freedom and reason

“Even if the investigation proves that the shooting was legally justified, I don’t think that even matters.” —Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara.

Can you imagine any scenario in which those supporting rebellion would not consider law enforcement quelling it excessive force?

Can you imagine any scenario in which those who support the cause of a protester shot and killed by a law enforcement officer would admit that lethal force was justified?

I can’t. We now have two cases—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—where the fact pattern curated from multiple videos clearly shows that officers acting in self-defense, yet those who make martyrs of these two deny what is plainly visible and legal precedent negating mens rea for both. (See Loretta and Richard: The Renee Good Shooting and Correct Attribution of Blame.)

We hear the opposite argument, don’t we? The act of quelling rebellion is excessive force against people protesting an oppressive regime and is, therefore, by definition, illegitimate. The very act of quelling rebellion confirms the thesis that the regime against which the rebels are rebelling is oppressive.

In their 1957 article “Techniques of Neutralization,” Gresham Sykes and David Matza argued that people who violate legal and social norms neutralize guilt and social condemnation through rhetorical strategies that build in assumptions and alter perceptions, allowing them to maintain the appearance of a positive self-concept while rejecting dominant moral frameworks. When the corporate state helps them spread assumptions and alter perceptions, the criminal worldview becomes perceived as the normative one.

What the ICE Out protestors and the corporate state have prepared for America is a catch-22; their framing assumptions are tacitly accepted by most observers. To be sure, both rebels and authorities construct narratives that morally immunize their actions; each side frames itself as justified and the other as illegitimate. This is not a disagreement over facts. This is why facts don’t matter to progressives. This is about moral perception as a social process. But only one side is morally righteous.

The protestors deny responsibility for a situation in which people are dying. Consider the assumptions in place and their classification in Sykes and Matza’s system. “They forced us to rebel; the system leaves us no other choice.” Protestors have a priori negated the right of officers to defend themselves. This is a denial of injury. “One officer hurt doesn’t matter compared to systemic oppression.” The officer has no right to self-defense since he is the oppressor. This is a denial of the victim. “Police are agents of oppression; they’re not innocent victims.” This is the technique of condemnation of the condemners: “The state has no moral authority; its laws are illegitimate.” The appeal to higher loyalties is heard in the rhetoric of “marginalized communities,” “social justice,” and so on. Here, the appeal to moral obligation is shifted upward from law to ideology. Nazis do this. (See “The Whole System is Guilty!”)

Under such presumptions, no leader carrying out his duty to defend peace and tranquility escapes the tag of “oppressor.” Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump—they’re all authoritarian, fascist, racist, etc. ICE is the modern-day equivalent Brownshirts. It follows that any law enforcement action carried out at their command is illegitimate. The ethics of anarchism (which are no ethics at all but nihilism) have now become the ethics of the American Republic. The anarchists have already won the ideological battle. Now they’re moving to dismantle the state by delegitimizing its monopoly on violence.

The firearm matters—and the media is hiding it. At the Minneapolis Border Patrol shooting, the suspect was armed with a SIG Sauer P320 AXG Combat, a high-capacity 9mm pistol with a threaded barrel, extended 20–21 round magazine, and a SIG Romeo optic—a setup costing… pic.twitter.com/NECAGsjlbz

— Andrew Branca Show (@TheBrancaShow) January 24, 2026

In this inverted world, the person killed by the officer is portrayed as a “victim”—a martyr for the righteous cause. The officer’s action confirms the thesis that the government against which the protester is protesting is “oppressive,” that ICE and Border Patrol officers are “murderers.” It doesn’t matter that officers saw an empty holster where a gun just was, and must presume the worst, because if they don’t, lives may be lost, shoot the violent man who is rising from the ground. He was not following lawful commands. He was struggling with the officers. Bad intent was plain. There was a gun. None of this matters.

Americans have to recognize the catch-22 the anarchists have put us in and reject it. We cannot defend a nation or the rule of law if the ugliness of doing so means we stand by idly while the country falls into lawlessness and chaos reigns. That’s textbook suicidal empathy. What do we even have law enforcement for if it is not to do the ugly work of public safety and upholding the rule of law? Anarchists will tell you about a natural order. But it’s not an order founded upon natural law. It’s an order rooted in the law of the jungle. This is why anarchism is the perfect street-level ideology for corporate statism.

This is why I don’t really care about “radiant poet mom of three” or “outdoorsy dog-loving ICU nurse man” or any other sappy rhetoric used to describe dead anarchists. Frankly, neither do those using such emotive language. Laken Riley, raped and murdered by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who had entered the United States illegally, was a nursing student. Do the ICE Out protestors care about the dreams and aspirations of the real victims of criminal violence? I’m not interested in the progressive martyrs except for their humanity. I want them to stop putting their lives at risk for nothing—worse than that, for corporate state power.

Congress has, over generations, passed many bills regulating immigration. Presidents have signed them into law. Presidents take an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the Republic. What on earth are progressives dying for? I can answer that question. I don’t think they can. Objectively, they are dying for corporate greed and the partisan electoral advantage necessary to perpetuate that greed—elite interests that disorganize neighborhoods and diminish the quality of life for working families. Subjectively, they are dying because it is meaningful to their disordered lives. They seek transcendent meaning, and so, like the fanatically devoted woman in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, they step off the ledge at Thulsa Doom’s command. (See Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism.)

It makes sense neither from a rational standpoint nor from the proclaimed choice of comrades (the proletariat). These people have lost their minds. They hate Donald Trump because they’ve been instructed to. They hate the America Trump represents because they have been taught to. Hatred has disordered them. Now they’re biting off the fingers of law enforcement. It’s jungle law. Those capable of this level of madness are capable of running gas chambers. This is Nazi-level insanity.

I know it is frustrating for a person who believes that he is so very right about something (or everything) to be confused when his fellow citizens go in a different direction. But how it works in democracies, especially in republic form, is that, sometimes, your side loses and you have to do a better job next time of persuading fellow citizens to join your side. America chose differently on November 5, 2024. It’s their turn.

If, instead of honoring the popular will and respecting the authority of public institutions, you run out into the street and disrupt civil society, biting off fingers, blowing whistles, and whatnot, then you’re behaving not like a citizen in a constitutional republic, but instead you’re behaving like a child who didn’t get his way. You’d admit, if you were a reasonable human, that this is a very immature attitude. When this happens in a family situation, the responsible and caring parent asserts his or her authority over the child and explains to him that we cannot always get what we want—that we have to be patient and wait our turn. If the child acts out and strikes the parent, then there is an additional lesson to be learned. The same is true when a citizen lashes out at lawful authority.

Sometimes parents do a bad job of raising children with self-control. In those cases, other authorities have to take up the slack. Obviously, a lot of parents haven’t been doing a good job preparing their children for the rigors of living in a democracy by teaching them to keep their hands to themselves. Who steps into the breech if authority is perceived as illegitimate? It then becomes the exercise of naked power. That’s not the druthers of a civilized society.

Remember Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop? Did you pick up on the world-building in that movie? Verhoeven depicts late capitalism as having turned social collapse into a business model. Public disorder becomes a growth sector. Corporate actors prefer crises because crises justify the expansion of their corrupt schemes. The scenario is less about deep state psy-op, which is one’s first impression, than about disaster capitalism.

In Verhoeven’s world, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) plans to rebuild Detroit as a corporate utopia (“Delta City”). This is the Democrats’ Blue City—Detroit, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, etc. Progressives and the corporate power progressives sublimate with social justice rhetoric have turned social collapse into a business model. The expansion of their corrupt schemes depends on public disorder, crime and violence, and decadence. The Democratic Party is the organized representative of disaster capitalism. Minneapolis is their demonstration project. So is the state of Virginia, the ancestral home of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

To ordinary America, my message to you is toughen up. You have a civilization to defend (see Send in the Troops). For the disorderly American, get over yourselves. Your nothingness should dwell in basements, jails, and insane asylums. To progressives still susceptible to reason, if you have any influence over the herd, and if your conscience is still functional, tell the true believers to go home. Don’t fear being excommunicated. Do the right thing. Your politics are killing people. (See Message to the Rank-and-File Progressive.)

You’re being led by the ring in your septum to believe that ICE and Border Patrol agents are hunting civilians. This is the same lie Black Lives Matter told you about police shooting unarmed black men. None of these deaths would have occurred if civilians were not emboldened to threaten the safety of law enforcement officers.

If common decency mattered, instead of creating more martyrs for the cause, you would tell the radicals you’ve loaded, cocked, and aimed at the federal government to peacefully exercise their free speech rights and not obstruct officers in their duties. There is no First Amendment right to interfere with law enforcement operations.

But you won’t do that because you’re full-blown jihadists now. You celebrate the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, by Luigi Mangione in December 2024, outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan. You even named righteous assassination after him: “Mangioning.” You mock the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You despair over the failed attempts on Donald Trump’s life. George Floyd and Renée Good are martyrs.

This explains the affinity between the Red and the Green. This explains your Islamophilia. You have made the ritual Emile Durkheim described as altruistic suicide a part of the revolution-from-above playbook. Martyrdom has now become a central element in the insurrection against the federal republic.

