Category: Uncategorized

Following up on my essay, The Set Up: Déjà vu All Over Again, new details have emerged that there was another player involved in the stage case of Michael Waltz “inadvertently” adding The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat concerning the bombing of the Houthis terrorists disrupting shipping lands in their sphere of operations.

The initial message, posted on March 13, 2025, came from an account labeled “Michael Waltz” and stated: “Team—establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.” Investigators need to know the role Wong played in this affair.

Wong worked in private practice with Covington & Burling, a Washington, DC-based international law firm. Covington & Burling is known for its extensive work in international trade, regulatory compliance, and governmental investigations. On February 25, 2025, Trump signed an executive order stripping security clearances from employees of Covington & Burling and initiated a review of all federal government work with the firm. Just saying.

Hopefully, the investigation will get to the bottom of all that. But there’s another matter that must be addressed: the matter of hypocrisy on the Democrat side. Remember in 2010 when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks released sensitive military information provided by Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst? The government charged Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 for receiving these materials and pursued him for years? That Act is the primary statutory vehicle that the government uses to bring criminal prosecutions for leaking or mishandling classified information. In 2024, Assange agreed to a plea deal, pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified documents. Note the dates—the persecution of Assange was led by Democrats.

The moment Goldberg realized he was in what he considered to be a "classified briefing," he should have immediately quit the group.

When he did not, he became A SPY. The fact he was actively screen-shotting messages make it even worse.

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) March 26, 2025

Goldberg was invited to an end-to-end Signal chat with Trump’s national security team and took screen shots of what he believed was classified material and publicly shared it. Either he conspired with somebody in that chat to accomplish this or he exploited human error to obtain classified information. I suspect that he was invited in as a deep state operation to disrupt the Trump agenda and to influence the outcome of upcoming elections that could determine the fate of the House. Either way, why is Goldberg walking around not only free but celebrated by Democrats as a hero while Assange had his life destroyed?

Journalists should be asking Jeffrey: was this classified information and you’re a spy, or do you want to walk that back? Of course, walking that back doesn’t mean that it could have been classified information that Goldberg shared—information Democrats claim risks lives. The rest of us should remind Democrats in Congress that it was their beloved president Obama who pursued Assange. We must ask, in light of this, why aren’t Democrats demanding the Trump Administration arrest and charge Goldberg under the Espionage Act of 1917? Will Democrats walk back their hyperbole? Of course they won’t. No party in American history has been more hypocritical than the Democratic Party.

As I have been writing about for a while now, lawfare has become a major weapon in the project to disrupt and ultimately destroy the Trump president and stifle the populist movement. My essay, The Judicocracy Problematic, in particular is a warning of the problem of allowing the establishment to substitute the judiciary for democracy. We are witnessing what I warned about playing out before our eyes.

One aspect of lawfare is resort to the universal injunction and the temporary retraining order (TRO) in the federal judiciary. A universal injunction refers to a court order that not only concerns a legal dispute for the parties directly involved but also prohibits the federal government from enforcing a law or policy against anyone, anywhere, not just the plaintiffs in the case. The TRO is a type of injunction.

The use of these judicial instruments rightly raises concerns about the scope of judicial authority and foundational principle of Separation of Powers, principally in the usurpation of the Article II authority of the executive branch of the federal government.

The US Constitution splits judicial powers across its first three articles to balance power among the branches of government. Article I grants Congress the ability to establish and shape the federal court system, giving it control over the judiciary’s structure. Article II assigns the President the role of nominating federal judges, with the Senate providing advice and consent, ensuring the executive and legislative branches share responsibility for judicial appointments. Article III then defines the judiciary itself, establishing judicial independence by stating that judges serve “during good behavior”—essentially for life unless they engage in misconduct or other unethical behavior.

One is right to ask how the impeachment standard in Article II migrated to Article IIII. The current consensus interpretation is that Article II covers impeachment as a check on all federal officers, including judges. This interpretation ties judicial tenure to this standard of behavior, meaning judges can be removed through impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate for offenses like abuse of power or bribery. However, cabinet officials, who are federal officers, serve the pleasure of the President (see the 1926 Supreme Court case Myers v. United States).

Abuse of power is obvious in the rise of the universal injunction, which compromises the separation of powers. Historically, injunctions were narrow, tailored to the specific parties bringing the suit whatever the issue. The legal roots trace back to English law, where courts aimed to provide remedies that were just and specific to the case at hand. In the US, this carried over into federal courts under Article III, with the Judiciary Act of 1789 and later cases like Marbury v. Madison (1803) establishing judicial review—but not broad, universal relief. 

As I noted, aside from the Supreme Court, federal courts are created by Congress. So far, the Supreme Court and Congress have allowed the rise of universal injunctions. It now is time to review the matter. It is also time to revisit the question of whether the Article III standard legally aligns with the Article II standard for removing a federal officer. If federal officers in the Cabinet are exempt from this standard, then why not federal judges, with the authority to remove them residing in Congress given Article I powers?

The reason why these matters must be revisited is because of what I discuss in that recent essay cited above: the usurpation of executive authority reserved by the Constitution to the President of the United States, the one office elected by all citizens. The modern surge in universal injunctions began gaining traction in the twentieth century as the courts became increasingly politicized.

One oft cited early example of the universal injunction is the 1963 case Wirtz v. Baldor Electric Co., where a district court issued an injunction affecting non-parties. This was an extraordinary action by the court. The real escalation and normalization of the practice came decades later with politically charged issues, for example immigration, where single district judges started halting entire federal policies. 

For instance, in 2015, a Texas district judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) immigration policy, affecting millions beyond the plaintiff states. One will recall that Democrats bitterly complained when US District Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas issued that nationwide injunction.

Similarly, during Trump’s presidency, judges in Hawaii and California issued universal injunctions against the travel ban, stopping its enforcement nationwide. What did Democrats think about that? Crickets. With Trump, the practice skyrocketed, with the administration facing an avalanche of such injunctions, a sharp contrast to the handful seen during earlier administrations. Democrats cheered on the judiciary for the resort to lawfare. Given their growing political irrelevance, it was their only recourse—that and the deep state.

The political warfare in all this is obvious. Litigants, often states or advocacy groups, turn to what is called “forum shopping” looking for sympathetic judges in districts known for ideological leanings eager to usurp Trump’s authority. One of the factors associated with this is the expansion of the administrative state, prompting bolder judicial responses usurping Article II powers to entrench that establishment. Indeed, one of the flashpoints is the use of the universal injunction to stymie Trump’s project to deconstruct the administrative state.

