Midnight Doctrine

There are moments in public life when the old words keep their spelling and lose their meaning. A court order is called temporary, though it may do permanent work. A command to remove speech is called restraint, though restraint is what one puts upon an animal. A ban on future words is described as protection, though the thing chiefly protected is power from embarrassment.

The case of Reckless Ben is one of these moments. A man makes videos about a dispute between a business and a private citizen. The videos become popular. Money is raised. Anger spreads. The business goes to court. The court hears one side. An order is signed. The videos must come down. The next video must not go up. The man appears for a minute and a half and says, in the plainest possible terms, that he has finished his work and cannot publish it without risking jail.

This is the point at which decent citizens are expected to become stupid.

They are asked to believe that nothing serious has happened because the document is clothed in legal language. They are asked to believe that silence is not silence when it is produced by a judge. They are asked to believe that a speaker remains free so long as he is free to guess which words may send him to jail. They are asked, above all, to believe that the suppression of speech is not censorship when the censor uses the vocabulary of safety.

The order in question came from a Utah court, entered after one side had been heard and the other had not. This is called ex parte, a Latin phrase which, like many Latin phrases in law, is useful because it makes an alarming fact sound tidy. It means that the state acted after listening to one half of the story. Such orders may sometimes be necessary. A court need not wait politely while a man burns down a house, hides evidence, threatens witnesses, or publishes home addresses to a mob. There is conduct which may be stopped, and rightly stopped.

In this case, some parts of the order belong to that ordinary world. Do not make threats. Do not dox people. Do not trespass. Do not impersonate officials. Do not destroy evidence. No serious defender of liberty needs to defend bomb threats, stalking, or the publication of private family information. Freedom of speech is not a license to terrorize one’s enemies.

The difficulty begins where the order leaves conduct and enters speech.

It forbids future material that is false, misleading, harassing, interfering, defamatory, or unlawful. At first glance this may appear reasonable. Who wishes to defend misleading statements? Who wishes to defend defamation? Yet this is exactly how censorship commonly presents itself. It does not announce that it is afraid of truth. It announces that it is opposed to falsehood. It does not say that criticism must stop. It says that harmful criticism must stop. It does not say that one side must be silenced. It merely creates a fog in which only silence is safe.

The word “misleading” is especially convenient. It is not a fact, like a date or a name. It is a judgment. A statement may be true and still be called misleading because it lacks context, because it gives the wrong impression, because it leaves out the other side’s preferred explanation. A speaker under such an order does not know in advance what is forbidden. He learns it only afterward, when the court decides whether his sentence has crossed an invisible line.

That is not liberty. It is a guessing game played against the state.

The order also required existing publications to be taken down, not after a trial, not after a jury had found that a particular sentence was false, but before such a finding had occurred. Whole videos, whole bodies of reporting, whole lines of public inquiry were to disappear. This is the old crime with the new paperwork: prior restraint.

The phrase has an antique sound, but the thing itself is always modern. Prior restraint means that the state stops speech before it can reach the public, or removes it before the speaker has been judged liable in the ordinary way. It is not punishment after publication. It is prevention. It is the hand over the mouth.

The American rule against such restraint was not invented for pleasant speech. It was made for ugly pamphlets, angry newspapers, reckless accusations, noisy campaigns, and political agitation. If the only speech protected were cautious speech, the First Amendment would be a museum piece. The great danger to liberty does not come when the state silences a polite essay on gardening. It comes when the state silences an attack on a business, a public official, a church, a union, a landlord, a police department, or any other institution capable of making life difficult for its critics.

The Supreme Court has said this many times in many costumes. A scandalous paper cannot be shut down merely because it is scandalous. A pressure campaign against a businessman cannot be enjoined merely because it embarrasses him. A boycott organizer cannot be held responsible for every unlawful act committed by an enraged supporter unless his own words are intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action. The logic is simple. If the worst listener can destroy the rights of the speaker, then any controversial speaker can be silenced by the worst person in his audience.

This is the heckler’s veto, except that the heckler need not even heckle. He may send an anonymous threat. He may behave like a lunatic. Then the person criticized may point to the lunatic and say: see what your words have caused. Silence him.

That theory is poison to public life. It gives every angry crowd and every interested opponent a method. If you cannot answer the accusation, make the accusation dangerous to repeat. If you cannot disprove the reporting, attach it to the behavior of strangers. If a speaker has followers, treat followers as weapons. If one follower commits a crime, treat the speaker as the arm that committed it.

No one should send threats. No one should excuse threats. A person who sends a bomb threat is not engaging in politics, journalism, protest, or satire. He is committing a crime. The proper answer is to find and punish him. The improper answer is to silence a reporter, commentator, or critic because some unknown person responded to his work with criminal stupidity.

