In our modern world, it is very common to conflate motives we do not understand with some form of mental illness. This is understandable when it comes to horrific crime. A serial killer is so violent and twisted that it is hard for us to comprehend his actions, and there is certainly a fair amount of mental illness that is a factor.
Today, however, people often use this explanation when it comes to political disagreements. Abortion, hatred of Christians, the mutilation of children — these beliefs are so horrible that they can only possibly be explained by a malfunctioning brain. But that is not the only explanation. The other option is that some people have a very different set of values that drive them to pursue goals we view as evil.
Our differences are not based on mental illness but fundamental beliefs about right and wrong.
The average American would like to avoid this truth, because it comes with an unnerving conclusion: Your political enemies are not crazy; they are sane people who hate you and want to hurt you.
As sophisticated and modern people, we tend to avoid language that implies some form of objective metaphysical truth. Evil is a concept that conjures up images of old churches, judgmental Sunday-school teachers, and medieval peasants trying to explain a drought.
We have the technology and understanding to explain everything in the world around us. Explanations that call on unseen forces or divine intervention are no longer required. In this thoroughly materialistic view, humans are simply animals with more sophisticated brains. Any undesirable behavior, therefore, can be understood as a malfunction of that brain.
There is no evil; there is only mental illness.
Modern Americans are universalists in a very strange sense. We assume that our values, beliefs, and customs are the default for all humans everywhere. Americans believe that all our assumptions about the way life ought to be lived are arrived at through individual human rationality, so if another person has a functioning brain, he will, of course, come to the same conclusion.
When we are confronted with someone who has very different understandings or goals, it is assumed that something has happened to his faculties of reason.
We try to argue with these people in hopes that rational debate will help them see the error of their ways. If debate does not work, we begin diagnosing the dissenting individual with all kinds of pathologies that explain why he doesn't see the world the way we do. The explanation for divergent morals or goals is always a defective mental process, never a genuine difference in how we view the world.
The obsession with material explanations accounts for half of this phenomenon, but the other half is explained by our desperate need to avoid real conflict.
One of the major selling points of liberalism was the reduced need for violent conflict by removing existential questions from the political arena. Who is right about God? What is the ultimate good? To what end should we orient our society? These are all important but dangerous questions. The answers are exclusive and all-encompassing.
These are the things that people are willing to kill and die for, so better to make them off-limits and focus on something everyone can agree on — making more money and increasing the standard of living.
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The desire to end the terrible wars that were fought over religion or identity is entirely understandable, and it is difficult to argue that the focus on economic cooperation did not produce significant benefits, but this was always a trade-off that could never last.
We may like to pretend that we are too advanced and sophisticated to get hung up on these primitive concerns, but under the surface, they continue to define us. Those conflicts do not disappear, and when they re-emerge, you have stripped your civilization of the tools needed to identify and address them, which is exactly what we are seeing now.
Americans no longer have the moral language to discuss good and evil, so they simply apply a clinical diagnosis to their opponents instead. Believing a radical leftist is mentally ill is far easier than addressing the alternative. If the progressive is a perfectly sane person and still wants to take your son if you do not chop off his genitals, then the calculus for what must be done changes radically.
Differences of opinion can be navigated as long as two parties share the same moral assumptions and the same goals. But if there is a fundamental difference in what is considered good or evil — if two groups seek radically opposed outcomes — then no amount of rational debate will ever resolve the core issue.
If our differences are not based on mental illness but fundamental beliefs about right and wrong, then a disturbing conclusion emerges. When rational debate is no longer an option, then the only solution left is the same one our unsophisticated ancestors came to for centuries — one group must win and the other must lose.
In the best scenario, this means an exercise of power from the winning side that allows it to rule over the other, forcing its way of life upon the defeated foe. In the worst scenario, this means violence and war until one side is no longer willing to fight to defend its way of life.
In either case, this is a return to an existential understanding of politics. The stakes are no longer higher taxes or lower taxes, but survival.
It should be said that mental illness is real and can be a factor in some political trends, but the idea that half of Americans are crazy because they do not share your political views is absurd. The truth is much darker: We are at least two societies, with mutually exclusive understandings of morality and purpose, trapped in one country.
