If you are reading this, you should not be.

Because you are reading this on LED light. This is an abbreviation for Luciferian emission devices.

Knowing this, then … so what? Sew buttons on your underwear. This is what my mother would tell me. She is wonderful. Is your mother wonderful? Do you love her? Do you honor her?

Do you do her honor when you are on your iPhone? Or have you forsaken your mother in favor of an image of yourself curated by an algorithm?

This is why everyone who stays online for long enough goes insane, one way or another.

Surely, you know that this is being done to you every time you look at an LED device. But are you in control of your device? Or is your device in control of you? Either way — how would you know? You could know if you noticed. But noticing is hard. Have you, for example, ever noticed how hideous LED lights are? The harsh, bright white light. It is unnatural.

Here’s a trick question: When is the last time you did drugs? Here’s the trick: You are doing a drug right now.

A drug, according to one Joe Rogan podcast guest — or rather, a guest who was quoting a cynical but realistic professor of medicine — is a substance that when put into your body produces a measurable effect.

Light, then, is a drug.

Light comes not only into your eyes, but also bathes your skin. Sunbathing is fun. Have you ever bathed naked in a white room of LED light? It would be less fun and is not recommended. And yet, as doctors know, tanning salons can be healthy. It is all a question of Vitamin D. This is a hormone, actually, produced mostly endogenously — although it can be taken orally.

If you watch a sunset on a beach, you will sleep well that night. This is science. And you believe in science, do you not — anon?

If you believe in science, you should know that being in an LED-lit room and then just turning off the light, bathing your face in an LED-lit machine glow, reading articles, and looking at images will not help you sleep.

And if you believe in science, you should know that sleeping well is good, actually. So then why — pray tell — were incandescent lights banned by Obama? For the environment? Did anyone actually believe that?

RELATED: Sun’s out, guns out: Finally, therapy even men can enjoy

Photo by Luke Hales / Contributor via Getty Images

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he wasn’t there — it has been said.

Obama was the first president to tweet. His reign lasted eight years. Then the world caught on fire. The fire was orange. Everyone got deranged. Well, not everyone. But everyone who hated the color orange so much that their entire lives became consumed by a pathetic fiery pathos, summarized in three words: Orange Man Bad.

But Heraclitus said that the world is fire. And only fire.

Earth? Wind? Water? You do not feel these elements when you are inside, bathed in LED light. You do not feel these elements when you are outside, staring at your iPhone. Or Samsung. What are you, an Android? If so, do you even dream of electric sheep?

Every time you submit to the LED-lit algorithm, you trigger yourself. This is true. Because the algorithm is designed to trigger you. This is how the “apps” make money off of you. This is why everyone who stays online for long enough goes insane, one way or another. And usually in a bad way if they don’t log off and love someone or something real.

What does Hillary Clinton really love? Her adulterous husband? Her email server? The United States of America? At this point, what difference would it make?

She wrote her college thesis on a man who wrote a book that started with an epigraph honoring Lucifer in his own words. That man’s name was Saul Alinsky. She deeply disappointed him. He was right. She proved him right by being the biggest loser in American politics of the past half-century.

But her emails! Her emails were not good for her. She would have been better off if she stuck with incandescent light bulbs. But the world did not stay that way. She was defeated by a half-black man, who was cooler than she was because he mastered the LED light show. And then she was defeated by an Orange Man, so that you could log off and go outside and enjoy being in America once again.

Throw away your LED lights. Buy incandescent. It is more like fire and less Satanic.

​Digital superstitions 

Bill Maher urged the left to stop equating President Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler, arguing that “makes it a lot easier to justify things like assassination.”

‘I’m no fan of this guy but he is right, and people on the Left like him need to call for this as well.’

Maher made the comments on a Friday episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” His remarks followed the tragic assassination earlier this week of Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk.

Maher mentioned Trump’s recent dinner at Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab in Washington, D.C., where left-wing protesters confronted him.

“Trump is the Hitler of our time! Free D.C., free Palestine!” the protesters chanted.

As they were escorted out of the building, they told diners, “You should all be ashamed that [Trump] was welcomed here. He’s terrorizing communities in D.C. He’s terrorizing communities all over the world, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines, to Palestine, to Venezuela.”

RELATED: Filmmaker David Mamet tells Bill Maher that Democrats have destroyed the family — and he agrees

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Maher told his audience, “This s*** has to stop, too. [Trump] went out to dinner — I wouldn’t have done that — in Washington, D.C., okay. And people started to gather around him, and they were chanting, ‘You’re the Hitler of our time.'”