This distinction matters because free speech is always defended in bad company. It is defended alongside fools, zealots, cranks, vulgar men, angry men, and men who exaggerate. That is not an accident. Sensible, mild, agreeable speech seldom needs a constitutional shield. The test of the principle comes when the speaker is troublesome and the target is powerful enough to hire lawyers.

There is another feature of the modern system which deserves attention. Speech is no longer suppressed only by sheriffs seizing printing presses. It is suppressed by platforms, payment processors, hosts, and intermediaries who are shown a document bearing a judge’s signature. The court may not directly command every platform on earth. It may not have jurisdiction over every company that carries the disputed speech. Yet the document travels. It is uploaded, forwarded, attached to a takedown request, and placed before some employee whose task is not to defend the First Amendment but to reduce risk.

The cheapest answer is compliance.

This is how censorship works in a bureaucratic age. The state does not always need to knock down the door. It can create a paper object that causes private actors to do the knocking for it. A fundraising page vanishes. A platform reviews a complaint. A creator’s archive becomes radioactive. The order restrains one man, and the fear spreads outward to everyone who handles his words.

This is collateral censorship: censorship by pressure, by uncertainty, by the natural cowardice of institutions that would rather remove ten lawful things than defend one troublesome thing.

The most revealing fact is not merely that the order was issued. It is that silence becomes the only rational advice. A lawyer reading such an order does not tell the client to speak carefully. Careful speech is still speech, and speech can be called misleading. He tells him to say nothing. Not because the court has used the exact words “you may never mention this company,” but because the order makes every mention dangerous.

This is the chilling effect, an expression too mild for the thing it describes. It suggests a breeze. In practice it is a locked room. The speaker sits with a finished work in his hands and does not publish. He does not know whether a sentence will be called defamatory, whether an edit will be called harassment, whether a description will be called interference. The jail is not imaginary. Contempt is the weapon behind the order. A man who disobeys may be fined, jailed, or held until he complies. The law says: challenge the order if you like, but obey it while you challenge it.

This is why prior restraint is more dangerous than ordinary punishment. A criminal law may be challenged after arrest. A defamation suit may be defended after publication. An injunction demands obedience now. Even an unconstitutional injunction can have force until it is dissolved. In plain English: the state may gag you first and sort out your rights later.

A society that accepts this arrangement will not need many censors. It will teach men to censor themselves. It will teach lawyers to advise silence. It will teach platforms to remove first and examine later. It will teach businesses that a lawsuit can be not merely a remedy but a tactic. It will teach judges that temporary orders can reshape public debate before the public knows what happened.

The defenders of such orders will say that reputation must be protected. It must. They will say false statements can destroy a person or a business. They can. They will say mobs are dangerous. They are. These facts do not answer the constitutional question. They are the reason the question exists.

The remedy for defamation is a trial. The remedy for threats is prosecution. The remedy for trespass is enforcement of the law. The remedy for criticism is not an order erasing criticism before any court has found it false.

The First Amendment does not promise that public argument will be clean, fair, or painless. It promises that the state will not decide in advance which side may speak. It promises that truth is not to be presumed by the party who reaches the courthouse first. It promises that a speaker is not to be gagged because his enemies have learned to recite the proper adjectives.

False. Misleading. Harassing. Interfering. Defamatory. Unlawful.

There is the modern censor’s vocabulary. It is not always dishonest. Sometimes it names real wrongs. That is what makes it useful. A good censor does not need to invent a new language. He needs only to stretch the old one until every dangerous sentence fits inside it.

The question raised by this case is therefore larger than one YouTuber, one franchise company, or one collection of disputed property. The question is whether public controversy may be halted by a temporary order issued after one side speaks and before the other answers. If the answer is yes, then the right to publish belongs not to the citizen but to the timetable of the court. It exists until a plaintiff persuades a judge that speech has become too unruly to tolerate.

That is not a free press. It is a licensed press with occasional permission to bark.

The proper course is not difficult to state. Keep the restrictions on conduct. Enforce the law against threats. Protect homes, families, witnesses, and evidence. Then remove the restraints on speech. Let the videos be judged by the public and, if necessary, by a jury. If particular statements are false and defamatory, prove it in court. Name the sentences. Present the evidence. Accept the burden.

A free country does not erase a man’s reporting first and ask whether it was false afterward.

The old principle remains sound because human nature has not improved. Men with power still dislike being accused. Institutions still prefer quiet. Courts still possess the terrible ability to turn one side’s story into an official command. The temptation to silence is permanent. That is why the rule against prior restraint must be permanent as well.