As mentioned above, the Supreme Court hasn’t definitively settled the issue, and Congress has been reluctant to take on the matter, leaving lower courts room to wield this untoward power. However the problem has been noted at by the Supreme Court. In Trump v. Hawaii (2018), justices criticized universal injunctions as historically unmoored and a power grab. Still, the Court has set no binding limit on the practice. And, again, Congress is sitting on their hands.

The universal injunction is a paradigm of judicial overreach; a single unelected judge can derail a national policy, undermining democratic processes, thereby thwarting the popular will, and moreover creating inconsistent law (conflicting injunctions from different courts). Defenders of the practice tell is that they’re a necessary check on executive overreach, especially when policies affect millions uniformly and irreparable harm is at stake. But this is the function of judicial review, ultimately delivering cases to the Supreme Court where the establishment of national-level judgments on constitutionality properly resides. 

The Supreme Court needs to act to clarify the matter. It will be terrible for the Republic if they get this wrong. Indeed, it will be something of a judicial coup, possibly sparking a constitutional crisis. But Congress also needs to act to reign in partisan judges who use the universal injunction to improperly constrain the executive branch. One immediate action that can be taken is defunding these courts. This will allow Congress to get around the problematic migration of Article II standards to Article III governing the tenure of judges. Another action Congress can take immediately is for the Judiciary to bring these judges before the committee and interrogate their actions. Congress has oversight authority.

Bottomline: a democratic republic cannot abide by the tyranny of a judicocracy.

My college at my university just released the results of a survey of my college concerning AI use. I missed the administration of this survey, so my opinions are not reflected in the report. Wednesday, I published a timely essay on acceptable AI use, On the Ethics of AI Use. I didn’t share it on social media on Wednesday because I didn’t want to step on my more pressing essay on the Signal chat story (The Set Up: Déjà vu All Over Again).

I took a screen shot of the relevant page of the Taskforce finding and share it here (see above). I am heartened to see that a large majority of the faculty of my college who responded to the survey finds acceptable use of AI in proofreading and editing, both for faculty and for students. ChatGPT is a solid copyeditor (so is Grammarly, especially in its enhanced features). I am also pleased to see that faculty recognize the importance of AI in the use of generating ideas (a sizable minority finding it acceptable for creative work, as well).

I am a dismayed about the number of faculty who find AI useful for content creation (a large majority, actually) and a sizable minority that find it acceptable for students to use AI for first draft generation. On the latter matter, there is a difference between using AI to generate ideas and generating first drafts. If generating first drafts follow from an outline where sources have been used (and these are appropriately found using AI as a research assistance), this is arguably more acceptable, but I am concerned that some students will prompt AI to generate first drafts. Students could do this to generate a template to understand what an academic essay looks like, as AI systems model good form and writing mechanics (and writing tutors are practically unavailable), but drafts should be in a student’s words.

How one would know whether the student generated a first draft using AI, given that drafts written on a computer are polished over time, would require surveillance, such as saving drafts to present to their teachers, which is inappropriate—it’s just the way most people work these day. So it becomes a trust issue (a problem in October 2023 addressed by philosopher Daniel Dennett, summarized in this interview). We mustn’t let AI create a climate of suspicion that negative impacts academia. To be sure, the trust issue is already upon us, and this is conveyed elsewhere in the survey, but we must resist this temptation.

I hasten to identify a problem in this regard, which I note in Wednesday’s essay on the ethical use of AI. When proofreading and editing documents using AI, which, again, is acceptable, it raises the likelihood that the paper will be flagged as AI generated (e.g., by GPTZero). This is what’s called a “false positive” and, while initiating a disciplinary process based on these results is wrong, I fear some faculty will do just this. Why it’s wrong is that AI detection is flawed technology. Not just for identifying human-generated text as AI generated, but also because of the problem of the “false negative.”

I recently asked ChatGPT to rewrite Karl Marx’s preface to his essay “A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Right” in the style of Christopher Hitchens. I then entered the output unaltered into GPTZero. It reported that the content was 100 percent human generated. It was in fact 100 percent AI generated. Students will learn this trick soon, as such things are quickly socialized, and simply ask the bot to rewrite their paper in the style of a human author and easily evade detection. So why would we attempt to prosecute cases of academic dishonesty using these systems? Suspicious faculty could wreck a student’s academic career using flawed technology. Use of AI detection should be disallowed for this reason, and universities across the country are disallowing it on these grounds. (I have an essay on this coming soon.)

I have been warning my students this week about the risk of using AI in copyediting in their other classes. I allow it in mine because it improved their work and enhances their understanding of science writing. But I tell them that my rules are not transferable to other courses. I tell them to speak with their professors and clarify the matter.

One of the complaints about AI-assisted work is that it compromises creativity and originality. This argument may sound familiar to some of old timers. Academics were skeptical of calculators in the 1970s when this technology rolled out. But calculators testify to the importance of technology in advancing knowledge and productivity. Now calculators are standard in math and science classes. The same is true with statistical packages, etc.

This applies to the arts, as well. It goes for old technology, too. When I was in high school my home room was Mrs. Craig’s art class at Oakland High School in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I took all the art courses Mrs. Craig offered. I particularly liked to draw streets and buildings using perspective. I used rulers to draw lines to the vanishing point and then drew objects using the lines as guides. Fast forward and we find architects generating projects using significant technical assistance, including AI assistance. Nothing wrong with any of this. Indeed, there’s a lot right with it: it improves the quality of one’s work and increases his productivity.

This includes ideas generated by the technology. Consider that any accomplished blues or jazz player will incorporate into their inventory the licks of other blues and jazz players. This isn’t plagiarism. It’s an important part of growing one’s inventory of musical knowledge. What’s the difference between human-generated and AI-generated blues and jazz licks? I don’t see any. I use an AI box that generates bass and drums based on chord patterns and progressions I feed to the machine and then improvise over it. I could publish the results. Problematic? No. It’s an effect. Pedals are effects. Putting strings on a piece of wood is an effect. The principle remains the same across time. And it is my composition. I am the author.

