Concordia University Wisconsin Gives Christian Colleges A Bad Name
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Concordia's first response was to prevent a TPUSA chapter from being recognized on campus.In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Concordia's first response was to prevent a TPUSA chapter from being recognized on campus.The Left Has Abandoned Rational Debate And Embraced Political Violence
The aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder should leave no doubt: the left has become a political movement predicated on violence and coercion.How liberals let America’s colleges collapse into illiberalism
America’s colleges and universities ought to advance the public interest by serving as bastions of old-fashioned liberalism. If they did, they would champion free speech. They would establish communities of scholarship, teaching, and learning grounded in civility, toleration, and equality under law. And they would transmit knowledge about the sciences, social sciences, and humanities while cultivating students’ capacity to ask questions, listen attentively, examine evidence, formulate their opinions, and persuasively convey their views.
Instead, America’s colleges and universities purvey illiberalism by punishing dissent from campus orthodoxy, rewarding intolerance, treating individuals unequally under the law, and politicizing the curriculum.
The recovery of liberal education in America depends not least on liberals’ recovery of liberalism.
For decades liberals have dominated higher education in America. Why did they transform, or fail to prevent the transformation of, the nation’s colleges and universities into institutions advancing illiberal education?
Several hypotheses spring to mind.
A progressive revolution
One possibility is that liberals subordinated education to the promotion of progressive priorities. Convinced that they discovered the guiding principles for politics, the formulas for generating fair and effective public policy, and the mechanisms for implementing it, liberals demoted rigorous study of America, the West, and the world.
They marginalized messy and time-consuming debates about competing principles and rival preferences. They disseminated what they regarded as the final word about political norms, practices, and institutions. Instead of assisting students to gain appreciation for their civilizational inheritance, they concentrated on equipping them to change the world in accordance with progressive theories of justice and jurisprudence.
Another possibility is that liberals suffered from a ruinous mix of conformism, complacency, and cowardice. Formally committed to a diversity of perspectives — while identifying diversity with an openness to the varieties of progressivism — liberal professors in the 1970s welcomed a new generation of graduate students to campus who espoused a variety of left-wing doctrines. These students viewed scholarship and teaching as politics by other means.
In the 1980s, liberal faculty tenured the post-1960s generation of scholars. In the 1990s, liberals stood idly by as the recently tenured professors institutionalized political correctness by promulgating speech codes, truncating due process for students accused of sexual misconduct, and exploiting the curriculum to inculcate progressive doctrine.
In the 2000s, with the students of the post-’60s generation professors entering the professoriate, faculty discovered new weapons to enforce uniformity of opinion, including trigger warnings, microaggressions, and bias-response teams. Few were the liberals who challenged these illiberal measures or contested the illiberal slogan, “Speech is violence,” that justified them. Most campus liberals held their tongues for fear of that dreaded censure: “conservative.”
RELATED: Harvard’s hypocrisy hits the courtroom
In the 2010s and 2020s, with critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs ripening into full-blown progressive wokeism, conventional campus wisdom proclaimed that “silence is violence.” Liberals evaded accusations of complicity with violence by openly embracing the fashionable theories according, which concluded that America is racist to its core, necessitating that government and private-sector organizations give decisive weight to race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender in allocating rights, responsibilities, and benefits.
A third possibility is that liberals confused sophistication in moral reasoning with sound ethics. Under liberal supervision, college courses on moral reasoning proliferated. These typically provide students with fanciful moral dilemmas, like whether you should pull a switch to divert a runaway trolley from striking five people tied to the track onto another, which would kill one immobilized baby. Or students were served divisive public policy questions about abortion, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage.
Professors invite students to apply a variety of theoretical perspectives — from which professors typically exclude traditional conservative considerations — to resolve the moral dilemmas or settle the public-policy debates. Such courses in moral reasoning foster the delusion that the moral life consists of clever reasoning in support of progressive ends rather than in the exercise of courage, self-restraint, integrity, generosity of spirit, friendship, and the other moral virtues. Moreover, they reinforce the prejudice among professors that only those who equate progressive moral reasoning with moral excellence deserve faculty appointments, administration positions, and a respectful hearing in the public square.
Liberals reclaiming liberal education
It would be useful for liberals to examine these hypotheses — and others — that endeavor to explain one of the great failures of liberalism over the last 75 years: the demise on liberals’ watch of liberal education in America.
Cass Sunstein appears well-suited to the task. A longtime Harvard Law School professor, Sunstein is a distinguished and remarkably prolific scholar, by far the most cited in legal academia. He has written widely and influentially on law, politics, and economics. He possesses substantial government experience, having served from Sept. 2009 to Aug. 2012 as the Obama administration’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. And he is the author of a short and lucid new book, “On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom,” that restates liberalism’s core convictions and maintains that it deserves the allegiance of Americans of diverse viewpoints and persuasions.
Explaining where liberals went wrong in governing American universities is inextricably connected to understanding liberalism and defending freedom. Yet the closest Sunstein comes to even acknowledging the problem is the anodyne remark that liberals “do not like the idea of orthodoxy, including on university campuses.” That, however, is like saying that corporate executives who bankrupt their companies don’t like losing money. The issue is how those in charge contribute to their organization’s downfall.
