By Catherine Salgado
By Brooke Stanton
By The Editors
By Judd Dunning
By Gayle Nobel
By Michael Watson
By Conlan Salgado
By Wilfred Reilly
By Conlan Salgado
By Judd Dunning
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Conservatism at its highest form has never been a matter of nostalgia. It is philosophy in motion—reason disciplined by gratitude, freedom guarded by order, and faith translated into civic strength. The conservative is not a man clutching the past; he is the custodian of the permanent things, those “enduring norms of human existence” that Russell Kirk called the backbone of civilization. To conserve, properly understood, is to remember that truth is not invented but inherited.
Marcus Aurelius begins the modern mind’s schooling in discipline: “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” From that Stoic axiom flows every idea of ordered liberty. The self-governed citizen precedes the self-governed state. Aristotle refined the same law: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Virtue is not opinion but muscle memory. The West’s political architecture—its parliaments, courts, and constitutions—was built to make those private habits public.
Edmund Burke warned that “society is a contract… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” He understood that liberty without lineage becomes license. James Madison echoed him in The Federalist Papers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The architecture of checks and balances was not cynicism but realism about the crooked timber of mankind. Real conservatism accepts this anthropology: man is fallen but improvable, dangerous yet dignified. Law and virtue must co-govern him.
Faith, the second column, anchors the first. C. S. Lewis described pride as “the complete anti-God state of mind.” Chesterton called tradition “giving votes to our ancestors.” Their point was identical: humility is the precondition of freedom. When a civilization forgets transcendence, it confuses appetite for rights. Proverbs says, “Better a patient man than a warrior, one with self-control than one who takes a city.” A republic cannot survive on temper tantrums; it survives on temperance.
The American Founding Fathers understood this symmetry. Alexander Hamilton wrote that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” but he coupled energy with accountability. Power without virtue is chaos; virtue without power is futility. The mature leader—ancient or modern—must carry both: strength guided by conscience, will moderated by law. Burke’s “men of intemperate minds” can neither rule nor be ruled.
Viktor Frankl, forged in the furnaces of the twentieth century, gave the metaphysical corollary: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’” Meaning, not comfort, is man’s first need. When politics degenerates into therapy, citizens become clients rather than creators. Frankl’s warning is everywhere around us: a society that loses purpose breeds grievance as its new religion.
F. A. Hayek saw the same rot in economics. “The more the state ‘plans,’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” Freedom requires uncertainty; command economies destroy both wealth and will. Michael Novak corrected the caricature of capitalism by calling it a “moral, cultural, and political system.” Markets are moral when they reward work, risk, and service. Ayn Rand’s fierce individualism—“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others”—reminds us that production is not greed but gratitude in motion.
Order and freedom, faith and enterprise—these are not museum pieces. They are living laws that modern leadership either honors or violates. The mature statesman must translate them into action: protecting free markets without forgetting moral markets; defending borders without surrendering compassion; fostering innovation without idolizing novelty. Each decade tests these balances differently, but the measures are old. Aristotle’s phronesis, prudence in context, remains the supreme political virtue.
Whittaker Chambers, who saw both the seduction and collapse of ideological utopia, wrote, “Man without God is a beast, and men governed by men without God are beasts led by beasts.” His testimony was not theological ornament; it was empirical. Every total state begins by declaring itself moral and ends by worshipping power. The modern conservative recognizes that danger in new guises: bureaucracy masquerading as benevolence, redistribution disguised as compassion, central planning dressed in digital form.
Against that drift stands the principle of subsidiarity—the idea that decisions belong as close to the citizen as possible. Tocqueville praised the “science of association” as democracy’s mother discipline: free men learn responsibility by governing something smaller than the state. When families, churches, and local guilds weaken, the individual turns upward for salvation. The bureaucrat replaces the priest; the algorithm replaces the conscience.
Culture is the moral weather of a nation. T. S. Eliot mourned, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Yeats foresaw that “the centre cannot hold.” Milton warned that “the mind is its own place.” Art predicts politics: fragmentation of meaning precedes fragmentation of order. A civilization that sneers at beauty will soon sneer at truth. The conservative task is aesthetic as well as ethical—restore reverence through art, ritual, and education. The Republic begins in the classroom.
Every serious age eventually rediscovers Plato’s admonition: “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” Indifference today often dresses as sophistication. The warrior-scholar refuses that pose. He studies politics not to dominate but to defend. He knows, with Adam Smith, that “self-command is not only a great virtue but the keystone of all.” He knows, with Dante, that man “was not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” He knows, with Burke, that liberty “must be limited in order to be possessed.”
The modern conservative sees how the digital age tempts us to reverse every hierarchy: feeling above reason, entitlement above effort, identity above character. Yet truth remains stubborn. “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts,” wrote Aurelius. A society addicted to resentment will paint its institutions in envy’s hue. Gratitude, by contrast, breeds stewardship. The great renewal begins in thanks—for inheritance, for law, for the chance to build.
This is why the family, the church, and the voluntary association are not sociological footnotes but the engines of moral capital. They are where liberty learns manners. When ideology dissolves sex into construct, debt into policy, crime into victimhood, and excellence into oppression, the conservative must reassert reality itself: male and female, seedtime and harvest, duty and reward. Nature is not bigotry; it is order. “To make us love our country,” Burke said, “our country ought to be lovely.” A nation without families that honor creation cannot be lovely for long.
The economy is a moral realm as well. Hayek’s rule of law, Novak’s moral ecology, and Frankl’s quest for meaning converge in one lesson: freedom demands discipline. Debt that devours future generations, subsidies that punish industry, and inflation that stealth-taxes the worker are not economic missteps; they are moral failures. They trade stewardship for expedience. The conservative insists that thrift, not stimulus, is the first kindness to the poor.
Internationally, order begins with sovereignty. “Energy in the executive,” Hamilton reminded us, is a virtue when it defends independence and peace. Burke called this “the cheap defense of nations.” A people that cannot protect its borders soon loses the ability to protect its values. Patriotism is not hostility to mankind; it is loyalty to the gift one has been given. As Chesterton laughed, “We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.” The storm today is global technocracy, the soft despotism of unelected consensus. The answer is ordered love of home.
All these truths form the armor of the modern warrior-scholar. He moves through noise with silence, through outrage with logic, through nihilism with faith. He reads Marcus Aurelius in the morning and Hayek at night. He prays with Proverbs and debates with Madison. He knows that history is not a museum of errors but a map of renewal. Every generation inherits the same fight: to keep freedom tethered to virtue and virtue alive in freedom.
