President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he plans to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon, saying he is prepared to use “Full Force, if necessary” against Antifa and related tendencies as he broadens his strategy of sending federal forces to US cities. In a message posted on social media, Trump said he has instructed the Department of Defense to “provide all necessary troops to protect war-ravaged Portland.” The move is necessary, he contends, to safeguard US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, which are under siege from Antifa and other domestic terrorists. Trump is acting decisively to quell rebellion.
This development has set on fire the hair (figuratively speaking) of libertarians like Radley Balko. (Balko, a defender of the Redemptionist Posse Comitatus Act, has a long association with pro-corporate outlets like the open-borders thinktank Cato Institute and Reason magazine.) In a Facebook post, Balko writes, “Sure seems like the president just authorized the military to use lethal force against US citizens.” So? Where in the Constitution is this forbidden? Nowhere. Quite the contrary: the main reason the Constitution was written was to permit the federal government to deploy troops to suppress insurrection and rebellion in the various states. (See Concerning the Powers of the US Constitution—And Those Defying Them; Posse Comitatus and the Ghosts of Redemption.)
ICE agents charge towards protesters during a protest against the U.S. President Donald Trump administration’s immigration policies, outside an ICE detention facility in Portland
A little history is in order. The Philadelphia Convention of 1787 that produced the Constitution cannot be understood apart from the well-justified anxieties that swept the young republic in the wake of Shays’ Rebellion. In 1786 and 1787, farmers in Massachusetts organized armed resistance to courts and tax collectors. Although the state militia eventually suppressed the rebellion, the episode alarmed political leaders throughout the United States. The new nation needed not only to defend territory from foreign invasion, but from violent threats from within.
The uprising revealed a dangerous truth: under the Articles of Confederation, the national government lacked the executive authority, resources, and standing army to intervene if unrest spiraled beyond a single state’s control. The Annapolis Convention of 1786 failing to resolve the serious issues facing the new nation, delegates arrived in Philadelphia in 1787 determined to craft a stronger framework that could prevent domestic instability. Indeed, they scrapped the Articles of Confederation altogether and drafted an entirely new document, one that established the American Republic with a strong executive authority, the chief element missing from the Articles.
Debates at the Convention repeatedly returned to the theme of order and republican limits on democracy. Participants warned of the “excesses of democracy,” by which they meant the ease with which local majorities (or in the case of Antifa today, aggressive minorities) could mobilize against established law or property rights. In other words: mob rule. The framers concluded that the federal government must be given explicit power to restore order when states proved unable or unwilling to do so. Such is the case in Oregon, where the Portland government has signaled that it has no real intention of protecting ICE agents operating there. At least Portland authorities have been unable to deal with Antifa and other anti-government forces.
Recent attacks on ICE facilities have escalated tensions nationwide. In Portland, anti-ICE protests have led to violent confrontations. On June 14, 2025, a large-scale demonstration escalated into a riot outside the ICE facility in South Portland, resulting in multiple arrests and injuries. Protesters threw fireworks, knives, and rocks at law enforcement officers, and federal agents deployed tear gas and flashbangs to disperse the crowd.
But the violence is not contained to Oregon. In June 2025, President Trump ordered the federalization of California’s National Guard (placing them under Title 10 status) and deployed approximately 4,000 National Guard soldiers, along with 700 US Marines, to Los Angeles. On September 24, 2025, a sniper opened fire from a rooftop at an ICE field office in Dallas, Texas, targeting federal agents (but killing two detainees and critically injuring another). This incident follows a series of similar attacks, including the July 4 ambush at the Prairieland ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, where approximately twelve individuals coordinated a shooting attack, resulting in the injury of an officer.
In response to these escalating threats, the US Attorney General has ordered the deployment of Justice Department agents to ICE facilities nationwide and directed Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate and disrupt individuals or groups involved in domestic terrorism targeting federal agents. On September 22, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order designating Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” And now he is deploying federal troops to Portland.
(It’s sad that it took the assassination of Charlie Kirk for a President of the United States to declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. If the government had been on this case for years, it might have had the intelligence to know what Tyler Robinson was planning to do and possibly prevent that event. As Freedom and Reason will testify, I’ve been warning folks about Antifa for years. It’s not like we didn’t know what Antifa was and is. If I can know this, others can.)
Shays’ Rebellion was a series of violent attacks on courthouses and other government properties in Massachusetts, leading to a full-blown military confrontation in 1787.
Having the foresight to anticipate an ongoing problem with insurrection and rebellion, the Founders crafted some of the Constitution’s most enduring provisions, which Trump now has at his disposal. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress authority to call forth the militia not only to repel foreign invasions but also to “suppress insurrections” and enforce federal laws. Likewise, Article IV, Section 4, known as the Guarantee Clause, commits the United States to defend each state against both foreign invasion and domestic violence. These clauses formalized the federal government’s responsibility to preserve internal peace and tranquility.
Although foreign threats loomed then, as they do now, the more immediate danger in 1787 was internal. Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation. Shays’ Rebellion remained fresh in the delegates’ minds as a vivid example of how quickly unrest could erupt. But even vivid examples fade with time—and are clouded by partisan ideology.
But the reality that the Founders anticipated remain—there will be those who rebel against the Republic—and they bequeathed to posterity a muscular state that could respond; for if one state descended into rebellion, the weakness of the Confederation would allow disorder to spread across the Union, undermining commerce, the general welfare, and legitimacy; by embedding protections against insurrection in the Constitution, the framers secured a fragile republic against the kinds of domestic upheaval that had so recently shaken Massachusetts.
“Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say, by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence.” —Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)
Jurupa Valley High School has been desperately trying to find volleyball opponents this season. Eight schools have refused to play the team until Jurupa Valley removes AB Hernandez, a male athlete, from the court. The victims of Jurupa Valley’s decision to prioritize the feelings of a male over the desire of females to play volleyball against other females are not limited to the schools forfeiting games to uphold the integrity of women’s sports. The girls on Jurupa Valley’s own volleyball team are also victims of Hernandez and of those who enable his delusion that he is female. It is not only the humiliation of having to compete with a ringer on the team; Jurupa Valley is now facing lawsuits from current and former teammates alleging traumatic experiences sharing a locker room with a male who pretends to be female.
Karl Marx, in The German Ideology (1840s), offers readers a short satirical allegory that exposes the folly of philosophical idealism—the postmodernism of his day. He asks readers to imagine a man who believes that drowning occurs not because of water or gravity, but because people hold the idea of drowning and gravity in their heads. If only they could banish this superstition, the deluded man claims, they would become immune to drowning. Thus, the man spends his life battling the “illusion” of gravity, ignoring the persistent and measurable evidence of its effects.
This allegory concludes the preface of the manuscript, setting the thematic foundation for Marx’s critique of philosophical idealism. It illustrates with absurd clarity the danger of believing that material facts depend on mental constructs. Just as water and gravity do not vanish because someone declares them social constructions because we use ideas to describe them, so biological realities do not cease to exist simply because they are reclassified as oppressive categories. Yet contemporary postmodern frameworks—whether in the doctrine of gender identity or in critical race theory—repeat this mistake. They treat stubborn realities as illusions to be dissolved by rhetoric.
Words can either illuminate truth or distort or conceal it. Postmodern jargon is of the latter sort—distorting truths and fabricating fictions. Marx’s allegory captures perfectly the ideology that imagines gender to be an illusion, one that, if banished from our minds, would free some men from the “fate” of being men. The same could be said for the “illusion” of age. Why can’t a man be a boy forever—or a girl, for that matter? Why does he have to be human at all? Why can’t he be a dog or a horse? Or a god? If gender is merely a concept imposed by an oppressive society, why should it stop at that oppression? Once we accept that facts are illusions sustained only by oppressive belief, no boundary remains secure against redefinition.
Marx’s allegory anticipates the epistemic corruption of postmodernism: privileging ideology over reality. Postmodernist constructs—whether in critical race theory, gender identity ideology, or related doctrines—are not scientific discoveries but evasions of science, rationalizations to maneuver around inconvenient truths. They cater to the wishes of those who would prefer reality to bend to their desires, who mistake subjective convenience for objective fact. But this is not merely a matter of personal delusion. Once elevated to doctrine, these evasions are weaponized by activists and political movements, particularly on the left, where postmodernist notions provide the rhetorical scaffolding for campaigns to reshape culture, law, and policy. Once institutionalized in academia, law, and policy, these evasions compel society to live within the fiction.
Image by Sora
If you demand that life be organized around reality, then you risk being called a bigot, fascist, phobic, racist, and so on. But acknowledging the fact of gender is not fascism, nor phobia, nor the product of religious-like dogma. It is simply an acknowledgment of reality. But to those who believe that truths can be dissolved by jargon, acknowledging reality becomes heresy. When postmodernism colonizes science and society, truth itself is forced to yield to narrative. Once narrative becomes sovereign over fact, the consequences are as predictable as a man jumping from the top of a skyscraper without a parachute or some other device that allows him to safely float to the ground below him. (Remember the scene in The Matrix where Neo believes in gravity and meets pavement? Have you checked up on the Wachowskis lately? They seem to have abandoned the desert of the real.)
