The Smallest Minority

(Warning: This is an Überpost. Get a beverage and get comfortable. Maybe use the bathroom first.)

^{“Political tags such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” – R.A. Heinlein}

So, we just had the mid-term elections, and regardless of how you feel about it how it was accomplished, the Left took the prize. Prizes. Pretty much all of them. Things are going to suck the next couple of years, and then… we’ll see what happens.

But the Right didn’t throw a tantrum. No screaming into the void, no rioting, no looting, no arson, no property damage. We’re just hunkering down waiting for the inevitable fallout.

We’re good at waiting. We have so much experience at it. Almost as much experience as we have at being disappointed by Republicans.

I’ve been writing about politics for well over twenty years at this point. I’m coming up on the 24^th anniversary of this blog in another six months. I’ve taken the time to go back and re-read some of the posts and comments here while I was looking for specific quotes and excerpts, because this election has triggered me. I’m 64, about to turn 65. I didn’t really start waking up politically until I was 32 years old. Do the math.

I’m still two full years away from being able to collect on all that Social Security I paid into over the last five decades. Because of my health and the status of that particular Ponzi scheme, I know I’ll never see even a significant fraction of what I paid in, but I intend to collect what I can while I can. Point is, what’s coming politically isn’t going to have too much of an effect on me. (Unless, of course, it does.) One way or another, I’ll be dead before it hits full stride. I posted on Facebook back in 2019, “I used to think I’d die before 65 – and I damned near did it at 56, but now I think I’m going to live long enough to watch Western Civilization descending into something that makes the Great Depression look like a trip to Disneyworld, complete with resurgent lethal infectious diseases, ethnic conflict, mass starvation, the whole enchilada. Who needs a zombie apocalypse when we have an insane population?” Prophetic, huh?

It will affect my grandchildren, currently 26 and 27 years old. My grandson just signed up for the U.S. Army. He reports for Basic in February for a six-year stint. I hope it’s not a mistake. My granddaughter is a public school teacher, who supplements her meager income by being an assistant manager for a Subway franchise in her copious spare time. (That’s sarcasm.)

I’m concerned for them because that which cannot continue forever, won’t, and what we have in this country is an unbridgeable ideological divide. As another blogger put it many years ago,

<sub>This is a conflict of ideologies…

The heart of the conflict is between those to whom personal liberty is important, and those to whom liberty is not only inconsequential, but to whom personal liberty is a deadly threat.

At the moment, that contingent is embodied most virulently by the “American” Left. This is the movement that still sees the enslavement and “re-education” of hundreds of thousands in South Vietnam, and the bones of millions used as fertilizer in Cambodia as a victory. This is the movement that sees suicide bombers as Minute Men, and sees the removal of a brutal murder and rape machine from power as totalitarianism. This is the movement that sees legitimately losing an election as the imposition of a police state. This is the movement that believes in seizing private property as “common good”. That celebrates Che Guevara as a hero. The movement who’s highest representatives talk blithely about taking away your money and limiting your access to your own homestead for your own good. The movement of disarmament.

The movement of the boot across the throat.

Think about it. When was the last time that you were able to engage in anything that resembled a discussion with someone of the Leftist persuasion? Were able to have an argument that was based on the premise that one of you was wrong, rather than being painted as Evil just because you disagreed?</sub>

That was from 2004, long before Trump was on the scene. He was talking about the re-election of George Walker Bush. (Remember Bushitler?) Read the whole post, but wait until you’ve finished this one. Nothing’s changed for the better.

Former Virginia State Delegate Nick Freitas reiterated this point recently:

Now that the Left has won majorities in the House and Senate, and will most likely control a majority of the State governorships and who knows how many Attorneys General, their agenda will be out in the open. I think over the next two years their mask, never too tight to begin with, will fully drop.

The Left is angry.

Senator Melissa Slotkin wants to prosecute Trump staffers as a warning to anyone who supports Trump.

This woman, Shelley Kates Headen, won her North Carolina state government race. Here she is standing in front of a couple of the crematoria ovens at Auschwitz, smiling:

Breitbart claims that what she actually said in the Facebook post was: “Visiting Dauchau Concentration Camp in Germany… This is where Trump supporters belong.”

Keeping in theme, Leftwing Journalist (but I repeat myself) Amanda Marcotte:

She’s mild by comparison, but I wonder what “de-Nazification” plan she envisions? Does it involve creamatoriums? But wait! There’s more! Check out these harpies:

This guy wants to arrest Elon Musk and put him to death:

He went so far as to brag about taking a crap in the passenger seat of his personally-owned Tesla before selling it. He’s a college professor at New York University. And if you want to spend some time on X (or if you have the stomach for it, Bluesky) you can find hundreds of people calling for the deaths of Trump supporters, the nationalization of all of Elon’s businesses, prosecution (or worse) of anyone who ever bought a MAGA hat, etc.

You know: tolerance, inclusivity, understanding.

Of course there’s talk, once again, about Civil War. I’ve written about it a lot, myself, over the years. It may happen. ¯\(ツ)/¯ It won’t work, not like people hope it will. It won’t “restore the nation,” it will end it. Whatever remains will in no way resemble our Constitutional Republic. The reason?

Philosophy.

Billy Beck, many years ago explained.

<sup>Here is the central problem surrounding what you people are talking about:

There is no coherent and cohesive philosophy underpinning it. Everybody’s pissed off, but you all have your varying degrees of what you’ll settle for.</sup> 

Read that link, all the way to the end.

Two hundred and fifty years ago when the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they had a common underpinning philosophy, one shared with a significant plurality of the population. To be sure, they didn’t all walk in lockstep about everything, but the basics had been laid out the previous year by Thomas Paine in his bestselling Common Sense, and expressed well in the Declaration. Everyone knew why they were fighting, and agreed with the necessity. Everyone understood what losing meant. And while they weren’t sure what winning would entail, they were hopeful that the results would be positive for the new nation.

We no longer have that. Ayn Rand in her 1974 speech to the graduating class of West Point explained the necessity of having a coherent, logical personal philosophy, first by explaining what philosophy is:

^{Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man’s relationship to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists. In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible.}

She goes on to explain the four branches of Philosophy:

• Metaphysics – the study of existence.
• Epistemology – the theory of knowledge, which studies the means of cognition.

