freedom and reason

“We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us.”—Malcolm X

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”—George Orwell

In A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980 and widely adopted in high schools, Howard Zinn argues that all history-writing is shaped by choices, just as mapmaking is. A cartographer decides what to enlarge, what to shrink, and what to leave out entirely; those decisions create a perspective, not a neutral mirror of reality. Historians, Zinn contends, do the same (but more than that, as we shall see): what they highlight or omit reflects ideology, political interests, and values (and, I must add, tribal affinity). He uses the analogy to insist that objectivity in history is impossible, because the historian must always select from an overwhelming number of facts—and those selections inevitably reflect a standpoint, usually that of governments, elites, or victors.

The analogy is true enough in science, as well, and thus crashes on the shores of a necessary truth. Yet it has proved useful to those who claim that truth is determined by power and standpoint, and that a marginal standpoint can legitimately revise history in the pursuit of power—a hallmark of postmodernist thought.

Below, I quote Zinn at length so readers can see exactly the perspective and politics I am criticizing in this essay—a politics I once endorsed myself, for example, in a 2012 talk to educators, A Culturally Competent and Democratic Pedagogy.

“To state the facts,” Zinn writes, “and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.”

He then deploys the mapmaker analogy:

“It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.”

Zinn concedes that selection, simplification, and emphasis are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But, he insists,

“My argument cannot be against [them],” he writes. “The map-maker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical; it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual.”

The ideological interest, Zinn continues, is never openly expressed the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious. Instead, traditional history is presented “as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability.” This is not intentional deception; historians have simply been trained in a society that treats knowledge as a technical problem of excellence rather than as a weapon in the hands of contending classes, nations, and races.

At the core of Zinn’s project is the smuggling in of a primitive ethic: that the living are responsible—not for historiography, but for the actual deeds of past generations. Otherwise, why would any historian’s “ideological” rendering of the past matter at all? If traditional historians distort history to evade collective, intergenerational responsibility, then the responsible progressive historian must rediscover or emphasize the facts they omit or downplay. The entire endeavor only makes sense if one first accepts that collective, intergenerational responsibility is something the living ought to bear—and bear in a way that justifies altering present arrangements.

I reject that premise, as I made clear on Thanksgiving 2021 in Awokening to the Meaning of Thanksgiving. “Thanksgiving is about the living. It’s not about corpses—except for the dearly departed we remember together,” I wrote. “Those who want everybody to dwell in a narrative of collective guilt have way too much influence in today’s world. We need to be more forceful in our insistence that they sit the fuck down.”

I put the matter bluntly, I know. I was frustrated. I still am. Every time I hear a land acknowledgment at a ceremony or meeting, I sigh and roll my eyes. If I were inclined to be more disruptive, I would say something. Instead, I redirect the frustration into essays.

Two years later, in Giving Thanks Amid Uncertainty and Hopeful Developments, I wrote:

“I hope I never have a day in my life when I won’t or can’t be thankful for living in the greatest republic that ever existed—the United States of America. Although I am not responsible for the actions of those now dead and gone, I can be thankful for my ancestors who founded, built, and defended this great nation. I worry about the future, though, not only because of the threats abroad, but also because of the rot inside. The enemies of America are in charge of the machinery of the republic. I’m not religious, but I know many of you are and will pray for America. I’m thankful for that, too. We need more than prayers, though. We need action.”

(We took that action in November 2024 and returned a transformational leader to the White House.)

What I want to do in the remainder of this essay—while I wait to celebrate the day with my nuclear family—is recover from manufactured forgetting key relevant facts about Thanksgiving and show that the claim that the holiday celebrates the genocide of indigenous peoples is a recent, thoroughgoing political reinterpretation, one that emerged long after the holiday’s traditions were firmly established in American culture.

The facts of the case are objective, not ideological. Thanksgiving developed not as a commemoration of conquest but as a moral and religious day of gratitude, shaped far more by nineteenth-century Protestant culture and the exigencies of the Civil War than by early colonial events—though those events supplied moments later generations felt worth remembering.

The colonial antecedents lie in seventeenth-century New England harvest celebrations. The best-known—the 1621 Plymouth gathering—was a modest festival attended by both Pilgrims and Wampanoag during a period of alliance and mutual dependence. It was neither intended nor understood at the time as a celebration of dispossession or violence.

When Malcolm X, in his 1963 Message to the Grassroots speech, uttered the phrase quoted at the top of this essay, he could not possibly have been talking about Africans. There were no African slaves at Plymouth (or for decades after). He was deconstructing the symbolism of Plymouth Rock as the founding of a great and peaceful nation by misleading his audience—just as journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine would decades later with the 1619 Project—about the history of America.

The national holiday we observe today, however, owes its form to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation, issued amid a civil war, designating a day of gratitude, prayer, and unity. Whatever nostalgic connection we retain to the Plymouth story we learned in grade school (complete with hand-traced and crudely-decorated construction-paper turkeys stapled to corkboards), modern Thanksgiving has no connection to the Indian Wars or any narrative of conquest. To teach children that it does is educational malpractice—and malpractice in American public education is as rare as medical injury.

The association of Thanksgiving with genocide is a post-1960s critical narrative born of the convergence of American Indian political mobilization (AIM and related movements), broader progressive civil-rights activism, and the rise of postcolonial, revisionist historiography rooted in postmodern corruption of our sense-making institutions. Beginning with the 1970 National Day of Mourning, activists reframed Thanksgiving as a myth that obscures catastrophic population loss, displacement, and cultural destruction. For the anti-American activist, the holiday now symbolizes the start of a tragic trajectory rather than communal gratitude. To them it means the American project is invalid.

In this telling, the American story is exceptional in terms of ethnic oppression and genocide. Indeed, this is the only kind of American exceptionalism allowed—if one wishes to avoid being smeared as a white supremacist.

The 1621 gathering itself is not a myth; it happened. But turning Thanksgiving into a day of mourning is a political act of repurposing—a classic move of woke ideology, which demands that every American story be reexamined through the lens of power, race, and structural injustice.

(When critics remind me that “woke” is an old word whose meaning has changed, they are half-right: its first mainstream print appearance was in 1962, urging black Americans to “stay woke” to racial injustice. The core purpose, however, has not changed: to make permanent the perception that America is fundamentally unjust.)

The reinterpretation of the holiday as a symbol of genocide thus represents an intentional political shift in cultural sensibilities rather than the uncovering of a hidden historical truth. But the truth of Thanksgiving was never hidden—any more than the history of slavery was hidden. The trope of “hidden history” is itself a rhetorical device for manufacturing historical forgetting.

The youth of today are taught history not as an informative exercise, or even to educate the developing person about discernment in historiography and the importance of understanding biography and history; rather, the purpose of history education since the 1960s is pitched as the liberation of secret truths concealed by oppressors—white cisgendered Christian supremacists—to advance an imagined status quo manufactured forgetting means to valorize.

Many of us who grew up before the woke era experienced Thanksgiving as a day of family and reflection (even an atheist like me could participate culturally and feel loved), unburdened by subversive political desire. I say that so younger readers may pine for a world where not everything is politicized, where the woke gaze is diminished.

My generation (born 1962) always knew about the fate of indigenous peoples. We were horrified by aspects of that history, but we recognized it as history: deeds done by the dead, for which no living person bears responsibility—even if they inherited the spoils of conquest and colonization.

America is not exceptional in this way: World history is the story of conquest and colonization; American Indians themselves arrived in worlds shaped by earlier conquests.

Progressive history revises the past in order to delegitimize the present on the fallacious premise that each generation is responsible for the sins of its predecessors. That is a primitive ethic, one that the modern world rightly buried. It should never have been resurrected from its grave.

The future is open, but it is also constrained by the present order—some elements of which are worth preserving. When in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell quotes O’Brien, an Inner Party member, about the past, present, and future, he highlights for readers the power of shaping history to influence society and maintain authority.

Those in power, or who are in a position to capture it, manipulate collective memory by censoring and rewriting historical events to justify their ambitions. If the ruling class or some other determined group can convince people that past events occurred in a certain way, then they can shape beliefs, values, and expectations—and this control shapes future behavior to align with their interests.

Postmodernists are right about this—the one truth they cannot deny: control over historical narrative is a tool for political domination, as people’s understanding of the present and their vision of the future are deeply influenced by what they are taught about the past. For them, it’s all about discursive power (which depends on corruption and command of society’s institutions). For those who care about facts as really-existing things, it’s about truth and justice. This is why it is vital to the life of the free republic to prevent its youth from being taught to feel guilty about their nation’s past.

(For further reading on this topic, see my July 2021 essay The Zinn Effect: Lies Your Teachers Tell You.)

Have you seen this yet?

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson: "We can't jail our way out of vioIence… it's racist" pic.twitter.com/IdroYZaKiG

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 25, 2025

The chart below illustrates why the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, is full of shit. He tells his constituents that America will never incarcerate its way out of violent crime. No social system can completely eliminate violent crime. And the best that a society with dense urban populations, widespread idleness and welfare dependency, fractured family structures, the presence in power of policymakers and politicians who promote a culture of resentment and violence, and officials who stand down law enforcement while returning lawbreakers to the street can do is reduce crime and violence to tolerable levels. The most effective way to do that? Incarceration.

Incarceration doesn’t reduce violent crime by deterring criminals from preying on the public or warring with one another. Deterrence requires more law enforcement officers on the street and the aggressive policing of the populations there. Incarceration reduces violent crime through incapacitation. Suppose a society removes violent offenders from the streets. In that case, it follows that those who cannot abide by the rules of a decent society will be unable to commit violent crime. This is logically obvious, and the empirical evidence confirms it, as shown in the above chart.

There is no other explanation for the drastic drop in crime associated with mass incarceration. Our society is neither more equal nor less impoverished than it was in the decades before the 1960s. Criminogenic conditions only increased in the period following the 1960s, which explains the drastic rise in crime since then. What exacerbated those conditions? Ghettoization; the vast expansion of the welfare state; mass immigration that idled millions of American citizens; and the practice of defining down deviance. Who is responsible for this? Corporations and their progressive operatives in the Democratic Party, along with Republican collaborators (RINOs).