“Liberals,” Sunstein states, “prize two things above all: freedom and pluralism.” Liberal freedom means in the first place that “people are allowed and encouraged to establish their own path, to take it if they like, and to reverse course if they want to do that.” Pluralism follows because people, possessing different backgrounds, skills, and interests, will choose different paths or alter course by their own lights. Liberalism so understood forms an enduring part of the American creed.
America’s colleges and universities purvey illiberalism by punishing dissent from campus orthodoxy, rewarding intolerance, treating individuals unequally under the law, and politicizing the curriculum.
However, Sunstein writes, “More than at any time since World War II, liberalism is under pressure — even siege.” New right critics “hold it responsible for the collapse of the family and traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority, and widespread immorality.” Intellectuals on the left decry liberalism’s inability “to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, racism, sexism, corporate power, and environmental degradation.”
Sunstein’s book responds to the “urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be.”
Liberalism, he observes, has roots in the premodern virtue of liberality, which encompasses generosity, openness, and public-spiritedness. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the thinking and practices that acquired the name liberalism in the 19th century came to be associated with religious toleration and limited government.
In 20th- and 21st-century politics, some liberals emphasized negative rights, or freedom from coercion particularly by government; others stressed positive rights, or entitlements to government assistance — in housing, education, and health care. In academic political theory, John Rawls developed the leading account, which views liberalism as centrally concerned with basic political principles to which all reasonable citizens should agree; other academic liberals hold that liberalism consists in promoting autonomy as the highest human ideal.
Sunstein celebrates liberalism as a big tent and fighting faith while preferring a progressive liberalism that revolves around John Stuart Mill’s “experiments of living.” Believing that the state should assist citizens to experiment adequately, Sunstein favors a government that, under limited circumstances, counters citizens’ expressed preferences to enhance their deliberations and make their choices more reasonable. He considers measures that extend from government information campaigns, accurate labeling, and mandatory seatbelt laws to tax incentives, cap-and-trade systems, and fuel-economy mandates.
Sunstein’s sophisticated yet accessible discussions of the rule of law, free speech, markets, regulation, and government’s role in ensuring the material and moral bases of security and opportunity provide a welcome corrective to the proliferating misunderstandings of the liberal tradition along with its many faces and supple sensibilities.
Missing the mark
His brief for freedom also reinforces liberal narrow-mindedness and smugness.
First, Sunstein mischaracterizes liberalism’s core. It is not, as he asserts, experiments of living, but rather, as John Locke and America’s founders affirmed, the conviction that human beings are by nature free and equal. This conviction sustains liberalism’s big tent, which hosts, among others, those like Sunstein who are drawn to experiments of living.
Second, Sunstein dismisses and deflects liberalism’s critics, right and left, rather than learning from them. This is costly because liberalism’s critics have much to teach about liberalism’s tendency, like all schools of political thought and all regimes, to carry its principles to an extreme.
RELATED: Students are trapped in mandatory DEI disguised as coursework
Liberalism’s vices include the dissoluteness bound up in the tempting belief that opposition to coercion entails overcoming the imperatives of morality. It also fosters the complacency that stems from overreliance on formal procedures to mete out justice. And it is steeped in the arrogance that assumes liberals have refuted faith and supplanted rather than supplemented classical teachings on ethics and politics. Brushing off critics, Sunstein fails to explore the extent to which liberalism finds itself “under pressure, even siege” because of its own shortcomings.
Third, Sunstein idealizes liberal character. He depicts liberals as secular saints neither deficient in certain virtues nor prone to specific vices. Yet to take one telling example, liberals, as Mill argues in “On Liberty” and elsewhere, tend to disregard the wisdom stored up in traditional writings, inherited beliefs, and established institutions.
Sunstein’s disregard of essential wisdom stored up in the modern tradition of freedom — particularly its early appreciation of freedom’s dependence on biblical faith and classical political philosophy — converges with the biases of many of his left-liberal friends and colleagues. This disregard begins to explain his and their failure to connect liberal education’s demise to liberals’ departures from the liberal tradition in its richness and fullness.
The recovery of liberal education in America depends not least on liberals’ recovery of liberalism.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
CNN tried to smear this pastor — but exposes the truth about the left instead
The media's newest attempt to villainize Christianity proves why such attacks rarely — if ever — succeed. And in this case, the attempted smear revealed more about the attacker than the attacked.
Enter CNN and Idaho pastor Doug Wilson.
It's an uncomfortable truth for the gatekeepers of power. In this battle, conviction, honesty, and truth win.
CNN recently profiled Wilson and spotlighted his views on gender roles, sexual morality, and politics, cherry-picking his most provocative answers and stripping them of nuance.
But how CNN framed Wilson's ideas revealed the true motive for the profile: He's a "Christian nationalist" with "controversial views," and —gasp! — his influence is growing, therefore we must tar and feather him. The profile even went to great lengths to connect Wilson to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who praises Wilson and attended a Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches in Tennessee. Wilson co-founded the CREC, which recently planted a new church in Washington, D.C.
