freedom and reason

I sat down last night to list several of Trump’s accomplishments in the first 100 days of his second term and it turned into an essay. It happens. I’m in a groove lately.

Some will read this and ask, “Where are the criticisms?” Seriously, are you really short on criticisms of this man? Nearly everything we hear from the media and progressives is criticism—unhinged criticism. (Did you witness Rachel Maddow’s nervous breakdown last night? I will share the video at the end of this post.) All the good stuff is ignored or warped to fit the media narrative, which is decidedly anti-Trump and anti-populist, and frankly anti-American.

This isn’t a perception. Content analyses of media accounts find that the coverage of Trump is over 90 percent negative. Even Fox News is down on Trump. The garbage polls—the same suppression polls that predicted a Clinton victory in 2016 and a Harris victory in 2024—etcetera. It’s a massive propaganda blitz.

This essay is interested in presenting a review of the facts that cuts through the propaganda.

The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been nothing short of a whirlwind, marked by bold actions and tangible results that have reshaped the nation’s trajectory. Populist-nationalism has globalism and progressivism on the run. Trump’s record is a model for rank-and-file Europeans to follow.

Despite a coordinated effort by the media to obscure these successes with negative spin, the facts—here drawn from widely available sources—reveal a remarkable period of progress in a short frame. I focus on the President’s decisive actions to dismantle bureaucratic overreach, secure the border, revitalize the economy, and restore cultural and national pride. While the list is extensive, it scratches the surface of what this administration has accomplished. I’m sure Trump and his associates can give you more.

Central to Trump’s agenda, and a key reason for my support during the election, was securing the southern border and addressing illegal immigration. I have written a lot about this, so you know how I feel about it. You also know that I couldn’t be more pleased with the outcome.

The results in this area have been staggering, with illegal border crossings plummeting to historic lows, with a 96 percent decline from the Biden administration’s peak. US Customs and Border Protection reports just over 7000 southwest border crossings in March 2025, the lowest on record. Construction resumed on the US-Mexico border wall, adding to the over 400 miles built during Trump’s first term. Yes, walls work.

These measures protect American workers by curbing corporate exploitation of cheap labor and thwart attempts to manipulate the Census for political gain, preserving the cultural and national integrity of the American Republic.

Trump achieved this not through contentious legislation but via executive action, declaring a national emergency to deploy the National Guard, Armed Forces, and Coast Guard assets to the newly designated Gulf of America. He ended catch-and-release policies, reinstated the Remain in Mexico program, rebranded the CBP One app as CBP Home for self-deportation, suspended the Refugee Admissions Program for 90 days, and terminated parole programs for nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. We were told that we needed legislation to accomplish all this. We just needed a new president.

Within US borders, ICE arrests surged by over 600 percent compared to the Biden era, targeting criminal illegal immigrants like gang members and rapists, facilitated by an executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations to combat fentanyl trafficking and violent crime.

Despite interference from rogue judges, Trump’s high-profile focus on this issue has set the stage for large-scale deportations once legal obstacles are cleared. Recall my recent essay showing that Clinton, Bush, and Obama deported some thirty million illegal aliens. If Trump can check the runaway judiciary, he can add another ten million or more to that number.

Economically, Trump’s “America First” policies have delivered impressive results. Over one trillion dollars in private sector investments have poured into the country, bolstered by deregulation that saved Americans billions by rolling back Biden-era appliance efficiency standards. A sovereign wealth fund was announced to fuel long-term growth, and initiatives to boost domestic semiconductor production created thousands of high-paying jobs in states like Arizona and Ohio. Small business optimism has surged, driven by promises of tax relief and reduced compliance costs. Trump is liberating American business—and that means more jobs for Americans.

The media is trying to avoid admitting how dramatically the situation for ordinary Americans has improved under Trump. Remember when they made a big deal over inflation and egg prices? “Trump promised to bring them down!” They repeat this without telling you that he did.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) fell in March 2025, the first monthly decline in nearly five years, with annual CPI dropping to 2.4 percent and core CPI to 2.8 percent, the lowest since March 2021. Gasoline prices fell more than 6 percent from February to March, wholesale egg prices dropped 44 percent by mid-March, and prescription drug prices for Medicare and low-income Americans were slashed with an executive order. Mortgage rates declined for seven consecutive weeks.

The elite do go on about Tariffs, don’t they? This is because they’re globalists. Democrats are the party of globalization. And the media is their propaganda mouthpiece. But tariffs and external taxation built the United States. That’s Alexander Hamilton’s American System. It’s what Republicans with Lincoln at the helm restored. And Democrats destroyed.

Trump’s tariffs on imports from China, Canada, and Mexico have sparked global negotiations, encouraged domestic manufacturing and protected and created opportunities for workers in the Rust Belt that Democrats and their RINO allies devastated with globalism. While critics claim tariffs raise costs, they overlook the long-term benefits of re-shoring high-wage jobs, decoupling from authoritarian regimes like China, and prioritizing American workers over transnational corporations. New data show that, far from being inflationary, tariffs are reducing commodity prices.

Trump’s commitment to dismantling the administrative state, another priority on my list during the campaign, saw significant progress through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk. Musk is loathed by progressives, but the reality is that DOGE achieved tens of billions in savings by cutting waste, fraud, and federal programs. This is why progressives loathe Musk so. A hiring ratio of one new employee per four departures was implemented, and the Federal Executive Institute (training ground for bureaucrats and technocrats) was shuttered.

These moves, executed through a slew of executive orders, memorandums, and proclamations advanced the deconstruction of bureaucratic overreach and technocratic control. This is democracy in action.

Those who have followed me know that I have a long history as an environmentalist. I still am, but I have learned a lot about energy and the environment since then and have come to realize much of what I believed was naïve and, frankly, reactionary. A decade ago, I might have cringed when Trump expanded offshore drilling, opened Alaska for exploration, and ended Biden’s electric vehicle mandate and inefficient 7.5 billion dollar charging program, earning praise from the American Petroleum Institute (API) and automotive workers for boosting energy production, economic growth, and protecting American jobs.

Why would I care that the API would support Trump’s policy? Because we cannot be energy independent or run our society without fossil fuels. I came to this conclusion before Trump was elected. The reality is that we can’t replace oil and gas with windmills. And, while solar is promising, without advancements in batteries, tapping the sun is impractical. It may shock you to learn that I also believe in nuclear power, but that’s a long-range goal. Those take time to build. In the meantime, we must rely on gas and oil.

I have become a global warming skeptic, especially the goal of carbon-neutrality (humans breathe, after all, and the Earth is greener than it was twenty years ago). What the focus needs to be on is clean air, soil, and water. We must get forever chemicals out of our environment, and with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in the administration, we finally have the right focus.

Combating woke policies was a top priority for me, and Trump delivered by banning males from women’s sports and abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, affirmative action, and critical race theory across federal agencies, fostering a merit-based, colorblind society. These reforms, alongside border security and economic revitalization, will be among Trump’s most significant accomplishments.

A big part of this is rededication to freedom of religion, speech, and the press. The reality is that, while Democrats have become ever more oppressive in these areas, the Republicans have become ever more devoted to the liberal principles to which I have always subscribed.

I confess, cryptocurrency is not something I’m up on, but like AI, I realize that the world is changing, and that instead of resisting the things we cannot reverse, it is better to lean into them and lead. In reviewing matters, I learned that, in the digital realm, Trump positioned the US as a global leader by lifting cryptocurrency restrictions, establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, creating a US Digital Asset Stockpile, hosting the first White House Digital Assets Summit, and forming a Presidential Working Group on Digital Asset Markets. This is the future, and I am impressed by how aware Trump is on such matters—at 78 years of age.

On a radical note, given that AI and robotization will in time replace human labor, if we can prevent the globalist regression into neofeudalism, liberation from necessary labor and the reorganization of society that will entail promises a new social order in which Maslow’s hierarchy becomes a reality for all. (To be sure, I have concerns, but as I noted above, that’s not the point of this review.)

And then there’s Trump’s cabinet, which was confirmed at a record pace with 11 nominees approved in just 16 days—including Marco Rubio (State), John Ratcliffe (CIA), Kristi Noem (Homeland Security), and Scott Bessent (Treasury). This is an impressive lot. Perhaps more impressively, Trump appointed prominent liberals like Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services) to major positions in his administration. Democrats tried to stop it, but Trump created a twenty-first century “team of rivals.”

Gabbard restructured the National Counterterrorism Center to target terrorists and drug-smuggling gangs, referring over 1,000 individuals for arrest and deportation, ended DEI in the ODNI, and exposed operatives undermining the administration. Kennedy launched the “Make America Healthy Again” commission to prioritize wellness, engaging senators in data-driven health policy reforms. And he is engaged in a comprehensive review of food additives and vaccines.

Attorney General Pam Bondi reformed the Justice Department to address politicization of government and facilitated the deportation of over 20,000 illegal immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated woke military policies, driving Army recruitment to a 15-year high, while supporting women in combat roles and outlining plans to counter China in the Indo-Pacific. Also, veterans benefited from Hegseth’s efforts to streamline VA healthcare.

And did you hear? Rubio has announced the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) office, previously known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), because it censored Americans. The office, which cost taxpayers over 50 million dollars annually, had shifted from its original mission of countering foreign disinformation—such as terrorist propaganda from groups like ISIS or state-sponsored narratives from Russia and China—to targeting domestic speech. It did so through a network of NGOs. (Musk told us how the scheme works.) The program spent millions to censor and silence citizen’s voices—government-sponsored censorship that violated free speech principles.

The office funded organizations and technologies that blacklisted conservative media outlets, such as The Daily Wire and The Federalist, impacting their revenue by pressuring social media platforms to deplatform them or suppress content. This has been known for a while. A lawsuit filed by these outlets and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2023 accused the State Department of funding censorship infrastructure (we need more Ken Paxton types in government). Mike Benz has been telling us about this for a long time. Finally we have a government in place that listen.

Additional achievements include releasing the JFK assassination files, restoring service members discharged over COVID-19 vaccine refusals, and designating English as the official language. Trump secured the release of American hostages from Afghanistan, Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and Hamas, and facilitated the arrest of the terrorist behind the 2021 Abbey Gate attack that killed 13 US service members. His transition team brokered a Gaza ceasefire with plans to rebuild the region economically. And progress is being made in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. China is being isolated, and this weakens Iran.

Contrary to the psy-ops being run by the media and the Democratic Party, Trump’s first 100 days have been a masterclass in decisive leadership, delivering on promises to secure the border, revitalize the economy by restoring the American System, dismantle bureaucratic excess, and restore national pride. When one says Trump is playing 4D chess, he is often mocked. But this is because Trump is precisely doing that. There is a method to his madness.

Are there criticisms of Trump that one might form? Sure. But over against the accomplishments, it is hard to imagine how they could negate a remarkable 100 days. One would in any case have to admit to the accomplishments I have identified. Of course, there are those who wish the accomplishments did not occur; these are things progressives oppose (in part because it’s Trump who is accomplishing them). But these accomplishments were what the majority voted for on November 5, 2024.