“First of all, assholes, he’s not Hitler. An insult to everybody in the Holocaust, to begin with,” Maher continued. “Second of all, calling somebody Hitler makes it a lot easier to justify things like assassination. Let’s put a s***load of that away, shall we?”

RELATED: Bill Maher shocks with humble admission about Trump: ‘I gotta own it’

Photo by BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images

X users reacted to Maher’s comments.

“Gotta give credit to Bill Maher for being basically the only person in his party to acknowledge the damage Democrats have done by calling everyone they don’t like Hitler,” Outkick writer Ian Miller stated.

Shawn Farash wrote, “Bill Maher believes people should STOP calling Trump ‘Hitler’ because it leads to the justification for assassination. I’m no fan of this guy but he is right, and people on the Left like him need to call for this as well.”

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​News, Washington d.c., Washington dc, Dc, D.c., Donald trump, Trump, Bill maher, Politics 

Less than 20 minutes after Taylor Swift posted photos celebrating her engagement to Travis Kelce to Instagram, the comments section filled with young fans warning her to get a prenup or to resist taking Travis’ last name.

For the fanbase, this engagement was an exciting personal achievement, but one that was not meant to be overshadowed by her individual professional achievements. They didn’t want to lose sight of the brand Swift has meticulously crafted over the past two decades.

Their engagement is touted as the ideal American relationship — but it’s not.

Swift is something of a marketing genius, constantly altering her image and music to adapt to what is culturally relevant. This skill for promotion reached its peak when she began dating Kelce, a relationship that was exhaustingly promoted by everyone from TMZ to the NFL.

Perfect illusion

Seeing the couple take the next step in their relationship is, generally, a good thing. Many conservatives rushed to defend the couple against those who were weary after the endless, inescapable coverage of their romance.

Their defense was correct: It is good for young people to see examples of healthy relationships ending in marriage. Swift, one of the most profitable musicians of all time, has become a cultural icon who many young women look up to. Seeing her mature into marriage is an encouraging illustration for her loyal fanbase.

But it’s also a kind of illusion.

Swift and Kelce, both 35 years old, are millionaires several times over. They each have achieved international stardom, forging lives, careers, and fame long before they began building a life together. Their combined net worth is a number that would make most Americans laugh as they fret over the price of eggs, gas, and college.

Their engagement is touted as the ideal American relationship — but it’s not. Their engagement came only after they first pursued individual personal success. They waited until their mid-30s to begin the marital process, instead expending their younger years focusing on worldly success above all else.

They will likely never have to worry about mortgages or grocery bills, their children will probably never have to save money for college, and their age of retirement will not be based on financial necessity. Their coming marriage is entirely different from the typical American marriage.

Broken blueprint

But why is that a bad thing?

In a recent poll of Gen Z Americans, 34% of men who voted for President Donald Trump said that having children is the most important part of their personal definition of success. Of that same group, 29% defined their personal success by being married. On the other hand, 51% women who voted for Kamala Harris said the most important definition of personal success is having a fulfilling job or career. Shockingly, only 6% of those women believe that having children or being married are definitions of success. Even women who voted for Trump ranked their financial independence and career success above familial obligations.

It’s no secret that our culture is divided. But this polling reveals where the line is drawn and how deeply it’s splitting society apart. Young women, who make up a large portion of Swift’s audience, are focused on fiscal obligations. Young conservative men, who are seeking family life above all else, are the outliers.

Gen Z sees marriage as something that can only come after they have achieved financial independence and professional success. Wherein marriage was once the foundation of a healthy, thriving society, it’s now the capstone on a fully established life.

Need more proof? Shortly after World War II, the median age for marriage was between 20 and 22. Today, that number is much closer to 30. Meanwhile, between 1900 and 2022, the U.S. marriage rate dropped by almost 60%.

Twisted priorities

Pundits use a plethora of excuses for these changes. They blame financial insecurity, inflation rates, crime statistics, souring housing prices, and societal disasters, like 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. But wars, famines, and periods of uncertainty have always been a part of the human experience.

The real problem is rooted in how young people are now taught to view marriage.

RELATED: Misogyny? Please: Our real problem is female entitlement

David Eulitt/Getty Images

Zoomers are taught that personal identity and financial success are life’s greatest achievements. Public schools relentlessly promote college education as the predominant adolescent accomplishment and cite university degrees as distinguished identities. A secure bank account and a high-yield stock portfolio are championed above building families.

