In the first episode of Series One, I go back to that question, because I’m convinced we are forgetting the answer.

In this episode

• Why the most dangerous thing that can happen to a nation isn’t defeat. It’s forgetting. (Exodus 1:8)

• The movements on the left and the right trying to re-found America, and why both end in bigger government

• What the Declaration of Independence says government is actually for

• Why America was a creed, not a bloodline

• The covenant hidden in the Declaration’s last sentence

• Why the founders said a free country needs a moral and religious people

• Live Q&A: why the right is divided, and how to love your country without blind trust

The sources

1. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 1 (1787): “...whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

2. Exodus 1:8: “Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.”

3. The Declaration of Independence (1776): the opening line, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,” and the closing pledge.

4. Abraham Lincoln, speech at Chicago, July 10, 1858: “blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.”

5. John Adams, letter to the Massachusetts militia, October 11, 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

6. George Washington, Farewell Address (1796): “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1 (1835): “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”

8. John Adams, A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law (1765): “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.”

9. Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address (1989): “As government expands, liberty contracts.”

I promised to look this up: who asked Franklin what kind of government they’d made? Maryland delegate James McHenry recorded that as Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked him, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” She is usually identified as Elizabeth Willing Powel of Philadelphia. Franklin answered: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

First covid, but then George Floyd dies, gets national coverage, and next thing you know Black Lives Matter goes from being a chant to a billion dollar movement who carried out illegal acts of arson and destruction across America.

I think the “fever dream” aspect of it came from the sheer delusion displayed by the media at the time.

In August for example, CNN broadcast from the street in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and ran a caption underneath…

“Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting.”

While behind the reporter, cars and buildings were literally on fire.

It’s practically a meme.

I personally remember I was threatened by clients of a coaching business I was working at, at the time. I was told that if I didn’t post the infamous black square, I was somehow racist.

It was such a culturally and emotionally charged time in our country.

Now let’s forward to April 2024.

Protesters at the University of North Carolina pulled down the American flag on the main quad and raised a Palestinian flag in its place.

The chancellor of the school had to walk out with police and put Old Glory back up himself.

This is four years apart, but still the same campuses. Same institutions and slogans of “liberation” and “resistance”.

The same people telling you and me that if we ask questions, we’re racists.

And no, you’re not crazy. Here’s the truth…

Islam is the new black.

Now, what do I mean by this?

I’m obviously not referring to ALL Muslims. I am specifically referring to the political movement that is wrapped up in Islam.

In other words, Palestine has replaced Black Lives Matter as the West’s sacred victim.

And I will prove it to you.

There are three parts to this and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

First, I’ll show you how and why these very powerful people with agendas NEED a sacred victim in the first place.

Second, where the Palestinian cause specifically came from, because it’s much older than we think, long before 2023.

And third, why in the world it keeps working on us, and what’s at stake.

There is much, much more at stake than you think.

So first…

Every manufactured sacred victim follows the same sequence.

A tragedy happens. Then, certain leaders amplify the suffering, they demand your allegiance in the name of support, they use that allegiance to seize more power, you and I pay the price.

The genius is in the middle. Once the victim is placed beyond question, the movement claims to speak for the victim.

So anyone who questions the movement is accused of attacking the victim.

So most people just shut up.

For example, let’s go back to 2020 during the BLM riots. Within a matter of days, Black Lives Matter went from a hashtag to a movement every institution in America was expected to bow to. Corporations posted black squares on Instagram. Members of Congress knelt in the Capitol wearing kente cloth. Churches planted BLM signs on their front lawns.

The media called it a “racial reckoning.”

And the message was simply this...

If you asked whether burning down a neighborhood actually helped the people who lived there… if you pointed out that Black Lives Matter the ORGANIZATION was not the same thing as the statement that Black lives matter… you were a racist.

It worked. It worked beautifully.

But at what cost?

The BLM riots caused an estimated $1-2 BILLION in insured property damage. To put this into perspective, this made it the most expensive civil disorder literally in American insurance history. Worse than the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

More than 2,000 police officers were injured in the first two weeks alone.

Local businesses that were already struggling due to the lockdowns were looted, burned, and forced to shut down. Many of them owned by the very people the movement claimed to be fighting for.

And instead of naming it, our institutions excused it.

“Mostly peaceful”, they said.

Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation took in roughly $90 million in 2020 alone.

And where did the money go?

Well… according to the foundation’s own tax filings, nearly $970,000 went to a company owned by the father of co-founder Patrisse Cullors’ child.

About $840,000 went to Patrisse Cullors’ brother for “security” and a firm tied to board member Shalomyah Bowers was paid more than $2 million.

And the foundation quietly bought a roughly $6 million house in Southern California.

The New York Post reported that Cullors herself bought four homes worth a combined $3 million+ before she stepped down in 2021.

If you look at CharityWatch, a nonprofit watchdog, they can’t even give the foundation a grade, because the organization’s books are so unreliable, they can’t tell donors how their money was spent.

Even Tamika Palmer, Breonna Taylor’s mother, called the organization a fraud.

Really? The movement that told you to “say her name”?

Yes, really.

That’s just the BLM foundation, let’s not forget corporate America.

According to a Washington Post analysis, America’s 50 largest public companies and their foundations pledged $49.5 BILLION toward racial justice after Floyd’s death.

Amazing, right? So generous?

Well… only $4.2 billion of that was actual grants. Meaning, the rest was mostly loans and investments. The bulk of it from two banks, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.

All designed to come back to them in some way.

And how much went to criminal justice reform? The thing millions of people actually marched in the streets for?

About $70 million.

Out of nearly $50 BILLION..

That’s only about 14 cents of every $100.

Follow the money and you don’t find a movement at all, you find a social justice cosplay of Game of Thrones.

It’s all bureaucracy and theatre.

The movement that claimed to fight for Black lives left Black neighborhoods burned, got rich, and walked away.

The next year, Chicago recorded 797 homicides making it the deadliest year in a quarter century.

You were lied to. WE were lied to.

And then, almost overnight, it vanished.

Why, you might ask?

Because these same actors had a new sacred victim.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas crossed into Israel, murdered roughly 1,200 people, and dragged about 250 hostages back into Gaza.

It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Within days, before Israel had even begun its response in earnest, the same campuses, the same media apparatus, and the same activist networks that told you to “say their names” in 2020 were chanting “from the river to the sea.”

All across Columbia, UCLA, Harvard, Yale, etc…

Keffiyehs replaced the kente cloth.

And the vocabulary, the language, etc.. all the same.

“Occupation…”

“Liberation...”

“Resistance...”

“Decolonization....”

I want you to notice how fast this happened.

And the same patterns.

What’s interesting when you begin to look deeper is realizing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not new at all. What IS new is how quickly, and how completely, the Western left adopted it as its sacred cause.

One minute, the defining moral crisis of our time was police violence. The next, it was Gaza.

How does an entire movement pivot that fast?

Because the cause itself was never the end, the cause is simply the means.

Still think I’m reaching?

If you don’t believe me, believe them.

On October 10, 2023, three days after the massacre, while Israeli families were still identifying their dead, BLM Chicago posted a graphic of a paraglider with the words “I stand with Palestine.”

If that doesn’t mean anything to you, Hamas terrorists used paragliders to drop into the Nova music festival in southern Israel, right before they slaughtered and raped innocent young people.

They deleted it the next day. Then they posted that they stand with the people who “will do what they must to live free.”

The same week, BLM Grassroots, a national network of BLM chapters, put out a statement describing the attack as an attempt to tear down the gates of “the world’s largest open air prison.”

The national BLM Foundation claimed it had no official relationship with the Chicago chapter. But what’s interesting is back in 2016, the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 50 organizations, published a platform accusing America of being complicit in a “genocide” against Palestinians.

Even The Nation, about as left-leaning as magazines get, has written about how deep those roots go.

And then there’s the moment that, for me, settles the whole question.

On the night of April 29, 2024, more than 100 activists, many masked and in keffiyehs, packed into the ground floor of a building on 37th Street in Manhattan, a few blocks from Times Square.

This space belonged to a nonprofit called The People’s Forum. Some of them had just come from the Columbia encampment.

The group’s executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, got up and urged the room to “give Joe Biden a hot summer.” He praised the Columbia students for deciding “that resistance is more important than negotiations,” and told everyone to “support our students so that the encampments can go for as long as they can.”

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the end goal was to “recreate the summer of 2020.”

Just a few hours later, they smashed the windows of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and renamed it “Hind’s Hall.”

Two janitors who were working the overnight shift that night are now suing the People’s Forum in federal court because, according to them, the takeover was not an organic student protest but a coordinated, professional operation.

They say they were assaulted and mocked as “Jew-lovers” and “Zionists.”

Neither of them is even Jewish.

Now, here’s an important question. Who pays for the People’s Forum?

A 2023 New York Times investigation traced its money to an American tech millionaire named Neville Roy Singham. The Times tied him to a global network that pushes Chinese Communist Party propaganda. The People’s Forum itself has publicly called him “a Marxist comrade.”

According to public filings, Singham and his wife gave the People’s Forum more than $20 million between 2017 and 2022, routed through shell organizations and donor-advised funds that make the money harder to trace.

His wife, Jodie Evans, co-founded Code Pink, another regular presence at these protests. Groups linked to Singham have given Code Pink more than $1.4 million since 2017. That’s roughly a quarter of its funding.

A self-described Marxist millionaire living in China, bankrolling the room where American activists were told to bring back the summer of 2020.

You can’t make this up.

Now, where all of this starts to make more sense, is just peeking back through time just a little further.

Because the “free palestine” movement seemed to arrive at universities with the language of liberation. It didn’t arrive there on its own.

So why is that?

We have to go back to 1921.

The British appointed a man named Haj Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was supposed to be a bridge between the Arab population and the British administration.

This made him the highest religious AND political Arab authority in the region.

However this got tense, in 1936, Al-Husseini organized the “Arab Revolt” against the British for three years.

He then fled to Lebanon, then Iraq, and tried to organize a coup against the British again. So British forces fight back, humiliate him and guess where he runs to?

Berlin. In 1941 he arrives in Germany and sits down with Adolf Hitler, begins to broadcast anti-british Nazi propaganda to the Arab world, and helped recruit Muslims into the Waffen-SS.

After WWII, it’s May 1945, Al-Husseini is humiliated once again, runs away to Cairo, Egypt.

Years pass and in 1964, the Arab League, led by Egypt, created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

One thing that needs to be made clear is that this is a full three years before the “Six Day War”.

The reason this is significant is because as you’ll see the messaging that will be used “resistance to Israeli occupation”, but this is before any single Israeli soldier occupies the West Bank or Gaza. There was no occupation to resist at this point.

All you have to do is look up the PLO charter from their founding and read it for yourself. The Palestinian National Council met in Jerusalem that year and adopted the original, which rejected Jewish national rights in the territory and called for the elimination of Israel.

Finally in 1967, the Arab states went to war with Israel and lost brutally in six days. The Arab world was humiliated after three military defeats.

Since Israel sided with the West, the Soviet Union saw an opportunity to gain leverage in the middle east. So they took Arafat in and they also understood something the Arabs hadn’t yet.

Since WWII and the fall of the Nazis, open ethnic hatred had become bad optics.

Not an effective approach anymore and they knew this.

The language of the second half of the twentieth century was liberation, colonialism, and self-determination.