Trump voters knew what they were getting—and they’re getting what they wanted. They are frustrated by the determined resistance of the establishment (and they should be), but the rhetoric that Trump voters are experiencing “buyer’s remorse” is a myth manufactured by a corporate propaganda apparatus desperate to drive down support for the man. The elite want you to focus on the negative, while ignoring the fact that Democrats are more unpopular than they have ever. If the election were held today, the outcome November 24 would be the same. The media dare not admit this.

As I noted in a post this morning, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 47 percent of likely US Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Fifty-one percent disapprove. That’s just over half. Pretty normal given the political split in our country (and Independents tend to be volatile attitude-wise). Only last week Trump’s approval was over 50 percent. It will likely be that again. We’ll see.

I also point out this morning that, if you dig into the crosstabs, what you’ll find pulling down Trump’s numbers are college educated white women. It’s an interesting phenomenon in American society that working class people support a Republican president— and even college, educated white men, albeit not by much. But by double digits, college educated white women don’t like him. Who is more likely overrepresented in these polls? Even in Rasmussen polling? Who is more likely to take a phone call from a pollster? There is no buyer’s remorse.

It is important to ask whose opinion is more important. Professional white women and the credentialed class? Or working-class Americans? Trump represents the working class. Odd that he is so hated by those who claim the working class as their choice of comrades. I call bullshit on their announced sympathies. It’s just pretense. They think working people are hobbits. Deplorables. Mouth-breathers.

Oh, before I do, the matter of stock market volatility. Yes, it is volatile. Markets go up and they go down. Is the Wall Street crowd unhappy—the rich investors who control 90 percent of investments? Yes. They want a globalize economy. They hate the American System. That’s obvious; they’re the crowd that engineered free trade.

Yet we have the middle class throwing the stock market in our faces as Exhibit A in how awful Trump is. Yet another indicator that those who claim the working class as their choice of comrades don’t really view the worker as an ally. Manufactured working class affinity is a hegemonic strategy.

The credentialed class comprise the same strata that portrays working class resistance to lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, and forced vaccination programs as backwards and ignorant. RFK, Jr gave children in Texas measles, you know. It’s the same strata that wants immigrants to clean their houses and landscape their lawns and babysit their kids. They don’t want a powerful industrial economy and safe neighborhood that benefit working families because they live in la-la land. Let them eat cake. They marvel at windmills. And virtue signal over race and gender. Trump is the embodiment of the thing they hate most: a rich man who stands with working class Americans.

* * *

This is the Rachel Maddow clip I noted at the outset of this video. This is a broken person talking. The Trump administration is not deporting American citizens. Yes, they arrested a judge—who broke the law. Nobody is above the rule of law. Not even judges. (I’d like to say especially judges, but that would suggest some degree of inequality before the law.)

Maddow has deluded herself into believing that the country is against Trump because paid protestors and lunatics are on the streets protesting him. Remember BLM? These days, there’s a mob looking for a reason to be seen. Narcissism is pathological in our society. TikTok. OnlyFans. “Look at me!” It’s the Century of the Self. These are the same people who celebrate Islamism and Hamas. The same people who think that through a kind of strange alchemy (slogans) men can become women.

Cluster B types and true believers now represents the American majority? I don’t think so. I think most Americans are grounded. God, I hope so. But an alarming number of them aren’t. Get ready to the threat to democracy those people pose. That’s the real peril we face.

You’re a “loser” if you don’t “stand up to Trump.” That’s what Maddow says. “You’re a loser.” How junior high. Apropos for the woman who likely sat at the mean girls table (at least I can picture her there). She thinks that lawfare is a barometer of justice. No, Rachel, thwarting the will of the people is antidemocratic. And Trump is doing what to Social Security?

Maddow suggests that the trans issue—which the majority of American agree with Trump on—will split the public from Trump. She thinks that immigration—which the majority of American agree with Trump on—will split the public from Trump. I don’t think so.

Maddow is nowhere near the real world. If you watched this and found yourself agreeing with Maddow, then bless your heart. Please come back to Earth. You’re leaving the planet. And you don’t have a rocket ship.

Meanwhile, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 48 percent of likely US voters approve of President Trump’s job performance, up from his low of 47 percent. This may surprise you that his low wasn’t so low. It might also surprise you that, in the most accurate polling, Trump has been above 50 percent most of the time. That’s because the media hammered an engineered poll into your head yesterday to crowd out accurate reporting on Trump’s first 100 days. To use Democrat talking points, the first 100 days were “chaos” and “confusion” and “corruption.” Ah, alliteration.

(Are these folks unaware that when they all come on X and use the exactly same words that they confirm it’s a coordinated propaganda push? It’s not as if all their posts don’t appear in our timeline.)

* * *

As a sociologist (with considerable training in psychology), it’s a fascinating thing to watch this Trump derangement syndrome. Knowing what lies behind it makes it even more fascinating. That’s me being the objective rational observer. But I’m also politically interested. Obviously.

There are essentially two positions with respect to America’s fate. One is Americanism, i.e., the vision of the founders (and Lincoln) and the desire to preserve and advance the vision. The other is globalization, which rejects the founder’s vision and seeks to deconstruct the American Republic for the sake of transnational corporate power, privilege, and profit. Globalists want to erase the modern nation-state.

Trump is with the founders and Lincoln. Obviously. So if you’re pro-America, then you support his agenda. If you’re globalist, then you have to find a way to undermine the restoration project—since globalism was well on its way thanks to Democrats and RINOs—and that means finding ways to delegitimize him. Lie about him. Incite mob violence (right JB Pritzker?). Prosecute him (700 years in prison). Groom assassins even. Whatever, you can’t admit to wanting the managed decline of the American Republic. You can’t admit to globalism because people love their country and the idea of America and they don’t want to lose their way of life to the totalitarian Chinese model of social control—or Islamism. As long as the legacy media controlled the narrative, most Americans didn’t know it was happening. Now they do. (Thanks, Elon.)

The globalists can’t admit their agenda precisely because Americans love their country and that’s a huge problem for them. They have to separate the people from the leader who represents their interests and sentiments. So they try to make Trump out to be an authoritarian who lies beyond the bounds of the acceptable—as a threat to democracy. Remember? He’s “weird.”

But the people aren’t buying it. Even if you suppose that only a minority of Americans support Trump, it will still be a sizable minority, tens of millions of people (77 million as we saw in 2024), and while you can fool some of the people most of the time, you can’t fool them forever. (Okay, you can fool some of them forever.)

The attempt to sustain the ruse has reached a crisis point because everything they try fails. But they can’t stop, since that would have them admitting to their ambitions. They’re in a real pickle. Many of us know what their ambitions are, but they depend on a significant proportion of the population not getting it. But persistence in the bamboozle clues more and more of the population into their ambitions everyday. At this point, everything they do is counterproductive—it exposes them. That they thought a blue suit would be a rallying point tells us how deluded they’ve become. Or maybe they’re bubblized. In their circles, they have convinced themselves that lies are truths. Whatever. It’s one panic after another. They’re wrecking themselves. And with every panic, more Americans are saying to themselves, “Wait a minute. What? A blue suit?”

Remember Chicken Little? That.

Trump is really just a businessman from Queens who loves his country and believes in the American System. He’s been the same ever since we’ve known him. I’m sixty-three years old. I’ve been watching this whole time. I was never in the globalist crowd. Trump has always worn a suit (usually blue) and tie. He’s always done his spaz routine (he doesn’t mock disabled people). He’s the same person to everybody. He doesn’t put on a flannel shirt to condescend to the ordinary America. That’s why the people like him.

In retrospect, of course he was going to be president. He had future president written all over him. He was fine with elites until he ran for the office. Then, what he always told us he believed, became a problem. Because he genuinely loves America. And now he’s president—again. The globalists threw everything they could at him and the people still elected him—twice. And when they try to say that’s because a majority of Americans are stupid, they lose their claim to representing the people—and democracy (which of course they don’t believe in). They just alienate the masses they thought they had under their thumb.

Hillary Clinton called working class people “a basket of deplorables.” Remember that? She said the quiet part out loud. That’s what the elites think of ordinary Americans. Trump doesn’t think that about the people. He’s an American along with the rest of us. Clinton’s not. She is a globalist. She’s with the oligarchs. She’s not like the rest of us. Neither is Biden. Nor Harris. Or all the rest of the globalists. They’re alien to the Creed.

In the end, the globalists are delegitimizing themselves, and their attempt to re-legitimize themselves—to cover their agenda—just delegitimizes them further. At this point, they look insane. If you read the constant X postings of the Lincoln Project you only see crazy people now. See above: Rachel Maddow looks like a person who’s lost touch with reality. The anti-Trump posts on X are completely unhinged. And it is the same crowd that believes in the craziest things, such as “transwomen are women.” It’s an insane asylum on that side. Not just the rank-and-file. The people running the asylum.

Remember what Nietzsche said about insanity? That.

We might be kind and say that they’re not insane, that there’s some method to their madness, and to some extent there is (which means they’re psychopaths), but at this point they’ve worked their way so far into a corner that they can’t get out. They’re now just clawing at the air like Melanie Daniels in Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds—albeit Daniels derangement was temporary. I don’t think Maddow is ever coming home. Or Joy Reid. (Maybe Reid was never hooked up right to begin with—which tells you a lot about the folks who hired her.)

Trump derangement syndrome is a very real thing. That clawing at the air makes people dangerous. For some, like Daniels, it’s not permanent. So perhaps there’s hope. On the other hand, it means they were predisposed to bamboozlement, like those who called for lockdowns and mandates during the last pandemic (trust me, they’ll be another coming along sooner or later). Some will never regain their sanity, and any Trump-like figure that comes along will find them clawing at the air again. And we will see it for what it is.

Either way, these folks do not have what’s best for America in mind. We need to keep the lot of them away from power. Vote Republican in the midterms like the future of your country depends on it. Because it does.

“We have to be honest with the American people. We are going to have to deal with the reality that people who are here illegally will be deported. That’s the law. And it’s something that we have to enforce.”—Barack Obama

I snagged the chart from the Migration Policy Institute. The number of deportations under Obama were lower overall than the two prior administration, but note the emphasis on removals relative to returns.

What’s the difference between removals and returns? Removals are formal deportations where an individual is ordered to leave the United States by an immigration judge or through a legal process. The individual must be removed from the US after they have been apprehended by immigration authorities, e.g., Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Returns are voluntary departures where an individual agrees to leave the US without the formal deportation process. This happens when a person is apprehended but not formally removed through a legal proceeding. Instead, the individual is allowed to return to their home country without facing an official removal order. This process is handled primarily by CBP.

With respect to these numbers, we should reflect on how few illegal aliens were returned and removed during Trump’s first term. During Trump’s first go around, ICE deported approximately 935,000 individuals, including removals and returns. That’s remarkably low given the hysteria over Trump’s immigration policy. Remember the moral panic? Trump was Hitler. He was throwing brown people into concentration camps. The regime was separating families. The CBO were brownshirts. ICE were Gestapo.

