We are at war.
The primary conflict in contemporary America is not rich versus poor, or black versus white, or even rural versus urban.
It is Americans versus Leftists. It is Patriots versus Communists.
As I write this in February 2026, we, in the United States and other Western nations, are in the midst of war…and millions of people do not realize it. The Left is at war with America. The Left is at war with the West. The Left is at war with the essential principles of Western Civilization.
The Left has an ally in this war—a powerful ally. That ally is Islam. Not militant Islam—not Islamic totalitarianism—not Islamo-Fascism. Just Islam. The core, basic, ineradicable principles of Islam make it a necessary, implacable wannabe destroyer of Western Civilization, and—despite their massive differences—an inevitable ally of the Left.
There are five questions to answer. These are: One: What are the essential, life-giving principles of Western Civilization? Two: What are the core ideas of the Left that drive it to war against the West? Three: Similarly, what are the core ideas of Islam that drive it to war against the West? Four: What is the nature of this war? Five: Finally, how can America and the West win it?
One: The Life-Giving Principles of Western Civilization
More than any other culture of which we know, Western Civilization has embraced and practiced reason, with all of its magnificent consequences—rational philosophy, science, life-glorifying art, education, business, limited government, individual rights, and eventually, capitalism.[1] Classical Greece—and especially, that extraordinary polymath, Aristotle—provided the cradle of Western Civilization. The eminent historian, Will Durant, wrote: “Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history…physics, biology…poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy…ethics, politics…democracy: these are all Greek words for cultural forms seldom originated, but in many cases first matured…by the abounding energy of the Greeks.” [2]
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was especially seminal. Whatever his errors, he was the first great biologist of whom we know. He contributed substantially to every field of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, and esthetics. He created the field of logic virtually from scratch; and consistently wedded logical reasoning with empirical data, thereby teaching mankind—more than any other intellectual—how to think: Knowledge is gained by logical, non-contradictory reasoning about observed facts.
The Greek, especially the Aristotelian approach to cognition often featured observation-based rationality and it was not accidental that science, as well as philosophy and the arts, flourished in their culture. But reason, although more fully cultivated in the West than elsewhere, did not go unimpeded. The faith-based method of Judeo-Christianity swamped the Greek approach during the early Middle Ages, leading to the catastrophic cultural collapse of the Dark Ages (roughly the 5th through the 9th centuries A.D.).[3] But the Greek, specifically the Aristotelian approach, in the figures of such seminal minds as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and others, made a pronounced comeback in the 13th century Medieval Renaissance. The Italian Renaissance (approximately 1350-1550) and the Enlightenment (roughly the 18th century) were examples of the West returning to its Greek roots, to a great extent secularizing its culture, re-establishing reason, and minimizing the influence of faith.
The United States was founded as a nation in the late-18th century and James Madison’s words in the “First Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution perfectly expressed the Enlightenment attitude toward faith-based beliefs: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” There will be no official state-backed, state-sponsored, state-mandated religion in the United States, one that residents must follow or suffer the consequences of second-class citizenry; religious belief, or the lack of it, is solely a matter of personal conscience. This right to religious freedom, in concert with freedom of speech and of intellectual expression, means that men can reason as they will, they can act on their reasoning as long as they are not criminals, they can write original books, develop new theories in every field, create technologies, compete freely with older ideas and methods, and earn and retain a fortune. Suppressive religion, a suffocating force during the Middle Ages and to this day in the Arab-Islamic world, was suppressive no longer. Human beings were free to think and act. This is the fundamental reason of two benign phenomena: 1. America became the preferred destination of millions of oppressed immigrants 2. America became a fountain of creativity in theoretical and applied science (Benjamin Franklin, Robert Goddard, the heroes of the U.S. space program), in medicine (Walter Reed, Jonas Salk, Maurice Hilleman), in technology (Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers), in industry (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, James J. Hill), in literature (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain), in psychology (William James), in philosophy (Ayn Rand), in film (the creation of the entire industry), and in every productive field known to man.
In America, in the second half of the 19th century, slavery had been abolished, and in the northern states, there were no Jim Crow laws brutally suppressing black American citizens. That region, for that period of time, might have been the freest place/time of human history. The principle of individual rights—the moral conviction that your life belongs to you, not to the state or the church—was likely more prevalent then and there than anywhere else before or since. This freedom of the mind led to the advances described above and to many more.
Part of such freedom was that by the 19th century, and continuing to our day, religion was no longer a pervasively oppressive threat in America or in the Western world as a whole. But in the late-20th century, and especially in the 21st, it had been replaced by a philosophy even more balefully repressive: Marxism.
Two: The Anti-American, Anti-Western Principles of the Left
The dominant philosophy of the modern Western Left is Marxism—which, today, is supplemented with elements of Post-Modernism. Karl Marx (1818-1883), the philosophy’s founder, was a German ideologue whose goal was to destroy capitalism and replace it with full totalitarian socialism. The essence of his philosophy is the theory of class struggle: The dominant feature of all human societies, both historically and currently, is an inherent conflict between the rich and the poor, between the owning class and the working class. The rich get rich by exploiting the poverty classes, while the poor struggle for mere survival. It is important to note that Marx did not distinguish between capitalism and other forms of political-economic systems in this regard. That is, under monarchy, theocracy, feudalism, and imperialism—the non-capitalist systems that Marx knew, as well as the Communist and National Socialist regimes that developed subsequently—wealth is generally gained by brute force; whereas capitalism, embodying the principle of individual rights, legally prohibits theft, and is the system in which wealth is earned via productivity. Marx did not distinguish between political-economic systems of brute force and the political-economic system of individual rights. He did not differentiate between the systems in which the rich plunder their wealth and the system in which the rich produce their wealth. All wealthy men have stolen their wealth. He and his intellectual heirs do not distinguish between Andrew Carnegie and Attila the Hun. To Marxists, America’s productive giants of the late 19th century were uniformly robber barons. They robbed their wealth; they did not produce it.