Reaction to the profile was dramatic and predictable.
But in trying to portray Wilson — and, by extension, conservative Christians — as dangerous, CNN accidentally exposed something far more telling: the fragility of the progressive worldview.
Moral amnesia
CNN didn't profile Wilson by accident.
The network specifically targeted him because he represents so much of what it opposes. And he is perfect for the role: the unapologetic patriarch who stands against the sexual revolution, envisions a Christian world, and refuses to bend his knee to the latest secular creed. The point of the profile wasn't to better understand Wilson or his theology, but to sound a warning that his worldview is a threat to the anti-God secularism that progressivism serves.
Here's the irony: The framing and subsequent outrage assumes that Wilson's views are some bizarre novelty. But they're not.
RELATED: Doug Wilson's CNN interview exposes the left's religious
For most of history, Wilson's views would be considered unremarkable.
A Christian who desires the entire world to know Christ and to follow Him? Of course. A Christian who preaches biblical sexual ethics? Wouldn't expect anything less. A Christian who affirms a traditional view of the family? It's exactly what you expect.
Whether or not you agree with Wilson, his views are hardly alien to America or Christianity.
This interview demonstrates the collision between the moral memory of the past and the progressive sensibilities of the present. Progressivism has moved the goal posts so far in such a short amount of time that views our recent ancestors held are now treated as existential threats.
Clarity wins
But why Wilson? And why now?
You don't need to agree with him to see what's happening here: The elite view Wilson and other Christians like him as a threat, so they give him a spotlight to "expose" him.
The implied question underneath the interview is: How can someone possibly believe this stuff?!
And that's why this interview is fascinating.
On one hand, progressives, the legacy media, and those entrenched in power look down upon Wilson for having "backward" and "outdated" views, which they would describe as a "threat to democracy." But there sits CNN reporter Pamela Brown across from Wilson asking her loaded questions — precisely because Americans are no longer buying what the left is selling.
You know this is true not because of what Wilson said but how he said it.
Wilson spoke with clarity — no flinching, PR-friendly slogans, or euphemisms. He didn't try to hide his views but spoke plainly. It's proof that progressivism is lacking answers, running out of influence, and grasping at villains because it can't defend its own failing moral vision.
Utopia's lies
The progressive project isn't collapsing because Christians like Wilson are attacking it (though he is). It's collapsing because people are seeing it for what it is.
For decades, the left promised liberation, enlightenment, and progress. People were told that if they abandoned the "oppression" of Christianity, rejected the "old" moral codes, and embraced the "right side of history," life would be utopia.
RELATED: The left's new anti-Christian smear backfires
But the fruit of the progressive project speaks for itself. Instead of flourishing, Americans were handed confusion, division, and despair.
The evidence is everywhere.
The loneliness epidemic. The crises of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. The breakdown of community. The sense that all of the "freedom" that progress promised has only left us less happy, less rooted, and less sure of who we are.
This is why Christianity is a threat to the progressive project. Christians speak with conviction about God, family, and moral order. It offers an alternative to the chaos of "progress," and the left cannot tolerate a rival vision for the good life.
Except, this one actually works — because it is true.
Progress on trial
CNN thought it was shining a spotlight on a fringe figure with alleged influence over the government. It was an attempt to fearmonger about "Christian nationalism."
But what is actually illuminated is the abject failure of the leftist worldview. The progressive narrative that dominated our culture for generations hasn't delivered on any of its promises. Instead, it has made our culture sick and eroded what is true and good. The progressive utopia, it turns out, is hell.
That's why this interview matters in a way CNN doesn't understand.
You don't have to agree with Wilson's theology, tone, or methods. But he and other Christians have something the left doesn't: a coherent moral vision that doesn't shift with the cultural winds, one that doesn't seek to uproot good in service of evil.
It's an uncomfortable truth for the gatekeepers of power. In this battle, conviction, honesty, and truth win. And in this case, it's why the attacker ends up attacked. The more they smear faithful Christians as extremists, the more obvious it becomes that progressivism has nothing good to offer — no map, no anchor, and no hope.
CNN tried to put Wilson on trial, but the real defendant was secular progressivism. And the verdict isn't just "guilty" — it's "failed beyond repair."
'White people bad': CNN panel crushed over embarrassing Smithsonian exhibits
Celebrated fitness expert Jillian Michaels appeared on a CNN panel and mocked several Smithsonian museum exhibits for displaying blatant progressive bias.
On CNN's "NewsNight with Abby Phillip," Michaels fired back at Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and former Democrat strategist Julie Roginsky for taking issue with the Trump administration's official review of exhibits and materials at the Smithsonian.
Roginsky claimed that Trump has "some random person" deciding what is appropriate for the museum and that the exhibits now must align with topics that do not offend the president or his supporters. Michaels asked the panelist to address some of the exhibits, to which the Russian Roginsky replied that slavery was something the Trump administration did not want to talk about.
'Do you know that when you walk in the door, the first thing you see is the gay flag?'
“He’s not whitewashing slavery," Michaels said. The trainer continued, despite Roginsky's objection: "And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.”
