I had the pleasure of speaking at a men’s event with Tri-City Covenant Church (CREC) yesterday evening. People continue to become evermore interested in finding the path forward out of our present madness, and back to being a proper country. They deserve much credit for their contributions to the mission at hand.

You are all likely aware of the time and effort I dedicate to research on all manner of relevant topics. Well, this time I wandered into a real mess. I appear to have stumbled into what, at first look, seems to be a substantial scandal within the Legislature - one that involves betrayal of principles and promises for cold hard cash and self-promotion. It’s very much not what I was hoping to discover. I’m still working to get my head around the situation. I’ll be consulting on the ethics of the issue and how to proceed. I would covet prayer in the meantime. My initial inclination is to go public with my findings in short order. Stand by for more information.

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You all helped me push my debut book, Counterspell: A Field Manual for the Counter-Revolution, to the #1 new release on Amazon for the first week. I can’t thank you enough for that. Now, however, due I suspect to the weighty content of the book itself (and the time commitment to digest it) the Amazon algorithm is starved for reviews, and the book has all but disappeared from the recommendations. So, I’ll ask for another favor: if you’ve enjoyed the content, be it a chapter, section, or the whole book, please consider leaving an Amazon review to help drive further discovery of the book.

This week I would like to share yet another section of the work focusing on the misnomer of “public health,” and further analysis of the implications drawn from recent legislative events.

From Counterspell the book (one of many such phrases exposed):

“How “Public Health” Was Manufactured

Before I walk the roster of laundered doctrines, I want to dwell on a single case that demonstrates the entire mechanism in one frame. It is so clean, so precise, and so close to home that once you see it you will never stop seeing it. The case is the phrase public health.

Return for a moment to the chapter on language and the three-part test for truing our words. Health, in its plain and original meaning, is an individual reality. A body is healthy or unhealthy. A person is sick or well. A specific mother holds a specific feverish child. Health is inseparable from the concrete human being who possesses a body, who makes choices about that body, who bears the consequences of those choices, and who, under any legitimate ethical system, retains the moral authority to seek or to refuse treatment. Health is located where the body is located: in a person, individually, with agency, with responsibility, with dignity.

Now introduce the phrase public health. The public has no body. The public cannot get sick. The public cannot die. The public has no liver, no lungs, no conscience, no truly collective mind. The public cannot consent to treatment, cannot decline treatment, cannot weigh the relative moral claims of its own continued life against other goods. The public is not the kind of thing that has health or the lack of it, because the public is not the kind of thing that has a body at all. The term, on its face, is a category error.

And yet the moment the term is accepted into common usage, a staggering reorientation has already occurred. Health has been redefined. It now refers to a statistical profile of a collective that has been reified as if it were a single living organism. The body politic has been granted, linguistically, a mortal body. That body can now be said to be sick, at risk, vulnerable, endangered. The individual’s actual, physical body has been relegated to the status of a cell within the collective organism. And cells do not have rights against the organism. Cells do not get to refuse the organism’s demands. Cells are to cooperate for the good of the whole, and if a cell gets too uppity against the whole, its fate is apoptosis or phagocytosis: destruction.

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This is the Hermetic vision in pure form. Recall from earlier chapters that the entire underlying metaphysics of Scientism treats humanity as the One—a single organism working its way through History toward unification and divinization. Public health is not a policy term. It is a theological term. It imports the Platonic fantasy of the city as a single body, Rousseau’s general will that overrides particular wills, Hegel’s state as the concrete expression of Spirit, and Marx’s social man for whom the individual is only a momentary expression of class. The phrase public health smuggles this entire cosmology into the conversation under the guise of a neutral, clinical category.

Watch now what follows, mechanically, once the term has been accepted.

First, a new priesthood appears. The collective organism cannot feel its own symptoms, cannot know its own condition, cannot speak for itself. It requires an interpreter. The public health official—credentialed, appointed, insulated from accountability—becomes the sole authorized diviner of what the body politic needs. Of course, this great and powerful structure, devoid of accountability, is a prime location of capture for perpetual revolution and ever-greater radicalization.

Your own doctor, who can actually examine your body, now ranks beneath the diviner who cannot. The mother, who can actually hold her child, now ranks beneath the bureaucrat who cannot. Because it is not her child’s individual body that matters in the new framework; it is the collective body, and she has no special claim on that one. The priesthood does.

Second, individual moral agency is reclassified as obstruction. Your refusal to accept a novel pharmaceutical product is no longer your decision about your body; it is a threat to public health. Your decision to gather with your family for worship is no longer your right to assemble; it is a super-spreader event. Your decision to keep your business open is no longer your livelihood; it is a non-essential activity endangering the community. The framework itself now makes your exercise of traditional liberty into a form of aggression against the organism of which you are merely a cell. And aggression against the collective licenses a response.

Third, traditional ethics is inverted. Under the older framework, medicine was ordered to do no harm to the individual in front of you. Under the new framework, medicine is ordered to optimize the statistical profile of the collective—and if that means withholding monoclonal antibodies from a white man with pre-existing conditions so that the public’s equity score can improve, that is precisely what the framework demands. I document elsewhere in this chapter how the Biden FDA’s scorecard weighted non-white skin color several times more heavily than significant pre-existing conditions in rationing a scarce, life-saving drug. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Fact Sheet for Health Care Providers: Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of Sotrovimab,” revisions in 2021 and 2022, p. 3, which authorized clinicians to consider “race or ethnicity” as a factor that “may also place individual patients at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.” Operationally, this language gave state health departments cover to introduce racial weighting into rationing schemes for scarce monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals during the Omicron period. Three states implemented explicit scoring frameworks: New York State Department of Health Memorandum, “Prioritization of Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Monoclonal Antibodies and Oral Antivirals for the Treatment of COVID-19 During Times of Resource Limitations,” December 27, 2021, which classified “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity” as an independent risk factor; Utah Department of Health, “Crisis Standards of Care Monoclonal Antibody Allocation Guidelines,” January 2022, which assigned non-white race a 2-point weight on a 25-point clinical-risk scale—identical in weight to congestive heart failure, and double the weight of diabetes; and Minnesota Department of Health, “Ethical Framework for the Allocation of Monoclonal Antibodies,” December 2021. Utah and Minnesota withdrew the racial criterion in early 2022 following litigation threats; the New York policy was challenged in Jacobson v. Bassett (N.D.N.Y.) and Roberts v. Bassett (E.D.N.Y.). The point for the present argument is not the legal disposition but the operational fact: the medical priesthood, given a scarce drug and a patient at the bedside, judged that race-as-class-membership should outrank congestive heart failure in determining who lived and who did not. That is not medicine. That is the doctrine. That decision was not a corruption of public health. That decision was public health operating exactly as designed—aggregating over the collective, silencing individual moral claims, and enabling ideological capture and collective punishment via equity.

Fourth, and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, competing worldviews are delegitimized as anti-science. The Christian who objects to a mandate on conscience grounds is no longer exercising religious liberty; she is endangering public health. The parent who objects to a school policy of child-bureaucrat secrecy on parental-rights grounds is not defending his family; he is contradicting the science, and that pseudo-threat to the child via non-affirmation might just breach the threshold of abuse requiring legal action. The small-business owner who objects to closure orders is not asserting economic liberty; he is science-denying and eligible for forcible closure if not pogroms and mob justice. The phrase public health has pre-positioned every objector as a moral and epistemic inferior before he has uttered a syllable.

Public health is a theological construct masquerading as a medical one. It is Scientism’s archetypal trick. And once you have seen it in this one case, you will recognize the identical trick everywhere it is deployed: gun violence, the public interest, climate action, social justice… Each of these phrases performs the same trick: dissolve the individual, reify the collective, install the priesthood, delegitimize the dissenter.

This is how the Left’s religious system maintains its dominance. It does not argue against your worldview. It redefines the shared vocabulary in terms that make your worldview unsayable. They laugh at you, and, in too many cases, you shut up.”

Now, it’s important to answer a question I know I will encounter, though it hasn’t yet been made explicit, which is “if we can’t use the public health framework to protect against pandemics and such don’t we become defenseless?” It’s a very astute question, because I did not explicitly propose the positive vision for such defenses in the book. However, the reality is that such things, to the degree that they are a state interest at all, should be handled under a defense framework; i.e. they should fall under the common defense prescribed constitutionally, and be a military and police matter. From that frame the individual retains the full measure of agency and constitutional rights due, while those that do the dangerous things in the dark so we all can sleep sound in our beds get to expand their scope to appropriately counter biological threats under a paradigm that severely constrains their activities within the borders of our nation. Of course, decisions about things such as vaccination or medical care must always remain with the individual or their correct proxy (parent or guardian, spouse, etc) to consent or to refuse to consent. This framework does a much better job of upholding sphere sovereignty.

The next item is the necessity of educating and pressuring, via taboo-making mechanisms, your elected representatives and authorities to adopt this understanding and framework for moving forward. We just saw the very unfortunate defeat of a heroic effort within the NH Legislature to remove the vaccine for the sexually-transmitted Hepatitis B virus from the required list for children. Frankly, it’s an insult to every good and decent parent, and father in particular given his natural role as protector, that the state thinks so awfully of them that they would mandate such a vaccine for infants. This defeat came at the hands of a Republican Senate, and quite possibly at the behest of a Republican governor. It’s rather unconscionable given the political top-cover provided by the Trump administration by doing exactly this already at the federal level.

Fundamentally, this legislative defeat represents a misalignment with fundamental republican principles - that’s little “r” republican on purpose, as it references the form of government under which, ostensibly, people have rights to such things as bodily autonomy from the state (absent criminal conviction), and rights of conscience, religion, association, and more that are implicated in such decisions.

It is only within the framework of taboo-making by social mechanisms that such a thing gets fixed. Get to it.

Find Counterspell: A Field Manual for the Counter-Revolution on Amazon in print and eBook (and please leave a good review if deserving).

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I wanted to thank those who have supported this Substack financially, but my terms with Amazon locked me into a contract where I can’t distribute a free book to paid subscribers outside the Kindle ecosystem. I have figured out a way to get you a copy…

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The CHARLIE Act was designed to enact paradigm change on public education for the better. On April 29, 2026, the Senate Education Committee gutted the CHARLIE Act. What had been introduced as the Countering Hate And Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education Act—a bill that named what it was prohibiting and grounded its authority in the constitutional order—was rewritten as a near-identical reissue of the 2021 “divisive concepts” statute that the judiciary already struck down.

The timing makes the capitulation worse. The Trump administration has spent the past year systematically dismantling the regime of district-court injunctions that activist judges used to choke off conservative governance. In Trump v. CASA, Inc. (June 2025), a 6-3 Supreme Court majority held that district courts lack statutory authority to issue nationwide injunctions. Of twenty-four emergency-docket cases involving challenges to Trump administration actions in 2025, the administration prevailed in twenty. The pattern is unambiguous: district courts in California, Maryland, and Massachusetts issue maximalist injunctions; appellate courts and the Supreme Court reverse them. The Senate amendment affirms this judicial overreach at the very moment it is losing its grip.

The political picture is equally clear. Seventy-eight percent of American parents oppose biological males in girls’ sports. Seventy-seven percent oppose mixed-sex bathrooms in schools. Eighty percent support parental notification on gender-identity content. These are 75–80/20 issues—the issues on which Trump won decisively in 2024 and on which the Republican coalition has been built since 2022. The Senate amendment, by enshrining “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” as protected statuses in the same statute that purports to prevent ideological capture of public schools, cedes that ground just as the fight is being won nationally.

I. The Foundational Error: Civil-Rights Framing

The original CHARLIE Act was crafted knowingly. It opened with a claim about the proper end of public education—“preparing students for productive citizenship”—and located its authority in the constitutional order. It named the prohibited pedagogies by name and lineage: Hegelian and Marxist dialectical analysis, Freire’s critical consciousness, Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy, Crenshaw’s intersectionality, critical race theory, critical legal theory. It explained why they are prohibited: because they promote purposeful division by framing society through lenses of inherent oppression, and because they cultivate a hostile or revolutionary disposition against the American founding. That is constitutional framing. It says: the people of New Hampshire have the authority to determine the civic ends of public education and to forbid public employees from using the state’s classrooms to undermine the constitutional order.

The Senate amendment throws all of this away. The amended title—“AN ACT relative to the prohibition on teaching discrimination”—is telling. The bill is no longer about civic formation of citizens. It is about discrimination. And because it is about discrimination, every prohibited belief must be rendered as a claim about inherent superiority or inferiority among symmetrically protected identity categories. Any framing in identity categories plays into the Left’s strengths. It is almost word for word the 2021 banned-concepts law that was struck down, and, believe it or not, it was likely to our great benefit that it was struck down.

The deeper problem is structural. Civil-rights anti-discrimination law is built on the principle of symmetrical, blind protection. It cannot, by its own internal logic, distinguish between teaching that celebrates the American founding and teaching that condemns it as a settler-colonial project. Civil Rights law is a foundation of shifting sand not suited for any education reform effort from the Right.

II. The Myth of Neutral Education

Having abandoned constitutional republican ground of natural rights, the Senate reaches for a substitute principle: neutrality. The amendment requires educators to provide instruction “without endorsement” through a “factual, objective” lens. Then, two subsections later, the same bill demands that educators “teach civic education in a manner that cultivates a neutral or patriotic disposition”—a phrase borrowed from the original CHARLIE Act. These two requirements cannot both be true. Cultivating a patriotic disposition is endorsement—endorsement of the American founding, of the constitutional order, of the transcendent principles of inherent rights. If instruction must be “without endorsement,” patriotism cannot be cultivated.

There is no such thing as neutral education. Every act of teaching presupposes some account of what is true, what is good, and what kind of human being the student should become. Curriculum itself—the very fact that thirteen years of compulsory schooling are spent on these things and not those—is a value judgment of staggering weight. To pretend otherwise is not to achieve neutrality but to conceal the values that are operating, which makes them harder to examine and harder to challenge.

Worse, “neutrality” as a regulative ideal favors whoever controls the framing of what counts as neutral. In every American educational institution of the last forty years, that has been the side that treats progressive premises as the unmarked default and traditional or patriotic premises as the marked, ideological, contestable view. A teacher framing American history through Howard Zinn can credibly claim to be presenting the “factual, objective” account. A teacher framing it through the Federalist Papers must constantly disclose that he is offering a particular viewpoint. The Senate’s neutrality requirement ratifies this paradigm.

There is also a creed problem. The bill’s protected categories include “creed” alongside race and color. A creed is a system of belief—a worldview, a confessional commitment, a set of held convictions about how one ought to live. “All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” is a creed. Communism is a creed. Sharia Law is a creed. Fascism is a creed. These are not interchangeable. They make rival, mutually exclusive claims about the nature of reality. A statute that forbids teaching that one creed is “inherently superior” to another has boxed out patriotic education and enabled radical relativism. It has staked out the position that all creeds are morally and pedagogically equivalent. Under the literal text of the amended statute, a New Hampshire teacher cannot purposefully teach that constitutional republicanism is inherently superior to Marxism-Leninism, or that the founders’ understanding of natural rights is preferable to Sharia law. A statute cannot demand patriotism and creedal neutrality simultaneously. The Senate amendment demands both.

III. What the Original Bill Got Right

The original CHARLIE Act identified prohibited pedagogies by name and lineage rather than by attempting to define every possible prohibited act. Every one of those names—Freire’s critical pedagogy, Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy, Crenshaw’s intersectionality, critical race theory—is a term of art in the field of education, taught in graduate schools, cited in peer-reviewed journals, named explicitly on syllabi. Every working teacher and administrator with a master’s degree knows what these terms mean. The litigation strategy that asks federal courts to declare such terms incomprehensible is a legal performance within the framework of critical legal theory itself, not a serious epistemic claim. Naming the prohibited frameworks by name gave educators precise notice and gave courts a manageable interpretive task. If such a thing is impossible, then the Constitution itself is likewise incomprehensible—we know that is a cop-out.

The original bill also drew the line at the right level. It did not enumerate protected identity classes because it was not anti-discrimination legislation. It was civic-formation legislation. It identified pedagogies, not statuses. That formulation could be enacted alongside parental-rights, sex-segregated-facilities, and women’s-sports legislation without contradiction, because all of those bills share its underlying premises about biological reality, parental authority, and contested ideological claims. The amended bill cannot. If it passes, it will be cited—immediately and predictably—as legislative authority for the proposition that New Hampshire recognizes “gender identity” as a protected status equivalent to race and sex—exactly a policy the Biden administration attempted to read into Civil Rights law that SCOTUS just rejected. Plaintiffs in every future Republican-priority bill in this area will quote it as black-letter state policy. Bills segregating bathrooms and locker rooms by sex may not survive next to this Senate bill. The amendment is not only self-defeating—it is perpetually defeating of future policy.

IV. The Enforcement Catastrophe

The Senate amendment’s enforcement regime is not merely weaker than the original CHARLIE Act. It is weaker than the 2021 divisive concepts law that generated zero meaningful enforcement actions in three years of operation—the very statute the Senate is ostensibly trying to improve upon.

The 2021 divisive concepts law provided a civil action against the school or district, a remedy through the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights, and a code of conduct violation—none requiring proof of intent, but only commission. The original CHARLIE Act provided a private right of action with $10,000 in compensatory damages per violation plus attorney fees, a code of conduct violation up to and including certification revocation, and an explicit legislative finding that employment in public education is a privilege funded by taxpayers, not a right. The Senate amendment provides a code of conduct sanction only—and nothing else. Both civil remedies from both prior statutes are gone.