But the truth is that wealth—the goods and services that benefit human life—must be created. The question of whether wealthy men produce their wealth or plunder it from oppressed slaves, serfs, or conquered victims is of the first moral importance. Carnegie, for example, brilliantly ran a company that forged millions of tons of steel from raw materials dug out of the ground enabling the construction of skyscrapers, automobiles, locomotives, transcontinental railroads, agricultural technology, sewer mains, water mains that deliver fresh water, and much else to the immense betterment of human life. Similarly, John D. Rockefeller expertly ran the Standard Oil Company that took raw petroleum, refined it into usable oil, gasoline, and kerosene products, and then shipped it around the country for beneficial use by millions of Americans. Henry Ford did not steal automobiles or the money he made selling them; prior to his mass production of them, only a relative handful of cars were in existence. Thomas Edison made a fortune by supplying electric power that didn’t exist prior to his creative work. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent was the legal basis of the Bell Telephone Company which, for the first time, provided telephone service to millions of Americans, earning Bell a well-deserved fortune. In more recent times, Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak did not steal their money; they created the Apple I and Apple II computers, founded the Apple Computer Company, eventually created the Mac, revolutionized the computer industry, satisfied millions of customers, and abundantly earned their fortune. In our day, Jeff Bezos created Amazon, an extraordinary company that made possible at-home, retail shopping for billions of fulfilled customers worldwide, whose patronage has made Bezos one of the richest men of history. Under capitalism, productive individuals create wealth, satisfy customers, and earn their fortunes. Noted historian, Paul Johnson, wrote: “From about 1870 onwards, American industrialists, inventors…began to bring the fruits of…man-made mechanical marvels , to the bulk of the American population in unheard of abundance….Food, housing, refrigeration, light, and power…were suddenly made available”[4] and within reach of millions.
Marxists, however, neither see nor care about the critical moral distinction between creating wealth and plundering it. To them, all wealthy men are thieves, they are all robber barons, they are all guilty. Consequently, “Eat the rich,” is their slogan.
“The rich oppress the poor”—this is an article of faith in Marxism. Today, it has been supplemented with related beliefs from such Post-Modernist philosophers as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Marx is right, say the Post-Modernists, in claiming that the rich oppress the poor; human society is divided into two warring classes: oppressor and oppressed. But Marx did not apprehend the full extent of the oppression. The full truth is that whites oppress non-whites, males oppress females, straights oppress gays, and so forth. Justice requires decent people to side with the oppressed in the inveterately on-going class-race-gender-sexual orientation struggle. Philosopher, Stephen Hicks, described Post-Modernist claims like this: “Our current social context…is characterized by oppression that benefits, males, whites, and the rich at the expense of everyone else.” Hicks adds: “Postmodern themes in ethics and politics are characterized by an identification with and sympathy for the groups perceived to be oppressed in the conflicts.”[5]
This marriage of Marxism and Post-Modernism in recent decades, and the prominence of these theories in our universities and school system, is what explains the rise of “wokeness” in contemporary culture, meaning those who are “woke” to the on-going oppression and who intend to remediate it. Ultimately, “liberation of the oppressed” involves full-scale, bloody insurrection a la the French Revolution to overthrow the capitalist system and establish the dictatorship of the working class (or of the oppressed groups more broadly). Marx’s call for violent revolution was interpreted by his followers, such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others, as a mandate to annihilate class enemies. For example, Martin Latsis, Lenin’s head of the Cheka (the secret police), told his men: “We don’t make war against any people in particular. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.”[6] Events in the Soviet Union, in Communist China, in Cambodia, in North Korea, and elsewhere, show us that members of the owning class are to be expropriated of their cash, their property, their freedom, and their very lives. Notice that the murder count of Communism’s “class enemies” over the past century is a numbing 100 million.[7]
But if the goal is to succor historically oppressed groups, why rail against, and seek to destroy, capitalism and its principle of individual rights? After-all, surely, in logic, the principle of individual rights extended to all human beings is the panacea for oppression in any and all of its hideous iterations. And just as certainly, Communism, a brutally dictatorial system that denies and expunges individual rights, and that cruelly punishes all opposition to the state with execution and/or harsh slave labor[8], will inevitably oppress innocent victims, probably by the millions.
Related, why the hatred poured out in our day against white males? One example of such antipathy is Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its sub-category of Critical Whiteness Studies promulgated by such intellectuals as Robin DiAngelo. These CRT writers blame Western Civilization and the white man for virtually every evil known to history—imperialism, racism, slavery, genocide, and any other horror of which they can conceive. For example, American writer and critic, Susan Sontag, wrote: “If America is the culmination of Western white civilization…then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. The truth is that Mozart, Pascal…Shakespeare…Newton…et. al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”[9] But knowledge of history and philosophy combine to show us the blatant falsity of these anti-white beliefs. For example, slavery has existed all over the world for all time, extending back into the mists of pre-history, including in Africa, where powerful tribes subjugated weaker ones, often enslaving victims for their own use or for sale to Arab slave traders and later to European ones.[10] Westerners not only did not originate slavery or the slave trade; it was the burgeoning principle of individual rights in 18th century Great Britain that lead, for the first time in history, to an organized, concerted abolitionist movement. The truth is that slavery was ubiquitous; abolitionism was Western. Related, if one studies the history of the Mongol conquests, of Arabic Muslims subjugating wide swaths of the Middle and Far East, including India, the staggering brutality of Asian Communists, and much else besides, one is quickly disabused of the notion that white Western men are the scourge of human history. Indeed, as noted above, Western Civilization is the most-life-giving culture of history, especially its monumental moral principle of individual rights—its recognition that your life belongs to you, not to the state or the church—which, when and where implemented, has liberated men from subjugation to king, aristocracy, slave drivers, and organized religion[11]; and, if consistently practiced, will do the same from Fascism, Communism, and Islam (and indeed, in WWII and the Cold War did precisely that regarding the first two of those horrific ideologies/political systems).