The theoretical neutrality of the liberal system allowed this drift to occur under the surface, but the differences have become too extreme to ignore. Both sides have their own internally consistent understanding of the world, but they are entirely incompatible with each other.
One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, and the winning side is going to impose its way of life on the other. There is no way to avoid this reality, and obscuring the truth with comforting fictions about mental illness only ensures that you will be the side that loses.
How did we end up with modern leftism and all its ills?
For Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the answer depended on how deep you were willing to dig. For the average person, the problem seems to have started with World War II; the "more informed" soon realize that World War I is when things went wrong.
This battle will not be won on social media, through new platforms, or by means of yet another ideology.
But the "genuine historian," writes von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in "Leftism Revisted," goes further back in history still, all the way to the "mother of most of the ideological evils besetting not only Western civilization but also the rest of the world": the French Revolution.
Paul Kingsnorth’s compelling diagnosis of what ails modern man in "Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity" places him somewhere in von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's third category
It’s not that this English writer — a recent convert to the Orthodox Church — dismisses the damage wrought by the 20th century, which shattered the West’s confidence in its animating principles and, in time, killed Christendom — setting in motion a broader campaign of deracination, disorientation, and disenchantment, advanced from both sides of the liberal political binary.
Like von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Kingsnorth understands that these terrible events are the expression of a sickness that took hold centuries ago, at the storming of the Bastille — an event that ushered in the birth of ideology, the razing of ancient hierarchies, the sacrifice of multitudes in the name of "Reason," and the initiation of the continental variety of the liberal experiment.
Kingsnorth, however, goes a step farther. He does not merely trace the origins of the crisis — he names the thing that now drives it.
That which has demolished "borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing" is, according to Kingsnorth, a centuries-old "monster that grows in deserts," coming of age in the spiritual wastelands created by the French and Industrial Revolutions.
This insatiable force — what Kingsnorth calls the "Machine," but also "Progress" — has swallowed the world and, in doing so, made it increasingly difficult for those within it to perceive reality except through its own corrupting lens.
What cannot be quantified or digitized — "that irrational, illogical world of beauty, wild nature, and spiritual truth" — is not merely ignored but actively obscured.
The Machine’s values — progress, openness, the rejection of limits and borders, therapeutic individualism, universalism, materialism, scientism, and the primacy of market logic — have become so ubiquitous, writes Kingsnorth, that we now treat them "as if they were natural as rain or wind."
These values can be distilled into what he calls the "Four S’s":
They stand in direct opposition to the older order, grounded in the "Four P's": past, place, people, and prayer.
Where the Four S's dissolve inheritance, the Four P's depend on it.
Care for and attention to the Four P's threaten the Machine’s liberal anti-culture and are therefore treated with suspicion or contempt — dismissed as naive at best and at worst as reactionary, bigoted, or "deplorable."
Recall former President Barack Obama’s remarks about working-class Pennsylvanians who failed to embrace the promises of progress: "It’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion ..."
Like its supporters, the Machine’s critics are legion. Yet their opposition is often absorbed.
Kingsnorth acknowledges that conservatism, at least in theory, comes closest to offering an anti-Machine politics rooted in human reality. It values tradition, centers home and family, affirms religious faith, and resists both centralized power and abstract utopianism.
But the problem, says Kingsnorth — drawing on Roger Scruton and G.K. Chesterton — is that mainstream conservatism operates largely within the same liberal framework it claims to resist.
As Chesterton observed in 1924, "Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition."
The result is a politics that conserves the aftermath of revolution rather than the inheritance it displaced.
The goalposts, in other words, were moved long ago — inside the belly of the beast.
After searching for a label for those who would genuinely resist the Machine — those seeking, as Rod Dreher has put it, to build "networks of resistance" — Kingsnorth arrives at a term deliberately resistant to left-right categorization: reactionary radicalism.
Reactionary radicalism, says Kingsnorth:
aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomized individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a world view. A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion. … A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbor rather than competition with everyone.
But how, exactly, can this be put into practice?
This battle will not be won on social media, through new platforms, or by means of yet another ideology. These are the Machine’s native terrain — its shock absorbers.
One increasingly widespread act of resistance Kingsnorth highlights is homeschooling, which he calls "the most important thing any parent can do to resist Machine culture."