The remaining code of conduct sanction is triggered only by purposeful violations—which is the wrong frame entirely. When government itself is inflicting harms upon children and families the fact of the offense, and not the mysterious heart-feelings of the offender, are what matters. A child subjected to Freirean critical consciousness exercises has been harmed regardless of whether the teacher harbored conscious ideological intent. The professional education establishment operates precisely by training teachers to execute a curriculum; the intent is baked into the pedagogy itself, upstream of any individual classroom. Requiring proof of purposeful discrimination collapses the entire enforcement mechanism rendering the whole bill worse than meaningless—a pseudo-solution to campaign on.

V. The Larger Surrender

The Trump administration is in the middle of the most aggressive judicial defense of executive authority in modern history, and is winning. Trump v. CASA invalidated the nationwide-injunction tool. The Department of Justice is suing states that allow biological males in girls’ sports under Title IX. Cabinet departments are rescinding gender-identity and DEI guidance. Major medical institutions are quietly revising pediatric gender-affirming-care protocols—the United Kingdom’s Cass Review, Sweden’s Karolinska, Finland’s national protocols have already pulled back on the basis of the underlying evidence. The 2024 election was a referendum on these issues, and the result was unambiguous in favor of Republican policy.

Into this moment the New Hampshire Senate has chosen to introduce an amendment that retreats, roughly, to the Democratic position circa 2010. It is an abandonment of the party platform and a capitulation on 80/20 polling issues in our favor. It is a position that would have been considered defensive even in 2018, before Bostock, before the Loudoun County protests, before the Cass Review, before the 2024 election, before Trump v. CASA. It is the legislative equivalent of winning the castle in a siege only to then abandon the castle to take up residence in the surrounding woods to play Robin Hood.

Further, the endorsement of the lower-court decision on this matter not only cedes the policy win to Democrats, it reinforces the very usurpation of legislative authority that has stifled conservative government for generations.

This pattern of substituting strong constitutional foundations for weak civil-rights ones is not accidental. It is the predictable output of a conservative legislative apparatus colonized at the staff and consulting level by organizations formed inside the paradigm that forecloses any possibility of conservative victory. They substitute constitutional ground for discrimination law because that is the only ground they know in a Civil-Rights regime that has reigned in place of our constitution for decades. It’s another cycle of fuel for the demoralization engine, and precisely the outcome driven by Ayotte’s DOJ and their Civil Rights division who showed up to malign the bill.

The path forward is not to defend the amendment. It is not even to refine it. It is to recognize that it was conceived in a posture of defeat that the underlying facts do not warrant, and to return to the ground the original bill staked out: that public education is a formative enterprise; that the people of New Hampshire are entitled to determine what that formation aims at; that the constitutional order is the proper aim; that pedagogies designed to delegitimize that order have no claim on the state’s classrooms or the state’s payroll; and that the proper response to a district court ruling that contradicts these premises is to make the better argument on appeal, and even to consider impeachment of rogue judges, not to rewrite the legislative agenda to match the ruling.

The unfortunate reality is that the Senate’s position is so far to the Left that it represents what would have been considered radical by Democrats just thirty years ago—it represents a significant worsening of even the poor status quo. At present it does not appear that the positions are reconcilable, nor that further negotiation on this issue can be undertaken without a real risk of making things worse in NH law. As such, it is my regrettable advice that the bill, as amended, should be rejected outright by the GOP House. Kill it dead and send a message that we won’t negotiate on terms rigged to defeat conservative policy. Sometimes in iterated games theory is it more beneficial to lose a round badly than lose by a small increment. I am hopeful we can try again in the future.

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For more analysis and strategy, Counterspell: A Manual for the Counter-Revolution, is available now in electronic and print formats on Amazon where it has achieved #1 new release status in Political Philosophy and Democracy categories.

Yesterday, we identified their technique. They do not argue — they mock. They do not debate — they debase. It works because you have not yet learned to smile back at their laughter and press on to victory. You have not yet learned to reject their entire frame and reframe the whole situation along terms that ensure their defeat instead of ours. That changes today.

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The Exploitation of Agreeableness

We are a nation of men and women raised to embrace conflict-aversion as a supreme virtue and to shrink from the kind of plain, unflinching social rebuke that every healthy culture has always required. It is within this vacuum of warranted masculine aggression that Cancel Culture, and social taboo-making, thrives. The Left did not create our conflict-aversion — but they identified it, mapped it, and built their entire social enforcement apparatus on top of it.

From Counterspell:

“It appears that the most potent psychological tool of the opposition is the exploitation of agreeableness. We do not want to think of ourselves as bad or evil and will make the choice to be discriminating with language to avoid cognitive dissonance… it is simply human nature that when a person becomes emotionally upset about something, others tend to assume that the thing causing the emotional disturbance is real, and not fake. They give the distressed person the benefit of the doubt and begin working to alleviate their distress. It is through such emotional assertions of paramorality that the Left makes people hostage to, or indoctrinates them into, pseudoreality.”

“Niceness is not a virtue. It is the absence of a virtue. All that is required to achieve the false virtue of being nice is to be averse to conflict, and all that is required to avoid conflict is to allow evil to win uncontested. The cure is good men, not nice guys.”

Their Foundation Is Social, Not Rational

Here is the intellectual key that changes everything. The mechanisms of Leftism do not stand on reality. They stand on social ground — socially negotiated, socially constructed, socially enforced, and socially disastrous. This understanding must completely alter our strategy. We cannot win by leaning into facts and evidence alone when their very foundations are located on another continent entirely. We must embrace the use of social mechanisms toward positive ends, because that is the only terrain on which their edifice can be reached.

From Counterspell:

“Their own presuppositions, being socially constructed and socially affirmed, are resistant to the same kind of presuppositional attack from the Right… The socially constructed foundation stands or falls on social affirmation or stigmatization, which means it can only be undermined by disrupting the affirmation infrastructure and taboo-making… This is why the Right’s argumentative victories are sterile: defeating a Leftist argument on its merits does nothing to the social-affirmation machinery that sustains the Leftist’s presuppositions.”

Laughter is their cheapest weapon. It costs them nothing to deploy — we’ve already been socially conditioned as the punching bag. This dynamic was perfected, perhaps most visibly, in the twenty-year run of The Daily Show — a vapid, content-free comedic enterprise in masterful social manipulation that did more to set the terms of acceptable opinion than any policy argument on earth. But it only works while we shrink from the laughter instead of turning the joke back around on the court jester.

The Moment Everything Flips

When the laughter stops working on you, we have a firm foundation on which to launch the counter-attack. When the laughter stops working in the culture — when it lands on deaf ears, or worse for them, draws a knowing laugh back — we are winning.

From Counterspell:

“What is happening when a credentialed stranger invokes the science at you is not a moment of legitimate epistemic authority meeting a layman. It is an act of dialectical subordination in which a religious ideology, laundered through captured institutions, is deployed to silence a competing set of presuppositional commitments… The entire performance is a shell game, and the whole game depends on your willingness to accept the premise that one side is science and the other is merely opinion. You must refuse the premise… Once you see this, it cannot work on you anymore. You will still be called a denier. You will still be told to trust the experts. But you will see the maneuver for what it is: a frightened priesthood reaching for its trusty weapon — and, oh, what a sight it is to behold when that sheath flexes empty, and their faces reflect their horror.”

What To Do Monday Morning

Counterspell is not about documenting the collapse all around us for posterity. It is about halting the collapse and building back what made America great in the first place. It is a battle manual toward victory. But a battle manual is only useful to a soldier who acts. The action is simpler than you think.

From Counterspell:

“Taboo is a tool. Use it. The Left captured the culture by making its enemies’ beliefs unspeakable. The same mechanism runs in reverse… Shame is an underrated teacher.”

“A sharp tongue is the first sword. Use it before the law has to. Open rebuke is a gift to the person being rebuked and to the community watching. Silence is complicity dressed up as manners. The people around you need to hear someone say the thing they are afraid to say. Be that person often enough and others will become that person too.”

The Close

Their laughter is their only garment. It is them who stand nude before the class. They need all eyes on you to avert the gaze from their own nakedness — from the spellcasting, and from the damnable ethics underneath. Do not give them that courtesy. Direct the eyes squarely to their nakedness, their sophistry, and their empty arsenal. Never be on the back foot. Put them on the back foot.

They are laughing because laughter is the last thing in their quiver. The argument was never there. The science was never real. The authority was always borrowed from institutions they captured, not earned by ideas that survived scrutiny. Every day that their laughter lands on someone who simply no longer cares — someone who has seen the machinery and refuses the flinch — is a day the spell weakens. They need your embarrassment. Stop giving it to them.

Counterspell by Michael Belcher — available now for preorder on Amazon where it is #1 in the New Release chart. The full history of how this system was built, who built it, how it captured your institutions, and what the counter-offensive looks like at every level from your living room to the state legislature. The laughter has an answer. This book is it.

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Two Kinds of Science

They assert The Science™ to stand above you as they giggle and point. Their laughter and your embarrassment distract you from the most critical point you should be exploiting to your advantage. They wield not science, but Scientism. The distinction is everything, and they are counting on you never noticing it.

From Counterspell:

“The first meaning of science is the one most people learn in school: the scientific method. A tool… You do not ‘believe in’ a hammer. You do not place ‘faith’ in a hammer. You pick it up and you use it when you encounter a nail, then you put it down. The second meaning of science — the one our present rulers almost always mean when they invoke the term — is the old Hermetic, Platonic, Hegelian sense: Scientia, a metaphysical system of knowledge aimed at transforming the world to conform to a prophesied end… It does not seek falsification — it seeks confirmation by any means necessary. It does not welcome competing hypotheses — it declares dissent to be heresy. This is Scientism.”

The trick is in the equivocation. A speaker uses the word in the second sense while relying on you to hear it in the first. Anthony Fauci said the quiet part loud when he declared, on national television, “I represent science.” He was not describing a method. He was claiming a throne. They rely on their sophistry and your confusion to imply the common, hammer version of science while actually advancing religious prophecy. Their method is in the weaponization of language — in casting spells — not in the scientific method.

The Inventory of Spells

Herbert Marcuse is the most proximate historical architect of this mechanism. In his doctrine of Repressive Tolerance, he provided the explicit recipe: suppress Rightist speech through social sanction, not argument. The result is the arsenal of thought-stopping clichés deployed against you every day.

From Counterspell:

“Trust the science… Do your own research — from reputable sources… The scientific consensus is settled… Anti-science… Science denier… Conspiracy theorist… That’s been debunked… Experts agree… It’s not a debate. The candid admission. They will not argue with you. They will ostracize you instead. Each of these clichés is a small social weapon. Used once, it is nothing. Used ten thousand times, across every venue of public discourse, it installs a flinch reflex in the population. The flinch then does the work of the argument. The citizen silences himself not because he has been persuaded that his objection is wrong but because he has learned that raising it will produce the flinch, and he would rather avoid the flinch than speak.”

This is not science. It is not argument. It is the liturgical enforcement mechanism of a faith system that cannot survive honest contact with competing claims. It is Cancel Culture as developed explicitly by explicit Marxists for the explicit purpose of the destruction of Western culture — and it wears a lab coat.

The Tactical Reality

You aren’t losing the argument in a sparring match where your attacks land on a real body of the enemy and are counted as points. You are losing the argument in the environment of that dream where you stand, as a child, before the class only to realize you are not dressed. The audience doesn’t see you as being in a sparring match at all — they see you in the buff and as the butt of the joke.

From Counterspell:

“You are not losing the public argument because your arguments are bad. You are losing because you have been maneuvered onto a battlefield where your arguments have been pre-classified as inadmissible before you ever open your mouth. The referee is not neutral. The playing field is tilted ninety degrees to the vertical, so every ball simply lands in your net by virtue of gravity.”

The ground has been laid to begin to see the battlefield for what it really is, and not for what you have been conditioned to see. Their religion is dressed as science. Their clichés are sacraments. Their mockery is not confidence — it is the reflex of a system that has no argument to make. Tomorrow, Part Two: how to tilt the playing field decisively in our favor, and begin to win.

Counterspell by Michael Belcher — the full architecture of this system, its ancient lineage, its institutional capture, and the legislative counter-offensive — is available tomorrow. Preorder the ebook version now on Amazon, the #1 New Release in Democracy books.

After a decade of research and writing, the book launches Friday, May 1.

Counterspell launches Friday, May 1, 2026. Ebook is available for pre-order on Amazon now. Paperback and hardcover ship May 1. Below you’ll find the introduction in audio (in my voice, recorded this week) and the first three lessons of the afterword in a produced PDF. The new website is live to match at www.counterspellgroup.com.

This post exists to give you four things — the audio excerpt, the PDF excerpt, the pre-order link, and a short personal note about what this book is for. In that order. Please share widely.

Listen — the introduction, in my voice

This is the full author’s note that opens the book. About six and a half minutes. It is the shortest distance between a stranger and the argument the book makes.

🎧 [ Audio excerpt — 6:45 ]

If you are reading this on a device where the player doesn’t render, the audio is also available at counterspellgroup.com.

Read — the first three lessons of the afterword

The book closes with twelve plain lessons — no philosophy, no jargon, no footnotes — addressed to a reader with a job, a family, and only so many hours in the week. The PDF below contains the introduction and the first three of those lessons.

The lessons are the version of the book you can carry in your pocket. The full argument runs to twenty-eight chapters. But if you forget everything else and remember the lessons, the book has done its work.

📄 Download the PDF excerpt →

The first three:

1. Call things by their proper name. 2. Niceness is not a virtue. 3. Ignorance is not an excuse, and neither is going along.

The other nine are in the book.

Pre-order

Ebook — $9.99, available now Paperback — $19.99, ships May 1 Hardcover — $29.99, ships May 1

➡️ Pre-order on Amazon

If you would rather wait to hold the print edition in your hands, that is the right call for some readers and I would not talk you out of it. The risk of bans on this book are real, so I would definitely prefer a hardcopy. But the ebook ships immediately on launch to your device.

A note on what this book is for, and what it isn’t

There are a lot of books that explain what is wrong. There are fewer books that name the system producing what is wrong. There are fewer that seek to take the whole grimy picture, which would normally get you called a conspiracy theorist, and lay it out so mechanically and factually that it becomes normal and obvious.

Counterspell attempts to do that last thing. The argument runs from the mysteries of ancient Egypt through Plato’s Academy, through Hegel and Marx, through the Frankfurt School, and into your child’s classroom and your state legislature. The argument is that what calls itself the modern progressive Left is not a political movement, not an economic philosophy, not a cultural trend — but a religious system, operating through a mechanism as old as civilization itself.

If that sounds like the kind of claim that requires extraordinary evidence, you are right, and the book attempts to provide it. I read the primary texts. I cite the sources. I name the figures. I extend the lineage all the way through to the people writing the curriculum your children will be taught next year.

The book is written for the widest possible audience. I am a Christian. My faith informs everything I write. The argument I make does not require you to share my faith — only your willingness to follow an argument where it goes. There will be something in this book that will offend just about every reader, of every stripe. If you are a progressive, the early chapters will challenge everything you hold dear. If you are a mainstream conservative, the later chapters will challenge your comfortable assumptions about institutions you trust. If you are a libertarian, the theological underpinnings will grate. If you are a Christian, the frank treatment of certain esoteric practices will disturb.

I ask only this: persist. You will be rewarded with knowledge if you can endure the occasional discomfort.

What you can do this week, if you want to help

I have not asked much from this Substack in three years. Today I am asking a little.

One. Pre-order the ebook. The pre-order numbers in the first week shape the algorithm that determines whether the book is shown to anyone who is not already on this list. A pre-order from a paid subscriber here is worth more than ten orders the week after launch.

Two. If the audio excerpt or the lessons resonate, share this post with one person you think it would land for. Just one person. The right person. That is how books that matter actually move.

Three. If you are part of a group — a church, a study circle, a homeschool co-op, a political organization, a podcast audience — and you want a copy in front of more people than yourself, reply to this email. We are still working out bulk-order terms as the book moves from Amazon-only into wider distribution, and I will tell you what I know.

That’s it. No paywall on this post. No upsell. Just the book, the excerpts, and the request.

A personal note, last

This book cost me real things. The work it argues for has cost me more. I wrote it anyway because I have a daughter, and because the world she will inherit is being unmade by people who know exactly what they are doing, and because there is no one else who is going to write the book I needed to read. So I wrote it.

Whether it lands for you or not, thank you for being here. That you are reading this is, in a small but real way, part of what made the book possible.

The path through is not theoretical. It is not won by lone wolves with strong opinions. It is won, if it is won at all, by reconstituted communities of serious, faithful people who have reordered their loves and their habits around something higher than the regime.

I hope this book serves that work.

— Mike

Counterspell is dedicated to my daughter — that we may heed the call to “do enough.”

🇺🇸 Pre-order on Amazon · 📄 PDF excerpt · 🌐 counterspellgroup.com

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And, yes, there’s something symbolic about a gold ingot being cracked and crushed between an iron anvil and an iron hammer.

I can also announce that this is only the first of several planned books. This, being the first and foundation of those to come, will be the most comprehensive and generalist manual on identifying how the enemy works and what we must do to get to the victory we all desire. For that reason, the subtitle of the book is The Field Manual for the Counter-Revolution. The title, in keeping with the theme, is Counterspell. The book pulls together to totality of my prior written works from the past decade, crafted into one coherent whole, and supplemented with significant new material, analysis, and biographical information.