When a man says he cannot publish because he may go to jail, the public should not look away merely because the gag is printed on legal paper. The paper is part of the story. The silence is part of the story. The fear is part of the story.

One of the great tricks of modern power is to call a thing by the name of its opposite. A bombing becomes a police action. Censorship becomes public safety. Bribery becomes access. And a corporation becomes a person.

This last fiction is among the most useful. A corporation has no body, no conscience, no grave, no childhood, no hunger, no fear of prison, no son to bury and no rent to pay. It is an arrangement of papers, offices, contracts, and bank accounts. It exists because the state allows it to exist. It can be dissolved by law, merged by agreement, renamed by committee, and resurrected under another shell. Yet the law, with a solemn face, announces that this artificial creature must be treated as though it were a citizen.

The result is not equality. It is the destruction of equality by means of legal grammar.

A person may speak. A corporation may spend. When the court pretends these are the same act, it does not enlarge freedom; it enlarges power. The poor man has a voice. The corporation has a public relations department, a legal department, lobbyists, donors, consultants, subsidiaries, political action committees, and enough money to make silence around it feel like consent. To say that both are merely exercising “speech” is to use language not to describe reality, but to cover it.

This is how a democratic society is hollowed out while its official vocabulary remains intact. The ballot box is left standing. The speeches continue. The courts speak of liberty. The newspapers speak of debate. The citizen is told he is free because no one has forbidden him to talk. Meanwhile, every institution around him has learned to hear money more clearly than words.

The corporation receives the rights of a person without the weaknesses of one. It may influence elections, shape laws, punish communities, poison rivers, destroy towns, and then retreat into abstraction. No one is guilty. The market demanded it. The board approved it. The shareholders expected it. The structure required it. Responsibility dissolves into procedure.

A man who steals bread is a criminal. A company that steals wages has made a payroll error. A man who lies under oath is punished. A company that deceives millions issues a statement. A man who poisons a neighbor may go to prison. A company that poisons a region pays a fine, raises prices, and calls the matter resolved.

This is not personhood. It is privilege disguised as principle.

The purpose of such language is not to clarify the law, but to make injustice sound technical. Once the corporation is called a person, its power appears natural. Its money becomes expression. Its domination becomes participation. Its demands become rights. The real person, the living citizen, must then compete against an immortal paper being that cannot feel pain, cannot be jailed in any meaningful sense, and cannot die unless it is no longer profitable to keep alive.

A society that confuses corporations with people will eventually confuse ownership with citizenship. It will ask not what a man needs to live, but what an institution needs to grow. It will defend the liberty of the largest machines and call this defense of the individual. It will permit wealth to speak through a thousand mouths while telling the solitary citizen that he, too, may speak.

And technically, he may.

Authority starts with the room. I saw it from a hard plastic chair fixed to the floor. A desk stood at the front, set a little higher than the rest. That small lift changed how people spoke. Voices dropped as they stepped up. A badge lay by the official’s hand like a tool ready for use.

Rank moves through simple objects. Name cards. Seals. Tickets with numbers. Each one tells the crowd that judgment already took place. People relax when they see these signs. The need to check fades. The symbol does the thinking.

Process gains a moral glow through use. Papers move from tray to tray like parts on a belt. A stamp feels final. A printed notice feels earned. A fine in bold type feels deserved. Order creates trust. Trust creates consent.

The room has its own soft language. People are called entries. Loss is called an update. Removal is called a transfer. I heard the clerk read these lines in a flat, steady tone. The words cleaned the act as they passed through the air.

Onlookers finish the job. An approved act receives an approved reason. The one who suffers carries the blame in the story that follows. Character grows out of outcome. The record becomes proof. Pity follows the file.

Each role comes with a script. The rule enforcer points and people stand. The box keeper nods and property changes hands. Repeated acts turn into identity. Identity locks the pattern in place. The pattern feeds the system.

I felt the pull myself. The desk asks for trust. The badge asks for agreement. The steps of the process promise relief. Doubt takes effort. Going along feels smooth. The line carries you to the end.

There is a particular kind of modern conversation that resembles an argument in a room with the lights turned off. Everyone is certain there is furniture, everyone is bruised by something, and nobody can agree on what they struck. The thread in front of me is of that kind. It begins with a question about a notorious rumour and ends with an argument about demons, clones, acids, codes, and the supposed indifference of the public. In the middle is the true subject, which is neither pizza nor islands, neither emails nor court filings. The true subject is the craving for a world that makes moral sense.