It is in these truths that lie the key to understanding the Left’s war against America and the West. If Leftists genuinely cared about succoring the oppressed, they would whole-heartedly embrace capitalism and the principle of individual rights. But they do not. Rather, they seek to destroy the sole principle and system that liberate oppressed men and women. Why? Obviously, their goal is not to liberate oppressed men and women. Then what is it?
Notice, that they want to eat the capitalist rich. They want to destroy Carnegie, Rockefeller, Edison, Ford, and Jobs, et. al. When they have political power, they do not limit themselves to plundering the productive rich. They kill them. Marxism seeks to destroy the most productive, life-giving members of human society. They loathe them. They despise the productive rich and the honest, successful, fulfilled middle class. Marxists are permeated with envy for the productively successful. Ayn Rand defined envy as “hatred of the good for being the good.”[12] Envious hatred of the good is a venomous, virulent motive that often leads to an attempt to destroy society’s best members. This is the essence of Marxism, and always has been: Marxism is a philosophy of, for, and by envy-riddled, psychopathological, wannabe mass murderers. Their ultimate goal is pure, unadulterated nihilistic destruction of human life and all that makes it possible. The establishment of a Communist totalitarian state is but a necessary means to that end. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff describes “nihilism”:
“Nihilism”…means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. Hatred is not the same as disapproval, contempt, or anger. Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the desire to lash out at the hated object, to wound, to disfigure, to destroy it. The essence and impelling premise of the nihilist-modern is the quest for destruction, the destruction of all values, of values as such….It is a destruction he seeks for the sake of destruction, not as a means, but as an end.[13]
Do the Marxists seek to build up Somalia, Laos, Brazil, and other poor nations of the world? They do not. Do they spew out hatred and virulent loathing toward these poverty-stricken nations? They do not. Toward whom do they express violent loathing and blood lust? Toward the most life-giving civilization of history: the United States of America and other Western nations.
This tells us everything of importance regarding their nature, their motives, and their goals.
Three: The Anti-American, Anti-Western Beliefs of Islam
What is the core similarity between Marxism and Islam? Suppression of the free-thinking individual mind.
Islam’s route to all-out war against the West is much older than Marxism’s but even more primitive and just as destructive, although in a different form. Observe its core tenets and its history.
Its founder, Mohammed (570-632 A.D.) was a warlord who both preached and practiced holy war. Allah’s teachings to Mohammed in the Koran are God’s final revelation; they supersede all previous ones and there will be no more. Islam is the one true faith. Its destiny is to conquer and rule the world. Other religions such as Judaism and Christianity will be tolerated but only in dhimmitude (a term coined by Egyptian-born writer, Bat Ye’or, meaning to live as second-class citizens under Islamic rule.)
To this end, Mohammed and his followers conquered Arabia; before The Prophet’s death, he exhorted them to conquer the world. They proceeded to subjugate large swathes of the Byzantine Empire, and to carve out an enormous empire to the east. Present day Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of India, and beyond were pulled into the Islamic orbit and held under harsh repression: Apostasy, being born into the one true faith and subsequently abandoning it, is a capital offense under Islam; dissenters cannot easily escape its thrall. Related, Durant wrote regarding the invasion of India: “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.”[14]
Francois Gautier, a writer and admirer of Indian culture, quotes historians who estimate that “the Hindu population decreased by eighty million between the year 1000 and 1525, indeed, probably the biggest holocaust in the world’s history…”[15] We can only estimate the exact number of victims murdered but the motive is clear: Islam is a fanatically monotheistic religion and Hindus believe that there are millions of gods, a profanely heretical claim to devout Muslims. Regarding Islamic conquest of previously-Christian territory, Middle East scholar, Bernard Lewis, wrote of “the irruption of Muslim armies from Arabia into the then Christian lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and, for a while, Southern Europe.”[16]
Muslim armies conquered Spain in 711 A.D. and held large parts of the country for centuries. They crossed the Pyrenees, invaded present-day France, but were defeated in 732 by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, possibly the most consequential battle in European history, because it decided whether Christianity or Islam would be the dominant religion in Europe. In 1453, Turkish Muslims conquered the Christian city of Constantinople. By 1683, the Turks—the Ottoman Empire—had conquered most of Eastern and Central Europe, and, for the second time, laid siege to Vienna. But John Sobieski, King of Poland, swooped down out of the hills with his cavalry and routed the Turkish invaders. The date was September 12, 1683.[17] This means that September 11, 1683 represents the high point of jihad in the West, the closest Muslim warriors have come to attaining the long-cherished Islamic goal of conquering Europe; these two days are virtually forgotten in the West, but remembered in ignominy in the Middle East—and Osama bin Laden did not pick the date 9/11 out of a hat. In 1915, on the eve of its extinction in WW I, the Ottoman Empire capped its bloody history by the savage murder of roughly 1.5 million Armenian Christian civilians in the ghastly Armenian Genocide.[18]
Islam has long been intent on conquering the world, including Western Civilization.
History is filled with endless warlike brutality wrought by men of virtually every creed, including Christianity, whose founder counseled peace. But Islam has been relentlessly aggressive from the lifetime of Mohammed until the present day. Why? Because its founder—Mohammed, and the God he worshiped, Allah—did not counsel peace. Rather, Allah and Prophet in concert preached unremitting warfare and conquest of the infidels (non-believers). For example, look at some of the surahs (chapters) in the Koran. To quote but a few:
“Make war on them until idolatry [unbelief] shall cease and God’s religion shall reign supreme.” (8:39).