The final measure is gratitude. Frankl again: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” The conservative accepts that challenge first in his own soul. He reforms before he legislates. He governs by example before he governs by law. He does not apologize for strength, excellence, faith, or family, because these are not partisan possessions—they are civilizational prerequisites. He knows that “order is the first need of all” (Kirk), that “the good for man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” (Aristotle), and that “liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith” (Tocqueville).
Modern conservatism, rightly understood, is not reaction but realism. It is the recognition that human nature has not evolved as quickly as our machines, and therefore the ancient truths remain the newest news of all. It asks leadership to grow modern only in tools, not in morals; to innovate in means, not in ends. The wise leader of any age must reconcile executive energy with humility, strength with service, ambition with gratitude. That maturity of leadership—the modernity that mirrors the ancients—is the standard of statesmanship.
In the end, the warrior-scholar’s creed can be written in six words: Virtue. Order. Liberty. Faith. Family. Gratitude. These are not slogans but coordinates. A civilization that orients itself by them will stand, even as empires of ideology fall. “The love that moves the sun and the other stars,” Dante wrote, still moves men of courage. The task is eternal: to keep that love luminous through reason, reverence, and resolve. That is the true modern conservatism—the oldest wisdom, newly alive.
*****
This article was published by redisthenewcool.wordpress.com and is reproduced with permission.
Follow Judd Dunning on X @JuddDunning. When not writing for Newsmax, The Prickly Pear, and other national publications, Judd can be heard as a nationwide radio guest and TV commentator. He is also the author of 13½ Reasons Why NOT to Be a Liberal: And How to Enlighten Others, available on Amazon and at major retailers.
Image Credit: Judd Dunning
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By Joy Pullmann
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Editor’s note: This is an excellent essay, and the point about “social transgenderism” especially so. But arguing that our society cannot be over-feminized because it does not have feminine characteristics is insufficient; it forgets that femininity, like masculinity, may be pathologized. Frankly, women do not act “like men”; this claim rests on the fact that women have abandoned family and children to pursue the characteristically male priorities of career and ambition. But Helen Andrews is precisely right: when women get INTO the workplace, they act pathologically feminine. HR departments are essentially reputation banks. Conflict is almost never confronted honestly between two employees; complaints are made to a representative, counter complaints are made, gossip rips through the office–this is not a typically male behavior. The Public Discourse is dominated by the priority of “making people feel safe, included, welcome”; men, I hate to say it, rarely care about that sort of thing even when talking to their wives. Men are unsubtle and direct in their speech habits, if they are average men. Finally, suggesting that men simply need to prudently outcompete women is flippant; the whole purpose of an environment dominated by pathological femininity is that it is actively hostile to male success. Overall, we agree that men share a huge portion of the responsibility for our cultural decay. This is because, as one with any modicum of insight knows, men are cowardly in the face of female emotion. Male cowardice and female promiscuity: these are the two hands of the demon’s grip.
Writer Helen Andrews turned a viral speech into an essay for Compact that’s been driving the Internet wild since it published Oct. 16. She argues woke culture is the inevitable result of women taking over the majority of academia and other pivotal industries such as law, media, and medicine: “Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.”
“Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” she writes.
As usual, Andrews bravely makes some countercultural points with enjoyable flair, and a lot of what she says is true. Everyone should read her whole article. Rather than simply replicate what she gets right, however, I would like to argue a few finer points. First, I don’t think it’s accurate to claim we have a “feminized” society. Second, I think Andrews applies her thesis too broadly, arguing it can explain more than it actually does.
It seems obvious that decaying Western societies are in fact not femininized, because our societies do not champion female hallmarks. The top exhibit for this is the lack of babies. The vast and troubling Western fertility crisis would not exist if women were feminine, because it is feminine to naturally seek children.
Yet 64 percent of American women younger than 50 say they don’t want kids, according to Pew Research last year. Not feminine.
Our culture has also become incredibly immodest, another rejection of a primordial female trait, as Wendy Shalit memorably explained in the late ’90s. Some of the most conservative families I know, who homeschool and strongly affirm defined sex roles and male leadership of homes and churches, allow their beautiful daughters to wear “workout” shorts cut like boxer briefs and crop tops. And this has been true since I was a child.
Trump-supporting female celebrities celebrate each other wearing skin-tight, butt- and breast-baring bodysuits that get the notice of New York Magazine and The New York Times. This is not feminine either.
An essay comprehensively chronicling our culture’s rejection of femininity could get very long, so let’s conclude this observation for now with just one more hallmark example. Our culture’s cold indifference to children — the worst form of hatred — is also the opposite of feminine. Women naturally put children first. This is why women prioritize empathy, cohesion, and safety — because children are irrational, risky, and an obstacle to competition, yet we innately understand their value transcends these male criteria.
Despite rhetoric claiming the opposite, our culture systematically puts children last. The Covid lockdowns sacrificed children’s futures for (largely female!) adult psychoses. Abortion, invitro fertilization, and contraception mass murder children for adult pleasure. Democrats will shut down the government to feed the welfare state that cannibalizes the young’s economic stability, and Republicans help them. It’s not feminine to put the children last.
As I wrote in a speech delivered a year ago to Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, “are we really experiencing a cultural ‘overfeminization?’ It looks to me like, instead, we have a swap. We have feminization where there should be masculinity, and masculinization where there should be femininity. Our women are pushed to act like men, and our men to act like women, and the resulting social transgenderism makes everyone extremely unhappy, not to mention dysfunctional.”
Do we have too many weak men and unhinged women? Absolutely! I’d argue, however, that’s because our society has reversed men and women’s roles and in so doing abandoned both masculininity and femininity. We are not “too feminine.” Our women are not feminine enough, and our men are not masculine enough.
I also think Andrews is wrong to try to use sexual differences to explain the whole of identity politics, wokeness, cultural Marxism, or whatever is your term du jour. The truth is that cultural Marxism (my preferred term), which was largely created by men like Antonio Gramsci and Wilhelm Reich, has largely been allowed to dominate due to male flaccidity, aruising long before women started chaining themselves to fences.
“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently,” Andrews claims.
This would not be true if the men controlling academic, law, and media institutions had required that women abide by the existing institutional culture of seeking truth at the expense of feelings. Just like with Adam and Eve in the garden, men are ultimately responsible for the corruption of our culture’s institutions, even if a lot of women helped, because men are the ones who abandoned their responsibilities to preserve those institutions against inversion for the good of our society.
