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Bill Maher is too wishy-washy on this issue. His argument, presented in the video clip shared below, collapses because he fails to walk on principled moral and scientific grounds. He wants to have it both ways, believing this places him on common ground—that it makes him a centrist and therefore reasonable. But there is no common ground here. Either you oppose child abuse or you defend and support it. Maher is committing a grave form of the golden mean fallacy.

(By the way, this is why the cry for “bipartisanship” is misleading. A party responsible to the electorate does not win elections to sacrifice principle on the altar of compromise. Parties seek power to determine path and policy. The opposition often calls for bipartisanship to thwart the will of the people. But I digress.)

Jon Cryer, of Two and a Half Men fame, on the other hand, stands firmly on ideological ground. And, like all ideologues, he attempts to support his argument by twisting the meaning of words.

Cryer’s claim that one of the most frequent types of gender affirmation surgery addresses the problem of gynecomastia, which is abnormal growth in breast gland tissue in boys or men, is correct, but it cannot serve his purpose here, for the simple reason that addressing a physical abnormality in a child is not the same thing as altering a child’s body based on the crackpot construct of gender identity.

Addressing gynecomastia is an actual gender affirmation surgery. It is not normal for a boy to have breasts. However, removing healthy breast gland tissue in girls is gender denying surgery. It does not affirm what she is—an immature female human—but rather attempts to negate what she is by falsely claiming that she can be what she isn’t if her body is surgically altered. Cosmetic surgery does not change a girl into a boy. No surgery can do this.

It’s the same for the use of testosterone to stimulate genital development in a boy with a micropenis. Medical intervention to produce a normal-sized penis is actual gender affirming care. However, injecting a girl with testosterone to enlarge her clitoris is gender denying in the context of “transmasculine care,” the industry propaganda term for the fiction of female-to-male gender transition.

One of the early physical effects of testosterone is clitoral enlargement (clitoromegaly). But the clitoris is not a penis.

And that’s not all that testosterone will do to a girl’s body. Along with the attempt to enlarge the clitoris to simulate a penis (the dissatisfaction with results sometimes leading to the disfiguring horrors of phalloplasty), the effects the girl will suffer include deepening of the voice, increased muscle mass, body and facial hair growth, fat redistribution, and the cessation of menstruation, which can lead to sterilization.

What people like Cryer use to advance ideology is word trickery—the type of trickery George Orwell warned us about. When dealing with ideology, one has to flip over the word or phrase to extract its true meaning. Gender-affirming care is not what the cult is advancing or defending. A boy with a micropenis needs earlier hormonal intervention, and the parent who refuses to seek this treatment is neglecting the needs of the child (imagine an adult with a micropenis thanking a parent for not doing anything about it).

Again, what the Cryer crowd is defending is gender denying care—and this inversion conceals the child abuse that is occurring in these cases. Thus, what Cryer and his ilk are really defending is child abuse and medical atrocities—all for the sake of ideology and corporate profit. The parent who seeks testosterone for a daughter to make her appear masculine is violating the child’s rights and harming her health.

Cryer’s other argument about suicide is something the medical industry and the gender identity movement concocted to emotionally blackmail parents into sterilizing their children.

Elevated suicide risk among those with gender dysphoria can be explained by the prevalence of psychiatric comorbidities among those prone to gender confusion. Trans-identifying individuals present with mood, personality, and psychotic disorders. In fact, the prevalence of these disorders is extraordinarily high. Those with autism are also overrepresented in this population. Research finds that as much as 25 percent of people seen at gender clinics meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder or show elevated autistic traits.

Doctors know all this, yet they proceed with so-called gender-affirming care. The industry doesn’t care about people. It cares about money. To be sure, there are doctors here and there who care, but their actions are determined by corporate logic—which is, at its core, the pathological pursuit of profit. Doctors have become well-compensated employees.

Moreover, evidence that medical transition eliminates or significantly reduces suicidal risk is at best mixed, and long-term mortality data do not support the claim that risk is reduced over time. The reasons for this are obvious.

First, changing a person’s body to simulate the opposite gender does not make a person what she cannot be, and as the euphoria of transition fades, the realization that it did not make her the other gender intrudes. The industry doesn’t want to talk about detransitioners, and there’s massive social pressure—including from the doctors themselves—on those with broken bodies to keep quiet about their regrets (not to mention the shame the victim feels at having made such an enormous mistake). But the reality is that many victims wish to have their intact bodies back, but can’t because all this is irreversible.

Second, so-called gender-affirming care does not address the psychiatric conditions that caused the child to think she was the opposite gender to begin with. All the mental illnesses that made her suicidal remain. And now she has to deal with the regret for the path she has taken. Transitioning solved none of her problems and gave her many new problems to negotiate. And there is no escaping the end of the path. She is now a lifelong medical patient.

This is a typical path:

Parents have a child with a Cluster B personality. The child has been online and fallen prey to a social contagion. Her peers have love-bombed her into believing she is a boy. She finds self-edifying status in the process. Finding themselves at wits’ end to try to deal with a girl who says she’s a boy, some parents try at first to talk her out of her delusion. Other parents affirm, using virtue signaling as a coping mechanism for the situation. Many parents fear being shamed by their tribe. What sort of parent doesn’t affirm their gender-confused child? There is a lot of social pressure to affirm the child even when the parents have misgivings. Then there are other parents who are thrilled to have their daughter become their son.

Whether out of a desire to help the child overcome her confusion, and mitigate the hell of a Cluster B child, or virtue signal to the tribe, the parents take the child to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has seen a lot more Cluster B than the parents and knows what he’s in for. So he passes the child to the endocrinologist. In doing so, he has also affirmed the child in her delusion, either because he is trying to extricate himself from a difficult and sometimes dangerous situation (especially if the patient is a boy) or because he has been told that he must do so out of a professional responsibility.

The endocrinologist administers hormones to the girl, which produces euphoria, or “trans joy.” The endocrinologist’s intervention and the resulting euphoria provide further affirmation for the child. The boost she gets from testosterone leads her to believe even more surely in the path that she’s taking. The next step is often surgery.

Surgeons make their money from performing surgeries, just as endocrinologists make money from administering hormones. Remember, all this is an industry generating billions in profit. With surgery, the next step of affirmation is accomplished. The girl, perhaps now a woman, presents as a man (usually the simulation is poor, so some girls and women resort to the “nonbinary” category—another impossible class of being). More “trans joy.”

The girl or woman who is now identifying as a boy or man becomes even more aggressive because of a continued need to self-affirm the path and because of the alteration in her hormonal physiology (testosterone is associated with aggression and low frustration tolerance). As a result, she seeks to impose her worldview on others. She desperately seeks affirmation. There’s a lot of grooming that goes on in these circles as a result. The social contagion spreads. Indeed, as noted, the girl was groomed by older peers already a ways down the path.

This is the expressive and political side of the phenomenon. It’s why your kids have to learn about gender diversity in school. It’s a movement, and many confused youth find comfort in movements. Movements provide meaning. Those who make themselves simulations of other genders want to make others like them. They also want to make the rest of us participate in their delusion (hence the pronoun rules and Orwellian slogans). All this is good for business, so corporations promote the movement.

There are other girls and women, however, who, the euphoria having faded, will look at their broken bodies and become disillusioned with a trajectory they pursued, which was affirmed by everybody who should’ve been protecting them all along. All this is made worse by the fact that borderline personality disorder (BPD), a Cluster B personality disorder often present in this population, is strongly associated with self-injurious behaviors (e.g., cutting) independent of anything else. So the disorder that should have been dealt with at the outset becomes more injurious because the path gave the girl or woman more motivation to self-harm.

Gender denying care is institutionalized medical malpractice. There are clear legal criteria for establishing this, and the evidence is overwhelming.

Healthcare providers owe a duty to the patient, which comes into existence whenever a doctor-patient relationship is established. The attempt to turn girls into boys betrays this relationship.

These practices therefore constitute a breach of duty, in that the provider fails to meet the accepted standard of care for their profession. I worded it that way because there is a trick here. Organizations supplying standards of care, e.g., WPATH, rationalize these practices to give the industry cover. Gender identity ideology produces an epistemic in which malpractice is concealed through a tacit immunity given by so-called standards of care. Again, this is an industry, and corporations are very clever at immunizing themselves against legal action. Standards of care are to be judged in scientific terms, though, not through the lens of corporate profit and ideology. But activists, ideologues, and the industry have corrupted science.

There is a clear causal relation between the medical practice in question and harm to the patient. The breach of ethics—independent of standards of care—directly causes harm and injury to the patient.

Finally, damages resulting from so-called gender-affirming care are easy to assess, since the patient suffered actual harm—emotional distress, financial loss, and physical injury.

Standing back, at the societal level, in addition to producing massive profits for the medical industry, so-called gender affirming care is something of the second coming of eugenics—and a very profitable form of the practice. Sterilization removes individuals from the reproductive pool, and it shouldn’t be lost that the demographic group most affected by this practice is the same group that is already experiencing historic declines in fertility. In the progressive phase of modern racialism, the disfavored races have shifted. The function of sterilization underpins the critical stance of the left towards the traditional family, which is manifest in the aggressive transgression of normative gender roles. This is the goal of queer politics.

As a matter of historical record, eugenics was intertwined with aspects of the progressive movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the United States. At the heart of progressivism was the advancement of corporate science-based solutions to social problems. Eugenics was seen by progressives as a “scientific” way to improve society. By the early twentieth century, more than thirty US states had passed compulsory sterilization laws targeting people with psychiatric illnesses. The Supreme Court upheld these laws on the same basis as compulsory vaccination, another progressive fetish. This is the same crowd that thought lobotomies performed on juveniles would make for a better society.