It’s weird, because I lived through Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and I don’t remember any hysteria over returns and deportations during their presidencies. Sure, there were those who complained. But there was no hysteria. During Clinton’s second term, deportations averaged 1.7 million a year—nearly twice as many as Trump deported during his entire first term. Where was the moral panic?

What explains such a drastically different perception and reaction? I explained this in a recent article, but I will summarize my conclusion here. But before I do, I need to emphasize that it is not a party thing. Trump and Bush are both Republicans. Yet the response to their immigration policies were radically different.

The progressive media carried Bush in many respects. They clearly favored him in 2000 in his run against Gore. Their coverage of the steal in Florida favored Bush. They perpetuated the WMD lies and were cheerleaders for the Second Gulf War (just as they were cheerleaders for the First Gulf War). They promoted the Swift Boat smear against the Kerry campaign. They obscured the irregularities in that election.

There’s a reason why the media treated Bush and Trump differently. Trump is a populist and a nationalist and therefore a direct threat to the globalist agenda. In contrast, George Bush was a globalist and a neoconservative, which the progressive media promote. It isn’t because Trump is a Republican, but the wrong kind of Republican.

Which brings us to the explanation: the globalist agenda has moved into the next phase: open borders and mass immigration in order to disorganize nation-states. We see this in Europe, as well. There, the Islamization of the West is more obvious. But it’s a happening here, as well.

When Clinton, Bush, and Obama deported tens of millions from America this was useful because that was the phase of transnationalization focused on regional and global trade agreements, entrenching the global financial system, and offshoring capital and work to export processing zones across the Third and Second (then no longer communist) Worlds. It was useful to appear to have the back of the American worker by being tough on immigrants, cover while they were destroying the industrial base on which the American worker depended. They made up for the devastation with cheap products from China, as well as easy money and credit cards.

Having established the foundation of the New World Order, the second shoe to drop is the creation of a borderless world. This explains the manufactured hysteria over Trump’s policies. Through the use of the universal injunction and hobbling Trump’s presidency, globalists have effectively thwarted his immigration policies.

It was Joe Biden’s role to open the borders. He telegraphed the strategy during the 2020 debates. In so many words, he told immigrants and the human trafficking networks to get ready—immigrants were welcome in America. Schumer went on the record saying that, because native fertility rates are so low, we needed immigrants to replenish our ranks. Biden’s pick of Alejandro Mayorkas was a signal to the traffickers.

Today, they’re coming after Trump even more aggressively on the matter of immigration. They have to keep the millions that flooded into our country here—to make voters of them, to drive down the wages of native-born workers, and to disorganize communities. Trump is confronting a vast apparatus that is driving down his popularity by making it difficult for him to deliver on his campaign promises.

And that means that the apparatus is making it difficult for the electorate to have what they voted for.

The progressive media frame that Trump is now deporting two-year-old US citizens is among the more troubling frames yet. Not troubling because it’s true. At best it’s a gross misrepresentation of the situation. No, troubling because of how audacious the misrepresentation is. The argument that Trump deported US citizens is particularly egregious. One has to abandon basic reason to sustain the frame. It’s naked propaganda.

Suppose a German citizen who has lived in the United States for a number of years and while here has a child. Under the current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the child enjoys birthright citizenship. The German citizen decides to go home to Germany. Is she going to leave her child in America because the child is an American citizen? It’s hard to imagine that she would. She is the child’s mother. I know if I were to move to another country, I’d take my kids with me.

You might be interested to learn that the child in this scenario is automatically a German citizen because Germany’s nationality law, like most nationality laws, is based on descent (jus sanguinis), not place of birth (jus soli). In other words, there is nothing controversial about a German woman living in America returning to her homeland with her two-year-old German child. A German family is going home to Germany—their language, their culture, their nation.

The same thing holds if this were a case of deportation. Suppose, for whatever reason, the German citizen is deported to Germany. She’s wants her child to be with her. Her child is a German citizen to boot. So naturally the child goes with her. The government isn’t “deporting a two-year-old American citizen.” The government is deporting a German citizen who is taking her German child back with her to Germany.

My hypothetical is identical to the case of the Honduran citizen with the two-year-old Honduran child born in America. The woman is being deported. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) asks her if she wants the child to go home with her or have the child placed with another family. She wants to take the child home with her to Honduras. After all, like Germany, Honduras reckons citizenship by descent, therefore the child is a Honduran citizen. A Honduran family goes home to Honduras—their language, their culture, their nation.

Obviously the Honduran woman did not have a legitimate claim to asylum. True, Honduras isn’t the land of opportunity that the United States is (albeit cities like San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa do have areas with a growing middle class), but it’s not an abandoned airstrip on a remote island. You know how progressives rage whenever anybody describes the Third World countries as “shit-hole countries”? Surely progressives aren’t saying that Honduras is a shit-hole country. It sounds like, though.

And what about family separation? Do they want Honduran children staying in America without their mothers? That sounds like a historical desire that Democrats would find repellant (at least based on their rhetoric). Then again, the way things are going, with families increasingly depicted as traditional ways of organizing society best left to the past, who knows. Maybe don’t ask the mother whether she will take her child back with her to Honduras then. Maybe ask the two-year-old child. If she can know her gender identity, then she can know whether she wants to be in Honduras with her mom or in America with God knows who.

What about the cases of Honduran children with cancer? The progressive media are advancing this line, too. Not a big deal for our German citizen in the hypothetical scenario, since Germany has universal health care and, were her child to have cancer, it would be taken care of. But did you know that in Honduras there a thing called the Ministry of Health (SESAL), as well as a thing called the Honduran Social Security Institute (IHSS)? SESAL and (IHSS) provides free healthcare services to Honduran citizens. Guess what else they have in Honduras? Cancer treatment. Not quite the shit-hole country progressives thought it was.

This is a typical feature of propaganda. It’s like showing Trump in a blue suit at the Pope’s funeral and suggesting that blue suits are disrespectful and Trump is the only one in attendance wearing a blue suit. Not only are facts excluded, but the assumption is false. Here we are told that Trump is deporting two-year-old American citizens to God knows where without informing the audience that the children are Honduran citizens whose parents are being deported. When elites control the propaganda apparatus they can make nothing-to-see-here into all-important-things. They take the ordinary and make is extraordinary. It’s like a magic trick. It’s sleight-of-hand.

The propaganda frame makes it sound like ICE is snatching little children riddled with cancer from their parents and sending them off to some totalitarian hellhole. Again, Honduras isn’t paradise (where is paradise?), but it has a functioning democracy and rather forward leaning politics. Xiomara Castro, elected in 2021, is the first female president of Honduras. She’s a member of the Liberal Party. These Honduran kids are going to be fine in Honduras. Will you stop believing in progressive media already?

As an aside (maybe not), you might remember that Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, refused to comply with a Supreme Court order, which led to the 2009 Honduran coup d’état. The day after the army removed him from office, the Honduran Congress impeached him. He deserved it for disobeying the Supreme Court, right? I don’t know. Soon after the coup, US President Barack Obama issued a statement: “We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras, the democratically elected president there.”

Put in a pin in that for when Trump refuses to comply with a Supreme Court order (they’re already lying to you by saying he already did) and Congress impeaches him (which is what will happen if folks put Democrats in charge of the House two years from now) and the US Army ousts him. He won’t receive the Zelaya treatment.

No one is above the law, Democrats chanted in lockstep in reference to their persecution of President Donald Trump. But the hypocrisy of Democrats is unbounded. Democrats are condemning the arrest of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, warning it could threaten the rule of law.

Dugan is accused of obstructing a US agency and concealing an individual to prevent his arrest. On April 18, 2025, she allegedly helped Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an illegal Mexican immigrant facing charges of battery, evade arrest by federal immigration officials at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. According to the criminal complaint, Dugan, after becoming aware of the presence of ICE agents, directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney to exit her courtroom through a non-public jury door, delaying his arrest. The charges carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a 350,000 dollar fine.

The hypocrisy is easy to explain. More than operating with double standards, progressives see the judiciary and the administrative state—when it carries forward their agenda—the same way Islamists see theocracy. Rule by clerics and technocrats is the antithesis of liberalism and republicanism. But this is the world Democrats want Americans to in.

The goal of a one-party state led by Democrats is to acquire power to put in place judges and administrators who advance progressive ideology. This is what lies behind the strategy of open borders. It’s why Democrats are especially outraged by the arrest of judges who interfere with deportation. Democrats want to keep every illegal alien in America, even terroristic gang members, because they believe that most of them will vote for Democrats out of appreciation for allowing them to enter and stay in our country. Deportation is a direct threat to the party’s objective. And so, Trump is an “authoritarian.” That means that democracy and the rule of law don’t matter. And that means they never do except as instruments for advancing the progressive agenda.

DEAR DEMOCRATS, who are furious with the FBI arresting 2 judges in the past 24H.

Why don't you listen to your media?

"No person is above the law."

"No man is above the law."

"No one is above the law."

"Nobody is above the law."pic.twitter.com/3J499aLbWf

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 25, 2025

To cut through the fog of ideology, controlling immigration is a federal obligation—and it is necessary: without control over our borders and who is allowed to be in our country, we have no country. Judges that interfere with deportation efforts are activists in the globalist project to erase borders. They should be removed and their courts defunded or abolished. If they break the law, then they should be arrested and prosecuted.

There is nothing authoritarian about any of this. Nationalism is not inherently authoritarian in character. Nationalism is a set of moral and political principles centered on the belief that a group of people who share a common identity—through culture, ethnicity, history, and language—should form a sovereign nation-state. Every patriotic American should be a nationalist. More than this, every person who believes in the Enlightenment project should be a nationalist.

A child of the Enlightenment, the modern nation-state emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Enlightenment ideas about popular sovereignty, combined with the revolutionary experience of overthrowing aristocracy, led to peoples redefining themselves as nations of citizens rather than subjects of a king. The modern rule of law emerges from this arrangement. Liberalism and republicanism represent the apex of this development. Lose these and lose freedom.

Progressives’ fellow travelers give away the game. Today on X, none other than arch-neoconservative Bill Kristol writes: “If they were arresting judges in another country with an authoritarian-inclined (even if democratically elected) government, we’d be alarmed.”

Note that Kristol, who has for a long time now aligned his opinions with Democrats and progressives (really, there is no light between neoconservatives and Democrats, since the former is merely the rebranding of Cold War progressivism), doesn’t care if the government was democratically elected. He doesn’t believe in republicanism. He only believes in advancing the progressive cause. This might sound odd given that Kristol is a neoconservative. But the reality is that, in light of common elitism, neoconservatism easily converges with progressivism.

Recall what Kristol’s father, Irving, the “father of neoconservatism,” once said: “What’s the point in being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?” This is the heart of neoconservatism: to use U.S. military power to usher in a New World Order. And neoconservatism is merely the rebranding of Cold War progressivism.

I responded to the son’s post that, if another country were arresting judges who were illegally thwarting the will of the electorate, then we would be applauding. This is because we believe in the rule of law and democracy. We’d be alarmed if the United States supported anti-democratic forces that were thwarting the will of the people of that country. But this is what neoconservatives desire: the overthrow of popular governments and the installation of regimes that carry out the imperialist agenda. We have been alarmed about this many times.