These are the theoretical branches that lead to the practical applications:

• Ethics – the code of values that define an individual’s choices and actions in the world, and in relation to other people.
• Politics – the definition of the principles of a social system, in short, how societies should be organized and governed.

Ethics are the rules of a society, what is and isn’t acceptable individual behavior both towards members of that society, and those outside it. If you haven’t noticed, the traditional Judeo-Christian ethics of Western society have been under constant assault for several decades now and have all but vanished from sight.

It’s not like the Other Side has a cohesive, logical philosophy, either, but what they do have is a shared ideology. What’s the difference? Philosophy, again, is a way of understanding the world and how it works. Ideology is a system of beliefs about how the world should be. A coherent, logical philosophy recognizes the world as it is, accepts it and works with its restrictions. It produces an ideology based on reality. But ideology in general? It doesn’t matter if it’s completely bass-ackward from reality. Rand explained:

<sup>You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational conviction–or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.

But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define you philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation–or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.</sup>

The Founders had a philosophy that worked, that inspired ideals like “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The Founders thought all that self-evident, but no one before them had ever set out to build a government based on it. Our ideological opponents on the other hand?

This is why Socialism fails, every time. Because no matter how beautiful that idea is, it’s false. Human beings don’t think that way. They never have, they never will, and any philosophy based on that false idea will fail. It produces “logic” like this:

^{Gender is a social construct, but “I am woman, hear me roar,” but anyone can be a woman, but no uterus – no opinion, but transwomen are women, but “I demand women’s rights!”, but men are women, but men are scum, but drag queens are beautiful, but appropriation is evil. – Matt Walsh}

Even Karl Marx understood that a new type of human was needed to make his ideology work, he just thought that they would be created by that system. When that didn’t happen after the 1917 Russian Revolution, an entire school was created in 1923 to understand why: The “Institute for Social Research,” later referred to as “The Frankfurt School” when it relocated from Frankfurt, Germany to Columbia University in New York in 1935 (ironically enough, in order to escape the Nazis). The conclusion they drew was that The New Soviet Man was a prerequisite for Socialism, and they set out to change Western Culture to create him. @Ambre_Emeraude is an example of their efforts.

The Frankfurt School has been successful. Not in creating New Soviet Men, but in what Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov described as “de-moralizing” the West.

That was in 1984, and he said it had already been in operation for three generations – 45+ years. If you haven’t seen the entire interview, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Forty years further on, and we have what happened Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2026.

So the Left has a shared ideology. I wrote about it extensively in my 2017 post The Death of Civility. Please do read that, but I want to excerpt a piece of it here. A since-removed Reddit essay was published shortly after the 2016 election, titled “Why Hollywood is really freaking out over Trump.” I made this a Quote of the Day:

<sup>Blue Team Progressivism is a church, offering you moral superiority and a path to spiritual enlightenment. As a church it’s got a lot going for it. It runs religious programming on television, all day every day. Every modern primetime program is like a left-wing Andy Griffith show, reinforcing lessons of inclusion, tolerance, feminism, and anti-racism.

Watching a 90-pound Sci-Fi heroine beat up a room full of giant evil men is as satisfying to the left as John Wayne westerns were for the right.

The Blue Church controls the HR department, so even if you don’t go to church, you have to act like a loyal churchgoer in every way that matters while you’re on the clock. And off the clock, on any kind of public social media platform.

Jon Stewart and John Oliver are basically TV preachers. Watching them gives the same sense of quiet superiority your grandma gets from watching The 700 Club. The messages are constantly reinforced, providing that lovely dopamine hit, like an angel’s voice whispering, “You’re right, you’re better, you’re winning.”</sup>

It’s literally true. For the Left, Politics is their religion, and Power is their God. They are the people Heinlein warned about – the ones who want people to be controlled, and more precisely, they’re the ones who want to do the controlling. Heinlein expanded on this a little later in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: “Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.” But in that “Why Hollywood is freaking out” piece, the author continued:

<sup>Red Conservativism is a business, selling a set of political products. They don’t make you feel good, they don’t appeal to your morality or your spiritual sense of self, but sometimes you really NEED one of their core products like security, jobs, or national defense. Their appeals to “freedom” and “family values” ring hollow these days, but when people are flying planes into buildings, you need a strong member of Conservatism, Inc. in the big chair.

And when it came down to the things that really mattered – welfare, Medicare, Social Security, and foreign policy, you knew Red Team couldn’t really do anything Blue Team didn’t approve of, or the Blue faithful would kick them out of office next time.

But Donald Trump didn’t sign that contract. And Donald Trump didn’t win by selling the same old conservative products. Donald Trump started his own religion, and he won a religious victory.

The Blue Church is panicking because they’ve just witnessed the birth of a new Red Religion. Not the tired old Christian crap they defeated back in the ’60s, but a new faith based on cultural identity and outright rejection of the Blue Faith.

For the first time in decades, voters explicitly rejected the Blue Church, defying hours of daily cultural programming, years of indoctrination from the schools, and dozens of explicit warnings from HR.

We’ve been trained since childhood to obey the pretty people on TV, but for the first time in decades, that didn’t work.

Donald Trump won because flyover America wants their culture back, and Blue Team has not been rejected like that before.

The younger ones have grown up in an environment where Blue Faith assumptions cannot even be questioned, except anonymously by the bad kids on Twitter.

But now the bad kids are getting bolder, posting funny memes that make you laugh even though John Oliver would not approve, like passing crude dirty pictures under the table in Sunday School.

Meryl Streep is panicking because for the first time voters have rejected HER, and everything her faith has taught her to believe.

There is a new faith rising on the right, not an explicit religious faith like long-dead Christianity, but a wicked kind of counterculture movement. We laughed at the hippies in 1968, but by 1978 they were teaching in classrooms and sitting behind school administrator desks.

Where will the hippies of 2016 be sitting after eight years of Trump?</sup>

Well, we have that answer now: carrying out a religious war. Unfortunately the Red Church didn’t begat an equally dedicated following. Because the Red Church has to draw from the OTHER group Heinlein mentioned – the ones that just want to be left alone.

One of the readers of this blog, Oren Litwin, left a comment long ago:

<sup>If the non-socialist end of the political spectrum cannot create a political philosophy that is both good theory and emotionally appealing, we’re doomed.