“When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.” (9:5).
“Fight against those to whom the Scriptures [the Bible] were given as they believe in neither Allah nor the Last Day…and [they] do not embrace the true Faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued.” (9:29).
(All Koranic quotes are from the N.J. Dawood translation.)
Related, the second most holy text in Islam is the Hadith, a compendium of stories about and sayings ascribed to the Prophet by commentators who in Islam are considered the most reliable. We must keep in mind that the Prophet is considered the ideal man and his actions are to be emulated by all devout Muslims. What was his life, in part, like? According to one reliable biographer, Ibn Ishaq, the Prophet took part in twenty-seven battles or raids. Against one tribe of his Jewish enemies, the Qurayza, he beheaded the men and pubescent boys and enslaved the women and children. One significant story has Mohammed telling his followers to offer the following alternatives to unbelievers: They may convert to Islam, submit to Islamic rule, or prepare for battle. There are no other alternatives. Living together peacefully, as equals, is not an option. And so on.
“The Golden Age of Islam”
What is Islam’s attitude toward high intellectual culture, that is, rational philosophy, science, and the arts?
Let us look at the Golden Age of Islam, and its demise, for clues to an answer. For roughly four centuries, from 800 to 1200 A.D., the Arab-Islamic world, from Spain to Persia, was a fountainhead of glorious intellectual culture. Islamic caliphs were often enlightened, educated men. For example, one of them, al-Mansur, initiated an intellectual movement that translated brilliant Greek texts into Arabic. Another, al Ma’mun, established in Baghdad a research institution dubbed “the House of Wisdom, and he sent to Constantinople for Greek books.” Aristotle was generally the favored Greek philosopher of Muslim intellectuals, and, indeed, the great Greek philosopher “appeared” to al Ma’mun in a dream. Muslim thinkers were often legally protected to reason courageously and effectively on numerous important subjects. And reason they did! During these centuries, Muslim thinkers made significant advances in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, Aristotle scholarship, and composed both vividly beautiful and powerfully epic poetry. This was a true Golden Age. What happened to it? Orthodox religion is what happened. Several points must be made.
First: Islam had always been the basis of the culture—the Greek approach was an ephemeral, if glorious, overlay on a deeply entrenched Islamic foundation. Enlightened rulers permitted free thinking, there was no constitutional right to it.
Second: The theologian, al-Ghazali (1058-1111) had enormous influence. He was a philosophic skeptic who denied the efficacy of reason to resolve serious problems or guide human life. Only unquestioning faith in the Koran could do that. Orthodox Islam—the worship of Allah and the emulation of The Prophet—this was the righteous path for men to follow. All else was vicious nonsense.
Al-Ghazali (and other theologians) built on an already sturdy Islamic cultural foundation. His books were widely studied. The books of the Aristotelian thinkers were often burned. A literal understanding of the Holy Text was enshrined. Reason was anathematized. Faith was elevated. Today, al-Ghazali is considered by Muslims to be, second only to Mohammed, the greatest man in the history of Islam. A magnificent culture was thereby laid waste and for 800 years the Arab-Islamic world has subsisted in a dark age dominated by dreary religious orthodoxy.[19]
Islam and Marxism: Partners in Destruction
Today, Islam has a great deal of similarity with Marxism. This claim will certainly raise eyebrows. After all, skeptics will point out, Marxists are philosophic materialists, they hold that everything in existence is matter, there is no spirit; consequently, they are devout atheists. But Muslims, obviously, are devout followers of a spiritual God, they anathematize philosophic materialism and atheism, indeed, when they hold political power they execute thinkers for expressing such heretical views. So what is the commonality with Marxism?
Observe that Islam promotes its own form of nihilism. Their religion upholds a strictly literal interpretation of the Koran, that is, of a primitive 7th century religious text that calls for blind obedience to Allah’s commands, for severe punishment for those who contradict its precepts, for death for apostasy—i.e., abandoning the one true faith—for holy war against the infidels—that is, non-believers—and for world conquest by any means possible, whether lying, cheating, breaking treaties, murderous terrorism, invasion masked as immigration, victorious warfare, or any other method imaginable.
There is no departure permitted from a strict religious orthodoxy. Free thinkers are stifled and/or killed. High intellectual and/or artistic culture collapses. Rational philosophy is not allowed. Science is circumscribed. Questioning is forbidden. They destroy most of great value to earthly life. They denigrate real life while they venerate an imaginary one. They seek destruction not as an end in itself but in service to a fantasy being—but they seek destruction. They are spiritual killers who necessarily morphed into bodily ones. It is true that there are many honest Muslims who seek to live—but, unfortunately, they hold little or no power.
Arab-Islamic leaders seek to destroy America and the West for two reasons: 1. Western power stands in their way of global domination 2. Deeper, Western culture, at its best, with its commitment to reason, promotes life. But Islamic “culture” subordinates earthly life to a fantasy realm, that is, it promotes destruction and death; like a horde of ghastly zombies, the faithful cannot abide flourishing earthly life, and they will gladly die, if, in the act, they can murder those who seek to live. If possible, Islam is even more evil than Marxism. The two share more than a common enemy: They share a common bloodlust to kill those capable of attaining thriving earthly life—and they are fitting partners of mass destruction.
Four: The Nature of the War
What is the Marxist plan? How do they scheme to take over America and turn it into a Communist dictatorship? A preliminary point is about nomenclature.
Revolution vs. Putsch
Marxists are often referred to as “revolutionaries.” This is a misnomer. The term “revolution” should be reserved for uprisings seeking to move the political system from a more dictatorial one to a freer one. So the American rebellion against the British was a revolution. Perhaps even the French uprising against the ancient regime was a revolution, although its immediate result was bloody chaos, its intermediate result was Napoleonic imperialism and then the restoration of monarchy, and freedom was finally secured only as a long-range result. But the Bolshevik uprising of 1917 was not a revolution; it was a putsch.