The feminist movement has clearly made this problem much more severe for young women. As seen in the polling, women are subjected to this financial enslavement regardless of political affiliation. And as feminism wormed its way into every aspect of our culture, it removed the value of being a loving wife and mother. From an early age, young girls are told that they have been freed from the “oppression” of familial duties. Instead, they are encouraged to build corporate, highly marketable identities.

It’s good to see Swift and Kelce take on the responsibility of marriage. But the idea that marriage is the capstone of an economically viable partnership is a rejection of the natural order.

Fans who want to see Swift sign a prenup and refuse to change her name are the manifestation of a confused generation. They have been taught to think that it’s better to isolate the individual for their valuable branding rather than find peace in the glory of marriage.

​Taylor swift, Travis kelce, Taylor swift engaged, Marriage, Gen z 

Jenny Lynne Boelter, the wife of political assassination suspect Vance Luther Boelter, has filed for divorce in Sibley County, Minnesota.

According to Minnesota court records, Jenny Boelter, 51, of Green Isle, Minn., filed suit for divorce on Aug. 29. She is represented by family law attorney Maury Beaulier. Vance Boelter is listed on the case docket as a self-represented litigant.

Beaulier told Blaze News that Jenny Boelter “will not be making a further statement.”

‘We are appalled and horrified by what occurred.’

Both of the Boelters filed a motion and stipulation to seal all of the case records. Sibley County District Court Judge Amber Donley issued an order to that effect on Sept. 2.

The suit is listed as “dissolution with children.” The Boelters have five children, four of whom have reached adulthood.

Vance Boelter, 58, faces a slew of federal and state murder-related charges from the June 14 assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman (DFL-Brooklyn Park), her husband, Mark Hortman, and their golden retriever, Gilbert.

He also faces attempted murder charges for the shooting and grievous wounding of state Sen. John Hoffman (DFL-Champlin) and his wife, Yvette Hoffman, and the attempted shooting of their daughter, Hope Hoffman.

RELATED: Assassination suspect Vance Boelter tells STUNNING inside story about shooting

Vance and Jennifer (Doskocil) Boelter were married on Oct. 4, 1997. They have five children.Jenny Boelter/Facebook

A Minnesota grand jury on Aug. 14 indicted Vance Boelter on eight criminal counts, including first-degree premeditated murder, attempted first-degree murder, impersonating a police officer, and felony cruelty to an animal.

He earlier pleaded not guilty to six federal grand jury charges that include stalking, murder, attempted murder, and firearms offenses related to the other felonies. Boelter could face the death penalty for the federal murder charge. He will be in federal court in November for a status conference.

Vance Boelter is being held for trial at the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, Minn. Hennepin County set his bail at $5 million on the state charges. He won’t face state prosecution until the federal charges are resolved.

The Boelters were married in October 1997. The family moved around quite a bit with Vance Boelter’s numerous jobs in the food-processing industry. They lived in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, according to property records.

The Boelters were partners in nonprofit charitable and religious ventures, including Revoformation Ministries Inc. and You Give Them Something to Eat Inc. They were also part of a partnership that owned Red Lion Group, a company dedicated to increasing locally grown food supplies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The other partners are the Rev. Mcnay Nkashama and his wife, Nathalie, according to documents obtained by Blaze News.

The Boelters attempted to establish a security company in 1999 and again in 2018. The more recent business, Praetorian Guard Security Services LLC, invested in equipment, including decommissioned police vehicles, but the business never got off the ground. Jenny Boelter was listed on the company website as president and CEO of Praetorian Guard, and Vance Boelter was named as director of security patrols.

One of the Praetorian Guard vehicles, a 2015 Ford Explorer Police Interceptor, was allegedly used to shuttle Vance Boelter to the homes of four Democratic Minnesota state legislators on June 14. Prosecutors said Boelter’s plan was to murder the lawmakers. Boelter has said he planned only to make citizen arrests but that plan went horribly wrong. The vehicle was originally owned by the Osceola Police Department in Polk County, Wis., according to title records.

RELATED: How did a religious, small-town Minnesota boy morph into an alleged political assassin?

The stuff of nightmares: Vance Luther Boelter allegedly sought to kill 4 Minnesota lawmakers in the overnight hours on June 14, 2025. Photos by FBI and Liz Collin/Alpha News

The suspect’s first stop just after 2 a.m. on June 14 was the Hoffman home in Champlin. According to Hennepin County prosecutors, the senator and his wife were able to push Vance Boelter out of the front entry of the home and close the door. He then allegedly fired at least nine shots through the door, striking the senator nine times and causing eight bullet wounds to Yvette Hoffman.

