What kind of brand new day is it? Recent events might mean that it’s a dark new day. Cam Edwards put his fears to music. Please listen to the lyrics.
RogerG
Brand New Day, by Cam Edwards
Gaslighting and the Murder of Charlie Kirk
* Gaslighting: a form of psychological abuse and manipulation where one person, the gaslighter, tries to make another person doubt their own perception of reality, memory, and sanity. The term dates back to the play/film, “Gaslight” of 1940. In the story, a man dims the gas lights in his wife’s bedroom and blames her as part of a plot to drive her into insanity to steal her wealth.
Can we know the truth of something? Yes, truth exists. If not, we would be rootless, and so would our world. Life would be chaos, no verities to guide us. While technology has greatly expanded our field of vision, so much of the information is filtered. If we receive it in its raw and unfiltered state, our modern education has handicapped us in making sense of it. The dispensers of all that comes our way are just as blind as the recipients. Primordial herd instincts kick in and things go viral, poorly understood and unrestrained. Example: George Floyd.
We are adrift at the mercy of those who have need to gaslight us to salvage the last vestiges of their failed worldview. Theirs is an ideology of recent origin and consequence, single-mindedly corseting all human experience into a story of victim and victimizer. It grew out of and found a home in 19th-century Progressivism, the militant socialism of Karl Marx, the softer socialism of today’s Democratic Party, the New Deal, mid-20th century neo-Marxism, and today’s environmentalism. The government became the repository of great power, so long as its enthusiasts controlled it as well as the cultural buttresses of the edifice, the cultural commanding heights.
“The long march through the institutions” of the 1960s radicals began in earnest, and they succeeded. They dominate the schools – K through grad school – entertainment, the faculty lounge, much of the government work force, huge swaths of organized labor, the c-suite, many white-collar demographics, swaths of college-educated single women, the big foundations, the legacy media, much of the new media. Their adherents swarm on social media. Their blinkered view is a manifest failure, and thus the need to gaslight us.
They need not know that they are gaslighting us. They are acting out the disquiet and anxiety of their philosophy crashing down. Belief smashes into reality. Reaching for excuses, they end up manipulating our perception of reality, and themselves.
In the progressive redoubts of our media and broader culture, the tactic is acute. Their reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk is a case in point. I’m reminded of the five stages of grief: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. Where is our progressive media? Mostly, somewhere between denial and anger.
They deny any complicity in birthing and propagating the mindset of a person who could gun down a husband and father of two. Their refrain: “It wasn’t us.” They additionally turn to bargaining with “The other side is as bad or worse” and “He deserved it”, and anger in “How dare you”. At this juncture, depression is nowhere to be found, but acceptance takes a disgusting turn.
Throughout, gaslighting is used to throw up a smokescreen to obfuscate their connection to the mind of the shooter. “It wasn’t us” took the form of “He’s MAGA”. They hang their hat on superficial identity characteristics, not the suspect’s mind, the essential cause of the killing. His parents were described as well-to-do Republicans, his father a sheriff, the family well-acquainted with guns. Democrat political consultant Joel Montfort wrote on X (see #1),
“Raised in the stereotypical All-American white conservative family with a sheriff for a father, Tyler grew up around guns and knew how to use them. It’s the guns.”
He found room to shoehorn the Democrat shibboleth of gun control into his gaslighting.
Regurgitating the same line was Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of the Democrat-adjacent Meidas Touch media outfit, who said on X (see #1), “So after days of Republicans blaming and vilifying Democrats and trans people for Kirk’s murder despite having no clue who the person was, we find out it’s a white guy from a Republican family in Utah who loved guns.” It appears to be a nervous tic on the Left to distract attention away from the shooter to the inanimate object that he was holding on that rooftop. Classic gaslighting.
Then facts tumbled out contradicting that dry run at gaslighting. The shooter was the black sheep of the family. Shell casings were engraved with transgender and Antifa messaging, first debunked by the leftist bastions in the media, then relegated to the memory hole when that dodge was exposed. Heck, now, it appears that the guy had a transgender lover.
MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd moved right into the bargaining part of the grief liturgy, “He deserved it”. You see, according to Dowd, the victim is “hateful”. Speaking about Kirk, Dowd insisted (see #2), “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
Other moral miscreants on the Left jumped to a sick form of acceptance. A MIT researcher wrote (see #3), “I really want to see that video of Charlie Kirk dying again because it works better than my anti-depressant.”
The crowd in the staff room at TMZ was caught cheering when the news of Kirk’s killing was broadcast (see #4). The co-hosts of the live program jumped into damage control by saying a video feed of a rather mild car chase in LA caused the outburst of adulation, but others discounted the hastily devised rationale. One disturbing fact: the timing of the news announcement and cheers doesn’t match the excuse. The cheers align with the appearance of the news of Kirk’s killing during the car chase video feed. Classic gaslighting.