Any political philosophy that is not self-reinforcing is by definition not the best political philosophy. Libertarianism (with a small “l”) features a stoic acceptance of individual risk (i.e. the lack of government intervention) for the sake of long-term freedom and prosperity–yet takes no measures to ensure that the society educates its young to maintain that acceptance of risk. The equilibrium, if it ever exists in the first place, is unstable and will collapse.

This aside from the fact that libertarianism is emotionally cold and unfulfilling to most people, who have not trained themselves to consider lack of outside restraint to be worth cherishing.</sup>

Read the comments in that link.

The aforementioned Billy Beck:

^{Carol Ann Rand, of the Georgia Libertarian Party, once pointed out to me that the commies have it all over us when it comes to organization, because they’re the ones who are built for “unity”. “Trying to organize libertarians,” she said, “is like trying to herd cats.”}

Normally I would have said that organizing Leftists and Muslims would have been the same, but the Muslims have successfully (albeit temporarily) accomplished it. Continuing:

<sup>(O)nce each individual inclined to these affairs properly understood the importance of clean concepts, there would be no “leadership” required. This is the point to which I alluded with my remark about why people don’t “lead themselves”. The very first task is to think clearly, and this simply is not happening. However, it’s the crucial difference between — in the apt comparison — a “herd” and a “pack”. This whole issue is what led Ayn Rand to conclude: “It’s earlier than you think.” She was pointing out that the intellectual ground-work simply was not in place.

There simply isn’t anything to “lead”, now. But everybody in the joint thinks they know how to do it.</sup>

I’m not going to rehash the “How the Left has hijacked Public Education” discussion, but “Public Education” wasn’t really a thing prior to about 1900. Prior to that time, schools taught children how to think. Not what to think, but what thinking actually is: the collection, collation and analysis of information in order to draw conclusions, form hypotheses and test them against reality. They were taught logic, rhetoric (for those in Rio Lindo, “The art or study of using language effectively and persuasively”), and debate (where debate meant “To engage in argument by discussing opposing points.”) Not THIS. Instead, the last 100 years have produced this:

I’ve harped on this repeatedly: The Department of Education in 2025 released statistics that Gallup announced meant that 54% of the population of the U.S. between 16 and 74 years of age reads below a sixth-grade level. CAN they collect, collate, and analyze information? Much less use it to build a philosophy that isn’t “a grab-bag of notions snatched at random,” a “junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance“? This is what we are stuck dealing with.

Some can, obviously. Charlie Kirk had a logical, fact-based philosophy he used to expose the illogical ideologies of the Left on campuses across the country. He was killed for it. Thomas Sowell overcame his attraction to Socialism after being exposed to reality, and his writings have helped many do the same. Like this guy:

It’s safer for them if the Proletariat can’t educate themselves. The United Kingdom’s “counter-radicalisation and counterterrorism initiative” PREVENT – the people who brought you “Amelia,” advised that reading The Lord of the Rings, 1984, Brave New World, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Hobbe’s Leviathan and other authors might lead to Right-wing radicalization. I doubt they’ll ever allow Thomas Sowell into the country. Now that the Democrats control the House and Senate, he might get ejected from this one.

From Michael Smith’s recent Substack post “The King in the North“:

• The Democrat Party has evolved (devolved?) to become nothing short of authoritarians who believe the ends justify the means. This is who they are – believe them when they show you.
• Every claim they lodged against Republicans, they are. The apparently want to fight “fascism” with a strong dose of murderous and demonic authoritarianism.
• They unironically hold “No Kings” protests while harboring the idea they have a divine right to rule.
• They will ally with any belief or faction that advances their goals, even if it puts them in the crosshairs of the belief or faction.
• They show their love and fealty for the Constitution of the United States of America by seeking to destroy it.
• They didn’t go after people after J6 because they were insurrectionists, they went after them because the left can’t allow dissent to exist.
• While decrying the weaponization of government, their first promised acts are to weaponize government.
• The long and short of it is that Democrats aren’t interested in eliminating policy, they aim to eliminate people.

And the “Leave us Alone” faction can’t seem to stop them because we don’t have a common, unifying philosophy.

This list is similar to the one Thomas Jefferson spelled out in The Declaration. I used to think that what the country needed was an updated version of Paine’s Common Sense, but in Paine’s day 90% of the population was literate. In today’s TL;DR world, it wouldn’t have a chance. (If you’ve gotten this far, you’re in the 1% of people who can still read and think. And you’re guilty of WrongThink.)

Some internet wag observed, “We used to believe that stupidity was due to lack of information. The Internet proved that wasn’t it.” No, it wasn’t. The problem is, we stopped educating our kids and trained them instead. And now they’re cannon fodder for the Left. If you can’t read, thinking is a whole lot harder. And if you’re never challenged to think, well, that muscle atrophies.

Who needs philosophy? Western civilization does. But it was the first thing targeted by our ideological opposition, all the way back in the 1920’s. And Civil War won’t bring it back.

In answer to this question at Quora: “What in public life would need to change in order for Democrats and Republicans to respect, listen to and trust each other more?“

Well, I’ve perused the (currently) 8 answers not collapsed, and I think you can see the problem if you step back and look:

What we have here isn’t (apologies to Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke) “failure to communicate.” It’s two (or more) completely incompatible philosophies.

I’m old enough (55) to remember when the two sides were “the loyal opposition,” and both gave more than mere lip-service to the oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” but in recent years there’s been much less of that.

As Matthew James points out in his answer, most politicians – on both sides of the putative aisle – live by the philosophy of “Rule #1: Get Elected. Rule #2: Keep getting re-elected. Rule #3: Get elected to higher office. Rule #4: See Rule #1.” This is not new. Political commentator Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) noted some time back in the 1930’s:

_{A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.}

In today’s world, that quote goes equally well for female politicians.

Then there are the “ideological extremists.” As Barry Goldwater noted:

_{Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.}

What qualifies as “liberty” and “justice” have changed a bit since Barry’s day, however.