These are growing pains. Panic occurs whenever new technology comes along. We have been here many times before. And we will in the future. Many embrace the new technology and advance the field. Others resist. But eventually almost everybody comes around to the new technology and it becomes normalized. The only ethical problem is passing off AI-generated content (text and images) as human generated. Beyond that, AI is a tool like anything else. There will always be Luddites and technophobes, but even here, most of them come around to a technological advancement over time; they have to because they will be left behind if they don’t. People worry about being replaced by AI, but they are far more at risk of being replaced by humans who use AI.

The survey reports faculty concerns. I get it, and agree with many of their concerns. But it’s heartening that so many of my colleagues recognize the usefulness of the latest technological advancement. It means that the period of panic and resistance will be short-lived and the college can get on with riding the technological wave—a wave that will benefit everybody in the longterm.

“Because the thinking person does not need to inflict rage upon himself, he does not wish to inflict it on others. The happiness that dawns in the eye of the thinking person is the happiness of humanity. The universal tendency of oppression is opposed to thought as such”—Theodor Adorno (1969) 

This essay was a long time coming. I had promised several years ago that I would tackle the correspondence between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, both major figures in critical theory (of the Frankfurt School variety). The correspondence (which you can read here) occurred in late 1960s and highlighted the two’s divergent views on the student protest movements sweeping Europe and the US at the time, particularly in 1968–1969. Their disagreement is relevant for understanding Marcuse’s ideas about free speech and tolerance, which I write about in a 2018 essay published on the Project Censored platform, and how these have come to rationalize the repressive intolerance of woke progressivism.

Adorno, who was based in Frankfurt at the time, took a dim view of the student protests of his day, especially those led by the German SDS (Socialist German Student Union). He saw their tactics—disruptive demonstrations, occupations of university spaces, and violence, highly resembling the recent disturbances on college campuses in Europe and the United States over the last several years—as reckless and, crucially potentially authoritarian. (For an analysis of today’s student radicalism see The Growing Threat on Our College Campuses.)

Adorno held a deep-seated wariness of mass movements, informed by the rise of National Socialism, which he’d witnessed firsthand before fleeing Germany in the 1930s. In early 1969, when students occupied the Institute for Social Research (where Adorno served as director), he called the police to clear them out. He action shocked the radical left. They thought the move was reactionary and illustrative of his detached persona. In his letters to Marcuse, Adorno justified his action by arguing that the students’ militancy threatened to undermine the enlightenment project.

Adorno was not alone in this concern. By this time, Jürgen Habermas, who was initially supportive of student radicalism, had become critical of the movement’s tactics, especially under leaders such as Rudi Dutschke of the SDS (I wrote about Dutschke recently). At a congress in Hanover in June 1967, Habermas famously clashed with Dutschke, warning that the students’ flirtation with direct action and utopian rhetoric risked what he called “left fascism.” (Habermas reflects on his position in a collection of essays published as Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics.) Habermas was with Adorno when the latter called the police. 

Marcuse, living in California and more attuned to the 1960s counterculture, was far more enthusiastic of the students’ tactics. He saw the movement as a revolutionary force. In his correspondence with Adorno, Marcuse defended the students’ tactics, seeing these as a necessary break from the oppressive structures he would criticize in his 1964 One-Dimensional Man. He urged Adorno to see the protests as a practical extension of their shared critical theory.

Marcuse’s views on the violent tactics of the student movement were consonant with his views on free speech and tolerance, most notably articulated in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” which I criticized in the Project Censored essay. Marcuse argued that a society claiming to be tolerant—i.e., the liberal democracies—perpetuated injustice by tolerating oppressive ideas (e.g., fascism, racism) under the guise of neutrality. 

Marcuse proposed a radical alternative: “liberating tolerance,” which meant intolerance toward movements or ideologies that (in which view) upheld domination, while amplifying marginalized voices. This idea became the basis of the praxis of woke progressivism, seen more recently in the rise of cancel culture. What his argument amounted to was a rejection of free speech, with Marcuse suggesting that certain ideas—those he deemed regressive—shouldn’t be allowed a platform. Thus, he supported censoring far-right groups while protecting leftist dissent, a stance that smacked of hypocrisy or authoritarianism.

Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we witnessed social media platforms employing Marcuse’s sentiments—censoring, de-boosting, deplatforming, and shadow-banning rightwing voices. Moreover, as I argue in my 2021 essay The Noisy and Destructive Children of Herbert Marcuse, Marcuse’s justification for suppressing speech his politics deemed oppressive was enthusiastically taken up by postmodernist movements, such as Black Lives Matter and trans activism.

In their correspondence, Adorno pushed back. He warned Marcuse that his position flirted with the same dogmatic tendencies they’d both critiqued in totalitarian regimes. For Adorno, the core of critical theory was unrelenting questioning of everything, which precluded selective silencing, even if the target was intolerance itself. It is clear in reading Adorno’s words that he would not in principle support a position in which either he or anybody else served as commissar. It was against his very being as a free thinker—a being he desired for everybody else.

Their exchange peaked in 1969, with Marcuse accusing Adorno of betraying revolutionary potential by siding with the establishment, evidenced by his calling the police to remove students who had occupied the institute he directed. For his part, Adorno found Marcuse’s romanticizing the student protest as abandoning reason to chaos. History has vindicated Adorno’s position. Marcuse’s “tolerating intolerance” became a major justification for cancel culture, deplatforming, and otherwise limiting open discourse. Marcuse’s position is a paradox. And while identifying and contemplating contradiction lie at the heart of critical theory, paradox is anathema to it.

A lawsuit naming Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, Scott Bessent, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, and the National Archives and Records Administration as defendants. The lawsuit asks a federal judge to declare the use of Signal unlawful. Signal is end-to-end encryption communications app, meaning that it ensures that only the sender and recipient can access the content of messages or calls, that comes pre-installed on many government phones and used for closed communications between government officials.

Who is the judge assigned to the case? James Boasberg. Boasberg is the same judge assigned to oversee the case involving the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport terrorist-designated Venezuelan gang members. He also oversaw several high-profile Trump grand jury probes conducted by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Boasberg attempted in the Alien Enemies Act case to assume the Article II powers of the Commander-in-Chief by issuing directives during a military operation. The administration was compelled to invoke the State Secrets Privilege, a legal doctrine in the US that allows the government to withhold information from legal proceedings if its disclosure could harm national security. Providing that information to a partisan Obama-appointed judge would compromise national security.