Chesterfield Public Schools board member Dot Heffron mirrored the left’s joy in her Instagram post (see #5): “Call me old fashioned, but I remember when we used to be okay with shooting Nazis.” She was forced by her colleagues to resign. Dean of Students at Clover Hill High School, Alana Hartman-Hall, decided to taste her foot like Heffron when she posted (#5), “When you promote violence and advocate for a percentage of teachers and students to be sacrificed to school shootings … You reap what you sow.”
Bargaining proceeds apace in “They are just as bad, if not worse”. The shambolic attempt to compile lists of political violence to match or exceed anything from the Left was concocted to disguise the reality. The definition of “political violence” was fudged and instances excluded and included to fit the preordained conclusion. The only indisputable act of carnage by the Right is Jan 6. The rest are . . . bizarre. The confrontation in the Pelosi home was by a deranged homeless man, for instance.
However, an entire 2020 summer of riots (“mostly peaceful” riots?) is somehow missing from the left column. What about the run of memorial defacements and statues throughout that same year? Do you doubt the existence of the free-range leftist student mobs on college campuses for the past decade or more? Oh, don’t forget, what about the antisemitic elements that shut down swaths of college campuses and made life dangerous for Jews throughout much of 2023-24? The LA mobs that attacked and threatened ICE and CBP officers this year? The ambushes of ICE officers outside their offices in Texas (see #6)? When the Left does political violence, they do it big, really big, and often. Gaslighting has to be a go-to in the Left’s toolkit.
Anyone’s news feed is littered with examples of a media intent on hiding its fingerprints on a mode of thought that is all-too-easily a greased slide to revolution and violence. Just lather on the gaslighting to hide the fact. Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk is dead, his wife a widow and children fatherless, many of our colleges remain unhealthy to mind and body, large precincts of our media spew a skewed version of reality (gaslighting), and many denizens of these spaces are intellectually and morally crippled and unhinged.
Putting aside the gaslighting, we have a lot of shoring up to do to, as the Democrats and the Left are fond of saying, “save our democracy”. We can start by dethroning the Left and unplug their gaslighting.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Liberals Hype Tyler Robinson’s Conservative Roots After MAGA Backlash”, Nick Mordowanec, Newsweek, 9/12/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-murder-tyler-robinson-maga-liberals-2129055.
2. “MSNBC’s Shameful Breaking News Coverage on Charlie Kirk”, Becket Adams, National Review, 9/14/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/msnbcs-shameful-breaking-news-coverage-on-charlie-kirk/.
3. X post by John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine, 9/12/2025, at https://x.com/jpodhoretz/status/1966474553049092170.
4. “TMZ’s X/Twitter Inundated with Demands for Firings After Staff Heard Cheering During News of Charlie Kirk Assassination: ‘F**k You,’ ‘You’re Done’”, Warner Todd Huston, Breitbart, 9/12/2025, at https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/09/12/tmzs-x-twitter-inundated-with-demands-for-firings-after-staff-heard-cheering-the-news-of-charlie-kirk-assassination-fk-you-youre-done/.
5. “Update: Chesterfield School Board member resigns after uproar over social media post”, Michael Phillips, The Richmonder, 9/14/2025, at https://www.richmonder.org/chesterfield-school-board-member-asked-to-resign-by-peers-youngkin-after-social-media-post/.
6. “Left-Wing Militants Charged with Attempted Murder After Ambushing Officers Near ICE Facility”, James Lynch, National Review, 7/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/left-wing-militants-charged-with-attempted-murder-after-ambushing-officers-near-ice-facility/.
We Have Him
This morning on Fox and Friends President Trump announced “with a great deal of certainty” that “we have him in custody”. The arrest of the suspect was made possible by a tip to authorities from someone close to the person. His surrender was arranged by his father and a minister close to the family.
It’s premature at this moment to draw any strong conclusions or lessons about him, us, and our times. That will be necessary, but not now.
All we have is sorrow, grief, prayers, and thoughts of reaching out to comfort his devastated wife and family. It’s the thoughts of what’s next for them that weighs heavy on me.
RogerG
The Latest on the Kirk Shooting
Let me crow a bit. As predicted, based on rudimentary information from the scene, the weapon was not a semi-auto, AR platformed gun. Sorry, Maxine Waters. One shot taken, one hit, and skedaddle. That fits a bolt action rifle. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that it was outfitted with a scope, since such guns normally have one attached. Thus, the one-and-done. The shooter must have known the place as a student, frequent visitor, employee, or both. That leads me to believe it was a student, or was one in the recent past. He knew the area well enough to devise his escape. What does all this mean? This was not a professional hit. These perpetrators are motivated by zealotry. If it was a professional hit, the target would have been higher profile.