The book is available for preorder in Ebook/Kindle format here: www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX35XZQF. Unfortunately, print edition preordering is not available, but both paperback and hardcover will go live on May Day.

I would like to share with you, below, a section on my developing Theory of Mind of Leftism.

Theory of Mind: Reasoning with the Wall

That is, a working model for understanding how the Leftist mind operates, and why reasoned argument fails against it.

You have likely experienced the following: you present a Leftist with a well-reasoned, evidence-based argument. You defeat their position thoroughly. And then, without a moment’s pause, they switch to an entirely different argument that flatly contradicts their first. Consistency is not required. You have not won anything. You have merely swiped at a vapid vapor.

This is not stupidity. It is the absence of the substrate from which consistent reasoning would proceed.

Conservatives tend to operate from a basis of ethics, and that ethical basis is typically transcendent—rooted in something above, beyond, and fundamental to the individual, the society, and the moment. Leftists tend to operate from shallow presuppositions: utilitarian, practically oriented, concerned with outcomes as defined by whatever the current social and strategic consensus holds to be desirable. Where the Leftist ethical basis is contemplated and well-formed—and it sometimes is—it is socially constructed and legitimized, not transcendent but immanent. It stands on the shifting sand of whatever the group currently affirms.

This is the foundational asymmetry. Reason does not produce ethics; it proceeds from ethics. Ethics are the first principle—the thing that exists before reason and informs experience. They do not exactly exist as “self-evident,” as if holding up a speculum to ones own heart will reveal them with fidelity to the mind. They cannot be properly legitimized by an appeal to “common sense.” As we established in our treatment of practical ethics, there are only three methods of ethical formation: assertion on one’s own authority (which rests on the authority of the person, which is to say next to none), social mediation (which is inherently relativistic and therefore not truly an ethic at all, but an anti-ethic), and the transcendent (which alone provides an ideal against which actions can be measured). The Leftist operates, at best, from the second. The Right, when consistent, operates from the third.

Because the Leftist’s ethical substrate is shallow, shifting, or absent, the reasoned argument has nothing stable to land on. Language for them is not a tool to describe reality; it is, per the alchemical tradition from which their entire project descends, a weapon to change it. You cannot argue someone out of a position they did not argue themselves into, but that was felt into. When the position rests not on reason but on social affirmation, emotionalism and shallow utility, your reason is simply irrelevant to the architecture of their belief.

The Persistence of Conscience

And yet something persists beneath the shallow presuppositions. The Leftist who operates against moral reality still feels it, even if they cannot name it. The moral law is written on every heart. The conscience registers violations of moral reality whether or not the person acknowledges the source of that reality.

For the reader who needs an account that does not rest on theological premise, the behavioral evidence makes the case. A purely social-constructivist account predicts that discomfort diminishes as social reinforcement of the in-group ethic increases—the more thoroughly embedded in an affirming ideological community, the less guilt the member should feel. The observable pattern runs precisely opposite. The doubling-down, the nihilistic self-injury, the intensifying need for social affirmation, the escalating suppression mechanisms—these deepen with ideological commitment rather than ease. The feedback loop tightens as the social endorsement grows. A model of suppressed conscience predicts exactly this: the harder you press against a functioning moral faculty, the harder it presses back, and the more energy must be expended in the pressing.

The secular materialist will object that cognitive dissonance theory explains the same data without requiring a transcendent moral faculty. The objection does not hold. Cognitive dissonance theory is itself a secular, incomplete reframing of the process inherent to conscience—it describes the symptom only. The theory predicts that dissonance diminishes as the contradiction is resolved through group affirmation and the adoption of a consistent in-group ethic. A person deeply embedded in an affirming ideological community should, under this model, experience decreasing discomfort as the community validates their beliefs. The observable pattern runs precisely opposite—and the in-group’s tyrannical need to cancel, excise, and punish any pangs of conscience surfacing among its members is itself demonstrative of the unreality of socially constructed ethics. A social ethic that was actually functional, and foundational to the subject, would not require a perpetual suppression apparatus directed at its own adherents. The very acts of tyranny used to maintain the social construction point beyond the group itself—to a higher authority than the group consensus, one the group did not intend to point to, that must be the impetus for the escalating totalizing suppression and perpetual revolution of shifting targets. The cancel machinery is not just aimed outward at the enemy. It is aimed inward at the faithful. That fact alone testifies that something deeper than cognitive dissonance is at work… [continued in Counterspell: A Field Manual for the Counter-Revolution, coming May Day 2026]

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CHAPTER 5, SECTION 6: THE DIALECTICAL RATCHET

The dialectic does not have to be complicated. It can be simply thought of as third-way-ism — the practice of taking two competing ideas and “synthesizing” them into a new concept that accounts for both. Somebody wants to cook dinner at home, another wants to eat dinner out, and the negotiated synthesis might be getting takeout to eat in. This process is readily weaponized, however, as it has been by the Left for centuries, into a mechanism whereby leftist ideas are synthesized with rightist ideas in a way that always favors the gradual progression of leftism.

This is accomplished by handicapping the rightist ideas through “scientizing” them — various linguistic tricks that place the rightist idea, properly considered in the realms of theology or philosophy, into the realm of “science” or “experts,” who can then speak to the rightist ideas as “false” (making an objective claim with no basis in objectivity). Alternatively, rightist ideas are placed outside the Overton Window and thus made unacceptable socially. These practices favor the leftist ideas during the negotiated process of synthesis such that it effectively builds out a dialectical ratchet — so named for the tool that moves by ever-so-small increments in one direction while resisting movement in the other.

Further necessary to the understanding of this incremental process is that the “science” we typically consider to be science is not the same “science” that they mean when they engage in the process of political warfare. This was outlined in the political theology of Hegel in the division of “science” into two categories — one rudimentary and process-driven, the other metaphysical and prophecy-driven. Very much of what the modern Left refers to as “science” is actually of the latter variety, and more properly called Scientism.

By capturing the broader sciences and infecting them with Scientism, the Left has managed to remake institutions and repurpose them as reification agents of leftist dogma. The Left can, through the dialectical process described above, point to the institutions it has captured and the “science” it has infected with Scientism to label rightist ideas and policy as “objectively false” or “scientifically harmful” — while in reality referring to a religious ideology, not actual science. They get away with this because they have ideologically captured the institutions that would, in a functional system, serve as a check on their false claims to expertise.

Do not take my word for any of this. Psychology Today published a piece in 2020 laying out the strategy for implementing this process, citing dialectical behavioral therapy as the model, detailing how they intended to negate rightist ideas and policy through this dialectical process. The author of the piece gives away the game at the end: “In principle, Republicans could use this strategy too, but the main problem currently besetting that party is the rejection of factual and scientific information.” In other words, the Republicans do not get to use this strategy because their ideas are not correct according to the institutions that the Left controls.

I ask you then to consider, with this new knowledge, what the actual purpose might be of a training event for lawmakers from both the Left and the Right — learning to utilize the dialectical process to “work together,” to find “common ground,” and to “reduce polarization.” Would it be helpful to know that this training event was run by a psychologist? Do not assume the worst of those involved in bringing in this training, however. It is entirely likely they did not, and do not, know the true intentions of it.

I know this because I was there. And having since conducted a forensic examination of the organization behind that training, I can now tell you the full story.

The Trust: A Necessary Prologue

Before we turn to the organization itself, a historical parallel is necessary — one that should be taught in every school and is not, because its implications are too dangerous to the people who run them.

In the early 1920s, the Soviet secret police — the GPU, predecessor to the KGB — established a fake anti-Bolshevik resistance organization called the Monarchist Organization of Central Russia, known internally as Operation Trust. The organization presented itself as an underground network of loyalists working to restore the old order from within the Soviet system. It recruited genuine White Russian émigrés, anti-Communist officers, and foreign intelligence operatives into its ranks. It held meetings. It planned operations. It gathered resources. It looked, in every respect, like the real thing.

It was not the real thing. It was a GPU front, designed from inception to identify, attract, control, and ultimately neutralize the genuine anti-Communist resistance. By drawing real resisters into a managed structure, the Soviets accomplished several objectives simultaneously: they identified who the real opposition was, they channeled oppositional energy into activities that posed no actual threat to the regime, they gathered intelligence on foreign support networks, and they demoralized the broader resistance by ensuring that every effort undertaken through the Trust’s auspices failed at the critical moment. The Trust operated for years before its true nature was exposed. By the time it was, the damage was done — the authentic resistance had been gutted from within.

The principle is timeless: if you cannot destroy your enemy’s resistance directly, build a version of it that you control, and let your enemy’s best people walk into it voluntarily. The operation need not be a perfect conspiracy. It need not involve every participant as a knowing agent. It need only be designed — at the top, by those who understand its structure — to produce the desired outcome. The sincere participants are not obstacles to the operation. They are its most valuable assets, because their sincerity is what makes the operation credible.

Keep this pattern in mind. We are about to see it again.

Braver Angels in the New Hampshire House

In late 2022, shortly after being elected to the New Hampshire House for the first time, I received an invitation from House leadership to attend what was billed as a continuing education event: Managing Difficult Conversations with Colleagues and Constituents. The training was scheduled for December 15th, 2022, in Representatives Hall — the House chamber itself — and was put on by an organization called Braver Angels, described in the official House Record as “a nonprofit working to bridge the partisan divide.” The session was to run approximately two hours and was open to all Representatives-Elect. Members would be paid mileage for attendance. It was followed immediately by the Annual Legislative Christmas party at the Upham Walker House — refreshments and fellowship to seal the experience with warmth and goodwill.

I attended — not because I was taken in by the billing, but because I was deeply suspicious that it would be exactly what it turned out to be: a political warfare operation. A “bipartisanship training” event, run by an outside organization, conducted behind closed doors in the House chamber, led by a psychologist, and aimed at freshly elected legislators who had not yet established their bearings? Everything about it triggered the instincts I had developed over years of studying these methods. I went to see it with my own eyes and confirm what I suspected.

I was not disappointed.

The session was led by a Washington, D.C.-based representative of the Braver Angels organization — a psychologist, as was stated openly — and was conducted according to the methods of dialectical behavioral therapy. This, too, was stated plainly. To my knowledge, the session was never broadcast publicly or live-streamed. It was an intimate affair, conducted inside the House chamber, with newly elected legislators as its subjects. I understood what I was watching in real time.

The format proceeded in stages, each building on the last.

First, the exercises were relational. Legislators from opposing parties were paired together and guided through structured intimacy-building exercises — getting to know one another on a personal level, sharing experiences, establishing rapport. There is nothing sinister about getting to know your colleagues. But this was not the point of the exercise. The relational stage was the preparation of the ground for what followed.

Second came the negotiation exercises. Here the method revealed itself. Participants were required to adopt the frame of mind and policy positions of the opposing party — to inhabit the other side’s perspective, to explore that frame from within, to understand it not merely intellectually but empathetically, in the captured sense of that word we examined earlier. Having thus inhabited the other side’s frame, the participant was then guided to moderate his own position toward it — to find the middle, the synthesis, the third-way resolution.

This is the dialectical ratchet in live application, administered by a trained psychologist to elected officials in the seat of government.

Consider what this process actually does when you account for the presuppositional depth asymmetry we have been developing throughout this book. The ethics of the Left tend to be shallow, operational, and relativistic — socially constructed, situationally negotiable, and anchored not in transcendent principle but in the social context of the moment. The Right — at its best, at least, and certainly at the level of its deepest commitments — tends to stand on transcendent ethics, deep principles, and opposition to social constructivism. These are not symmetrical starting positions. The conservative participant is being asked to step off of bedrock and wade into quicksand. The progressive participant is being asked to move from one patch of quicksand to another. The conservative loses something real — contact with his principles. The progressive loses nothing, because his position was never anchored to anything deeper than social negotiation in the first place.

The exercise was designed to break conservative participants away from their deep ethical commitments and draw them into the realm of social constructivism, where social context and interpersonal relationships trump principles, where feelings outweigh foundations, and where the Left can and does serially dominate. The Left lives in relativistic social constructivism. It is their native territory. Asking a conservative to meet them there is not finding common ground — it is an away game on an opponent’s field with the opponent’s rules and the opponent’s referees.

This is how the dialectical ratchet operates in a legislative environment. Each “bipartisan” exercise, each “bridge-building” session, each “depolarization” workshop functions as one click of the ratchet. The conservative is moved incrementally leftward. The progressive holds position or advances. The net motion is always in one direction. And the whole operation is dressed in the language of goodwill — common ground, bridging the divide, managing difficult conversations — so that anyone who objects to the process can be dismissed as partisan, unreasonable, or unwilling to work with others.

The Organization Behind the Operation

Having experienced the method firsthand, I set about examining the organization that delivered it. What I found was not reassuring.

Braver Angels — the largest grassroots “depolarization” organization in America — was founded in December 2016 in South Lebanon, Ohio, weeks after Donald Trump’s election. Its founder and president is David Blankenhorn, a self-described liberal Democrat educated at Harvard and the University of Warwick, where he studied under the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson. By Blankenhorn’s own admission, he carried Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals “in our back pocket” during his years as a community organizer, and considered Alinsky “our ultimate teacher.” He also visited the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee — the legendary training ground for civil rights and labor organizers, and a well-documented node of Communist organizational infrastructure in the American South.

An Alinsky-trained community organizer who studied under a Marxist historian. This is the man who built the bridge that conservatives are invited to walk across.

To his credit — or to his cover — Blankenhorn spent years building credibility on the Right. He founded the Institute for American Values in 1987, a think tank focused on marriage and fatherhood. His 1995 book Fatherless America made him a prominent voice in the social conservative movement. His 2007 book The Future of Marriage argued that marriage is fundamentally oriented toward uniting biological, social, and legal parenthood. He aligned himself with the conservative position on same-sex marriage — one of the central cultural flashpoints of the era.

This is the Trust pattern. You do not build a controlled opposition by announcing your intentions. You build credibility with the target population first. You invest years. You say the right things, defend the right causes, build the right relationships. You become trusted. And then, at the moment of maximum leverage, you turn.

Blankenhorn’s turn came during Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal trial challenging California’s Proposition 8. He served as the defense’s principal expert witness — one of only two witnesses the Prop 8 proponents dared to present. His testimony was catastrophic for his own side: he conceded under oath that same-sex marriage would “likely improve the well-being of gay and lesbian households and their children” and identified twenty-two benefits of same-sex marriage from his own book, disagreeing with only five. He told the court: “We would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were the day before.” The judge ruled his testimony unreliable and entitled to essentially no weight.

Two years later, Blankenhorn published a New York Times op-ed titled “How My View on Gay Marriage Changed.” The capitulation was complete. His former colleague Maggie Gallagher, who had left the Institute for American Values years earlier over precisely this trajectory, wrote a response that now reads as prophecy: “The truth about something as important as marriage cannot be the price we pay to live with each other... Giving up marriage is too high a price to pay. And it is not the last good we will be asked to surrender.”

She was right. It was not the last good. Blankenhorn’s next project would ask conservatives to surrender something far more consequential than a single policy position. He would ask them to surrender the very method by which they hold any position at all — their grounding in transcendent ethics.

Two readings of Blankenhorn’s biography are possible. The charitable reading is that he is a sincere man who changed his mind, found that his social relationships with progressives were more important to him than his prior convictions, and channeled that experience into an organization designed to help others do the same. The analytical reading — the one informed by the Trust pattern, by Alinsky’s own methodology, and by the observable outcomes of the organization he built — is that Blankenhorn operated for decades within conservative institutions, built trust and credibility, and deployed that credibility at the critical moment to undermine the cause he had championed, before pivoting to build an organization whose structural function is to replicate that same trajectory in others.

The purpose of a thing is what it does. What did Blankenhorn’s arc do? It neutralized one of the conservative movement’s expert witnesses on marriage at the precise moment his testimony was most needed. What does the organization he subsequently built do? It neutralizes conservative legislators at the precise moments their votes are most needed.

The Anatomy of Structural Asymmetry

The co-founding team tells the same story. Bill Doherty, the University of Minnesota family therapy professor who designed the workshop methodology, had previously organized a group called “Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism” — not against polarization generally, not against political extremism broadly, but against Trumpism specifically. This is the man who designed the “neutral” therapeutic process. The third co-founder, David Lapp — raised Amish, now Catholic, who writes for The Federalist and American Conservative — provides the requisite conservative credential, the essential window dressing that allows the organization to claim bipartisan bona fides. Every Trust needs its sincere participants.

Braver Angels itself discloses a sixty-forty funding split between left-of-center and right-of-center foundations. The organization grew from half a million dollars in revenue in 2017 to over five and a half million by 2024. The founder draws a salary of nearly a quarter-million dollars. The Carnegie Corporation funds it under its “Democracy” program. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding through its Madison Initiative. The organization operates within a broader ecosystem of roughly four hundred “depolarization” organizations tracked by the Civic Health Project at Columbia University. One of the most prominent sister organizations in this ecosystem — Living Room Conversations — was co-founded by Joan Blades, who also co-founded

MoveOn.org

, one of the most aggressive progressive political organizations in America.

The right-leaning funding isn’t truly “Right” at all, but socially liberal, Chamber-of-Commerce libertarianism. It is not. The neoconservative movement was funded by right-leaning money for decades while operating as a dialectical pole to the neoliberal establishment. Koch-funded organizations have a long history of funding libertarian and “reform conservative” initiatives that channel conservative energy away from populist and traditionalist priorities. Templeton funds inquiry and dialogue as institutional values — which is precisely the frame that makes the dialectical operation possible. Money follows mission, and these missions are compatible with the structural asymmetry Braver Angels produces.

