The construct “authentic self,” currently circulating on social media as Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina’s 1st District announces her resistance to the transgressive praxis of the gender project, is a paradigm of what George Orwell warned about in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party turns words into their opposites to chill the air and manipulate the populace. What is identified as the “authentic self” in gender ideology is in reality a simulated sexual identity. Its desired function is not only to dissimulate misogyny—demanding that men be permitted to invade women’s spaces and assume opportunities reserved for that sex class for purposes of genuine equity—but to disorder organic common sense by disrupting the human being’s evolved capacity to see the real.
Rep. Nancy Mace
The simulation is never the reality, yet the populace and its representative are expected to engage in doublethink, at least flawlessly appearing to accept the simulation as real. Doublethink is the ability Orwell identified of the indoctrinated ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept both as true. If transwomen were women, then the prefix means nothing. At the same time, in its actual meaning, “across from” or on the “other side of,” in this case literally the “opposite of,” all men are transwomen in the sense that they stand opposite of women. As slogan, the construct is a form of cognitive dissonance institutionalized by a totalitarian regime to control thought and suppress dissent. The term is thus an instantiation of the process by which individuals reconcile conflicting realities to align with the Party’s official narrative.
The folx work from the blindness of doublethink. The “folx” are the woke progressives who failed to deceive the majority of Americans on November 5, 2024. There is a lot of be excited about the fact that Donald Trump and his “Team of Rivals” won the popular vote, winning the largest number of votes than any GOP candidate in history (closing in on 77 million votes, more than two and half million more votes than the major opponent). Trump won 58 percent of electoral votes—the majority of states—including every swing state. Republicans retook the Senate and retained control the House. Republicans now control 37 of 50 governor’s mansions. The political realignment is deep and profound, with eighty percent of counties across the United States trending red in the voting. It’s clear that a majority of Americans want to uproot the woke progressive sensibilities that are upending their lives. In the face of deep and profound corporate state hegemony, the will of the reality-based citizen prevailed. Common sense is still alive and kicking.
But the woke progressive ideologue still controls the apparatus—the Academic-Industrial Complex, the Cathedral, the Culture Industry, the Medical-Industrial Complex. Identity politics, DEI, and the rest of it still pervade our institutions, channeling the resentment of the proles the Party has sacrificed on the alter of corporate profit and cultural decadence. The apparatus must be deconstructed and the people liberated. And we don’t have a lot of time to get this done. The United Kingdom under the thumb of Labour has become Airstrip One. This is the fate that awaits the United States if Democrats regain power. House elections are less than two years away. November 5 should be the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare. But to be this, the moment needs seizing. Tomorrow’s historical question of whether America awakened in time will be determined by citizen actions today.
A big part of that struggle is to reclaim language from the Ministry of Truth. The problem of gender ideology is central to this struggle. But so is the language we use to describe our political standpoints. This is why I am so tenacious when it comes to grasping the meaning of the word “liberal” and insisting that we use this word with reference to its actual meaning. We therefore must also clarify the meaning of “conservative” and “progressive.”
Perhaps the main difference between the conservative, as originally understood, and a liberal person is that the latter openly embraces modernity. I see a lot of criticism of modernity from self-identified conservatives. But what is modernity? Modernity is the shift away from agrarian, feudal, and traditional relations towards industrialization, secularism, and urbanization, those developments associated with the rise of rationality, science, and technology. Modernity is the concrete embodiment of Enlightenment ideals: individualism and personal autonomy, progress (not progressivism, another inversion that conceals regressive tribal desire), humanism, reason and science, and skepticism of authority. Modernity is aligned politically with the development of capitalism, the modern nation-state, and republicanism. Modernity is the state that takes man away from the primitive and tribal politics of identity and pushes him towards rational individualism and nationalism.
If one takes a moment to reflect on this, he will see that most modern conservatives are substantially liberal. The conservative of old—the monarchist and traditionalist of the Ancien Régime—is a reactionary, out of place in the modern world. What the modern conservative—the man who lacks self-awareness of his liberal sensibilities—is really reacting to is postmodernity and the project to abandon modernity for totalitarianism and transhumanism, a desire rooted in anarchist and nihilistic sensibles, i.e., authoritarian desires organizing and organized by the corporate state. Liberals reject all that, as all that is inherently destructive to the Enlightenment values liberals and modern conservatives embrace. As such, one cannot be both liberal and progressive. When people identify as both, they are admitting they’re either purveyors or victims of doublethink.
Propaganda poster from the Star Wars franchise
A few days ago on Facebook, I used the movie franchise Star Wars as a metaphor to remind progressives who saw in that series of what is happening in the actual world. I wanted to remind them of this to help them find the liberal that may still be lurking in their bosom—to join the fight to restore the Old Republic. In the first installment of the franchise, the Rebel Alliance prevailed. Speaking metaphorically, 2016 repented the destruction of the Death Star. But the Empire remains and persists and always coming after the Rebel Alliance. The Empire struck back in 2020. And they’re not done after the Return of Jedi. The Empire hates the American Creed—federalism, civil liberties, and popular sovereignty—because the Creed stands in the way of the Agenda. The Agenda: the Empire wants to make America something other than what it is meant to be. Progressives cheered on the Alliance in theaters. And when Disney infused the franchise with woke progressivism, many progressives resisted. We need to help the progressive now grasp the spirit of those sympathies, to find their inner liberalism—their authentic self. That’s the spirit of the American Revolution.
If a white man murders a black man, and his motive is racism, are other white men responsible for his actions? From an ethical and legal standpoint, the actions of one individual cannot be automatically attributed to others who share similar characteristics, such as race, unless there is direct evidence of complicity or shared responsibility. In a case where a white man murders a black man motivated by racism, the culpability rests solely on the individual who committed the act unless others actively participated, encouraged, or conspired in the crime.
I had nothing to do with this
If a white man murders a black man, and his motive is racism, are his offspring responsible for his actions? No, his offspring are not responsible for his actions. Responsibility for a crime or immoral act lies solely with the individual who committed it, not with his descendants. This principle aligns with both legal doctrines, which prohibit assigning guilt to others based on familial ties, and ethical reasoning, which emphasizes individual accountability.
These moral truths apply to all crimes. Individuals are solely responsible for their own actions, and guilt cannot be inherited or transferred to others, including offspring or family members. Ethical frameworks and legal systems universally uphold this principle, emphasizing individual accountability rather than collective or familial blame. The alternatives are barbaric and primitive.
Given these principles, which are correct, how are reparations paid to ethnic or racial groups for wrongs committed against them by members of other ethnic or racial groups acts of justice? Is it not unjust to assign blame to those who committed no wrongdoing, to hold them accountable for the actions of others, most of whom are dead? Who are the living victims? The actual victims are buried in the same ground as the perpetrators. Most are dead and gone. Any perpetrator alive can be help responsible—as an individual.
The same is true with land acknowledgments. A land acknowledgment is a formal statement that recognizes the indigenous peoples as the traditional stewards of the land and pays respect to the history and culture of the communities that lived on and cared for it before colonization. These acknowledgments often highlight specific tribes or nations historically connected to the area and express solidarity with ongoing efforts for justice and reconciliation.
What justice is being sought? To shame those who live today for actions taken by people who are now deceased? To extract from the living reparations for the actions of the dead—to take from those who did nothing to give to those who suffered no injury? What is being reconciled? The historical and ongoing injustices faced by indigenous peoples due to colonization? Colonialism is in the past. The past cannot be changed.
Much of world history involves the conquest, colonization, and domination of one group by another. This pattern has occurred across civilizations, empires, and eras, as societies have often expanded through warfare, subjugation, and exploitation of others. Examples include the Roman Empire’s expansion across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; the Mongol conquests across Asia and Europe; the spread of Islamic caliphates; and European colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Conquest and colonization have shaped borders, cultures, languages, religions, and economies throughout history. The contexts, scales, and consequences of these processes vary widely, but the principles of justice remain firm: no collective or intergenerational penalty allowed.
I teach social theory at a midsized state college in the Midwest. Social theory in my program is not separated into two courses, so I have to teach both classical and contemporary theory in one fourteen-week semester. Because so much contemporary theory is either rooted in classical theory or postmodernist nonsense, most of the content covers classical theory, with emphasis on Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and George Herbert Mead. Because the role religion plays in social life is crucial to understanding human action, I have built in a substantial sociology of religion component.
