freedom and reason

The degree to which progressivism has confused technocracy with democracy in popular consciousness is impressive. Now progressives are just embarrassing themselves. Victims of their own design. There is widespread panic that deconstructing the administrative apparatus is an authoritarian move instead of what it is: the restoration of democratic governance to a constitutional republic and getting the nation’s financial house in order.

One of the biggest panics to emerge over the last couple of days concerns the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump is an authoritarian, we are told, because he created a government agency without congressional approval, and it’s doing things. We now live in a fascist dictatorship and DOGE is Exhibit A. Support the brave federal employees resisting the fascist dictator! But did the President do this? It’s yet another false narrative. Hell, DOGE isn’t even new.

The office in question is officially the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization, formerly known as the United States Digital Service (USDS). That’s right, the office already existed. And progressives are going to love this part: USDS was established by executive order under President Barack Obama as part of his efforts to improve the federal government’s digital services and technology. Congress was not involved. The goal of DOGE, and USDS before it, is to modernize and streamline government services, making them more efficient and effective—to reduce the size of government and save the taxpayer money.

This good idea hardly begins with Obama (who had few good ideas, frankly, and a lot of bad ones). I wrote about this in a November 14, 2024 essay titled A Week Into a Four Year Term That Hasn’t Started—and Progressives Are Already Losing Their Minds. (Progressives were panicking about DOGE then, so we knew what was coming.) In that essay, I highlight Al Gore presenting his final report, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less (a Report of the National Performance Review) to President Clinton in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House.

By 1999, estimates suggested that the initiative had saved around $136 billion through various cost-cutting measures, including workforce reductions, streamlining of federal agencies, and improvements in government procurement and service delivery. That’s no small sum of money given the federal budget at the time, which had not yet reached two trillion dollars. I did a little math and determined that, today, the US would save half a trillion dollars using the same approach. If DOGE is more aggressive, it could save a lot more than that. That’s a bad thing? I guess if you are progressive and want big, intrusive government to enlarge the number of those dependent on your power (see my recent essay Make Our Republic Great Again).

Despite the name, DOGE is not a federal executive department. It is well within the power of the president to reorganize existing agencies, combine existing functions, or create new offices within agencies through executive orders. We should want to see our government agencies run efficiently—or eliminated when detrimental or no longer useful. Do readers know how big the federal government is today? It’s approaching seven trillion dollars. And it’s deeply in the red. The present deficit is closing in on two trillion dollars annually. The government is adding trillions to the debt—which now exceeds 36 trillion dollars—every year. It’s time to whack agencies and offices.

The Washington Post story “USAID security officials on leave after refusing access to Musk allies” is Exhibit A in the problem of bureaucrats defying the will of the people and the need to whack programs. Once again, we confront the technocratic problem: agencies resisting directives of the executive. The term of art used here is “agency independence.” You hear this all the time from bureaucrats in corporatist style governments when asked what they would do if, say in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats came to power. Answer: ignore their directives. The idea is that if an executive enters office whose policies are seen by bureaucrats as detrimental to practices that they have deemed appropriate, then they are right to resist the executive.

CNN is reporting this morning that Elon Musk said President Donald Trump agreed the USAID should be “shut down” after its funding was frozen and dozens of employees were placed on leave. “With regards to the USAID stuff, I went over it with [the president] in detail and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in an X Spaces conversation Monday. He added that Trump confirmed this decision multiple times. Trump, when asked about USAID before the conversation, told reporters: “It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out, and then we’ll make a decision” on its future.

Two top USAID security officials were placed on leave for blocking DOGE personnel from accessing the agency’s systems, despite threats to call law enforcement. Around sixty senior staff were also put on leave for attempting to bypass Trump’s executive order freezing foreign aid. Musk, co-hosting the X Spaces conversation with Senator Joni Ernst and Vivek Ramaswamy, criticized USAID as “incredibly politically partisan” and beyond repair. “USAID is a ball of worms,” he said. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee letter requested an update on the incident, raising concerns over security breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive data. However, Katie Miller, a Trump appointee to DOGE, confirmed, “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”

USAID officials warn the State Department lacks the capacity to manage USAID’s vast development projects and that eliminating the agency would severely weaken US foreign policy. “We’re basically going to be punching with one arm behind our back,” a former senior USAID official said. It’s fine to express one’s opinion, but the future of the agency is not up to the federal bureaucrats appointed to run it. The future of USAID is up to the Executive. Indeed, the attitude expressed by action resisting democratic authority suggests Sheldon Wolin’s observations concerning inverted totalitarianism. If a nation is to avoid that situation, or to unwind it if substantially there, which we are, then it is imperative that agencies of the executive in a constitutional republic understand that they are duty bound to carry out the directives of the executive, who in our system is elected by the nation. Bureaucrats don’t choose the president or his policies. The people do. Bureaucrats carry out the policies of the president the people elected. If they aren’t prepared to do this, then they should resign. If they won’t resign, then they should be fired and locked out of their offices.

Here’s the reality: Bureaucratic inefficiencies and mismanagement are rampant at USAID—corruption, lack of oversight in aid distribution, wasted funds. But that’s just part of the problem. The mission is the problem. USAID-funded initiatives undermine local economies by flooding markets with free goods, discouraging local production. When the bureaucrats aren’t doing that, they encourage the production of goods that are not sought in the market, with the effect of destabilizing foreign economies. USAID promotes “democracy projects,” i.e., interventions in domestic affairs that advance the interests of transnational corporate power. USAID projects have prioritized US geopolitical interests, a euphemism for capitalist globalization, these deriving from neoliberal and neoconservative assumptions, over genuine development needs, which leads to dependency rather than self-sufficiency. Moreover, while USAID is pitched an independent agency of the US government responsible for providing foreign aid and development assistance, its operations provide cover for CIA operations. During the Cold War, USAID programs were used as fronts for intelligence operations in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. USAID is a weapon US intelligence operations and imperial adventures. It needs to be whacked.

Belief that USAID is necessary for delivering sustainable development solutions reveals at best a profound naïveté. But watch progressives lose their shit because it’s Trump and DOGE reforming the agency, pitching this as another instance of Trump’s authoritarianism by those who haven’t a clue about how the agency works, the power it serves, the ends it seeks. This is one more piece of evidence for my claim that the progressive left is not really left at all but handmaidens of the corporate state. What we call the left today is a customized rhetorical gloss of leftism, one rooted in the postmodern rot of CRT, postcolonial studies, and QT, i.e., ideologies that invent oppression or portray the normal as oppressive, and obscure the functional role of the progressive in transnational power schemes. But then progressivism was never really a working-class politics. It was from the beginning a corporate substitute for populism and genuine reform. This is why true populist figures and reforms are reviled and resisted by those who are now on the run.

I was telling my wife Friday on the way to dinner that, at this point, the constant panic reporting only serves the punctuate the reason why the corporate media and Democrats are no longer trusted. The propagandists and progressive politicians thought that when they told big lies that didn’t work that the problem was that their lies weren’t big enough. So, they kept telling bigger and bigger lies not realizing that the effect of the strategy runs in the opposite direction once the apparatus is viewed as illegitimate. It’s a habit they can’t kick, apparently. And a big part of the problem is that deny they are addicts. Liberating social media has made mutual knowledge an insurmountable problem for the propagandist. Progressive lies now only work on progressives, a dwindling proportion of the population. The Democratic Party is now more unpopular than at any time since the pollsters started asking people about it. If Democrats don’t change direction, then they’ll dwell in the wilderness for decades—where those who tenaciously cling to bad ideas should dwell.

This essay concerns two matters: Trump’s actions with respect to the FBI establishment and the Department of Justice, and the dire situation in Ukraine. Both matters concern the problem of the administrative and deep state apparatuses, which exist and operate beyond the Constitution and democratic norms, and have been heretofore unaccountable to the public interest.

But it’s a new day, and accountability has arrived in the figure of Donald Trump and an army of patriots at his back. Learning lessons from his first term as president, in which he and his allies failed to purge the Executive Branch of administrative and deep state actors determined to undermine the populist movement and its campaign to restore constitutional integrity and democratic-republic principle to the nation, Trump is this time around moving quickly and decisively to eliminate from government the globalists engaged in the managed decline of the American Republic.

For the first matter, the matter of the FBI, I base the following in part on a reporting by several major corporate news outlets (ABC, CBS, The New York Times, etc.). According to these sources, the Justice Department has instructed Edward Martin, the Acting US Attorney in Washington DC, to dismiss prosecutors involved in investigating the January 6 Capitol riot. The order is detailed in a memo from January 31, written by Acting Attorney General James McHenry. The memo has been confirmed by multiple sources.

Crucially, in a scheme to preserve the deep state project, some of the prosecutors who had initially been hired temporarily to work on the January 6 investigation were made permanent employees before the presidential transition. The memo stated that their continued employment was interfering with the ability to execute the agenda of President Trump’s administration.

In a separate directive, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has mandated a review of all FBI agents who were involved in the Capitol “insurrection” investigation. The memo states that these dismissals are to take effect immediately, listing specific individuals whose employment will be terminated.