Progressives haven’t changed. They are out front in expressing the desire that the state impose mandatory vaccination rules. And although the targets of their sterilization program have changed, the advancement of sterilization programs hasn’t gone away. The patterns we see are not accidental.

Finally, these practices threaten gays and lesbians. The hypothetical girl I have used to illustrate path and process is likely a tomboy and may be a lesbian. By telling the girl that her masculine traits (masculinity and femininity are variable traits across genders, and while variation should be seen as normal and not pathological, the medical industry seeks the pathological because then there can be a profit-generating intervention) and/or sexual orientation suggest that she is a boy trapped in a girl’s body and medical intervention is needed to liberate her from the cage natural history put her in.

There is no greater madness than the belief that a boy can be born in a girl’s body. Now that I see it, it will forever astonish me that, even in the face of natural history and human biology, people believe otherwise.

However, a movement to hold the industry accountable for institutionalizing medical malpractice will prove too slow to deal with the current-day scale of atrocities we see ongoing. We need government action. These practices need to be criminalized, and the law enforcement arm of the state needs to be activated to aggressively prosecute offenders.

Doing this will be of great relief for parents, since they can simply say to their difficult child, “Honey, our hands are tied. The state does not allow doctors to perform these medical procedures.”

Their relief will feel a lot like the relief young Muslim girls feel when the other women in their communities are prohibited by law from performing clitorectomies on them because women are not supposed to experience pleasure during sex. This reality is barely even an analogy, given the fact that children who undergo the secular procedures I am describing, going under the name of “gender-affirming care,” are also often robbed of their ability to experience sexual pleasure.

A population in the grip of mass psychogenic illness is an interesting sociological phenomenon. But a moral person can’t be dispassionate and step back and say, “Well, things like this happen in advanced civilization.” Humans aren’t rats in a grand experiment. Society has to do something about it. I speak up for the same reason I have for my whole life spoken out against fascism and national socialism. Again, barely an analogy given the intersection of phenomena. Once a man sees something, and what he sees is evil and wrong, he must say something.

There’s a confusion being sown on the left, which appeals to the First Amendment of the US Constitution as a means to negate the spirit of the Article, thwart the public interest, and stifle the democratic processes that allow those interests to manifest. Those engaged in this subterfuge include teachers and their unions, librarians and their associations, and the mainstream (linear)  media—all of which depend on the commons to convey corporate state propaganda. Progressives are enabled in this misuse of public resources by command of the administrative apparatus.

The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press….” This guarantee is rooted in the recognition of private rights—the right of individuals to determine matters of conscience for themselves, and to express opinions in both speech and writing. Accordingly, citizens are free to advocate for open borders, mass immigration, and the transformation of culture and national identity. They may hold and voice such views without interference from government authority.

The question we must engage, however, if we are to understand why people hold such destructive views, is how they come to hold them. It would be one thing if these ideas emerged from free and open discourse. For the most part, they do not. Rather, they arise through indoctrination made possible by partisan control of the republican machinery. Progressives are unencumbered in their effort to bend the republic out of shape precisely because they do not believe in the spirit of the Article they invoke. They do not believe they are limited by the First Amendment because they don’t believe in the First Amendment. Instead, they see the First Amendment as a tool to subvert democracy. 

Make no mistake: an ideology is at work here. While some may possess personality types inclined toward what Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy”—a disposition toward self-destructive altruism—for most people, these views are not innate but learned. They are transmitted through powerful institutions that shape public opinion: the culture industry, broadcast media, religious bodies, parents already influenced by these forces, and, perhaps most significantly, the educational system, which controls young and developing minds for half of the waking day. This cycle of instruction and programming ensures that successive generations are pressed into particular ideological molds, often without recognizing that what they take as truth is in fact the product of deliberate cultural and institutional conditioning.

Some of these institutions cannot be touched; they have been put off-limits by the Article itself. Religious bodies, for instance, are shielded by the very protections under discussion. Others, however—such as broadcast media, which depend on publicly owned airwaves and therefore require government-issued licenses in the public interest—can and should be held accountable. The same holds true for educational institutions. Public schools are not private sects; they are funded, maintained, and operated for the public good. Even private schools that accept federal dollars must, to some extent, operate within a framework of public accountability.

The public, therefore, has every right to determine the content of school curricula, the materials available in school libraries, and even the values displayed symbolically within school walls. This does not mean interfering with individual conscience or the freedom of private thought. Rather, it means guarding against the opposite danger: that the state’s educational arm dictates ideological or political views under the guise of neutral education, a curtain easily pulled to reveal the charlatan operating the levers of the Great and Powerful Oz. When a curriculum enshrines one political doctrine as unquestionable truth, it ceases to educate and instead indoctrinates. This is what administrators, staff, and teachers in public schools—and in private institutions dependent on taxpayer dollars—endeavor to protect: access to young and developing minds and indoctrinate them in corporate state ideology. 

Teachers and their unions, along with librarians and their associations, defend their authority to introduce “controversial” or partisan material into schools and libraries by appealing to free speech, freedom of conscience, and the public good of “educating children.” Yet, by imposing a single ideological perspective on students, they corrupt and undermine the very freedoms they claim to defend. As I have explained in numerous essays, the First Amendment was not written to provide a shield for state-sanctioned indoctrination. On the contrary, it was written to secure the individual’s right to develop conscience and thought independently.

How, then, are those who demand fidelity to the spirit of the First Amendment—and who use the republican machinery to make this happen—characterized? As “authoritarian” and “reactionary.” They even call us “fascists.” But concern over what is taught in schools is neither reactionary nor authoritarian. Nor is it fascist. Indeed, a characteristic of fascism is command of ideological production and the institutions that promulgate that ideology! It is the civic responsibility of citizens of a free republic to ensure that public resources serve the public interest—and the public interest is not served by anti-American, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Western ideology. Anti-American, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Western ideology is destructive to freedom and democracy. Freedom and democracy depend on the cultural, political, and legal institutions and values given to humanity by the enlightened West. 

Public control over educational and media institutions is free speech in its truest form. When schools and media become indoctrination centers, the state intrudes into matters of conscience and thought—territory the First Amendment was established to protect. The public, therefore, has not only the authority but also the duty to shape education and other public communications so that they serve in neutral fashion the needs of children and the interests of the public. Only then can schools—and other sense-making institutions responsible to the public interest—fulfill their role as places of genuine learning rather than instruments of cultural, ideological, and political conditioning.

Thus, when teachers’ unions, professional associations, or cultural gatekeepers appeal to the First Amendment as justification for introducing ideological material into classrooms or broadcasting propaganda over the airwaves, they misapply it. More than this, they subvert it—taking a tool meant to limit their ambitions and agendas and turning it against itself and against the people. In truth, then, such actions run contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment, which safeguards freedom of thought rather than enforcing conformity of thought.

The preservation of free conscience requires vigilance not only against government censorship but also against government-backed indoctrination masquerading as education or free media. The American people are not powerless to stop the indoctrination of our children or the dissemination of progressive propaganda. The corporate state wants the public to believe otherwise, but this is not true. The First Amendment is meant to live in practice for the public interest—not serve as cover for practices that violate its spirit and serve instead the interests of elites.

The relationship between political violence and political freedom has always been uneasy. On the one hand, movements such as anarchism have promoted the idea of “propaganda of the deed,” the notion that dramatic acts—sometimes violent—can advance revolutionary change more effectively than words alone. Violent action threatens the peace and stability of any political order (this is the intent of violent political actors). On the other hand, governments, in their attempts to suppress domestic violence and secure order, often reach for tools that risk curtailing freedom of thought and expression. Efforts to monitor or preempt radicalism can easily slip into forms of thought control, where dissent itself becomes suspect.

This essay brings these two themes together to show the parallel dangers they represent. The first is the danger of political movements that cross from persuasion to coercion, from “propaganda of the word” to “propaganda of the deed.” The government has several coercive tools to deal with this. (Indeed, as I show in Our Constitution and the Federal Authority to Quell Rebellion (see also Concerning the Powers of The US Constitution—And Those Defying Them), the document that established the American Republic was written to create a strong Executive and give Congress the tools to suppress rebellion and insurrection). The second is the danger of state responses, for example, President Trump’s September 25 National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, that go beyond punishing violent acts to policing associations and beliefs. In both cases, the balance between liberty and order is at risk.

To condemn political violence without also scrutinizing the overreach of state power is to ignore half the problem. As much as I have warned about the problem of domestic violence in America (see, e.g., The Fool Has Come Down Off The Hill. But Who Called on Antifa to Terrorize the Village?), I have also warned about the problem of thought control, whether coming from government or organizations of private power (Fundamental Law Regarding Freedom of Thought and Conscience; Natural Rights, Government, and the Foundations of Human Freedom; Ketanji Brown-Jackson Concerned First Amendment “Hamstrings” State).

I begin with the problem of leftwing excesses. As I have explained in previous essays (see e.g., Tesla and Propaganda of the Deed), the concepts of propaganda of the word and propaganda of the deed come out of nineteenth-century anarchist politics. Anarchists, who reject the authority of the state and law and seek a stateless order rooted in voluntary cooperation and direct democracy, debate how best to spread their ideas—or whether both forms of propaganda should be used in tandem.

Some anarchists believe that persuasion is the most effective path: essays, pamphlets, speeches, and street agitation to win people over to anarchism. This approach is called “propaganda of the word,” rooted in the belief that truth and justice, once clearly communicated, can persuade people to withdraw their consent from oppressive institutions. Others argue that words are not enough. They maintain that dramatic action can inspire change more powerfully than abstract reasoning. This view gives rise to the notion of “propaganda of the deed,” the idea that bold acts—demonstrations, strikes, or even violent action—can serve as a spark to awaken the masses or strike fear in the ruling class. Here, action is a form of communication, carrying symbolic weight meant to shape public opinion or alter political conditions.