The transnational corporate elites who pull the strings of the marionettes they’ve manufactured—that’s you—are laughing all the way to the new world order. Everybody who supports the ICE Out rebellion has blood on their hands. You added another martyr to the growing list of human sacrifices today. Good job, y’all.

What is the word you like to yell at other people? “Shame!” That’s it. Right back at you.

This is a Color Revolution. This is Insurrection.

A “radiant poet mom” weaponizes her two-ton Honda Pilot against Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With her predictable demise, she becomes a martyr for a subversive campaign, organized by the corporate state, against the American Republic.

Three weeks later, in that same city, Border Patrol agents kill a “cheerful ICU nurse” brandishing a firearm. Predictably, the mayor accuses “masked agents” of “pummeling one of our constituents and shooting him to death.” The Minnesota governor, persisting in his defiance of the US Constitution, tells the national government to quit enforcing law and order.

Neoconfederates don’t wait for the facts. It’s all anti-American propaganda all the time. The corporate state media and anti-American forces exploit these and other instances of violence provoked by rebels to fuel a conflagration across a nation now submerged in a historic deep freeze. The incessant blowing of whistles deafening reason. “ICE Out” is yet another installment of a decade-long color revolution.

A color revolution refers to waves of mass protest movements that challenge or cripple—or even replace—elected governments through the appearance of nonviolent demonstrations and symbolic branding designed to mobilize public support against established authority, often under the banner of democracy.

These movements typically present themselves as spontaneous grassroots struggles for democracy and transparency. In reality, such uprisings are rarely organic; they are encouraged, funded, and strategically guided by transnational corporate interests, opposition parties, NGOs, intelligence services, and the broader cultural, educational, and media apparatus to reshape a country’s political system.

Thus, “color revolution” serves as shorthand for elite-backed regime change. It does not represent an authentic uprising by the masses but instead mobilizes radicalized elements of a population to thwart the popular will by destabilizing society.

In the US context, movements such as the Women’s March, March for Our Lives, Families Belong Together, Climate Justice, Trans Rights advocacy, Quiet Quitting, Black Lives Matter, Free Palestine, No Kings, and ICE Out are not isolated, spontaneous grassroots efforts. Rather, they form a series of manufactured uprisings in an ongoing revolution-from-above.

Parallel to these street-level actions, forces seeking to delegitimize and overthrow governments weaponize corporate-controlled law firms, corrupted government agencies, and partisan judicial bodies to remove—or block from power—representatives of the genuine popular will and defenders of liberal and republican ideals and institutions.

These same forces manufacture successive crises—environmental, political, public-health-related—to keep populations in a perpetual state of fear and subjection. This strategy relies on large segments of the population primed to obey elite-selected experts, self-styled saviors, and manufactured martyrs. The result is recurring waves of mass hysteria and moral panic, often characterized by mass formation psychosis or mass psychogenic illness, which spread through social contagion.

The reservoir of irrational dissent is cultivated by elite-captured cultural and educational institutions that revise history: exaggerating past injustices (while glorifying past rebellions ostensibly aimed at addressing them) and memory-holing the accomplishments and virtues of righteous movements and nations. This tactic is known as engineering a legitimation crisis.

Mass manipulation also involves enforcing a double standard, in which legitimate government actions—law enforcement, military operations, and the like—are deemed acceptable only when exercised by corporate-backed movements and parties. A police riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, is portrayed as an insurrection, while lawful enforcement action is condemned as fascism.

American citizens are now taking up arms against the federal government. They’re martyring themselves in a ritual of altruistic suicide. And Democrats want more than this. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is giving permission for illegal alien invaders to use that state’s Stand Your Ground law to fire upon federal agents. This is insurrection.

At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here. 

The officers attempted to… pic.twitter.com/5Y50mYONGH

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 24, 2026

Ultimately, what underlies this multifaceted class war on populations is transnational corporate power seeking to establish a new world order. It aims to deconstruct the interstate system emerging from the Enlightenment and replace it with a neofeudal network of elite-controlled estates, where the fractured masses are administered by cultural and technocratic managers. Donald Trump is the bulwark against the New Fascism. He must be brought to heel.

Since the summer of 2018, the resurrected Freedom and Reason platform has chronicled the elite war on America. You have a front row seat. Stay tuned. Stay frosty.

In political debates, it’s common for participants to challenge one another to define what they mean by terms like “left” and “right.” That instinct is correct: a rational argument depends on shared definitions. If two people use the same word to mean different things, they are not really debating at all—they are talking past each other. When someone clarifies meanings, they are often accused of “playing semantics.” But semantics are essential to dialectical reasoning, whose goal is to produce light rather than heat, so that individuals can make rational decisions based on their interests and principles.

The problem in the case of left and right, however, is deeper than people usually realize. Left and right are not substantive political categories. They’re not metaphysical or ontological concepts. They have no inherent content—no fixed assumptions, axioms, or principles that define them. They are merely positional labels. By contrast, terms like liberal and conservative do have real substance. They refer to identifiable political philosophies with stable core commitments.

The origin of the left–right distinction makes this clear. During the French Revolution, liberals sat on the left side of the National Assembly, while conservatives—traditionalists, monarchists, and defenders of the ancien régime—sat on the right. From this accident of seating emerged a vocabulary that has been treated ever since as though it describes deep political realities. Except for the respective philosophical systems attached to them in any given place or at any given moment in time, these positional labels have no real transhistorical meaning.

At that moment in French history, liberalism was the revolutionary force. It opposed absolutism and hereditary authority; it championed constitutional government, freedom of conscience, individual rights, and legal (or formal) equality. Liberalism was labeled “left-wing” not because left had intrinsic meaning, but because liberalism was challenging the existing power structure and its proponents sat on the left. Once liberalism succeeded, however, it became the new hegemonic order. Capitalism was legalized and normalized, constitutional government replaced absolutism, and liberal principles became the foundation of the state. Liberalism moved from being the antithesis to becoming the thesis. Where people sat shifted; what they believed didn’t.

Liberalism is the thesis of the American Republic. The Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are liberal documents. The fact that what we know as modern conservatism is, to a significant extent, substantively liberal in character doesn’t make liberalism conservative. No misuse of terms changes reality. It simply means that a synthesis has emerged that allows liberals and conservatives to forge a political coalition capable of reclaiming the American system from progressives, who have, in effect, abandoned all liberal principles. Liberals and conservatives remain distinct and have very real disagreements over matters of the role of religious faith in politics, but these disagreements do not prevent finding common cause concerning the existential threats to the American Republic.

Returning to the historic French situation, a new antithesis soon emerged: socialism. Socialists challenged liberal capitalism and liberal individualism in the name of social ownership, collective responsibility, and economic and social equality. A similar thing occurred in the United States, as well; here, it was associated with the emergence of progressivism, the ideology of corporate statism. And, to be clear, that’s what socialism was in France. The socialist vision of Frenchman Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (whom many consider the real father of sociology, not his secretary August Comte) was really corporatist-technocratic, with elite experts and industrial leaders managing society rather than democratic worker control.

With the rise of corporatism, opposition to liberal capitalism was labeled “left-wing,” and liberalism, the dominant system, was increasingly described as “right-wing” because it sat conceptually to the right of socialism. This is why one finds liberalism identified as such around the world. America is the odd case because progressives dressed themselves as liberals—Teddy Roosevelt branding corporate statism as a “New Liberalism” (also a “New Nationalism”) by which he meant a break from classical laissez-faire liberalism toward a state that actively regulated corporations, promoted social welfare, and (ostensibly) protected workers. This is the scheme that his fifth cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, institutionalized in the New Deal, vastly expanding the reach of the state into the lives of citizens, negating the liberal principle of limited government. Progressives refer to themselves as liberals to this day. Many conservatives call progressives that, too. Both are wrong.

This history reveals the core problem. “Left” and “right” do not name coherent philosophies; they describe shifting power relationships within a given hegemonic order. Under the prevailing hegemony of progressivism, whatever ideology challenges that hegemony is labeled “right,” and whatever defends or advances it is labeled “left,” regardless of their substantive philosophical content. This produces a conceptual absurdity. Liberalism can be “left-wing” when it opposes monarchy, then “right-wing” when it opposes corporate statism, even though its principles remain unchanged. Protesters advocating a form of absolutism can then march with signs declaring “No Kings!” Likewise, what is called “socialism”—more accurately corporatism or social democracy—can be labeled “left-wing” while opposing liberalism, despite being philosophically hostile to liberal individualism, which was the philosophy of those who once sat on the left. The labels float free of substance and become markers of power position rather than ideology.

This also eliminates any conceptual space for a counterrevolution if the counterrevolution is defined merely as the hegemonic position, imagined or real. Reflexively, the counterrevolution is portrayed as “far right.” This is not wordplay when political antagonisms are rendered in principled sides. In yesterday’s essay, Between Corporate Hegemony and Popular Sovereignty: Donald Trump and the Bulwark of Populism, I explain that Trump and the populist-nationalist movement represent an insurgency against the prevailing hegemony of corporate statism. The movements to return America and Europe to their liberal foundations are identified as “reactionary.” This framework allows corporate-state propagandists to portray populism and nationalism as authoritarian, even fascistic, simply because they challenge progressive or social democratic hegemony rather than because of their intrinsic philosophical content. The progressive, today in rebellion against the US Constitution, cannot be reactionary because it is “left-wing,” a label that renders even terroristic violence immune from derogatories easily smeared on liberals and conservatives.