In an interview with Blaze News from behind bars, Boelter claimed he opened fire on the Hoffmans only because they placed hands on him and he feared losing control of his weapon. Boelter said he had no intention of shooting anyone on June 14.

‘There’s gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger-happy.’

After finding his second alleged target in Maple Grove was not at home and being scared off from his third target by a New Hope Police Department squad car, Boelter allegedly drove to Brooklyn Park and the home of the Hortmans, the FBI said.

He was at the front door speaking to Mark Hortman when Brooklyn Park police drove up about 3:30 a.m., prosecutors said. Boelter then shot Mark Hortman, forced his way inside the home, and gunned down Melissa Hortman and the family dog, prosecutors said.

Boelter allegedly texted his wife and children about three hours after the murders and said, “Dad went to war last night.” In a separate text to Jenny Boelter, Vance Boelter apologized for creating the mayhem the family was about to face, police said.

“Words are not gonna explain how sorry I am for this situation,” Boelter wrote, according to the FBI. “… There’s gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger-happy and I don’t want you guys around.”

The FBI said Jenny Boelter took the children and fled the family home at her husband’s suggestion. Police were tracking her vehicle. Reached by phone, Jenny Boelter agreed to pull over and wait for law enforcement near Onamia, Minn.

She gave police permission to search the family vehicle and her cell phone. In the vehicle, police found two handguns, ammunition, passports, and about $10,000 in cash. She was not detained and has not been charged in the case.

Jenny Boelter retained the Halberg Criminal Defense law firm. On June 26, she released a statement saying she was “absolutely shocked, heartbroken, and completely blindsided” by the shooting rampage.

“It is a betrayal of everything we hold true as tenets of our Christian faith. We are appalled and horrified by what occurred and our hearts are incredibly heavy for the victims of this unfathomable tragedy.”

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​Politics 

One of the challenges of being a teacher is having to deal with how different young people are not only from yourself but also from whom you had been at the same age.

We expect political opinions, musical taste, and career aspirations to shift from one generation to the next, but with the passing of decades, it becomes harder to pinpoint the forces driving these changes.

It seemed to mean little to my students that modern people were now free to marry or not marry, or to have short-term liaisons or long-term relationships.

Take Generation Z. Most were born after 9-11 and have no real memory of the catastrophic event that brought terrorism and then war to the forefront of public attention. Moreover, Zoomers grew into their teen years shaped less by fears of terrorism and worries about war than by an increasing social liberalism.

By the time the oldest Zoomers, those born in the late 1990s, reached high school, media and educational institutions had discarded any pretense of maintaining neutrality about fundamental ethical and cultural questions in favor of actively promoting progressive stances on issues of race, sexuality, and gender.

Past progressive

Because they came of age in a climate where anything connected to religion, tradition, and middle-class norms could be condemned as backward and oppressive, Gen Z, I have found, has developed a very different relation to the values of liberal progressivism than have previous generations.

Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials tend to integrate gay marriage, gender transition, and identity politics into a broader narrative having to do with the continual expansion of freedom. Even when they criticize the excesses of social experimentation, they tend to emphasize the harm caused by excessive personal freedom to the health and well-being of the community.

In other words, regardless of whether one thinks this is a positive development or not, the idea that the U.S., and the rest of the world along with it, has been set on a course of increasing personal choice and expanding individual self-determination has been taken for granted by nearly all.

Vexed by sex

But this past semester, a conversation with the undergraduates in my upper-level seminar hinted that Zoomers are prepared to see these matters quite differently.

I teach at a university in South Korea with a large population of international students. Many of the Korean students have attended international schools which follow an Americanized curriculum and have grown up watching Disney and Pixar films, as well as engaging with social media that also brings them into contact with progressive ideas.

In discussing topics like sexual equality and changes in sexual mores, there was surprisingly little readiness among the students to view the right of women to have careers or the freedom to have sex outside of marriage as the result of an emancipatory political struggle.

Older liberals, of course, believe that these gains were won by fighting against a staid, conformist, and conservative establishment that was dead set against change. The basic liberal narrative divides the bad old days of unquestioning conformity from a present or a future marked by tolerance, openness, and experimentation.

While such a conception of history has been overused in contemporary society, I was shocked to discover how foreign such a way of thinking was to my students.

