In New York, those who control or direct traffic are not police officers, but city employees assigned exclusively to manage traffic. I made my way to him as the one person who could stop the sea of cars and get me to that taxi. Desperate and out of breath, I explained I was being chased and implored him to help me.
That young man then said something quite simple to me that changed everything. “Why don’t you go to the police, right over there?” pointing to one of the NYPD teams assigned to Times Square standing nearby.
What was so remarkable was that in the midst of this episode, and even in the past, during my relationship with this person, I had never considered going to the police. It simply had never occurred to me, because this woman’s behavior and the fear I lived with had become “normal,” a familiar experience and emotion. It was just how things were. You don’t go to the police when things are “normal.” As I write these words, I realize how illogical and strange this must sound
I will never forget what happened next for as long as I live. It felt as though someone had flipped a switch in my mind as I thought to myself: “Wait a minute, this guy thinks I should go to the police. None of this is normal! None of this is okay. Of course, I should go to the police!” My God, I was going to run into traffic and risk my life to get away from her, but it didn’t occur to me to approach the police?! The years of threats and mistreatment I had endured had conditioned me to respond irrationally to my fear of being harmed by simply running away instead of reaching out to law enforcement even when they were steps away from me. This wasn’t normal or acceptable, but fear had short-circuited my rational thinking.
The traffic agent grabbed my shoulders and slightly shook me. I looked up and saw him staring over my shoulder with an intense look of concern on his face. I’ve always presumed he saw her at that point, waiting and watching. He said, “Wait, I understand. I’m getting you into that taxi. I’m going to take your hand. Stay with me,” at which point the taxi, miraculously still available, had inched closer to us. He stopped cars in all lanes across Times Square and got me in that cab. “Call the police,” he said, in what sounded like a gentle order. I did.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, my shift in awareness and against fear culminated in a restraining order against the woman, I increased my personal security, and I jumped through multiple hoops in New York City to get a handgun permit.
This experience was important to me, and I’m sharing it with you because it demonstrates the power of being conditioned by fear. I had never considered the solution my traffic hero suggested because the feeling of fear provoked by this woman had become normalized. The abused start to see the punishments and attacks as something they should be clever enough to avoid and possibly even their own fault.
This epiphany shook me out of an automatic and robotic response to a frightening situation. It was a life-changing reminder of the vital importance of maintaining logic and reason and the concomitant clarity of mind that helps our innate decision-making—especially during a frightening and disturbing event, when we need it the most.
None of us can eliminate all fear, and we shouldn’t want to. Fear is a needed response to danger and can keep us out of harm’s way. But we need to learn the right way to respond to fear—at least being guided by logic and clear thinking, rather than irrationality and unadulterated instinct. This strategy also helps us distinguish fear from cultivated anxiety and exploited fear responses. Look at it as your modern brain managing your ancient brain.
Problems Must Never Be Solved
Theorists studying political fear make a valuable point in differentiating personal fears from political fears. This is important because these different types of fear arise from different dynamics. Corey Robin posits this: “Private fears like my fear of flying or your fear of spiders are artifacts of our own psychologies and experiences and have little impact beyond ourselves. Political fear, by contrast, arises from conflicts within and between societies. . . . It may dictate public policy, bring new groups to power and keep others out, create laws and overturn them.”30
While private and political fears are indeed different, it’s valuable to consider how some people are particularly vulnerable to both. Those living with anxiety, which encompasses symptoms of fear, worry, and apprehension, are particularly vulnerable to political messages that exploit serious national events. While the first half of the twentieth century is often referred to as the “Age of Anxiety,” the twenty-first century is giving it a run for its money. Throughout history, humanity has been susceptible to fear-based manipulation, which has been evident in how governments and societies have responded to threats such as terrorism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and savage Middle Eastern conflicts.
I look back with more understanding about how fearful events in my personal life made me more vulnerable to “fear messaging” because I had already acclimated to fear as a familiar feeling. It is no coincidence, for example, that it was after the emotionally shocking suicide of my first girlfriend when I was only nineteen that I became a left-wing activist.31 My primary interests included, not surprisingly, feminism, violence, and protecting women from malign social and political influences.