“The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict,” Andrews asserts. “In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.”
Yet the manipulation, subversion, and covert treachery of cancel culture also wasn’t started by women, it was started by men. I’d date it back to Machiavelli, the first prominent Westerner to abandon Christian virtues and argue for doing whatever worked to gain power. Her characterization above is a pretty apt description of The Prince.
In America as well, it was not women running academia, law, and government back around the turn of the 20th century when these institutions wholesale substituted the relativism of Progressive Darwinism for the American doctrines of inherent, equal natural rights based on objective, observable realities set by the Supreme Creator. Progressivism is the true American antecedent of today’s cultural Marxism (many books have been written on this subject, but my favorite is Hillsdale professor Kevin Slack’s War on the American Republic).
It was men who opened the doors to this destructive philosophy by abandoning their faith in classic Christian mores, violating their natural male duty to protect the weak. We should not confuse women being easy prey for maladaptive atheist ideologies with women being solely responsible for this state of affairs.
It is lovely of Helen to take responsibility on behalf of women for our refusal to improve ourselves as a sex by taking to heart accurate rebukes of our collective bad behavior. While this is a generous impulse, and something every individual needs to do, she lets men off too easy. It’s probably because men are our cultural whipping boys, but while that is indeed bad the just response is not to obscure their at-least-equal contributions to and responsibility for this situation.
Here’s my favorite section of Andrews’ article: “Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?”
She’s right — our society institutionally discriminates against men. The more than 100 federal feminist “antidiscrimination” laws alone institutionalize systemic bias against men.
But so what? If men want to re-assume their responsibilities as leaders of homes, churches, cultural institutions, and government, they cannot take Adam’s line, “The women made me do it.” God didn’t accept that excuse in Eden, and we shouldn’t accept it now. Leadership means taking responsibility, not scapegoating (even if women share the blame for the mess, which we definitely do!). Men need to shed their internalized transgender roles just as much as women do.
That starts with ending all the masturbatory whining on X and Substack about how The Woman is keeping them down and taking prudent actions to outcompete women in the public square. If women really are so bad at running institutions, and men are really so darned competent in the workplace compared to women, it shouldn’t be impossible for men to reroute women away from destroying public institutions into what we’re much better at: raising families and lovingly civilizing our husbands.
*****
This article was first published at The Federalist, and is reproduced here with permission
Image credit: Grok AI
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By Conlan Salgado
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
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and The institutional Democrat Party has persisted in a manner reminiscent of extremophile bacterias; by all accounts, it should have died off after the Civil War, which was a war to preserve the political cause (slavery) and the culture (the Southern Plantation) for which and in which the party existed.
Rarely has an institution lost its war, its political mainspring, and its cultural reserve without being properly destroyed along with them, but the Democrat party is, like extremophile bacterias, apparently exceptional.
Functionally, it is most similar to a parasite. Over a historically short period of time, it has embedded its post-WWII ideology in the entire complex of social institutions: universities, media, flagship magazines, entertainment studios, corporate offices, awards organizations, non-profits, NGOs, the Federal Bureaucracy, law firms, medical regulatory agencies, the Military, the Pentagon, k-12 education, labor unions, and the philanthropic and charity industry.
Once embedded, it begins digesting the riches of the host institution: knowledge, information and its arrangements, aesthetic joy and its objects, military lethality, cultural prestige, scientific reputation–the peculiar treasure and authority of each institution is consumed, then brought to bear in service of the ideological project.
Certain folk prefer absolute precision; they do not want to confuse the Democrat Party with modern Leftism per se. Although I acknowledge the historical anxieties my approach might awaken, I imagine the party of abortion fandom, transgenderism, anti-populism, and repressive tolerance as sufficiently representative of Leftism’s most atrocious tendencies.
It has been often said: ideology follows on lifestyle. The Democrat party is run by coastal elites and urban aristocrats. These are people whose wealth is not tied to the well-being of American land; their assets are primarily global and abstract. Their education is a pedagogical discipline that trains the appreciation of multi-culture, which means no culture in particular, no religion, no orthodoxy of ethics, no national identity–none of the distinct features which make the face of a society. Only a cosmopolitan lifestyle which obfuscates any form of belonging to one specific place.
For them, the American middle class dream is parochial in the sense of existentially petty. The American middle class citizen aspires to a moderate amount of wealth and small amounts of leisure; their greatest asset is usually a single home sitting on American soil. The traditional vision was that an American middle class parent would be able to save part of his income, then buy better opportunities for his children (investment funds, college accounts).
Such people, for an aristocrat, are repulsive, living a life of inconsequential well-being, actually content (can you imagine that) with their immediate surroundings, their pitiful amount of disposable income, the cliched ambitions of family and faith which they pass down to their children, their belief that loyalty to the nation (instead of a global order) is somehow an enlargement of their spirit.
The middle class live the most caricatured version of an elite life; for the elites, the middle class is a jealous, buffoonish imitation of them.
As a description of elitist mindsets, this is probably superb, but when political power is concerned, we must wonder why the Democrat strategy seems to be self-consciously primed toward electoral catastrophe.
Don’t, we sheepishly puzzle, DON’T THEY WANT TO WIN AN ELECTION AGAIN?
Such naive inquiries ignore the standing reserves of the Left’s power, which are not popular sentiment, but rather institutional dominance. Have any of the signature achievements of the postmodern Left been accomplished through honest populism? Abortion? The Mount Sinai Supreme Court decided when rights were obligated and when life began. Gay marriage? Never; that was the Mount Sinai SCOTUS also. “Gender” discrimination as a civil rights cause? Alas, the Mount Sinai Supreme Court.
Oh, how about open borders, or, pardon me, the “humanizing of immigration policy?” Rogue executive and state-level actions.
Were we not witness to the hysteria over the return of abortion to the states, the most democratic policy move this side of “rule by the people”? Thousands fewer dead children? This was the end of women’s rights?
Democrat strategy is constructed around past effective methods regarding salient policy issues.
One does not need to appeal in a humble, persistent way to the instincts and principles of the people if one teaches their children from ages 5 to 22 what is right and wrong, who history’s villains and heroes are, what systems of economy, law, and social welfare they should support, and which “isms” perpetuate virtue. The future has already been bought off. Ascendance becomes inevitable.
If the universities from which come the whole contingent of important lawyers, judges, doctors, think-tankers, memo writers, congressional staffers, bureaucratic advisers are uniform in ideology, political power has already been secured. Democracy becomes then a figurative ritual, nothing more.