Conceptually, the left-right framework collapses under its own contradictions. However, in the practice of propaganda, the lack of intrinsic meaning only enhances the usefulness of the respective labels for those whose political function is to manipulate the public mind. Left and right are glittering generalities; a historical pecularity is repurposed and taken up as weapons in partisan warfare. If left and right were real ontological categories, they would have stable definitions. They would be grounded in enduring principles. But they are not used that way. Instead, they are elastic labels that stretch to include mutually exclusive beliefs, thus deceiving the public when it is advantageous to hegemonic power, while fracturing meaningful and effective coalitions built upon the cogent syntheses of philosophical systems.

To be sure, there is peril in the liberal-conservative coalition. What we identify historically as right-wing is a constellation of beliefs—hierarchy, patriarchy, religious authority, and traditional social structures—that is, traditional conservatism. This was the worldview of those who sat on the right of the French National Assembly. Today, millions of Americans still identify with these ideas. Liberalism—commitment to free speech, constitutional limits, equality before the law, and individual rights—stands in contrast to traditional conservatism, even if it is now also defined as right-wing around the world. Obviously, these positions are antithetical when distilled into rigid substances; they cannot coherently belong to the same category.

To the extent that those in the contemporary conservative movement regress to the belief-constellation of traditional conservatism, the liberal-conservative coalition fractures, a schism reinforced by the perception on that side that liberals are also progressives. This confusion speaks to the vital importance of reclaiming liberalism from the progressive distortion—to expose progressivism as the negation of liberalism, and reveal to the modern conservative that he is really a liberal, even if he believes in hierarchy and traditional values, which are also familiar to liberals. After all, both sides accept the reformulation of hierarchy as emergent inequality based on competition and meritocracy. Moreover, apart from a noisy Christian nationalist minority, the desire to see Christian ethics remain at the heart of the moral system of Western Civilization persists as a shared commitment. Indeed, in the face of critical race theory, queer praxis, and Islamization, liberals have become eager to join conservatives in reasserting America’s foundational ethics.

Clarifying these matters is not pedantic. The usage of terms cannot be rationalized by noting as a trivial fact that their meanings change over time. Words either accurately and precisely refer to reality, or they become weapons of manipulation (as one sees in the repurposing of the word “gender” by those who mean to confuse the gender binary and the fact of its immutability). George Orwell warned the West at every turn—in his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in his seminal essay “Politics in the English Language”—about the consequences of repurposing language for political purposes. Liberalism has a fixed meaning. It refers to a specific philosophical tradition centered on formal equality, freedom of conscience and speech, individual liberty, limited government, property rights, and the rule of law. Those principles do not change simply because political coalitions shift. Liberalism is something. Left and right, by contrast, are not.

I have described myself as a liberal my entire adult life, and I once thought of myself as being “on the left.” In retrospect, that was a mistake. I sometimes still make this mistake out of habit—and, admittedly, out of concern that being labeled as “right-wing” delegitimizes my arguments. Indeed, this is the function of positional terms and the reductive checklists based on them: to dismiss out of hand the arguments of one’s opponent. “That’s a right-wing argument” becomes the equivalent of plugging one’s ears and rehearsing progressive or socialist talking points. What I really mean when I describe myself as a “man of the left” is that I support liberal principles, not that I belong to a coherent “left-wing” ideology. Once progressives abandoned liberalism altogether, they left me standing to their right. “What happened to you?” they asked, as if something actually had. The real question is, what happened to them? Why did they abandon the liberal principle? Why did they follow a term with no substantive meaning?

As I have endeavored to explain, liberalism has been redefined in the American spaces as progressivism. I reject that equation. And so should you for the sake of objectivity. Liberalism and progressivism are not the same thing; they are, for the most part, opposites—at least opposite enough to be incompatible. Progressivism embraces forms of administrative authority, collectivism, identity-based politics, and speech policing that liberalism explicitly rejects. When people like me (and there are many of us) say, “I used to be on the left, but the left has lost its mind,” what we mean is that liberalism has been displaced on the left as originally understood by progressivism, while still wearing the liberal label. I’m not abandoning liberalism. I’m refusing to follow words wherever they happen to wander. Indeed, I am more liberal now than I have ever been—and that is why I’ve changed my mind on some issues. To my progressive family and friends, that makes me a “right-winger.” It’s as if they never actually listened to me, but instead assumed tribal membership. In that respect, I understand their astonishment.

For these reasons, I no longer describe myself as left or right. This is not an attempt to obscure my politics by rejecting positional labels. Rather, this is a clearing out of the tangle of glittering generalities that obscure my moral and philosophical commitments. Those labels discourage reflexive thinking by encouraging tribal habituation, collapsing distinctions between incompatible ideas, and making rational debate harder, not easier. They put rings in noses (sometimes literally) and lead the herds with invisible reins. Political philosophy should be discussed in terms of what people actually believe: conservatism, liberalism, progressivism, socialism, etc. These are meaningful categories. Left and right are not. I made the mistake in the past of identifying with a side and not a set of principles. Not totally (which is what allowed me to escape), but embarrassingly enough. I will do my best to not do that anymore. I am a liberal—not because I sit on one side of a shifting political spectrum, but because I affirm a tradition with a clear, stable, and defensible philosophical core.

In his Davos address yesterday, President Donald Trump offered a sharply critical assessment of Europe, arguing that the continent is “not heading in the right direction” and that parts of it have become “not recognizable” in recent decades. He attributed Europe’s economic and social difficulties to a mix of policy choices—especially expanding government spending, green-energy priorities, and what he called “unchecked mass migration”—and contrasted this with what he described as an American economic resurgence under his leadership.

Trump framed large-scale immigration as economically and socially disruptive, contending that importing new populations had undermined growth, living standards, and social cohesion across the West, while insisting that tighter borders, cultural integrity, and a move away from transnationalism and a return to traditional economic policies were central to restoring prosperity, stability, and Western identity. This is what global elites did not want the working classes of the Western nations to hear. This is why those elites are in a panic: populist-nationalism is on the rise, and the fascistic apparatus of the corporate state has failed to contain it.

Have you ever wondered why the machinery of the corporate state—the academy, the administrative bureaucracy, the culture industry, legacy media, the judiciary, and the donor networks of both major parties—reacted with such alarm when Donald Trump rose to power? Trump was a media darling before the dramatic moment in June 2015 when he descended the gilded escalator in Trump Tower to announce his first presidential campaign. For decades, they had asked him when he was running for President. Now he was, and it was the worst fate to befall the world since the appearance of Adolf Hitler. In fact, it was exactly that. A switch was flipped, and millions of people lost their minds.

These institutions mobilized to label Trump’s policies as authoritarian and fascist, even as previous presidents, such as Barack Obama, were able to expand executive power (or, more accurately, more fully exercise the inherent powers of the office), pursue foreign interventions, and carry out mass deportations of illegal aliens, with little public fanfare or moral condemnation. The difference is not in the legality or scale of the actions themselves, but in their alignment with the corporate state. Trump’s populist agenda, backed by mass political support outside the elite consensus, threatens the carefully managed hegemony that sustains the corporate state, provoking a coordinated pushback from every institutional channel that protects it.

This essay, synthesizing analyses and arguments presented over several years on this platform, explores how the structure of the US federal government, while embedding deep corporate influence across culture, administration, and law, nonetheless preserves enough democratic mechanisms to allow such an outsider as Trump to govern—albeit precariously and under constant institutional resistance. Readers must understand that, while the Founders separated powers to establish a government resistant to fascist formation, the scheme requires a strong national leader and a movement of determined patriots who believe in the American system to fight the corruption of elite power that threatens that separation.

The contemporary United States is best understood not as a fully pluralistic democracy, but as a regime in which real governing power is exercised by what can be described as a corporate state. This corporate state is composed of large corporations and financial interests, the donor class embedded in both major political parties, legacy media institutions such as linear television and radio, the culture industry of film, music, and publishing, public education and the modern academy, the permanent administrative bureaucracy, and substantial portions of the judiciary.

These institutions need not conspire explicitly to act in concert; their unity emerges organically from shared career pathways, ideological assumptions, material incentives, and professional norms. Indeed, the situation is to a significant extent the result of a convergence of interests, as well as structural inertia. These streams form a coherent governing class whose interests and worldview dominate public life. But Leviathan is also the result of elite machinations—the transnational corporate agenda manifest in organizations like the World Economic Forum.

This arrangement is what we call corporatism, a defining structural feature of fascist systems, in which nominally private institutions are functionally integrated into state power. Political authority is exercised not primarily through elected representatives accountable to voters, but through a dense web of bureaucratic, cultural, and managerial forces and personalities that operate beyond direct democratic control.

While Europe is almost lost, America differs from the consolidating fascism of European history in a critical respect: it cannot as of yet permanently close itself off from popular participation. This is the genius of the founders’ design of the American system. Constitutional requirements such as federalism, regular elections, and separation of powers compel the regime—with strong leaders and engaged patriots who love the Republic—to preserve democratic processes, even if those processes are constrained and steered by emergent structures antithetical to a democratic republic.

