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Nick Fuentes has now appeared on the Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder, and Piers Morgan shows. The conservative world is fractured over whether conservatives should defend such appearances in the name of open dialogue. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, has drawn fire for defending Carlson’s interview with Fuentes. For progressives, whether it’s appropriate to defend Carlson is not really the question. The real question is whether Fuentes and his ilk should ever be platformed at all.

The flashpoint for conservatives, as usual, is Israel. Fuentes identifies with the “America First” tradition and argues that Zionists wield excessive influence over US foreign policy. I disagree with Fuentes on a range of issues, including his views on Israel, but giving him a platform is in keeping with the free speech tradition that, among other things, makes America a model for the world to emulate. We know that progressives don’t believe in this proud tradition. But conservatives? I thought they had taken a liberal turn in the face of progressive authoritarianism. Defending Carlson should be reflexive. That it’s not is troubling.

As a man in his sixties who has followed politics all his life, I remember a time when—even for highly controversial figures and ideas—the value of open dialogue was broadly recognized as a core feature of a free society. Freedom of speech and the airing of opposing views were not merely tolerated but actively encouraged, especially by those who saw themselves as defenders of democracy as a republican proposition (that is, anti-majoritarian). This was before the rise of what is now called “safetyism”—the idea that certain viewpoints are so dangerous they must not be publicly aired at all. Beyond the legitimacy of its stated goal of protecting people from harmful art, images, and works, safetyism immediately raises a deeper question: who decides which ideas are “too dangerous” to be heard—elites, or the public itself?

Whether American society is more open today than it was in previous generations is an easy question to answer. From roughly the 1950s through the 1970s, it was markedly more open. I recognize that there was censorship during this period and especially before (e.g., the Hays Code—formally called the Motion Picture Production Code—the dominant movie censorship and content regulation system in the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1960s). America cycles between periods in which disagreeable expression and speech are more or less tolerated. But from the late 1960s through the 1970s, expression in America was free-wheeling. But it was not to last.

The establishment of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in 1985—founded by a group of politically connected women (including Tipper Gore, Susan Baker, Pam Howar, and Sally Nevius) to increase parental awareness of explicit content in popular music—was not the first manufactured panic around perceived harmful expression. However, the PMRC was not a one-off; it was the harbinger of a re-emerging censorship regime: the modern speech-code movement. These codes accompanied the growing hegemony of antiracist ideology, feminist theory, and multiculturalism. By 1990, well over a hundred U.S. colleges had formal speech codes regulating “offensive” or “demeaning” speech. Speech codes spread across American institutions, public and private.

Social media platforms were established within an already embedded culture of safetyism. At first, however, they emphasized free expression as their primary value proposition. Then, around 2013–2015, the idea of “trust and safety” emerged, and within only a few years, it came to govern content moderation along ideological and political lines. The result was stifling. While there has been a partial return to openness in recent years—especially since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, rebranded it as X, and allowed formerly deplatformed figures to reenter the social media space, prompting other platforms to follow suit—the backlash over Fuentes’s high-profile appearances demonstrates how incomplete that recovery remains. The habits of deplatforming and no-platforming still prevail in public institutions and popular sensibilities.

The case of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, illustrates this shift with striking clarity. Rockwell was an avowed neo-Nazi who openly celebrated Adolf Hitler and promoted explicit racial hostility. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared on national television, spoke on university campuses, and debated prominent public intellectuals. To younger observers, socialized in the context of today’s platforming norms, Rockwell’s media presence would feel shocking; many contemporary figures who are far less extreme face far greater institutional barriers. Whatever one thinks of Fuentes, he is no George Lincoln Rockwell. His adoration of Hitler is a fascination with pomp and circumstance and a “great man” sense of history (he admires Josef Stalin for similar reasons). Rockwell was hardcore. He was the real deal.

In Rockwell’s era, mainstream hosts such as David Susskind were willing—even eager—to confront extremist voices in public. Susskind invited Rockwell onto his show despite openly despising him, arguing that the public had a right to see such figures in the clear light of day. To be sure, Carlson and Morgan are willing to confront Fuentes publicly (even if Carlson chose to do so after interviewing Fuentes). But the fallout from Rockwell’s television appearances was not accompanied by the same pearl-clutching surrounding Fuentes’s more public exposure. Indeed, Rockwell’s campus appearance at Brown University was defended not only by civil libertarians but by administrators who regarded free expression as a core academic principle. Given the panic over Charlie Kirk’s presence on university campuses, it’s obvious that the tolerance for disagreeable ideas has sharply eroded among a great many college students. Not that students didn’t protest Rockwell; however, in the face of those protests, the prevailing assumption was not that students must be shielded from offensive or dangerous ideas, but that a democratic society proves its strength by allowing such speech to occur.

Back when college students appreciated platforming controversial figures—even Nazis. https://t.co/Yk3mo2o7yJ

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) December 8, 2025

It wasn’t only Susskind who took on controversial figures on broadcast television. The broader media environment of the mid-twentieth century reflected a tradition of openness and the free exchange of ideas. Mike Wallace’s pioneering interview program in the late 1950s routinely hosted radical figures. Wallace’s aggressive questioning and willingness to push the boundaries of public debate reflected a deeply held assumption of the era: that open exposure, not suppression, was the best antidote to hateful or dangerous ideas. William F. Buckley, the host of Firing Line, was also willing to bring on controversial figures. Broadcasters and university leaders trusted the public to be resilient. They believed that extremism lost its power when stripped of mystery and confronted in public. In this view, the danger lay not in allowing extremists to speak but in hiding them—and thereby granting them a forbidden allure.

Today’s norms are fundamentally different; the question remains whether these norms are organic or manufactured—and whether that matters. While legal protections for speech remain largely intact, our dominant institutions have become profoundly risk-averse. To put the matter bluntly, our sense-making institutions have taken on an authoritarian and elitist character, treating the public less as citizens to be informed than as a population to be managed. Platforming is no longer viewed as a means of exposing and defeating bad ideas, but as an implicit endorsement—or at least that is the perception that has been cultivated. Digital platforms, media firms, and universities increasingly operate on the premise that exposure itself constitutes harm. In a fragmented online environment, where clips circulate without context and algorithms amplify outrage, institutions suggest that exposure to ideas is too dangerous and that suppression is safer—and they claim the authority to decide which ideas and personalities are worthy of suppression.

As a result, individuals whose views fall far short of Rockwell’s—whether merely heterodox or sharply conservative (labels that presume progressivism as orthodoxy)—often face barriers to public participation that did not exist half a century ago. The contrast between Rockwell and contemporary figures like Fuentes makes this unmistakable. In today’s climate, Fuentes is systematically excluded from mainstream media, deplatformed by major tech companies (X just reinstated his account, which was banned in the summer of 2021), and treated as beyond the pale even in spaces historically devoted to dissent. Whether one approves of his views is beside the point. The institutional response reveals how tightly the boundaries of acceptable discourse have narrowed; Fuentes, alongside other figures such as Alex Jones, remains banned on YouTube.

Some will argue that this comparison does not establish a simple story of decline but merely reflects changing philosophies of openness. The argument goes like this: mid-century America tolerated a broader range of public speech because it believed democratic resilience required exposure rather than insulation; contemporary society prefers a protective model, one that prioritizes harm reduction and the prevention of inadvertent legitimation. This is true as a description of prevailing hegemony. But openness in a democracy is not a principle that can be endlessly redefined. A society is either open or it is not. The earlier era feared authoritarian suppression and trusted sunlight as the best disinfectant. That is the definition of an open society. The present era fears misinformation, radicalization, and destabilization—and therefore seeks to manage public discourse by restricting it. By definition, that is a closed society. Its explicit aim is to prevent certain ideas from ever being openly discussed. Presuming the majority wants it that way does not change the fact.

