The Freedom & Virtue Institute

09/15/2026

My latest article in The Vital Center.

We are rational, individual entities because we are self-conscious, can reason, and have dominion over our actions. How can we retain such dominion by outsourcing our rational powers and decision-making to contraptions? What can be the incentive for the masses to engage in the habits of rational exe

08/27/2026

The concept of culture war is derided by some people. However, let ask ourselves, is there cultural conflict in America today? It is difficult to find the soul that may say that there isn’t.

Americans have been waging a “culture war” in the last several decades. especially since the early 1990s. It is on the 90s that the effect of previous cultural shifts appear, and shocked many of us. Since the late 1980s a number of examinations of cultural shifts have appeared from men such as James Davison Hunter, Charles Murray, Robert Putnam,, Robert Bork, and many others.

Cultural conflict in America is nothing new. It did not start with the great disruption of the 1960s either. We can safely say that it began even before the Declaration of Independence.

Certain factors have made the present moment unique, at least to some extent. One is the technological communication improvements giving a global voice to more and more people. Another is the defeat of orthodox communism. In s sense, Soviet communism was very tangible and direct in his approach to “hot” revolution. A clear enemy helps people circle the wagons against it. Today’s Marxism is a web, it camouflages, it embraces the culture as its war zone, it is the united front enemy—now you see it, and now you don’t.

So, there is a culture war because cultural Marxism and the developments rising from Critical Theory transformed the understanding of revolution by questioning and transcending dialectical materialism. Moreover, reacting to these developments, a number cultural responses vie for control of a response. Classical liberalism, free markets, and even traditional morality are questioned from the right. Are we to reaffirm historic Christian principles and ideas such as limited government and subsidiarity? Is it a return to those values what can counter leftist barbarism? Is the response needed a more nationalist and even jingoistic isolationism? Is it technocratic globalism?

The question is whether or not Westerners in general and Americans in particular have the moral and intellectual resources from which to draw in order to meet the present challenge. Even as important is the question of whether or not the present moment is not unusual but more akin to our historical understanding of cultural conflict over time. Are the changes occurring when Tocqueville wrote or Martin Luther King marched threads in a seamless garment whose next chapter is here with us now it was there a radical leap?

Can we plot a way forward without assigning to the present a unique essence that requires a different response?

Over the past few decades We have tried to find answers but remain mostly with questions. I am of the opinion that it is in understanding the changes that occurred within Marxism that we might find directional focus to assess the present moment. The influence of postmodernism and deconstructionism are but two of a number of entangled binaries within a culture in flux. The questions can be exhaustingly complex but these two, in my estimation, are crucial. Understand the challenging options and what they target and you can begin to create a framework for action and brush off responses that may not be adequate.

What were the elements constitutive of an overarching realm of values ad assumptions that prevailed on our ethos over time in spite of the ever present conflicts and disagreements? If we can identify them, how can we bring them to practical applications and renewed vigor?

But that we are in a unique culture war is without a doubt true. The avalanche might have come through a long-term accumulation of factors but it is here now and the village is at the foot of the mountain.

08/26/2026

Wealthy people like Elon Musk have most of their money invested in companies. They do not have hundreds of billions in cash. Their successful companies serve the common good by making accessible to people products that enhance their lives. They also create jobs all around the world. In the case of Musk he has created and sustains over 1 million direct and indirect jobs.

If you confiscate his assets you are depriving a job creator of the resources he uses successfully to help a lot of people and advance technologies that benefit the present and can assist the future. You remove an engine of progress and substitute it with nothing.

To whom you give these resources? You give them to bureaucrats who produce nothing but paperwork. You let politicians to decide what to do with a loot that will soon be squandered. They will transfer the resources to some people or to other companies that did not earn them in the form of grants, services, and funds. These are spent rather quickly, consummed and destroyed. A good number of wealthy people will take a piece of these resources through their political connections. At the end you stopped the engine of wealth and job creation to satisfy your virtue signaling, which you falsely call Justice.

08/25/2026

Awareness of the threat of cognitive dissonance is important for all of us. There is no telling of the ends people go through in order to maintain the coherence of their present belief system. Even when presented with strong contrary evidence people will push back. Changing one’s mind on important areas is always a threat, a step into the darkness of the unknown, and a death.

The university used to be that place where there was space to experience that journey into new understandings. It provided a heaven that confronted the dissonance and allowed for debate and disagreement. The shrinking of that space is one of the great tragedies of our times. Universities exchanged the market place of ideas for democratic centralism.

08/22/2026

My new piece at The Everyday Man Commentary:

Our culture has moved away from the belief that “certain attitudes are really true, and others really false,” and towards one which takes an antagonistic stance against that moral order.

08/22/2026

Are all cultures equally valid in their ideas and practices? No. That makes no sense. Cultures are human constructs. All human constructs are going to contain both truth and error, because they are the products of fallible, imperfect human beings. However, cultural relativists want to convince us that, as values are also constructs, we cannot objectively say that any culture is superior. These very people turn around and attack the values of Western civilization as being “oppressive.” The deciding element being power. They are convinced that their views are superior but are not willing to demonstrate it. They just need to impose their views because, after all, social law is decided by power.

If you give them examples from science or logic showing that certain beliefs and practices are wrong, they will not flinch. Science and logic, they will affirm, are also constructs, as everything is. We live in a world where we are isolated from the substantial, if it even exist. What is key is narrative not logic. The narrative of “the oppressed” must be triumphant snd the task is not to convince others through logical argumentation but to impose it.

Rubbish...

08/19/2026

After many years living in a very Republican community in SW Florida and being active politically years ago, I have seen it all.