I use the term putsch to mean an attempt to overthrow a freer regime and establish a more dictatorial one. Although the Romanov dynasty was a brutally authoritarian monarchy, the Communists were vastly worse; theirs was the first totalitarian state…with life-and-death power over millions of innocent citizens. As but one example, “from 1825 to 1917 the total number of people [executed for political “crimes” in Russia was] 3,932….These figures were surpassed by the Bolsheviks in March 1918, after they had been in power for only four months. It follows that tsarist [Czarist] repression was not in the same league as Communist dictatorship.”[20]
It also follows (from both this and much else about Communism) that Marxist ideologues in the U.S. today are criminals and they are thugs; they are not revolutionaries. The great Chinese philosopher, Confucius, said many centuries ago: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” This is of more than mere semantic significance. Successful human living requires us to use exact language that accords with the nature of things in reality. There is a literal life-and-death difference between fighting for freedom and fighting for dictatorship.
Step One in the Putsch: Control the education system.
If activists of a specific ideology can take over the teachers’ colleges, the Humanities divisions of the universities, the state and federal departments of education, the public-school system, and the private schools, they can preach their propaganda to millions of intellectually defenseless students every year.
Principles vs. Propaganda
To a great degree, leftists have accomplished this in America. They have minimized (or outright eliminated) phonics in teaching reading, dumbed down the literature reading list, and eliminated history, replacing it with a mushy hybrid called “social studies.” Millions of teens graduate contemporary high schools, even though they struggle with the mechanics of reading, can’t write a coherent paragraph much less an essay, and know next to nothing of history, including the history of their own country. These horrifying results are demonstrated repeatedly by the public statistics. For example, according to literacy statistics published at the website Thinkimpact, “on average, 66 percent of fourth-grade children in the United States could not read proficiently in 2013”—in 2022, roughly 21 percent of American adults were illiterate and 54 percent of adults were reading below 6th grade level. Related, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests are often called “the nation’s report card.” The 2017 results showed that American 4th graders scored in math, on average, 240 out of a possible 500, a dismal 48 percent; in 2019, their scores rose by a single point to 241.[21] For me, many years of teaching Philosophy in numerous U.S. colleges and universities have borne out the dismal state of education in contemporary American schools.
But the kids do “know” a great deal of leftist propaganda. Many of them (not all) have been indoctrinated with the beliefs that Communism is morally superior to capitalism, that the U.S. is a racist nation and millions of Americans today are white supremacists, that we are living on “stolen land” that properly belongs to American Indians, that Western Civilization is responsible for slavery, imperialism, and genocide, that gender is not biologically based, rather it is a social construct, it is “assigned” at birth, and people—including children—can change their gender, and that man-made warming is destroying the planet.
The schooling has gradually gotten worse over the decades. Today, the U.S. school system largely “accomplishes” two things (with some exceptions):
- In content, it indoctrinates the students with leftist propaganda and teaches them very little actual history, literature, or science.
- In method, it teaches woefully inadequate thinking skills—phonics to read proficiently, effective writing skills, and solid math training.
In many cases, the students lack the critical thinking skills necessary to challenge the propaganda with which they’ve been bombarded. This, of course, is by design: People who possess weak thinking skills are unequipped to challenge the “wise rulers” of the Communist state.
Step Two in the Putsch: Control the language.
This is, of course, closely related to Step One and is largely “accomplished” in the schools. To take one major example, observe the controversy over what is a woman.
Sex Insanity: What is a woman?
Now I can give a good accurate definition of what a woman is without consulting either a biologist or a dictionary. A woman is an adult female human being. She is an adult to distinguish her from girls (who are younger), she is female to distinguish her from males, and she is a human being to distinguish her from other species.
Nevertheless, despite the simplicity of this task, Judge (and now SCOTUS Justice) Ketanji Brown Jackson claimed that she could not define what a woman is. Obviously, she could. She is just bending a knee to the leftist “woke” mob. Why? What does the left gain by claiming ignorance of a woman’s female nature?
Let’s go back to the schools. In the elementary schools, leftist ideologues posing as teachers propagandize that gender is fluid, it is malleable, that many kids with male sex organs are actually girls (and vice-versa), and that the kids can transition to a different gender The truth is that this is vicious nonsense. Gender in the English language has been used as a polite euphemism for sex. Gender is rooted in biology—the very word is derived from the words “gene” and “genetics”—an individual’s sex is hard-wired into every cell of his/her body—nobody can change their sexual identity. And, critically in this regard, one’s sexual identity is perceptually self-evident. As an example, a female friend of mine has a raw sense of humor and is, at times, shockingly funny. She had a drawing on the wall of her bathroom. It presented two young children who looked like twins, brother and sister, perhaps five years old, naked, getting ready to step into the bath. The little girl is looking at her brother’s crotch. The little boy is saying: “No, you can’t touch it. You broke yours off already.” The joke is humorous but it illustrates an important truth: Gender is observational. We can literally see what sex/gender one is. (There are rare cases where babies are born with ambiguous genitalia, but this does not change the overwhelming majority of cases in which genitalia are not ambiguous.) [22]
Why does the left perversely insist that gender is social, not biological—and that it is fluidly malleable, not hard-wired into our sexual nature?
The Epistemological “Benefits” of Gender Insanity
There are two “benefits” for the left from this seeming insanity.
One is the confused misery it drills into the kids’ heads, which is further exacerbated by “gender transitioning” medications and by the horrific, mutilating surgery some kids undergo. For pure unadulterated nihilists, this savage destruction of a child’s psyche and life holds a darkly perverse satisfaction. Why so horrifically harm the children rather than protect them? As Shakespeare aptly states in King Lear: “Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile.”