It was the fear and anxiety impressed upon me by that experience that shaped my initial political and psychological view of society. The reality of a woman feeling so desperate and disturbed to think the only way out of the emotional predicament she was facing was self-annihilation also provoked my interest in psychology and faith. The violent shock of losing someone I loved stirred passions and interests that shape my life to this day.
In their effort to collect lost souls, the left’s common declaration to society is that they are the defenders and saviors of the downtrodden, abused, and yes, frightened. Consequently, I was attracted to an environment that I was told existed to confront and change the unfair, bigoted, and misogynistic system leading too many people to despair and misery.
My emotional injury made me a perfect target for the left. I arrived looking for salvation from fear and the brutal unknown future, and my affliction was then exploited by the people who declared themselves the saviors and activists who would confront the bigots and bad guys. They claimed to want to change a system that existed to take advantage of the vulnerable. But in reality, they were exploiting vulnerable people like me and so many others.
My first three books, using my experience as a left-wing activist, exposed the leftists, feminists, and other grifters for the frauds they are. Over time, I realized that liberal social justice groups were not helping people in need or solving any of society’s problems. They were, in fact, relying on perpetuating the unfairness and suffering of women, people of color, and others in need of real advocacy in order to maintain power, influence, and fundraise.
What I did not comprehend at the time was that there was an even more destructive and deliberate reasoning to the methods of the left. Leftists weren’t just malignant narcissists who were callously making things worse because they didn’t care. They were making things worse by design. They were deliberately exploiting our fears not just to crush the rest of us, but to maintain their own base and support.
The motive of activists on the left is an insatiable greed for power and political influence, based on their belief that they’re worthier and better than everyone else. But it is also about owning issues surrounding victimhood and fear in order to control people who are likely damaged and more easily exploitable. The targets the left seeks to recruit as foot soldiers are young people looking to become activists, to right wrongs, and to save people—perhaps even themselves, as I was doing—and who have very few or no one else to rely on for guidance and support.
In my first book, The New Thought Police, I describe an incident that began to reveal for me how the fear-based tactics of liberal social justice activism were not just a fraud, but a mechanism with which to maintain political control and even to protect politically powerful people from exposure as frauds themselves.
I had been complaining to my feminist mentor at the time that some actions by liberal organizations were actually making certain situations worse. Perpetuating divisions and fear on the issues instead of trying to find solutions or common ground with conservatives on issues like violence against women, access to health care, and economic fairness perplexed me. We were supposed to make the world better, right? I was disabused of that romantic notion quickly and was stunned as she explained that “every now and then we need to rub salt into the wound” to maintain our position and influence. “Rubbing salt into the wound” means maintaining the feeling of perpetual victimhood and pain in your constituency so that you don’t advocate yourself out of business.32
I was told that if we (the organized feminist movement) ever did become so successful that we weren’t needed—something that was my goal as a feminist activist—it would be a problem because we would eventually be needed again. And what a disaster that would be, because we wouldn’t be there! To avoid that catastrophe, we needed to make sure the wounds of our constituents would never quite heal, meaning we (the advocates) would always be needed, allowing us to continue to exist.
Only a leftist could deliver up this reasoning to explain why maintaining the misery of those who are suffering was actually a good thing in the long run. It was as ethical as a doctor withholding a cure for a chronic disease in order to keep patients coming in for a lifetime of treatments. Make no mistake: it also mirrors the loathsome reasoning guiding today’s progressive grifters and the political establishment that this book is dedicated to unmasking.
I had these experiences thirty years ago, but they are evidence of a craven fraud still operating to this day. This is a hallmark of the left and its addiction to using and maintaining fear not just to control the population at large, but to control its own constituencies. The kings and queens of the left look on the rest of us as pawns, to be used and sacrificed as necessary to protect the royals.