If the three aspects of power–judicial, legislative, executive–are each decade apportioned more towards the unelected, and less towards the elected politicians, the simple, common sense obsessions of the average American dissipate into election cycle grievances, with no further governmental impact.
The more we consider the insurgent anti-populism of the Democrat party, the more ridiculous the advice of critics sounds who say, “The Left must become a popular cause again. They must abandon the fringe and advance on the center. They must cede their left flank and return to common sense.”
Yes, and I must remember to look at the unicorn next time I go to the zoo.
The Left despises representative government on two different ideological scores: firstly, they suppose that the moral superiority of their cause gives them an equally superior claim to power. A progressive may indeed have a less “palatable” agenda; he may even lose the election in formal terms, but any time power is abandoned to the unawokened, it is a theft and a travesty. Donald Trump is more illegitimate than any illegally ensconced Democrat could be.
Secondly, they “understand” how governance is a social and moral science; it is an activity which requires expertise and specialized knowledge. It is not merely a matter of the just and equitable distribution of state resources; it is the just and equitable distribution of state privileges, chief among them what used to be called “God-given rights”. That was before God died and before government became so total.
A right is a mark and guarantee of elevated status. To speak, for example, of parental rights risks elevating the notion that parents are uniquely privileged to guide the upbringing of their children. And what if they are homophobes? And what if they are transphobes? And what is they are racists? Dispensing rights is a sensitive business, with strong potential to derail the ideological project if the wrong persons should secure them; any careful leftist knows as much.
Any careful leftist also knows that the ideology has resilience; administrative process, which has been used as grounds by numerous rogue judges to set aside executive action, is not meant to prevent revolution; it is meant to prevent reform.
Joe Biden unilaterally extended temporary protected status and parole to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, and nary a tap from any district court gavel. But if Donald Trump attempts to revoke unlawful executive action, administrative process preserves it.
These examples might be quoted ad infinitum.
4 years of intensive chemotherapy may send a cancer into remission, but the body politic is larger than most bodies, and it’s been infected far longer.
The Trumpian project is a generational one. It continues 4 years, 8 years, and 12 years hence.
Facing the total implosion of their century-long project, the Left can only graft their own unfathomable hate onto the intentions of their enemies.
Violence is the soul’s revenge on its own impotence. Though it is doubtful the Democrat party has a soul, its impotence is undeniable.
There is nothing for it to do now except change, but since it cannot do that, it is reduced to the plotting serpent, who looks enviously at the good fruits of the Trump administration, and contemplates how to turn all of them into poison apples, into occasions for the destruction of the country.
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By Neland Nobel
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
Editors’ Note: One of our most cherished concepts in the West is freedom of religious practice. As Professor Saad points out in this critical video, a misunderstanding of this concept is paralyzing the West as it attempts to deal with a vigorous and ascendant Islam. Yes, in the US, individual Muslims should be free to practice their religion in peace and safety. Still, they have no right to impose those beliefs on others through Sharia law, holding up traffic during prayers, and subjecting others to their broadcast of public prayers, or other attempts to establish dominance over other religions or people without religion. They cannot use force or intimidation in our country. As the saying goes, your right to swing your arm stops when it touches my nose. In America, Islam must allow other religions also to flourish to uphold the idea of freedom of religion. It is a two-way street. Moreover, part of the exercise of freedom of religion is the right to object to and criticize others’ religious practices. Monty Python can satirize Christianity without being in danger. A cartoonist who offends Muslims in France is murdered. As long as it is just words, and not actions, a free society should be able to discuss spiritual matters and even joke about them. Through that dialogue and education, people have the freedom to choose what faith or doctrines they will adopt. Today, however, the left wants to stop all criticism of Islam by labeling it Islamophobia and hate speech. It isn’t. It is free speech, exercised by others in the pursuit of their right to practice their religion. Freedom of religion does not cover just one faith. That is what is so stupid about the Co-Exist bumper sticker. Only one religion is using violence, and only one demands that it should be the only one practiced. Which religion is the offender?
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By Lauren Smith
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes
Editors’ Note: If any American thinks the crazies are running wild here, they will not find much comfort from what is going on in Europe. They are running wild there as well, for many of the same reasons. Our universities and intellectuals have betrayed us. There is such a thing as “The International Left”, and it is clearly on display, which comes with a whole set of positions that are inimical to the family, to free enterprise, and to the ideas of limited government and free speech. Note, just like in the US, European Leftists grab for the state to suppress freedom of speech and religion. This fight is beyond “making America great.” It is a battle now across the Western world for liberty and sanity.
Brussels wants to allow children to change gender at any age—and punish any state that disagrees.
Brussels has completely lost its mind over trans ideology. Under a new EU proposal, children could be allowed to choose their own gender, regardless of age. According to the “LGBTIQ+ equality strategy 2026-2030,” the European Commission intends to “facilitate exchanges of best practices among member states to support the development of legal gender-recognition procedures based on self-determination that are free from age restrictions.” In other words, children should be free to declare themselves transgender or nonbinary at whatever age they please, and the adults around them should take their new identities at face value.
The trans activists pushing for these changes are likely to argue that ‘social transition’—when a person dresses in clothes of the opposite gender, uses different pronouns, and adopts another name—is completely harmless for children. The more ‘moderate’ gender ideologues believe that, even if there is an age restriction on prescribing hormones or undergoing gender-reassignment surgeries, there isn’t much danger in allowing a child to simply identify as the opposite sex. But this is far from true. In fact, we know that encouraging kids to shop around identities can be incredibly risky. Not only does it promote a negative body image, but it can also lead them towards medical intervention.
Worse still, the EU has suggested it wants to put a stop to any therapists or other adult intervention that might convince children they are not trapped in the wrong body. According to the new proposal, Brussels aims to outlaw any “conversion practices” in countries where they are still legal. The issue is, ‘conversion therapy’ as it is normally understood is already illegal across Europe—that is, it is decidedly against the law of any EU country to kidnap, torture, or assault another person for any reason, especially not in order to change their gender or sexuality. The kind of practices the EU really has in its sights when it refers to banning ‘conversion therapy’ is actually more akin to therapy and counseling…..
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Continue reading this article at The European Conservative.
Image Credit: GROK AI image generator
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Here at The Prickly Pear, we know that switching to a new cellular service can be challenging at times. Let’s face it, no one wants the hassle. But that hassle is necessary if Conservatives want to support those who support them.
