In 2018, thought crime was again ready for its close-up and served as the subject of a Yale Law Review article. The “two sides” rhetorical argument is titled “Why Is It Wrong to Punish Thought?” We’re fortunate the author concludes that punishing people for their thoughts would be a bad idea. He writes:
It’s a venerable maxim of criminal jurisprudence that the state must never punish people for their mere thoughts—for their beliefs, desires, fantasies, and unexecuted intentions. This maxim is all but unquestioned, yet its true justification is something of a mystery.36
A “mystery.” Oh, brother. The fact that there is even a debate about whether or not thoughts should be punished in the United States is concerning. A small group of radicals who hold influential positions in education, media, legislation, and policy-making have leveraged their influence. Unfortunately, we must marshal strong arguments to explain why prosecuting people for their thoughts is not a good idea. This is going to be a battle, but we can win it.
Hard as it may be for some people to accept, Marxism and racism are being taught to children and young adults from kindergarten through graduate schools across the US today. It appears that far less instruction is taking place on the founding principles of our nation.
Freedom of thought has always been a fundamental problem for totalitarian regimes because it is the key to communication, inquiry, independent judgment and action, and dissent—things despots recognize as existential threats. Thought itself is the key to self-awareness, desires, understanding, and comprehension of the environment and circumstances we face as individuals.
Freedom of thought is inextricably linked to freedom of speech, and the two are intertwined as necessary components of personal and political freedom. America’s founders knew this and enshrined freedom of speech as the first item in the Bill of Rights. They also knew that tyrants would necessarily need to censor speech to strike at the freedom of the mind itself. Freedom of thought, in other words, is the most basic of liberties. Professor Lucas Swaine of Dartmouth College reminds us:
The American founders laud the importance of freedom of thought: Benjamin Franklin endorses it in a notable aphorism, contending that without freedom of thought there can be “no such thing as wisdom.” More emphatic still is Thomas Jefferson’s sweeping declaration that he has “sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” The statement reflects Jefferson’s antagonism towards illegitimate coercion and fear of reprisal, both of which powerful rulers have deployed to control populations and to silence dissent.37
America’s founders boldly rejected the autocratic form of government that prevailed around the world in their day—rule by kings, queens, emperors, or military dictators. Instead of bowing down to powerful rulers who often considered themselves to be gods or divinely appointed leaders, Americans stood tall and embraced self-government. US citizens are their own sovereign rulers, electing public servants to carry out the will of the people. Our founders said Americans would be in charge of our own lives. The preamble to the Constitution makes crystal clear who is in charge in its first three words:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . .
Elevation of the individual through a representative democracy keeps a nation free. Yet the left focuses on smashing the individual. They’ve pushed repeatedly for rule by technocrat. Who else would presume to tell us what words are unsayable each year? It all comes down to replacing the free mind of the individual with collective reliance on the bureaucratic system for every need.
Dr. Carl Jung (1875–1961), revered as a great mind and one of the founders of modern psychiatry, understood the importance of the individual in society resisting the forces of the “dictator state.” Ideological forces, he argued, will destroy Western civilization but can be defeated as long as the individual understands what’s at stake.
In his 1957 treatise on the subject, The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Society, Jung issues a warning to the individual about the danger of despotic regimes:
The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State (raison d’état). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses.38
The first half of the twentieth century was marked by mass death and destruction, caused by communist and fascist forces that had no regard for the individual and subjected their own citizens and enemy states to the iron fist of authoritarianism. The communists who rose to power in the Bolshevik Revolution as World War I raged; the fascists who fought and won the Spanish Civil War; the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan that sought to conquer much of the planet during World War II; the Nazis, who murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust; and the communist regimes that rose to power in China and Eastern Europe after World War II had many differences. But all shared a contempt for the rights and freedoms like those proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed to the American people by our Constitution.
Jung’s prescription for not acceding to the mass despotic states of communism and fascism is to embrace and understand our power as individuals in a dynamic and personal way that will help us resist the overpowering nature of the despotic state.
Only when we understand what’s truly happening, that we’re not alone, and that none of this is natural or organic, can we be sure of ourselves and stand up to those working to gaslight and threaten us into their mindless mass. Only by being informed about the intentions, the failures, and the misery and destruction behind the left’s worldview can we defend against it.
Chapter 3 The Fear Industrial Complex
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL1
We are now all targeted by what I call the Fear Industrial Complex, an insidious dynamic relying on the direct and indirect collusion between various societal, cultural, and political entities using fear to control and suppress the American public’s willingness and ability to engage in social, cultural, and political life.
We know the bureaucratic establishment wants Americans on perpetual high alert, filled with anxiety, blaming themselves, surrendering control, and taking action to keep themselves out of the spotlight. It’s time to look at how they do it.
Fundamentally changing the American system requires government, education, and business all being compromised by small groups and individuals moving from the Marxist rat nests of academia into human resource departments, corporate boardrooms, marketing, and executive suites. There they work to expel all conservatives by accusing them of whatever rights violations seem most administratively effective. If there are no conservatives, they expel all the moderates. Once the moderates are gone, the Marxist left will turn on their former allies in the non-Marxist left.
