Liberation Day 9/21/2025

 Reflections on Liberation Day - 9/21/25

Old age is a bitch because it lets you remember the past not as painted by the media but as we experienced it. That’s not to say we were saints and all was great, but we remember the facts of the time as they were.

I grew up in Northern Italy in the 1950s. My family had a notable history in the Italian Resistance against the German occupation from 1943 to 1945.  From a very young age, I learned the difference between Independence Day and Liberation Day. The first celebrates a separation from an unacceptable political structure. The latter celebrates the expulsion of a foreign occupying force.

Today, America found its Liberation Day.  Sure, we have been independent for 250 years, but the founding principles of America have been OCCUPIED since 9/11/2001 by a combination of government and cultural manipulations. The government roused up and brainwashed the citizenry to support forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, etc. Even if we want to presume, despite recent analyses, that warmongers did not light the first fuse in NYC 9/11, they sure leveraged circumstances and popular fears into the forever wars they benefited from.

The cultural occupation was a more subtle event. It started in the 1970s academia with a strategically planned infiltration first proposed by Gramsci, then Alinsky, then the Frankfurt School, then Weather Underground, and Students for a Democratic Society, etc. It called for the penetration of the educational establishment from the top down. In the 1970s, it infected colleges; in the 1980s and 1990s, it spread into the K-12 system. In the early 2000s to 2015, it spread to the broader society in the guise of “Political Correctness”. The term was first used to supervise and control correct thinking in collectivists' cadres, then it expanded to coerce conservatives at large into “either say something positive or keep it to yourself for social harmony’s sake”. It worked: conservatives ceded the debate podium and were silenced.

By 2016, conservatives were defined as uneducated and of inferior moral character and sentiments. “Woke” was invented to glorify those who “woke” to the new thinking constructs scripted by the Ivy League-Marxist-educated elites: critical theories of race, history, medicine, physics, urban planning, etc. 

By 2016, we learned from CNN the voting differences between Deplorables and the College-educated.  

In 2016 to 2020, we heard how the populist majority had been bamboozled by an illegitimate president controlled by Russia, who was obstructed to political impotence.

In 2020, COVID provided the perfect cloud of confusion within which elections were rigged, as it has been documented in 2025.

In 2020-2024, censorship became the norm ostensibly to battle disinformation and any dissenting opinions. Dissenters were labeled racist and white supremacist by default.

Much to everyone’s surprise, in 2024, the commonsensical populace took a second bite at a Trumpian alternative.

For nearly 10 months, we have seen fraud and corruption uncovered and carefully detailed by DOGE, and belief in the bureaucracy has declined dramatically. Yet despite the ugly details, conservatives still could not find a voice and a way out of the “cultural occupation”.

That changed on 9/10/2025 when Charlie Kirk, an activist promoting open dialogue, was assassinated. The official answer is that the shooter is an angry young man in a relationship with a furry trans. Alternate guesses include a broader conspiracy of furry types and various state actors, either foreign or domestic. Take your pick. Of late, conspiracy theories have been proven right within six months, so we’ll know soon.

The result has been unexpected: Today, we witnessed a national-scale cultural and religious revival that called believers and followers to “Be Charlie Kirk” and continue his peaceful mission. His wife forgave the assassins in a spirit of Christian martyrdom.

Today, I saw the end of any claim of superior morality by the left. The attendees of the memorial found a new voice. They will no longer cede the podium. They will demand recognition of the difference between good and evil and their right, duty, in fact, to enforce a social recognition of the differences.

The days of “be nice or be silent” are over. We demand recognition that what is right is right, what is wrong is wrong, and common sense trumps convoluted academic critical theories. I do not claim that 

‘The witch is dead” but I think that if Woke is not, it sure smells like the beginning of its end. The time when self-appointed elites could define correct thinking has come to its logical dead end, if not today, soon.

That is Liberation Day, 9/21/2025

My Turning Point - 9/10/2025

 On 9/10/25 a giant fell. The thunder he created, I believe, will resonate for a long time for many. 

I followed Charlie Kirk for years, occasionally watching his on-campus debates with college students under the banner "Prove Me Wrong". I recognized him as a force for peaceful change, but alas, he did not change me enough. I remained stuck in the mental maze that typified my adult mode of political interaction.

I believe the vast majority of conservative thinkers in America checked in their mode of political interaction at the "Political Correctness Desk" beginning in the early 1980s. 

The term Political Correctness came into use in the 1970s by the left to define what their leaders defined as the correct way to think progressively about feminism, gay marriage, education, and political action. 

In the 1980s, Conservatives adopted the term as a snide, ridiculing description of Progressive-mandated party-think. It was a Trojan horse. Most Conservatives gradually came to accept it as a rule to follow to be "Correct" in political discourse. Most would see it as a call to avoid inconclusive debate, do not let politics impact friendships and social occasions. Either say something agreeable or nothing at all - Correctness was conflict avoidance.

The result was that a silent majority became evermore silent. 

During the Reagan years, many of us saw a return to a political and economic normality that had been lost in the 1965-1975 decade. We were in the early years of family formation, entering the beginning of career formation in a society and economy that were active, productive, and becoming unconcerned with politics that mostly appeared to work.

The 90s and 2000s brought sudden changes: the fall of Communism, the Internet, the WTO, globalization, NAFTA, Dot-Com, and the myth of Hope-and-Change. Through that turmoil, Conservatives focused on work, productivity, law & order, too busy or uncaring to focus on politics; Correctness was repackaged as polite conflict avoidance.

The 2010s to 2020s were dominated by endless wars, government propaganda, the independent media capture by government, industries, and NGOs, the dressing-up of global warming from a fact into an anthropogenic threat, the pharmaceutical industry capture, and the military-industrial complex. 

Each period brought increasing consolidation of corporate power, government expansion, and corruption enabled by permissive morality and cultural/social disruption. Conservatives largely accommodated rather than actively resisted interpreting "political correctness as conflict avoidance," thus ceding the debate stage to Progressives, emboldened by a mantra of "the more radical, the better."

Like Jeremiah in the wilderness, voices like Charlie Kirk's were beginning to ring warning bells, but again, Political Correctness was conflict avoidance - "agree or keep it to yourself for the sake of smooth relations, no matter how preposterous the argument."

Conservatives, by tradition since the American Revolution, most want to be left alone. The less government, the less turmoil, the less interference, the better, because we are busy building whatever for our families and lives. Conversely, Progressives seek change, government mandates, direction, activism that in all historical experiences, became bureaucratic social control of the individual by the collective, driven by redistributive envy. 

Free speech is the last defense, our First Constitutional Amendment. It was made possible and remains so only by the Second, and by the Defenders like Charlie Kirk's (Turning Point USA) and Elon Musk's (Twitter/X), who put their lives and pocketbooks at risk for the cause.

Thanks to Charlie, I have found my Turning Point. I will refuse all calls to violence, but I will no longer cede the debate stage by agreeing that costumes and reality are equivalent. They are not. Destructive delusions that men can be women and vice versa. That socialism in a 'democratic' costume can be a lasting freedom despite all historical experience. That government is not the enemy of the individual. That critical theory is not an intellectual scam. I will not debate to convince, but I will no longer agree to fashionable delusions and nonsense just to be agreeable. Now I will rather walk away.