Given the degree of violent crime in American society—largely the result of decades of progressive social policy that destroyed inner-city neighborhoods and demoralized the people living in them—mass incarceration has proven the most effective intervention if the goal is to make society safer and therefore freer. That should be the aim of anyone who claims to care about other people—especially those who profess that black lives matter. Unfortunately, the same party that for the most part created these conditions continues to perpetuate them for economic and political reasons, and that party remains a significant force at both the federal and state levels. That would be the Democratic Party.

Some people view mass incarceration as an indicator of unfreedom. But the relevant question is whether the deprivation of liberty is justified. Not everybody deserves to be free. Unfreedom is justified under the principle of just deserts: if one breaks the law, there are consequences, and the consequences should keep foremost in mind the safety of those who follow the law. It is the right of the lawbreaker to be punished for his actions. It is the right of the people to be protected from those actions. Some see demographic patterns in criminal justice as evidence of systemic racism. This may be true with respect to the policies that create and exacerbate criminogenic conditions, but it is not true of the institutions that must deal with the consequences of those policies. Demographic patterns in criminal justice reflect demographic patterns in serious criminal offending.

In the final analysis, the deprivation of liberty experienced by those who commit violent crimes is the result of both progressive policies and the voluntary actions of those who suffer them. Those who abide by the law do not deserve to be victimized by those who do not. Regardless of social conditions, those who harm others choose to do so. One makes a choice to break the law. Their victims—or those they are likely to victimize—have a legitimate expectation that a good society will use the most effective and immediate means available to enhance public safety. Incarceration is the most effective and immediate means to that end.

Politicians like Brandon Johnson (and JB Pritzker) do not operate from an objective, empirical standpoint. Not because they cannot—although Johnson is plainly a stupid man—but because they operate from an ideology that asks the public to imagine that demographic patterns in criminal justice are driven not by the demographics and patterns of crime but by systemic racism. This is a falsifiable proposition, and it has been repeatedly falsified. If rational and honest people are to reason objectively and scientifically, then ideologues like Johnson are among the worst politicians a city can elect. Yet citizens continue to elect them. Therein lies the deeper problem plaguing the blue city: widespread ignorance and ideological corruption among the populace.

Are there other ways to reduce violent crime? Yes. Among them: closing the borders; deporting illegal aliens; restricting public assistance to those who truly have no other means of support; and insisting that able-bodied Americans go to work. However, these measures must be pursued in tandem with aggressive law enforcement and incarceration. It will take decades to undo the harm Democrats have inflicted on American cities over the last seventy years. Given the depth of ideological corruption, partisan loyalty, tribal affinity, and imposed ignorance in this country—largely a consequence of progressive control over society’s sense-making institutions, e.g., public education—it is unlikely that citizens will be able to keep Democrats out of government and elect those who would rationally address these problems at the scale required to re-order society, restore public safety, and reverse the structural causes of criminogenic conditions (what one properly identifies as the evidence of systemic racism).

I will close by noting that the logic behind the reductions in violent crime between the mid-1990s and roughly around 2014 is the same logic that explains why violent crime increased after 2014: the nation largely abandoned effective law-and-order policies. This was not accidental. Beginning around 2010, the mass media began promoting the myth of systemic racism and white supremacy. Wealthy individuals and organizations created and funded groups like Black Lives Matter, which persuaded millions that depolicing and decarceration were justified based on the false claim that law enforcement was inherently racist. This problem was made worse when, in 2020, Democrats opened the borders and flooded the United States with cheap foreign labor—an intentional action benefiting billionaires while disorganizing working-class communities and diminishing the life chances of American citizens.

The worsening conditions in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods are not the unintended consequences of well-meaning policy. The do-gooders are not doing good. Today’s situation is deliberate in the same way that criminal law defines and adjudicates intent and criminal culpability. Because of the way violent crime affects all of us, we are victims of a grand political crime perpetrated by the elite and their functionaries in the Democratic Party. As I have noted before, Republicans don’t run the blue cities. Unfortunately, congressional Republicans seem hesitant to act to stop the federal judiciary from undermining Donald Trump’s efforts to rein in violent crime.

Recent polling by Richard Baris (of Big Data Poll) shows that a large share of Americans—particularly younger voters, including many on the political right—believe that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. When asked, a plurality of registered voters (38.4%) believe “what Israel has done in Gaza amounts to genocide.” Less than 3 in 10 (29.0%) say it does not, and roughly one-third (32.6%) are unsure. Republican voters ages 18-29 agree 43.5 to 36.2 percent. That margin widens significantly among the same age group that self-identifies as America First Republicans, with nearly 60 percent agreeing with the statement. Moreover, except among Republicans overall, Israel drew less support than did Gazans. Even here, sympathy for Israel is less than 50 percent. More striking is that the group with the greatest sympathy for Gaza is young devotees of the American First movement. Note also the ambivalence of many respondents. The sample size of the poll exceeded 2,000. (For Baris’s report, see Poll: Sympathy for Israel Falls to Historic Low Among U.S. Voters.)

As someone well-informed about the conflict and having an in-depth understanding of the laws of genocide and war, these numbers are troubling. They indicate that a large proportion of the American population does not understand the situation. However, as I will come back to at the end of this essay, it suggests something more disturbing: that many Americans hold Israel to a different standard than they do other nations. Assuming, charitably, that these numbers mainly reflect widespread ignorance of genocide law and a nation’s permissible response when attacked, it is important to state that the belief that Israel perpetrated genocide in Gaza misinterprets both the legal meaning of genocide and Israel’s response to the events of October 7, 2023.

On the matter of genocide, a genocide is defined by its motive: the intent to destroy an ethnic population in whole or in part. Israel did not carry out its operations in Gaza with this motive. Israel’s action in Gaza was defensive. Israel was responding to an attack by a belligerent entity on Israeli soil. Indeed, it was responding to a genocidal act, not perpetrating one. To explain this, I will draw a parallel between the Israeli-Gazan situation and Allied operations conducted against Nazi Germany during WWII. Allied actions in Nazi Germany will serve as the moral measuring rod for judging the appropriateness of Israel’s actions.

Under Nazi rule, Germany pursued a genocidal agenda, seeking to eliminate the Jews from German society and from Europe altogether, with plans to do the same in the Middle East (see Jew-Hatred in the Arab-Muslim World: An Ancient and Persistent Hatred). Following this genocidal aggression and Germany’s broader assault on Europe, the Allies unleashed a campaign of overwhelming force on German cities—Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, and other urban centers—reducing them to rubble. The devastation, when viewed in photographs today (easily obtained by searching Google images, some of which appear in my essay The Danger of Missing the Point: Historical Analogies and the Israel-Gaza Conflict), bears a striking visual resemblance to Gaza. Roughly 600,000 German civilians were killed in Allied bombing alone, tens of thousands of them children, and millions of German civilians died through other causes during the war. Yet the Allied campaign is not understood as genocidal because its motive was defensive and reactive. The scale of devastation, horrific as it was, did not define the moral category. Intent did.

The Hamas attack of October 7 carried a clearly stated genocidal intention. Hamas’s foundational commitment is the removal of Jews from Palestine, which its slogan “from the river to the sea” and its charter openly articulate. The 1988 Hamas Covenant contains genocidal language, including explicit calls for violence against Jews as a group, promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, and framing of the conflict as a religious obligation to eliminate the “Zionist enemy.” The charter contains two particularly inflammatory provisions that are widely regarded as genocidal in intent. Article 7 quotes a well-known hadith declaring that the Day of Judgment will not arrive until Muslims fight and kill the Jews. Article 13 categorically rejects any peaceful solution or negotiation, stating that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad” and dismissing all diplomatic initiatives and international conferences as contrary to Hamas’s principles. Regardless of later revisions to the charter, which do not alter the intent identified above, the ideological core remains: a Jew-free Palestine. October 7 was carried out in furtherance of this genocidal goal.

Israel responded to the horrific attacks of October 7 defensively, striking Hamas targets embedded across Gaza’s densely populated urban environment. Again, crucially, the moral comparison between Germany and Hamas rests not on the scale of devastation (in lives lost, approximately 6-7 percent of the German civilian population, and 3-4 percent of the Gazan population), but on motive: in both cases, one side initiated aggression grounded in genocidal ideology; the other responded with overwhelming force designed to defeat that aggression.

Critics argue that the comparison to World War II is flawed because the Allies fought a sovereign nation-state, whereas Israel faces a non-state militant organization embedded among civilians. However, the structural form of the enemy does not alter the essential moral fact: in each case, a genocidal actor initiated the violence. Israel’s response, like that of the Allies, aimed to neutralize an entity driven by the elimination of a people, as the Hamas Convenant makes clear. Once more, intent, not political form, is the hinge of the moral argument.

Another criticism focuses on foreseeability. Critics claim that even if Israel did not intend civilian casualties, the extent of the destruction was foreseeable and therefore morally condemnable. Yet international law has long distinguished between intent and foreseeable collateral damage. Civilian casualties, even on a large scale, do not constitute genocide unless they arise from a desire to destroy a population. The Allies bombed German cities knowing that civilians would die in enormous numbers, yet their motive—to defeat a belligerent and genocidal regime—remains morally distinct from genocide itself. The same holds for Israel confronting Hamas fighters who systematically embed themselves in civilian structures precisely to produce inflated civilian death tolls.

A further argument asserts that Israel’s overwhelming military superiority imposes a heightened obligation for restraint. But superiority does not alter intent, nor does it erase the right of a nation to defend itself after suffering a genocidal massacre. Indeed, a nation acquires overwhelming military superiority to deter threats to its people and to effectively repel those threats if deterrence fails. The Allies eventually enjoyed overwhelming industrial and military superiority over Germany, yet this never transformed their defensive campaign into genocide. Nor did Israel’s campaign in Gaza become genocidal. Moral categories do not shift based on the balance of forces.