Additionally, Bove has ordered the FBI’s acting director, scheduled to be replaced by Trump nominee Kash Patel, should he be confirmed by the Senate (which may call him back for further testimony considering these developments), to compile a list of current and former agents involved in the investigation to assess whether further personnel actions are needed. This includes a directive for the firing of eight high-ranking FBI executives. The action is expected by this Monday. The head of the Washington DC Field Office is also scheduled to be removed by February 10. In his memo, Bove argued that some of these FBI personnel could not be trusted to support the implementation of the President’s agenda and ordered further review of those involved in cases related to several sensitive issues.

This action follows a previous one in which more than a dozen federal prosecutors from the team that charged former President Trump in the documents case were also dismissed, with the Justice Department expressing doubts about their ability to carry out Trump’s agenda.

The purge of Justice Department and FBI employees is aimed at addressing politicization and weaponization of these agencies, and it extends beyond senior FBI officials; officials in charge of national security, cyber, and criminal investigations have also been targeted for forced resignations or retirements. The full scale of the personnel changes is still unfolding, but it promises to be deep and sweeping.

Predictably there has been pushback, for example, from the FBI Agents Association, which warns that such actions could weaken the bureau’s ability to protect national security. But this is cover for Establishment desire to preserve the deep state apparatus for purposes of shaping state action beyond democratic accountability and executive purview. If the public knew about the history of the FBI and its decades-long war on the American People, then Trump’s actions would not be seen as so controversial, at least not to their minds, and his speedy action in purging these elements from government will hopefully function to draw public attention to this history.

As for the second matter, this one involving the actions of deep state actors internationally, as many readers will already know, over the past fifteen years Ukraine has been marked by shifting alliances, protests, revolutions, and war. In 2010, pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych won the presidency. His decision in 2013 to abandon the European Union (EU) trade deal in favor of closer ties with Russia sparked the Euromaidan protests. By early 2014, mass demonstrations led to Yanukovych fleeing the country, and a pro-Western government took power with oligarch Petro Poroshenko at its head. Poroshenko served as President of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019, his presidency marked by a strong pro-European and pro-NATO stance. Poroshenko’s tenure was marked by corruption and governance problems, which contributed to his defeat in the 2019 election, where Volodymyr Zelensky won in a landslide on promises of anti-corruption measures and reform.

It was during the Poroshenko regime that the Biden family entangled itself in the internal affairs of Ukraine running a global money laundering scheme. Knowledge of this scheme, and questions about a Democratic National Committee (DNC) server, is what led to President Trump telephoning Zelensky, a phone call that provided an opportunity for Democrats to impeach the president (which occurred on July 25, 2019), a charge of which he was acquitted in the Senate. 

I want to share the relevant parts of the phone call because in hindsight those who are honest with themselves given everything they could now know should see Trump’s noble intent in getting to the bottom of schemes by the deep state to undermine his presidency and those enriching the Biden family, the head of which would likely be Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election. As it turned out, Biden was the establishment pick to assume the presidency, installed in the wake of the release of a weaponized coronavirus, manufacturing pandemic conditions used to rig the 2020 election, as well as a color revolution, which saw widespread rioting across American cities, violence driven by propaganda manufacturing false mass perception of systemic racial injustice. 

“I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump began early into the phone call with Zelensky, “because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” It was clear that this would be the intent of his phone call (and not to congratulate Zelensky on his recent victory). Trump continued: “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike [a cybersecurity company]… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.” After Zelensky said, in part, “I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine,” Trump responded, “Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair.”

Before continuing with the transcript, some context is necessary. Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, and a close Trump ally, was a central figure in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Giuliani had copies of a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s youngest son.

Hunter Biden dropped off a liquid-damaged laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never returned to retrieve the device, which then became the property of the shop. With a subpoena in hand issued by a Wilmington grand jury (the US attorney’s office in Wilmington had been investigating Hunter Biden about lobbying and financial matters since at least 2018), the FBI took possession of it from the shop in December of 2019. The FBI verified that the laptop was authentic before the year was out.

A year later, in October 2020, Biden and then-Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arranged for an open letter to be composed by several dozen former high-ranking intelligence officers to misdirect the public by claiming that there was a high probability that it was Russian disinformation aimed at interfering with the 2020 election. In other words, evidence that would have likely harmed Establishment aspiration to install Biden as president was used in a scheme to undermine Trump’s reelection bid. Among many other things, this is precisely why Trump is moving so aggressively to purge the government of deep state actors—and why the Establishment was so desperate to prevent Trump from regaining the White House in 2024. 

As the phone call suggests, Giuliani may have already been in possession of the laptop’s contents. With all this in mind, let’s continue with the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call. Trump says, “I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great.” Trump then pivots to the Biden family: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”

Trump is referring here to video of the Joe Biden admitting before a group at the Council on Foreign Relations that, as then-Vice-President (under Obama), he threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless they fired a prosecutor that was looking into the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings—a company on which his son Hunter had accepted a board seat. Biden bragged, “I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.” This is why Biden gave his son Hunter a full and unconditional pardon (and soon after pardoned several close family members) for any federal crimes he may have committed during the period the pardon covered. Without this context one might wonder why the pardon so specifically covers the period from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024. No need to wonder now: that’s the period in which Hunter operated as bagman for the Biden crime family. 

Apparently aware of all this, Zelensky responded, “I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I’m knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue.” (Was Zelensky talking about CrowdStrike or Burisma?) (For more on this, see my December 2019 essay The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President and the follow up I Told You Joe Biden is Corrupt and Compromised.)

With this knowledge in hand, let’s return to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and recall that Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 following Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution and the ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. On March 16, 2014, a referendum was held in which over 90 percent of Crimean voters, most of the population ethnically Russian with cultural and linguistic ties to Russia, supported joining Russia. On March 18, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty formally incorporating Crimea into Russia. Predictably, the annexation of Crimea was widely condemned by Ukraine and the West, with Western countries imposing sanctions on Russia.

At the same time Russia annexed Crimea, it backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine, also ethnically Russian, with extended and immediate families on both sides of the borders. The pro-Russian separatists were primarily active in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, collectively known as the Donbas. In April 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, armed separatists seized government buildings and declared the formation of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR). This led to a prolonged conflict with Ukrainian forces. Despite the 2019 election of Zelensky, who promised peace and reform, tensions escalated into a full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. In February 2022, just before launching its full-scale invasion, Russia officially recognized the DPR and LPR as independent states. Later that year, Moscow annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. 

The Euromaidan protests are often described as a color revolution. Color revolutions refer to a series of purportedly mostly nonviolent, pro-democracy uprisings in post-Soviet states (for examples, Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine’s own Orange Revolution in 2004). Euromaidan shared characteristics with these movements—mass protests, demands for democratic reforms, and opposition to a pro-Russian government. However, Euromaidan was distinct due to its violent escalation, as well as the direct role of external actors. Russia and pro-Russian voices dismiss it as a Western-backed coup. The evidence supports the Russian narrative. 

As I discuss in my essay penned at the outbreak of the conflict (History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War), the CIA played a large a role in the Ukraine conflict. The US intelligence agency provided covert support to Ukrainian forces and opposition groups even before the annexation of Crimea. In that essay, I provide evidence and analysis that the CIA’s involvement in training Ukrainian security forces, particularly after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the conflict in the Donbas region. This support included not just advising on strategies to counter Russian-backed separatists and intelligence sharing, but military aid, and in some instances active involvement in aggression, often in association with neo-Nazis and other far-right elements.

To be sure, the agency’s role in this and other matters around the world are veiled in secrecy, and while apologists will argue that there is little concrete evidence to fully confirm or deny the extent of the CIA’s actions in Ukraine, the history of the CIA and the ongoing resistance to transparency, as well as the stated goals of the neoconservative establishment, speak volumes about the design. It reveals remarkable naiveté—and major-league dissembling for those in the know—to believe that the US was not playing a behind-the-scenes role in stoking tensions with Russia to support broader geopolitical goals. Indeed, this is a typical play by the intelligence service. All this is under the cover that US involvement is not a design to wage a proxy war against Russia, but a response to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its ongoing destabilization of Ukraine. The official stance of both the US government and intelligence agencies is reluctance to confirm direct involvement beyond what is publicly disclosed, which is downplayed. Again, one would have to be naïve, ideologically blinkered, or lying to deny the plot. 

There are discussions about a UN peacekeeping force in Ukraine, which would likely put US forces on the ground in the crossfire. To be sure, such a mission is at present unlikely, as Russia remains a UN Security Council member. Meanwhile, however, Ukraine’s NATO membership bid has gained strong support from Western allies, especially after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, an invasion provoked by NATO expansion. Why do I say provoked? During the negotiations over German reunification in 1990–1991, Western officials, including US Secretary of State James Baker, promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” (my view then was that NATO should be dismantled, its function negated by the fall of the Soviet Union). Citing these negotiations, Russia has long held that NATO’s expansion into former Soviet-aligned states (Poland, the Baltic states, and later Ukraine and Georgia’s aspirations) broke that promise and posed a security threat to Russia and its allies—which obviously it has. (See The US is Not Provoking Russia—And Other Tall Tales. See also The US and NATO in the Balkans.)

Western leaders maintain that NATO’s open-door policy allows countries to freely choose their alliances, and that Russia was never given a formal guarantee limiting NATO’s growth. Convenient, no? NATO has stopped short of immediate membership, at least for now. However, Ukraine’s EU accession is progressing more tangibly, with candidate status granted in 2022 and ongoing reforms aimed at meeting EU standards. Ukraine’s alignment with the West continues to deepen, fueling geopolitical tensions with Russia. Trump could save a lot of lives by withdrawing US and NATO assistance to Ukraine and forcing the Zelensky government to the table for peace negotiations and territorial reappraisal. But then the military-industrial complex (MIC) would lose a lot of money.