Freedom rot

When I brought up how much freer individuals are today in comparison to the 19th century, when an adulterous affair could lead to irrevocable banishment from respectable society, the students were hesitant to describe modern sexual mores as liberating. It seemed to mean little to them that modern people were now free to marry or not marry, or to have short-term liaisons or long-term relationships. Instead, they preferred to describe the conditions of their lives in terms that called to mind a “prison.”

What weighs on them is the predicament of living at a time when competition keeps growing ever more intense for the emblems and markers of middle-class affluence that are shrinking in supply. The idea of viewing gay marriage and even gender equality in the manner of the older generation of progressives — as a reassuring sign that the world is becoming more just, free, and equal — seems to offer little in the way of reassurance against the daunting economic realities they feel are bearing down on them.

Who’s the boss?

But it is not only the rising cost of living and the disappearance of economic opportunity that accounts for this change in mindset. What is perhaps just as decisive is the fact that Zoomers are the first generation for whom social justice and identity politics had become entrenched as the governing ideology, in which expressing the wrong views about race, gender, and sexuality could have severe consequences for one’s future.

As much as Zoomers may be convinced that the U.S. and the West committed grave moral wrongs in having colonized or dominated the world, it does not escape their attention that members of victim groups for whom previous generations had extended much sympathy have now become authority figures possessing the power to punish those who deviate from the ideological line.

Thus, Gen Z is much less likely to regard woke progressivism as an emancipatory force that will ultimately improve the lives of all. Rather, they are prone to regard it as a weighty burden that they must bear in order to demonstrate that they are good and moral people.

As with other forms of deontological ethics, it is necessary to uphold political correctness for its own sake, and not because one derives a concrete benefit or advantage from doing so. The psychological burden of carefully controlling one’s speech is the price of living in a diverse and open society, which they feel they have no choice but to accept.

That they feel they have no choice is the consequence of a progressive education, which distorts and effaces the past.

RELATED: The first disembodied generation

AFP/Getty Images

Use your illusion

Zoomers might be under far fewer illusions than Millennials about how political correctness actually functions in society, but ask them how diversity and tolerance came to be the most important values, and you are likely to get bewildered looks. Being free of the spell of the emancipatory narrative of liberalism seems to come at the price of not being able to know the story of how one arrived at the grim destination of woke liberal hegemony.

Zoomers are shrewd enough to recognize that the system which seeks to control them is a hodgepodge of prohibitions and freedoms, a mess of license and licenses, and a motley of opiates and superstitions. The insidious aim of their education appears to have been to fill them with so much confusion and uncertainty as to leave them immobilized and at a loss as to how to proceed.

This education has had the effect of making them reticent. Yet, at the same time, Zoomers can show an intense curiosity about the things their education has not taught them or sought to discourage them from learning in the first place.

Described as a cautious group, brought up in a time of ideological conformity that seeks to root out rebellion and independence, Zoomers, especially when approached in a gentle and humble spirit, are likely to embrace as helpful advice the lessons that current-year liberalism wants everyone to forget.

​Gen z, Zoomers, Wokeness, South korea, College, Education, The youth 

America’s colleges and universities ought to advance the public interest by serving as bastions of old-fashioned liberalism. If they did, they would champion free speech. They would establish communities of scholarship, teaching, and learning grounded in civility, toleration, and equality under law. And they would transmit knowledge about the sciences, social sciences, and humanities while cultivating students’ capacity to ask questions, listen attentively, examine evidence, formulate their opinions, and persuasively convey their views.

Instead, America’s colleges and universities purvey illiberalism by punishing dissent from campus orthodoxy, rewarding intolerance, treating individuals unequally under the law, and politicizing the curriculum.

The recovery of liberal education in America depends not least on liberals’ recovery of liberalism.

For decades liberals have dominated higher education in America. Why did they transform, or fail to prevent the transformation of, the nation’s colleges and universities into institutions advancing illiberal education?

Several hypotheses spring to mind.

A progressive revolution

One possibility is that liberals subordinated education to the promotion of progressive priorities. Convinced that they discovered the guiding principles for politics, the formulas for generating fair and effective public policy, and the mechanisms for implementing it, liberals demoted rigorous study of America, the West, and the world.

They marginalized messy and time-consuming debates about competing principles and rival preferences. They disseminated what they regarded as the final word about political norms, practices, and institutions. Instead of assisting students to gain appreciation for their civilizational inheritance, they concentrated on equipping them to change the world in accordance with progressive theories of justice and jurisprudence.