Before Trump, the system could maintain the appearance of democracy while limiting the scope of popular influence. After its marginalization in the wake of the Great Depression, the Republican Party, established in the previous century to rejuvenate the American system and liberate the South from its backwardness, came to play a central role in suppressing the popular will. For most of the postwar period, it functioned as an institutional intake valve for dissent, absorbing popular frustration with elite governance and redirecting it into safe, controllable channels. Bureaucratic resistance, donor influence, and party discipline ensured that this dissent did not translate into fundamental challenges to the corporate state. Republicans so inclined are often referred to as RINOs—Republicans in name only. When RINOs control the Republican Party, the party’s role is controlled opposition.

When the Democratic Party governs, however, the system approaches de facto one-party rule with gusto. During periods of Democratic control of the executive branch, the corporate state’s major elements—academia, administrative agencies, culture, media, and much of the judiciary—align almost entirely with the governing party. Appealing to the false doctrine of agency independence, bureaucratic agencies exercise maximal autonomy, insulated from electoral accountability, while judicial interpretation increasingly reflects the progressive consensus.

Beyond the forces of campaign finance and corporate lobbying, beyond the administrative state and regulatory capture, beyond the judiciocracy, ideology plays a major role in shaping the popular sphere. Opposition voices are not merely contested but delegitimized, framed as immoral, irrational, even dangerous. They are censored, deplatformed, marginalized—even targeted by the weapons of lawfare.

Under these conditions, nearly all substantive elements of fascism are present: the fusion of corporate and state power, ideological conformity enforced through cultural authority, governance by managerial elites, and the marginalization of opposition rather than popular sovereignty. What remains absent is permanence—because elections still exist. To be sure, the efficacy of elections in conveying the popular will can be weakened by ceding sovereignty to transregional and transnational institutions and relations, as we see in the case of the European Union, and to some extent, in the American case. The republican institutions of the United States remain robust in comparison. Yet our status as one of the few democratic societies in the world is in jeopardy.

This robustness explains how somebody like Donald Trump can ascend to the White House. Trump and the populist movement represent a genuine threat to the antithesis of the corporate state. This is not because Trump opposes capitalism as such—he is himself one of the more successful entrepreneurs in history—but because he rejects elite managerial control, globalized economic priorities that subordinate national interests, cultural authority monopolized by elite institutions, and bureaucratic governance detached from voters that is the administrative state. Trump’s political power derives directly from mass democratic support rather than institutional endorsement, which makes him uniquely threatening to a system designed to manage and contain popular influence.

The aggressive reaction to Trump and populism follows logically from this threat. The culture industry and legacy media saturate the public sphere with negative framing and moral condemnation, shaping public perception and narrowing the bounds of acceptable discourse. The academy supplies intellectual justification for exclusionary practices and extraordinary measures. The administrative state delays, obstructs, or nullifies policy through procedural resistance, while the judiciary constrains executive authority through expansive and selective interpretations of law. This resistance does not require a centralized conspiracy; it is the predictable self-defense of an entrenched ruling order seeking to preserve—and reestablish—its hegemony. The desire for a New World Order is not whispered in corners. They tell us who they are and what they want

Populism can govern at all only because democratic mechanisms have not been entirely dismantled. When an outsider like Trump captures the Republican Party, which is more open to mavericks than the Democratic Party (which isn’t really open to any, as we saw with the marginalization of Bernie Sanders and Robert Kennedy, Jr.), and is backed by a broad social movement (MAGA), the Common Man can override donor influence and compel even reluctant Republicans, including establishment figures, to align with the movement to remain electorally viable. However, such governance is fragile; it operates under constant constraint from administrative, cultural, and judicial power centers that remain outside popular control. Even members of Trump’s party want to move on from him. The RINOs are desperate to get back to the status quo. This is why they resist leading Congress to codify the American First agenda.

Every American election must be understood not merely as a contest between two parties, but as a struggle between corporate state hegemony and popular sovereignty. Trump and the patriots who stand behind him represent the movement of the Common Man. This is the leader the working class has been waiting for. They watched the First Family descend that golden escalator with entirely different eyes. Yet, while the people can assert their will electorally, that will is immediately checked, constrained, and filtered by non-electoral institutions, the institutions of elites who have a different plan for America—they mean to make America go away. Democracy exists, but only as a contested space rather than a governing principle.

Put simply, permanent fascism in America is prevented not by elite restraint or glittering generalities about democracy, but by the incomplete closure of the system, buttressed by constitutional structure, and enforced by mass participation. All of this is held together by what remains of republican virtue. As we celebrate our 250 years as an independent nation, patriotism is as much of an imperative today as it was in 1776. We cannot allow Democrats to retake power on November 3. Vote like Donald Trump is on the ballot. Even if your Representative or Senator is a RINO, punch his ticket. We are the bulwark against permanent fascism.

Update (January 22) Willian Kelly, aka dawokefarmer, who filmed himself screaming at churchgoers after storming their church, has been arrested. Kelly was arrested just hours after he had a meltdown on TikTok where he called for people to rise up and “shut this country down.”

Update (January 22): According to reporting by The New York Times, two of the members of the mob that interrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota. Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Louisa Allen have been taken into custody by the FBI.

Is there a tension in contemporary Christian discourse between Jesus’s injunction, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” and the claim that Christianity constitutes a moral system? At first glance, these positions can appear incompatible, and they are often treated as such—especially within progressive Christian contexts, where moral judgment is displaced rather than abandoned. I will argue that progressive Christianity enforces standards grounded less in coherent ethical principles than in shifting criteria of affinity and power, both personal and collective. By contrast, within a classical framework of Christian ethics, no such tension exists.

Morality, by definition, involves judgments about how people ought to act, distinctions between good and bad behavior, and standards by which actions are evaluated. If these standards are to be universal, they must appeal to an objective ontology.

As I explained in essays at the end of last year (Moral Authority Without Foundations: Progressivism, Utilitarianism, and the Eclipse of Argument; Epistemic Foundations, Deontological Liberalism, and the Grounding of Rights), progressivism is relativist and utilitarian; as such, it eschews defining a moral ontology. In short, there is no moral substance to the woke church; there is only a rhetoric of virtue, one exuding indignation, self-righteousness, and egoism.

To be sure, the woke Christian invocation of “do not judge” can appear to function as a blanket prohibition on moral evaluation, but this reading mistakes a situational admonition for a universal forbiddance. In contemporary progressive discourse, moral judgment itself is often portrayed as inherently exclusionary, harmful, or oppressive. Taken at face value, however, this understanding departs sharply from the role judgment plays within the New Testament and within rational Christian theology more broadly. In its original context, the command to “judge not” does not abolish moral discernment—the capacity to recognize, reflect upon, and decide what is good or right in particular circumstances—but rather presupposes and disciplines it.

In the same discourse, Jesus calls out hypocrisy—appearing righteous outwardly while acting unjustly in practice; judging others harshly while denying one’s own fallibility; using religion for status rather than genuine devotion to God. In the light of Christian ethics, the progressive Christian is the antithesis of Christianity because he denies each of these sins in himself (see Standing King’s Dream on Its Head: The Nightmare Antithesis of the American Way).

On Sunday in St. Paul, Minnesota, a mob of around 40 members of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, the Racial Justice Network, and allied community leaders entered the sanctuary of Cities Church and disrupted the service. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a longtime Minneapolis attorney, self-proclaimed civil rights activist, and community organizer, as well as an ordained minister, led the intrusion. With her were other local figures—Monique Cullars-Doty (BLM Minnesota co-founder), Chauntyll Allen (St. Paul public school board member and activist), and Satara Strong-Allen (community leader)—and outsiders, former CNN host Don Lemon and combat veteran and social media influencer William Scott Kelly, who goes under the handle “DawokeFarmer.”

Armstrong and Lemon, in particular, reinforced by memes comparing their actions to Jesus’ purification of the temple, have claimed in interviews to represent true Christianity. Lemon was brought along to create a video record of the cleansing, so the world could see the righteousness of the mob—a feature of its madness (see The Phenomenon of Progressive Brain-Locking and Its Role in the Madness of Crowds). Desperate to be seen, Lemon took his turn atangonizing churchgoers.

This is not what they were doing. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus, teaching in the Jerusalem temple, which he declared to be “my Father’s house,” affirmed its sacred purpose as a place of prayer for all nations by dramatically cleansing the temple by driving out merchants, money changers, and their animals, condemning them for having turned a house of prayer into a den of thieves, which symbolized how religious authorities had distorted worship through exclusion and exploitation. Jesus’ actions helped prepare the grounds for his prosecution.

The egoism of the mob betrayed their appeal to faith. Jesus taught that religious devotion should be sincere and directed toward God rather than performed to impress others. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your unseen Father. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” He contrasted this with praying publicly for show, warning against hypocrisy and empty repetition.

The crux of this teaching is that the faith the world would come to know as Christianity is about a genuine, humble relationship with God, not public display or social approval. Jesus cleansed the temple as the Son of God, not as a self-proclaimed righteous man who justified destructive and terrorizing action based on that holiness. Moreover, he instructed his followers to obey civil law—to never use their devotion to God as a license to transgress statutes of the secular authority.