Michaels argued that it was worth noting just 2% of white Americans owned slaves, and the horrible practice has been around for "thousands of years" and therefore predates America.
"Do you know who was the first race to try to end slavery?" Michaels asked Roginsky.
At that point, host Phillip chimed in, "I'm surprised you're trying to litigate who is the beneficiary of slavery."
Michaels immediately rejected the assertion and later remarked that Phillip was trying to straw man her argument and connect everything to race, just as the museum was.
"Every single thing is like, 'Oh, no, no, no, this is all because "white people bad."' That's just not the truth," Michaels said about the exhibits.
She was not done.
RELATED: CNN host says J6 was the worst day for violence in DC amid Trump's National Guard deployment
Phillip asked for other examples from Michaels, who was able to cite several from documents she brought with her.
"Every single exhibit, I have a list of every single one. Like, people migrated from Cuba because 'white people bad,'" Michaels explained. "Do you know that when you walk in the door, the first thing you see is the gay flag?" she told the panelists.
Still Phillip was not convinced, so Michaels continued.
"There's one [exhibit] called 'Change Your Game,'" she detailed. "'Is gender testing fair in sports?' Then it goes on to say how it's complex to do gender testing in sports. It's not complex. It's basic science."
The panel, often interrupting, seemingly could not answer Michaels' questions as to "why is this in the Smithsonian?"
"It's been completely captured, and it's totally partisan," the 51-year-old claimed.
As Michaels rattled off her examples, the CNN host declared, "We don't have time to litigate all of this," but Michaels fired back again.
"Of course we don't because then you're gonna lose the argument. Everything [in the museum] is racialized."
RELATED: Brian Stelter melts down as Trump makes the Smithsonian great again
Michaels took to her X page following the segment to share an image of a Smithsonian exhibit about Cuban and Caribbean migration to the United States.
The exhibit blamed the migration on U.S. support for "foreign governments that favored U.S. businesses and fought communism," along with "U.S. policy" that contributed to "violence and corruption."
It also noted "wealthy white Cubans" as the first to leave the island but did not openly note communist policies as a reason for poverty or corruption.
"When you make every single exhibit about white imperialism when it isn't relevant at all, that is a problem," Michaels told the CNN commentators.
As for her claim that just 2% of white Americans owned slaves, progressives have argued the figure is unfair because it does not focus on the states in which slave-owning was most prominent, which Politifact called "the most reasonable way" to measure it.
Although the 2017 article sought to disprove a similar claim (the figure used was 1.4%), Politifact actually cited a historian who said the idea that black American slave owners had around 20,000 slaves of their own during the same time period was "not that far off."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Democrats wanted a makeover. They got Marxism and Molotov cocktails.
In February, Democratic Party operatives and elected officials met for a retreat in Virginia hosted by Third Way, a self-described center-left organization. Their goal: develop a strategy to reverse the party’s hard-left drift and reconnect with working-class voters.
They brainstormed ways to neutralize the far-left infrastructure that now defines the party. Among their key recommendations? Embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery. Show up at tailgates, gun shows, local diners, and churches.
Corporate media and DC careerists will pretend these protesters don’t represent the party. They’ll try to repackage the fury in the streets as civic activism. But we won’t let them.
That plan flopped.
Democrats didn’t pivot to working-class America. They ran straight back into the arms of their radical base. By June, they had poured money and institutional support into the No Kings protests erupting nationwide.
These protests didn’t happen at tailgates or in small-town churches. They returned to the same streets torched during the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 — angrier, louder, and even more extreme.
And the party cheered them on.
From Hillary Clinton to Chuck Schumer, Democrat leaders lined up in support. Corporate media echoed their talking points. None of them could rein in their base. More damning, none of them wanted to.
The protests weren’t fringe outbursts. In fact, they revealed the party’s core. Their rhetoric was radical. Their goals were openly anti-democratic. Many participants waved explicitly communist banners, marched under Marxist slogans, and called for the dismantling of American institutions.
That imagery — the rage, the theatrics, the ideological extremism — was exactly what February’s conference attendees feared. But it’s now the public face of the Democratic Party. The working class isn’t clamoring for more street theatrics. They want real solutions from people in power.
So we at the Oversight Project did what we do best: investigate.
We focused on a key protest organizer, a group called 50501 — short for “50 protests in 50 states for 1 movement.” Its website paints a clear picture. Placards read “Impeach the dictator,” “Impeach the bitch,” and “No one is illegal on stolen land.” Moderate? Hardly.
We compiled Instagram activity from 50501’s state chapters — 34 in total, plus Washington, D.C., and several national branches. We tracked who its social media managers followed, and what emerged was a clear pattern of associations: communist, neo-Marxist, anti-American, and foreign-aligned groups.
These protests didn’t bubble up from the grassroots. They were built from the same radical networks that have long tried to destabilize the country from within.
RELATED: Billionaire Walmart heiress funds anti-Trump chaos, backs radical ‘No Kings’ protests
Seventeen accounts followed nearly 20 accounts tied to the Party for Socialism and Liberation — a Marxist-Leninist group that splintered from the Workers World Party. One of its former members carried out the shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.