Indeed, one of the barriers to accomplishing these ends are the neoconservatives, whom I have been writing about for two decades at this point (see War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy). Neoconservatism is a political movement advocating a strong US foreign policy promoting “democracy,” a euphemism for transnational corporate power, and expanding the scope of military power (feeding trillions of dollars to the MIC) to achieve those ends. The neoconservatives are largely in favor of Ukraine’s EU and NATO membership and increased Western military support against Russia. They frame the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a frontline struggle between authoritarianism and democratic values, advocating for robust US and allied military aid to ensure Russia’s defeat. The warmongers argue that admitting Ukraine to NATO would deter future Russian aggression, while downplaying the obvious: NATO enlargement risks further and direct escalation with Moscow. One is not overreacting to worry that escalation could lead to World War Three.

The Establishment pitch is that a decisive Ukrainian military victory backed by Western support is essential for long-term European security and the New World Order. This is why war with Russia is a risk worth assuming. Yet they are in fact waging war with Russia via their proxy Ukraine—and the Ukrainian people are suffering terribly as a result. It is not enough to purge the Justice Department and the FBI of those who seek ends detrimental to the interests of the American People; Trump needs to purge the Executive Branch of warmongering neoconservatives and all others who represent a clear and present danger to the American Republic and the world. And he has to act fast; he only has one term in office, and there are actors who are seeking ways to remove him from power before that term expires. I like JD Vance, and I suspect he will be President one day, but I unsure of whether he is as purpose-driven a man as Donald Trump.

See update below!

Trump has ordered federal employees to remove pronouns from email signatures by end of day today. “Pronouns and any other information not permitted in the policy must be removed from CDC/ATSDR employee signatures by 5.p.m. ET on Friday,” according to a message sent Friday morning to CDC staff. ABC News has confirmed that federal employees with the Department of Transportation and at the Department of Energy also received the memo. On his first day in office, Trump signed a pair of executive orders calling for an end to what his administration called “radical and wasteful DEI programs.” The orders moreover emphasized the move by the administration to restore “biological truth to the federal government.” Both orders were referenced in the Friday memos.

In April 2023, I wrote about the problem of compelled speech at the NIH (see NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech). In that essay, I provided readers a link to an NIH document “Gender Pronouns & Their Use in Workplace Communications.” When I clicked on the link to the NIH document today it’s 404, a page unburdened by what has been. Fortunately, I took a screen shot of the sample signature blocks employees were instructed to use in their emails. You can find the sample signature blocks in my essay. They’re more than ridiculous, they’re tyrannical.

The NIH adapted its pronoun list from the “Gender Pronouns Guide from UW Milwaukee LGBTQ+ Resource Center.” I clicked on that link and it, too, is 404. As with the NIH document, I grabbed a screen shot from this page, as well, which you can also find in the essay cited above.

UW Milwaukee and public universities across the nation receive federal money, so Trump’s actions are sweeping and taking hold nationally. And what a welcome development this is. Ending the practice of compelled speech and the chill that hysteria over pronouns puts into the air is a great victory for liberty. The man has been in office only a few days and already our society has become more open and democratic. I have been waiting a very long time for a president this dedicated to the principle of freedom and reason. (Readers really should spend some time reviewing these executive orders. They are amazing.)

Being a public employee, one of the concerns I have had over the last several years is having to die on that hill. If you sincerely can’t determine whether I am a man then your gender detection faculty has been corrupted. Humans are generally quite accurate at determining the gender of others based on body shape, facial features, movement, and voice. Women do a bit better than men, but studies suggest that people of either gender can correctly identify gender from facial images alone with around 95 percent accuracy, depending on factors like facial expressions, image quality, and lighting. When other cues such as voice and body motion are included, accuracy can increase further. If you know my gender but demand my pronouns anyway, then you are part of the reason why others have corrupted gender detection faculties. In the vast majority of cases, this is an exercise in compelled speech to advance and ideology. A free people must resist this.

Long ago, I became determined to never put my pronouns in my email signature or announce my pronouns at meetings or before a classroom, not just because I don’t subscribe to the ideology (it’s woo woo), but because it’s unethical for me or others to pressure individuals into rehearsing in a public setting speech codes associated with ideologies to which they may not subscribe. This is especially true with respect to students who may feel compelled to follow the direction of their instructor because he is an authority figure. Students are a captured population in the sense that many will feel like they can’t leave the room and thus feel compelled to speak in the manner their instructor is requesting. Organizations should not be about forcing employees to convey ideology. It is a subtle form of tyranny, but it is tyranny nonetheless.

Speaking of being unburdened by what has been….

* * *

Update (2.1.2025): This note is following up on the above concerning the removal of those ridiculous pronoun blocks in emails sent by federal employees and the taking down of pages promulgating the insanity of gender ideology. Trump’s action is the equivalent of purging the federal government of Scientology or the woo-woo of some other pseudoscientific ideology. This is a battle for the ages, as the anti-Enlightenment forces occupying our policy-making and, more deeply, sense-making institutions, are finally on the run.

Among the items you will find in this instantiation of panicked reporting by PBS is the taking down of public health information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, including lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary kids. Those who read Freedom and Reason and other platforms concerned with saving Western civilization from ideologues already know that such curricula testifies to the extent of the progressive project to reprogram vulnerable children in our public schools to produce adults who take gender ideology on faith and who will then support the policies of those who are promulgating the postmodern rot of queer theory.

While there are kids who identify as transgender or nonbinary (and parents, counselors, and doctors who identify them as such), no such person exists in our species. The existence of such a person as such is a purely ideological construction—and rejecting that construction does not erase the existence of those who have internalize it any more than denying the tenets of Islam erase the existence of those who identify as Muslim (just to get that bit of emotional and reputational blackmail out of the way). The claim of transgender or nonbinary existence is not a nonfalsifiable proposition of the sort that marks the presence of a true religious faith (e.g., the thetan in Scientology). Materially, there are two genders: male and female. This is incontrovertible; these facts have been confirmed: males cannot be female, females cannot be males, and neither can be both genders nor genderless. The natural history of our species completely contradicts claims to the contrary.

Indeed, the fact of the gender binary is essential to the evolution of all life that reproduces through a cycle where a gamete (haploid reproductive cell) with a single set of chromosomes combines with another gamete forming a zygote. This zygote then develops into an organism made up of cells with two sets of chromosomes (diploid)—and the cycle begins again. This includes not only all animals, but all plants, as well (however complex the cycle, so don’t trouble me with mosses and the like).

We cannot continue as a rational, scientifically-based civilization is we allow the truth of the life cycle to be denied by our governments and other public institutions. Churches and other religious institutions can deny such truths all they want. Individuals can deny truth, too. It’s their civil right to deny reality. But they cannot be allowed to corrupt public institutions with the falsehoods that obscure this truth. These institutions must work from scientific truth if they are to advance the material interests of the people they are established to represent in a secular society. See, not only are these forces anti-science, they are anti-civil rights and anti-democratic, to boot.

The Trump Administration is not at war with science but with science denialism, the postmodern rot that has corrupted our sense-making and policy-making institutions—not just in biology, but in every domain of knowledge and action, knowledge defined here as validated belief and action. This is one of the most significant, perhaps the most significant development in my lifetime. I have been sitting here for years feeling helpless while progressives have commandeered our public institutions and injected into the bloodstream of the masses a false narrative about the way the world works.

How thrilled I am to sit here today, now an old man, a man who now has hope for the future, watching a leader and movement standing up to the collective insanity that has warped mass consciousness and the workings of the institutions vital to the advancement of knowledge.

I am a liberal and a (small “r”) republican. This means I believe that (a) rights—such as conscience, speech, writing, assembly, association, privacy, due process, self-defense, and property—derive from nature and therefore inhere in each of us, and (b) constitutional government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. The People are sovereign both individually and collectively, not just nominally, but practically. I consider myself very fortunate to live in a country founded on these principles. Yet I am confronted by the reality that we are not living up to the principles our founders and the generations that followed bequeathed to us.

The central question confronting the founders of this country was how to reconcile the tension between individual rights and democracy, or the popular will. To address this, they established a constitutional republic with a bill of rights applicable to all people residing within the nation, the scope of which is determined by judicial review. This rights framework enables democracy while avoiding the problem of majoritarianism, or the tyranny of the majority. Meanwhile, representative government mitigates the risk of the tyranny of the minority. In practice, then, the state must have the power to secure our rights while simultaneously being limited in a way that preserves the integrity of those rights, thereby checking both the popular will and the tyranny of the minority.

I sometimes use this analogy: according to the Bible, the devil only has the power that God grants him; God allows Satan authority in the world, but Satan’s power is limited. In this analogy, Satan represents the government, while the sovereign represents God. Under the ancien régime, the sovereign was the king; in a totalitarian society, the sovereign is the state; in a constitutional republic, the sovereign is the people—both collectively and individually. Another way to conceptualize this is through the analogy of parental authority: under absolutism and totalitarianism, the king or the state respectively acts as the parent, while in a constitutional republic, the people assume this role. Once I become an adult, I am my own parent.