I was very naive early on thinking that every Republican is a conservative. Soon I discovered that such was not the case. That dichotomy served me well to strengthen my conviction that I must always stand on principles. The electoral political game will put you in touch with a lot of huffing and puffing politicians who might even want to use you for their agenda.

Be always aware of that. Progressive ideology is alive and well in Republican circles and in purportedly conservative communities. Many powerful institutions within these communities are bastions of leftist ideology, from philanthropy to education to cultural outlets. They operate within a performative ethos of conservatism while undermining it. True conservatives at times are intimidated by it and go along. I soon found out that not going with the flow costs you. And one must be willing to take what comes your way..

08/12/2026

Critical theory became an all-and-all assault on Western civilization and all its postulates. It developed in the pre-second world war turbulence of Germany at the city of Frankfurt, through a think tank funded by a young wealthy Marxist, Felix Weil. The theory had many prominent expositors, especially the think tank’s second director, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Both were leading German philosophers and sociologists who shaped Critical Theory’s main arguments against traditional epistemology, modern, reason, and mass culture.

Importantly, many of its criticisms of modernity are shared with classical Christian philosophy, such as the problem with instrumental reason and the idolatry of scientism, and the dangers of mass culture and its assumptions and products.

It, however, assumes Marxist presuppositions as the antidotes to modernity. Critical theory’s framework is N**i fascism, the demise of republicanism in Germany, and the terror of both N**i and Stalinist ideologies. They were trying to rescue Marx from its totalitarian tendencies and highlighted the myth-making outcomes of the enlightenment as it gave us technocracy as the solution to social problems.

Their analysis seems circular abd dated. They associate all evils with virtually everything in Western society, and give a too broad indictment of both enlightenment philosophy and traditional morality as being the germs of the turmoil they experienced. This is done by offering oversimplified explanations of power dynamics and without offering any practical alternative.

I should finish a book on the development of Critical Theory soon. I truly believe that examining it, and it’s associated theories, can help us understand the present moment.

08/09/2026

To buy in one of Mamdani’s Soviet-style grocery stores you must show an ID! But he says that it is racist to ask people for an ID to vote. So, added to Soviet-style, shall we call his stores KKK-themed? Then he backtracks and says an ID will not be required. Let’s see if that is true.

His communist experiment will cost $150 million just to build the five stores he intends. These Soviet-style stores will not operate on the profit motive, you see, profits are evil. They will run on a deficit-motive, on wasting taxpayer money, while giving corporations all the reasons to leave the state, lowering the tax-base that feeds the stores. Deficit-motive is so compassionate…

What will happen to the little bodegas? They will close or hurt financially. Or maybe shop atMandani stores and resell. Moreover, the Soviet stores will sell a lot of the items at discount but not of the rest. If the rest are not at discount, people will buy those wherever is closer to them. They will sell mostly the subsidized items, increasing losses. But there is something else. People from nearby states will flock to the stores just for the specific items that are at discount.

To avoid these problems, he says, an ID will not be required. What will be required is only a library card. Well, a library card is an ID! It is required to secure that people who live in an area buy only in that area’s grocery store, avoiding all the pitfalls mentioned. Isn’t that the same principle as saying that to secure that only citizens vote we need an ID? Yes, it is the same. He is trying to trick people saying that a “regular” ID is not required. A distinction without a difference. If you need to secure that only residents in a given area purchase there, you need a safe way to secure that, thus a library ID. Does everyone has a library ID? Isn’t that the argument against voter ID, that not everyone has one?

But think about it. Isn’t the essence of freedom that you can go to any store and buy something? In the Soviet stores however you are given a sector where you buy, the state tells you to do so.

It is not as if these types of supermarkets have not existed before. Go to any communist country. They are all disasters. Talking about “Soviet-style”, ask Boris Yeltsin. When he came to America he wanted to go to a regular grocery store. When he was taken there, he was fascinated. In his autobiography he tells us that was the moment he realized that they had to change to a free-market, profit motive system. But Mamdani will make it work.

08/08/2026

Banished from Germany and expelled from France, Karl Marx arrived at London in August of 1849. He made London his home for the rest of his life. Stateless and destitute, and with his wife Jennifer expecting their fourth child, he was rescued by his lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engel, who lived in Manchester since 1842. For the next 20 years, Engels will funnel money to Marx to keep him afloat. Marx, the defender of the workers, seems to have never worked one day of his life. Besides reading, witting, and plotting, he did nothing else.

It is in London that Marx comes in contact with the world of the classical economists of capitalism, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Erasmo Darwin, de Sismondi, and others. He was also influenced by the population errors of Malthus. From them he concluded that capitalism was nothing more than a thief’s construct. Why? Because, if they were correct about the factors of production, and Ricardo’s subsistence theory of wages was also correct, the only factor of production that actually created wealth was the worker. The other two,land and capital, being inanimate, produced nothing. The capitalist was a thief who stole the surplus value belonging to the proletarians.

Wages were kept artificially low, as the system deemed the worker was merely another calculation on a ledger. As this happened, other classes will join the workers at one end of society, more and more bodies pressing against their meagerness, owning less and less. At the other end, we will find less and less capitalists owning more and more wealth, as they ate each other in competition. In between, a void, a vacuum, the engine of revolution.

But Marx was wrong, none of this happened. His errors gave way to revisionist theories after his death, as his followers had to find ways to explain the failure to materialize of his predictions. To this day, his minions find ways to clean up the mess while promising the great Valhalla envisioned by the master. His failure was later explained well by the 1870s marginalists like Jevons, Walrass, and Menger; although the Spanish classical thinkers had anticipated these discoveries, they all ought have to know better.

Marx missed the entrepreneur, the idea. The idea is the one that creates what the worker later confects The system rewarded and incentivized ideas that change the world. The idea was the fourth factor of production that redeemed the system qua system.