Frankly, I don’t see how such an interpretation even crosses the mind of anybody who claims to believe in democracy and the rule of law. It rather exposes an authoritarian mind. Kristol doesn’t like Trump and his agenda, which the populace voted for, because it stymies imperialism, so it’s authoritarian. This is typical of neoconservative framing. Governments that do the bidding of corporate elites are “democratic.” Those that resist global corporate power are “authoritarian.” This is an Orwellian projection. Kristol, like progressives, desires the rise of the judicocracy and lawlessness because these are means to stifle democracy. His is the mind of a cleric, not a republican.

This is how something called the “Democracy Project” can arise with the premise that the United States has a moral duty to spread democracy (here a euphemism for corporatism) worldwide, even by military force if necessary. Neoconservatives, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, dressed imperialism in American values—capitalism, democracy, and human rights—and portrayed these values as universal, arguing that promoting them abroad would make the world more stable and secure—and serve America’s interests.

But these are not America’s interests. These are not America’s values. Not the coded version, that is. Decoded, these are the interests and ambitions of transnational corporations and world financial organizations.

Readers should know that the guiding light of neoconservatism, political philosopher Leo Strauss believed that classical political philosophy (supplanted in the progressive mind with postmodernist notions of power, but with the same attitude) contained hidden truths accessible only to the elite. The masses needed guiding myths to maintain social order. 

If that sounds like the thinking of Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr there’s a reason for that: they all represent the same broader cultural and political shift in elite circles. Lippmann, in Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), argued that the average citizen was too uninformed and emotionally driven to truly participate in rational democratic decision-making. Democracy, he argued, needed to be managed by a knowledgeable elite—experts, journalists, and technocrats—who could interpret reality for the public and manipulate them towards the right ends. Likewise, Niebuhr, a theologian and political thinker, emphasized the limits of human reason and virtue, advancing a “Christian realism,” wherein such idealistic projects as democracy and peace would always fail. Thus, leaders had to balance moral ideals with the reality of power—often requiring myth to maintain social order. Both Lippmann and Niebuhr were progressives.

Like the followers of Lippmann and Niebuhr, Straussians interpreted their man’s ideas as justifying an assertive role for elites in shaping political life—including the promotion of democracy (as so warped) abroad as part of a larger civilizational mission. This interpretation heavily influenced the architects of the so-called “Democracy Project” in US foreign policy after the Cold War. But the mission wasn’t spreading civilization, but entrenching the power and privilege of the New Aristocracy. 

Like Lippmann, Niebuhr, Strauss, and his father, Kristol is an organic intellectual for the New Aristocracy. He’s an elitist and a globalist. He is a neoconservative. Democrats are neoconservative. They align with progressivism. Those who want to protect the American Republic need to get that straight in their heads.

We can focus on the political economic dynamics that lead to change at the macro level. Indeed, we must. However, we mustn’t neglect the cultural ideological side of the struggle for power or fail to recognize to which class the sides ally.

The attitude of organic intellectual serving the interests of the corporate class—academics, entertainers, mass media—is one that privileges the exotic and the foreign. The fetishes here are Islam, queer, and race. This comes with loathing of the ordinary and the traditional.

Having been established centuries ago, the ordinary and the traditional have been modernist in orientation. Correspondingly, its intellectuals are traditionalist, not merely from settling into a new epoch, but in carrying over the importance of family and community. The desire for the exotic and the foreign is a postmodernist attitude. Its proponents hate family and culture and the liberal and republican values that define the modern age.

This schism is, of course, tied to the political economic dynamic, wreaking havoc on capitalist relations and the international system of modern nation states and raising among the ruins a transnational corporate state. The postmodern attitude is thus an expression of globalism and corporate power over against the nation, state and popular power.

The situation is at once revolutionary and counterrevolutionary—revolutionary in the sense that the corporatist system is struggling to break free of the reins of the capitalist mode of production; counterrevolutionary because it opposes the Enlightenment that stymies what lies beyond it: the reestablishment of a type of feudalist mode of production, where the proletariat is returned to serfdom, its fate determined on estates governed by lords. To be sure, the estates are high tech, and the lords are corporations, but the basic arrangement is the same—it is a condition of unfreedom. The corporatist revolution is therefore counterrevolutionary in the sense that it is atavistic and regressive.

Having recognized all this (which assumes the political economic dynamic of world historical change), we need also to study the process by which the cultural-ideological program of the corporatists is established. The strategy is slick, but once you grasp it, you have another means beyond content criticism to delegitimize it.

It’s not enough to criticize ideas—though that’s necessary—we must also expose how corporate elites and their army of intellectuals inject those ideas into the bloodstream of the body politic. For example, how did woke progressives infuse public education with gender ideology and make a disruptive and destructive praxis appear normal and necessary? Gender ideology is but one tentacle of the octopus, but it serves as a useful example. so we shall begin there. 

Here’s how the process unfolds:

• First, elites colonize the governing, policymaking, and sense-making activities and institutions with progressive operatives—academic, administrative, cultural, educational, judicial, and media-based. In short, they capture the hegemonic machinery. Today, progressivism commands the machinery.
• The elites and intellectuals then spend years crafting a comprehensive ideology and a new way of speaking about reality—what we might describe as language contamination. This mirrors what George Orwell called “Newspeak” in 1984. This ideology, traceable over the past several decades, was manufactured by academics and activists. The repurposing of the concept of gender, heretofore a synonym for sex, to refer to an unfalsifiable subjective identity is the paradigm of the strategy.
• Next, they install this ideology at every level of the hegemonic machinery and normalize it—treating it as if it has always been part of our institutions or at least the result of a long social justice struggle finally won by those who stand on the right side of history. This requires, among other things, historical revisionism. A notable tactic here is the practice of rendering as false what everyone knew was true until a few decades ago, and to portray that truth as the product of an evil hegemonic system that demands deconstruction. This tactic mystifies the strategy by projecting its intent onto those who defend history and science, thus creating fake legitimacy.
• Finally, when the public pushes back, the new order labels them bigots for resisting—even questioning—what has allegedly always been normal, portray modernists as conspiracy theorists and paranoids. And, of course, bigots.

The first three steps prepare the ground for the fourth: portraying those who object to a novel and destructive ideology as narrow-minded and reactionary. It flips the burden—no longer do ideologues have to explain why gender ideology should guide our institutions. Instead, the onus falls on dissenters to justify their objections. It makes a crackpot idea appear rational while making rational people seem like crackpots.

* * *

I’ve spent years debunking the core claims of gender ideology and exposing its harmful consequences. This is a necessary task. I knew I’d be accused of bigotry when I went public with my conclusions, but gender ideology is so destructive that silence wasn’t an option.

When I decided to speak out, I asked myself a question I believe all of us are obliged to ask: could I live with my conscience if I stayed passive in the face of a campaign to disrupt ordinary, common-sense understandings of gender—and all the lies and atrocities that come with it? Puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Disfiguring surgeries. Sterilization. I thought about lobotomies and other horrors once pushed by the medical establishment. I thought about the medical experiments Nazi doctors performed on Jewish children. Brave people speaking out were essential to ending those practices (war was necessary in the case of the Nazis). Who today would defend destroying an adolescent’s frontal lobe to make the boy more compliant? The Nuremberg Code spoke loudly about the crimes of the national socialists. Somebody had to speak out. The machinery of justice had to act. Today, those whistleblowers are seen as heroes. The German doctors in the dock at Nuremberg are universally recognized as villains (but not those who escaped justice).

I thought about gay kids being manipulated into believing they’re the opposite sex—setting them on a path that would destroy their lives. I thought about the girls and women losing their spaces and opportunities to boys and men, whether deceiving or deluded (there’s no objective way to tell the difference). Had I stayed silent, knowing what I now know, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror.

I know not everyone is ready to stand on the ground of truth and face the mob. The consequences for doing so can be severe. The mob is scary. But it only takes a few people to create mutual knowledge. And courage is contagious. 

Still, to delegitimize gender ideology, we must do more than critique its claims. We must show how we arrived at this moment. That requires critical historical analysis and systems thinking. Gender ideology isn’t unique. The same strategy was used to re-racialize American society after the civil rights victories of the mid-twentieth century. It’s been used to delegitimize Western civilization, elevate corporate scientism over democratic science, and install technocracy in place of republican governance.

These strategies are manifest not only in gender ideology, but also in critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and other postmodern doctrines—advanced not by grassroots radicals, but by transnational elites and corporations. The so-called grassroots radical may be a true believer, a professional activist, or suffering from a Cluster-B personality disorder, but together they form the reactionary mob, trained up by the hegemonic apparatus. In a significant extent, the counterrevolution has succeeded, which makes the resistance appear counterrevolutionary.

To save Western civilization, we must root these doctrines out of our governing and sense-making institutions. To preserve freedom, reason, science, the West, our families, our way of life, the public must understand not just that these are dangerous ideas—but how they gained legitimacy. To be sure, it is a false legitimacy, but legitimacy of any sort is necessary to elevate power to authority. Our task is to expose the process to show that what masquerades as authority is class power.

One tactic has been to portray attitudes that advance the globalist project as “leftwing”—the New Left. How did a praxis advancing neoliberal and neoconservative goals become identified as left-wing politics? How did the corporate state come to embrace “left-wing” causes?

The answer, once you’ve done the critical historical and political analysis, is simple: the New Left is not a left-wing movement. It’s anti-human, anti-liberal, anti-rational, and anti-worker—all things that are antithetical to Old Left. Indeed, it’s a corporate-state strategy designed to fracture the traditional left and reincorporate its members into an alliance with globalist technocracy. To turn prior defenders of conscience and free speech into ideological authoritarians. To transform a fraction of the masses into reactionary mobs cloaked in the garb of justice.

Transnational elites and their progressive operatives—the organic intellectuals of globalization—cleverly constructed and absorbed the ideas of the postmodern New Left. They read Antonio Gramsci, too. They hijacked his cultural strategy, not to bring about communism (which is not to say that end is desirable), but to entrench corporatism.

DEI is the most obvious program that advances this alliance. At first, it may seem strange that corporations would embrace such ideas a diversity, equity, and inclusion. But with the correct approach to grasping the truth, it becomes obvious. Like gender ideology (a component of DEI), DEI programming was installed in our institutions to make corporate power and profit appear moral and just, while disorganizing the organic politics of the proletariat and the strata of entrepreneurs.

The saw this with the debate over affirmative action (DEI 1.0). Criticizing it was labeled “racist.” We were told that privileging black applicants over white ones could not be racism, because racism = prejudice + power, and only whites have power. By constructing a formula that placed critics of affirmative action out of bounds, and establishing that formula as the only truth, no real debate could be had. In an Orwellian transformation, what was racist became antiracist.

This formula hides the truth: corporations and elites hold the real power—not average white citizens. DEI and affirmation action don’t rectify injustice—they perpetuate it. The formula strengthens bureaucracy and its liberty-negating processes.

