Late Cambridge University professor Jason Arday

Cambridge University killed a man earlier this month. Its M.O.: DEI (Diversity/Equity/Inclusion).

Professor Jason Arday, 41, apparently took his own life nine days after he resigned from Cambridge amid well-supported charges that he had plagiarized his 2015 PhD thesis, and not just a little bit here and there. Philosophy professor Nathan Cofnas ran the dissertation through a machine designed to pick up textual similarities and discovered a 2009 thesis by a different scholar that matched Arday’s text either exactly or with minor differences page after page after page. If you don’t believe me, go to Cofnas’s substack here: Nathan Cofnas.

Arday was not just your typical professor. He had been named Cambridge’s youngest black professor at age 37, despite a rather thin scholarly c.v. A virtual poster boy for DEI, he was anointed by the university’s administration and faculty as the second coming. His lectures on sociology, many of which can be found online, essentially amounted to reminding us that the world was “centered on whiteness” and that this “whiteness” needs to go.

When Arday’s plagiarism was exposed and his guilt in the matter proven beyond doubt to anyone with a mind open to facts, the cry of “Racism!’ went up immediately (big surprise there) and more than 15,000 — 15,000 — Arday supporters gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to protest the “witch hunt” launched against a black man. This means that thousands of people — likely many more thousands than those in Trafalgar Square — believe that plagiarism, i.e., claiming for oneself literary work that is not one’s own, is perfectly okay if the perpetrator belongs to a protected race or ethnicity. Support did not wane even when it was further revealed that universities in Ohio and South Africa Arday claimed to have attended announced they could not find his name in their records.

Cambridge proceeded to launch an investigation which pushed Arday to resign and, a few days later, apparently to commit suicide. (Arday died Aug. 14, but the cause of death has been heavily obfuscated. Suicide is presumed, as he suffered from no known disease or disability. He left behind a wife and two children.)

Why do I say that Cambridge killed Jason Arday? It’s not because they started an investigation that was by all accounts called for. No, they as good as killed him when they hired him, knowing full well he was not qualified.

In all the videos taken and in reports from those who knew him, Jason Arday seemed like a really nice guy, someone to share a joke or grab a coffee with. Friendly, sincere…and naive. Perhaps he saw the opportunity laid out before him to gain wealth and prestige in exchange for a little fibbing and thought, “What’s the harm in a little con?” Maybe he didn't even consider it a con. More like a game. Yes, he committed fraud. But the party that made the fraud possible was Cambridge and its DEI program. Arday killed himself (apparently) when his con was exposed and he was publicly shamed, yet the con was enabled by the insane idea that people should be hired for positions based on race, creed or gender rather than merit.

Had he not been coddled by DEI and made into something he was not fit to be, Jason Arday might be alive today. He might have entered some profession or trade that he was good at, and found a place right for his gifts. We all have our particular talents and the trick is to identify, cultivate, and apply them. Jason Arday, wooed by the sirens of self-serving academia, didn’t have a chance to do that. RIP.

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In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three young children—Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months)—at their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, before surviving a half-hearted “suicide” attempt (she jumped out a second-story window) that left her paralyzed. As of this date (Aug. 23, 2026) Clancy’s trial is underway. She has confessed to the deed, but her defense attorney claims she is not guilty by reason of insanity.

The insanity plea is based on the notion that Clancy at the time suffered from “postpartum psychosis.” Postpartum depression is a real mental condition that generally occurs within the first three months after birth. But the claim of postpartum “psychosis” stretches the time frame by several months. Furthermore, Clancy was sufficiently in charge of her faculties to send her husband, the children’s father, on errands designed to keep him away long enough for her to wrap exercise bands around the necks of Cora, Dawson, and Callan, and squeeze.

Clancy will either spend the rest of her life in prison, or be sent to a mental institution. Either way, three young lives have been cut short and a father — whose emotional condition is never considered in the many articles published on the subject — will live the rest of is life with the nightmare of his children’s gruesome murder.

What concerns me is the support being shown Clancy by untold thousands of women. Videos abound online of women pretending to defenestrate themselves in imitation of Clancy’s silly botched “suicide.” Hundreds of women assemble daily outside the courthouse where she is being tried in order to show solidarity with … with what exactly? The trials of motherhood? The mental strain of caring for children? Or maybe the right of women to extend abortion demands deep into post-birth childhood?

A GoFundMe account for Clancy has topped $1 million.

Why all this money and energy and moral posturing for a woman who killed her own children? The thought of killing a child, let alone one’s own children, would send most people running to the bathroom to throw up. It takes a deep moral sickness to do what Clancy did — not just a mental aberration or psychological condition but a demonic attitude. Imagine yourself in the middle of such an act. How could you keep going? You could only continue — keep strangling each child until dead — if you harbored a repulsive hatred for life itself. To support such a woman on some feminist pretext or other makes one wonder if the controversial title of a recent Jonathan Pageau video isn’t somewhere in the ballpark of of truth: “Feminism is the political arm of witchcraft.”

It will be objected that Clancy was influenced by meds she was taking, or that a strained relationship with her husband prompted her action. I don’t care. We are moral agents and responsible for our actions, period.

You want to support a mother? How about giving to a GoFundMe for Miracle Keith of Conway, Arkansas? In June, Miracle literally ran through smoke to save her daughter Amiri from an apartment fire. She risked her life for her daughter and is currently fighting to regain the proper use of her lungs, which were compromised by smoke inhalation. Details at the end of the video below.

We are at a place in our sick culture where some people cannot tell the difference between a woman who kills her children and one who risks her life to save her child. Worse, they prefer to moralize and grandstand for the killer over the hero.

God help us.

Ricky Gervais is a funny guy. I love his humor and I prize particularly his famous hosting of the Golden Globes a few years back, in which he tore into the political hypocrisy of Hollywood celebs.

But I do wish he’d stop talking about science. On numerous platforms including Stephen Colbert’s late show, Gervais has preached his gospel of science as Always True and Always the Same. It would be hilarious if not for the fact that, to judge from the response he got on Colbert, large gobs of people agree with him.

In the above clip, he puts it this way: If all the science texts in existence were to disappear today, a few hundred years from now new ones would be written, their conclusions identical with today’s conclusions.

When you pick yourself up off the floor, join me in attempting to enlighten Ricky.

At the end of his second semester as a professor at Princeton, Albert Einstein — who was a scientist, as you know — gave the questions of his end-of-term exam to an assistant for printing. The assistant, befuddled, commented: “But, Prof. Einstein, these are the same questions you asked on the first semester final.”

“Yes,” Einstein responded, “the questions are the same. But the answers have changed.”

The science of physics had altered in just a few months, requiring new answers to old questions. Think, then, of how radically it can change from decade to decade or century to century. Pick up a scientist from the year 1900 and plunk him down in the middle of a modern physics class and he will not have the slightest notion of what’s being discussed. Quantum theory? What’s that? How on earth can a particle be a wave that has collapsed? What does that even mean??

Not only do science’s answers to the riddles of reality change over time, but even among scientists of the same era, confusion can abound. For decades, a monstrosity called “string theory” has dominated physics, making beaucoup de bucks for the physicists who espoused it. Only lately have people in the mainstream scientific world taken to heart the objections of us outsiders and of a few rebels on the inside that a theory requiring 22 dimensions, when all we have are four, is probably a stupid idea.

As physics goes, so go the rest of the sciences. Are there really folks who think that medicine is currently a hegemonic block of unquestioned belief? If so, how do they explain the fact that, according to a Johns Hopkins research project in 2023, approximately 371,000 Americans die each year from misdiagnosis? That’s 371,000 instances in which science — medical science in this case — just plain got it wrong, Ricky. In addition, the recent “pandemic,” supported by various theories that mutually contradicted one another, should have been enough to alert thinking people to the false façade of Unquestionable Medical Science.

If anything, scientists as a whole might be defined as a community of people who haven’t the slightest idea what the hell is going on, but who need to come up with theories about what’s going on in order to keep their jobs.

Ricky has confused science with material reality. He naively thinks that material reality can be mapped without error and that scientists are therefore cartographers of the real. Silly and dear, ain’t it? In our time, this foundational idea of material-facts-as-reality has blinded us to what previous generations knew: That to grasp the Real — the truly Real — one should look to poetry, and music, and love, and spirit.

Why do I dwell on this popular misunderstanding of science? Because “science” is a word whose connotation is way bigger than its denotation. “Science” denotes the study of physical reality in various aspects. But its connotation — what we might call its Cultural Value — is essentially equal to that of Religion. “In his house we believe in Science” was among the obnoxious litany of “beliefs” that showed up on signs on people’s lawns during the pandemic. How can one “believe in” a profession? One cannot. But one can believe, as Ricky apparently believes, that science has The Answers. And that makes science, for him as for so many, a religion.

