The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by https://econamericas.com/ Fergus Hodgson, CAIA

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The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by https://econamericas.com/ Fergus Hodgson, CAIA

The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by https://econamericas.com/ Fergus Hodgson, CAIA

Share

The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by

https://econamericas.com/

Share

The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by

https://econamericas.com/

Share

The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by

https://econamericas.com/

Share

The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by

https://econamericas.com/

Share

The Capitalism and Morality Conference Alberta was presented by https://econamericas.com/

Nein Kings? More Like, Nine Kings.

Greetings and salutations! Remember the “No Kings” protests (which I’d call a color revolution operation more than a protest)? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Ostensibly, it was a protest held in defense of our democracy against being attacked by those who see themselves as kings.

Two things are wrong with that framing. We have kings. And the democracy isn’t ours.

I’ll spend the rest of this article earning both halves of that, but I need to hand you a tool first, and the tool is a concept I want you carrying forward: government is applied metaphysics. I mentioned this back in an earlier article, Abuse and Disabuse, and I want to expound upon it here, as it is a load-bearing concept in my system of thought.

Government Is Applied Metaphysics

What do I mean when I say that government is applied metaphysics? I mean that the very concept of government is built on metaphysical premises. Where there is two men, there is government (so no, you can’t exist without it unless you’re living in the woods like a nymph). Don’t mistake me for saying this as a figure of speech, as I’m being literal here. Government applies (by force, if necessary) and instantiates a given metaphysic. Don’t believe me? Tell me, if we’re a Constitutional republic or Constitutional democracy (I’ll address that later), why does the text of the Constitution no longer have to change for the application of that Constitution to change? It’s because the text matters less than the metaphysical and ontological premises being instantiated. This is where most people stop short in their thought, attributing this problem to activist judges, corrupt politicians, and the like. I think the issue runs deeper than that, and stopping bad actors in government one at a time leaves the foundation untouched. Let’s dive further.

Every law answers a metaphysical or ontological question before it answers a legal one. What is a person? What is a right? What is a marriage? And so on. All the way down to your speeding ticket that you were issued for going five over in a school zone. Courts rule on these metaphysical questions on an hourly basis; philosophers have argued them for millennia. The difference is that the courts have the power of the state behind their decisions. Your neighbor’s opinion about what a human being is, is an opinion. The state’s opinion about what a human being is, is backed by those shiny bracelets that the police love so much (handcuffs, for the uninitiated).

This means that neutrality is unavailable; to think otherwise is a utopian position. A legal system must answer the first principle questions in order to have a basis from which to operate; answering them commits the state to a given metaphysical system; the system then enforces that metaphysics on everyone inside its jurisdiction, including the people who reject it.

Here’s the part that turns all of this from a philosophy lecture into your Tuesday afternoon. A document does nothing. Ink is inert. The Constitution has never once arrested a man, seized an account, closed a business, or told a school district what it may teach. Between the text and your life stands a person holding an office, and that person has to decide what the words require before he can act on them. Every application of law, every single one, runs through a human being performing that translation.

Which means the operative law of a country is the text as filtered through the metaphysics of whoever holds the office. The Constitution hasn’t changed since 1992, yet the translation of metaphysics into our everyday life continues unabated.

So look at the artifact itself. Why is the Constitution written? Why does it exist as a text at all? England ran for centuries without a written constitution and runs that way still, governed by accumulated statute, custom, and precedent that no one ever gathered into a single document. The founders knew that, as they were Englishmen in every sense that mattered, yet they broke with English practice on this specific point, deliberately, at considerable effort. Why do this?

Because of what they believed about reality.

Each government is a mechanism by which a given metaphysic is brought into the physical reality. The artifacts a regime leaves behind (and the context that surrounds them) will tell you which metaphysics it was operating on. A written constitution is one such artifact. Writing a standard down makes three claims about the way reality works, whether the men doing the writing notice they’re making them or not.

1. There is an objective standard. There is something for words to correspond to, and it existed before anyone showed up with any given grievance.

2. It is accessible to whoever reads it. No mediator required, no special faculty, other than the context in which the law was written and fluency in the language.

3. The officer applying it can be measured against it. Which means he can be wrong. Which means he can be corrected (theoretically).

We shall expand and expound on those three concepts.

Exhibit A: Originalism Versus Living Constitutionalism

For example, let’s take originalism versus living constitutionalism. This is a hilariously silly dispute on its face, as it’s asking “does the law mean what is written, or should the judge have carte blanche to rewrite the law to get the best outcomes?” “Best” being defined by the judiciary, of course.

This is an “ends justify the means” style of thinking that subverts the whole point of a Constitution; that is, to be written down and checked against as an agreed-upon standard.

The Constitution has seven articles, twenty-seven amendments, at roughly 7,600 words. That very document recorded the manifestation of a federal government of limited, enumerated powers, and that government has metastasized into a continent-spanning administrative apparatus that manages you as a cog in a vast machine. Wha? What happen? The same words are being interpreted via very different metaphysics, boyo.

The Revolution That Left the Furniture Where It Was

Chief Justice John Marshall understood this in 1803 when he decided Marbury v. Madison, the case that established the power of a court to strike down an act of Congress, and he built the argument on writtenness itself. The powers of the legislature are both defined and limited, he wrote, and the reason those limits were committed to writing was so “that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten.” That is the whole justification for judicial review. Judicial review is the mechanism that says the Court may check Congress because the text is fixed and legible, and a fixed legible text can be held up against an act to see whether they match. The power that the modern Court uses to make the text mean nothing in particular was originally justified by the text meaning something in particular. Alanis would call it ironic whereas I call it a metaphysical revolution that took place inside a document that never changed a jot or a tittle.

Go back to those three claims and watch what the practice looks like now.

1. The standard lives in the mind of the officer (call it the mens rea of the bench). There is nothing for the words to correspond to until a court announces which parts of the text it seeks to emphasize and which parts it will ignore.

2. Access runs through the men. What the words require is learned by studying the officers instead of the text (which doesn’t matter so much to the officer), and the text gets cited afterward as a justification, usually secondary to the goal of the officer doing the interpretation.

3. Nothing outside the officer measures him. Error becomes a thing only his colleagues are positioned to declare, and they declare it rarely. Who can tell a judge that he is wrong but another judge?

What we have instead of a standard is bias, be it personal or procedural, and bias is inaccessible because it exists only in the mind of the person applying it, shifting with his mood and temperament.

This “living” Constitutionalism facilitates the skinsuiting of the Constitution into new and amorphous forms. For most of the last half century, one such form held that abortion was protected by the 14th Amendment as a “private” matter (that ends a human life), while gun laws weren’t really “infringements” against the 2nd Amendment (because they were “reasonable” in the 21st century). An unwritten right was backed by the highest court in the land, whereas a right written down in plain English got weighed against whatever the era found sensible.

Therefore, the question starts as “who interprets the law?” on its face, but when more clearly stated, it becomes “who defines reality for 340 million people?”

What That Makes a Judge

What does this do to the man in the robe?

If the words no longer fix the meaning, somebody has to supply meaning, and that somebody is whoever happens to be holding the case. At that moment he isn’t so much consulting a standard as he is issuing one, and the only people positioned to review what he issued are other men holding the same office under the same premises.

They have the last word amongst men. That’s what royal means. It has nothing to do with crowns or ermine or bloodlines, and everything to do with where the appeal stops.

This leads to the following question:

Who is educated in the whims of the judges?

You cannot be. Nobody can be. A standard that doesn’t exist until it’s applied to you cannot be studied in advance, cannot be conformed to, cannot be planned around. What can be studied is the men. Their moods, their leanings, their clerks, their circuit, their favored tests, the arguments that worked on them last term. That is rarified knowledge that only comes from existing in their world, within their ranks. You can’t just read the Constitution and expect it to be applied - that would be madness...wouldn’t it? The judges keep society intact, after all. That is their true job, which is why no one will listen to your interpretation of the plain language of the document in question.

We were forewarned about this, way back in yesteryear.

In 1788 a fellow writing as Brutus (a pretty smart one, generally attributed to Robert Yates) warned New York that the proposed judiciary would answer to nobody. Here is the bullet-pointed indictment Brutus/Yates circulated:

1. Finality without appeal. Judicial adjudications are final and irreversible; no court sits above them to hear an appeal, in error or on the merits.

2. Error without correction. No authority can remove them for any error in judgment or want of capacity, and none can reduce their salaries. The framers copied England’s good-behavior tenure while omitting England’s tribunal for correcting judicial mistakes.

3. Power above the legislature. They determine in the last resort the extent of Congress’s powers; they give the Constitution an explanation, and nothing above them can set that explanation aside. English judges are bound by the laws the legislature passes; the will of the judges controls the legislature.

4. Construction by spirit rather than letter. They explain the Constitution according to the spirit of the law, unfettered by the words.

5. The states are dissolved by degrees. Each adjudication becomes a precedent, and the accumulation will silently melt the states down into the general government.

6. Responsibility is absent by design. No court of justice was ever invested with powers so immense while placed in a situation where they are answerable to so few.

7. The summary charge. Independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in that situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.

Hamilton wrote Federalist 78 and 81 to sell the ratification of the Constitution, saying:

1. It’s the least dangerous branch. The judiciary poses the smallest threat to political rights of the three departments, and beyond comparison the weakest of them.

2. The judiciary doesn’t even have purse or sword. No influence over either; no command of the strength or the wealth of society; no direction whatsoever over the two things that make government able to compel a human being.

3. They also have neither force nor will, merely judgment. The bench decides. It has no desire and no command.

4. The judiciary is bound by strict rules and precedents. These would define and point out judicial duty in every particular case, specifically to prevent arbitrary discretion in the courts.

5. Judicial review implies no superiority over the legislature. (Judicial review being the power of the federal and state courts to examine the actions of the other branches and determine whether they square with the Constitution.) The people stand above both the judiciary and the legislature, and judges are servants of a fundamental law they are ascertaining rather than composing.

6. The judiciary is dependent on the executive arm. The courts require the executive even to give their own judgments effect, which is precisely what keeps them modest.

7. Judges require good behavior for their whole tenure. Life tenure exists so judges can resist encroachment from the political branches, with impeachment standing by as the check on the judges themselves.

8. Judicial encroachment is a phantom (81).

Hamilton answered six of the seven charges from Brutus, added two assurances of his own, and stepped around Brutus’s fifth charge. Now hold what was sold beside what was delivered:

1. The least dangerous branch delivers a body that has settled abortion, marriage, school prayer, campaign finance, firearms, presidential immunity, and the reach of every agency in Washington. Name a domain of American life the least dangerous branch has left alone.

2. No purse, no sword delivers federal judges running school districts, prison systems, and police departments by consent decree for decades at a stretch. A court commanding another man’s purse and another man’s sword has no need to own either.

3. Merely judgment delivers the Casey decision, in which the Court announced that liberty includes the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. A court that hands you the authority to define existence has told you where it thinks law comes from.

4. Bound by strict rules delivers tiers of scrutiny conjured whole from a footnote in 1938, balancing tests weighted by the man holding the scale, and stare decisis released whenever a special justification appears, the specialness of the justification being determined by the party seeking release.

5. No superiority over the legislature delivers Cooper v. Aaron, in which the Court’s own interpretation became the supreme law of the land, binding every officer in every state, forever, by its own declaration.

6. Dependent on the executive arm delivers the 101st Airborne escorting nine children to school in Little Rock, after which compliance became a habit and the dependency became a formality.

7. Impeachment as the check delivers eight federal judges removed in the republic’s entire history, and zero from the Supreme Court. Zero.

8. The phantom menace delivers nine officials, life tenure, no appeal, immunity from suit for malice and corruption alike, sole authority to say what their own authority is.

9. And the charge Hamilton never answered. The states melting by degrees delivers incorporation, 1897 through the 1970s. Everson took a clause that barred Congress from touching the religious settlements the states had made for themselves and converted it into the instrument for overriding them. Silently, adjudication by adjudication, precisely as charged.

In short, Brutus identified what he saw as the logical conclusion, what I would call shadow metaphysics (the concept I mentioned in Abuse and Disabuse); that is to say, a metaphysical endpoint that would be reached when following premises to their conclusion. Hamilton sold assurances that these worries would never come to light, and those assurances are goods that have never been delivered.