The Left Rots from Within
As a government becomes more corrupt, its efforts to silence and control the people become ever more urgent. Over the past twenty-plus years, we have seen further expansion of bureaucracy and the rapid degradation of personal freedom. For much of this time, the overlords have used the guise of terrorism as an excuse to ignore, and lie about, the abuse of our constitutional protections.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, members of an even more panicked and frantic American establishment revealed themselves to be the tiny tyrants they are. They stoked fear among the public that the new president was a “Russian spy,” and that he and his team were fascists who were going to destroy the country. Setting the country on fire with constant and idiotic fearmongering about Trump being a “danger to democracy,” some eventually resorted to labeling the president’s supporters as actual terrorists.
In the pages that follow, I will pull back the curtain on this alliance of government, the academy, and business working in concert to control society through fear. This includes Big Tech censoring and silencing us either directly or through self-censorship by intimidation. It is the left’s “social justice” groups perpetuating and cultivating “wokeism,” not because it improves anyone’s lives, but because it allows the left to control us in the name of racial and social justice. This is a war against all of us, our families, friends, and communities, and includes the nefarious plan to separate children from their families by demanding and facilitating indoctrination in our schools.
The good news is that Americans do not want the radical social and cultural shifts promoted by wokeism, a movement controlled by a small, but influential, number of people. Our self-appointed progressive saviors know the power of fear and are experts at using it, but they continue to underestimate the American people. We are not pawns. We are free men and women who can, and will, determine our own futures.
It’s time we turn on the light, put our would-be leftist overlords smack-dab in the public eye, and take this country back.
Chapter 2 Hiding Your Wrongthink
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
—MARIE CURIE1
None of the political and cultural assaults on our society in the last ten years are natural or organic. What’s unfolding in front of us now is promulgated by a small number of well-entrenched leftists determined to revive a failed and deadly political theory at the expense of us, our families, and our country. They will fail, because when we expose what the left is up to, challenging and defeating them becomes much easier and more decisive.
If you told me I’d be writing again about political correctness in the twenty-first century, I would have laughed. PC was criticized aggressively in the 1980s and ’90s; eventually, it was widely treated as a joke. Many considered it a fad growing out of the intellectual and emotional meltdown liberals were suffering after eight successful years of conservative Republican president Ronald Reagan.
Even now, the term PC can bring up cringing memories of increasingly desperate and insecure liberal and feminist activists who felt entitled to silence anyone who disagreed with them. These same whining fools then felt empowered to demand we change how we speak and write to accommodate them, labeling any expression they found offensive a “microaggression.”
Published in the anxious post–World War II world of 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel 19842 dramatically warned of how control of language opens the door to totalitarianism and domination of our very thoughts. In the novel, the dictatorship Oceania invented the new form of expression called “Newspeak” as a weapon of mind control. Professor Steven Blakemore remarks on Orwell’s conveyance in 1984 of the vital importance of language and speech to physical and psychological freedom:
The Party is aware that language is potentially political, that even newspeak is potentially subversive to its ideology. Consequently, the Party’s ultimate goal is to destroy language itself, and this is implicit in “the Principles of Newspeak” . . . [providing] a “world view,” but it makes all other world views impossible because reality is only grounded in the Party’s semantic vocabulary. Hence the citizens of Oceania cannot think in any terms other than what the Party invents or legitimizes. . . . As the Party violently breaks the delicate nexus between language and reality, it attempts to “break” the very nature of language as we know it.3
As we now know, political correctness was no passing fancy. The genuine history and origins of PC make clear its significant danger to the freedoms Western civilization gives us. PC was another of the many shots throughout the twentieth century to inject Cultural Marxism throughout the world, like a cancer seeking to metastasize through the entire body.4
Political correctness has now matured into a twenty-first-century version of a political Rosemary’s Baby5—an idea cloaked as an unusual but benign situation, only to reveal itself as something terrible. Over time, it has birthed the monsters of wokeism, cancel culture, and “Critical Theory” academic indoctrinations, which is the umbrella ideology responsible for the racism and destructive scourge of Critical Race Theory (CRT).