I have suggested to my students a connection between Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis and Marx’s critique of Bruno Bauer’s The Jewish Question. In today’s essay, I explore whether Marx anticipates Weber’s thesis concerning the spirit of capitalism and the role played by Protestantism in that development.
I want to begin with Weber’s observations in Ancient Judaism, published posthumously in 1921, which focuses on the unique socioreligious structure and historical consciousness that shaped Jewish life and thought. Why I start here will become obvious soon enough. Unlike the cyclical or unchanging worldviews of some Eastern religions, the Jewish perspective portrayed the world as a dynamic, historical process with a clear purpose and endpoint. Weber highlights how Jewish theology framed the world as a temporary structure awaiting a divinely mandated reordering of things, one that would ultimately reestablish Jewish dominance and harmony with God’s will. Weber describes an ethical rationalism in Jewish thought that shapes a unique approach to social conduct, one emphasizing moral accountability and responsibility over magical or mystical elements.
This ethic, according to Weber, forms a core part of the Western (Europe and North America) and Middle Eastern (West Asia and North Africa) ethical foundation from which both Christianity and Islam emerge respectively. Judaism thus represents a crucial turning point—a “pivot”—in Western and Middle Eastern social evolution, marking a shift toward a future-oriented, ethical framework that has influenced broader cultural and religious traditions.
Max Weber
In the story of the Jewish people, a dialectical process involving transformative forces is apparent. From a biblical perspective, God throws obstacles before the Jews for them to overcome and move to a higher unity. In the Hebrew Bible, the figure of Satan, which means “adversary” or “accuser,” is quite different from the Christian conception. Satan in Judaism is not an autonomous source of evil opposing God but rather a divine agent tasked with testing human resolve and moral integrity. In the Jewish view, obstacles are not inherently evil but instead provide opportunities for growth, self-discovery, and greater unity with God. (For more on the Christian conception of Satan, see my Zoroastrianism in Second Temple Judaism and the Christian Satan, which I penned on Christmas Eve 2018 while at my Mother’s house in Tennessee.)
Judaism’s focus on testing and overcoming obstacles cultivates a worldview grounded in engagement with the material world. While many religious texts focus on stories about the exploits of the gods, the Hebrew Bible is the story of a people. Rather than perceiving worldly existence as something to transcend (as might be found in Christian or Gnostic views), Judaism sees human action in history and the world as crucial. Through action, effort, and struggle, one realizes divine purposes, bringing creation closer to its ideal form. This engagement with the material and historical world has been foundational in Jewish thought and practice, producing an ethic of resilience and a worldly focus that values tribal ties and historical progress.
This theme of struggle and synthesis was influential for Georg Hegel, whose dialectical approach sees history as an unfolding process in which contradictions drive development. The process is one of becoming, a process where progress emerges through conflict and resolution, emphasizing the movement of concepts through contradiction, negation, mediation, and sublation (Aufhebung), revealing the inherent unity within opposition and a higher unity through resolution. Hegel finds inspiration in the Jewish conception of history as dynamic and directed by challenges. He views history as the realm in which human freedom and rationality unfold through struggle, ultimately seeking unity in a higher order of things. Though Hegel developed his dialectic in the light of a broader Christian philosophical framework, his emphasis on worldly struggle and progress through contradictions shows a strong resonance with this aspect of Jewish thought.
In Ancient Judaism, Weber discusses how the Jewish God’s demands are often exacting, framing obstacles as tests of moral and spiritual resilience. This view leads to a focus on ethical action, rather than merely escaping the world or achieving personal salvation. Weber suggests that this historical outlook sets Judaism apart from many ancient religions, as it emphasized moral behavior within the material world as a central aspect of fulfilling the divine will. Weber also connects this worldview to the notion of a dialectical process (albeit he doesn’t work from an explicitly Hegelian standpoint). Weber describes how the Jewish people faced cycles of suffering and redemption, interpreting each setback as part of a divine plan that requires human agency for its fulfillment. This focus on historical engagement and overcoming adversities through human action aligns with Hegel’s view that history is a dynamic process of development driven by conflict and resolution.
“For the Jew,” Weber writes in Ancient Judaism, “the social order of the world was conceived to have been turned into the opposite of the one promised for the future, but in the future it was to be overturned so that Jewry could be once again dominant. The world was conceived as neither eternal nor unchangeable, but rather as being created. Its present structure was a product of man’s actions, above all those of the Jews, and of God’s reaction to them. Hence the world was a historical product designed to give way to the truly God-ordained order.” The God-ordained order is the achievement of the highest unity. “There existed in addition a highly rational religious ethic of social conduct,” Weber continues, “free of magic and all forms of irrational quest for salvation; it was inwardly worlds apart from the path of salvation offered by Asiatic religions. To a large extent this ethic still underlies contemporary Middle Eastern and European ethics. World-historical interest in Jewry rests upon this fact.” From this he draws a profound observation: “Thus, in considering the conditions of Jewry’s evolution, we stand at a turning point of the whole cultural development of the West and the Middle East.”
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In his essay “Zur Judenfrage” (“On the Jewish Question”), published in 1844 in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, nearly eighty years before the appearance of Ancient Judaism, Marx explored the relationship between Judaism and the socioeconomic structures of society, particularly within the context of Christianity and civil society, i.e., the capitalist mode of production. Marx proceeds via a critique mainly of Bruno Bauer’s Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question), published in 1843, but also Bauer’s “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden” (“The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free”), published in Georg Herwegh’s Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz.
Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer
Bauer argues that Jews should not be granted political emancipation until they relinquish their religious identity. In his view, the persistence of a distinct Jewish identity is incompatible with the secular, universal rights needed for modern citizenship. Bauer contends that true political emancipation requires the abolition of religion altogether. He sees religion as a barrier to universal human rights and believes that a secular state, free from religious influence, is necessary for genuine emancipation. Bauer criticizes the special privileges that various religious groups, especially Jews, seek within the state, arguing that such privileges undermined the principles of equality and universal rights. Crucially, in Bauer’s way of thinking (and this is true for Marx, as well) the Jewish identity is centered on religious belief and not matters of ethnicity or race.
In his critique of Bauer, as he is wont to do, Marx shifts the focus from religious identity to economic and social structures, exploring the nature of political emancipation and the broader context of human emancipation beyond political rights. He criticizes Bauer for not recognizing the deeper socioeconomic dimensions of emancipation and, as expected, argues for a more radical transformation of society. In this shift, Marx contends that Judaism’s practical spirit has flourished within Christian societies; the Jew is not an isolated religious figure, but a representative of the broader societal tendencies toward egoism and practical need. Now we come to it; the thesis of the present essay thus becomes explicit: is it the case that the Protestant ethic Weber identifies in his earlier work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05) as enabling the development of the capitalist spirit is actually the perfection of Judaism in the totalization of capitalist relations identified by Marx.
By egoism, Marx means individualism, which is the political emancipation offered by the liberal state, which is to say that liberalism elevates individual self-interests over communitarian ethics, a process I have referred to in the past as “detribalization.” Liberated from their tribe, the individual is reincorporated into the national structure emphasizing equality under the rule of law. This focus is associated with Marx’s interest in alienation, where individuals become disconnected from communal bonds and social solidarity and thus estranged from other men and self (since self is also a social product). Marx thus distinguishes between political and human emancipation, the latter involving the transformation of social relations to overcome the alienation inherent in capitalist society. Under these new arrangements, human beings are free to develop their capacities in conjunction with others, rather than in competition with them. (See The Postmodern Condition: Human Nature, Tribalism, and the Future of the Nation-State.)
Marx identifies practical need and egoism as the core principles of civil, or bourgeois society. He argues that in the monotheism of the Jew money becomes a deity—indeed, the central deity. In Marx’s view, money as the ultimate value degrades all other aspects of human and natural life into mere commodities. The dominance of money, Marx contends, has secularized the Jewish god, transforming Yahweh into a universal symbol of self-interest and economic exchange. Moreover, Judaism reduces human relations, including gender relations, to transactions. This commodification extends to all aspects of life under the influence of money and private property, reflecting a broader societal contempt for nature and intrinsic human values. Marx also critiques the Jewish emphasis on legalistic adherence, viewing it as a reflection of the bureaucratic and self-interested nature of civil society.