So, based on what we see of our current system, have we a Constitutional Republic? Hardly. How about a Constitutional Democracy? Getting warmer. What I see is a Royal Managerial Democracy in all but name.

Royal, because the last word belongs to judge-kings as an institution.

Managerial, because the populace is actively managed in every aspect of its life.

Democracy, because the managed populace votes to choose some of its managers, and to make the choices its managers permit.

The Constitution still exists (as a husk). Federal officers route around it, whilst paying it all the lip service required. The people remain sovereign the way a painting of a smoking pipe is a pipe (in label only).

Returning to the top, there are two things wrong with the slogan No Kings, then. We have kings. And the democracy isn’t ours.

Brutus is the founder of the American Epistemology Institute (AEI), an educational nonprofit dedicated to restoring the metaphysical foundations of American life. He is the creator of Metadiagnostics — a diagnostic theory that identifies how metaphysical premises shape institutional behavior and civilizational trajectories. Twenty years of autodidactic philosophical study. A professional background in systems design. A conviction that the real crisis is upstream of politics. He is the lead author of AEI’s white papers. Read more at Grinning Brutus

I. Refreshing, Isn’t It?

Let’s talk entropy. There are many scenarios in which the definition of entropy is contingent on the context, so let’s use the thermodynamic variety; a drive toward equilibrium. Hot becomes warm. Cold also becomes warm. This is due to flow of energy from a higher gradient to a lower gradient, like a cup of coffee allowed to sit in a room. The interface is where the heat crosses over from one material (the inner wall of the cup) to another (the outer wall). The energy gradient is the flow of heat from the cup to the air, and when maximum entropy is reached, there is no more gradient, no difference in temperature between coffee and its surroundings, thus equilibrium is achieved. Ah equality; isn’t it refreshing?

Let’s scale that concept up; zoom out and you’ll get to the concept of the heat death of the universe (that escalated quickly). Heat death is what would occur if all energy gradients were leveled and energy was maximally distributed across the entire universe. Just a permanent sea of lukewarm equality where nothing changes ever again because all energy at the most fundamental level has been smeared evenly across the cosmos. I bet you think you know where I’m going with this. Perhaps you’re correct; let’s find out together.

The coffee in that example moves from hot to warm over time, and political positions do so in kind. A position is less a static point on a graph and more of a vector; it has a direction and a velocity.

So the political positions we have are photographs. Where does this or that policy sit? Is that position extreme or moderate? Where do you fall on the spectrum? Every one of those questions asks for a temperature reading and none of them asks in what direction the position is traveling.

What a man holds about what is fundamentally real (metaphysics) determines what he holds about what man is (anthropology, seated within ontology); what he holds about man determines what is good for man (ethics); what is good for man determines what the state should do about it (government application of metaphysics). That chain runs downhill and it does not run back up. You cannot start with a policy preference and reason your way to a metaphysic, but a metaphysic will reach the policy whether its holder intends it to or not, and it will keep going after he stops, because premises don’t have opinions about how far they should be taken.

Concerning velocity, a metaphysic answerable to something outside itself moves slowly, because it must correspond to reality. A metaphysic answerable only to itself has nothing to collide with. It travels at whatever speed its carriers can manage, and its carriers can manage quite a lot.

All of this is to say that if I know a person’s metaphysic, I can tell where they’re headed without looking at where they currently stand.

Let’s find out.

II. Give Me the Metaphysic and I’ll Give You the Platform

To expound on the above, let’s build a (hypothetical) political party via deduction.

Here is the premise, and it is the only thing we get:

Reality trends toward equilibrium, and every gradient is a temporary and unjust deviation from that trend.

That’s it. Now watch what a mind holding that has to conclude, because the ordering is not optional; from the metaphysic follows what man is, from what man is follows what is good for him, and from what is good for him follows what the state must do about it. You cannot skip a level, and nobody gets to stop it from reaching the politics tier; it manifests whether he wants to or not.

Plank One. Universal mixing and boundary dissolution.

Start at the top, because this one is just the premise translated into political grammar. A boundary is a maintained difference; that is the entire content of the concept, whether the boundary is a national frontier or a property line or a wall of a cell. If gradients are unjust deviations, then boundaries are the instruments by which the injustice is sustained, and dissolving them is not one policy among several but the primary act of the entire program. Every subsequent plank is a special case of this one applied to a particular boundary.

Other terms for gradient include disparity, inequality. Does this sound familiar yet?

Let’s continue. An abstract line drawn on a map by dead men should not determine whether a child eats. Sounds reasonable, compassionate, maybe even radically so; the border acts as an interface of injustice in this argument, preventing equilibrium of resources from reaching the child in question.

Plank Two. Reimagined beauty, identity, and human achievement capacity.

Now we descend a level, because the premise has an anthropology in it and we have to state what man is before we can say what he needs.

Under a realist account, a man has a nature; he is a particular kind of thing, with an end proper to that kind, and he flourishes by achieving what his nature is for. Every one of those words is a gradient. A nature distinguishes this kind from that kind. An end distinguishes achieved from unachieved. Flourishing distinguishes the man who got there from the man who didn’t.

Our premise cannot have any of it. If gradients are deviations, then a nature is a deviation, and man is not a kind of thing with an end but undifferentiated material bearing whatever description is currently applied to him. Beauty, then, is not the visibility of a form achieved; it becomes a ranking imposed by observers, and rankings are gradients, and gradients are unjust. The capability of human achievement cannot be higher in one man than another because organizing achievements into a hierarchy would be a gradient. Identities associated with higher gradients of performance cannot be allowed, as we have determined non-equilibrium states are immoralities. As such, they must be dissolved as stated in plank one.

Sex (skinsuited into “gender,” and if you read Skinsuiting for Fun and Profit you already know what happened to the word before anybody argued about the thing) is inside this plank rather than beside it, and it is inside it necessarily. The distinction between man and woman is the sharpest gradient a human being carries, it was not installed by any assembly, and a premise that dissolves natures cannot leave that one standing while taking the others. Anyone who tells you these are unrelated fights does not comprehend the totality of their metaphysical stance.

Plank Three. Agency through systemic relief.

We have dissolved boundaries and we have dissolved natures. There is one thing left standing that can generate a gradient, and it is the acting man. Give a person a real capacity to choose and he will use it, and the use of it produces difference; he studies and another doesn’t, he saves and another spends, he builds and another watches, and within a generation there are gradients everywhere and you have to start over.

So agency itself has to go, and it cannot go by being denied outright, because denying that men act is absurd on its face and nobody would accept it. It goes by relocation. The premise says that outcomes are produced by systems rather than by choices, so the man who succeeded was carried by structures and the man who failed was obstructed by them, and in neither case did anything he did make the difference. Real freedom, then, is not the exercise of a capacity you have; it is the application of entropy to the structures that made your outcome look like your own doing. Personal responsibility becomes a cruelty rather than a compliment.

You have now relieved man of the internal locus of control (which comes with failure states), and as such, the plank positions itself as compassion, because it is the removal of the weight of agency that he was genuinely struggling under.

Plank Four. A kinder equilibrium.

With accumulated dissolutions under its belt, the party now states its terminus in public, because at this point it can do so freely, having incrementally dissolved barriers that would have made outright statements untenable to make out loud.

With boundaries gone, natures gone, and agency gone, what remains is a population of interchangeable units with no distinguishing form, no end proper to them, and no capacity to produce difference through action. There are no gradients left to dissolve. Competition subsides because there is nothing to compete for and nobody in a position to win; striving subsides because striving requires a height and we have removed the heights; suffering from comparison subsides, and this is the plank’s honest promise, since you cannot suffer by comparison when there is nothing left to compare.

The party calls this a kinder equilibrium and the party is not lying; it is kind within its metaphysic. Even though its actions lead to crumbling infrastructure, low trust society, and lack of opportunity for growth, this is kind from the standpoint of an entropic metaphysic. It is also the state in which nothing positive whatsoever can be allowed to occur; a palliative care writ large.

III. Now Go Read a Platform

Everything above was derived. I never looked outward, never consulted a manifesto, never checked what anybody currently believes; I took one premise about equilibrium and followed the ordering down until it arrived at policy.

So go find a platform. Any party, any country, and read it with the derivation in hand.

The Core Diagnostic Question would ask: what would a man have to believe for this to be rational? Not what he says he believes, since he’ll tell you compassion and fairness and he won’t be lying. What would have to be true underneath for these commitments to hang together as a set rather than as unrelated preferences that happen to arrive in the same decade?

The words held still while the concepts underneath were replaced, which is what I mean by linguistically skinsuited. Justice still means justice as far as anyone can tell from outside. So does health, freedom, care. But justice has become outcome parity, health has become the absence of a standard to fall short of (body positivity, for example), freedom has become relief from the burden of choosing, and care has become the reduction of gradient. Classic instances of shared vocabulary and very different dictionaries.

Which is why hunting for the men operating the engine is a waste of an afternoon. A metaphysic doesn’t require a conspiracy, it requires carriers, and a carrier doesn’t have to know what he’s carrying; he inherits a vocabulary, the vocabulary has premises in it, and the premises reach the politics whether he wants them to or not. Unwitting metaphysical advancement is not the exception but the rule; only in this case, it is the advancement of a metaphysical death engine given a political party and rationalization for its actions.

To conclude, consider the man who holds the “sensible” version of every plank and recoils from the extreme version, proud of his moderation and objective stance, able to take the good ideas from both sides. He is moving in the same entropic direction, only slower with a longer timeline, to the same destination.

Your coffee gets cold either way.

Brutus is the founder of the American Epistemology Institute (AEI), an educational nonprofit dedicated to restoring the metaphysical foundations of American life. He is the creator of Metadiagnostics — a diagnostic theory that identifies how metaphysical premises shape institutional behavior and civilizational trajectories. Twenty years of autodidactic philosophical study. A professional background in systems design. A conviction that the real crisis is upstream of politics. He is the lead author of AEI’s white papers. Read more at

I think that I, and most, when we think of the Founding, we think mostly of the political aspect and as such, it provides a relatively narrow pov of how and why they built what they did. Then when we include the metaphysical aspect, or even the adherence to reality and truth... The terms of liberal or conservative in these senses really muddy the water.

Consider the metaphysical, the Receptivist and the Constructivist (I googled the terms…) Calling the former conservative and the latter liberal ends up mixing the political implications; for one can hold the former and be politically liberal and vice versa.

And in consideration of the aspect of adherence to truth... I highly doubt that conservative or liberal labels even apply. I can think of no person who would call themselves other than conservative.

Which then the conversation then becomes “I am a liberal conservative liberal” or “I am conservative conservative conservative”...

And to be honest, we could drop the adherence to truth aspect as it is largely unhelpful both as a label - because of how broad it is - and as a tool of discourse because it would make those whom one would call liberal, automatically the villain of the conversation.

So then we are left with two, and even then, the terms are still too loaded. Both metaphysically and in the ordering of government. I don’t believe we should use the terms in the metaphysical sense as it again doesn’t actually capture the distinction being drawn, although it does do it better than truth. I was familiar with the concepts, not exactly what they were called…

One is what I’ve been calling Recognition of being aka Receptivist: we live in a created order - moral, physical, metaphysical - that we did not make, and our duty is to recognize it, receive it, and conform ourselves and our institutions to that higher order as best we can.

The other is Creation of being aka Constructivist: reality, moral norms, or even human nature itself is treated as something plastic that we can and should actively shape, will, or reconstruct according to our own lights.

I could see how liberal and conservative could fit these categories but again, too many categories are being pressed into those terms, nor do they capture the essence of them.

As to the definition within the political sphere... It largely holds as it refers to the consolidation of power, liberal meaning the limited nature, conservative meaning in the consolidated nature... Yet this too is also inaccurate as the actual question is how individuals should relate in a collective.

Therefore the better method would be to define it by Individualism and Collectivism. The former being the respect and recognition of the right of the individual to create his own life because each man is created in the image of God and he is thus meant to live according to the judgment of his own reasoning mind. He is endowed with rights and responsibilities that are not negated by the group when conflict arises. The necessary limitations being the transgression of another individual’s rights.

The latter emphasizes that when a conflict arises between what you believe and what the other members of the group believe, the needs of the group must often come first. The group is said to have fundamentality over the individual, and it is said to have rights over the individual. (Paraphrasing @CodyLibolt for these two definitions)

So liberal and conservative are still a better fit, yet I’d still say that they don’t really belong…

If we are conservative, we need to define what we are conserving, hence the oft fought argument between conservatives, classical liberals, and post-liberals.