Another possibility is that liberals suffered from a ruinous mix of conformism, complacency, and cowardice. Formally committed to a diversity of perspectives — while identifying diversity with an openness to the varieties of progressivism — liberal professors in the 1970s welcomed a new generation of graduate students to campus who espoused a variety of left-wing doctrines. These students viewed scholarship and teaching as politics by other means.

In the 1980s, liberal faculty tenured the post-1960s generation of scholars. In the 1990s, liberals stood idly by as the recently tenured professors institutionalized political correctness by promulgating speech codes, truncating due process for students accused of sexual misconduct, and exploiting the curriculum to inculcate progressive doctrine.

In the 2000s, with the students of the post-’60s generation professors entering the professoriate, faculty discovered new weapons to enforce uniformity of opinion, including trigger warnings, microaggressions, and bias-response teams. Few were the liberals who challenged these illiberal measures or contested the illiberal slogan, “Speech is violence,” that justified them. Most campus liberals held their tongues for fear of that dreaded censure: “conservative.”

RELATED: Harvard’s hypocrisy hits the courtroom

Photo by Cassandra Klos/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In the 2010s and 2020s, with critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs ripening into full-blown progressive wokeism, conventional campus wisdom proclaimed that “silence is violence.” Liberals evaded accusations of complicity with violence by openly embracing the fashionable theories according, which concluded that America is racist to its core, necessitating that government and private-sector organizations give decisive weight to race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender in allocating rights, responsibilities, and benefits.

A third possibility is that liberals confused sophistication in moral reasoning with sound ethics. Under liberal supervision, college courses on moral reasoning proliferated. These typically provide students with fanciful moral dilemmas, like whether you should pull a switch to divert a runaway trolley from striking five people tied to the track onto another, which would kill one immobilized baby. Or students were served divisive public policy questions about abortion, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage.

Professors invite students to apply a variety of theoretical perspectives — from which professors typically exclude traditional conservative considerations — to resolve the moral dilemmas or settle the public-policy debates. Such courses in moral reasoning foster the delusion that the moral life consists of clever reasoning in support of progressive ends rather than in the exercise of courage, self-restraint, integrity, generosity of spirit, friendship, and the other moral virtues. Moreover, they reinforce the prejudice among professors that only those who equate progressive moral reasoning with moral excellence deserve faculty appointments, administration positions, and a respectful hearing in the public square.

Liberals reclaiming liberal education

It would be useful for liberals to examine these hypotheses — and others — that endeavor to explain one of the great failures of liberalism over the last 75 years: the demise on liberals’ watch of liberal education in America.

Cass Sunstein appears well-suited to the task. A longtime Harvard Law School professor, Sunstein is a distinguished and remarkably prolific scholar, by far the most cited in legal academia. He has written widely and influentially on law, politics, and economics. He possesses substantial government experience, having served from Sept. 2009 to Aug. 2012 as the Obama administration’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. And he is the author of a short and lucid new book, “On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom,” that restates liberalism’s core convictions and maintains that it deserves the allegiance of Americans of diverse viewpoints and persuasions.

Explaining where liberals went wrong in governing American universities is inextricably connected to understanding liberalism and defending freedom. Yet the closest Sunstein comes to even acknowledging the problem is the anodyne remark that liberals “do not like the idea of orthodoxy, including on university campuses.” That, however, is like saying that corporate executives who bankrupt their companies don’t like losing money. The issue is how those in charge contribute to their organization’s downfall.

“Liberals,” Sunstein states, “prize two things above all: freedom and pluralism.” Liberal freedom means in the first place that “people are allowed and encouraged to establish their own path, to take it if they like, and to reverse course if they want to do that.” Pluralism follows because people, possessing different backgrounds, skills, and interests, will choose different paths or alter course by their own lights. Liberalism so understood forms an enduring part of the American creed.

America’s colleges and universities purvey illiberalism by punishing dissent from campus orthodoxy, rewarding intolerance, treating individuals unequally under the law, and politicizing the curriculum.

However, Sunstein writes, “More than at any time since World War II, liberalism is under pressure — even siege.” New right critics “hold it responsible for the collapse of the family and traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority, and widespread immorality.” Intellectuals on the left decry liberalism’s inability “to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, racism, sexism, corporate power, and environmental degradation.”

Sunstein’s book responds to the “urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be.”

Liberalism, he observes, has roots in the premodern virtue of liberality, which encompasses generosity, openness, and public-spiritedness. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the thinking and practices that acquired the name liberalism in the 19th century came to be associated with religious toleration and limited government.