I get asked on social media, “What do you care whether a man presents as a woman?” This isn’t the right question. The question is why we should care whether society is compelled to believe that a man is or can be a woman. We should care because the societal-wide denial of reality will be the death of freedom and reason.
In recent years, activists advancing the doctrine of gender identity—often in tandem with Antifa or kindred misfits and Cluster B types—have claimed Marx as an intellectual ally. Their rhetoric is framed in the vocabulary of oppression, struggle, and liberation, with Marx cast as the revolutionary patron saint of resistance against all social hierarchy. Anybody who has considerable time with the literature—and has the capacity to grasp what he is reading—knows this gets Marx and his materialist method wildly wrong. The doctrine of gender identity does not emerge from the German materialist tradition, but from French postmodern philosophy. The attempt to enlist Marx’s authority in its service requires a twisting of his thought so radically that it undermines the very foundations of historical materialism.
Marx does not deny biological reality. He locates gender relations in material conditions, above all in the division of labor and the economic structures that shaped the family. His comrade, Friedrich Engels, is even more explicit. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels traces women’s subordination to the rise of private property and male control of inheritance. Neither Marx nor Engels suggests that gender itself is a mere social construct, nor that men and women are categories sustained only by ideology. For them, gender is objective, binary, and immutable. What can change are the social and economic arrangements built on that reality. (Note: In scientific literature, before the post-1950s ideological repurposing of the word, one will find such phrases as “peculiar to the female gender” or “diseases of the opposite gender.” Gender is a synonym for sex, which Engels uses in his book.)
So how has Marx come to be invoked in defense of theories that deny the reality of gender? The answer lies not in Marx but in later reinterpretations of his legacy. Beginning with the Frankfurt School, cultural Marxism shifted attention away from the base of society (the political economic foundation, comprised of the forces and social relations of production) and toward the superstructure of culture, ideology, and identity. This move loosened the anchoring of Marxist analysis in material conditions, making it easier for later theorists to treat cultural categories as arenas of struggle in their own right.
It is not that critique of the superstructure lies outside the Marxist frame of analysis (see Antonio Gramsci); rather, its risks treating the superstructure as the deeper reality. If one treats the world as determined by ideas, rather than ideas representing reality, one stands truth on its head. This is the inverse of Marx’s method, which sets truth on its feet. Critical theory is a return to the German idealist Georg Hegel, the teacher against whom the student who picked the lock that inevitably led to the materialist conception of history, Ludwig Feuerbach, rebelled.
In Capital, Volume One, in the Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873), Marx writes, “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” Marx continues, “In Hegel, the dialectical process is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” This is the scientific epistemic. Returning the dialectical process to its previous upside-down posture corrupts science.
Carrying critical theory to its logical conclusion, and adding additional distortions, poststructuralist/postmodernist thinkers—Foucault, Derrida, Butler—manufactured an epistemology that is profoundly anti-materialist. In their work, they emphasize discourse, power/knowledge, and performativity, arguing that categories such as gender are not rooted in biology but constructed through language and the persistence of “oppressive norms.” Though these ideas are alien to Marx’s framework, activists have merged them with Marxist rhetoric. The language of “false consciousness,” “ideological domination,” and “revolutionary struggle” is applied not to class exploitation but to the gender binary itself. In this warp, a man overcomes the ideological domination that made him falsely conscious of his gender, and the revolutionary struggle against the gender binary becomes an act of “liberation”—and those around him, if not his allies who affirm his delusion, become reactionaries. They become fascists, a smear that habitually falls from the face of the trans activist.
Distortion of historical materialism is the source of the modern activist claim to Marxism. It appears Marxist in form—invoking struggle, liberation from oppression, and revolutionary overthrow. But it is postmodern in content—asserting that gender is discursive, fluid, and mutable. Marx’s name lends the project revolutionary authority, but his substance is discarded.
The contradiction could not be starker: Marx’s materialism insists on confronting reality as it is, not as one wishes it to be. His allegory in The German Ideology mocks the man who denies gravity as a mere superstition, illustrating the danger of philosophical idealism. To deny the permanency of gender is to repeat the same folly: a war against reality fought with words, while the facts remain as immovable as gravity. Passing off rebellion against reality as Marxist does not extend the logic of historical materialism but betrays it.
Karl Marx never published a systematic theory of gender in the way later feminist or postmodern theorists have attempted. His central focus remained on class, labor, and material conditions. But he was working out a theory of gender relations towards the end of his life. Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was written in the wake of Marx’s death and rests heavily on Marx’s engagement with Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877). Marx had studied Morgan closely, filling the margins of his copy with extensive notes and reflections that connected Morgan’s anthropology to the materialist conception of history. Engels drew on these notes as the foundation for his own synthesis, and in the Preface he acknowledges this debt, describing the work as “in substance the outcome of Marx’s researches.” Thus, Origin, shaped by Engels’ hand, is deeply rooted in Marx’s theoretical legacy, mediated through Morgan’s ethnological findings.
Taken in its totality, Marx and Engels’ work ties gender to material relations of production. Marx—and more explicitly Engels in Origin—understood the subordination of women as historically contingent, rooted in the rise of private property and the division of labor. For them, patriarchy is not eternal or natural. It emerges when men gain control over surplus resources and inheritance systems, reorganizing family life and social structures around property ownership. However, neither Marx nor Engels denies the existence of biological differences between men and women. They never suggest that male and female are “illusions” or “social constructs.” Biology—and Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection—is taken as reality. What can change—and what they sought to explain—were the ways societies organized around these facts. Women’s subordination is explained not in terms of discursive categories or identities, but in terms of material-economic structures.
In Capital and related writings, Marx observes how industrial capitalism increasingly draws women into wage labor. This shift disrupts older patriarchal household structures, but it also exposes women to new forms of exploitation. Marx recognizes the dual character of this development: women are both exploited more directly under capitalism and also brought into the broader sphere of class struggle. In that sense, wage labor is not only a site of oppression but a possible path toward emancipation. Marx and Engels consistently treat the bourgeois family not as a purely cultural or moral unit but as an economic one. The family is, in their analysis, depending on the mode of production, a mechanism for the transmission of property, the reproduction of labor power, and the maintenance of class structure. Gender roles within it are shaped by economic necessity, rather than by an autonomous “gender ideology.”
In sum, then, Marx locates gender oppression not in “identity” or cultural categories but in material arrangements. He sees the potential for emancipation in the reorganization of labor and the abolition of private property, not in an ideology that encourages people to take leave of their senses, to drown in the waters of illusion. For Marx, as for Engels, gender inequality is inseparable from the broader struggle against class exploitation. Imagining oneself to be the other gender—or no gender at all—allows escape from inequality. Indeed, it only perpetuates it, as we see in the Jurupa Valley High School case. Allowing AP Hernanez to compete against women is profoundly misogynistic. How this isn’t obvious to everybody testifies to the corruption of popular consciousness by the postmodernist epistemic.
Thus, the betrayal of Marx’s materialist conception of history and social relations is not merely an intellectual error—it’s an expression of bourgeois ideology. By severing identity politics from the material critique of capitalism, postmodernism disarms the working class. It shifts the struggle away from corporate domination, exploitation of labor, and the accumulation of profit, and redirects it toward endless disputes over language, identity, and subjective “recognition.” In doing so, it fragments collective resistance and redirects revolutionary energy into cultural quarrels that pose no real threat to capital—indeed, that advance corporate power and profit.
This is why corporations have eagerly embraced this inversion. Gender identity ideology and related postmodern constructs provide cover for monopolies and financial elites. By championing “inclusion” and “diversity,” corporations rebrand themselves as “progressive” while continuing to extract surplus value, suppress wages, and consolidate power. They also use the doctrine of gender identity to extract billions from its victims via the medical-industrial complex. Postmodernism thus becomes an instrument of bourgeois hegemony and profit-generation: it erodes material analysis, masks exploitation, and manufactures consent for corporate rule.
What the appropriation of Marx by gender identity ideology reveals is not the consistency of their framework but the poverty of it. Postmodernism borrows Marx’s revolutionary fire while extinguishing his materialist core. The result is a doctrine that speaks in Marxist cadences but cannot withstand a Marxist critique. Far from being Marxist, gender identity theory represents the very kind of philosophical idealism Marx spent his career dismantling. The postmodernist doctrine of gender identity is a betrayal of Marx’s lifework. The denial of reality masquerading as liberation serves as an enabler of capital. It diverts the struggle against exploitation into battles over subjective self-definition, leaving intact the structures of profit and power—even advancing them. What is presented as Marxism is, in truth, the opposite: a bourgeois ideology that protects the very system Marx sought to overthrow.