The age we live in has brought back the oldest political instrument in a new costume: the ritual of hatred. The old dictators had to build a square and a platform. We have built a feed. The old propaganda needed a Ministry. We have outsourced it to everyone with a microphone and a grievance. In such a climate, the key word is “pattern.” A pattern is a comforting thing. It promises that scattered facts point in one direction. It promises that your fear has an object. It promises that your anger has a target. Once a man has a pattern, he will defend it as he defends his own sanity.

The thread follows a familiar ascent. It starts with something that can be checked. It cites a public incident. It points to documents, or what it claims are documents. It names persons. It then performs the crucial trick: it treats the existence of a document as proof of the interpretation of the document. The words are the same. The meaning is conjured. A phrase about food becomes a confession. A request for a bag becomes a rite. A triviality becomes a cipher. The method is not to prove a claim. The method is to make disbelief feel stupid.

Observe how it works. A man reads an email about “hotdogs” or “jerky.” He does not prove what the word means. He implies that it must mean something else, because it would be strange if it did not. “Isn’t it weird” is the hinge of the whole machine. Every time it turns, the mind is invited to choose between two identities. One identity is the awake citizen. The other is the dupe. The argument is rarely about evidence. It is about self respect.

The internet is especially suited to this kind of mental blackmail. It supplies infinite fragments and punishes any attempt to assemble them slowly. It rewards the man who shouts first. It rewards the man who accuses without stopping to define his terms. It rewards the man who can attach a wicked label to an enemy, because labels are faster than sentences. There is a reason the thread keeps returning to the idea of censorship. A censor is useful. He provides the speaker with a martyr’s uniform. If a platform removes a video, the removal becomes evidence. If a platform leaves it up, the presence becomes evidence. This is a closed circle that produces the pleasure of certainty without the labour of thinking.

One sees, too, the language of the confessional, borrowed by people who do not confess. “I am just asking questions.” “I am just thinking out loud.” “I do not know, but.” These phrases give a man permission to spread a rumour while preserving his self image as a reasonable person. In earlier centuries, it was considered vulgar to ruin a man’s name without proof. Our century has democratized vulgarity.

There is also the peculiar modern obsession with “lists.” The thread longs for a list of culprits, a list of allies, a list of proof. A list relieves the mind from judgment. Once you have a list, you have a tribe. You have a way to sort the world into clean categories. The trouble is that lists are the favourite tool of the liar, because a list can contain true names for false reasons. A man can be present at a party for mundane reasons. A photograph can be real and the story around it can be invented. The list seduces precisely because it mixes the verifiable with the imagined.

At this point, one might ask why such talk persists, given that it routinely collapses under scrutiny. The answer is that scrutiny is not what the speaker seeks. He seeks moral intoxication. He seeks the thrill of being among the few who “see.” He seeks the comfort of believing that evil is organized, because random evil is unbearable. If evil is organized, then the world is intelligible. If it is intelligible, then it can be defeated. If it can be defeated, then one’s own suffering has a purpose.

Yet here is the dilemma. The thread gestures toward real crimes and then dresses them in supernatural costume. It speaks of child exploitation, which is a genuine horror, and then inflates it into an all purpose myth in which every enemy becomes a priest of darkness. The consequence is not greater justice. The consequence is the destruction of attention. The public, confronted with a torrent of claims, finds it easier to turn away from all of them. Those who profit from secrecy should be grateful to the amateur myth maker. He provides them with a shield made of absurdity.

The only practical remedy is also the least exciting: a discipline of evidence. In the thread, the clearest moment occurs when the conversation briefly turns from fever to method. Extract concrete claims. Find the primary sources. Court filings. Official statements. Original documents. Label each claim as verified, refuted, or unverified. Refuse to carry the unverified forward. This feels dull, because it is dull. Truth is usually dull. The liar relies on this. He relies on your impatience. He relies on your appetite for drama.

A simple micro framework would clean the air in ten minutes, if anyone desired clean air.

First: quote the claim exactly, with time and context. Second: define what would prove it. An indictment, a sworn affidavit, a certified record, an authenticated email archive. Third: fetch the primary document. If you cannot, say so. Fourth: separate “this exists” from “this means.” The first is a matter of record. The second is a matter of argument. Fifth: assign a confidence threshold. If evidence quality is below the threshold, the claim does not travel.

A threshold you can live by is this: if the claim accuses a named person of a serious crime, and you cannot point to a primary document that does the same, you treat it as unverified. If the claim rests on a coded interpretation of ordinary words, and you cannot show consistent usage across many documents plus independent corroboration, you treat it as unverified. If the claim depends on anonymous social accounts, you treat it as unverified until identity is established by multiple independent identifiers.

In July 2025, the White House released an executive order pushing for more “involuntary treatment” of unhoused and mentally ill people—saying it’s about public safety and restoring order. The order can’t legally institutionalize anyone on its own; only courts and state laws can. But it pressures states to expand forced hospitalization programs by tying them to federal funding.