If you wanted the world’s sympathy, you didn’t talk about driving the Jews into the sea. You talked about land. Refugees. Occupation.

The Soviet Union understood this better than anyone. The KGB were masters at public perception and propaganda.

Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the West, later documented extensively how KGB helped craft the Palestinian cause into a Cold War weapon against America’s most reliable ally in the Middle East, and that Yasser Arafat, born in Cairo, was cultivated and trained by Soviet-aligned services.

Some historians argue about how much of Pacepa’s account to trust. But what is NOT in dispute is that the PLO was armed, funded, and diplomatically backed by the Soviet Union for decades. So much so that the PLO even had an embassy built in Moscow in 1974.

By the 1970s, the rebrand was complete. A cause whose founding father had courted Hitler was now the flagship of Third World liberation, complete with revolutionary posters, academic champions, and observer status at the United Nations.

Now what happens after should send shivers down your spine.

The Arab countries that took the PLO in, every single one that supported them, eventually threw them out aggressively.

Not once…

Not twice…

But three times, this happened.

Jordan was first. The PLO found refuge in Jordan, but instead of assimilating, they built a state within a state. They had their own checkpoints, military, they rejected Jordanian law.

Then, in September 1970, Palestinian militants hijacked several passenger jets, forced three of them down in the Jordanian desert, and blew them up in front of the world’s cameras.

King Hussein was livid. He unleashed his army, crushed the militias in what Palestinians still call Black September, and within a year had thrown the PLO out of Jordan entirely.

They ran away to Lebanon. The PLO took over the refugee camps and did exactly what they had done before but worse. They setup their own police and even taxed Lebanese citizens. They even setup their own courts, so much so Lebanese citizens had a name for it.

Fatahland.

Rocket attacks on Israel became routine, and Lebanese civilians paid the price with their own lives.

This escalated and escalated until civil war broke out in 1975.

1982, Israel had had enough. They drove the PLO out of Beirut, and its fighters took off to Tunisia, while Arafat sailed off to Greece, waving to the cameras.

Then there’s Kuwait.

Kuwait bankrolled the PLO for years. So when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, you’d think Arafat would condemn it. Instead, he celebrated it and allied with Hussein. Not exactly how you treat your friends.

So after the Gulf War, Kuwait drove out nearly all of its roughly 400,000 Palestinians, many of whom had lived there for decades.

Needless to say, they also stopped sending the checks.

The Arab world used the Palestinians, fought the Palestinians, and expelled the Palestinians.

And the Western left barely said a word.

This brings us to our final alliance: Iran and Qatar.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has openly called for Israel’s destruction for more than forty years. It needed proxies to fight the war it couldn’t fight directly.

Hamas, founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, became one of them. Tehran is well armed so they supplied the military resources, the weapons, and the training.

And understand this: Iran has never wanted a Palestinian state. A state would mean a peace deal, and a peace deal would end the war. This doesn’t help them at all.

But a war needs a story and telling stories was the one thing the Soviet Union had perfected.

So even though the USSR collapsed in 1991, the KGB’s strategy lived on.

The language Moscow had spent decades wrapping around the Palestinian cause, words like “liberation,” “colonialism,” and “resistance,” was still there, waiting for a new owner.

And this is where Qatar comes in.

The emirate has been the Muslim Brotherhood’s most reliable state patron for decades. It hosted Hamas’s political leadership in Doha. It sent hundreds of millions of dollars a year into Hamas-run Gaza (with, to be fair, the blessing of Israeli governments that thought cash would buy peace and quiet).

And in 1996, Qatar launched Al Jazeera.

Most of it’s staff came straight from the BBC’s Arabic channel, which had just shut down. Western-trained journalists, Western production practice, and a story Moscow had already written.

It instantly became the most-watched news network in the Arab world and of course well funded.

This alliance was genius.

On Al Jazeera, every Israeli operation became a war crime. Every Hamas attack became resistance. Every dead civilian became a martyr, photographed, packaged, and broadcast to a global audience with no framework to question what it was seeing.

The prophet Isaiah had a word for that, about 2,700 years ago:

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” - Isaiah 5:20

And Qatar didn’t stop at television. According to the Department of Education’s own database, Qatar is the single largest foreign funder of American universities.

They have poured $8.8 BILLION into our education system.

When the same country that hosts Hamas’s political leadership is also the biggest foreign check writer to American higher education, it’s worth asking what all that money buys.

At minimum, it buys a seat at the table. And a lot of goodwill.

Iran provided the guns and Qatar provided the narrative that made it all look righteous.

So when this cause finally arrived in Western universities, newsrooms, and parliaments, it came wearing the exact vocabulary the Western left had spent decades building.

“Colonialism...”

“Indigenous rights...”

“Occupation…. resistance...”

And if you think all of this is ancient history, it’s not.

Just in May of 2024, at the height of the encampments, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote an open letter to American college students.

He told them:

“You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front…”

The “Resistance Front” is Iran’s own name for its network of terrorist proxies.

It’s what they call Hamas, Hezbollah, and The Houthis.

That’s who welcomed the American campus movement into the family.

That same month, a University of Tehran professor went on Iranian state TV and bragged that their “Hezbollah-style base in the US is much larger than what we have in Lebanon.”

Really?

Unfortunately, yes.

Two months later, in July 2024, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines put out a public statement. Keep in mind, this was the top intelligence official in the Biden administration. Not exactly a right-wing operation.

She said:

“We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”

Can you believe this?

A hostile foreign government financially supporting American protesters… ON American soil.

She also said Americans protesting “may not be aware that they are interacting with or receiving support from a foreign government.”

In other words, most of the kids in the tents weren’t the masterminds.

Instead, they were the product. This should make us angry.

The sincere become the human shield for the whole operation, because who wants to be the guy yelling at college kids?

This is by design.

How do I know this is true? How do I know this isn’t sincere and genuine concern for human suffering?

Simple… Follow the suffering and see if the outrage follows it.

It doesn’t.

Take Yemen for example. The civil war there began in 2014. By the end of 2021, the UN Development Programme estimated it had killed about 377,000 people, most of them through hunger and preventable disease rather than combat, and the large majority of them children under five.

And the United States sold weapons to the Saudi-led coalition fighting that war.

Where were the encampments? Where were the keffiyehs? Where was the correspondent standing in a famine ward, demanding justice?

Sam Harris has made exactly this point. For years Yemen was the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, with American weapons directly implicated, and it never became the moral obsession of universities, newsrooms, or activist networks the way Gaza did.

Why not?

Because the perpetrator wasn’t Israel.

What about Nigeria? Right now, Christians are being slaughtered by jihadists. Genocide Watch puts the toll above 60,000 innocent people.

No divestment campaigns, no campus statements, no protests, or tent cities.

Silence.

None of this makes sense if the outrage is about human suffering.

ALL of it makes sense if the outrage is about the villain.

Just like BLM.

In 2019, the year before George Floyd died, police in America fatally shot 14 unarmed Black people. That’s according to the Washington Post’s own database.

Fourteen.

That same year, 7,441 Black Americans were murdered.

A Black man in America was roughly eight times more likely to be murdered than a white man. And in almost all of those cases, the killer wasn’t a cop.

When Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who admittedly expected to find bias, studied police shootings, he found no racial difference in the data. He called it the most surprising result of his career.

In fact, within minutes of publishing his paper, he was asked to take it down. Later, he received death threats.

Why?

Again, it didn’t fit the desired narrative.

So ask yourself. If the movement was really about Black lives, where was it for the 7,441?

Billions were pledged in the name of Black lives, under the banner of police violence. Then in 2021, 797 people were killed in Chicago alone, and the movement was nowhere to be found.

Why?

Because those victims didn’t come with the right villain.

So when a warlord starves Muslim children in Yemen: silence.

When jihadists slaughter Christians in Nigeria: silence.

When Israel fights back against a terrorist organization that hides behind its own civilians, the entire Western left suddenly rediscovers the sanctity of human life.

This is an orchestrated lie.

Now I get it, I do.

George Floyd was a real man, and his death was a tragedy. Palestinians in Gaza are real people, and they are suffering terribly.

But that’s exactly what makes the manipulation so evil.

This manipulation and power machine does not invent pain. It harvests it.

It picks which pain to amplify, manufactures the outrage around it, promises to do something about it and does nothing except enrich its leaders and seize more power.

And who has to pay the price?

WE the people do.

The man who planned October 7 said it himself.

In June 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported on dozens of messages from Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, sent to ceasefire negotiators and Hamas officials.

In them, he described the deaths of Palestinian civilians as “necessary sacrifices.” And he told Hamas officials:

“We have the Israelis right where we want them.”

He believed the rising civilian death toll would build worldwide pressure on Israel.

Years earlier, he’d put it even more bluntly in an interview with an Italian journalist:

“We make the headlines only with blood.”

His own words.

Hamas didn’t stumble into a sacred victim position. It manufactured it out of its own people.

Both things can be true at once.

Yes, the suffering is horrible AND the people exploiting it are evil.

If you actually care about human suffering, you don’t get to pick which victims are sacred and which ones are invisible. Compassion doesn’t choose its victims by political convenience.

I’m not here to defend Israel. That’s a different discussion. I am here to point out a pattern that we keep falling for.

And to make it worse, the leaders of this movement just so happen to be socialists and communists. The organizers behind the People’s Forum and Code Pink, are run AND funded by self-described Marxists.

They use this sacred victim narrative to get votes and those votes are for BIGGER government.

Bigger government = more power. For them, not us.

I don’t have a problem with Muslims who come to America, assimilate, embrace the Constitution and the values it was built on. That has always been true and it always will be.

What I’m talking about is radical Islam as a political movement. One that, like communism, wants to re-found the West in its own image, and has learned to use the sacred victim playbook to get there.

There’s a difference between a religion and a political movement that wraps itself in one.

If we can’t call this out, out of fear of being called an Islamophobe, we will keep falling for the trap and at some point we will cross a point of no return as a nation.

So why does this keep working on us?

I’ve written before about what I call identity dysphoria. It’s the distress that comes from believing the person you’re supposed to be isn’t being realized. What follows is deep shame, and then the hunt for relief.

It happens to people. And it happens to nations.

For decades, we’ve been told from classrooms, newsrooms, and screens that our founding was evil, our history uniquely predatory, and our prosperity stolen. And a lot of us started to believe it.

A people ashamed of their own story will grab almost anything that promises to make them feel righteous again.

That’s what a sacred victim offers… instant righteousness.

“Kneel here.”

“Post this.”

“Chant this.”

Congrats, you’re one of the good guys now.

It’s counterfeit absolution is what it is and it’s always paid for with somebody else’s freedom.

None of this is new, by the way. Not even in America.

One of my personal heroes didn’t bow down to the sacred victim even when it helped his cause.

In March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd in Boston and killed five colonists. Within weeks, Paul Revere was selling an engraving of the “Bloody Massacre” that showed a neat line of redcoats calmly gunning down peaceful townspeople on an officer’s command.

The truth is, that’s not quite what happened.

But it spread like wildfire and Americans were outraged.

And who stepped up to defend those British soldiers in court?

John Adams.

One of our own founding fathers who hated what the Crown was doing took the case nobody else would touch, because he believed even the most hated men in Boston deserved a fair trial on the facts.

He famously told the jury:

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

The captain and six of his men were acquitted. Two were convicted of manslaughter.