The personnel confirm the pattern. The organization makes conspicuous efforts at balance — hiring a Republican CEO, maintaining a Focus on the Family director on its board, employing a former Republican congressional candidate as its national ambassador. But examine the type of conservatism represented. The Republican ambassador ran in California against Maxine Waters and associates with the American Project at Pepperdine and the Progress Network at New America Foundation — reform conservatism, heterodox conservatism, the kind of conservatism that the progressive establishment finds tolerable precisely because it has already been detached from the transcendent ethical commitments that make conservatism a threat. There is no one from Heritage Action on this board. No one from the Freedom Caucus. No one who represents the populist, the traditionalist Right, or Evangelical Christians that actually challenges the institutional progressive order. The conservatism on display at Braver Angels is the kind that has already undergone the very process the organization administers – Jeff Flake conservatism.

And most revealing of all: Braver Angels’ own internal data shows that across its events, Democrats consistently outnumber Republicans. The organization’s own Red Caucus page describes itself as “a minority within Braver Angels” that wants “our voices to be heard.” A 2024 investigation found that in conservative areas, the workshops’ most documented effect was empowering liberal participants “to come out of the closet” — an outcome benefiting progressive expression, not conservative retention. As one liberal participant candidly observed: conservatives suspect that “what you’re really going to do is get them in a room and then explain to them how they’re wrong.” That suspicion, it turns out, is analytically precise — the explanation just operates through therapeutic technique rather than overt argument.

The academic evidence on effectiveness is equally damning. The most rigorous study found workshops produced a modest reduction in partisan hostility at one week, with effects decaying rapidly. A 2025 meta-analysis of the broader depolarization field concluded that such interventions produce only approximately five-point shifts on a hundred-and-one-point scale, that effects decay within two weeks, that repeated exposure does not produce cumulative benefits, and that “current approaches are unlikely to scale effectively to solve polarization at a societal level.” In other words: the therapy does not even work on its own stated terms. It does not reduce polarization. What it does — the thing it actually accomplishes, as measured by observable outcomes rather than stated intentions — is produce a handful of Republican legislators in each state who have been psychologically conditioned to prioritize relational comfort over principled commitment.

The Proof in New Hampshire

The proof is in the outcomes.

In the years since that December 2022 session, a bipartisan caucus emerged from the Braver Angels training — a group of legislators from both parties who continued to meet and operate under the Braver Angels framework. That caucus, which has since rebranded itself as Granite Bridge, has serially disrupted Republican votes and undermined GOP policy commitments despite Republican majorities. The Republican members of the caucus have become unreliable voters for the party platform and the ethical commitments their constituents elected them to uphold. Meanwhile, the Democratic members of the caucus continue to vote largely as a unified bloc — as they always have. The ratchet clicks. The synthesis favors the Left. The Republican defectors provide the margin.

This is precisely the pattern we would predict from the theory. The dialectical process does not produce genuine compromise. It produces managed defeat for the side operating from deeper principles, because the act of “meeting in the middle” requires that side to abandon depth while the other side merely shifts laterally within its own shallow plane. The GOP members who underwent this training did not become more effective legislators. They became more pliable ones — more susceptible to social pressure, more willing to substitute relational comfort for principled commitment, more inclined to mistake agreeableness for virtue.

The purpose of a thing is what it does. What does Braver Angels do? It produces Republican legislators who vote against Republican priorities while Democratic legislators continue to vote as a bloc. That is what it does. That is its purpose.

The Trust Pattern, Complete

Return now to Operation Trust. The GPU did not need every member of the Monarchist Organization of Central Russia to be a knowing agent. It needed only to control the structure, set the rules of engagement, and ensure that the energy of the authentic resistance was channeled into activities that produced no real threat to the regime. The sincere White Russian who joined the Trust believing he was fighting the Bolsheviks was not an obstacle to the operation — he was its most valuable asset, because his sincerity attracted other sincere people, and their collective sincerity made the operation credible.

Braver Angels is not a carbon copy of Operation Trust. The analogy is structural, not conspiratorial in every detail. But the pattern holds: an organization founded by a man trained in Alinsky’s methods and educated under a Marxist historian, who spent years building credibility within conservative institutions before publicly capitulating on the central cultural issue of his era, and who then built an organization that uses therapeutic technique to replicate that same capitulation in elected officials — producing, as its measurable output, Republican legislators who defect from their party’s platform while Democratic legislators maintain bloc discipline. The organization is funded predominantly from the left, staffed with a carefully curated version of conservatism that poses no threat to progressive institutional power, and embedded within a broader ecosystem that includes organizations co-founded by the creator of

MoveOn.org

.

You do not need to believe that every volunteer, every facilitator, and every well-meaning Republican state legislator who attends a Braver Angels workshop is a conscious agent of the Left. They are not. Most are sincere. That is the point. The Trust works precisely because its foot soldiers believe in it.

What you must understand is this: when a psychologist, operating from the methods of dialectical behavioral therapy, places you in structured exercises designed to detach you from your principles and move you toward “synthesis” with positions that are fundamentally incompatible with those principles — and when the organization behind that psychologist was built by an Alinsky-trained operative who personally walked the exact path they are now guiding you down. So-called “bridge building) is a political warfare operation conducted on the floor of a state legislature, with your ethics as the target.

I have endeavored to keep the focus of this Counterspell Group project exclusively on the work. I have attempted to minimize myself in the whole project. However, in this first major work you’re going to get introduced to my own background, because I think it’s important to connect in that more intimate way…

“I was raised on the Left, and the foremost orientation of that upbringing was not, in fact, the goodness of Leftism, but a hatred of — and an assurity of the evil in — conservatism. The goodness of Leftism was, in most cases, simply presumed, without evidence, by merely framing it as the opponent of the evils of the Right. It was a long series of events that eventually brought me over, first in seeing the reality of the consequences of Leftism, and then in understanding the reality that, while not explicitly argued and presented along ethical lines, the effects of conservatism were far more beneficial to individuals and society than Leftism. This experience, and the slowness by which I transitioned from one side to the other — primarily slowed by the absence of explicit ethical dimensions in Rightwing discourse — made me realize that the utilitarianism of conservative argumentation was a major stumbling block. People are ethical creatures, and ethical arguments should be first above all else.

I understood the effect of social mediation on beliefs quite strongly, as it was my mother who functioned as a perpetual link to Leftism, and whose opinions of me kept me constrained, mentally, outside of the realm of reality, unwilling to break free for fear of disappointment and relationship damage. Little did I realize at the time that the act of being disowned by my mother for my faith and politics would, though devastating emotionally, set me free both mentally and ethically to pursue truth and goodness.”

Longtime readers will recognize very much of the content, as the work was initiated as a collection of years worth of essays and topics, which are then edited, updated, expounded upon, and linked into a comprehensive whole that will bring you a more full picture than any read-through of the essays alone could accomplish.

“What I have just described — the long, painful process of breaking free from one worldview and building another — is not unique to me. You are going through a version of it right now, whether you know it or not. Let me propose an analogy that may assist you in recognizing how this all works.

What if I told you that within your mind there were prisons of both minimum and maximum security, and that these prisons were constructed and enforced in a partnership between society and yourself? What if the prisoners held captive were ideas?

You will be introduced to more complete and actionable paradigms for information and sorting that will assist you in all truth-based efforts.

“This theory of mind maps cleanly onto the tripartite model we established earlier.

The wizards are those who have been fully given over. The conscience is effectively extinguished. They take pleasure in evil. They wield the cliches and the escalation deliberately, as weapons, with full clarity of purpose. In the Christian Scriptures, these would be understood as demonically possessed — not in the culturally distorted sense of involuntary seizure, but in the sense of volitional alignment with the demonic, a reprobate mind operating in service of wickedness. They are the operators of the system.

The spellbound are the majority. They are caught in the feedback loop at varying degrees of callousing. Their conscience is still functional but increasingly suppressed. They are dependent on the cliches. They are increasingly disordered. They are, in a very real sense, victims of the system — people operating in the world in a way that is not conducive to flourishing, because the ideas they have internalized are psychologically taxing and conducive to harm. They are the target audience of the wizards and the raw material of the revolution.

The based are those who operate from a foundation grounded in reality — whether or not they have yet arrived at the fully transcendent. They have either never entered the feedback loop or have broken free of it. Among them are those who have survived the dam breaking and rebuilt on firmer ground. They know, from personal experience, what the spellbound are going through. That knowledge is both a burden and a weapon.”

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Text Version:

“It’s been a long couple weeks of legislative activity, and, while most of the work went well, there were some hiccups. I also had the opportunity to discuss much with legislators, and a wide range of items at that. Some of the conversation was friendly, humorous, in fairly inconsequential. Much of it, however, was oriented towards the work at hand, and that means talking about politics according to the full range of political philosophy considerations, as well as argumentation towards achieving the understanding and votes necessary to achieve goals.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, and neither should the methods of argumentation that I tend to employ – I’ve discussed these at length here for years. This last week something hit me right square in the face that I’ve been trying to skirt for all these years in developing strategy and apologia for my positions: there’s many more ways to get things wrong than I’d care to admit.

Much of the volume of words expended in this Counterspell effort have proceeded from a simple premise: people, generally, hold a foundational set of beliefs (occupying a position of “faith,” or “first principles”), spanning knowledge creation (epistemology) to ethics, from which they proceed to reason out answers to real problems that confront them in a manner that is of reasonable consistency. In other words, two people with the same foundational beliefs ought to be able to use like reason to achieve roughly the same answers to questions given the same circumstances.

However, I think I need to adjust the degree to which I assume consistency, good reason, and the ability to generalize principles to similar, but marginally different, situations. I’ll give you an example that will be at some length.

In discussing a matter in which the question of government treatment of citizens versus noncitizens was of paramount importance in achieving the correct solution to a problem, I ran into problems. With these several persons, with views ranging from vaguely libertarian to moderate conservative to populist, the errors mounted quickly and, strangely, from the same unexpected source.

These several legislators, though all being reasonably pro-Trump, patriotic, scoring fairly high among various vote-tallying orgs, and, importantly, each affirming the conceptual difference between an American citizen and a noncitizen, had extreme difficulty, in some cases prohibitive difficulty, coming around to the ethical conclusion that there is a circumstance wherein the government ought to treat these groups differently. What was the basis for this difficulty? The dreaded “D” word, “discrimination.”

For all the affirmed similarity in applicable first principles, and for all the demonstrated capacity for exercising reason with fidelity, and for the clear knowledge that there are times and places where “discrimination” is both good and necessary, it was nonetheless the presence of this dreaded “D” as a thought-stopping cliché that did in their capacity to reach a correct conclusion. More than just “correct,” and far more than a mere thought experiment, this was a necessary conclusion to reach to affect the safety and security of their own people and fulfil their oath of office. Yet, they couldn’t get there.

The issue at hand was the presence of People’s Republic of China nationals at our colleges and universities. Now, mind you that these persons also do acknowledge the scale of intellectual property theft that has occurred in this manner. They also recognize, though probably to a more limited extent, the weaponization of these ties by the Chinese Communist Party to develop, import, and deploy biological and chemical weapons against America. But, then there was that “D” word again. We wouldn’t want to be called “racist” after all (spoiler alert, I was, in fact, called racist, and by a rogue Democrat writing in the House calendar).

So, I’m still formulating how to respond to this situation, but I think I need to work on developing my argumentation and persuasion at every conceivable point of entry for error from A to Z, where previously most of my argumentation has been pointed at arguing for A under the assumption that, once A was affirmed, we could arrive at Z together with just a little reason. Let’s begin by trying to do exactly that: a full walkthrough of the ethical and, where necessary, practical argumentation for this exact issue.

The first necessary preconception in this chain of reason is that there is a fundamental difference between a citizen and a noncitizen. Coupled with this necessary preconception is another preconception: nations are a legitimate category. The Christian perspective on this is fairly straightforward and not too difficult to make. God ordains the nations, sets their geographic boundaries, and scattered the peoples and languages at Babel. God ordains their civil government rulers as jurisdictionally limited to the respective national boundaries, ethically limited to their given sphere and scope of action, and their very telos (reason for existing) is given as the protection and justice for the people of that nation (Biblically, “nation” is “ethne,” and that has some importance here in defining a “people” group).

The next necessary preconception is around the goodness of living in peace, and the goodness of the use of both violence and tools of coercion generally in defense of the innocent. This is also a case made readily Biblically – the Bible is full of accounts of obtaining, carrying and utilizing armaments defensively, from Nehemiah’s wall builders and David’s sling, to the “buy a sword” instruction from Christ to those without, to the myriad wars waged in accordance with God’s Law and commands. Scripture identifies man as “made in the image of God,” and for he who would shed man’s blood (murder) to be put to death by the civil authority as retribution. Numerous iterations of Christian “Just War Theory” have been formulated utilizing varying degrees of Scriptural fidelity. There can be no doubt that war is not outside of the Christian worldview, after all, Proverbs identifies both “…a time for peace and a time for war…”

The heart of the Christian ethical perspective towards violence and war is identified as the necessity of taking actions – actions that would be undesirable in the conditions of Eden – that represent a positive good under the conditions of the curse, in order to restore a state of peace and law that has been breached by an offender. As such, Scripture identifies civil police powers, retributive justice, and war all in the same realm of legitimate action by the civil authority, and defensive use of violence as legitimate by the individual.

To help identify and define these points let’s take a couple brief thought experiments up. Let’s say we are citizens of a hypothetical large, powerful nation functioning as a constitutional monarchy. Let’s say things are reasonably good for us here at home. However, there is an island nation off the coast where things are not so good for their people. It’s an utter tyranny. They traffic children as slaves. They regularly execute men in the towns to instill terror and forestall uprisings. Their secret police have raped virtually every woman on the island. Do these facts warrant defensive use of violence to affect the overthrow of that evil, despotic island regime? Yes, they very much do. Do those facts legitimize our nation in undertaking a defensive war against the government of the island nation on behalf of the genuinely oppressed citizens of that nation? No, it does not.

You see, according to the basic Biblical worldview, nations and their civil authorities being geographically bounded and existing for the justice of their own people, it would be an affirmative evil to coercively withdraw the necessary blood and treasure of our people for that purpose, because our civil authority has no ordained role in justice for the inhabitants of that island.

Now, would it be wrong for individual citizens of our nation to take it upon themselves to risk their own blood, and finance using their own treasure, the overthrow of such a regime on behalf of those islanders? That’s a much more difficult question where competing interests of the rightness of individuals to intervene with violence in defense of innocence toward peace, versus the jurisdiction of a civil authority to limit the war-like actions of their own citizens against foreign nations to prevent conflagration to war between nations. I suppose a hearty “maybe” is in order.

Would it be right for either our nation or the citizens of our nation to recognize the plight of these islanders, recognize it formally, and take actions below the threshold of war to enable these islanders to affect their own defense? That is, again, a complicated question given the possibility for such events to spiral into open warfare between nations, but, all things considered (which is outside the scope of this lesson) it would be a lot easier to get to “yes” under this paradigm than those prior – a nod to the work of the Special Operations Forces guys is due here.

However, such events do not occur in a vacuum. Let’s now add the nuance that his particular Island nation is formally allied to several other hostile nations whose actions, collectively, could be categorized as placing them in a state of war with our nation. That changes the moral calculus significantly. By implicating this island nation now as an enemy taking actions that imperil the peace and justice of our own citizens we enter into a situation where our own civil authority is justified in enacting defensive violence – not on behalf of the citizens of the island nation, but on behalf of our own citizens.

That last caveat is important because the objective of the use of violence should always be that which restores a state of peace and law for our citizens. It may be that it also works out to the considerable benefit of the islanders – perhaps our best course of action is recognizing some contingent of those islanders as the legitimate government to empower them and provide us with an ally going forward, but, perhaps for any number of reasons the best course of action is to simply topple the regime and infrastructure of the island, even though it would certainly not be in the best interest of those oppressed islanders. The point is that the best course of action for our citizens is that which should be pursued, regardless of the effect that may have on foreign nations and their citizens – subject to basic Christian ethics, of course.

Next up, we have the basic applicability of laws to those within the geographic boundaries of a nation. Here, too, the Bible is quite clear that there is to be one civil code that is applicable to both the citizen and the (authorized) foreigner. This is a basic application of the impartiality of law within the context of nations, borders, citizens, and so on. However, the Biblical scope of law in this regard is primarily to do with criminal law – you must not have different types of crimes for the native and the visitor.

However, the Biblical scope of law in this regard is primarily to do with criminal law – you must not have different types of crimes for the native and the visitor. This does not mean the civil magistrate is forbidden from making any distinctions whatsoever between citizen and non-citizen, or between authorized visitor and hostile alien. Quite the opposite. Right reason and Scripture both require the magistrate to exercise precisely this kind of wise discrimination (the original, non-taboo meaning of the word) in every area outside strict criminal adjudication: immigration policy, visa issuance, access to public institutions, national security measures, military contracts and conscription, land ownership (especially in strategic or border zones), voting and civic participation, holding public office, access to public benefits or welfare, and especially higher education that touches intellectual property, dual-use research, or strategic technology.