The second “benefit” is equally monstrous. If they can confuse kids regarding an issue that is perceptually obvious—a directly observational fact—then they can certainly confuse them regarding much more abstract claims like: “Freedom is Slavery—War is Peace—Ignorance is Strength.” If the word “woman” can hold radically divergent meanings, such that biological men may be included under its rubric, then such moral-political terms as “freedom,” “slavery,” “war”, “peace,” and others, can also be held to manifest meanings polar opposite to their accurate definitions.
Remember: If you control the language, then you control the conceptual terms in which men think. This critical point is reminiscent of the character Syme in Orwell’s masterful 1984. He is working on Newspeak, pruning the language, ridding it of such undesirable terms as “freedom.” He reminds the hero, Winston Smith, that if we purge the language of such terms as “freedom,” “individual,” “rights,” “revolution,” and so forth, then men will not be able to even think of generating revolution against the Communist state. And that is the monstrously dark secret of the Left’s seemingly bizarre war on gender sanity.
Step Three in the Putsch: Control Immigration.
A rational and just immigration policy for a free society would vet immigrants for criminal or jihadist ties, as well as for communicable diseases. This is done, obviously, to protect citizens of the free country from dangerous persons. This is or certainly should be self-evident. As part of this process, consideration should also be given to the issue of migrants from savagely primitive societies and/or ones from countries where the dominant religion/ideology is implacably hostile to the principles and ideals of a free society. My point, of course, is to protect America and the other free countries of the West from Islam.
Migration & Leftist Voter Bloc Assimilation
We have seen in several European countries, including Great Britain, and in the U.S., especially in Minneapolis, a constellation of policies that are horrific for innocent civilians of the host nations. We can use England as a prime example. Leftist politicians let in many thousands of immigrants from backward Third World countries, especially ones dominated by Islam.
Predictably, given the nature of Islam, many immigrants show no gratitude to the English, no appreciation for their relative freedom and advanced culture, no desire to assimilate into and enjoy the fruits of a vastly more life-giving, superior civilization. Rather, many Islamic immigrants intend to breed more profusely than their hosts, to call for ever more immigration, to become a numerical majority, to impose sharia law, to vehemently scream “racist!” at any opponent, to be vastly more fervent than their opponents, and to eventually convert England from within, to conquer England for Islam. Related, the infidels are inferior beings in the eyes of many Muslims, especially women, who are fair game. Consequently, we see the rise of savage rape gangs, who brutalize infidel girls and women, and who often go unpunished. When Englishmen scream about the terrible injustices, leftists call them “racists” and can and sometimes will impose legal punishment on them for engaging in “hate speech.”
What is the gain for the leftists? The obvious gain is political. They let in millions of poor immigrants whether legal or illegal, they put many on welfare, they inculcate dependence on leftist programs, and they thereby groom a substantial voting bloc to support them. Political power is gained. But power can be used to do good—or it can be used to do evil; it may be used to support life—or to destroy it. Given the raw evil of the Marxists, it is no surprise how they wield such power. What is their real gain?
They add a culture of simmering hatred to their own…and directed against their enemies. The Muslims loathe and seek to conquer Western Civilization. Like the Marxists, they hate Westerners, they hate Jews, they hate freedom, they hate success, they hate life. They are brothers in nihilistic destruction. They add another loud voice to the clamor that the white man is racist, that Western Civilization is evil, and that capitalism must be replaced with dictatorship. When rational Englishmen protest the Muslim depredations, it gives leftists another opportunity to loudly accuse them of “racism” and to guilt them for seeking to protect their civilization and their freedom. And the rape gangs, the rampant crime of many Muslim neighborhoods, the corruption, and the savagery all have value for the Marxists—nor is that value limited to the Muslims.
In the United States, the leftists have let in millions of illegal Latino immigrants, some of whom are murderers, rapists, and/or members of MS 13, Tren de Aragua, and other hideously violent gangs. Further, leftist judges fight to keep such monsters here, to legally prevent the Trump administration from deporting them. Why? What’s the gain for the left? The gain is continual chaos…which leads to the final step in the putsch.
Step Four in the Putsch: Control the Streets.
Violent insurrections only begin in the mind. They end in the streets.
A gang of political thugs who seek to overthrow the government of a relatively freer society and impose totalitarianism confront a difficult dilemma: The vast majority of the freer country’s citizens prefer to live under relative freedom rather than under dictatorship. How to move them off of that preference and to an acceptance of brutal dictatorship? Let’s look at some of the masters. How did Lenin and Trotsky do it in Russia? How did Mussolini come to power in Italy? What were Hitler’s tactics in Weimar Germany?
In Russia, the Bolsheviks instigated the notorious “July Days,” a series of riots and violent uprisings by soldiers, sailors, and workers that contributed to on-going chaos.
Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 to a large degree by using his thuggish Blackshirts to initiate endless violence against workers, labor unions, and other opponents of the Fascists.
Hitler used a similar method in the 1920s and early 1930s: Combined with adroit political maneuvering, the future fuehrer deployed his SA or Brownshirts—a violent paramilitary organization—to fight relentless street battles against Communists and other political rivals, to intimidate Jews, and to demonstrate his power.
What is the common denominator here? Why the endless street fighting? If you violently disrupt everyday life on a regular basis, if you make it enormously difficult or even impossible for honest people to work, to school, to shop, and to live, if you terrify the populace that this is their future, then they become ready for a strong leader to impose authority, to lay down the law, to crush the street violence, to establish law and order, and to re-institute some semblance of normal life.
In America, this is the purpose of the on-going street violence. This was the purpose of the George Floyd riots during the summer of 2020, this is the intent of Antifa riots in Portland and Seattle, this is the goal of the leftist street battles against ICE in Minneapolis, and this will be the purpose of future leftist rioting in the streets, which is guaranteed to happen. The totalitarian goal is everywhere the same: Intimidate honest burghers with unrelenting violence. In the United States, the educational system has already prepared roughly half the population for Marxist dictatorship. In perhaps another twenty years or so, it will have similarly prepared many more Americans.