Judaism reaches its zenith with the perfection of civil society, Marx observes, which occurs within the Christian world. Christianity facilitates the complete separation of civil society from the state, promoting egoism and atomistic individualism. He describes Christianity as the theoretical elevation of Judaism’s practical concerns, while Judaism represents the common practical application of Christian principles; thus Christianity and Judaism are interlinked, with Christianity emerging from Judaism and ultimately merging back into it. This interdependence reflects a broader process of alienation and commodification in society, where human and natural values are subjugated to the imperatives of money and self-interest.
Marx argues that the tenacity of the Jew is not due to his religion per se, but to the underlying human basis of his religion, namely egoism. In modern civil society, egoism is universally realized and secularized, making it impossible to convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature. Marx concludes that the nature of the Jew is not merely a reflection of individual narrowness but embodies the broader societal narrowness shaped by practical need and self-interest. Thus Marx equates Jewish identity with capitalist practices, suggesting that the “worldly religion of the Jew” is “huckstering” (meaning to promote or sell) and implies that the emancipation of Jews is intertwined with the emancipation of society from capitalism.
Marx writes that “Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.” He continues: “From the outset the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is, therefore, the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again.” Then, controversially, “The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”
Marx argues that true emancipation, whether for Jews or others, cannot be achieved solely through political means within a capitalist society, which he sees as inherently alienating. Political emancipation is only partial freedom; it allows individuals to be legally equal but does not address the deeper social structures that lead to economic inequality and human alienation. Political rights, in Marx’s view, give individuals formal freedoms without transforming the social conditions that foster real human liberation. Marx thus suggests that “solving” the Jewish question, which is at once the solution for the broader problem of human emancipation, requires transcending the capitalist system altogether. He views capitalism, the “world of hucksters,” as a system that perpetuates division and self-interest. Emancipation for any marginalized group, including Jews, would only be possible if society as a whole were liberated from the constraints of private property and class antagonism.
Marx argues that the traits he associates with Judaism—egoism, materialism (in the commercial sense), and self-interest—find their full expression and “perfection” within a Christianized civil society, one where economic self-interest dominates and individuals exist as atomized entities, disconnected from collective “species-ties.” In this worldview, Marx sees Christianity—and he is I presume speaking of Protestantism here—as the “theorizing” form of Judaism, where the separation of the state and individual material interests becomes complete. The goal of “social emancipation,” in Marx’s view, requires freeing society from the egoistic values he attributes to “Judaism,” thus abolishing the primacy of individual material gain over collective human connection.
Marx’s solution to the Jewish question thus lies in winning the struggle for a communist society, ie., classless and stateless social arrangements, where people are not defined by economic, religious, or social divisions but by their collective humanity, or species-being (Gattungswesen). For Marx, humans, unlike other animals, are capable of consciously shaping their world through labor and are inherently collaborative beings. By abolishing private property and class exploitation, Marx envisions a world in which individuals could attain true freedom and community beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society and return to harmony with the species-being. The Jew thus goes away not in the eliminationist or genocidal sense offered by the Nazi but rather in the sense that, without the need for religious or other ideological affinities, there are no religious groups at all. In other words, Christians and Muslims go away with the Jews; in all cases, the people remain.
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Weber and Marx offer distinct, yet intersecting interpretations of Judaism in relation to social and historical development, each viewing Judaism through the lens of broader cultural dynamics. Weber’s perspective centers on Judaism’s foundational impact on Western and Middle Eastern ethical development, particularly its rational, future-oriented ethics. For Weber, Judaism’s unique historical view—one that saw the current world order as provisional and human actions as pivotal to its unfolding—was revolutionary. He argues that Judaism introduced a linear, purposeful, even teleological conception of history, with a moral order that emphasized individual responsibility and rational conduct. This ethical rationalism, he suggests, laid groundwork for Western moral systems, differentiating it from other ancient religious traditions. (Some take it further than this. For example, Yale professor David Gelernter argues that Judaism calls upon Jews to be separate themselves from other groups in order to sit in judgment based on their moral standpoint. See my 2009 essay An Obnoxious Chauvinist.) For Weber, Judaism represents a turning point that helped shape the Western focus on law and morality, making it a crucial element in understanding the origins of contemporary Western ethics.
Marx approaches Judaism not as an ethical foundation but as a metaphor for the self-interested materialism he critiques in modern capitalism. He frames Judaism within the socio-economic context of civil society, asserting that “Judaism” is synonymous with the values of egoism, individualism, and materialism. In Marx’s view, these qualities find their ultimate expression in the capitalist world shaped by Christianity. He sees Christianity as enabling civil society to split from the state, allowing individual economic interests to eclipse communal ties. This structure, for Marx, represents the dominance of economic individualism over collective social values, where the individual operates solely out of self-interest, creating a fractured society that is “emancipated” from shared humanity and ethical bonds. In his polemic, the “social emancipation of the Jew” equates to society’s liberation from the “Judaism” that he equates with capitalist egoism, suggesting a need for social cohesion beyond individual material concerns.
In examining both theorists together, some might suppose opposing evaluations. Weber sees Jewish ethics as an essential contribution to a rational moral order, one that elevated the West’s ethical landscape. For Marx, the values he associates with Judaism—refracted through his critique of economic life in a Christian-dominated world—symbolize the rise of alienation and egoism that need to be overcome. Weber’s view is grounded in the ethical and historical developments Judaism inspired, which he considers essential to the development of Western civilization.
But are these opposing evaluations as some might suppose? As implied above, I don’t think so. As noted, well before Ancient Judaism, Weber published his two-part essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in the journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Archive for Social Science and Social Policy). There he articulates how religious asceticism initially drove the development of a rational order that would later become foundational to capitalism.
For Weber, a particular ethic embedded in certain Protestant denominations, particularly Calvinism, fostered a mindset conducive to capitalism. Weber believed that Calvinist principles, such as the doctrine of predestination and the importance of a “calling,” encouraged individuals to pursue hard work, discipline, and frugality as a means of demonstrating their worthiness. Over time, these values contributed to a rational economic ethos, supporting the growth of capitalist structures, particularly in Western Europe and America.
Paradoxically, with the rise of capitalism, material accumulation and organized efficiency replaced the spiritual motivations that originally guided work, and over time the religious framework gave way to secularized capitalism, which no longer relied on a religious ethic, but continued to demand structured, disciplined labor. Weber believed that capitalism transformed its original religious values into a self-perpetuating system that, in the end, destroyed the very values that had underpinned it. This has been termed by contemporary theoretician George Ritzer “irrationality of rationality.”
Weber writes in his essay, “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.” He continues: “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.” Then, “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.”
For Weber, this secularized rationality under capitalism finds a situation where the once spiritually motivated Protestant ethic has faded, leaving workers trapped in impersonal systems. Capitalism, which once rested on an Enlightenment optimism, moved by a Promethean spirit, had become or was everywhere becoming “stripped of its religious and ethical meaning.” The “pursuit of wealth” becomes “associated with purely mundane passions,” a shift that Weber sees most vividly in the United States where labor becomes a rationalized, mechanized pursuit that transforms individuals into components of a larger system, valuing economic productivity over personal fulfillment or spiritual meaning.
“Military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalist factory,” observes Weber. “Organizational discipline in the factory has a completely rational basis. With the help of suitable methods of measurement, the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production.” He continues: “On this basis, the American system of ‘scientific management’ triumphantly proceeds with its rational conditioning and training of work performances, thus drawing the ultimate conclusions from the mechanization and discipline of the plant. The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines—in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is robbed of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism; in line with the demands of the work procedure, he is attuned to a new rhythm though the functional specialization of muscles and through the creation of an optimal economy of physical effort.”
Under such systems, individuals become highly specialized, functionally attuned to machines and industrial demands that strip them of their “natural rhythm.” Scientific management involves training individuals to become so attuned to the needs of the factory or bureaucratic state that their very psycho-physical apparatus is reshaped to maximize efficiency. Here, Weber captures a profound dehumanization: individuals are no longer valued for their intrinsic humanity or creativity, but rather for their utility within the rationalized system. Weber writes, “This whole process of rationalization, in the factory as elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, parallels the centralization of the material implements of organization in the hands of the master. Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized. This universal phenomenon more and more restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct.”
This observation is echoed in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, where he discusses the “animality of man.” Gramsci, a Marxist, critiques the asceticism promoted by bourgeois and bureaucratic ideologies, which seek to regulate not only labor but also leisure and private life. This Puritanical control denies individuals the full range of their human experience, including the “animal” pleasures of the body, such as enjoyment, rest, and play. Such a system enforces a mechanical efficiency that prioritizes productivity and obedience, stripping people of the very pleasures and freedoms that make life meaningful. Thus Gramsci viewed the functional denial of human vitality as part of a broader strategy to maintain social order. By suppressing instincts and channeling energy exclusively into work or compliant behavior, hegemonic systems prevent individuals from fully experiencing their humanity. This is a subtle but effective way of dehumanization: not by reducing people to animals in a crude way, but by denying them access to the joys and instincts that connect them to their natural being.