Some critics insist that Israel never truly left Gaza, pointing to border controls and airspace restrictions. This is the “Gaza under siege” narrative, which typically elevates controls and restrictions with language suggesting an Israeli blockade. But Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 was complete: every soldier and every Jewish civilian was removed from Gaza. What followed was Hamas’s ascendancy and its decision to militarize Gaza, diverting international aid away from civilian needs and into tunnels and weaponry (Gaza-specific aid for the 2005-2023 period is estimated at $12–15 billion, with $3.5-4 billion coming from USAID). The dire conditions in Gaza reflect this militarization, not an Israeli desire to eliminate the population. Holding Israel responsible for the consequences of Hamas’s governance confuses cause with effect.

Critics also claim that Hamas does not represent the civilian population in the way that the Nazi regime represented Germany, making the analogy inappropriate. Yet Hamas is the de facto governing authority of Gaza, exercising control for nearly two decades. (Can it really be said that the Nazi government was representative of German interests?) Gaza has deliberately placed its military infrastructure in hospitals, schools, and residential buildings to maximize civilian exposure and to weaponize civilian casualties for political effect. When a governing authority uses civilians as shields, civilian deaths become part of its strategic calculus, not evidence of genocidal intent by the opposing force.

Some argue that the scale of destruction in Gaza must itself be taken as proof of genocide. But devastation alone does not define genocide. World War II’s destruction of Germany far exceeded what has occurred in Gaza (possibilty twice as many civilians deaths in Germany compared to Gaza), yet the Allies are not remembered as perpetrators of genocide against Germans. The decisive factor in moral reasoning is always intent, not the magnitude of devastation, and Israel’s intent has been the defeat of a genocidal organization, not the extermination of a people.

This brings the analogy to one more important dimension. The Allied demand for Germany’s total surrender was followed by the project of denazification, which aimed to ensure that Germany would not repeat its genocidal aggression. Ending hostilities without uprooting the ideology at its core would have guaranteed future conflict. By contrast, the cease-fire negotiated between Israel and Gaza—despite Israel’s ongoing operations—prevented Israel from securing a total surrender from Hamas or enforcing any ideological disarmament comparable to denazification. Calls for Hamas to be disarmed have not been accepted by Hamas itself (and the Arabic parties involved seem disinteresting in pressing the issue), and nothing resembling ideological de-radicalization has occurred in Gaza. The Islamist, clerical-fascist ideology that undergirds Hamas bears a conceptual similarity to the fascism that animated Nazi Germany, but unlike postwar Germany, Gaza has undergone no ideological transformation. This is why I opposed a cease-fire. I believe Israel should have been permitted to completely remove Hamas from the territory.

Thus, Israel is not only wrongly accused of genocide; it is held to a standard that the Allies themselves were never held to. Imagine how unacceptable a resolution to WWII would have been if it had ended through a cease-fire that left the Nazi regime intact, unreformed, unbeaten, and un-disarmed. Such an outcome would have been rightly rejected as dangerous and incomplete. A cease-fire may halt violence temporarily, but it can also freeze a conflict in a form that prevents the defensive side from accomplishing the very goal that made its campaign morally justified. Yet Israel faces precisely this situation. It is judged harshly for doing far less than what the Allies were required to do to end a genocidal threat, and at the same time, is denied the opportunity to achieve the decisive conditions that ended the fascist threat in Europe.

The charge of genocide against Israel not only fails historically, legally, and morally—it inverts the roles of aggressor and defender in a way that obscures the real dynamics of the conflict. So I close by asking readers to consider the source of the double standard. How did the sides get flipped in the minds of so many people? How does Israel become, in the eyes of millions of reasonably intelligent observers, a bad actor when the Allied victory over Germany is celebrated, and the deradicalization of a belligerent entity is seen as necessary? What is the difference between the cases? The only one I can see is that, in the case of Israel’s actions, the ethnic group defending its people from genocide is Jewish. Given the extent and intensity of anti-Jewish sentiment in the West today, perhaps this was a predictable development.

Before I get to the main topic of this essay, which concerns a recent viral video by actor Mark Ruffalo, I must first note a remarkable headline on a related matter. Yesterday, in an article about Border Patrol’s Operation Charlotte’s Web (so named because the site of the action, Charlotte, North Carolina, the city where Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was brutally murdered by Decarlos Brown Jr.), CBS News buried the lede: “One-third of those arrested by Border Patrol in Charlotte were classified as criminals, internal document says.”

In fact, the author, Camilo Montoya-Galvez, writes, “Fewer than one-third of the individuals arrested by Border Patrol during the Trump administration’s recent immigration enforcement crackdown in Charlotte were classified as criminals, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.” Later in the article, she notes, “Roughly 200 green-uniformed Border Patrol agents recorded more than 270 immigration arrests during the Charlotte campaign” (her word choice makes it sound like war). Of these, “[f]ewer than 90 of those arrested by Border Patrol were categorized as ‘criminal aliens’ in the document.”

Ninety criminal aliens would make it one-third, so fewer than that suggests perhaps 89 or 88 of the 270 arrested by Border Patrol fit that designation, determined mainly by criminal convictions, but also those charged with a crime, or engaged in conduct that makes them removable on criminal grounds. Montoya-Galvez could have written, “almost” or “nearly” one-third, but that would have changed the obvious intent of the story, which was to manufacture the appearance that the Trump Administration was violating a media-manufactured promise that it would only be targeting criminal aliens for arrest and deportation. This “promise” asks the public to expect that, confronted with a detainee who is in the country illegally, Border Control is supposed to release that individual (who may or may not be a danger to society)—as if an illegal alien had not by definition already committed an offense: that of illegally entering a country or overstaying a visa.

What the headline works overtime to obscure is the remarkable fact that almost one-third of those detailed by Border Control have a criminal record or, for some reason, were designated as criminals. We are told, and, as the reader will see, Ruffalo repeats the myth, that the immigrants being detained and deported are much less likely to have a criminal record than citizens. Not that it matters, of course, since removal of illegal aliens would reduce the overall volume of crime, whatever the relative proportions of criminal offenders; but having documented the fact that a large proportion of illegal immigrants detained in Charlotte meet the criteria of criminal aliens, a headline properly phrased would cause the rational observer to question the myth. Moreover, that one-third of those detained in Charlotte (so far) aligns with an equally astonishing statistic that the media attempts to slot into the narrative of systemic racism—that one-third of black men in America have a felony conviction—puts another of Ruffola’s claims, namely that criminals are by and large white, to the test.

Famous actor Mark Ruffalo says that criminal aliens are NOT criminals.

"Most of the crimes that are committed in this country are by WHITE people"

What do you want to say to Mark Ruffalo?pic.twitter.com/nRvGQgT328

— Anti Woke Memes (@AntiWokeMemes) November 24, 2025

Turning now to Ruffalo’s viral video, my first reaction upon watching it was that the man is as dumb as he looks. But he’s not the only one (even if others aren’t so dumb looking). In the clip, Ruffalo begins by telling us that the immigrants are not the criminals. According to the statistics, he says, white people are the criminals. He then goes on to tell the camera that the “gift of our time” is getting to see who the true villains are, who is really making our lives unbearable, who is making us so desperate: the billionaires. It’s time, Ruffalo says, for Americans to take back our country from the extreme wealth that has its hands all over the power of the nation. Keep the immigrant. Send the billionaires packing. Then we can once more be the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Setting aside Ruffalo’s dubious claim about white criminality, how can a man capable of stringing words together to form more or less intelligible sentences fail to see the obvious? What is making life desperate and unbearable for millions of American workers is the billionaires and the weapon they wield against the native labor force: the immigrant. Ruffalo suffers from the same blindness that afflicts the useful idiots protesting outside the migrant detention center in the Florida Everglades (see Protests at Alligator Alcatraz: What Do The Protesters Want?): the failure to see the connection between extreme wealth and mass immigration.

The pattern—both the capitalist-immigrant connection and the failure of individuals to see it—is older than most people realize. The connection hides behind the slogan “a nation of immigrants,” a foundational myth that functions as ideological mystification: a bourgeois narrative that naturalizes exploitative labor relations and obscures the use of superexploited immigrant labor to depress wages among the native born.

From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, the United States absorbed wave after wave of European immigrants at the precise moment industrial capitalism was exploding. Who benefited most? The industrialists, with intellectuals like Horace Kallen selling the scheme to politicians and the public. The mass of cheap labor was the critical input that supercharged capitalist accumulation. Industrialists and their shills lobbied against any restriction on immigration, dispatched recruiters to Europe (facilitated by ethnic middlemen), and worked hand-in-glove with steamship companies to keep the human cargo flowing. The public justification was always the same: “labor shortages.” Translation: wages were too high, and high wages cut into the profits required to build Newport mansions and corner the steel market.

Capitalism’s inner logic explains why they sought cheap foreign labor. Competition compels every capitalist to maximize profit, which means minimizing labor costs. Surplus value is extracted from labor; the lower the wage, the greater the portion of the working day that is unpaid, and the fatter the owner’s margin. Flooding the labor market with immigrants also disciplines workers: when there is always someone hungrier standing behind you, strikes become risky, and unions lose leverage. At the same time, competition forces capitalists to substitute machines for men. The organic composition of capital rises, productivity increases, and fewer workers are needed. The individual capitalist who automates first gains a cost advantage; when everyone follows suit, which they inevitably do, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall intensifies the hunt for still-cheaper labor. The result is a growing reserve army of the unemployed—first immigrants, then natives—driving down wages across the board.

In the 1920s, Congress slammed the door. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924 slashed immigration from Europe to a trickle. Industrialists howled; nativists—and, more importantly, American workers—prevailed (see my December 2018 essay Smearing Labor as Racist: The Globalist Project to Discredit the Working Class). With the foreign tap turned off, employers suddenly faced real labor shortages (that is, wages they could no longer suppress).