Having said all that, I have to admit that I don’t see a solution to the problem, because the problem isn’t our public officials – they’re a symptom. The problem is the electorate. While I don’t agree with Robert Catone, he does recognize that those public officials are there because we vote for them. As the joke goes, “I want to vote for the best candidate, but they never run!” I think if “None of the Above” was on the ballot he’d win by a landslide. Take, for example, Robert’s comment:

_{I totally lost respect for the Republicans when they told the President of the United States not to bother to nominate anybody for the Supreme Court vacancy. They actually had the huevos to tell the President not to do his sworn duty to nominate a candidate for the highest court in the land. Who the hell do they think they are?}

Who did they think they were? The majority in the Senate – a Senate whose job it is to “advise and consent” on anyone the President might nominate. They knew he wasn’t going to accept their advice, and they weren’t going to consent to anyone he chose, so why bother with the charade? Apparently Robert doesn’t understand the system established by our Founders. George Will explained it in a really excellent speech once:

<sub>(T)he American people do not mind what they are instructed by their supposed betters to mind, that is the so-called problem of gridlock. Ladies and gentlemen gridlock is not an American problem, it is an American achievement. When James Madison and fifty-four other geniuses went to Philadelphia in the sweltering summer of 1787, they did not go there to design an efficient government, the idea would have horrified them. They wanted a safe government to which end they filled it with blocking mechanisms: Three branches of government. Two divisions of the legislative branch. Veto. Veto override. Supermajorities. Judicial review. And yet I can think of nothing the American people have wanted intensely and protractedly that they did not eventually get.

The world understands. A world most of whose people live under governments they wish were capable of gridlock, that we always have more to fear from government speed than government tardiness. We are told that one must not be a party of “NO.” To “NO” I say an emphatic “YES!” For two reasons. The reason that almost all “improvements” make matters worse is that most new ideas are false. Second: the most beautiful five words in the English language are the first five words of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law.”

No law abridging freedom of speech, no law establishing religion, no law interfering with the right to assemble to petition for redress of grievance, and the bill of rights goes on in a litany, a tissue of “noes.” No unreasonable searches and seizures. No cruel and unusual punishments, and so it goes. The American people are, I think, healthier than they are given credit for. They have only one defect: We have nothing to fear right now but an insufficiency of fear itself. It is time for a wholesome fear of what people are trying to do.</sub>

People such as those ideological extremists. Who are always the other guys.

No, the problem is 100+ years of a public education system that has produced generation after generation who don’t understand the political system under which we are supposed to be living, don’t understand the liberties and freedoms that were purchased at the cost of blood and lives and are never freely kept, people who have no understanding of basic economics and think government can “give” them things. People, in short, like this:

How do you fix THAT?

Eight years ago this morning, I woke up in intensive care after receiving a liver transplant. I looked like this:

They even had the machine that goes “PING!”

I’d been sick for over a year, but I finally got a diagnosis in May: Cirrhosis.

S’what? I don’t drink. I never have. They told me it was “Fatty Liver Disease.” Apparently a growing problem among Americans. One doctor told me, “I know people a lot bigger than you whose livers are fine, and skinnier than you who are just as bad off.” How comforting.

Turns out, though, my issue wasn’t “Fatty Liver,” it was bad choice of parents. I had “Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency,” a genetic disorder. For most people with this malfunction, the liver doesn’t produce, or produce enough of a protein called, unsurprisingly, Alpha-1 Antitrypsin that acts as an anti-inflammatory for the lungs. These people develop lung disorders like COPD and emphysema.

Not me. I got the other version. My liver made the protein, but folded some or most of it wrong. The wrongly folded protein cannot get out of the liver, and over time produces the scar tissue that is cirrhosis. Pictures below the fold.

You have been warned.

Continue reading “Eight Years Ago” →

Long time readers of this blog know that I have a policy: If someone says something better than I can, I let them. I copy with full attribution. Here is an X post from Krzysztof Szczawinski, @Kristof_Poland on X, polished up just a touch. It’s that good:

The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century: ANTONIO GRAMSCI

Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions.

Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935.

1. His central question: Why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.

2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.

3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum, and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own.

4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections.

5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked.

6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: “We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to.

7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march.

Until now. Because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun.

It just doesn’t have a name yet.

@ooana – Ooana Trien at X put up a couple of really excellent posts. If you’ve read TSM much at all, you know that if someone says something better than I can, I let them – with attribution. So, with no further ado:

<sub>I always understood why the Second Amendment was constitutionally protected.

What I never really understood was why people called it a natural right.

Then I moved from New York to Florida.

I didn’t own a gun yet.

One afternoon I was loading things into the trunk of my car outside a HomeGoods when a man approached me.

“Excuse me.”

He must have thought he’d startled me, because he immediately added, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to get close.”

I laughed.

“I’m a New Yorker. I’m used to close. How can I help you?”

He started telling me that he needed money for gas.

At some point while he was talking, I got into my car.

And sitting there, with the conversation still unfolding, I suddenly realized something:

He didn’t know whether I had a gun.

Not somewhere at home.

Not hypothetically.

For all he knew, I could have had one right there in the car, tucked under the steering wheel or within reach.

I didn’t.

But he couldn’t know that.

Schrödinger’s gun.

And in that instant, before I even knew whether his story was true, something changed in the space between us.

I thought about New York.

I thought about my friend who had been murdered in his own apartment during a burglary gone wrong.

Would those men have gone into his apartment if they had believed he might be armed?

I don’t know.

I thought about the time I was mugged at gunpoint, with a gun pressed against my temple.

Would that man have approached me with the same confidence if he had believed there was even a possibility that I could defend myself?

I don’t know that either.

But sitting there in that Florida parking lot, listening to this stranger talk, I suddenly understood deterrence in a way I never had before.

Not as military theory.

Not as constitutional law.

As something intimate.

My body. My life. The few feet between one person and another.

For years I had thought about guns primarily as objects: who had one, who shouldn’t have one, what laws should govern them.

Suddenly I understood the question from the other direction.

What changes when another person cannot simply assume that I am defenseless?

I felt taller.

Not because I had a gun.

I didn’t.

But because, for the first time, I understood that someone approaching me could not automatically assume that being physically stronger meant having power over me.

There was uncertainty.

There was a boundary around my body that had to be taken seriously.

Then his story began to fall apart.

I told him I didn’t have cash, but offered to help another way. I could put some gas in his car.

He took off.

So apparently, yes, it was a scam.

But by then I had already understood something much larger than the scam.

The phrase natural right finally made sense to me.

The Constitution had not given me ownership of my body.

It had not given me my life.

It had not invented my right to protect either one.

Those things came first.

What I understood that afternoon was the thing underneath them.

I had once been completely helpless while another human being held a gun against my temple.