When modern defenders of censorship confront the challenge that America was freer in the past, they dissolve the question into competing definitions of freedom. However, if freedom means a broad arena of public debate in which even the most odious views may be confronted openly, then mid-twentieth-century America was, in this crucial respect, a freer society. If freedom is redefined as a social environment carefully shielded from destabilizing or hateful ideas, then no-platforming—whether through rules or shaming—becomes a method of protection. But this latter conception does not match the historical meaning of freedom in Western societies. No-platforming does not protect freedom from within—it replaces freedom with managed thought.

Put another way, the censorship regime echoes George Orwell’s starkest warnings: it risks creating a society in which the appearance of safety and knowledge substitutes for genuine understanding. Recall the slogans in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Freedom is Slavery.” “Ignorance is Strength.” Invoking Orwell’s slogans may sound dramatic; Airstrip One is not our reality. But the substance of his argument prevails: without access to information and the right to be an informed participant, we remain essentially ignorant, subject to the control of those who dictate speech and shape thought. To be kept in the dark by those who want to keep us there is an essential element in servitude. And while we can still hear Fuentes if we want to, some wish we couldn’t, and it’s worth worrying about them before they prevail. Because if we don’t, then they will.

Since I have a formal area of expertise in political economy as part of my PhD credentials, I can help Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with something I recently learned she said in a 2018 interview with Margaret Hoover on Firing Line. Ocasio-Cortez stated that, when the United States was founded, it did not operate on a capitalist economy. “Capitalism has not always existed in the world,” she said. “When this country started, we were not a capitalist—we did not operate on a capitalist economy.” The first part is true enough. The second part is entirely false.

Putting the matter charitably, Ocasio-Cortez profoundly misunderstands both economic history and the conceptual frameworks used by scholars of capitalism’s long development. While popular historical memory and political discourse often treat capitalism as synonymous with industrial capitalism, the major traditions of classical political economy—as well as Marxist, neo-Marxist, and world-systems scholarship—define capitalism as a mode of production and exchange that long predates America’s founding. Agrarian capitalism and merchant capitalism are not stages preceding capitalism but expressions of capitalism in its developmental phases. By the mid-eighteenth century, when the United States emerged, the transatlantic world was already deeply embedded in capitalist relations, both legally and structurally.

World-systems theory offers one of the clearest accounts of this long historical view (the longue durée, as the Annales School calls it). Immanuel Wallerstein argued that capitalism consolidated as a world-system during the “long sixteenth century,” roughly 1450 to 1620. This period saw the emergence of a Europe-centered network of production and trade characterized by core–periphery relations and market-oriented forms of labor control and exploitation.

For Wallerstein and others in this tradition, capitalism is not merely a national economic system but a world structure of accumulation and exchange. Within that framework, mercantilism, colonial resource extraction, coerced plantation labor, and early wage labor are all unmistakably capitalist. The system was already centuries old by 1776, the year Adam Smith described its logic in the Wealth of Nations and the Continental Congress passed the Declaration of Independence. (For a primer on these matters, see Ronald Chilcote’s 1984 Theories Of Development And Underdevelopment. Although fewer than 180 pages, it manages to present a comprehensive review of the capitalist history and the various theories developed to understand it.)

Legal historians have similarly emphasized capitalism’s deep medieval roots. In his 1977 Law and the Rise of Capitalism, Michael Tigar argues that the legal architecture of capitalism—the commodification of labor obligations, contract doctrine, merchant law, and private property norms—developed from the early Middle Ages onward, a period of eight centuries. As feudal society matured, the growing prominence of towns, trade guilds, merchant capital, and money rents created institutional and juridical conditions conducive to capital accumulation. By the fifteenth century, capitalism was not merely an emergent possibility but an increasingly visible reality woven into European social and economic life.

Marxist historiography reinforces this view. Karl Marx found capitalism developing in the womb of feudal society, emerging through long-term shifts in property relations, labor control, and market dependence. Far from appearing suddenly in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, capitalism unfolded immanently from contradictions within feudalism itself. The steady commutation of feudal labor dues into money rents, rise of agrarian capitalism in England, expansion of commodity markets—all signaled the internal maturation of capitalist relations long before industrialization. Thus, for Marx and the generations of scholars who followed him, capitalism is a process, not an event or a structure—and the process in all its foundational elements was in place well before America’s founding. Indeed, it was a central cause of America’s founding.

Before continuing, I want to head off at the pass resort to the social constructionist dodge, in which things come into existence because power names them. It is true that, before the mid-nineteenth century, people described the system with different terms. However, even before the modern name for the system came about, those who described the system recognized it for what it was.

Enlightenment writers speak of the “commercial society,” emphasizing markets, trade, and profit-seeking. Smith famously describes Britain in these terms. Others refer to the “mercantile system,” highlighting the state-directed, trade-oriented economic order of the transatlantic world. In political debates, in Britain and the early United States, observers write about the “moneyed interest” or the “monetary system,” calling attention to the power of financiers. Early nineteenth-century commentators describe a “system of wage labor” or “free labor,” capturing the dependence of the system on labor markets. Although historians now use the term “agrarian capitalism,” we read in the texts of past historians about “enclosures,” “improvement,” “money rents,” and “tenant farming”—all features of rural capitalist transformation. In short, before the label capitalism existed, the same underlying system was identified through the language of commerce, industry, money, trade, and wage labor. 

As I have explained in previous essays, cultural and ideological transformations played an important role. Max Weber’s famous analysis of the Protestant Reformation—beginning in 1517—illustrates how religious innovation helped rationalize economic behavior and weaken medieval constraints on accumulation. While Weber’s thesis does not claim that the Reformation created capitalism (he is often misunderstood in this respect), it shows how Calvinist ethics intensified tendencies already underway, giving moral and psychological sanction—the “spirit of capitalism”—to the disciplined, rationalized pursuit of economic gain. In this respect, the Reformation acted as an accelerator of capitalist development rather than its point of origin. Sharp readers will note that, to theorize that Calvinism acted in such a way, one must presume the system already existed. Indeed, in many ways (and Marx would insist this was the case), the emerging capitalist system created the conditions that prefigured the Protestant Reformation.

The Founders of the United States understood that they operated within a capitalist system, and the nation’s founding documents reflect this awareness. The Constitution embeds core principles of capitalist political economy: strong protections for commercial relations, enforceable contracts, private property, and mechanisms to secure credit, money, and interstate markets. The Contract Clause, the Takings Clause, and the Commerce Clause all function as legal infrastructure for a society organized around private ownership and capital accumulation. The Constitution was a conscious and deliberate effort to legitimize and stabilize market relations. By establishing a national framework that ensured rational legal rules for investment, facilitated commercial expansion, and protected property rights, the Founders created a constitutional order designed not to facilitate the future rise of capitalism—or some other system Ocasio-Cortez imagines capitalism corrupted—but to perpetuate and strengthen a capitalist system they already took for granted.

I agree with critics of the congresswoman that she is not up to the task of representing her constituents (I will avoid commenting here about why they would continually re-elect her). Still, we cannot excuse Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance of the history of capitalism. She and her supporters tout her 2011 bachelor’s degree from Boston University, where she double majored in Economics and International Relations. Her bona fides are referenced to claim that her credentials make her specially qualified to speak on such matters. Yet she doesn’t know that the scholarly traditions she would have encountered in her coursework converge on a clear conclusion: by the time the United States was founded, capitalism was not only present but entrenched in the Atlantic world.

We cannot blame this on her instructors. She would have learned in lectures that colonial commodity production, merchant finance, the plantation complex, the transatlantic slave trade, land speculation, and the increasingly global division of labor were all expressions of a capitalist world-system already in full operation. To describe early America as something other than capitalist is incompatible with the conceptual frameworks of classical and neoclassical economics, world-systems theory (which the congresswoman would have learned about in international relations), Marxist and neo-Marxist theory (one should expect a socialist to know at least that), and standard histories of law and property. I will give the teachers at Boston College the benefit of the doubt; they would have taught students that the United States’ founding institutions, commercial practices, and social relations were already embedded in a centuries-old capitalist order.