Put simply, certain liberties cannot be stripped from individuals simply because the majority seeks to impose conformity with the popular will. Nor should a minority of the wealthy and powerful be allowed to impose its will on the people. Thus, both forms of tyranny are in principle checked. However, with the rise of the corporate state and the technocratic apparatus, this balance—always delicate—has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Indeed, in many ways, our society has become unbalanced.

I have written extensively on the problems of the corporate state and technocracy, but there is another issue at hand, one that is not disconnected from those problems. This is the demand that government should provide for the needs of its people. Meeting this demand carries inherent risks. When the government assumes responsibility for people’s well-being, they become dependent upon it. Consequently, their loyalty shifts away from themselves as autonomous individuals and their fellow citizens and toward the state—and the party that controls the state or that part of it that governs the dependent. The state, in effect, becomes the parent, and those dependent upon it become its children.

Dependence on government thus grants it power over the individual, compromising the integrity of our rights, and because we are a people, not just those who are directly dependent upon it. Just as children do not possess the same rights as their parents, a dependent populace is subject to restrictions on conscience, speech, association, privacy, defense of self and others, and other natural rights. Dependence on government compels all citizens—since this is a representative system—to accept obligations they did not voluntarily assume, potentially hindering their own prosperity and the rewards of responsible decision-making for themselves, their families, and their communities.

At the same time, structural conditions exist that are not the result of poor individual decision-making but rather the inevitable concentration of wealth and power in the hands of those who control the nation’s political economy. This is after all, a capitalist society, the deleterious conditions of which are made worse with the rise of corporate power. Without access to legitimate means of self-sufficiency, some individuals will experience material deprivation, and some will resort to illegitimate means to satisfy their needs and desires. Thus, public safety necessitates government intervention, which inevitably places burdens on others. This burden goes beyond the criminal justice response but in addressing the criminogenic conditions that make that response necessary.

For much of my life, I voted for Democratic candidates, believing that their policies best aligned with the principles of individual rights and equal opportunity while addressing the deprivation problem. However, as the party increasingly embraced a vision of expansive government intervention, and with this intervention compromising our rights and liberties, I found myself questioning whether this shift was compatible with the foundational principles of classical liberalism and republicanism. This growing intrusiveness occurred while I was gaining a greater appreciation for the founding principles. As government grew more intrusive, as it intruded upon my freedoms of conscience, speech, writing, privacy, etc., the risk of state dependency and the erosion of personal autonomy became too great to ignore. A pound of flesh was being extracted, and that pound of flesh was the rights and liberties to which I am entitled as a human being.

At the same time, the Republican Party, through its populist transformation, has returned in many ways to its roots as the Party of Lincoln—championing individual liberty, economic self-sufficiency, and the sovereignty of the people over an overreaching state. This evolution has drawn me toward the Republican side, not out of blind partisan loyalty, but because its current trajectory aligns more closely with the principles I have always held dear and now hold dearer. If we are to preserve a constitutional republic that empowers individuals rather than diminishes them, we must support policies and leaders who prioritize liberty over dependency and self-governance over bureaucratic control.

The challenge remains to reconcile the necessity of government action with the imperative of maintaining individual autonomy. If the state is too weak, it cannot create the conditions necessary for the meaningful exercise of rights. If the state is too powerful, it risks becoming the parent, rendering citizens dependent rather than self-governing. The solution is not to reject government intervention outright but to ensure that any intervention preserves the sovereignty of both the individual and the people. This requires designing institutions and policies that empower individuals rather than enfeeble them, fostering conditions in which people can provide for themselves rather than becoming wards of the state. It also necessitates resisting both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of concentrated wealth and power, recognizing that each presents a distinct but related threat to republican liberty.

Ultimately, a free people must resist the temptation to trade autonomy for security, even when government action is necessary. The strength of a constitutional republic lies in its ability to mediate these tensions without eroding the principles that sustain it. The goal must always be to ensure that government serves the people, not that the people serve the government. The moment the latter occurs, sovereignty is lost, and the republic risks becoming something else entirely. Not all our problems can be solved by government. At the risk of being accused of being a Reaganite, many times government is the problem.

In June of last year I published The Persistence of Medical Atrocities: Lobotomy, Nazi Doctors, and Gender Affirming Care. In addition to comparing gender affirming care (GAC) to lobotomy in that essay, I compared GAC to female genital mutilation (FGM). Concerning the latter, the federal government of the United States banned FGM as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. In 2021, the law was strengthened with the passage of the STOP FGM Act of 2020, increasing penalties and expanding jurisdiction to cover more situations, including acts performed outside the US that involve US residents. Moreover, FGM is illegal in many US states, with laws that provide additional penalties. The mutilation of girls and women, as well as boys and men, and that is what GAC is, should be banned across the United States and its territories. The double standard in this case is very troubling.

What I will say next will become significant when I turn to President Trump’s executive order of January 28, 2025, Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation. I want to return to the matter of lobotomy, a medical practice that was largely and quietly discontinued over a lengthy period of time, and contrast that with the prohibition of female genital mutilation (FGM). The prohibition on FGM contrasts sharply with the historical acceptance of lobotomy, despite both involving invasive and often non-consensual bodily harm. FGM, widely condemned as a human rights violation, has been outlawed in many countries due to its irreversible physical and psychological damage. This is also true of lobotomy in several countries across the globe. Even the Soviet Union banned lobotomy, making it one of the first countries to do so, proclaiming in 1950 that lobotomy was harmful and inhumane. Soviet psychiatrists criticized the procedure for its severe side effects, including deterioration in cognitive function and disorganization of the personality.

This stance stands in stark contrast to the widespread use of lobotomies in Western countries, particularly in the United States and Europe, during the mid-20th century. Lobotomy was widely practiced throughout the mid-twentieth century, often without patient consent, including on children who cannot consent due to their immaturity. Although lobotomies were eventually abandoned due to advancements in psychiatric treatment (I will leave the problematic character of these treatments to the side for this essay) and ethical concerns, they were never explicitly prohibited in the same legal and moral framework as FGM. This discrepancy highlights how societal and medical perceptions shape the regulation of bodily interventions, often influenced by cultural, gendered, and institutional biases. A key institutional bias comes in the corrupting force of the profit-motive, a force that drives the medical-industrial complex. The profitability of GAC overrides the same ethical standards that led to the eventual discontinuance of the lobotomy, the latter not nearly as profitable. Given the power of this corrupting force, it cannot be left to the medical-industrial complex to act on their obligation to medical ethics.

FGM is a deeply entrenched patriarchal practice that perpetuates the subjugation of girls and women by enforcing harmful beauty, purity standards, and gender stereotypes. The severe physical and psychological consequences, including chronic pain, childbirth complications, and trauma, underscore its oppressive nature. In the past, progressives were supportive of the prohibition on FGM, viewing the practice as a form of gender-based violence that violates the right of girls and women to live free from a harm caused by gender ideology. I want to make this clear: FGM is a practice governed by a gender ideology that see physically altering the body of girls and women as necessary to bring their bodies into alignment with the stereotypes of a patriarchal society. Progressives argued that cultural traditions cannot justify practices that inflict harm and reinforce gender stereotypes. I don’t see any distinction between the practices of FGM and GAC. Both accomplish the same thing and are motivated by parallel ideologies, not just in form but in substance. What happened in the case of GAC? When did genital mutilation become okay? Why the double standard?

I have explained this matter on Freedom and Reason. I document how it happened in Gender and the English Language. Why it happened is analyzed in several other essays (see, e.g., Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix: Monstrosity and the Deceits of Trans Joy). I will leave the reader to those and other essays. Right now, I want to put on my sociology hat and discuss the power of culture and ideology in normalizing extreme and harmful action against girls and women.

From a sociological standpoint, cultural traditions refers to the beliefs, norms, and values that shape perceptions of reality and reinforce systems of power. Culture functions as a tool for maintaining dominant ideologies by normalizing certain worldviews while marginalizing others. Through institutions like education, media, and religion, cultural narratives legitimize social hierarchies while socializing individuals into accepting, often uncritically, beliefs, norms, and values that make likely certain ends, making those ends appear natural and inevitable, even necessary. This process influences everything from economic behavior to gender roles, dictating what is considered acceptable or deviant. Culture is thus not just a reflection of society but an active social force that delivers and perpetuates ideology, shaping how individuals understand their place in the world and interact with power structures. For progressives, GAC is acceptable while FGM is deviant, despite the fact that both are instantiations of genital mutilation demanded by ideology. Gender ideology and queer praxis underpins the double standard and misdirects public consciousness to uncritically accept one while rejecting the latter on reason. This is an instance of what George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four calls “doublethink.”

If the principle that underpins the prohibition of FGM—the rejection of harmful cultural practices—were taken seriously by rational minds, then these same principles must be consistently applied across all forms of extreme body modification, including genital mutilation. Just as FGM has been recognized as a violation of human rights despite its cultural justifications, other medical interventions that permanently alter bodies in ways that reinforce ideological norms should be subject to the same scrutiny. GAC is driven by gender ideology, a set of beliefs, norms, and values that shape perceptions of reality and refinance systems power—while generate large and sustained profits for the medical-industrial complex. Culture has the power to shape what is considered abusive or ethical, and it should not be allowed to obscure the fundamental question of whether a practice truly serves individual well-being or simply reinforces existing power structures. The prohibition against FGM defies cultural demands, putting health and safety of girls and women above ideology. A society committed to protecting vulnerable individuals must critically examine all medical interventions through this lens, regardless of the prevailing cultural or political narratives that seek to legitimize them.

