a feature of its madness (see The Phenomenon of Progressive Brain-Locking and Its Role in the Madness of Crowds). Desperate to be seen, Lemon took his turn atangonizing churchgoers.

This is not what they were doing. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus, teaching in the Jerusalem temple, which he declared to be “my Father’s house,” affirmed its sacred purpose as a place of prayer for all nations by dramatically cleansing the temple by driving out merchants, money changers, and their animals, condemning them for having turned a house of prayer into a den of thieves, which symbolized how religious authorities had distorted worship through exclusion and exploitation. Jesus’ actions helped prepare the grounds for his prosecution.

The egoism of the mob betrayed their appeal to faith. Jesus taught that religious devotion should be sincere and directed toward God rather than performed to impress others. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your unseen Father. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” He contrasted this with praying publicly for show, warning against hypocrisy and empty repetition.

The crux of this teaching is that the faith the world would come to know as Christianity is about a genuine, humble relationship with God, not public display or social approval. Jesus cleansed the temple as the Son of God, not as a self-proclaimed righteous man who justified destructive and terrorizing action based on that holiness. Moreover, he instructed his followers to obey civil law—to never use their devotion to God as a license to transgress statutes of the secular authority.

Armstrong, Lemon, and Kelly not only appealed to the authority of God, but also to the United States Constitution to justify entering the sanctuary of a church and harassing the congregation as the exercise of free speech and protest action. This was the framing by The New York Times, which covered the story with the headline “Protest at Minnesota Church Service Adds to Tensions Over ICE Tactics” (transparently lamenting the possibility that BLM action might delegitimize the insurrection against the federal government).

Yet the First Amendment does not warrant harassment or trespass in a place of worship—or any other place immune from the heckler’s veto. Moreover, that amendment guarantees religious liberty. Protest is about expressing advocacy and opposition while respecting others’ rights to safety and worship. Once the goal or effect is coercion, fear, or interference, it crosses the line from protest into criminal behavior, regardless of the cause being claimed. There were children in attendance on Sunday, and Lemon’s camera captured the terror in their faces. This wasn’t a protest action; this was mob intimidation. A congregation of peaceful Christians was terrorized.

We have been here before. Across many communist revolutions in the twentieth century, independent religious institutions—especially Christian churches—were treated as inherent threats to revolutionary authority and were therefore subjected to coercion, intimidation, and suppression. Because churches represented alternative sources of communal loyalty and moral authority, they were seen as rival power centers incompatible with movement or state control. As a result, revolutionary regimes in countries such as the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and across Eastern Europe routinely invaded or closed churches, harassed or imprisoned clergy, and terrorized congregants through denunciations, political reeducation, and surveillance.

The aim was not merely secularization, but the consolidation of ideological monopoly, in which moral formation, social organization, and ultimate allegiance were redirected from religious communities to the revolutionary regime itself. What we witnessed in Stl Paul on Sunday was the radical desire to replace traditional Christian authority with an authoritarian reorganization of society wrapped in a rhetoric of Christian love. The dress was see-through, the body of hate clearly visible.

Jesus also speaks of recognizing people “by their fruits.” Such a teaching presupposes the ability, indeed the necessity, to evaluate actions and character. One cannot identify hypocrisy, bad fruit, or moral failure without making judgments about action and behavior. The prohibition is not against moral reasoning itself but against a particular kind of judgment: hypocritical, self-righteous, or condemnatory judgment that assumes the prerogatives of God.

Mob intimidation by those on the left in the name of Jesus assumes the perogatives of God, transgressing the laws of a nation founded upon Christian ethics and natural law by falsely appealing to the righteousness of Christian moral authority. They demand Christian love to make themselves immune to judgment by those who love Christ.

They, moreover, appeal to Christian justice to make themselves immune to legal consequences. But when asked whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the Roman government, Jesus replied, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” affirming a legitimate place for civil authority, even under a pagan and unjust regime, while also observing that obedience to the state does not replace devotion to God.