So, what is the current state of the evidence? According to reports – whose accuracy I cannot vouch – the likely weapon was found. It was bolt-action, the most accurate firearm mechanism commercially available. It provides the most secure platform for combustion and release of the bullet for accuracy in a firearm, but a shooter must have time to reacquire the target in the sights to take follow-up shots. This guy, if his rifle was scoped, could accurately see that additional shots were not necessary so he could flee the scene immediately. Shoot-and-run.
The rifle discovered nearby had a Mauser-style action in 30-06 caliber. The Mauser action can be found on many popular sporting rifles made by manufacturers like CZ and Ruger (M77 for instance). 30-06 is a beloved sporting round, proof that any gun, no matter its caliber or mechanics, is a “human killer” if pointed at one. The hysterical frothing at the mouth, normally by firearm simpletons, that ARs are special man-killers, is pure nonsense. The murderer of Charlie Kirk made manifest what plain common sense reveals.
As for the killer, he’s somewhere in the vicinity of the crime scene. The longer this takes, the further he flees. Authorities are in the possession of higher quality surveillance footage, clear enough to reveal his precise appearance. He is young, of student age. Like the Nashville shooter, this killer had festooned his ammunition with engravings of LGBTQ jargon (3 rounds were left in the magazine, one short of the normal 4). The Nashville murderess had such jargon on stickers applied to the gunstock. This murder was the action of a zealot.
So, no, you won’t find George Soros fingerprints on this carnage; though, he funds the movements and groups that spawn these warped individuals. And, no, this killer is not brilliant. He’s an example how far fanaticism can push a person’s limited creativity in carrying out mayhem. This guy will be captured soon, dead or alive. Zealotry is a deadly enterprise.
RogerG
Charlie Kirk’s Murder, A Watershed
I’m thinking of Charlie Kirk. May God shelter his soul and comfort his wife, children, and family.
The Left in America echoes the Left in Russia of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s recounted in Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s 3-part historical novel, The Red Wheel. It’s eerily reminiscent: the strong current of militant socialism on college campuses, the scent of violence wafts along with these groups, the killings, murders, assassinations. Lenin’s brother, Aleksandr, was executed in 1887 for the attempted assassination of Czar Alexander III. Previously, in 1881, they succeeded in taking the life of Czar Alexander II, his father. Nicholas II’s reform-minded prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, was murdered in 1911 while attending an opera in Kiev. That’s a taste. Everyone in conspicuous positions of authority lived on pins and needles.
Sound familiar? Militant socialism – we call it “woke” – is a smothering orthodoxy on campus. The unremitting intimidations of conservatives, disruptions, threats, the closing of their venues overhangs our places of higher (?) learning. Charles Murray, social scientist, and professor host, Allison Stanger, were attacked at Middlebury College in 2017. Stanger suffered a concussion. In 2018, 5th U.S. Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was prevented from speaking before the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society. Stanford apologized. These are more than anecdotes. They are common enough to be indicative.
On 10/7/2023, one of the most bestial acts in recent memory was inflicted on Israelis by Hamas. The acts were unspeakable, but on the next day protests erupted on and off campuses in defense, ostensibly, of the Palestinians, specifically of Hamas, the people who run Gaza and committed the slaughter of 1,200 people. Parts of our campuses were shut down and American Jews threatened and terrorized.
One doesn’t have to hunt very long to find examples of the toxic nature of our schools. The Democratic Party is the institutional embodiment of what is happening to our young people. The party activists demand a fight. The militancy on the Left is on the march. The moderate Democratic Leadership Council is replaced by The Squad, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Jasmine Crockett, et al.
In December of 1859 in his newspaper The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison wrote of John Brown,
“In firing his gun, John Brown has merely told what time of day it is. It is high noon.”
RogerG
A Dying Thought Experiment
A thought experiment that’s approaching two centuries old, or maybe longer? The Jacobins of the 1790s thought that they could toy with a culture and civilization like a lab biologist splicing genes (The Cult of Reason, The Reign of Terror, revolutionary tribunals, the guillotine). Marx thought he could bring about a new world order by reshaping every person’s mind, marriage, and family, all the way to the totality of life’s arrangements (thus, totalitarianism). 19th-century Progressives injected into the mainstream the thought that a class of credentialed “experts” would lead us to nirvana. Are people with sociology degrees the arbiters of our existence? And then, today, some amongst us contrived a more robust Marxism, tied to progressivism, and infecting those “experts”, that swells the membership of victimizers and victims so as to perpetuate the revolutionary churn (being “woke”).
What are the results? The zealots become divorced from reality as the world collapses around them. Anarchy reigns, lives destroyed. They are experiencing the death throes of their thought experiment and can’t bring themselves to apologize.