Other words exhibit a similar dichotomy between simple denotation and blown-out-of-proportion connotation. If you think of one, mention it in comments.

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What happened Tuesday? Several fascists won Democrat primaries in New York City, virtually guaranteeing that fascists will represent NYC in Congress next year.

What’s that you say? They weren't fascists, they were communists? Or maybe “just” socialists? I’ve got news for a lot of you:

ALL COLLECTIVISM IS THE SAME. And it’s all stained with blood and rife with slavery. The State is the State is the State. The principle guiding the “socialists” in New York is that the government has the right to seize private property and impose its will on the people in the name of a collective good. The guiding principle of fascism is “nothing outside the State” — in other words, the right of government to impose its will on the people in the name of a collective good. Please explain to me how A is not A. You have been fooled into believing that the Left-Right political spectrum is legitimate, and that the only choice you have is between communism and fascism. Since “communism” is a soft word and “fascism” is a hard one, the unreflective person-in-the-street will choose communism. In other words, s/he will choose the all-encompassing power of the State over . . . the all-encompassing power of the State.

Think of the difference in public reaction to the Democrat primaries would be if the headline, instead of reading, “Socialists win big,” read “Fascists win big.” Most lefties would assume that means that freedom-lovers, MAGA types, the opposites of fascists, had won. They are stuck on the Left-Right spectrum where freedom doesn’t even have a place. Yet that second headline would be accurate: The socialists who won are interchangeable with fascists. This goes against the intuition of mainstream people whose knee-jerk reaction will be, “No! Communists are on the Left! Fascists are on the Right!” Oh really, and who decided that?

I don’t have space to go into Stalin’s role in fabricating the current Left-Right spectrum. but it’s covered in my book, linked below, underneath the cover shot. Read it, please, not because I wrote it, but because I don’t know of any other text that makes the case of communism’s fascist identity, even though it should be obvious to a critical thinker. Read it, because as long as people assume that the only alternative to communism is fascism, they will vote Left, and we will end up with the very thing they think they are voting against: fascism.

Communists Are Fascists (and too stupid to know it)

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Heidegger addresses language-as-communication vs. language-as-truth, 1957

Martin Heidegger is not easy. But give this short video a chance. Heidegger was one of the first intellectuals to challenge the ubiquity of technology, and here he is questioning the use of language as the mere technology of communication. What else could language be, you may say, but communication? What else? The instrument of truth, which Goethe (as cited here by Heidegger) called “the poetic language.” Genuine poetry doesn't just communicate, it uncovers truth. It is the same when we use words to unveil concepts, whether concepts of material entities or of experiential conditions.

Heidegger called the truth “aletheia” or “unconcealment.” The use of words as logos serves the truth. Poetry does this and so do we when we look deep at an object or into an idea and determine the right word for it. In everyday use, however, words can become easy handles for second-hand concepts. In the video, Heidegger notes that language of the naturally familiar and the language of science were drifting further and further apart, and that scientific language emphasized calculation. At 4:31 he observes that the emphasis on scientific language was (already in 1957) “changing and hardening man’s imagination into merely a kind of calculative thinking.”

Consider where we are today with “Artificial Intelligence,” which is not intelligence at all. Noble Prize-winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose has pointed out again and again that “AI” is not intelligence, but calculation. No one seems to listen to him. Intelligence means the ability to grasp the identity, the nature, the essence of X, not merely analyze it. So-called “AI” can tell you everything about a cat, from its physical characteristics and its history to its biology, but it has no idea what a cat is.

Why is this important? Because the truth is being diminished to mere mathematics. Because the truth requires freedom of the individual to uncover/unconceal for him/herself the essences of things, and when this is reduced to mere calculation, we might as well hang up our humanity and let AI roll over us.

Listen to the video and see if you don’t glimpse something prophetic from nearly 70 years ago.

(For those who object on obvious grounds: Yes, I know that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party for about a year in the 1930s. He was a political idiot, overwhelmed by his German nationalism in spite of the fact that his teacher Husserl was Jewish, his mistress Hannah Arendt was Jewish, and a number of his prominent students, such as Emmanuel Levinas, were Jewish. Heidegger was de-Nazified after the war and for two years forbidden to hold a university position. Arendt’s intervention put him back in circulation. Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, adored Heidegger’s work and paid him a friendly visit following the war. Sephardic Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida based much of his philosophy on Heidegger’s principles. If he and Arendt and Frankl can forgive Heidegger, so can we. The truth is too important to ignore just because it comes from a man who has committed a foolish and stupid act. Richard Wagner wrote some viciously anti-semitic articles. I still listen to his music. Feel free to argue to the contrary.)

I’ve posted the video above, not because I wish to discuss the “Double Standards of Religious Freedom” but because of the opening 42 seconds, and specifically the phrase Harris quotes his colleague as using at around 0:40 — “That’s just your opinion.” What is the belief Harris asserts that prompts this response? It is the belief that forcing women to wear burqas and beating or killing them if they refuse to do so is wrong. It’s just his opinion. It carries no moral weight.

Harris then gives her — yes, the academic objecting to his assertion is a woman — the following hypothetical. Suppose a culture existed in which every third child had its eyeballs removed, wouldn't that count as something less than morally desirable? “It would depend,” she answers, “on the reason for it.”

You see, different cultures have different practices. One cannot proclaim “right” or “wrong” except as a cultural prejudice. It’s just your opinion, and your opinion is no more than an expression of the culture you come from.

What, precisely, is “just” your opinion? Any expression of value. Anything other than 2 plus 2 are 4 and the sun rose this morning. And we’re not even sure of those. “Truth" is, after all, a matter of cultural bias. A matter of opinion.

This is the result of philosophical subjectivism that has been dominant since the 17th century. It began with Descartes and continued through the Enlightenment to Kant and beyond. Hamlet is our most treasured drama for the simple reason that Shakespeare saw clearly what was happening intellectually ca. 1600: Doubt was raising its putrid skull. The title character is told by his father’s ghost that he (the father) has been murdered by Hamlet’s uncle. Hamlet vows revenge. Only….

How can he be sure? He cannot prove that his uncle murdered his father. He vacillates and acts with wild inconsistency, resulting in the death of poor, silly Polonius. Even after staging a play to “catch the conscience of the king,” Hamlet fails to act. After all, it’s just his opinion that uncle murdered daddy. He postpones action so long that, when he does follow through, it’s too late. Everybody dies, Denmark falls, and Norway — self-assured, “I don’t need to prove anything” Norway, whom Hamlet confesses would go to battle “even for an eggshell” — enters and conquers. If you want a metaphor for today’s West vs. Islam, there it is.

To doubt one’s own beliefs because they cannot be proven leads to subjectivism. X is not true in an absolute sense, but only as an opinion, as a subjective belief. I believe late-term abortion is murder because I know that the “fetus” is a fully functional human. That this human is dependent on another human for life does not change its condition. But wait, this is merely an opinion, based on old cultural values which have been supplanted by new ones. I also believe rape is wrong in all situations, but that’s just an opinion, so when Muslim gangs rape young girls in England — research it, it is a fact — it is justified by their opinion that it’s open season on “infidel” girls. You can’t prove them wrong!

If you’re paying attention, you’ll have noticed the following: Doubt/subjectivism leads inevitably to Absolute Certainty. The abortion-on-demand crowd will not allow for disagreement. They are right and you are wrong. The “libertarian” Cory Massimino has proclaimed that to stop a woman from aborting her baby up to the moment of birth is tantamount to rape. Meanwhile, actual rape is excused for “cultural” reasons. In 2019 the following was entered into the records of the House of Lords:

“Noble Lords may be aware of the case of Sarah—not her real name—which has been reported as one of the worst sex grooming cases on record. She describes how she was kidnapped aged 15, imprisoned in a house, forced to learn the Koran and beaten when she made mistakes. She was held as a sex slave for 12 years and was repeatedly raped by different members of the grooming gang. She had three forced Sharia marriages, eight forced abortions and two live births. Her abusers referred to her as ‘white trash’. They forced her to wear Islamic dress and permitted her to speak only Urdu and Punjabi. She has not received the help she needs from social services and is frequently suicidal.”

This was seven years ago, yet only now is England stirring awake to this nightmare. English authorities have been grossly slow to act for the same reason as Hamlet: They realized that the contemporary world judged their belief to be “just their opinion.” The Muslim rape gangs have a right to their opinions as well, and these include their belief that infidel girls are fair game. To impose Western opinion over the opinion of Muslims is to embrace — gasp — Islamophobia. And of course, that’s much worse than rape. The Woke bunch is 100 percent certain of it.