Yet, in Jesus’s teaching, devotion to God is not a license to disobey civil law. His instruction to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” assumes compliance with lawful civil authority, even when that authority is imperfect or unjust. Jesus himself paid taxes, respected legal processes, and did not encourage resistance or lawbreaking in God’s name—a devotion to secular power necessary for crucifixion!

For Jesus, faithfulness to God expresses itself within the bounds of civil order, not outside it. For this reason, Martin Luther King, Jr., advocated peaceful civil disobedience, the legal consequences of which must be accepted by his followers (see The Rule of Law and Unlawful Protest: The Madness of Mobs).

In Christianity, God’s authority does not justify coercion, disruption of others’ rights, lawlessness, or terrorism. On the contrary: devotion to God calls for humility, peace, and respect for law. When one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter, drew a sword and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Malchus, Jesus stopped him, saying, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” He then healed the servant’s ear, demonstrating his commitment to peace and mercy, even in the face of violence.

Religious conviction is never a blanket justification for civil disobedience, and it forbids righteous violence against authority. Disobedience to the state must always be principled and grounded in Christian ethics—and a last resort. Violence, especially, is always an action of last resort. Even if we take the mob that entered Cities Church on Sunday at its word, that it was led by Christians, there is no basis in Christianity to trespass and terrorize the congregation in a religious sanctuary. Nor is there any basis to do so in the secular laws of the American Republic. On the contrary, the secular law defends religious liberty.

The secular law is clear in this case. Beyond the First Amendment, in addition to reproductive health facilities, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (18 USC § 248), commonly called the FACE Act, makes it a federal crime to use force, threat of force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person exercising their religious freedom at a place of worship. This includes entering, leaving, or participating in worship services at churches, synagogues, and mosques.

Many observers have asked us to imagine a mob of Christian Nationalists entering a mosque and intimidating the congregation. What would Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison say about that? We may soon know, as several top Minnesota political leaders have been subpoenaed by federal authorities as part of an ongoing investigation into the chaos in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Federal prosecutors, including the Department of Justice and the FBI acting through a grand jury process, have issued subpoenas to, among others, Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, and Attorney General Ellison. While these subpoenas seek documents and communications related to interference with and obstruction of federal law enforcement efforts, scrutiny of the state’s failure to charge and prosecute the Sunday mob will likely become part of the inquiry.

* * *

The modern progressive resolves the tension noted at the top of his essay not by clarifying types of judgment, but by collapsing them. Moral discernment and moral condemnation are treated as indistinguishable. To judge actions is equated with harming persons, but only for the progressive’s choice of comrades. The progressive man condemns ICE for frightening children when deporting illegal aliens (an unfortunate consequence for the choices of parents who have no right to be in America), but he claims righteousness for his own action of frightening children. Really, he does not regard children at all, but uses them either to affirm his moral character (such as it is) or as targets of his rage.

It is not the case, therefore, that the progressive operates without moral pronouncements; rather, the progressive Christian appeals to an ideological framework dressed in faith that, in truth, operates outside Christian ethics and natural law. Wokeness does not eliminate judgment; it merely redefines its grounds and redirects its energy.

This should be obvious: progressive Christian discourse issues strong moral judgments against “judgmentalism,” traditional doctrine, exclusion, and perceived harm, while, at the same time, judging others based on ideological notions—critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and queer doctrine. These notions are prettied up with the language of “kindness,” but beneath the makeup lies ravenous swine. (See The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”.)

The reality is that it is not whether judgment exists, but who is permitted to judge and be judged. Without a moral ontology, this becomes entirely arbitrary, manifested either by mob action or totalitarian command. This is the moral relativism of progressivism: the targets of judgment are not based on an objective ethical system, but on power, personal or collective. It dresses itself in the raiments of salvation and manufactures its own Christs, elevating those who obstruct and resist civil authority to the status of martyr—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and now Renee Good. The Sunday mob chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot” and, in a call and response, “Say her name!” “Renee Good!”