By Nathanael Blake
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Hurting Netflix for promoting perversion is not enough to heal our culture. Those who see the evil of what Netflix is doing need to go beyond criticism and boycotts.
The rainbow people won’t leave the kids alone.
We were told that the LGBT movement was about adults — giving everyone equal rights and getting the government out of the bedrooms of consenting adults. But this was a lie; LGBT activists were always coming for the children.
Just look at the recent kerfuffle over Netflix. Right-wing influencers and activists have drawn attention to the many Netflix shows promoting LGBT content for very young children (e.g., a cartoon with a little boy putting on a dress to dance for his two dads). Prominent figures such as Elon Musk and Utah Sen. Mike Lee have joined in the denunciations, and the backlash seems to have hurt the company’s stock price.
It remains to be seen whether this is a temporary dip or whether Netflix is about to take a permanent hit a la Bud Light. What is clear is that Netflix is deliberately grooming kids with LGBT messages.
Most attempts to deny this malintent are lies so obvious as to be insulting. The suggestion that Netflix shows are just reflecting or representing reality (“LGBT people exist, get over it”) is laughable. If they were just trying to capture reality, there would be a lot more happy, churchgoing evangelical characters on TV. Likewise, if the goal is just to provide representation for misunderstood minorities, why aren’t there more positive portrayals of, say, Latin-mass-attending Catholic families with seven kids?
The truth is that Netflix and its peers carefully curate what they include in their offerings — rival Amazon Prime Video is going so far as to scrub guns from the promo pictures for James Bond films. Pretending that Netflix’s content choices are neutral is ridiculous. Thus, the most compelling argument from those defending Netflix is also the honest one: which is to ask why pro-LGBT content shouldn’t be included in kids’ shows — that is, why is it OK for the prince to kiss the princess, but not for the prince to kiss another prince?
This is an awkward question for many of those attacking Netflix because they have embraced the sexual revolution, including much of the LGBT agenda. From Elon Musk’s personal example to the many right-wing influencers cheering when other right-wing influencers in same-sex marriages buy babies and deprive them of their mothers via commercial surrogacy, these are not people with a coherent conservative sexual ethic.
And yet there is more than cynical grift and political opportunism here. Yes, some people are happy to attack their political and cultural foes for things they accept in their friends, but others are questioning the sexual revolution in general, and the LGBT movement in particular. Two issues have especially induced this reconsideration. The first is that kids were not part of the deal; the second is the sudden prominence of the T portion of LGBT. And, of course, these often overlap.
The result is an unsettling of the settlement that had been tacitly accepted following the triumph of the campaign for same-sex marriage, a campaign that had focused on adults and promised that redefining marriage would not affect others. This promise was false, and people are realizing it, in part because LGBT activists keep pushing the envelope, for example, by inserting LGBT messages into Netflix shows for kids.
Many people who accepted same-sex marriage were surprised by the LGBT movement’s immediate and aggressive pivots toward both transgenderism and by its claiming children as part of the “LGBT community.” They should have seen it coming; these moves were always implicit, even if many people didn’t realize it. After all, the “T” has been part of the movement for years, and the “born this way” narrative presumed that some children are, from birth, part of the “LGBT community,” that they possess intrinsic and immutable gender identities and sexual orientations that must be accepted for them to flourish.
In truth, there is no gay gene or set of genes, and LGBT activists such as the lesbian New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen have admitted that the “born this way” mantra was just a useful lie. The reality is that human sexuality is complex, with many variables, including environmental and mimetic factors. Which is to say that what children are shown can shape not only their view of sexual morality but also their sexuality itself.
We should not be surprised by this formative influence. After all, even left-wing outlets such as The New York Times and The Guardian have run pieces worrying about how porn has deformed the sexuality of a generation of young men, specifically by normalizing sexual strangulation.
Of course what children see shapes their understanding of what is normal, what is normative, of who they are, and what they should want. The right-wing influencers denouncing Netflix for shoving LGBT messages into shows for kids are right to be disgusted, and this revulsion is a sign of the natural law at work in their hearts and minds.
But they should not leave it there. Hurting Netflix for promoting perversion is not enough to heal our culture. Those who see the evil of what Netflix is doing need to go beyond criticism and boycotts. They need to look for a right understanding of human nature and human sexuality, a diagnosis both of what has gone wrong and what it would mean to go right. And for that, they should look to those who saw the present evils coming while consistently offering a better way to live. Which is to say, to the church.
Less Netflix is good, more church would be even better.
*****
This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.
Image Credit: The Federalist/Youtube/Netflix Jr.
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By Shawn Fleetwood
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Under Colorado’s argument, a state could “forbid a regulated licensed professional from affirming homosexuality if that were consistent with the then-prevailing ‘standard of care.’”
The Democrat-led state of Colorado seemingly attempted to dodge addressing a key point raised in a pivotal free speech case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. And it’s clear Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett were having none of it.
The moment came during oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case centered on Colorado therapist Kaley Chiles’ challenge to a state law prohibiting professionals such as herself from providing “conversion therapy” to children suffering from issues related to sexuality and gender dysphoria. Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, Chiles, a Christian, alleges that the statute infringes upon her ability to engage in related talk therapy with her minor clients and violates her First Amendment rights.
During her opening statement defending the law, Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson claimed that “conversion therapy” “does not work and carries great risk of harm.” She further argued that the law “governs only treatments,” and thus “does not interfere with any First Amendment interest.”
“[B]ecause Colorado’s law regulates treatments only, and because it enforces the professional standard of care, the law falls squarely into the reasonable regulation of professional conduct that does not trigger First Amendment [strict] scrutiny,” Stevenson said.
When given the opportunity to question the Centennial State solicitor general, Gorsuch posed a “mirror image” hypothetical, in which he noted how other states could potentially pass laws similar to Colorado’s that instead prohibit licensed therapists from using talk therapy that “affirmed” minors’ pursuit of homosexuality.
He specifically probed whether, under Colorado’s argument, a state could “forbid a regulated licensed professional from affirming homosexuality if that were consistent with the then-prevailing ‘standard of care’” and “so likewise, if the prevailing standard of care were to change or solidify that this sort of talk therapy is beneficial to minors, or at least not harmful to minors, then a state could pass a mirror image statute to Colorado’s that prohibits any attempt to affirm changes of gender identity or sexual orientation, and that would be subject to mere rational basis review” as opposed to strict scrutiny?