Scripture itself draws this line unmistakably. Leviticus 24:22 commands, “You shall have the same law for the stranger and for the native-born; I am the Lord your God.” But the immediate context is a blasphemy trial and the principle of talionis (eye for eye) — purely criminal and judicial. The verse guarantees equal criminal punishment, not equal civil rights. In actual practice, foreigners who sojourned in Israel received that criminal equality and basic protections, yet faced sweeping civil exclusions for the protection of the nation. Most notably, land was not inheritable by strangers. Leviticus 25:23 declares, “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.” The permanent tribal land allotments in Numbers 26 and the book of Joshua were reserved exclusively for the citizens of the nation. Jubilee laws returned every inheritance to its original Israelite family line. Certain foreign nations were barred from the assembly of the Lord forever (Deuteronomy 23:3-6), and broader restrictions applied to holding office, full covenant privileges, and national security access. These distinctions were not sinful partiality — they were required for the magistrate to fulfill his God-ordained duty to protect his own nation and people.

To suggest the opposite — that the magistrate must treat citizens and non-citizens with total civil equality in every area — quickly descends into absurdity even on purely secular grounds. Imagine a nation that allowed citizens of a hostile foreign power to own strategic border land, vote in its elections, hold public office, or receive the same military contracts and welfare benefits as its own nationals; that nation would cease to exist within a single generation. Or picture a university system that granted nationals of an adversary state unrestricted access to every research lab, intellectual property pipeline, and dual-use technology program under the banner of “impartiality,” then acted shocked when the adversary’s military gained every technological advantage. History is littered with such self-inflicted disasters: empires that opened their gates, their treasuries, and their institutions to unvetted foreigners under the delusion that discrimination itself was the sin. The result was never justice — it was conquest or collapse. Scripture simply forbids us from making the same suicidal error.

Discrimination and exclusion from certain things must occur to the benefit of the citizen — for whom government is ordained — in order to avoid partiality toward the visitor (or invader). The civil magistrate’s telos is the protection and justice of his own nation, not the equal treatment of all humanity under his jurisdiction (Rom 13:4; 1 Pet 2:14). Partiality that favors the stranger at the expense of the citizen is the very sin Scripture condemns in civil judgment (Deut 1:16-17; Lev 19:15). God Himself discriminates constantly — between Israel and the nations, between clean and unclean, between covenant people and strangers — and commands His magistrates to do likewise in their sphere.

National civil authorities possess the Biblical capacity and right to wage defensive warfare, to conscript citizens for that effort, and — when another nation is waging war of any sort against our nation — to discern that reality and analyze whether any given citizen of the warring nation should be viewed as a threat, a combatant, or an arm of the enemy civil authority. Scripture affirms this: nations are real and bounded (Acts 17:26), the magistrate bears the sword for the good of his people (Rom 13:1-7), and defensive war is legitimate (Prov 20:18; Eccl 3:8). Israel censused only its own citizens for military service (Num 1), excluded certain foreign nations from covenant privileges and land inheritance (Deut 23:3-6; Lev 25:23), and treated hostile foreigners as perpetual threats to be kept at arm’s length or removed (Ex 23:33; Deut 20). The magistrate owes no equal access or benefit to those whose governments are actively working against his own people — and in multi-domain conflict, any citizen of the hostile nation may at any moment become an active agent of that enemy power, much as in The Matrix any bystander could suddenly reveal themselves as an agent of the system.

To suggest otherwise — that the magistrate must grant equal civil access to nationals of a nation at war with his own — descends into absurdity even on secular grounds. Imagine allowing citizens of an enemy state to own strategic land, vote in elections, hold public office, receive military contracts, or access sensitive research labs during active hostilities; such a nation would be conquered from within before the first shot was fired, and that’s precisely what is occurring to us. History records empires that collapsed under refusal to discriminate when the enemy was already inside the gates. The magistrate’s duty is to protect his people first, and Scripture forbids the suicidal delusion that impartiality toward the invader is virtue.

This brings us directly to the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese National Intelligence Law of 2017, Article 7, states unambiguously: “Any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law.” This is not optional. Combined with the much longer-standing practical reality of CCP control — the social credit system, the “United Front” work, and the total absence of any meaningful private sphere — the situation is exactly as you described: like in The Matrix, any given PRC national can become an agent of the system at any given time. Every Chinese citizen, student, or researcher must therefore be reasonably categorized along the threat-agent-combatant gradient as an unacceptable risk to our own citizens. This is not racism; it is the same prudent analysis any magistrate must perform when his nation is under sustained, multi-domain attack (intellectual property theft on an industrial scale, biological weapons research ties, espionage in universities). Treating them as neutral visitors would be the real partiality — favoring the interests of a hostile nation over the safety of our own.

We see the same Biblical pattern of exclusionary laws and regulations applied to foreigners across the spectrum — from the average foreign citizen all the way through the preposterous welcoming of the alien invader. In Scripture: ordinary sojourners (ger) received basic legal protections and one criminal code (Ex 12:49; Lev 19:33-34), but were still excluded from land inheritance, certain offices, military conscription, and full covenant membership unless they converted and integrated. Hostile foreigners (nekar) faced outright exclusion, perpetual enmity, and no right of residence (Deut 23:3-6; Ex 23:33; Neh 13:23-30; Ezra 10).

In the American context under the same covenantal logic: ordinary friendly foreigners have always faced visa restrictions, background checks, and limits on sensitive activities (historical precedent from the Alien and Sedition Acts through modern export controls). Nationals from hostile powers have faced outright bans on sensitive research access (e.g., the 2020 Presidential Proclamation suspending entry of certain PRC students and researchers tied to military-civil fusion strategy; 50 U.S.C. § 2652 restricting foreign visitors from sensitive countries at national labs; the ongoing Data Security Program barring adversary access to bulk sensitive American data). Welcoming the “alien invader” — mass illegal migration from hostile or incompatible nations without vetting, assimilation requirements, or regard for national security — is the precise inversion of the magistrate’s duty. It is not compassion; it is dereliction and partiality against our own citizens.

Here is the complete A-to-Z walk we must now fortify in every argument. Even when first principles are verbally affirmed, derailments still occur at multiple stations downstream from those foundations for many reasons. The “D-word” is only the most obvious among them. Every single link—linguistic, categorical, jurisdictional, incentive-driven, courage-dependent, and threat-gradient-specific—must be fortified in advance.

Applying the full chain to the issue: The civil authority of the United States has both the right and the duty to restrict or entirely prohibit People’s Republic of China nationals from enrolling in American colleges and universities—especially those engaged in any research with national-security implications. This is defensive action in the same category as Nehemiah posting guards or a just war: love of the American nation, obedience to the magistrate’s ordained role, and preservation of peace, security, and justice for our own citizens. Any incidental effect on Chinese nationals is irrelevant; our telos is not their telos. To fail in this task is a dereliction of duty for which magistrates will answer.

We can no longer argue only the first principles and assume the rest will follow. The legislative conversations that prompted this reflection showed exactly why: capable, patriotic men who affirm the difference between citizen and non-citizen, who recognize the scale of CCP theft and weaponization, still freeze at the point of necessary discrimination because downstream error points remain unaddressed. Until we close every possible exit, we will remain stuck in the pattern of managing decline rather than achieving victory. Enabling defeat is anathema to the Christian magistrate.”

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The whole program is downright insidious. The manner in which the most sickly-sweet, public-relations, human-resources language is weaponized to conceal the deadly and damnable content of the message — the linguistic warfare equivalent of handing a child a grenade and instructing him to run over to the soldiers. It’s little wonder why so many teachers have adopted the mannerisms of bad children’s television presenters while waving flag of Hamas and cackling about the demise of their enemies.

Though, it really shouldn’t be a terrible surprise. At the risk of losing my audience by invoking Harry Potter, and since people seem to relate to the story as a totalizing social paradigm for their lives, the brainwashers and tyrannical indoctrinators of history have seldom looked and talked like Voldemort — reality has always mirrored Dolores Umbridge. From Orwell: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

The first thing we must understand is that all language, and indeed all ideas, stand on a basis of presuppositions. The language used, whether explicitly or implicitly, assumes certain things to be true about the world we live in, the manner in which humans relate to one another, and so on — more academically language always assumes and stands upon certain types of epistemology, anthropology, ethics, and more. It is therefore very much possible to extract these presuppositions by analyzing the language used, and that information can then be compared to known historic systems of thought and related systems of government.

For this study I have captured a significant number of lesson plans from SEL provider Chooselove to analyze from which we will identify all these things, and expose how they are diametrically opposed to all that America was founded to be — it is a wholly foreign creedal system.

From this first lesson plan image we can identify many things. Firstly, we identify a moral prescription, or archetype of goodness, being named the “illuminator.” Now, the term itself is low-hanging fruit for discussion of esoteric spiritualism, but we’ll save conversation for later. The traits associated with the morally prescribed target of “illuminator” are identified as “kind words,” “kind hands,” and “kind choices.”

Any student of either history or ethics should identify the most pressing question here as “who defines what is and is not ‘kind’.” That is, for now, unstated, but you would be correct to keep your neck-hairs elevated as we dive deeper into answering this question.

In this next portion of the lesson plan we can identify that there is a contrast of opposites being established between the previously identified “illuminator” and the new, Orwellian term “diminisher.” This approach takes advantage of the inherent binary (perhaps, dialectical) nature of the human mind, always seeking to increase understanding by comparing a thing to its opposite. As this term “illuminator” is established as a an ethical identity, the addition of “diminisher” in the position of the opposing pole establishes it as an unethical identity — a classic good guy/bad guy binary is hereby established for the children.

Further in this plan you can see the bad guy being given the attributes of “complaining,” seeking fairness, and questioning authority. The beginnings of social engineering the perfect Statist drone-citizen are present here — never questioning authority, never complaining that somebody is receiving preferential treatment, always obedient.

Now, we begin to move firmly into the territory of danger, as the plan calls for the social-engineering of children away from necessary discrimination — giving angry or volatile people space, choosing not to associate with antisocial people, ignoring instincts about danger — and towards seeing only good, in-common attributes in people who trigger such alarms. Notice, also, that the good guy versus bad guy paradigm is being reinforced further to define the bad guy not as the person irritating you, demonstrating a lack of effort, or transgresses boundaries and traditional ethics, but as the person who notices these things and avoids or rebukes them. This is the beginning of the inculcation of Marcusian Repressive Tolerance and smuggles blank-slate radical Socialism presuppositions.

Here, we begin to import the ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism, as if those aren’t hotly debated and controversial political topics, into the totalizing moral formation of children via public schools. As an aside, noting the final paragraph identify “safer… school environments,” I must tell you that I observed this organization present at an event perhaps a year or two ago, along with some branch of the Department of Homeland Security. They did a whole lecture on how it’s a terrible idea to place guards, especially armed guards, at schools to protect children. They insisted, instead, that violence itself must simply be programmed out of society… can you imagine the hubris of this statement? Of course, it’s utterly impossible, but even if it were possible the moment it was achieved we would be violently conquered by the first nation to take up arms. It entirely fails the test of the Paradox of Tolerance.

Here, we continue the lesson plans to indoctrinate the older school-aged groups, and we introduce the necessity of staying quiet when you see or hear something you strongly disagree with — “silence, you!” Of course, this is not universal. We’ve already begun to identify, and will continue to really drive the point home with upcoming further lesson plans, that you are decidedly not supposed to keep quiet when somebody transgresses and becomes a “diminisher.” No, not even a little bit. We will continue to see explicit calls to vehemently socially oppose those people. So, who is supposed to just shut up? Us, of course. Do not criticize Leftist language — but you must stand strong and attack any Rightist (here, labeled “diminisher”).

We must digress for a moment to identify the sheer evil of teaching a 4-year-old child to, effectively, just accept abuse and stay quiet. Telling a child their abuser, be that abuser 4 or 40, is “still learning” and requiring submissiveness is absolutely intolerable cruelty.

Now, with the middle-school lesson on “compassion,” we see the blank-slate, Socialist presuppositions come into full view. Here, we are explicitly telling children that the “bad guy” is not really the bad guy, and, in fact, it’s the people who call the bad guy the “bad guy” who are the real bad guys: DIMINISHERS! This is the recipe for the anarcho-tyranny we are seeing all around us. This is how societies commit civilizational suicide, and it’s how young women learn to override their natural instincts and put themselves in harms way to advance the revolutionary cause. This was well highlighted in a recent survey circulated on X that identified that, when viewing people receiving punishment, the reaction of men is entirely different depending on whether the punishment is viewed as just, but women’s reactions to viewing the same punishments levied mattered none whether the punishment was just or not — they viewed the punishment as abhorrent regardless of the rationale for it.

Criminals, victims and society deserve justice. Justice is oriented towards, foremost, retribution. This is in accordance with God’s Law, and to teach what is found above is to directly oppose the Gospel. How can any Christian send their children to learn this?

Now, again, the final destination of this social engineering comes into full view, as the lesson explicitly demands we “let go of labels and judgements.” Take a moment to absorb and consider the absurdity of abandoning the use of judgement socially — then look around at the culture and tell me that this isn’t exactly what the Left has pushed, and achieved, in so many spheres of American life.

You cannot function in life without making discriminating judgements. Will you get onto the public transport with these people? Do I go to a bar late at night in this part of town? Who should I marry? Does this strange pitbull need a kiss on the face? Will I send my child to government-run schools?

Of course, again, these lessons don’t serve to entirely eliminate judgement. Rather, they seek to completely reorient that system of making judgements to bypass much of the higher faculties of mind (Logos), and implicate as many of the socially-mediated functions of mind as possible (Pathos) in order to advance the ethics of the Frankfurt School Marxists, and orient all hatred only against the traditional, the Christian, the “olds.”

More engineering towards creating compliant, yet politically-actionable Leftwing citizens in the name of “Light” versus Dark (“Shadow”). How can we miss the totalizing moral paradigm being presented here with this language? Our Constitutions, SCOTUS precedents, and various legislation all serves to guarantee that most of education, and certainly the realm of ethical development, remains the sole domain of the parent and, if they so choose (and they should), the Church. These people are actively and with the most up-to-date scientific methods inculcating a totalizing ethical framework in your children that is, quite likely, oppositional to your own.

And, for the last piece, we identify that they are coercing your children to sign pledges to abandon any ethics you have tried to pass on to them in favor of these socially-engineered, Leftist-Socialist, blank-slatist, highly esoterically spiritual ideals. This is no different than having a child pledge to Allah and Mohammed, and it’s in our public schools every single day. SEL is evil. These people are our enemy.

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America’s founding constitutional republic was deliberately constructed as a limited government of enumerated powers, resting on rights endowed by the Cre…

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America’s founding constitutional republic was deliberately constructed as a limited government of enumerated powers, resting on rights endowed by the Creator and subordinated to divine ordinance—a covenantal order where magistrates serve as ministers of justice, and sphere sovereignty preserves distinct governing domains of family, church, and state from totalizing intrusion. Yet, beginning gradually after Reconstruction and accelerating through the twentieth century, the nation has undergone a profound shift toward democracy: a form of civil government characterized foremost by factional identity politics, revolutionary violence and mobbishness, unrestrained government powers, the replacement of God-ordained rights with revocable privileges, and the rise of oligarchs manipulating divided factions for power and privilege amounting to historical royal lords.

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This descent manifests plainly today across the spectrum of social norms, statutory law, case law, and bureaucratic rules. From affirmative action programs, to include DEI as a successor ideology, that allocate opportunities and resources by racial or sexual faction to a tiered taxation system where roughly half the population pays no federal income tax while receiving redistributive grants, effectively plundering one class for another’s privilege. In the explosive growth of welfare systems that foster dependency as a factional tool, and in public-private partnerships and “stakeholder (Soviet) capitalism” that entwine oligarchic interests with state coercion we see the fruits of this transition. In the deliberate factionalization along lines of race (black and brown blocs, Latinx blocs, and Asian blocs versus white), sexuality and gender blocs (LGBTQ demands), income blocs (poor versus middle and wealthy), and geographic blocs (rural versus urban divides) we see the consequences of this descent. These are not mere policy disputes but symptoms of incentive realignment: where the republic incentivized civic duty and mutual restraint under transcendent ethics, and in the “to rule and be ruled in turn” spirit, democracy incentivizes short-term plunder, grievance mobilization, and terror against opposing factions.

The thesis is clear: the post-Reconstruction slide into democracy has realigned incentives across all actors—citizens divided by identity, institutions, oligarchs, bureaucrats, immigrants, and foreign entities—toward instability and revolutionary capture. Modern distinctions between “direct democracy,” “representative democracy,” or any qualified “democracy” are rejected as a deceptive canard, designed to rehabilitate the term by conflating republican safeguards (representation, checks, limits) with democratic essence – an essence that truly lacks for the goodness attributed to it. The constitutional republic lacks democracy’s central components entirely. Communism, Socialism, and Fascism are forms of democracy—extending privileges to favored identity factions without restraint—while voting itself is severable from democracy and not native to many of its historical expressions.

Subtle egalitarian ideals, imported from European revolutionary thought, have contributed to eroding the republic’s transcendent foundations, softening resistance to unrestrained majoritarian or factional will. This essay examines the definitions from Scripture, ancients such as Aristotle, and the American Founders; traces the gradual descent; details incentive shifts actor by actor; explores how the linguistic and conceptual supplanting of republican virtues with “democracy” has enabled revolutionary capture; and concludes with the path of recognition.