Classical Christianity addressed the tension coherently by distinguishing between judging actions and condemning souls, between moral correction and final judgment. Christians were called to name sin while acknowledging their own fallibility, to correct others with humility, and to leave ultimate judgment to God. This framework preserved moral clarity without claiming moral omniscience.

In the modern period, Christian ethics, emerging from rational Christianity and natural law, sources from which the Founders formed the moral order underpining the American Republic, universalizes moral judgment for every citizen, each equal before the law. Faith becomes a personal matter, while law applies to everyone, the state possessing the sole authority to enforce the law with violence where citizens fail to follow it.

The core problem, then, is not judgment itself, but confusion about its nature. This confusion is intentional. A moral system that forbids judgment cannot survive; it negates the very standards that make morality possible. Christianity remains morally intelligible only by distinguishing kinds of judgment, not by judging arbitrarily or abolishing judgment altogether. Crucially, Christian judgment can only be the law of a secular society when it is universal and detached from Christian theism (since people are free from the imposition of faith as a matter of the ethic itself).

America cannot allow mobs of left-wing activists to impose their novel and cynical interpretation of Christianity over the law or the personal rights of Christians. When that distinction is lost, an artificial vocabulary of morality emerges—“social justice”—and gives way to zealotry; and the edict to “judge not” becomes less a moral principle than a rhetorical shield against moral (and legal) accountability.

If Christians are instructed not to judge, how can Christianity meaningfully function as a moral framework at all? It can’t. Progressive Christians offer the world no moral system, for no moral system can be found in relativism or utilitarianism, where morality is whatever power says it is, or where the means are rationalized by desired ends with no moral purchase.

Indeed, progressives suck the morality out of Christian ethics, scattering the Gospels of Jesus into a jumble of cherry-picked scriptures arbitrarily selected to justify harassment, intimidation, and violence in pursuit of decadent ends. The social justice warrior leverages the name of Jesus as a cudgel to attack conservative and liberal Christians and the American Republic. It is not only un-Christian—it’s un-American.

Christianity has always been unavoidably moral. It names certain actions as sinful, calls for repentance, and demands moral transformation. Concepts such as sin, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption lose all meaning if no behavior can be judged right or wrong, or if such judgments are made in bad faith. A Christianity that forbade judgment in every sense or judged from an ideological standpoint would cease to be a moral system and collapse into moral incoherence. Such a Christianity would be no Christianity at all. And this is the Christianity to which the Sunday mob appealed. These are fake Christians.

The BLM mob can escape neither religious nor secular judgment for its actions on Sunday. Those who comprise it must be made an example for others who would cynically leverage religious faith to justify mob intimidation and collective violence. Bring the hammer.

* * *

Note: A journalist cannot claim immunity simply because he is documenting a crime. While observing or reporting on illegal activity is generally protected under free press principles and the First Amendment in the United States, these protections apply only when the journalist does not himself engage in illegal acts. If a journalist encourages, directly participates in a crime, or provides material aid, he can be prosecuted as a principal, accomplice, or accessory, even if his intent includes documenting or reporting the event. In short, the act of reporting does not shield someone from criminal liability when he actively participates in the crime itself. Don Lemon is in trouble.

“Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

I want to share with you today something I teach in my college course, Freedom and Social Control. I believe this observation is broadly useful right now, in light of the unfolding insurrection in Minneapolis and the promise of more rebellion in other cities across the United States. Insurrection is a social contagion, one with a quasi-religious character, and without a reason to rise against the government, and for the sake of collective sanity, the contagion must be interrupted.

In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Sigmund Freud argues that religion is a collective psychological construction arising from deep human wishes („Wunscherfüllung“): the desire for protection, transcendent meaning, and a benevolent father figure, especially in the face of civilization’s constraints (necessary to check das Es, or the it or Id) and nature’s dangers and uncertainties.