In other words, one of our own founders looked straight at a sacred victim story, one that served HIS side, and refused to let passion override the facts.

That’s the type of leadership America was built on and the kind we need to get back to.

What if we don’t?

The wrong people will keep winning.

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of the largest city in America, has been an advocate of the Palestinian cause since he’s been a public figure.

He also happens to be a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and once told a room of young socialists that the issues they “firmly believe in” include “BDS” and “the end goal of seizing the means of production.”

That’s straight up communism.

The sacred victim and the communist end goal, sold as one package.

I wrote about this in The Commies Are Coming. Every major communist regime of the twentieth century followed the same sequence:

Utopian promise → win over the people → gain power → seize total control → destroy anyone who objects.

The sacred victim is also the first two steps.

Sure, most people at these rallies aren’t communists, but when a movement’s own leaders tell you where they’re headed…

Well, believe them.

And this is a one-way door. A nation can vote itself into this far more easily than it can vote its way out.

That’s why our founders didn’t trust anyone with unchecked power.

Not kings, mobs, factions, or movements with a seemingly righteous cause.

So they limited government.

And they wrote down that our rights don’t come from the state, the crowd, or the cause of the week. They come from God. Which is the exact opposite of the social or communist world view.

So what do we do?

Long before any of this, God wrote the warning into His law. When He gave Israel its standard for justice, He said this:

“You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with a majority, so as to pervert justice, nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit.” - Exodus 23:2-3

Not even the poor man gets a pass.

Not because God doesn’t care about the poor. Scripture is full of His heart for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. But because justice that bends toward whoever looks most sympathetic isn’t justice at all.

It’s a sacred victim.

And Proverbs gives us the way out of it:

“The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” - Proverbs 18:17

Be the one who examines.

Who is funding this?

Who is gaining power?

What am I being asked to surrender?

If you can’t answer these questions, stay neutral.

When you feel that rush of righteous outrage, slow down and ask who benefits from it first.

James Madison saw this coming too.

In Federalist No. 10, he warned about what he called faction: a group of citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens.”

That’s a sacred victim movement, described in one sentence, in 1787.

And in Federalist No. 55, he wrote one of my favorite lines in all of American political writing:

“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter how smart or well-meaning the individuals are. Put enough of them in a crowd fired up by passion, and watch reason lose.

We answer to God, not the mob.

We need to get back to standing up for Truth, even if we’re standing alone.

Jesus told us, “the truth will set you free.”

-Mitchell

Sources

2020 and the BLM money

• CNN’s “fiery but mostly peaceful” chyron in Kenosha (August 2020), Lead Stories fact check

• UNC protesters replace the U.S. flag and the interim chancellor restores it (April 30, 2024), WUNC

• $1–2 billion in insured losses, the costliest civil disorder on record (Property Claim Services via Axios), Fox Business

• 2,000+ officers injured, Major Cities Chiefs Association report, via Fox News

• BLM Global Network Foundation took in $90 million in 2020 (AP, February 2021)

• BLM tax filing: payments to Trap Heals, Cullors Protection, and Bowers Consulting; the ~$6 million Los Angeles property (AP, May 2022)

• Patrisse Cullors’ four homes for $3.2 million (New York Post reporting, April 2021), via Fox Business

• CharityWatch rating of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation

• Tamika Palmer calls BLM Louisville a “fraud” (April 2021), WAVE 3 News

• Washington Post analysis, “Corporate America’s $50 billion promise” (August 2021), via Inside Philanthropy

• Chicago records 797 homicides in 2021, the most since 1996 (AP), via WTTW

From BLM to Palestine

• BLM Chicago’s paraglider post (October 2023), BizPac Review / Daily Caller News Foundation

• BLM Grassroots statement (October 2023), Fox News

• The Nation, “Solidarity Between BLM and Palestine Has Deep Roots” (October 2023)

• The People’s Forum meeting before the Hamilton Hall takeover (April 2024), Washington Free Beacon

• Hamilton Hall janitors’ lawsuit, Louis D. Brandeis Center

• New York Times investigation of Neville Roy Singham’s network (August 2023), as cited in Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter to the DOJ

Where the cause came from

• Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald Rychlak, Disinformation (2013)

• Kuwait’s expulsion of its Palestinians after the Gulf War, Middle East Quarterly

• Al Jazeera’s 1996 launch with former BBC Arabic staff, Gulf News

• Qatar’s $8.8 billion to U.S. universities, per the Education Department dashboard as cited by FDD, Daily Wire

Iran and 2024

• Ayatollah Khamenei’s letter to U.S. university students (May 2024), Times of Israel

• Foad Izadi’s Iranian state TV remarks (May 2024), Iran International

• DNI Avril Haines’ statement on Iranian influence (July 2024), via AP

Selective outrage

• UNDP: Yemen war deaths reach 377,000, 70% of them children under five (November 2021), Al Jazeera

• Genocide Watch, “Nigeria’s Silent Slaughter: 62,000 Christians murdered since 2000”

• Washington Post “Fatal Force” data: 14 unarmed Black people fatally shot by police in 2019, USA Today fact check

• Violence Policy Center, Black Homicide Victimization in the United States (2019 data)

• Roland G. Fryer Jr., “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” NBER (2016)

Hamas in its own words

• Wall Street Journal reporting on Yahya Sinwar’s messages (June 2024), via JNS

The communist end goal

• Zohran Mamdani’s 2021 remarks to the Young Democratic Socialists of America, PolitiFact

• Mitchell Miles, “The Commies Are Coming”

Founders and Scripture

• John Adams, closing argument for the defense, Rex v. Wemms (December 1770)

• James Madison, The Federalist Nos. 10 and 55

• Scripture quotations from the English Standard Version

This makes our nation relatively young, but interestingly enough we have the oldest national constitution still in use in the world.

Something about it has stood the test of time.

Yet, 11 days after our nation’s birthday, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) announced their new national platform. It calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the President and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by Congress, and completely dissolving our Constitution to draft a new one.

In other words, they want to deconstruct our government and build a new one in their image.

A few weeks prior to this, Gallup released its poll on national pride and revealed that only 33% of Americans are “proud” to be American. That’s the lowest it’s been since Gallup began 25 years ago.

To make it worse, among Americans under 35?

14%.

Now, before you think this is a left-wing problem, it’s not.

Nick Fuentes, a podcaster who has one of the largest young audiences in the country, said that from 1600 to 1960 America was “almost all white, all Christian” and that on a multiracial, religiously pluralistic society, “we kind of need to rethink that.”.

And just this week, a right wing pastor, Joel Webbon, released a video arguing that Republicans need to embrace socialism to win. He went on to argue similar points to Fuentes.

So the far left and the far right are arguing different, but eerily similar, messages. The left wants a new constitution. Part of the right wants a new people.

“We need a new approach.”

Whether it’s a new party, a new constitution, or a new economic policy.

Why does it feel like America is coming apart? And is the solution a “new” anything?

America is coming apart. But the solution is nothing new, and I’ll prove it to you.

In fact, George Washington warned us about this exact moment 230 years ago. In his Farewell Address, he told Americans to “resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts.”

Then he described how the attack would come:

“One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.”

In other words, beware of anyone selling “something new” for our Constitution. He knew some would try to hollow it out, undermine it, or abolish it completely.

So what did Washington say would protect us?

First, a limited government, such as ours, only works if the people within it govern themselves.

But to govern ourselves, we need an order higher than the state.

What could that be?

Faith.

For the last fifty years of American life, we’ve been testing this theory, and I believe the results prove it true.

In that same Farewell Address, written in September 1796 as he stepped down, Washington named the things he believed the republic could not live without.

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

Washington, the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention and led our federal government with no established church, argues that religion and morality are necessary for political prosperity.

He continues.

“In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

So religion and patriotism.

He’s saying you cannot honestly claim to love the country while you are rejecting the pillars that make a free country possible.

“Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion… reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

He was making it abundantly clear how important this was, because he knew full well how our Constitution structured our government. The limits on our government made our nation free and therefore depended on a moral structure that came directly from our Protestant Christian faith.

Two years later, John Adams said this to the Massachusetts militia:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

A Constitution is a net. It can catch a lot, but it can’t catch a whale.

So this is the problem with our government right now.

Our Constitution was created for a moral people but that morality must come from somewhere.

At our founding, it came overwhelmingly from the Protestant Christian faith. 250 years later, we are less Christian than we’ve ever been.

Christianity in practice produces fruit of charity, stewardship, honesty, and virtue.

So what happens when you remove that? The gap doesn’t stay empty. Something must take its place.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

History proves this to be true. If a society has no true religion, it will replace it with a political one.

A political religion that replaces God with the state, pastors with bureaucrats, repentance with re-education, and charity with welfare.

Let’s look at France, for example.

In 1793, the revolutionaries shut down the churches. But they didn’t stop there, they turned Notre-Dame into a Temple and appealed to their god as the “Goddess of Reason.”.

Or what about Russia.

The Soviets literally made atheism official state policy. But then embalmed Lenin and put him on display in a tomb, where people lined up for hours to see his dead body.

They replaced the Bible with Karl Marx. They had their own heresies and even their own confessions. Except these weren’t offered in a church. They were extracted by force at show trials.

In both cases, when they removed God, they replaced Him with the state.

The vacuum will inevitably be filled.

Sometimes atheism or “new thought” and sometimes a counterfeit Christianity.

A Christianity that gets turned into a tribe, bloodline, or a party platform. It’ll quote scripture, monument the cross for all to see, but it’ll miss the main thing.

It’ll no longer be about Jesus. It’ll be about us versus them.

This is how a podcaster like Fuentes can say America was “all Christian” in one breath, and in the next say we need to “rethink” the very values that made America free in the first place.

This is how a pastor like Webbon can demand the government to do the job Jesus gave the church to do.

Both of them talk about faith. But look at where they’re putting their hope.

Not in God. In power.

When faith becomes a tool to win, it stops being faith. It’s just another political religion.

And I’m not saying that every socialist, or every young man watching Fuentes, is intentionally trying to replace God. They very well may sense, correctly, that something is missing.

But I am saying this is the collective pattern. The DSA platform and Nick Fuentes’s comments are not separate phenomena. Two sides of the same coin.

You might think, “What about Scandinavia? “They’re secular yet peaceful.”

Yes, but they have enormous states, some of the highest taxes on earth, and yet again, government filling the roles churches and families used to fill.

This happens every single time.

Even secular figures noticed this firsthand and wrote about it too.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French magistrate came here in 1831 to observe and to write about our new and very revolutionary society. He was shocked, as many people were, that a free and equal society hadn’t eaten itself alive.

He watched and observed everything about our laws, our culture, our habits, and so on. His biggest observation was our churches.

He wrote that religion in America “takes no direct part in the government of society,” but that it was “the foremost of the political institutions of that country.”

He noticed that a free people who can legally do almost anything must be the kind of people who will not.

“Thus whilst the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.”

This is the underlying relationship between government and freedom.

As government expands, freedom retracts.

For freedom to remain, a people must govern themselves and self-governance is only possible with a strong moral and religious foundation.

The law can be wide only when the conscience is not.

Tocqueville summed it well when he said…

“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”

How, he asked, can society escape destruction “if the moral tie be not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?”

This is the trade off.

Every time you loosen the state’s grip, you are counting on the people to grip themselves. That is the deal Washington and Tocqueville both saw, and it is the deal we are breaking.