While Stevenson initially appeared to agree with Gorsuch’s premise, she went on to argue that “the fact that there are words involved [in the therapy] doesn’t make a difference.” Citing the high court’s recent U.S. v. Skrmetti decision upholding a Tennessee law banning certain trans procedures for minors, she said states “have the power to regulate even in the face of” uncertainty within the medical community, and that the recognized “‘standard of care’ could change there, and the legislature can act to change that.”
The seemingly convoluted answer sparked an extensive back-and-forth between Gorsuch and Stevenson, in which the former attempted to pin the latter down on what exactly she was trying to argue:
Gorsuch: So, even cases where ‘medical uncertainty’ exists, you think that the state could pass such a law prohibiting ex-ante speech that would affirm gender identity changes or sexual orientation changes or homosexuality?
Stevenson: I don’t think you have to reach that question in this case because here —
Gorsuch: I’m asking about the logic of your argument. I think you just said states can regulate even in the absence of medical consensus in this fashion. Is that right?
Stevenson: Where there are no words involved and no First Amendment issue raised, and —
Gorsuch: No … we’re talking about speech and we’re talking about … talk therapy. That’s what I want to get at. And I think you’re saying that if there’s medical consensus, a state surely could pass mirror image laws. And I think you’re saying, but I want to make sure, that even in cases where there’s medical uncertainty, a state could so regulate?
Stevenson: You could reach a holding in this case that said, ‘Yes, treatment is treatment, and … it doesn’t matter whether it’s … consistent with the standard of care or not.’ We would urge you to reach a narrower holding in this case —
Gorsuch: I understand that, but I’m asking you to answer my question. … [T]his court has many times said when there’s medical uncertainty, we defer to state judgements. And I think you’re saying, that ‘yes.’ I think the logic of your position has to be ‘yes.’ …
Stevenson’s unsuccessful attempt to adequately address Gorsuch’s questions prompted Barrett to interject and press the state solicitor general on the point of “medical uncertainty.” The junior justice highlighted potential “competing” views within the medical community about the safety and efficacy of conversion talk therapy and so-called “gender affirming care.”
“Can a state pick a side? … I want to be very clear. It’s not that the medical community says, ‘We just don’t know.’ It’s that there are competing strands, and some states like, say, Tennessee, which was the state at issue in Skrmetti, pick one side. Colorado picks another side.” Barrett said. “Your position is that rational basis applies?”
Stevenson appeared to try to wiggle out of the question. She argued that Colorado’s position is that “the standard of care is important” but was cut off by Barrett, who asked that she answer the question.
“No, our view is that would not be the right rule here,” Stevenson said. “One, because that’s not consistent with the history and tradition identified in [NIFLA v. Becerra], and two, because the reason why that history is important and the reason why the standard of care is important is because it’s a confirmation that the state is not actually trying to shut down viewpoints … “
Seemingly befuddled by Stevenson’s confusing response, Barrett further probed the state solicitor general about why she doesn’t believe the “standard of care” question “isn’t relevant there,” seemingly referring to her previous hypothetical about states “picking sides” amid competing medical opinions.
“Wouldn’t that be a situation in which Colorado is essentially … looking at expert evidence and saying that, ‘We think this is what’s appropriate. That we shouldn’t have this kind of talk therapy.’ And Tennessee is choosing a different one as a matter of its state law, or am I not understanding that correctly?” Barrett asked.
Stevenson replied, “What I’m saying is, where there is a First Amendment issue raised and the state can show we’re regulating a treatment and we’re regulating consistent with the standard of care, there is a confirmation, a security, that the court can have that there is no other motive going on to suppress viewpoints or expression.”
“So, Colorado’s law would trigger rational basis, but Tennessee’s hypothetical law would be strict scrutiny?” Barrett asked, homing in on Colorado’s apparent double standard in which prospective laws barring therapists from affirming minors’ pro-gay/trans thoughts would be subject to a more heightened form of review by courts than laws like Colorado’s.
“If it were against the standards of care,” Stevenson responded.
*****
This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.
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By Neland Nobel
Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute
Editors’ Note: Dennis Prager is one of the most influential Conservative Thinkers. He began his career on the radio in 1982 and subsequently produced multiple books, as well as hundreds of tapes and CDs of lectures, which were distributed nationwide. He also founded the influential Prager University, which was visited by 21 million unique visitors in 2024, and an estimated 10 billion visitors since its inception. He has had a tremendous influence on many of us, including the late Charlie Kirk. Last November, he suffered a terrible fall, complicated by previous back surgery, which almost killed him and left him quadriplegic. This is his first public interview, and it is lengthy to be sure, but filled with insight about life and our current situation in the world. We think you will find it both informative and inspiring. You will find he is a man who lives by the principles he has taught.
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https://pricklypear.news/wp-content/uploads/featurevideoimage-1.jpg 576 768 Neland Nobel https://pricklypear.news/wp-content/uploads/logo_2025_800x97.png Neland Nobel2025-10-11 00:26:542025-10-09 07:43:48Featured Video: The First Post Accident Interview With Dennis Prager
By Neland Nobel
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
There was a Supreme Court hearing yesterday about whether conversion therapy would be permitted in Colorado. Currently, the state legally forbids practitioners from using talk therapy for gender dysphoria cases.
Over 20 states have similar bans, and the decision could have a ripple effect nationally.
It appears that the court was quite skeptical of Colorado’s arguments, which seem to violate the First Amendment right to free speech.
While the case will nominally be about free speech, we believe it will delve into the assertions and contradictions of the LGBTQ movement.
Progressives say gender is a social construct, and not biological. If so, why can’t there be different social constructs from the one they advocate? Are some “constructs” more beneficial to both individuals and society? Do the historical record and tradition supply us with helpful information?
And suppose there can be different social constructs. In that case, people should be able to discuss alternatives and share information so that both individual and public policy decisions can be informed by science, information, and debate.
Colorado takes the position that any debate is dangerous because only “gender affirming care” is the professional standard. However, that seems to be not gender-affirming care, but rather gender-denying care.
Progressives describe gender (roles, expressions, identities) as a social construct—shaped by culture, history, and power dynamics—while treating sex (chromosomes, anatomy) as more biologically fixed. This distinction comes from thinkers like Judith Butler, who argue that gender isn’t innate but performed through societal norms. The idea is that rigid binaries (e.g., “boys wear blue, girls pink”) oppress people, so we should dismantle them for fluidity.
This is essentially what you will be taught at the university, and the result is a surprising number of younger people who no longer see themselves in traditional male and female roles. In 2023, a poll showed that 65% of the population believed there are two gender identities, and 34% believed there are many.