Conservatism is therefore unclear... Both from a metaphorical and political view point, it is often, and accurately so, accused of being the rawl to the Liberal ratchet. This too was a Burkean flaw. One can see it in his resistance to change being more of push against haste instead of error.

Liberalism is in that sense, the revolutionary aspect, the removal or changing of things, often taken to the radical extreme of France.

Classical Liberalism is fine for it captures the Founding governmental structure quite well, but it lacks the metaphysical level, per se…

Burke is a conservative in the classic sense, that is to say not of the metaphysical or political, but of the preservation of a thing or things. Quite often for the sake of the thing itself, for it was believed to have carried the wisdoms and truths of the ages before simply due to its age and endurance. This being his core presupposition in the nature and purpose of government.

Post-Liberals are in an aspect quite Burkean in their distrust of abstract individualism and his respect for tradition, but they often move beyond Burke by making the political community itself the active guardian of the common good.

See, America was Receptivist in its metaphysics and Individualist in its governmental structure, designed to control the effects of faction rather than to perfect souls or impose a single moral vision. That combination produced something distinctive. Thus it was both conservative and liberal in the classical sense, and in so doing, rendered a newer political ideology chiefly known as Americanism. That particular combination produced something distinctive. It was not simply European liberalism (which often lacked the same metaphysical grounding) nor European conservatism (which tended to be more Collectivist in structure).

I think this is the term needing to be brought back as it captures both aspects of the Founding. Primarily because of its distinction of the metaphysical level from the structural level. It lets us describe the Founding without forcing it into the overloaded European terms: liberal/conservative. Both of which often operated as a collectivist, regardless of Receptivist or Constructivist metaphysics; often stretching the terms across the metaphysical and structural levels at the same time. Americanism, by contrast, keeps the two levels more clearly distinguished, and it provides a clearer, less muddy concept to conserve.

Burke fits interestingly here, though not quite in the way many assume. He is not commonly understood as a Constructivist, for he plainly believed in a higher moral order, natural law, and truths that transcend any particular society. Rather, he is best understood as a Traditionalist, a form of synthesis between Receptivism and institutional inheritance. The distinction is important because it reveals both the strength and limitation of his thought.

For Burke, inherited institutions, customs, and traditions are the primary repositories of political wisdom. They are not merely historical accidents but the accumulated experience of generations attempting to live in accordance with a higher order. In this respect, Burke adopts a receptive posture toward reality. Yet his reception of the higher order is largely mediated through tradition itself.

This can be seen in his defense of the American cause. Burke’s argument rested heavily upon the colonists’ appeal to prescriptive rights rooted in the English constitutional tradition. The American Founders, however, justified their claims on different grounds: that rights are pre-political, derived from the nature of man and the laws of God, and therefore remain valid whether or not any particular institution recognizes them.

Here their divergence becomes apparent. The Founders begin with rights and judge institutions accordingly. Burke begins with institutions and infers rights through them. Both affirm a higher order, but they disagree about how that order is known and applied in political life.

This is the chief limitation of Burke’s framework. Because inherited institutions become the primary means by which political truths are understood, those institutions acquire a presumption of legitimacy that can make them difficult to judge by an external standard. Rights remain theoretically prior to institutions, but in practice institutions increasingly mediate the recognition and exercise of those rights.

The result is a tension within Burke’s own thought. He wishes to defend a higher order above society, yet his epistemology places such weight upon inherited constructions that the constructions themselves begin to function as the practical standard of legitimacy. This does not make Burke a Constructivist in the modern sense, nor does it mean he opposed change. Indeed, he opposed primarily radical and abstract change, preferring precedent. But it does mean that his framework is better suited to explaining why societies should be cautious in reform than why they are justified in overturning longstanding institutions that have become unjust.

And yet this is where the American Founders part company with Burke. By grounding rights directly in the higher order rather than in inherited institutions, they possessed a standard external to the institutions themselves. Institutions could therefore be measured, corrected, reformed, or even abolished when they violated the rights they were meant to secure. Burke’s framework, by contrast, tends to blur the distinction between the standard and the thing being measured by it. In that sense, his traditionalism tempers revolutionary excess, but it also weakens the force of his critique against unjust traditions and inherited political arrangements.

This limitation becomes especially apparent in later political movements influenced by Burke. Once the inherited institutions themselves lose their connection to the higher order, Burke’s framework offers fewer resources for distinguishing between what is merely inherited and what is genuinely just. The result is often an increasing reliance upon institutions, traditions, or political authority as arbiters of the good, a tendency that can be observed in varying degrees among many post-liberal and integralist schools of thought.

See, if we’re going to keep using “conservative”, it behoves us to be clearer about what exactly we’re trying to conserve - the Receptionist posture toward reality, or just the existing arrangements. Most modern and European models assume that a Receptivist metaphysic necessarily requires an institution-centered or common-good-centered political order. Aka, Collectivist. The Founding rejected that inference. The Founders believed that because reality, human nature, and moral law are objective, rights are objective as well, and therefore government must be limited by them.

Thoughts?

D00M42 posts about politics and philosophy on X at https://x.com/D00M42 and writes . D00M42 prefers to stay pseudonymous.

The modern “Judeo-Christian” formula is frequently treated as the timeless foundation of Western liberty. This essay argues, however, that it is a twentieth-century civic synthesis which extracts a shared political vocabulary from distinct and frequently incompatible theological traditions. Its utility as an emergency framework does not render it a sufficient metaphysical foundation for the public order. By examining James Lindsay’s defense of the formula, this essay asks whether a neutral procedural square can preserve human liberty after the transcendent authority that originally limited political power has been excluded from it.

I. The Synthetic Scaffold: The ‘Judeo-Christian-American’ Framework

In the contemporary conservative imagination, the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis has attained the status of a foundational myth, often depicted as a three-legged stool supporting Western civilization: a tripod of Hebrew covenant, Christian grace, and American proceduralism. For secular conservative thinkers—most notably James Lindsay—this framework serves as a vital firewall against the corrosive impulses of the modern Left. In his reflections on America’s 250th anniversary, Lindsay frames the American Experiment as a moment of integration, arguing that the Calvinist Pilgrims and the Founders revived the Covenant of Sinai in a “Christian-Gentile” key. By blending Jewish notions of responsibility, Christian mercy, and Enlightenment common sense, he proposes a uniquely “Judeo-Christian-American” philosophy that represents the essence of the West.

The attempt to anchor this synthesis in the Puritan founding, however, reveals a fundamental detachment from history. Advocates like Lindsay point to the Puritans as the architects of this covenantal integration, yet this ignores the reality of the Puritan world. Far from seeking a “Judeo-Christian” partnership, the Puritans were strict supersessionists who viewed their commonwealth as a New Israel under the exclusive lordship of Christ. To the Puritan mind, the “hyphen” would not have been a source of strength, but a dilution of the very truth that defined their community. By rebranding these rigorous, vertical believers as proponents of a modern, proceduralist synthesis, contemporary conservatives do not recover the American past; they project a secularized, administrative sensibility onto a seventeenth-century faith that would have found such an identity alien.

The appeal of Lindsay’s position is not merely rhetorical convenience; it reflects a genuine intellectual response to the vacuum of modern conservatism. In a landscape defined by the deconstruction of Western heritage, his framework offers a “usable past” that feels both grounded and distinctively American. By framing the American experiment as a deliberate integration of Western and Hebraic roots, he rescues the conservative tradition from the charge of being a collection of reactive prejudices. Furthermore, by identifying a high-stakes enemy—the “managerial progressive” machine—he allows his audience to view their advocacy as the defense of civilization itself. His focus on “values” rather than “dogma” bypasses divisive theological debates, offering a streamlined identity that can be shared by secularists, Christians, and Jews alike. For those exhausted by the perceived moral drift of modern life, this framework promises a restoration of order that is intellectually rigorous and immediately deployable in the public square.

Yet, when subjected to historical inquiry, this “three-legged stool” reveals itself as a late-modern civic coalition rather than an ancient inheritance. The model promises a public order robust enough to sustain a shared moral vocabulary while remaining sufficiently “neutral” to accommodate secularization. In practice, however, it functions as a structural artifice, reframing Hebrew tradition as “covenant-as-contract,” Christianity as “grace-as-sentiment,” and the American founding as a triumph of “procedural neutrality.”

The addition of “American” to this hyphenated synthesis is the final move toward procedural neutrality. By defining the West as “Judeo-Christian-American,” the framework shifts the source of liberty from the transcendent Logos to the procedural genius of the American Founding. Here, the “American” term acts as a stabilizer—a secular container that allows “Judeo-Christian” values to be utilized without the “danger” of their original, non-negotiable theological claims. The American hyphen does not merely describe our tradition; it redefines it as a manageable set of administrative values capable of sustaining a neutral public square.

This transition from a participatory to a procedural order is rooted in the late-medieval “nominalist turn.” As John Milbank argues in Theology and Social Theory, this shift dissolved the classical understanding of participatio—the belief that created realities possess their meaning, goodness, and intelligibility by sharing analogically in the divine order rather than existing as autonomous, self-contained entities—and replaced it with a world of discrete, unrelated objects governed by the arbitrary will of God or the mechanics of power. If justice is no longer a reality in which one participates through the Logos, it must be constructed through social contract. Consequently, we moved from an order limited by a transcendent horizon to a system where order is generated exclusively through the negotiation of individual wills. As Charles Taylor observes, this ushered in the “buffered self,” the modern individual who views the world as an impersonal, disenchanted space. The “neutral” square is thus not a discovery of inherent balance, but the political architecture of a disenchanted reality that, having lost the capacity to recognize a shared divine order, is left only with the administrative management of competing desires.

This formulation achieves stability through systematic omission: it brackets the sovereign authority of the living Logos. By defining the West through functionalist values rather than a shared metaphysical reality, the framework inadvertently adopts the very nominalism it purports to oppose. By stripping the world of its inherent, divinely ordered meaning, it renders the state unable to govern by recognizing a pre-existing justice, forcing it instead to become a mechanism that merely adjudicates between conflicting wills. Rights are no longer participations in a divine order, but self-evident political fictions negotiated within a hollowed-out public square. The danger is not merely that this framework is secular, but that it is epistemologically hollow: by positioning the “Judeo-Christian-American” synthesis as the timeless ground of the West, the modern conservative movement defends a construct that cannot generate its own soil, having excluded the only authority—the sovereign Logos—capable of limiting political power to something other than the administrative management of a disenchanted reality.

II. The Modern Invention of the Hyphen

In this climate, the “Judeo-Christian” label was an act of political triage. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the term civic permanence, famously declaring that American democracy rested upon a “Judeo-Christian concept”—before adding, with telling indifference, “I don’t care what it is.” That blunt admission captures the essence of the project: the term functioned not as a serious theological claim, but as a generic placeholder for a unified civic identity.

By emphasizing a shared moral inheritance, the architects of this coalition carved out a defensive perimeter against existential threats. Yet, this success rested upon a fundamental misreading of theology. To make the “hyphen” functional, the irreducible tensions regarding the Messiah, the nature of the Covenant, and the requirements of salvation were relegated to private “belief,” while a flattened, generic version of “moral law” was promoted to the level of public “foundation.”

Ironically, the same postwar consensus that embedded this synthesis into the American lexicon coincided with the entrenchment of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower himself would later warn posed the gravest threat to the American way of life. Far from a neutral philological descriptor—as biblical scholar Wes Huff asserted in a recent post, claiming the term “has nothing to do with geo-politics or a one world order”—the “Judeo-Christian” formula has demonstrably functioned as a durable geopolitical and institutional scaffold. Its history reveals a striking convergence with expansive state architectures and the progressive blurring of jurisdictional lines between spiritual authority and temporal power.

This transformation stripped the Covenant of its supernatural character, reducing a historical relationship with the Living God to a set of contractual rights. Similarly, it reduced the radicality of grace to a sentiment of universal brotherhood. The irony is twofold: the term was deployed to preserve the religious character of the West, yet it functioned as a “legitimacy trap” that rendered religion irrelevant to the state. By providing a “value-neutral” basis for legitimacy that did not require acknowledging Christ’s sovereignty, the framework incentivized religious institutions to operate as mere “value-suppliers” for a state that manages the procedural “sandbox,” trading their jurisdictional independence for a seat at the table of American civil religion.