If the people won’t, the state eventually comes back.

It always comes back, in the name of help and support.

And guess what?

Just as Washington coupled religious morality with patriotism, Tocqueville noticed the exact same thing.

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.”

Religious zeal in this country, he said, was perpetually stimulated by the duties of patriotism. Love of God and love of the country were not in competition at all. In fact, they fed each other.

When I say patriotism, I do not mean blind loyalty. I’m also not saying that America is faultless.

And I definitely don’t mean “blood and soil”.

America was never a bloodline. It’s a creed. A set of beliefs, values, and commitments.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 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.”

Abraham Lincoln said it best when he talked about immigrants who had no family ties to the Revolution at all. They could still look at the Declaration, he said, and feel “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh” of the men who wrote it.

How could that be possible? Because they believed the same truths and committed to it in the same way.

So when someone says we need to “rethink” that, they’re not trying to recover anything or fix anything.

They’re replacing it.

So what do I mean by patriotism?

I mean deep gratitude, veneration even, for an inheritance that others fought to secure.

I mean the simple, unfashionable belief that America is a beautiful place, with a beautiful story, despite its imperfections.

That it’s worth loving, preserving, and handing to your children in better condition than you received it.

You only repair what you still love.

To do that, as Washington and Tocqueville made clear, we need morality that comes from Christian faith, and we need love for our country.

But that’s not quite enough.

We need one other pillar.

In 1765, while the British Parliament was trying to tax nearly all printed paper that the colonies used. This is known as Stamp Act.

And John Adams, 29 years old at the time, wrote this…

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know.”

In other words, knowledge is a right given to us by God AND it’s a weapon against tyranny.

But he got more specific.

“...an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”

In simple terms, the right to know who is ruling you and what they are doing.

Also known as civics. A general understanding of what’s going on in your local and federal governments is the greatest way to spot propaganda.

This is the most natural defense against authoritarianism.

When Adams wrote this, he saw what Britain was doing from a mile away. Britain was coming to control paper, which is the equivalent of our internet now.

And he was right.

Tyranny does not usually arrive saying “I am tyranny.” It arrives saying, “Trust us, we’re protecting you.”

In other words, “you are too stupid to be trusted with this, so let us handle it.”

And then they always attempt to seize control of information and the narrative.

57 years later, after the Revolution had been won and the Constitution written, James Madison, the main architect of our Constitution, came to the same conclusion:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governours, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

A people who mean to govern themselves must arm themselves with knowledge.

Because a limited government only stays limited if the people know where the limits are. If you don’t know what the government is allowed to do, you’ll never notice when it does more.

So how armed are we?

Last month, the Annenberg Public Policy Center released its 2026 civics survey:

• 35% of Americans can’t name all three branches of government.

• 24% can’t name a single right protected by the First Amendment.

• Only 43% can name freedom of religion.

Think about that. So when an organization proposes abolishing the Senate and putting the Supreme Court under Congress, how many Americans could explain what would be lost?

Knowing why the founders split power in the first place is the only thing that makes a proposal like that sound as radical as it is.

These three pillars sustain our Constitution and therefore our limited government.

Love for God.

Love for country.

Diligent knowledge of our history and civics.

A free society with a limited government needs all three at once.

A living and active Christian faith that displays love, mercy, and goodness towards our neighbors.

A love of the country strong enough to fight for it, correct it, and leave it better for our posterity.

A knowledge and understanding of history and civics so we’re equipped against propaganda, lies, and threats.

The crises we keep treating as separate…

The collapse of the family, the growth of the administrative state, the shame campaign against the American story, the inability of young people to say who they are without a political adjective in front of it, and now open calls from both flanks to replace the founding itself…

These are not separate. They are the predictable outcome from a nation that has lost its foundation.

I have spent years writing and speaking about what I call identity dysphoria.

Identity dysphoria, simply put, is the state of distress stemming from the belief that the person you believe you are is not being realized in your life.

What follows is deep shame, then the hunt for relief.

I dealt with this and the only solution came from the truth of the Bible. The Bible doesn’t say to fix yourself by working harder. The story of the Bible makes it clear that we as individuals can only be made new through receiving a new identity in Christ.

It can’t be earned. It is received by faith.

Here’s my point…

A nation also runs on a story it believes about itself. And a nation can lose its mind the same way a person can.

And the solution, what America REALLY needs, is not a new constitution, a new people, a new political party, or a new politician to come and save it.

It needs to receive again what it was given.

Who we are under God.

What this country was for.

What a free people have to know in order to stay free.

Ronald Reagan said it well in 1961:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

He said versions of that for decades, because it is a timeless truth.

Liberty is not inherited like eye color or a trust fund.

The answer is right in front of us and may not be easy, but it is simple.

In our families, churches, and communities, we need to recover the commitment to these three pillars.

Lead by example first. Instead of watching Netflix or scrolling, read Washington’s Farewell Address out loud with someone close to you and discuss it. Stop and ask what they think he meant and share it means to you.

It takes less than an hour.

Then do the same with the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Engage in dialogue with those around you.

Join a Bible-believing church in your area. Attend a Bible Study and ask questions.

Whether you’re a pastor, teacher, parent, or friend, cultivate a love for God, for our country, and diligence for knowledge of history and our government.

This is how a people come back from identity dysphoria at the scale of a nation.

Not by inventing a new America.

By receiving the real one, telling the truth about her, and refusing to let the next generation lose her.

A people who know their true story cannot be enslaved by a false one.

As Jesus said, the truth will set you free.

-Mitchell

Very easy to remember because this happens to be my wife’s and my anniversary as well as my birthday.

I was turning 30 and my beautiful wife wanted to celebrate in a special way and she always wanted to go to Iceland.

Neither of us had been, but upon arriving, we realized most of Iceland is driving and hiking.

Honestly? It was perfect.

My wife and I like views and talking, so we were happy.

It turns out that hours between waterfalls that I couldn’t pronounce and sitting in the car, make the perfect conditions for a man to finally hear something he’d been avoiding for years.

For weeks before this trip, I didn’t know why, but it’s like God had highlighted one person in particular out to me to pay attention to.

Hard to explain, but that still small voice, I’ve learned not to ignore.

So before we hit the road for our first waterfall, I downloaded everything I could find from him. Interviews, podcasts, lectures, debates…

This man was Charlie Kirk.

For about three days, my wife and I would hike, see a waterfall, then drive and listen. We’d talk about it, then rinse and repeat.

It was a blast.

We both were in somewhat of an awe, but I don’t think she knew just how moved I was.

Sure, he was sharp, intelligent, well-read, could quote passages from our founding documents off the cuff…

It was impressive, sure.

But most of all, he refused to choose between God and his country. He was so on fire for Jesus, while also taking a political stand.

Jordan Peterson: And I know you’re a figure whose political activity is grounded in a religious substrate.

Charlie: That’s right.

Peterson: Shapiro is of course like that too, and Dennis Prager.

Charlie: Christianity is my foundation.

This was new for me.

See, my parents were associate pastors when I was young and later in my teen years. they went into full-time travel ministry.

So for most of my life, I always thought that’s what I would do. Even though in my early 20s, I went into business, this was still the plan and expectation I had for myself.

But all the while, I couldn’t ignore what I was seeing in my country. I watched as the culture in our nation had grown more morally corrupt.

Colder towards God, more divided, confused and violent.

And I always wanted to do something about it.

Even as a young boy, I would ask my teachers and my parents questions. So much so. They’d get pretty annoyed and tell me that I’d understand when I got older.

It was like this burning inside of me that never went away, but I ignored it.

It’s because where I come from, you don’t mix politics and ministry.

Mixing in politics could water down your witness for Christ. You might offend someone.

This wasn’t a written rule, but more so an unspoken one.

And I believed it.

This inner compulsion grew and grew, I remember watching debates and lectures in my free time sometimes until 2 or 3am.

In 2024 the Ronald Reagan biopic released and I wanted to see it. The only person I could get to come with me was my newlywed wife. We walked into the auditorium and looked around. I’m pretty sure everyone else in that room was 50 and older.

The scene where the president stands at the wall in Berlin and says:

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

It brought me to tears.

Literally a 28 year old man, crying about the fall of the soviet union. I had this desire to do something. I just couldn’t articulate what it was.

By my own admission, I was stuck in between these two worlds because of a story I was telling myself.

That is until I heard Charlie Kirk simultaneously share the Gospel and take a stand for our nation.

He wasn’t a politician, nor was he a pastor.

He was 18 years old when he started Turning Point USA out of the suburbs of Chicago.

Nobody handed him a platform. He decided to pick up a folding chair and a microphone, and engage in civil dialogue on college campuses.

His reason was…

When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts. When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group.

He was right. Our nation’s society and culture were birthed through contending with ideas. We wrestled with them in dialogue and arrived at the best possible outcome.

For example, our constitution was the product of public debate over months, as people wrestled with the idea of a federal government in the newspapers.

He would sit down outside at college campuses with a sign reading “prove me wrong.”

You don’t agree with Charlie? Great. You could grab the mic and defend your views.

He didn’t give a speech, then ran away without defending it. He welcomed anyone and everyone to exercise their right to free speech.

And guess what? Students started showing up in droves.

Thousands of students would show up to either watch or debate him.

He started a movement.

He launched 900 college chapters and 1200 high school chapters across the nation.

Young people were inspired…

Why?

He made conviction look like something to be proud of, as opposed to something to hide.

He was young and simultaneously proud to be American when the culture had learned to hate our nation and our history.

He loved God and he loved our nation.

And the most spiritually starved generation in American history followed him anyway.

So how did he impact me?

Hard to put into words.

For the first time, I witnessed someone making an impact in a way I’d never seen before, but knew the world needed.

In the beginning of September last year, I was on the phone with a good friend of mine and mentor named Mark. He had asked how I was doing - I was honest.

I told him lately I had been feeling uneasy, unfulfilled… and stuck. I wanted to do something else with my life.

He asked what it would be.

I told him it might sound strange, but I wanted to somehow pursue politics. That it could be a mission field just as much as traditional ministry could be.

That I wanted to make an impact similar to Charlie Kirk, but in my own way.

Mark said that sounded interesting, and we should talk next week.

We never got the chance. Before our next conversation, Charlie was murdered.

I remember. I was in my home in NYC, on the phone with one of closest friends, Taylor, when he saw the clip and told me mid-sentence.

“Bro, look at the link I just sent you. Charlie Kirk was shot”.

I watched it and my heart sank.

I turned to my wife, Bee.

She looked at me and asked…

Bee: “Do you think he’ll be ok? We need to pray. Do you think he’ll be ok?”

I answered, “I… don’t know. It doesn’t look good.”

She started to cry, as I held her.

The man pioneered the largest conservative youth movement by speaking the truth in public. He was murdered for it, while doing it.

And look, I’m not here to write a eulogy.

But I wanted to share the impact Charlie Kirk had on me, because I know many of you feel the same.

Charlie Kirk inspired us all…

But personally, his life also gave me the permission I needed.

Permission to pursue a work that could be done in a way I didn’t know existed. To educate, inspire, and disciple, and to defend both the Gospel and the founding principles this nation was built on.

Because we need both.

Charlie saw that before almost any of us, and he did it with such character, virtue, and wisdom.

I think he modeled what a modern-day founding father would look like.

And he was just as much a force for the Kingdom of God as he was for the conservative movement.