Weber argues that rationalization extends beyond the factory and workplace to the bureaucratic state, where power and control are increasingly centralized. This centralization of material resources in the hands of the master not only reflects the economic concentration that Marx critiqued but also a social concentration of power that restricts personal agency. Weber explains that bureaucratic discipline colonizes the lifeworld, creating a highly organized, depersonalized social structure where individual charisma or freedom loses significance. This mirrors Marx’s argument on alienation, where workers are estranged from the products of their labor and from each other, treated as interchangeable units within a mechanized, impersonal process.
Thus both Weber and Marx scrutinize the impact of capitalist rationality on the human spirit, albeit through distinct frameworks, one idealist, the other materialist. Marx argues that capitalism alienates individuals by reducing them to productive inputs, estranged from the products they create and from one another. For Marx, the capitalist system objectifies human beings, exploiting them for their labor while concentrating the means of production in the hands of a few, thereby intensifying class divisions and rendering workers increasingly powerless. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber similarly laments capitalism’s reduction of individuals to cogs in the bureaucratic machinery, where disciplined labor has become an impersonal, mechanized process devoid of spiritual meaning or ethical grounding.
Both theorists thus critique the rationalization inherent in capitalist structures, which transform work from a potentially meaningful or ethical activity into an instrument of profit. Weber traces the historical roots of this transformation to the ascetic Protestant ethic, which sanctified disciplined labor as a calling. Yet as capitalism secularized, this sense of purpose evaporated, leaving behind a disenchanted economic structure driven by efficiency rather than ethical fulfillment. Where Protestantism once infused work with religious value, modern capitalism has stripped labor of meaning, leaving “the ghost of dead religious beliefs.” Marx and Weber both recognize this dehumanizing shift, but while Marx more explicitly attributes it to class exploitation and the concentration of capital, Weber attributes it to the consequences of a general culture of rationalization, where individuals become subsumed within impersonal systems governed by economic calculation.
In the end, they’re talking about the same thing. Weber’s depiction of the capitalist system echoes Marx’s notion of alienation. In his analysis of “scientific management,” Weber describes how capitalist organization trains workers to conform to the demands of machinery, optimizing their physical and mental capacities to fit the needs of industrial production. This functionalization mirrors Marx’s description of estrangement from species-being, in which labor becomes something external to the worker—a mere means to survive, rather than a fulfilling or self-actualizing activity. In this context, both thinkers recognize the depersonalizing effect of capitalist rationality, which treats labor not as a source of human dignity but as a commodity to be measured, optimized, and controlled.
Both Marx and Weber also observe the concentration of power within the capitalist system. Marx attributes this concentration to class dynamics, where the “master” class monopolizes the means of production, systematically disempowering workers. Weber similarly sees capitalism concentrating control, focusing on the bureaucratic machinery that centralizes authority in a way that restricts individual autonomy. For Weber, the bureaucratic state and capitalist enterprise both contribute to a form of disenchantment, where rationalization encroaches on every aspect of life, ultimately subordinating personal values and autonomy to the dictates of a system that prioritizes efficiency over humanity.
* * *
Both The Protestant Ethic and Ancient Judaism explore how different ethical systems, stemming from unique theological frameworks, impact the society’s orientation towards the world, including economic activities. However, while Protestantism’s ethics dovetailed with and supported the rise of capitalism, Judaism’s ethical monotheism did not prioritize worldly success in the same way, remaining more focused on survival and cohesion within a specific cultural and religious identity. Therein lies the antithesis that finds its higher unity in the capitalist system. The Jewish approach to economic life, according to Weber, must be understood in the context of the broader ethical and social framework provided by their religion. Weber emphasizes the role of Jewish law in regulating economic behavior; the intricate legal system developed by ancient Jewish scholars sought to ensure that economic activities were conducted ethically and justly. For example, laws concerning fair weights and measures, were aimed to prevent the exploitation of market life.
Marx’s essay in response to Bauer’s arguments against Jewish emancipation in Germany is really a springboard to discuss the nature of political and human emancipation. Marx contends that true emancipation requires the separation of church and state and then the abolition of all religious distinctions. This is one of many arguments Marx makes that anticipate Roberto Unger’s concept of “super liberalism,” a critique of liberalism that pushes beyond its traditional boundaries, reimagining how individuals can interact in ways that transcend established norms of personal autonomy, rights, and social organization to recover human solidarity.
In Unger’s view, traditional liberalism emphasizes individual rights, personal freedom, and legal structures to protect individuals from interference. However, he argues that liberalism in this conventional form fails to address deeper issues of social inequality, economic disparity, and the limitations imposed by rigid institutional frameworks. (This view is obviously inspired by Isiah Berlin’s observation of the distinction between “negative” and “positive” liberty, which was anticipated even earlier by Erich Fromm in his Escape from Freedom.)
In the nineteenth century, debates about Jewish emancipation were deeply entwined with broader questions about citizenship, statehood, and secularism. Marx’s intervention in this debate reflects his attempt to push beyond the immediate issue of Jewish rights to address the deeper, structural problems of capitalist society. His ultimate goal is the abolition of all forms of alienation, whether religious, political, or economic. Marx’s critique of Judaism can thus be seen as part of a broader critique of religion and its role in society, where he argues that political emancipation, the granting of equal rights within the state, does not equate to human emancipation, which is the liberation from economic and social constraints. For Marx, religion, including Judaism, represents an ideological barrier to true human freedom because it perpetuates a false consciousness that obscures the material realities of economic exploitation.
RFK, Jr. eats McDonalds and drinks a Coke and the corporate statists lose their minds. “Hypocrisy!” They cry in unison. Either they don’t understand what hypocrisy is or they don’t think the people do. So I’m here (once again) to educate those who don’t know what a word means.
God-level trolling
Hypocrisy indeed involves a discrepancy between expressed beliefs or principles and actions, but it is specifically tied to the pretense of belief or virtue. Hypocrisy is not knowing something is unhealthy or wrong and doing it anyway—that could be addiction, inconsistency, weakness, or something else. Hypocrisy arises when someone claims to hold a standard or value while acting in a way that contradicts it with the intention of deceiving others into believing he is virtuous.
Recognizing something is bad like smoking and wanting to reduce its practice but continuing to smoke may reflect human fallibility, etc., but not necessarily hypocrisy unless the person also claims not to smoke or condemn others for it while doing it himself.
The corporations that manufacture harmful products are very happy to see progressives misrepresent the concept of hypocrisy because it assists in the campaign to stop liberals from improving the health of Americans. Corporations stand to lose trillions if they’re pressured into making healthier products. Not just Big Ag and other corporations stand to lose but the Medical-Industrial Complex, which depends on unhealthy people. Indeed, the MIC makes and maintains millions of sick people in a continual basis
Peter Thiel’s recent remark to Bari Weiss that modern science has become “more dogmatic than the Catholic church was in the seventeenth century” is a powerful observation about the state of knowledge in the twenty-first century. Thiel’s observation reflects the extent to which the institutions of science, once rooted in skepticism and open inquiry, have been co-opted by external forces that cannot tolerate dissent.
Peter Thiel: "What has become 'science' is more dogmatic than the Catholic church was in the 17th century"
Watch as Bari Weiss tries desperately to get Thiel to criticize MAHA / RFK jr, and Thiel responds with a spectacular exposition of everything wrong with modern science. pic.twitter.com/a1l29BzQqd
The two dominant forces behind this shift are corporate power and woke progressive ideology. Corporate power subordinates scientific inquiry to the demands of profit generation, prioritizing outcomes that align with market imperatives rather than seeking objective truth. Progressive ideology operates as a form of quasi-religious dogma that legitimizes itself by appealing to moral imperatives, often stifling challenges to its tenets as heretical or harmful. Together, these forces create a system where skepticism is not just unwelcome but actively suppressed, as it threatens the legitimacy of the power structures behind the institutions.