Boasberg being assigned to the Signal case is not an accident. This was a setup. The goal is to join the project of judicial obstruction with deep state goals to undermine the Trump Administration. Part of the tactic was Boasberg’s attempt to set a perjury trap in the Alien Enemies Act case. Yesterday, congressional Democrats also tried to set a perjury trap in interrogating Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence. They knew Goldberg would drop the other shoe today. Goldberg gave Congress as heads up that he would do this on a podcast yesterday with Tim Miller (Bulwark Podcast).

This is an attempt by the demoralized Democratic Party, the political side of the administrative state, to mount a narrative they hope will delegitimize the Trump Administration. At present the Party finds difficult to mount the delegitimizing campaign they successfully pursued against Trump during the first term. The federal Judiciary and the deep state have come to their assistance.

We have been here before. Jeffrey Goldberg is playing the role of Alexander Vindman, the retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel who gained national attention during the first impeachment inquiry of Donald Trump in 2019. Vindman was in the White House Situation Room when Trump made the phone call to Zelensky.

We know how Vindman came to be in that room: he was serving as the Director for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Russia on the National Security Council. Readers may find relevant that Vindman was born in Ukraine during the Soviet period. We also know how Goldberg, a notorious anti-Trump reporter, came to be on Signal chat. At least we think we know. He was invited by Michael Waltz, the National Security Adviser in the Trump administration. However, I hasten to note that this is Goldberg’s account. Goldberg claims in his reporting to have received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as “Michael Waltz.”

As of today, Trump is standing with Waltz (although he is upset with him). This is on the surface surprising given that Waltz was the one alleged to have invited Goldberg to the chat. Is this because Trump does not yet know for certain whether Waltz is the person who identified himself as Waltz on the chat? Does he suspect that somebody else using that name invited Goldberg to the chat? Or is it because he does not want to alienate Waltz during a deep state operation to once again undermine his presidency?

History makes clear that the deep state is determined to thwart Trump and delegitimize the populist American First movement. This desire is born of the transnationalist project and the managed decline of the American Republic necessary for affecting this desire.

An old narrative has reemerged along side this that the Trump Administration is siding with Russia, a nuclear power that exists outside the globalist project. Thus, the project is infusing the present narrative with the Trump as Russian stooge narrative. If this feels like déjà vu there’s a reason for that. Again, we have been here before. The warmongers are desperate to keep alive the conflict with Russia. Part of what got their goat is Vice-President JD Vance’s sentiments towards Europe expressed on the chat.

The reality of what happened can be simply explained: high-level government officials were engaged in a conversation over a secure app installed on government phones updating the team about an unfolding and ultimately successful military operation. Other countries were also informed of these military operations, as well, as it standard in such situations. When considering whether this was top secret information, these details must be kept in mind.

The question that needs to answered is how Goldberg was invited to that chat and then follow that back to the operation that put him in that room. This is the real national security threat—it suggests a mole in the Trump Administration’s national security team planted to undermine the presidency and his foreign policy. The narrative being established by the corporate state media is designed not only to undermine Trump, but to obscure the existence and goal of the deep state. In doing this, national security is being compromised. All this betrays the desperation of the transnational agenda.

My university is working through its AI policy and some faculty are reluctant to recognize the value of this new technology. I allow my students to use AI as a research tool and as a copyeditor. I agree that AI-generated content is ethically problematic, but using AI as a research assistant, copyeditor, or even a sounding board to clarify thoughts and steel man arguments, is not only ethical but increasingly standard, perhaps even necessary for those for whom English is a second language. The ethical landscape hinges on attribution and intent, which are distinct from passing off AI-generated content as wholly one’s own.

I have thousands of books and dozens of binders with printed articles in my campus office and home library, as well as access to a myriad of databases through my university’s library. At the same time, AI can sift through vast datasets, summarize studies, or flag relevant sources faster than a human—e.g., tools like ChatGPT (OpenAI) or Grok (X’s chatbot, a term coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land to denotes a form of understanding) can process thousands of articles in minutes. This accelerates discovery and grounds one’s work in evidence. Moreover, if one is familiar with a body of literature, AI can help immensely in recalling sources, while suggesting related sources. 

Using AI as a research assistant is fine if one verifies the output. As I have noted in the past on Freedom and Reason, AI can hallucinate, citing nonexistent books and papers, or bias results (e.g., by overreliance on certain sources). The responsibility falls to the researcher to ensure accuracy. In this way, one can think of AI as a colleague, librarian, or reviewer suggesting books that one stills need to check and read. 

Crucially, per academic norms, no attribution is needed for this backstage or process role. APA, MLA don’t require citing search tools. When my students include these tools on their works cited page, I ask them to remove them when making revisions. The method by which they locate sources is not relevant; what is important is that they go look for sources, read them, and cite them accurately and fully, following all the rules of the assigned style.

AI tools such as ChatGPT and Grammarly polish grammar, tighten prose, or suggest structural tweaks. The writing mechanics of AI systems are sound and instructive. For example, a writer can reduce a 500-word draft to 300 without losing meaning. It’s not only more efficient but raises the quality of one’s work by enhancing clarity and readability. The result is instructive, as well, such as in AI modeling active voice; AI tutors writers by providing a ready model of efficient and logical writing and even thinking. 

All of this perfectly acceptable. Writers have long used tools, such as spellcheck and thesauruses (just don’t abuse the thesaurus!) to refine their work; AI is just a smarter version of these tools. The final product still reflects the author’s ideas and voice. Think about it: no one credits Microsoft Word or Outlook for fixing typos or suggesting phrasing. There is no need to credit AI for such things any more than one should credit calculators for use in solving math problems or statistical packages for generating output and interpretations. 

Bouncing ideas off AI to clarify thoughts or steel man arguments is also a perfectly legitimate use of AI. It can challenge assumptions or refine logic, acting as a Socratic sparring partner. Thus, thinkers have another method for engaging in dialectics. One can sharpen his arguments, essays, or speeches this way. AI thinks logically, so using AI as a sounding board is often more helpful in reaching understanding than engaging humans in debate and discussion. An unfortunate reality—and this has been a reality since time immemorial—is that humans typically do not understand the rules of logic and engage instead in sophistry, which undermines reason rather than enhancing it. 

The intellectual work involved in forming an argument using AI remains the possession of the arguer; AI just helps the arguer see his argument more clearly. No attribution is needed here, either, as AI is serving as a process tool, not a content source. In this way, as a thinking machine, AI is an effective learning tool. It’s like playing a computer in chess or puzzling through patterns in a video game.