Armstrong, Lemon, and Kelly not only appealed to the authority of God, but also to the United States Constitution to justify entering the sanctuary of a church and harassing the congregation as the exercise of free speech and protest action. This was the framing by The New York Times, which covered the story with the headline “Protest at Minnesota Church Service Adds to Tensions Over ICE Tactics” (transparently lamenting the possibility that BLM action might delegitimize the insurrection against the federal government).

Yet the First Amendment does not warrant harassment or trespass in a place of worship—or any other place immune from the heckler’s veto. Moreover, that amendment guarantees religious liberty. Protest is about expressing advocacy and opposition while respecting others’ rights to safety and worship. Once the goal or effect is coercion, fear, or interference, it crosses the line from protest into criminal behavior, regardless of the cause being claimed. There were children in attendance on Sunday, and Lemon’s camera captured the terror in their faces. This wasn’t a protest action; this was mob intimidation. A congregation of peaceful Christians was terrorized.

We have been here before. Across many communist revolutions in the twentieth century, independent religious institutions—especially Christian churches—were treated as inherent threats to revolutionary authority and were therefore subjected to coercion, intimidation, and suppression. Because churches represented alternative sources of communal loyalty and moral authority, they were seen as rival power centers incompatible with movement or state control. As a result, revolutionary regimes in countries such as the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and across Eastern Europe routinely invaded or closed churches, harassed or imprisoned clergy, and terrorized congregants through denunciations, political reeducation, and surveillance.

The aim was not merely secularization, but the consolidation of ideological monopoly, in which moral formation, social organization, and ultimate allegiance were redirected from religious communities to the revolutionary regime itself. What we witnessed in Stl Paul on Sunday was the radical desire to replace traditional Christian authority with an authoritarian reorganization of society wrapped in a rhetoric of Christian love. The dress was see-through, the body of hate clearly visible.

Jesus also speaks of recognizing people “by their fruits.” Such a teaching presupposes the ability, indeed the necessity, to evaluate actions and character. One cannot identify hypocrisy, bad fruit, or moral failure without making judgments about action and behavior. The prohibition is not against moral reasoning itself but against a particular kind of judgment: hypocritical, self-righteous, or condemnatory judgment that assumes the prerogatives of God.

Mob intimidation by those on the left in the name of Jesus assumes the perogatives of God, transgressing the laws of a nation founded upon Christian ethics and natural law by falsely appealing to the righteousness of Christian moral authority. They demand Christian love to make themselves immune to judgment by those who love Christ.

They, moreover, appeal to Christian justice to make themselves immune to legal consequences. But when asked whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the Roman government, Jesus replied, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” affirming a legitimate place for civil authority, even under a pagan and unjust regime, while also observing that obedience to the state does not replace devotion to God.

Yet, in Jesus’s teaching, devotion to God is not a license to disobey civil law. His instruction to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” assumes compliance with lawful civil authority, even when that authority is imperfect or unjust. Jesus himself paid taxes, respected legal processes, and did not encourage resistance or lawbreaking in God’s name—a devotion to secular power necessary for crucifixion!

For Jesus, faithfulness to God expresses itself within the bounds of civil order, not outside it. For this reason, Martin Luther King, Jr., advocated peaceful civil disobedience, the legal consequences of which must be accepted by his followers (see The Rule of Law and Unlawful Protest: The Madness of Mobs).

In Christianity, God’s authority does not justify coercion, disruption of others’ rights, lawlessness, or terrorism. On the contrary: devotion to God calls for humility, peace, and respect for law. When one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter, drew a sword and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Malchus, Jesus stopped him, saying, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” He then healed the servant’s ear, demonstrating his commitment to peace and mercy, even in the face of violence.

Religious conviction is never a blanket justification for civil disobedience, and it forbids righteous violence against authority. Disobedience to the state must always be principled and grounded in Christian ethics—and a last resort. Violence, especially, is always an action of last resort. Even if we take the mob that entered Cities Church on Sunday at its word, that it was led by Christians, there is no basis in Christianity to trespass and terrorize the congregation in a religious sanctuary. Nor is there any basis to do so in the secular laws of the American Republic. On the contrary, the secular law defends religious liberty.

The secular law is clear in this case. Beyond the First Amendment, in addition to reproductive health facilities, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (18 USC § 248), commonly called the FACE Act, makes it a federal crime to use force, threat of force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person exercising their religious freedom at a place of worship. This includes entering, leaving, or participating in worship services at churches, synagogues, and mosques.

Many observers have asked us to imagine a mob of Christian Nationalists entering a mosque and intimidating the congregation. What would Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison say about that? We may soon know, as several top Minnesota political leaders have been subpoenaed by federal authorities as part of an ongoing investigation into the chaos in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Federal prosecutors, including the Department of Justice and the FBI acting through a grand jury process, have issued subpoenas to, among others, Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, and Attorney General Ellison. While these subpoenas seek documents and communications related to interference with and obstruction of federal law enforcement efforts, scrutiny of the state’s failure to charge and prosecute the Sunday mob will likely become part of the inquiry.

* * *

The modern progressive resolves the tension noted at the top of his essay not by clarifying types of judgment, but by collapsing them. Moral discernment and moral condemnation are treated as indistinguishable. To judge actions is equated with harming persons, but only for the progressive’s choice of comrades. The progressive man condemns ICE for frightening children when deporting illegal aliens (an unfortunate consequence for the choices of parents who have no right to be in America), but he claims righteousness for his own action of frightening children. Really, he does not regard children at all, but uses them either to affirm his moral character (such as it is) or as targets of his rage.

It is not the case, therefore, that the progressive operates without moral pronouncements; rather, the progressive Christian appeals to an ideological framework dressed in faith that, in truth, operates outside Christian ethics and natural law. Wokeness does not eliminate judgment; it merely redefines its grounds and redirects its energy.

This should be obvious: progressive Christian discourse issues strong moral judgments against “judgmentalism,” traditional doctrine, exclusion, and perceived harm, while, at the same time, judging others based on ideological notions—critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and queer doctrine. These notions are prettied up with the language of “kindness,” but beneath the makeup lies ravenous swine. (See The Problem of Empathy and the Pathology of “Be Kind”.)

The reality is that it is not whether judgment exists, but who is permitted to judge and be judged. Without a moral ontology, this becomes entirely arbitrary, manifested either by mob action or totalitarian command. This is the moral relativism of progressivism: the targets of judgment are not based on an objective ethical system, but on power, personal or collective. It dresses itself in the raiments of salvation and manufactures its own Christs, elevating those who obstruct and resist civil authority to the status of martyr—Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and now Renee Good. The Sunday mob chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot” and, in a call and response, “Say her name!” “Renee Good!”

Classical Christianity addressed the tension coherently by distinguishing between judging actions and condemning souls, between moral correction and final judgment. Christians were called to name sin while acknowledging their own fallibility, to correct others with humility, and to leave ultimate judgment to God. This framework preserved moral clarity without claiming moral omniscience.

In the modern period, Christian ethics, emerging from rational Christianity and natural law, sources from which the Founders formed the moral order underpining the American Republic, universalizes moral judgment for every citizen, each equal before the law. Faith becomes a personal matter, while law applies to everyone, the state possessing the sole authority to enforce the law with violence where citizens fail to follow it.

The core problem, then, is not judgment itself, but confusion about its nature. This confusion is intentional. A moral system that forbids judgment cannot survive; it negates the very standards that make morality possible. Christianity remains morally intelligible only by distinguishing kinds of judgment, not by judging arbitrarily or abolishing judgment altogether. Crucially, Christian judgment can only be the law of a secular society when it is universal and detached from Christian theism (since people are free from the imposition of faith as a matter of the ethic itself).

America cannot allow mobs of left-wing activists to impose their novel and cynical interpretation of Christianity over the law or the personal rights of Christians. When that distinction is lost, an artificial vocabulary of morality emerges—“social justice”—and gives way to zealotry; and the edict to “judge not” becomes less a moral principle than a rhetorical shield against moral (and legal) accountability.

If Christians are instructed not to judge, how can Christianity meaningfully function as a moral framework at all? It can’t. Progressive Christians offer the world no moral system, for no moral system can be found in relativism or utilitarianism, where morality is whatever power says it is, or where the means are rationalized by desired ends with no moral purchase.

Indeed, progressives suck the morality out of Christian ethics, scattering the Gospels of Jesus into a jumble of cherry-picked scriptures arbitrarily selected to justify harassment, intimidation, and violence in pursuit of decadent ends. The social justice warrior leverages the name of Jesus as a cudgel to attack conservative and liberal Christians and the American Republic. It is not only un-Christian—it’s un-American.

Christianity has always been unavoidably moral. It names certain actions as sinful, calls for repentance, and demands moral transformation. Concepts such as sin, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption lose all meaning if no behavior can be judged right or wrong, or if such judgments are made in bad faith. A Christianity that forbade judgment in every sense or judged from an ideological standpoint would cease to be a moral system and collapse into moral incoherence. Such a Christianity would be no Christianity at all. And this is the Christianity to which the Sunday mob appealed. These are fake Christians.

The BLM mob can escape neither religious nor secular judgment for its actions on Sunday. Those who comprise it must be made an example for others who would cynically leverage religious faith to justify mob intimidation and collective violence. Bring the hammer.