That’s where the concern starts. History shows that when governments claim to “protect” society through confinement, it often slides into punishment disguised as care. It’s not fascism—no grand flags or cult leaders—but it is authoritarian in the quiet, bureaucratic sense. Power centralizes. Rights narrow. The definition of “mentally ill” starts to stretch.

There is a peculiar sort of arrogance common among intellectuals, pundits, and keyboard radicals alike—the belief that they, unlike others, have escaped the great machinery of ideology. It is a flattering delusion. And like all flattering delusions, it is almost always false.

The average man may go through life unaware of how his values were shaped, or by whom. But the dangerous man is the one who believes himself immune to shaping. He imagines himself a free thinker while he quotes newspapers word for word. He condemns the herd while grazing beside it. And in his mind, only others are ideological. He merely sees the truth.

This is what I call the view from nowhere.

Every belief comes from somewhere. Every moral, political, religious, or aesthetic instinct was formed in a context—social, historical, economic. To pretend otherwise is not honesty; it is performance. The performance of objectivity. Of transcendence. And it is, in many cases, more dangerous than ideology itself, for it gives cover to the worst dogmas by claiming they are not dogmas at all.

The man who says, “you are brainwashed,” but believes himself washed clean, is not enlightened—he is blind to the bars of his own cell.

It was Marx who spoke of false consciousness, but the problem goes deeper than class. It is a condition of the modern soul: to be saturated with ideology, yet convinced of one’s purity. This is what allows cruelty to wear the mask of reason, what allows empire to call itself peace, what allows injustice to pose as order.

There is no escaping the structure. The best one can do is to become aware of it—to drag it into the light, brick by brick. And even then, the structure is not undone. Only made visible.

To admit that you are shaped is not weakness—it is the first act of resistance. To confess that your ideas are not born from a vacuum is not defeat—it is the beginning of intellectual honesty.

It is no longer sufficient to call it ignorance. We are past that. What has taken root in the common language—especially in the mouths of those who most benefit from public ignorance—is not confusion but a deliberate perversion of meaning. The term socialism, once the symbol of shared burden and collective progress, has been dragged through the ditches of capitalist propaganda until it means, now, simply: “anything I dislike.”

Take a moment and consider this: you pay taxes. I pay taxes. The labourer who builds the tower, the nurse who tends to your dying mother, the teacher whose hands are tied behind their back by austerity—they all pay taxes. And from those taxes, a civilised society might fund hospitals, roads, schools, a measure of dignity. But say such a thing aloud, and you’ll hear the cry: Socialism!

Socialism, in its classical form, refers to the communal ownership of the means of production. Not the act of a nation treating its citizens with basic decency. Not the building of a school, or the subsidising of medicine. Yet we are told—daily, in newspapers, on radios, in the mouths of pundits fattened by their own corporate sponsors—that to expect anything in return for our labour is tantamount to Marxism.

And still, the billionaires—those pale pharaohs of the modern empire—stand upon a mountain built from our backs and cry freedom. Freedom for whom? Not for you, the citizen, who may be bankrupted by a broken leg. Not for the worker, whose wages have stagnated while productivity soars. Freedom, here, means only the right of the wealthy to extract, to exploit, and to escape.

What is proposed, by those labelled “radicals,” is not utopia. It is not revolution. It is a return—merely—to a time before the great theft. A time when the richest paid their share, and the working class had a chance not merely to survive, but to live.

This rage is not born from envy. It is born from the lived experience of a system rigged so thoroughly, that to be born without wealth is to be sentenced to exhaustion. We are not asking for the whole loaf. Only that the crumbs stop disappearing.

And when someone suggests this—when a woman dares to say that her labour entitles her to more than silent servitude—they call her a socialist. As if that were a crime. As if the crime were not the theft of human lives in service of stock dividends.

This, then, is the sickness. To believe that suffering is natural. That cruelty is order. That the richest men alive deserve your loyalty more than your own children deserve insulin.

It is one of the curiosities of modern politics that a tax can be dressed up as a weapon and cheered like a parade. When the President threatens foreign countries with tariffs, the crowd understands him to mean that their governments will pay. It is a comforting picture: the foreigner humbled, the nation enriched. Unfortunately, it has no connection to reality.

An import tariff is not paid by a foreign state. It is collected at home, from the importer, and passed on to the public in the form of higher prices. This is a plain economic fact, as obvious as gravity, yet it is obscured by the deliberate misuse of language. The tariff is presented as a blow struck outward; in truth it falls inward, upon the citizens themselves.