It’s important to keep in mind philosophy’s culpability in all this. Ever since Rene Descartes asserted that his existence was the only immediately demonstrable fact — the infamous “I think, therefore I am” — and David Hume explained that your belief the sun will rise tomorrow is groundless the West has been thrall to the notion that if you can’t prove something along the lines of mathematical proof, it’s a useless assertion, “just an opinion.” Of course, that notion itself cannot be proven, but if you mention this, you won’t be allowed into graduate school. University faculties promulgate subjectivism as an Absolute Truth, and most of them are too stupid even to notice the paradox. Some 20th-century philosophers, notably Martin Heidegger and Alfred North Whitehead, have written powerful indictments of subjectivism, but these have been largely ignored.

In history, one thing and one thing only asserts Truth as non-subjective Truth and does not bother to “prove it,” knowing full well that nothing worth anything is “provable.” One thing and one thing only wins the day for good or for evil:

Masculinity.

Norway exhibited masculinity where Hamlet was self-emasculated. Norway triumphed, Hamlet saw all that he loved drenched in blood.

The Muslim rape gangs acted with masculine assuredness while English authorities tucked their genitals away and congratulated themselves on not being Islamophobic. Hundreds of English girls were sent to a living hell, while Pakistani immigrants grinned.

Men’s actions determine society’s view of right or wrong, not “proof.” An incident in early American history, all but forgotten until Christopher Hitchens’ biography of Thomas Jefferson, demonstrates this. In 1788, when Jefferson was Secretary of State and the country was a baby, it came to his attention that Muslim pirates were enslaving American sailors in the Mediterranean. When he asked representatives of the Caliphate why this was happening, Jefferson was told that the Koran (or Quran, what have you) gave Muslims the right to enslave non-Muslims.

Jefferson did not twiddle his thumbs and say to himself, “Well, we have our opinion on the matter and they have theirs.” He acted with masculine virtue to impose our “opinion” over theirs. He sent the U.S. Marines to destroy the Caliphate, thus engendering the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn. He did so because the Enlightenment ideal of complete subjectivism had not quite reached the halls of government. He did so because he knew that protecting Americans from Barbary pirates was the right thing to do. Could he prove it? Of course not. Nothing worth anything is provable.

Western culture has been emasculated by Enlightenment/doubt/subjectivism. Feminism has played a role. Like it or not, that is the obvious truth. Meanwhile, another, encroaching culture advances dark values with masculine assurance, values such as putting women in bags and beating them when they try to escape, and the best a woman — a woman — in the post-Enlightenment Western intellectual establishment can say when you object is, “That’s just your opinion.”

Dear whomever was Sam Harris’ partner in this dialogue: I don’t have opinions. I make observations. And my observation regarding what should be done with someone like you is this: You should be bitch-slapped and put back in elementary school. Oh dear, do you find that objectionable? Well, that’s just your opinion.

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Above: George Orwell, who depicted a fascist dictatorship in Nineteen Eighty-Four but called it “Oligarchic Socialism” with good reason.

Kids say “poo-poo” instead of s*** because the cute sound shields them from the grossness of the thing described. Adult kids “define” political ideologies in cute ways to keep them from the ugliness of what they indicate. For instance, columnist Dear Abby’s so-called definitions:

• Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.

• Communism: You have two cows. The government takes both and gives you part of the milk.

• Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both and sells you the milk.

• Nazism: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

Cute indeed. And dangerous. Dangerous because it’s close enough to the truth to make some people take it seriously. It ignores among other things the following facts:

1. All four ideologies, not just Naziism, have had people shot, and on mass scales.

2. All four fit easily under the umbrella of collectivism. Their common denominator is State control over those cows — and you.

3. The “definitions” paint socialism in an attractive light compared to the others. Yet its ability to take (should read: steal) a cow could at any moment morph into its ability to take both, sell you the milk, and then shoot you and your remaining livestock. Once the power over you and your property is established, anything goes. The “Naziism” defined above is just a potential extension of “socialism.”

Okay, so these are stupid and misleading. What then are the real definitions? If you are at all familiar with this substack, you know that I am suspicious of definitions. I prefer descriptions, which are the not the same thing. A definition is a set of words that chases other words around in a circle. A description is the concept we have of something when we have observed it carefully, and without previous prejudice.

Let’s look at Socialism. We can see by looking at all forms of government called “socialism” that private property is not allowed. All property is owned by the collective. When people use that word, they usually assume that the government is the collective, or at least its representative. And while that is true to a very large extent, there is such a thing as voluntary socialism, in which the collective is simply the community at large. Famously, the Pilgrims attempted it when they landed at Plymouth Rock. Everyone in the community had an equal share in the crops and other wealth produced, whatever the level of effort they displayed. Work all day and get X, sleep all day and get X. Somehow, that didn't work out, and the Pilgrims reverted to “Get what you work for.” Technically, voluntary socialism constitutes an attempt at instant communism. More about that later.

Socialism today means State socialism, in which the government owns all property, including and most especially, the means of production. In a socialist society, no one owns a farm or a factory. The State owns and runs these and all other forms of wealth production. You’ve heard Mayor Mamdani of New York express his desire for the government to “seize the means of production.” (If you haven’t, look up the video on YouTube.) That is classic socialism: the collective, in the form of government, steals property from individuals and ends up owning everything. Individuals own nothing. The wealth produced by collective ownership is then distributed by the government to individuals “according to their need,” as the formula goes.

Mayor Mamdani calls himself a “democratic socialist,” whatever that may be, but his stated desire to seize the means of production makes him a socialist, period. Yet President Trump and others have called him a “communist.” What is that and how does it differ?

According to the system developed by failed journalist Karl Marx and his banker buddy Friedrich Engels in the 19th century, communism is the end-goal of socialism. In socialism, force is required to make people equal. The government takes from the wealthy and redistributes it to the needy. The government must also keep people laboring to produce wealth for the collective so there’s something for the government to distribute. These two principles are key: 1) The State owns and produces everything, 2) The State decides who will receive goods such as housing, food, and energy.

Communism is what supposedly results when government is no longer required to keep things equal. At some point in the future, preceded by decades if not centuries of socialism, people will simply produce in common and share in common without the government having to force them to do so. The State will “fall away,” leaving the idyllic condition of communism. No one will try to “get ahead” or own property to the exclusion of others, and no government will be necessary to keep people from doing so. Communism is a future stateless society of equal ownership and equal labor. That’s why I called the Pilgrims’ collective society “an attempt at communism.”

This may sound good to you. Wow! A society in which everybody pitches in to produce and everybody shares in the subsequent wealth. Why not?

There’s only one problem. Communism has never, does not, never will, and never can exist. Communism, the averred end-goal of socialism, is a phantom.

It’s easy to see why. Consider the unicorn.

The unicorn is a favorite example of an object-less concept. A unicorn is not a real entity because the concept of one is not anchored to a known physical presence. Physical entities must relate to material objects capable of being presented to the senses, and as we have seen, the object is the same as our thought of it. The thought and the object are coeval, i.e., they exist simultaneously and are indivisible. Where one is, the other is. When that is not the case, then the purported concept is inauthentic.

That is clearly true of physical entities.

It is also true of mental entities such as political theories.

To return to our subject: How can it be said that “communism” does not exist?

“Communism” exists only if one asserts that ideas are prior to matter, that nature (matter) has no nature and that culture should not, therefore, conform to it. If we may make reality anything we can imagine, if we can assert the reality of unicorns because we can see them in our minds, then of course communism is possible. So is breathable water, a fourth primary color, and immortality.

But if we insist that experience of the real is our only true source of concepts, if we understand that concepts are integral to encounters with real-world entities and only encounters with real-world entities, then communism does not and cannot exist, for we nowhere encounter the equality it demands.

Communism rests on the idea that people can be forced to become equal, despite the fact that no examples of equality exist anywhere in the known universe. Not only no two snowflakes, but no two thumbprints, no two roses and no two people are the same, no matter their similarities. For two or more entities to be equal, they must be the same. From the standpoint of realism, that is a literal impossibility, yet this is the meaning of the equality that communism insists must be the future of humankind: an impossible utopia.

Equality contrasts with Freedom, which is everywhere evident. My every action is mine, and yours, yours. My decisions are made independently of yours, even if they are made in consideration of yours. I act freely, which means Freedom exists. The most basic argument for a society that limits government is that humans are free, and therefore in need of a society that reinforces its nature by supporting said freedom.

“Communism” is merely the equation of thoughts with other thoughts. It has no ground in real-world experience. Freedom is real because the experience of acting as an individual human being – of walking or running or petting the cat or eating a hot dog or starting a business – belongs to me. That is what is meant by freedom: the ability to act and the experience of acting as an independent entity. Communism is the theoretical absence of individual freedom and its replacement with “equality,” a condition encountered nowhere in nature — an impossibility.

If socialism’s end-goal is communism, and communism is literally impossible, what then should we label governments that claim to be “socialist” and “communist?”