To put this in a way the progressive will understand: Keep Marx’s name out of your damn mouth.
One of the more striking experiences of my life was being the target of a petition circulated at my university, not even two years ago, and the Kimmel controversy caused me to consider a paradox. The purpose of the petition was to collect signatures from those seeking my dismissal from employment. To be sure, the right to petition the government is enshrined in the First Amendment. But invoking the petition clause to suppress the conscience clause of the very same amendment turns the amendment against itself. This approach exploits one part of the amendment to undermine its spirit.
Imagine, for instance, using the petition process to demand the government repeal the First Amendment—a move that would also eliminate the right to petition for redress of grievances. Such a tactic would clearly weaponize the amendment for authoritarian ends and expose the petitioners’ hostility to freedom—and future petitioning. Petitions of this kind should be dismissed out of hand for their clear authoritarian intent.
We should recognize such efforts for what they are: attempts to dress authoritarianism in the trappings of constitutional process. The framers of the Constitution never intended to grant within our founding document the right to abolish the document itself. To be sure, they provided a process for amending the Constitution, but the Constitution remains the Republic’s foundational law. No reasonable architect of a government would intentionally design its own destruction.
I recognize that the Declaration of Independence presumes the right to overthrow a government, but the right to rebellion comes with specific conditions that justify such an action. It begins by establishing what good government does, namely, defending the unalienable rights of its citizens. It is whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends that the people can exercise their right to alter or abolish it, and the new government that replaces it must effect those unalienable rights.
That is why it is crucial to consider the intent behind any petition. If the aim is to demand that the government uphold free speech rights—acknowledging that public institutions cannot suppress speech except on very narrow grounds, such as incitement to violence—or to prevent groups and individuals from using harassment, intimidation, or violence to suppress or compel speech, then the intent is good. By contrast, if the aim is to pressure government into suppressing speech arbitrarily, or to enable groups and individuals to coerce, harass, or intimidate others into silence, then the intent is malevolent, and we should name it as such.
It would be a welcome and necessary step for government bodies and public institutions—bound by the doctrine of incorporation to uphold the First Amendment—to state plainly that the First Amendment cannot be used as a tool to suppress the speech of professors or students. Even stronger would be an acknowledgment that such misuse of the amendment amounts to harassment, intimidation, and attempted coercion in its own right.
Upon his return to late-night television, Jimmy Kimmel quipped, “I don’t want to make this about me because—and I know this is what people say when they make things about them.” (Cue the laugh and applause signs.) Moments earlier, he had said: “I don’t think what I have to say is gonna make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you don’t, you don’t.”
But this isn’t about whether people “like” Kimmel. It’s about what he said—and the fact that a massive media corporation gave him a platform to say it. By framing the issue as one of likability, Kimmel deflected attention from his actual words. That matters because what he communicated was a signal: that if political violence comes from the left, he will help obscure its motive. (See Jimmy Kimmel’s Return and the Persistence of Late Night Talk Shows.)
He reinforced the point when he insisted: “I don’t think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone.” This is false. Kimmel knows exactly who and what Tyler Robinson represents. It’s what he tried to obscure in the monologue that got his show suspended. The assassin represents the millions who cheer Kirk’s murder and who celebrate the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump.
Kimmel also asked his audience to consider this: “Should the government be allowed to regulate which podcasts the cell phone companies and Wi-Fi providers are allowed to let you download to make sure they serve the public interest?”
Second, the government does have a legitimate interest in policing podcasts, cell phones, and other digital platforms when they are used to transmit terroristic threats or coordinate acts of political violence.
Kimmel and Disney ABC refuse to take responsibility for his statements. By casting the issue as a censorship debate—as though it were interchangeable with addressing political terrorism—Kimmel trivializes the seriousness of the moment. The stakes are not remotely the same, and framing them as parallel only muddies the issue. Disney ABC has positioned Kimmel as a martyr in the supposed struggle against “Trump’s fascism,” while obscuring the real sources of political violence. Kimmel continues to serve as a propagandist for the progressive left.
Image by Sora
Fascism is frightening, to be sure—which is why I’ve devoted so many words to the subject over the years on this platform. But what’s also frightening is when millions of people believe they’re living under Hitler-style fascism when they’re not. Moral panics take populations to dark places and obscure the real situation. Today, we see a large segment of the US population interpreting the legitimate exercise of constitutional powers as national socialism—while simultaneously defending corporatism as a desirable political-economic system and rationalizing political violence in the streets.
So what would fascism look like in the present day? Much like what we saw in 2020: censorship, fear campaigns, rebellion, rigged elections, the installation of a senile man as president. We witnessed a color revolution and a coup carried out by the deep state and powerful corporate actors, while the corporate media refused to call it for what it was. In fact, the media projected the opposite narrative. That’s why I raised the alarm about the New Fascism on Freedom and Reason. And while the situation has improved somewhat, we’re not out of the woods.
The alarm to raise now—Jimmy Kimmel’s return being just one piece of the puzzle—is that so many people have come to believe that reclaiming democracy from corporate control and street-level authoritarianism is itself a form of fascism. Perception has been flipped. Millions of people are living in a camera obscura, going to extremes to preserve the illusion.
What we see in the media and on the streets is easy to mock because it’s so over-the-top. We’re told that regulating media conglomerates in the public interest is fascistic, when in fact it’s the opposite. We’re told political violence is antifascist, when in reality it is its antithesis. This upside-down portrayal of the present moment poses a real threat to the work Americans must do to preserve and defend the Republic. And those who buy into the illusion remain impervious to reason.
Just yesterday in Green Bay, I saw a woman standing in front of a local television station with a sign that read, “Protect free speech.” She was so proud of herself. Her husband, standing behind her, was equally proud. I felt sorry for her. It’s tragic, I said to myself while driving by, that those who shape mass perception led her to believe she was standing up for freedom by defending the power of corporations to propagandize her. Only a few years ago, she likely believed corporate media control over public perception was a terrible thing. Now she stands on a street corner defending it.
Jimmy Kimmel is returning to ABC. This is troubling because what Kimmel said that prompted Disney ABC to suspend The Jimmy Kimmel Show was more than vile. It was a signal to those on the left who are considering perpetrating more acts of violence against conservative personalities that corporate propagandists will obscure the source of political violence in America. Kimmel’s reinstatement is tacit acknowledgment by Disney ABC that its company endorses this propaganda strategy.
Something important that’s being missed with the Jimmy Kimmel saga…
By spreading the vile lie that Charlie was assassinated by MAGA, the implicit message from Kimmel was clear: If you kill a conservative, we will cover for you. We will whitewash the murder because we don’t…
Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet put his finger on this in recent comments about the scandal when he said Kimmel was effectively saying to those who commit political violence, “We have your back.” Take a careful look at what Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
This part is a signal: “the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” Kimmel knew that the assassin was sympathetic to Antifa and its violent transactivist wing. He knew MAGA did not kill one of its own. Even if Kimmel didn’t, he had no reason to claim that the assassin was a member of “the MAGA gang.” In putting the matter this way, Kimmel is conveying the following: If you assault or kill a prominent conservative, we, the spokesmen for progressive ideology, will obscure your role in targeted political violence by blaming it on the targets of it.
The precipitous decline of The Jimmy Kimmel Show
I have heard many outrageous things in my life, but what Kimmel says here is truly one of the most outrageous things I have ever heard. Before learning of Kimmel’s return I pictured in my mind executives at Disney turning to one another and agreeing that Kimmel had to go—not just because he was losing the company money (which he clearly is), not just because they perceived that he had delegitimized himself as an effective propagandist, but because he implicated Disney in rhetoric encouraging political violence by conveying an intent that influencers like Kimmel will cover for it. I said this on my Facebook feed. I have to walk back these assumptions now.
As I stated in previous essays on this platform, many on the left are defending Kimmel by wrapping what he said in an appeal to the First Amendment. It bears repeating that the First Amendment has nothing to do with Kimmel’s cancellation. FCC chairman Brendan Carr doesn’t have the power to fire a Disney employee. Disney has that power. Disney can fire employees based on their speech. Even if one has an expansive view of the First Amendment, in this case, Kimmel said what he said not as a private citizen on a social media platform, but as an employee standing on a Disney platform. What does Kimmel’s return tell us about Disney? It is an endorsement of Kimmel’s speech.
For those arguing that Carr pressured Disney to cancel Jimmy Kimmel, in answering a question put to him on The Benny Show, Carr did assert the power of the FCC in making sure that holders of licenses granted use of the publicly-owned communications spectrum honor the lawful demand to serve the public interest. Regulating media corporations is an entirely legitimate power delegated to the FCC by the republic that created the agency. However, for the record, Carr had not even moved to draft a complaint or directive to Disney concerning this matter. Moreover, Trump was out of the country at the time and did not know that any of this had transpired. The left’s attempt to pin this on Trump, to continue the propaganda narrative that Trump is an autocrat, is entirely fallacious.