To this end, President Donald Trump signed an executive order doing just that, establishing a federal policy prohibiting the funding, promotion, and support of gender transition procedures for minors under 19 years old. It accurately defines these procedures as “chemical and surgical mutilation,” including puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and gender-affirming surgeries. The order asserts that such interventions cause harm and lack scientific integrity, the lack of which I demonstrate in numerous essays on this platform (more than this, disconfirmation of its claims), instructing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to review and amend policies that rely on guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). I discuss the WPATH in the essay “Fear and Loathing in the Village of Chamounix” cited above. Crucially, Trump’s order mandates the defunding of medical institutions that provide these treatments to minors by restricting federal research and education grants, research often aligning with WPATH assumptions.

There’s more. The Secretary of HHS is directed to take regulatory actions limiting access to gender-affirming care for children, including revising Medicare and Medicaid standards and rescinding previous federal protections. The order further directs the Department of Defense to exclude such procedures from TRICARE coverage, the Office of Personnel Management to ensure federal employee health insurance plans do not cover pediatric transition-related treatments, and the Department of Justice to prioritize enforcement against practices it deems deceptive or harmful. It also calls for new legal avenues for individuals seeking recourse against medical professionals involved in gender-affirming care, including reviewing Department of Justice enforcement of section 116 of title 18, United States Code, and prioritizing enforcement of protections against female genital mutilation. It calls for convening states’ attorneys general and other law enforcement officers to coordinate the enforcement of laws against female genital mutilation across all American states and territories. It moreover targets state laws and policies that remove custody from parents who oppose such treatments.

There is more still, so I encourage readers to following the link and read the order themselves. I will conclude by noting that Trump’s decisive action in strengthening protections against harmful medical interventions reflects a commitment to safeguarding the rights and well-being of vulnerable individuals and those who cannot consent to having their bodies medically altered by an for-profit industry. By reinforcing the prohibition of female genital mutilation by extending similar protections to minors facing the irreversible medical procedures covered by GAC, the administration has prioritized ethics, human dignity, and science over ideological pressures. The executive order ensures that federal resources are not used to promote treatments lacking scientific integrity. Through strong regulatory measures and a clear stance against coercive medical practices, the Trump administration has reaffirmed the government’s role in protecting children from harm. This stance should be expanded to cover adults, as well. Nonetheless, the policy underscores a broader commitment to defending fundamental human rights and resisting cultural narratives that seek to normalize irreversible medical interventions on minors.

I have voted for Ralph Nader in 2008. I regret not voting for him in 2000 and 2004. Why? Nader’s political commitments align with mine. Ralph Nader has been a longtime critic of America’s food system, condemning corporate control, unsafe food practices, and weak government regulation. He has argued that agencies like the FDA and USDA are too close to industry lobbyists, leading to lax oversight and frequent food contamination issues. Nader has also spoken out against factory farming, citing its environmental harm, poor animal welfare standards, and negative health effects. He has criticized agribusiness giants for monopolizing the industry, reducing competition, and squeezing out small farmers, ultimately limiting consumer choice and food quality.

Nader’s criticisms of the medical-industrial complex also align with my longstanding views on the matter. Nader has opposed the pharmaceutical industry, accusing it of prioritizing profit over public health. He has highlighted the patent abuses that block competition and misleading direct-to-consumer advertising that encourage overmedication. He has also criticized the close relationship between government regulators and pharmaceutical companies, as corporate influence weakens safety standards and allows unsafe drugs to reach the market.

What I stated about Nader’s views and activism can also be attributed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy, who was my preference for president in the 2024 election because he was the most effective critic in the race of corporate control over the food system, the influence of industry lobbyists on regulatory agencies like the FDA and USDA, and the environmental and health consequences of industrial agriculture. Kennedy has campaigned against factory farming, highlighting its role in environmental degradation, animal cruelty, and the consolidation of power by agribusiness giants that harm small farmers and consumer choice. Like Nader, Kennedy is a critic of the pharmaceutical industry’s profit-driven practices, particularly its influence over government regulators and the high cost of prescription drugs. Like Nader, Kennedy has criticized Big Pharma for monopolistic practices, aggressive patent extensions that stifle competition, and misleading advertising that prioritizes profits over patient well-being.

The Democratic Party have aggressively sought for decades to marginalize Nader and Kennedy’s views and thwart their work, especially where they might enter the political sphere where they could have the greatest impact on food, medicine, and other industries that detrimentally impact the lives of working class American and their children. As you sit today and listen to Kennedy’s confirmation hearing today—or whenever you get a chance to sit and listen to it—you would have to be profoundly ignorant or profoundly ideological blinkered to not see how the statements and disagreements testify to the vital role of the Democratic Party in advancing the interests of the oligarchy, as well as the professional-managerial and the credential strata whose serve those interests, that together constitute the corporate state and the technocratic apparatus.

The White House budget office has ordered a pause on all federal grant and loan programs, potentially affecting trillions in government spending. Predictably, there is opposition to this move by those affected by it. In this essay I will explain why the administration finds this necessary and why the credentialed and professional-managerial strata are panicked over it.

How many trillions are we talking about? Three trillion dollar was spent last year on federal assistance programs to businesses, nonprofits, universities, businesses, and state and local government grants. To clarify, this is not assistance to individuals. Social Security and Medicare, the trust funds, are not included in the pause, although they stand to benefit from slashing the federal budget. 

That three trillion figure is mind blowing one. Leaving aside the trust funds, the two largest federal budget items are military and interest on the national debt. Department of Defense funding bill provides just over 824 billion dollars for 2024. It was increased several tens of billions in the 2025 budget. In 2024, interest on the national debt was $1.1 billion—$251 billion more than in 2023. Taken together with other discretionary spending, the 2024 budget was $2.7 trillion dollars. This means that spending on the programs Trump has paused exceeds all discretionary annual spending plus the cost of servicing the debt. The federal government has been stacking trillions upon trillions of dollars onto the national debt. The debt now exceeds $36 trillion, with approximately 1.7 trillion dollars added annually. 

Interest on the national debt goes into what accounts? Foreign and international investors, including countries like Japan ($1.1 trillion) and China ($749 billion), now hold $7.9 trillion (29 percent of publicly held debt). The Federal Reserve’s holdings have risen to $4.8 trillion due to monetary policy actions, while intra-governmental holdings, such as Social Security and Medicare, account for $7.1 trillion. That means that the government is borrowing from the trust funds generated by payroll taxes. Domestic private investors, including mutual funds ($3.8 trillion) and banks ($1.7 trillion), play a significant role. State and local governments hold approximately 2.1 trillion dollars of debt, largely for pension funds and reserves, while other domestic and international investors collectively hold about $6 trillion. Whoever owns it, the interest represents $1.2 trillion dollars that crowding out other investments.

Debt financing comes with another problem. When a government borrows money to finance its deficits, it issues bonds, which require interest payments. The amount of government borrowing can influence interest rates because, if the government issues large amounts of debt, it may need to offer higher interest rates to attract investors, particularly if there are concerns about the government’s ability to repay the debt. Borrowing demands push up the cost of money in the economy overall. As interest rates rise, it makes borrowing more expensive for the private sector. This is known as “crowding out.” Thus private businesses that want to borrow for investment—such as to expand operations, build new facilities, or develop new products—find it more costly to do so. Consumers are also discouraged from taking out loans for things like homes or cars. As a result, government borrowing reduces the amount of investment in the private sector, stifling economic growth.

Therefore, apart from the government spending a significant portion of its budget on servicing debt, which results in less fiscal flexibility to invest in other important areas, such as education, infrastructure, or public services, as well as perpetuating a vicious cycle, increased demand for borrowing—both from the government and the private sector—pushes interest rates higher, making it more difficult for businesses to secure financing at affordable rates.

Those who think the government can print its way out of this, whether they want this or not, if they have their way, which they largely have, must know that risks turning us into a Third-World county. Combined with support for mass immigration from the Third World, this seems to be what they want. The historical examples of excessive money printings are many. These cases highlight the consequences of a practice that can lead to runaway inflation, eroding the value of currency and causing severe economic instability. I will review some of the worst cases so readers can get an idea of the problem. 

In the aftermath of WWI, to pay reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic printed money at an unsustainable rate, causing hyperinflation and a plummeting of the mark’s value. By 1923, the exchange rate reached 4.2 trillion marks to one US dollar.  In Hungary after World War II, the government printed money to cover wartime expenses, resulting in one of the worst instances of hyperinflation in history. By 1946, Hungary’s inflation rate was so severe that prices were doubling every fifteen hours, and the pengő became worthless.

There are more recent examples. In Argentina during the late 1980s, the government printed excessive amounts of money to finance budget deficits, leading to an inflation rate of 12,000 percent in 1989, destabilizing the Argentine peso. Bolivia faced a similar situation in the 1980s when economic crises prompted the government to print money, resulting in annual inflation of 24,000 percent by 1985. During the early 1990s, Yugoslavia experienced hyperinflation as the breakup of the country, war, and sanctions led the government to print money to fund its operations, driving inflation to 313 million percent by 1993. Zimbabwe began printing money to finance its budget deficit, sparking hyperinflation that peaked at 79.6 billion percent in 2008. The Zimbabwean dollar became worthless and the country abandoned its currency the following year. In Venezuela, beginning in the mid-2010s, the government printed money to deal with declining oil revenues and economic mismanagement, resulting in hyperinflation that reached over a million percent by 2018. This led to the collapse of the bolívar and widespread economic hardship.