Thirty-three accounts followed Democratic Socialists of America pages. Sixteen followed Students for a Democratic Society. Twelve connected with Students for Justice in Palestine.
Many accounts also followed known foreign-aligned activist groups, including Code Pink — famous for its disruptions in congressional hearings — and the Act Now to Stop War and Racism coalition (ANSWER).
Naturally, we found ties to Antifa as well, including groups like Anti-Fascist Aktion and prominent members such as @PunkwithACamera.
We wish we had this report back in February. We would’ve printed it out and handed it to every Democrat in attendance — just to watch their faces drop as they saw what their party has become.
This is the story of the American left for the next decade: the radical tail wagging the party dog.
Corporate media and D.C. careerists will pretend these protesters don’t represent the party. They’ll try to repackage the fury in the streets as civic activism. But we won’t let them.
We’ll keep exposing the ties. We’ll name the names. And we’ll make sure every Democrat trying to rebrand ahead of 2028 wears the consequences of these alliances around their necks.
Comedian sentenced to 8 years in prison for jokes — judge allegedly cites Wikipedia during conviction
A Brazilian comedian said a judge took issue with his Wikipedia page when she handed down an eight-year prison sentence.
Comedian Leo Lins, whose full name is Leonardo de Lima Borges Lins, was about three years removed from his comedy special when Judge Barbara de Lima Iseppi ruled the comedian made "discriminatory" remarks while on stage.
The comments the judge made during her ruling have been perceived as "power-hungry" by other comedians, who expressed shock at their compatriot's conviction.
'This is indicative of what's coming to America, and it's happening around the world already.'
Lins' 2022 special "Disturbing," or "Perturbador" in Portuguese, was ordered to be taken down from the internet by the Brazilian government in 2023, according to Euro Weekly News. Since then, it has garnered millions of view on uploads by third parties.
According to the outlet, the court found that Lins' performances have contributed to "the spread of verbal violence in society and promote intolerance."
Judge Iseppi added, "Freedom of expression cannot be used as an excuse to make hateful, prejudiced, and discriminatory remarks."
Those remarks, also known as jokes, allegedly contained material about the following groups: "black people, obese individuals, elderly people, those living with HIV, homosexuals, evangelicals, Indigenous communities, people from the impoverished northeast of Brazil, Jews, and people with disabilities."
In a video uploaded by Lins on Thursday, the comedian alleged that the judge made several bizarre remarks during the sentencing, including citing Wikipedia as a source for her claims.
"Wikipedia," Lins bluntly said in the video, called "About My Prison."
"This is not a joke," he continued. "Imagine an innocent man accused of murder. The judge says, 'Did you kill?' He says, 'No.' She goes on Wikipedia [where] people can lie. 'Yes. Convicted.'"
Lins also claimed the judge said that even though the jokes "happened in a theater," they became harmful when they "left the theater" and showed up online.
Blaze News reached out to different comedians who have faced cancellations from comedy clubs over the years due to their content, including Leonarda Jonie, who shared the news of Lins' conviction to her 215,000 X followers.
"This is indicative of what's coming to America, and it's happening around the world already," Jonie told Blaze News.
Jonie, who is Albanian, said that everyone should be concerned with the "imposition on freedom of speech" that is reaching every corner of the globe.
"Notice how you can't joke about the predetermined protected groups, but you can say whatever you want about white people?" she added.
Comedian Brendan Blacquier, who goes by the name "Uncle Hack," said Lins should be celebrated for being "overly inclusive with his jokes."
"I don't think there's a group he didn't make fun of," the comedian jokingly told Blaze News. "Also, I was unaware that the country of Brazil appointed a czar of laughter. The only appropriate charges that Leo Lins should face is for being too funny, by the sounds of it."
The popularity of Lins seems indisputable: A 2020 special on his YouTube channel has over 8.3 million views. Blacquier said that comedians of such a stature, and most comics in general, will never do what Lins did.
"That's exposing the government for what they truly are. Power-hungry to the point they want to control emotions.
I wish Leo Lins well and hope his spirits remain high," Uncle Hack added.
According to the Daily Caller, Lins' legal team plans to appeal the conviction based on a Supreme Court ruling from 2023 that overturned a lower court that criminalized Lins' words.
Lins was also fined 300,000 Brazilian reals, or about $54,000 USD.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Progressive castoffs don’t get to define the right
When woke mobs began chasing off guest speakers from college campuses and elite institutions started investigating scientists over minor infractions against gender orthodoxy, a certain class of moderate progressives realized its reign was ending. Figures like Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shermer weren’t conservatives by any stretch. In the George W. Bush or Barack Obama years, they would have qualified as mainstream progressives. But they couldn’t keep pace with the radical left.
These disaffected progressives needed a new label. But they couldn’t bring themselves to align with the “backward” conservatives they’d spent careers ridiculing. Venture capitalist Eric Weinstein coined the term “Intellectual Dark Web,” which Weiss attempted to popularize in the New York Times. But most settled on “classical liberal” to describe their stance. The problem? They had spent years rejecting classical liberalism.