The transformation of science into dogma can be traced to structural changes within the scientific enterprise itself, particularly the rise of “peer review” in the mid-twentieth century. What is often portrayed as a neutral process to ensure quality and rigor in research, peer review in practice is a gatekeeping mechanism that enforces conformity to institutional norms and ideological orthodoxy. Peer review functions less as an arbiter of scientific merit and more as a tool for maintaining the status quo, ensuring that dissenting perspectives are marginalized. This parallels the modern phenomenon of “fact-checking” in corporate media, which similarly operates under the guise of impartiality but often serves as a mechanism for censorship. Both are methods of consolidating authority by creating artificial structures of legitimacy, obscuring their true purpose: the control of information to advance particular interests.
The trial of Galileo
In recent years, these mechanisms have faced significant disruption due to the proliferation of alternative sources of information. The internet and digital media have enabled the bypassing of institutional gatekeepers, allowing individuals to disseminate knowledge that is not only independent of corporate and ideological control but also demonstrably effective in practice. True science, after all, is validated not by institutional endorsement but by its utility and its ability to produce outcomes that benefit the broader public. The rise of alternative platforms has exposed the inadequacies and biases of the traditional systems, undermining their claim to authority.
The erosion of institutional credibility, then, stems from the growing recognition that these structures are not neutral arbiters of truth but mechanisms designed to legitimize the goals of the powerful. By prioritizing corporate profits or ideological conformity over genuine inquiry and public good, they have revealed themselves as tools of domination rather than sources of enlightenment. As a result, the public increasingly views these institutions with skepticism, recognizing their authority as a façade masking authoritarian control.
Authority itself must be understood in this context. As Max Weber told us, true authority derives from legitimate power, grounded in trust and transparency, and exercised in service of the common good. In contrast, what passes for authority in many contemporary institutions is power legitimized through hegemonic techniques—practices that manipulate consent and manufacture credibility. Either authority is legitimate power or it is a cover for power. The latter is not authority but authoritarianism. In exposing these structures for what they are, i.e., mechanisms for legitimizing corporate and ideological goals to achieve ends contrary to the interests of the people, the institutions of science and the media have lost their authority.
Thiel hits the nail on the head, and the reason for the problem he identifies is that the institutions of science have been captured by corporate power and woke progressive ideology—neither of which can tolerate skepticism, since skepticism of their preachments undermines their legitimacy.
This from Mashable just appeared on my timeline: “PSA: Your Twitter/X account is about to change forever.” If you’re going to leave Twitter for the reason identified here, then you will also have to delete Google, Bing, etc., because they’re all feeding your posts, tweets, emails, searches, etcetera into their generative AI systems. You will also need to stop publishing in journals, newspapers, nooks, etcetera. These, too, are being fed into AI. Oh, and your artwork, photographs, architectural drafts, musical compositions and performances—everything. Just stop living. Everything you do is fed into AI. Find a cave and go live in it.
The X (formerly Twitter) logo
Here’s what the propaganda offensive is about. X is targeted not because it’s doing something extraordinary. Indeed, X is the least of the worst offenders. X is targeted because it’s the least of the worst offenders. (So, in that sense, I guess it is extraordinary.) X the freest social media platform on the Internet, and the corporate state and censorship-industrial complex wants to scare you into leaving the platform to undermine its profitability (if Harris has been elected President, elites would be using additional weapons to accomplish this).
This is a very straightforward thing: The power elite don’t want you to have open and free media because when you do you become autonomous and unmanageable. Look at what happened on November 5. America—the world—got a massive injection of freedom and democracy, and the corporate state is freaking the fuck out about it. Every bit of propaganda now telegraphs existential fear. Their lies tell the truth of the situation. They’re freaking the fuck out because they are indeed fucked.
One more thing. This article suggests that people are not leaving X because of November 5. Wrong. They’re leaving X because of what happened last week. They’re leaving to find places to bubblize more hermetically so they can deepen the woke practice of cerebral hygiene. The left has become a cult. Woke is a religious movement. But here’s the thing, X is posting record numbers in terms of viewers and activity. X has become the biggest source of news not only in the United States, but where it is allow to freely operate around the world. The people have taken back the media—and their government. This is why I call X the “Gutenberg Internet” moment. We are living through something akin to the Protestant Reformation.
In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” I think we may have falsified that truism. Folks wanted a revolutionary moment. You’re welcome.
I have been planning to write this essay for quite some time. Steven Bannon’s rant on the War Room this morning finally pushed me to do it because, while he knew the concept of “creative destruction,” he was a bit sketchy on where the idea came from, suggesting not only Joseph Schumpeter as its possible author but also Friedrich Hayek. Having expertise in the field of political economy, I thought to myself that I should go ahead and write it up so readers of Freedom and Reason can get a sense of the spirit behind the desire to deconstruct the administrative state. There’s a lot of fear out there about what all this entails, and one of the goals of this platform is help assuage fear so people can practically move forward without trepidation.
Joseph Schumpeter, Austrian-American economist and political scientist
Schumpeter was an influential Austrian-American economist and political scientist who explored the dynamic nature of capitalism and its ability to generate growth through innovation, but he also warned of its vulnerabilities, particularly to social and political changes. Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” to describe the process by which capitalism perpetually renews itself through innovation. In Schumpeter view, new technologies and adaptive business models disrupt existing structures, leading to economic progress while simultaneously making older industries and jobs obsolete. He rooted this in the cyclical nature of economies (influenced by the Kondratieff Wave theory, which I may write about in the near future), attributing booms and busts to waves of innovation. Schumpeter thus emphasizes the critical role of entrepreneurs as agents of change who drive innovation—and the problem of bureaucratic fetters on that critical role.
In his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), Schumpeter argued that capitalism would eventually give way to socialism due to its own success. He saw that the rise of large corporations and bureaucratization would erode the entrepreneurial spirit, leading to a managed economy. It is crucial here to clarify Schumpeter’s notion of socialism aligns more closely with a corporatist or technocratic conception than with the classical Marxist vision of a workers’ state. Schumpeter’s socialism is characterized by the bureaucratic management of economic resources, a shift from entrepreneurial capitalism to a system governed by large corporations, bureaucracies, and technocrats. This form of socialism emerges not from workers seizing the means of production but as an evolutionary outcome of capitalism’s own successes, leading to an administrative state.
Friedrich Hayek, neoclassical political economist
Schumpeter’s concern is our present reality, but his concern was arguably insufficiently framed such that it would move the populace to resist more vigorously the rise of the administrative state in real time. Moreover, he saw this development as inevitable amid the complexification of the capitalist mode of production. For a more polemical and hopeful critique, then, we must turn to Friedrich Hayek, who viewed corporatist or technocratic developments as a grave danger to freedom and something that we can and should resist. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek warned that central planning, whether by bureaucratic elites or under socialism of the Schumpeter sort (or the Soviet style), leads inevitably to authoritarianism. And here we are.
I now to turn to the problem of authoritarianism in the American System, which I have discussed in create detail in past essays on this platform, and bring into view the administrative apparatus of the Executive Branch of the US Republic. One of the problems with the creation and proliferation of Executive Branch functions is the perception that they are original to the founding or otherwise organic to the Republic and therefore cannot be eliminated when they are determined to be redundant, useless, or detrimental to the overall government function, as well as to liberty. For example, when I tell people when the Department of Education was established as a Cabinet position, they are typically surprised, having assumed that this department was established much earlier and that it somehow contributed to the US supremacy as a scientific and technological powerhouse.
Actually, only four Cabinet positions were established in the first year in the first term of America’s first President, George Washington, the great wartime general who served as Chief Executive from 1789-1797: Secretary of State (to handle foreign affairs); Secretary of the Treasury (to manage the nation’s finances), Secretary of War (renamed Secretary of the Army in 1947 and absorbed into the Department of Defense); and Attorney General (established to provide legal advice to the President, becoming part of the Department of Justice in 1870). Secretary of the Navy, created to oversee naval affairs, would be established almost a decade later, in 1798 (absorbed into Department of Defense in 1947). After that there was a lull in the expansion of government, which then occurred incrementally. Let’s review:
The Postmaster General was a Cabinet-level position from 1829-1971, when the Postal Reorganization Act made the Postal Service an independent agency. Secretary of the Interior (1849) was created to manage domestic affairs, including natural resources and public lands. Secretary of Agriculture (1889) to oversee agricultural programs and policies. (Why not absorb this into the previous Cabinet post?) Secretary of Commerce and Labor (1903), now split into separate Departments of Commerce and Labor (1913). Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (1953), now split into two departments: Health and Human Services and the Department of Education (1979). Secretary of Defense (1947) to pull military leadership under a single authority. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1965) to address housing needs and urban issues. (Why not absorb into the Interior?) Secretary of Transportation (1966) to oversee transportation infrastructure and policy. (Interior?) Secretary of Energy (1977) to handle energy policy and nuclear management. Secretary of Veterans Affairs (1989). (Why not absorb into the Defense Department?) And, finally, Secretary of Homeland Security (2003) to coordinate national security and emergency preparedness.