Their response? They turned south. Labor agents fanned out across Dixie, offering train tickets, running ads in The Chicago Defender, and building company housing. The Great Migration was born. Northern industry actively recruited blacks to replace the immigrant labor that restrictive laws had denied them. Black workers, excluded from most unions and fleeing Jim Crow, were seen as docile, desperate, and—crucially—cheap. The parallel is exact. European peasants spent decades being lured across the Atlantic by the same class that later lured sharecroppers’ sons out of Mississippi. Different skin color, same economic function: a disposable labor pool to keep native wages from rising. (See Shorthanding “Black Jobs.”)

Fast-forward a century. The game is the same. Only the costumes and cultures have changed. When immigration restrictions, postwar prosperity, and strong unions finally forced American wages upward, industry needed a new reserve army that couldn’t vote (not legally anyway), couldn’t easily unionize, and could be deported at the first sign of complaint. Enter the H-1B visa: a modern indenture dressed up as “high-skilled immigration.” (See We Need to Close the Borders; The H-1B visa Controversy: The Tech Bros Make Their Move.)

Tech billionaires and their lobbyists insist America faces a catastrophic STEM shortage, yet they rarely raise starting salaries, fund serious domestic training, or recruit from the millions of laid-off American coders already here. Instead, they fly in planeloads of young workers from India, bind them to their employer with the threat of visa revocation, and pay them 20–40 percent below market while pocketing the difference as profit. The Indian outsourcing firms (the new ethnic middleman) that dominate the program force employees to sign contracts agreeing to pay massive “liquidated damages” if they dare leave for a better job. It is debt bondage with stock options and a Silicon Valley postcode. Once again, a restricted labor pool for natives becomes a glut the moment capital is allowed to import replacements; once again, the loudest voices crying “shortage” are the same ones whose yachts keep getting longer.

Like I said, it’s an old pattern. When policy blocks one source of cheap labor, capital finds another. Close the borders to Europeans, and the factory owner reaches into the South. Open them again to the global poor, and the children of the Great Migration find themselves idled in ghettos (The Defenders of Mass Immigration Insult Native-Born Labor). The billionaire class never runs out of “labor shortages”; it only runs out of workers willing to work for little to nothing—until it imports new ones. (See The Mass Immigration Swindle; The Denationalization Project and the End of Capitalism.)

That is the connection Ruffalo and the rank-and-file progressive cannot (or will not) make. The misery Ruffalo laments is not an accident. It’s the business model he embraces when he defends open borders and condemns ICE operations. On second thought, perhaps Ruffalo isn’t as dumb as he looks. Perhaps he’s doing the dirty work for the wealthy elite who pony up the capital to finance the movies he stars in. Perhaps, like so many other celebrities, he knows who butters his bread. And what of his estate? Does he, like so many of his kind, have groundskeepers and housekeepers? Are the citizens? Probably not.

A group of protesters has been blocking access to an ICE facility in Florida, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz. The protesters are not shy about explaining their motivations. Without prompting, they openly declare that ICE is “kidnapping people” and “separating families,” all in service to “fascist billionaires.”

Their action and rhetoric raise intriguing questions, especially when viewed against the broader ideological stance often held by such activists. One might reasonably expect that many of these same protesters also advocate defunding the police or even prison abolition. Yet they are not seen blocking jails and prisons across the United States. Nor are they interfering with routine law enforcement interactions involving US citizens. Their actions appear highly selective—segregated across domains—focusing intensely on the treatment of immigrants, to the point of putting their own bodies on the line, while showing far less urgency toward the treatment of citizens.

The protesters’ claim that ICE is engaged in “kidnapping” is fundamentally misleading. Kidnapping is the act of taking someone captive illegally by force for nefarious purposes (perversion, ransom, sex trafficking). ICE, by contrast, operates as a branch of law enforcement, enforcing immigration laws in much the same way that other agencies enforce criminal laws. This involves detaining and arresting individuals, delivering them to the justice system for processing and adjudication, and, in many cases, deporting them. In the case of citizens, in other law enforcement domains, this process may involve jailing or imprisoning them. Comparatively, many more US citizens are sent to jails and prisons each year than immigrants are deported. Family separation frequently occurs in both contexts, although on a much vaster scale for citizens. Yet these protests consistently overlook the vast disparity in scale between the two systems. Why?

I will come to that. But before I do, it must also be noted that the accusation that ICE’s actions serve the interests of “fascist billionaires” is specious at best. Many of these same billionaires and large corporations favor increased immigration, as it tends to drive down wages for native-born workers and legal residents by introducing a labor force willing, or at least compelled by circumstance, to accept lower pay. On the political side, immigration also shifts partisan power dynamics, overwhelmingly benefiting Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats, who align with the transnational agendas of these corporate powers. Thus, the protestors are advancing the interests of the billionaires they describe as “fascist.”

In contrast, the populist-nationalist faction within the Republican Party—exemplified by supporters of Donald Trump—pushes for stricter immigration controls, which directly opposes the interests of many of these so-called fascist billionaires. This contradiction suggests that the protesters’ framing does not align with the complex economic and political realities at play with leftwing interests in mind. If they were truly on the left, their commitment should prioritize worker interests over corporate ones. Instead, they defend developments that undermine American workers and superexploit foreign ones—all for the sake of corporate power and profit.

There is an apparent irony here. These activists—who chain themselves to gates and lie down in front of federal vehicles to block the enforcement of immigration law—are unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly, but let’s be charitable) doing the bidding of the very “fascist billionaires” they claim to oppose. The billionaires in question are not the caricatured nationalists of progressive imagination; they are the architects of a post-national order who seek to erode the sovereignty of the United States and other Western nation-states in service of a globalization project led by transnational corporations. These entities envision a future in which populations, especially labor, are managed not by democratic nation-states but by a corporate-administrative regime exercising control through bureaucratic rule, digital surveillance, and technocratic systems of credit and compliance.

The Florida protest is hardly an isolated incident; it fits a recurring pattern we have witnessed across the country for months. A clear parallel can be drawn with Antifa and similar movements (in fact, many of those engaged in anti-ICE protests are Antifa). Far from resisting the corporate-led denationalization project, the protestors seek to accelerate it—by disrupting borders, undermining the legitimacy of republican institutions (in the small-r, classical sense of a self-governing polity), and eroding the very concept of civic cohesion and national integrity that serves as a counterweight to unaccountable elite power.

The irony can be explained by acknowledging sentiments of commonality found among the protestors: their routine condemnation of the United States as a white-supremacist settler state built on stolen land—an indictment they extend to the entire Western nation-state tradition. Far from being contradictory, their selective outrage and tactical choices reveal a deeper coherence rooted in an explicitly anti-American and anti-Western politics. Immigrants, in this worldview, are not defended primarily out of universal humanitarian concern (what about the people of America and other advanced Western countries?), but because mass immigration is seen as a solvent that erodes the cultural continuity, demographic cohesion, and historical legitimacy of the very nations these activists consider irredeemably illegitimate.

In other words, the protestors champion open borders for the same reason many ordinary citizens demand immigration enforcement: both camps recognize—whether they admit it or not—that large-scale, unassimilated immigration fundamentally disrupts the continuity of the modern nation-state, which is precisely what the transnational corporate agenda seeks. The difference lies in valuation: where one side sees dissolution as justice, the other sees an existential threat. Yet, only one side has worker solidarity in mind. The protester and the border hawk agree on the transformative power of demographic change—one rationalizes it as justice and celebrates it as retribution, the other resists it as self-preservation. Self-reservation is the rational instinct.

The question for Americans in choosing comrades is whether they wish the nation-state to go away and transnational corporations to control mankind’s future, or whether the West remains a system of free nation-states where the respective countries shape their own destinies according to republican principles enshrining individual liberty and collective self-determination in the spirit of mutual interests and respecting differences. The latter requires borders.

It is not a hard choice to make. Those protesting ICE facilities advance the transnational corporate project. That project seeks to establish global corporate statism. This is the New Fascism. Either we stop it, or the world will be what Orwell asked us to imagine in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

In reflecting on my “sermon” yesterday (Republican Virtue and the Unchained Prometheus: The Crossroads of Moral Restraint and the Iron Cage of Rationality), I thought it necessary to present a critique of Karl Marx’s observation regarding the production of ideas and the relation of the means of production, a subject about which I have written many times. In approaching this matter, I have quoted favorably part of a passage from his 1845 The German Ideology, which establishes an essential truth, one I still find compelling: 

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class that has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence, of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess, among other things, consciousness and, therefore, think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. 

However, Marx immediately follows this with an example that gets to the heart of the problem with communist thinking, that of reductionism: “For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an ‘eternal law.’” In this example, the reader is to accept that the principle of separation of powers is an ideology that disguises ruling class power by projecting the principle as a universal one rather than an emergent or practical doctrine that prevents the domination of any one party in a reasonable system checked by ethical ideals that may, in fact, be rooted in human nature (Marx has a tortured relationship with human nature, as readers will soon see). In the case of ideals that elevate liberty above tyranny, such as those of a free republic, separation of powers may not be ideological deception but rather an arrangement that preserves liberty for all by constraining both the tyranny of the majority and rule by the minority of the opulent, and by giving a voice to the people. 

Let’s allow Marx to continue for a moment longer: 

If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honor, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself, on the whole, imagines this to be so.  This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e., ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.

The reader might suspect here that Marx talks himself out of his own position, since it is the ideals of duty, freedom, equality, and so forth, ideals that represent the common interests of all members of society, that come to hold sway in development and thus limit the actions of the ruling class. Is that not a good thing? Should we not recognize this before rejecting the separation of powers and putting our fate into the hands of the masses (direct democracy, i.e., majoritarianism) or a vanguard that claims to represent the popular interests with no checks on its power (i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat)? Rejecting these ideals as inverted projections of aristocratic and bourgeois power risks abandoning them to mob rule or to the channeling of those passions by a new aristocracy for its own ends, whether in the form of a communist or corporate (read fascist) master, rather than grasping that some arrangements allow human nature to find its expression in just social arrangements in free and open relations—such as those identified in yesterday’s essay. 