One problem, however, is that, in using AI as a copyeditor, one risks an unintended side effect of AI’s polish: tripping up detection tools like GPTZero. When using ChatGPT, Grammarly, or similar AI for copyediting, the output can ping as “AI-generated” because these systems smooth out the natural messiness of human writing in ways that mimic the machine’s own generative patterns. Put another way, AI is a very good writer, and polished writing produces false positivists.

When ChatGPT copyedits, it doesn’t just fix commas. It might rephrase for flow. These rewrites align with its training data and as a result nudge the text closer to patterns GPTZero flags. Grammarly’s “clarity” suggestions can do this, too, swapping passive voice for active or trimming hedges—changes that reflect AI’s stylistic leanings. But this is not a bad thing. Again, one not only tightens his writing by using AI to copyedit but learns to be a better writer by having AI model good writing. 

Detection tools are built on corpora (a collection of written texts, especially a body of literature on a particular subject or the entire works of a particular author), including AI outputs. If ChatGPT’s editing mimics its own generative style (or Grammarly mimics a similar optimization), the edited text can overlap with those training sets, raising the “AI likelihood” score. It is easy to defeat these systems with even moderate tweaking to the output. But why should a writer feel compelled to degrade his work because others may have suspicions about it? This is one of the problems with AI: it degrades trust.

The problem vis-à-vis AI detection is that many don’t grasp the reality that the detectors aren’t distinguishing intent—they’re just pattern-matching. The issue therefore lies with detection tools overreaching. They’re blunt instruments, designed to catch fully AI-written essays (and even here there are false positives), not nuanced edits using AI assistance. Punishing writers for using AI as a tool—especially for legit copyediting—misreads intent. It’s like flagging a painter for using a ruler: the art’s still his. The ruler is a tool, like a calculator or a statistical package.

Using AI to edit or as a sounding board is ethical—the author is refining his work, not outsourcing it. He is using a superb piece of technology to increase his productivity and to improve the quality of the product. The problem is therefore practical, not ethical or moral: detectors can’t yet tell human with AI polish from AI from scratch. That’s on the technology, not the author. Until such time where the detectors can do that (and they may never be able to, especially with the pace of advancement in this technology), the use of AI detection in assessing the honesty of the writer is unjust. The problem of false positives is insurmountable—while the problem of false negatives allows those who use AI for content generation to escape detection.

Unfortunately, especially if an instructor is aggressively suspicious of student writing, the problem of false flagging of content as AI generated could discourage AI use in writing. This is unfortunate because, as noted, AI copyediting is a great equalizer for non-native speakers or busy creators. If a professor or editor wrongly assumes a polished draft is AI-generated, it risks unfair penalties, especially in academia. Plagiarism policies lag tech reality (and likely always will), and to be blunt about it, technophobia punishes those was avail themselves of the latest tools to improve their writer and better convey their ideas.

One last point. I have heard from many people the complaint that what they perceive as AI content feels sterile. I suspect this complaint stems from the feeling that strong logic and good copyediting prioritizes efficiency and polish over personality—traits that can make the writing feel as if it’s missing a human touch. Yet there are thinkers who are highly logical with tight writing mechanics, and an argument can be made, and should be made in my view, that the work of these thinkers is as valuable, and in some areas more valuable, that the writing of those who infuse their work with digression, passion, and tangents. As a huge fan of Star Trek, the analogy that comes to mind is the distinction between viewers who favor Spock over Kirk and vice-versa. The Spock writer prefers logic over passion. 

In my own writing, I often pursue tight science writing, while other essays are written in a white heat (some readers of Freedom and Reason find typos and let me know about them, which I appreciate very much). Sometimes, I pursue both at the same time, infusing my science writing with polemics. But there is nothing inherently wrong with sterile science writing (indeed, as I said a moment ago, sometimes this is preferrable). If readers don’t like it, that’s a matter of taste. No writer should feel compelled to change his style because others find it sterile. And no writer should deny himself the benefits of technology for fear that others will judge him harshly for it. There is no ethical basis upon which to make that judgement. Their self-denial (assuming it’s genuine) is their problem, not the author who uses the tools available to him.

You have probably heard that a trans woman is a male with a female brain. As Magnus Hirschfeld put it: “a woman’s soul in a man’s body.” This is why we often hear of people being born in the wrong bodies. People are assigned gender at birth, but the assignment is sometimes wrong. Therefore, a man can really be a woman and those around him are supposed to affirm his womanhood. Although the man who believes he is a woman is indistinguishable from the man who portrays himself as a woman (deceit or fetish), we are to accept his claim. This argument rests on a false premise. 

Humans are sexually dimorphic—there are clear biological differences between males and females. But those differences taken as attributes aren’t one or the other; they lie along a spectrum with plenty of overlap. We often refer to categorical variations in the gender binary as overlapping distributions. Whether we’re talking attributes like hand size or something more complex like brain structure, traits vary considerably within each sex without jumping the boundary into the other sex’s territory.

The brain shows signs of sexual dimorphism—size, wiring, or specific regions can differ between men and women. But those are averages, not strict types. Daphna Joel’s work on brain mosaics suggests that most of us have a mix of “male-typical” and “female-typical” brain traits, not a pure “male” or “female” brain. A man might have some characteristics more common in women, and a woman might have some that lean toward what’s typical for men. This doesn’t mean their biological sex flips—it’s just how people vary.

Joel’s 2015 article “Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), analyzes brain scans from over 1,400 individuals, looking at features like size, connectivity, and volume in regions known to show sex differences. She found that while there are average differences between male and female brains, individual brains rarely align entirely with one “sex typical” pattern. Instead, most show mosaic of traits, some more common in men, others more common in women.

Joel expands her argument in her 2019 book Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain. Here she explains how every brain is a unique blend of traits that don’t neatly split into “male” or “female” categories. She argues against the old-school idea of gendered brains, using the mosaic concept to challenge stereotypes. Marco Del Giudice and associates, in a 2016 PNAS letter, argues that Joel’s methods miss large, consistent sex differences. But this only counters the trans gender argument more stridently, namely the notion that there are female brains born in male bodies. 

Consider the range of variability in hands. If a man has slender, delicate fingers, we don’t say he has “female hands.” We recognize that’s how his hands turned out—they’re still male hands—because they are attached to a male body. (Pick most any body part: hips, feet, even genitalia.) Brains work the same way. So, to be sure, there’s variation, but slapping on a label like “female brain in a male body” (or the reverse) is ideology not science. Gender is binary, even if traits sprawl across messy, overlapping ranges.