More broadly, he urges a turn away from the purely rational toward the reasonable; the building of parallel systems resilient enough to resist assimilation; the rejection of technologies that promise freedom while delivering dependence; and a renewed pursuit of transcendence.
In short: a recovery of the Four P's.
To those still enthralled by the Machine, such people will appear as barbarians — unrefined, unassimilable, and threatening.
The question, Kingsnorth suggests, is what kind of barbarian one will become.
The "raw" barbarian has fled the Machine’s reach. The "cooked" barbarian remains within its walls but practices quiet, persistent dissent.
Either way, he has made himself inedible. Enough indigestible barbarians, and the all-devouring Machine may choke to death.
The Southern Poverty Law Center was formally incorporated in 1971 by a pair of Alabama lawyers keen on handling anti-discrimination cases and advancing the cause of civil rights in the United States.
The SPLC morphed over time into a smear- and fear-mongering racket, raking in millions of dollars in contributions — over $106.47 million in fiscal year 2024 alone — and paying its executives gargantuan salaries while both attacking law-abiding conservatives and allegedly funding the very extremism it purportedly seeks to curb.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that a grand jury in Alabama returned an indictment charging the SPLC with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.
The organization is accused of secretly dumping over $3 million in donated funds to individuals linked to various extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America — groups the SPLC was supposedly fighting against.
'The SPLC hate group label will almost undoubtedly make it into press reports about future events.'
While liberal donors might now be waking up to the fact that the SPLC is a radical and rotten organization, conservatives have long recognized it as a menace and for good reason: The SPLC's mischaracterizations and alarmist rhetoric helped set the stage for at least one shooting.
The Family Research Council is a conservative think tank that promotes family, marriage, and the rights of the unborn and speaks forcefully against divorce, pornography, and sexual deviancy. By maintaining orthodox and principled biblical stances on various social issues, the FRC found itself on the SPLC's radar.
The liberal hate racket listed the Family Research Council as an "anti-gay group" in a winter 2010 report and put it on the same list of extremist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations — groups that allegedly "have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics."
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Heidi Beirich, then-research director at the SPLC, said there was no difference between the FRC and the KKK in the eyes of the SPLC; that "what we're saying is these [anti-gay] groups perpetrate hate — just like those [racist] organizations do."
The SPLC's hate-mongering ultimately set the stage for a terrorist attack against the Family Research Council.
Floyd Lee Corkins II stormed into the office of the FRC in Washington, D.C., armed with a gun on Aug. 15, 2012. Corkins later told investigators that he got the name of the conservative organization from the SPLC's list of alleged anti-gay groups and that he intended to kill as many FRC employees as he could.
'They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.'
The terrorist proved unable to execute his massacre thanks to the bravery of Leonardo Reno Johnson, the unarmed security guard on duty that day.
Despite catching a bullet to the arm, Johnson managed to disarm and subdue the shooter.
"Floyd Corkins was responsible for firing the shot yesterday that wounded one of our colleagues and our friend Leo Johnson," said Tony Perkins, president of the FRC, "but Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center."
The SPLC displaced any and all blame for the attack, stating the day after the shooting that "Perkins' accusation is outrageous" and that the FRC "should stop the demonization and affirm the dignity of all people."
As evidenced by its serial demonization of other conservatives and conservative groups, including Turning Point USA and its founder Charlie Kirk, the hate racket clearly did not learn anything from the incident.
The SPLC's "Year in Hate and Extremism 2024" report contained a lengthy section titled "Turing Point USA: A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024."
This section stated that:
Kirk knew full-well what the hate racket was up to, stating on May 25, 2025, "The SPLC has added Turning Point to their ridiculous 'hate group' list, right next to the KKK and neo-Nazis, a cheap smear from a washed-up org that’s been fleecing scared grandmas for decades."
"Their game plan? Scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us," continued Kirk. "Remember the Family Research Council? An SPLC-inspired gunman went after them. They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs."
The day before Kirk's Sept. 10, 2025, assassination at Utah Valley University, the SPLC Hatewatch newsletter named Kirk and TPUSA as extremist, according to testimony entered into the congressional record in December.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), chairman of the House subcommittee on the Constitution and limited government, said during the same hearing, "As with FRC, in the aftermath of Charlie's assassination, there have been no retractions, no accountability, and no acknowledgment of the risks inherent in branding mainstream political figures as existential threats. These incidents, separated by 13 years but linked by the same targeting architecture, underscore a sobering reality. The SPLC's designations don't merely stigmatize. They can serve as ideological permission slips for individuals already willing to commit political violence."