I’m not going to tell you to “be like Charlie Kirk.” I think he would’ve hated that and it would be the wrong lesson anyway.

He would tell you to follow Jesus, to be like Christ, and to take a step of courageous faith to do the thing God put you on this planet to do.

Even if it’s scary, if it costs you friends, your reputation, and a lot of hard work.

You have no idea the impact it will have on people. People alive today or future generations.

So what’s the thing burning on the inside of you to do?

Maybe yours isn’t ministry or politics. Maybe it’s a business, a family, art, or something that doesn’t exist yet.

One thing I’ve learned is to say it out loud to someone. Once I did, it lit a spark and there’s a chain reaction.

Let it happen.

And let Charlie’s life be a testimony.

Be courageous.

Speak the truth.

The truth will set you free.

-Mitchell

For starters, abortion was broadly legal in Massachusetts up to 24 weeks. After 24 weeks, it was still legal, but only under four exceptions.

1- Necessary to preserve the life of the patient

2- Necessary to preserve the patient’s physical or mental health

3- Warranted because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis

4- Warranted because of a grave fetal diagnosis incompatible with sustained life outside the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions.

You’d think this would’ve been enough, but just last month Governor Maura Healey signed an official bill removing all four exceptions, leaving it completely legal and acceptable after 24 weeks, as long as a physician green lights it.

To make it worse, this bill also removes the requirement that the abortion must take place at a hospital.

This signing was broadcast as if we were signing a peace treaty, with the governor at a desk surrounded by smiling middle aged women.

In the same month, a GoFundMe campaign for Lindsay Clancy’s family, the woman on trial for strangling and murdering her three young children after sending her husband away to run errands, has raised over a million dollars.

This is a woman who admitted to the act and yet people across the US, raised over a million dollars to support her and her parents. This started an internet phenomenon, where mothers across the nation filmed themselves crying, holding their own infants, captioning it “Same, Lindsay. Same.”

As if, they empathized with her postpartum symptoms so much, they forgot that she admitted to committing a triple homicide, infant triple homicide by the way.

And lastly, a video recording of a public roundtable in Chicago published July 4th 2025, started gaining a little attention. I stumbled onto this recording and I was absolutely sick to my stomach, almost in disbelief of what I was witnessing.

Katie Gibson, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, attempted to justify why the state should be able to intervene and control what our children should be taught.

The example she chose, of course, ended up being, in her words, “Christian fundamentalist tyrant” as the living conditions in which the state should be able to intervene.

In her words…

“Socialist analysis makes clear that the nuclear family form is an inherently repressive, racist, and hetero-sexist institution that functionally reinforces and reproduces capitalism.”

Really Katie?

By definition, the nuclear family is simply a household unit made up of two parents and their children living together in the same home. This is racist? Repressive?

Of course Eman Abdelhadi steps in defend her position by saying it’s for the child’s material needs…

“When we say family abolition, I think a lot of people think we mean kinship abolition… What we actually mean is the nuclear family as an economic unit… who your parents are, who you partner with, how many children you have… determine how much access to food, housing, clothing, education you’re going to have… The abolition of that economic unit… all of our material needs are taken care of by the collective.”

And then Katie Gibson steps back in to illustrate her point.

”So if you are born into a home headed by a Christian fundamentalist tyrant, for instance, you have the rights that that Christian fundamentalist tyrant gives you.”

Olivia Katbi steps in and in attempt to offer some peace of mind to those who might be reluctant to dropping off their kids at one of these government owned daycares or pre-k centers.

“We do have child watch at all our general meetings and we require like a background check for our child watch volunteers.”

But she really drops the ball later and admits…

“My daughter’s 16-month-old. I would never drop her off at child watch…”

The hypocrisy never ends folks.

More importantly, they SAY they don’t want to mean kinship abolition. That they mean the nuclear family as an economic unit.

But if you abolish the economic unit, somebody still has to raise the kid. And when the rubber meets the road, why is it that they always want to introduce child care.

Government controlled, funded childcare to be precise.

Whoever feeds the child forms the child. Marxists have always understood this and used this. First the fundamental needs. Then the education.

Then what they’re you’re allowed to know and say. The pattern is undeniable.

These may sound like three unrelated stories, but trust me, it’s not.

These are just three examples among countless others.

If our culture was a tree, these three examples are the fruit of the same morally decaying branch.

What do I mean?

Something has gone catastrophically wrong in America.

For the last several years I’ve been writing and speaking about what I call identity dysphoria.

Identity dysphoria is the state if psychological or emotional distress caused by the belief that one’s identity, purpose, and / or value is not being materialized.

In other words, it’s the deep rooted belief that “I’m not enough”, “I’m not good enough”, I don’t measure up”, or “ I don’t have what it takes”.

Whether this belief is true or not, it can spring up consciously or subconsciously and when it does, it’s almost always accompanied by strong feelings of shame and an emotional drive for validation.

Drive to prove it wrong and therefore remove the pain.

I wrote a book about it. I’ve coached people through it. I believe it is the root of most of what ails us as individuals.

And at some point, it became painfully obvious that this same condition has taken hold of my country.

My home.

America doesn’t know who she is anymore.

America is a melting pot, yes, but there used to be a shared identity, values, and culture that united us. It strengthened us. Despite our differences, we still knew who we were, what we stood for, and what we didn’t.

What unites us today?

In fact, we’ve almost rejected unity as a value entirely and replaced it with corporate clichés such as “diversity is our strength”.

Since when does diversity precede strength?

In the context of ethnic diversity, I understand why this idea has been propagated, but in almost any other context, strength comes from unity.

Sports teams, businesses, families, communities, churches and so on all understand and prove that what unifies us is what produces resilience: shared values, purpose, and identity.

We’ve lost this.

Above all the foundational values that we’ve lost, we’ve lost sight of morality. What we all agree is good, right, wrong, and virtuous.

John Adams famously wrote on Oct 11, 1798, in a letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Massachusetts Militia:

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Now he knew our nation wouldn’t only be made up of Christians, but he was making a point that a limited constitutional government such as ours, cannot restrain people whose passions are not already checked by a shared moral culture. That culture being one built on Biblical Christian morality.

I firmly believe our nation has grown steadily less moral and less unified, and left our culture so fragmented, this has left us as vulnerable as we have ever been.

Vulnerable to more chaos than can manage. Vulnerable to very dangerous ideologies that want to take advantage of our “diversity” and mold a new identity for America that they deem better.

How did this happen?

Who’s responsible for this?

Better yet, who can fix it?

It’s We The People.

Just like the founding generation, took it upon themselves equipped with the unshakeable conviction that a united people with God on there side could establish a free nation for themselves and their posterity…

In the same manner, we can get it back and protect it.

This is my message to the American Church.

When I say We The People, I do mean all of us, but I do think there’s a unique responsibility on the church specifically.

I’ll confess, as I’m just as guilty of this.

Separation of church and state has it’s place, it’s necessary to avoid theocracy, but it does not mean we as followers of Jesus say and do nothing in regards to the preservation of our nation.

Somewhere along the way, we lost our courage.

I for one, have held back, I’ll be the first to admit it. I was afraid of what people would call me or accuse me of.

Christian nationalist…

Too political…

Divisive or what have you.

The ones who seem more interested in owning the left than loving their neighbors.

And rightfully so, there are plenty of examples of individuals doing very un-christlike things in Christ’s name. I think this is one of the most evil acts you can commit, using Christ’s name to justify acts for your own self ambitions that He clearly condemns.

But somewhere along the way, we confused “don’t be a Christian nationalist” with “stay out of it completely”.

We, church, lost our identity first.

Not America.

We forgot our civic responsibility to be salt and light in our own country and left that seat for anyone else to sit in.

We as the church have lost our courage and we have called it wisdom.

Jesus, stood up to the elites, the corruption, and He flipped tables in the temple. He was just as much a lion as he was a shepherd. Yet, He commanded us let our light shine.

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.

Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

-Matthew 5:13-16

He told us to go into all the world and make disciples.

Listen…

The world NEEDS America and America NEEDS the church.

Even if they hate us, just like they hated Jesus, He never backed down.

There are always those with ears to hear, but how can they hear if we only speak up inside of our own comfortable walls on Sunday morning?

This nation needs the church, and the church needs to stop hiding.

If that sounds like something a Christian nationalist would say, I’d ask you to hear me out.

What I’m describing is not theocracy. It’s simply this: the truth needs to be spoken boldly by the people entrusted with it, before it’s too late to speak at all.

For decades, the American church has been slowly retreating from public life. It happened so gradually that most of us didn’t notice.

It started with good intentions.

Bill Hybels, the founder of Willow Creek Community Church, went door to door in the suburbs of Chicago in 1975 asking people why they didn’t attend church. The answers he received were what you would probably expect.

“Church is too boring.”

“It’s always about money.”

“It’s not relevant enough to my life.”

So Hybels built a church designed to remove every objection those surveys surfaced.

For example, drama sketches instead of liturgy. Short talks on fundamental needs instead of 45min expositions of Scripture. No offering plate passed to visitors.

Amongst other things.

It worked… at least on paper it seemed to. Willow Creek grew to about 25,000 people across seven campuses. This made it one of the largest churches on the continent.

And their model was franchised to thousands of pastors worldwide.

This model, later referred to as “seeker sensitive”, became the gold standard way to build a church.

However something interesting happened. In 2007, Willow Creek, the same church, published the results of a massive internal study they called “REVEAL”.

The study involved over 80,000 people across more than 200 churches...

And the findings were devastating.

What it revealed was that church activity, in fact, did NOT correlate with spiritual maturity at all.

The model was good at attracting seekers and forming new believers, but not for discipleship. The people furthest along in the faith were the most likely to be spiritually starving, and the most likely to leave.

Standing in front of thousands of pastors at his own leadership summit, Hybels, admitted the truth: “We made a mistake.”

The strategy sounded great on paper, but the gospel is not a business. We’re not building a product that requires market research in order to craft the perfect pitch.

It’s Jesus’s church. His church, not ours.

When you build an institution around what the unconverted say they want, the unconverted define the institution. That’s the opposite of discipleship and the opposite of what Jesus modeled.

Who are we trying to please?

What started as a strategy to reach the lost became a habit of letting the lost set the terms and eventually a silent retreat.

None of this is new.

There is a story in Scripture that perfectly illustrates this.

Around 1050 BC, Israel was asking God for a king. God was reluctant, but eventually He gave them Saul. It started out well, but eventually Saul had a flaw. None of us are perfect, but some flaws can be fatal.

The fatal flaw was disclosed when the prophet Samuel confronted him for disobeying God’s command. Saul’s response was:

“I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice.”

Saul feared what his people thought, more than he feared what God thought. For this, God removed him from his throne and replaced him with David.

David, by contrast, walked onto a battlefield where an entire army was frozen in fear of the Philistine champion, Goliath. His question was not, “What will they say about me” or “is this the right political moment”…

Instead, his question was:

“Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?”

The American church has modeled Saul’s priorities for at least forty years.

We have to be brutally honest… do we fear the people or do we fear God?

When I say fear, I mean reverence and high value. What do we value most?

I would have to say, barring the exceptions, in general we have feared the culture and our reputation more than we have feared the Lord.

We feared being called names bigoted, racists, fascists, intolerant, Christian nationalist and whatever knee jerk accusation that could be thrown our way.