But even if Trump had pressured Disney, even if Carr had issued a complaint or directive on this matter, it would not have contradicted the First Amendment, since the foundational law gives the FCC power to regulate a public resource for the public interest. Those who argue that the government has no power over corporate media firms are effectively arguing for corporate rule over the people. Had the FCC acted, this would have helped Disney ABC. They could then have distanced themselves from Kimmel’s speech under the cover of a claim, as fallacious as it is, to government suppression. Since progressives have convinced themselves that this is in fact what happened, Disney is acting in a provocative manner, challenging the FCC’s power to regulate media corporations. Moreover, they are presenting Kimmel as a free speech martyr—one that Disney saved from government oppression.
Found on Reddit
On the persistence of late-night programming, it’s not just Kimmel’s show that’s in freefall. So are Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon’s shows in sharp decline. Rationally, since these are for-profit corporations, such precipitous drops in viewership should signal a change in programming. Yet these shows have persisted for years. The evidence suggests that the reason for the decline in viewers and the persistence of late-night programming stems from the same source—a dynamic that may seem counterintuitive at first, but understandable upon closer examination.
The drop in viewership is largely attributed to shifts in political sensibilities in America. Over the past several years, American culture and politics have been moving rightward. As a result, many Americans are increasingly turned off by progressive politics and by the phenomenon of “clapter,” in which cruel mocking of ordinary Americans replaces sophisticated humor. They are taking their business elsewhere. This creates a process in which the audience becomes increasingly winnowed ideologically. What remains is a hardcore left-progressive segment—zealots who hang on every word of the late-night host, seeing them as wise and representative of their politics. These programs are thus cultivating a crowd by weeding out those with different sensibilities.
This situation has a corrupting effect on the sense of humor of this audience. The late-night audience finds cruel and mean-spirited rhetoric funny, primarily because they loathe the targets of the host’s jokes. It reinforces their belief that they belong to a superior, “in-the-know” group, while everyone outside that group is dismissed as backwards, mouthbreathers, neanderthals, and rubes, unworthy of attention. It polarizes the in-group/out-group dynamic. The persistence of these late-night programs, despite the drastic decline in overall viewership, can therefore be explained by their propaganda value. They maintain a loyal core audience that aligns with progressive political agendas. The Democratic Party and the broader progressive movement depend on this dedicated nucleus of supporters as a key part of their voter base. Late-night programming provides this nucleus with a clear target of opposition: the rest of America.
Because media elites are largely aligned with progressive political interests, they are willing to continue funding shows that serve as effective vehicles for pro-Democrat messaging. In other words, Kimmel, Colbert, and Fallon effectively operate as a political messaging arm of the Democratic Party and the corporate elites that party represents. This is significant, since ABC, CBS, and NBC are the traditional media networks that have shaped mass consciousness—culture, ideology, morality, politics—for decades. Late night has thus been weaponized against the American majorityfor the sake of the political party that represents corporate statism. This weaponization is contrary to the public interest clause of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC. What we are witnessing is broadside against the American Republic.
Democrats know that corporations have too much power. They know the government has the power to regulate corporations. They’ve said so countless times. Their rhetoric in the aftermath of Kimmel’s cancellation is duplicitous in the extreme. The reality is that, while they know corporations have too much power, Democrats want corporations to have too much power. And they will want that as long as corporations shill for them. Disney is defying the public interests to continue serving in its capacity (alongside CBS and NBC) as the broadcast propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.
If you want to understand how the world works—how history unfolds—you must examine power: the relations that determine it, the institutions that embody it, the motivations driving the wealthy and powerful to pursue their goals, the decisions they make, and the structures that allow them to seek power and wealth exclusively.
We see this kind of power analysis all the time in science fiction and fantasy. Authors engage in world-building precisely because they know a plot must unfold within a framework of possibilities and constraints. Those possibilities and constraints are given by the larger structure of the imagined world. Without them, nothing makes sense. The reader accepts the built world as necessary and obvious.
Given this, it’s worth asking why so many people deny that the real world has a structure. From the standpoint of power, it isn’t surprising: the powerful benefit from denying the structures that grant them immense possibilities while keeping ordinary people from achieving the good life. And they spend a great deal of time ensuring that the ordinary man doesn’t accept theories critical of elite power.
Image by Sora
Nobody watching FX’s Alien: Earth thinks “conspiracy theory” when told that five corporations rule the Earth a century from now. Nobody reading The Lord of the Rings dismisses Tolkien’s carefully built world as implausible, given assumptions about the supernatural. In both cases, structure is essential to understanding the unfolding plot, the characters’ motivations, and the constraints and challenges they face—and overcome.
Yet in the real world, many people leap to “conspiracy theory” when confronted with the realities of corporate power, greed, and elite machinations to gain and preserve wealth and influence at the expense of ordinary people.
By accepting that references to such structures are mere conspiracy, the ordinary man resigns himself to seeing events as accidental or as the work of charismatic personalities. He imagines his own struggles are simply the product of personal inadequacy. Too many blame men blame themselves for their circumstances instead of challenging power and pursuing the good life for themselves, their families, and their communities. They believe what they are told instead of questioning those who tell them what to believe.
I want to begin by making it clear that my intention is not to offend my Christian friends and family. If you listen carefully, I believe what I am about to say should not offend you. Indeed, I would hope it will flatter you. I see you as an ally. For the woke progressive who reads this, not so much. This essay is about him. I’m using Christianity as the comparison point. We need more of that attitude.
Image by Sora
Growing up, I was an atheist—and I have remained one. Yet almost everyone around me believed in God, angels, and devils. I was often the only person in the room who did not share those beliefs. Others took these things on faith, for such things cannot be demonstrated empirically. But they did not demand that I do the same. I could disbelieve without fear of reprisal. People could hold their faith, and I could reject it, and we all managed to coexist peacefully.
Today, however, disagreement feels very different. It feels that way because different beliefs are not tolerated by certain groups, and these groups wield considerable power. We are living in a climate where political ideology—particularly on the progressive left—demands the same kind of unquestioning faith once reserved for religion and demands it of everyone under the threat of reputational, material, and even physical harm.
One may like to imagine that I’m exaggerating, but people are harassed, intimidated, and even assaulted for refusing to believe in progressive doctrine and mythology, such as the myth of gender identity. Progressives hold those who defy woke doctrine “accountable” for their deviation. Today is the big memorial service for Charlie Kirk, a young conservative influencer who was held “accountable” for refusing to fall in line with gender identity doctrine.
Think about that. A man murdered another because he refused to believe that a man can be or become a woman. This would be like a Christian assassinating an atheist for refusing to believe that Jesus was the son of God. And the murderous actions of the progressive zealot are being praised by millions, many of whom are prepared to risk their livelihoods to voice that praise.
Progressives insist that authoritarianism characterizes the Republican Party, that Trump is a fascist, and that democracy is on the verge of collapse. There is no evidence for these claims. Like religious dogma, such claims must be accepted not through reason but through faith. If people want to take such things on faith, they are welcome to it. But can they behave like Christians, who don’t make other people’s lives miserable by pressing their faith on them? Could progressives go to their place of worship and voice their beliefs and practice their rituals without trying to impose them on the rest of us? Can we ensure that their beliefs don’t scale the Wall of Separation? Can we all agree that we enjoy a Bill of Rights that leaves matters of conscience to the individual? Apparently not.
I don’t care if a man wears women’s clothes. But why do I have to affirm the lie that women’s clothes—or women’s makeup, silicone breast implants, a surgically crafted neovagina—makes a man a woman? Why should women endure men who think or say they’re women in their female-only spaces? Why must progressives behave like zealous Muslims, praying loudly in the streets, hassling disbelievers, and threatening violence? Why do they insist on taking control of government and imposing their faith-based doctrines on a free society of individuals who are trying to live by rational rules and evidence-based policies constrained only by necessary ethical guardrails? Christians aren’t doing that—even if progressive mythology, which centers false claims of oppression and persecution in its doctrine, imagines otherwise.
Thus, the crucial difference between Christianity and progressivism lies in their respective consequences. The Christian faith that surrounded me growing up, that still surrounds me, was and is not dangerous. It didn’t and doesn’t threaten my safety. It didn’t and doesn’t silence me—though I confess I was often silent because I was outnumbered, and because I asked myself: what would it matter anyway? Was I going to talk people out of a faith belief? Especially since their faith afforded me the right to my own beliefs? Christianity allowed for disagreement and coexistence.
Progressivism doesn’t tolerate me and my beliefs. This ideology resembles Islam and other authoritarian belief systems. These belief systems are not content to let others live differently; they demand conformity. They suppress speech, punish dissent, and justify hostility toward those who resist.