Yet, this is not a simple matter of not paying attention in class or natural variation in the range of native intelligence. There’s an ideological and political problem for Ocasio-Cortez and her Democratic colleagues in admitting that the American Republic was founded to guarantee capitalist relations for its citizens. Democratic socialism is difficult to reconcile with a legal system designed with such assurances. The institutional architecture of the United States was built to safeguard private property and support market exchange, and thus limit the state’s ability to interfere extensively in economic life. While democratic socialism seeks to expand public ownership, socialize key sectors, and subordinate market outcomes to collective decision-making, the American framework assumes the primacy of private capital and uses constitutional constraints to preserve it. For any democratic socialist policies to work, they must operate within—rather than replace—a constitutional order fundamentally designed to reproduce the capitalist mode of production. I no longer believe that it possibly beyond a very limited extent.

Being a charitable person, I checked to see whether Ocasio-Cortez ever corrected her comment. I could find no evidence that she ever did. This is troubling enough (she is quite incurious). More troubling is the possibility that she suspects she is wrong but doesn’t care to know whether she is because the fiction that capitalism represents a corruption of the American Republic rather than its foundation is ideologically useful. By remaining ignorant, the congresswoman can advocate for democratic socialism while at the same time feigning support for the Constitution and the Republic’s founding ideals that her politics contradict. To be sure, she doesn’t believe in the American System; she is, after all, a progressive, a functionary of corporate statism, which is an expression of late capitalism brought about by the hegemony of transnational corporate power, which is as much a danger to capitalism as the socialist policies Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk pretend to understand. We must therefore conclude that her alliance with corporate state power is about replacing democratic republicanism with an administrative apparatus she presumes will see in her a useful bureaucrat. It already has, hasn’t it?

“The world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state. It is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty. The world works best when nations prioritize their interests. The United States will put our own interests first and, in our relations with other nations, encourage them to prioritize their own interests as well. We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the sovereignty-sapping incursions of the most intrusive transnational organizations, and for reforming those institutions so that they assist rather than hinder individual sovereignty and further American interests.” –National Security Strategy of the United States of America, November 2025

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) articulates a fundamental shift away from the post–Cold War bipartisan consensus that assumed increasing economic interdependence and the diffusion of political authority beyond nation-states—in a word, globalization—would generate peace and prosperity. The Trump strategy rejects those premises. Instead, it grounds US national security in four core commitments: (1) protecting the American homeland; (2) promoting American prosperity; (3) projecting peace through strength; (4) advancing US influence in a world of sovereign nations.

Where previous administrations—Democrat and Republican—have treated globalization and transnational governance as inevitable, the Trump NSS exposes this rhetoric of “inevitability” as a choice that carries costs. It argues that globalist frameworks have empowered non-accountable actors (corporations, ideological networks, and international institutions) at the expense of citizens, workers, and national sovereignty. Rather than viewing geopolitical competition as outdated, the NSS asserts that great-power rivalry has returned, and that the United States must defend its cultural and economic vitality against those powers (China, Russia) and diffuse transnational systems that undermine democratic self-determination.

Readers need to be able to deconstruct the rhetoric of inevitability coming from corporate state propagandists. Framing globalization and transnational governance as “inevitable” performs a specific kind of ideological work: it recasts contested political projects as objective historical destiny. By transforming deliberate strategies into impersonal processes, such rhetoric depoliticizes choices that would otherwise demand public justification, while recoding dissent as resistance to reality rather than disagreement over ambitions and aims. It obscures elite machinations by portraying the people as backwards and naïve. Inevitability language thus functions as a legitimating device, shielding ambitious institutional agendas from democratic contestation by presenting them as the unavoidable tide of history rather than as risks knowingly assumed. It is a profoundly anti-democratic rhetoric.

Embedded within Trump’s broader argument is a pointed assessment of Europe’s situation—an analysis that is predictably receiving widespread criticism in the corporate state media but that represents one of the most philosophically coherent portions of the memo. If readers don’t have time to read the entire memo, they will profit from reading section “C. Promoting European Greatness,” which begins on page 25 of the memorandum. We are early down the path Europe has been on for quite a while. I want to focus on that section next. I conclude this essay with a note about the political character of nationalism. 

The NSS portrays Europe as confronting a convergence of pressures: (1) demographic decline combined with unmanaged migration flows; (2) cultural and civilizational uncertainty, where traditional identities are increasingly viewed as illegitimate; (3) transnational governance structures (e.g., EU bureaucracy) that insulate major decisions from the democratic will of individual national electorates; (4) economic stagnation outside of small competitive zones, producing frustration among working classes; (5) political fragmentation, with populist parties rising in response to elite indifference.

The memo describes these factors as contributing to what it terms “civilization erasure”—the weakening of Europe’s inherited civilizational foundations: accountable democratic institutions, cultural continuity, national self-determination, rule of law, and stable borders. The NSS argues that the strength of the West historically comes not from supranational structures, but from sovereign nation-states cooperating freely. Europe’s classical nations—Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland—are the engines of advanced political systems, economic and technological innovation, and humanism and science. When those nations lose sovereignty, Europe loses its vigor—and, I will add, elites and barbarians alike become emboldened. Thus, the report frames the European Union’s push toward deeper integration as strategically risky: it consolidates authority in distant institutions while weakening the democratic legitimacy of national governments. This creates a vacuum in which public discontent grows, fueling social fragmentation.

The NSS explicitly asserts that cultural integrity is a component of national strength. When a society loses its confidence—when its historical narratives are delegitimized or portrayed as inherently oppressive—it becomes less coherent and less capable of defending its interests. Europe, in this framing, is experiencing a loss of faith in its civilizational inheritance, a diminished capacity to regulate migration according to national priorities, a cosmopolitan and elite culture suspicious of national identity itself, and an erosion of social trust necessary for political stability. By calling this “civilization erasure,” the memo is arguing that Europe risks dissolving the very preconditions of democratic sovereignty. As I have long argued, the preservation of Western institutions and the rule of law requires a common culture rooted in Enlightenment principles, values that emerge from European Christian civilization. 

The NSS argues that a strong, self-confident Europe is essential for US security. A fragmented or demoralized Europe becomes a weak partner. The document thus encourages reaffirmation of national sovereignty, respect for distinct European cultures and histories, a shift toward secure borders and democratic accountability, and partnerships with governments willing to defend these principles. This section of the memo is a call for renewal, urging Europe to reclaim the civilizational confidence that once made it a central pillar of the West. I could not agree more with the Trump Administration’s assessment here, and those who regularly read my work know that I have made this argument on this platform for years. Indeed, this is the theme of Freedom and Reason: A Path Through Late Capitalism. Nationalism is the path. Otherwise, globalism will replace capitalism with a transnational corporate state order, which will not carry over the Enlightenment freedoms—conscience, expression, and individualism. This is what I have identified as the New Fascism.

Whenever I tell a leftist that I am a nationalist, they assume that I am a right-winger. This is why I frequently remind readers of a crucial point: nationalism has been mislabeled as exclusively right-wing for propaganda purposes; historically, nationalism has been left-wing, including anti-colonial sovereignty movements, socialist nationalism (not nationalist socialism, i.e., fascism, which is a form of corporate statism with globalist ambitions), and working-class movements that fought for sovereignty against empires and oligarchies.

A left-leaning defense of nationalism can be articulated in several key ways. Progressives often champion democratic participation and fair economic systems, typically couching their rhetoric in “worker rights.” But these desires are impossible to secure when decision-making migrates upward into opaque transnational bodies that lack direct democratic accountability. That progressives support administrative-technocratic rule and transnational governance structures betrays their leftwing rhetoric. When multinational/transnational corporations can relocate production globally, open borders to mass migration, bypass environmental and labor rules, and pressure governments through capital mobility, workers lose leverage. When corporate power can command the rules of speech, democracy fades. National sovereignty—including borders, democratic control of economic rules, policymaking, and industrial policy—is essential for protecting working-class interests.