The government in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is often thought to be a communist government. But Orwell didn't call it that. The government in Orwell’s novel labels itself “oligarchic socialism.” This is the actual end-state of all socialist governments: Rule by oligarchs (the elite) over people forced to be “equal,” forced into labor and into the acceptance of whatever the oligarchs say is so, even to the point of having to believe that, if the State so proclaims, then 2 plus 2 are 5. There is no “nature” of things. Only the vision of the oligarchs.

Every so-called “communist” country has ended up this way. North Korea is only the most extreme example. At first socialism is introduced, with the supposed goal of eventually making everyone equal and happy. As that is an impossibility, communism never arrives (it can’t), so the state hardens and an elite come into permanent rule over a population: oligarchic socialism.

But wait. Doesn't forcing people to live under the absolute rule of the State conform to the idea of fascism? Clearly, it does. Oligarchic Socialism could be called fascist without any alteration of concept. The terms indicate the same thing. Which is why I keep coming back to the importance of calling the Left FASCIST. Yes, they are socialists, but as I have just outlined, socialism leads inevitably to Orwell’s oligarchic socialism, which is indistinguishable in reality from fascism.

Every time I hear someone on the anti-socialist Right called “fascist” I want to scream, “Don’t let them call you that! Call them that!” As long as freedom is associated with “fascism” and the Left is labeled the much milder “socialism” there is little to no hope of cultural victory for the Right. Whatever political group is called “Fascist” will be the bad guys. That association will not, cannot, alter. What remains is to use the term accurately. “Left-wing fascist” is not a contradiction, it’s a redundancy. Until the Right stands up and starts using the phrase loudly and clearly, we might as well all throw up our hands and admit that 2 plus 2 are 5.

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Above: A Hindu widow burns on the funeral pyre of her husband.

When the British established a political presence in India in 1757, it was not their intent to interfere with local customs. But as relationships with the locals deepened, certain Hindu practices rubbed the colonizing Brits the wrong way. One of the big ones was “suttee,” the practice of throwing living widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. (Yes, this was a real thing.) In 1829, William Bentinck, governor-general of Bengal, abolished suttee. The story goes that Hindu leaders protested, claiming suttee was their tradition. Bentinck responded that he would honor their tradition, provided suttee practitioners honored the British tradition of hanging people who burned widows alive. Eventually, the practice disappeared.

I cite this, not to deny the dark side of colonialism, but to point out that it can have a bright side, too. If that sounds strange, if it seems I am saying that evil can be good, it’s because you (like all of us) have been propagandized by contemporary culture to believe in the progressive/leftist judgement of all moral matters as black and white, befitting the model of oppressor vs. oppressed. Colonialism is evil because it enables a more powerful group of people, the oppressors, to lord it over a less powerful group, the oppressed. There’s an end to it.

But what if good and evil were not that easy to define? What if, in the midst of oppressing a people’s culture, one oppresses the evil within it? Does anyone — can anyone — actually defend the practice of suttee? You might excuse it as a cultural practice or an anthropological fact, but morally can you really stay neutral, or worse, support it? Unless you are subhuman, the answer of course is no. And here’s where the Left shifts into its Moralizing mode. By condemning a cultural practice as “evil,” they will say that you are — ready for the obvious? — racist. And racist is the worst thing anyone can be, far worse than burning innocent women alive.

This is how some extreme leftists actually find themselves defending the Iranian regime against the Iranian people, the USA, and Israel. We shouldn’t interfere, they say. Interference borders on colonialism. The West is always the oppressor, and whomever it fights is the oppressed. If the West fights a terrorist regime, it remains in the wrong because it is attempting to change another culture’s beliefs. And that is racist, the worst moral condition imaginable. Next to racism, they say in essence, hanging hundreds of women for uncovering their hair, as the Iranian regime has done, is nothing.

We are clearly dealing with two opposing concepts of good vs. evil. On the one hand, the good is whatever conditions or actions are advocated by the oppressed, while evil is whatever conditions or actions are advocated by the oppressors. This concept relies on a previous understanding of “Oppressed” and “Oppressor.” The distinction is vague. When Rome conquered Carthage, was Rome the oppressor and Carthage the oppressed? It’s hard to see why not, as Rome erased every aspect of Carthage’s culture, not to mention Carthage itself. One of Carthage’s cultural beliefs eradicated by the Romans was the custom of running over newborn babies with chariots to ensure the pleasure of the gods in battle. Carthage was entirely replaced by Rome, complete colonization.

When the Comanche built an empire by fighting and defeating virtually every other tribe on the plains, were they the oppressor? I don’t see why not. Yet one rarely hears the Comanche decried for “colonizing” land held by other tribes, though that is what they did. Furthermore, the tribes conquered by the Comanche had in turn conquered

If any people were ever oppressed by a next-door neighbor, surely it was the Irish by the English. More than a million Irish died and twice as many fled the country when the English forced the export of crops for profit during the potato blight (1847-1855), thus directly and deliberately starving an entire population. This allowed the English to move in and virtually wipe out what was left of the Irish language and many of its customs. (This is for people who think that because I championed the British elimination of suttee I must be pro-Brit.) This was colonialism of a particularly dark sort, but I guess white people colonizing other white people doesn’t count.

And now, the elephant in the room. All but the most diehard antisemites will admit that millions of Jews were murdered by National Socialism during World War II. It is furthermore clear who was oppressed and who did the oppressing. Yet when, after the war, a small group of Jews founded their own tiny nation in a corner of what once had been the Ottoman Empire, suddenly Jews became the oppressor. To be clear: Jews did not “drive out” Arabs upon Israel’s founding. Jews were already there, tilling the land and “turning Palestine into a garden” as T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” wrote to George Bernard Shaw in 1932. Rather, thousands of Muslim Arabs fled Israel to avoid living under “Jewish rule,” and in the hope that they could join with Muslim neighbors to “push Israel into the sea.” (This phrase survives as “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” i.e., destroy Israel and replace it with yet another Muslim country to add to the several already there.) Israel did precisely zero oppressing in 1948. This is well documented. How it got translated into Arabs becoming the oppressed with Jews cast as their oppressors may never be fully understood. But somewhere in the mix emerged idea that “white people” (i.e., any fair-skinned adherents to Western civilization) are the oppressors, while all people of color are the oppressed.

This belief has crescendoed since the 1950s, and is peaking today. If you think that European/white culture has done anything other than harm oppressed minority cultures then you are racist/nationalist/right-wing/Islamophobe/whatever. You are BAD. This is a baby’s way of judging good and evil. A baby will count as “good” those near to him but “bad” those who are strangers. It’s cut and dried, black and white. A leftist will judge as good all those who believe in the oppressor/oppressed model and as evil any who deny it.

Those who reject the oppressed/oppressor model embrace the opposite viewpoint; namely, that the good is an expression of the truth about humanity. The truth is that humanity (like the rest of existence) has a certain nature and that this nature can be discovered and developed, which is the good, or ignored and opposed, which is the foundation of evil. If you’ve ever wondered why the left is so adamant about the insane assertion that men can become women, get pregnant and lactate, this is why: Because to admit that men and women exhibit distinctly different abilities and qualities is to admit that there is such a thing as human nature. The left can’t afford that. To be able to say that socialism works when it has never worked before, you must first be able to claim that humans are infinitely malleable. All you need for socialism to work is a totally different humanity. Creating a new, sexless race devoid of all so-called natural conditions such as the desire for family and a yearning for the divine tops their list of preparations.

If humanity has a certain, inherent nature that cannot be radically altered, then good and evil become measurements of how behavior conforms or fails to conform to the truth of that nature. The manifold truth has revealed itself in the West through historic events and metaphorical episodes throughout the ages. An early truth was expressed in the commemoration of Passover, which revealed the need for people to be free from pharaohs of every kind. A different truth was brought to light in ancient Athens, which brought reason to bear on human experience. These two principles — freedom and reason — have informed the West for millennia. They stand in opposition to the oppressor/oppressed model of the culture-mavens.

“Ha!” I hear the sophists sneer. “You are not championing the true and the good, you are merely touting as true the beliefs of your culture, which is no better than any other culture and in fact decidedly worse for its being oppressive. There is no universal truth, just ‘truths’ relative to their culture of origin.”

Ah yes. Pilate and Jesus. Jesus: “I came to bear witness to the truth” Pilate: “What is ‘truth’?” Pick a side. Choose carefully. It is not a choice between oppressor and oppressed, though the left would surely see it that way. It is a choice between “truth” as a subjective irrelevancy and truth as spiritual knowledge. The sophists of the left will insist that the truth of freedom and reason is not provable, hoping you’ll forget that their claim to merely culturally relative “truth” is equally unprovable. Proof is not possible in this domain, only demonstration and an appeal to the good that is possible in all people, if dormant in some.