Those who believed sex was “fluid” tended to be concentrated in the young and in females.
But here’s where the tension creeps in: If gender is so constructed and changeable, why oppose therapies that help someone deconstruct a non-traditional identity back toward the binary?
Progressives reject biological essentialism (e.g., “you’re a man because of your body”) but then essentialize gender identity as an unchangeable inner truth that miraculously overrides biology. This “inner truth” is entirely subjective and can’t be verified except through words and feelings. This is not a “scientific diagnosis, but a self diagnosis, from often an unstable person. The medical professional must “affirm” the self diagnosis of the afflicted, something that is rarely done with any other medical condition. And if you don’t “affirm” the self diagnosis, it can create “harm”, but no “harm” is assigned if the self diagnosis is faulty.
Critics suggest that this converts the medical profession from seeking scientific answers to merely following the patient’s self-diagnosis. Is that a standard of care?
They rely on stereotypes (e.g., “if you like dolls, you’re a girl”) to validate transitions, which undercuts the anti-stereotype ethos. In the conversion therapy context, bans focus on minors because the state sees these practices as coercing kids away from their “authentic” identity—treating identity as fixed, not fluid. So in a sense, your identity is fixed, but your sex organs are fluid?
However, if identity is fixed, it can’t be changed by talking, and there is no “change” in outcome as a result of talking. If it is not fixed, then it can be altered by conversation. What is wrong with having a conversation?
If everything’s “constructed”, why not let people freely remix it, including toward traditional norms?
The contradictions of the Progressive view of gender and sex don’t stop there. For example, the concept that individuals are “born this way”, a slogan popularized by Lady Gaga and activists, aims to normalize homosexuality by framing it as immutable—like eye color—not a choice or lifestyle. But massive genome-wide studies (e.g., a 2019 analysis of nearly 500,000 people) found no single “gay gene”—genetics explain only 8-25% of same-sex behavior variance, with environment (prenatal hormones, upbringing) playing a huge role. No credible evidence supports the existence of a deterministic biological switch.
However, if it’s biological primarily and fixed at birth, as they argue, why invoke social constructs at all? Progressives often pivot: “Born this way” isn’t a literal genetic term; it’s about orientation emerging early and resisting change, countering claims that it’s “curable” through therapy. But critics argue this cherry-picks science—early emergence doesn’t prove biology over nurture, and it dodges how culture shapes what we call “gay” (e.g., ancient societies had fluid homoerotic norms without modern labels). If no gay gene exists, it bolsters the view that sexuality is partly constructed, making conversion therapy a debatable tool for those distressed by it, not pseudoscience.
In short, Progressives are arguing out of both sides of their mouth at the same time.
Moreover, if sexuality is innate, why the “recruitment” vibe from Pride events or queer representation in films? There is more than just hypocrisy here. Why celebrate and amplify if it’s not contagious?
That is why there are no “straight” parades. Most people accept what they are and would hardly think it is worth advertising.
Pride parades supposedly originated as protests against discrimination (following the Stonewall riots in 1969), evolving into visibility campaigns for acceptance. They say it is not converting straights but fostering acceptance. But if that is true, why the emphasis on getting their story to young children who have not yet formed solid views of sexuality? When does public relations for acceptance morph into grooming? Why are Disney and Netflix putting it in cartoons for children? And why are the numbers of people identifying as non-binary growing so fast if it is not really a recruiting campaign dressed up as a cry for acceptance?
And, if you are trying to gain acceptance, why make the parades outlandish displays of nakedness and fetishes? Why does getting naked in front of others advance the idea that homosexuality is just as normal and valid as heterosexuality?
Rather than promoting acceptance, parents legitimately feel that a perverse movement is recruiting their children, and that is causing blowback against the LGBTQ community. And the more political violence we see from the TQ portion of the spectrum, the more public anger is building against the LGB portion of the community.
The more transgender individuals attempt to force themselves into our daughters’ locker rooms, the more the public gets fed up with all the sectors of the LGBTQ coalition. It is a dangerous and creepy behavior.
We suggest that, for the sake of the LGB, they should divorce themselves from the TQ. There are contradictions galore within the coalition. A lesbian woman, for example, knows she is a woman who is attracted to other women. She does not feel “fluid”, and she knows she is a woman and likes being one. She is not interested in transitioning. The same can be said for gay men. They know they are men. They are not one sex on one day and another sex the following day.
What we think this case is really about is that one side has been free to proselytize society, and the other side is forbidden from objecting. In contrast, attempts by the other side to enter the discussion are called hate speech or get stifled by laws that are unconstitutional and completely unscientific.
Even if you accept the nonsense that people “choose” their gender, then should they not be able to make an informed choice and hear at least both sides of the issue? And at what age should this discussion be had? It surely can’t be among kindergartners at the local library. But in fact, this is precisely where they want to proselytize our kids.
*****
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By Conlan Salgado
Donald Trump’s brand of politics is called “ultra-nationalism” by his chroniclers, “America First” by his supporters, and, by his more emotionally prone critics, “basically Hiroshima-plus-Nagasaki-plus-the-Holocaust-plus-the-bubonic-plague-plus-the-genocide-of-the-American-Indians-plus-the-great-leap-forward-plus-the-death-of-everything-good-plus-the-news-that-your-Grandma-just-died” all happening to American democracy at once. I call the president’s politics “quotidian insurgency”, or the daily revolutionary effort to undermine the establishment decision makers, the old structures by which […]
https://pricklypear.news/wp-content/uploads/newsom-2.jpg 720 1280 Conlan Salgado https://pricklypear.news/wp-content/uploads/logo_2025_800x97.png Conlan Salgado2025-10-10 00:26:452025-10-09 07:53:58 Bibbity, Bobbity, Democracy!
By Joseph Varon
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
When I was a young medical student, I believed with all my heart that medicine was the highest calling a human being could answer. We were not just training to earn a degree or secure a position. We were stepping into a lineage, inheriting a tradition that stretched back to Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Osler, and countless others who saw the care of the sick as a sacred covenant. Every time I walked into a ward, I felt both nervous and exhilarated, as if I were entering a cathedral where the human body and spirit were laid bare.
A patient’s trust was not a transaction—it was a gift, a profound act of vulnerability. To be allowed into that sacred space was to be given a responsibility greater than anything I had known. We did not speak in the language of “compliance metrics” or “quality indicators.” We spoke of healing, of service, of devotion. Medicine was not a career. It was a vocation, a purpose, a life anchored in something deeper than self.