Those at the Founding are necessary. But some of the others in that list are problematic, and we should revisit them. The Education Department has become captured by woke progressivism (SEL, DEI, Queer Theory, CRT, etc.) and repurposed for indoctrination in corporate statist ideology; the bureaucrats there are engaged in social engineering for the benefit of the power elite. Consequently, the United States has slipped from top dog in the world to lagging dozens of other countries in producing knowledgeable citizens. Some on the right might argue that it’s not a matter of eliminating the department but capturing it and pressing down into the masses an alternative ideology. But indoctrination is not the point of education. Education should be concerned with the development of critical thinking and practical skills. This is best left to local governments, those thousands of engines of innovation. Parents need choice and democratic control over the apparatus. The American System is, after all, founded on the principle of federalism.
I am not going to go through all of these departments (I parenthetically suggested some consolidation above), but while I am here, in addition to the Department of Education, I would like to schedule for termination the Department of Homeland Security. We should then eliminate the CIA, the CISA, and the FBI. Whether the Department of Justice should be abolished is something on which I need to reflect further, but I am leaning towards returning the Attorney General’s office strictly to the role of President’s counsel. I am bringing up the Justice Department because of its embeddedness in the domestic security apparatus. At the very least, we need to end the power of the administrative state to wage war against American citizens, and this will require a radical reorganization of the entire apparatus, during which its powers should be drastically diminished. What would be a particularly useful redesign of all this might be found in a Department of National Integrity, which would oversee immigration and naturalization, the charter ensuring states would have the power to determine whether those who cross the national border would be allowed to cross state borders.
The rise of the administrative state, as critiqued by Schumpeter and Hayek, presents a grave danger to the preservation of liberty and the proper functioning of democracy. Schumpeter’s vision of a bureaucratized, corporatist socialism driven by capitalism’s own excesses may seem inevitable, but Hayek’s warning in The Road to Serfdom urges us to resist this trajectory. The expansion of executive agencies and the entrenchment of bureaucratic power foster conditions ripe for authoritarianism, where central planning and administrative overreach undermine both individual freedom and democratic accountability. To counter this, we must recognize that many of these institutions, far from being organic extensions of the Republic’s founding principles, are modern impositions that can and should be reevaluated and in some cases eliminated. The federalist structure of the American System provides a framework for decentralization and local governance, offering a path to reclaim liberty from the grip of technocratic control. By dismantling unnecessary and counterproductive elements of the administrative apparatus, we not only honor the principles of limited government and self-rule but also safeguard the entrepreneurial and democratic spirit essential to preventing the slide into authoritarianism. This endeavor demands vigilance and bold action to ensure the preservation of liberty for future generations.
The man who snatches rockets out of the air, Elon Musk
Don’t be afraid of change. Face the challenge with the courage of the men who built this nation. Republicans now control the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, and thirty-seven of fifty governors’ mansions. Eighty percent of counties across the United States shifted towards the Red. Many of these Republicans—an ever growing number of them—are not the Republicans of old. They are populist-nationalists and classical liberals. Indeed, there has been a mass exodus of liberals from the Blue to the Red team, seeing the reformed Republican Party as the place where the founding principles and values of America now reside. Moreover, the party has become the nucleus of the innovative spirit that drives not only economic but societal and personal development, represented by, among others, Elon Musk and his various endeavors. We now live in a new era. We can and must reclaim the greatest of America and build a future where all Americans prosper and live more freely. We owe this to future generations.
The corporate media is having a go at Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, for co-hosting Fox & Friends Weekend. What they don’t tell you is that Hegseth is a decorated US Army veteran and vocal advocate for veterans’ issues. They don’t tell you that the man graduated from Princeton University and earned a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and then deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq (three times), earning among other honors the Bronze Star and Combat Infantryman Badge. After his military career, Hegseth became CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, where he focused on policy advocacy for veterans, especially in areas like healthcare reform and mental health support. Frankly, the only pick Trump could make for Secretary of Defense that wouldn’t draw jeers is an establishment figure itching to take the United States into more wars (more on that later).
Here’s how Senator Elizabeth Warren put it on X: “A Fox & Friends Weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense.” She continued, “All three of my brothers served in uniform. I respect every one of our service members,” before adding: “Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.”
This is how dishonest Democrats are—and there’s nobody more paradigmatic of that dishonesty than Elizabeth Warren, a woman who falsely declared herself to be an American Indian on official forms.
DNA tests indicate Warren had an American Indian ancestor six to 10 generations ago. She is not an American Indian.
Unlike Warren’s claim to be American Indian, Hegseth is everything he claims to be. But the lying from progressives is off the hook.
Indeed, there were a lot of intangibles in this election. A big one was the matter of lying. That does not appear in the polling. However, the narrative for many years is Trump is a liar and that his labeling of legacy media as “fake news” was an illegitimate attempt to delegitimize a trusted source of information. But what the people saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears is an endless stream of lies from not only the legacy media, but from Democrats, as well.
Trump’s pick for Attorney General Matt Gaetz
The nomination of House member Matt Gaetz for Attorney General has especially triggered progressives, who are claiming that Gaetz has been investigated for sex trafficking. It’s not uncommon for people to be investigated and exonerated. That’s why our system works from the position of legal innocence: a man is innocent until he is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
In Gaetz case, back in February 2023, the Department of Justice officially decided not to bring charges against the Congressman. Why? Because there were concerns over the credibility of key witnesses. The DOJ decision effectively closed the case without any charges being filed against him.
Given this, here is arguably nobody more qualified for the post than Gaetz; the man knows what it feels like to be persecuted by politicized agency controlled by the other party.
President Clinton looks on as VP Gore presents the National Performance Review. Behind them a pile of government regulations.
On September 7, 1993, Vice President Al Gore presented his final report, From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less (a Report of the National Performance Review) to President Bill Clinton in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House before his Cabinet, members of Congress, and hundreds of civil servants who helped craft the report and its recommendations. By 1999, estimates suggested that the initiative had saved around $136 billion through various cost-cutting measures, including workforce reductions, streamlining of federal agencies, and improvements in government procurement and service delivery.
Yet, when Trump appoints Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), there is widespread mockery among progressives and the media elite. The double standard runs deep and long.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
And they continue to lie about Donald Trump. No, Trump is not a felon. One can only be a felon in New York when the jury verdict is entered into the record at sentencing. Why is this? Because the judge can set the verdict aside. Just because a jury renders a verdict of guilty doesn’t mean the defendant is a convicted felon. It means that a jury has told the judge that, in their opinion, the defendant is guilty. What is more, the New York case was one of the most ridiculous cases ever brought before a jury (see Rigged System! Blowing Up the Independent Judiciary). Expired misdemeanors artificially resuscitated by an underlying felony charge that was never actually identified? Are you freaking kidding me? Hell, the jury was told that they didn’t even need to agree on whatever charges they imagined. Even if Judge Juan Merchan eventually does enter a verdict of guilty into record it would likely be overturned up the line.
And, no, Trump has not be found guilty or even charged with sexual assault, another lie that progressive continue to perpetuate.
This is the way it has been for eight years now. The Steele dossier. The Russia hoax. The Zelensky phone call. The insurrection. The documents case. Attempting to overturning an election. Suckers and losers. Bloodbath. Good people on both sides. Admiration for Hitler. Ad nauseam. Lies and misrepresentations. Why? Because Trump is an outsider and threatens the hegemony of the Establishment.
Democrats thought they were building a one-party state. They were rudely interrupted on November 5, 2024. And they are losing their shit over it.
(This thing with dragging Trump with the “felon” label, even if true, is bizarre coming from progressives who often support their claim that the system is unjust by observing that one out of every three black men is a felon. They’re right about that. One-third of all black men in America is convicted felon. So would these progressives not support a black felon for a government post? Do they think that a felony conviction means political death? Or is that only in the case of white men People who claim to speak for justice ought to take some time to learn what that word actually means?)