Marx’s claim that the ruling class in every era (except the original one, which I will come to) controls not only the material foundations of society but also its intellectual life has long been regarded as one of his most penetrating insights. Again, I have quoted the useful part of his formulation several times on this platform. I do find it useful, especially with the emergence of the corporate state and technocratic rule under late capitalism. But in light of what I have just presented, revisiting that formulation becomes a necessity; I cannot just leave that “out there.” Marx’s assertion that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” precludes the possibility that the ideas that it manufactures serve other interests beyond those of the ruling class. To be sure, ideas are ultimately expressions of underlying material relationships, but these relationships are determined by really-existing human beings; dominant moral or political concepts are not merely notions articulating and justifying the interests of the class that rules. While Marx’s argument rightly underscores the intimate connection between power and the circulation of ideas, Marx extends the claim in a way that exposes the limitations of his framework, ultimately undermining his attempt to reduce political ideals to mere instruments of class domination.

One might object that The German Ideology was an immature work. Marx was, after all, only 27 years old. But the formulation Marx sets down here informs decades of his work. He repeats in so many words the formulation in the Preface to his 1859 Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” This is a solid critique of idealism, but what about human nature? Is it possible that social consciousness is, at least to some degree, rooted in the anthropology of our species?

Marx’s own example of the separation of powers in The German Ideology illustrates the problem. He argues that in a society where the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and monarchy compete for power, the separation of powers becomes the prevailing doctrine, presented as an “eternal law,” though it merely reflects the accommodation among ruling groups. In this reading, the principle of divided government is not a constitutional innovation grounded in moral or practical insight but a veil concealing shared domination. This interpretation ignores why such principles emerge in the first place: not as disguises or distortions but as carefully crafted mechanisms that prevent precisely the kinds of domination that Marx suggests they hide.

Consider the American Republic. In a republic committed to preserving liberty, the separation of powers operates as a check on both the tyranny of the majority and the concentration of authority in the hands of the wealthy. It is not ideological mystification but a structural arrangement that protects the freedom of all by limiting the capacity of any faction to rule unchecked—the opposite of what is desired by the corporate state represented by the Democratic Party and those elements of the Republican establishment that oppose the return to constitutional principle. (Speaking of young men, Alexander Hamilton, one of the principal designers of federalism, was not much older than Marx when he penned 51 of the Federalist Papers’ 85 installments that helped secure the Constitution’s ratification in 1788.)

The tension in Marx’s account becomes sharper as he goes on. He notes that historians often speak of different ages as being governed by different dominant ideals—again, honor under aristocracy, equality and freedom under the bourgeoisie—and he insists that these are merely the ruling class projecting its own interests in universal form. Yet he also describes the way such ideals assume an increasingly abstract and universal character, appealing to members of all classes. What explains this? The stupidity of the common man? Perhaps. Marx does portray this as a necessary tactic of every new ruling class: its interests must be presented as the interests of all, and its concepts must appear as universally valid principles. But in characterizing the process this way, Marx acknowledges that these ideals take on an authority that exceeds the narrow interests of any particular group. Moreover, by reducing these to class power (as he does in the 1959 Preface), he precludes the possibility that these ideas may exist in human nature, finding their expression in social arrangements appropriate to that nature. Could it be that concepts such as duty, equality, liberty, and constitutional restraint resonate across social boundaries not because they serve a ruling class, but because they articulate widely felt moral intuitions and fundamental features of human social life?

I need to bring into the discussion Marx’s concept of “species-being” (Gattungswesen) presented in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. His conception of human nature provides a critical lens through which to evaluate his account of ruling ideas. Here, for Marx, humans are essentially creative and social beings whose nature is realized through conscious, productive activity shared with others. Labor is not merely a means of survival but a vehicle for self-expression and the fulfillment of human potential (echoes of John Locke). Yet in The German Ideology, he reduces moral and political ideals to instruments of class domination, leaving little room to consider how these ideals might genuinely facilitate the realization of species-being. Principles such as equality and liberty, and their elevation through constitutional government (or their expression under the original conditions of primitive communism, i.e., hunter and gatherer societies), do more than conceal or obscure ruling-class interests—they create social conditions under which humans can exercise their inherent capacities for cooperation, creativity, and rational deliberation.

Viewed through the lens of species-being, then, universal ideals may be understood not merely as ideological projections but as giving rise to structures that enable humans to develop and express their essential nature. Thus, Marx’s framework contains the seeds of a tension (not unexpected in the dialectical working out of opposing ideas if we are to be charitable): if human nature is cooperative and creative, i.e., social in a uniquely human way, some moral and political ideals must have real normative force, independent of ruling-class interests, because they sustain the conditions necessary for human flourishing. How would our species otherwise have survived for hundreds of thousands of years of its existence? Surely, we can assume that such conditions are to some significant extent universal; we are, after all, all members of the same species. Given this, does it now follow that some conditions facilitate the expression of that nature, while other conditions corrupt and suppress it?

There is a normative contradiction in Marx’s theory: Marx denies that universal moral ideals possess genuine validity, yet he relies on a universal moral horizon—human emancipation rooted in a conception of species-being—to condemn class domination. This view is even more problematic given the fact of individual differentiation across a range of attributes (Marx does not deny the Darwinian conception of natural history, nor should he). It follows from the stubborn truth of human differences that, with the complexification of social ecology over time, driven by technological innovation, itself an expression of man’s creativity, social segmentation is an inevitable development. It was his colleague, Frederich Engels, in part relying on Marx’s notes concerning Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 Ancient Society, who made this very argument in explaining the emergence of social class in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. To put this another way, Marx treats all universals as ideological illusions while simultaneously appealing to a universal to ground his critique: again, the original conditions of humanity, primitive communism, the condition before the segmentation of human society.

Secondly, there is a historical contradiction: Marx claims that ruling ideas exist to reinforce ruling-class power, but the very political institutions he dismisses as ideological—bills of rights, checks on authority, constitutions, representative assemblies—have, uncorrupted by ideology and money-power, functioned precisely to limit the power of elites, thus creating the grounds for equality before the law, which Marx cannot easily dismiss as an ideological prop. Although he attempts to reduce formal equality and all the rest of it to ideological tools of ruling class power, these institutions have constrained monarchs, curbed aristocratic privilege, and held economic elites accountable to broader publics. Their effect and purpose have been to redistribute power, not conceal it—first civil rights, then political rights, and finally social rights (as T.H. Marshall showed in his seminal 1949 essay “Citizenship and Social Class”). Marx’s framework cannot account for such developments without mischaracterizing them.

What Marx misses—or conveniently skirts—is that many political ideals and institutions endure not because they mystify domination but because they successfully channel enduring features of human nature, which, I argue in this previous essay, are realized through Protestantism. Marx says as much in one of his earliest works. I have discussed this matter before, but it takes on new significance for me considering what I am grappling with in these essays. In “On the Jewish Question,” published in 1844, Marx contrasts what he calls “theoretical Christianity” with “practical Judaism” to illustrate his concern with the relationship between ideas and material life. Anticipating Max Weber, Marx characterizes theoretical Christianity as a religion of abstract, universal principles, emphasizing contemplation and moral ideals rather than concrete human needs or social relations (see Anticipating Weber: Revisiting Marx and the “Jewish Question”). Practical Judaism, in contrast, is oriented toward everyday life, the world of commerce, property, and sensuous (sinnlich) social activity. Yet, as Weber suggests, Protestantism permits Christians to pursue the worldly pursuits Judaism valorizes within moral constraints that emerge from a cultural system that cannot be reduced to material relations.

By drawing this distinction, Marx argues that genuine human liberation requires attention to material and social conditions, not just abstract legal or moral principles. My reaction to this observation now is: of course. But more must be said; for human beings, made aware of their individuality, their creative productive power, desire liberty, resent arbitrary power, respond to principles of equality and fairness, and seek institutions that distribute authority in ways that protect against abuses. Their individuality is an a priori condition unrealized by millennia of subjection.

A communist would find individualism a barrier to the project to reconstruct society along collectivist lines, since he would have to suppose that individuality is not a product of a constrained human nature, as Thomas Sowell puts it, constraints imposed not by subjection but by natural history, but rather an infinitely malleable nature, which is to say no nature at all. Yet constitutional structures such as the separation of powers survive because they work for all, not because they allow one group to exploit and oppress the other; they bind rulers and ruled alike, limit the sway of passion and unbridled self-interest, and make room for the exercise of reason regulated by civic responsibility and deliberation, which are simultaneously self-interested and solidarity-building. These practices reflect insights into human nature that transcend class interest, and they represent achievements in political thought that Marx’s reductionist framework cannot—or dare not—fully acknowledge.

I will, of course, defend Marx’s desire for a more equitable social result. He saw collectivism as a means to greater individual liberty; with exclusive control over the productive means of production, the people would be a liberty to produce for themselves. It may very well be the case that the emerging automated society will, if the people demand it, free all from necessary labor (if they don’t, then neofeudalism and administrative management is likely mankind’s fate). But, in the end, and it pains me to admit this, Marx hobbles his own argument. By reducing ideals such as equality, liberty, and the rule of law to ideological projections, he obscures the fact that these ideals—again, uncorrupted by ideology and money-power—serve as constraints on the very powers he believes they rationalize.

Marx recognizes that universal principles come to dominate political discourse, yet he cannot explain their force without conceding, however obscuring that concession in a barrage of verbiage, that they speak to genuine human concerns. Thus, in opposition to his point, the universalization of such ideas does not merely disguise class rule—it limits it. In the final analysis, the most coherent conclusion is not Marx’s explicit one, but the one he tries to avoid: that certain political ideals and constitutional forms are not tools of domination but the means by which free people secure just social relations against domination in the first place.