This is where fear enters the picture. For the first time in my life, I must worry about whether others—specifically progressives—will harm me because of my beliefs. I never worried about that with Christians. Whatever my disagreements with their faith, I felt safe around them—and I still do. Their beliefs did not threaten my freedom or safety. The same cannot be said of today’s woke progressivism. You see the proof of that everywhere.
For almost thirty years now, nearly every fall and spring, I’ve walked into a classroom and lectured about Karl Marx. I always tell my students that to truly understand Marx, one must see how he arrived at his brilliant insight about the power of ideology. You can’t discuss Marx’s theory of false consciousness without first discussing Ludwig Feuerbach and his rejection of the divinity of Christ in the mid-nineteenth century.
I’ve given that lecture year after year, always knowing that in every class there are Christians—many of them conservative, many on the political right. But not once have I feared they posed a danger to me. They listen. They don’t complain. They don’t report me. They don’t try to have me fired.
Yet if I were to speak about gender as binary and immutable, I know what would happen—because it has happened elsewhere. I would receive complaints. Hell, I don’t even bring that subject up in class, and still a petition was circulated demanding my removal. The same thing has happened when I’ve presented crime statistics truthfully, exactly as the data show: there is no anti-black racism in civilian-police encounters. Students went to the dean and complained that I wasn’t “in line” with Black Lives Matter. As if I had to align my lessons with BLM propaganda. That’s the equivalent of Christian students running to the administration and insisting that I wasn’t “in line” with Christianity—yet that has never happened.
This contrast reveals something important: how differently Christians and progressives respond to intellectual challenges. Christians may disagree profoundly, but they tolerate the discussion. Tolerance is central to Christian teachings. Rational Christianity is a major source of Enlightened values. This is why I often say that Christians are allies in the cause of defending the American Republic. Progressives, by contrast, react like intolerant religious fundamentalists—any challenge to their ideology is treated as an offense worthy of escalation, whether through administrative channels or organized campaigns to silence the “infidel.”
The comparison highlights something important about ideologies: they are not created equal. Christianity, whatever one may believe about its truth claims, is built on the example of Jesus, who gave his life for others out of love. Islam, by contrast, has historically promoted a posture of hostility toward those who are different, insisting that outsiders must either conform or be cast out. When Christians ask, “What would Jesus do?” this does not cause one to worry that his head may be detached from his body. It is the spirit of intolerance in zealous religious belief that the progressive left mirrors: either one adopts their ideology, or one risks marginalization, silencing, or even violence.
For those wondering why progressives ally with Islamists, why they share their hostility toward Jews and the modern state of Israel, the answer lies in part here. The vast majority of modern Jews do not live strictly by the Old Testament. Jewish thought today is largely secular and aligns more closely with rational Christianity in the modern period than it did long ago. As Karl Marx and Max Weber, in careful independent analyses separated by a generation, showed, Christianity itself drew heavily from Judaism’s rational elements, transforming them into a framework that helped form the very foundations of civil society: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the separation of church and state. Progressivism, like Islam, rejects that foundation.
My only problem with Christianity is that I cannot believe in what I have no evidence for. But that is no problem for Christians. And Christians have no problem with me. So—no problem. As long as Christians don’t impose their beliefs on me, and I don’t try to strip their beliefs from them, we remain friends and family.
Progressives, however, don’t want that arrangement. And so I confess: I do not feel safe in their presence. Christianity’s faith may be empirically unprovable, but it does not endanger me. Progressivism’s faith, however, threatens my freedom and security—because it insists not only on belief among its members but also on the obedience of society to woke progressive doctrine. This attitude threatens democracy and human freedom.
Some conservatives—Ted Cruz, most notably—worry that Jimmy Kimmel’s potential removal from late-night broadcast television (Disney has indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! but not yet fired him) sets a dangerous precedent: If Democrats regain power, Cruz and others warn, they will use the same tactic against conservative figures.
This warning calls to mind the words of Christopher Hitchens, who, speaking at the University of Toronto’s Hart House Debating Club, said, “Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else, you are—in potentia—making a rod for your own back.” I have often appealed to Hitchens’ warning. But I also realize that it doesn’t matter how tolerant conservatives and liberals are of the excesses of the left. When progressives have power, they come after their enemies no holds barred. Out of power, they resort to guerrilla warfare.
Cruz’s concern rests—and perpetuates—a misunderstanding. As I explained in yesterday’s essay (Progressives Flipping Like Flags on a Pole: The Cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel and the Real Threat to Free Speech), the FCC never pressured Disney to act but rather reasserted the purview of the agency. Disney anticipated the cultural climate and political winds and made a decision. The company has always exercised its own judgment regarding employees. (Recall Gina Carano’s removal from The Mandalorian after she compared being a Republican today to being a Jew during the Holocaust, or ABC canceling Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect for a remark about the September 11 terrorist attacks.)
Misunderstanding aside, the Texas Senator appears to believe that showing tolerance toward opponents’ speech—I shall in a moment come to who that opponent is—will inspire progressives to respond in kind. That expectation is naïve. On what grounds should conservatives and liberals expect grace from a movement and a power that treats offensive speech as justification for censorship, deplatforming, termination, or—in more extreme rhetoric and action—eradication?
No matter what stance the FCC takes—whether invoking its “public interest” mandate or ignoring it, as it often does—progressives will continue canceling, deplatforming, and targeting conservatives. It’s what progressives do. We don’t have to speculate. We already have years of experience with their tactics. There is no goodwill to be found on that side. That’s because the two sides in this struggle represent irreconcilable standpoints on liberty and justice. One side (comprised of conservatives and liberals) believes in dialogue. The other side is authoritarian.
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Conservatives assume that the free speech tenet of liberalism is a universal value, that rational people accept the guardrails of constructive dialogue—principles enshrined at the birth of the Republic—voiced in the first article of the US Bill of Rights—and upheld as civic ideals and enforced by legal protections ever since. The woke progressive stance, by contrast, is illiberal. It embraces a militant conception of speech as violence. For many on that side, even silence is violence.
From this perspective, offensive or “harmful” speech is not an idea to counter through dialogue but an act inflicting real damage, thus demanding resistance. The “marketplace of ideas,” long central to liberal thought, is rejected. Certain expressions—especially those labeled “dehumanizing,” “hateful,” or “oppressive”—are treated as instruments of domination that reinforce “systemic injustice.” Speech, in this framework, is never neutral but always entangled in power (this nihilistic expression owes a lot to the Fench postmodernist epistemic, but it is ultimately a popular reflection of corporate power). To tolerate harmful discourse is to perpetuate harm. Words are like sticks and stones for the woke progressive: they injure. Even silence wounds.
The moral justification for this stance ostensibly rests on a supposed ethic of harm prevention and self-defense. If words create fear or reinforce oppression, suppressing or punishing them becomes framed not as censorship but as justice (see The Noisy and Destructive Children of Herbert Marcuse; also, We’ve Been Here Before: Student Radicalism and Their Apologists). From this vantage point, harassment, intimidation, or even violence against offensive speech is rationalized as protective action. That the claims of harm may be exaggerated—or imagined—is irrelevant. The core assumption is that all disagreement is harmful, oppressive, and intolerable. The result: their side is so right that the other side must either submit or suffer reputational, material, and even physical consequences.
Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, in a 1968 postscript to his 1965 essay calling for the suppression of the free speech rights of conservatives, writes, “I suggested in ‘Repressive Tolerance’ the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressed. Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character.” Angela Davis’ mentor called on the left to “fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination.”
This is not a rational position. It’s irrational, and irrationalism legitimizes violence under the guise of collective and righteous self-defense—without any purchase in morality. In a word, it’s authoritarianism. Authoritarians necessarily oppose liberalism because it threatens their assertions by opening challenges to them; irrationalism is rationalism’s antithesis. There is no synthesis to be found in this dialectic; the former is the negation of the latter—the consequences are destructive. The individual who rejects dialogue as inadequate or complicit in “injustice,” as defined by the “oppressor-victim ideology” (critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, whatever) inevitably embraces action—often violent action—as the only path to “justice.”
Harassment, intimidation, and coercion are rebranded as morally necessary, framed as defenses of dignity, equality, and “safety.” Safety in this perverse worldview is secured by making the conditions of others unsafe. Dialogue itself is judged dangerous, since it allegedly sustains the harms it fails to eradicate. Disagreeable opinions must therefore be destroyed by force. Justice is flipped on its head and recast as “social justice.” In this formulation, freedom becomes slavery—to adopt the Orwellian slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
From this formulation follows a profoundly detrimental consequence: truth becomes a casualty of social justice. When truth contradicts the narrative of the righteous victim, it is recast as hateful and oppressive. Victimhood falsely confers an epistemic privilege that, if accepted, renders universal standards of reason impossible. Compromise cannot occur in a framework where concession is a priori treated as complicity in oppression. Dialogue is betrayal, negotiation is surrender, and violence for one side only becomes virtue.