In 20th- and 21st-century politics, some liberals emphasized negative rights, or freedom from coercion particularly by government; others stressed positive rights, or entitlements to government assistance — in housing, education, and health care. In academic political theory, John Rawls developed the leading account, which views liberalism as centrally concerned with basic political principles to which all reasonable citizens should agree; other academic liberals hold that liberalism consists in promoting autonomy as the highest human ideal.

Sunstein celebrates liberalism as a big tent and fighting faith while preferring a progressive liberalism that revolves around John Stuart Mill’s “experiments of living.” Believing that the state should assist citizens to experiment adequately, Sunstein favors a government that, under limited circumstances, counters citizens’ expressed preferences to enhance their deliberations and make their choices more reasonable. He considers measures that extend from government information campaigns, accurate labeling, and mandatory seatbelt laws to tax incentives, cap-and-trade systems, and fuel-economy mandates.

Sunstein’s sophisticated yet accessible discussions of the rule of law, free speech, markets, regulation, and government’s role in ensuring the material and moral bases of security and opportunity provide a welcome corrective to the proliferating misunderstandings of the liberal tradition along with its many faces and supple sensibilities.

Missing the mark

His brief for freedom also reinforces liberal narrow-mindedness and smugness.

First, Sunstein mischaracterizes liberalism’s core. It is not, as he asserts, experiments of living, but rather, as John Locke and America’s founders affirmed, the conviction that human beings are by nature free and equal. This conviction sustains liberalism’s big tent, which hosts, among others, those like Sunstein who are drawn to experiments of living.

Second, Sunstein dismisses and deflects liberalism’s critics, right and left, rather than learning from them. This is costly because liberalism’s critics have much to teach about liberalism’s tendency, like all schools of political thought and all regimes, to carry its principles to an extreme.

RELATED: Students are trapped in mandatory DEI disguised as coursework

Photo by filo via Getty Image

Liberalism’s vices include the dissoluteness bound up in the tempting belief that opposition to coercion entails overcoming the imperatives of morality. It also fosters the complacency that stems from overreliance on formal procedures to mete out justice. And it is steeped in the arrogance that assumes liberals have refuted faith and supplanted rather than supplemented classical teachings on ethics and politics. Brushing off critics, Sunstein fails to explore the extent to which liberalism finds itself “under pressure, even siege” because of its own shortcomings.

Third, Sunstein idealizes liberal character. He depicts liberals as secular saints neither deficient in certain virtues nor prone to specific vices. Yet to take one telling example, liberals, as Mill argues in “On Liberty” and elsewhere, tend to disregard the wisdom stored up in traditional writings, inherited beliefs, and established institutions.

Sunstein’s disregard of essential wisdom stored up in the modern tradition of freedom — particularly its early appreciation of freedom’s dependence on biblical faith and classical political philosophy — converges with the biases of many of his left-liberal friends and colleagues. This disregard begins to explain his and their failure to connect liberal education’s demise to liberals’ departures from the liberal tradition in its richness and fullness.

The recovery of liberal education in America depends not least on liberals’ recovery of liberalism.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, Woke, Woke college students, Woke college, Liberalism, Liberals, Cass sunstein, John rawls, John stuart mill, Liberty, Colleges and universities, Diversity equity inclusion, Conservatives, Leftists 

On August 22, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed in an unprovoked attack while riding a public transit train in Charlotte, North Carolina. The suspect, 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr., who had a long history of criminal activity and mental health issues, was charged with first-degree murder and faces a federal charge that could carry the death penalty.

It’s as clear cut of a case as there ever was — and yet, here comes the left furious, not at Zarutska’s preventable death, but at conservatives for pointing out the soft-on-crime Democrat policies that made the homicide possible.

Except conservatives are spot on. If it wasn’t for Charlotte’s no-carry law for all public transit, perhaps knowing that firearms could be present would have prevented Brown from acting, or perhaps someone could have stopped him.

“Law-abiding citizens should be able to protect themselves wherever the hell they are, especially if my tax dollars pay for it … because what ends up happening every single freaking time in a gun-free zone?” asks Sara Gonzales, BlazeTV host of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”

“You have someone who doesn’t give a s**t about the laws, and they bring a weapon, and they kill people.”

Other progressive policies to blame are lenient or cashless bail, sentencing reductions, early release and parole expansions, decriminalization of certain offenses, and restorative justice initiatives, among others. Brown was arrested and released at least 14 times, showing he likely benefited from some of these Democrat-backed crime policies.

“This man, 14 prior arrests — felony larceny, robbery with a dangerous weapon, assault, shoplifting, making threats, diagnosed with schizophrenia — why was he on the streets? Democrat policies,” says Sara.