This is why we must reject the claim that the desire for more equitable social arrangements is the exclusive domain of those advocating social justice. Might more just social arrangements be achieved by pushing even further the liberal ideals that have emancipated over the centuries and across the planet billions of human beings from communism, fascism, monarchy, and primitive religion? The question answers itself. We certainly don’t need to wonder what will happen to democracy and liberty under communist rule. Humanity already tried that. With terrible results.

* * *

I want to append to this essay a few kind words about Karl Marx, since it may seem that I am abandoning him, especially in light of my recent alignment with populist politics, where so many resist appreciating the man’s contributions to the scientific study of economics and history. I have argued before that Marxian thought—not his political project, but his contribution to anthropology and sociology—ought to serve as a foundational paradigm for the social sciences, including the study of history. In Marx and Darwin: Pioneers of Scientific Inquiry in Social and Natural History, I clarify that when I say I identify as a Marxist, I mean it in the same way one might say they identify as a Darwinist. In the annals of intellectual history, Marx is to social history what Darwin is to natural history.

In Marxist but not Socialist, I elaborate on this point by citing Christopher Hitchens’ remark during a 2006 town hall in Pennsylvania: “I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist.” Hitchens explained that he remained impressed by Marxism’s analytical rigor and historical insight—its capacity to illuminate the deep structures and internal contradictions of capitalist society, and to reveal the underlying causes of inequality and social unrest. He was particularly drawn to Marxism’s emphasis on economic justice: its vision of a society in which opportunities and resources are more equitably distributed and the needs of the many take precedence over the privileges of the few. (See also Why I am not a Socialist.)

Hitchens, of course, began his political life as a committed socialist, deeply involved with the International Socialists, a Trotskyist organization. Over time, he became disillusioned with socialism as a workable political project. By the 1990s and 2000s, he believed that much of what passed for socialism had degenerated into a form of corrupt populism, and he no longer regarded the international working-class movement he had once envisioned as a plausible engine of global change. This growing disappointment led him to step back from socialism as a political goal. He also came to see capitalism as a far more revolutionary force for good; in his estimation, the bourgeois revolution still had unfinished business.

After 9/11, Hitchens aligned himself with certain strands of neoconservative foreign policy. This shift reflected his deep loathing of clerical fascism, particularly in its contemporary Islamic form. He came to view the struggle against Islam and other totalitarian movements as a moral imperative. This stance placed him at odds with much of the left (this would be even more true today), even though he remained steadfast in his defense of liberal, secular values against what he perceived as existential threats. Throughout all this, he upheld his commitments to civil liberties and human rights. (Then again, today’s left can hardly be counted upon to defend liberal, secular values, civil liberties, and all the rest of it. Indeed, the New Left appears to be very much against these Old Left ideas.)

Despite these political shifts, Hitchens continued to describe himself as a Marxist—intellectually, if not politically. It is in this sense that I echo his formulation: Marxist, but not socialist. What he sought to preserve in Marxism is the same thing I aim to preserve: the method, specifically, the materialist conception of history. This approach holds that economic and material forces—rather than ideals or metaphysical motivations—ultimately drive the development of human societies. No Geist is unfolding the world toward a teleological end. Like Hitchens, I still regard Marx’s analytical framework as an effective tool for understanding historical dynamics and the transformative power of capitalism, even as I reject socialist politics in practice.

I’m an atheist. Don’t let that frighten you—I think Christians (some, anyway) will appreciate what I have to say in this essay. For years, though, admittedly, I called myself an antitheist. I wasn’t merely a non-believer (that hasn’t changed); I was an active opponent of religion. I have moderated my position over the years. Today, I will tell you that it depends on the specific religion being discussed as to whether I would actively oppose it. In other words, I am no longer an antitheist.

In the two decades between my self-identification as an antitheist and my selective opposition to religious faiths, I learned, or more accurately have admitted, to two things: (a) not all religions are equal (or are all cultures); (b) Christianity—especially Protestantism—provided the indispensable moral guardrails for the Enlightenment it helped give birth to. Reason in its product, intellectual and technological, must be constrained by those guardrails if it is to remain reasonable.

The first lesson is blunt: Christianity and Judaism are, for the most part, good; Islam is, in its totality, bad. The first two are creators and sustainers of civilizations built on liberty and individual rights. The third is civilization-destroying—an ideology of the barbarian. Centuries and our present experience testify to the truth of these claims. Yet we have not learned the lessons this history teaches us. We have let the barbarians inside the gates. If we do nothing, we will pay with our dignity and our freedom. Indeed, if Islam is allowed to become hegemonic, the West will enter a New Dark Ages. Women will become second-class subjects of a clerical fascist order, and gays will be killed or transed. Islam is not the only threat to dignity and freedom, of course, which I will come to later in this essay. But it is a useful tool for those who seek to replace late capitalism with a neo-feudalist world order.

The second lesson is this: the soil in which both Protestantism and the Enlightenment grew was capitalism—first its legal emergence eight centuries ago, as lawyers for the nascent bourgeoisie argued for property rights in medieval courts, and then its consolidation as a world system during the Long Century (roughly 1450–1620), from there spreading globally. Capitalism requires rationalism; rationalism, over time, fractured the Catholic monopoly (and eventually compelled even Catholicism to resemble Protestantism). Rationalism depends on capitalism. However, neither capitalism nor rationalism can survive without the guardrails of Christianity, since both depend on republican virtue and the centrality of the individual. The American Founders understood this and seized a moment that world history will almost certainly never repeat. They saw a path to freedom. Keeping open that path requires preserving the foundation they set down in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, its Bill of Rights, and the American System.

In the clip I share below, Dave Brat conveys the position I have come to over the last several years. He said this in dialogue with Steve Bannon on the latter’s War Room podcast. But before you get to that, some background on Brat and his perspective will help clarify his argument and the one I advance in this essay. It is his remarks that inspire my essay (sermon?) this Sunday afternoon.

Brat served as the US Representative for Virginia’s 7th congressional district from 2014 to 2019. In 2014, he gained national attention by defeating (by a large margin) House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary—the first time a sitting House Majority Leader had ever lost a primary. Brat narrowly lost his 2018 re-election bid to Democrat Abigail Spanberger. Spanberger, readers may already know, just won the 2025 Virginia gubernatorial election this month. Brat’s close defeat to Spanberger, and her subsequent victory over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by a double-digit margin, testifies to the alarming political shift in the state of Virginia, the home of both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

Brat is a frequent guest on Bannon’s War Room, which I encourage visitors to this platform to follow. Brat is not merely a former congressman; he has a long history in academia. Brat joined the faculty of Randolph–Macon College in 1996 as an economics professor. Randolph–Macon is a private liberal arts college in Ashland, Virginia (founded in 1830, it’s the oldest Methodist-run college in continuous operation in the country). For six years, Brat chaired the College’s department of ethics and business. Since January 2019, he has served as dean of the Liberty University School of Business.

Brat’s core argument is that Adam Smith’s invisible hand theory, advanced in the latter’s magisterial The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 (the very year American patriots declared war on the British monarchy), is properly understood in the context of Christian moral philosophy, albeit eschewing rigid Puritanism. Brat’s position is supported by Smith’s earlier work, his 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, wherein Smith roots sympathy in human nature. He argues that benevolence, justice, prudence, and self-command are genuine virtues. His nature intact, man therefore praises generosity and justice even when they go against his immediate self-interest. However, the natural moral sentiments and the impartial spectator mechanism Smith describes in this work can be systematically corrupted, even disabled, by certain belief systems, social structures, and passions.

The man of system, or the man whose public spirit is supposed to be wholly engrossed by the view of some favourite plan of government, or of some favourite scheme of politics, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. (Part VI, Section II, Chapter II, “Of the character of virtue”)

Here, Smith anticipates what we now call ideological thinking: the belief that society can and should be remade according to an abstract blueprint, regardless of the moral intuitions, sentiments, and traditions of the people in it. The ideologue overrides the organic corrections of the impartial spectator (simultaneously the source of natural market relations and social solidarity) with top-down rationalistic schemes. Thus, Smith recognizes that the innate capacity for sympathy and impartial moral judgment in man can be disordered and perverted by extreme religious doctrines that crush ordinary human sentiments; partisan faction and spirit; rationalistic ideological schemes (“the man of system”); and the cultural worship of wealth and power.

Must-see segment from Steve Bannon’s War Room: https://t.co/TvZhJvnAzp

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) November 23, 2025

Some may hear Brat and think he is rejecting reason. This is why I spent time explaining his position; he is not rejecting reason. What he is saying is that, without moral guardrails, the centrality of individualism, a proper understanding of human nature, and the modern nation-state (and the Peace of Westphalia) that Protestantism made possible, we get corporatism and communism—both irrational, totalitarian, destroyers of virtue-guided reason. Corporatists (the transnationalist corporate project) and today’s communists (the Red-Green Alliance) see in Islam a common weapon for disordering reason guided by the ethical constraints conducive to natural moral reasoning. Protestantism’s great achievement, which, as Max Weber (and Karl Marx before him) recognized, is the realization in Christianity of practical Jewish culture. Thus, the construct of a Judeo-Christian tradition is not a propaganda tool to advance the interests of Israel, but rather recognition of the legacy of Jewish culture in modern Christian thought.

For his part, Weber mourned the broken link between freedom and reason. The great sociologist even folded Nietzsche’s “death of God” thesis into the core of his argument that, once religion ceases to underwrite Western values, morality, and purpose, society is left unmoored. Weber saw that Nietzsche grasped the tragedy that the Enlightenment and the rise of science, what Weber describes metaphorically as the unshackling of the Titan Prometheus (which I will explain in greater detail later in this essay), had effectively cancelled the Christian god, leaving no philosophical foundation for ethics or truth. Nietzsche’s prediction that this would lead to nihilism was the correct diagnosis of the problem of our age. We indeed see nihilism everywhere today. We see it in the delusion that a man can shed his gender and become its opposite—or both or neither of the two. We see it in violence directed towards those who utter unpopular opinions.