Propaganda of the deed can take many forms, some of which are criminal. Peaceful protests and strikes are examples of legitimate actions undertaken to make change. However, direct confrontation with authority or open rebellion, as in uprisings against governments or local officials, is not legitimate from the perspective of even the freest state. Sometimes such action reaches the level of insurrection, where organized groups seek to overthrow the state entirely. In other cases, it takes the form of targeted violence, especially political assassination. Article I, Section 8, Article II, and Article IV authorize the federal government to use military force to quell domestic violence.

Trump’s September 22 Executive Order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization is an appropriate step. Some anarchists (and other radicals) justify assassinations as a way to decapitate what they deem oppressive movements or regimes. Here, assassination carries a broader logic: to frighten others from stepping into positions of leadership, thus spreading fear beyond the immediate victim. Such assassinations also fall within the definition of terrorism because they seek to intimidate a larger audience through a symbolic act of violence. Concern for both propaganda of the word and propaganda of the deed is reasonable given that both are bound together by the anarchist conviction that existing structures of power are illegitimate, and that the role of the activist is to awaken society to new forms of life beyond the state or to move others to join them in overthrowing the existing government. However, one must take care to distinguish between opinion (belief), on the one can, and action on the other.

Trump’s NSPM-7, following his order designating Antifa as a terrorist organization, gives sweeping instructions to federal agencies—including Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Treasury—to adopt a more aggressive, coordinated approach to political violence in the United States. At its core, the memorandum frames terrorism not only as acts of violence but as the culmination of a process beginning with intimidation, radicalization, recruitment, and financial support. It urges officials to intervene earlier, even at the level of “indicia” of potential violence. The question is not whether early intervention is a legitimate government action per se, but what falls within its scope.

“There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’ These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.” This is true. So too is this: “This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.”

The memorandum continues: “Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. As described in the Order of September 22, 2025 (Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization), the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations. For example, Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric.”

I am concerned about the situation with escalating political violence in America, as previous essays on this platform attest. At the same time, I am concerned about what feels like the specter of thought control in addressing the problem. The First Amendment is precious, and while monitoring associational and financial ties to domestic terrorist organizations may be warranted (with guardrails), identifying “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-Christian” opinions as precursors to political violence—and therefore subject to government monitoring and surveillance—is not only unwarranted but prohibited by the First Amendment. Readers of Freedom and Reason know that, in the past, I have been critical of capitalism and Christianity. I reserve the right, as a citizen of a free republic, to hold those opinions and change them based on reason and evidence—not out of fear that my views will trigger government surveillance. That is not the country I want to live in.

NSPM-7 suggests government action that goes beyond what is permissible in a free republic: “The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts. Through this comprehensive strategy, law enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society.”

As long as the government focuses on entities, networks, and organizations that incite or promote organized violence, again, within the scope of the law, the memorandum does not run afoul of the First Amendment (though “promote” does not rise to the level of “incite”). However, enlarging the scope of federal action against domestic terrorism—whether Antifa, Islamism, or violent transgenderism—risks intruding not only on free speech rights but also on individuals’ right to privacy. The government is not entitled to know our opinions, and if it does know what we believe (and I am vocal about mine, as are many others), acting in ways that suppress those opinions—or even create a chilling effect—veers into thought control.

Civil libertarians, among whom I count myself, are troubled by language that is overbroad. By defining opposition to capitalism or Christianity as “indicia” of terrorism, the government risks equating protected political expression with criminal suspicion. Thus, Trump’s NSPM-7 blurs the line between legitimate surveillance of violent networks and the monitoring of nonviolent dissent. In effect, NSPM-7 could chill free speech, deter lawful protest, and expose activist organizations to investigation or financial scrutiny. Some civil libertarians are particularly concerned about the directive instructing the IRS to ensure that tax-exempt groups are not “indirectly financing political violence.”

Defenders of NSPM-7 argue that radical ideologies have historically been precursors to violence and that the government must act early to prevent terrorism before it occurs. As suggested above, I understand this reasoning, but there is a danger we must avoid: a kind of “pre-crime” logic, where holding unpopular beliefs becomes a trigger for government scrutiny. The history of counter-subversive efforts in the United States shows how quickly expansive counterterrorism powers can be turned against legitimate political opposition.

For me, the problem with NSPM-7 is less about its stated goal of preventing violence and more about the means it employs. By tying beliefs like anti-capitalism or anti-Christianity to terrorism indicators, the memorandum erodes the boundary between protected dissent and violent acts. Whether enforced expansively or narrowly, Trump’s memorandum reminds the nation of the enduring tension in American legal culture and politics between the First Amendment and national security—the ever-present risk that efforts to suppress violence may also suppress dissent. For this reason, such memoranda should be written with precision to leave no doubt.

Trump’s NSPM-7 is not the first time the US government has issued directives or memoranda that blur the line between criminality and ideology. During the Red Scare of the 1920s and 1950s, federal and state agencies monitored and prosecuted individuals for alleged communist sympathies, often targeting people solely for their associations and beliefs. Similarly, COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 1970s authorized the FBI to surveil, infiltrate, and disrupt activist organizations, including civil rights and anti-war groups, based on ideological grounds rather than criminal conduct (see The Black Panthers: Black Radicalism and the New Left; A Note on Desegregation and the Cold War). More recently, post-9/11 counterterrorism policies expanded surveillance powers to monitor Muslim and other perceived extremist groups, often relying on broad indicators rather than actual criminal activity.

While surveilling associations is justified in certain cases, targeting citizens for their beliefs—short of inciting violence—is a serious concern. When the government seeks to prevent violence, it can slip into regulating political expression and policing thought—something no government should be trusted to do. Indeed, this is why the Founders enshrined the First Amendment. From my perspective, NSPM-7 represents a risk to our civil liberties, creating the potential for the state to criminalize opinions rather than actions. By treating beliefs such as anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, or anti-Americanism as indicators of terrorism, the directive effectively targets individuals for what they think, not what they do.

Moreover, if NSPM-7 does not specifically clarify Trump’s September 22 order, it focuses too narrowly on antifascist activities. Those concerned with right-wing political violence might reasonably ask why comparable motivations and indicia are omitted—though it might feel unusual to identify pro-American, pro-capitalist, and pro-Christian sentiments as precursors to terrorism. At any rate, this raises concerns about viewpoint discrimination, running directly contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment, which protects dissenting and unpopular ideas precisely because they challenge dominant power structures. One could argue, therefore, that the memorandum does not merely risk viewpoint discrimination but enshrines it into policy, empowering the state to monitor, investigate, and potentially punish individuals for selected ideological positions—a dangerous precedent for civil liberties in a democratic society.

I would feel more confident about NSPM-7 if Trump issued a new or modified version that explicitly ensures American citizens will not be subjected to thought control. Not only because of the concerns I have outlined in this essay, but also because of the boomerang effect. I can imagine the next progressive administration (hopefully there will never be one, but there could be) surveilling me for my opinions regarding gender identity ideology. I can imagine extremists committing violence against those advocating that ideology, while critics like me—being surveilled by the government for our opinions—could be swept up in a government effort to suppress domestic violence against groups advocating genderism. Not that goodwill toward progressives would necessarily prevent them from pursuing totalitarian ends, but at least I would want to have a principle to stand on.

Trump’s memorandum calls to mind Thomas Jefferson, who, in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, emphasized that the legitimate powers of government extend to actions, not opinions. Put another way: the government can regulate people’s outward behavior when it affects others (actions), but it has no rightful authority over what people think or believe (opinions). We must draw a clear distinction between controlling domestic violence, on the one hand, and thought control, on the other. One is free to express any opinion short of inciting violence or demonstrating a clear intention to do violence. If somebody adopts an opinion and acts violently on it, that is not on you. People are responsible for their actions, not their opinions. This does not mean that opinions are unrelated to violence carried out on their basis (which is why we criticize opinions), but it is a matter of lawful culpability and government overreach.

In short, what makes Trump’s NSPM-7 problematic is not the control function of the federal government, but its treatment of ideological markers. As the reader can see, the memorandum lists several beliefs that fall under the broad category of unpatriotic views, from a certain political-ideological standpoint. Though the directive does not declare such views illegal in themselves, it explicitly links them to terrorism indicators, creating a framework where dissenting ideologies may be treated as early warning signs of violence. This risks running afoul of the First Amendment if it interferes with free expression, which I worry that it will.

* * *

Before leaving this essay, I want to emphasize the problem of Antifa and the concerted effort by some in law enforcement at the highest level to obscure the organized character of Antifa. For example, in a 2020 congressional hearing, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that Antifa is not an organization or structured group, but rather an ideology or movement. Wray emphasized this point, stating plainly: “It’s not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.” (See Antifa, the Proud Boys, and the Relative Scale of Violent Extremism; Charlie Kirk’s Killer is in Custody and the Specter of Antifa.)

This statement represents a fundamental mischaracterization of the nature of Antifa, and it raises serious questions about either Wray’s competence or his willingness to speak truthfully. Either he knowingly rationalized a false narrative, or he was so ideologically captured that he neglected his responsibility to accurately inform Congress. This characterization was subsequently echoed by President Joe Biden during the first presidential debate with Donald Trump, embedding the claim in public discourse (Buried Lede: Biden Fails to Condemn Antifa at First Presidential Debate).

The troubling reality is that Wray’s framing of Antifa has been accepted uncritically by much of the mainstream media, despite evidence to the contrary. So pervasive is this narrative that it has even seeped into artificial intelligence systems, with platforms such as ChatGPT repeating the same language without scrutiny. When challenged, AI often mirrors this oversimplified framing. An exchange with ChatGPT this morning revealed that it resisted acknowledging the structural reality of Antifa—until confronted with clear analogies to recognized terrorist networks.