We feared losing our seats, hurting the brand, losing donors or followers and somewhere along the way told ourselves we were being strategic, loving, relevant, or keeping the door open for the lost.

But is this what Jesus modeled?

Can we even say it’s working?

From 1975 to today, female church attendance dropped from 39% to 25%. Male attendance fell from 30% to 18%.

The world doesn’t need another institution that affirms what it already believes.

Walk into your local library and look at the pride display in the children’s section, right at eye level for a 6yr old, while the Bible story hour was canceled two years ago for being ‘exclusionary.’

Then ask yourself, who decided that? And where was the church when it happened?

Somewhere along the way, we took a constitutional principle designed to protect the church from the state and twisted it into something else.

The phrase “separation of church and state” comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists in 1802.

They were a religious minority worried about government interference in their worship. Jefferson assured them that the First Amendment had erected “a wall of separation between church and state.”

What this meant what that the state couldn’t establish a national church or interfere with the free exercise of religion.

The wall was built to keep the government out of the church, not the church out of the government.

The founders never once believed Christian faith should be privatized or subordinate to ideologies. In fact, they believed the exact opposite.

John Adams famously wrote that the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The entire system was designed on the assumption that virtue, largely built on the foundation of the christian faith, was the backbone of self government.

Just look at history.

The first Great Awakening took place from 1730-1740s.

The American Revolution took place from 1765 to 1776.

The second Great Awakening, 1790 to the 1840s.

We greatly underestimate how these events shaped the culture of our founding and the birth of our nation…

And honestly how far we’ve strayed.

There were a group of preachers called the the “Black Robed Regiment”. This was a name given by the British to these colonial American pastors who wore black clerical robes and preached sermons about liberty and taking a moral stand against tyranny.

These men shaped the political landscape during the American Revolution.

The entire civil rights movement was NOT a secular movement at all. It was organized in churches by pastors.

These were pastors who understood and believed that an unjust law, was no law at all. If we believe the gospel, then we must know that it has political implications.

And yet today, mention anything resembling a Christian conviction in public, and someone will invoke “separation of church and state” like a spell designed to make you disappear.

And we let them.

In 2024, a woman named Phyllis Morris and her local Women’s Forum in Sweetwater, Texas bought a nativity scene for the county courthouse lawn.

Keep in mind this was during Christmas.

They did their research, got written approval from the county judge and the county commissioners and they set it up themselves. Almost immediately, a letter to the editor of the local paper demanded the display be removed and decried it as a violation of the separation of church and state.

A public hearing was called. The room overflowed literally out the doors, into the halls, all the way to the entrance. News stations showed up, not only from their county but even surrounding ones.

And after all of that, the commissioners voted to let the nativity stay. Phyllis Morris had to research constitutional law, secure written government approval, and survive a public hearing... to put up a nativity scene.

At Christmas.

In literally Texas.

Just this year, 2026, Kimberly Polk, a Christian substitute teacher in Maryland, who taught preschoolers, used students preferred names, but refused to use preferred pronouns. She NEVER misgendered anyone, because she avoided pronouns entirely.

She asked for an accommodation and the school district refused.

A preschool substitute teacher who never once misgendered a child, whose only offense was quietly declining to say words she believed were untrue… and guess what?

The federal court ruled against her.

The court said the district’s policy was “neutral and generally applicable” and fired teachers who violated it. She lost.

In 2024, Louisiana tried passed a law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms. They were immediately challenged. A lower court struck it down.

Then in 2025, Texas passed a similar law. Also challenged.

The Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’s law in April of this year... by literally a 9-8 vote.

By one vote.

Seriously?

A classroom poster of the Ten Commandments required a federal appeals court to split 9-8 just to survive.

This is where we are in America.

We used to have debates about whether the state should even run a church (which it shouldn’t), but now under the same principle of “separation of church and state”, we’re debating whether a text that sits in the Supreme Court’s own courtroom can be hung in a 5th grade classroom without being declared unconstitutional.

This is what happens when the church cowers in silence.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does culture.

For a decade, the most visible Christian voice in the American public square was not a pastor.

He was just one of us.

Charlie Kirk walked onto college campuses with a folding chair and a microphone and took hostile question after hostile question for years.

He boldly took a stand and was just as much of a force for the Gospel as he was for the conservative movement.

Where were the rest of us?

Why was it that the young, spiritually starved youth of this nation followed him with such zeal?

Why were we so inspired?

It’s as if they saw someone doing something the church should’ve been doing all along. Something biblical, something Christlike. He was being the salt and light that Jesus told us to be.

He was murdered for it.

I remember being in my home in NYC when he was killed. I held my wife in my arms why she wept.

The following Sunday we went to Church and a young man who had been to our church a few times came that morning. He interrupted the service near the end and confronted our pastor, angry, and asked…

“You know I came to service today, I didn’t want to because you posted a picture mourning Charlie Kirk. But I came today to ask, “how could you support someone who spread so much hate and violence?” .

You know, my wife and I thought it was strange, we looked online and tried hard to find any other church in our city who posted about his murder.

We couldn’t find one, except our own church.

Not one pastor, not one church who spoke out about a christian man who took a stand for our country and the christian faith it was built on, who was murdered for it.

Where was the church?

But you know what we did find? Endless posts, endless videos of the world celebrating his death. Mocking his death.

I look up and I see a church that was once courageous, strong, who stood up to corrupt powers, who loved their neighbor, who once bore one another’s burdens…

When elites would refer to the church as “men who have turned the world upside down”. (Acts 17:6)

Now I see a church who is more influenced by the world, then a world influenced by the church. At least here in my country, my home.

WE, the church, lost our identity.

THEN America did.

We lost it first.

This my friends, was inevitable.

When you don’t know who you are, you will accept almost any identity that makes you feel righteous again. This is true for a person, and it is true for a nation.

America currently suffers from what I can only describe as identity dysphoria at the scale of nation, and the church let it happen.

We need to be strong and courageous again, just like our ancestors.

Our founders gave us a system designed to resist concentrated power. They modeled what a generation of courageous, strong, virtuous, and faithful people were capable of.

They gave us a governing philosophy that roots human dignity not in the government’s permission but in God’s design.

What they could not give us, because no generation can hand this to the next, is the will to defend it.

That part was supposed to be our job.

That part was supposed to be the church’s job.

Government should restrain public evil. It cannot produce private righteousness. The state cannot make anyone holy. That has never been its job and every time it has tried, it has failed.

So what do we do?

We must remember who we are.

Identity precedes behavior, not the other way around.

We are not a perfect nation. No honest person claims we are. But we are a nation founded on a set of ideas that were revolutionary in human history: that rights come from God, not government; that all people are created equal; that government exists to secure those rights, not grant them; that power must be divided because people are fallen; and that a free people, guided by virtue and faith, can govern themselves without a king.

These ideas emerged from a Christian understanding of human nature and human dignity.

The founding of our nation was not a secular project that Christians happen to live in.

It is, in its deepest logic, a Christian project.

Christian precisely because it refuses to compel belief.

Why?

Because you cannot have virtue without freedom. Freedom IS the prerequisite for virtue.

Some might object at this point, “America was not Christian, what the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli?”

You’d be quoting “America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion”, line.

Context is important. That line was a diplomatic assurance to a Muslim ruler that the United States was not a crusading church-state and would not make war on Muslims over religion.

It was NOT a confession of national atheism.

If you’re honest, you read everything in context, you can never arrive at the conclusion that America wasn’t built on Christian principles.

John Adams insisted the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.

9 out of the 13 states required Christian profession to even hold office.

The Declaration of Independence appeals to the “the Creator” and mentions “the Supreme Judge of the World” which is a reference to Jesus Christ in the book of Revelation.

November 1, 1777. Continental Congress gave a Thanksgiving proclamation.

They told the states to set a day so the people would make “penitent confession of their manifold sins” and ask “that it may please God through the merits of Jesus Christ mercifully to forgive” them.

They also asked God to “prosper the means of religion for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”

This was literally Congress.

I could go on and on.

For far too long, the American church has compartmentalized the gospel and politics. We’ve told ourselves that sharing the gospel is our job, and governing the country is someone else’s. But the gospel is not a private transaction between an individual and God.

It is the announcement that Jesus is Lord over every square inch of creation, including the public square.

The early church didn’t merely evangelize the Roman world. They went out at night and picked up the infants that Rome had left on the hillsides to die. They adopted those innocent babies into their own families, just as we were adopted into the family of God in Christ.

And they did it until the very act of leaving children to die on hillsides was outlawed. That is a political action.

William Wilberforce spent 46 years fighting and losing and fighting again to end slavery in the British Empire.

Because he believed Christ’s dominion reached into the halls of government.

John Knox confronted a queen to her face. Dietrich Bonhoeffer conspired against his own government because he understood that silence in the face of evil is itself an act of complicity.

The black church in this country marched and organized and preached from the pulpit until Jim Crow finally fell.

Not one of those people believed they could keep their hands clean. Not one of them believed you must do nothing until you can do the perfect thing. And every single one of them was accused of dragging the gospel into the gutter of politics.

Thank God they did.

I am not asking you to join a political party.

I am asking you to remember who you are and to stop being afraid.

We sing, “You are worthy of my praise”, to God on Sunday mornings while we’re in our safe churches, but is He worthy of your dignity?

Is He worthy of your reputation? When He said to the disciples “follow me” they dropped everything.

Jesus knew what He was asking of us when He asked, but we’ve forgotten.

“In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” - Jesus, John 16:33

If being a follower of Jesus was meant to be comfortable, He wouldn’t have sent the comforter.

He said, take heart.

Stop being afraid of what people will call you. The names are coming regardless. Stop being afraid of being labeled a Christian nationalist. Stop being afraid of losing your reputation, your platform, your seat at the table.

The Saul strategy did not work. It never works. Fearing the people gains nothing but temporary validation and will cost everything.

Stop telling yourself this isn’t your lane.

You are an American citizen, which means you have been granted the authority to govern. Stop outsourcing the formation of the next generation to algorithms and influencers and a public school system that increasingly treats your faith as as dissent and dissent violence.

And stop waiting for someone else to do it.

I don’t know about you, but I am done compartmentalizing and I am done letting timidity masquerade as wisdom.

America needs a movement. A movement that takes the culture seriously because God takes the culture seriously.

The whole testimony of Scripture is that God interrupts the cycle. He takes weak individuals and makes them strong. He gives them a new heart and breathes His Spirit within them.

He takes cowards and makes them courageous.

He takes a shepherd boy and puts him in front of a giant.

The question is whether we are willing.

We NEED to be willing.

The world needs America.

America needs the church.

And the church needs to stop hiding.

Remember who you are. Be strong and courageous.

Take heart.

Speak the truth.

The truth will set you free. The truth is a person and the world needs Him.

-Mitchell

For the Bolsheviks, that moment arrived in January 1918 after losing the only free nationwide election Russia had ever held.

They dissolved the Constituent Assembly at gunpoint and their slogan “All power to the Soviets” revealed itself for what it had always been: all power to the Party.

For Fidel Castro, it came after he had already consolidated control.

The guy who spent years insisting he was no communist stood before the cameras in 1961 and declared himself a Marxist Leninist for life. The supposed “democratic”, “anti-dictator” revolution had been a necessary facade, I suppose.

And a similar sobering moment is happening inside our own nation.

A significant faction inside the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is called The Marxist Unity Group (MUG).