“Colonialism” is just a word meaning that a bunch of people conquer another bunch of people and drag their stuff into the newly conquered space. It has happened throughout history, was probably common before history, and will continue to happen in the future, barring a miracle. Good and evil exist inside colonialism as they exist inside every human activity. Colonialism has been known to bring disease and slavery into colonized countries. It has also been known to save women from being burned alive and babies from being run over by chariots. Colonialism for good or ill depends heavily on who is colonizing whom. But that is far too contextual for the baby-thinkers of the contemporary left.

PS:

In terms of the sheer number of countries invaded and culturally overthrown throughout the last 1500 years, the No. 1 colonizer — and it’s not even close — is:

Islam.

As I said, it depends on who is colonizing whom.

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It is one of the claims of this substack that the authentic meanings of certain words are slipping away, replaced by words that favor Left ideology. These are individual words such as “fascist,” “racism,” and “hate.” Let’s add “stolen.”

“No one is illegal on stolen land” are now famous words after the semi-talented Billie Eilish uttered them at the Grammy Awards earlier this month.

Dear nitwit: No, this is conquered land. When a socialist government takes private property by force, that is stolen land.

The territory of the United States was won largely in combat with tribes of Native Americans, though at various times we also fought and won land from the British and the Mexicans — who had previously conquered and won said land from Native Americans.

No land was stolen. It was conquered.

If history were properly taught in high school, Eilish and similar self-righteous types would be aware of the difference. When Henry V fought the French at Agincourt, he didn't steal their land. He conquered it. Romans didn’t steal the territories of its empire, it fought for them. One might make the case that wars of conquest are not a good idea (though in some cases they obviously are, e.g. the Allies conquering Nazi Germany, Christians taking back Spain from Islam) but you cannot use the concept “stolen” interchangeably with the concept “conquered,” except of course in the company of those with minds so open their brains have fallen out.

But now, in addition to being aware of Lefties abusing individual words, we must be on guard for whole sentences they speak, the true meanings of which go right past their sympathetic audiences. Case in point, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s recent comments before a black audience in Georgia. He was there to promote his new book. Keep that tidbit in mind.

As you can see from the video clip above, Newsom very brashly assured his black audience that he is just as stupid as they are. “I’m just like you. I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy,” he said, grinning. If you understand English, what he is saying is clear: “You (black people in the audience) are just like me (‘I’m just like you’) in that you probably didn't get an SAT over 960, i.e., you’re average-to-below average, like I am.”

How is this not racist?

There is no debating that this is what he said. If you examine his sentences, that is their only possible meaning. We on the Right understood this immediately, commencing a barrage of videos and commentaries. And from the Left? Nothing that I can find. (If you locate a Left-leaning response, please post it in comments.)

One might assume that Newsom’s defenders are too embarrassed to say anything. I don’t think so. I doubt they understood what he said, or if they did, they refused to acknowledge it. After all: “Democrats/liberals/Leftists cannot be racists, right? That’s why we went Left — so that we would be safe from labels like that. We memorized the formula: Left is good, Right is bad. Please don’t take that away! We’d have to think for ourselves!”

I expect the Left will, at length, come up with some kind of “interpretation” that supposedly contradicts the non-contradictable meaning of Newsom’s words. They’ll dribble cliches like, “The meaning is subjective,” and be taken seriously by a culture that’s been brought up on the lie that truth is endlessly malleable.

By the way, Newsom dropped a bomb that got lost in the nuclear explosion of his racist remarks: He can’t read. His dyslexia keeps him from being understand the printed word. (However did he write that book he’s promoting?) AND HE IS BEING TAKEN SERIOUSLY AS A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE?

I don’t know about you, but I want a president who doesn’t need to trust somebody else to read urgent messages to him from foreign leaders.

+++

Above: Losing Democrats scream h*tred at an image of Donald Trump. All right, it’s a scene from 1984 where the socialist population scream h*tred at an image of their No. 1 Enemy of the State, Emanuel Goldstein. But really, what’s the difference?

Originally published following Trump’s election in 2024, this is one of my most viewed and most shared postings. It contrasts the Left’s hatred of Trump and Trumpers with the Right’s hatred of Leftist ideas. Unfortunately it is still pertinent, so I am reposting. The Left continues to judge as evil any action taken by Trump, even when Democrat presidents have taken the same actions, as when Obama used ICE to kick illegals out of the country, resulting in 20-plus deaths. It refuses to acknowledge children rescued from trafficking by Trump’s administration, the reduction of prescription medications, and the justified military strike against the dictator Maduro.

Here’s the reprint from late 2024:

I promised to address the subject of hate, but almost wish I hadn’t. Hate is difficult to discuss because it is morally elusive. It is not intrinsically immoral to hate. One may hate sin and injustice, and in fact, Thomas Aquinas wrote that failure to hate injustice is a sin. (FYI, we use “injustice” here to mean something much broader and inclusive than the Left’s tiny mantra of “lack of equity.” For example, the theft of some people’s money to underwrite the lives of others, the waging of pointless wars, the tyrannical imposition of medical procedures…. The list is long.)

There is a line to be drawn, however, between hating evil ideas and unjust outcomes on the one hand, and hating people on the other. “Hate the sin, not the sinner” is the watchword of Christian belief regarding hatred. It is not always an easy distinction to maintain. We all hate Naziism. Why can’t we hate Hitler, et al, as well? Where does one stop and the other begin? Yet the difference is crucial, especially when it applies to groups of people. Hating Germans was never acceptable, even when the ideology many of them espoused led to nightmare. Generalizing according to race, nationality, ethnicity, religion or any other form of group identity is the most despicable form of hate, no matter who’s hating whom.

It is this mass-identity form of hate that concerns us here. Recall the song lyric:

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

— Oscar Hammerstein II

The song from South Pacific refers of course to racial hatred. Lt. Cable in the musical has found it impossible to overcome the prejudice drilled into him by his parents and marry a Polynesian girl. How could he tell mom and dad? Racial hatred has, thank God, greatly abated over the decades, but in his song, Lt. Cable hit on something that applies to all forms of hatred: It must be taught. Group-hate is not an inherent quality. We are not born with it. It is installed in us, instilled in us. It is carefully taught — taught by families, by nations, by cultures, by ideologies. Catholics were once taught to hate Jews, and Protestants to hate Catholics and vice-versa. It’s not limited to the West. The massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda was group-hate at its pinnacle, and while I am no expert on African tribes, I would bet good money that the Hutus weren’t born hating the Tutsis. They had to be taught.

The massive outpouring of hatred directed against Trump supporters by a large number of Democrats has not, and I pray will not, reach anything like the fever pitch of tribal slaughter. But it is nonetheless disturbing that a Yale professor has advised Kamala Harris’s supporters to cut off contact with relatives who voted for Trump — a position endorsed by Whoopi Goldberg; that according to ABC News roughly half the country regards Trump as a fascist (!) and by extension his followers fascists as well; that TV personality Jimmy Kimmel condemned millions of Americans for “voting for a criminal”; and that numerous videos of losing Democrats expressing outrage and in many cases suggesting violence against Trump supporters have appeared on social media.

Sometimes the hatred is potentially deadly. Consider Marn’i Washington, a FEMA worker who was fired recently for not assisting disaster victims if their property contained a Trump/Vance sign. This is an almost unbelievably evil act, tantamount to attempted murder. Washington was fired, but in an interview following her firing she claimed that the word to avoid Trump/Vance houses came down from on high — from FEMA officials. This is being investigated, and if true, should result in prison terms, not just firings.

None of this should surprise, however, considering that the tens of millions who voted for Trump have been labeled “deplorable” and “garbage” by Democrat leaders.

In short, to the Left we are deplorable fascist garbage who support a criminal president and deserve to be ignored by our families and by the government agencies charged with our protection. Oh yeah, we’re also white nationalists and a threat to democracy.

They hate us.

Furthermore, they hate us because we are “hateful.” Everywhere the Woke post on social media you see the word “hate” hurled against conservatives. We burst with hate. We thrive on hate. We HATE HATE HATE and the losing side hates that!

But you know what? They’re right. We do hate. Only we don’t hate them.

We hate their ideas and their actions.

We hate socialism, a failed economic system that’s killed more people than it’s fed.

We hate monetary policy that inflates the economy and leads to poverty.

We hate the idea that it’s okay for millions of people to flood our country without being vetted for criminality, disease, and child sex trafficking. We hate the fact that money is diverted from our own citizenry, from veterans and the homeless, to feed and house these flagrant lawbreakers, who are really nothing other than invaders without uniforms.

We hate sending billions of dollars to a country halfway around to the world to fight a losing war that only benefits American munitions manufacturers.

We hate abortion-on-demand, as if it were just another form of birth control.