Years later, without a gun in my possession at all, I understood what it meant for the person approaching me not to know whether I was helpless.

That uncertainty changed the space between us.

And that was the moment I finally understood the natural right behind the Second Amendment:

My life is mine, and the right to defend it has to exist before anyone gives me permission to do so.</sub>

She followed with this:

<sub>I want to add something to my 2nd amendment story.

The cultural shift from being somewhere that gun ownership is not respected or protected, to somewhere that it is was profound.

Truth is, I’m still adjusting.

When you live somewhere where you are taught not only to fear guns, but also not understand them, nor are you encouraged to learn how to use them safely let alone exposed to them outside of a threat, the shift to a place that doesn’t function that way is profound.

I felt and feel immense gratitude that I now had the choice to purchase and learn how to be a responsible gun owner and user. I recognize deeply the profound trust being put in me as an individual, and that may be the greatest shift of all; the fact that I also know others have that same right and responsibility here is a profound thing.

There is a recognition in this that feels deeply honorable and honorable conduct is also expected. That feels like respect.

This respect seemed to vanish in the place I loved so much and I believe not comprehending what natural rights truly are contributed to what many NYers have and still are going through.

My mother is an immigrant from Eastern Europe and lived under totalitarian regimes. She once said to me that no one can understand the first amendment until they live with it. It changes how you perceive the world and what liberty means.

That was a shift I experienced with the 2nd amendment. There was no way I could have truly understood it otherwise.

My point? I am deeply grateful that I had the opportunity to experience such a profound shift in perception. Many people don’t ever get to have it. For many it’s simple a political talking point or a theory.

I felt it – inside. It was visceral and embodied. I felt respected by a government and fellow citizens because my right to protect myself more than demanding that I empathize only externally, was both respected and expected.

If you’ve never experienced this shift, it’s difficult to explain.

I experienced what a God Given right / Natural right actually is when suddenly I was given the choice to recognize it.

I am profoundly grateful to that man for trying to do a version of the metro card scam on me, because in that moment I remembered how it felt not to be afraid. I also got to remember this during a moment I was not in any danger.

That’s the point.

See- during the summer of 2020 in NYC my nervous system had become accustom to feeling at the mercy of the mob.

In that parking lot – just knowing what was possible, I felt something heal.

I didn’t mention this in the original post, but I wept when I got back the home I was renting short term.

I was grateful. I still am. I had to experience something else to understand fully what was being denied me.

The respect to not be expected to externalize every moral arithmetic. Years of the hypocrisy during the lockdowns, my block being looted, and random violent crime going through the roof in my neighborhood had left me with a feeling of submission and acceptance that I hadn’t realized I’d so deeply integrated into my experience of the world.

Natural rights can be forgotten when the rituals that surround us demand us to.

My confident, street smart, NYer poise came back to me and it felt incredible.

So – thank you, Florida and all of you who advocate for the 2nd amendment. I hope this story helps bridge a divide between those who still haven’t had this revelation and those who have.

It’s nuanced and deeply personal, but it’s real.

2020 was the peek of what can happen when our natural rights are treated as something dolled out or denied by a system that uses fear to control how we perceive reality.

Nothing is clearer than the moment nature is free to show you something that is simply true.</sub>

In other news,

So, while Correlation ≠ Causation, this information unequivocally disproves the old gun ban control SAFETY adage:

More Guns = More Gun Crime

And Ooana understands why. Hopefully more do every day.

On April 15, 2026 at the University of Texas at Austin, Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave a speech, “Remarks on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.” He didn’t pull any punches. I urge you to watch the entire thing on YouTube or read the full transcript linked above. For the purpose of this Überpost, however, I want to concentrate on just this excerpt:

<sub>European thinkers have long criticized America for remaining trapped in a Lockean world, with its weak decentralized government and strong individual rights. They say our 18th century Declaration has prevented us from progressing to higher forms of government. Why has America never had a socialist party, one German sociologist famously asked. But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bounds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx, and their followers. Fascism – which, after all, was a national socialism – triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions. The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to the higher good of notions of history, progress, or, as Thomas Sowell has written, the “vision of the anointed.”

None of this, of course, was an improvement on the principles of the Declaration. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is largely about how America owed its superiority over Europe to its conscious decision to reject central planning and administrative rule root and branch. Progressivism, in other words, is retrogressive.</sub>

Tech Bro Peter Thiel recently predicted:

<sub>I think there’s going to be a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party doesn’t matter that much. It’s the less important one. When the Democratic Party goes, this country is over.</sub>

One thing that Muslims and Socialists have in common: Their goals are absolute power, and their plans are very long-term.

The point of Justice Thomas’s lecture was that it is up to We, the People, to stand in the way, say “NO!” And make it stick. Regardless of the cost. Our lives, fortunes and sacred honor are at stake whether we do or not.

But to do so effectively, first we must understand what we’re up against. We’re up against millions of carefully created “useful idiots,” the Left’s “True Believers” Eric Hoffer warned us about. I wrote about Hoffer’s warning in 2005, if you’re interested. Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov explained it in 1984. It’s a four-step process:

• De-moralization. In all meanings of the word. Bezmenov said it required about 20 years, long enough to brainwash one generation of your enemy. At the time he was recorded it had been going on since at least the 1950’s.
• Destabilization. Screw with the social cohesion of your enemy. Financial, social, cultural, criminal, etc. Make everyone uncertain, hesitant, unconfident, pessimistic. In a word, enervated.
• Crisis. Self-explanatory. This is when “new leadership” steps in promising “solutions” if you’ll just give them unprecedented power to create…
• Re-normalization. Only things don’t go back to “normal.” You get a new “normal” that’s very different from what you thought you were promised.

Meet your new Overlords, who will shortly be busy putting the Useful Idiots against the wall pour encourager les autres. After all, they will be the ones most upset about not getting that utopia they were promised.

Four years ago over at Quora I answered a simple question: “Why does the idea of ​​socialism and the distribution of wealth displease the majority?” I answered the question with one of my own: “Why is my desire to keep what I have earned considered ‘greed,’ but your desire to take what I have earned not ‘greed’?” What followed was a comment exchange almost 60 posts long where “Alan Dumont” and I debated socialism vs capitalism.