No export tariffs have been imposed. On the contrary, a few have been lifted. There is no mechanism by which foreign producers are compelled to “make up” price differences. When the President says that tariffs will be raised if they do not lower their prices, he is simply promising to tax his own people more heavily and calling it strategy.

Such confusion is not accidental. Political language is often designed to turn actions inside out, to make taxes sound like victories and hardships sound like punishments inflicted on someone else. A crowd will accept higher costs more readily if they are told that foreigners are suffering. This is the oldest trick of power: to disguise the burden by misnaming it.

There is a kind of liberal who believes that tolerance, to be genuine, must be absolute. He believes that every view, however vile, must be granted the same platform, the same legitimacy, the same polite hearing. He is, of course, a fool.

A society that tolerates the totalitarian without resistance is not demonstrating virtue; it is writing its own death warrant. We saw this in Weimar Germany, where the enemies of democracy were invited into the public square to preach the destruction of the very liberties that gave them the microphone. They were not suppressed; they were indulged. And in short order, they turned tolerance into a noose.

Free expression must be defended, yes—but let us not confuse suicide with principle. When a political movement openly declares its aim to extinguish liberty, to turn citizens into subjects and debate into dogma, it is not merely a “contrary opinion.” It is a threat to the foundations that allow opinions to exist at all.

Democracy must be tolerant of criticism, satire, even insult. But it must also possess the intelligence and the will to draw the line when faced with those who would abolish it. To refuse that duty is not noble. It is cowardice dressed up as liberalism.

The simplest proof of corruption is not in ideology but in the balance sheet. One need only look at the net worth of America’s representatives. They arrive as lawyers and small businessmen; they depart as millionaires. The system is oiled with loopholes—insider trades disguised as foresight, contracts steered to friends, the revolving door into consultancy and lobbying. Public service has become a form of private investment.

The same pattern holds abroad. USAID, once draped in the language of charity, functioned less as benevolence and more as an instrument of soft power. Aid projects bolstered allies, punished enemies, and entangled fragile economies with Washington’s priorities. When the agency was torn apart, it was not because America had outgrown imperial habits, but because its mask had slipped. What had been presented as generosity revealed itself as leverage.

It is convenient to mock individual figures—a socialist with a mansion, a populist with a book deal—but the rot is systemic. The enrichment of representatives at home and the hollowing of aid abroad are not accidents. They are features of a political order where wealth accumulation is the true bipartisan platform.

It is a curious habit of political discourse to ascribe folly to one side alone. We are told, with a sneer, that “left-wing grifters” hawk crystals and aura readings, while the right speaks only of sober realism. But alternative medicine is no one’s monopoly. Surveys show belief in homeopathy, herbal remedies, and “spiritual healing” runs like groundwater beneath the entire political spectrum.

On the right, it blossoms into vitamin empires, prepper cures, and the anti-vaccine crusades of hucksters like Alex Jones. On the left, it takes the form of Instagram wellness culture—yoga influencers peddling tinctures, astrology dressed up as science, crystals marketed as salvation. The habit is cultural, not ideological. To blame it on the left alone is projection, a sleight of hand to cover the much larger marketplace of conservative pseudoscience.

Even within progressive politics, the “leftie crystal healer” is a caricature. Figures like Hasan Piker, ContraPoints, or Vaush do not shill for aura cleansers. Their work is political, not mystical. The overlap between the countercultural fringe and socialist commentary is thin. What survives today is a stereotype rooted in the 1970s hippie scene, recycled whenever critics want to paint the left as unserious or unscientific.

And yet, it is precisely from that subculture that new political migrants emerged. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., once an environmental crusader in the Democratic Party, became first a vaccine skeptic, then a prophet of “medical freedom.” He built his base among those wellness communities once coded “left,” before carrying them into alliance with Trump’s populism. His “MAHA” (Make America Healthy Again) campaign did not spring from socialist doctrine, but from the collision of New Age distrust and right-wing grievance. By the time he joined the administration, the crystal merchants of yesterday had become the foot soldiers of MAGA.

This is the true danger: not that one camp dabbles in pseudoscience, but that discontent can be weaponized. Wellness culture, anti-corporate rhetoric, and anti-government paranoia can all be braided together into a rope sturdy enough to haul people across the political spectrum. The result is not socialism, but a new kind of reactionary populism wrapped in the language of “health” and “freedom.”

There is a useful distinction to be made, though politicians labor to blur it: that between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is the quiet love of one’s country, like tending to a garden not because it is the grandest in the world but because it is yours, and because without care it will fall into ruin. Nationalism, by contrast, is the boastful assertion that one’s garden is superior, that neighboring plots must be seized or trampled, and that anyone who doubts its perfection is an enemy.