Witness the grotesque word salad of Charlotte’s mayor, Vi Lyles, as she attempts to rationalize the unprovoked murder of a young lady on her city’s public transit system. She wants us to understand the killer, as he plunges a knife into the young woman’s neck, all caught on a surveillance camera (see #3). The release of the videotape occasioned a press conference by the mayor where she referred to the murder as a “a tragic situation that sheds light on problems with society’s safety nets related to mental healthcare.” “Problems with society’s safety nets”, you’ve got to be kidding.
It’s the “root causes” mumbo jumbo of today’s progressives. The huge caravan throngs swamping over our border once Biden took the oath of office, it was said, could not be addressed by enforcing the border. It’s the same as Lyles’s (see #4) “we will never arrest our way out [of] issues such [as] homelessness and mental health.” We must somehow cure poverty in the Third World before we can have border security. An administration spokesman said of VP Harris’s approach to Biden’s border crisis (see #1), “The vice president’s work and what we’re focused on this afternoon is thinking long term and getting at the root of the problem as the administration simultaneously addresses the immediate challenges at the border.” Then, Trump takes the oath and within a few months, we have a cure.
Chicago’s mayor Brandon Johnson is all into the “root causes” mantra. He adds a hostility to constitutional federalism and the Second Amendment to the political liturgy. According to Johnson, other states are responsible for Chicago’s inability to control violent crime. He charged on X (see #2),
“Chicago will continue to have a ‘violence problem’ as long as Red states continue to have a gun problem. The endless flow of illegal guns into Chicago can be traced to Red states like Mississippi, Indiana, and Louisiana.”
Johnson wants every state to have Illinois gun laws, and until they do, the residents of south and west Chicago will have to tolerate the killings of their loved ones. The question never occurred to Johnson: Why is a good portion of his city a war zone and not these other places? Is it because of the relative prosperity in these places from all the gun running to Chicago gangs? When you have to defend the indefensible, you sound like Harris, Lyles, and Johnson.
We are witnessing the death throes of a thought experiment. It can’t stand under the weight of its failures. Not holding people accountable, a fruitless campaign to eradicate all vestiges of poverty and personal anxieties everywhere, and social workers as substitutes for cops leads to, well, Charlottesville, Chicago, the 2020 summer of riots, statue toppling, and Washington, D.C. For that matter, throw in New York City, good chunks of California, the entire urbanized west coast for that matter, almost any place run as a Democrat one-party fiefdom.
And to think that New York City may be on the cusp of electing an out-and-out Marxist. Will we ever learn?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Harris’ mission to tackle migration root causes scores big money support but border crossings remain high”, Priscilla Alvarez, CNN, 2/6/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/politics/kamala-harris-migration/.
2. “Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson blames city’s violence problem on ‘red states’”, staff, Washington Examiner, 9/3/2025, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/3790926/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnson-blames-red-states/.
3. “How Long Will We Tolerate the Madness in Our Streets?”, Rich Lowry, National Review, 9/9/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/how-long-will-we-tolerate-the-madness-in-our-streets/.
4. “What the Hell Is Charlotte’s Mayor, Vi Lyles, Talking About?”, Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review, 9/8/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-the-hell-is-charlottes-mayor-vi-lyles-talking-about/.
Livin’ on a Prayer
I personally identify with the characters in Bon Jovi’s ballad, “Livin’ on a Prayer”. My wife and I had to struggle to make our way in the world. Looking back, it was hard. Keeping food on the table for the kids and making rent was a grind. Working the temporary, part time, and occasional job while going to school stretched our endurance and patience. It’s the act of striving, though, that is necessary for building character. Without it, who knows, our human development would have been stunted.
I keep this in mind as politicos appeal to our vanity to get our votes. Their refrain is that it’s someone else’s fault, that somebody else is holding us down. We are victims of hazy, generalized “elites”, “globalists”, the “top 1%”, the patriarchy, “whiteness”, a nearly endless and fuzzy collection of others. “The deck is stacked”, we are reminded. We have no more agency than a six-year-old. They offer more government goodies to suspend us in greater dependency. Today, it’s true of the Right and Left.
Trump and MAGA offer an insulated and perpetual economic playpen under a plethora of subsidies (no tax on tips, Social Security, overtime, and crony capitalism) and protective tariffs. No need to worry about competition. Our bankrupting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are mostly held above reproach. We get to slide our way to insolvency while content in our firm belief in the unbelievable.
The Left, meaning the Democratic Party in toto, screech the loudest for debilitating dependency. Their response to creative destruction is for everybody to be a coder, and, of course, more government bennies. Biden declared war on coal and his retort to those with a big fat crosshair on their livelihoods was (see #1), “Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well . . . .” There you have it. He’s going to kill your jobs and communities. As for you, just go pound sand . . . in college. Biden promised that the rest of us will pick up the tab.