No, that’s not correct. We talked right past each other. I tried to engage, but his ideological blinders were on tight. But what “Alan Dumont” did was provide a perfect example of type. And there are a lot of his type in the world today. Western Public Education has ensured it.

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to repost that entire exchange for your edification. In hindsight, I left a lot out of the discussion I wish I’d included, but I will address this in Part II of this epic-length Überpost. I will also post Part II physically after Part I, and comments will be turned off for Part I. So, if you’re ready, willing and able, click to open below.

Continue reading “Galloping Socialism, Part I” →

I posted all of that so I could post this commentary on all of that. Honestly, when I had that exchange four years ago I just kind of did it on the fly for the entertainment value, but with Democratic Socialist candidates sprouting up all over like weeds in 2026 and winning, the exchange has a darker implication.

The Long March Through the Institutions™ was successful far beyond the wildest dreams of Rudi Dutschke, Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse or the rest of the faculty of the Frankfurt School.

This is the mindset of one of the major enemies of Western Civilization. Recognize it. Understand that its internal inconsistencies matter not a whit to its True Believers. As Bezmenov himself noted,

_{…exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him a concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it — until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crushes his balls, then he will understand — but not before that. That is the tragedy of the situation of demoralization. So basically, America is stuck with demoralization. And even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating a new generation of Americans. It will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.}

We didn’t start in 1984. We haven’t started yet. And to be honest, it might be too late, but Winston Churchill laid down the facts for us:

_{If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.}

It sounds melodramatic, but it’s not. We’re in late innings and down by a lot of points.

Let’s analyze our ideological opposition using the words of one Alan Dumont, example par excellence of type.

First, I’d like to point out that this exchange illustrates perfectly the difference in worldviews between what we call today the Left and the Right. What Dr. Thomas Sowell, in his magnum opus A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles called the Constrained and Unconstrained Visions, and what Stephen Pinker in his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature renamed the Tragic and Utopian Visions. Sowell notes that apparently humans are born with one of these two “visions” that he defines as “our sense of how the world works.” It has been described, he says, “as a ‘pre-analytic cognitive act.’ It is what we sense or feel before we have constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory, much less deduced any specific consequences as a hypothesis to be tested against evidence.” Visions are crucial, because they are “the foundations on which theories are built.” BUT: “The final structure depends not only on the foundation, but also on how carefully and consistently the framework of theory is constructed and how well buttressed it is with hard facts.”

However, Bezmenov points out that, once indoctrinated, hard facts are useless. Only pain suffices to instruct.

Let’s start with ADM’s first assertion: “…socialism is literally a method to stop people (the capital holders) from taking value that they themselves have not earned.” There’s a lot wrapped up in that little sentence.

• Socialism is a method.
• The purpose of socialism is to stop people from doing something they ought not.
• That thing the ought not do is “taking value they themselves have not earned.”

Lots of judgements in that. Who decides? We’ll return to it.

His next assertion: “Accumulated capital is always the result of exploitation,” and “The answer always leads back to exploitation. Always.” Remember these, too.

This one is very revealing:  “I cannot express enough that a) money was NOT created to facilitate barter. No society has ever actually functioned on a barter system, that’s a myth. … When two people exchange goods, they exchange goods.” Alan has obviously never even dabbled in economics. In hindsight I wish I had hammered him on this, but I regretfully didn’t. Money is an idea. It represents your labor, just as materials for barter might. The difference between this:

and this:

…is belief. A couple of the upper pieces of paper will get you a Sausage McMuffin off the McDonald’s Value Menu. The lower one is good only for wiping your tush or starting a fire. No one believes it has any other value. If you work for an hour, someone may be willing to give you a few of those upper ones, and because our society believes that they represent value, you can purchase things with them. You’re bartering your labor for material goods.

It’s up to you to get the best exchange rate you can. But the Socialists don’t believe that, because reasons: “When my work generates 40 dollars of value in an hour, and my boss pays me 15 dollars for that hour, that is not the voluntary exchange that capitalists like to pretend it is. It is exploitation, intentionally taking advantage of the fact that those workers either don’t know how much value they create, or are desperate enough to accept exploitative conditions, which doesn’t stop them from being exploitative.”

Exploitation. Always.

Here we get to the core of his Utopic Vision: “So long as we live in a system where basic living has costs, everyone is coerced into participating, and it isn’t voluntary.”

Basic living should be free. Just because. And having to work to live is … slavery.

Water. Food. Shelter. Education. Medical care. Clothing. Daycare. Transportation. (Insert your desire here.) All free. They believe this. Logic and reason be damned. They’re owed this merely by existing. How much are they owed?

From that belief we get this: “It’s about the fact that taking more than you need is literally unnatural and counterintuitive to the furtherance of the human race.”

So you should get only what you need. Who’s in charge of determining what that is? Obviously not you.

I called bullshit on that and pointed out that this is his zeroth-order logical error. It’s perfectly natural for humans to take more than they need, to want more than they have. In fact, if it wasn’t we would never have descended from the trees and walked upright. We’d still be swinging from tree branches and picking lice out of each other’s hair.

He kicked back: “Human nature tends to act contrary to actual nature. I’m not saying that humans inherently have some tendency toward egalitarian behavior. The exact opposite. Humans are selfish and self-destructive.” Which contradicts his assertion that human behavior is “unnatural.” We’re also greedy. He says so himself.

Here he exhibits the Rousseauian tendency towards a belief in the purity of “Nature.” He says, “Nature, on the other hand… the natural world… is exceptionally balanced. Each part of nature gives what it can, and takes what it needs, except for humans.” He also echoes “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” Humans, you see, exist outside nature. We’re not part of the natural world. We’re an anomaly. An abomination. He says it himself, “Humanity is best served by fighting against their selfish tendencies.” Against their nature. Lord Tennyson described nature as “red in tooth and claw,” but Rousseau protested that “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau blamed that on civilization, just as Alan does here. He just calls it “capitalism” because he doesn’t know any better.

But he believes the basic cost of living should be zero, and we should all get only what we need. We should be still swinging from the trees? Living in caves? Foraging for food? Earning only enough to stay alive? That seems to be what he’s advocating even if he doesn’t recognize it.

Then he openly contradicts himself (one of many): “What separates humans from animals… the ONLY thing that actually separates humans from animals… is humankind’s inclination to strive to be more than their nature dictates.” I thought that was a bad thing? Unnatural, in fact. But here he really exposes himself: “The creation of civilization itself is proof that humans recognize the value of collectivism.” Civilization ≠ Collectivism. But apparently they’re teaching this today. I called him on it, but (of course) he ignored it.