A key insight shared by both populist left and populist right is that globalization has redistributed power upward, not outward. Corporations have benefited from offshoring production and open borders, which have allowed them to take advantage of cheap foreign labor and drive down the wages of workers in the West. Financial institutions have benefited from deregulated capital flows, amassing vast concentrations of wealth in ever fewer hands. Managerial elites have benefited from cosmopolitan mobility. Working people in all nations—American, British, French, German, Italian, Swedish—bear the costs. The NSS’s critique aligns with this understanding: transnationalism has facilitated elite integration while undermining local democratic communities.

So, on the occasion of Trump’s NSS memo, I return to the argument I have been making for years: the traditional left/right divide is no longer the primary axis of politics. The new divide is, on one side, populism-nationalism, emphasizing borders, cultural continuity or integrity, democratic control, and economic fairness for citizens; the other side, progressivism-globalism, which emphasizes borderless labor markets, transnational governance, and the moral obsolescence of nation-states, portends the demise of democracy and human freedom. Understanding the real bifurcation points is how one explains the rise of populist and nationalist movements across Europe and the United States. These movements include both left-wing (in the liberal sense) and right-wing (conservative/traditionalists) variants, but they share a common concern: the disempowerment of ordinary citizens by global systems they did not vote for and cannot influence. The struggle is not between capitalists and the working class but between corporate elites and the masses.

We need to return to and reinvigorate populist nationalism as a bulwark against the New Fascism. A healthy nationalism—civic, democratic, pluralistic—anchors political legitimacy in the people, limits the power of corporate and transnational bureaucracies, fosters solidarity and mutual obligation, protects local cultures and traditions, and ensures borders reflect the interests of citizens, not economic elites. This is the form of nationalism compatible with left-wing commitments to democratic participation, labor, and the general welfare. One may wonder why self-described leftists (socialists, etc.) are not populists, but the fact that they oppose populism tells that they are not really on the left, but instead on the side of corporate state power. How that happened is a topic I have addressed in several essays on this platform. But the fact that it happened is incontrovertible.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy memo should therefore be seen not as a backward-looking or xenophobic document, but as a coherent defense of sovereign democratic nations in an era of transnational dominance. Its analysis of Europe—particularly the argument concerning cultural confidence and the concept of civilization erasure—reflects growing popular concerns across the Western world. The grand strategic debate of the twenty-first century is no longer left versus right. It’s populism versus progressivism, democratic nationalism versus globalist managerialism. Europe and the United States are witnessing parallel movements because ordinary citizens sense that the social contract has been renegotiated without their consent.

A left-leaning, pro-worker, civic nationalism provides a compelling counter-vision: one rooted in the belief that nations remain the only institutions strong enough to defend democratic participation, protect workers, regulate markets, and preserve cultural continuity against the homogenizing forces of global capital. In that sense, the NSS’s argument about Europe is not merely an assessment of foreign policy—it is part of a larger global realignment, one in which cultural integrity, democratic republicanism, and national sovereignty are the fronts in a struggle to save Western civilization.

In monotheism, the devil possesses only the power that God permits. Analogously, words—criticism, insults, and labels—possess only the power we grant them. (See Sacred Words—Presumed and Actual Power.)

This raises a fundamental question: who, then, acts as the god in the governance of language? Will it be the people themselves—the authors of history—or an authority that assumes the role of commissar, disciplining and punishing individuals for their words? And who, precisely, would that commissar be? Is there anyone you would trust with such power? Put more plainly: who do you wish to be your master—yourself, or someone else?

When we internalize negative words, they may wound us; when we acknowledge them without allowing them to define us, they lose their force. The power of language is not intrinsic but relational—it arises from the interaction between speaker and listener. If we wish to nullify hurtful words, we need only refuse to grant them authority over us. A mature person has developed the capacity for tolerance. In a free and open society, this choice belongs to the individual. In a totalitarian society, it is made by someone else.

With power behind them, those with authoritarian ambitions teach people to fear words by making them psychologically fragile—by persuading them that they are incapable of deciding for themselves how language should affect them. Children are no longer taught “sticks and stones may break bones…”; instead, they are taught to experience speech itself as a form of violence—but only the words that those who are teaching them identify as such. To a significant degree, those in charge of children are government agents. Teachers, for example. Many teachers, working from curricula and pedagogical practices designed to this end, make children fragile.

This has been true for a long time. More recently, the public has learned that physical violence is a just means of suppressing speech that offends certain people. We see this, for example, in the case of a white woman who calls a black man a derogatory name at a traffic dispute. The black man renders her unconscious with a fist—a homicidal act praised by progressives on social media. Those who glorify the man’s actions say she deserves the violence he visits on her. We see the same thing with transactivists, who target with harassment, intimidation, and violence those who refuse to affirm their delusions (namely, lesbians and proponents of women’s rights). When they aren’t using violence, the transactivists are demanding institutions punish those who refuse to misgender them.

The selection of words to be restricted, or those that justify violence, is determined by particular groups. The rules are windows to power.

I’ve been called an Islamophobe, a racist, and a transphobe. Yet I choose not to be affected by those words (although I am harmed by those who attempt to discipline or punish me for my opinions). But even if I were offended by these words, nobody would think that those who smear me with them are justifiably disciplined, punished, or subject to violence. Such selectivity tells us who controls the narrative. They are not those who believe words are just that: words. They are those who treat some words as worthy of punishment, even violence.

When an authority laces words with coercive power, the result is not freedom and openness but an illiberal, authoritarian condition that suppresses both. The policing of speech, therefore, exposes a problem that liberals—those committed to a free, open, and tolerant society—must confront. If they don’t, they will find themselves living under conditions of unfreedom.

Years ago, I said that our defense of free speech must become obnoxious. A colleague who understood me pinned it to her office door. I stand by what I said. Be obnoxious. Disobey the thought police. Don’t stand for government and public institutions telling you what to say; they don’t believe in liberty. They are the enemies of freedom. We must be in command of words if we are to freely express our conscience, which is our right. Without that, we are not individuals.

But no one has the right to freedom from offense. It’s an individual’s choice to be offended. No one should expect that the government will police words that some individuals find offensive. Their stunted capacity to tolerate the expressions and opinions of others, whatever the cause of their immaturity, is neither the fault nor the responsibility of those who use words. Offense-taking is on the offense-taker.

Admiral Frank Bradley met with Congress behind closed doors concerning the double-tap strike of the drug boat, a semi-submersible, to explain his reasoning behind the operation. Democrats and Republicans emerged from the meeting with different opinions about the legitimacy of the admiral’s actions. Only one side’s opinion is correct—and it’s not the Democrats.

As you probably know, on September 2, a DoD helicopter crew fired two Hellfire missiles at a fleeing narco-vessel in the Caribbean Sea. The first missile disabled the vessel’s propulsion; the second, fired minutes later, ensured it sank along with its multi-ton cargo of cocaine and the two traffickers who remained aboard attempting to right the ship, potentially allowing the operation to continue. The point of the DoD operations is to prevent either the delivery or recovery of the boat’s cargo. This necessarily involves killing agents attempting to deliver or protect illicit cargo.

One may believe that extrajudicial killing is immoral, but beneath the partisan noise around the question lies a straightforward legal reality: as I explained in an essay published on my platform yesterday (The Legality of Extrajudicial Killing and the Convenient Forgetting of History), such actions are lawful under long-standing US statutes and case law. Read the essay for the deep legal basis for conducting such operations and to learn about how the Obama administration used this same authority in a far more aggressive manner than the Trump administration. In today’s essays, in light of yesterday’s meeting, I want to review the two primary domestic legal authorities upon which such actions rest: (1) the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (46 USC. §§ 70501 et seq.) or MDLEA; (2) Use of Force (RUF) and the joint Standing Rules of Engagement (SRE) (10 USC § 284).