Patriotism, in its healthy form, is rooted in affection, loyalty, and civic duty. It tolerates dissent, because the patriot believes his country can be made better. It motivates sacrifice without demanding hatred of others. Nationalism, on the other hand, is built on purity and superiority. It defines itself not by what it loves, but by what it excludes. It can unify people swiftly, but the price is always suspicion, scapegoating, and war.

The conceptual danger is that the line between the two is thin. Patriotism becomes nationalism the moment criticism is called treason. Leaders know this, and cloak their power-grabs in patriotic language: defending the flag, protecting the nation, purging traitors. Nationalism is not love, but hunger. It is the habit of seeing mankind as insects, arranged in species and swarms, each struggling for domination.

History is clear enough. Patriotism gave us the American Revolution’s plea for liberty, or the French Resistance fighting occupation. Nationalism gave us the unification of Europe’s empires, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the ethnic purges of the Balkans. In pluralistic societies, patriotism can embrace diversity, but nationalism always fractures them, insisting that only one group is the “true” nation. Globalization has sharpened the contrast: patriotism adapts; nationalism resists.

Americans, in particular, have long declared a hatred of nationalism. The Founders feared it as a European disease that bred tyrants. Washington warned against passionate attachments. Lincoln spoke of preserving the Union, not of a nationalist crusade. After the trenches of 1917, nationalism was blamed for slaughter. After 1945, it was synonymous with fascism itself. The Cold War framed America’s patriotism against the nationalism of the communist bloc. Civil rights leaders distrusted nationalism as the language of exclusion. Yet Americans were not innocent: Manifest Destiny, segregation, and Cold War triumphalism were nationalism in all but name. The irony was to practice it while pretending to loathe it, calling it instead “patriotism” or “exceptionalism.”

The pattern is dangerous, because the habit of hating nationalism in word but indulging it in deed leaves a society blind to its return. The test, then, is simple. Ask of every so-called patriotic appeal: does it open the circle wider, or does it push some out? If it invites, it is patriotism. If it excludes, it is nationalism.

They told us justice was blind. Yet here stands the figure of power, prying open her eyelids and forcing her gaze upon his enemies. When the Attorney General is dismissed for insufficient loyalty, and a loyalist is installed in his place, the machinery of prosecution becomes not a safeguard but a cudgel.

A kangaroo court requires no elaborate construction—only the corrosion of restraint. Replace judges with apparatchiks, instruct prosecutors to see guilt where none exists, and declare the verdict before the trial begins. The forms of law remain intact: subpoenas, juries, gavels, black robes. But the spirit rots. The spectacle of legality disguises the reality of vengeance.

It is not the overt brutality of a dictatorship that menaces us first. It is the subtle shift: the filing of charges on a whisper, the selective leak to the press, the sudden collapse of an opponent’s finances under regulatory scrutiny. These are the tremors before the quake.

Power, when unchecked, does not merely prosecute crimes—it manufactures them. And once the public accepts the theater of justice as justice itself, the court is no longer a court. It is an instrument of domination, stamping its seal upon the will of one man.

Fascism does not arrive in jackboots. It creeps in with militias, slogans, and chants. Trumpism is Mussolini in 1921: gangs rehearsing, the Leader worshiped, the republic already trembling. The army has not yet been unleashed, but the whisper is there: send soldiers into the cities, let them cure democracy with bullets. This is the waiting room of dictatorship. The furniture is already nailed to the floor.

The republic is not yet dead. It lies on its sickbed, fevered, whispering the Bill of Rights like half-forgotten psalms. At its side stands Trumpism, smiling like a vulture that has already chosen its meal. Fascism never falls from the sky. It seeps through cracks in courts, in legislatures, in the hesitation of generals.

First come the gangs — the Proud Boys, the militias, the martyrs of January 6th. Then the Leader, swollen with chants, declaring that he alone is the nation. And last, always last, the army. Italy bowed when the King signed away his power. Germany bowed when the Reichstag burned. America waits for its crisis — a riot, a terror, a war, whichever proves most convenient.

We are already in the second stage. The chants drown out the law. The party kneels not to its platform but to the man. The crowds clamor for uniforms on every corner, crime purged by bayonet, as though chains were freedom. They cannot see that they are begging for their own shackles.

And when the moment comes — when generals, too, discover that hesitation is not resistance — the waiting room will swing open. The patient gasping on the bed will be smothered by its own doctors, cheered on by its own citizens.

Americans boast of democracy as if it were a birthright, yet one-third of the nation refuses to speak. In 2020, eighty million fell silent. In 2024, eighty-five million. Their silence was not neutral; it was decisive. By doing nothing, they governed more than those who acted.