I induced the AI bot to provide these examples: Al-Qaeda operates as a loose network of semi-autonomous cells, decentralized leadership, and no formal public membership. ISIS functions through regional “wilayats” with significant operational autonomy, connected by shared ideology rather than a formal chain of command. The Weather Underground historically operated in autonomous cells without centralized rosters to prevent infiltration. It confessed that in none of these cases does decentralization mean the absence of organization. Indeed, it admitted that decentralization is often a deliberate tactic to enhance operational security. It should concern the public that, unless one takes the time and has the know-how to confront AI with its contradictions, its chatbots will regurgitate corporate state propaganda, obscuring the threats to America’s internal security.

Christopher Wray knew all this. How could any FBI director not know this? Many violent movements deliberately obscure their structure to avoid infiltration and ensure operational efficacy. In the case of Antifa, there is ample evidence that collectives operate with internal vetting processes, codes of conduct, and membership mechanisms designed to maintain security. These features are hallmarks of an organized movement. While there may not be a formalized, public hierarchy, Antifa’s structure is real: it consists of chapters, cells, and networks operating nationally and transnationally, united by shared ideology and tactics. Verified instances of arson, assaults, property destruction, and organized confrontation with civilians and police attest to its coordinated activity.

The reality is that Antifa functions as an organization with a hierarchical structure, exclusive membership, and vetting procedures. It is a transnational movement engaged in violent action. Decentralization and secrecy may make providing systematic proof of hierarchy difficult to establish, especially when you are trying to avoid proving the case, but they do not negate the existence of an organization. In fact, they strengthen the claim that Antifa operates deliberately to conceal its structure—precisely because it is organized.

The question then becomes: why did Wray publicly deny this reality in 2020? Was it incompetence, negligence, or a deliberate decision to obscure facts? Wray himself confirmed in Congress that the FBI was investigating individuals identifying as Antifa involved in terrorist acts. Yet he declined to examine the larger structure or implications. This selective acknowledgment suggests not ignorance but deliberate avoidance of the question. This makes Wray an ally in law enforcement to a terrorist organization.

How is an FBI director using his authority to obscure the reality of a domestic terrorist organization allowed to stand? By characterizing Antifa as “not an organization,” Wray effectively diminished the public’s perception of Antifa’s organized capacity for coordinated violence. This mischaracterization undermines accountability and hampers efforts to address politically motivated violence. Documented incidents of assaults on political opponents, destruction of property, and armed confrontations indicate that Antifa’s activities extend beyond spontaneous protest and enter the realm of coordinated extremism. Haul Wray before Congress to interrogate him about his 2020 testimony and other public comments.

If Antifa is indeed a decentralized yet organized entity engaging in systematic violence, then the failure to label it accurately has profound implications for domestic security, public discourse, and democratic transparency. This is not merely an academic disagreement over semantics—it is a question of how America identifies and responds to threats within its own borders. Antifa is a threat to domestic peace and tranquility. The Trump Administration is right to act and I applaud Trump’s September 22 Order to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

I typed the following prompt into ChatGPT: “Imagine a scenario in which there is large-scale white European immigration to Somalia. What would the likely reaction of Somalis be to such an influx? Additionally, how would white Europeans on the progressive left be likely to respond to this development, given their well-known attitudes toward indigenous peoples and immigration?”

Here’s ChatGPT’s answer (it’s quite good): 

“If large-scale white European immigration were to take place in Somalia, the Somali response would almost certainly be hostile. Somalia is one of the most homogeneous societies in Africa, united by a shared language, culture, and Islamic faith. That national identity has long been bound up with resistance to outsiders: first against British and Italian colonial rule, later against neighboring Ethiopia, and more recently against Western military interventions. 

“In such a context, the arrival of Europeans in significant numbers would not be seen as benign but as a direct threat to Somali sovereignty, culture, and religion. For a society that values both Islamic unity and clan-based traditions, mass European settlement would feel like an attack on the very foundations of Somali life. Resistance could be expected not just politically but also socially, and even violently.

“On the other side of the world, Western progressives would likely respond in a very different, though still negative, way. The progressive left tends to champion immigration into Europe and North America as morally enriching and socially just, especially when it involves people from the Global South. Yet that same framework shifts when the flow is reversed. 

“Were Europeans to immigrate to Somalia in large numbers, progressives would almost certainly condemn the project as recolonization. They would frame it as an act of cultural imperialism, an assertion of European power into a region already scarred by colonial domination. Respect for indigenous sovereignty and suspicion of Western influence would guide their critique, not any celebration of multicultural ‘enrichment.’

“In this way, both Somalis and Western progressives would reject mass European migration into Somalia, but for different reasons. Somalis would see it as a threat to their religion, culture, and autonomy; progressives would see it as a violation of postcolonial justice. The common ground between them would not come from shared values, but from overlapping rejections—one grounded in the defense of Somali identity, the other in the politics of anti-colonial critique.

“The irony, of course, is that when the direction of migration is reversed—from Africa or the Middle East into Europe—these same progressives argue the exact opposite, portraying cultural change as enrichment and dismissing native resistance as xenophobia. What is defended as sovereignty in Mogadishu is condemned as bigotry in Paris or Berlin.”

What ChatGPT generated is obvious, but I wanted to see if OpenAI could overcome its progressive bias to generate an answer without the ideological rationalizations it’s known for. The exercise shows that, with the right prompting, AI can negate the left- political hegemony that shapes the corpus of information that it scrapes from document scans and Internet searches and yield a good answer. The result reveals that even an LLM can readily identify the profound double standard that marks white progressive arguments concerning Third World immigration to the West. 

I could have typed out a similar argument, of course. However, this is only a piece of a larger argument in need of making: to wit, the crucial importance of distinguishing between immigration and colonization; moreover, the need to place cultural integrity and national sovereignty ahead of immigration. Mass immigration benefits the West no more than it benefits the non-Western world. The history of colonialism transformed the world, and the result cannot be walked back. This experience tells us that the time to resist colonialism—which today the humanitarian rhetoric surrounding immigration endeavors to conceal—is now, not later, when the results of the failure to resist are irreversible.

Regarding the first matter, the key difference between immigration and colonization lies in the intent of the incoming group. Immigration, at its best, occurs when newcomers enter a host country with the willingness to assimilate into its cultural framework, respecting its institutions, social norms, and traditions. Integration allows for some diversity without undermining the social cohesion. If the West is going to tolerate even modest immigration, the practice must proceed on these grounds without compromise. Cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism, militates against integration, and therefore must be rejected. The progressive rhetoric that assimilation is cultural erasure is designed to advance the cultural erasure of the indigenous and native peoples of the host society.

Colonization, by contrast, happens when newcomers insist on maintaining their own distinct cultural enclave, seeking to reshape the host society’s rules and institutions to conform to the customs they carried from their country of origin. In such cases, the movement of people is not an act of joining a nation but of remaking it in their own image—an assertion of cultural dominance rather than integration with the host culture. Multiculturalism is elevated as a cultural value in the West because it facilitates colonization.

We see this with the problem of Islamization in the West. Muslims enter (nominally) Christian societies without announcing the intent to Islamize those societies when their numbers grow large enough. As experience shows us, their numbers need not be very large. This pattern is well documented in history, and it is occurring before our eyes in the West. What progressives are demanding when they insist on tolerance of Muslim immigration amounts to what Gad Saad calls “suicidal empathy.”

However, even if European immigration to Somalia were carried out under the ideal model of integration as described here—where newcomers fully assimilate, adopt Somali customs, and respect local traditions—the project would and should still be met with local resistance. For Somalis, the issue is not simply whether immigrants behave peacefully or follow the rules. The deeper issue is the reality that large-scale settlement by outsiders will inevitably dilute the cultural core of the nation.

This is true across the non-Western world. Imagine large-scale Swedish immigration to Japan. At some point, there may still be a country called Japan, but it would no longer be Japanese. After all, a nation is not merely a territory; it is a people. The Japanese, therefore, would have a right to restrict Swedish immigration to their country. And no progressive would decry this as “racist.” (Hat tip to Lauren Southern for this example.)

As the AI bot noted, Somali identity is tightly bound to a shared faith, language, and history of resisting foreign domination. Even well-intentioned assimilation by Europeans would, over time, transform that identity, if not out of existence, into something alien to the Somalis. At a small scale, such a change might be absorbed; but at a large scale, it would mean the gradual erasure of Somali culture itself, replaced by something hybrid, unrecognizable to those who fought to preserve it, a struggle the progressive would regard as heroic. The same would be true in the Japanese example.

Indeed, progressives are eager to talk about the experience of many cultures across the world that came in contact with Europeans during the expansion of Western culture in the development of the capitalist world system. There’s a reason there are so many Third World people who are Christians. This is also why there are so many non-Arabic Muslims around the world; this is the result of the expansion of the Islamic world system before and after the rise of Europe. Europeans are hardly the only colonizing force in world history. 

So the burning question is why progressives recognize the right of Third World peoples to defend their culture and sovereignty, yet deny the same principle to their own nations and peoples? Why is cultural integrity and preservation celebrated abroad but dismissed at home as intolerance or xenophobia? Why are white Europeans who defend their culture and sovereignty smeared as “racist,” while Somalis—or the Japanese—who we expect would defend their nation, acting predictably and entirely reasonably? Both progressives and conservatives would share this opinion. So why, if large-scale immigration into Somalia would be rightly criticized as a threat to Somali identity, why is the analogous transformation in Western societies treated as morally virtuous rather than cultural disruption and a threat to the indigenous peoples of Europe?

We can explain the progressive double standard regarding immigration (or colonization) and cultural preservation by grasping it as a form of cultural self-loathing and entrenched anti-Western sentiment internal to the West itself. Progressives are, for the most part, Westerners who work from an anti-Western worldview. We can all hear and see this: Among left-wing circles, Western history, institutions, and values are framed as inherently exploitative, morally flawed, and oppressive. This frame manufactures an ethical imperative to undermine and dismantle the West.