Over the years, however, something shifted. What was once a vocation has been stripped of its soul. It has been rebranded, reframed, and reduced until it barely resembles the profession I entered with such hope. Medicine today is a business enterprise. Patients are consumers, doctors are “providers,” and healing has been crowded out by billing codes, liability fears, and the suffocating weight of bureaucracy. The vocation has been replaced by a job, and a job can always be abandoned. That is what haunts me most.
The decline of vocation did not happen overnight. It was gradual, almost imperceptible at first, like a slow leak in the hull of a ship. Administrators multiplied until they outnumbered physicians. Insurance companies dictated what treatments were permissible, not based on medical judgment but on actuarial tables. Pharmaceutical firms turned research into marketing, blurring the line between scientific discovery and sales strategy. Hospitals transformed into corporations with CEOs, branding departments, and profit margins to defend. The physician’s desk became a computer terminal, and the patient was no longer a soul in need of healing but a data point to be coded and billed. Even the language betrayed the transformation: patients became “units of care,” outcomes became “deliverables,” and clinical judgment was rebranded as “adherence to protocol.”
This hollowing out of medicine’s soul reached its most devastating climax during Covid. It was a moment that should have summoned the deepest instincts of our profession. Uncertainty, fear, and suffering filled our hospitals. That is precisely when vocation matters most. The physician is supposed to walk into the fire when others flee. Yet what did we see? Doors closed, clinics shuttered, doctors retreating to their homes, waiting for bureaucrats and government agencies to tell them what to do. Protocols were enforced even when they harmed. Independent thought was punished. Dissent was silenced. And while patients gasped for air and families begged for help, too many physicians were nowhere to be found.
I remember vividly those early days of the pandemic. There was terror in patients’ eyes, but also profound gratitude when they saw a physician willing to step into the room, to touch them, to treat them as human beings rather than contagions. The vocation of medicine means that when everyone else runs out, the doctor runs in. Yet in those months, only a few did. The rest followed orders from afar, citing fear or policy as justification for absence. Covid revealed what I had long suspected: when medicine is reduced to a job, it can be deserted. But when it is a vocation, it cannot.
This crisis was not an accident. Its roots stretch back decades. The Flexner Report of 1910 reshaped American medicine for better and worse. On one hand, it elevated scientific standards and eliminated substandard schools. On the other hand, it centralized control, tethering medicine more tightly to institutional and governmental power. The apprenticeship model of mentorship—where students absorbed not just skills but ethos—gave way to industrialized training. Instead of being formed as healers, students were molded as technicians. They memorized protocols, but they did not absorb the sacred trust that comes with vocation.
As the years passed, the culture of medical education further eroded vocation. Students entered with idealism but were quickly buried under debt, exhaustion, and cynicism. The long hours and relentless pressure might have been tolerable if accompanied by true mentorship, but too often residents were taught that obedience mattered more than judgment, compliance more than conscience. Independent thought was punished; curiosity was suffocated. By the time many young doctors finished training, the fire that brought them to medicine had been extinguished. They learned to survive, not to serve. They asked, “How do I get through my shift?” not, “How do I heal this patient?” And so vocation faded into memory.
The corporatization of healthcare sealed the transformation. Most physicians today are not independent practitioners but employees of sprawling hospital systems. Their loyalty is no longer to the patient in the bed but to the employer who pays their salary. When conflicts arise—and they do—doctors are pressured to serve the system, not the individual. Metrics dominate their day. Doctors spend more time entering notes into electronic medical records than speaking to their patients. They practice defensive medicine, not inspired medicine.
In this new order, the sacred trust between doctor and patient is fractured, and patients feel it. They sense the hesitation, the divided loyalty, the invisible administrator lurking in the background of every decision.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, that fracture widened into a chasm. Patients watched doctors recite government talking points rather than speak with their own voices. They saw courageous physicians punished for questioning harmful policies. They saw lives lost because protocols were enforced with blind rigidity. In the process, trust in medicine collapsed. Patients did not abandon science—they abandoned a system that no longer felt human.
The cost of this loss is immense. It is measured not only in suffering patients but in the moral injury inflicted on physicians who still believe in vocation, for those of us who refused to abandon patients, who entered the Covid wards when others would not, the betrayal by our colleagues was harder to bear than the virus itself. We saw medicine reduced to bureaucracy; our profession degraded to a managerial class in white coats. We saw joy replaced by despair. The joy of medicine—the joy of touching a life, of helping someone breathe again—cannot survive long in a system where patients are processed like products.
Yet despite all this, I remain convinced that vocation can be reclaimed. I have seen sparks of it. I have worked alongside nurses whose compassion burned bright even when the system tried to smother it. I have mentored students who still dared to look at patients with wonder, who resisted the temptation to see them as checklists. These moments remind me that the vocation is not dead. It is dormant. And like all dormant things, it can awaken—but only if we fight for it.
Reclaiming medicine as a vocation will not be easy. It means refusing to accept the idea that profit should dictate care. It means confronting administrators when their directives betray patients. It means daring to trust your own judgment, even when the system demands obedience. It means remembering that healing is not found in guidelines alone but in listening, in touching, in caring. It means reviving the joy of medicine, which can never be measured in quarterly reports. Above all, it means refusing to forget why we entered this profession in the first place.
To practice medicine as a vocation in today’s world is costly. It may mean losing a job, losing status, even losing friends. But the cost of surrendering vocation is far greater. If we continue down this path of commodification, medicine will not survive as a profession worthy of trust. Patients will turn elsewhere, society will fracture further, and the sacred bond between physician and patient will be broken beyond repair.
The choice before us is stark. Medicine will either be a vocation or it will be nothing. We can remain cogs in a machine that processes patients like widgets and rewards obedience above conscience. Or we can reclaim our calling, rediscover the courage and compassion that defined medicine for centuries, and once again stand with our patients as healers rather than employees. That choice belongs not only to doctors but to patients, students, and society as a whole. Patients must demand more. Students must resist the system’s suffocation. Doctors must rediscover the flame that first lit their path.
If we succeed, perhaps one day a new generation will walk into a hospital with the same awe I once felt, aware that they are part of something sacred, aware that medicine is not a commodity but a covenant. That is the vocation of medicine. It is the beating heart of our profession. And it is worth fighting for with everything we have left.
*****
This article was published at Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.
The graphic for this article is available at Wikipedia.
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