The riots against political enemies will continue. By then, the country will be ready for a Marxist leader—someone beyond Bernie Sanders, AOC, or Zohran Mamdani—to call for nationalization of industries, abolition of private property, one party rule, a definitive terminus to free speech, and the establishment of “re-education camps” for political enemies…to call for these policies and to win national elections.
Five: How Americans Can Win the War Against the Left
At this point, what needs to be done should be obvious. In order:
Step One: Circumvent the school system.
The educational establishment—the teachers’ colleges, the Humanities divisions of our universities, the state and federal departments of education, the public-school system, and the leading private schools—are permeated with hard-core leftist ideologues. The establishment cannot be reformed, improved, or saved. But it can be outflanked.
The key principle to saving education in this country is: Parents must take full control of their children’s education.
Homeschooling
Homeschooling is an outstanding option. The statistics show that, by every metric, homeschooled kids score significantly better than do public school kids[23]. There are several important reasons for this.
First is that parents generally want their children to have strong academics—to read effectively, to write coherent paragraphs and eventually essays, to comprehend basic arithmetical calculation, and to have a solid knowledge of history. They generally do not want their children brainwashed with abysmal leftist propaganda.
Second is that the home is generally a safe environment –no bullies, no thugs, no drugs, none of the many problems that beset numerous public schools.
Third is the small class size: Mom, dad, or whoever is teaching has far fewer students to teach than in the public schools and can lavish much more individualized attention on each child.
There are many resources for homeschooling parents today, both on-line and in books. www.outschool.com is one. A superb book that is chockablock with helpful information for homeschooling parents is The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Jessica Wise and Susan Wise Bauer.
Further, many homeschooling parents supplement their teaching by hiring tutors. Today, it can be done inexpensively via Zoom. For example, let’s say a homeschooling family in Michigan wants to hire an expert in biology to teach that subject to the kids. There are websites for tutors (www.varsitytutors.com is one.) They search several and find a doctoral student in Oregon. The graduate student, let us say, has a bachelor’s degree in biology and has completed two years of grad school in the subject—so he already knows vastly more of the subject than most high school biology teachers do. Further, he is a grad student, so he probably needs money. The parents can hire him at a reasonable rate—and the grad student gets the benefit of earning a modest salary in his field, teaching experience, and a strong referral if he does well. It’s a win-win.
Microschools
Finally, perhaps the most exciting development in contemporary American education is the rise of microschools. These are small community schools in which a disgruntled teacher leaves the school system, contracts with several parents, opens a small school in the basement or rec room of one family’s home, and proceeds to revitalize the old one-room schoolhouse. Most of these school marms (or men) know that the children need academics—not propaganda—including phonics to learn reading. Websites providing useful information on this development are www.prenda.com and microschoolrevolution.com. This is how Marva Collins—one of the finest educators this country has ever known—got started in Chicago, and eventually built her tiny little school into the outstanding West Side Prep.
However parents do it, they need to take responsibility for educating their children.[24] The educational establishment will only continue to propagandize them. For further reading on this topic see my essay, American Schools: The Collapse, The Cause, The Cure, published in Capitalism Magazine.
Step Two: End the Corruption of Language.
Commonsense rationality helps in this regard. Most Americans know that men are not women, that a woman is an adult female human being, that freedom is not slavery, that war is not peace, and so forth. But young children can and are be(ing) indoctrinated in the schools. Common sense is not enough.
This is one reason of many that people should study Ayn Rand. They should read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: Philosophy of Ayn Rand.[25]
Millions of Americans must understand Rand’s primacy of existence principle.
Stated simply, this means that the world of nature is what it is, and cannot be altered by a sheer act of mind or will or consciousness, neither by one individual’s mind nor an entire society of them. For example, the law of gravity remains true, no matter if I reject it or eight billion human beings do so. (And we act on such an irrational belief at our own peril.) So I might believe that I am a woman—but I am not. I might convince society that I am a woman—but I remain male. The Communists might convince us that freedom is slavery but the nature of those two phenomena remain antithetical.
There is a humorous story about Abraham Lincoln that is fitting in this regard. Supposedly, he was addressing a backwoods audience. He asked them: “If we call a horse’s tail a leg, how many legs will the horse then have?” “Five,” answered the audience. “No,” said Lincoln. “The horse will have four legs, because calling a tail a leg will not make it so.”
Exactly right—and for us in America today, at least a rudimentary understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy is vital to protect the rationality of language, that is, the unbreached connection between words and the reality that they signify. As Leonard Peikoff writes in Objectivism: Philosophy of Ayn Rand, “To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.”
Step Three: Institute a Rational Immigration Policy.
All immigrants must be vetted as individuals. We must do our best to keep gangsters, Islamic jihadists, and other criminals out of the country by securing our borders. All violent criminals among illegal aliens must be apprehended and deported. Regarding illegal immigrants who are working honestly, we have a choice: We can deport them or offer them a chance at becoming U.S. citizens. But if the latter, there are conditions that must be met, and one of them is to be vetted for criminal associations, and obedience to the United States’ laws
Although there are many honest, peaceful Muslims, the core beliefs of Islam call for jihad and global domination. The peaceful persons in this religion are nominal Muslims, who are not practicing an essential principle of their faith. If they start practicing their religion fully, they necessarily become violent. The media says that they have become “radicalized.” The truth is that they have become “Islamified.” This is a serious problem in developing a just policy for Islamic immigration—and I will deal with it in a separate essay.