Resistance from within the Jewish tradition was both early and persistent, serving as a vital corrective to the homogenizing impulse of the hyphen. Arthur A. Cohen’s The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition remains the definitive rebuttal, laying bare the theological dishonesty of the synthesis. Cohen argued that the label was an American political invention designed to foster a comfortable civic consensus at the expense of theological truth. He demonstrated that the synthesis required Judaism to shed its particularity and Christianity to abandon its unique messianic claims. Scholars like Jacob Neusner and Eliezer Berkovits similarly argued that Judaism is defined by its distinctness from Christianity; for them, any synthetic blurring was not a source of strength, but a threat to Jewish integrity.

Viewing the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis as a timeless foundation is a profound historical error. It mistakes a wartime defensive measure for the structural steel of the building itself. We have inherited a tactic designed for the 1940s and elevated it to a metaphysical necessity. The result is a conservative movement that fights for its existence on the terms of a temporary coalition, unaware that the coalition’s foundational premise—that a pluralistic nation can be sustained by a de-dogmatized “value set”—is the very mechanism that has left our culture spiritually defenseless. This civic de-dogmatization paralleled deeper shifts in the scriptural foundations themselves.

III. The Ancient Christian–Rabbinic Fork: Two Worlds, Two Texts

The “Judeo-Christian” hyphen rests on the popular assumption of a continuous, harmonious scriptural tradition. In reality, the history of the biblical text is one of profound divergence. Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, the scriptural inheritance of Israel was curated, contested, and bifurcated. These were not peripheral variants; they were intentional divergences that crystallized as the Apostolic proclamation of the Incarnate Logos intersected with rabbinic efforts to delineate communal boundaries.

Christ and the Apostles were not bridging two co-equal religions; they were announcing the eschatological fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures in the person of the Messiah within the living tradition that became the Church—long before the post-70 AD rabbinic reconfiguration crystallized distinct trajectories.

The Apostolic Textual World

For the early Church, the Septuagint (LXX) was not merely a translation but the inspired delivery system of the Logos. New Testament authors operated within this Greek textual world, citing it authoritatively as gegraptai (“it is written”). As Eugene Ulrich demonstrates, the “original” biblical text of the Second Temple period was a fluid, developing collection of manuscripts. The Church received and interpreted the Greek Old Testament within the living tradition of the altar and priesthood, seeing these texts not as static documents, but as illuminated by the Incarnate Word.

A vital clarification is necessary: the Great Isaiah Scroll at Qumran (1QIsaᵃ) presents a text with a proto-Masoretic character, confirming that the Masoretic tradition did not emerge ex nihilo after 70 AD. It drew upon an older, established stream of Hebrew transmission. However, this only deepens the theological stakes. As Karen Jobes and Moises Silva observe, the diversity of Second Temple texts was eventually pruned by a “standardization of tradition” that reflected the competing needs of distinct communities. The rabbinic project of standardization was a hermeneutic decision to prioritize a textual stream that resisted the Church’s claims. The Qumran scrolls do not prove the Masoretic text is “wrong,” but they confirm that its canonization was a deliberate act of identity formation in direct opposition to the Church’s Christology. By the second century, the Masoretic Text (MT) became the bedrock of an emerging Rabbinic Judaism that defined itself in critical, non-negotiable contrast to the early Church.

The Chronological Schism

Beyond textual variance, the post-70 AD rabbinic movement produced a distinctive chronology of sacred history. The Seder Olam Rabbah (c. 160 AD), the foundational rabbinic chronicle, compresses the Persian period by approximately 160 years compared to the timelines reflected in Ptolemy’s Canon and other external sources. This is more than a historiographical curiosity; it alters the arithmetic of Daniel’s prophecy of the “seventy weeks” (Daniel 9:24–27). Under the Seder Olam’s reckoning, the prophetic timetable no longer converges upon the lifetime of Jesus. Whether this was an internal methodological choice or, as scholars like Mitchell First suggest, an act of “theological engineering,” the result is clear: by the second century, Christian and rabbinic traditions operated within chronologies that no longer mapped the same historical landscape.

The Testimony of the Early Church

The Church Fathers were acutely aware of this schism. In Dialogue with Trypho (c. 150 AD), Justin Martyr explicitly addressed the divergence: “They [the Jews] have altogether taken away many Scriptures from the [Septuagint] translation... your teachers [the rabbis] have caused you to believe that the Scriptures are not as they are, but have interpreted them differently.” While modern scholarship cautions against overstating “deliberate alteration”—noting that some LXX variants reflect broader Second Temple pluriformity—Justin’s diagnosis captures a genuine historical reality: this was not a philological dispute, but a battle over the identity of the Messiah.

Pressure Points of Proclamation

These divergences cluster precisely where Apostolic proclamation confronted post-70 AD rabbinic boundary-setting:

The Sign of the Virgin (Isaiah 7:14): The LXX renders the Hebrew ‘almâ as parthenos (“virgin”), the prophetic signal of the Virgin Birth. Rabbinic readings later pivoted to alternatives that obscured this Christological application.

The Pattern of Sacrifice (Psalm 40:6 / Hebrews 10:5): The Apostolic reading—“a body you prepared for me”—reveals the Old Covenant’s localized sacrifices as fulfilled in the Incarnate Logos. The Masoretic tradition reads “ears you have dug for me,” steering the text toward ritualized obedience rather than the body as the site of definitive atonement.

The Divinity of the Messiah (Deuteronomy 32:43 / Hebrews 1:6): The LXX includes the exhortation, “Let all the angels of God worship him,” affirming Christ’s sonship. The Masoretic tradition omits this, reflecting a boundary-setting impulse that the Apostolic mission dismantled.

The Wounds of the Messiah (Psalm 22:16): The LXX reads ōryxan cheiras mou kai podas (“they pierced my hands and my feet”). The Masoretic tradition reads ka’ari (“like a lion”), a reading many textual critics regard as syntactically incomplete, which obscures the verse’s crucifixion resonance.

The Inclusion of the Nations: The LXX epilogue to Job and its reading of Amos 9:11–12 (“that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord”) provided the scriptural mandate for the Church’s universal mission. The Masoretic tradition narrows these texts, reinforcing the particular boundaries the Apostolic Church sought to transcend.

These are not mere artifacts of translation; they are tectonic plates of tradition. The modern “Judeo-Christian” synthesis treats these Scriptures as interchangeable reservoirs of “ethical values” to be harmonized through a proceduralist lens. But for the Apostles and Fathers, they were the historical unfolding of the Logos into time. By forcing these two divergent worlds into a singular, hyphenated box, the current consensus does not preserve tradition; it hollows it out, minimizing the scandal of the Cross and the necessity of the Incarnation.

IV. The Displacement: How the Hebrew Text Entered the Christian West

The “Judeo-Christian” synthesis assumes a stable, monolithic textual foundation. In reality, the history of the Western canon is defined by a slow-motion displacement of the Church’s original blueprint. The bridge between the Apostolic Church and the modern hyphenated consensus was not one of natural continuity, but a series of deliberate shifts in textual authority that systematically favored the post-70 AD rabbinic stream over the Apostolic Greek inheritance.

The Quest for Hebraica Veritas

For the early Church, the Septuagint (LXX) was not merely a translation but the inspired delivery system of the Logos. The rabbinic movement, however, viewed these Greek Scriptures as a distortion. Around 240 AD, Origen’s Hexapla established the Hebrew text as a “master” standard, implicitly positioning the Church’s Greek text as derivative. This trend accelerated with St. Jerome and his pursuit of Hebraica veritas (“the Hebrew truth”). Jerome famously relied on clandestine rabbinic instruction, a move that prompted Augustine’s sharp protest in De Civitate Dei (18.43). Augustine argued that the Septuagint’s authority was providential and that undermining it risked severing the Church’s continuity with the Apostles.

Despite Augustine’s warnings, the trajectory of Western philology—driven by humanist and scientific concerns—gradually sidelined the Septuagint in favor of the Masoretic Text (MT). The Reformation’s ad fontes principle completed this displacement. By treating the post-70 AD Masoretic text as the “neutral” original, Reformers bypassed institutional Church authority. Once the Church accepted a Hebrew canon defined outside its own tradition as the “real” Old Testament, the semantic and theological bridge for later syntheses was fully constructed. This pursuit of historical precision, while valuable, marginalized the Apostolic hermeneutic that read the Old Testament as an organic, Christological fulfillment, eventually sacrificing the Church’s interpretive sovereignty on the altar of historical-critical detachment.

The Semantic Deformation of Justice

This philological displacement had profound political consequences. The shift in the Western understanding of justice was not the product of a single translation, but Jerome’s preference for Roman legal terminology in the Vulgate acted as a critical conduit for a broader intellectual reorientation. By translating the Apostolic dikaiosynē—a term evoking the holistic, participatory harmony of the soul under the Logos—as the Latin iustitia (frequently inflected by the Roman concept of aequitas), the translation facilitated a move toward an administrative, procedural understanding of right relationship.

As Gerhard Kittel notes, dikaiosynē is fundamentally relational and participatory; it describes a person’s standing before God. When flattened into iustitia, it began to carry the weight of Roman legalism—a concern for the balanced ledger of rights and duties. This coincided with the “nominalist turn” that replaced a cosmos of objective participation with one of discrete objects and legal contracts. Where dikaiosynē denoted harmony under the Logos, aequitas shifted the emphasis toward balancing competing individual claims through external rules.

Over centuries, this semantic pivot helped detach justice from its vertical, transcendent horizon, increasingly framing it as a horizontal negotiation between rights-bearing agents. This provided the late-medieval and Enlightenment legal orders with a new, less theological vocabulary for governance. By the time this reached the modern era, “justice” had been successfully abstracted from the life of the Church and tethered to the procedural management of the State.

Some argue that because the Septuagint originated as a Greek translation for the Jewish diaspora, the Church’s reliance upon it was merely the adoption of a Jewish document, thereby vindicating the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis from the start. This observation is philologically accurate, yet it is ecclesially insufficient. It confuses provenance with participation. The Church did not receive the text as a static artifact of ancient Judaism, but as the transfigured language of the Incarnate Word. By the time the Apostles cited the Septuagint, it had been fundamentally remade by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ; it had become the Church’s unique textual life-blood. When the West abandoned this participatory framework in favor of a neutral, philological “original,” it did not merely switch translations; it dismantled the mechanism of Christological participation, facilitating the modern, administrative neutralization of the public square.

V. The Actual Architecture of Western Liberty: Jurisdictional Sovereignty

The “Judeo-Christian” hyphen is an intellectual artifice that obscures the genuine historical development of Western civilization. The architecture of the West was not assembled by a generic coalition of “values”; it was forged through the integration of Roman procedural jurisprudence, Greek metaphysics, and—most crucially—the revolutionary jurisdictional claims of the Church as the living Body of the Logos. This synthesis did not arise from neutral negotiation; it was born because the Church possessed the authority to baptize, discipline, and reorient the civil sphere. Liberty was not an abstract gift of the state, but a boundary line drawn by the Church against the totalizing reach of temporal power.

The Jurisprudence of the Logos

The trajectory of Western law—from the Roman tradition to the emergence of constitutionalism—is fundamentally a story of Christianized synthesis. The defining moment was the “Papal Revolution” of the 11th century, which, as Harold J. Berman documents, systematically established the independence of ecclesiastical law from secular rule. While Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis provided the procedural toolkit, articulating that imperial majesty must be “armed with laws” for the common good, it was the Church that provided the limiting principle. Medieval canonists looked not to a secular contract, but to the vertical gaze of the Incarnate Logos. They understood law as an objective, participatory reality to be discovered rather than invented—an extension of divine order that provided a horizon no ruler could transgress without forfeiting legitimacy.

St. Thomas Aquinas crystallized this in the Summa Theologiae. In I-II, Q. 95, Art. 2, he grounds the claim in Augustine’s dictum that “that which is not just seems to be no law at all,” concluding that a law which deflects from the law of nature “is no longer a law but a perversion of law.” He restates the principle even more sharply in I-II, Q. 93, Art. 3: “Human law has the nature of law in so far as it partakes of right reason; and it is clear that, in this respect, it is derived from the eternal law. But in so far as it deviates from reason, it is called an unjust law, and has the nature, not of law, but of violence.” This principle, coupled with the doctrine of the Two Swords articulated by Pope Gelasius I, established dual jurisdictions as a structural check against totalization. The Magna Carta (1215), forged in a climate of ecclesiastical assertion regarding the limits of royal prerogative, embodied this tension in practice, demonstrating that limited government was a direct consequence of the Church’s insistence that it held a jurisdiction distinct from the State.