Several factors influenced the inflation problem in the United States today, and the increase in the money supply during the COVID-19 pandemic is one of them. In response to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, the federal government implemented large fiscal stimulus measures, including direct payments to individuals, unemployment benefits, and business relief programs, while the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low and engaged in large-scale asset purchases, known as “quantitative easing.” This combination of fiscal spending and monetary policy aimed to prop up the economy but led to a significant increase in the money supply. While this increase helped support demand during a time of economic shutdown, it also triggered inflationary pressures as supply chains were disrupted and labor shortages emerged. We can attribute the currently problem of inflation, particularly in goods and services, to this large influx of money into the economy without a corresponding increase in production. The scope of the problem is so big that it will take a while to wring inflation out of the system. 

Biden isn’t entirely to blame for this. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve undertook a series of unconventional monetary policies, most notably quantitative easing, to stabilize the economy. The Fed purchased large amounts of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities to lower long-term interest rates and inject liquidity into the financial system. This monetary stimulus aimed to encourage borrowing, spending, and investment to help revive the economy. While inflation remained subdued during most of Obama’s presidency, the increase in the money supply during this period contributed to higher asset prices, such as stocks and real estate. The long-term effects of expansive monetary policies laid the ground for future inflationary pressures.

Part of undoing this involves a bottom-up review of the budget. the Trump administration can’t leave that review to the same people who put the nation in this situation. This is what folks mean when they talk about deconstructing the administrative state. A paradigm shift must happen at some point to save the republic. I will probably not agree entirely with the program array when it all comes back on line, but cut will have to be made. There will be pain. The pain is unavoidable.

There is some confusion about all this works. Congress holds the power of the purse, meaning it’s responsible for appropriating funds through the passage of laws, including budgets and spending bills. This appropriation determines how much money will be allocated to various government departments, programs, and initiatives. Once Congress has appropriated the funds, the Executive is responsible for managing and utilizing them, sometimes according to the guidelines set by the legislature, but which generally leaves management matters to the various agencies. Federal agencies and departments under the executive branch implement programs, ensuring that appropriated funds are spent effectively and in compliance with legal requirements. This arrangement reflects the principle of separation of powers.

Historically, the Executive has had the power to impound funds, i.e., delaying or withholding the spending of funds Congress has appropriated for specific purposes. This allows the executive branch to control the use of budgeted funds, either temporarily or permanently, rather than spending them as intended by Congress. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 restricted the president’s ability to withhold funds without congressional approval. But the Executive still retains discretion in managing appropriated funds. Agencies can shift funds between accounts or purposes. The OMB still controls the timing and rate at which funds are distributed, in part to prevent overspending. Moreover, the Executive can determine how programs are administered or prioritized within the scope of legislative intent. If money is being spent in ways not intended by Congress, or within the scope of the Executive’s priorities, the Executive has a responsibility to address these matters. 

This idea is that Congress has control over appropriations while the president manages them. Trump paused certain programs to determine whether they’re being used appropriately and effectively. It’s part of the comprehensive review of the administrative state he promised during the campaign.

The administrative state, often referred to as the “fourth branch of government,” operates within the executive branch and is largely staffed by a credentialed class of professionals whose expertise drives the implementation of government policies. This class shares a natural affinity with the professional-managerial class found in academia, think tanks, and nongovernmental organizations, as both groups benefit from expansive government operations. Their professional interests are closely tied to the continuation of large budgets, sustained appropriations, and a steady flow of grants and loans, which fund their programs, secure their positions, and support their institutional objectives. This dynamic creates a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of big government and can lead to resistance against efforts by Congress or the Executive to curb spending or shift priorities. Such resistance arises from both practical concerns over job security and ideological commitments to the policies and projects they administer, presenting significant challenges to elected officials aiming to reform or restrain administrative practices.

Many in my line of work—I am an academic—identify as on the left and talk a good game about the working class, the interests of which they purport to advance and defend. However, this is not the class to which they belong, and their opposition to the grant and loan programs Trump has paused is rooted in the interests of their class, the new middle class, not in the interests of the working people they say they represent. In the way, the new middle class are the functionaries of the corporate state.

In his Prison Notebooks, written while in an Italian prison during the fascist period, Antonio Gramsci provided us with useful distinction that can help us understand the problem. Gramsci distinguishes between “organic intellectuals” and “traditional intellectuals.” Organic intellectuals emerge from or are tied to specific social classes. Depending on their class commitments, such intellectuals can either challenge or transform existing power structures, or they can defend the status quo and perpetuate the system. In either case, they articulate the interests and values of their class, helping to build its consciousness and capacity for political action. In contrast, traditional intellectuals are detached from class struggles and linked to long-standing institutions, such as academic or religious institutions. They consider themselves independent and perpetuate the status quo by remaining aloof from it. Gramsci argues that the distinction is not fixed; time can institutionalize organic intellectuals; traditional intellectuals can realign with new hegemonies.

One may conclude that the professional-managerial class within the administrative state operates as a modern iteration of Gramsci’s “traditional intellectuals,” ostensibly detached yet deeply invested in maintaining the systems that sustain their status and power. While their rhetoric often champions the working class, their actions and priorities reveal a closer alignment with their own class interests. This contradiction underscores the importance of identifying true “organic intellectuals,” those who represent the working class, challenging entrenched power structures rather than perpetuating them. Only through such realignment can the interests of the broader population take precedence over the self-preservation of an insulated elite.

At the same time, there can be organic intellectuals within academia, such as administrators drawn from corporate or political ranks, as well as business professors who embody and articulate the interests of the capitalist class. These individuals, while situated within educational institutions, often serve to reinforce and legitimize the values and priorities of the economic elites they represent. Their presence shows that organic intellectuals are not confined to popular movements but can emerge in institutional settings to advocate for dominant class interests. Understanding this dynamic is crucial to understanding how academia, like other institutions, can perpetuate hegemonic power.

The federal grant and loan programs in question often serve the interests of specific elites and professional classes rather than directly benefiting the working class. For instance, grants to universities fund research projects that may advance academic careers or institutional prestige but offer little immediate or tangible benefit to working-class communities. Most of the knowledge academics produce is esoteric and of no practical value to working people. At the same time, it can be of considerable value to those classes who exploit working people. Indeed, those who work in institutions of higher learning, many of whom proclaim solidarity with working people, are nearly unanimous in their defense of open borders, a policy that harms the interests of working people.

Similarly, loans and subsidies to businesses and nonprofits frequently bolster the corporate sector or professional-managerial institutions, reinforcing their dominance while leaving the material conditions of the working class largely unchanged. Even programs aimed at aiding state and local governments can disproportionately benefit administrative bureaucracies rather than addressing the pressing needs of working-class citizens. This allocation of resources reveals a misalignment between the stated goals of these programs and the realities of who benefit from them.

The Democratic Party, traditionally perceived as the party of labor, has undergone a significant transformation over the past several decades, aligning itself more closely with the interests of the credentialed and professional-managerial class, the class that serves as functionaries for the corporate state. This shift, exemplified by Clinton’s embrace of globalization and market liberalization, prioritized policies that benefited elites in academia, finance, and technology while leaving many working-class Americans behind. In contrast, the Trump presidency represents a populist reorientation of the Republican Party, challenging the corporate state’s dominance and addressing issues critical to the working class. Trump’s efforts to deconstruct the administrative state, reprioritize federal spending, limit immigration, and adopt a more nationalist economic agenda signal a break from the traditional Republican alignment with global corporations. This approach, while controversial among those seeking to sustain the status quo, reflects a genuine attempt to empower ordinary Americans and prioritize their economic and social well-being over the entrenched interests of the managerial and elite classes. Thus the pain imposed is not out of a desire to hurt working class citizens, but to establish the conditions in which they can regain control over their lives in the republic that was meant to serve their interests.

Capitalism isn’t going anywhere. The question for the left is what sort of capitalism will best serve the interests of the working people, which includes their ability to live their lives beyond the scope of an expansive and intrusive government. It also means that those made dependent on government by progressives will have a change to become more self-reliant and enjoy the dignity that comes with work. With mass deportations, there will be jobs that need to be filled. It’s time to transition the idled from their idled lives to lives lived productively. Everything follows from this, most importantly the reestablishment of the nuclear family among those most harmed by progressive social welfare and other policies. One of the consequences of getting Americans back to work is the amelioration of the criminogenic conditions that make citizens unsafe by generated the individuals who populate our prisons.

Today on X, I ran across a conversation between a woman who wanted to know why women should be forced to undress in front of men in female-only spaces and a man who insisted that individuals identifying as the opposite gender are in fact the opposite gender. This is an obvious falsehood, and it is upon this falsehood that gender ideologues demand the inclusion of males in female-only activities and spaces. The man presented no argument not because he was not up to the task—nobody is up the task because there is no rational substance to marshal for it. However, defeating gender ideology requires not only insisting on biological truth, but on making sure public policy concerning gender-segregation in society is based on that truth and not on ideology that denies it.