Other than that, our immigration policy should welcome honest men and women from all over the world. Immigrants have contributed enormous value to this country and will continue to do so. Immigrants from most countries, from Latin and South America, from the Caribbean, from Africa, Asia, and Europe—if vetted and found honest with no criminal ties or communicable diseases—should not merely be admitted but welcomed gladly to America. Millions of immigrants will continue to be productive men and women—and will be outstanding U.S. citizens.
Step Four: Crush Leftist Street Violence.
What would have happened if the Kerensky regime had the power and the will to smash the Bolshevik riots in the streets? How would history be different if the Weimar government had crushed the Nazi street violence, and killed Hitler, the National Socialist Party hierarchy, and the majority of their stormtroopers? There is no way to know. But it is at least possible that Russia, Germany, and the world would have been spared the horrors of Soviet Communism and National Socialism.
We must recognize that contemporary leftist thugs trend in that direction. Are they overt Communists? Some are—members of Antifa and several leaders of Black Lives Matter[26], for example. Many of their followers, to be generous, are perhaps not or not yet. They may be merely “useful idiots,” in Lenin’s vivid terminology. They either already are Communists, or trend strongly in the same totalitarian direction of their European predecessors. But whether committed Marxist terrorists or mere useful idiots, their endless street violence must be definitively ended. If state and local authorities will not crush it, as they should, then POTUS must. In that case, he could invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, and send in federal forces. It is in our rational self-interest as a free society to spend whatever money is necessary to build and maintain sufficient prisons to hold these violent leftist monsters. But their endless rioting will no longer be endless. It will have come to a definitive terminus.
***
If we take these four steps, and only if we do, then we can survive as a free country. If we do not, then liberty in America is doomed: We will be a Communist totalitarian state in a matter of decades. The choice is ours—and we are running out of time.
Notes
[1]There have been numerous other advanced cultures. But for one reason or another, reason was not permitted to flower into a full life-giving culture of freedom, philosophy, science, the arts, medicine, agriculture, and business. The great Golden Age of Islam, for example, was truly glorious but was destroyed internally by orthodox religion even more than by the devastating Mongol invasions of the 13th century (and, to a significant extent, was based on Aristotle and the Greeks in the first place.) Numerous cultures around the world made substantial advances in mathematics and other fields but were held back from liberty and freedom of the mind by suppressive religion, or tribalism-collectivism, and/or brutal despotism in the form of sundry kings, emperors, tribal chiefs, and conquerors.
[2] Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume Three, “The Life of Greece” (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939), vii.
[3] Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 2005). Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Boston: Mariner Books, 2019). See also, Andrew Bernstein, “The Tragedy of Theology,” The Objective Standard, Winter 2006-2007, vol. 1, no. 4, 11-37.
[4] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 596-597.
[5] Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Ockham’s Razor Press, 2011), 17, 6.
[6] Stephane Courtois, et. al., The Black Book Of Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 8.
[7] Stephane Courtois, The Black Book Of Communism, 4.
[8] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume One (New York: Harper Perennial, 1973).
[9] Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America (A Symposium),” Partisan Review 34, no. 1 1967: 57-58. Quoted in Wikipedia, “Susan Sontag,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag, emphasis added (accessed April 6, 2024.)
[10] Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 186-196. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge University Press, 1982), vii. Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3.
[11] Andrew Bernstein, “The Case For Western Civilization,” The Objective Standard, Fall 2024, vol. 19, no. 3, 11-38.
[12] Ayn Rand, “The Age of Envy,” in Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Meridian, 1999), 130, emphasis is in the original.
[13] Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 221.
[14] Will Durant, The Story Of Civilization, Volume One, “Our Oriental Heritage” (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1935), 459. Notice that Durant published this in 1935, several decades prior to Mao’s murder of tens of millions of Chinese civilians. It is possible that, today, the Islamic conquest of India is only the second bloodiest story in history.
[15] Francois Gautier, Rewriting Indian History (New Delhi, India Research Press, 2003), 38.
[16] Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 18.
[17] Paul Fregosi, Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests From the 7th to the 21st Centuries (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 343-348.
[18] Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 1995). See also: Andrew Bernstein, “Lessons of the Armenian Genocide,” The Objective Standard, Summer 2015, vol. 10, no. 2, 48-57.
[19] Andrew Bernstein, “Great Islamic Thinkers Versus Islam,” The Objective Standard, Winter 2012, vol. 7, no. 4, 50-67.
[20] Stephane Courtois, The Black Book Of Communism, 13-14.
[21] Andrew Bernstein, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read or Write or Understand Math—And What We Can Do About It (New York: Bombardier Books, 2022), xvi-xvii, 4-7.
[22] Richard Dawkins, “Why biological sex matters” (New Statesman), 26 July 2023 https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/07/biological-sex-binary-debate-richard-dawkins
Richard Dawkins is an eminent contemporary biologist. He writes: “Sex is a true binary. It all started with the evolution of anisogamy – sexual reproduction where the gametes are of two discontinuous sizes: macrogametes or eggs, and microgametes or sperm. The difference is huge. You could pack 15,000 sperm into one human egg. When two individuals jointly invest in a baby, and one invests 15,000 times as much as the other, you might say that she (see how pronouns creep in unannounced) has made a greater commitment to the partnership.”
And later: “Genuine intersexes are way too rare to challenge the statement that sex is binary. There are two sexes in mammals, and that’s that.”)
[23] Andrew Bernstein, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read or Write or Understand Math—And What We Can Do About It, 135-137.
[24] There is a great deal of useful information for parents in Why Johnny Still Can’t Read or Write or Understand Math—And What We Can Do About It.
[25] Dr. Peikoff’s book is advanced philosophy. If readers want an introduction to Rand’s philosophy, they can read my Objectivism in One Lesson: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Lanham, Md.: Hamilton Books, 2008).
[26] For example, Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, two of BLM’s founders, are self-professed Marxists.