The same applies to the claim that opposing male intrusion into female spaces represents bigotry. That assumption, too, was installed through the same strategy. Many assumptions are installed in this manner. Those of us fighting to reclaim liberal freedoms and democratic institutions must therefore stop fearing labels. “Islamophobia,” “racism,” “transphobia”—these epithets are used not to describe reality but to marginalize dissent. We must stop caring what they call us. We know why they do it. Explaining why and how they do it is thus essential to defeating them.

This critical analysis isn’t mine alone. It builds on an old tradition. The German left-Hegelian Ludwig Feuerbach, in 1842, developed the “transformation method”—a way to invert the relationship between reality and illusion as framed by religion and ideology. Feuerbach argued that religious beliefs are not divine truths but projections of idealized human qualities—love, justice, power—externalized onto a supernatural being (God). By reabsorbing these divine traits back into humanity, Feuerbach demystified religion, exposing it as a reflection of human nature.

Karl Marx adopted, refined, and radicalized Feuerbach’s method. He agreed that religion expresses alienation—but rooted this alienation in material social relations, especially economic ones. At the core of alienation is the class struggle. Marx’s critique of ideology exposes how ruling class interests mask exploitative conditions in the language of morality and justice. He didn’t stop at analysis; he called for praxis to change the world. However, he left it to us to expose the strategy.

This was the worldview of the Old Left. Liberal. Democratic. Anti-elite. Popular. The Old Left fought to empower working people, preserve communities, and oppose exploitation. The New Left is its opposite. It aims to destroy families and communities for the benefit of the very elites the Old Left sought to overthrow. This explains why many liberals now join conservatives in the populist-nationalist movement. Even without deploying the transformation method, they see the truth: the enemies of freedom, sovereignty, and democracy are the same elites who fund and advance the New Left.

People like George Soros don’t bankroll protests to challenge corporate and financial power. They fund movements to preserve and entrench these oppressions. They install prosecutors and advocacy groups to thwart the popular will. This isn’t a Jewish conspiracy (another tactic to chill the air is to smear those who evoke the specter of Soros with antisemitism)—it’s class warfare waged from above.

Gender ideology is one part of a larger counterrevolutionary project: the return of the working class to serfdom under a New Feudalism. Once you understand the system, all the tentacles become visible. But knowledge is only potential power; the people must act to turn potential into outcomes. There are more of us than there are of them.

* * *

Remember the end of A Bug’s Life?

Hopper: “Let this be a lesson to all you ants! Ideas are very dangerous things! You are mindless, soil-shoveling losers put on this earth to serve us!”

Flik: “You’re wrong, Hopper. Ants are not meant to serve grasshoppers! I’ve seen these ants do great things! And year after year, they somehow managed to pick food for themselves and you. So who’s the weaker species? Ants don’t serve grasshoppers! It’s you who need us! We’re a lot stronger than you say we are… and you know it, don’t you?”

Earlier in the film, Hopper warned his lieutenants: “Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one. If they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life! It’s not about food—it’s about keeping those ants in line.”

Flik’s response to what Hopper told his subalterns behind closed doors? “Ants grow the food. Ants pick the food. And the grasshoppers leave!”

When I first watched A Bug’s Life, I wondered why Disney would distribute a film so critical of elite domination. It’s a story about exploited workers (ants) rebelling against parasitic rulers (grasshoppers) through collective action. That’s class consciousness—delivered with Pixar charm.

Directed by John Lasseter and co-directed by Andrew Stanton (who later directed WALL·E, another radical allegory), the film was inspired by Aesop’s fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper. But its subtext—about labor, class, and resistance—is unmistakable. Whether intended or not, the film critiques the very system that produced it.

Perhaps corporations allow—even socialize—radical messages because they’re so supremely confident in their control over the populace. The anti-capitalist band Rage Against the Machine signed with a major label, after all. This is how the culture industry works: it manufactures a pretense of justice to co-opt and contain opposition.

I have many disagreements with critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, but he put in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man that captures the spirit of my critique:

“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.”

Rolling Stone recently framed Tom Morello’s politics like this: “Like many of his comrades in music, the artist despairs at the bizarre, daily antics from the Trump administration. Trade wars, cosying[sic]-up with the enemy, picking fights with allies. Every day, another pie thrown from the MAGA circus.”

“You can only imagine what it’s like here with the impending shadow of American fascism,” Morello told the magazine. “The almost ethnic cleansing of discourse is a very significant warning sign, where anybody who wants to apply for a grant, or if you used words like ‘inclusion,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘African-American,’ you’ll be red-flagged.”

That’s corporate framing. Morello opposes “trade wars” (neoliberal rhetoric) and repeats neoconservative talking points about Russia. All of this aligns with the goals of the corporate state. Rejecting that frame, we see that Trump policies seek to re-shore high-wage value added manufacturing to the United States, as well as rapprochement with Russia for the sake of world peace and to marginalize China. Trump and the populist movement do not represent the “shadow of fascism.” On the contrary, the peoples of Europe and North America stand in the shadow of a New Fascism.

Indeed, Trump and the populist movement is resistance to the New Fascism. This is the real threat, what Barrington Moore, Jr. called a “revolution from above.” As noted earlier, the revolution-from-above in our time represents a counterrevolution against the Enlightenment. If the globalist project succeeds, we won’t just lose our liberties. We’ll lose the Enlightenment itself—and enter a New Dark Age.

* * *

One of the most common objections I encounter when raising concerns about elite coordination in shaping the global order: the supposed lack of direct evidence—the demand for the proverbial “smoking gun.” Detractors ask: Where is the document? Where is the confession? 

But this standard of proof, while emotionally satisfying, an effective is sophistry is allowed, is intellectually naïve. Power, especially at the highest levels, rarely broadcasts its intentions. The nature of elite influence is opaque, strategic, and subtle. Elite machinations take place behind closed doors, across private conferences, and through networks inside institutions, not press releases.

Yet we are not without means to understand what is happening. Just as in a criminal trial, one does not need a confession to reach a conviction. A murderer is not obligated to explain himself under our system; he enjoys a constitutional protection against self-incrimination. Rather judge and jury infer intention and guilt from evidence—corpus delicti (the body of the crime), patterns of behavior, access, motive, and opportunity. The prosecutor builds his case from context, evidence, and the logic of the act itself. What explains the outcome? Can it be explained another way? Is there reasonable doubt?

So too with global economics and politics. We don’t need elite actors to publish their plans for hegemony, resource control, or ideological engineering. We observe policies coordinated across actors, financial systems that perpetuate inequality, wars whose beneficiaries are always the same, and technologies that centralize control. These are not accidents. There is no reasonable doubt to be had here. The consistency of outcomes and the mechanisms by which they are produced point to rational actors with converging interests. Conspiracies are real. And rational people have theories about them.

To demand a confession from the architects of global power is to misunderstand both the nature of power and the means by which we come to know anything complex and concealed. Like any good detective—or any good historian—one must work from the evidence available (and there’s plenty of it), grasp the patterns, and be willing to follow reason and facts where they leads, even if the path runs behind closed doors.

Remember what Groucho Marx said to his wife when caught in bed with another woman: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

The Supreme Court case, Mahmoud v Taylor, a dispute between parents and the Montgomery County Public School District in Maryland over the inclusion of queer-themed storybooks in the elementary school English language arts curriculum, may be a watershed moment in parental rights. I begin with a brief background of the case and then critique the position of those critical of community and parental opposition to the inclusion of queer politics in public instruction.

In 2022, the Maryland district introduced picture books to expose young children to gender nonconformity and transgender identities—among them Pride Puppy, described Publishers Weekly as an “engaging introduction to Pride parades for the youngest readers successfully [that] testifies to the warmth and power of queer community,” and Born Ready, celebrated by Kirkus Reviews as “[a] triumphant declaration of love and identity” that “shines with joy and affirmation.”

Initially, parents could opt their children out of lessons involving these books. However, in March 2023, the school board eliminated this option, citing concerns about stigmatizing students represented by the books, high absenteeism, and logistical challenges. The first two objections are odd and curious. The possibility that students represented by the books might be stigmatized is a problem created by the inclusion of these materials in instruction. That’s ironic. The second problem of high absenteeism suggests that educators are eager to make sure every child receives instruction in the doctrine (more on that in a moment). The third flies in the face of other opt-outs the district allows.

After the district moved to require all students read and reflect on these books, a coalition of Catholic, Muslim, and Ukrainian Orthodox parents sued, arguing that the mandatory exposure to these materials violated their First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion by conflicting with their beliefs about gender and sexuality. The parents argued that the policy forced them to choose between the integrity of their faith and withdrawing their children from public schools. Many of them either did not have the timing and training to homeschool or the money to sent their children to private schools.

The school district countered that the books were not part of sex education, which students were allowed to opt out of, but literacy-focused, aimed at fostering respect in a pluralistic community, and that exposure to differing views did not coerce students to abandon their beliefs. (What does exposure to queer doctrine have to do with literacy I don’t know.) Critics of the parents’ position raised concerns about the practical implications of broad opt-out rights, fearing they could disrupt curricula and extend to other topics, complicating public education.

Lower courts, including the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, had previously ruled against the parents, finding no evidence that the curriculum compelled them to change their beliefs (the facts contradict this finding, as instructional materials require students to accept the doctrine). However, during oral arguments on April 22, 2025, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared sympathetic to the parents’ claims, questioning why the district could not accommodate religious objections through opt-outs, since, as noted, Maryland allows such provisions for sex education.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson engaged in pointed questioning about the parents’ options for avoiding the Montgomery County Public School District’s curriculum. She specifically probed the practical implications of the parents’ demand for an opt-out, asking whether they could simply enroll their children in private schools or homeschool if they objected to the public school’s curriculum. Jackson implied that the parents’ religious objections did not necessitate a constitutional violation if other schooling options were available.

She also challenged the parents’ claim that the lack of an opt-out forced them to violate their beliefs, emphasizing that public schools serve diverse communities and must balance competing interests.

If diverse communities matter, then what about the Catholic, Muslim, and Ukrainian Orthodox communities? We see the same privileging of the queer community with respect to women’s activities and spaces. Trans rights are paramount; the rights of girls and women are sacrificed on the alter of queer doctrine. The myriad of exclusive communities that make up Western society are all subordinated to the cult of gender ideology. Their beliefs and principles must give way to queer doctrine.

Jackson’s questioning aligned with the school district’s position that the curriculum was about fostering literacy and respect, not indoctrinating students. This line of inquiry contrasted with the conservative justices’ focus on the district’s refusal to accommodate religious objections, highlighting a divide in how the court viewed the balance between parental rights and public education’s goals. But is there really a divide here? Why are parental rights and the goals of public education necessarily in contradiction? Shouldn’t public education reflect the goals of parents and the community? Isn’t that what democracy would look like? Indeed, there is an elite assumption of the value of technocratic control over education, which is indeed at loggerheads with the interests of working families in maintaining cultural integrity.