It seems an intentional oversight by the trans activists. If we don’t call a man with dainty hands “part female”—rather we just say his hands are an expectation of the male spectrum—why not treat brains the same? If someone is male, then their brain is a male brain—even if it’s got traits that show up more frequently in women. The idea of a “female brain” appearing in a male body leans on this assumption that there’s some perfect “female brain” blueprint ready to be mismatched. But brains don’t come with a gender sticker apart from the body they are in. They’re molded by genetics, hormones, and life experiences—all tied to the body’s gender, even if the result looks different from person to person.

Say a man’s brain leans toward higher emotional sensitivity or less aggression—traits that might line up with female patterns. It’s still a male brain, just wired in its own way. The hand comparison is instructive here (podcaster Andrew Gold suggested it): we’re fine with physical traits varying without saying they belong to the other sex. Brains shouldn’t be any different.

Determining gender comes down to basics: gametes, chromosomes, and reproductive anatomy. If we stick to that—sperm or eggs, XX or XY, testes or ovaries—then brain wiring or hand shape can vary without negating the binary. It’s just diversity within the framework. A man can have the daintiest hands or a brain that skews “feminine” and still be a man, because gender isn’t about variation—it’s about the reproductive biology.

People err when they use variation in attributes to argue that the binary itself isn’t valid. This is what we call the continuum fallacy: thinking that because there’s no sharp line between two groups, the groups aren’t real.

Variation doesn’t wipe out categories. Sex reduces to binary reproductive roles—males make sperm, females make eggs—tied to gametes, chromosomes, and anatomy. That’s a clear either/or. It’s a binary. You’ve either got ovaries or testes. You are either XX or XY—and extra or missing chromosomes are anomalies. Traits like brain organization or hand size overlap between men and women, but that doesn’t make male and female fuzzy concepts. A man with some “womanly” brain, whatever that’s supposed to mean, isn’t negating the binary—it just showing how males can differ, which of course they do, along a myriad of atrributes.

Lying in wait is the essentialism trap. Saying a “female brain” can pop up in a male body assumes there’s a fixed “female brain” ideal—while tossing out the idea of a male/female split in a sexual dimorphic mammalian species. That’s a mess. Either traits stick with the body’s sex, or they’re untethered, which doesn’t match what we know scientifically. The mistake is thinking brain variation trumps biological sex, when it’s just variation within it.

The problem is also mixing up categories and traits. Science defines “male” and “female” by reproductive function, not by every detail matching a stereotype (which are also culturally and socially constructed). The fallacy acts as if sex depends on a checklist—hand size, brain wiring, etc.—instead of on its biological base. A man with delicate hands isn’t less male; a woman with exceptional spatial skills isn’t less female. Variation of attributes across categories—even when they overlap—doesn’t undo the categories.

People overreach with averages. Joel’s research suggests that brains are a mix of traits—not cookie-cutter “male” or “female.” Some stretch her findings to say male and female brains don’t exist at all. But, on average men’s and women’s brains (as well as a myriad of other trait) do differ, but the differences are large, and that ties back to the anthropological truth of sexual dimorphism. Variation doesn’t mean the categories vanish; it means people within them aren’t clones. The gender binary is real. And gender is immutable.

“The legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions.” —Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Danbury Baptist Association

This cartoon is accurate and it’s a real problem. I have been on the receiving end of this idea. To be sure, in my case, students have the freedom to draw up petitions and make a lot of noise, but that doesn’t change the sentiment from which their actions issue. That sentiment is fascistic. However draped in the language of social justice, it is a totalitarian desire.

The right of others to be authoritarian in spirit is given in a free system. One is free to say and write whatever. The problem is authoritarianism in action—and thus the sentiment expressed in the cartoon is condemnable even if it is wrong to punish those who merely express it.

However, if my employers were to ever take up the desire, and punish me for my disbelief, then the situation becomes manifestly fascist. And the fact is that a lot of employers have indeed taken up this desire, and people have suffered on account of disbelief. The specter of fascism is not merely haunting America but palpable in so many ways. This is true as well as in Europe.

Tragically, because of the chill this puts in the air, most others are forced into a kind of bad faith, where they disbelieve but go with the flow to avoid the consequences of openly expressing their disbelief. That is yet another sign that freedom has already been compromised; people debase themselves because they are fearful of misfits and those with power who have their backs.

I saw on the interstate Friday a Tesla with the brand and emblems removed. This was presumably to avoid having the vehicle keyed or worse. It is a sign of the times. We have one side that believes in personal liberty and the right to expect that property and person will be safe from destruction and violence. The other side believes that sentiment justifies destructive and violent action. The vandal has always been a pain in the side of civilization.

I might wish others saw the world the way I do, but to force them to, either by punishment or terrorism, is a deeply totalitarian impulse. Both punishment and terrorism have been used to force populations to agree with utterly fallacious worldviews. It is in the face of this force that we must rise.

“But isn’t your belief that you should be free from coercion also a belief?”

The only thing I demand is what I demand for everybody else: the right to be free from having to believe what somebody else believes. This freedom requires but one universal rule. Is this coercive. No, it isn’t. But you will hear that it is. So I want to arm you with a rebuttal.

The quote above is made up, but it captures a sentiment, and I have heard it said in this form or another. I bet many of you have, too. It’s what we call a tu quoque move—a man who demands liberty is accused of holding a belief, as if that alone makes his stance equivalent to the coercive actions he is rejecting.

It’s a sleight of hand: it implies that because I have a conviction (freedom from coercion), I’m somehow hypocritical for opposing others imposing theirs. This move skirts a critical distinction. My “belief” isn’t about dictating what others must think—it’s about preventing anyone from doing that to anyone else. It’s not a positive imposition of a worldview, but a negative boundary against force.

This should be obvious—anti-coercion is not coercion. But for many it is not. It’s an obvious contradiction, albeit obscured by the Orwellian world that has grown around us (where, for example, racism becomes antiracism). But that is the contradiction that lies at the core of the sentiment I capture in the quote. That is what the other side believes.

If you take anything away from what I am writing here it is that fascism is not on the side that demands freedom from compelled speech, but rather on the side of those who demand others change their core beliefs and values so misfits fit in. “Should?” Whatever. “Will?” No. To be sure, a free society tolerates misfits. It is not obligated to change the world to normalize their deviance, since this limits the freedom of everybody else. The desire that it should be otherwise is the fascist spirit.