II. Defining the Forms: God, Ancients, and Founders

The constitutional republic, as established in America, rests on a transcendent, God-ordained understanding of ordered liberty: government as a minister of divine justice, limited by sphere-sovereignty principles limiting the scope and means of each. These are distinct God-ordained domains where state intrusion is bounded, Church expression does not wield the sword, but ministers to the conscience, and the family is the foundational unit. Rights are not abstractions, prone to gnostic reinterpretation, nor manufactured by social consensus (a democratic virtue), but explicitly Creator-endowed. Aristotle’s definitions of “constitutional” and “republic” reigned for millennia before modern obfuscation—finding expression in the Founders’ separation of powers, enumeration, representation, and further mechanisms towards frustrating excesses, explicitly rejecting democracy as turbulent and incompatible with security of liberties (Madison in Federalist 10; Hamilton’s warnings of mob rule).

Democracy, by contrast, is the perverted form where the dominant factional alliance rule for self-interest (Aristotle in Politics), descending into licentiousness, factional terror, and tyranny (Plato in Republic Book VIII–IX). Historical expressions—from Athenian demagogues inciting violence against minorities, to Jacobin terror privileging revolutionary factions, to Communist vanguard democracy suppressing dissent—reveal its core: identity-block mobilization, elevation of demogogues, privilege allocation, and unrestrained coercion. Democracy is not “rule by the people” in a harmonious sense, but rule by mobilized “demos” factions against other demos, often violent, always oppressive.

The Founders uniformly rejected democracy, guaranteeing a “republican form” in state constitutions and the federal frame in Article Four Section Four. Modern linguistic subversion—attributing republican virtues to “democracy”—serves as political warfare, deceiving citizens into accepting factional excess as “progress,” and the failures at attributable to outside “wreckers.” Communism, Socialism, and Fascism fit democracy’s essence: extending privileges to favored identity blocs (proletariat, race, nation) without biblical or republican restraint.

III. The Gradual Descent: Reconstruction to Present

The shift began subtly after the Civil War, with the Reconstruction amendments (particularly the 14th) serving as entry points for expanding federal unrestraint beyond enumerated bounds, centralizing power and laying groundwork for later interpretations that eroded state sovereignty and individual rights protections. The Progressive Era accelerated this through the 16th and 17th Amendments (income tax and direct Senate election), establishing an administrative state that bypassed legislative deliberation and began treating government as an instrument for social engineering rather than limited justice and collective defense – this was the origin of the shift from government bound by transcendent ethic to government manufacturing ethic via consensus and manipulation (the “Prussian” model).

The New Deal marked a decisive rupture: Social Security, labor regulations, and early welfare programs institutionalized redistribution as privilege allocation, plundering productive classes to buy factional loyalty among the poor and working urban blocs. This expanded unrestrained executive and bureaucratic power, framing the state as provider and parent rather than a mere terror to the evildoer, wielding the sword in righteous justice.

The Great Society under Lyndon Johnson represented the full flowering of democratic excess: the War on Poverty exploded welfare programs (Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, Medicaid), fostering multi-generational dependency as a permanent factional tool; Medicare and federal education funding (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) initiated government takeover of spheres traditionally reserved to family, church, and local, voluntary civics organizations, centralizing control and indoctrinating in a model where there is no appeal higher than the civil government; civil rights legislation, while containing republican elements, increasingly shifted toward privilege allocation (affirmative action precedents, disparate impact) for favored racial factions – what probably should have been tackled as an anticompetitive, cartel-busting undertaking instead enshrined privilege in law based on identity characteristics.

Post-1965 changes compounded this: the Immigration and Nationality Act ended national-origin preferences, importing new factional blocs for demographic manipulation and ensuring perpetual internal divisions within civil society for oligarchs to exploit. Contemporary developments—stakeholder capitalism enforcing factional mandates through public-private fusion (e.g., ESG frameworks), the further explosion of entitlements, and administrative equity initiatives—complete the unbound state, where government functions as deity granting privilege, seizing assets, and tolerating no dissent as it takes up its newfound task of formulating the State mythos – censorship and information warfare operations against the citizenry become necessary tools here.

Imported egalitarian rhetoric—echoing revolutionary European ideals of fraternity unbound by divine ordered heirarchy—softened resistance throughout, portraying unrestraint as compassion and liberation.

IV. Incentive Shifts by Actor: From Republic to Democracy

Oligarchs/Elites

Under the constitutional republic, the production of elites and oligarchs is limited and bounded to competency. Limited pathways for elite success within the prevailing republican order provide a deterrent against severe overproduction and credential inflation. Wealth and influence earned through stewardship within covenantal ethics, sphere sovereignty, and equal rights under divine law, incentivizing long-term investment in civic unity, family cohesion, and social stability while also serving to keep each variety of elite within their specialized area.

Democracy realigns the incentives toward elites becoming Aristotle’s demagogues: champions of ethnic combat who rise by making alliances and retain status through tossing crumbs of privilege to the plebs of their faction. They fund NGOs to perform quasi-governmental functions that merge and compete with the entrenched bureaucracy. Media and political machines mobilize identity blocs to mutual combat that secures privileges for the faction while preventing broad unity against the oligarchs themselves. They raid the institutions to capture the appearance of authority, often via credentialism, as they burn through that banked social capital, hollowing out the structures of civil society, inflating credentials, and collapsing institutional trust. Incentives shift to political power via factional manipulation incentivizing, in turn, the mass importation of more and more dissimilar identity blocs. Career gains come through cronyism and nepotism, cementing broad royal-like and ethnocentric class structures in the culture. Reduced value is placed on children and family as social cohesion erodes and focus shifts to selfish indulgence. The destruction of institutions incentivizes the offshoring of savings and disincentivizes reinvestment in America.

Legislature

Under a republic, the nature of law is best viewed as a shield, in defense of the liberties of all and restraints on government power. Deliberation and compromise are incentivized among representatives protecting God-ordained rights through enumerated powers, as their mutual checks and cultural ethics deter the worst behaviors. Civic unity is fostered. Social cohesion is strengthened, as the use of the levers of government as a weapon is discouraged. Optimism prevails in stable order. Long-term saving and investing are encouraged. Stability in the currency is maintained as much of the economic sphere remains outside of strict regulation by the civil authority.

Democracy shifts law to become a sword with which to coerce weaker factions and plunder the treasury. Demagogic pandering is directed to mobilized factions. Privileges (tax exemptions, subsidies, affirmative mandates) are allocated to secure bloc support. Restraint is eroded, as factional combat breeds a “kill or be killed” attitude among the emergent Volkish nations. Political power is pursued via privilege brokering as legislators vie to become oligarchs themselves. Career advancement comes through factional loyalty wherein impartiality is punished by the voters. Civic unity and social cohesion become fractured, purposely, by both real and imagined transgressions. Fear-driven opportunism replaces optimism, lending towards disloyalty and treason. Spending and plunder replace saving and careful stewardship of public funds. The nuclear family structure is devalued where God-ordained leadership. threatens ambitions of the oligarchs.

Executive

The republican executive is bounded by strong federalism and legislative checks. It operates as, at most, a truly limited Caesar – wielding the sword with swift severity in those instances of invasion and war, but at rest and merely observing otherwise. Execution is limited to enumerated authority, not imperial, global jurisdiction. He serves as minister of justice, and deterrence reigns. Restrained political power is incentivized among the other branches in the absence of clear threats to their spheres of authority. Career fidelity to the constitution is encouraged by transcendent ethic. Civic and social unity are promoted in identifying the only existing threats as external. Strong family cohesion exists under God-ordained leadership., where the head of household can be confident in the head of the executive branch to maintain order within tolerable limits.

Under democracy, weakened federalism and legislatures empower the executive as emperor. Expansion occurs via administrative decrees and agencies. Factional privileges are granted, purchasing more power under the branch that already wields the weaponry of government, as the executive becomes, effectively, top oligarch. A trend towards monarchy emerges, unrestrained by legitimate checks, making the transition to tyranny appear natural and deterministic. Unchecked political power is pursued, but where other oligarchs place some limits on power at home that executive power is more unbound abroad. Civic and social cohesion become divided, as order is not maintained, and, eventually, mere survival for the masses becomes a matter of correct factional alignment. Radical swings in policy emerge. Fear of rivals fuels social pessimism. Lavish spending replaces saving. Family emphasis is reduced amid chaos. Headship is eroded by family dependency on factional handouts.

Judiciary

Justices of a republic are seen as weak, not directly wielding the sword, and bound by honor. Neutral interpretation protects equal rights under divine order. Limited political influence is incentivized, as stepping into partisanship risks checks. Career integrity is encouraged. Civic and social unity are promoted. Optimism prevails in just restraint, and judicial decrees that all can abide. Saving and investing occur in stable society with stable law. High-value family planning is supported. Cohesive families exist absent the factionalization of feminist family courts and critical legal theories.

Under democracy these avatars of justice become factional demagogues undermining constitutional limits and exerting, as possible, direct control over those who wield the sword. They find themselves unchecked by the weakened legislature. Activist redefinition occurs as “living document” obfuscatory theories prevail. Privileges are allocated by faction (racial/sexual quotas, redistribution rulings), incentivizing yet another class of would-be oligarchs to overreach in the name of “our democracy.” Factional political power is pursued. Career activism emerges. Unity and cohesion become fractured, as the instability of law quickly becomes the instability of all things. Fear-based rulings replace optimism. Judicial decrees to loot the treasury on behalf of their faction become normalized. Family and child value are deprioritized, as crisis mentality breeds a “get yours while you can” attitude. Headship is weakened under policies disfavoring fathers, as fatherhood is an existential threat to both oligarchs and democracy.

Bureaucracy/Administrative State

Positions are very limited under a constitutional republic, as the scope of government is itself limited. The appointed persons are to carry out only the policy of the elected officials in accordance with supreme law, and nothing more or less. Minimal political sway is incentivized, as political and policy concerns are zealously guarded by elected officials. Career service to law is encouraged and honorable. Civic and social harmony are promoted by the dearth of civil government interference into private affairs. Productive saving and investing are supported, as the scope of bureaucracy limits plunder. Strong familial bonds and headship exist, as in the absence of a bureaucratic “expert” class decisions and solutions are devolved to the family level.

Under democracy the bureaucracy explodes as the scope of government does. Protections on individual rights dissipate. Elected members of government lean more on the permanent bureaucracy to accomplish policy in an illegitimate manner than via the legitimate mechanisms of policy and lawmaking. Bureaucracy is weaponized for factional enforcement (regulatory harassment of disfavored groups, privilege distribution via agencies). Entrenched political power is pursued by stashing partisan oligarchs in exile within the bureaucracy. Career permanence comes via factionalism. Unity and cohesion become divided. Fear of reform replaces optimism, as the uselessness of the bureaucratic functionary is tacitly acknowledged. Family focus is reduced and leadership is eroded, as the bureaucracy arises as a powerful faction and replacement of the provider and protector.

Higher Education

Under a republic, higher education incentivizes inculcation of virtue and reason within its sphere. Political restraint and moderation are fostered. Career merit is promoted, where ideas are tested instead of insulated. Civic and social unity are strengthened. Optimism prevails as technologies are driven by sincere inquiry. Saving and investing occur in knowledge production. Cohesive families exist under God-ordained leadership, unthreatened by the educated or educators.

Democracy shifts incentives to indoctrination in grievance. Youth are mobilized as revolutionary factions easily dispatched as cannon fodder. Political activism dominates. Career comes via credentialism and factional alignment absent competency. Unity and cohesion become fractured. Fear-mongering is incentivized through grant-making/writing towards studying, foremost, issues that can drive more spending and plunder. Fractured patriotism emerges under financially incentivized foreign interference. God-ordained leadership is undermined through relational ideologies and the necessary destruction of the family that enables oligarchs to remain unthreatened.

Economics/Business

The republic incentivizes free enterprise bounded by rights and transcendent ethics wherein freedom to trade most categories of goods is unrestricted within the geography of a political entity, and foreign trade balances national security with the realities of comparative advantage. Political neutrality is promoted. Innovation is encouraged and rewarded by the market. Civic and social cohesion are strengthened. Optimistic growth prevails as wealth increases. Saving and domestic investing are supported. Strong family planning and child value exist as heads of household have consistent, quality employment. Familial stability is maintained as roles are fostered and reinforced.

Democracy shifts to crony privileges via partnerships. Democratic replacement immigration drives down wages and increases demands on both legitimate economics and welfare and cements ethnic in-group preference that excludes natural-born citizens from whole sectors of economics. Political alliances are incentivized to avoid the wrong side of regulatory capture. Career cronyism emerges and significantly saps efficiencies. Unity and cohesion become division and anger. Privileges for many become the status quo and drive single-issue voting blocs around grievances. Spending on influence replaces savings, and offshoring hides funds abroad to avoid domestic pillaging. Family focus is reduced, as children for many outside the welfare/benefit classes become significant economic burdens. God-ordained leadership is weakened.

NGOs/Media

Voluntary civil society incentivizes apolitical aid and education under a republic. Productive citizenship is promoted. Career service is encouraged. Unity and cohesion are strengthened. Family emphasis and God-ordained leadership are maintained and strengthened.

NGOs arise as factional warfare arms under democracy, amplifying sophistry and terror against opponents, teaching the tradecraft of revolution to cadres, and recruiting the masses as fodder. Political propaganda dominates. Career activism emerges. Unity and cohesion become fractured. Fear-mongering is incentivized. Spending on narratives dominates. Family is deprioritized if not targeted for destruction. God-ordained leadership is eroded. Through taxpayer funding, a perpetual “soft-landing” job prospect is provided for members of the regime in temporary exile from governing.

Citizen Factions

Black/Brown Factions

Equal standing under transcendent law and Constitutional order incentivizes assimilation and civic duty under a republic, where speaking the same language and performing the same customary habits lends towards trust and fosters relationships. Political participation is for unity and fortifying boundaries of government. Career merit is promoted. Social cohesion is strengthened, where commonalities in religion, trade, and ethics dominate differences in color and origin. Optimism prevails in greater equality. Saving and investing are encouraged. High-value family planning is supported. Cohesive families and God-ordained leadership exist absent democratic targeting for factionalization.

Mobilization for racial privileges (affirmative action, reparations demands) is pursued under democracy. Dependency and grievance against other factions are fostered. Bloc political power is pursued around Volkish nationalism and “collective consciousness.” Career comes via quotas, and unemployment is incentivized. Cohesion becomes fractured. Fear of oppression dominates, and, in short years, brain-drain renders broad swaths unsuited to meritocratic advancement. Spending on immediate needs replaces saving. Child value is reduced amid instability except where incentivized by welfare benefits. Headship is weakened as government replaces the role of the father in providing.

White Factions

Duty to ordered liberty without special privilege incentivizes unified political restraint under a republic. Career effort is promoted. Social cohesion is strengthened. Optimism prevails in merit. Saving and investing are encouraged. Intentional family and child value are supported. Strong headship exists. Colorblind meritocracy is maintained as mutually beneficial absent coercive plunder.

Defensive grievance or retreat emerges under democracy, as redistribution and mandates plunder or marginalize. Resentful political backlash is incentivized. Career barriers arise in the presence of replacement immigration, racial quotas, and ethnic-bloc capture of industries. Cohesion becomes division. Fear of displacement dominates, and disincentivizes both effort and investment. Spending on defensive categories over saving predominates. Family is deprioritized in the presence of extreme sex-linked divisions. Headship is eroded in the presence of hedonistic feminism and egalitarianism. Finally, the rise of a white identity political bloc embraces whatever means necessary to secure a future, and with it the rise of white-identity oligarchs alters the political landscape.

LGBTQ Factions

Civil liberty within moral bounds and private practices incentivizes privacy and public decency under a republic. Optimism prevails in tolerance elevating limits of civil government. Saving and investing are encouraged. Grievances are oriented to the Church instead of the state, thereby maintaining sphere sovereignty and keeping the sword out of the debate.

Privileges (mandated recognition, quotas, celebration) are pursued under democracy. Cultural rupture is mobilized against traditional spheres. Political demands dominate and disempower the Church sphere as it contracts under the threat of the sword. Grievance is directed to the state to dismantle the family sphere in “equity” with those who cannot produce a natural family. Career comes via identity-as-a-credential through standpoint epistemology and factional capture of institutions. Cohesion becomes fractured. Fear of backlash dominates while becoming ever more incentivized. Spending on advocacy is prioritized. Family is devalued by sales of children to those unable to naturally produce their own. Ever-greater public transgression of transcendent order and ethics is incentivized.

Poor Factions

Opportunity under equal rights generates capacity for earning for nearly all persons under a republic, with wages guides by fair market conditions. Stable careers are promoted. Social cohesion is strengthened in institutions shared among all. Optimism prevails in predictability. Saving and investing habits are encouraged. Family planning with high child value is supported through affordability. Cohesive headship exists even in lower classes. Responsible charity is readily available via civil society and Church organizations.

Dependency on redistributive privileges is fostered under democracy. Voting blocs expand welfare plunder. Entitlement politics dominate. Career stagnation emerges in the presence of replacement immigration. Pathways are blocked for those who cannot afford education towards credentials, locking the capable-but-disadvantaged out of the upper classes and elites. Fear of cuts dominates. Spending replaces saving. Large/low-value families increase welfare benefits. God-ordained leadership is severely weakened in the inability to provide for ones own family and reliance on systems of plunder and factionalism.

Middle Class Factions

Stability through work and duty incentivizes balanced politics under a republic. Career advancement is promoted according to merit. Civic and social unity are strengthened in shared institutions. Optimism prevails in security and stability. Saving and investing are encouraged. Deliberate family planning and high child value are supported. Strong headship exists.