Finally, maybe you haven’t heard but Pentagon officials have been informally discussing how the Department of Defense might respond if Donald Trump were to issue “unlawful orders,” for example, if the President were to dismiss large numbers of nonpartisan staff (let’s hope he does). It is as if military personnel have forgotten that the integrity of the United States depends on civilian control of the military, which is vested in the person of the President, who is under the Constitution, in addition to being Chief Executive, the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy.
Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley behind the President
This isn’t the first time Pentagon officials schemed without Trump’s knowledge. Two days after the police riot on January 6, 2020, Trump’s top military advisor, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, took covert steps to prevent Trump from initiating a military strike or nuclear launch. On January 8, Milley convened a confidential meeting in his Pentagon office with senior military officials overseeing the National Military Command Center. He instructed them not to proceed with any orders unless he was directly involved. Milley confirmed their understanding of his orders by looking each officer in the eye and asking for verbal acknowledgment. Scary stuff.
Milley also communicated with a Chinese general during the final weeks of Trump’s presidency. He made two calls to Chinese General Li Zuocheng—on October 30 and January 8—assuring Li that he would provide a warning if the US were to plan an attack on that authoritarian regime.
This is an extraordinary admission. If Milley were to warn the Chinese of a pending attack, then this would allow China to thwart the attack or even strike US targets first. China is a nuclear power. Milley revealed that senior Trump officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, were aware of the calls. How is this not treason?
This is what Trump is up against. He was elected by the American people to represent in the highest office of the Republic the will of the popular sovereign, and behind his back, the military-industrial complex—made up of unelected bureaucrats that serve interests other than the popular sovereign—directs the war machine as they see fit and makes foreign policy on the sly.
Remember back during the Cold War when General Douglas MacArthur, commanding US and UN forces on the Korean Peninsula, publicly criticized President Truman’s policies? Truman relieved MacArthur of his command, asserting the principle of civilian control over the military. This decision sparked significant public debate but ultimately reinforced US constitutional norms.
What if the Pentagon wants to continue the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia when Trump has called a halt to that deadly war? Etcetera. You can see that we have a problem if the Pentagon is going behind the Command in Chief’s back and making their own policy. This is precisely why we must deconstruct the administrative state.
Suppose Trump does lie. Well, so do the media and Democrats. Seeing that it’s a wash in the regard, that no side has a monopoly on virtue, what is left over are the policy questions. The people don’t like diminished standard of living, globalization, mass immigration, gender ideology, grievance politics, forever wars, and a host of other things that legacy media and Democrats are on the wrong side of. The people also don’t like being called “racists,” “fascists,” “Nazis,” “deplorables,” “garbage,” etc. And they don’t like the corporate state bureaucracy working at cross purposes with the men and women they elect to lead this country. So they picked the party that promises to fixes the things they don’t like, that doesn’t call them names, and that promises to bring to heel unaccountable power.
The people trust themselves to know the truth. But Democrats don’t trust the people at all. And that’s as good a reason as any to not trust the Democrats.
They aren’t mean to be. They’re meant to protect domestic business and jobs and, more importantly, compel reshoring of industry and services and bringing jobs back home to America.
If products from China and elsewhere are made more expensive, then domestic production of those products becomes incentivized, which in turn creates jobs here at home. The more jobs that are created here—coupled with mass deportation—empowers labor and, making domestic workers worth more to employers, which in turn puts upward pressure on wages and demand for labor increases. All things equal, rising wages raises the standard of living produces superior life-chances. It creates the potential for fewer people dependent on government. All this raises quality of life well beyond wages. We may actually begin to repair the broken American family.
Remember why the neoliberals pushed “free trade” to begin with. By off-shoring of productive and importing cheap foreign labor, corporations push down wages for native workers. Globalization is literally class warfare, with transnational and even nationally-based corporations waging economic war on American citizens. In order to keep a semblance of the same standard of living, workers incur debt, which enriches the banks—and when they can’t pay their mortgages, the banks take their houses. All of this—along with rent-seeking, etc.—is an attempt to destroy organized labor and restore the falling rate of profit in the West. It certainly has worked to destroy organized labor (except public service unions, of course, which are part of the extended administrative state), but it couldn’t stem the fall in the rate of profit. This is because the “solution” to the problem is the cause of the problem.
Globalization and neoliberalism are what Democrats and establishment Republicans have been pushing for decades. It’s a failed policy for the working man and woman. We have to get back to a national economic strategy that puts American first. Tariffs are a logical step in that process. I look forward to seeing the free-traders eat crow.
It’s often called “going no contact.” A key tactic in cult induction is to separate people from their friends, family, and associates to estrange them from their core associations and pull them ever deeper into the doctrines and rituals of the cult. They do this by making the familiar sinister. For example, Scientology identifies “suppressive persons,” those the inductee or member feels—or is told to feel—don’t share her or his views. Cult membership creates a state of perpetual unreality where the subject of control becomes capable of believing the most unbelievable things.
We often think of cults as small and rare. But cults can be large and are quite common. They’re marked by the extraordinary capacity of members to rationalize reality—that is, deny the obvious. MSNBC provides a useful window into one of the largest cults in operation today, namely woke progressivism. You would think that Chief Resident of the Yale Albert J. Solnit Integrated Adult/Child Psychiatry program would not engaged in grooming tactics, but this is one of the big problems of psychiatry: this is how psychiatry increases its patient pool (Making Patients for the Medical-Industrial Complex).
There a new form of “going no contact”—women withdrawing from reproductive and sexual relations. Trump’s election as US President for a second, non-consecutive term has triggered strong reactions among some women on social media. In response to Trump’s victory, echoing a feminist movement in South Korea that instructs women to stop dating, having sex, getting marriage, and having children, women are pledging to go on a sex strike to voice their frustration and discontent (they are also shaving their heads). Pitched as a movement to achieve female autonomy from patriarchal relations, withdrawing from heterosexual relations en masse is a manifestation of an extremist ideology, one that rests on a mythology about men, and demands on the basis of that mythology transgression of societal norms that have been in place since time immemorial and served our species well. This is where woke progressive culture has brought us.
Woke culture shares a lot of features with Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Consider Mao’s “Four Olds” campaign aimed at negating “old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas” in China. The “Four Olds” movement encouraged the Red Guards to destroy anything seen as representing traditional or bourgeois values. Sacred sites, religious texts, and other items associated with historical traditions were attacked, as well as normal familial relations, with the goal of disembedding young people from the normative system that safeguarded them and prepared them for an autonomous life (to the extent that this could be achieve in Communist China), and reincorporating them into the void of Maoist thought, transforming Chinese society into a collectivist state with no independent thought or intrinsic moral value.
This type of transgressive praxis lies central to gender ideology. In his 1995 Saint Foucault, David Halperin explores Michel Foucault’s influence on queer theory, particularly how Foucault’s ideas of power and sexuality can be applied to understand queer desires and identities outside traditional frameworks. In there, Halperin makes the following observation: “Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality.” He continues, “As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”
While homosexuality, i.e., same-sex attracted, has an essence and limits, queer is nihilistic; life lacks inherent meaning, purpose, or value. “‘Queer,’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative, a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices: it could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with children —with, perhaps, very naughty children. ‘Queer,’ in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.”
One finds rank and file transactivists identifying as Marxist-Leninist and proponents of Mao-Zedong Thought
Thus, in the same way Mao sought to disrupt traditional understandings and practices of cultural and family life in order to create a new society in which Mao Zedong thought would prevail and the multitude would behave accordingly, queer theory transgresses normative boundaries, including those that safeguard children and women, to create a new society in which queer theory is the hegemonic ideology the masses are required to obey, rules that are always in transitions as those unburden by what has been push their desires on those who resist or who go along for fear of what will happen to them if they don’t.
Gender ideology extends beyond trans activism and others who crave openly exercising their paraphilias. The “4Bs” movement, which originated in South Korea, has become a feminist wave, advocating for the rejection of traditional gender roles and intimate relationships with men. Initially a fringe element of South Korean feminism, the movement has gained international attention, particularly in the United States, following political shifts and perceived impacts, but especially the election of President Donald Trump. The movement represents a radical rejection of societal expectations surrounding heterosexual marriage, childbirth, dating, and sexual relationships, calling for women to reclaim autonomy over their bodies and lives and resistance to its extremism only makes it more determined to distort reality and disrupt normal social relations.