The power of gender ideology in undermining the science of gender and women’s rights is part of a larger problem: science denialism. A rational secular society must be one that accepts science as a vital part of public policy and the delineation of rights. To delineate something means defining and describing something with clarity and precision. That involves drawing boundaries around or specifying the characteristics of a thing to distinguish it from other things. These boundaries and characteristics are objective, i.e., independent of the mind. Science is the superior way of determining the boundaries and characteristics of things that exist objectively.

Recognizing the role biological science plays in the determination of truth is not a presumption that scientific truths are fixed; science is an open system where claims are subject to scrutiny and disconfirmation. Rather, the establishment of science requires that the truth of the gender binary must be disconfirmed before policies based upon it are replaced. More than this, the claim that a man is a woman because he says he is must be supported by positive science. Given that such a claim is subjective, and that objective claims about gender that contradict science are easily disconfirmed, it is at present impossible to see how gender ideology can replace the science of gender. One can only do this by rejecting science.

Sal Grover’s commentary in the tweet I share below is thus on point. “If I was going to go on national television to say that women should accept men in women’s spaces, you better believe I’d make sure I had a good argument for it,” she writes. “But because there isn’t a good argument for it, everyone who does it ends up making a complete fool of themselves.” As a college professor, I am surrounded by administrators, faculty, and students who believe that women should accept men in women’s spaces. They justify this belief by asserting the same claim as the man in the video. But it is always only an assertion, asserted by someone who refuses to admit the science of the matter. Since the claim is false, and since I don’t want to simply assert something, I thought it would be useful to explain why.

https://twitter.com/salltweets/status/1883078002000707795

Gender (or sex) determination in humans (and other mammals) is guided by chromosomal karyotypes, specifically XX and XY configurations. The presence of the Y chromosome plays a pivotal role, as it carries a critical gene called SRY (sex-determining region Y). This gene, when functional, directs the development of male reproductive tissues, leading to the production of small gametes known as sperm (or spermatozoa). In the absence of the Y chromosome, as in individuals with an XX karyotype, reproductive tissues develop to produce large gametes called eggs (or ovum). Occasionally, the SRY gene on the Y chromosome may not function properly. When this occurs, the reproductive tissues are unable to produce either sperm or eggs. Sometimes monotremes (echidnas and platypuses) are held up as examples of mammals that do not fit this model. However, even in monotremes, gender is binary; despite their unique system of gender-determining chromosomes, monotremes still produce individuals that develop as either male or female. There are no exceptions to the rule.

This is also true of birds, although sex determination operates through a different chromosomal system known as the ZZ/ZW system, the reverse of the system found in mammals. In the avian system, females are the heterogametic sex (ZW), while males are the homogametic sex (ZZ). The presence of the W chromosome determines female development, whereas its absence leads to male development. In birds, the DMRT1 (doublesex and mab-3 related transcription factor 1) gene, located on the Z chromosome, plays the critical role in male development. Because males have two Z chromosomes, they express more of this gene, which promotes the development of male characteristics. In females, who have only one Z chromosome, lower levels of DMRT1 and the presence of the W chromosome drive female differentiation. To be sure, there are complexities in avian biology. For instance, cases of sex reversal have been observed, typically influenced by environmental and hormonal factors rather than chromosomal anomalies. However, as with mammals, these exceptions do not negate the fundamentally binary nature of gender in birds.

In fact, the gamete system is fundamentally binary across all animals and plants (so I need not go through the reptile, fish, insects, and all the other varieties of life). In all sexually reproducing organisms, there are two types of gametes. This distinction defines the binary nature of gender at the gamete level and underpins the biological classification of male and female across species. This binary system arises in natural history (evolution) from the fundamental constraints of reproduction; small gametes are optimized for mobility and quantity, increasing the likelihood of fertilization, while large gametes are optimized for nutrient provision, ensuring the initial support of a developing zygote. This complementary strategy has evolved independently in many lineages because it is highly effective for sexual reproduction. Evolution is not intentional but it is remarkably rational.

Putting the matter simply, the gender binary is a feature of the chain of life across these kingdoms, whatever the variation in how these gametes are produced and distributed among individuals. Even in cases where secondary sex characteristics, reproductive roles, or chromosomal systems introduce complexity or variation within species gender remains binary.

This is an essential biological truth; it cannot be changed by ideology. Rejecting biological science only makes a person unscientific in his thinking. It does not change reality. It will not do to say that a man who claims he is a woman really is one and therefore should be allowed to participate in activities and be present in female-only spaces. If this demand proceeds on the ground of truth, then it must advocate for eliminating sex-segregated spaces altogether. Otherwise it is entirely arbitrary. Why women must accept men in their activities and spaces must proceed via a different argument, for example that individuals should have access to the same activities and spaces regardless of their gender. This argument proceeds on the grounds of strict equality of treatment, which must eschew recognition of grouped differences. If this is accepted, the principle of equity is abandoned. As it stands right now, the gender ideology crowd wants the have their cake and eat it, too.

Equity is why gender-segregated spaces exist in the first place. Gender-segregated spaces were established because they provide comfort, privacy, and safety in settings where material differences between males and females can have practical or social implications. In changing facilities, locker rooms, and restrooms, segregation generally ensures personal privacy during such activities as attending to hygiene needs. In sports, gender segregation allows for fair competition by accounting for physiological differences, such as muscle mass and strength, that can influence performance. In gender relations, it protects women from male violence, which has a profound and devastating impact on females. Male violence perpetuates gender inequality and undermines women’s autonomy, safety, and well-being. Victims may suffer long-term physical injuries, mental health challenges such as anxiety, depression, and trauma, and a diminished sense of self-worth. These effects perpetuate a cycle of fear and marginalization, as women feel and are unsafe in areas of life where they are especially vulnerable.

Even if there are women who don’t mind men in their spaces, the fact that there are women who do is sufficient for maintaining gender-segregated spaces. Likewise, the fact that not all men harass or perpetrate violence against women does not negate the fact that some do, including those men who claim to be women, and therefore the safety of women depends on the integrity of these spaces. The woman in the video makes several important points, one of which is the question of why it should be men who decide the fate of women. For that matter, why should some women decide the fate of all women?

Throughout this essay I have used gender and sex interchangeably. This is because, as I have shown in numerous essays on Freedom and Reason, they are synonyms and have been for eight centuries. I have shown on this platform that biologists still use the term gender in describing reproductive anatomy and processes. Moreover, I have documented the rise of gender ideology and the political project to falsely divorce gender from sex by arbitrarily changing the definition of the former and appealing to the subjective construct of gender identity. Disconfirmation requires identity to be an objective thing, this so we can determine what sort of thing it is.

There is no evidence in science that validates the claim that a person can be born in the wrong body, and it is difficult to imagine how this could even be possible given the fact that the brain of a male is by definition a male brain, this because the brain in question, like the heart, kidneys, and everything other organ and system, exists in a male body, however it may appear in a scan. That grouped differences come with trait variation in the myriad of attributes that delineate the gender binary does not obviate the qualitative differences inherent in sexual dimorphism. Moreover, altering physiology chemically or changing its appearance cosmetically through surgery doesn’t change what the organism is genetically. Those interventions only simulate gender. Simulations of things are not the things themselves. When they are not used to predict the working out of a theory, they are deceptions.

If reason and science were followed, there would be no controversy concerning gender since this whole thing would have been over before it started. But, over a period of decades, anti-science sentiment infected the thinking of those whose hands grasp the levers of power, and through this power an ideology has emerged that misleads people into believing impossible things. It is in this sense that I describe gender ideology as a religion. Unfortunately, it is a religion that state respects, which, considering the separation of religion and public policy articulated in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, it should not. The relevant clause in the article is specifically worded this way: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and the free exercise piece requires freedom from its exercise.

The other items in that same article, the rights to freely speak and publish, are necessary conditions for the advancement of science. The goal of establishing a secular republic for the advancement of science and technology was paramount in the intent of the Founders. If they were alive today and looked at the corruption of our sense-making, law-making, and policy-making institutions by gender ideology they’d ask when America lost the plot. My essays on Freedom and Reason explain how this happened. My commitment to science compels me to do this work. But I cannot alone push ideology out of our sense-making institutions and governmental agencies and set the nation back on the path of enlightenment. That will require those of us who work from reason to pull together. It’s not that a man should be punished for claiming he is a woman. It’s that women shouldn’t be punished because he does.

John Cleese over on X, reacting to the claim that God saved Trump from death in Pennsylvania, asked “Why did God put the shooter on the roof in the first place?”

https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1883037560794185823

As you know, I’m an atheist—and, if you didn’t know, an admirer of John Cleese for his comic genius. Nobody can take away his body of work. But what Cleese says here grossly distorts the Judeo-Christian view on divine intervention. No, I don’t think Cleese is being funny here. He has established a pattern concerning matters of religion.

Contrary to Cleese’s straw man, Christians and Jews believe that man’s capacity for free will is a feature of creation. God didn’t need to put a shooter on the roof. The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had his own motivation—and he represented the will of a great many people, as we have seen in polling on the question. Indeed, we infer his motive based on popular sentiment, since Crooks cannot be questioned because of the fact that he is deceased, shot dead by a Secret Service sniper.