The Ontology of Dignity

The concept of “human dignity” derives its operative weight in the Western legal tradition not merely from its scriptural mention in Genesis—an inheritance shared with ancient Israel—but from its Christological fulfillment and elaboration. As Larry Siedentop argues in Inventing the Individual, the doctrine of the Incarnation fundamentally reoriented the status of the human being by identifying the person as a soul capable of a direct, vertical relationship with God, thereby breaking the ancient monopoly of the city-state (and, by extension, any immanent collective) over identity. Aquinas grounded human reason in this same vertical relationship, describing it as an imprint of the Divine light on the soul.

The Imago Dei thus became the ontological sanctuary: creatio continua—the doctrine that God sustains the person and the universe in every moment—and the Pauline understanding of conscience as an internal witness created a sphere of dignity that the state cannot penetrate. This specific theological labor, rooted in the hypostatic union and the realism of the Logos, birthed the concept of limited government. The “individual” was not a product of secular philosophy or generic biblical theism, but an ontological category carved out by the Church’s insistence that the human person possessed an inherent, participatory value that the magistrate was bound to respect.

The Destruction of the Metaphysical Architecture

The “realism” of the West relied on the recognition that human nature is an objective, ontological reality rather than a legal fiction. In English Common Law and clerical equity, law functioned as a check on power because it recognized a source of justice antecedent to the state. Rights were inherent attributes of a creature sustained by God, not merely the claims of “rights-bearing agents” negotiating a hollow secular contract.

We must reject the notion that Western liberty is merely the product of a “Judeo-Christian” synthesis. Such a framing is historical revisionism, stripping away the high-stakes theological labor that forged our freedom. The West was built by those living under the immediate sovereignty of the Living Logos—not in a neutral square where theological claims were bracketed for the sake of consensus. By reducing this legacy to a hyphenated value set, we preserve the procedural machinery of law while dismantling the metaphysical architecture that once rendered that law binding upon the conscience of both ruler and ruled. In the absence of the Logos, that machinery inevitably decays into an administrative engine of control; when the state no longer acknowledges the ontological sanctuary that the Church once defended, it assumes the authority to define the human person by its own administrative metrics.

VI. The Neutral Square Contradiction

The fundamental incoherence of the secular-conservative project lies in its desire to retain the fruits of Western liberty while discarding the roots that nourished them. James Lindsay’s demand that we “slough off most of the religiosity” in our values—while defending the cultural inheritance of the Bible and “Judeo-Christian” ethics—is a profound nominalist error. In his framework, “Nature’s God” and “natural law” function as sufficient substitutes for the Triune God and a thick theological order. He views the history of the West as a civilization that only achieved its potential once Enlightenment thinkers “put faith in the flames.” This celebrates the very process of desacralization that dismantled the ontological framework necessary to sustain the civilization he seeks to protect.

By demanding a public square cleansed of “religiosity,” Lindsay and like-minded thinkers are not defending Western liberty; they are ensuring its erosion. If human rights are not rooted in the objective sovereignty of the Logos—if they are merely “values” reached through procedural consensus—they become entirely dependent on the administrative apparatus to define their meaning and scope. As Alasdair MacIntyre demonstrates in After Virtue, once the teleological framework of human life is discarded, we are left with “emotivism”—a state where moral language is drained of objective content and reduced to the expression of preference. In such a vacuum, “procedural neutrality” is not a protective shield; it is the final arbiter of human nature. Once the transcendent authority standing above the state is removed, one does not create a neutral space; one creates a power vacuum that the state, by necessity, must fill.

The failure of the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis is a structural necessity of the modern managerial state. As Walter C. Opello and Stephen J. Rosow argue, the liberal state emerged by subordinating individual subjectivity to the “rules of reason” that maximize social productivity, effectively trading the thick, participatory moral orders of the past for a utilitarian calculus. By positioning “neutral” values as the basis of the public square, the state creates an environment where citizens are no longer bearers of inherent, pre-political rights, but efficient contributors to the administrative order. In this system, “neutrality” acts as a mechanism to neutralize all non-instrumental human motivations—such as love, loyalty, or obedience to a transcendent order—that might disrupt the bureaucratic machine. By de-dogmatizing our tradition, we have not created a space for pluralistic freedom; we have surrendered the only vocabulary capable of challenging the administrative state’s claim to be the final arbiter of human life.

This dynamic echoes Eric Voegelin’s critique of Gnostic tendencies in modernity: the immanentization of transcendent symbols into political ideologies that promise intramundane salvation. Lindsay deploys a similar diagnosis against “woke” Marxism, yet the caution remains: without vertical anchorage, proceduralism invites the very Gnostic-like totalism it opposes. As Patrick Deneen suggests in Why Liberalism Failed, liberalism’s success in liberating the individual from traditional bonds undermines the cultural preconditions necessary for self-government, leading to a “soft despotism” of administrative oversight. Without the vertical reality of the Church bearing witness to the dignity of the person as imago Dei, the administrator becomes the final interpreter of existence.

Against this, some advocates argue that the “Judeo-Christian” synthesis need not be secularized, but can serve as an ecumenical defense of natural law. They maintain that Western liberty is rooted in moral truths that remain accessible to human reason across sectarian divides. However, this “thicker” defense ultimately founders on the jurisdictional shoals identified by Oliver O’Donovan in The Desire of the Nations. By divorcing natural law from the vertical, Christological reality of the Church, this framework implicitly concedes that the public square can be ordered by a “general” morality, while the “specific” truth of the Gospel remains a private, ecclesiastical matter. This forces a bifurcated existence: we are granted the right to hold our faith privately, but we are denied the right to challenge the state’s administrative logic with the fullness of that faith. Consequently, this synthesis remains tethered to a neutral proceduralism, lacking the jurisdictional authority to assert that the state itself is subject to the sovereignty of the Logos.

Lindsay attempts to combat the “managerial progressivism” of the Left, yet he fights it on its own terrain. By utilizing a secularized, “hyphenated” baseline, he advances a program of immanent repair encoded in the Enlightenment project. He seeks to combat the totalitarian machine while insisting on operating within the same pristine, neutral construct designed to function as its staging ground. He fails to acknowledge that if the public square is truly “neutral,” it possesses no immune system against a totalizing state. The “neutral square” is not a fortress of liberty; it is a temporary waiting room for the next administrative override. Proceduralism, detached from participation in the eternal Logos, lacks the moral density to sustain the very civilization it claims to protect.

VII. The Hyphen as Transitional Triage, Not Foundation

It is necessary to concede that the “Judeo-Christian” hyphen was not born of malice. Under the existential pressures of the 1930s and 1940s, it served as a functional act of civilizational triage. Confronted by the nihilistic threats of Fascism and Soviet atheism, defense intellectuals and religious leaders identified the need for a unified civic front. In that specific geopolitical crisis, the hyphen functioned as a pragmatic barrier designed to hold back a totalitarian flood that threatened both the synagogue and the altar.

The “Judeo-Christian” synthesis involves a degree of immanentization for civic utility—a strategy that buys time but inevitably erodes without replenishment from deeper sources. While it successfully avoids the worst modern Gnostic eruptions, it cannot generate the cultural density required for the long term. The tragedy of the contemporary Right is its inability to distinguish between a temporary tactical arrangement and a permanent foundation. By treating a wartime measure as an ontological baseline, secular conservatism has mistaken the tourniquet for the limb itself.

The erosion of the jurisdictional barrier between the state and the religious institution is no longer a theoretical concern; it is a feature of administrative governance. The conventional understanding of the “separation of church and state” is frequently invoked as a wall to keep the Church from infringing upon the state’s neutrality. In practice, however, the state has established its own secular religion—the religion of Procedural Neutrality—and is using its coercive power to force all other institutions to conform to its dogmas. The state is no longer an external referee; it is acting as an ecclesia, an authoritative body that determines which “values” are permissible and which are illicit.

This “reverse breach” is evident in the systematic encroachment upon institutional autonomy:

Institutional Autonomy: Mandates regarding health coverage force religious organizations to facilitate practices they define as inherently immoral, overriding their internal moral order.

The Ministerial Exception: Efforts to apply secular employment non-discrimination statutes to the hiring of ministers treat the Church as a mere employer subject to the “neutral” labor calculus of the managerial state.

The “Neutral” Orthodoxy: Administrative efforts to judge which activities are “religious” enough for exemption effectively place the state in the role of a theologian, stripping faith-based organizations of their jurisdictional autonomy and reclassifying them as secular agents of the state’s own moral framework.

These are not isolated instances of bureaucratic overreach; they are the natural fruits of a “neutral” system that lacks a transcendent recognition of a power higher than itself. If the state is the sole author of the values that govern the public square, it will invariably ensure that all other moral authorities remain subservient to its administrative ends.

We must distinguish between tactical alliance and metaphysical foundation. Legitimate civic cooperation between Christians and Jews is both possible and necessary; we can stand together against tyranny and protect the conditions of a peaceful public order without dissolving our distinct theological realities into a hyphenated abstraction. The danger lies in the claim that this cooperation supplies the foundation for the law, human rights, or the nature of liberty itself. A temporary coalition can preserve civic peace, but it cannot ground the objective moral order of the universe.

To hold on to the hyphen as our primary foundation is to admit that we no longer believe in the veracity of our own civilizational source code. It is an act of intellectual surrender, suggesting that we are too secularized to stand on the ground we actually occupy, preferring the “neutral” middle ground of a defensive construct. The mid-century emergency has long since passed; persistence in this framework breeds stagnation, leaving conservatism reactive—defending outcomes without replenishing the theological soil that produced them. By allowing the hyphenated synthesis to frame our political existence, we have allowed the state to become the Summus Pontifex of our age, defining the boundary between the permissible and the prohibited. Escaping this trap requires a restoration of the jurisdictional reality that actually birthed Western freedom. The doctrine of the Two Swords is not a nostalgic relic, but the only mechanism capable of breaking the state’s monopoly on the definition of the human person.

VIII. The Alternative: The Two Swords

The path out of the managerial trap is not found by digging deeper into localized archetypes or retreating into the “neutral” sandbox of the Enlightenment. If we are to reclaim Western liberty, we must recover the only framework capable of resisting the corrosive engine of the administrative state: the classical doctrine of the Two Swords.

The Jurisdictional Split

As Pope Gelasius I formulated in 494 AD: “Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled: the sacred authority of the priesthood and the royal power.” This is not a relic of a theocratic past but the foundational architecture of limited government. As Harold J. Berman documents, it was this jurisdictional conflict—the creative tension between these two authorities—that birthed the Western legal tradition by establishing that the state is not the ultimate source of law. This jurisdictional split is the only structural check against a totalizing project. The temporal sword holds the mandate for the physical maintenance of peace and procedural justice, while the spiritual sword holds the authority to interpret metaphysical reality, define the human person, and anchor dignity beyond the reach of the state.

The “hyphenated” consensus attempts to merge these spheres into a single, manageable civic unit, creating a secular integralism that forces the state to become a surrogate for the Church. By failing to distinguish between the two, we have allowed the cultural apparatus to become the final arbiter of human nature, replacing the imago Dei with “values” subject to administrative revision by fiat. Concepts such as Abraham Kuyper’s “sphere sovereignty” extend this insight: distinct spheres—family, church, state, academy, economy—each possess derived authority under the cosmic lordship of Christ, preventing any one from becoming totalitarian.

The Recovery of Sovereignty

Authentic Christian realism recognizes that the public square is a procedural necessity, but it insists that this square is not the source of our meaning. When the Two Swords are properly ordered, tyranny is structurally constrained because the state lacks the authority to define the human person. Spiritual authority acts as a constant, vertical check on temporal power, reminding the magistrate that his authority is delegated, limited, and subject to a higher Law. The Logos does not abolish jurisdictions; it orders and sustains them.