First, the MDLEA asserts US jurisdiction over drug trafficking on the high seas, even by foreign nationals aboard foreign or stateless vessels. Courts have repeatedly upheld this assertion when the ship is stateless or when the flag state consents (explicitly or tacitly). Second, the RUF and SRE for these missions explicitly authorize deadly force—up to and including the complete destruction of the vessel—when lesser means fail to stop it. The double-tap was a straightforward instance of mission completion.

These semi-submersibles are designed to remain afloat even when disabled. As long as the hull remains afloat, the cargo can be recovered by follow-on boats. Video evidence shows the vessel still moving under residual momentum and two crew members actively working on deck after the first strike. From the lawful perspective of the helicopter crew, the objective—preventing the cocaine from reaching its destination or being recovered—had not yet been achieved. The second missile finished the job the first strike started.

Critics who decry the action as extrajudicial killing are importing a framework that doesn’t apply. This was a law-enforcement interdiction on the high seas against a stateless criminal enterprise. No sovereign state has ever successfully challenged these operations in an international forum, and dozens of Latin American and European nations have signed bilateral agreements facilitating them.

Those who condemn the strike while ignoring precedent should recall that materially identical operations occurred under every administration from Reagan to Biden. As I noted in the previous essay, buttressed by law passed in the aftermath of 9/11, the Obama administration conducted hundreds of drone strikes—some killing American citizens and many more killing uninvolved civilians—in countries with which the United States was not at war, under legal theories far more expansive than those used in the Trump case. I criticized the Obama Administration for some of these actions; the question of their lawfulness was never challenged by Democrats. They’re only objecting here because Trump is the President. It is purely partisan noise—meant to reinforce the video of Seditious Six (see below).

We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community.

The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution.

Don’t give up the ship. pic.twitter.com/N8lW0EpQ7r

— Sen. Elissa Slotkin (@SenatorSlotkin) November 18, 2025

Ultimately, the legality of such strikes is not a function of who occupies the White House but of who controls the statutes and the courts. Congress may amend the MDLEA or restrict DoD counter-drug support tomorrow if it wishes. They have chosen not to do so for more than four decades because the American political consensus has supported the disruption of the cocaine supply chain, even when disruption requires lethal force at sea. They would also opt to repeal enabling legislation passed in the wake of 9/11. Until that consensus changes and is codified, any order to sink a fleeing drug boat, including with a second missile when the first proves insufficient, is a lawful order by definition.

Again, I want to emphasize that one may still find the practice morally troubling. Reasonable people can debate whether the problem of narcoterrorism justifies such actions. But these debates are about what the law ought to be, not what it currently is. As it stands, the helicopter crew that fired the second Hellfire acted well within US domestic law, international treaty obligations, and decades of unbroken precedent. The footage is dramatic. But the law is settled until Congress unsettles it. The rest is partisan politics—and a continuation of the coup the Establishment put into action even before Trump entered the White House for the first time. Don’t let the signal be drowned in noise. Make the moral argument—which would, on principle, require criticizing the law itself—but don’t use this case to undermine the legitimacy of the federal republic.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, especially around 2010–2011, academic concepts such as “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and related terms migrated into popular discourse. This shift was driven largely by progressive activists influenced by critical race theory and sympathetic media. These concepts are often invoked to explain average group differences—most notably income disparities—between black and white Americans. The claim is that such differences are primarily, if not entirely, the result of racial privilege enjoyed by whites and racial oppression experienced by blacks. This framework, however, rests on two fundamental errors: (1) conflating cause and effect; (2) the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Advocates of the “white privilege” explanation often point to statistical differences as evidence of racism, treating the observed disparity itself as proof of its cause. But this reverses the proper direction of rational analysis. If racism is proposed as the independent variable, one must clearly define what racism means in this context and how it causally produces specific economic outcomes. Simply labeling the disparity as racism sidesteps the actual causal investigation. In this model, the conclusion is smuggled into the premise. It’s sophistry.

A second error lies in treating demographic averages as if they directly describe every individual within a group. This assumes that each white person is a concrete instance of the abstract statistical average for whites, and likewise for blacks. In reality, both groups contain enormous internal variation: homeless whites living under bridges, wealthy and professionally successful whites; the same range among black Americans. Treating individuals as embodiments of group averages obscures more than it reveals.

A more grounded analysis begins by acknowledging that white Americans, on average, do earn more—but then asks why. These explanations look beyond racial identity and toward a broader set of variables associated with life outcomes: Are whites more likely to graduate from high school? Are they more likely to have some college or a completed college degree? Are they more likely to grow up in stable, intact families? Are they more likely to live in safer neighborhoods? Are they more likely to obtain jobs with higher wages? Are they more likely to save and accumulate wealth?

Not every white person enjoys these advantages, nor does every black person lack them. But if these factors correlate with income, then average differences between groups can emerge even without invoking racial privilege as the driving causal mechanism. These variables describe patterns of behavior, social structures, and personal or community-level achievements—not racialized systems of privilege.

The progressive explanation based on white privilege and white supremacy does not grapple with these underlying variables. Instead, it reframes the discussion into a moral narrative of “oppressors” and “victims”. This moral binary, borrowed conceptually from the French revolutionary categories of “perpetrators” and “victims,” stands in for genuine analysis (“Franz Fanon says…”). Consequently, it prevents a clear understanding of the factors actually constraining average black outcomes.

Among these relevant factors are: Higher crime rates in many black neighborhoods, lower high school and college graduation rates, lower workforce participation, lower prevalence of stable, intact families, lower likelihood of obtaining higher-wage jobs, etc. None of these observations is offered to “blame the victim”—for that would assume that blacks, as a collective, are victims, which is precisely the assumption this argument rejects. The concern is that by attributing all disparities to white wrongdoing, progressive rhetoric prevents society from addressing the real obstacles to black advancement. Critical race theory in practice tice undermines the life chances of black Americans.

Woke progressive rhetoric sabotages them; if the goal is to improve average outcomes for Black Americans, then solutions should target the factors that truly drive opportunity. These include: strengthening public safety so that communities can thrive; increasing mentorship and support in schools; reinforcing norms of achievement, discipline, and work ethic; pursuing public policies that expand employment opportunities

Economic policy also plays a big role in this. For example, the post-1965 surge in mass immigration introduced large numbers of low-wage workers into the labor market. This had real displacement effects on black workers, particularly those without advanced education, while also suppressing wages across several sectors. These are material realities, not ideological constructs.

Reducing complex socioeconomic differences to a narrative of white privilege not only rests on flawed reasoning; it actively diverts attention from the cultural, economic, educational, and structural factors that more plausibly explain group outcomes. Addressing these real causes—rather than blaming whites as an abstract categorical group—offers a path toward genuine improvement in the lives of black Americans and a clearer, more honest national conversation.

Trump administration officials are today justifying the follow-up strike on a drug-running vessel on September 2 that killed surviving crew members by asserting that the mission’s purpose was to ensure the vessel’s complete destruction—an action the Pentagon had internally authorized as legally permissible. It was not to kill survivors. The first strike had not completely disabled the vessel, so a second strike was necessary.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing on Monday that Admiral Frank Bradley ordered the second strike specifically to sink the boat. I missed that press conference. “Admiral Bradley acted fully within his authority and the law by directing the engagement to ensure the vessel was destroyed and the threat to the United States was eliminated,” Leavitt said. War Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed that account for the first time at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, saying the second strike “sank the boat and eliminated the threat.”

By framing the strikes as targeting the vessels themselves—language that mirrors a classified Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo authorizing the attacks—officials place the operation that led to the double-tap of the drug boat on its strongest possible legal footing amid mounting questions about the incident. According to three lawyers with direct knowledge of the matter, the Guardian is reporting today, the memo concludes that the United States may lawfully use lethal force against unflagged vessels transporting cocaine because drug cartels use the proceeds to finance violence.