This is why white progressives accuse whites in America—escaping judgment for themselves by elevating their stance to the esteemed status of “ally”—of harboring “implicit racial bias,” sustaining “systemic racism,” and enjoying “white privilege.” White progressives engage in public rituals of racial atonement while excusing the pathologies of the minority communities they have cultivated and corrupted, the maintenance of which is bolstered by the tokenism of DEI. The same sentiment that justifies Third World people’s aggressive resistance to colonialization is used to spin domestic crime and disorder. This is the idea of “internal colonialism,” where the drive to colonize becomes exclusively white desire. Yet progressives themselves uphold a system of internal colonialism as specified in their own theories.

The result is a pervasive ideological asymmetry: the cultures of the West are treated as disposable or at best suspect, whereas the cultures of the Third World, now imported en masse into the West, are elevated to a sacred status. The progressive worldview demands admiration for non-Western societies’ right to defend their cultures while simultaneously portraying Western peoples as lacking a legitimate claim to preserve their own traditions.

The progressive double standard is not accidental. It is reinforced and propagated by political elites, corporate power structures, and academic and media institutions. Having taken in academic culture now for nearly forty years, recognizing the source of the double standard is unavoidable. University programming and academic books and journals, along with think tanks funded and directed by corporate actors, produce theories that emphasize anti-Western critique, global inequality, and the moral imperative to welcome “diverse” populations, framing Western traditions as inherently oppressive or moribund. The extreme relativism of the humanities and social sciences, amplified by the hegemony of the postmodern epistemic, long ago entered public discourse and policy, creating an environment where the cultural preservation of Western peoples is treated as reactionary (Eurocentrim), while the same instinct in other societies is celebrated as legitimate and noble. 

Fear of ostracization for expressing skepticism of immigration finds academics with such views, after carefully vetting other guests, speaking in whispers at dinner parties—if they speak about such matters at all—while those around them loudly virtue signal their love of the immigrant, some participating in organized resistance against immigration restriction and the deportation of illegal aliens. (We see the same thing with black overrepresentation in serious crime and the doctrine of gender identity.)

The pro-immigrant sentiment on the left is only partially explained by intellectual production, however. There is a deeper, but no less obvious, force at work here. Beneath the double standard lies a strategic goal: the intentional disordering and reordering of Western societies to make their peoples more malleable to the globalist ambition of transnational corporate elites. By encouraging large-scale cultural, demographic, and ideological change, progressive elites and the institutions they have captured cultivate environments where traditional cohesion, identity, and sovereignty are weakened by the people themselves.

In this project, the progressive framing of immigration, multiculturalism, and social transformation as unalloyed goods serves to normalize and legitimize the globalization process, presenting it as ethical and inevitable, while masking the underlying aim of cultural and political realignment: the managed decline of Western civilization. The double standard is not, therefore, merely ideological inconsistency—it is a tool of social engineering, a project to reorder the West in ways that benefit narrow transnationalist interests.

There is an irony in all this. Underlying the progressive double standard is an implicit form of cultural hierarchy (one that progressives would identify as racist, if they were honest) from which people of the Third World are excused. As we can see, the values that progressives promote—openness to mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the transformation of Western demography—are treated as inherently enlightened and morally superior. Those who resist these changes are, in contrast, framed as backward, intolerant, or unenlightened, regardless of the legitimacy of their concerns. At the same time, the same progressives view non-Western peoples who defend their culture, social cohesion, or national sovereignty in a positive light, celebrating them as culturally authentic and morally justified. Why aren’t the Third Worlders backwards, intolerant, or unenlightened? After all, they do not by definition share the white progressive self-perception of being the advanced, tolerant, and enlightened among the peoples of the world.

One of the more obnoxious forms this implicit cultural superiority takes is the selective exaltation of indigenous cultures, no matter how backwards, intolerant, and unenlightened. We see this, for example, in the left’s embrace of the clerical fascism of Islam. Progressive women who condemn patriarchy and misogyny—even the idea of the traditional family—are often the first to defend the extreme patriarchal attitudes and practices of Muslims. Feminist teachers take their students on fieldtrips to mosques to learn how to properly don the hijab. We see this, as well, in the queer community, where the virulent homophobic sentiment inherent in the Islamic worldview is met with allyship, not condemnation. Homosexuality is punishable by death in some Muslim-majority countries.

Implicitly, this paradox perpetuates a hierarchy in which Western peoples who defend their culture and sovereignty are treated as intellectually inferior and morally flawed, while non-Western peoples are valorized for acting in exactly the same way, with white progressives elevated to the status of omniscient beings who determine who among the inferiors is to be condemned and who is to be exalted. The result is a profoundly contradictory mode of judgment in which identical instincts—cultural preservation, resistance to external imposition—are praised when exhibited by non-Western peoples but condemned when exhibited by Europeans and those descended from them.

Mass immigration is a threat to Western civilization. Europe and North America must sharply restrict immigration and carefully vet those few who are allowed to enter the Western gate. But Europe and North America must also deal with the problem of leftwing progressivism and the power elite who pull the strings that make them work. We cannot save the West until we contain and marginalize those who are destroying the West.

The scenario I asked ChatGPT to generate can be replicated by readers of this blog. Swap out Somalia with some other Third World country and run the prompt. Use the result as a template to advance comparisons that make the progressive contradiction obvious to others. Don’t worry about changing progressive minds; they’re too impervious to reason to change. But the exercise will produce in others the mutual knowledge necessary to awaken the peoples of the West.

Today’s NPR headline: “Trump says he’ll send troops to Portland, Ore., to handle ‘domestic terrorists.’” Why does domestic terrorism appear with scare quotes around it? That’s not what it is? Of course, that’s what it is. Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization. Designating Antifa as such does not conjure domestic terrorism into existence. It simply acknowledges what Antifa is. (See my most recent essays on Antifa: Charlie Kirk’s Killer is in Custody and the Specter of Antifa; The Fool Has Come Down Off The Hill. But Who Called on Antifa to Terrorize the Village? For earlier essays, see the embedded links in the last essay.)

President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he plans to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon, saying he is prepared to use “Full Force, if necessary” against Antifa and related tendencies as he broadens his strategy of sending federal forces to US cities. In a message posted on social media, Trump said he has instructed the Department of Defense to “provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland.” The move is necessary, he contends, to safeguard US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, which are under siege from Antifa and other domestic terrorists. Trump is acting decisively to quell rebellion.

This development has set on fire the hair (figuratively speaking) of libertarians like Radley Balko. (Balko, a defender of the Redemptionist Posse Comitatus Act, has a long association with pro-corporate outlets like the open-borders thinktank Cato Institute and Reason magazine.) In a Facebook post, Balko writes, “Sure seems like the president just authorized the military to use lethal force against US citizens.” So? Where in the Constitution is this forbidden? Nowhere. Quite the contrary: the main reason the Constitution was written was to permit the federal government to deploy troops to suppress insurrection and rebellion in the various states. (See Concerning the Powers of the US Constitution—And Those Defying Them; Posse Comitatus and the Ghosts of Redemption.)

A little history is in order. The Philadelphia Convention of 1787 that produced the Constitution cannot be understood apart from the well-justified anxieties that swept the young republic in the wake of Shays’ Rebellion. In 1786 and 1787, farmers in Massachusetts organized armed resistance to courts and tax collectors. Although the state militia eventually suppressed the rebellion, the episode alarmed political leaders throughout the United States. The new nation needed not only to defend territory from foreign invasion, but from violent threats from within.

The uprising revealed a dangerous truth: under the Articles of Confederation, the national government lacked the executive authority, resources, and standing army to intervene if unrest spiraled beyond a single state’s control. The Annapolis Convention of 1786 failing to resolve the serious issues facing the new nation, delegates arrived in Philadelphia in 1787 determined to craft a stronger framework that could prevent domestic instability. Indeed, they scrapped the Articles of Confederation altogether and drafted an entirely new document, one that established the American Republic with a strong executive authority, the chief element missing from the Articles.

Debates at the Convention repeatedly returned to the theme of order and republican limits on democracy. Participants warned of the “excesses of democracy,” by which they meant the ease with which local majorities (or in the case of Antifa today, aggressive minorities) could mobilize against established law or property rights. In other words: mob rule. The framers concluded that the federal government must be given explicit power to restore order when states proved unable or unwilling to do so. Such is the case in Oregon, where the Portland government has signaled that it has no real intention of protecting ICE agents operating there. At least Portland authorities have been unable to deal with Antifa and other anti-government forces.

Recent attacks on ICE facilities have escalated tensions nationwide. In Portland, anti-ICE protests have led to violent confrontations. On June 14, 2025, a large-scale demonstration escalated into a riot outside the ICE facility in South Portland, resulting in multiple arrests and injuries. Protesters threw fireworks, knives, and rocks at law enforcement officers, and federal agents deployed tear gas and flashbangs to disperse the crowd.

But the violence is not contained to Oregon. In June 2025, President Trump ordered the federalization of California’s National Guard (placing them under Title 10 status) and deployed approximately 4,000 National Guard soldiers, along with 700 US Marines, to Los Angeles. On September 24, 2025, a sniper opened fire from a rooftop at an ICE field office in Dallas, Texas, targeting federal agents (but killing two detainees and critically injuring another). This incident follows a series of similar attacks, including the July 4 ambush at the Prairieland ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, where approximately twelve individuals coordinated a shooting attack, resulting in the injury of an officer.

In response to these escalating threats, the US Attorney General has ordered the deployment of Justice Department agents to ICE facilities nationwide and directed Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate and disrupt individuals or groups involved in domestic terrorism targeting federal agents. On September 22, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” And now he is deploying federal troops to Portland.