If you’re 23 and still haven’t “found yourself”, Nancy Pelosi boasts that a young adult can cling to their parents’ healthcare policy till age 26. She gushed in 2009 during the Obamacare debate (see #2):
“Just think of the difference that this would make for young people. They’ll be able to do what they want to do without having to find a job that has healthcare benefits.”
There you have it; their answer to the discomforts of striving is to make somebody else pay for it. It is so outrageous if wasn’t so pitiful. Extend adolescence to your mid-twenties.
Juxtaposed is Bon Jovi’s reality of striving, the painful, sometimes slow, grasping for the next rung in upward mobility. It’s how life becomes a molder of men and women. The formula for entering the middle class hasn’t changed: get married, stay married, have kids, work hard, and never stop learning, in no particular order. At times, it’ll seem like you’re “livin’ on a prayer”. Good, prayer is a good thing.
Please listen to the lyrics of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”. It could well be the anthem of our initiation into adulthood. In Latin, Carpe Diem.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Biden Suggests Coal Miners Learn to Code To Be Prepared for ‘Jobs of the Future’”, James Crowley, Newsweek, 12/31/2019, at https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-new-hampshire-campaign-code-1479913.
2. “Pelosi appeals to youth in health bill”, Mike Soraghan, The Hill, 10/14/2009, at https://thehill.com/homenews/house/52350-pelosi-appeals-to-youth-in-health-bill/.
A New NFL Season . . . And I’ve Had Enough.
*The NFL announced the continuation of the “social justice” messaging in the endzone for the 2025 season.
Yes, I’m complaining again. Maybe I shouldn’t. But I can’t help but notice that pro-football, both the NFL and Division 1A college in this era of the transfer portal and NIL, has swelled beyond an athletic contest of trained, skilled, and fit athletes under great coaching into an extravaganza, a bacchanalia in many cases, a show to rival anything on Broadway, and embellished with trendy ideological crusades. A manufactured over-the-top enthusiasm is evangelized in the commercials that glosses over reality. The whole thing from the pregame to halftime and afterward has become our secular society’s version of America at worship, a worship of the outlandish.
Our pews are emptying but 100,000-seat stadiums packed, tv ratings off the charts. But where’s the game; where’s the simple fact that this is a match between teams of the highly honed in mind and body? The comely Carrie Underwood struts out on a runway to belt out the theme of Sunday Night Football amid pyrotechnics, strobe lights, and flashy cameos of rock and football celebrities. The Sao Paulo game between the Chiefs and Chargers had a gaudy Super Bowl-style halftime that’ll rival anything in February, or the raunchiest Mardi Gras. Again, where’s the game; where’s the clash of great athletes in shoulder pads in all this hubbub?
Trendy ideological beliefs permeate the production. Five years after George Floyd, the deadly summer of chaos, defund the police, metropolitan downtowns laid waste, and the subsequent flight of business and the middle class from these toxic environments, the NFL is still pursuing “social justice” – er, “equity”. The games continue to be festooned with a national anthem for a racial group. End zones are tattooed with “End Racism” or “It Takes All of Us”. Is this a Democratic Party rally or a game?
Yeah, “end racism”, and end the gratuitous virtue signaling. The NFL overtly perpetuates the myth that men and women are equal in their fascination for sports (see #1 for insight into that). The NFL lavishes funds on flag football so the girls can show off their physical prowess (proof that everyone is over-paying for this thing). I thought that transgenderism abated the illusions of physical “equity”. It’s more than expanding the fan base. Throughout, including the commercials, physical differences are whitewashed, and women are equally gonzo as the men. It’s as if the NFL is busy shaming those women, maybe most, of different inclinations. It appears to be the NFL’s vast social engineering project.
It’s true. The NFL is proof of John O’Sullivan’s First Law (see #2): “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” Thanks, Roger Goodell, for the garish twice-weekly cultural revolution. I just want a game absent all of the folderol.
Watch Greg Kelly and Megyn Kelly (no relation) on her show. I won’t vouch for everything said but sympathize with the sentiment. I, too, am done with the NFL.
Oh, by the way, you can drop that ridiculous kickoff routine.
RogerG
Sources:
1. For instance, review “A Sex Difference in the Predisposition for Physical Competition: Males Play Sports Much More than Females Even in the Contemporary U.S”, Matt Hayward, editor, NIH: National Center for Biotechnology Information, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3498324/.
2. Can be found in “John O’Sullivan’s First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing”, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, at https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/05/john-osullivans-first-law-all-organizations-that-are-not-actually-right-wing-will-over-time-become-left-wing/.
Our Cultural Descent into Madness
Years ago – I retired from teaching in 2015 – I used Back to School Night as an opportunity to speak to parents about the ways they can help their child succeed in school. One suggestion was to refuse to give the kid a smartphone. Another was to never install a computer in the child’s bedroom. A lone computer for school work should be placed in a common area in the home and supervised by the parent. No personal smartphone, carte blanche internet access, and limit the availability of home electronic devices (TVs, tablets, etc.). Add making family meals a communal experience.