The memo argues that cartels are engaged in a so-called “armed conflict” with regional allies and that, under the doctrine of collective self-defense, the US is permitted to destroy the cocaine shipments to cut off the cartels’ funding for weapons and operations. The memo asserts that the likelihood of deaths among those on board does not, by itself, render the vessels illegitimate military targets. The legal analysis is buttressed by intelligence findings contained in a classified “statement of facts” annex to the OLC opinion, as well as a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) dated July 25 authorizing the use of military force against drug cartels. Although the documents are classified (to avoid alerting the enemy to intelligence sources, operations, and tactics), sources say they include detailed information, e.g., estimates that each drug-running boat carries roughly $50 million worth of cocaine. One can see by the images and video the Pentagon has released that these are drug-running vessels.

https://t.co/tid2Cal7s8

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) December 3, 2025

Yesterday’s Pentagon press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, addressed this issue (see above). Wilson also pointed out that the Washington Post article condemning the action was based on anonymous sources and that the Pentagon had corrected the article before it was published by the Post. The Post ran with the story anyway. The Post’s claims were, surprisingly, debunked by the New York Times.

There really isn’t anything here. But that doesn’t mean that the story is no longer interesting. On what grounds is the White House basing its legal authority to conduct these operations? This is where it gets interesting. Readers may recall that the Obama administration carried out a wide range of lethal operations that rested on the same legal foundations now invoked by Trump to justify maritime strikes on drug-running vessels. Obama authorized hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, countries with which the United States was not formally at war, on the theory that the 2001 AUMF extended to “associated forces” of terrorist groups and that the president possessed inherent Article II authority to neutralize imminent threats abroad.

What’s the AUMF? The AUMF, or Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, is a law passed by Congress just three days after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the nation. It has been the primary legal foundation for many US military actions ever since. You may believe that extrajudicial action is wrong, and you have a right to that opinion, but one’s moral viewpoint does not make a law illegal. If Democrats don’t like the law, they should try to change it. However, the AUMF was passed with overwhelming support from both parties. In the Senate: 98 yeas, 0 nays, 2 not voting. In the House: 420 yeas, 1 nay, 10 not voting. (The lone “nay” was from Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California.) That means that Democrats are responsible for the law that Obama used to carry out extrajudicial killings.

Actions by the Obama administration involved extrajudicial killings not only to kill noncitizens, but also US citizens, and did so routinely without judicial oversight or host-nation consent. Moreover, the Obama administration expanded maritime interdiction under Operation Martillo, in which US forces boarded, disabled, and, yes, even used lethal force against stateless vessels engaged in narcotics trafficking. The reality is that Obama pushed the AUMF much farther than Trump has—much farther. Where was the hysteria then? I said something about it back in the day, especially concerning the extrajudicial execution of US citizens (including a teenager), but I heard nothing from Democrats. They adored Obama (still do). And they loved his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton (still do), who was all in on extrajudicial killings. Many of them fell prostrate on the pavement when she lost the presidential campaign to Trump. (TDS can be traced to this moment.)

The hysteria we’re seeing on the left today ostensibly moves from the claim that attacks on drug-trafficking boats linked to Venezuela constitute illegal extrajudicial killings. Yet Trump’s actions are based on the same conceptual framework underpinning Obama-era counterterrorism and counternarcotics operations: collective self-defense, broad AUMF interpretations, and the “unwilling or unable” doctrine to justify force against non-state actors operating from hostile or ineffective states. Therefore, Trump’s actions are not illegal. So why are Democrats calling on Hegseth to resign? Why are the Seditious Six using these incidents to justify their video encouraging military personnel to disobey Trump’s orders? Their party joined Republicans in passing the AUMF. They supported Obama throughout his presidency. They did not repeal the law under Biden. The hysteria is not because Democrats are principled, but because all this is part of a color revolution aiming to derail the will of the people.

The difference in perception lies not in the underlying legal theories but in political alignment and public framing. It is purely partisan. Obama’s actions were cast as legitimate acts of counterterrorism, whereas the Trump administration’s maritime actions have been portrayed as aggressive counternarcotics strikes with geopolitical implications without legal foundation. Complete propaganda. Some even go so far as to absurdly call his actions “war crimes,” saying that when Democrats get back in power, they will hold Trump and administration officials accountable. I have no doubt they will try (they impeached the man twice for nothing and pursued lawfare against him and his associates under Biden). Yet, both administrations relied on expansive executive authority of the identical sort (only Obama pushed it further) to use lethal force outside traditional battlefields against networks viewed as national security threats.

Not that I think the facts will have any effect on TDS sufferers, but at least the rational among us have the facts on our side. This is why it is so important to ensure Democrats don’t return to power in 2027. The project of managed decline of the American Republic is bad enough with Democrats out of power. If they regain power, they will accelerate the project. They explicitly tell us that this is the plan. Electing Trump did not erase the globalist threat to the American Republic. Democrats and the Establishment still possess the power to dismantle the nation. The rot is inside the system. Republicans need to focus like a laser beam on this. They need to articulate a compelling narrative to counter the forces arrayed against the people.

The economy is struggling thanks to years of globalist policies. I understand that many Americans are suffering higher prices and all the rest of it. This is why Democrats are resurrecting James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” slogan. To the extent that this is true, however, the economic situation is due to Democratic and RINO financial and monetary policies. But even more than the economy, something greater is at stake: the future of democratic republicanism. Americans faced economic hardship in the past, but when the future of the country is under threat, they historically pull together and defend America from those who seek to harm it, foreign or domestic. To be sure, nationalism and patriotism are at a low ebb due to decades of indoctrinating our youth with anti-American sentiment. Yet there are adults in this country who can come off the sidelines and stand in the breach.

The Trey Reed case came up in one of my classes. I was not familiar with all the details of the case, although I am the one who brought it up in response to a claim that lynching is still a problem. My point was not to interrogate the case but to note that authorities ruled the case a suicide and that, moreover, even if it were a racially-motivated killing (for which there is no evidence to my knowledge), it would not be a lynching for conceptual reasons. My point was to inject skepicism in the conversation. In this essay, I will explain my reasoning and provide details of the case after taking a closer look at the facts.

I begin with a disclaimer and a couple of statistical observations. This case is still ongoing, and evidence currently not publicly available may be forthcoming that indicates a racially-motivated killing. It would take additional evidence to conclude that it was a lynching. It should be noted that, although suicide among blacks is rarer than among whites, according to the CDC, for 2022 (the most recent year with a detailed demographic breakdown), of the 49,476 total suicides, 3,826 were blacks. Moreover, according to the FBI, for that year, there were 13,446 black homicide victims. Approximately 89 percent of those murders were perpetrated by blacks. Although most of those murders were perpetrated with guns, many other methods were also used to carry out homicide. Strangulation is not an uncommon method of murderers.

Demartravion “Trey” Reed was a 21-year-old Black student at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. On September 12, 2025, Reed was found hanging from a tree on the university campus. The Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s Office, led by Randolph “Rudy” Seals Jr., conducted an autopsy and ruled the death a suicide by hanging. Delta State University Police Chief Michael Peeler reported that the findings of his department were consistent with the local coroner’s conclusions, which noted no broken bones, contusions, lacerations, or other signs of assault. Peeler said there was no evidence of foul play. These facts were widely reported across the media.

Reed’s family was not satisfied with the ruling and has called for an independent autopsy as well as greater transparency, including access to video evidence. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump is representing the family in their independent investigation, and Colin Kaepernick’s “Know Your Rights Camp” is reportedly funding the independent autopsy. Additionally, US Representative Bennie Thompson has called for an FBI investigation.

The case has drawn comparisons to the history of racial violence in the United States, particularly lynching, which shapes how many people are interpreting the circumstances surrounding Reed’s death. Whatever the facts of the case, there is a conceptual problem with the claim of racial lynching in this case in that the historical and scholarly understanding of the phenomenon in the United States (Ida B. Wells, Stewart Tolnay and EM Beck, and many contemporary historians) emphasize that lynching was not merely a form of homicide but a public, ritualized performance of racial domination. (For my writings on the topic, see “Explanation and Responsibility: Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide,” published in 2004 in The Journal of Black Studies; “Race and Lethal Forms of Social Control: A Preliminary Investigation into Execution and Self-Help in the United States, 1930-1964,” published in 2006 in Crime, Law, & Social Change. See also Agency and Motive in Lynching and Genocide and There was No Lynching in America on September 24, 2024, on this platform.)