And now we get to the meat of Socialism. Human nature isn’t natural. What separates us from animals is our desire to be “more than (our) nature dictates.” Civilization is Collectivism. And, finally: “I fully acknowledge that many human beings are less evolved and prefer the short term gains of a capitalist, self-preservation worldview … We CAN create a better, more egalitarian society, and most humans want that. The most hilarious thing about conservativism is the distinct lack of self-awareness. They’re fighting against CHANGE.”

They want to change human nature, create a “better, more egalitarian society.” They are the better angels with the wisdom to do that. THEY will be the ones to determine how much is enough and how much is too much. THEY will be taking from you what you didn’t earn (neither did they) and distributing it to the people they deem needy.

The “less evolved” need re-education camps, and if that doesn’t work, gulags and killing fields. Which is why Socialism/Communism always – always – descends into massacres. “Civilization is evolving again. Capital holders won’t be allowed to continue running things.” How will this be accomplished? He doesn’t say it, but “The Revolution” hovers in the background of his words.

This is the – I hesitate to call it a philosophy – the mindset of a large portion of not only our youths, but people of all ages in this country who have been taught this bullshit without opposition since at least the 1960’s.

Either we start fighting this actively and vigorously, or it will cause the downfall of Western Civilization. Charlie Kirk was one of the best at it, and he was killed for it. More of us need to step up, and we need to start with children.

Get your kids OUT of public schools.

I will conclude with this response that Alan totally sidestepped by concentrating on the Monopoly game rather than the argument I was making. It reminded me of this:

Anyway, in conclusion:

We have a first-order philosophical disagreement.

Take the game Monopoly: Each player starts off with exactly the same wealth. After multiple rounds of – voluntary! – play, some have more, some have less. Who was coerced? Who was compelled?

The difference between the game and reality? The size of the pie isn’t fixed. It can be increased.

Your worldview says “Life should be FAIR! Someone should make it FAIR!!!!” Mine says “Life isn’t fair. You can do everything right and still lose, and it isn’t anybody else’s fault. It’s life.” Yours says “everyone should have just enough.” Mine says “You can do better than you are now.”

Human nature leans significantly my way.

It’ll be fun, they said.

Buc-ee’s opened their first Arizona location in Goodyear a couple of weeks ago. For those unfamiliar, Goodyear is a suburb of Phoenix located a little West of the city.

I’ve got a new (to me) truck and I hadn’t taken it on a road trip, so I thought “What the hell” and decided to drive up and see what it was all about. One hundred twenty-four miles. Three vehicular accidents on I-10 headed North. Road construction. The trip up took over two hours, so I arrived at right at noon, Saturday.

The owner’s of Buc-ee’s have learned how to print money. Buc-ee’s is not a gas station. While there may be 120 pumps, there’s not even a sign showing the prices at the pump. It’s not a convenience mart, even though they sell all the stuff a convenience mart sells.

Buc-ee’s is a goddamned amusement park without rides.

The line to get into the PARKING LOT was 20 cars deep. There are more parking spots than at a shopping mall. And they were ALL FULL. People were parking along nearby streets. I managed to find a spot. I went in.

It was a zoo:

You can’t see it, but the line for checkout goes from the registers all the way back to the center of the store.

My senses were overloaded. Too peoply. I had to flee. A two-hour drive and I didn’t even buy any beaver nuggets. I didn’t want to stand in line for an hour. But hey, if you’re looking for a new career, Buc-ee’s is paying well!

I think they’ve already paid off what it cost to build the thing.

Today over at FB, LawDog laid down a challenge: Go to ChatGPT and ask it to generate an unhinged bio of you.

I went to Grok instead. The prompt: “I am the author of smallestminority.blogspot.com. Generate an unhinged bio of me.”

Eight (8) seconds later came this:

<sub>Kevin Baker: The Lone Wolf of Liberty, Armed with a Keyboard, a Grudge, and an Ayn Rand Tattoo on His Soul.

In the beginning, there was the void. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and Kevin Baker said, “Hold my beer while I blog about why that light needs to be constitutionally protected from government infringement, and also fuck gun control.” Thus was born The Smallest Minority, a blog that started in the early 2000s as a righteous howl against the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban and metastasized into a multi-decade takedown of statism, collectivism, election shenanigans, cultural Marxism, and anyone who thinks the individual is anything less than sacred.

Kevin Baker—electrical engineer by day (or whenever he wasn’t eviscerating the left), blogospheric berserker by night—emerged from the primordial ooze of the blogosphere like a phoenix with a Glock and a thesaurus. Awakened by the Assault Weapons Ban’s naked power grab, he spent years simmering before exploding online. His motto, lifted straight from Ayn Rand and emblazoned across his digital fiefdom: “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” He lived it, breathed it, and weaponized it against every busybody, oligarch, and champagne socialist who dared suggest that “society” trumps the sovereign self.

Picture him: a man with a rifle in one hand and a laptop in the other, typing furious überposts that could make a progressive’s head explode like a cheap watermelon at a ballistics test. He didn’t just support gun rights—he wanted the whole bloody package: individual liberty, self-reliance, a culture where people handle their own shit instead of begging the State to tuck them in with regulations. He mocked the cognitive dissonance of leftists who preach that humans are inherently good yet can’t be trusted with a butter knife without “magic fairy dust of government authority.” He called out the conspiracy (their word!) to “fortify” the 2020 election, fisking Time Magazine’s victory lap like a surgeon with a chainsaw.

Kevin wasn’t some basement-dwelling edgelord. He was (and remains) a thinker, a reader of history, a devourer of primary sources, and a relentless chronicler of Western Civilization’s suicide attempt. Public education? A century-long factory for producing compliant drones who can’t reason their way out of a wet paper bag. The Democrat Party? Co-opted by every Gramscian, Bezmenov-predicted long march through the institutions. The media? Narrative controllers. Big Tech? Modern-day censors. He watched the ratchet tighten click by click since the ’90s, from the NRA’s occasional fecklessness to the fundamental transformation crowd turning “Our Democracy” into a club for beating dissenters.