There is an interesting paradox in Jackson’s argument—or at least the position of her ilk. Recall the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), which involved a baker refusing to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple due to religious objections. I presume Jackson was sympathetic to the couple in that case. Jackson’s cameo in the Broadway musical & Juliet suggests an affinity. We know the crowd in question was sympathetic to the couple. That same crowd would likely agree with Jackson about the parents pulling their kids from Montgomery County Public School District.

Presume I am right about that. The point I wish to make concerns an obvious double standard: the same crowd that believes it’s a grave injustice to find another baker after the first one declines to make a cake with a message he finds objectionable at the same time believes it’s perfectly reasonable for parents to find a different school that won’t teach their five-year-old boys can be girls.

To be sure, public education is a very different animal than a cake shop, but that makes the double standard even more remarkable. There is no compulsory cake purchasing in America. A private baker cannot—or at least shouldn’t be—compelled to violate his conscience. Customers are free to take their business elsewhere. Education, in contrast, is compulsory. The children are a captive audience. This takes us into deep ethical waters. If the school is public, then it must conform to Constitutional principle. The First Amendment protects freedom of conscience and speech. Private schools may offer religious instruction; indeed, parents choose them with that expectation. Public schools shall not; they cannot compel students to accept ideas that contradict their conscience—nor should they teach ideas that deny objective reality.

Let’s pursue the matter of principle. Imagine a Muslim child being told in social studies that Christianity is the only true religion, with dissent punished by the teacher. Consider an atheist child being told that belief in God is mandatory and the denial of God’s existence will be disciplined. These scenarios seem outrageous—but they are analogous to what is occurring in the Maryland case. In Montgomery county, guidance on curriculum implementation instructs teachers to discipline students who assert that there are only two genders or who refuse to comply with pronoun policies aligned with gender ideology.

Imagine a male teacher insisting students refer to him using feminine pronouns. Are parents expected to accept that a teacher may demand their children affirm a known falsehood? There are only two genders, after all. The male teacher is a man whatever he thinks of himself. He is, of course, free to think of himself in any way he wishes; he is not, however, not free to compel children or their parents to think of him in that way. Yet school policy demands that students misgender him—and furthermore insists that refusing to misgender him is itself misgendering (it doesn’t get more Orwellian than that). This isn’t a hypothetical, for the record; it’s happening.

This is professional malpractice; it’s indoctrination, not education. Public education should not be in the business of pressing falsehoods into young minds or promoting as truth that which is controversial, disputed, or unscientific. Teaching the speed of light? That’s appropriate, even if its nuances are beyond a child’s understanding. But claiming there are more than two genders or that a mammal can change its sex takes children into the realm of fantasy. Imagine a public-school math teacher insisting that 2+2=5 and punishing students for disagreeing. Imagine a science teacher promoting geocentrism and disciplining students who assert heliocentrism. These scenarios sound absurd—but they mirror what’s happening in Maryland’s largest school district.

To return to the matter of high absenteeism, why the insistence that every child be instructed in gender ideology? There is only one reason I can see: to ensure, for the sake of a political agenda, that every child is exposed to queer doctrine. This is the very definition of ideological indoctrination. It moreover calls into question the fitness of educators for their roles, and not just on grounds of competence. Is this why they entered the classroom—to groom children into accepting a particular ideology? If one wonders whether men become priests to be around children, then one must also consider the possibility that at least some teachers choose a career path that puts them close to children. (Did you note the decline in pearl clutching on the left over pedophile? Rather conspicuous in its absence if you’re paying attention.)

To be clear, gender ideology is not always analogous to religious instruction. Religion is, by nature, unfalsifiable. Gender is falsifiable. However, the subjective concept of gender identity à la Stoller is unfalsifiable, and this is where the ideology veers into quasi-religious territory. However, whether one considers gender ideology a religion or simply an ideology that contradicts objective fact, no child should be compelled to receive such instruction—especially not when it’s falsely framed as science.

The parents in the Maryland case were not even asking to remove gender ideology from the curriculum; they merely wanted to opt out. Even this was deemed unacceptable by the school district. Opting out should be the bare minimum, but gender ideology should not be taught in public schools at all—for the same reason that creationism or Christianity as-truth should not be: whether religious or pseudoscientific, such teachings have no place in a secular, public education system.

So again, why the insistence? I have racked my brain to think of some educational imperative to teach queer doctrine and all I can come up with it is using it as an example of how to think critically about pseudoscientific claim—and this could only be an exercise for more advanced students. One can smell the protests if any school district in America were to dare to use queer doctrine as the paradigm of pseudoscience.

The danger here is very real. A parent cannot fully protect their child from indoctrination when teachers have them for hours every day on most days of the week. These are children—they can be made to believe nearly anything (see the California McMartin Preschool case if you need an eye-opener). It’s one thing for peers on the playground to talk about gender ideology—or claim to be a dinosaur or a dog. It’s something else entirely for an adult in authority to teach a child that a man can be a woman.

Frankly, to believe something so absurd to the degree that one would teach it in school is disqualifying in itself. But setting aside the question of competence, it is not the role of teachers to instruct children in such beliefs, nor is it the role of public schools to override parental authority in service of a political agenda and the fetishes of the queer community. Believe what you want on your own time. But take down the flags, cancel the curriculum, and remove the books from public schools and libraries. These should be ideological-neutral spaces. The First Amendment demands it.

The New York Times is reporting that, two decades having passed since Nascimento Blair was last in his home country Jamaica, he has finally been deported. A judge ordered Blair to be deported after he was convicted of kidnapping in 2006. He was allowed to remain in the United States after leaving prison in 2020 because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not consider Blair a priority for deportation. Now they do. So away he went.

With the reality setting in that their poster boy, “Maryland Dad” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is a human trafficker, The New York Times has offered Blair as the next poster boy. The Gray Lady wants its readers to know his biography (as its reporters have constructed it)—among other things, how he reformed his life, as if that has anything to do about whether he should live his reformed life in the United States or in his home country. If he is such a saint, Jamaica could use him.

“I feel if Trump met him, he would think this guy makes America great,” said Dawn Ravella, a social worker, quoted in the Times. “He was born in Jamaica, but made in America. A person who did something bad, had remorse, paid their [sic] dues and paid it forward by living a life of kindness and service.” He is reformed, The Times reports, channeling his supporters for whom his “life story was one of rehabilitation, nuanced and filled with qualities that they believe Mr. Trump’s deportation machine disregards as it flies out immigrants en masse.”

Where was the furor over Mr. Clinton’s “deportation machine,” which removed 12.3 million illegal aliens from America? Or Misters Bush and Obama’s machines that removed 10.3 million and 5.3 million respectively?

The headline of the Times article “21 Years Later, Deported Back to a ‘Home’ He Barely Knew” announces a fallacy. Why is it so awful to send a man back to his home country that he hardly knows, but desirable for a man to illegally cross into a country he hardly knows? Imagine this argument: “Yes, he lived here as a child, but he hasn’t been here for 21 years, so we shouldn’t let him in.” That’s not an argument. The issue at hand is whether there is a legitimate reason for the man to enter. 

The relevant question concerning Blair is whether there is legitimate reason for him to stay. He is an illegal alien with a felony conviction for kidnapping and scheduled for deportation. Blair’s rehabilitation is entirely beside the point. This is no reason for him to stay in a country in which he holds no citizenship. He doesn’t even enjoy a path to citizenship. He was never told when he was released from prison that he could stay in the country because had been rehabilitated. He was in America only because ICE did not act on a judge’s deportation order. Now they have. And he is home—like Garcia.

Readers will recall that the media used a similar frame to manufacture sympathy over family separation for purposes of delegitimizing Trump’s deportation efforts during his first term. The ploy becomes obvious merely by asking why, if it’s so terrible to separate families at the border, separating America families has never been a concern. Family separation in the context of crime commission is standard. The rational question is why they’re being separated, not that they’re being separated. 

What the New York Times is doing is the purist form of propaganda: irrational, emotional appeals to obscure the reality of the situation in order to thwart the removal of illegal aliens. This is a simple matter really. Not everybody in the world can be in our country. There are rules about who can and cannot be here, how they are supposed to enter, and so on. If an individual is not supposed to be here, he needs removing. All the other stuff is noise generated to cloud reason. Mass immigration is a choice. The question citizens need to answer is who makes the choice. Is this what the People want? The polling tells us the answer is no. Trump’s landslide victory in November 2024 tells us the answer is no.

In several essays on Freedom and Reason I have made it plain who is making the choice to flood the United States with foreigners and why. I can summarize those conclusions by putting it this way: If one oppose mass deportation, he is effectively stand with corporate power over against the working class. Mass immigration is a corporate strategy to drive down the wages of the American worker and change the American way of life to advance the wealth and privilege of the global corporate class and entrench elite hegemony over the populace. If you need more evidence of the grand plan look at what they’re doing to Ireland. Still need more evidence? Look at what they’ve done to England, France, and Germany. What more evidence does a person need?

The elite have weaponized the US judiciary to advance a globalist project. They’re trying to force a constitutional crisis.

We’re hearing a great deal about “due process” these days. The pro-immigrant rhetoric is typically wrapped in the Bill of Rights. But what Democrats and the media aren’t telling their audiences—and the People should expect an objective media would tell them this—is that Illegal aliens have sharply limited due process compared to citizens, rights defined by congressional statutes and judicial precedent not enshrined in the Constitution. Why would they be in the Constitution? Only the People enjoy the privileges and immunity of citizenship. It’s their country. What would be the point of citizenship otherwise?

For illegal aliens, the scope of due process is constrained and determined by other powers, particularly in immigration proceedings. The Supreme Court has held that Congress has broad plenary power over immigration allowing it to prescribe the terms of due process for non-citizens. More than this, in Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), the Court held that “[i]n the exercise of Congress’ plenary power to exclude aliens or prescribe the conditions for their entry into this country, Congress in § 212(a)(28) of the Act has delegated conditional exercise of this power to the Executive Branch.” 

Rights like hearings, legal representation, or appeals are granted only as provided by statutes like the Immigration and Nationality Act. The president has broad powers under Article II to interpret and execute the laws Congress passes. In Mathews v. Diaz (1976), the Court clarified that non-citizens’ due process rights are subject to congressional limits. This is what democracy looks like.

While illegal aliens facing deportation may receive procedural protections (e.g., a hearing before an immigration judge), these protections are statutory, not constitutional, and can be modified by Congress and are subject to Executive discretion. Expedited removal, authorized under 8 U.S.C. § 1225, limits due process, providing only minimal review. The President can put anybody in charge of an immigration court. Given that very few of those illegally in our country have a legitimate asylum claim, with the right judges in place—i.e., those who serve the interests of the People—the President can rapidly remove millions of illegal aliens.

If the same due process enjoyed by US citizens were extended to illegal immigrants, a President would be unable to remove the ten million foreigners who illegally entered our country under the Biden regime—or the other ten million or so who came before them. How did Clinton remove more than 12 million illegal aliens from America? How did Bush and Obama remove more than 10 million and 5 million respectively? They could do this because they enjoyed the powers I described above. Where was the hysteria over due process then?