“If that guy were in prison, he would not have harmed this woman. So it’s really that simple.”

But it’s not just soft liberal crime policies that paved the way for the suspect’s heinous act. It seems the Democrat-spawned race war also played a key role.

Surveillance footage from the train not only captured the horrific attack but also Brown’s comments immediately after. In the video, he can be heard saying, “I got that white girl,” as he waited to exit the Charlotte light rail train.

And yet, CNN’s Van Jones dismissed the idea that Zarutska’s murder was racially motivated, claiming the suggestion was nothing more than “race mongering” and “hate mongering.” He declared there was “no evidence” of a racial motive and then displayed sympathy for the suspect, saying, “We don’t know how to deal with people who were hurting in the way this man was hurting. Hurt people hurt people.”

Sara ponders what would have happened if the situation were reversed and a white man killed an innocent black woman, stating, “I got that black girl.” Almost certainly there would be zero sympathy for the mental health issues of the white person.

“We would see riots in the streets right now in every major city in the country,” says Sara.

“If anyone dares say anything about the black community, about the crime in the black community, about black people killing each other in Chicago every single weekend in record amounts, about black fatherlessness, about violent crime in black people,” they’re condemned as racists, says Sara. “The statistics are there, but you’re not allowed to say it. … You’re only allowed to talk about race when it’s against white people.”

“Hurt people hurt people?” she scoffs. “Have you ever heard Van Jones say that when a killer or an aggressor or anyone who is not the victim is white?”

To hear more of Sara’s commentary, watch the episode above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred take to news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Sara gonzales, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Blazetv, Blaze media, Van jones, Cnn, Leftist rhetoric, Iryna zarutska 

Over 100,000 demonstrators packed the streets of London on Saturday afternoon for a “Unite the Kingdom” march led by British independent journalist Tommy Robinson.

The march, featuring people holding the English flag aloft, comes as local councils across the United Kingdom are taking down English flags flown by Britons. Some politicians are calling the mere flying of the English flag a rallying point for “hate.”

‘You either fight back, or you die.’

Robinson live-streamed his festival on X, which opened with a prayer and featured musical performances, as well as speeches from actor Laurence Fox, Rebel News journalist Ezra Levant, and activist Sammy Woodhouse. His supporters packed the blocks around Whitehall, waving the Union flag of Britain and the red and white St. George’s Cross of England. Some in the audience around the stage held photographs of Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated earlier this week.

“This is the biggest demonstration in Britain’s history!” Robinson told the crowd. “This is your community. These are your brothers and your sisters. We today are united. Today is the spark of a cultural revolution in Great Britain.”

“They’ve managed to silence us for 20 years with labels: racist, Islamophobe, far-right. They don’t work anymore,” Robinson declared. “The silent majority will be silent no longer.”

He slammed the “globalist revolution” for attacking the family, Christianity, and opening the borders.

Robinson connected Elon Musk to speak to the attendees via video chat. He thanked the billionaire for supporting freedom of speech by purchasing X.

RELATED: ‘Christ is king!’ chants break out at large memorial for Charlie Kirk in London

Laurence Fox, Kate Hopkins, and Tommy Robinson attend the Unite The Kingdom rally on September 13, 2025 in London, England. Photo by Ben Montgomery/Getty Images

“What I see happening is a destruction of Britain,” Musk stated. “The government has failed in its duty to protect its citizens, which is a fundamental duty of government.”

Musk had a message for those in the “reasonable center,” who “ordinarily wouldn’t get involved in politics.”

“Look carefully around and say, ‘If this continues, what world will you be living in?'” he said. “If this continues, that violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice.”

“You either fight back, or you die,” Muck concluded.

RELATED: Why the English flag now terrifies the regime

Photo by Guy Smallman/Getty Images

A counterprotest, “March Against Fascism,” formed nearby, organized by the Stand Up To Racism group. Those demonstrators held up signs reading, “Oppose Tommy Robinson. Stop fascists & the far right.”

Left-wing media outlets labeled Robinson’s march as an anti-immigration protest.

Metropolitan Police claimed that the crowd was “too big to fit into Whitehall.”

The deparment further added, “We have deployed additional officers with protective equipment in multiple locations, supported by police horses, to deal with the disorder,” via a social media post.

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​News, Elon musk, Tommy robinson, U.k., United kingdom, Britain, Great britain, Sammy woodhouse, Ezra levant, Laurence fox, Unite the kingdom, Politics