* * *

Note: A journalist cannot claim immunity simply because he is documenting a crime. While observing or reporting on illegal activity is generally protected under free press principles and the First Amendment in the United States, these protections apply only when the journalist does not himself engage in illegal acts. If a journalist encourages, directly participates in a crime, or provides material aid, he can be prosecuted as a principal, accomplice, or accessory, even if his intent includes documenting or reporting the event. In short, the act of reporting does not shield someone from criminal liability when he actively participates in the crime itself. Don Lemon is in trouble.

“Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

I want to share with you today something I teach in my college course, Freedom and Social Control. I believe this observation is broadly useful right now, in light of the unfolding insurrection in Minneapolis and the promise of more rebellion in other cities across the United States. Insurrection is a social contagion, one with a quasi-religious character, and without a reason to rise against the government, and for the sake of collective sanity, the contagion must be interrupted.

In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Sigmund Freud argues that religion is a collective psychological construction arising from deep human wishes („Wunscherfüllung“): the desire for protection, transcendent meaning, and a benevolent father figure, especially in the face of civilization’s constraints (necessary to check das Es, or the it or Id) and nature’s dangers and uncertainties.

While religious doctrines are ontologically false, Freud contends they persist because they fulfill profound emotional needs and help maintain social order. Like Karl Marx (in the Preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” published in 1844 in Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher), Freud is sympathetic to religion, even if he does not personally believe in God, because he recognizes the comfort and moral structure it provides (Marx is sympathetic for other reasons, while also highly critical of false consciousness as a manifestion of alienation).

Central to Freud’s thesis is the distinction between delusion and illusion. A delusion is a belief held in contradiction to evidence, reality, and reason (e.g., believing that gender is interchangeable), whereas an illusion is a belief motivated by wish-fulfillment—false, perhaps, but not defined solely by its falsity. Religion, Freud insists, is an illusion because it arises from universal human desires rather than a psychotic denial of reality. This makes it distinct from delusion, which is a personal subjectivity incongruent with the objective reality around the person. Delusion is pathological for this reason.

Freud predicts that as scientific rationality advances, humanity will gradually outgrow religion, replacing it with a more sober, reality-based ethic. Yet he demonstrates a profound understanding—or Verstehen, in the German sense—of religious belief: religion provides moral guidance, psychological comfort, and, perhaps, necessary social control at this stage of cultural development, especially for those who cannot tolerate life’s anxieties without it. Here, his idea intersects with Marx’s notion of religion as a painkiller—the “opiate of the people” („das Opium des Volkes“).

In my lectures, I situate Freud in a larger discussion of Paul Ricœur’s 1965 “Master of Suspicion” thesis (“les trois penseurs de la suspicion”), alongside Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of religion, the “Death of God” thesis („Gott ist tot“, an observation that also influenced Max Weber, as noted in previous essays on this platform). Freud claims to avoid Nietzsche systematically, confessing that he feared he might discover ideas too close to his own—but the overlap is striking. German intellectuals were swimming in Nietzschean waters, so the man’s influence over Freud (as well as Weber and others) was likely inevitable.

Both Freud and Nietzsche understood religious belief as a human projection: religion sublimates unconscious drives over rational self-understanding, and morality is historically contingent rather than divinely grounded. Nietzsche’s critique of religion as a response to human weakness and suffering parallels Freud’s account of religion as wish fulfillment. Nietzsche’s psychological style of conveyance anticipates Freud’s method: interpreting beliefs as symptoms rather than truths.

In lecture, I often recall Nietzsche’s line from Beyond Good and Evil (quoted at the top of this essay). Overstated perhaps, but strikingly relevant today: what counts as madness in an individual—cruelty, irrational beliefs, self-deception—can become normalized, even revered, when shared collectively. Social scale can convert pathology into “morality” and “truth.” (Did the man call it or what? Whatever one thinks of Nietzsche, that his perception was high-powered is undeniable.)

Nietzsche’s insight anticipates Freud’s treatment of religion as a mass psychological phenomenon: not private psychosis, but a culturally sanctioned illusion that persists because it is shared. Their approaches diverge, however: Nietzsche frames these beliefs as mass psychogenic illness; Freud frames them as a universal, developmentally understandable aspect of the human condition. Nietzsche emphasizes decadence, herd mentality, and social power; Freud emphasizes the psyche’s readiness to accept comforting illusions. Nonetheless, both recognize culture’s capacity for collective irrationality.

This is why I emphasize in lectures and public pronouncements the moral imperative to tell the truth and avoid leading impressionable people astray—whether accidentally or intentionally; one has an ethical responsibility to know what’s going on. A man can be charitable, compassionate, and understanding, but when belief becomes pathological and destructive, he must criticize it. Reforming character at scale requires identifying the vulnerabilities that make people susceptible to harmful illusions—and those who take advantage of those vulnerabilities. This demands brutal frankness and the courage to offend even those we hold close.

Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution grants authority to the federal government:

“To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.”

Article II, Section 2 grants this authority, among others, to the President:

“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”

This is the office that calls the military into national service.

Article VI, Clause 2—the Supremacy Clause—states:

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The Tenth Amendment cannot plausibly be interpreted to grant states the right to thwart the authority or laws of the national government. There is no such thing as “states’ rights.” States are granted powers; people retain their rights. State power exists only at the pleasure of the national government. The rights of the people are limited only by reason.

This constitutional framework provides all the authority the President needs to nationalize the Minnesota National Guard—or the National Guard of any other state—when necessary to provide troops for a legitimate federal purpose.

However, if there is any question about this authority, Congress made it explicit in the Insurrection Act (10 USC §§ 331–335, enacted in 1792).

Section 331 — Federal aid for State governments states:

“Whenever there is an insurrection in any State against its government, the President may, upon the request of its legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened, call into Federal service such of the militia of the other States, in the number requested by that State, and use such of the armed forces as he considers necessary to suppress the insurrection.”

Leaders of states in rebellion against the national government often emphasize the phrase “upon the request of its legislature or of its governor,” while ignoring the subsequent sections, which override state consent.

Section 332 — Use of militia and armed forces to enforce Federal authority states:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

Section 333 — Interference with State and Federal law further states:

“The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—
(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State and of the United States within the State that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity; or
(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.”

What is occurring in Minneapolis constitutes an insurrection. Minnesota is in rebellion against the national government. The governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, are failing to defend the civil rights of the citizens of that state and of the Republic. The state is interfering with the execution of federal law.

The President not only has the authority to deploy the military into Minneapolis—he is obligated to do so. Failure to act would constitute a failure in the President’s core duties as Chief Executive of the United States. History regards as heroic those Presidents who act:

In 1871-72, President Ulysses S. Grant used federal troops to suppress domestic insurrection carried out by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. Acting under the Enforcement Acts of 1870–1871, particularly the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, Grant declared martial law in parts of South Carolina, suspended habeas corpus, and deployed federal troops to arrest hundreds of Klansmen. The KKK was effectively dismantled for a generation. Grant justified these actions because state authorities were either unable or unwilling to protect the civil rights of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution, making federal intervention both lawful and necessary.

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had used the state National Guard to block the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Eisenhower responded by removing the Guard from state control, placing it under federal command, and sending active-duty troops to protect Black students. Eisenhower acted under Article II authority and the Insurrection Act, making clear that state defiance of federal court orders would not be tolerated.

In 1962-63, President John F. Kennedy used federal force to enforce civil rights during confrontations in Mississippi and Alabama. In 1962, when Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett resisted the court-ordered enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and deployed U.S. Army troops to restore order after violent riots erupted. In 1963, Kennedy again federalized the Alabama National Guard to enforce desegregation at the University of Alabama over Governor George Wallace’s objections. In both cases, Kennedy acted on the principle that when states obstruct federal law and deny constitutional rights, the President not only may act—but must act.

On November 5, 2024, I voted for a man of action. I voted for law and order. I voted for the United States Constitution. I have regretted some of the votes I cast in the past. I do not want to regret this one. Action is needed now. If the President does not act, the nation risks descending into civil war. History will judge harshly Trump’s failure to act in this moment.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” —Preamble to the United States Constitution

Today, we mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever his personal failings, King loved America enough to hold it accountable to its ideals, insisting that equality and freedom are not abstract aspirations but binding commitments. The torch of his dream helped guide the country out of contradiction. An assassin’s bullet made sure he did not live to see America thrown back into it.

Standing at the Lincoln Memorial, King reminded the nation that the American experiment is measured not by its words alone, but by whether it fulfills its promises to all its people. King’s dream did not reject America—it called the country to become itself, to judge individuals not by their identities, but by their character. The man came bearing republicanism, the belief that a nation’s power derives from the People, exercised through representative government, with citizens’ virtue and the common good as its foundation.

The Democratic Party stands King on his head. Indeed, the party of slavocracy and Jim Crow subverted America’s promise from its inception. The party now openly channels anti-American sentiment. As the Good Book teaches us, God places challenges or adversaries—sometimes symbolized as Satan—in a nation’s path to test it. These obstacles are meant to push the people to confront injustice, overcome both external and internal evils, and achieve a more righteous, perfected nation.