Good advice? Probably, but the genie has leapt out of the bottle long ago. Today, we have a youth culture that has taken a dark turn. Witness the school shootings since at least Columbine. Two, one in 2023 (the Nashville killer, Audrey Hale) and this most recent one, are transgender young adults targeting children. No, transgenderism is not an archetype for mass homicide. But maybe gender anxieties can come hitched to other emotional comorbidities. It’s something to seriously ponder.
We certainly have an entire generation intimately obsessed with the online world. There are many dark places in that space, and one of the darkest is social media. It has the awful capacity to accelerate discomfort, discontent, and organized bullying. The digital world has the nasty habit of according distance from the objects of online hate. The sentiment is depersonalized thereby removing the normal constraints that inhabit one-on-one encounters. It should not be surprising that an explosion of rage occasionally occurs.
In this regard, I am reluctant to turn to Netflix as a window into modern youth culture; however, I recommend “Adolescence” for a realistic perspective on the problem. The story and scenes are gripping for what it seems to be saying about the social underbelly of our children’s lives. A 13-year-old murderer, the edgy middle school social atmosphere, an ever-present online culture, a nearly dysfunctional school with a spottily competent teaching staff and administrators, and omnipresent video in the classroom make for a troubling stew. I have seen the first two episodes, and that is my impression at this point.
Are we making our children forever anxious and fundamentally illiterate? Is social media a catalyst for faddish ideologies and their ensuing emotional discomforts? Could we be breeding our own demise? Please watch “Adolescence” now showing on Netflix, at least the first two episodes. It could be a chronicle of our descent into madness.
RogerG
A Marxism for the Right
No, the title is not a reference to the likes of Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson joining the ranks of Antifa or the crowd behind Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. But they are unknowingly thinking like a Marxist.
The emergence of this new mental orientation on the Right begins with being “woke”. Specifically, it’s jargon for a hypothetical state of awareness, a capability of perceiving the deeper reality that is concealed to all but the most discerning. Facts are optional. The idea is traceable to Karl Marx, and therefore central to the “woke” Left with all their “critical theories” of oppressor/oppressed and the beleaguered “marginalized”.
Marx was not satisfied with a call for revolution. That’s too simple. His thought is more robust than that. He sought to explain the stream of all human experience since the dawn of time. For him, we are socialized into our status as oppressors or the oppressed. To set the world right according to him and Engels, the complete human, not just society, minds and all, need to be reshaped to be truly “free”. We must be cleansed of this filth of past and present socialization. He’s advocating totalitarianism pure and simple.
Marx called the malign socialization of traditional society “false consciousness”. In Marx’s fevered imagination, almost everything in our existence trains us into accepting our condition, like our language, family, marriage, faith, traditions, etc. Marx wanted all of it junked and refashioned at the behest of his woke “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. For anyone with an ounce of humanity, this should send shivers down your spine. We now have generations trained in the gibberish. It shows, look at the young.
Neo-Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School in 1920s and 1930s Germany (technically, the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) – Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc. – fled Nazi Germany, landed in the West, most notably the U.S. The virus spread in the academic “soft sciences” throughout the 1950s to today, waiting on the gullibility of Robin DeAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, BLM, Occupy Wall Street, the college campus mobs, statue topplers, the faculty lounge, and the looser canons of the Democratic Party such as AOC, Mamdani, the surviving Squad, Bernie and his “bros”, the DNC.
What infected the Left has spread to the Right in what the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye referred to as The Horseshoe Theory: both Left and Right come to mirror authoritarian tendencies, but actually more than that. A woke Left leads to a reaction in the rise of a new woke Right. Marx has his bourgeoisie bogeymen; Fascists have their liberals (classical liberals, that is), “cosmopolitans”, Jews, or anyone that they see as undermining national solidarity. Parts of the new Right have copyrighted their own hobgoblins.
All claim to have the gift of seeing the clandestine threat, the hidden structure of oppression, and are thus awoken. An element of the Right shows symptoms of the “woke” infection. It starts with a unique vocabulary for the Right, words that remind a person of the allegedly hidden cabals and insidious networks not seen by the average person. Establishment, elites, neocons, globalists, warmongers, the deep state, for instance, all generalities, litter their harangues. Only they are awoken enough to expose it. QAnon appears, the alleged Epstein/Israeli cabal, the swamp, etc. Similarly, Marxists forever after 1917 were in a constant state of vigilance against “wreckers”, underground churches and worshippers, samizdat free thinkers, kulaks, saboteurs. Now the Right has joined the thought-fad by listing their own scapegoats.