We hate the absurd idea that the sexes are interchangeable, hate men posing as women in sports, and hate most especially surgeries on children that remove their sex organs.

We don’t hate the people who think and do these things, although we generally think of them as fools. We hate their foolish ideas and deeds that result in death, poverty, and moral collapse. This is the “hate” they hate us for.

So I have a suggestion for the losing side: Stop hating us, and stick to hating our ideas. In hating our ideas you will need to come to grips with what those ideas are. You will have to face the possibility that when you censor free speech, using “hate speech” as an excuse, it is your side that embraces fascism, not ours. You’ll have to explain why child sex trafficking is actually cool, and why people who have broken the law to enter this country deserve better treatment than our own citizens. You’ll be forced to defend arming a foreign country to kill people in another foreign country for no reason pertaining to our own freedom and security. You’ll need to consider the meaning of free enterprise vs. that of socialism with an open mind.

It would be a grand shift of focus if the Left were to engage with us intellectually rather than shouting their hatred at The Orange Man, just as the Ingsoc population in Orwell’s 1984 hurled hatred at the fictional Emanuel Goldstein. (See the movie clip above.) But I’m not holding my breath. Remember, “You’ve got to be taught,” and a large chunk of our country has been taught to hate all that Trump and his followers stand for. The indoctrination has been going on for decades, long before Trump made his appearance on the political scene.

I was a teenager in the late 1960s, when the seeds of this hatred were sown. Anyone who recalls that time will remember the sudden change that came over the country. The dividing line was the Vietnam War. Before that war, America was secure in its values, which included the rights outlined in our Constitution — the right to free speech, the practice of one’s chosen religion, the right to bear arms, etc. — and the idea that individuals were free to pursue their dreams based on their own merit. There were flaws, as there will be in any social system, the most serious of which was the undercurrent of racism. The turmoil of the ‘60s brought racism and other previously hidden faults to the surface and made it possible to set a course correction.

Along the way, however, the idea set in that America’s flaws made her somehow irredeemable. American values “marginalized” the poor, and never mind that the country’s poor at the time numbered far fewer per capita than most other countries. American values idolized the family, which to the nay-sayers was nothing more than an institution for the enslavement of women. American values favored the independent and the industrious over the collective and the non-productive, a violation of socialist ethos. American values derived from Christianity, which was guilty of not being Buddhism, the chic religion of the ‘60s generation.

To make taking sides easy for the uncritical mind, the Right-Left political spectrum, which had gone through myriad distortions since its origin in the 1789 French Revolution, was further distorted to accommodate two conflicting political stances at the same end of the spectrum. If you championed freedom from government-enforced social change, you were on the Right. But being on the Right also meant championing fascism, the very epitome of government-enforced social change! Freedom thereby became conflated with its opposite, and being on the “Right” came to mean both resisting state control and insisting on it.

Confusion sent unreflective people to the Left, since it was purported to be the more compassionate…and, well, at least it wasn’t fascist! Thoughtful people noticed that it was the Left, not the Right, that demanded government control of everything from business to morals, and that this was closer to actual fascism than the Right’s hands-off position. But thoughtful people were hard to find. Besides, it’s always much easier to acquiesce to what your society teaches you, and what ‘60s society taught was that being on the Left was good, and being on the Right was bad. It was really that simplistic.

Those on the Left were also deemed (by the Left, who were in charge of the academy) to be intelligent, while those on the Right were labeled stupid and uninformed. In other words, “intelligence” came to mean the uncritical acceptance of whatever was said to be “on the Left.” If you challenged any ideas held by the Left, you were a “Right-winger,” and socially unacceptable as well as stupid. I recall having what at first I thought would be a civilized conversation with two advocates of strict gun control. This was in the 1970s, long after American values, including the Second Amendment, had come to be considered equal to fascism. My two friends were staunch advocates of removing most guns from private ownership. “That won’t keep criminals from getting guns,” I argued, “and will only make it harder for ordinary citizens to defend themselves.” Instead of offering a counter-argument, one of them turned to the other and said, “He’s really gone right-wing, hasn't he?” That ended the discussion. Left is good, Right is bad.

From the ‘60s on, “Being on the Left” became a path to automatic intelligence, instant moral rectitude, and fast-track political correctness. No thinking required.

And now the 2024 election has exposed the fact that a large majority of Americans never bought into it, never accepted Leftist hatred of their own country and its values. The Left may have taken over the universities, the media, public health and general society, but the spirit of independence — which from 1776 onward has been the core of the American experiment, whatever its errors along the way — endured beneath the cultural radar and came out Nov. 5 en masse to restore American values to America. It was a kind of miracle.

Yet we are hated by a minority that would upend the results of this election and call it “democracy.” They hate us because they have nothing else to justify their positions. They cannot defend the indefensible ideas they espouse. They don’t even try. They simply pronounce moral cliches about compassion and love and then turn with unparalleled viciousness against anyone who questions their automatic claims to virtue, starting with the Orange Man at the top, and working their way down to each and every one of us. If they were not fools, they would stop to ponder why intelligent, courageous Democrats like R.F.K. Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Naomi Wolf have seen through the charade and abandoned the Democrat party.

It has taken 60 years for the ‘60s Leftist project to run its course. It is now spent, and its partisans have only hate in their arsenal. The brainwashed population in Orwell’s 1984 focused their hate on one fictional man because they had nowhere else to put it. The Left has for years used Pres. Trump as the target of their hate, with “deplorables” as mere appendages. Now their hate has spread to the tens of millions of us who supported Trump. You hate us but we will not hate you back. We don’t roll like that. We know you are redeemable. We know you can change your minds if you are honest about what has happened.

But if you don’t, it won’t matter in the long run. We have truly turned a page. We have won, and will continue to win.

+++

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (above)

“Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

As 2025 ends and 2026 begins, words remain a weapon employed with great success by the Left. For instance:

“Colonialism.” This refers to the activity of one a political system taking over a country or land foreign to that land’s beliefs. If it were applied accurately, Islam would be fingered as its most successful advocate. When Islam booted up in the 7th century, zero countries were Muslim. A mere three centuries later, formerly Christian Egypt and formerly Zoroastrian Persia were Muslim countries. They had been colonized. Islamic colonization continued until today, when 53 countries — none of which were originally Muslim — genuflect to Mecca and intone those hideous calls to prayer that Obama says he loves so much. And you have to be blind, deaf, dumb, and butt-stupid not to see that Islam today is attempting to continue its colonial project in the UK and Europe, as well as places like Dearborn, Michigan.

And yet, ask AI for a “history of colonialism,” and this is what you get:

“Colonialism's modern era began in the 15th century with European maritime powers like Portugal and Spain exploring, conquering, and settling territories, kicking off what's often called the Age of Discovery, with major waves expanding into the Americas, Africa, and Asia until the mid-20th century. While forms of empire existed earlier (like ancient Greece/Rome), the systematic, state-driven control of distant lands by European nations marks the start of modern colonialism, driven by trade and capitalism.”

In other words, Europeans virtually invented colonialism. Colonialism prior to “the modern era” is not even mentioned, because to do so would make ignoring Islam impossible. Rule No. 1: Always blame white people and capitalism. If they are not to blame, figure a way to make it look as if they are. This clothes the concept (in this case, the idea of colonialism) in a word (“colonialism”) that hides the concept’s real meaning and substitutes “quite another object” in its place. (See the Wittgenstein quote above.)

Israel recently joined Europe on the list of countries called “colonialist,” which is darkly hilarious when you realize that Jews have been living in the area for millennia, and that Israel is a tiny speck of real estate surrounded by gigantic states that Islam colonized in recent centuries.

You may have noticed that the word we use for the actual concept, “colonialism,” is the same as the word used to hide the concept. This is what makes getting at the truth almost unbreakably difficult. We must use words to get past words, must disentangle our minds from the lies of words by means of words themselves. The main thing to remember is never to take a word to mean what it purports to mean in everyday discourse, but to look deeply into its original, authentic meaning — the concept behind the linguistic symbol. “Colonialism” has an authentic meaning, and it didn’t start with Europeans.

And then there’s….

“White nationalism.” This is assumed in daily chat to be a deep evil, where “black nationalism” and “brown nationalism” are assumed to be next-to-holy. That would be labeled an instance of racism if the word “racism” actually held any meaning. But for years now, “racism” has clothed the concept of anti-racism. If you believe that merit alone determines worth, or that certain truths are universal and apply to all humans, then you are a “racist,” which is to say, an anti-racist.

I know that “white nationalism” does exist and it ain’t pretty, though I’ve never personally met a white nationalist. So-called “alt-right” activist Nick Fuentes really is a white nationalist, as well as a real-deal racist piece of filth. I’d like to think he’s in the minority, though I can’t confirm it. Most people who are called “white nationalists” aren’t even remotely racist. They are simply white. For instance, many on the Left besmirch Charlie Kirk’s memory by calling him “racist,” yet when it is pointed out that Kirk founded, at his own expense, a non-profit organization for the promotion of black entrepreneurs, his accusers ignore it. Kirk was white and unashamed of being white. Therefore, he was a “white nationalist.” So are tens of millions of us by that definition.