Unlike Corkins, Kirk's alleged assassin does not appear to have made any mention of the SPLC's smears against his victim.
FRC president Tony Perkins welcomed the charges against the SPLC on Tuesday, noting that "for years, the SPLC has used its platform to label and target organizations with whom it disagrees, often blurring the line between legitimate concern and ideological attack. That kind of reckless characterization doesn't just damage reputations, it has put lives at risk."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!A recent set of man-on-the-street-style interviews conducted by conservative Kaitlin Bennett in Tampa, Florida, yielded alarming results — as many of them shared that they would feel more comfortable standing next to someone shouting “Allahu Akbar” than someone in a MAGA hat.
“The good news is that we were actually filming for three hours, but we still managed to get 30 minutes of liberals saying Donald Trump and Trump supporters of MAGA were worse,” Bennett tells BlazeTV host Pat Gray on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”
“I have 30 minutes of this on my YouTube channel, Liberty Hangout. And a woman literally goes, ‘I’m a Democrat, so I definitely feel I, you know, can relate more to radical Islamists.’ ... She said it out loud. That’s their entire thing right now,” she explains.
Bennett took to the streets of Tampa while the city was celebrating St. Patrick’s day, which worked in her favor.
“I’ve always found the best way to engage with people on a topic like this is to go up with them and say something completely unrelated,” she says, noting that asking everyone where St. Patrick was from helped to break the ice before the questions got more political.
“Then they answer, and I get them hooked,” she explains.
“Most people just walked away. Most people, actually, when they see a camera, they do have a little bit of awareness of, like, ‘Don’t open your mouth,’” she says, though she notes that the woman who related more to radical Islamists justified her position with the fact that “she’s gay.”
“For a lesbian to say that she has more in common with radical Islam than MAGA supporters, when they would literally kill her, it’s so ignorant. It’s just sheer, unadulterated ignorance,” Gray says, shocked.
To enjoy more of Pat's biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
American snowboarder Chloe Kim was not looking to turn her Olympic event into a sideshow.
The two-time gold medalist from California was subject to the most popular — and divisive — question being asked of U.S. Olympians at the 2026 games in Italy.
'The US has given my family and I so much opportunity.'
On Monday, a female reporter asked a panel of Americans how they "feel representing Team USA right now."
The open-ended question has been a source of much controversy already, but when Kim spoke up, it was probably not what the reporter was hoping for.
"Obviously my parents being immigrants, this one definitely hits pretty close to home," Kim began. "I think in moments like these, it is really important for us to unite and kind of stand up for one another for all that's going on."
While her answer was not likely to please both sides of the political aisle, Kim continued.
"I'm really proud to represent the United States. The U.S. has given my family and I so much opportunity. But I also think that we are allowed to voice our opinions on what's going on," the 25-year-old added. "And I think that we need to lead with love and compassion. And I would love to see some more of that."
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The question in Livigno, Italy, seemed to be deliberately politically divisive. The reporter prefaced it with a reminder that President Donald Trump had called Kim's "teammate" Hunter Hess "a real loser."
Hess is an American freestyle skier who told reporters that he had "mixed emotions" about representing the United States, which the president replied to by saying Hess should not have tried out for the team.
"U.S. Olympic Skier, Hunter Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn't represent his Country in the current Winter Olympics. If that's the case, he shouldn't have tried out for the Team, and it's too bad he’s on it," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Hess later walked back his comments, stating on his social media that he loves the United States, while adding, "But there are always things that could be better."
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Kim, born in Torrance, California, is defending her Olympic gold in women's snowboard half-pipe, having won at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and the 2022 games in Beijing.
Kim qualified for the finals on Wednesday, finishing first in the qualifier ahead of Japan's Sara Shimuzu and American teammate Maddie Mastro, according to the Olympics.
The final takes place on Thursday, February 12, at 1:30 p.m. ET.
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Whatever our theological differences, our common enemy is the radical left, which seeks to persecute Christians of all kinds.
The Irish are a deeply religious people. They have rejected their Catholic heritage and replaced it with devout secular liberalism.
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