Nietzsche’s prescription, however, the Übermensch (the “Over-man”) and der Wille zur Macht (“the will to power”), in the wrong hands, would prove catastrophic. Indeed, it has, as the world’s experience with National Socialism demonstrated for all to see. The Nazi Party and the corporate state he represented are the epitome of putting mankind’s fate in the wrong hands. Nietzsche’s defenders will contend that he did not mean “will to power” as the desire to dominate other people. They insist that he meant it as the fundamental drive of all life, which he saw as the innermost essence of being. Every living thing strives not just to survive, Nietzsche argued, but to expand, express, and increase its feeling of power—to create, grow, overcome resistance, and become more than it is. To be sure, these are admirable traits in a man. At the same time, Nietzsche wanted to recover from pre-Christian cultures their affirmation of life (destruction, sensuality, and suffering) and acceptance of natural aristocracy and rank. He wanted not the reclamation of pagan gods and heroes, but rather the life-affirming values that those gods and heroes personified. He put it this way: “Roman Caesars with Christ’s soul.” (See Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity and His Impact on Social Theory.)

This solution to our affliction follows from Nietzsche’s diagnosis, but his remedy is wrong. The answer is not a new pagan assertion of passion and strength; rather, the solution lies in the restoration of republican virtue rooted in Protestant ethics. That does not require any of us to become Christian (I won’t convert, so it cannot follow that I think others should, nor does it preclude conversion), but it does require us to preserve, even reclaim, those moral guardrails that once surrounded reason. Weber’s concept of Der entfesselte Prometheus (“Prometheus unchained”), materialized in world-historical conditions, has proved to be an irrational outcome.

Weber writes in his 1905 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage (stahlhartes Gehäuse).

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today, the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

Although the textual source of the quote “Und der entfesselte Prometheus ist an die Stelle der alten Götter getreten,” which translates to “the unleashed Prometheus has taken the place of the old gods,” is difficult to pin down, it is commonly attributed to Weber, and it is what he intends by his argument. Readers will likely know Prometheus (Προμηθεύς) is the Titan of Greek mythology who most radically embodies rebellion against divine tyranny and selfless love for humanity. In Aeschylus’s tragedy, Prometheus Bound, Zeus seizes power and plans to destroy the weak human race; Prometheus defies him by stealing fire from heaven and giving it to mortals—bestowing upon them art, science, technology, and civilization itself. For this crime, Zeus chains the Titan to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle daily tears out and eats his liver, which regrows each night—an eternal torture meant to break his will. Yet Prometheus refuses to submit, foretelling that Zeus’s own downfall will one day depend on the secret knowledge Prometheus alone possesses.

I'd like to change the world | Peter Weyland TED 2023 https://t.co/DgzUeYPpt8 via @YouTube

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) November 23, 2025

This story is powerfully retold in Ridley Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus, his much-maligned prequel to his landmark science fiction film Alien (1979). There, the character Peter Weyland (magnificently performed by Guy Pierce), who prefigures the rise and spirit of entrepreneur Elon Musk, uses Aeschylus’s tale in a fictional 2023 TED Talk to condemn those who would limit his ambition with ethical guardrails. I have shared the scene above, but to highlight Weyland’s point:

We wield incredible power—the power to transform, to destroy, and to create again. The question, of course, before us is: What the hell are we supposed to do with this power? Or, more importantly, one should ask: What are we allowed to do with this power? The answer to that, my friends, is nothing. Rules, restrictions, laws, ethical guidelines—all but forbidding us from moving forward. Well, where were the ethics during the Arabian conflicts? Why are rules preventing us from feeding impoverished cultures? How is there a law which states: If we build a man from wires and metal—a man who will never grow old, a man who will never feel the heat of a star or the cold of the moon—how is the creation of such an incredible individual considered unnatural? The answer to all these questions is simple: These rules exist because the people who created them were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Well, I am not afraid!

Like Weyland, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1820, Prometheus Unbound, portrays the Titan’s eventual release as the triumph of human progress over tyrannical authority. This is an optimistic reading of the tale. For centuries, Prometheus has stood as the archetypal symbol of the bringer of light (much like Lucifer) who suffers for rebelling against the gods and liberating mankind, the suffering hero whose gift of fire (power, reason, technique) is both humanity’s glory and its potential doom—the exact image Weber had in mind when he described the modern rational-technical order as a once-beneficial force that has now broken its chains and turned against its creators. Percy’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, published the pessimistic side of the story two years earlier, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In her reading of the myth, Victor Frankenstein, a man who creates a monster, is a new Prometheus. Like the Titan, Victor steals the forbidden fire—the secret of life: electricity—from the gods and gives it to humanity in the form of a grotesque, unnamed creature. Frankenstein is punished horribly for this transgression, just as Prometheus was chained and tortured for his.

Frankenstein is thus the dark counterpart to Prometheus Unbound—the same Promethean act of bringing fire and life, but ending in isolation, vengeance, and mutual destruction.

The horror depicted by Mary Shelley is the likely endpoint of reason without guardrails. We already see its manifestation creeping everywhere. Indeed, this is how we have come to be ruled by technology and its attendant technocratic apparatus. This is why democracy is giving way to administrative rule and stifling bureaucracy. With these developments, we can see the approaching death of democracy and liberty. Atheists should, therefore, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Christians to rebuild the American republic according to its founding vision. That begins with patriotism and the recognition that we face enemies on three fronts, each embodying tyrannical irrationalisms: the sophistication of corporatism and communism, both born of modernity, and the pre-modern barbarism of Islam. This is not a call for atavistic solutions, but for the reclamation of republican virtue. Weber’s pessimistic take that “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs” is not yet entirely manifest. The spark that animated the Founders has not gone out. Our task as free men is to rekindle their flame and mind it carefully.

One of the persistent assumptions in public discourse, the grand narrative promulgated by those who control the means of intellectual production and the distribution of perceptions, is that the people most vulnerable to indoctrination are the so-called “dumb” or “unsophisticated”—those with little formal education, who hold to traditional or fundamentalist religious beliefs, or who are simply remote from elite institutions and the world of higher learning (i.e., have not endured the full course of indoctrination in progressive ideology). This view, expressed by progressives, treats “common people” as uniquely susceptible to propaganda because they reside outside the intellectual class or are too unintelligent to listen to reason. It is often implied that their commitments—whether to inherited norms, local knowledge, or religion, particularly certain strains of Christianity—are evidence of gullibility or ignorance.

This picture falls apart under sociological scrutiny. Historically, in the West, Christianity is intertwined with the Enlightenment itself; it is not simply a system of manipulation for the masses. Christianity, in particular Protestantism, is the wellspring of individualism and personal liberty. More to the point of this essay (I had to get that out of the way), empirical experience shows that highly educated people—those with multiple degrees, professional credentials, and roles in knowledge-producing institutions—are often among the most thoroughly indoctrinated individuals in society. Their indoctrination is not despite their intelligence but, in some sense, because of it. Elite education does not simply transmit knowledge; it transmits the ideological frameworks and loyalties that legitimate existing institutions.

I have before quoted Karl Marx’s observations in The German Ideology (a mid-nineteenth century text that finally appeared in the early 1930s). His words bear repeating here:

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”

One finds this passage in Section A, “Idealism and Materialism.” How does such an upside-down world come to be projected into consciousness? In Section B, “The Illusion of the Epoch,” Marx writes:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”

The argument I am making here (and have been making for years) aligns with observations made by Noam Chomsky, who has argued that cultural and political elites must be the most deeply indoctrinated segment of the population, precisely because their function is to reproduce and defend the status quo.

In an interview clip featured in the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Chomsky identifies two different targets for propaganda. The first is “what’s sometimes called the political class. There’s maybe twenty percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, plays some kind of role in decision-making. They’re supposed to sort of participate in social life—either as managers, or cultural managers like teachers and writers and so on. They’re supposed to vote, they’re supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial. So that’s one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there’s maybe eighty percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything—and they’re the ones who usually pay the costs.”

If the system benefits them—or depends on them—then internalizing its worldview is not merely likely; it is structurally necessary. Recall George Orwell’s quip in his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism” (published in the British magazine Polemic) that “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell points to the same dynamic I’m identifying in this essay: intelligence and education provide the tools for ideological sophistication and rationalization, not immunity from propaganda.

To be sure, as the foregoing implies, susceptibility to indoctrination is universal, but it expresses itself differently across social strata. The working class may inherit a religious or traditional worldview—with all its protective benefits. But the professional-managerial class, steeped in the incentives and norms of elite institutions, in the command of the ruling class, internalizes ideological narratives with far greater depth and rigidity—narratives that in practice cause great harm to persons and society. In this sense, the very people who most confidently diagnose “brainwashing” or stupidity in others may themselves be among the most thoroughly shaped by the ideological apparatus of the corporate state and its attendant professional culture. Intelligence of the sort useful to elites does not inoculate its possessor from propaganda; under certain conditions, it enhances vulnerability to it.

We see this dynamic at play in today’s politics. Those who support Donald Trump (and Trump himself), or who dissented from the authoritarian measures elites deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic, or who reject or express skepticism about the “scientific medical consensus” regarding the concept of gender identity or pharmaceutical products such as vaccines, are routinely portrayed by progressives as “conspiracy theorists,” “mouthbreathers,” or “rubes.” Meanwhile, progressives celebrate obviously shallow and ridiculous figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, presenting them and others as the future of America. They embrace demonstrably fallacious and hateful ideologies like critical race theory and queer theory, and their attendant concepts: collective punishment, gender identity, intergenerational guilt, white privilege, etc.

Consider the fact that it was the bourgeois elite who developed and promulgated the ideology of cultural and moral relativism. In his 1953 Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss made an argument that is often paraphrased as “if all cultures are equal, then cannibalism is just a matter of taste,” which readers may have seen in a meme shared on social media. Strauss did not say exactly this, but it is an accurate distillation of what he did say. Strauss criticizes cultural and moral relativism by pointing out that if a society’s acceptance of a practice is the only standard for its legitimacy, then cannibalism would be just as valid as that of any civilized society. His point: if we deny any natural or objective standard of right and wrong, then we lose the ability to morally judge even the most extreme practices.