Disillusioned progressives are not conservatives. They’re not classical liberals, either. They don’t get to define the future of the right.
“Classical liberal” serves as the ideal label for repackaging Obama-era liberalism in a way that reassures Republicans while keeping a safe distance from the woke left. It sounds moderate compared to identity politics. It evokes America’s founders — Washington, Jefferson, Adams. If you want to appear reasonable to conservatives while shielding yourself from attacks on your right flank, aligning with the founders is a smart move.
Whether the branding strategy was intentional remains debatable. What’s not in question is how badly this self-description distorted classical liberalism.
Some members of the Intellectual Dark Web drifted right. Most did not. They held tightly to progressive instincts. Many were atheists. Some had built careers in the New Atheist movement, penning books mocking Christianity and debating apologists for sport. Several were openly gay, and most championed same-sex marriage. These were not defenders of tradition — they spent decades undermining it.
They didn’t oppose the revolution. They led it — until the mob turned on the parts they still cherished, like feminism or science.
Toleration of all ... except atheists
When the Intellectual Dark Web embraced the “classical liberal” label, it did so to defend free speech. Most of these disillusioned progressives had been canceled — for “misgendering” someone, for not parroting the latest racial orthodoxies, or for refusing to bow to ideological litmus tests. They longed for an earlier version of progressivism, one where they still held the reins, and radical activists didn’t dictate the terms of debate.
This shared frustration became the rallying point between conservatives and anti-woke liberals. Free speech offered common ground, so both sides leaned into it. But classical liberalism involves far more than vague nods to open dialogue.
Some trace liberalism’s roots to Machiavelli or Hobbes. But in the American tradition, it begins with John Locke. Much of the Declaration of Independence reads like Thomas Jefferson channeling Locke — right down to the line about “life, liberty, and property,” slightly rewritten as “the pursuit of happiness.”
In “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” Locke argued for religious toleration among Christian sects. He even entertained the idea of tolerating Catholics — if they renounced allegiance to the pope. But Locke drew a hard line at one group: atheists.
“Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God,” Locke wrote. “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist ... [they] undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.”
For Locke, atheism was social acid. It dissolved the moral glue holding a nation together. A silent unbeliever who kept to himself might avoid trouble — but even then, Locke saw no reason to trust such a man with power. Atheism, in Locke’s view, posed a civilizational threat.
Indispensable religion
Now, consider the irony. Many of today’s self-declared “classical liberals” rose to prominence attacking religion. They led the New Atheist crusade. They mocked believers, ridiculed Christianity, and wrote bestsellers deriding faith as delusion. These weren’t defenders of liberal order. They launched a secular jihad against the very moral foundation that made liberalism possible.
Their adoption of the “classical liberal” label isn’t just unserious. It’s either historically illiterate or deliberately deceptive.
It’s a mistake to treat America’s founders as a monolith. They disagreed — often sharply — and those disagreements animate much of the "Federalist Papers." But one point remains clear: Their understanding of free speech and religious liberty diverged sharply from modern secular assumptions.
RELATED: Labeling you ‘phobic’ is how the left dodges real arguments
Even after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified, several states retained official churches. Courts regularly upheld blasphemy laws well into the 20th century. Some state supreme courts continued defending them into the 1970s. Blue laws, which restrict commerce on Sundays to preserve the Sabbath, remain on the books in several states.
John Adams put it plainly: The Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The founders, and the citizens they represented, expected America to function as an explicitly Christian nation. Free speech and religious liberty existed within that framework — not apart from it.
Skin suit liberalism
So when non-woke liberals claim that “classical liberalism” demands a secular or religiously neutral government, they misrepresent history. That idea would have struck the founders as absurd. The Constitution was not written for New Atheists. Adams said so himself.
Faced with these historical facts, critics usually pivot. They argue that America has morally advanced beyond its founding values. Today, we tolerate non-Christian religions, recognize women’s rights, and legalize same-sex marriage. These changes, they claim, bring us closer to “true” American principles like freedom and equality.
Classical liberalism was a real political tradition — one that helped shape the American founding. It deserves serious treatment. Watching it get paraded around by people who reject its core values is exhausting. If Locke or Adams saw progressive atheists wearing classical liberalism like a skin suit, they’d spin in their graves.
The secular liberalism of the 1990s and early 2000s is not classical liberalism. It isn’t even an ally of conservatism. The non-woke left served as useful co-belligerents against the radical fringe, but they were never true allies — and they should never be allowed to lead the conservative movement.
Some have earned respect. Carl Benjamin, Jordan Peterson, and others have taken real steps to the right, even toward Christianity. That deserves credit. But let’s not kid ourselves. Many who still fly the “classical liberal” banner don’t believe in the values it represents. They reject its religious foundation. They rewrite its history. They co-opt its label while advancing a worldview its founders would have rejected outright.
Disillusioned progressives are not conservatives. They’re not classical liberals, either. They don’t get to define the future of the right. And they certainly don’t get to lead it.
'Woke right' smear weaponized by liberal interlopers against MAGA conservatives, populists — and Arby's?