(It’s sad that it took the assassination of Charlie Kirk for a President of the United States to declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. If the government had been on this case for years, it might have had the intelligence to know what Tyler Robinson was planning to do and possibly prevent that event. As Freedom and Reason will testify, I’ve been warning folks about Antifa for years. It’s not like we didn’t know what Antifa was and is. If I can know this, others can.)

Having the foresight to anticipate an ongoing problem with insurrection and rebellion, the Founders crafted some of the Constitution’s most enduring provisions, which Trump now has at his disposal. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress authority to call forth the militia not only to repel foreign invasions but also to “suppress insurrections” and enforce federal laws. Likewise, Article IV, Section 4, known as the Guarantee Clause, commits the United States to defend each state against both foreign invasion and domestic violence. These clauses formalized the federal government’s responsibility to preserve internal peace and tranquility.

Although foreign threats loomed then, as they do now, the more immediate danger in 1787 was internal. Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation. Shays’ Rebellion remained fresh in the delegates’ minds as a vivid example of how quickly unrest could erupt. But even vivid examples fade with time—and are clouded by partisan ideology.

But the reality that the Founders anticipated remain—there will be those who rebel against the Republic—and they bequeathed to posterity a muscular state that could respond; for if one state descended into rebellion, the weakness of the Confederation would allow disorder to spread across the Union, undermining commerce, the general welfare, and legitimacy; by embedding protections against insurrection in the Constitution, the framers secured a fragile republic against the kinds of domestic upheaval that had so recently shaken Massachusetts.

The kind of domestic upheavals that shake the republic today. Rebellion shook cities across America only a scant five years ago. The “Summer of Love” was a wake-up call. The specter of domestic violence is rearing its head once more. Trump should have taken much more aggressive action against the rebellion of 2020. It appears he won’t be flinching this time. (For context, see On the Road to Civil War: The Democratic Party’s Regression into Neoconfederacy; The Struggle for Western Civilization on the Modern Political Landscape.)

“Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say, by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence.” —Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)

Jurupa Valley High School has been desperately trying to find volleyball opponents this season. Eight schools have refused to play the team until Jurupa Valley removes AB Hernandez, a male athlete, from the court. The victims of Jurupa Valley’s decision to prioritize the feelings of a male over the desire of females to play volleyball against other females are not limited to the schools forfeiting games to uphold the integrity of women’s sports. The girls on Jurupa Valley’s own volleyball team are also victims of Hernandez and of those who enable his delusion that he is female. It is not only the humiliation of having to compete with a ringer on the team; Jurupa Valley is now facing lawsuits from current and former teammates alleging traumatic experiences sharing a locker room with a male who pretends to be female.

Karl Marx, in The German Ideology (1840s), offers readers a short satirical allegory that exposes the folly of philosophical idealism—the postmodernism of his day. He asks readers to imagine a man who believes that drowning occurs not because of water or gravity, but because people hold the idea of drowning and gravity in their heads. If only they could banish this superstition, the deluded man claims, they would become immune to drowning. Thus, the man spends his life battling the “illusion” of gravity, ignoring the persistent and measurable evidence of its effects. 

This allegory concludes the preface of the manuscript, setting the thematic foundation for Marx’s critique of philosophical idealism. It illustrates with absurd clarity the danger of believing that material facts depend on mental constructs. Just as water and gravity do not vanish because someone declares them social constructions because we use ideas to describe them, so biological realities do not cease to exist simply because they are reclassified as oppressive categories. Yet contemporary postmodern frameworks—whether in the doctrine of gender identity or in critical race theory—repeat this mistake. They treat stubborn realities as illusions to be dissolved by rhetoric.

Words can either illuminate truth or distort or conceal it. Postmodern jargon is of the latter sort—distorting truths and fabricating fictions. Marx’s allegory captures perfectly the ideology that imagines gender to be an illusion, one that, if banished from our minds, would free some men from the “fate” of being men. The same could be said for the “illusion” of age. Why can’t a man be a boy forever—or a girl, for that matter? Why does he have to be human at all? Why can’t he be a dog or a horse? Or a god? If gender is merely a concept imposed by an oppressive society, why should it stop at that oppression? Once we accept that facts are illusions sustained only by oppressive belief, no boundary remains secure against redefinition.

Marx’s allegory anticipates the epistemic corruption of postmodernism: privileging ideology over reality. Postmodernist constructs—whether in critical race theory, gender identity ideology, or related doctrines—are not scientific discoveries but evasions of science, rationalizations to maneuver around inconvenient truths. They cater to the wishes of those who would prefer reality to bend to their desires, who mistake subjective convenience for objective fact. But this is not merely a matter of personal delusion. Once elevated to doctrine, these evasions are weaponized by activists and political movements, particularly on the left, where postmodernist notions provide the rhetorical scaffolding for campaigns to reshape culture, law, and policy. Once institutionalized in academia, law, and policy, these evasions compel society to live within the fiction.

If you demand that life be organized around reality, then you risk being called a bigot, fascist, phobic, racist, and so on. But acknowledging the fact of gender is not fascism, nor phobia, nor the product of religious-like dogma. It is simply an acknowledgment of reality. But to those who believe that truths can be dissolved by jargon, acknowledging reality becomes heresy. When postmodernism colonizes science and society, truth itself is forced to yield to narrative. Once narrative becomes sovereign over fact, the consequences are as predictable as a man jumping from the top of a skyscraper without a parachute or some other device that allows him to safely float to the ground below him. (Remember the scene in The Matrix where Neo believes in gravity and meets pavement? Have you checked up on the Wachowskis lately? They seem to have abandoned the desert of the real.)

I get asked on social media, “What do you care whether a man presents as a woman?” This isn’t the right question. The question is why we should care whether society is compelled to believe that a man is or can be a woman. We should care because the societal-wide denial of reality will be the death of freedom and reason.

In recent years, activists advancing the doctrine of gender identity—often in tandem with Antifa or kindred misfits and Cluster B types—have claimed Marx as an intellectual ally. Their rhetoric is framed in the vocabulary of oppression, struggle, and liberation, with Marx cast as the revolutionary patron saint of resistance against all social hierarchy. Anybody who has considerable time with the literature—and has the capacity to grasp what he is reading—knows this gets Marx and his materialist method wildly wrong. The doctrine of gender identity does not emerge from the German materialist tradition, but from French postmodern philosophy. The attempt to enlist Marx’s authority in its service requires a twisting of his thought so radically that it undermines the very foundations of historical materialism.

Marx does not deny biological reality. He locates gender relations in material conditions, above all in the division of labor and the economic structures that shaped the family. His comrade, Friedrich Engels, is even more explicit. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels traces women’s subordination to the rise of private property and male control of inheritance. Neither Marx nor Engels suggests that gender itself is a mere social construct, nor that men and women are categories sustained only by ideology. For them, gender is objective, binary, and immutable. What can change are the social and economic arrangements built on that reality. (Note: In scientific literature, before the post-1950s ideological repurposing of the word, one will find such phrases as “peculiar to the female gender” or “diseases of the opposite gender.” Gender is a synonym for sex, which Engels uses in his book.)

So how has Marx come to be invoked in defense of theories that deny the reality of gender? The answer lies not in Marx but in later reinterpretations of his legacy. Beginning with the Frankfurt School, cultural Marxism shifted attention away from the base of society (the political economic foundation, comprised of the forces and social relations of production) and toward the superstructure of culture, ideology, and identity. This move loosened the anchoring of Marxist analysis in material conditions, making it easier for later theorists to treat cultural categories as arenas of struggle in their own right.

It is not that critique of the superstructure lies outside the Marxist frame of analysis (see Antonio Gramsci); rather, its risks treating the superstructure as the deeper reality. If one treats the world as determined by ideas, rather than ideas representing reality, one stands truth on its head. This is the inverse of Marx’s method, which sets truth on its feet. Critical theory is a return to the German idealist Georg Hegel, the teacher against whom the student who picked the lock that inevitably led to the materialist conception of history, Ludwig Feuerbach, rebelled.

In Capital, Volume One, in the Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873), Marx writes, “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” Marx continues, “In Hegel, the dialectical process is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” This is the scientific epistemic. Returning the dialectical process to its previous upside-down posture corrupts science.

Carrying critical theory to its logical conclusion, and adding additional distortions, poststructuralist/postmodernist thinkers—Foucault, Derrida, Butler—manufactured an epistemology that is profoundly anti-materialist. In their work, they emphasize discourse, power/knowledge, and performativity, arguing that categories such as gender are not rooted in biology but constructed through language and the persistence of “oppressive norms.” Though these ideas are alien to Marx’s framework, activists have merged them with Marxist rhetoric. The language of “false consciousness,” “ideological domination,” and “revolutionary struggle” is applied not to class exploitation but to the gender binary itself. In this warp, a man overcomes the ideological domination that made him falsely conscious of his gender, and the revolutionary struggle against the gender binary becomes an act of “liberation”—and those around him, if not his allies who affirm his delusion, become reactionaries. They become fascists, a smear that habitually falls from the face of the trans activist.

Distortion of historical materialism is the source of the modern activist claim to Marxism. It appears Marxist in form—invoking struggle, liberation from oppression, and revolutionary overthrow. But it is postmodern in content—asserting that gender is discursive, fluid, and mutable. Marx’s name lends the project revolutionary authority, but his substance is discarded.

The contradiction could not be starker: Marx’s materialism insists on confronting reality as it is, not as one wishes it to be. His allegory in The German Ideology mocks the man who denies gravity as a mere superstition, illustrating the danger of philosophical idealism. To deny the permanency of gender is to repeat the same folly: a war against reality fought with words, while the facts remain as immovable as gravity. Passing off rebellion against reality as Marxist does not extend the logic of historical materialism but betrays it.