The power grabs include government, businesses, and schools (from K–12 to university and graduate schools) mandating woke policies through DEI rules and trainings; mainstreaming the scourge of identity politics, including public ad campaigns normalizing discrimination; the vandalism of language and changing definitions; and bullying and harassment through “cancellation,” including the loss of employment, expulsion from school, and being spied on and debanked by financial institutions at the behest of the federal government.2
It is important to note that all the rules and policies moving through our culture promoting “social justice” are not solving problems or making life better. Most were never designed to do so. On the contrary, this assault on our culture and politics is frequently meant to make things worse. Its goal is to permeate American life with a chronic fear born of not knowing from one moment to the next what is safe to think, say, or do. It is a chaos meant to divide us and embed fear in the simplest acts of everyday life. Progressives imagine that frightened and exhausted Americans will have only one option—turning to government to manage and control the new Hobbesian world order. In reality, this is the equivalent of sending the Hindenburg to rescue the people of the Titanic.
We saw the real-time catastrophic impact of DEI unfold before our eyes here at home in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis by the terrorist group Hamas. Three Ivy League university presidents were called before Congress to explain what they were doing to address antisemitic demonstrations on their campuses. A shocked nation watched as the three women refused to unequivocally denounce the Jew-hatred illustrated by some students, staff, and professors, and instead demurred, saying calling for the genocide of Jews would only be against their code of conduct depending on the “context.”
The fallout was immediate, but their equivocation confirmed the institutionalizing of DEI policies in hiring, training, and curriculum has codified discrimination as an acceptable answer to past discrimination. But even beyond that, this theory not only prescribes excluding people for immutable characteristics (race, gender, and ethnicity); it weaves in the noxious reasoning that demonizing certain types of people is reasonable, even necessary, as they are deemed irredeemably bigoted, “deplorable,” if you will.
This shocking strategy of denouncing tens of millions of Americans is not new. It started with someone quite mainstream—Hillary Clinton. During her 2016 run for the presidency, she made quite the splash during interviews and public events where she introduced the strategy of smearing tens of millions of American voters as “deplorable,” “irredeemable,” and even “not American.”3 The people she smeared were committing the crime of supporting her opponent for the presidency, Donald Trump. This provided permission from a national leader to view and condemn a vast group of people simply because of who they were. This must be considered as one of the keys that unlocked the door allowing mob action against business owners, local police, Republicans, conservatives, white people, and ultimately, Jews.
Jon Miltimore and Dan Sanchez at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) expand on how Marxists embedded at American colleges not only did not abandon their failed ideology with the fall of the Soviet Union and communism but instead “mutated” with a focus on cultural Marxism. Indoctrinated college students were then churned out into society. Miltimore and Sanchez discuss how the original Marxist “class war doctrine” has shifted into an oppressed-versus-oppressor structure:4
But instead of capital versus labor, it was the patriarchy versus women, the racially privileged versus the marginalized, etc. Students were taught to see every social relation through the lens of oppression and conflict. After absorbing Marxist ideas (even when those ideas weren’t called “Marxist”), generations of university graduates carried those ideas into other important American institutions: the arts, media, government, public schools, even eventually into human resources departments and corporate boardrooms.5
Miltimore and Sanchez remind us that our current culture of fear—from cancel culture to crime to riots to perpetual victimhood—stems from Marxist indoctrination at American universities. The seeding of American institutions with indoctrinated Marxist foot soldiers creates a machine for finding oppression, and when they cannot find it, they will create it. The Fear Industrial Complex is an institutional demolition team masquerading as builders.
Weaponizing Envy
Interestingly, an important point rarely discussed or acknowledged is envy being at the core of the left’s strategy. Great minds have been warning humanity about the dangers of envy for millennia. This emotion sparks hatred and resentment, which can be used to inflict fear into others.
Wholly different from jealousy, which emerges when a threat is perceived to affect a valued relationship, the Oxford English Dictionary defines envy as “Malignant or hostile feeling; ill-will, malice, enmity” that includes “The feeling of mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of superior advantages possessed by another.”6
Many domestic abuse cases start with an abuser who is deeply jealous of their partner. The abuser surveils them, accuses them, denigrates them, and eventually decides, “If I can’t have you, no one can.” With envy, the comparable sentiment would be, “If I can’t have that, no one can.”
We’re lectured, gaslit, bullied, and encouraged to believe that success is unfair and that it’s a bigoted act to do well, and you may be punished in the end for the affront. With resentment and envy inculcated by the left targeting American society, the toxic brew of emotional and mental abuse can ultimately manifest itself in society as mass anxiety inhibiting action, causing depression, and ultimately allowing a relinquishing of control of one’s life to others. And that’s exactly what the left’s malign forces intend.
The repercussions are increasingly dangerous.
From ancient history to our modern age, envy has fueled civil uprisings, war, and family violence. Today, it also fuels the demands of so-called progressives clamoring for “equity”—tilting the playing field until outcomes are equal—leading to insatiable demands, tensions between different groups of people, and condemnations of our country, values, and way of life.
The manipulators and grifters haven’t changed much, but the mode and techniques used to indoctrinate and condition us have become more refined, detailed, and dangerous. Fear, envy, and mass anxiety are harnessed today against people from the smallest towns to the largest metropolises. Mass media, social media, and other technological advances allow abusive manipulation by the liberal establishment to target all of us everywhere, in ways inconceivable just a few decades ago.
Envy, while as old as the first humans, has now been embraced and weaponized by the left to gain control, money, and power to advance a radical and destructive cultural and economic agenda. The left and the increasingly corrupt and frenzied establishment it dominates have found the fruits of envy too exciting to ignore.
Envy is at the root of their denunciation of free markets, demonization of successful people, embrace of cancel culture, pursuit of woke religiosity, and promotion of all things doomsday. By design, envy is the fuel, deranged punishment is the result.