They state their end goal pretty plainly on their own website:

“a world free of the market, borders, classes, and all other oppressive structures that exist under capitalism—in a word, communism.”

This is their goal. Not “democratic socialism” or “social democracy.”

These are merely masks, a means to arrive at their real destination...

Which is communism.

This is the same organization that has sitting members of Congress in its ranks.

The same organization whose members and allies are running cities, staffing mayoral offices, and shaping policy in ways most Americans do not even realize yet.

They are not hiding it anymore.

They frame democratic socialism as a transitional stage. This is directly from the horse’s mouth.

“Marxist Unity Group works towards adopting a minimum-maximum program for DSA. We view both the “minimum” and “maximum” program as essential…

Essentially, they intend to roll this out in stages. The minimum program first, the maximum program eventually.

“The minimum program refers to the party’s comprehensive platform: the policies that it will immediately implement upon taking power to establish working-class political rule and place society on the path of a socialist transition out of capitalism. The maximum program refers to the results of this process: a world free of the market, borders, classes, and all other oppressive structures that exist under capitalism—in a word, communism.

So this isn’t democracy and it’s not socialism. So why use the cover “democratic socialist”? (whatever that means)

Well, I’m glad you asked…

“Centering programmatic politics will restore the sense of unity and purpose that socialists enjoyed during the Sanders campaigns. However, our program will have much more ambitious aims, and instead of belonging to a single candidate, it will be developed democratically by the entire socialist movement.”

Got it. So they honestly view America as a modern day Troy to infiltrate. Socialism is their Trojan Horse and within it awaits a world where the government wields the political power, the means of production, and property.

And if you think, “Mitchell, this is the Marxist Unity Group, not the DSA.”

Sure, but MUG is a recognized caucus inside the organization and the DSA has not repudiated any of it. And many of the intellectual leaders within the DSA share the same language.

Cea Weaver for example, who works on Mayor Mamdani’s staff, tweeted “Elect more communists.”

Yea, real subtle Cea.

The mayor of the largest city in the United States chose to bring someone with that public position onto his team.

Mamdani himself has been clear about the end goal. In 2021, speaking to the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), he said:

“But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS, right, or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.

And what I want to say is that it is critical… that we do not meet a moment and only look at what people are ready for, but that we are doing both of these things in tandem… to ensure over time we can bring people to that issue.

This is a direct quote.

And yes, I know people will say…

“But that was 2021 and he’s walked it back since. He’s called himself a democratic socialist. He’s denied being a communist in interviews.”

I hear you. But notice what he DIDN’T do.

He’s never clarified that his end goal changed.

He never said seizing the means of production was a mistake or something he no longer believes in. That is exactly how the transitional approach works.

They use the raw language when they’re talking to the movement, but dress it up when they’re talking to the broader public.

And Mamdani also campaigned with Hasan Piker.

Probably the most blatantly radical of them all.

Hasan Piker is a leftist streamer and political activist with millions of followers.

On the record, he has called Mao Zedong “one of the great leaders of this world,” a man who “changed the entire universe, the entire planet,” while dismissing the tens of millions who died under his rule as mere “excesses.”

He has also declared that the fall of the Soviet Union was “one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century.”

If that isn’t enough, he also said this regarding home owners:

“Yeah kill them! Kill those m-therf-ckers and murder those m-therf-ckers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their f-cking red capitalist blood, dude.”

He later disputed that it was merely hyperbolic.

Really?

Was this comment hyperbolic too, Hasan?:

“If you cared about Medicare or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott.”

How long will we dismiss these calls for violence as mere hyperbole? I don’t think they are. His hero, Mao, murdered an estimated 40-70 million people.

Not to mention the estimated 20+ million deaths at the hands of the USSR, which he said was a tragedy…

And he meant the fall of the USSR was the tragedy, not the deaths.

This is the company Mamdani chose to keep while asking New Yorkers for their votes.

Now, if you are tempted to roll your eyes, I understand. For years, the term “communist” has been thrown around so loosely in American politics that it lost its weight.

But that is exactly what makes this moment dangerous. This is a classic “boy who cried wolf” predicament. But let’s just genuinely contend with the logic for a moment.

What’s the true definition of communism? This is worth clearly defining because definitions are the first casualty of any ideological takeover.

Communism is a totalizing political philosophy. It begins with the abolition of private property, the means of production and ends with the concentration of all meaningful power to a centralized state.

A centralized state that answers to no one.

Private property is treated as the original sin of social life: the root of exploitation, hierarchy, and alienation.

Once private ownership of productive assets is eliminated, the state becomes the only real owner.

This puts the state in the position to becomes the only REAL decision maker about who works, who eats, who speaks, and who is allowed to exist outside its plans.

The same logic extends outward.

National borders are dismissed as artificial constructs that divide the working class and the family is viewed as a competing source of loyalty and formation that must eventually be subordinated to the collective.

Religion, independent associations, and any moral authority that claims to stand above the Party are treated as threats to be managed or dismantled.

Don’t take my word for it.

Observe history.

Every major communist regime of the twentieth century followed the same sequence…

Utopian promise → win over the people → gain power → seizure of total control → and then the absolute systematic destruction of those who objected or simply stood in the way.

So then why does it end in so much death?

Because dissent is perceived as violence. This is the historical pattern.

Dissent becomes obstruction of progress, and obstruction must be removed.

This is what they have consistently done.

Now, for this sequence to unfold in the United States, the existing constitutional system would have to be dismantled or rendered meaningless.

How would they do this, you might ask? The first necessary step, would be the careful work of making Americans hate their own system.

The only way to do this successfully, would be to begin teaching a different story about our history.

By redefining words until they lose their original meaning.

“Colonialism” for example, will no longer be a historical description of settlement and expansion. It becomes an original sin.

Notice the selectivity.

The same standard is almost never applied to the Islamic conquests that erased Christian societies from the Middle East and North Africa…

Or to the Mongol expansions that reshaped China and Central Asia, or to the long history of Russian imperial growth.

Conquest and displacement are among the most common patterns in human history.

Nearly every people group that holds territory today arrived there, at least in part, through force.

But they will use “colonialism” differently.

The will treat it with unique moral horror. This is reserved for Western and American expansion specifically…

…and it reveals that the real target is not conquest itself, but the legitimacy of OUR history and OUR systems.

Why?

Because once people are convinced that their inheritance is fundamentally evil, the hard work of preserving it starts to feel immoral.

At this point, the soft language of “democratic socialism” begins to sound like moral progress.

This is why it is vital for all of us to know what we believe and WHY we believe it.

To look deeper.

The entire worldview of these communists, is simply not compatible with ours.

This isn’t just a difference in “political preference”, but of two completely different views on morality, human nature, and ultimately God.

For example, our founding fathers understood something the communists either denies or despise and it’s this…

Power does not purify the person who holds it. Power REVEALS the person who holds it.

And because every person is fallen, every person given unchecked authority will eventually abuse it.

History has proven this to be true.

This comes from the doctrine of original sin, from the Bible.

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” - Rom 3:23

The founders firmly believed this and so when they applied it to our government, it became the single most important idea ever baked into a constitutional system ever.

Thomas Jefferson said:

“…in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”

And in 1963, Ayn Rand expanded on this idea…

“There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two — by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first.”

The Constitution does not assume leaders will be virtuous.

It assumes they will NOT be, and it builds guards around them to prevent them from abusing power.

Separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.

A Bill of Rights that does not grant you your freedoms but recognizes them as pre-existing, endowed by your Creator, beyond the legitimate reach of any government to revoke or redefine.

The founders did not trust concentrated human will because they had studied both Scripture and history.

And so must we.

Our founders had watched what happens when men claim the right to remake society according to their vision.

They designed a system to protect us against that.

The communist tradition inverts this entirely.

It puts its faith in the planners, the vanguard, the Party.

It treats the state as the instrument of human perfection rather than a necessary restraint on human fallibility.

The American constitution restrains power because it assumes people are fallen.

Communism demands unlimited power because it assumes an enlightened few can perfect humanity, even against those very people’s will.

So the are two different anthropologies, two different accounts of what a human being is, and therefore two different accounts of what government is even FOR.

And I want to be fair here.

Most people who call themselves democratic socialists are not automatically secret communists.

There are people who look at the flaws in our system like poverty, healthcare costs, the housing crisis, and they want something better.

I get that, I really do.

Because I think lot of the people supporting these candidates are not thinking about Marxist theory.

But the correct diagnosis does not automatically validate the prescription. You can diagnose the problem and be correct in that, while also having the wrong solution to said problem.

And unfortunately, sometimes that solution can be deadly.

The policies you see right now (rent freezes, government owned grocery stores, higher taxes on the wealthy) are popular for a reason, because they speak to real needs.

But some of the same people pushing them have already told us this is just the start.

Those policies are the minimum program. The maximum probram, by their own words, goes further.

And ignoring the difference is exactly how these parties have accumulated power, historically, every time.

In this case, we’re staking our entire government system on this.

An entire group of people who are only looking to seize more power. Eventually, far too much power.

It’s been said that a nation can vote itself into communism more easily than it can vote its way out. History shows that once the machinery of total control is built, it rarely gives the keys back willingly.

Decisions like these are one way doors.

I’ll give the majority of the supporters the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they don’t understand where this movement is headed, but these leaders are pretty dang clear in what they want.

The Marxist Unity Group is not hiding it. Cea Weaver is not hiding it. Hasan Piker is not hiding it. Neither is Mamdani.

We can either dismiss it and take that chance or we can believe them.

and honestly, here is what I have learned, in my own life and in studying history.

The story you believe about yourself determines how you live.

That is true for a person, and it is true for a nation.

America currently suffers from what I can only describe as identity dysphoria at the scale of a nation.

We no longer know who we are.

We are not sure if we were ever the good guys.

Between classrooms, newsrooms and entertainment, we have been beat over the head and told that our founding was evil, our history uniquely predatory, our prosperity stolen, and our system a vehicle for oppression.

And the tragedy is we’ve started to believe it.

We’ve become ashamed.

A people who are ashamed of their own inheritance will accept almost any ideology that promises to make them feel righteous again.

This is Achilles’ heel of America right now.

This is exactly how an ideology that has produced more corpses than any other in human history rebrands itself and walks through the front door of our government.

It does not arrive with a hammer and sickle. It arrives with a promise to fix what is broken: housing, healthcare, inequality, injustice.

It counts on a population taught to despise its own story not to ask what comes after the “fixing”.

When you no longer believe your civilization has moral legitimacy, you become uniquely vulnerable to those who offer a new legitimacy in its place.

To those who promise to make you righteous and moral again.

Members and allies of this movement now sit in Congress, influence or control city governments, and hold the mayor’s office in the largest city in the United States.

This is happening now.

Their staff have called for electing more communists, described private property as a weapon of white supremacy, and are now writing housing policy.

Influencers who praise Mao and mourn the Soviet Union’s fall are treated as legitimate political partners.

The soft branding of “democratic socialism” does what transitional language always does: it lowers defenses long enough for the harder ideology to establish real power.

None of this is new.

We need only to look at history and use the power we already hold.

That may surprise you, but the truth is the founders gave us everything we need to resist this…

A system of government designed to resist concentrated power, a Bill of Rights that draws a line the state cannot cross, and a governing philosophy that roots human dignity not in the government’s permission but in God’s design.

We have more power than we realize.

What they could not give us, because no generation can hand this to the next, is the will to defend it.