The answer to the polling question asking whether ICE should be abolished is a proxy for the deeper question: Shall we have open borders? A CNN poll finds that more than three-fourths of Democrats effectively want open borders—hardly unexpected. Only a little more than one in ten Republicans do.

But there is an even more profound question underlying that one: whether one believes a nation should have borders at all, which is another way of asking whether there shall be nations. The answer to this question is everything.

The divide between Democrats and Republicans is wide and unbridgeable. It has always been substantial, to be sure, but the gulf between the parties today is as deep as it was when the nation stood at the threshold of the Civil War in the late 1850s. The parties represent two different conceptions of the future: either an American future or a future without America.

This is tragic, given that we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—the document that put absolutism and monarchy on notice. Instead of a year spent reflecting on the greatness of the American Republic, we must devote our energies once again to confronting forces that seek to disunite us. I worry that the patriots no longer have the energy required to stand up for the nation. I fear that decades of emasculation and America-bashing have rendered too many men impotent. This moment will test whether America still has the stones to overcome obstacles thrown in its path.

I have been arguing since 2020—when it became obvious to anyone with open eyes and ears that the country was in deep trouble—that the real divisions in politics are not superficial or partisan, but profoundly moral and philosophical: populism versus progressivism, nationalism versus transnationalism, individualism versus collectivism, democracy versus technocracy, and republicanism versus corporatism.

The opposing sides of these binaries together constitute a larger binary: American versus anti-American. Each pair marks an axis of political identity. Together, they form a political grammar: to speak in one term is already to reject the other; to locate oneself on one end is to be positioned against its opposite.

These are not neutral preferences but rival camps. One cannot inhabit both sides at once. These are not positions along a spectrum but lines of division—populism or progressivism, nationalism or transnationalism, individualism or collectivism, democracy or technocracy, republicanism or corporatism.

This follows from the three foundational laws of logic.

The Law of Identity holds that whatever exists has a determinate identity; a thing is itself and not another (this is why, e.g, the transgender individual is an impossible individual).

The Law of Noncontradiction holds that the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect; a claim cannot simultaneously affirm and deny the same predicate. For example, the alleged fusion of populism and progressivism is a falsehood.

The Law of the Excluded Middle establishes bivalence: every proposition is either true or false, with no third option between them. In short, either the people govern themselves, or they are governed by something else.

Consider what Democrats want (they confess this openly): big, intrusive government; control over the socialization of our children; administrative and corporate control over our bodies and choices—the medicines we take, the foods we eat, the media we consume, the words we say; the privileging of selected ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities over the rights of the individual; a disarmed population; bargain-basement wages for workers; the diminishment of Western culture through the imposition of multiculturalism; and global governance.

There is a word for what Democrats want: authoritarianism. Indeed, there is more than one word for it: totalitarianism, serfdom—many words apply. However, the following words appear in the Party literature and pronouncements only as glittering generalities: autonomy, democracy, freedom, and justice. Their plans will cancel the substance of each of them in action. In fact, as the record of history makes clear, they have already weakened all of these.

The Statue of Liberty was conceived by French abolitionist Édouard René de Laboulaye and designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi as a celebration of liberty and republican government, a tribute to the American Revolution, and a symbolic nod to the end of slavery after the Civil War. Its full original name makes this clear: “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

Lady Liberty is a republican symbol. She had nothing to do with immigration. In France, the female personification of republican liberty is called Marianne. Emerging during the French Revolution, Marianne embodied the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity)—a civic, secular figure representing the sovereignty of the people rather than monarchy or empire.

This shared republican imagery forged a deep symbolic connection between France and the United States: when France gifted Liberty Enlightening the World to America in the nineteenth century, the statue fused these traditions—Marianne’s revolutionary spirit with America’s own Lady Liberty—affirming a transatlantic commitment to republican self-government, popular sovereignty, and the universal aspiration toward freedom. America’s own Columbia guided the founding and expansion of the Republic.

Like Columbia in the United States, Marianne served as a symbolic guide for a new republic, appearing in art, coins, and public buildings as a reminder that the nation derived its authority from its citizens. Its torch burned out; France lost its way. We mustn’t allow the nightmare antithesis of progressivism extinguish the flame of liberty in America.

Those who would put out liberty’s light have been at it for a long time. In 1903, transnationalists—cultural figures, philanthropists, and writers who elevated the message of an 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”—repurposed the statue, mounting a plaque with Lazarus’ poem inside its pedestal. The poem was not commissioned as the statue’s mission statement. It was not displayed on the statue at the dedication (which occurred decades earlier). The plaque reflected Lazarus’s personal humanitarian views, not the views of the nation.

What did the country think? A few decades later, in the 1920s, the nation, with populists and nationalists—in a word, patriots—leading the way, would sharply restrict the flow of immigration for more than forty years. The nation needs another forty years. The antithesis smears the patriots with invectives—“anti-immigrant,” “bigot,” “chauvinist,” “intolerant,” “nativist,” “racially prejudiced.” To hell with the antithesis.

Progressives are going full fascist right before our eyes. The street elements leverage anarchist and communist symbology, but the function is corporate statist. (Remember, Hitler called his politics “socialist,” too.) The neoconfederate attitude among Democratic Party leaders is the mark of the managed decline of the Republic. Those in the streets and those in the suites seek either the dissolution of the Union or a one-party state. The racist element is obvious in anti-white bigotry. The opposite of the American thesis could not be more explicit.

Whatever the problems one may have with the Republican Party—and I have a few—the choice in November 2026 is clear if one wishes to keep the United States of America. This does not mean we cannot have a system with multiple political parties. It does mean that the core of each party must have the foundational principles of the Republic at the core of their respective platforms. A stable constitutional republic can tolerate neither a movement nor a party that stands in the way of American greatness.

Many of us have seen these videos—or perhaps readers have experienced this personally, tragically, sometimes, even with a loved one—where a person shouts repeatedly phrases like “Fuck off!” or “Go kill yourself!”

You may have noticed that the phenomenon is almost exclusively associated with woke progressive types, especially trans-identifying individuals. I say “almost” to be charitable; I’ve never heard conservatives or liberals do this (strong executive function). There may be some, but there’s a reason why this is characteristic of those who identify as queer or woke, which I will come to.

The phenomenon has features indicative of mental illness, which may or may not be organic. Have you ever heard of perseveration? This is a state in which a person’s speech (or thought) becomes stuck in a loop, causing them to repeatedly chant the same phrase, often at the top of their lungs in monotone (or internally, such as in cases of selective mutism, which sufferers attest to).

This happens when executive control over language breaks down. Instead of choosing words deliberately, the brain locks into automatic, high-emotion speech patterns that repeat without flexibility. This feedback loop is a sign of dysfunction in the frontal lobe. It can result from a structural defect or chemical imbalance, external triggering in defective or primed individuals, or intoxication.

Brain-locking instances occur during intense emotional arousal, such as panic, rage, or stress, or when the deep animal part of the brain is disinhibited. We can call it “panic-chanting” or “rage-chanting” for shorthand. In these moments, the brain’s threat system overwhelms the parts responsible for inhibition and reasoning, causing speech to become aggressive, primitive, and repetitive.

Emotionally charged phrases like “Fuck off” or “Go kill yourself” are especially likely because they’re easy to produce and carry strong emotional force, even though the person may no longer be consciously intending their meaning (trance states often accompany the phenomenon).

In humans, such phrases are emotionally high-salience, socially aggressive, and conditioned through past use; the person deploys them whenever confronted by triggering stimuli. We see this in other mammals, as well, such as stressed cats howling. It signals that the mammal is potentially dangerous, but it also signals danger in primates, as well—even those with big brains. When a physically restrained detainee chants, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” “Don’t touch me!” “I’m disabled!” or any number of other phrases common in police encounters, one must be especially cautious. The police understand this, which is why they deploy restraint holds or devices.

A person in a brain-lock cannot control their actions, obviously. This was why straitjackets and tranquilizing drugs and devices (which immobilize the person) have been part of institutional psychiatry for decades. Indeed, the phenomenon often suggests neurological injury or a psychiatric condition. When I cover the history of this in my course Freedom and Social Control, students often gasp, “How could we have been so cruel?” But the reality is that these interventions work; what is unleashed by internal dysfunction can be contained by external restraint. What appear as torture devices have a calming effect. Not wanting to experience them again builds in self-control (although some seek out weighted blankets and the like).

"Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off"

My wife heard this from the other room and said "It sounds like a chicken".

A classic example of a white liberal boomer female not minding her own business. The comments from the guys are priceless. pic.twitter.com/qXov8hhwoV

— Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker (@Martyupnorth) January 15, 2026

We see this in anti-ICE protests and transactivism (sometimes manifesting in the latter as literal barking), but we also see it in other public settings, such as the recent video of a woman who objects to men duck hunting. Have you seen this video? The hunters laugh it off, but it’s disturbing to watch.

We also saw it in a recent video in a park where a woman, after being asked a question by a reporter, David Zeer, childlike chants a limited catalog of short, insulting phrases. It can weird out even normal people. Zeer tries to reason with her, but it’s only by getting away from the situation that the woman calms down. She appears normal again at a distance. Even for otherwise normally appearing persons, when triggered, intrusive thought loops in humans collapse vocabulary into repetitive high-charge phrases. The phrases are simultaneously command-like, insulting, and profane.