While religious doctrines are ontologically false, Freud contends they persist because they fulfill profound emotional needs and help maintain social order. Like Karl Marx (in the Preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” published in 1844 in Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher), Freud is sympathetic to religion, even if he does not personally believe in God, because he recognizes the comfort and moral structure it provides (Marx is sympathetic for other reasons, while also highly critical of false consciousness as a manifestion of alienation).

Central to Freud’s thesis is the distinction between delusion and illusion. A delusion is a belief held in contradiction to evidence, reality, and reason (e.g., believing that gender is interchangeable), whereas an illusion is a belief motivated by wish-fulfillment—false, perhaps, but not defined solely by its falsity. Religion, Freud insists, is an illusion because it arises from universal human desires rather than a psychotic denial of reality. This makes it distinct from delusion, which is a personal subjectivity incongruent with the objective reality around the person. Delusion is pathological for this reason.

Freud predicts that as scientific rationality advances, humanity will gradually outgrow religion, replacing it with a more sober, reality-based ethic. Yet he demonstrates a profound understanding—or Verstehen, in the German sense—of religious belief: religion provides moral guidance, psychological comfort, and, perhaps, necessary social control at this stage of cultural development, especially for those who cannot tolerate life’s anxieties without it. Here, his idea intersects with Marx’s notion of religion as a painkiller—the “opiate of the people” („das Opium des Volkes“).

In my lectures, I situate Freud in a larger discussion of Paul Ricœur’s 1965 “Master of Suspicion” thesis (“les trois penseurs de la suspicion”), alongside Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of religion, the “Death of God” thesis („Gott ist tot“, an observation that also influenced Max Weber, as noted in previous essays on this platform). Freud claims to avoid Nietzsche systematically, confessing that he feared he might discover ideas too close to his own—but the overlap is striking. German intellectuals were swimming in Nietzschean waters, so the man’s influence over Freud (as well as Weber and others) was likely inevitable.

Both Freud and Nietzsche understood religious belief as a human projection: religion sublimates unconscious drives over rational self-understanding, and morality is historically contingent rather than divinely grounded. Nietzsche’s critique of religion as a response to human weakness and suffering parallels Freud’s account of religion as wish fulfillment. Nietzsche’s psychological style of conveyance anticipates Freud’s method: interpreting beliefs as symptoms rather than truths.

In lecture, I often recall Nietzsche’s line from Beyond Good and Evil (quoted at the top of this essay). Overstated perhaps, but strikingly relevant today: what counts as madness in an individual—cruelty, irrational beliefs, self-deception—can become normalized, even revered, when shared collectively. Social scale can convert pathology into “morality” and “truth.” (Did the man call it or what? Whatever one thinks of Nietzsche, that his perception was high-powered is undeniable.)

Nietzsche’s insight anticipates Freud’s treatment of religion as a mass psychological phenomenon: not private psychosis, but a culturally sanctioned illusion that persists because it is shared. Their approaches diverge, however: Nietzsche frames these beliefs as mass psychogenic illness; Freud frames them as a universal, developmentally understandable aspect of the human condition. Nietzsche emphasizes decadence, herd mentality, and social power; Freud emphasizes the psyche’s readiness to accept comforting illusions. Nonetheless, both recognize culture’s capacity for collective irrationality.

This is why I emphasize in lectures and public pronouncements the moral imperative to tell the truth and avoid leading impressionable people astray—whether accidentally or intentionally; one has an ethical responsibility to know what’s going on. A man can be charitable, compassionate, and understanding, but when belief becomes pathological and destructive, he must criticize it. Reforming character at scale requires identifying the vulnerabilities that make people susceptible to harmful illusions—and those who take advantage of those vulnerabilities. This demands brutal frankness and the courage to offend even those we hold close.