Squeezing by tiered taxation and plunder is experienced under democracy, especially during the earlier phases where middle-class wealth represents the bulk of the treasury. Resentment or alignment with privilege-seekers by adopting flexible identities is incentivized. Defensive politics dominate, and withdrawal from institutions occurs. Career insecurity emerges in the presence of replacement immigration and ethnic capture. Cohesion becomes fractured. Fear of decline dominates. Spending cuts replace investing and hording of necessities is observed. Family size is reduced. Family leadership is weakened.

Wealthy Factions

Stewardship incentivizes restrained politics under a republic, as well as charity and investment in shared institutions. Innovation is promoted. Unity and cohesion are strengthened. Optimism prevails in legacy building and assured inheretence. Saving and investing are encouraged. Entrepreneurship is supported. High-value family planning is maintained. Strong family leadership exists.

Alignment with oligarchs for crony protections, or factional competition, is pursued under democracy. Manipulative politics dominate. Masses are divided by identity to protect the wealth of the elites, while the demagogues constantly shake them down. Fear of taxation leads to hiding wealth overseas. Unstable families emerge. Family leadership is weakened. Incentives shift to pleasure-seeking hedonism and licentiousness, and investment in destructive paradigms.

Rural Factions

Autonomy in isolated geography incentivizes local politics under a republic. Self-reliance is promoted. Social cohesion is strengthened. Optimism prevails in independence and acquired skillsets. Saving and investing in land occur for high efficiency and productivity. Large and high-value families are supported. Strong headship exists.

Marginalization by urban-dominated privileges (regulatory burdens, cultural disdain) is experienced under democracy. Isolationist politics dominate. Career obstacles arise. Cohesion becomes fractured. Fear of erasure and asset seizure dominates. Spending is defensive. Family emphasis is reduced. Headship is eroded. Heavy reliance on subsidies emerges.

Urban Factions

Ordered community incentivizes integrated politics under a republic. Career opportunity is promoted. Unity and cohesion are strengthened. Optimism prevails in diversity and unity in patriotism, civics and religion towards a common future. Saving and investing are encouraged. Balanced family and child value are supported. Strong family leadership exists under traditional institutions.

Mobilization for revolutionary paradigms is pursued under democracy. Identity-dominant politics dominate. Career comes via networks and taxpayer-funded schemes. Divisions are incentivized and culturally ingrained. Spending on trends and demonstrating wealth/power is prioritized. Child value is low outside of increased government benefits. Family is weakened.

Non-Citizen Actors

Immigrants

Incentives to assimilate to ordered liberty and covenantal society exist for freedom and opportunity under a republic. Political integration is encouraged, even if not in the first generation. Merit is promoted and incentives are aligned. Civic and social unity are strengthened. Optimism prevails, as do grateful attitudes. Saving and investing are supported. Strong family planning and child value are maintained. Cohesive headship exists.

Mass importation as factional blocs for divide-and-conquer strategies is pursued under democracy, and incentives are realigned away from opportunity towards welfare and graft. Demographics are altered for power. Identity/ethnic bloc politics dominate. Identity quotas emerge. Cohesion becomes fractured. Fear of exclusion dominates. Spending replaces saving. Large/low-value families emerge. Family structure is eroded.

Foreign Enemy State Actors and Terrorist Groups

Deterrence via limited social attack surface and strong sovereignty exists under a republic. Cohesion in civil society is maintained. Avoidance of kinetic conflict is incentivized. Minimal political leverage is possible through subversion. Unity against threats is strengthened. Optimism prevails in security. Saving for defense is encouraged. Trust exists in distributed and decentralized defensive capacity. Strong family protection and headship are maintained.

Exploitation of unrestraint—proxies, lobbies, open borders for infiltration—is pursued under democracy. Amplified political disruption dominates. Careers in subversion emerges. Cohesion fractures. Fear exploitation is incentivized. Spending on subversive operations is prioritized. Invasion by both asymmetric and tradition methods becomes a greater possibility.

Allied Nations

Mutual respect for sovereignty incentivizes cooperative politics under a republic. Alliances are promoted for deterrence. Civic and social harmony are strengthened internally through expectations of peace. Optimism prevails in partnerships. Saving and investing occur jointly.

Leverage of internal factions for concessions is pursued under democracy. Opportunistic politics dominate. Exploitation emerges. Cohesion becomes fractured. Regime-change and revolution is pursued via factional divisions. Fear of instability dominates. Spending on influence is prioritized.

V. Democracy as Enabler of Revolutionary Capture

The linguistic and conceptual supplanting of republican virtues with the label “democracy” has been a masterful combination of historical accident and deliberate information warfare. Republican features—representation, limited voting, checks on power, protection of rights—were gradually rebranded as “democratic” through Progressive education, Wilsonian rhetoric abroad, Cold War propaganda equating Americanism with “democracy” against totalitarian foes, and media/academic repetition. This was partly accidental: well-meaning defenses of liberty against communism conflated the forms. But it was also warfare: progressive forces, inheriting egalitarian ideals unbound by divine ordinance, deliberately blurred lines to rehabilitate democracy, associating it with freedom, equality, and popular will while stripping its ancient/founding connotations of factional terror and unrestraint.

Citizens came to demand “democracy” in the name of those good things—fair representation, voice in government, equality under law—believing they defended the republic. In reality, this enabled factional identity conflict: privileges over rights, mobilized blocs against one another, and an unbound state-as-God model where government assumes total providential role, dissolving sphere sovereignty and transcendent limits on the civil authority. This fertile soil allowed esoteric Progressivism’s vanguard to flourish unchecked: the long march through institutions via privilege allocation, sophistry concealing open planning and terror, rupture-repair cycles without republican barriers, and gnostic confidence in historical inevitability. As examined previously, the openness of revolutionary doctrine—proclaimed evangelically among initiates—thrives in democracy’s unrestrained factionalism, where sophistry hides plots in plain sight and perpetual mobilization sustains the eschatological drive toward man-made Eden.

Any effort to affect counter-revolution, and return to a republican form of government, must account for these incentives, nullify those that perpetuate democracy, and reorient them – perhaps via a new slate of incentivization meant to bridge the gap and retrain the conscience. Of course, this only represents a start. There is much more analysis to be done on incentives and how they might be altered. We look forward to examining strategy to this end in the future.

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Soon, we will be releasing what we believe will be a groundbreaking piece on the nature of “democracy” and the present state of affairs in America that might guide efforts strategically going forwards. It’s a significant undertaking, and has been in the works for several weeks already. We won’t push it out before it’s ready, but be on the lookout.

In January 2026, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti—activists intervening in federal immigration enforcement operations by direct, kinetic action—were shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. These incidents occurred amid broader federal efforts to execute deportation orders, which encountered organized resistance from the broad Left. Analysis of participant behavior, including coordination via Signal messaging groups tracking federal movements, indicates criminal conspiracy and counter-state operational capacity. The nature of these interventions was insurgent: activists leveraged captured state-level apparatus (including endorsement from Minnesota officials) to obstruct what may reasonably be termed “counter-revolutionary” federal executive actions aimed at restoring national sovereignty over immigration enforcement.

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The tactics deployed in response—rapid mobilization, scripted protests, disruption rituals—are derived from openly available sources, including Beautiful Trouble manuals, Alinsky’s organizing principles, Gramsci’s cultural hegemony prison notebooks, Frankfurt School disruption methods from Counterrevolution and Revolt and Repressive Tolerance, and color revolution toolkits supported by entities like the National Endowment for Democracy. These are taught and coordinated through a network of NGOs, many with official connections to the state of Minnesota, funding streams via platforms such as ActBlue, and operational ties to foreign Communist states including Cuba and China.

When these patterns are identified publicly sophistry is deployed from both the streets and the commanding heights of media: mockery, accusations of “conspiracy theory,” and exploitation of public disinterest in complicated writings to bury truth in plain sight, just outside the Overton Window. This mechanism is foremost among the revolutionaries – there is no force in the universe stronger than taboo. Like nearly everything else the Left does, sophistry, too, has its origins in Platonism.

The Minnesota events are not isolated but exemplify a captured counter-state laboratory, perpetuating rupture-repair cycles of revolutionary praxis through fraud-enabled institutional control. The thesis remains: the historic practice of open planning and open communications on the Left stems from esoteric Progressivism, with a direct line to ancient Hermeticism and Platonism—a faith presupposing inevitable historical unfoldment toward a man-made Eden by gnosis-bearing “men of history” or philosopher-kings. Openness operates as decentralized roadmap by which the zealots might push with synchronicity, while sophistry serially subverts counter-efforts below the victory threshold.

The Strategic Layer: Openness as a Consequence of Doctrinal Confidence

The Left’s openness in planning and communication is a strategic feature rooted in the presuppositions of esoteric Progressivism. Belief in the inevitable unfoldment of history toward the eschaton allows any actor who understands the doctrine to advance the shared trajectory. Revolutionary texts are published without restriction: Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s Unrestricted Warfare remains unclassified and openly available, enabling refinement that Western analysts often fail to confront systematically. Beautiful Trouble is available online and in audiobook format, as is Rules for Radicals. Leftists typically do not learn these tactics directly from the texts, but, historically, from revolutionary cadre and secondary education, and, today, more and more from NGOs through public trainings.

This approach resembles, in some ways, the U.S. military’s commander’s intent model—decentralized execution toward a common end-state—but substitutes the Spirit of History for a human commander and, due to the elitism of gnostic-selection, restricts operational delegated only to the gilded elites. The result is an inverse of American results: consistent kinetic weakness (e.g., paralysis in Spanish Civil War anarchist units due to suspicion of insufficient enlightenment; Maoist purges targeting perceived deviations) contrasted with sustained political and institutional successes via political warfare. Theory and praxis evolve without classification or barriers, supporting the long march through institutions, capture of commanding heights, disruption of cultural sense-making facilities, and active advancement of the foreign policy of Communist nations.

Sophistry is central to all the Left’s successes: taboo-making through mockery exploits laziness and disinterest, concealing open declarations while offensively forcing adversaries into reactive postures. There’s a reason the childhood nightmare of being laughed at before a class of peers is a recurring theme in history. This mechanism captures institutions, influences politicians via praxis, and attracts cadres often characterized by cluster-B pathologies and what may be termed the feminine nature of Marxism—emphasizing relational manipulation and passive-aggression over hierarchical confrontation.

Contemporary examples include the obfuscation of COVID-19 origins, dismissal of World Economic Forum “Great Reset” documents, and the rapid institutionalization of transgender policies (linked to Platonic-Hermetic motifs of primal androgyne unity disrupted and seeking recombination). In Minnesota, fraud-enabled capture since 2020 has transformed the state into a site for testing and exporting these methods, with NGO networks providing training and coordination against federal authority.

The Metaphysical and Religious Foundations: Esoteric Progressivism and Its Ancient Lineage

Esoteric Progressivism, with a direct line to ancient Hermeticism and Platonism, constitutes a religious faith—eschatological, coercive, and structured around gnostic elements demanding intolerance despite operating within “liberal” frameworks. Its lineage extends from ancient Gnosticism and Hermeticism, through Platonic philosopher-kings and the noble lie, Socratic provocation, Arabic inquiry, Medieval European Elites, Jacobin rupture, the German idealist tradition (Hegel’s hermetic “wizardry” as analyzed by Glenn Magee and Eric Voegelin), Marx’s “material” eschatological prophecy, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Mao, Deng, to contemporary identity-based Democratic strategies functioning as oligarchic divide-and-conquer mechanisms.

This faith operates simultaneously at the levels of presupposition, faith, ethics, and strategy, with specific linkages to Platonic and Hermetic ideas in each domain:

- Presuppositional level: Esoteric Progressivism presupposes a teleological view of history as an inevitable unfoldment toward perfection, mirroring the Hermetic principle of the universe as an alchemical process (solve et coagula) and Platonic emanation from the realm of Forms, where the material world is a shadowed ascent toward ideal truth, guided by those who perceive the eternal patterns.

- Faith level: The eschatological conviction in a man-made Eden available after all oppressive hierarchy is deconstructed reflects Hermetic rebirth into divine unity (the adept completing the great work) and Platonic return to the ideal state under philosopher-king rule, where gnosis-bearers realize the promised harmony disrupted in the fallen world.

- Ethical level: Justification for deception, manipulation, and perpetual rupture derives from the Platonic noble lie (permissible falsehoods to maintain social order among the ungifted) and Hermetic pendulum and creation mythology, where dissolution of existing structures is morally required for higher coagulation and rebirth as the elect gather the divine shards and transcend distinctions.

- Strategic level: The vanguard’s role in driving history forward, with openness among initiates, echoes Platonic guardianship (philosopher-kings educating and directing society covertly when needed) and Hermetic transmission of knowledge among adepts, proclaiming doctrine evangelically while concealing operative details from the profane. This is reflected in the modern paradigm of “democracy” more correctly identified as oligarch-led identity factions, perhaps as one might suspect was Plato’s intent from the beginning, with his Republic as an initiate text teaching a pre-modern form of revolution and power consolidation to elites reading between the lines and educated within the academy.

The rupture-repair cycle—Hermetic solve et coagula, dialectical thesis-antithesis-synthesis—ensures perpetual revolution. Openness of these doctrines reflects faith in this inevitability while serving practically as a self-fulfilling roadmap appealing to fallen human nature. The story of Lucifer’s fall offers insight into the strong inward desire to make oneself the lawgiver and seize the knowledge of powerful things. Strategic doctrine is proclaimed evangelically (like gospel), distinct from compartmentalized tactical operations.

Liberalism, in this view, is a metaphysically thin mechanism—”don’t go to war over small differences”—that, untethered from ordered Christian liberty, necessarily accelerates toward libertinism and liberationism, as, lacking its own metaphysical limiting principle it can advance only calls for “more liberty” even in the face of excess liberty, acting as a solvent for the culture and ethics.

Sophistry plays a theological role: concealing truth from the ungifted while enabling vanguard manipulation. This is also a key origin of the “tyranny of the theater-kids” idea, where it takes an actor to summon righteous indignation and cackling hysteria in the face of truth and justice.

Counter-Strategies: Addressing the Asymmetry

The Minnesota case exemplifies the model: open playbooks operationalized under sophist cover by NGO networks, academia and media, a perpetual rupture-repair sustained against federal enforcement, and institutional capture creating a counter-state laboratory for tactics. Leveraging the state apparatus for insurgent purposes is a key indicator of the state of play. Openness, while signaling doctrinal confidence in esoteric Progressivism, presents exploitable weaknesses when systematically confronted.

Neutralizing the taboo-making machinery of sophistry requires deliberate deployment of counter-mockery, humor, and sustained erosion of captured institutions’ social capital – this is a foremost place to deploy I/O broadly. Historically, this mirrors the use of satire and ridicule against revolutionary pretensions, as seen in Puritan writings of that Satan who cannot withstand mockery, or the underground samizdat humor in Soviet bloc countries that undermined regime legitimacy by mocking official narratives. In modern contexts, dissident online communities have effectively employed memetic warfare to dismantle DEI and critical race theory taboos, turning Alinsky’s own Rule 5 (”Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”) against leftist enforcers as they feebly attempt to wield the hammer of the heights that they did not earn; examples include viral campaigns exposing the hilarity of “men make the best women”, which strip away the protective ridicule shield and force public reevaluation, raising the laziness threshold and disrupting the concealment mechanism that hides open planning in plain sight.

Establishing parallel epistemological institutions grounded in American founding traditions and the solid foundations of Christian theology counters the disruption of cultural sense-making facilities by rebuilding objective reality anchors outside captured commanding heights. Doctrinally, this draws from the Puritan emphasis on covenantal communities and scriptural authority as bulwarks against gnostic relativism, akin to the parallel ecclesiastical structures maintained by dissident Protestants during periods of state persecution. In the American context, it echoes the pamphlet culture of the Founding era, which fostered independent sense-making against British propaganda. Contemporary applications include the expansion of classical education networks (e.g., Hillsdale College affiliates and homeschool cooperatives) and alternative media ecosystems rooted in constitutional originalism and rejecting “living documentism.”

Applying the paradox of toleration—as articulated, poorly, by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies—involves treating openly declared revolutionary and seditious doctrine and activated playbooks not as protected speech but as high crimes. Historically, American measures like the Sedition Act of 1918 targeting socialist and anarchist agitation during wartime, the Communist Control Act, and espionage law should prevail over lawless judicial tyranny. In theoretical terms, it recognizes esoteric Progressivism’s coercive intolerance (demanding conformity under the noble lie ethic) and refuses unlimited tolerance that enables self-destruction. Modern implementation could involve rigorous Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement against NGO networks with ties to foreign Communist states, or classifying certain color revolution training materials as seditious when used in domestic counter-state operations, as seen in ongoing federal investigations into protest coordination linked to Minnesota events.

Exploiting Leftist non-delegation rigidities in kinetic domains requires developing asymmetric, decentralized opposition. Counter-organizing within moderate populations sympathetic to the Marxists to divide and stoke jealousies and ambitions against their cadres may hold potential. More broadly, pushing the Left to enter the kinetic domain where the information battlespace has been adequately prepared shifts the initiative to the American forces.