REPORTER GETS HECKLED: "THIS IS THE STATE OF THE US RIGHT NOW"

RAV's @DaveZere getting harassed as he is trying to be very respectful to protestors in MN. pic.twitter.com/NQila8WYMJ

— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) January 10, 2026

Alcohol or drug intoxication can increase the likelihood of this kind of speech lock. Many observers have wondered whether the woman triggered by the Zeer in the park is intoxicated. Zeer encountered other people with this tendency that day, one of whom he was actually able to calm with his relentless calm demeanor (Zeer is a remarkably patient man). You can see that many in the park that day are emotionally dysregulated individuals.

This is not Tourette’s or coprolalia (involuntary utterance of obscene or aggressive phrases), but more like echolalia-like looping (repeating others’ words), only auto-generated.

As implied by the foregoing, the loop can continue until interrupted by an external distraction. Sometimes it resolves with a shock intervention, such as overpowering command voice, macing (CN gas) and pepper spraying, or flashbangs (stun grenades), but not always. Fatigue can also resolve the loop; I have seen people exhaust themselves incessantly repeating the same phrase. However, some people are almost indefatigable, which stresses out everybody around them, amplifying the danger.

Cops are human, too, which is why anti-ICE demonstrators blow whistles (I have taken to calling them “cicadas,” those annoying insects prominent in the southern United States where I grew up). The whistles are not to warn “neighbors” of ICE operations but to trigger a reaction from cops, which can then be used for anti-government propaganda. The chanting often begins as a tactic to provoke officers, then brain-locking follows.

Woman dragged from car by ICE in Minnesota ID’d as LGBT and racial justice activist https://t.co/M3DvzpfEuY pic.twitter.com/tmsUEcto32

— New York Post (@nypost) January 14, 2026

Physical removal from the situation allows for emotional cooling, which is why police are quick to separate such individuals from reinforcers in the environment, putting them in the back of a patrol car. It’s sad to see. It’s tough to watch. But intervention or removal is often necessary for the sake of the person. The recent instance of a woman pulled from her car is presented by the media as overreach by law enforcement, but you can see all the signs of brain-lock in the video. The repetition is self-reinforcing: hearing the phrase triggers it again, creating a loop, which is why action is often necessary.

Another reason for removal is that brain-lock is often triggered in mob situations where it becomes contagious. A crowd of people can be swept up in the chanting—what we know as mass psychogenic madness—even those who do not suffer from whatever is disordering the brain-locked. Such is the madness of crowds.

If readers will permit me a moment of digression, which will become significant at the end, The Madness of Crowds was the title of a book by Douglas Murray published in 2019. Murray argues that modern Western societies have descended into a form of collective hysteria driven by identity politics, particularly around the topics of gender, race, sexuality, and transgender issues. He posits that these discussions, once grounded in the pursuit of equality and justice, have devolved into rigid, unforgiving orthodoxies that stifle nuance, free speech, and rational debate, often fueled by activist movements and social media platforms.

The phrase “the madness of crowds” originates from the 1841 book, in three volumes, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, an early study of crowd psychology that chronicled historical examples of mass hysteria.

Murray structures his critique around metaphors like “hardware” (biological realities) and “software” (cultural constructs), contending that misapplications of these concepts lead to societal divisions, victimhood hierarchies, and a “grand derangement” where facts are subordinated to feelings and power dynamics. He calls for a return to universal humanist principles to counteract what he sees as divisive, quasi-religious fervor in progressive causes, warning that such madness risks undermining the very progress achieved in civil rights. 

In such cases of mass hysteria, especially after triggering, it’s no longer necessarily a deliberate attempt to communicate or insult, but a sign that emotional and speech systems are running without higher cognitive control. Mobs are especially dangerous, as we have seen in the anti-ICE protests or witnessed during the 2020 Antifa/BLM riots. It’s why Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to interrupt the train before it reaches the station. (He should have invoked the Act early in the Antifa/BLM riots, but he got bad advice from those around him during his first term as President. See Send in the Troops.)

This is yet another reason why the manipulation of fragile people by Democrats is so objectionable. Democrats are quite cruel in this regard, especially when they affirm the delusions associated with people prone to chanting—delusions they often put into the heads of people they seek to control and weaponize. These are the people who are flooding our streets to protest ICE and Trump. You can see the depth of ideological indoctrination when leftists irrationally insist that Trump is a “fascist” or a “king.” It’s typical of the disorder we recognize as Trump derangement syndrome (TDS). You know from experience that such persons are impossible to reason with. The reasoning part of the brain is suspended. The vulnerable are primed with TDS.

One sees the derangement when woke types claim that abstractions are real without evidence, such as with the claim of “systemic racism” or “white supremacy” attributed to conservatives, while ignoring the best case for systemic racism, namely Democratic control over America’s central cities (the “Blue City”), where they impoverish and make dependent minorities with predictable results, such as high levels of crime and violence. (I have published several essays on this topic on this platform over the years.)

One of the early indicators of a person susceptible to chant-triggering is the constant re-telling of the same stories—not over time or in different settings, but after having already told the story in the same setting. Most of us have met these types of people. I’m not telling many readers something they don’t already know. I could give examples, but out of respect for their identity and reputation, I won’t.

Such vulnerable types, many primed by indoctrination, others primed by unresolved trauma, are perfect subjects for the New Fascism, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, where progressives were eager to see the state engage in a wide range of authoritarian action against those they are instructed to find disagreeable for one reason or another.

These types are drawn to cult-like movements. It’s why progressives seek affinity with Muslims. They fit perfectly the diagnosis detailed by Erich Fromm in his Escape from Freedom, where he specifies the authoritarian personality type. In previous essays, I have characterized such individuals as “zombies,” walking around chanting “Brains! Brains!” Or, alternatively, “parrots,” squawking things like “Trump’s a felon! Trump’s a felon!” or “Trump’s a pedo! Trump’s a pedo!” (See “Hey, Ma. The Zombies are Marching Again”; “Trump is a Felon!” The Squawking of Party Parrots.)

Some of them even come on my Facebook posts and chant and squawk like this. However, the platform X is full of zombies and parrots. I have had to systematically ignore transactivists who repeat the same phrase incessantly. “Trans women are really women!” or “Trans rights are human rights!” repeated a dozen or more times as a list. This happens in other settings, as well. Have you seen the woman? This goes on for several minutes. It is uncomfortable to watch.

This is hard to watch. https://t.co/PA2rSK3c5H

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) January 17, 2026

I’ve been asked by Facebook friends why I don’t unfriend them. It’s because I’m charitable and tolerant. I pity them, frankly. However, I confess, I’m tempted to, and occasionally I do unfriend them. On occasion, I have had to block them. I had to do it with one individual during the Paris Games during the controversy over male boxers allowed to compete in the women’s sport. The man kept chanting insults. I banned him as much for the sake of others as for my own sake. Some individuals are insufferable and, unlike the police, I don’t have to deal with them on the street. The police have the patience of saints. I don’t have that much patience. But I try.

Earlier, I said that I have not personally seen conservatives or liberals do this. I also noted the phenomenon of the madness of crows. Reflecting on these observations, I want to close with a personal anecdote.

In 2011, during the protests over Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and state Republicans eliminating collective bargaining rights for teachers (Act 10), I was caught up in crowd madness (I reflect on my participation in those protests and compare them to what occurred on January 6 here: The Relative Ethics of Occupying Capital Buildings). I had yet to shed the progressive influence on my politics, but my liberal core remained; nonetheless, after waiting in the cold for hours waiting for Walker to show up at a business meeting in Green Bay, after most of the crowd had gone home, Walker finally showed up (strategically late, I suspect), I joined the mob in chasing Walker’s convoy to the gates, which were closed by security, leaving the mob to chant “Recall Walker!”

There was a cadence to the chant that entrained me, and I felt the rational part of my brain retreat, leaving me in a trance-like state with Id exposed. Even though I opposed the government’s action (I believe in organized labor, albeit its co-option by progressivism has admittedly greatly weakened my sense of solidarity), I left for home feeling deeply ashamed at having allowed myself to get caught up in the madness. I was ashamed not only because, as a sociologist who teaches the problem of the mob abstractly, I should have known better, but as a man who strives to be reasonable, I should have concretely known better. As readers might imagine, Douglas Murray’s 2019 book helped quite a bit here. As did Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism, published in 2022 (see The Future of a Delusion: Mass Formation Psychosis and the Fetish of Corporate Statism for an application of that work).

I had never behaved that way before. And I have never behaved that way since. It was a wake-up call. Indeed, shaken by this moment, I began my journey back to liberalism, sparking a process of self-deprogramming by purging progressive elements from my thought (it took me nearly a decade to get all the nonsense out of my head). I, too, am a mammal, I recognized. But I also recognized that I have a capacity for reason. Because I am a higher-order mammal, I forgave myself, but only after making sure that I would never again allow my capacity for reason to be diminished by the madness of crowds. So ashamed by this, I have apologized publicly to family and friends, making enemies of those angered that I left the tribe. To my credit, except for heavy metal concerts, I only ever chanted once. Chanting with others to call back Judas Priest for an encore is getting my money’s worth. Chanting with crowds of radicalized others is dangerous business.