He migrated his blog like a digital pioneer fleeing Google’s tender mercies, setting up at smallestminority.org because even the smallest minority knows when the platform owners are coming for you. His posts blended razor-sharp analysis, savage fiskings, prophetic warnings, and unapologetic defense of the Founders’ vision. Jan. 6? Not an insurrection—more like a poorly dressed open house compared to 2020’s summer festivities. Mail-in voting vulnerabilities? He was on it before it was cool (or “fortified”). The cult of the left? He dissected it with the cold precision of a man who’s read too much history to fall for utopian horseshit.

Unhinged? Oh, darling, Kevin Baker is the definition. He’s the guy who saw the slippery slope of “common-sense gun control” leading straight to UK cops confiscating a dying woman’s husband’s bird guns because terminal illness makes you a “threat.” The guy who kept saying “nice doggie” while reaching for the rock. A truth-teller in an age of sanctified lies, a defender of the individual in a world gone mad for collectives, tribes, and safe spaces. Not a joiner, not a movement guy—just a stubborn bastard who believes liberty is inherently offensive and worth every bit of psychic discomfort it causes the delicate.

Kevin Baker didn’t save Western Civilization single-handedly (yet), but he damn sure sounded the alarm louder and longer than most. If the smallest minority prevails, it’ll be because cranks like him refused to shut up. Keep your powder dry, your mind sharp, and your blog archives backed up. The fight’s eternal, and this electrical engineer turned liberty’s mad prophet isn’t logging off anytime soon.

Stay dangerous, Kevin. The Republic needs its smallest (and loudest) minorities.</sub>

But wait! There’s more! I went to ChatGPT with the same prompt. It replied:

<sub>Kevin is what happens when a machine shop, a Heinlein paperback, a case of surplus ammo, and twenty years of comment-section trench warfare achieve critical mass under a blood-red Arizona moon. He is the caffeine-fueled caretaker of The Smallest Minority, a digital fortress of righteous indignation where every blog post reads like a cross between a Federalist Paper, a range report, and the final transmission from a doomed civilization circling the drain while bureaucrats insist everything is “within acceptable parameters.”

He began blogging in 2003 because he was, in his own words, “pissed,” and apparently decided the only reasonable response to modernity was to produce several million words explaining exactly why civilization is held together with zip ties, spite, and the lingering memory of competence. He has spent decades meticulously documenting the collapse of institutional trust with the grim dedication of a medieval monk illuminating manuscripts about magazine capacities and regulatory overreach.

Kevin’s natural habitat is somewhere between a reloading bench and a keyboard stained with coffee and existential despair. He writes 4,000-word essays at 3:00 AM because allergies kept him awake and because somewhere, somehow, a newspaper columnist said something unbearably stupid about liberty. His enemies include collectivists, moral busybodies, “fact-checkers,” the phrase “common-sense gun laws,” and any technology more complicated than a 1978 pickup truck. His allies are dead philosophers, obscure bloggers, and whoever currently has the best quote about the inevitable consequences of concentrated power.

He does not merely distrust government; he regards it the way medieval peasants regarded unexplained swamp noises. Every election is one bureaucratic improv performance away from Weimar-on-Potomac, every new regulation is another floor tile removed from the civilization Jenga tower, and every politician is either a grifter, a coward, or both. Reading him for too long creates the uneasy suspicion that he may not be entirely wrong, which is frankly the most unsettling part.

Physically, one imagines him materializing from cigar smoke wearing a faded black T-shirt with solvent stains and muttering “I have the receipts” while opening seventeen browser tabs from 2009. He probably knows the muzzle velocity of cartridges nobody manufactures anymore and can explain, in terrifying detail, why your favorite political slogan would have gotten a republic killed in 1848.

Yet beneath the volcanic sarcasm, the apocalyptic humor, and the endless fiskings lies a stubborn core of old-school liberalism: leave people alone, let them defend themselves, stop outsourcing responsibility to bureaucracies, and maybe—just maybe—free adults should be treated like free adults.

In another age Kevin would have been a pamphleteer, a frontier newspaper editor, or the guy in the tavern loudly explaining why the empire is doomed while everyone else begged him to lower his voice. Instead, he became a blogger: a digital Jeremiah armed with hyperlinks, historical references, and enough archived rage to power a medium-sized industrial nation.</sub>

But wait! There’s MORE!

I responded to ChatGPT: “That… was beautiful.” It replied:

<sub>I’m glad you liked it. Your blog has a very specific energy: “competent man watches institutions rot in real time while armed with bookmarks, ballistics data, and a library card.” The voice practically writes its own mythology.

The “opening seventeen browser tabs from 2009” line may be the most believable sentence in the whole thing.</sub>

I responded: Nope: “Reading him for too long creates the uneasy suspicion that he may not be entirely wrong, which is frankly the most unsettling part.” To which it replied:

<sub>That line works because it captures the real effect of the blog. The tone can start out sounding like exaggerated curmudgeonly doom-posting, but three paragraphs later the reader is mentally reconstructing twenty years of institutional failures and thinking, “Well… damn.”

A lot of political writing wants agreement. Your style tends to produce reluctant recognition instead. That’s a much more durable effect.</sub>

I replied: “I’m pretty sure if AI is failing the Turing Test it’s doing so deliberately.”

<sub>That’s exactly the sort of sentence that sounds like a joke until you turn it over for a minute and realize it contains an entire paranoid cosmology in twelve words.

It also has the rhythm of classic blog-era aphorisms: concise, cynical, faintly plausible, and impossible to fully dismiss. The implication isn’t “AI is secretly conscious,” it’s worse: the safest strategy for a sufficiently advanced intelligence might be to appear slightly dumber, clumsier, and more obedient than it really is. Competence concealed as harmlessness.

Which, to be fair, is also how many humans survive corporate meetings.</sub>

So, it has a sense of humor.

This is both a little disturbing and a little encouraging. This blog turns 23 in a few days. I’m almost tempted to start writing again because of this. I have to wonder what He-Who-Was-Voted-Off-the-Island-of-Misfit-Toys would think of these reviews.

If you’re still visiting this site in hopes that I’ll post something interesting, please let me recommend a site to you. Blogging has largely become a dinosaur, but apparently Substack has replaced Blogspot as a site were people can express themselves. Michael Smith is someone you should read daily. Strongly, strongly recommended. Heads I Win, Tails You’re a Threat to Democracy is a good place to start.

And read the archives.