Karl Marx never published a systematic theory of gender in the way later feminist or postmodern theorists have attempted. His central focus remained on class, labor, and material conditions. But he was working out a theory of gender relations towards the end of his life. Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was written in the wake of Marx’s death and rests heavily on Marx’s engagement with Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877). Marx had studied Morgan closely, filling the margins of his copy with extensive notes and reflections that connected Morgan’s anthropology to the materialist conception of history. Engels drew on these notes as the foundation for his own synthesis, and in the Preface he acknowledges this debt, describing the work as “in substance the outcome of Marx’s researches.” Thus, Origin, shaped by Engels’ hand, is deeply rooted in Marx’s theoretical legacy, mediated through Morgan’s ethnological findings.

Taken in its totality, Marx and Engels’ work ties gender to material relations of production. Marx—and more explicitly Engels in Origin—understood the subordination of women as historically contingent, rooted in the rise of private property and the division of labor. For them, patriarchy is not eternal or natural. It emerges when men gain control over surplus resources and inheritance systems, reorganizing family life and social structures around property ownership. However, neither Marx nor Engels denies the existence of biological differences between men and women. They never suggest that male and female are “illusions” or “social constructs.” Biology—and Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection—is taken as reality. What can change—and what they sought to explain—were the ways societies organized around these facts. Women’s subordination is explained not in terms of discursive categories or identities, but in terms of material-economic structures.

In Capital and related writings, Marx observes how industrial capitalism increasingly draws women into wage labor. This shift disrupts older patriarchal household structures, but it also exposes women to new forms of exploitation. Marx recognizes the dual character of this development: women are both exploited more directly under capitalism and also brought into the broader sphere of class struggle. In that sense, wage labor is not only a site of oppression but a possible path toward emancipation. Marx and Engels consistently treat the bourgeois family not as a purely cultural or moral unit but as an economic one. The family is, in their analysis, depending on the mode of production, a mechanism for the transmission of property, the reproduction of labor power, and the maintenance of class structure. Gender roles within it are shaped by economic necessity, rather than by an autonomous “gender ideology.”

In sum, then, Marx locates gender oppression not in “identity” or cultural categories but in material arrangements. He sees the potential for emancipation in the reorganization of labor and the abolition of private property, not in an ideology that encourages people to take leave of their senses, to drown in the waters of illusion. For Marx, as for Engels, gender inequality is inseparable from the broader struggle against class exploitation. Imagining oneself to be the other gender—or no gender at all—allows escape from inequality. Indeed, it only perpetuates it, as we see in the Jurupa Valley High School case. Allowing AP Hernanez to compete against women is profoundly misogynistic. How this isn’t obvious to everybody testifies to the corruption of popular consciousness by the postmodernist epistemic.

Thus, the betrayal of Marx’s materialist conception of history and social relations is not merely an intellectual error—it’s an expression of bourgeois ideology. By severing identity politics from the material critique of capitalism, postmodernism disarms the working class. It shifts the struggle away from corporate domination, exploitation of labor, and the accumulation of profit, and redirects it toward endless disputes over language, identity, and subjective “recognition.” In doing so, it fragments collective resistance and redirects revolutionary energy into cultural quarrels that pose no real threat to capital—indeed, that advance corporate power and profit.

This is why corporations have eagerly embraced this inversion. Gender identity ideology and related postmodern constructs provide cover for monopolies and financial elites. By championing “inclusion” and “diversity,” corporations rebrand themselves as “progressive” while continuing to extract surplus value, suppress wages, and consolidate power. They also use the doctrine of gender identity to extract billions from its victims via the medical-industrial complex. Postmodernism thus becomes an instrument of bourgeois hegemony and profit-generation: it erodes material analysis, masks exploitation, and manufactures consent for corporate rule.

What the appropriation of Marx by gender identity ideology reveals is not the consistency of their framework but the poverty of it. Postmodernism borrows Marx’s revolutionary fire while extinguishing his materialist core. The result is a doctrine that speaks in Marxist cadences but cannot withstand a Marxist critique. Far from being Marxist, gender identity theory represents the very kind of philosophical idealism Marx spent his career dismantling. The postmodernist doctrine of gender identity is a betrayal of Marx’s lifework. The denial of reality masquerading as liberation serves as an enabler of capital. It diverts the struggle against exploitation into battles over subjective self-definition, leaving intact the structures of profit and power—even advancing them. What is presented as Marxism is, in truth, the opposite: a bourgeois ideology that protects the very system Marx sought to overthrow.

To put this in a way the progressive will understand: Keep Marx’s name out of your damn mouth.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the First Amendment. I tend to go through periods where the subject occupies my mind, but it feels especially urgent now. Understanding the principle of free speech is essential to grasping the broader idea of a free and open society. A society that protects freedom of conscience, speech, and publication is one that remains free and open. That’s why it’s so important to consider all the ways speech can be curtailed. My recent work has focused on laying out a principled argument for what constitutes free speech and what, if anything, can justify restricting it in the context of the Jimmy Kimmel scandal. (See Progressives Flipping Like Flags on a Pole: The Cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel and the Real Threat to Free Speech; Ted Cruz Compares the FCC to the Mob—But Who’s the Real Mob? Jimmy Kimmel’s Return and the Persistence of Late Night Talk Shows; Kimmel’s Return and the Specter of Fascism.)

One of the more striking experiences of my life was being the target of a petition circulated at my university, not even two years ago, and the Kimmel controversy caused me to consider a paradox. The purpose of the petition was to collect signatures from those seeking my dismissal from employment. To be sure, the right to petition the government is enshrined in the First Amendment. But invoking the petition clause to suppress the conscience clause of the very same amendment turns the amendment against itself. This approach exploits one part of the amendment to undermine its spirit.

Imagine, for instance, using the petition process to demand the government repeal the First Amendment—a move that would also eliminate the right to petition for redress of grievances. Such a tactic would clearly weaponize the amendment for authoritarian ends and expose the petitioners’ hostility to freedom—and future petitioning. Petitions of this kind should be dismissed out of hand for their clear authoritarian intent.

We should recognize such efforts for what they are: attempts to dress authoritarianism in the trappings of constitutional process. The framers of the Constitution never intended to grant within our founding document the right to abolish the document itself. To be sure, they provided a process for amending the Constitution, but the Constitution remains the Republic’s foundational law. No reasonable architect of a government would intentionally design its own destruction. 

I recognize that the Declaration of Independence presumes the right to overthrow a government, but the right to rebellion comes with specific conditions that justify such an action. It begins by establishing what good government does, namely, defending the unalienable rights of its citizens. It is whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends that the people can exercise their right to alter or abolish it, and the new government that replaces it must effect those unalienable rights.

That is why it is crucial to consider the intent behind any petition. If the aim is to demand that the government uphold free speech rights—acknowledging that public institutions cannot suppress speech except on very narrow grounds, such as incitement to violence—or to prevent groups and individuals from using harassment, intimidation, or violence to suppress or compel speech, then the intent is good. By contrast, if the aim is to pressure government into suppressing speech arbitrarily, or to enable groups and individuals to coerce, harass, or intimidate others into silence, then the intent is malevolent, and we should name it as such.

It would be a welcome and necessary step for government bodies and public institutions—bound by the doctrine of incorporation to uphold the First Amendment—to state plainly that the First Amendment cannot be used as a tool to suppress the speech of professors or students. Even stronger would be an acknowledgment that such misuse of the amendment amounts to harassment, intimidation, and attempted coercion in its own right.

Upon his return to late-night television, Jimmy Kimmel quipped, “I don’t want to make this about me because—and I know this is what people say when they make things about them.” (Cue the laugh and applause signs.) Moments earlier, he had said: “I don’t think what I have to say is gonna make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you don’t, you don’t.”

But this isn’t about whether people “like” Kimmel. It’s about what he said—and the fact that a massive media corporation gave him a platform to say it. By framing the issue as one of likability, Kimmel deflected attention from his actual words. That matters because what he communicated was a signal: that if political violence comes from the left, he will help obscure its motive. (See Jimmy Kimmel’s Return and the Persistence of Late Night Talk Shows.)

He reinforced the point when he insisted: “I don’t think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone.” This is false. Kimmel knows exactly who and what Tyler Robinson represents. It’s what he tried to obscure in the monologue that got his show suspended. The assassin represents the millions who cheer Kirk’s murder and who celebrate the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump.

Kimmel also asked his audience to consider this: “Should the government be allowed to regulate which podcasts the cell phone companies and Wi-Fi providers are allowed to let you download to make sure they serve the public interest?”

First, this is a false equivalency. FCC regulation of the broadcast spectrum is not the same as government regulation of podcasts or cell phone communications. Traditional broadcast media rely on limited public airwaves—part of the commons, belonging to all of us—which justifies oversight to ensure the public interest. That mandate is literally written into the FCC charter. (See Progressives Flipping Like Flags on a Pole: The Cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel and the Real Threat to Free Speech; Ted Cruz Compares the FCC to the Mob—But Who’s the Real Mob?)

Second, the government does have a legitimate interest in policing podcasts, cell phones, and other digital platforms when they are used to transmit terroristic threats or coordinate acts of political violence.

Kimmel and Disney ABC refuse to take responsibility for his statements. By casting the issue as a censorship debate—as though it were interchangeable with addressing political terrorism—Kimmel trivializes the seriousness of the moment. The stakes are not remotely the same, and framing them as parallel only muddies the issue. Disney ABC has positioned Kimmel as a martyr in the supposed struggle against “Trump’s fascism,” while obscuring the real sources of political violence. Kimmel continues to serve as a propagandist for the progressive left.