The appearance of this idea is no accident. Cultural and moral relativism is one of the elite intellectual products designed to dispossess those who undergo the course of ideological indoctrination of common sense. We see this today with progressives rationalizing the treatment of gays and women under Islam—and a myriad of other destructive and unjust ideas. For Strauss, cultural and moral relativism leads to nihilism, since all values become mere preferences, lacking any higher justification. Cannibalism is the paradigm that shows why a universal moral standard—natural right—is necessary. The truth is, and any reasonable person who escaped progressive brainwashing sees it, that not all cultures are equal. Some are better than others. Western culture is better than most. But it’s been corrupted by postmodernism and primitive ideas. And this explains the sharp rise in nihilism among today’s youth.

Crime reporting in some parts of the United States is increasingly resembling reporting in European countries. In Europe, concealing facts about crime obscures the consequences of the migrant crisis. Serious crime has been rising in Europe since 2015, when Third Worlders began entering Europe in mass. We are now seeing the practice here in the United States.

The Los Angeles Police Department has declined to release its crime-mapping data. According to LAist, when journalists requested the department’s COMPSTAT data under California’s Public Records Act, the LAPD refused, arguing that releasing the information could lead to “misguided public policy discussions or unjustified public panic.”

In other words, the public might react the wrong way if it knows too much. What would the public know if the LAPD released the data? They would know about the drastic overrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in serious criminal offending, where that crime was occurring in the city, and the failure of progressive policy to protect the residents of Los Angeles from crime and violence. For many, it would confirm what they already know.

Police departments do not get to decide how much information the public can handle. They do not get to gatekeep data because they fear criticism or policy debates they can’t control. Democracy and public safety demand transparency.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution follows the Information Age. It describes the evolving interplay between technologies such as advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering and the physical, digital, and biological realms. The term is meant to convey that these technologies—and the domains they touch—are converging, rapidly transforming the world into an era of integrated cybernetics. One area that has been fundamentally changes is the world of scholarly production. In this essay I focus on the revival of an old relationship in a new form: the interaction between those who generate ideas and the methods by which those ideas are realized in tangible media.

What has been lost with the mid-1970s emergence and normalization of word processing and the demotion of secretaries to administrative assistants is that, before the Information Age, intellectual work was rarely a solitary endeavor. In the decades before the computer scholars (as well as executives) depended upon a small army of secretaries and typists who translated thought into text. These individuals occupied a crucial position in the production of knowledge. A professor might draft notes or a manuscript in longhand or dictate thoughts aloud or via Dictaphone recordings, leaving it to the secretary (or amanuensis) to turn those rough ideas into polished, neatly typed manuscripts. The relationship between scholar and secretary was, in many ways, the prototype for our contemporary interaction with digital writing tools.

Typing was a technical art: accuracy, formatting, and legibility required both speed and mastery of a machine that, by the late nineteenth century, had become standard office equipment. The typewriter allowed little room for error. Once a draft was prepared, the scholar would review it by hand—crossing out words, inserting phrases, and marking corrections—before returning it for retyping. This process would usually repeat several times until a clean copy emerged, ready for submission to a journal or publisher for review.

It is crucial to recognize, in recovering our historical memory of this period, that the best secretaries did far more than transcribe. Those who worked in academic or literary environments were skilled interpreters of their employers’ thoughts. Through long familiarity with a scholar’s voice and habits of expression, secretaries developed a sensitivity to author intent, the meaning sought, and tone. They quietly served as copy editors, correcting grammar, clarifying syntax, and smoothing transitions, even strengthening arguments. Secretarial training in the early and mid-twentieth century included rigorous instruction in audience, composition, and grammar, so that by the time they entered universities or research offices, they were not merely typists but literate professionals capable of improving the evolving manuscripts they handled.

Both my parents taught at universities, and I remember fondly my conversations with their secretaries and how impressed I was with their knowledge of the various disciplines of the departments in which they worked (and their patience in entertaining my questions when my parents were busy with other things). I observed on numerous occasions professors handing secretaries rough drafts and notes to translate into typed texts. Secretaries would also moonlight, rendering for graduate students their papers, theses, and dissertations in clean and polished form. By the time I was in graduate school, I had to do all the work myself on a word processor and ask family, friends, and peers to critique my work—if they were so inclined and had time. More often, I would pore over the same draft, feeling as if I would never finish the paper by the deadline.

The collaboration that developed between scholar and secretary was one of synergy; the intellectual content originated with the scholar, but the clarity and polish of expression owed much to the secretary’s linguistic and technical skill. In most cases, these contributions went uncredited. Authorship, both then and now, is defined by conceptual ownership—the creation of ideas—while the labor of refinement remains invisible. Editors, copy editors, and proofreaders occupy a similar position today: they may shape a work profoundly, yet they rarely share in its authorship. Their task is to enhance a voice without adding content or altering its identity. In many ways, their success is measured by their invisibility.

But who can afford copy editors and proofreaders today? This is especially problematic for those working in most public colleges and universities today, where those who fulfilled these roles historically have been demoted or eliminated, and where constrained budgets allow for no functional alternative.

In this light, the recent return of dictation and editing technologies represents not so much a revolution in content generation but the revival of an old relationship. The scholar speaking into a microphone and feeding the result into an AI system like ChatGPT is reenacting a century-old pattern. Voice-to-text applications play the role of the stenographer or typist, producing an initial transcript from speech. The language model then assumes the role once held by the skilled secretary—organizing, clarifying, and copy-editing the raw material into coherent prose. The human author remains the source of ideas, of course; to delegate that task to the system would take the joy out of creative and scholarly pursuits. Moreover, many would regard using AI-generated content as ethically problematic. However, used responsibly, the machine serves as the intermediary that converts thought into a publishable form, just as the secretary did before the word processor.

To be sure, this digital secretary still lacks the intuition and personal familiarity of its human predecessor, but this limitation will soon be overcome as the technology becomes more advanced and personalized. Moreover, and this development has been overlooked, the digital secretary democratizes the production of publishable content. Where only professors or executives once had access to trained assistants, now anyone can summon one with a microphone and a prompt. The workflow—dictation, editing, revision, shaping—remains strikingly like that of the mid-twentieth century, but the economic and social barriers are falling away. Thus, generative AI has revived the practice of spoken composition, making dictation once again a natural mode of authorship. Anyone who has worked with speech-to-text technology has noted the vast increase in productivity that it allows, and with AI’s sophistication, the common errors of translation are increasingly a problem of the past.

The continuity across these technological changes suggests that the fundamental rhythm of intellectual labor has not altered. Human thought still requires translation into tangible form; ideas still depend upon instruments and intermediaries to become legible. What has changed is the nature of the intermediary—from a human presence seated at a typewriter to a silent, algorithmic collaborator on a screen. In both cases, the assistant bridges the gap between mind and text, between the messy spontaneity of speech and the disciplined structure of writing. The days of countless drafts on a word processor, a development that, as noted, has seen the demotion of secretaries to administrative assistants (who may themselves soon become obsolete or at least ever more remote from specific departments to which they were initially assigned as they’re assigned ever larger areas of responsibility, increasingly aided themselves by AI), are increasingly becoming a historical feature of what we can now see as an interregnum—the period between human and artificial assistance. The loss of the human secretary is lamentable, but that role’s replacement by technology was, in hindsight, inevitable.

Thus, the modern writer using voice-to-text and AI editing stands in a long tradition. From the professor dictating to a secretary in 1940 to the scholar speaking into a microphone on a device in 2025, the relationship between intellect and instrument remains one of interdependence. Technology has changed; collaboration has not. What was once the sound of clacking typewriter keys has become the quietness of digital processing—but in both, we hear the same underlying dialogue between human thought and mechanical expression in tangible media. To be sure, that artificial intelligence presents a daunting challenge to the world of work, and in some aspects, imperils the world (which is why regulation of this technology is vital—although, admittedly, I don’t know what that would look like and, frankly, I don’t expect it to occur), mankind must learn not to fear this particular aspect of AI. Some scholars will resist the revival of an old relationship in its new form, but as the technology progresses, fewer will be able to do so. For those who have not yet grasped the reality of the situation—newsflash: the future is here. 

I hasten to add, as I conclude this essay, that this is true not only for scholarly work, but for art and architecture, as well. One could, if he had the means, contract with an artist to represent his idea in a compelling image, or he could convey to an AI program the same idea and have the system render the image in mere seconds without compensation. Like the loss of the human secretary, the loss of the human artist is lamentable, but here as well the production of ideas in artistic form is being democratized. Readers of this blog will have already noted that I use OpenAI’s Sora to generate novel images conveying the theme of the essays in which these images appear. I credit Sora (or sometimes Grok when Sora is stubborn), but I wonder sometimes whether I need to. At any rate, I simply do not have the resources to employ human artists to do this work, and my own skill at artwork has diminished amid the many other commitments that are made—and that I make—upon my time.

I can assure the reader that I will never delegate the bulk of my creative work in music production to AI, although I confess to having relied on AI-generated bass, drum, and synthesizer loops in quickly putting ideas down to tangible media, some of which I have made available to the public. But AI-generated guitar and vocals? Songwriting itself? Those are bridges too far. While a man makes use of technology to convey his ideas to the world, he mustn’t lose his voice to technology.

When I was young, except for an overdrive or wha-wha pedal between me and the amplifier, I refused to use effects pedals in the chain. No choruses, delays, phasers, flangers, or synthesizers. I wanted nothing to come between me and the conveyance of my ideas. When I voiced my purism to the keeper of a music shop on the square of my hometown, he pointed out to me that stretching cat gut across a hollowed out gourd to generate resonating frequencies is an effect. The instrument allows the man to convey his ideas without resorting to his vocal cords. Everything is an effect, he said. It all comes between the artist and the expression of his ideas. He then asked me, What do you hear in your head? More than I can express, I responded. Then use what helps you express your ideas, he said with a smile.