This illiberal posture mirrors traits of a narcissistic personality. Narcissists exhibit grandiosity, hypersensitivity to criticism, fragile self-concepts masked by aggression, and an inability to recognize other perspectives as legitimate. Narcissists interpret disagreement not as an honest difference but as personal attacks or betrayals. Both the social justice warrior and the narcissist claim superiority while adopting a victim identity that demands special protections, skirting paradox, and freeing them from moral constraints against harming others. For both, dialogue is not truth-seeking but domination. Any challenge to the ego invites deflection, hostility, and aggression. The result is a worldview where compromise is impossible, criticism intolerable, and coercion recast as justified.
Recall Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote about insanity in his 1886 Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” The progressive left embodies Nietzsche’s observation—collective madness appears throughout human societies and history, and our present society and history are in the grip of a collective madness. That madness is woke progressivism.
Given these irreconcilable standpoints, neither conservative nor liberal should expect reciprocity from the left if they bend over backwards to tolerate progressives’ behavior. On the contrary, those compelled to forge this coalition should expect the worst. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is not a one-off. His murder punctuates the moment we’re enduring.
Does this mean conservatives and liberals should mirror the irrationalism of the left? No. It’s not in the constitution of our respective sides (which have more in common than not). We do what we have always done: use government, law, and policy to preserve the Republic and its constitutional foundations. What we don’t do is deceive ourselves into believing that inaction will pacify the left. We act where we can, and this requires holding corporations accountable to the public interest.
This is where Cruz misses the mark. The Republican Senator fails to acknowledge that the corporations that use the public airwaves agree, when given an FCC license, to serve the common good of the nation, not push an ideological or one-sided party standpoint. A Media Research Center (MRC) analysis of Trump’s second term, focusing on ABC/CBS/NBC evening newscasts, found that greater that ninety percent of coverage was negative, despite Trump’s popularity in the polls. Other studies find the same thing. We must hold corporate power to the standard of fairness if we permit them to reach into our living rooms night after night. Those who abuse the American System of free enterprise must face accountability for their actions. Cruz has identified the wrong mob.
Corporations are not people, after all, however much Supreme Court judges have leaned on the presumption that a past Court decision established as much. There is no such precedent. The phrase “corporations are people” can be traced to the 1886 case Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Co. But the actual opinion did not rule that corporations have Constitutional rights. The confusion stems from the court reporter’s headnote, which stated that the Court did not wish to hear argument on whether the “Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment (written to address the badges of slavery—overturning Dred Scott v Sandford by guaranteeing birthright citizenship to black Americans) applied to corporations, since “we are all of the opinion that it does.” Headnotes, however, are not law—they are summaries and not binding precedent. Over time, courts and lawyers treated the reporter’s statement as if it reflected the Court’s holding. Thus, myth has determined law and collective fate.
There is nothing in the foundational law that prevents governments from restricting corporate behavior, and what is in the law that prevents this is invalid from a constitutional perspective. Indeed, the principle that corporations fall under the rule of law is a necessary condition for a free society. In the age of absolutism, the sovereign’s authority was rooted in the natural law legitimized by its divine character. Corporations were material enterprises subject to that entity naturally entitled to express, interpret, and enforce that law. The sovereign’s power went by the Latin Quo Warranto—“by what authority?”—meaning that corporations are answerable to the sovereign.
America’s hard-fought independence from the British monarchy did not cede this authority to corporations, but rather transferred that authority from the sovereign in personal form (the king) to the sovereign in the corpus of the People (no kings). The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution establish that the American People are the sovereign, and corporations answer to the People through their elected representatives in a republican system that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed (I am here effectively quoting the founding documents). (I have written about this in several essays: Richard Grossman on Corporate Law and Lore; Progressivism Hasn’t Been Betrayed—It’s Been Installed; The Selective Misanthropy and Essential Fascism of the Progressive Standpoint.)
Tolerating progressive excesses in the service of corporate power compromises our values and hurts Americans. And that is what progressivism is—an expression of corporate governance and extralegal excess. When the government acts to advance the illegitimate regime of the corporate state, it is acting against the national interests. During and after the 2020 election, when the Biden administration and allied agencies repeatedly communicated with social media companies about what they deemed disinformation or foreign influence operations, flagging posts it considered “problematic,” including COVID-19 and vaccine content, pressuring firms to downrank or remove such material, it was advancing the interests of powerful corporations over the interests of the People the Republic was established to protect and defend.
Never forget what progressives did to you in 2020. During the Presidential election, social media companies suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, influenced by warnings from federal agencies and former intelligence officers about the machinations of foreign disinformation—a claim that those persons and entities knew was false. Executives later claimed that they were not directly ordered to do so by government officials, but their moderation policies clearly indicated external pressure. Why did they suppress the laptop story? Because they were determined to install Biden as President. Why Biden? Because the Democratic Party represents the interests of transnational corporate power. The suppression of the laptop story had its intended effect. Polling indicates that had the public known about the contents of the laptop, enough of them would have changed their vote to affect the outcome of the 2020 election.
The corporate state must be the target of conservatives and liberals concerned with preserving the American Republic. Inside Twitter (before it was acquired by Elon Musk) and other platforms, decision-makers with prior government and intelligence ties shaped the community standards that censored American citizens on platforms that were designed to provide the common man the means to express his opinion. Crucially, the censorship regime of social media reflected (it still does) not only institutional pressure but also a broader progressive outlook—one that prioritized combating misinformation, protecting public health messaging, and safeguarding election integrity, at the cost of restricting legitimate speech, for the purposes of perpetuating the corporate state.
The progressive panic over Jimmy Kimmel is a propaganda campaign manufactured to confuse Americans about the role of government in bringing corporations to heel for the sake of public interest. Progressives appeal to free speech (when convenient) to obscure their function as agents in entrenching and expanding corporate power—big media companies, the culture industry, and the administrative state.
The contest over speech in America is thus not merely a clash of policy preferences; it’s a deeper battle between two incompatible worldviews—and irreconcilable governmental frames. One side seeks to preserve a liberal order grounded in constitutional principle, open dialogue, and reason governed by republican virtue; the other redefines disagreement as harm, dissent as violence, and suppression as justice to establish a totalitarian corporate state. The latter works from a double standard, where their speech is portrayed as virtuous and actions justified, while like responses from the other side in defense of liberty are denied to them. It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the fight of our lives. We’re winning, but that’s when the left becomes most dangerous.
Conservatives and liberals who expect reciprocal tolerance misjudge the nature of this divide. The left’s illiberal posture, amplified through corporate actors, cultural and media institutions, and captured government agencies—indeed advancing those elite interests—has already demonstrated its willingness to curtail speech in pursuit of ideological goals. Kirk is not the only casualty of leftwing aggression, but rather an extreme and increasingly common manifestation of it. To respond with passivity to this existential threat to the Republic is to invite further erosion of liberty and our capacity to defend our nation. To be blunt, passivity in the face of extremism is suicidal empathy. You may feel sorry for the narcissist, but you don’t allow him to manipulate and mistreat you (to be sure, some do, but that indicates a mental illness in itself).
So what am I recommending? I have indicated the path forward above: bring corporations to heel using government and law. In recommending this, I want to stress that taking this path must not imitate progressive authoritarianism, but rather defend and reaffirm the principles of free expression, institutional accountability, and the rule of law. Only by holding corporations, cultural gatekeepers, and policymakers to the standards of a free republic can conservatives and liberals protect the American system from those who would dismantle it under the guise of justice. That is not suppression of speech but the liberation of speech from corporate power and street-level violence.
Ted Cruz fears that if progressives regain power, they will weaponize institutions to punish conservatives; that by tolerating this climate, conservatives will have ceded the very principle needed to defend themselves. But dialogue presumes two parties willing to engage the dialectic in good faith. Experience shows a consistent pattern: the left has little interest in mutual exchange or maintaining the rational guardrails that foster civil dialogue. There is no reservoir of goodwill to be found there, because progressives, on one side, and conservatives and liberals on the other, hold incommensurable positions on liberty and justice. Of course, one side is right, and the Constitution provides the means for making good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence. But Republicans need to assert that power.
We need to clearly identify the mob. It is not the government and its law. It is the corporation and its foot soldiers. There is a clear choice before us: either we have a free market capitalist system under the rule of law that works for the public interest, or a corporate sovereign that exists in a state of nature pursuing the narrow interests of rich and powerful elites. The former arrangement requires a constitutional republic established by men who recognize that our rights are derived from nature and not from man—and that government derives its just power from We the People. The latter is, in a word, fascism.
In a moment like this, when tensions are high, part of the job of the president is to remind us of the ties that bind us together. pic.twitter.com/4TGMufay1k
The role of propagandists is to manufacture the illusion of consensus between incommensurable standpoints when the resolution portends the negation of the other. The woke left rejects what binds us together. As I have argued in this essay, the thesis and the antithesis in this dialectic cannot result in a synthesis. I would remind people that this is not the first time in our nation’s history that we have been here.