The myth that non-voters are harmless is convenient, but false. They are younger, poorer, more precarious — groups that lean left. Their absence shifts power to the right. The uncast ballot is not empty; it is a weapon transferred by default.

Conservatives sneer that they will “outbreed” their enemies. Liberals chant about “mobilizing youth.” Both slogans disguise the truth: power rests not in numbers, but in presence. A majority that does not appear is not a majority at all.

And so the republic limps forward as a half-democracy. Its destiny decided not by belief, but by attendance. The citizen who abstains does not stand aside. He binds himself in silence and delivers the key to another.

The Ministry of Democracy would print it so:

The danger of fascism is not always violence. It is the quiet merger of state and corporate power. The United States is moving closer to this condition.

1. Trump’s Stake in Intel

The Trump administration has taken a 9.9% stake in Intel, valued at about $9 billion. The government calls it an “investment” through the CHIPS program. Formally these are non-voting shares, but the effect is the same: the state now has a direct financial interest in the country’s largest semiconductor company.

Intel’s stock rose. Nvidia followed with an investment of its own. Industry watchers now see the state as a shareholder, not just a regulator. This is the textbook definition of corporatism: private property remains, but the line between private and public disappears.

2. Jimmy Kimmel’s Removal

Soon after, Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by ABC/Nexstar for jokes about Charlie Kirk. The decision was presented as a business call, but it cannot be separated from the political climate. Corporations respond to pressure. They censor to protect themselves. When entertainment decisions are shaped by fear of political retaliation, the result is the same as direct state censorship.

3. Other Cases in America

Truth Social blurs the line between political party and private company.

TikTok negotiations show the state forcing changes in ownership under threat of bans.

Broadcast conglomerates like Sinclair and Nexstar distribute programming with clear partisan alignment while removing dissenting voices.

4. What It Means

The language of slavery has not died. It mutates. It hides itself in slogans, in memes, in comment threads where history is stripped for parts and wielded as shields for the guilty.

One hears the refrain: “Who sold the black people? The black people.” A line spoken in Parliament when Britain debated abolition, printed in American pamphlets when slavery was questioned, and now recycled as a cheap internet slogan. What was once the rhetoric of planters is reborn as the rhetoric of comment sections. Propaganda survives not by argument, but by deflection.

The Historical Core

Yes, African rulers and merchants sometimes sold captives. But the scale, demand, and machinery—ships, guns, credit, insurance, plantations—were European-built. Without European empires, the trade would not have metastasized into an industrial, transoceanic system.

Spain and Portugal invented the color categories: Blanco (White), Negro (Black), Indio (Indian). They built elaborate casta hierarchies—mestizo, mulato, zambo—sorting ancestry like livestock pedigrees.

By the 1600s, English colonists had borrowed “Negro.” By 1662, Virginia codified partus sequitur ventrem—children inherit the condition of the mother—making slavery hereditary and race-based. Where Iberia multiplied categories, Anglo-America reduced them to a binary: Negro vs. White.

Indentured Irish were brutalized, yes, but their servitude was temporary, not hereditary, not racialized. They remained legal persons. To equate that with African chattel slavery is not history. It is vandalism.

The Atlantic system was different: scale, permanence, racialization, global finance. This was not “slavery everywhere.” It was a system designed to turn Blackness into property and Whiteness into law.

The Fallacies

These evasions are not arguments. They are escapes.

Strawman: reparations caricatured as “blaming all white people.” Whataboutism: “But the Ottomans! But Africa!” False equivalence: if everyone sinned, then no one did. Tu quoque: you cannot accuse me, your side did wrong too. Appeal to popularity: millions agree, therefore it must be true.

The methods change. The purpose does not. They suffocate moral clarity.

The Lingering Present

Yes, slavery persists in Mauritania, in Libya’s markets, in the cocoa fields of West Africa. But to point at that and say “therefore the past does not matter” is like pointing at today’s wars to argue the Holocaust never needs remembering. The existence of present evil does not bleach away the responsibility for past evil. It compounds it.

The true danger is not ignorance. It is the confidence of the half-knowing—the certainty that a fragment of history, shouted loudly enough, erases the ledger of blood.

Midnight Doctrine

Slavery is remembered not because it was the only bondage in history, but because it was the one that industrialized race into law and left scars that shape the modern world.

Every “what about,” every “everyone did it,” every sneering half-truth is not harmless debate. It is collaboration. Collaboration with forgetting.

History is not only the record of what was done. It is the battlefield of what can be excused.

Receipts:

Virginia Slave Law, 1662: “All children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.”

Barbados Slave Code, 1661: first English statute defining Africans as chattel property.

Iberian casta records: 16th–18th c. colonial censuses and paintings.