Tune into Candace Owens and her tirades about the pernicious influence of Jews bordering on blood libel (the medieval canard about the murder of Christians by Jews to use their blood in religious rituals). Coming to the defense of the emotionally unstable Kanye West and his rant against the Jews of Hollywood, here’s Candace:
“What if that is what is happening right now in Hollywood? If there is just a very small ring of specific people who are using the fact that they are Jewish to shield themselves from any criticism, it’s food for thought, right? And I think, again, there have been enough people that are speaking out about a ring in Hollywood, also a ring potentially in DC, that we should start to ask those questions.” (see #1)
Sounds innocuous? The talk of a “ring of Jews to shield themselves” in Candace’s punditry smacks of the same shadowy forces occupying the minds of the Left. She said in the manner of Marx and Lenin when speaking of the bourgeoise, “They will kill people before they allow that ring to be exposed.”
The stark language of generalized and shadowy forces is strikingly similar to the bombast of the evil machinations of the bourgeoisie coming off the pen of Lenin in 1919: “The bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers’ organisations [sic] are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence [sic] of the rule of the exploiters.” (see #2)
For some on the Right, like their “woke” soulmates on the Left, antisemitism is making a comeback. Since the memory of the demonic Holocaust, though fading, still haunts us, their antisemitism is prefaced by disclaimers, versions of “Oh, no, not me” and “Some of my best friends are . . .” and “I love . . .”. It’s rhetorical maneuvering to engage in antisemitism by angling the Jewish identity into a cabal working against the interests and will of the American people.
The influential Tucker Carlson drinks at the same trough. Recently, he has been consumed in anxiety over the nefarious influence of the powerful, who just so happen to be Jews. On Zelensky, the president of Ukraine of Jewish ancestry, Tucker defames him and the leader of Blackrock in a two-fer, “Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.” Blackrock, the investment firm? It is led by Larry Fink, also Jewish. Compare this to some of the things in Völkischer Beobachter (National Socialist official newspaper, “People’s Observer”). (see #3)
He throws aspersions at Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, for being insufficiently devoted to the U.S., for having divided loyalties with you-know-who (Israel). Remember, Carlson has tirelessly expressed mortification about the post-9/11 wars, the “forever wars”, and warmongers. His argument, taken to its obvious conclusion, demands no foreign policy till we have solved all our problems. It is isolationism. Our special relationship with Israel, a country under constant threat of annihilation, is a regular source of annoyance to him.
The Jew thing crops up in his head. In response to Shapiro and other conservative commentators, he insists, “. . . so many of these people don’t seem to have the same level of actual care for American citizens.”
Contrasting himself with the allegedly rootless Shapiro, a Jew, he is unflinchingly American:
“I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. I’m shocked by how little they care about the country.” (see #4)
You see, this new online Right is immersed in the old bigoted trope of the “cosmopolitan” Jew, a people who cannot be trusted to have patriotic monogamy.
As for Americans who sign up for the IDF, Carlson ranted,
“There are a lot of Americans who’ve served in the IDF — they should lose their citizenship. You can’t fight for another country and remain an American, period.”
It is lost on him that Americans joined the Canadian Air Force to fight for Britain in WWII, that Americans for a century volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, and to fight communists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Angola, etc. Should they be booted from the ranks of citizen?
Carlson traffics in the Epstein/Mossad conspiracy story. More tales of the unhinged. He ruminates (see #5):
“. . . I think the real answer is Jeffrey Epstein was working on behalf of intel services, probably not American [Mossad]. . . . Now, no one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that’s naughty.”
There seems to be no grand mystery where a Jew cannot be found to be in the middle of it.
All such thought-fads that become embedded in the culture have a catalyst, usually a combination of events, mercurial personalities, and a potential reservoir of acolytes anxiously looking for a leader who can personify their angst. In 2015, a leader appeared in the form of Donald Trump and his coalescing MAGA movement. No, he’s not Hitler. No, he’s not an anti-Semite, far from it. He’s of the ilk of Theodore Roosevelt, a man who always wanted to be the “bride and every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every Christening” (according to TR’s daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth). Many people at the time became infatuated with TR as a force of nature (many still do). Specifics mattered little. Ditto for Trump and MAGA. Democracies are susceptible to enchantment.
His acolytes in the media and administration speak of him and his words with such reverence. His words carry the divine sanction of the Gospels. Yet, honestly, the yearning on the Right is based on real and pressing concerns. Our government is so big that it is no longer answerable to us. Our public spending and debt spiral out of control. Our education system has become the Left’s prep school, a training ground for future hordes of malcontents. The terms “boy” and “girl” are forcibly muddled making sexual privacy and safety meaningless. Genital mutilation of minors (“gender-affirming care”), really? Crime is seen as a call for therapy. Public barbarism in roving gangs of youth and ramshackle tent encampments sprawling across our cities have made salient parts of them unlivable.