The actual question is why God prevented the shooter from accomplishing his goal, the very question Cleese is trying to avoid or obscure. That’s a question of divine intervention. Divine intervention is a species of miracle. Miracles are extraordinary events, not the routine force behind human action or natural processes. God set the universe in motion and only occasionally intervenes. Miracles are for major course corrections or assists. God leaves everything else to the unfolding, a big part of which depends on the successes and failings of men, which we know as history.

Human agency is a vital part of God’s plan, and its importance is revealed straightway in the Bible. The first woman, Eve, transgresses God’s command that she and her mate, Adam, not partake of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil God planted in the Garden of Eden. God made Eve so that she could be deceived by a serpent. The meaning of the story is that it’s left to all of us to make good and right judgements, not be forced by God to do so. Eve should have resisted temptation. She didn’t, nor did Adam, and for that they were kicked out of Eden. Their wrongful deed was ultimately a good thing; as Erich Fromm notes in his 1941 Escape from Freedom, without transgression, human history would not be possible.

There is a scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex, a juvenile delinquent who murdered a woman, is subjected to the Ludovico Technique, the name given to a form of aversion therapy, in which viewing scenes of crime and violence are paired with a nausea-inducing drug. In the process, he becomes a clockwork orange, a thing that seems outwardly normal and appealing, like a fresh orange, but internally controlled and mechanical in action, like clockwork. A clockwork orange represents a person stripped of free will and manipulated into behaving in a predetermined manner. The virtues of the therapy that made Alex such a thing are extolled by the Minister of the Interior as the future of prison reform.

After demonstrating the success of the procedure at a gathering of political elites and medical doctors, with Alex the experimental subject, the prison chaplain rises to object to the speech of the Minister of the Interior. “Choice!” the chaplain exclaims. “The boy has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

In this scene, the state, acting in God’s stead (the wet dream of every authoritarian), is objectionable because total power makes a bad god, one seeking to determine human action by stealing human agency. This is not God’s plan. At least not the Judeo-Christian God. His plan grants human agency, permitting humans to take matters where they wish to, hopefully pursuing good and right courses of action—and avoiding those that lead to bad ends.

This is why society punishes wrongful behavior: the actions are not determined by God (how could they be bad and wrong otherwise?) but by the free will of the wrongdoer. One must choose to be righteous—which literally means to be right in a moral way—not compelled to be such by the state or an omnipotent being. This is a sign of God’s love. God grants mankind liberty because he loves us. It’s no accident that this is the foundation of the American Republic and a free society.

Do I believe God intervened in Pennsylvania? No. Trump turned his head at the last moment to reference a chart on immigration. That is serendipity (albeit many find it unfortunate). Had Trump not turned his head when he did, he would not be our president. Moments like this happen all the time. How many times have you upon approaching an intersection where cars have crashed thought had you not been delayed in your travels you might have been among the dead or injured? “There but for the grace of God go I” is a powerful sentiment, to be sure, but it represents our reflection upon events and the need to make meaning of them.

If one is determined to criticize religious thinking and other forms of mystification, pummeling straw men will not do. Cleese didn’t think this one through carefully. A lot of those who express irreligious sentiment are guilty of this.

Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed by a Republican Congress in June of 1866 and ratified in July 1868, states “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The amendment is one of three ratified between 1865 and 1870 during Reconstruction to guarantee the rights of black Americans and end the political and social inequities forced upon under Democratic Party hegemony. For this reason the articles are known collectively as the “Reconstruction Amendments.”

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. The order recognizes the historical context of the Fourteenth Amendment, which pertained to the postbellum situation and the situation of recently freed slaves, recognizing their birth in the United States as sufficient for citizenship. Section One thus, to borrow language from Trump’s executive order, “rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.”

Specifying categories not entitled to birthright citizenship, the order challenges the assumption of the blanket granting of citizenship to those born on American soil, a common law principle known as jus soli. “Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

Jus soli, or “right of soil,” originates in English common law, elements of which the United States inherited at its founding. However, the English themselves significantly moved away from birthright citizenship with the introduction of the British Nationality Act of 1981. This legislation shifted the emphasis to jus sanguinis, or “right of blood,” meaning that citizenship is now largely determined by the nationality of one’s parents rather than merely being born on British soil. Jus sanguinis is the standard for determining citizenship for most of the human population. This change was driven by efforts to address immigration concerns stemming from the nation’s former colonial empire and the evolving demographics following the decline of the British Empire. In other words, there is nothing controversial about excluding from automatic citizenship those born on national soil to parents who are not.

As expected, in one court or another, a federal judge in Seattle, US District Court Judge John Coughenour, in a brief 25-minute hearing, ruled that Trump’s order on birthright citizenship is “blatantly unconstitutional” and blocked it with a temporary restraining order. “It boggles my mind,” Coughenour opined. The Executive Order is not obviously unconstitutional, so what exactly boggles Coughenour’s mind is not apparent.

If Section One meant to cover anybody born on American soil is a citizen, then why are there exceptions? A person born in the US to a foreign diplomatic officer cannot be considered a US citizen at birth under the amendment. That’s because such persons are not under the jurisdiction of the United States but the jurisdiction of the country in which they hold citizenship. American Indians born in the US didn’t have citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act (the Snyder Act), which was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. They were born on American soil; why weren’t they automatically counted as citizens under the amendment? The answer is obvious: they weren’t the race with which the legislators who wrote the amendment were concerned. Before the Snyder Act, the Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), that a person born in the United States to Chinese citizens legally residing in America and under the jurisdiction of US law automatically becomes a US citizen. However, there has been no ruling concerning the status of children born to illegal aliens or to those holding temporary visas residing in the United States. The federal judge’s ruling thus goes beyond the scope of precedent, wrongly assuming the matter as settled.

I am encountering a great deal of panic over Trump’s executive order on birthright citizens (and more broadly his executive order Protecting the American People Against Invasion). One of the items panicking them is Elie Mystal’s absurd essay in The Nation “A Line-by-Line Breakdown of Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order.” Mystal falsely claims that the order “attempts to cancel the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.” Adding, “Getting rid of constitutional amendments via executive order is new, and, for me at least, ‘the worst.’” This appears to be what caused a long-time friend of mind to declare on Facebook that Trump was canceling the Fourteenth Amendment and thus bringing about an end to the American Republic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The subtitle of Mystal’s essay, a pull quote—“Almost every sentence of the order is wrong, misleading, or flagrantly unconstitutional”—is ironic. Nearly every sentence of Mystal’s essay presents no rebuttal, just goofy rambling. Perhaps this is to match his cultivated persona. Simply apply makeup and the man becomes full clown. Have I resorted to ad hominem? Listen to this take on Trump taking charge of the dire circumstances Biden left us with and judge for yourself: “In a flurry of lawless, unconstitutional, racist, bigoted, violent, and, in some cases, plainly stupid executive orders and pardons, Trump set his reign of terror in motion.” Reign of terror? This is the alternative clown universe in which progressives like Mystal dwell. If you don’t also dwell in that universe, then you’re a “mouth-breathing racist.” (Remember when those objecting to waring diapers on their faces during the COVID-19 pandemic was described as “mouth-breathers”? Etcetera.)

Of course, as I already indicated, it was inevitable that Trump’s order would trigger judicial review. Many if not all of Trump’s other orders will. But those panicking can relax; neither an executive order nor legislative action outside the amendment-making process can remove or change a constitutional amendment. Even Mystal, who purports to be an expert on constitutional matters, acknowledges this elsewhere in his essay. The US Constitution can only be amended through a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, or by a constitutional convention, which in turn requires ratification by two-thirds of the states (today that’s 38 of 50). That includes repeal of an amendment or any alteration to it, both of which require a new amendment (see the prohibition amendments that uglify an otherwise magnificent document). No president or legislature can remove a right from a constitutional amendment. That requires judicial review—which in principle is all of them.

Consider that the First Amendment rights to free speech and publishing have no trammels. You won’t find anywhere in that amendment language concerning defamation, i.e., libel or slander. However, through legislative action or judicial review (the latter occurs in testing the constitutionality of the former) speech and publishing have been fettered in the case of defamation. Perhaps there should be no exception, but defamation law is the law of the land. The Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches and seizures has been specified through judicial review, as well. Because of conceptual difficulties, such as reasonable suspicion and probable cause, and other matters, it has come before the courts and precedents have been established. This is true of all constitutional amendments—all are subject to judicial review. Indeed, this is true of all law in a democratic society considering the legal principle of stare decisis.

This is the reason the Supreme Court and lower federal courts exist in the first place: to review laws with respect to the Constitution and determine their scope and validity. Section 2 of Article III states: “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution.” Trump’s executive order is now moving through the federal courts. It will almost certainly be argued before the Supreme Court to determine its constitutionality. But to be clear, the matter of whether children born on American soil to those classes described in Trump’s executive order remains an open question. There is precedent in Trump’s favor. In Chae Chan Ping v United States (1889), the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act, affirming Congress’s authority to regulate immigration, in particular its power to set immigration policy and to pass new legislation even if it overrode the terms of previous international treaties (the matter concerned the Burlingame Treaty). As such, the ruling limited the role of the judiciary in shaping immigration to the United States. Considering this, Congressional Republicans have just introduced a bill to codify Trump’s birthright citizenship order.

The bottom line is that the order is not “blatantly unconstitutional.” The education of the public on this matter is urgent business. The media depends on widespread ignorance of constitutional law, separation of powers, and judicial review to mislead the public to save the globalist project to erase borders and advance the managed decline of the American Republic.