This is the goal of lawfare: hijack judicial review with the hope that the Supreme Court will hijacking congressional and executive authority by establishing a procedural framework that grinds Trump’s deportation efforts to a halt. If this happens, then the populace will know that the judiciary is working in tandem with the corporate class to begin the final stages of America’s destruction. The Trump Administration may have returned Blair home in time. But time is running out. There are millions of Blairs still in America—and the corporatocracy wants to keep them here.

In the face of The Resistance™, Trump is rising the polls. Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 52 percent of likely US voters approve of the job Trump is doing. 

The organizers of the “Hands Off” street performance might consider at some point whether want to keep going with this strategy. It seems to be producing the opposite effect. Corporatist propaganda confronts a now open media, and rational pundits like Scott Jennings make progressive pundits look like liars and lunatics. When progressives and the Democrats commanded social media they suppressed and de-platformed rational voices. When Elon Musk liberated Twitter from the censorship regime, he let progressives rant because he knew that they’re their own worst enemy.

Who are the organizers of the anemic color revolution? Among them are Open Society Foundations (created by multi-billionaire George Soros, now led by Alex Soros), which has shifted its focus toward direct political influence, organizing advocacy campaigns, legal defense funds, and protest infrastructure, and Sixteen Thirty Fund (administered by Arabella Advisors), which spends millions of dollars collected from anonymous donors. Those are two of several. These organizations provide resources for logistics and media campaigns. Thanks to the recent expansion and deepening of mutual knowledge facilitated by the more open system, the Resistance™ is becoming a money pit. At least that’s what the evidence suggests.

Now the People need the Supreme Court to do the right thing and get out of the way of the Trump agenda. But the people can’t depends on the Supreme Court. Congress must act to defund courts and impeach judges who are thwarting the popular will. Legislation is needed to restrict the tool of the universal injunction. The corporatists are getting desperate and they’re turning ever more aggressively to the machinery of government to deconstruct the American Republic. The judiciary is not the executive branch. Separation of powers is central to the republic scheme bequeathed to us by our forefathers. Government by judges is tyranny. Something must be done about this. Congress and the executive must reclaim the power given to them by the Founders.

The anti-democratic sentiment in the courts and on the left is a troubling thing. If the people don’t get a handle on it then the mob, frustrated by their increasingly inability to turn Americans against Trump, will ramp up its resort to vandalism and violence. One might think that limiting the judiciary in the corporatist project would provoke leftists to become even more terroristic. But ideologically-driven judges signal to the mob that their extreme behavior is appropriate—it encourages the elites who organize the mobs to turn to more drastic action by falsely portraying the President as an enemy of democracy. 

What lies behind this is the transnationalism agenda. Its two major pieces, namely neoliberalism and globalism, intertwined in the hands of Democrats and their Republican allies (there are still many of them), provide the economic and ideological framework driving transnationalism. Neoliberalism promotes the free flow of capital, goods, and services across borders. Globalism seeks interconnectedness and the integration of nations through trade, cultural exchange, and international institutions, e.g. the IMF and the WTO.

Neoliberal policies—trade liberalization and multinational/transnational corporate expansion—facilitate globalism by creating a borderless economic environment, prioritizing corporate interests over national sovereignty and local economies. This twin force exacerbates inequality and erodes cultural distinctions, as globalism and  neoliberalism homogenize markets and prioritize profit-driven systems over labor, environmental, and social concerns. This is the heart of the progressive agenda. It’s why progressives are protesting the removal of criminal aliens from the United States—if this hurdle is overcome, they know what follows is mass deportations. The color revolution and lawfare are part of a strategy to prevent this, which will undermine the Democrat’s electoral strategy and the corporate project to drive down wages for domestic labor. This is the politics of corporate power. And it is anti-worker.

It’s crucial for people to emphasize at every opportunity that the uprising is not organic. It’s a color revolution organized by global elites. Color revolutions have historically been a tool used by the global elite, working through government and nongovernmental organizations backed by corporate power, to change the governments of developing nations. Western organizations, such as Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, US Agency for International Development, and Open Society Foundations provide funding, logistical support, and training to so-called pro-democracy groups in those countries. These forms of support include legal aid (lawfare) and media training (to create the illusion of grassroots resistance). While this assistance is publicly framed as “democracy promotion,” Western intelligence agencies, such as the CIA or MI6, covertly orchestrate these movements to undermine unfriendly regimes and install governments favorable to transnationalism.

More recently, the tactic of color revolution has shifted internally, to undermine and replace governments in the First World. This is a response to genuinely pro-democracy movements in the West, commonly known as populist-nationalism—the organic popular response to transnationalism. The United States witnessed the deployment of color revolution in the summer of 2020 and at other points during the first Trump presidency. With the reelection of Trump, the tactic has reappeared. The good news is that (so far) it’s not working to sway public opinion. But it’s something to worry about nonetheless because it indicates that there’s a concerted effort underway to forever alter the historical trajectory of the West and the way of life of its citizens.

The deportation figures cited in the meme below are roughly in line with the historical data, though they require context to understand exactly what they mean by deportations. The numbers I cite in this article reflect a combination of “removals” and “returns.” Removals are formal deportations, often involving court orders or expedited processes, with legal consequences like bans on re-entry. Returns are less formal, typically involving migrants apprehended at the border who are returned without a removal order. The injunction statistics a more problematic.

Bill Clinton (1993–2001) carried out approximately 12.3 million deportations. Of these, 11.4 million (93 percent) were returned primarily at the border, involving migrants apprehended and deported without formal removal proceedings. Additionally, Clinton carried out about 870,000 formal removals. George W. Bush (2001–2009) carried out approximately 10.3 million deportations, with about 8.3 million (81 percent) being returns and roughly 2 million formal removals. Barack Obama (2009–2017) carried out approximately 5.3 million deportations. Obama focused more on formal removals (around 3.2 million) than returns. Obama was so aggressive with formal removals that he was nicknamed “Deporter-in-Chief.” Obama’s policies shifted toward prioritizing criminal aliens. Trump strategy builds on Obama’s strategy.

The claim that Clinton, Bush, and Obama faced zero injunctions is inaccurate. Universal injunctions (court orders blocking federal policies) have been a feature of immigration policy disputes across the four administrations under discussion (they were rarely used before then). However, the gist of the meme—that Trump has faced more injunctions than his predecessors—is true. Indeed, the difference is stark. 

Clinton and Obama each faced around a dozen injunctions over their two terms. Bush faced around half a dozen. In contrast, Trump faced some 64 injunctions in his first term alone—with his first term seeing fewer deportations (about 1.5 million) than his predecessors in a four-year span. It would have been more, of course, if not for the barrage of injunctions leveled at Trump’s efforts to carry forward the policies of his predecessors. So far, in his second term, Trump has deported around a 50,000 illegal aliens. And the injunctions are flying. Who knows what the final count will be. 

So, while the meme isn’t entirely accurate, it is substantially true, and its implications important to consider. We might ask whether, if Biden were still president and embarked on a similar path, he would face such a massive wave of injunctions. We do know this wasn’t an issue in his only term as president because he essentially ended the policy of mass deportation and instead effectively opened the border to millions of illegal aliens. We don’t really need to guess what a second Biden term would look like.

What explains the double standard? How could Trump’s predecessors deport so many millions with so few injunctions, while Trump is hampered by injunctions at every turn? Is the simply because it’s Trump doing the deporting and corporate elites need to portray his deportation policy as some extraordinary moment in US history to delegitimize his presidency? Or did Biden’s open border policy signal the desire of corporate elites to flood the country with cheap foreign labor going forward?

The double standard may be only apparent. Globalization was kicked into a higher gear under Biden and mass immigration became even more central to the plan to immobilize and demoralize whatever remains of the labor movement. As we can see with the protests across America, the left has been turned against the working class. Mass immigration is also central to the plan to establish a one-party state with the Democratic Party and compliant Republicans serving the interests of the transnational elite. Trump and the populist movement is the resistance the oligarchy needs to put down, so stopping Trump’s immigration policy by manufacturing the perception that it’s authoritarian kills two birds with one stone.

Progressives are trying to manufacture yet another moral panic, this time over Trump’s suggestion that American citizens and residents could be held in foreign correctional facilities. They drop the new panic into the narrative about Trump’s alleged totalitarian ambitions. You’ve all heard it by now. Trump wants to be a dictator. Sending terrorists and violent offenders to facilities external to the United States confirms it. He’s a fascist. And a Nazi. It is an absurd narrative.

Extraterritorial incarceration (or cross-border incarceration) is not an extraordinary practice. Several of the most progressive European countries have arranged to house prisoners in facilities in other countries—and their crime rates, albeit on the rise, are lower than ours. Progressives have for as long as I have been alive offered up Europe as an aspirational model for the United States. Are they not aware of the practice of cross-border incarceration across the European Union? 

Denmark has leased prison cells in Kosovo to house prisoners (Kosovo isn’t even an EU member state). In 2021, an agreement was made to send hundreds of inmates to a facility in Kosovo, with the arrangement formalized in 2023. Prisoners are today being housed there. This policy was driven by overcrowding in Danish prisons. Norway has sent prisoners to a Dutch facility to manage capacity constraints. In 2015, Norway leased space in the Netherlands to house inmates due to insufficient domestic prison capacity. Belgium also leased prison space in the Netherlands, specifically in Tilburg, to accommodate 500 inmates starting in 2010. This was a response to overcrowding in Belgian prisons. 

The UK is exploring options to house prisoners abroad due to record-high prison populations. Discussions have been reported with Estonia to potentially send British prisoners to facilities there. Sweden is also in talks with Estonia to house prisoners in Estonian facilities, as part of efforts to address domestic prison overcrowding. While the Netherlands has primarily been a host country (e.g., leasing facilities to Belgium and Norway), it has also explored sending prisoners abroad.

Readers should be aware that the reason given for cross-border incarceration, namely overcrowding, begs another question: why are these countries experiencing prison overcrowding? Crime has been rising across Europe and many of these countries lack the facilities to handle the influx of convicts. It moreover makes their societies safer to house incorrigibles in other countries. This begs yet another question: why is crime rising in Europe? Over the last several decades, Europe has made residents of millions of foreigners whose cultures are incompatible with European culture and who grew up in corrupt and crime-ridden countries. People are culture-bearers. The rise in crime correlates with the influx of Africans, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans. The correlation is not spurious.

According to Eurostat data from 2022, intentional homicides in the EU increased by more than 4 percent compared to 2021. Sexual violence offenses are on the rise across Europe. Thefts rose by 18 percent, robberies by nearly 10 percent, and burglaries by over 7 percent. Organized crime, particularly drug trafficking, is a growing concern, with INTERPOL noting a significant rise in related violent crime and money laundering. 

Some countries and cities experience more crime than others. Berlin saw an 8 percent rise in violent crime from 2021 to 2023, with homicides up 15 percent, sexual assaults up 12 percent, and robberies up 10 percent, according to the German Federal Criminal Police Office. Nationwide, violent crimes hit a 15-year high. In the UK, Birmingham’s violent crime rose 13 percent from 2021 to 2023, with knife-related offenses up 10 percent. London reported a 21 percent increase in knife-related incidents between July 2022 and June 2023, and homicides spiked in 2023.