In his opening monologue on Monday, Jimmy Kimmel addressed the killing of conservative Charlie Kirk, saying: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” At the time, it was already widely known that the shooter was an Antifa terrorist. What political points was the “MAGA gang” supposedly trying to score—raising the alarm about left-wing political violence? Kimmel’s line was a deliberate distortion, designed to mislead his audience and sustain a narrative that shields left-wing extremism.
On Thursday, one of the most virulent propagandists in network television history was suspended indefinitely. The falsehood about who killed Kirk was not Kimmel’s first foray into extremist messaging. He is the same host who openly wished death on those who used Ivermectin, suggesting they should be denied healthcare. In a notorious segment, he mocked “Wheezy,” saying: “Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in. We’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, Wheezy.” Wheezy could have been your father or grandfather. Perhaps he was. This came just months after Stephen Colbert humiliated himself dancing with syringes on The Late Show.
How did Kimmel survive this? Because he said this in the midst of the medical-industrial complex propaganda campaign to foist mRNA technology manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech (Comirnaty) and Moderna (Spikevax) on the American public, while smearing doctors and patients who used Ivermectin. After only a few seconds of research, I found that, in 2021, Big Pharma, with Pfizer and Moderna dominating the market, spent 6.88 billion dollars on direct-to-consumer advertising across all media. Linear TV (broadcast and cable) accounted for about 70 percent of Pharma TV ad spend. “Vaccine awareness campaigns” were a big part of this. Kimmel was a shill for the mRNA gene therapy campaign.
In an attempt to pin Kimmel’s suspension on President Donald Trump, CNBC misrepresented FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s remarks in the headline: “Carr says ‘we’re not done yet’ after Jimmy Kimmel suspension by ABC.” Who is “we”? Carr was clearly referring not to the government but to broadcast television as a business ecosystem. He spoke of Nexstar’s decision to preempt Kimmel’s program and described the resulting changes in the “media ecosystem” as a healthy market adjustment. Carr emphasized the broader trend: a historic shift in audience preferences away from progressive ideology, reflected in the ratings collapse now affecting linear television.
Feeling they have an opportunity to shift attention away from leftwing violence, progressives decry ABC severing ties with arguably the most loathsome cretin in broadcast history as an affront to free speech, finding yet another contrived way to depict the President as authoritarian while deflecting the actual affront to free speech: killing a human being for his words. But that’s not the only horror Kimmel’s script was designed to obscure. Kimmel’s line was also designed to disrupt his audience’s awareness that Kirk was assassinated by a killer motivated by left-wing progressive ideology manufactured by transnational corporate power, in particular that Tyler Robinson was an assassin for the doctrine of gender identity.
In mass media framing, to tie Trump to Kimmel’s cancellation, Trump is noted as having celebrated the suspension of Kimmel from the airwaves. Having called on Trump to lower the temperature, while at the same time blaming conservatives for political violence, progressives portray the President as persecuting those mocking Kirk’s death. I confess: I, too, celebrate Kimmel’s suspension. A major propagandist of the progressive corporate order is off the air. Good riddance. It’s a win for truth and reason when corporations eat their own. The President and yours truly can’t have an opinion without tying this to the specter of authoritarianism?
Disney understands the situation: Kimmel’s propaganda function was destroyed by the callousness of the television program in question. He was no longer worth the millions Disney was losing to keep him on the air. What’s the point of throwing money away if a Disney employee is no longer effective in his assigned role? As of 2025, Jimmy Kimmel’s contract with ABC is valued at 48 million dollars, with an estimated annual salary ranging between 15 and 20 million. Given this, expect more progressive television commentators to be handed pink slips.
Watch the above video of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr explaining the situation. He is clear about the role of the FCC in all this. There’s a lesson in this: you cannot trust media pundits to let Carr’s words speak for themselves in a contrived headline. You have to listen to the man’s words unfiltered. The rational default position when consuming media content is this: go to the source.
Why did viewers flipping through the channels have to suffer Kimmel for so long? This question is answered by what I’ve said already. Why were they subjected to this man in the first place? Same answer. You might otherwise wonder what executive would think Jimmy Kimmel Live! would make a good replacement for Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. Did you forget about that? Kimmel was brought in after Disney/ABC canceled Maher. Why did Disney cancel Maher? Because ABC affiliates pulled support from the program. They preempted it. Why would they drop Politically Incorrect? Maher criticized US foreign policy and elevated the reputations of the Islamic terrorists who attacked New York City and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001. He was bad for the military-industrial complex. That’s what happened to Kimmel: affiliates pulled support. Maher picked himself up and carried on. Can Kimmel?
Check this out. NBC was owned by GE at this time. This only aired once. I show this in my course, Freedom and Social Control, during the Mass Media and Propaganda unit. It explains a lot (the content is factually accurate):
For the record, the FCC can fine and restrict broadcast television for indecency, obscenity, and profanity. Outside of these categories, political or controversial viewpoints remain protected under the First Amendment. But that is beside the point. Kimmel’s suspension was ABC’s decision—he had simply become a liability.
As for Carr, he was stating a straightforward fact: Kimmel “appeared to directly mislead the American public” regarding the circumstances of Charlie Kirk’s killing. “Appeared” is a charitable way of putting the matter. That is exactly what Kimmel did—he misled the public. Carr took issue with Kimmel’s suggestion that the alleged killer was part of the “MAGA gang.” More charity. Kimmel went further than suggestion; he claimed that “the MAGA gang [was] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”
Carr reminded broadcasters that because they have licenses granted by the FCC, they have obligations to operate in the public interest. Carr has, as have his predecessors, repeatedly invoked broad principles like public interest, obligations of licensed broadcasters, and community values. This is standard regulatory language the FCC uses to define what broadcasters should do across many situations. Carr didn’t announce any specific enforcement, immediate penalty, or even that the FCC was filing paperwork.
The reality is that, in the United States, no private individual or corporation owns the airwaves. By law, and under the oversight of a democratically elected government, the airwaves are a public resource, held collectively by the American people. Carr is rightly concerned that those licensed by the FCC—and therefore accountable to the public—serve the public interest. That is the FCC’s core function. The agency has a long history of raising concerns about “public interest” or “community standards” in broadcasting. Indeed, ensuring these standards is, and has always been, the FCC’s mission.
For progressives, Kimmel has become a free speech martyr. In their telling, Trump fired him. That’s not what happened. Nexstar merely set the chain in motion. Sinclair, the nation’s largest ABC affiliate group, followed suit, stating it will not air Kimmel’s show—even if ABC decides to bring it back—unless “appropriate steps” are taken. That is their prerogative as a private media company. Sinclair has, for example, called on Kimmel to apologize. In the meantime, the affiliate will air a tribute to Kirk in Kimmel’s time slot on Friday. Prediction: Kimmel won’t be back. He is no longer a propagandist worth the tens of millions of dollars his show costs annually.
Why are progressives outraged? It cannot be about principle. Recall when Fox canceled Tucker Carlson—progressives celebrated. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, AOC clucked. Kimmel gleefully announced it to a cheering audience. Remember when NBC cancelled Megyn Kelly because she asked a discussion question about woke Halloween costume policy on college campuses? Pretext for NBC wriggling out of a 69 million dollar contract. Remember Roseanne Barr in 2018? ABC canceled Roseanne over a single tweet, then launched the spinoff The Conners, continuing the storyline with the other characters Barr created. The network even killed off her character, a Trump supporter, via drug overdose. Media outlets, commentators, and civil rights organizations hailed the cancellation as appropriate accountability. And yet, canceling Kimmel is a fascist move?
Why was Barr really canceled? As I suggested above: the show incorporated her political stance into the storyline. This was woven into her character’s working-class, Midwestern background, highlighting the political divides that can exist within a family. The political angle was deliberately provocative, sparking debates among fans. Critics argued that the storyline was polarizing and glamorized support for Trump. Those waiting to cancel the show were lying in wait, and Barr’s tweet provided the pretext. The show was commercially successful, yet ideology ultimately took precedence. This is the same ideology that puts conservative lives in danger.
Progressives defend the commercial interests of corporations that use the public airwaves to propagate messages—so long as those messages serve corporate elites and their progressive functionaries. The moment a pro-Trump perspective is broadcast—even in the context of exploring political polarization within a family, as in a dramatic comedy—a justification for cancellation can be found, no matter the show’s popularity. All in the Family was tolerated because Archie Bunker’s bigotry was presented as part of his character: an uneducated, working-class man. His humanization was designed to obscure Norman Lear’s—and Carroll O’Connor’s—intent to mock Nixon supporters. Nixon was portrayed as an authoritarian, too, but progressives in the 1970s had not yet become completely untethered to reality.