Racial lynchings were carried out by groups of white perpetrators against black victims, before large and small crowds, who treated the violence as a communal spectacle, for which they were held immune from legal consequences. This public and performative quality distinguishes lynching from private acts of violence or clandestine hate crimes; lynching’s purpose extended beyond harming an individual to terrorizing an entire racial community and reinforcing a social hierarchy grounded in white supremacy. I have described the phenomenon in my work as a public spectacle used to reclaim boundaries serving the interests of white racial exclusion and hierarchy. My thinking was inspired by James M. Inverarity’s “Populism and Lynching in Louisiana, 1889–1896: A Test of Erikson’s Theory of the Relationship Between Boundary Crises and Repressive Justice,” published in a 1976 issue of American Sociological Review. Inverarity’s analysis relies on Kai Erickson’s Durkheimian framework (boundary maintenance, deviance, and repressive justice) to test whether boundary crises in white political order produced repressive collective violence in the form of lynching.

By framing lynching as a subset of racially motivated homicide, especially as an act of boundary maintenance, this definition captures the essential features of audience presence, collective participation, and symbolic intent. It reflects the scholarly consensus that a lynching is best understood as a social ritual—an assertion of racial control—rather than simply as a killing motivated by racial animus. (My position was later supported in work by Mattias Smångs. See “Doing Violence, Making Race: Southern Lynching and White Racial Group Formation,” published in American Journal of Sociology in March 2016.)

There is no evidence that Reed’s death was a homicide or perpetrated collectively with audience presence. The surveillance video from Delta State University that might indicate this has not been publicly released because the investigation into Reed’s death is still ongoing. With no eyewitness reports of a lynching, video evidence would be necessary to make such a determination. Withholding video evidence by authorities is not uncommon. Authorities often withhold such footage to avoid compromising eyewitness interviews, forensic analysis, or potential criminal proceedings. Privacy concerns also play a role, as campus cameras frequently capture students and staff unrelated to the incident. Moreover, maintaining strict control over the chain of evidence ensures that the footage remains admissible in court, and early public release could raise questions about authenticity or tampering, as well as biasing the jury pool. However, if the video evidence did show such a thing, it is highly unlikely—so unlikely as to be implausible—that the public would not already know about it.

Without evidence, conceptual distinctions aside, how did the belief that this was a lynching emerge and spread? Misinformation about Reed’s death after the release of the initial autopsy. An individual operating an account claiming to be Reed’s cousin alleged that he had sustained injuries—specifically broken bones—that would have made suicide physically impossible. As noted, the initial autopsy does not indicate this. Although the creator of the misinformation later deleted the videos, as well as the account itself (I can find no information on the identity of the person behind the account), they went viral. Moreover, on a podcast, Krystal Muhammad, chair of the New Black Panther Party, claimed in a conversation with rapper Willie D that Reed’s mother had spoken to her about the contents of the second autopsy report. (I hasten to note that the original Black Panther Party has denounced the New Black Panther Party, emphasizing that it has no connection to the original organization.)

Terry Wilson, founder of the Idaho chapter of Black Lives Matter Grassroots, injected fuel into the moral panic, telling The Chicago Crusader ( “Lynching by Suicide: The Rebranded Face of America’s Racial Violence”) that the response from black Americans is deeply rooted in shared historical memory. “This sophisticated machinery of racial terror is just a fascist strategy that relies on overwhelming force from multiple directions, including misinformation, intimidation, and threats,” Wilson said. “I think we’re witnessing a coordinated campaign of disappearances, lynchings, and state-sanctioned killings that target Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.” He added, “We need to address this method of ‘lynchings by suicide,’ which is their way of rationalizing, from a medical standpoint, their actions. I think this is sort of a death rattle for white supremacy, because they’re relying on nearly every structural institution to justify or cover up the actions of individuals.”

I trust the reader will recognize the hyperbole of these assertions. The apparent factual basis of the assertions was provided in part by a June 3, 225 Washington Post piece, “Lynchings in Mississippi Never Stopped,” penned by DeNeen L. Brown, a staff writer for the paper. Her claim that “[s]ince 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports,” is valorized by the reputation of the Post as an objective mainstream news outlet.

However, every instance of death Brown cites was ruled a suicide by officials. One either accepts these rulings or supposes a conspiracy in which Mississippi state officials are covering up homicides. One must furthermore imagine that there was a racial motivation behind these homicides. Finally, if all these things could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, one must alter the definition of lynching to classify these homicides as such. It should be kept in mind that around one-quarter of all suicides are the result of asphyxiation and that more than 90 percent of those involve hanging. That eight black men over 25 years chose hanging as a method of suicide is not an extraordinary fact.

According to The New York Times (“A Black Man’s Death in Mississippi Strikes the Nation’s Raw Nerves” ), Jy’Quon Wallace, the 20-year-old Delta State student who discovered Reed’s body, is sympathetic to Reed’s family but, in the absence of a second independent autopsy, is not inclined to automatically connect Mississippi’s historical racial context to the body he found. “A lot of people are trying to use this situation to make it seem like it’s racially motivated. There are a lot of signs pointing to this as not a racially motivated situation. When that whole story comes out, if it does come out, it may give some people clarity. It may not. That’s not up to us,” Wallace told the outlet.

In that story, The Times reports, “Mr. Reed’s death was twice ruled a suicide, and no evidence has emerged that would suggest otherwise.” However, even if Reed were the victim of homicide, it does not follow that the perpetrator(s) was/were white or that, if they were, racial animus motivated the murder. Evidence is needed to make these claims. Even if the second autopsy found that blunt force trauma to the back of the head was the cause of death, or at least part of the sequence of events that led to Reed being hung from a tree, thus indicating a murder, the substance of a common rumor, the more likely scenario is that somebody had a grievance against Reed and murdered him. Some would object with the quip that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Sure, but when speculating, one has to consider relative likelihoods.

And that is what lies at the crux of this problem. Motivated reasoning makes up for the gap between the evidence and what many would like to believe—or have the others believe: that the United States remains a profoundly white supremacist nation where whites target blacks for violence. As I have shown on this platform, the reality is that whites are far more likely to be victimized (murder, robbery) by a black perpetrator than the other way around. This does not mean that racially-motivated violence does not occur (indeed, I would argue that the disproportionality just noted indicates its presence in contemporary society), but rather that, in the absence of facts indicating racism, it is a leap of faith fueled by ideology to believe without compelling evidence that white supremacy explains the Trey Reed case.

Note: The discussion of viral media claims was adapted from reporting by Daniel Johnson writing for Black Enterprise.

I want to share a narrative I often present in a similar form to my students and conclude with an observation about how some people perceive my politics. 

Many of my students identify as progressives (typical of higher-education social science programs) and uniformly view incarceration as a right-wing idea. In fact, incarceration is a liberal invention. Liberals sought to replace torture and retributive approaches with a rational system of justice grounded in the principles of deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. 

I tell this story to help all students understand the moral and political character of modern criminal justice. Part of its value is in showing progressive students how ideology can distort history and principle; it also helps conservative students see that the institutions they support rest on liberal, not traditional conservative, foundations. My goal is to not only correct misperception but also deepen their political-philosophical understanding.

The emergence of modern criminal justice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was deeply rooted in the liberal tradition, which emphasized individual rights, legal constraints on state power, and rational governance—what Herbert Packer identifies as the “due process model” in his article “Two Models of the Criminal Process,” in a 1964 issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

Two of the most influential figures shaping this new penal philosophy were Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria. Their works clarified the aims and methods of punishment in the modern state and circulated widely in Britain, continental Europe, and the American colonies. The philosophers provided the intellectual foundation for the rise of penal confinement and the development of the penitentiary as a core institution of criminal justice. Far from being a right-wing creation, the penitentiary was a liberal reform.