Sweden’s crime index in 2023 was 48.5, among the highest in Europe, when it used to be one of the safest countries in the world. Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Spain have all experienced rising drug-related gang violence, contributing to the increasing problem of violent crime. Belgium and France rank even higher than Sweden on crime indices (49.1 and 55.3, respectively, in 2023).

Just as many European countries are utilizing or considering extraterritorial incarceration in countries in their region, the Trump Administration is using and considering extraterritorial incarceration in foreign counties. The panic over the CECOT detention center located in Tecoluca, El Salvador, depends on concealing the fact that cross-border incarceration is a common practice. The corporate media and progressive pundits will not tell their publics this. Perhaps many of them don’t know about it. But some do. The truth is a problem for their narrative.

This is why progressives in America are not branding the governing parties of Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom “Nazis.” It’s why they aren’t warning the citizens of those and other social democratic countries that their governments are on the path to “fascism.” Wasn’t it only a few months ago progressives scolded Vice-President JD Vance for criticizing Europeans for their repressive speech policies and for corrupting democratic processes by marginalizing oppositional parties? Their gaze is selective. Their anti-fascism is fake.

Extraterritorial incarceration is not a sign of fascism. Social democratic countries across Europe have turned to or considering utilizing the practice to make their cities and communities safer in the face of growing crime caused by the globalist strategy to drive down wages by importing and securing residence for cheap foreign labor—also to disrupt Western culture. Misplaced humanitarianism among the populations there functions to cover and advance the strategy. The rise of repressive free speech law and lawfare disenfranchising those with nationalist sympathies is at its core a strategy to tamp down popular opposition to the globalist agenda. Extraterritorial incarceration would not be necessary if Europe deported those who threaten Western civilization.

For those who might want to quibble over the status of those housed in foreign prisons by noting that they are not citizens, know that the basis for citizenship in most of these countries (jus sanguinis) precludes even those born in those countries from automatically becoming citizens there. That means that residents who have lived their entire lives in these countries are subject to extraterritorial incarceration—analogous to sending US citizens to overseas detention facilities, an idea Trump is floating. These same persons are also subject to deportation, which would in the long term be the most effective way for reducing prison overcrowding and crime in Europe.

This is the advantage of citizenship law based on ancestry instead of birthright. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born in the US to parents who are illegally in the country or here on temporary visas. The order challenges over a century of legal precedent established by the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which has been blocked by multiple federal judges in states like Maryland, New Hampshire, and Washington, who deemed it unconstitutional. I have explained in articles on Freedom and Reason why it may not be unconstitutional. Extraterritorial incarceration may not depend on whether it is.

The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it will hear arguments on May 15, 2025, to address the Administration’s request to lift nationwide injunctions preventing the order’s enforcement. Legal scholars and critics, citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s “clear language” and “historical intent” to grant citizenship to all born on US soil, view the order as unlikely to succeed, though they admit that case’s outcome could hinge on the Court’s interpretation of jurisdictional nuances and its stance on nationwide injunctions (which also must be addressed, as I have also argued in articles recently published on this platform).

Before closing, I want to address two related arguments I routinely confront on social media. The first concerns the matter of civil rights for those who encounter the criminal justice process. I’m a civil libertarian. I have always been a strong advocate for the Bill of Rights. Leaving aside the question of whether noncitizens should have full access to those rights (I lean towards the position that they shouldn’t in any robust sense), such arguments concern principle. My record on principle in this regard is unassailable.

However, there are pragmatic considerations to be considered in making any public policy. Moreover, public safety is a human right. Due process is important, but so are the human rights of those who want to live in safe communities. The ideal approach to enhancing public safety means supporting the needs of communities. Central to this is the presence of high-wage, value-added manufacturing jobs and protection of American citizens and legal residents from cheap foreign labor by strict enforcement of immigration laws. American once enjoyed this situation. During the period between immigration restrictions in the 1920s and the globalization push following WWII, especially after the opening of the country to mass immigration again, crime was at historic lows in America. Families were largely intact. And communities were thriving.

If progressives were concerned with the situation of those who are arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison, kept here or sent abroad, why do they oppose policies that would recapture America’s Gold Age? It’s not as if we don’t know what works. Why do progressives support social policies destructive to communities and families? The drastic rise in crime that begins in the mid-1960s and peaks in the early-1990s was only reversed by mass incarceration and interventionist police action. Had progressives not pursued such destructive policies as the Great Society and globalization, there would have been no need to take the drastic measures taken in the 1980s and 1990s to restore some modicum of public safety to our towns and cities. Expanding the criminal justice system was necessary not merely because progressives have no will to do the things that make American safer; they actively oppose policies that addresses the root causes of crime in America—deindustrialization and the replacement of American workers with foreign labor.

The second argument I routinely confront on social media is the claim that the rate of crime commission by immigrants is lower than the rate for Americans (the rightwing libertarian think tank Cato Institute distributes this claim, which has become ubiquitous). On X, in recent back-and-forth about the deportation of criminal aliens, I awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait for long (I never do). “But immigrants commit crime at only half the rate of Americans.”

This claim is flawed. For one thing, it obscures the fact that those entering the United States illegally, such as crossing a border without authorization, outside a designated port of entry, are violating the criminal law. Despite what we are told, illegally entering the United States is not merely a civil violation; it’s a crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325, which can result in fines, imprisonment for up to six months, or both for a first offense. Penalties may increase for subsequent violations or aggravating circumstances.

Being established that it is a crime to illegally enter the United States, one would have to assume that American citizens illegally enter other countries with similar immigration laws (which is a great many of them—some even stricter) at a rate much greater than foreigners illegally entering this country. Since this is a rather absurd assumption, it’s obvious that illegal aliens have a much higher crime than American citizens when comparing apples to apples—without committing any additional crimes. I’m being a tad sarcastic here; this is not what those who make this claim have in mind. But it’s still worth pointing out.

What they mean to argue is that Americans are more criminal than immigrants. Not quite. Some native-born groups have very high crime rates—black men, for example, commit homicides at 6–8 times the rate of white men. This is a consequence of deindustrialization and the ghettoization of black men in dilapidated inner-city areas with high levels of social disorganization, exacerbated by public assistance programs undermining families in these areas—thanks to the progressive transnationalist project. Thus comparing immigrants to “all Americans” obscures several distortions. The majority of Americans, despite the decline in their standard of living, are law-abiding tax-paying citizens.

The real problem is that appealing to rates obscures the real issue, namely crime volume. Presumably, nobody wants more crime (at least nobody will admit that, albeit it is functional to certain ends). Rates aside, the fact is that illegal aliens add thousands of violent crimes (even ignoring millions of border-crossing violations) on top of all the violence crime America already endures. Reducing the numbers of illegal aliens to zero would stop those crimes cold. Fewer victims, less burden. It’s that simple, really.

Removing the alien contribution to the crime problem would mean thousands of fewer assaults, homicides, or robberies each year, easing the burden on victims, law enforcement, and the justice system. Additionally, the reduction would address measurable costs: fewer resources spent on processing illegal entry cases, less strain on infrastructure, and reduced economic impacts, not only the tens of billions of dollars in net fiscal costs attributed to illegal immigration annually (the burden on taxpayers), but the half a trillion dollars in lost wages to American workers annually (money that goes into the pockets of employers). By eliminating this population’s presence, the US avoids these added crimes and costs entirely, keeping the crime volume lower than it would be otherwise.

The real point of the claim is to suggest that immigrants are better than native-born Americans. To that I say, “fuck you.” But I need to say just a bit more than that. Making immigrants appear as a more desirable lot than Americans is functional to the ends sought by progressive transnationalists—not just to the needs of the corporations who seek super-exploitable labor pools, or the needs of Democrats seeking to draw more resources to their states and groom more voters for their party, but to advance the project of deconstructing the American Republic and, more broadly, the West.

At first approximation, the left loathes strength and tradition and takes up the cause of the weak and the marginal. This is the cause of “social justice.” It’s a struggle between “oppressor” and “victim.” In this formulation, normal working class and small business men and women (depicted as exclusively white) are the oppressor. Everybody else is the victim. But a closer examination reveals something very different. Leftists rationalize Islamofascism and defend Hispanic gang culture, both deeply patriarchal and antihuman traditions. This is why they get so exercised over attempt to deal with the worst people—the anti-West protestors on our college campuses, MS-13 members Trump is deporting, men demanding access to women’s spaces, murders and rapists (as long as they’re not white). Progressives upend reason, science, and common sense in the institutions they have captured for a reason. This is motive force behind the endless manufactures of moral panic.

Why did Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen travel to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia in prison but not personally reach out to the mother of Rachel Morin, whose daughter was raped and murdered in 2023 by Victor Martinez-Hernandez, a fugitive from El Salvador, while exercising on a hiking trail northeast of Baltimore? Van Hollen’s priorities are clear. And he speaks for millions on the left. I discussed his visit to El Salvador in Thursday’s blog. Update: Van Hollen finally got his meeting with Garcia. It was photographed. They had drinks together. Garcia looks healthy. More Democrats are making their way to El Salvador to join in the grandstanding—despite the evidence making it clear that Garcia, an El Salvadorian citizen, is right where he should be.

What lies in back of progressive social justice rhetoric is “Europhobia,” a hatred for, loathing of, and prejudice against Europeans and European culture. This includes the United States and Canada, the progeny of European society. I am reluctant to use such a neologism in light of the propaganda constructs “Islamophobia” and “transphobia,” but perhaps such constructs resonate with those who manufacture them. I trust readers understand what I mean with this term. It’s the anti-West sentiment, the source of sympathy for Hamas and animus towards Israel and Jews more generally on the left, etc.

This is not hyperbole. The left is explicit about it. I repeat myself: today’s left loathes Western civilization and the Enlightenment. They have abandoned their historic solidarity with the working class (which has smelled a bit paternalistic, frankly). They articulate this abandonment through their condemnation of “white privilege” and other like rhetoric. This is the postmodernist project. Note the construction: postmodern. They seek a new world order that leaves behind modern society and its values: democratic republicanism, humanism, individualism, liberalism, and secularism. They want this replaced by the atavisms of tribalism and “indigenous ways of knowing.” This destructive ideology is rampant in our colleges and universities—even k-12. It has corrupted medicine and science. It has colonized our sense-making institutions. It targets the family. And the community.

Tens of millions in the West are waking up to the fact that the postmodern project represents an existential threat to everything they hold dear. They are recognizing the signs now. The dramatic cultural and political pivot we’re witnessing is driven by an awakening in the West. Hopefully, it’s not too late. And despite the consequences of impatience with civil rights and due process that protects the worst humans on earth, the impatience is understandable—and until the left quits its anti-human project, the consequences inevitable. The majority is caught between principle and pragmatics, and they have only one life to live, and there are other lives to which they are responsible. They have to secure the safety of their families, and there are times where doing so demands bold action. In light of this, extraterritorial incarceration is a rather minor matter.