Fascism is frightening, to be sure—which is why I’ve devoted so many words to the subject over the years on this platform. But what’s also frightening is when millions of people believe they’re living under Hitler-style fascism when they’re not. Moral panics take populations to dark places and obscure the real situation. Today, we see a large segment of the US population interpreting the legitimate exercise of constitutional powers as national socialism—while simultaneously defending corporatism as a desirable political-economic system and rationalizing political violence in the streets.

So what would fascism look like in the present day? Much like what we saw in 2020: censorship, fear campaigns, rebellion, rigged elections, the installation of a senile man as president. We witnessed a color revolution and a coup carried out by the deep state and powerful corporate actors, while the corporate media refused to call it for what it was. In fact, the media projected the opposite narrative. That’s why I raised the alarm about the New Fascism on Freedom and Reason. And while the situation has improved somewhat, we’re not out of the woods.

The alarm to raise now—Jimmy Kimmel’s return being just one piece of the puzzle—is that so many people have come to believe that reclaiming democracy from corporate control and street-level authoritarianism is itself a form of fascism. Perception has been flipped. Millions of people are living in a camera obscura, going to extremes to preserve the illusion.

What we see in the media and on the streets is easy to mock because it’s so over-the-top. We’re told that regulating media conglomerates in the public interest is fascistic, when in fact it’s the opposite. We’re told political violence is antifascist, when in reality it is its antithesis. This upside-down portrayal of the present moment poses a real threat to the work Americans must do to preserve and defend the Republic. And those who buy into the illusion remain impervious to reason.

Just yesterday in Green Bay, I saw a woman standing in front of a local television station with a sign that read, “Protect free speech.” She was so proud of herself. Her husband, standing behind her, was equally proud. I felt sorry for her. It’s tragic, I said to myself while driving by, that those who shape mass perception led her to believe she was standing up for freedom by defending the power of corporations to propagandize her. Only a few years ago, she likely believed corporate media control over public perception was a terrible thing. Now she stands on a street corner defending it.

Jimmy Kimmel is returning to ABC. This is troubling because what Kimmel said that prompted Disney ABC to suspend The Jimmy Kimmel Show was more than vile. It was a signal to those on the left who are considering perpetrating more acts of violence against conservative personalities that corporate propagandists will obscure the source of political violence in America. Kimmel’s reinstatement is tacit acknowledgment by Disney ABC that its company endorses this propaganda strategy.

Something important that’s being missed with the Jimmy Kimmel saga…

By spreading the vile lie that Charlie was assassinated by MAGA, the implicit message from Kimmel was clear: If you kill a conservative, we will cover for you. We will whitewash the murder because we don’t…

— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) September 20, 2025

Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet put his finger on this in recent comments about the scandal when he said Kimmel was effectively saying to those who commit political violence, “We have your back.” Take a careful look at what Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

This part is a signal: “the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” Kimmel knew that the assassin was sympathetic to Antifa and its violent transactivist wing. He knew MAGA did not kill one of its own. Even if Kimmel didn’t, he had no reason to claim that the assassin was a member of “the MAGA gang.” In putting the matter this way, Kimmel is conveying the following: If you assault or kill a prominent conservative, we, the spokesmen for progressive ideology, will obscure your role in targeted political violence by blaming it on the targets of it.

I have heard many outrageous things in my life, but what Kimmel says here is truly one of the most outrageous things I have ever heard. Before learning of Kimmel’s return I pictured in my mind executives at Disney turning to one another and agreeing that Kimmel had to go—not just because he was losing the company money (which he clearly is), not just because they perceived that he had delegitimized himself as an effective propagandist, but because he implicated Disney in rhetoric encouraging political violence by conveying an intent that influencers like Kimmel will cover for it. I said this on my Facebook feed. I have to walk back these assumptions now.

As I stated in previous essays on this platform, many on the left are defending Kimmel by wrapping what he said in an appeal to the First Amendment. It bears repeating that the First Amendment has nothing to do with Kimmel’s cancellation. FCC chairman Brendan Carr doesn’t have the power to fire a Disney employee. Disney has that power. Disney can fire employees based on their speech. Even if one has an expansive view of the First Amendment, in this case, Kimmel said what he said not as a private citizen on a social media platform, but as an employee standing on a Disney platform. What does Kimmel’s return tell us about Disney? It is an endorsement of Kimmel’s speech.

For those arguing that Carr pressured Disney to cancel Jimmy Kimmel, in answering a question put to him on The Benny Show, Carr did assert the power of the FCC in making sure that holders of licenses granted use of the publicly-owned communications spectrum honor the lawful demand to serve the public interest. Regulating media corporations is an entirely legitimate power delegated to the FCC by the republic that created the agency. However, for the record, Carr had not even moved to draft a complaint or directive to Disney concerning this matter. Moreover, Trump was out of the country at the time and did not know that any of this had transpired. The left’s attempt to pin this on Trump, to continue the propaganda narrative that Trump is an autocrat, is entirely fallacious.

But even if Trump had pressured Disney, even if Carr had issued a complaint or directive on this matter, it would not have contradicted the First Amendment, since the foundational law gives the FCC power to regulate a public resource for the public interest. Those who argue that the government has no power over corporate media firms are effectively arguing for corporate rule over the people. Had the FCC acted, this would have helped Disney ABC. They could then have distanced themselves from Kimmel’s speech under the cover of a claim, as fallacious as it is, to government suppression. Since progressives have convinced themselves that this is in fact what happened, Disney is acting in a provocative manner, challenging the FCC’s power to regulate media corporations. Moreover, they are presenting Kimmel as a free speech martyr—one that Disney saved from government oppression.

On the persistence of late-night programming, it’s not just Kimmel’s show that’s in freefall. So are Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon’s shows in sharp decline. Rationally, since these are for-profit corporations, such precipitous drops in viewership should signal a change in programming. Yet these shows have persisted for years. The evidence suggests that the reason for the decline in viewers and the persistence of late-night programming stems from the same source—a dynamic that may seem counterintuitive at first, but understandable upon closer examination.

The drop in viewership is largely attributed to shifts in political sensibilities in America. Over the past several years, American culture and politics have been moving rightward. As a result, many Americans are increasingly turned off by progressive politics and by the phenomenon of “clapter,” in which cruel mocking of ordinary Americans replaces sophisticated humor. They are taking their business elsewhere. This creates a process in which the audience becomes increasingly winnowed ideologically. What remains is a hardcore left-progressive segment—zealots who hang on every word of the late-night host, seeing them as wise and representative of their politics. These programs are thus cultivating a crowd by weeding out those with different sensibilities.

This situation has a corrupting effect on the sense of humor of this audience. The late-night audience finds cruel and mean-spirited rhetoric funny, primarily because they loathe the targets of the host’s jokes. It reinforces their belief that they belong to a superior, “in-the-know” group, while everyone outside that group is dismissed as backwards, mouthbreathers, neanderthals, and rubes, unworthy of attention. It polarizes the in-group/out-group dynamic. The persistence of these late-night programs, despite the drastic decline in overall viewership, can therefore be explained by their propaganda value. They maintain a loyal core audience that aligns with progressive political agendas. The Democratic Party and the broader progressive movement depend on this dedicated nucleus of supporters as a key part of their voter base. Late-night programming provides this nucleus with a clear target of opposition: the rest of America.

Because media elites are largely aligned with progressive political interests, they are willing to continue funding shows that serve as effective vehicles for pro-Democrat messaging. In other words, Kimmel, Colbert, and Fallon effectively operate as a political messaging arm of the Democratic Party and the corporate elites that party represents. This is significant, since ABC, CBS, and NBC are the traditional media networks that have shaped mass consciousness—culture, ideology, morality, politics—for decades. Late night has thus been weaponized against the American majorityfor the sake of the political party that represents corporate statism. This weaponization is contrary to the public interest clause of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC. What we are witnessing is broadside against the American Republic.

Democrats know that corporations have too much power. They know the government has the power to regulate corporations. They’ve said so countless times. Their rhetoric in the aftermath of Kimmel’s cancellation is duplicitous in the extreme. The reality is that, while they know corporations have too much power, Democrats want corporations to have too much power. And they will want that as long as corporations shill for them. Disney is defying the public interests to continue serving in its capacity (alongside CBS and NBC) as the broadcast propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

If you want to understand how the world works—how history unfolds—you must examine power: the relations that determine it, the institutions that embody it, the motivations driving the wealthy and powerful to pursue their goals, the decisions they make, and the structures that allow them to seek power and wealth exclusively.

We see this kind of power analysis all the time in science fiction and fantasy. Authors engage in world-building precisely because they know a plot must unfold within a framework of possibilities and constraints. Those possibilities and constraints are given by the larger structure of the imagined world. Without them, nothing makes sense. The reader accepts the built world as necessary and obvious.

Given this, it’s worth asking why so many people deny that the real world has a structure. From the standpoint of power, it isn’t surprising: the powerful benefit from denying the structures that grant them immense possibilities while keeping ordinary people from achieving the good life. And they spend a great deal of time ensuring that the ordinary man doesn’t accept theories critical of elite power.

Nobody watching FX’s Alien: Earth thinks “conspiracy theory” when told that five corporations rule the Earth a century from now. Nobody reading The Lord of the Rings dismisses Tolkien’s carefully built world as implausible, given assumptions about the supernatural. In both cases, structure is essential to understanding the unfolding plot, the characters’ motivations, and the constraints and challenges they face—and overcome.

Yet in the real world, many people leap to “conspiracy theory” when confronted with the realities of corporate power, greed, and elite machinations to gain and preserve wealth and influence at the expense of ordinary people.

By accepting that references to such structures are mere conspiracy, the ordinary man resigns himself to seeing events as accidental or as the work of charismatic personalities. He imagines his own struggles are simply the product of personal inadequacy. Too many blame men blame themselves for their circumstances instead of challenging power and pursuing the good life for themselves, their families, and their communities. They believe what they are told instead of questioning those who tell them what to believe.