Far more common than actual white nationalists like Fuentes are what might be called “American nationalists,” people who love their country in spite of the flaws of which they are all too well aware. These include many black and brown Americans, and exclude a big chunk of white people. I personally hold white people like Hunter Biden and Tim Walz in utter contempt, yet I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for black Americans like Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell. This makes me a “white nationalist” to Leftist moralizers.

And of course there’s….

“Immigrants.”

Watch Godfather II again, and take special note of the scene early on when young Vito arrives by ship in New York Harbor after escaping execution by a Mafia boss in Sicily. See the crowd on board look up with awe at the Statue of Liberty, filled with a quiet hope. Watch as each newcomer registers with an official and is examined for disease. While it is not shown in the film, it is also true that people newly arrived from other countries needed to show proof that they had relatives or friends already in the United States, and that they were qualified to work. These people were immigrants.

Now consider the millions of people from dozens of countries around the world who have crossed our borders in the last several years without bothering to notify the government of the country they’ve entered, and who then take up residence and demand to be housed, fed, and generally taken care of while also waving the flags of the countries they’ve escaped, committing crimes on a scale out of proportion to their numbers and speaking ill of the United States. These people are not immigrants.

They are invaders.

Immigrants wish to partake in the benefits of their new country but also to contribute to it. Invaders seek to plunder the land they’ve entered. For evidence that we have been invaded, looking no further than the Somali population of Minnesota. Somalia is a destitute country in which the biggest contributor to the GDP is piracy — literally. In other words, Somalia fosters corruption. Instead of shedding their corruption upon arrival here, they put their worst tendencies to work, at first by merely signing up for tax-funded stuff (81 percent — EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT — of Somalians are on welfare), and then defrauding the government of literally billions of dollars. (If you are unaware of what I’m talking about, you probably rely only upon The New York Times, aka Pravda USA, for information.) While I am pleased by the work done by alternative journalists to unveil this atrocity, the reportage would be greatly improved if the proper word was used.

Consider the difference between these two statements:

“Somalian immigrants are responsible for stealing billions in tax dollars.”

“Somalian invaders are responsible for stealing billions in tax dollars.”

The second one has more punch because it is accurate. If this is recognized, Pres. Trump’s stated desire to kick Somalis out of the country is not the heartless “racist” rant the mainstream press has predictably dismissed it as being, but a perfectly reasonable response to an overtly evil act.

Unfortunately, the current political lexicon forbids me to call “evil” an act taken by “oppressed” populations. If Somalis, or Afghans, or Pakistanis, or members of any third-world population commit crimes ranging from illegal entry of the country to outright murder it’s okay, because they’re oppressed. Remember the Jewish couple murdered in D.C. by a man shouting “Free Palestine”? How long did the outrage over that event last? A few days, perhaps. If a Jewish man had murdered a Palestinian couple in D.C. (an event I can’t even imagine happening) we would still be hearing about it. Moral culpability is now weighted by national and ethnic identity.

The list of abused words could go on at some length. “Compassion” and “empathy,” misused massively, would be near the top. But the word most urgently in need of reclamation is fascism, a product of Left thinking that the Left blames on the Right. In that regard, I’m happy to announce that a marketing campaign is set to be launched next month for my book, Communists Are Fascists (and too stupid to know it). Published in October, Communists Are Fascists has not sold well, but my belief in the importance of its message prompted me to engage a marketing firm in promoting it. Fortunately, I was approached by a marketing agent who understands my book and is sympathetic to its message. I consider this my Christmas miracle! Look for promotions of my book starting in January.

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Above: Billy Preston covering George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” Or did George Harrison cover Billy Preston?

I am just old enough to recall a time when the word “cover” was not a musical term. Now, of course, it’s common, and refers to the performance of a song by someone other than the original artist.

Or does it? The concept generally works out. For instance, the Beatles were the first artists to release the song “Yesterday,” written by band member Paul McCartney. Since 1965, when the song was released, “Yesterday” has been performed — excuse me, “covered” — by more artists than any other song in history. This is simple and clear because it more or less corresponds to the distinction between writers and performers that existed before the 1960s.

But the concept of “cover” gets messy when artists are the first to record a song written by someone else. In 1969, McCartney wrote the song “Come and Get It,” not for the Beatles, but for a band called Badfinger. After Badfinger’s release of the song, other artists “covered” it. Only…whose song were they covering? Were they covering Badfinger’s song? Or were they covering a song by Paul McCartney? Both, maybe? The word “cover” confuses the issue of musical cause (writing) and effect (performance).

It also has the long-distance effect of giving more weight to performing a song than to writing one. Online I’ve seen countless references to “Fred Astaire’s ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz” and Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” The habit of associating a song with the artist who first performed the song obscures the fact of the song’s writer. There is no such thing as “Fred Astaire’s ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz” or Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” Both songs were written by Irving Berlin. They are his songs, and Fred and Bing merely sang them.

It gets weirder when you consider that George Harrison’s song “My Sweet Lord” was released on an album by Billy Preston six weeks before Harrison’s recording. So, can we say that George Harrison “covered” Billy Preston’s “My Sweet Lord”? “Wait!” you say, “George Harrison wrote ‘My Sweet Lord,’ so it was Billy Preston covering him!” Yes, but Preston released his version first, and in every other case, the performing artist who first releases the song owns the song’s identity, as in “Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas.’” So shouldn’t we say that Harrison was covering Preston? It’s a conceptual mess.

The word “cover” used in this manner reached maximum absurdity in my experience when I told someone I’d just met that I liked classical music. He frowned and said, “Isn’t classical music just covers of other people’s music?”

The conceptually clear way to talk about pieces of music is to make a distinction between writers on the one hand and performers on the other. This makes everything comprehensible. George Harrison wrote “My Sweet Lord” and both he and Billy Preston performed it. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and hundreds of symphony orchestras have performed them. Nothing is “covered.” It is either written by A and performed by B or written and performed by the same person. Introducing the word “cover” confuses the distinction between writer and performer.

Is this a small matter? Perhaps. But the unnecessary manufacturing of words weakens the sharpness and precision of language. And that is a big thing.

The introduction of “cover” is a small example of how unnecessary words blur our understanding. Now, consider the words “social construct.” This phrase caught fire in the ‘60s when a pair of sociologists introduced it, but the roots of the phrase can be traced back to Karl Marx. Marx’s central idea was that man, and for that matter everything else, has no inherent nature. Instead, he is Homo economicus, or economic man. Economic man acts rationally to pursue power and comfort. Values are not inherent. Rather, they emerge as part of economic man’s societal struggle. They are “social constructs.” The best definition I’ve found is:

“A concept that exists not in objective reality but as a result of human interaction.”

You’ve heard the phrase in connection with gender. “Gender is a social construct.” Biology is irrelevant. “Human interaction” alone determines how many genders there are, a number that lately seems to approach infinity. But you’ve also heard “crime is a social construct.” There is no such thing as inherently criminal behavior. Murder and rape must be framed in terms of human interaction, meaning social and economic factors. Honest leftists just come out and say flatly: “EVERYTHING is a social construct. Love, marriage, freedom, morality, slavery, justice — the entirety of human experience.”

That, essentially, is the present, unsupported belief of mainstream leftist intellectuals. Nothing has an inherent nature. “There is no such thing as nature,” says Slavoj Zizek. If leftists came out and proclaimed this creed to the public as baldly as that, they would not be taken seriously. Everyone knows that nature exists. Everyone knows that mushrooms will nourish you and toadstools will kill you. That is not a “social construct” concerning fungi. It is a natural fact. So the left comes up with an impressive sounding phrase that says, essentially, the same thing: “Social construct.” Nothing exists in objective reality, but is a product of our various cultures and societies. Translation: We just randomly make shit up.

I have an answer for the social constructionists.

You have it precisely backward. Natural law is not a social construct. Social construction is an aspect of Natural Law. I demonstrated this as it applies to music in my book, The Sound of Ontology: Music as a Model for Metaphysics (2017, Lexington Books), called “An important contribution to published work in the philosophy of music” by the professor who peer-reviewed it. The book is a revision of the PhD dissertation I wrote during my time at European Gradate School (EGS), and I still can’t believe they awarded me the degree. Why? Because my book makes the case that music is not, cannot be, and is done damage when it is insisted to be, an ungrounded “social construct.”