This is the low-hanging fruits of the Left’s long march though the institutions. The Left’s cultural sickness spread to other countries in our foreign policy. Pride flags unfurled at our embassy in Kabul, really? The reaction did not stop there. The long twilight struggle against international terrorism in the 9/11 wars of Afghanistan and Iraq was fodder for “populists”, first by the Left (“Bush lied, people died”, “No blood for oil”, Code Pink) and now by parts of the Right, to take the indictment further to include “forever wars”, “warmongers”, “neocons”, the Bushes.
Trump and MAGA gave the angst organizational form. Trump and his movement produced the “populist” Right’s vocabulary and targets of derision. Everyone and everything in the newsfeed get sucked into the new Right’s vortex. Unwittingly, Trump and MAGA are the catalyst and accelerant for the new woke Right. Intentionality is irrelevant. Gadflies on the fringe, from tiki-torch machers in Charlottesville to Trump foolishly having lunch with the antisemite Kanye West and the far-Right blowhard Nick Fuentes, are attracted to a burgeoning movement with real concerns.
Without the rise of Trump populism and its disparagement of “elites” and the amorphous “establishment”, it’s hard to conceive of a wokeness on the Right. Real misbehavior – the Russia hoax, lawfare, “the resistance”, higher ed’s neo-Marxist cultural revolution, etc. – invites ruminations of a conspiratorial underworld. The Left sees it in “whiteness”. The Right might see it in the Jews, “neocons”, an intersectionality between the two, globalists, a conspiratorial “deep state”, etc.
Some on the “woke Right” end up sounding like their brethren on the Left in a condemnation of capitalism, or free markets, as nothing more than an abstract ideology and not the product of government simply leaving people alone. Both ends of the spectrum are enthused about government and its politics manipulating the economy to benefit some oppressed class.
Let our vice president, J.D. Vance, in his own words, illustrate the union of the Left and Right in their “wokeness”:
* The Left’s Mother Jones magazine quoted Vance’s endorsement of the 2023 UAW strike when Vance said he was “[r]ooting for the auto workers across our country demanding higher wages.” (see #6)
* Vance supported Biden’s “bigness in business is badness” FTC chair Lina Khan by saying, “A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lina Khan … and they say, ‘well Lina Khan is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing.” Further adding, “And I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” (see #7)
* Vance champions the Democrats’ spendthrift rationale for entitlements, reducing a looming disaster for the young to the blasé, “One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t.” And curtly concluding, “So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people.” (see #8)
Between bashing business for exploiting workers and praising lefty economists/lawyers and boosting bankrupting entitlements, Vance exemplifies something more than “populism”. He signifies that coming together of the woke Left and Right in embracing the union extortion racket, socialist economics (an oxymoron since socialism is all about government, not economics), and the old getting the chance to pillage the young. It’s abominable.
The French writer, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, in 1849 once quipped, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, or “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Or at least, the two ends merge into the same mass over time, all “woke”, all sounding like each other, all sounding Marxist.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Candace Owens Goes on Bizarre Screed About ‘Ring’ of ‘Quite Sinister’ Jews in Hollywood”, Alex Griffin, Mediaite, 3/8/2024, at https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/candace-owens-goes-on-bizarre-screed-about-ring-of-quite-sinister-jews-in-hollywood/.
2. Lenin’s opening line in “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, March 1919, at https://old.iclfi.org/english/wv/935/qotw.html.
3. “Tucker Carlson called Ukraine’s Jewish leader Zelenskyy ‘rat-like’ on his Twitter show, repeating a well-worn antisemitic trope”, Haven Orecchio-Egresitz, Business Insider, 6/8/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-calls-zelenskyy-rat-like-antisemitic-trope-2023-6.
4. An excellent piece on Tucker Carlson’s darker manifestation of late was made by a former friend and colleague, James Kirchick, in “Tucker Carlson’s Dark Turn”, 7/24/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/09/tucker-carlsons-dark-turn/.
5. “Tucker Carlson Claims Jeffrey Epstein Was Working for Israel to Blackmail American Politicians”, Michael Luciano, Mediaite, 7/11/2025, at https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/tucker-carlson-claims-jeffrey-epstein-was-working-for-israel-to-blackmail-american-politicians/.
6. “J.D. Vance Really Wants You to Believe He Supports Striking Autoworkers”, Noah Lanard, Mother Jones, 9/19/2023, at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/donald-trump-jd-vance-josh-hawley-uaw-strike-biden/.
7. “Vance: Biden FTC chief is ‘doing a pretty good job’”, Rebecca Klar, The Hill, 2/27/2024, at https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4491363-vance-biden-ftc-chief-is-doing-a-pretty-good-job/.
8. “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism”, Victoria Guida, Politico, 7/16/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/the-trump-vance-ticket-is-a-repudiation-of-free-market-conservatism-00168578.