James Lindsay. Photo by DOMINIC GWINN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty ImagesOn his website, he stated:
Woke Right refers to right-wing people who have adopted the characteristics and underlying worldview orientation of the Woke Left for putatively "right-wing," "conservative," or reactionary causes. They are, as reactionaries, the image of the Right projected by the Left made real by players claiming to be on the Right. That is, they’re right-wing people who act and think about the world like Woke Leftists.
Lindsay echoed this definition in his written responses to Blaze News, in which he suggested that woke right "means using critical theories or Marxian analysis for right-wing or anti-Left causes."
"It is very specific," Lindsay continued. "Most conservatives do not meet this definition."
A sizeable portion of the MAGA coalition does, however, supposedly meet this or one of Lindsay's other definitions. Right-wing populists, for example, are on the liberal's naughty list, as are those who subscribe to national conservatism, which he dubbed "the Woke Right final boss."
The application of "woke right" to national conservatives amounts to the more tactical smear, as it not only cuts through the MAGA coalition but deep into the Trump administration and the Republican Party.
Past speakers at the National Conservatism Conference, which is run by the Hazony-led Edmund Burke Foundation, include Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Michael Anton, another senior State Department official; Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby; White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; Trump border czar Tom Homan; and Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.).
Of course, there's also JD Vance, who underscored in a NatCon speech — given just days before President Donald Trump chose him as his running mate — that while America was founded "on great ideas," it is not, as some have suggested, reducible to "just an idea."
James Lindsay and a bunch of his friends tried to pump the hatred higher because the term 'illiberal' — it just didn't succeed in sufficiently tainting and de-legitimizing conservatives.
While Lindsay has danced around labeling Vance "woke right" for daring to express such thoughts, stating in December, "I haven't called JD Vance Woke Right anywhere yet," he has implied as much — calling him a "post-liberal" with a predominantly woke right team, who not only entertains the woke right definition of "nation" but did the unspeakable: speak at a National Conservatism Conference.
In fairness to Vance and his fellow NatCon alumni, it is apparently easy to find oneself labeled "woke right." After all, even a fast-food chain has been tagged.
Lindsay recently indicated online that Arby's had veered into woke right territory with its post, "Unlike dad, our ham & swiss actually came back."
In the much ridiculed post, which he has since apologized for and walked back, Lindsay noted, "That's curtains for them. Cringe af."
When asked why national conservatives warrant their categorization as "woke right," Lindsay suggested that while "not all of National Conservatism is Woke Right ... the general thrust of the movement meets the basic definition."
Final boss
Hazony, the author of "The Virtue of Nationalism" whom Lindsay has repeatedly targeted with the “woke right” smear, explained to Blaze News that the strategy behind the term is not new.
"The main people who are behind this — and James Lindsay is the one who's most explicit, but I don't think that he's at all the only one — they've been doing the same thing for many years, long before the term 'woke right' came out; at least as far back as Donald Trump being elected, you know, so it's almost a decade ago," said Hazony. "There was this game of saying that in between liberals and Nazis or racialist fascists — in between, there is no legitimate position. That is a standard argument of the anti-nationalist liberal camp that has been used by many, many different people, and it's always the same."
"When people started using 'illiberal' ... in the mid-2000s, what they were doing was eliminating the legitimacy of the word 'conservative,' because 'illiberal' is anybody who's an authoritarian or a Nazi or a theocrat or a fascist, plus anybody else who's not a liberal," continued Hazony. "So that strategy, using the term 'illiberalism' as a way of saying, 'No, I'm not going to recognize that there are any legitimate conservatives or nationalists' — that's been around in that form for at least 15 years."
Hazony noted that more recently,
James Lindsay and a bunch of his friends tried to pump the hatred higher because the term "illiberal" — it just didn't succeed in sufficiently tainting and de-legitimizing conservatives. So they switched to "Christian nationalism," and it was the same kind of thing, where, you know, you pick the absolute least palatable people who can be called "Christian nationalists," you quote them, and then you say, "Well, everybody who's a nationalist and a Christian all the way right up to the borders of liberalism — that entire sphere of conservatives and nationalists who are basically normal but they have criticisms of liberalism — no, they're all illegitimate. They're all totalitarians. They all reject the American Constitution." And so they tried that; that peaked in 2023; and it failed. It petered out. They didn't succeed in convincing the average, intelligent person who's paying attention that the political spectrum is only liberals and fascists.
Whereas previous attempts failed, Hazony indicated that "this time, they have succeeded in drawing blood."
"This term [woke] was designed to be humiliating by taking the term that we were using for the Maoist-style cultural revolution that was taking over America and Britain and other countries. And now they say, 'Those of you who are fighting against this, you're exactly the same. You're the same exact thing.' And it upsets people."
'You got dogmatic, fanatic liberals who thought that the whole world simply could be brought under liberalism either by persuasion or, if not, then by conquest.'
Hazony further told Blaze News that "it's deeply insulting at a personal level for people who've devoted their time to trying to save America and the West from the woke, and at the same time, it's incredibly effective at destroying the coalition that was built — the anti-woke coalition — by making the different parties despise one another."