We are left with a choice that no typographical dash can obscure. We can continue to rely on the collapsing three-legged stool of modern proceduralism, waiting for the administrative state to finalize its reach, or we can return to the vertical reality of the Logos. Western liberty was not built by synthesis, nor by “neutral” contracts; it was built by the shattering of immanent idols and the assertion of Christ’s cosmic lordship over both realms. Any system that attempts to bypass the altar—whether it flees into the neutral rooms of the Enlightenment or the mythic forests of the digital fringe—will find its structures compromised by the same metaphysical law: if one does not gather with the Logos, one will inevitably scatter into the vacuum.

The Jurisdictional Buffer

The doctrine of the Two Swords is the original blueprint for jurisdictional pluralism. Its recovery requires us to cultivate and defend “intermediate institutions”—the family, the parish, and the local association—as active jurisdictional buffers. The modern individual stands naked before the state precisely because the “little platoons” that once mediated between the person and the sovereign have been hollowed out by administrative centralization. By recovering a robust sense of subsidiarity, we move beyond the “hyphenated” consensus that treats the public square as a sterile, neutral void.

In this model, the state ceases to manage the person and instead protects the spaces where the person is defined by higher loyalties. When these institutions operate under the lordship of the Logos rather than the administrative guidelines of the state, they become the primary mechanism for breaking the state’s monopoly on the human person. We do not need a new secular “values” coalition to save the West; we need to re-empower these autonomous spheres to perform their role as an immune system against the hubris of the managerial machine.

The hyphen was an emergency scaffold. Scaffolds stabilize patients in crisis; they must eventually yield to foundations. The alternative to the “Judeo-Christian” hyphen is the unapologetic assertion of two jurisdictions under the living Logos—a framework that protects the temporal order from the hubris of the state and the spiritual order from the corruption of the square. It is time to move past the hyphen, discard the mask of the utility machine, and return to the demanding reality of the faith that actually built the West. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). We must stand on the only Pillar that sustains the world.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources & Historical Texts

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Christian Classics, 1981.

Augustine. De Civitate Dei (The City of God). Translated by Marcus Dods. Modern Library, 1950.

Gelasius I. Duo Sunt (Letter to Emperor Anastasius). In Patrologia Latina, edited by J.-P. Migne.

Jerome. Select Letters. Translated by F. A. Wright. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1933.

Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Hendrickson, 1994.

Justinian. Institutes. Translated by Thomas Cooper. Various editions.

Secondary Scholarship & Modern Works

Avineri, Shlomo. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism. New York University Press, 1985.

Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Harvard University Press, 1983.

Cohen, Arthur A. The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Harper & Row, 1970.

De Lubac, Henri. Exegesis of Medieval History, vol. 1. Translated by Mark Sebanc. Eerdmans, 1998.

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2018.

First, Mitchell. Jewish History in Conflict: A Study of the Major Discrepancy between Rabbinic and Conventional Chronology. Jason Aronson, 1997.

Gregory, Brad S. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Belknap Press, 2012.

Hamburger, Philip. Separation of Church and State. Harvard University Press, 2002.

Hayes, Christine. The Emergence of Judaism: Jewish Religion in Response to the Critical Age of Antiquity. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Herberg, Will. Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Doubleday, 1955.

Jobes, Karen H., and Moises Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint. 2nd ed. Baker Academic, 2015.

Kittel, Gerhard, and Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Eerdmans, 1964.

Kuyper, Abraham. “Sphere Sovereignty.” In Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, edited by James D. Pratt. Eerdmans, 1998.

Legutko, Ryszard. The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. Encounter Books, 2016.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2006.

Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Nisbet, Robert A. The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. Oxford University Press, 1953.

Oakley, Francis. The Watershed of Modern Politics: Law, Virtue, Kingship, and Consent (1300–1650). Yale University Press, 2015.

O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Opello, Walter C., and Stephen J. Rosow. The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics. 2nd ed. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004.

Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Belknap Press, 2014.

Silk, Mark. “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America.” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1984): 65–85.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Tierney, Brian. The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150–1625. Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, 1997.

Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Fortress Press, 2012.

Ulrich, Eugene. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible. Eerdmans, 1999.

Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. University of Chicago Press, 1952.

Zimmerman, August. Subsidiarity: A Study of the Social Philosophy of the Catholic Church. Radio Replies Press, 1957.

Additional References

Huff, Wes (@WesleyLHuff). “So much noise online regarding the term Judeo-Christian…” X post, July 13, 2026.

Lindsay, James (@ConceptualJames). “For America’s 250th...” X post, July 4, 2026.

Various patristic and biblical references (Septuagint, Masoretic Text variants, Colossians 1, Romans 2) drawn from standard critical editions (Nestle-Aland, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Rahlfs-Hanhart LXX).

Dark Jordan is a Juilliard trained musician with a deep interest in Philosophy, Politics, Esotericism, and Orthodoxy. You find him on X at https://x.com/TheDarkJordan and follow his writing .

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Why People Are Concerned

2.1 Criminality

2.1.1 The Difference

2.2 Privacy (Safety)

2.2.1 Who Wants Privacy

2.2.2 Thought Harvesting

2.2.3 Stunted Growth

3 Who Is Speaking Up

3.1 Old-school Eco Warrior

3.2 Trad-Con

4 The State’s Digital Destination

4.1 Muh Dark Web

4.2 A Living Implementation

4.3 Hardware Surveillance

5 What We Can Do

5.1 Totalitarian

5.2 Identity

References

1 Introduction

New legislative changes have come to Canada, and the broad response has been underwhelming. This is notably the case with the general public, and with institutions which might have asserted themselves more strongly in times past, like the media, academia, unions, NGOs, and professional bodies such as the Canadian Bar Association. This comes to no surprise to many of us, who note the compound effect of digital pacification upon a culture that prides itself on avoiding conflict. But are those who have amassed the cojones necessary to voice some concern portraying the issue correctly?

With the recent passing of Bill C-9 and, likely to follow, Bill C-22, some are stunned by the speed at which federal law is changing, and some are attempting to share their opinion before it might be more commonplace to be criminally punished for doing so. These changes are coming courtesy of a variety of bills, with some of the most significant being Bill C-9 (Combatting Hate Act), Bill C-22 (Lawful Access Act), and Bill C-34 (Digital Safety Act). This article intends to discuss the ideas of these bills, the sociopolitical direction they lead us down, and the ways we’re likely to be thinking about them. Why? Because if we’re serious about wanting to move away from these trends, we need to discover ways of breaking out of our motivations for chasing them, which embrace negative sentiments, and cause society to become increasingly intolerant of humankind and human mind.

It’s one thing to realize the nature of these pieces of legislation and consider that society is transforming in precisely the ways many of our universally celebrated intellectual heroes had warned about. This is especially striking given that the legislation doesn’t even need to be given a far-fetched interpretation. But it’s bitter, off-putting, and cringey to see any actually in support of these changes, and particularly those who explicitly advocate for them to the end of presenting those who disagree with the legislation as already being guilty of what this legislation criminalizes:

“Bill C-9 is the combating hate act and this is absolutely a good thing unless you are a part of the problem and hate on vulnerable and marginalized communities. We should be accepting all persons. Bring back equality and equity. Bring back humanity. Less hate; more love.”^[1]

“So you want to be able to post a swastika and be a terrorist but remain anonymous”^[2]

Indeed, the agitators are out in full force, and whether they are intentional or not, their modus operandi is to draw you into a web of doubt and confusion. This has been explicated as the “aufheben der Kultur”, among other things, and, in that way, thought it’s not necessary to engage in “Jiu-Jitsu” with bad-faith interlocutors, there will come moments in some of our lives where we’re faced with a critical junction where we’re able to effect change. As such, it’s necessary to understand the ideas, not to benefit wraith-like cult initiates, but for impactful situations where the logic of policy is challenged, or a reasonable denizen of political-influence lends their ear.

2 Why People Are Concerned

The changes are focused around 3 areas:

1. New definitions for criminality

2. Erosion of privacy

3. Assurance of “safety”

As the erosion of safety occurs through the promise of safety, we can examine them together.

2.1 Criminality

These legislative changes add new offences to the criminal code:

• Intimidation and Obstruction: illegal to provoke a state of fear to impede access to a “protected place”. Exception for those seeking to obtain or communicate information.

• Hate Crime Offence: if one is deemed to be motivated by hate while committing any offence, one will be charged with an additional “hate crime offence”.

• Hate Propaganda Offence: illegal to promote hatred using a symbol:

– Terror-associated symbols

– Nazi symbols

– A noose

– Others symbols that can be confused with the above

Of course, the entire notion that one’s bias of hate can be detected through forensic and evidentiary methods only seems coherent because of a presumption of humans having “identities” and that one’s identity, or one’s most meaningful “identity”, comes through these dimensions: colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or mental or physical disability.

With these dimensions referenced in law, the state recognizes disparate types of citizens. That people are enumerated in this way is only relevant on the basis of the relations between the different types, with the details of those relations constituting the means by which the crime of hate is interpreted.

More specifically, since hate is defined through the ambiguous combination of the emotion one is experiencing as they express themselves, and the speculation of whether a reasonable person would view their expression as exposing an identifiable group to hatred, the entire determination is ultimately unfalsifiable. In fact, beyond directly making it forbidden to utter, write, inscribe, or otherwise record specific words or phrases, any hate speech legislation needs to be unfalsifiable, as it is always the forbidding of emotion, or otherwise expressing something which could invite condemnation. Any other more egregious example of what one would refer to as “hate speech” could otherwise be called incitement, with the one gray area possibly the repetition of slurs, but even that is impossible to fully understand. (Tourette Syndrome? Culture shock? Naive enunciation absent comprehension?)

As far as dimensions of identity upon which hate is theoretically predicated, if there weren’t a theory of the historical effect of group relations being applied, we wouldn’t have many of these dimensions for the state to contemplate. And though some might remain, like sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, or disability, at least they would be grounded in factors that are logically deducible. Most still know what a woman is. Age can be tracked. People of faith can declare it openly, as they can their sexual orientation. Disabilities can be diagnosed.

2.1.1 The Difference

“What’s the difference?”, some will say. “We still have group categories upon which to evaluate hate!”.

The difference is we shouldn’t be giving the state the power to assert it can read the minds or emotions of anyone. Worse than that, the moment we do grant that power to the state, we throw away the best epistemological toolset that can be used to protect people from undue harm and oppression: the opportunity for universally-applicable logic and reason. The only means by which rights and dignity can be fought for on even ground.

2.2 Privacy (Safety)

For many of us, it was always assumed that privacy is never something that can be guaranteed, just as one cannot operate in the world without having a body and face that are observable (notwithstanding the pathological effects of masking in public, be it as a criminal or as a good Covid cult initiate). When it came to the use of networked digital devices, one always wonders the degree to which law enforcement and security services operate neatly to the letter of the law, or whether there’s a difference between what information is monitored, and what information is legally acted upon. Techniques and technologies to violate privacy have existed since the advent of networked computers and digital telecommunication, and very few individuals utilize a perfectly rigorous process to maximize the care with which they use their devices.

That being said, there is a difference between operating under the expectation that the state and its agencies are prepared to use malicious practices to endow themselves with an enhanced ability to conduct surveillance on citizens, and the announcement of what is essentially an open-ended intent to do so.

With that intent declared, and acted upon, we should emphasize the need for attention to the fact that the state has taken it upon themselves to determine the definitions and methods to fulfill the requirements indicated by the new acts. Even if such details were to be formulated and presented through new legislation requiring the same level of scrutiny as the preceding initiating bills themselves, the fact of the original intent having been validated as appropriate generates some concern that it may be a foregone conclusion that future articulations will be acquiesced to obediently. But hopefully a threshold of unprecedented interest will be placed upon the revelation of those details, which will be the Governor in Council (the cabinet, which can be observed here for a reliable rictus buffet: https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/cabinet), the incoming Digital Safety Commission of Canada, and an assortment of meetings with legal representatives and private consultants to whitewash the gravy train of perpetual tyranny which has the potential to ensue.

Do humans really want to feel private? Aren’t we ultimately led, inspired, and tormented by our relationships with other people? Aren’t we perpetually chasing the amendment of those relations, our amendment through them?

What are some motivations that might exist for anything to be private at all?

• Irrelevance: Something not worth sharing for there would not be a sufficient purpose in doing so.

• Unfinished thoughts: A thought was formed, but isn’t yet fully understood, or not yet fleshed out.

• Inappropriate: “Do you have any Grey Poupon?”

• Offensive: Things better left unsaid, lest someone soil themselves.

• Security: Things that, if shared, could provide a common enemy with a tactical advantage.