Music is a product of how we hear pitched sound. When we hear a certain note, our ears suggest certain other notes in a meaningful hierarchy. This cannot be contradicted without denying one’s own ears and the laws of physics. The musical differences between various cultures do not imply a lack of natural musical law. They indicate different ways of applying natural musical law. For instance: The sitar players of Northern India tune their drone strings to complement the strings on which they make melody. That way, the drone strings resonate in tune with the melodic strings. This tuning is not a groundless social construct: It must consist of notes that resonate with the other strings. These tonal agreements are the same ones we in the West use to tune our pianos and guitars, they are simply employed differently. If you want to call these two different musical cultures “social constructs” you may, provided the natural law underlying those constructs is acknowledged.

Natural law, for music and justice and freedom and all the rest, underlies all social constructs. Don’t allow leftists to leave that part out.

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Look up “vermin” in the dictionary and this is what you see

Time to address the elephant in the room.

The Right has seen a frightening surge of anti-Semitism in the last few months, accelerating since Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and especially Nick Fuentes are the central figures in this wave of Jew-hatred, a trend that has split conservatives into two camps.

I remember the moment, earlier this year, when I realized that Tucker Carlson had a problem. He was interviewing a minor Trump cabinet member who outlined the numerous incidents of activist disruptions on Ivy League campuses. She cited a couple of examples involving Antifa types confronting Young Republicans and the like, then presented a case in which a gang of Harvard pro-Palestinian thugs stopped a Jewish student from getting to class. Carlson’s response, in paraphrase, was shocking: “Oh, now don’t you think there are a disproportionate number of Jewish students in Ivy League schools?” Seriously. He turned a discussion about Leftist campus activism into a rant about “too many Jews” at top universities. Okay, Tucker….

This reached a peak recently when Carlson platformed a man Charlie Kirk aptly labeled “vermin,” Nick Fuentes. Fuentes is openly racist and anti-Semitic. He has said on various occasions that Jews “don’t belong” in the United States and has called Israel “the anti-Christ.” Here’s a lovely quote from the vermin about black people: “I’m not living around blacks. Sorry. I want white kids and I don’t want my white kids bringing home black people to marry.”

Then there’s Candace Owens who, within a few days of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, decided that “Israel did it.” Her “reason”: Charlie had recently expressed doubts about certain policies of the Israeli government, and this was enough to cause Israel to murder him. To get straight on this related subject: To object to the policies of a government is not to attack the country itself. The government of my own beloved United States of America has, over the past decades, committed atrocities and pursued evil ends that I find abhorrent. Does this mean I hate my country? Far from it. It means that I love my country and am outraged when people in its government subvert its principles. At any rate, Owens blew up Kirk’s objections, whatever they were, into a theory about his assassination. Kirk was not explicit about these objections in the private conversations Owens cites, and he made no public statements regarding them. Still, Owens is certain that Mossad did Charlie in.

Where is the rock these people crawled out from under?

The big divide on the Right now is whether to continue to count such folk as our own, despite their wildly divergent stance on racial and ethnic equality, or to distance ourselves from them. The advocates of keeping them around say conservatism is “a big tent,” with room for many views.

Wrong. You don’t let snakes into your tent.

We come now to the subject of this substack: the meaning of political words. I have repeatedly made the case that the “Right” stands for individual liberty. This means that individuals — and families, which nurture individuals — are to be treated equally before the law, a condition that promotes equality in social intercourse as well. Any judgement by race or ethic group obviates this principle. When a snake like Fuentes judges people based on the collectivist principle of race or ethnicity, he is no longer on the Right.

It’s hard enough to fight off lying accusations about heroes of the Right like Charlie Kirk, whose memory is regularly doused in vitriol from know-nothings who accuse him of racism and homophobia. You have to punch back with facts such as: Kirk established a non-profit foundation for black entrepreneurs; and, when a person in his audience said he didn't want to share space with gay people, Charlie asked him to leave. This is tiring and time-consuming and generally ends in defeat because the sophistical Left rejects all facts that contradict their view of the Right as nothing but a gang of white nationalists.

Imagine how much harder that fight would be if an actual white nationalist piece of s*** like Fuentes were accepted by us. Integrity demands that he and any platform that features him — Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones are the most prominent ones so far — be condemned. As for Candace Owens, I doubt that anybody of any stature takes her seriously. Anyone who spends a great deal of precious airtime trying to make the case that Macron’s wife used to have a penis is a silly person.

I hate to say this but part of what I think made Fuentes into the subhuman he is today is that he started his political journey as a libertarian. I hate to say it because I, too, began as a libertarian. But somewhere along the way I realized what Christian cleric Richard John Neuhaus said was true: That politics are downstream from culture, and that culture in turn is downstream from spiritual belief. Libertarianism starts with economics, which is at the very bottom of this ontology, downstream even from politics. It espouses free enterprise, which is all well and good, but fails to acknowledge the origins of freedom itself.

Freedom was born in the events of Passover, the liberation of a people from tyranny. Because I am some sort of Christian (though I have never been able to figure out what kind), I also believe that freedom found its fulfillment on the Cross. But whether one is Jewish or Christian it is clear that the dignity of individual human life is central to a truly free society. A mere libertarian may hate Jews and blacks but still have his market economics. A mere libertarian may also claim, as one I know of has, that any attempt to stop a woman from having an abortion at full term is tantamount to rape. A free market is essential. It is also insufficient.

As the West goes forward, it must remember what it is. It is not Nick Fuentes.

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Sophists are people who argue for the sake of arguing, If you are not a sophist, you already know that the real reason for argumentation of any kind is getting at the truth. This was point of Socrates’ dialogues. It was the point of Charlie Kirk’s debates.

A dialogue has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is when the parties state their positions. In the middle, arguments defending those positions take place. A conclusion is reached at the end, when one side or the other has clearly won the argument.

Sophists do not recognize the last step. If an antagonist in dialogue with a sophist makes a definitive case for his position, the sort of thing that used to be crowned with the words Quod Erat Demonstrandum (QED) or “that which was to be demonstrated,” he will be ignored, and words will continue to roll from the sophist’s mouth. The only time a sophist will acknowledge the end of an argument is if the opposition surrenders, not because the sophist has a superior argument, but out of exasperation at the sophist’s unwillingness to cease talking when nothing else remains to be said. Kamala Harris was said to utter “word salads,” but all she did was what everyone else in her party does: throw out emotionally charged phrases to try to make themselves look good and the opposition bad.

Sophism is mother’s milk to the Left, especially the Woke Left.

Want examples? How long do you have? Choose from the profound and the absurd:

A new law in Colorado will allow abortions at 38 weeks. Now, at 38 weeks, there can be no doubt that this is a baby, not a “fetus,” that this baby can survive outside the womb, and that therefore killing him/her would be murder. QED. The sophist: “Wrong, you see, the right of the woman to choose not to raise the baby supercedes….”

Stop. Shut up. The argument is already over, and you lost it.

Iryna Zarutska, 23, was riding the light rail back from work in Charlotte, North Carolina, when she was stabbed to death by a black man who chose her, the only white woman in the car, to murder. As the killer exited, public transit surveillance recorded him saying, “I got that white b****.” That statement, and the choice of target, make it clear that this was a racially motivated killing, QED. The Sophist: “To call this incident racially motivated is racist!”

If the races were reversed, you’d be screaming “Racially motivated!” Shut the hell up.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat candidate for mayor of New York City, is on the record saying that the ultimate goal of the Democratic Socialists, a group with which he is affiliated, is “to seize the means of production.” This is the definition of communism: State-owned factories and businesses. Mamdani is a communist — QED. The sophist: “You are politically uneducated. You misunderstand the theoretical basis of socialism, not as communism per se, but as…..”

Shut up. I won’t allow you to do a verbal tap dance on the truth.

Previous U.S. presidents have added personal luxuries to the White House, including a bowling alley (Nixon), and a basketball court (Obama), all at taxpayers’ expense. Pres. Trump is adding a privately funded ballroom that will reduce the costs previously incurred when spaces outside the White House had to be rented to accommodate events for visiting dignitaries. Trump’s act is an authentic, altruistic enhancement of the White House, QED. The sophist: “He’s destroying the East Wing!” But the East Wing is nothing more than a few offices. “It doesn’t matter! The integrity of the White House, blah, blah.…”

Shut up. You’re moralizing instead of reasoning. You have no case except indignation over the loss of some offices of no historical significance. That’s all you have. Just. Shut. Up.

Find your own cases of Left-Sophists refusing to admit that 2 + 2 = 4. They’re everywhere.

I used to think that Leftists suffered from bad ideas, and that all we had to do was present them with better ideas, cogent arguments, and convincing trains of thought. But when they refuse to consider those arguments, or even to entertain the possibility that objective truth exists and can be grasped by an open mind, when they use words to deceive, answering reason with indignant moralizing, I have to admit I was wrong. Leftists don’t suffer from bad ideas. They suffer from being bad people.

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