The fallacy here lies in equating opposites. But belief in liberty isn’t the same as belief that demands conformity. The misfit is free to be a misfit. A free society does not tell the individual how to dress or even how to think of himself (although if it is self-destructive, then we might wish to help). The principle of liberty is to prevent him from forcing others to accept or respect his nonconformity—and force comes in many forms.

Acceptance and respect are not the same things as tolerating nonconformity. We are only obligated in a free society to be tolerant. We are not obligated to affirm the delusions of others. If nonconformity interferes with the liberty and rights of others, then the state must act to stop the misfit for the sake of liberty and rights.

There is very real danger here. The now ubiquitous dodge blurs the line between power and reason. If every belief is just a belief (and this is the core assumption in postmodernism and its progeny), then everything becomes about dominance—the imposition of the will of the one or the minority on the rest of us.

This is what lies behind the keying and firebombing of Teslas, which if tolerated, will almost certainly move to the next level, namely violence against persons. Indeed, it’s happened before. My warning isn’t speculative. Propaganda of the deed is a historical fact. This is terrorism.

Those who work from this fallacy—which is the fallacy of “speech is violence”—flatten the difference between the principle that protects individual autonomy, on the one hand, and a dogma that crushes it, on the other. It’s a rhetorical trick that lets those who seek to coerce others off the hook: “Well, you’ve got your beliefs, we’ve got ours, so who’s to say?”

Again, they’re not the same type of thing. One side’s belief, if manifest in positive action, law, and policy, comes with shackles and violence. The other is the precondition for freedom. If coercion appears here, it is in defense of liberty, not the arbitrary imposition of ideology. Coercion in the latter is just. Coercion in the former is criminal.

My universal rule—freedom from coerced belief—doesn’t need to justify itself by power. It is a necessary condition for reason to even function. Any power used in effecting that freedom is not an imposition but an action protecting myself and others from the imposition of ideas that would limit individual liberty. No one has to bow to the thug. He only does so to survive. If he is armed, then he is justified in using violence to survive.

Once you or I have been coerced into a worldview, all argument is negated; all that’s left is obedience to whatever idea is foisted upon us. Put another way, repression and violence don’t “reduce” to power because they start there. If force is legitimate, then it is authority. The state has the authority to coerce citizens because it represents the will of the people to secure their liberty and rights—when the state acts otherwise, it is illegitimate and thus an expression of fascist power. And then, and only then, do the people have the right to rebel. Not riot. Rebel.

Freedom of conscience and speech make it possible for the center of attention in the cartoon to make her or his demands. This is freedom that leaves fools on the hill. If you want to bend over for misfits, then bend over. That’s also part of freedom: the freedom to debase oneself. But I won’t. And if you want to continue living in a free society, then you won’t, either. I therefore appeal to your sense of self-dignity, since self-dignity, widely held, is a chief bulwark against life in a totalitarian society.

Self-dignity will also help you avoid becoming a misfit yourself. To be sure, there is a current out there that finds fashionable nonconformity for its own sake (the young are especially susceptible to the pull of fashion). But disobedience is really only righteous when it’s in opposition to delusion and tyranny. The civil rights struggle was righteous. The project to make us conform to untruths is not.

In an X post yesterday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, presently touring college campuses wearing a populist mask to obscure his subservience to the corporate state, pushed his plan for Medicare for All by citing statistics on life expectancy in a number of advanced Western societies. Here’s the chart:

Characteristics of Sanders’ sledgehammer style of rhetoric, arguing the case using the relative lower life expectancy of Americans compared to selected Western countries at best oversimplifies the matter, while obscuring the many downsides of socialized medicine.

It is fallacious to pin lower life expectancy on health care delivery models. The US ranks lower in life expectancy among advanced nations due in major part to lifestyle factors and violence—not just or even for the most part healthcare access. In fact, on pure healthcare outcomes (e.g., acute care, cancer survival), the US often outperforms its peers.

To be sure, Medicare for All will help close coverage gaps, but without tackling obesity, violence, and other societal issues, life expectancy won’t significantly improve for America. So while inequities in access are indeed a problem, Sanders drastically overstates the role of access disparities in the broader statistic.

The United States of America is the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care as a human right.

The result: We rank dead last among wealthy nations in life expectancy.

We must end that international embarrassment.

Yes. We need Medicare for All. pic.twitter.com/2RTKYLK2bV

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 21, 2025

Moreover, Sanders omits the downsides of socialized medicine from his pitch—e.g., bureaucracy, delays, lack of choice and flexibility, and rationing. The US outperforms other nations in innovation, responsiveness, and speed. Sanders’ focus on life expectancy thus obscures not only the other factors affecting the relative ranking of nations, but also the advantages of the US model. In attempting to address the problem of life expectancy through Medicare for All, Sanders’ plan risks those advantages.

It is also crucial to recognize that the US healthcare model, whatever its flaws, plays a critical role in supporting socialized systems globally via dynamic, market-driven innovation in medical technology, pharmaceuticals, and research. The US is the engine for the healthcare advancements that other populations enjoy. By keeping healthcare largely free market in the US, America enables the world to enjoy better medical care, making their health care outcomes better despite their socialized models.

Socializing medicine in the United States, by stifling innovation, will likely lead to stagnation in medical breakthroughs, reduced access to cutting-edge treatments, and slower advancements in life-saving technologies, hurting those other populations in addition to our own. In the long run, Sanders’ plan could result in fewer cures, less effective therapies, and diminished hope for patients worldwide.

Finally, supposing we were to implement Sanders’ plan, the cost to taxpayers would be staggering, requiring from taxpayers tens of trillions of dollars over the decade following its implementation. It would also expand the corporate state apparatus, concentrating even more power and wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of large corporations, while enlarging the strata of bureaucrats and technocrats who serve their interests.

Bottomline: Sanders’ pitch drastically oversimplifies life expectancy, while ignoring the myriad of downsides of the corporate state medical model he pushes.

Donald Trump followed through on his promise to abolish the Department of Education (DoE) yesterday. He signed the executive order Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities. He will need Congress to act to make his promise a reality; since the DoE was established by an act of Congress in 1979, dismantling it necessitates the passage of new legislation to repeal or significantly amend the existing law. The good news is that Trump will need a simple majority to accomplish this.