Those advocating for the state’s prying eyes will claim that the prying only happens to those who deserve it, and might suggest that things don’t really need to be kept private anyway, except those things which you never share with others.

And when such things get uttered, one has to wonder whether there might be some level of projection. We see it all the time: people having to have their delusional self-image confirmed by those around them. They can’t but help themselves, and there’s no shortage of examples in anyone’s life—from ourselves, from those we hold dear, and from those playing the role of foe. Our experiences as children also serve to remind us just how and why, at least at an emotional level, we give our minds consent to run through these patterns.

2.2.1 Who Wants Privacy

“More fear porn bullshit propaganda from a brainwashed simp. How have these bills affected you?”^[3]

Who has an expectation of privacy? Forget the prospectively targeted dissidents, or the awkwardly-intentioned stumbling normies, and let’s consider the activists, agitators, and the more enthusiastic of totalitarian apologists, of whom some might suggest they don’t have anything to hide, or anything to keep private beyond the details of their own loved ones. Would they claim to share everything else?

If we are to take such agitations at face value, because surely there are those who might think this way (and certainly such things would be thought by those who want to push these bills through), we need to consider human perception in the context of assuming one’s compliance to ever-encroaching tyranny, or Perceiving Imminent Collectivist Authoritarianism (PICA). It’s not enough to simply think “these people are tyrants who hate us, so obviously they want more tyranny”, and it’s also not enough to think “these people are sheep, and pushovers at the suggestion of increasing state control”, because some are not taking a passive stance at all, but either offer an enthusiastic hand to participate in empowering the state, or are at least active in their desire to agitate those whom they see as their other.

So in returning to our question of whether members of “team tyranny” are in favour of there being no privacy we ask:

“Are there things you are not sharing?”

If the logic is that anything expressed in communication between humans (and for now we’ll say, digital communication) should pre-emptively be made accessible to the prying eyes of the state, then it stands to reason that any communication that would have otherwise taken place privately should have been compliant with the objectives of our political society as understood by the state. And if that is the case, then what is the ultimate goal of this initiative? Is it not to reveal those who are not congruent to the objectives?

If unsafe expression of thoughts and ideas is harming members of our society, and the state has taken it upon itself to prevent that from occurring, would it not be ruinous to the effort for the bad actors to become more scrupulous in their malicious dissemination?

Assuming that is indeed the case, the supposed successful effect of the undertaking would either be to capture the ill-formed thoughts, or to prevent them from occurring, thus it becomes more reasonable to demand that all thoughts be shared.

2.2.2 Thought Harvesting

It’s difficult to predict whether technology and our understanding of neurobiology will ever get to the point of having instruments able to losslessly read thoughts, but it doesn’t matter, as the instruments of today are already, to varying degrees, attempting this. Be it through reading user preferences, or leveraging machine learning to continuously score a system’s prediction performance regarding online user behaviour, each time we allow for the state to be made increasingly in charge of ensuring the safety of the expressions able to be received, we tacitly legitimize the question of whether the state should ensure the safety of the expressions able to be conceived. And though we could let our imaginations go wild on how an implementation of such a capability might one day be developed, we can at least understand that, for now, a simple means of detecting when a biometric shift occurs in an observed subject could suffice in indicating that a thought has formed without it yet having been publicly expressed.

2.2.3 Stunted Growth

Good ideas might seem to come from thin air, but that’s seldom the case. A good idea becomes lucid in the mind of the thinker because of the thoughts and experiences preceding it.

A big part of the process of developing good thoughts comes in the form of presenting their seeds, or premature approximations of those things that could elevate human experience, in one’s exchanges with their peers, foes, and other participants. Should we impede our capacity to engage in that process, we relegate ourselves to old ideas and a system of force which becomes ever-increasingly rigid in its blind adherence to them. Indeed, many believe they can disburden themselves of creative work by employing a tool of approximating language, the aesthetic of which presents an ever-refined accuracy in its orchestration of terms (namely LLMs), and hope that this somehow permits humans to have its new evolution of existence, but we’ll be left sucking on our own dust if we expect the fundamental source of an idea to come from anything other than human thinking (little green men and entities occupying the manifolds of psychoactively-observed hyperspace notwithstanding).

3 Who Is Speaking Up

Though some higher profile institutions and organizations normally concerned with liberty, like unions, academia, NGOs, the Bar Association, and academia, have voiced some concern regarding new legislation, most of it provides consent to it in the same breath. That is to say, they validate the undertaking while claiming that there could be some unintended consequences. Of course, those unintended consequences are rarely described as affecting people universally as individuals attempting to state what they believe as true, but as negative effects on “marginalized” or “minoritized communities”. This is no surprise, and is one of the motivations for my writing about this subject.

The logic of these bills is that humans express and are presented with information which has been assured to fit within a range of specification over which the state assumes the role of best understanding. Whatever undermines that configuration will, over a long enough period, come to be a counterproductive and damaging element to be responded to accordingly, as opposed to an exceptional case worth of nuance consideration.

With that in mind, let us consider some disparate sources of criticism for the legislation which are doing a better job of describing the threat, who could be organized into buckets of Old-school Leftists and “Conservatives”.

3.1 Old-school Eco Warrior

As far as “Old-school Leftist” is concerned, a lot of people reacted positively to seeing Elizabeth May of the Green Party of Canada demonstrating concern for Bill C-22. Indeed, earlier this year May had shown some apprehension to the bill, particularly concerning the language used from which a threshold for procuring a warrant would be affected, but ultimately still supported the purpose of the bill and simply wanted it amended.^[4]

Ultimately, she abandoned support of the bill, and said that it should be scrapped altogether. Juno News^[5]

Though it’s great she finally refused to get behind the bill, it’s likely that this isn’t because a change in her worldview that would have otherwise caused her to cease empowering the state with additional surveillance capability. Her gripe was on the distinction of reasonable grounds to suspect to reasonable grounds to believe and, though that’s a worthy distinction, it’s ultimately on the basis of whether ANY offense from ANY Act “has been” or “will be” committed. Given the set of Acts entailed includes ones covering “hate crime” and identity-related offenses, we really don’t need to celebrate Elizabeth May finally having good sense about applying limits to government.

This is an operational consequence of approaching political society with a collectivist worldview. There is no way to avoid having to erect a tyrannical means of governance, regardless of how aesthetically pleasant and unimposing one hopes for it to be. But, she does show some distrust of government from time to time, as demonstrated with her pushback of Bills C-9, C-22, and back in 2015 when she opposed the Conservatives’ Bill C-51. Elizabeth May^[6]

So how is it that someone employing a collectivist worldview, which desires a socialist perspective on environmental issues, supports social justice—including Critical Social Justice and Decolonization—and supposes goals of equity which fundamentally conflict with aspects of civil libertarianism she exhibits from time to time, can still demonstrate resistance to the types of government overreach which would be necessary for meeting those goals?

Anyone ensconced in a collectivist worldview is engaged in a historical mission of completing the collectivist mission, which invariably must be some representation of a frictionless collective. It isn’t a matter of having the principles in place, even if they appear to be championing those principles in the meantime. The friction, tension, and contradictions of engaging political society are the evidence that they are engaged with their historical mission, and that they sport some form of proletarian consciousness.

In the case of the climate justice warrior, they will portray a mythology of the earth-loving steward concerned for all its inhabitants, and their oppression by a hegemonically-possessed machine of greed and lust for power. Ultimately, it must be them or their delegates who hold the levers of power—levers which must be wielded in order to meet their objectives. And, sure, it might seem that she’s only willing to empower tyranny when it’s aesthetically modest, but note that her excuse is not a principle of human freedom, but that of legal precedent. This hints us back to a rule by law vs. rule of law distinction, which is further placed in perspective when considering May’s support of Decolonization.

3.2 Trad-Con

Those who identify or otherwise perceive themselves as “conservatives”, or those who believe they can be associated as the type of citizen who embodies stereotypical traits broadly associated with the “traditional” inhabitant of the land, will feel explicitly targeted by the new legislation (particularly Bill C-9). They might believe they are witnessing a play by adversaries to codify in law the means to evoke a political advantage. This isn’t necessarily an incorrect perspective, but it only scratches the surface and, in doing so, causes many to miss an opportunity to catch a glimpse the serious issues these pieces of legislation introduce, and how to consider one’s principles in the face of that.

The truth is that many self-professed conservatives are amenable to having the state remove harmful threats from society, with some removals making more sense than others. Sure, in one regard the concept of borders is a fundamental component to a functioning society, and a pre-requisite to prosperity, and, thus, removing those things which should otherwise be kept out through a properly functioning border, like dangerous people who are in the country illegally, makes it appear that the state is indeed in charge of removing bad elements from our lives. But other examples are a bit more slippery, and even break the facade of an adherence to principles of liberty, with some well-known examples being the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and the push for warning labels on music in the 1980s, the application of obscenity laws and pressure campaigns by conservative public figures to remove offensive albums from record stores, and demands for strict radio broadcasting regulations. Many of those were criticized by the “mainstream left” of the day and, at that time, may very well have been doing so for reasons that are not so heavily biased by partisanship as has become the norm today. Ironically, for those who have taken to a more leftist partisan bent, the critics of those bills may be quite supportive of empowering the state to curate our digital experiences and assign us identity labels today, with the conservatives of the 1980s possibly being part of an older generation which haven’t the clarity of understanding necessary to form an informed and principled position on digital safety.

A good example of how conservatives of today have the right general concern, but are primed to be susceptible to suggestions that are at odds with liberty, is on the issue of digital devices and children. Certainly, giving children screen time is detrimental to their development, and though many public school advocates claim that the screens help children develop the “21st century skills” necessary for success in modern society (stupid, lazy, and misguided, at best), children don’t in fact need screen time, and most people with a modicum of good sense who spend a moment thinking about it come to the same conclusion. Unfortunately, when many of these people come across Jonathan Haidt, they suddenly agree that the state should invoke the force of law to ban social media for children, believing this will mitigate exposure to harmful content, restore wasted time otherwise spent staring into the abyss, and even help with discipline by not leaving them vulnerable to as many addictive activities. Jonathan Haidt^[7]

Whatever Haidt’s motives for taking this position, it affirms that the role of the state is to know what content is being looked at by which citizen, making a determination about what content the citizen is and is not to consume, and making it their business to limit, incentivize, and punish the consumption of particular information. It also affirms that the state is responsible for guiding, limiting, and directing a child to information in a capacity otherwise undertaken by its parents.

They’ll argue that corporations target children, and that they have a business incentive for doing so. And, no surprise, as this is perfectly in line with why anyone should be suspicious of public-private partnerships and the like. No one is waiting for a corporation whose axioms are centered around a child’s wellbeing, even if they’ve ostensibly made that their product. The fact remains that parents should be making decisions and setting boundaries for their children, just as they’ve always had to.

That will be countered by with the assertion that parents can’t be trusted to execute to a high-enough degree of success, and that too many children will still succumb to the depression, indoctrination, adoption of destructive habits, and formation of an erroneous worldview that social media sites threaten to burden us with. But the natural baseline of a society is that, whatever alleged polities it might entail, its fundamental components always break down to the familial and the individual. There is no fundamental unit of society described as a set of humans raised by the state, and anything resembling as such has always been rife with problems, such as a government-operated orphanage—or, say, a residential school.

But forget about comparing to see which approach offers the best performance: choosing the best performance is the wrong way to be thinking about it. We aren’t trying compare two baseline behaviours. One intervenes and disrupts the distribution of roles as occurs in nature, and so the case must be made for the intervention, not both “approaches”. And how is this case to be made? Not on the basis of whether the intervention produces an outcome that is good enough to justify the means, but on the fundamental basis for governance itself, and whether it is ethical to even apply such a measure to any human, much less all of them. No one has the right to vote away another human’s ability to procreate or ability to raise a child. Even if one human could give consent and demand to have the state take over their own child-rearing duties, that wouldn’t justify the state applying that consent to all other families it wishes to concern itself with.

4 The State’s Digital Destination

4.1 Muh Dark Web

I always found it laughable to hear people refer to the “Dark Web”, as though there is some location in a cyber-universe of alternate dimensions which is physically demarcated. The internet is simply a term to acknowledge our capacity to digitally transmit data, and it is nothing more cryptic than that. These same people are liable to suggest that the government can regulate some portions of the internet, and not others, similar to walking around a plaza and placing police tape on one brick-and-mortar store, and not the next. But what is being policed here is the capacity for data to be transmitted and received, and that we might stylize this in terms of social media platforms through which much of that data flows, the state’s mandate does not revolve around a set of corporations, but the capacity for information it deems illegitimate or inappropriate to be received by certain parties.