That part is on us.

Read history and our founding documents.

Know what you are being asked to give up. Refuse to let anyone tax the exchange of truth, whether the tax is social, reputational, or eventually something worse.

And do not be fooled by the language. When a movement’s own leadership says plainly where they are headed, believe them.

The truth will set you free.

But one topic in particular stood out to me.

You’re probably assuming it’s Charlie Kirk, but it’s not. The part I keep replaying in my brain is what they said about our founding fathers.

Admittedly, I noticed it eerily similar to her podcast with Milo Yiannopoulos.

In both conversations she expressed that the origin story of our nation is basically a lie. A myth we were handed as children and should have grown out of.

In Milo’s words, it’s “fake and gay.”

The “fake and gay” version, in Candace’s words, is a war over a beverage tax.

"I was in England studying with some priests and they were just sort of like 'everything that you Americans think, you know, is so foolish. Like America was obviously founded by Freemasons'. And now I'm really understanding like yes, you had these Freemason lodges that came over, you know, the Scottish Rite, and B'nai B'rith, and they they were the reason behind the Civil War. They were reason they were literally fighting for control of America. And the way that they do this is very similar to what we're seeing today. There's is this kind of mainstreamed lie. If you ask Americans, 'oh it was just the tea tax was too high' and this is what we did. We started throwing it out in the harbor and we said we're ready to go to war. Now that I say it, it sounds so stupid."

She’s referring to the Boston Tea party where a group of colonials dumped crates of British tea into a harbor. If that is actually what the Revolution was, she’d be correct to laugh at it. It would be one of the dumbest events in human history.

If that were true, I’d have to agree.

But it wasn’t about tea.

It wasn’t even about taxes.

And the story she reaches for instead, that the whole founding was a Freemasonic, occult project we should be ashamed of, is just as false as the fairy tale.

And definitely more dangerous.

By the end of this, I want you to know three things.

What actually catalyzed the Revolution, and eventually the birth of one of the freest nations in history.

Second, why the exact same fight is happening right now, in 2026.

And why the story a people believes about itself is, quite literally, a matter of life and death for a nation.

At the end I’ll share a personal story that will help you understand why this matters. A story that wasn’t even true, yet I believed, that led me to almost unalive myself.

But we’ll get to that.

I want to be fair to her, because most people responding to Candace aren’t.

Across both conversations, her claim is that America wasn’t founded by farmers and lawyers arguing about rights. It was founded by Freemasons.

“America was obviously founded by Freemasons,” she says, referencing lodges that came over from Europe and to the symbolism on the back of the dollar bill as evidence.

She traces it to the Illuminati, to a man named Adam Weishaupt she calls “an open satanist… using Christianity as a shell.”

She told Shawn Ryan the country was “designed to be anti-Catholic” on purpose, to keep people cut off from the real history.

And Milo takes it further. He says the founding “ripped out the natural system of government that is supposed to obtain over men on earth and pulled God out of the system, too.”

He argued, rather passionately, that what took place in 1776 didn’t free us from a king, but instead hid who really rules us.

So this is no small claim.

This is a claim that the entire Revolution was rotten at the root. Fraudulent at best, nefarious at worst.

That is a serious charge. And it deserves an equally serious response.

So this week I did something old school. I sat at my desk with a pen and a notebook and I read what the founders actually wrote.

I started with a man named John Adams.

He was our second president, and honestly, I think he deserves more credit than he gets. The man was a hero.

Let’s go back to 1765.

That’s eight years before a single crate of tea hit Boston Harbor, and eleven years before the Declaration.

Parliament passes something called the Stamp Act.

I’ve had more than one conversation about this, and surprisingly, most people think it was a tax on stamps, but rather it was a tax on paper.

All paper.

Every newspaper, every pamphlet, every almanac, every legal document and license in the colonies now had to be printed on stamped, taxed paper, by order of the Crown.

Maybe in 2026 that doesn’t sound like a big deal. But you have to remember this is 1765. Paper to them was what the internet is to us.

Only a few hundred years earlier, the printing press was invented. For the first time in history, ordinary people could hold a Bible in their own hands and read it for themselves.

Before that, the Bible had been twisted and used to oppress people in the name of God. The printing press changed everything. When ordinary people read it for themselves, they noticed it didn’t say what the elites claimed. That sparked the Reformation, and that was the fire the Puritans carried across the Atlantic.

About a hundred years later, the first Great Awakening swept through the colonies.

You have to grasp the culture that created. These people prized literacy, especially of Scripture and of British law. They were arguably the most literate, most idea hungry population on the planet.

Two of the best selling books from Britain to the colonies were the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Picture that. Common people who worked normal jobs all day like most of us, but then read and studied Scripture and John Locke in their free time. This was not normal.

And the Americans believed this wasn’t just their God given right, but it was their duty. To know the truth, and to guard the liberty they’d just acquired, not long before.

This “accidentally” created a nation of renaissance men and unfortunately for Britain, they grossly misunderstood and underestimated the Americans.

So when Parliament taxed paper, the colonists didn’t hear “a small fee on stationery.” They heard: we are going to control what you can print, read, share, and say.

And one 29 year old lawyer saw exactly what it was.

In August of 1765, John Adams published an essay in the Boston Gazette. He ran it unsigned, in four installments, because what he was about to say about the most powerful empire on earth was dangerous.

Some may consider it treason.

He wrote:

“There seems to be a direct and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.”

Keep in mind this is eleven years before independence, while the colonies were still writing polite petitions to their king. Nobody was even thinking about breaking away, but Adams saw it.

How did he see it when no one else did? He tells us:

“…a design is formed to strip us in a great measure of the means of knowledge, by loading the Press, the Colleges, and even an Almanack and a News-Paper with restraints and duties.”

The means of knowledge.

Adams understood you don’t need chains to enslave a people. You just need to control what they’re allowed to know, say, and share. In other words, if you can tax the flow of ideas and you can rule a continent from three thousand miles away.

Then he wrote the line that should be carved over the door of every school in America:

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge.”

Read that last part again…

“From the frame of their nature”. Meaning built into you, by God.

Now hold that against what Candace and Milo are claiming.

Start with the Freemason charge, because it’s the one that sounds the most damning.

Because John Adams wasn’t a Mason at all and he was the first one to say this and he wanted the Americans, his own people, to hear it.

He ran through a newspaper, in the open, for anyone to read.

Yes, some of the founders were Masons. But only 9 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration, and being a Mason in 1765 was closer to joining a civic club than a satanic order.

Adam Weishaupt, the “satanist” Candace names, didn’t even found his order until 1776, in Bavaria, and it was banned and gone within a decade. There’s no serious trail connecting it to Boston or Philadelphia.

The people who wrote that story, about the masons, were mostly sounding alarms decades after the fact.

She mentions the symbolism on the dollar bill too. The eye and the pyramid weren’t even on it until 1935, and the committee that designed the Great Seal included men who weren’t Masons at all.

Also, what’s very interesting to me is she says “America was designed to be anti-catholic”.

But remember, there was already very common Protestant-Catholic tension at that time due to the issues leading to the puritans coming over from England.

But there’s no evidence of an occult founding.

Not to mention according to Pew, there’s approximately 68 million catholics in the USA including Candace, so they’re doing just fine.

Now let’s talk about what Milo said. He says the founders “pulled God out of the system.”

But Adams, one of those founders, is doing the exact opposite.

He’s grounding your right to know, to speak, to think, not in a king, not in a government, but in your nature as something God made. That is not a godless document at all.

This is one of our founding fathers, rooting human liberty in the Creator, and risking his life to say it out loud.

The documents don’t show a secret occult plot. They show something more ordinary and far more powerful. Imperfect men, some freemasons and plenty not, arguing in the open about whether a people would be allowed to freely know the truth, or whether an elite would decide it for them.

That’s what the Revolution was actually about. The free exchange of truth, understood as a right given by God.

Now let’s bring it to 2026.

The equivalent of paper for them, for us is the internet.

They can’t tax the internet, at least not anytime soon. So the tax takes other forms.

You post the wrong opinion and you’re not fined, but you’re banned, or you’re labeled racist or bigot.

It’s a social and reputational tax, and it can cost you far more than money.

The truth is… the truth crisis is a distribution crisis. It always has been.

Whoever controls the exchange of ideas controls what a people can know.

Both about the world we live in and about ourselves.

I know this firsthand.

For years I was obsessed with one idea, and I wrote about it extensively in the past.

It’s this…

The story you believe about yourself determines how you feel about yourself, and how you feel determines how you live.

Behavior does not determine identity. It’s the other way around. Identity, who we believe we are, drives behavior.

By the time I was 26 I had achieved more than I ever thought possible. I made more money than I imagined I would. I met some of my heroes. I had every reason to be grateful.

And yet I was miserable.

I was so depressed and felt empty and numb all at the same time. This descended to my rock bottom moment, when one night I ended up lying in broken glass after an episode, texting a suicide note to my best friend Trent.

How is that possible?

Because I believed, despite all of it, that I wasn’t enough.

There’s more to that story, and I’ll share it another time. But here’s the point.

I believed a story. A narrative. And I’d bet almost every one of us has believed some version of it, and been driven to our own rock bottom by it.

Stories are that powerful. I was minutes from ending my life over one that wasn’t even true.

Now here’s what I need you to see. That same law doesn’t just govern people one at a time. It governs us together.

A family runs on a story. A business runs on a story. A city, a church, a nation, every group of people on earth runs on a shared story.

Who we are, how we got here, why we exist, etc…

That shared story becomes shared beliefs, shared beliefs become shared values, which then become shared behavior.

In other words, culture.

Culture is invisible glue that holds a group of people together.

Which means, if you wanted to destroy a nation, you wouldn’t need an army. You’d destroy its culture. And to do that, you’d just change the story the people believe about their group’s origin.

Convince a people their origin was a fraud, uniquely evil, something to be ashamed of, and they’ll dismantle their own house for you.

That’s why a podcast clip mocking the founding matters more than it seems.

And this isn’t coming from one direction. The same season Candace was calling the founding occult from the right, documentaries were teaching millions from the left that American democracy wasn’t even our idea.

Mockery from one side, revision from the other, and both lead to the same destination: a generation ashamed of who they are.

A nation that believes a false story about itself behaves exactly like a person who believes a false story about themselves.

Ashamed, guilty, and ultimately easy to manipulate.

I think what we’re watching in America is identity dysphoria at the scale of a nation.

So what’s the answer? It’s the same one it was in 1765…

Recover the true story. Read the documents for yourself. Refuse to let anyone tax the exchange of truth.

And to be clear, recovering the true story does not mean pretending the founders were saints. They weren’t.

The same men who wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” owned other human beings as slaves.

For the record, John Adams did not.

Were they hypocrites? In that, yes. And it took generations and a civil war to make the country live up to its own words.

But what the cynics miss is that the idea itself wasn’t the hypocrisy. The idea was the standard and it was set so high that the founders’ own descendants would pick it up and use it to tear the hypocrisy down.

“…they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That sentence, from a people saturated in Scripture and law, with no king, appealing to God for their governing principles, built a nation that, for all its sins, became one of the freest and most prosperous the world has ever seen.

That’s a powerful story. And it’s one worth knowing, and worth protecting.

The truth is… a people who know their true story cannot be enslaved by a false one.

As Jesus said, “…the truth will set you free.”

-Mitchell