Jeremy Bentham’s 1789 Principles of Morals and Legislation articulated a systematic utilitarian approach to legal and penal reform. Bentham emphasized deterrence and incapacitation as rational goals of punishment, seeking to minimize suffering while maximizing social utility. His architectural design for the Panopticon—a subject on which I devote an entire lecture—symbolized a broader shift toward a humane, systematized mode of punishment intended to replace the arbitrary and often brutal practices of earlier eras. 

For Bentham, criminal justice should be guided by general laws, proportionality, and a view of offenders as individuals whose behavior could be shaped through predictable incentives and disincentives. Moreover, he insisted that the judicial process focus on acts rather than actors: class, gender, race, and other statuses were irrelevant; actions were what mattered.

Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 On Crimes and Punishments similarly transformed the moral landscape of criminal law. Writing decades before Bentham, Beccaria offered a powerful Enlightenment critique of disproportionality, secrecy, and torture. He argued for clarity in the law, proportional penalties, and the rational administration of justice. (For this, his book was added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Church’s official list of forbidden books in 1766.)

Beccaria’s emphasis on legality, liberty, and predictable legal processes resonated deeply with American political leaders. The principles he articulated—visible in key provisions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—shaped American commitments to due process, bans on cruel and unusual punishment, and the rights of the accused. Beccaria helped shift the prevailing view toward deprivation of liberty (unfreedom for those who break the law), rather than capital and corporal punishments, as the primary penal instrument of the state.

Inspired by these ideas, reformers in the nascent United States moved rapidly toward creating institutions devoted to penal confinement. The first American penitentiaries emerged in the 1790s, grounded in the belief that offenders could be reformed through regulated labor, separation from corrupting influences, and structured discipline. By the end of the eighteenth century, the penitentiary had become a defining feature of the American penal order.

While Northern states adopted this model most rapidly, Southern states also had early advocates. In Virginia, for example, the establishment of a penitentiary was driven partly by the reformist impulses of Thomas Jefferson, whose broader political philosophy—deeply indebted to John Locke—aligned with liberal commitments to equality under the law, individual rights, and rationalized governance. The system across America was elaborated during the nineteenth century.

The intellectual foundations of these reforms rested squarely on the classical liberal tradition. Drawing from Beccaria, Bentham, Locke, Montesquieu, and other liberal thinkers, American constitutionalism and early criminal justice were built on the idea that political authority derives from the consent and rights of individuals and that punishment must be justified by general principles rather than arbitrary force. This framework informed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, each presupposing a political order grounded in individual liberty, limits on state coercion, and the rule of law.

Seen in this light, I explain to students, the rise of the penitentiary in the United States was not merely an administrative reform but an expression of deeper philosophical commitments. It is a window into the foundation of a free society. Confinement became the preferred mode of punishment precisely because it aligns with liberal principles: it operates through law rather than spectacle, proportionality rather than cruelty, and treats offenders as autonomous individuals capable of reform. 

Far from reflecting traditional conservatism, the penitentiary embodies a humane and optimistic vision of justice. The emergence of the penitentiary system stands as a central example of how Enlightenment liberalism reshaped the modern state and gave enduring institutional form to its moral and political ideals.

Of course, as implied above, some now argue that liberalism is not left-wing but right-wing—a view that ignores history. This revisionist approach would classify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as elements of right-wing governance. If one identifies as “on the left” and equates left-wing politics with progressivism, then liberalism indeed becomes “right-wing” by contrast. 

But in truth, progressivism—emerging as a post-liberal ideology supporting the rise of the corporate state after the Civil War, paralleling its social-democratic counterpart in Europe—is not left-wing in the classical sense. Progressivism elevates administrative and bureaucratic authority over the individual. It is an illiberal philosophy.

The point is that, if progressivism—rooted in corporatism and the ascent of a new administrative aristocracy—is labeled “left-wing,” then liberalism—understood as a commitment to individual liberty—becomes “right-wing,” simply because it stands in opposition to progressivism. This reframing reverses the ideological map as it was understood at the time of America’s founding and the French Revolution. Clever, to be sure.

Here’s the upshot: because I am a liberal, the swapping of political-philosophical sides makes me appear right-wing. Is it any mystery, then, why so many self-identified leftists accuse me of switching sides? What happened is that, beginning in earnest around 2018, as I explained in last Saturday’s essay, I shed ideas that contradicted my liberal principles. This meant rejecting the progressive elements in my thinking.  Through the distorted lens of the camera obscura, sharpening my thinking with the stone of principle has transformed me into a right-winger. So be it—but there it is. I am much happier as a result.

Trump’s New York “hush-money” case is a farce, a textbook show trial. The purpose of the case was not justice. It was so party parrots could clack around squawking “34 felonies! Rraaawk!, 34 felonies!” “Trump’s a felon! Rraaawk!” They’re still squawking.

In what is known in the business as a “zombie case,” prosecutors elevated misdemeanors beyond the statute of limitations to felony status by alleging that records were falsified to conceal another crime. How fake was this? Totally fake.

The fakery was present all along. The indictment did not specify exactly what the underlying crime was, pointing opaquely to “election-related” or “financial-related” violations, which, at the outset, denied Trump clear notice of the charge he supposedly intended to conceal. The first question any objective and rational person asks when they see this is how a criminal trial proceeds based on an indictment containing no underlying crime specified.

It gets even more absurd from there. The judge’s jury instructions required jurors to unanimously agree that Trump falsified business records, but did not require them to unanimously agree on which underlying crime Trump intended to commit or hide. In other words, jurors could rely on different theories of what the unspecified underlying felony was, just so long as they unanimously returned a felony conviction.

See the problem? I hope you do. I want to believe you do. All that mattered was that jurors said Trump was guilty of something, but they didn’t have to determine what he was guilty of, which prosecutors never told them, since they prosecuted Trump, wielding an indictment that never specified a crime.

This is why I often respond to the squawking of parrots with the question, “Have you ever read Franz Kafka’s The Trial?” In Kafka’s story, the precise charge against the accused, Josef K, is elusive, the logic of the accusation shifts (there is no logic, really), and K is expected to defend himself against something that is never clearly or fully articulated. K is trapped in a process where the form of legal procedure proceeds with great seriousness while the substance remains phantasmagoric. K is executed, never knowing what he was being executed for.

Adding to the insanity, after the verdict was delivered, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, imposed an unconditional discharge—no prison time, no fine—despite having allowed a conviction structure to stand that could not reasonably be expected to survive appellate review. Merchan could have set aside the verdict, but then he participated in a farce. He allows the show trial to go through the motions. And the point of the whole thing was to train party parrots to squawk a squawk. “34 felonies! Rraaawk!, 34 felonies!” “Trump’s a felon! Rraaawk!”

Even the way the parrots squawk the squawk is brainless. Trump wasn’t convicted of 34 felony counts. He was convicted of one felony offense (whatever it was). So even if one accepts that Trump was legitimately convicted of something, it would not be “34 felonies” but a “34-count felony.” The 34 counts? Every one of them was a misdemeanor that had expired.

There are certain things people say that disqualify them in my eyes from having anything to say worth listening to. This is one of them. Every time I hear somebody say that Trump is a felon, I know they haven’t a clue about the case or the law. Scarier is that they believe that show trials appropriate to the Soviet Union under Stalin should be run in America. They want Trump to be a felon because they loathe him, not because they have a shred of integrity or commitment to the rule of law.

There is a term for that: Trump derangement syndrome, or TDS. In Epstein, Russia, and Other Hoaxes—and the Pathology that Feeds Their Believability, I reference Manhattan-based psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, who has noted that TDS resembles a genuine psychological condition he has observed in his practice (see also What Explains Trump Derangement Syndrome? Ignorance of Background Assumptions in Worldview). A crazy case only seems sane to a crazy person.