In a recent Access to Information disclosure by Blacklock’s Reporter, it was shown that the government would consider legal action against persons it finds to be impeding its efforts to “uphold the integrity of and public trust in government information”. Such language better demonstrates fluid and movable limits to the application of force that the state would be prepared to utilize to maximize the supreme presentation of itself.^[8]

4.2 A Living Implementation

As was said before, the interpretation for some of this legislation and the standards by which they will be applied is still to be determined, and this will play out at the “pleasure” of the current administration and a new Digital Safety Commission, which is all the more reason to think about these legal shifts in terms of the ideas they’re based on, and the direction they move us in, rather than the semantics by which they’re expected to be constrained.

With these Acts, the state is acknowledged as being tasked with assuring the public (and itself) that the information being transmitted electronically is sanitized, and that there is oversight to understand who it is being received by. It is ambiguous enough to measure things against the term social media, given that all digital transmission intended for human eyes is arguably a form of social media—it is sent and received as a social act, pertaining to one’s social relations and socialization in society, and it is to be decoded as media that is legible and intelligible to human eyes—but the wording of the Act has made it into an even stickier and broader wildcard, by measuring it against the term Electronic Service Provider.

In a sense, there’s almost no activity we engage in anymore which does not involve an electronic device, and nearly every electronic device is capable of transceiving data, making it liable to be construed as an endpoint in digital communication or somehow pertaining to the provisioning of an “electronic service”. Any sort of modernized professional or recreational service comes with an elaborate interface comparable to what one expects when using a well-known social media platform. Emails from services might be interpreted as social media, even if they don’t display comments from other people (which they often do). And though we might assume that the devices themselves are not to be included in the list of items that are somehow indicated by these new Acts, the precedent is set, the state’s satisfaction as to whether it has succeeded in its efforts is likely insatiable, and if the completed standards or future interpretations of the legislation don’t bleed over into surveillance through hardware, future Acts which build upon these precedents can surely do that, especially as technology continues to improve.

4.3 Hardware Surveillance

“What do you mean by”Hardware Surveillance?” Doesn’t surveillance need to be implemented through services accessible through the internet?”

Well, what is the internet? It is not a place. It’s just an understanding of the ability to transmit data broadly across many systems by virtue of the fact that computers are able to transmit data to one another whatsoever. Our carriergrade telephony is leveraged via infrastructure designed to facilitate this, and our protocols are designed to attempt connections through whatever networks are available until the route is realized. But do we even need for that perfect route to be setup before surveillance data can be sent to one of the state’s systems specifically tasked for this purpose?

Not necessarily. All microcontrollers and CPUs have firmware—memory on the hardware itself—and future development could give greater consideration to the potential for surveillance by having firmware which runs software alongside the operating system presented to the user of the system containing those chips. The firmware work in conjunction with UEFI to launch software outside the OS, before the OS launches, or such as to automatically cause installation of specific commands and services once the user’s operating system is installed. The firmware can also be the operating system, as is the case with many embedded/IoT products, whether running RTOSes (Real Time Operating Systems), or even more minimal systems.

Would surveillance technology being placed on hardware have to use your internet in order to transmit data to the state? No, it wouldn’t. Though, it could certainly try to do that first, and that would be the most effective way to get that surveillance data to its intended destination. But, barring that, other means could be utilized, such as custom radio modules and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) solutions. If this initiative were sought long term, the state could see it fit to ensure that a rich pool of radio-capable devices were ubiquitously available to ensure surveillance data is always able to make its way to the destination, regardless of a citizen’s connectivity to the internet.

Here’s how Grok presented a hypothetical legislative path to digital surveillance at the hardware level:

What begins as an open-ended initiative with safety legislation, a new mechanism for enforcement, and a demand for corporate alignment with state policy is made all the more ridiculous in that the standards and interpretations are left open for the state to form and curate as it sees fit. Though it promises to do this with consultation should not assuage anyone’s concerns and should, in fact, do the opposite, given the federal government’s track record for awarding bloated contracts to companies and organizations with whom it has conflicts of interest. In time, reinterpretation, amendments, and publicly-funded pilot programs will lead to state standards for trust certificates at the hardware level, the assurance of “safe booting”, and digital safety standards for IoT, embedded security, and module safety centered not around encryption and permission to enforce operational privacy for an individual user, but “safety” regarding what information may theoretically be presented to a human. Indeed, as we’ve become accustomed to, and so the dialectic progresses, with a dialectic of digital safety.

Where this concludes is wherever the limits of technology happen to be, but which can thus far be imagined to include firmware signing, state safety standards for the reading and transmitting of sensor data, and safety for capture and storage of biometric data. A system of governance measures its success in the degree of control it has over the outcome of its initiatives, and so to grant it the semblance of legitimacy to assure the safety of our minds is to project a demand for the state to assert control over them.

Figure 1: Hardware Surveillance

5 What We Can Do

There’s little doubt that many are feeling helplessly left without a voice as it seems that the partisan structure of our system of governance is well-suited to passing in whatever legislation it targets, with the only pushback coming in the form of demands for amendments which imply the goal of the legislation is sound. For those who consider what future constraints are logically demanded by such legislation, they may feel at a loss to explain why Canadians are so warm to authoritarianism. The truth is that there is likely little to no support for an authoritarian system, freakish outliers notwithstanding, but that most are supportive of the logic to erect one so long as it is proposed under the veneer of what is socially acceptable. What this means is that hope is not lost, and that so long as there is room to move and a capacity to discuss, we can find opportunities to help people consider that they may be overlooking points about the issue that are not simply of a nature that opposes their values, but are actually ones for which their interest should ignite precisely because of those values.

5.1 Totalitarian

It’s easy to avoid imagining how a long term initiative might develop when the immediate rationale is based on “the children”. For this reason, it’s always necessary to bring people back to a base of understanding about incentives for power and professional advancement. There’s no doubt that anyone who is swayed by the argument “the corporate executives are willing to sacrifice your kids for extra bucks” can be led into agreeing that this extends to any position of sociopolitical import which, in addition to being remunerated, yields political and economic influence. Once we bring people into that view about those who draft, compose, vote on, and consult for these pieces of legislation, they’re more able to imagine that both the target of the initiative may not be perfectly identifiable, and that the operational scope is not limited to be perfectly discrete.

If you can get that far with people, then the next step is putting forward the question of what right a human being has to its own thoughts, and whether your interlocutor believes they would have a better life by relinquishing control of their mind to a governing entity—assuming, of course, that this entity has greater wisdom and is better able to orient them toward their correct destiny

(lest the interlocutor be a complete nihilist, in which case it’s time to move on).

Using the content of this article, you can then take it upon yourself to illustrate the path toward an increasingly totalizing system, both ideologically (the ideas) and mechanistically (the tech).

5.2 Identity

“The state’s enumeration of identity is precisely its policy to not allow you to be who you are.”

Any political system which seeks to extinguish the capacity for individuals to exert influence must either use immediate brutal force, or a rationale to dismiss those individuals. This means that if we have any hope of amending our system to be fair, support liberty, and potentiate human flourishing, we will need to completely and utterly obliterate any mention of identity from our laws. The only possible exception might be a national identity, but it is my opinion that such a thing is unnecessary so long as the laws apply equally to the citizens of the country, without exception.

Identity, in every case, is the reference to a theoretical model of a human mind, and once one’s association to that model is indicated, the observer can imagine the content of mind that may come to fruition as per the characteristics of that model, and cognize that model as an understanding of you. This, in essence, is a perpetual rationale to supplant any human, so long as the prospect of doing so is perceived to be beneficial.

There is no equal application of justice through laws that recognize a plurality of identities. For those identities to have any relevance whatsoever, such as to have prompted their addition, is for the state to reveal an intention for asymmetrical application of force to disparate classifications of citizen.

To move toward a just configuration of governance, we’ll be well-served by helping people understand that their perception of themselves as unique becomes meaningless in the face of a state that refers to them through group identity.

References

Blacklock’s Reporter. “Would Sue over Social Posts.” Blacklock’s Reporter, July 3, 2026. https://www.blacklocks.ca/would-sue-over-social-posts/.

Gerritsen, Ryan. “Elizabeth May Making It Known That She Along with Every Opposition Party Opposed Bill c-22 Due to Privacy & Constitutional Concerns.” June 18, 2026.

https://x.com/ryangerritsen/status/2067708645366

960578.

Haidt, Jonathan. “Get Phones Out of Schools Now.” The Atlantic, 2023. https:

//www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/ban-smartphones-phonefree-schools-social-media/674304/.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024. @HungryTrucker. More Fear Porn Bullshit Propaganda from a Brainwashed Simp. How Have These Bills Affected You? X post, 2026.

.

@HungryTrucker. So You Want to Be Able to Post a Swastika and Be a Terrorist but Remain Anonymous. X post, 2026. https://x.com/HungryTrucker/stat us/2072361444419743922.

Juno News. “MP Elizabeth May Says the Government Should Withdraw Bill c-22, Calling It the ‘Spyware Bill.’” June 3, 2026.

.

May, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth May on Combatting Hate Act.” March 23, 2026. https://openparliament.ca/debates/2026/3/23/elizabeth-may-1/only/.

May, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth May on Lawful Access Act, 2026.” April 17, 2026. https://openparliament.ca/debates/2026/4/17/elizabeth-may-5/only/.

May, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth May Speech on Bill c-51.” 2015. https://elizabet hmaymp.ca/elizabeth-may-speech-on-bill-c-51/.

(@mmysticbloom), Finding Serenity. Bill c-9 Is the Combating Hate Act and This Is Absolutely a Good Thing Unless You Are a Part of the Problem and

Hate on Vulnerable and Marginalized Communities. We Should Be Accepting

All Persons. Bring Back Equality and Equity. Bring Back Humanity. Less

Hate; More Love. X (formerly Twitter), 2026.

.

^[1] Finding Serenity (@mmysticbloom), Bill c-9 Is the Combating Hate Act and This Is Absolutely a Good Thing Unless You Are a Part of the Problem and Hate on Vulnerable and Marginalized Communities. We Should Be Accepting All Persons. Bring Back Equality and Equity. Bring Back Humanity. Less Hate; More Love., X (formerly Twitter), 2026,

^[2] @HungryTrucker, So You Want to Be Able to Post a Swastika and Be a Terrorist but Remain Anonymous, X post, 2026,

https://x.com/HungryTrucker/status/207236144441974

3922.

^[3] @HungryTrucker, More Fear Porn Bullshit Propaganda from a Brainwashed Simp. How Have These Bills Affected You?, X post, 2026,

https://x.com/HungryTrucker/status/20723

^[4] Elizabeth May, “Elizabeth May on Lawful Access Act, 2026,” April 17, 2026, https:

//openparliament.ca/debates/2026/4/17/elizabeth-may-5/only/.

^[5] “MP Elizabeth May Says the Government Should Withdraw Bill c-22, Calling It the ‘Spyware Bill.’” June 3, 2026,

^[6] “Elizabeth May Speech on Bill c-51,” 2015, https://elizabethmaymp.ca/elizabeth-mayspeech-on-bill-c-51/.

^[7] The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).

^[8] Blacklock’s Reporter, “Would Sue over Social Posts,” Blacklock’s Reporter, July 3, 2026, https://www.blacklocks.ca/would-sue-over-social-posts/.

Emmanuel Rajinder Buckshi a telecom engineer in Canada who is optimistic about the prospect of solving many difficult problems through technology. I scrutinize defenses of collectivism and look shrewdly upon the risk of runaway authoritarianism inherent in administering systems of governance.

He is long time musician and former guitar teacher, and believes an appreciation for music as a demonstration of the logical brilliance in nature provides a good starting point for people that are ready to work out differences of opinion in good faith.

He is the author of the new book Tyranny of We: The Selfishness of Collectivism. He posts on X https://x.com/RBuckshi. His book can be purchased

Here

Don Marshall is a normal Christian who loves his country and the liberties upon which it is founded. He is dedicated to doing what he can to prevent radical revolutionaries from destroying it, whether from the left or right. You can read more from him here: .