Central to all counter-strategies is the special place of truth as the primary mechanism for breaking the gnostic spells of esoteric Progressivism. When treated with utmost seriousness and deployed rigorously, truth resonates directly with observable sense perception, inherent logic, and heart-written ethics. This resonance possesses unique power to rapidly shift the Overton Window, awakening especially elites, or potential elites, to patterns previously concealed by sophistry. Success demands always advancing the most correct arguments, grounded firmly in traditional ethics and objective reality. Imperfect argumentation—flawed reasoning, significant exaggeration, or appeals lacking direct linkage to enduring moral frameworks—alienates the persuadable center, inculcates relativism by mirroring the Left’s own ethical flexibility, and fails to distinguish the counter-position. Those susceptible to mere self-interest or expedient bad argumentation are already claimed by the Left’s pragmatic vanguard; the decisive ground lies with hearts oriented toward truth, where uncompromising fidelity to the most accurate and ethically anchored claims alone secures lasting movement.

For national security personnel and policymakers, systematic study of these forms—analogous to confronting Unrestricted Warfare—is essential. Recognition of the metaphysical and religious dimensions of esoteric Progressivism, with its direct line to ancient Hermeticism and Platonism, enables proportionate, decisive response. A path through requires acknowledging the spiritual stakes and reclaiming ordered liberty before the zealots march another peoples off the eschatological cliff.

This is where we are at, and this is what must be done if we’re to have victory.

There is no easy button. There are no shortcuts. There is no way out but through.\

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“We stand in early two thousand twenty-six, and the signs around are unmistakable – the spirit of the age is manifest. The invasion persists in the heartland. Tens of millions of alien enemies already established—fueled by the revolutionary NGO complex in which the shadow government finds a center of gravity while in official exile. They continue to advance replacement economically, culturally, and electorally – a boon to the revolutionary Democratic party. Anarcho-tyranny defines daily life across much of the nation: Predators and rioters walk free, while elderly, nonviolent pro-life protesters languished for years under Biden-era sentences of decades in prison. Race-Marxist mobs invade churches with impunity, disrupting worship and intimidating congregants, finding no parallel enforcement to those long prison terms handed down for peaceful abortion clinic protests despite being far more egregious violations of the same federal statutes. In cities like Minneapolis, anti-ICE protests escalated into Bolshevik-style mobs tormenting random white citizens suspected of ties to Trump administration enforcement—chasing, harassing, demanding they produce proof of identity, and in some cases assaulting them.

This is not random chaos. It is a seditious conspiracy edging toward full insurrection, orchestrated by the broad Left—including its Islamo-Marxist axis alliances seen in campus radicalism and street agitation. Even the elected authorities of cities and states have threatened to deploy police and military forces against these federal agents for the crime of attempting to save this nation from the Left’s perpetual Marxist revolution. The target is clear: our still-in-the-cradle counter-revolutionary movement to re-enshrine American constitutional republican government, and supplant the Marxist “democracy” that has taken root, is the ultimate aim.

The scope of this sedition is vast—far beyond isolated acts. It encompasses coordinated networks across government agencies, courts, NGOs, academia, media, and tech platforms. It utilizes the actionable, strategic language of “intersectionality,” “peaceful protest,” and “anti-fascism” to coordinate, signal, and target. Thousands of actors, from street agitators to high officials, advance the overthrow incrementally. Yet bandwidth limits official response: Courts and prisons cannot process every violation, and a hundred-thousand charges of seditious conspiracy is not achievable however much it might be deserved. Strategic choices become necessary—pursue charges where impact is greatest, not exhaustive. This reality maye also force departure from traditional methods. Inflicting terror on the evildoer (Romans 13’s sword) and disincentivizing revolutionary resistance demands alternatives: Targeted, exemplary enforcement; public exposure and shaming; punishment by process; economic and social consequences; coordinated interposition by loyal magistrates. Half-measures fail against scale—only decisive, asymmetric counters restore deterrence.

A key tactic in their arsenal is jury nullification – a tactic actively being taught to deep-blue populations by well-funded NGOs. Revolutionary actors—rioters, agitators, even those committing overt violence—are brought to trial, only for revolutionary jurors (often drawn from captured urban pools) to acquit the guilty despite overwhelming evidence. This blocks the administration of justice outright, shielding the movement’s foot soldiers while eroding faith in the system. If scaled successfully—nullifying accountability across cases—it renders legal mechanisms useless in the fight, and necessitates an unpleasant shift in tactics. At that point, restoration of order shifts inescapably to kinetic-based warfare: Direct suppression of revolutionaries who now operate with impunity under a perverted “justice” system. It shifts to counter-insurgency warfare. It shifts to recognizing those bringing kinetics and “direct-action” for the revolution as enemy combatants to be dealt with by military means. They must be made to understand the reality of where jury-nullification to protect their revolution leads, and all efforts must be made to render it ineffective.

The methodology is calculated. Through founding documents, transcendent Biblical ethics, and game theory, the pattern emerges plainly. The Left escalates incrementally—advances just below the threshold that would provoke a unified, decisive response from the Right, and shift the playing field in our favor. NGOs sustain internal subversion without direct kinetic challenge from authorities. Lawfare isolates targets through endless injunctions. Alliances normalize revolutionary rhetoric without triggering backlash, as the sheer mass of persons undertaking these revolutionary activities acts to normalize it and prevent enforcement.

At the same time, they provoke deliberately. Isolated incidents—engineered confrontations at enforcement sites, mob actions amplified as “resistance”—are memetically cemented as proof of “fascist violence.” This justifies calls for further escalation: abolition of borders, defunding of police, silencing of dissent, and, eventually, calls to authorities to step down or be removed by force. The goal is to push the Overton window leftward while portraying any effective counter as illegitimate.

Game theory makes the danger clear. This is an iterated contest, not a single battle. The Left “defects” incrementally—escalates below the decisive threshold—while daring the Right to “cooperate” through perpetual restraint. If the Right refuses to escalate above the victory threshold—fearing “overreach,” isolated backlash, or memetic traps—the Left accumulates irreversible gains. Over iterations, total defection wins. We must win every single round perfectly, because once we lose one, the game ends forever. The republic collapses without a unifying counterstroke. If an optimal strategy is “tit-for-tat,” we must make sure, in iterated format, that the response is adequately calibrated to account for the thousands of “tats” unanswered.

Compounding this is profound demoralization. The Left is largely viewed as legitimate in all its undertakings because its actions are perceived as “just” under supplanted Marxist values—equity over equality, collective over individual, revolution over order. This is reinforced by virtually every cultural institution – long since captured – including media, academia, civil-society, and religious. Information warfare has tarred true justice from the Right as illegitimate: Enforcement of borders becomes “racism,” defense of life, liberty and property “extremism,” adherence to transcendent law “theocracy.” The violent splinter tactic, as explained by Stephen Coughlin, accelerates this: The Left maintains “non-violent” mainstream lines while tolerating or directing violent splinters (antifa, mob actions). The threat of violence normalizes radical demands—”give us policy concessions or the splinter acts”—while memetically framing the Right’s responses as the real violence, as per Repressive Tolerance. This pushes the agenda forward, iteration by iteration.

The nature of our future defeat must be faced without illusion. This is not twentieth-century warfare, where many losers retained dignity, property, or life under occupation with caveats. Historic reality—and Communist precedent—offers no mercy.

When revolutionaries prevail, men face slaughter or enslavement without exception. Women, down to puberty, become sex slaves or forced brides. Young children are killed to erase the last vestiges of vanquished lineages. Eastern Europe post-nineteen forty-five bears witness: Red Army advances brought mass rapes—two million German women alone, often in view of families, followed by murder or despair. Gulags swallowed millions into forced labor and death. Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland repeated the pattern: “Liberation” meant loot, rape, purge. The same pattern repeated in Cambodia, Cuba, Iran, and Spain.

Broader Communist history confirms: Cambodia’s fields claimed two million skulls, children smashed against trees. China’s Great Leap and Cultural Revolution devoured tens of millions in famine and frenzy. Ukraine’s Holodomor starved millions deliberately under Stalin. The Spanish Civil War saw churches burned, priests executed, nuns bodies exhumed and put on display for mockery and humiliation. Venezuela’s slow grind previews economic enslavement, as so many of their women have turned to cross-border prostitution to feed their families.

Defeat here means the same fate. No respectful terms. No reconstruction aid. The Islamo-Marxist axis and its allies add religious sanction to their atrocity. We win every single time, or we lose. One loss, and the abyss claims all. That’s how this works. There are no mulligans, no redoes, nobody coming to save us. This is what must be understood to those who contend that a good election result means that “we’re winning.” Even if it is true that “we’re winning,” we’re also very close to losing – just once. Once is all it takes.

Incremental accommodation fails the iterated test. Provocation succeeds when met with restraint. Only decisive escalation—unified, transcendent in ethic, above the threshold—secures the republic.

May God raise magistrates who see the pattern—and break it.”

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This also likely marks the last public episode of this format - hence, the reversal of the prior decision to make this available only to paid subscribers. It is necessary for us to explore other formats going forward, as the cost of producing these videos has increased, and it has not been met with a commensurate increase in paid subscriptions. As we have operated for months at a loss we must now change. We are exploring the possibility of moving forward with a podcast-like format. However, though presently unknown, there is an expiration date on the Counterspell project unless a significant increase in support can be gained. We hope you might share us with friends towards this end.

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Text Version:

“We have arrived at the final link in the chain, and the final video in this series, and of this format. The previous episodes have laid the ground bare. Ordinary polity has failed. The legislature is captured and feckless. The judiciary has become a revolutionary force, rewriting law through fiat and “living document” sorcery. The militia is neutered. Secession is suicidal. Nullification is crushed in court. Lower magistrates are isolated, infiltrated, or powerless. The republic faces existential threats on every front, and the revolutionary apparatus—both domestic and foreign—needs only one decisive victory while we must block every thrust perfectly.

There remains one office with the unitary authority, the oath, and the constitutional tools to act decisively. The presidency. The highest magistrate in the land. The last functioning link in the eternal chain.

The founders did not design the executive to be weak in crisis. They designed it to be energetic. Article II vests the executive power in a single president for a reason: swift, decisive action when the republic demands it. But the deepest warrant lies in Article IV, Section 4.

“The United States **shall** guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…”

This is not a passive promise. It is an active, affirmative duty. The federal government—led by the president—must guarantee that every state retains a **republican** form of government. Not a democracy. A republic. Not identify politics, robbery of the treasury, and endless graft. A republic – where the people are secure in their rights and possessions and the politicians are secure in nothing absent their obedience to Godly ethics and just law.

The distinction is everything. The founders feared democracy as mob rule, and as evidenced by the Athenians, as factionalism run amok—where temporary majorities or organized interests tyrannize minorities, whether that be financial, skin pigmentation, or ethnonationalistic minorities, where identity politics and class warfare replace deliberation and the common good is crushed. Madison warned in Federalist 10 of factions that would “sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.” They built a republic precisely to oppose this: representative government with checks against direct popular passions, bounded by transcendent law, protecting minorities from majority oppression and majorities from manipulated frenzy.

Over the last century, that republican form has been overthrown. “Democracy” has become the watchword of the revolutionary order—a word the founders used sparingly and always negatively. It has been substituted for the constitutional republic through progressive subversion, judicial fiat, and bureaucratic capture. Factionalism now reigns: identity politics pitting groups against each other, endless appeals to “majority will” that mask elite manipulation a la Philosopher Kings, policies driven by temporary coalitions rather than enduring principles. The result is not the founders’ system. It is something else. It is something illegitimate—oppositional to the republican guarantee itself, and flouting the American founding and the blood spilt for that posterity.

When the republican form is manifestly lost to this revolutionary democracy, Article IV imposes a duty on the president to restore it. This guarantee legitimates forcible intervention, even replacement of state governments that have devolved into factional tyrannies or been captured by revolutionary forces. It authorizes the president to use whatever means necessary—military deployment, suspension of rebellious officials, reformation of electoral processes—to reestablish republican order in the states. And it extends upward: The federal leviathan itself, when captured by the same factional democracy, falls under the same duty. The president, as the unitary executive, must reform or purge the federal apparatus to fulfill the guarantee nationwide.

This power is inherent in the president’s role as chief magistrate and commander-in-chief. It does not depend on congressional delegation or statutory limits. The duty to suppress domestic violence and guarantee republican form flows directly from the constitutional text and the transcendent ethic that animates it.

The judiciary’s claim to absolute supremacy—rooted in Marbury v. Madison’s self-asserted judicial review—has no constitutional warrant as final and unreviewable. It amounted to a subtle coup not to be fully realized for two-hundred years. The founders never intended the Court to be secular prophets – pharisees adding to the law while ignoring the foundations – upsetting constitutional order through redefinition and fiat. Jefferson rejected it outright. Lincoln, in his First Inaugural, warned: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” Jackson defied Worcester v. Georgia. The president retains coordinate authority to judge constitutionality in his sphere—especially when judicial rebellion aids the overthrow of republican form for damnable, revolutionary democracy.

The penetration runs deeper still. Legislative and bureaucratic branches are no longer legitimate in the eyes of the people or God. Foreign enemies—China, Russia, Qatar—and nominal allies alike, such as Britain and Israel, have embedded influence through bribery, blackmail, honeypots, and ideological capture. Domestic agencies operate with divided loyalties. The uniparty consensus serves these masters while the republic hemorrhages in the public square for all to witness. When magistrates abandon their oath to transcendent law and serve revolutionary or foreign ends, constituting malicious and aforethought attacks on the American citizenry, they forfeit legitimacy. The highest magistrate must interpose.

These are just some of the grievances that justify the charge—drawn from the present crisis, echoing the founders’ own indictments:

- The circumvention of law to fund dangerous pathogen research with enemy states, followed by mandates and censorship and medical meddling and manipulation that crushed livelihoods and worship, and caused the deaths of perhaps a million Americans.

- Anti-energy and regulatory policies that threaten food supply, freeze families, and erode freedom of movement while lining the pockets of both the Chinese and American politicians.

- Endless unnecessary foreign wars without declaration, laundering wealth through foreign proxies to enrich the corrupt.

- A surveillance-censorship regime that abolishes privacy and partners with tech cartels to silence dissent.

- Currency debasement theft and coming digital controls that pauperize families and prepare social credit tyranny and totalitarian control.

- Weaponized justice that revictimizes citizens while releasing predators, targets political prisoners with gulag conditions, and wields the sword only against the righteous.

- Incessant infringements on arms and attacks on the founding vision of decentralized militant capacity, and turning righteous defense of the innocent into crimes.

- Indoctrination and grooming of children into revolutionary ideologies, sexual perversion, cultism, and severing family bonds.

- Welfare and tax schemes that abolish the family unit and indenture the productive, while incentivizing fatherlessness.

- Election manipulation, insider corruption, and targeting of dissidents through lawfare and leaks.

- Alien invasion, perhaps to the tune of 50 million illegitimate persons on United States soil, economically and electorally replacing native-born and generational Americans, targeting those of European descent in particular, and loosing hand-picked, violent, foreign hordes to terrorize us.

The list is long, but the pattern clear: A revolutionary overthrow of republican form through factional democracy, foreign penetration, and moral collapse – it’s the totality of the works of Plato brought to life.

The president’s tools are both constitutional and warranted by transcendent ethic:

- Article IV, Section 4: Active duty to restore republican form—authorizing forcible replacement of captured state regimes and federal reformation, using inherent powers to suppress domestic violence threatening the guarantee.

- Article II executive power and commander-in-chief: Full control of military and agencies for decisive enforcement against factional rebellion.

- Oath of office: Defend the Constitution’s republic against all enemies.

- Coordinate review: Reject judicial supremacy where it aids overthrow.

- Declaration’s warrant: When all redress fails, reform under higher law.

These enable ethical transcendence of apparent bounds. Eroded constraints—congressional gridlock, judicial stays—are foils when republican form is lost. The highest magistrate acts with means necessary for efficacy and justice: Secure borders, purge compromised elements, restore electoral integrity, reassert transcendent limits.

To execute this charge effectively, tactical measures are essential. Preemptively federalize the National Guard in rogue states, relocating them to harmless postings while deploying loyal volunteer Guard units or active-duty forces to the power centers of subversive locales. This secures control without immediate escalation.

Foreign intervention is certain. The international communist bloc—China, Russia, the EU, and Latin American socialist states—will attempt military, economic, cyber, or asymmetric interference to prevent restoration of the republic, and throwing off the chains of slavery, as the destruction of America’s republic has been their mission since inception. Deterrence requires clear declaration: Any asymmetric action will meet American-fomented domestic revolutions in their nations or overwhelming conventional retaliation.

These measures are not sought lightly, but as the minimum required to prevent greater bloodshed and secure restoration without protracted civil war.

Calculated targets for deterrence (and execution if deterrence fails) include:

- China: Three Gorges Dam (catastrophic flooding and power loss crippling central China), major ports (Shanghai, Ningbo for economic collapse), key command centers, semiconductor facilities, and undersea cable landing stations.

- Russia: National Defense Management Center in Moscow (decapitating command), oil/gas infrastructure and pipelines (economic strangulation), key rail bridges, energy grids, and undersea cable nodes.

- EU: Primarily financial and cyber targets—Frankfurt banking hubs, Brussels institutions, SWIFT disconnection threats; withdrawal of all military support (NATO commitments suspended); engineered energy crises through LNG cutoff and pipeline sabotage proxies.

- Latin America (Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil): Havana command facilities and ports, Caracas oil refineries and PdVSA headquarters, key Mexican infrastructure under foreign influence, Brazilian energy dams and ports.

It should be made clear that standing in the path of our efforts at reformation are existential, and implicate the full measure of American military might in deterrence.

This is not vengeance. It is restoration—peace under ordered liberty, not factional tyranny.

It is not illegal – as he who saves his country breaks no law.

The chain’s last link stands ready.

May God grant a magistrate to wield it.”