When Reason Dies

America’s immigration debate reveals a broader collapse of logic, language, and responsibility—and Minnesota shows where it leads.

ABC7 Photo

In The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine wrote:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

There is a great deal of that going around these days.

Last night I posted on Facebook that I want Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, and Jacob Frey to answer ten very simple questions like “Does America have a border?”

There was not a single question on that list for which the factual answer is anything other than “yes.” None of them rely on emotion, interpretation, or ideology. They simply describe what is, not what some people wish were true.

And unless we get our arms around the emotional instability now driving American political life, we are cooked—aluminum foil in the microwave, timer set to ten minutes, cooked.

Why?

Because no issue—large or small—is being approached through truth or reason anymore. Everything is filtered through raw emotion. We are watching a full-scale renunciation of reason by a significant portion of the population, including its political leadership. Worse still, much of that leadership is doing this by design.

This did not happen by accident. A good deal of it traces back to intellectual arsonists who taught generations of students that language itself is a weapon and truth is merely a social construct. Jacques Derrida and his descendants may not have intended to light the house on fire, but they handed out plenty of matches.

Once language is severed from reality, everything becomes negotiable. Illegal aliens become “our neighbors,” “our people,” “migrants,” or “undocumented persons”—terms that feel good while erasing the fact that these individuals are, by definition, in the country illegally. ICE is accused of “snatching people off the street who committed no crimes,” when in reality it is executing legally mandated removals of people whose very presence constitutes a violation of law—whether by illegal entry or visa overstay. Families are said to be “ripped apart,” yet no similar outrage is expressed when an American citizen is sentenced to prison and separated from his family as a consequence of criminal behavior.

Emotion is selectively deployed, not consistently applied.

I said recently that Minnesota has become the epicenter of the most successful brainwashing operation since Hitler consolidated power in Germany. If that sounded excessive a week ago, the intervening days should have erased any doubt. This is not fringe behavior. It runs from the top of the DFL straight down through the voters who keep rewarding it. Democrats are fond of calling Republicans Nazis, but the people who enabled Hitler were not jackbooted monsters—they were ordinary citizens who swallowed propaganda wholesale. The resemblance is uncomfortable, and it is real.

So much of what the modern left believes—what it wants to believe—is simply false.

What Democrats have assembled is a sprawling coalition of emotional raw nerves: criminal misfits, social outcasts, anarchists, militant racialists, and ideological zealots, united under slogans like the future is female, no human is illegal on stolen land, love is love, science is real, and kindness is everything. These phrases are not arguments. They are emotional incantations.

And when you build politics on incantation rather than reason, you summon forces you cannot control.

It is not coincidental that a large share of the most emotionally unhinged activism comes from women (both heterosexual and lesbian), the mentally unstable, gender ideologues, and self-styled social misfits—often reinforced by estrogen-soaked beta males and overwhelmingly white participants intoxicated by a white-savior complex. This is not so much a color revolution as a pasty white temper tantrum, driven by feminized rage and the belief that performative vulgarity is a substitute for toughness or courage.

None of this should be surprising. These people are being carefully herded toward statism and collectivism—ideologies that tell them they are not responsible for their failures, that someone else is to blame: another race, another sex, another class, another country. They are told that how they feel about reality matters more than what reality is. Laws, morality, and even biology itself can be discarded if they produce discomfort.

To be clear, this does not mean that all women, or all members of any of these groups, are irrational collectivists. But this pathology is overwhelmingly concentrated on the American left, whose intelligentsia has learned how to distill the population down to its most volatile components and deploy them as political shock troops.

“If you believe it, it’s not a lie” is not a foundation for civilization. It was a joke delivered by George Costanza—a line meant to illustrate absurdity, not to serve as a governing principle.

A society that abandons reason does not become compassionate or enlightened. It becomes ungovernable.

Thomas Paine was right: once reason is renounced, no amount of argument will revive it.