"The idea that liberalism is about toleration was just thrown out the window and you got dogmatic, fanatic liberals who thought that the whole world simply could be brought under liberalism either by persuasion or, if not, then by conquest."
Playing with fire
Lindsay has tried tarring Blaze Media with the same brush he has used on Hazony and others, characterizing it as "the first captured stronghold" in his imaginative woke right "takeover" narrative.
'The term has little meaning other than as a slur used by people trying desperately to gatekeep this intellectual, cultural, and commercial majority movement.'
Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson, whom Lindsay has implicated as a key player in this supposed takeover, said, "I know Lindsay and we had a decent relationship until he suddenly lumped me and my tenure here at Blaze Media with his slur."
"Obviously, we have a wide variety of people and opinions at Blaze Media. We represent the broad MAGA-MAHA majority coalition, and I take that role seriously," continued Peterson. "But I do not need to say for the record that we are not 'woke right' because the term has little meaning other than as a slur used by people trying desperately to gatekeep this intellectual, cultural, and commercial majority movement."
Peterson suggested that the term's capricious usage has helped empty it of meaning.
"What's puzzling and ultimately discrediting about the term is that Lindsay and others lump disparate people and groups together into a wild, grand conspiracy," continued Peterson. "He and his associates refer a lot to abstract -isms like hermeticism, communism, and gnosticism and call all kinds of people followers of various schools of thought: 'Nietzscheans' and 'Schmittians.'"
The "Schmittian" smear lobbed around evokes Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who critiqued liberalism, defined politics as the distinction between the categories of friends and enemies, and lent intellectual support to the Nazi regime in Germany.
Peterson noted that he once tried to explain his thoughts on Schmitt to Lindsay over text.
"As a student of political thinkers who were taught by Leo Strauss, who fled Nazi Germany (as opposed to Schmitt, who became a Nazi), I think Schmitt's writings are important to anyone who wants to seriously consider the nature of executive power, which is why they are still studied by people of all kinds throughout the world," said Peterson. "But the idea that this makes me a Nazi or that I agree with everything Schmitt says or believed is ridiculous. James recently asked me to 'denounce Schmitt' on X at his command, which sounds a lot like he's trying to initiate the very 'struggle sessions' he often decries."
Peterson emphasized the range of people and institutions that Lindsay and his fellow travelers have lumped into his "grand conspiracy," noting, for instance, that "they throw in institutions from the Roman Catholic Church to the Claremont Institute, countries from Hungary to China, and individuals from General Michael Flynn to Yoram Hazony to Peter Thiel in the mix as part of whatever the 'woke right' is."
"It becomes silly pretty quick," said Peterson.
Threatened liberals
The host of BlazeTV's "The Auron MacIntyre Show" — one of Lindsay's frequent targets — said that when it comes to Lindsay, woke right "seems to be more of a branding exercise and a political weapon than it does anything with definitive content."
"I think that's the reason so many people have had difficulty when attempting to have even a basic discussion about the term," MacIntyre said. "The guy who is most famous for coining and popularizing it himself has admitted that it wasn't a great one, and it doesn't really have a lot of content besides its ability to be used as a political weapon."
'The only thing that seems to actually link any of these people together is their willingness to win.'
MacIntyre suggested that woke right's apparent transformation in the wild from a denigratory term for anti-Semites and identitarians into a strategic full-spectrum put-down is “the real trick of this term.”
"A lot of people assume that [anti-Semites and identitarians] were the original targets, and because of that, many people thought that perhaps there could be some value in it because, you know, not all of those groups are particularly ones that people enjoy being associated with," said MacIntyre. "That said, it's become quickly clear that the expansion of the term has now come to encompass Orthodox Jews like Hazony, guys who are big fans of Israel like Tim Pool, and others."
"He's included a large number of very well-respected people who are obviously well outside of this — guys like Matt Walsh."
RELATED: Let's build a statue honoring Pat Buchanan
"The only thing that seems to actually link any of these people together is their willingness to win, their willingness to fight back against the left, their willingness to say, 'Actually, we're going to take affirmative steps. We're going to take power. We're going to use power to win political battles.' And that seems to be the main violation," continued MacIntyre.
'What they're finding is actually, no, conservatives would like to be in charge.'
When asked whether this campaign might be, at least in part, the early stages of an effort to politically neutralize JD Vance ahead of the next presidential election, MacIntyre answered in the affirmative.
"Not only is that the case, I think he's been pretty explicit about that," said the BlazeTV host.
MacIntyre suggested that Lindsay and other "new atheists, rational-centrist types" feel threatened by Vance and the national conservatives, given their willfulness and refusal to "be ruled by people who hate them, hate their values, hate their religion."
MacIntyre suspects that while the "salience" of the "woke right" term has risen, the credibility of those wielding it has "plummeted."
"[Lindsay has] made many enemies of pretty high-profile figures with good reputations by throwing around this term and attacking people who clearly don't hold any of the nefarious views he's attributing to them," said MacIntyre.
The attacks have also served to expose bad actors who "ultimately were hoping to undermine the conservative movement rather than be a productive part of it," said MacIntyre. "That's something that's critical to know at this juncture."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Today's top stories
www.theblaze.com