This from Dana Mathewson, via David Burg on Townhall

Tim adds:

I can nitpick this a bit. For one thing he's wrong about socialism and communism; they do not go back to Marx so much as Jean Jacques Rousseau. Communism does go back to Marx and Engels but he was only taking an older idea and giving it a scientific veneer. In fact Communism is supposedly the end stage of socialism, which was the end stage of capitalism in Marx's view. There is a reason it was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics after all.

Communism was the paradise at the end of the evolution of society, not the doctrine itself. Being a Communist means first being a socialist. We call people Communists because they believe that socialism will result in this worker's paradise.

And the abuse of language is nothing new. Confucious warned about it in ancient China, saying that to restore a nation you must first true the language.

But the abuse of language came along after the twentieth century to a much greater degree because of a series of scientific developments that upended the Christian concepts of science and an objective Truth. The rise of psychology, particularly Freud, led to the concept of "my truth" as opposed to THE truth. Quantum physics and Relativity didn't help; both put the observer in the driver's seat. And Niels Bohr really pushed it forward with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics, in which he argued all thigns happen simultaneously. What had been looked on as purely a measuring problem became an attack on reality itself. (It's why Schroedinger came up with his cat-in-the-box experiment in the first place; he wasn't trying to explain Copenhaen but refute it. He and Einstein were the last holdouts.)

Anyway the role of the observer morphed in the popular culture and the weaker sciences into the idea the observer creates reality and this gave a huge push to the idea that we can change human nature and reality itself by the words we choose. So no longer is a child born a boy or girl but is "assigned" a sex when he is born for instance.

As to "capitalism" falling out of favor it should because we do not want capitalism, we want free markets. The great G.K. Chesterton called Capitalism "communism with a bigger paycheck" and he was right in terms of what Marx (who coined the term) meant; a crony capitalism, which is the Fascist economic system and entirely leftist. It is government partnering with giant corporations. Chesterton was an advocate of what he called Distributism, which was basically small, independent companies ie. the kind of free markets we used to have.

We are not capitalists. Nor should we choose to be. And we shouldn't let them demogugue us as such.

I also agree we should dump "Islamism" and admit that Islam itself is the problem. It is not just a few aberrant people; the Koran itself orders devout Muslims to murder their enemies, to rape their women and terrorize their families.

At any rate I think this a decent essay but wish he'd have gotten the details more accurate.

Fay Voshell adds:

Posted by: Mike at September 26, 2026 04:16 PM (r7WVt)

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at September 27, 2026 01:59 PM (oflqW)

Hide Comments | Add Comment