The “4Bs” is shorthand for four Korean words, each starting with “bi,” meaning “no.” The central tenets of the movement are Bihon (no heterosexual marriage), Bichulsan (no childbirth), Biyeonae (no dating), and Bisekseu (no heterosexual sexual relationships). These demands express a radical rejection of the roles that have historically been “assigned” to women, who have been expected to marry, bear children, and engage in heterosexual relationships as central elements of their identities and societal duties. By rejecting these “impositions,” women can challenge the patriarchal structures that have marginalized them and assert their autonomy.
The “4Bs” movement’s core message of resistance to traditional gender roles has found resonance beyond its borders. In the United States, following Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, a similar sentiment began to take hold, particularly among younger women, preparing the ground for an equivalent movement in the US. Many young women on social media platforms like TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) have explicitly embraced the “4Bs” in the wake of the 2024 Trump victory, expressing their frustration with a political system they see as increasingly hostile to women’s rights and bodily autonomy.
One of the key reasons why the “4Bs” has found a growing audience in the US is the profound disappointment among many women regarding the voting patterns of men. CNN’s exit polls following the most recent presidential election revealed a striking gender divide: while 54 percent of women voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, 56.5 percent of men voted for Trump. This stark contrast points to a troubling reality for women who know that a significant portion of the male electorate supported a candidate who they believe disrespects their bodily autonomy and perpetuates sexist attitudes. For these women, the “4Bs” movement offers a form of resistance, a way to reject the traditional roles that they claim men have been allowed to dictate.
Moreover, the rise of social media has facilitated the spread of this and other tendencies by allowing women to amplify their voices. Platforms like TikTok, X, and chatrooms on various social media sites have provided a space for women to reinforce perceptions about gender relations and express their desire to transcend them. The anonymity and reach of social media have allowed young women to discuss issues such as autonomy, consent, and gender equality, and gender identity in ways that would have been difficult in mainstream media and ordinary social spaces. But in the bubble they become distorted and exaggerated. Warped discourses on gender relations are reinforced in the same way that other destructive ideas have spread across social media, leading to such pathologies as transgenderism and self-identification with various psychiatric categories in the DSM-5 (see Why Aren’t We Talking More About Social Contagion?).
Obviously, there is a thematic similarity between Mao’s “Four Olds” campaign and the principles underlying the “4Bs.” But the crucial point here is that they parallel each other substantively. Both push to challenge and replace dominant cultural values and social norms. Mao’s campaign during the Cultural Revolution sought to eliminate “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits,” aiming to dismantle traditional structures and make way for a society built on new collectivist ideals. Mao wanted a complete rethinking of social values, relationships, and even personal identities, urging individuals to reject longstanding cultural and social practices seen as obstacles to progress. The feminist 4Bs movement represents a similar spirit by rejecting traditional gender expectations that are deeply embedded in culture. The call for “no dating, no sex, no marriage, and no childbearing” is a deliberate rejection of the social roles traditionally “imposed” on women, especially those centered around relationships with men and family roles, which are rooted in natural history. Like Mao’s campaign, the “4Bs” challenges social norms as a way to subvert power dynamics, questioning and refusing to participate in practices that proponents argue reinforce gender inequality.
In assaulting on the truth, transgressive politics create a climate in which lying to self and others becomes endemic to discourse, constituting the structure of a person’s cognitive frame. There are several theories in social science that address how cognitive framing can lead to communication breakdowns due to differing meanings assigned to the same words. Prominent among them is frame theory, rooted in cognitive linguistics and sociology, which explores how individuals use mental frameworks, or “frames,” to interpret signs, symbols, and situations. When two sides have different frames, even when using the same terms, they interpret those terms differently, leading to misunderstandings or outright communication failures. Any meaningful dialogue requires first clarifying the meanings of words and determine the words upon which there is agreed-upon meaning.
A key contributor to this theory is linguist George Lakoff, who emphasizes that words evoke mental frames shaped by culture, experience, and ideology. For example, the term “freedom” may mean personal autonomy to one person, while for another, it might imply the ability to uphold social responsibility without external interference. Another example is the way in which, for progressives, “democracy” becomes a cover for “bureaucracy” or “technocracy.” Differing frames mean words evokes entirely different values and ideas depending on affinity, leading to conflicting interpretations and failures in meaningful dialogue.
Likewise, Erving Goffman’s frame analysis in sociology suggests that people organize experiences and meaning-making into “frames” that guide their understanding of situations. When people communicate without aligning these frames—particularly when they are unaware that they even hold different frames—misinterpretation is likely. This misalignment can be especially pronounced in emotionally charged discussions, where words carry significantly different connotations for different groups, based on their unique cultural, ideological, or personal experiences.
The proliferation of lies, then, can be seen as a consequence of frames that distort words from their intended meanings, obscuring objective reality. While frames are meant to help individuals interpret and organize experience, they also act as filters, refracting or even warping what might otherwise be universally understood signs and symbols. When individuals hold opposing frames, their perceptions of reality diverge, with each group interpreting signs in ways that align with their worldview. This distortion can lead to a fundamental breakdown in the shared understanding of language itself, where words no longer reliably represent the same concepts across perspectives. Words like “justice,” “equality,” or “freedom” become battlegrounds for ideological warfare, as each side asserts its frame as the only truthful interpretation, casting the other as misinformed or deliberately deceitful.
As frames become increasingly rigid and polarized, they encourage a kind of epistemic insularity, where individuals disregard or reinterpret information that does not align with their established worldview (I have often referred to this as the practice of “cerebral hygiene”). In such an environment, deliberate deception or lies become endemic, as individuals and organizations tailor facts to fit within their frames. Here, language becomes an instrument of manipulation rather than a means of authentic communication. The result is not simply a diversity of perspectives but a clash of competing versions of reality itself—some closer to truth, others to falsehood. Lies, in this context, are not merely the result of dishonesty but are embedded in the structures of cognition and communication themselves, perpetuating a climate of obscurantism where language is weaponized to obfuscate rather than illuminate truth.
The many videos I see of progressives in hysterics over the election, the blame for their situation (fake videos aside) in large measure rests on the shoulders of those who have for years politically manipulated language and, more immediately, lied about Trump and mischaracterized his politics. The effects are not small. There are people who have actually killed themselves over the election result. One man, 46-year-old Anthony Nephew, killed his family before killing himself.
There are people close to me who are terrified by a Trump presidency. When I listen to the explanations for why they believe what they say about him, it’s the lies they repeat (see Averting Catastrophes and a Few Other Friday Afternoon News Items with Commentary). When I try to show them why these are lies, and why the liars are lying, I find they’ve taken no time to listen to the other side or find out for themselves whether the claims are true or false. But more than this, they have taken no time to work out the problem of meaning in word usage (or a theory of power). They can’t believe me; their cognitive frame applies different meanings to words we use in ways that make my claims and arguments appear extreme or untoward. I sound like the freed prisoner who has returned to Plato’s cave to explain to his colleagues still chained to the wall what he saw on the outside. They wonder what happened to me, as if I were radicalized by rightwing media and political figures.
This is a huge problem. We have one side of the electorate that is remarkably incurious about reality and tangled in ideology. They believe their ideology represents the real world. “We are the educated,” the progressives say. Look at the crosstabs and you will see that the educated did indeed vote for Harris. But educated in what? In what way? A person educated in gender studies is not going to be smarter than an engineer—or the carpenter who dropped out of high school and uses complex mathematics daily. The gender studies graduate is going to see the world through gender ideology, a neoreligion that denies truth and admits it does. The panic we witness tends to be associated with belief in the most impossible things, e.g., the notion that boys can be girls, or ridiculous things, e.g., that heterosexual relations are imposed on women and are generally oppressive. In this way, woke progressivism makes people not merely ignorant, but stupid—and self-destructive.
I understand the tenacity of these people in clinging to ideology. It’s associated with a personality type. Indeed, modern politics is in many ways a division between those personalities who are close minded and those who are open to other points of view and who listen to what people are saying, working to make sure that the meaning of the words used mean the same thing to everyone involved in the conversation—and to find that consensus on the basis of a shared concern for accuracy and precision in conveying reality.
But Jürgen Habermas’ ideal speech situation is not what’s going to build the new consensus. As intellectuals and leaders in the Democratic Party pivot in the face of reality, and the corporate state media talking heads pivot with them (not everybody on the progressive side is deluded, and some are already “standing up” to the woke progressive mob), many of the faithful will follow them towards the center. But centrism has always been a cover for the administrative state and regular technocratic rule, and as such the center is always the illusion of a genuine consensus.
freedom and reason 