This isn’t the first time Kimmel has been canceled. Comedy Central cancelled Kimmel and The Man Show in 2004—but for the opposite reason. The show, hosted by Kimmel and Adam Carolla, featured humor centered on stereotypical “male” behavior. Comedy Central was shifting toward more “socially conscious” programming. Carolla left the show in 2003 because the show was becoming increasingly tailored to match the progressive turn in corporate politics. But Kimmel couldn’t meet the demands of the emerging woke hegemony, so Comedy Central cancelled him. Presumably, progressives supported Kimmel’s cancellation then.
Were Kimmel’s free speech rights violated when The Man Show was cancelled? Were Norm McDonald’s free speech rights violated when he was fired from Saturday Night Live for talking about O.J. Simpson? As progressives told us during COVID, corporations are not obligated to uphold the free speech rights of citizens. Kimmel and McDonald are employees. Cancelling them is accountability culture.
Certainly Kimmel supports cancelling programming with which he disagrees:
In light of their record on free speech, progressives should sit this one out. Did any of them cry “fascism” when Twitter deplatformed Trump and The New York Post or Facebook booted Alex Jones off the social media giant? All those users who were cancelled for “misgendering” deluded men who think they’re women? Those who questioned Fauci’s “science”? No. Progressives applauded all that. They demanded it. They participated in it. They doxxed and reported social media users. The social media companies they used took directives from the Biden Regime (and deep state embeds). The worst thing to ever happen was Elon Musk buying Twitter and opening it up to diverse viewpoints.
We don’t need a bunch of authoritarians lecturing us on free speech. Their angle on this is obnoxiously disingenuous.
I can hear the objections: What about the right-wing complaint about social media censorship and deplatforming? There’s no hypocrisy here. There is a distinction between linear television and social media platforms. Broadcast television operates under licenses granted by the federal government and is subject to FCC oversight. Because broadcasters use the public airwaves, they bear editorial responsibility for what is aired. Who holds them accountable? We do through our elected representatives. Cable television functions similarly in that it also exerts clear editorial discretion, much like a magazine or newspaper that decides what content to publish. In both cases, the law treats these outlets as publishers, and they are accountable for their editorial choices.
Social media platforms, by contrast, enjoy a special legal status under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The law shields them from liability for user-generated content by declaring that they are not to be treated as the publishers or speakers of material posted by their users. The content belongs to the users of the service. The justification for this immunity is that these platforms are akin to digital bulletin boards. They are not exercising—at least they are not supposed to exercise— editorial oversight in the way traditional media did; rather, they are merely providing a space built by the taxpayer for ordinary citizens to express their opinions and exchange information.
In reality, in violation of Section 230, social media companies, while benefiting from this legal immunity, exercise significant editorial control. They establish and enforce “community guidelines,” an Orwellian euphemism for editorial control, removing posts, suspending accounts, and deploying algorithms that prioritize certain kinds of content over others. This means that social media functions like publishers, despite legal claims to neutrality. Defenders of the current system—progressives and the Tech Lords—point out that Section 230 explicitly allows platforms to moderate objectionable content without forfeiting immunity. So what’s their complaint? I already told you.
Today’s Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that 53 percent of Likely US Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Progressives have managed to give Trump a ten-point swing in his negativity rating in only a handful of days. Once exposed, progressives are their own worst enemies. Just get out of their way? Give ’em the rope that they’ll hang themselves with? Sure, but keep hammering, too. It’s the hammering that has exposed them.
This is what’s really freaked out progressives: the media ecosystem has shifted under their feet. There is a seismic quake in popular sentiment. It has shifted because America has moved away from progressivism and towards democratic republicanism. Progressives have lost the culture war, their empire is crumbling, and they’re turning, not only to more extreme rhetoric, but also to political violence. This is why America is a more dangerous place for conservatives and liberals today. Violence is increasingly the progressives’ only recourse. In the end, violence will be all they have. That’s the real threat to free speech. The “free speech” hysteria on the left is nonsense. Just another self-inflicted wound.
The ever-opportunistic Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer couldn’t let Kimmel’s cancellation slide. The controversy helped Schumer get back on the “Trump’s a fascist” train. Schumer just had to swap out dictators. Now Trump is “just like Xi.” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz describes the situation as “North Korea-style stuff.” That’s rich coming from the man who said what he said in the above clip. Comparing Trump to Hitler once more needs a little space and time. They’ll get back around to it. They already are: “Hitler’s Clampdown on Free Speech and Its Lessons for Trump after Jimmy Kimmel Firing.”
Wait until RFK, Jr gets rid of pharmaceutical ads. “Corporations are people, too!”
Recent polling conducted by Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen (presented yesterday on Steve Bannon’s War Room) reveals a striking reality: a vast majority of Americans are concerned about the rise of political violence. Their concern is not unfounded. Across the Western world—from the United Kingdom to continental Europe and the United States—citizens who value their cultural traditions, historical norms, and the legacy of Western civilization are increasingly defending those principles. Yet they face determined resistance from ideological and political movements on the left, which have become ever more desperate in perpetuating what is at heart an elitist transnational corporate effort to dismantle the West.
While activists on the left resort to political violence, much of the public remains patient, placing hope in Donald Trump and the MAGA movement to restore stability. Yet the challenges to democratic republicanism may exceed the capacity of any single leader to resolve. I confess a concern for civil war.
A similar dynamic is unfolding in Europe, where governments often suppress nationalist parties and voices seeking to defend Western identity and traditions. In both Europe and the United States, powerful institutions—the administrative state, mass media, academia, and the culture industry—actively oppose popular efforts to restore traditional norms.
These institutions resist any return to the center, to normalcy: a revival of values rooted in individual rights, constitutional government, and the Enlightenment principles that made Western civilization unique—tolerant, forward-thinking, science-driven, and dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In America, the Democratic Party and the technocracy it represents play a central role in progressive resistance to the return to democracy. Despite declining popularity among broad segments of the electorate, Democrats continue—with the support of allied elites in key institutions—to resist shifts back toward centrist, liberal, and traditional values.
From a pragmatic standpoint, this resistance seems irrational. Embracing moderation could strengthen not only the nation but also the Democratic Party’s own long-term prospects. Yet its rigidity is better explained by the deeper forces shaping progressive ideology—specifically, the influence of transnational corporate power. These global elites seek to weaken Western civilization in pursuit of a globalized, hi-tech quasi-feudal order.
Image by Sora
The conflict, then, is neither merely partisan nor national. It is a global struggle between ordinary people—often caricatured by the left as “fascist”—and a transnational corporate order. Progressive movements, including those centered on “social justice,” serve as instruments of that order, obstructing national restoration and cultural renewal.
Even if many Americans do not fully understand the political-economic underpinnings of this struggle, they feel its consequences. Cultural dislocation, political violence, and social instability are not isolated incidents; they are symptoms of a larger battle. The purpose of this platform is to raise consciousness about this situation.
Mass immigration has become one of the clearest flashpoints. The large-scale influx of migrants from the developing world has disrupted traditional social norms and strained local resources in many Western communities. To many citizens, this illustrates elite disregard for the well-being of native-born populations. Growing support for mass deportation reflects that frustration.
More Americans are beginning to see that defending democracy and freedom requires concrete government action—for example, designating extremist groups like Antifa as domestic terrorist organizations and investigating their ties to transnational power structures. Leaders such as Donald Trump can play a crucial role in this effort, but only if they adopt a more assertive posture.
Trump’s announcement this morning that he is designating the far-left “anti-fascism” movement Antifa as a terrorist organization on his Truth Social platform is a promising start. Objections by mainstream media propagandists following the President’s announcement adumbrate the elite forces that stand behind domestic terrorism.
Crucially, restoring Western civilization requires action at the local level: reclaiming city councils, school boards, and other institutions from ideological capture. It demands direct confrontation with radical movements and the intellectual frameworks that legitimize them—whether Black Lives Matter, transgender activism, Antifa, or the academic doctrines of critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. Citizens must speak out against these crackpot ideas. Parents must demand that public schools quit indoctrination and return to education.
Mark Mitchell’s analysis of digital platforms such as Reddit and Discord, also presented on the War Room yesterday, highlights the urgency of this fight. Controlled by elites and worth billions of dollars, these platforms have been deliberately designed to radicalize young Americans—to foster alienation and self-hatred. They exemplify the cultural battlegrounds that any future administration committed to national renewal must directly confront. They must, of course, do this in a way that does not compromise the free speech rights of any American, but they have to take decisive action.
Today’s political crisis is not simply a matter of partisan rivalry or cultural disputes. It is part of a broader confrontation between the people of the West and transnational forces seeking to reshape the global order. While polling shows many remain hopeful—especially through the leadership of figures like Trump—the persistence of political violence underscores the depth of the struggle. Only through both strong national leadership and grassroots engagement can Western civilization defend its heritage and secure its future as a free and sovereign community of democratic republics.
freedom and reason 