If the Department of Education is abolished, blue cities and states will continue indoctrinating America’s youth in public schools with critical race theory (CRT), queer theory, and other anti-Western ideologies. Moreover, the emphasis on social and emotional learning (SEL) will persist in undermining academic outcomes—either by diverting time away from core subjects like English, math, and science or by infusing these subjects with ideological content. This presents a challenge for those already brainwashed by progressive ideology—if they are ever capable of recognizing their indoctrination.

However, abolishing federal control over education in red cities, towns, and states would allow citizens in those areas to escape the influence of the credentialed class. The imposition of woke progressive ideology is largely inorganic to these communities. Without federal overreach, they could refocus on the true task of educating America’s youth.

To grasp the significance of liberating these communities from the dictates of a federal ministry of education consider that, of the 3,143 counties or county-equivalents in the US, Donald Trump won 2,588, while Kamala Harris secured only 555. Currently, the credentialed class shapes curricular and programmatic design—dictating progressive ideology—even to counties that would otherwise prioritize instruction in English, math, science, and appropriate social studies (civics, geography, and history) over woke programming.

While the county-level electoral map is not a perfect metric—since many schools are run by cities, independent districts, or mixed systems—public schools still exist within counties. Thus, Trump’s county-level success reflects the preferences of many families whose children attend public schools.

Advocates of woke progressive education argue that these frameworks offer essential perspectives on identity, power, and social justice, encouraging students to, in the language of that ideology, “critically engage” with issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Of course, the goal is not genuine critical engagement but rather the uncritical adoption of the progressive worldview on these topics—a worldview corrupted by corporatist and postmodernist ideas. These so-called “theories” infiltrate subjects like English, history, social studies, and even science, injecting warped interpretations, revising history to align with ideological goals, and degrading scientific norms and understandings.

The inclusion of such content in public education not only detracts from traditional subjects (which is damaging enough) and undermines academic rigor and essential skill development—it also implants in impressionable minds an ideology that is neither organic to their communities nor advantageous to their future prospects or rational civic participation.

When this issue is acknowledged at all, it is often misframed as a debate about the role of education in shaping students’ values and preparing them for higher education and the workforce. In other words, the situation facing American families is cast as a dilemma: balancing the demands of progressive curricula with the traditional goals of fostering academic proficiency. However, this way of putting the matter misrepresents the problem—it presumes that public education should universally assume the role of parents and communities in shaping children’s values. It positions public schools as the primary vehicle for instilling progressive ideals, while rejecting family and community values as backward and bigoted.

Progressives believe they know better than families and communities about the values children should hold. However, especially since the pandemic, tens of millions of Americans have rejected this premise (many had already rejected the premise). They increasingly recognize that progressive curricula and programming aim not at developing critical, independent thinkers or autonomous citizens who make decisions for the betterment of themselves and their communities, but rather at producing obedient corporate subjects and reliable Democratic voters.

The practical reality is that, since the establishment of the Department of Education (DoE), the introduction of SEL and other programming has shifted focus away from core academic subjects like literacy, math, and science. This shift has blunted the development of critical thinking, knowledge acquisition, and essential skills. The redistribution of time and attention has reduced instructional hours dedicated to academic rigor, negatively impacting test scores and overall educational outcomes. Teachers and administrators feel pressured to balance SEL with meeting academic standards, resulting in less effective delivery of both. The political reality is that SEL—and similar ideological initiatives—should be purged from public education not only because it interferes with the goals of education, but on principled grounds: public schools should not be an instrument for pressing ideology into the public mind. 

There is also the problem of bureaucratic bloat and the burden on taxpayers. Since the DoE’s creation in 1979, the teacher-to-administrator ratio in US public schools has shifted significantly. Before the department’s formation, schools were teacher-heavy, with relatively few administrators and minimal support staff. Most schools operated with a principal, perhaps a vice-principal, and a small central office team. In the decades following the DoE’s establishment, the number of non-teaching staff has grown at a much faster rate than the number of teachers.

While several factors contribute to this trend, one key driver is the expanding federal regulatory apparatus and its mandates on public education. The result is that, despite significant increases in education spending, much of the additional funding has gone toward administrative costs rather than directly benefiting classroom instruction. This regulatory imposition has created a vast bureaucratic structure, ostensibly to meet students’ needs and comply with federal mandates.

Returning to the ideological problem, some will recognize in the plan of action articulated by Rudi Dutschke, a German student activist and leader of the 1960s socialist movement, who described it as “the long march through the institutions.” His inspiration came from the work of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and the concept of “cultural hegemony,” which I have explored in several essays on Freedom and Reason.

Dutschke’s phrase is useful—it captures the essence of a strategy aimed at achieving cultural and political change by gradually infiltrating and transforming society’s key institutions, such as education, government agencies and departments, mass media, and the institutions of cultural production—in other words, the organizations that shape public perception and policy.

For Gramsci, cultural hegemony was essential for maintaining capitalist power; therefore, the left needed to challenge and reshape cultural norms through institutional influence. However, what we see today is not the left in either the liberal or Marxist sense, but rather a faux-left manufactured by the corporate class—progressivism—designed to mislead those who genuinely value social justice.

This is how the corporate class has secured hegemonic control over society over the last several decades: by disguising corporate aims in the language of democracy and justice. In other words, the accumulation of political power in the administrative state and technocratic apparatus entrenches a social logic that ultimately benefits corporate interests. Thus, the very concept of social justice has been transformed into its opposite. What moves under the appeal of social justice is totalitarian desire. 

With schools now offering an ever-widening range of services beyond traditional instruction, the introduction of SEL and other pursuits has added yet another layer to an already overcrowded curriculum—one driven by the ideological objectives of the credentialed class rather than the academic needs of students. At a time when greater emphasis on literacy, math, science, and civics (untainted by anti-American and anti-Western sentiment) is more critical than ever, public education has instead been burdened with ideological programming that undermines its core mission.

Ideological programming does not align well with the traditional goals of academic education, such as mastering subject-specific content and skill development, not because there is resistance to it by the ordinary citizen, but because ideological programming is not appropriate to the goals of education, which should focus on education not indoctrination.

However, for progressives, the goal is not education but indoctrination. The goal of creating obedient corporate subjects requires technocratic control of the centralized administrative apparatus, the enlargement of the bureaucracy, the retrenchment of this regime, and generations of voters who support the agenda. Therefore, the project to reclaim our democratic republic is advanced by the dissolution of the Department of Education. It is now up to Congress.